O mangá em tempos sombrios: do caos a redenção

Abstract

Visualizing the growing globalization, cultural products once trapped in their genesis can be released from this cultural tie. Thus, often objects that have been created for a purpose are modified by having contacts with the most diverse cultures and their by-products. The modern manga created around 1920 is abruptly altered as Japan heads towards World War II. In view of its consumption throughout the world, the manga is an object that the historian can use today to research on the most diverse issues, such as the relations between government forces and the population, family relations, among many other issues that the manga differs from the American Comics, where until a little while ago, only horizontal relations were formulated in contrast with the verticality always expressed in the manga, since its concept of translated origin is "irreverent images" bringing themes that escaped the elitist logic in Japan, that is, images of samurai, geisha, and other stereotyped elements of feudal Japan. Thus, this product is far from being a neutral object of influences of discourse and historicity, suffering constant hybridization while being constructed as one of the hegemonic products of relaxation in a pre-television world. During the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the manga was rebuilt to serve the historical moment in which it existed, thus, serving as propaganda for Japanese ultranationalism. After the fall of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, a shock, a trauma is present in the Japanese population, and the manga later, after a long time of mourning, would become a propagator of the struggle for peace. But the story is not static. It is in constant movement and as it would be, the manga begins to recreate itself again to adapt to the new world in which it is engaged, bringing the most diverse themes, varying in a surprising way, so that the western subjects can not understand the relations present in them, because they are empty of cultural experiences of the other and too imbued in their prejudices to be able to enjoy new experiments.