The Four Immigrants Manga facts for kids
| The Four Immigrants Manga | |
First English-language edition of The Four Immigrants Manga (Stone Bridge Press, 1998)
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Quick facts for kids 漫画四人書生(Manga Yonin Shosei) |
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| Genre | Autobiographical, Immigrants, Comedy, Daily life |
| Manga | |
| Written by | Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama |
| English publisher | |
| Published | 1931 (U.S.) |
| Volumes | 1 |
The Four Immigrants Manga (1931), also known as The Four Students Manga (漫画四人書生, Manga Yonin Shosei, "manga of the four students"), is a Japanese-language manga written and illustrated by Henry Kiyama (born Yoshitaka Kiyama (木山義喬, Kiyama Yoshitaka), 1885–1951). It is an early example of autobiographical comics.
The manga was created around 1924–1927 as 52 "episodes", each a two-page spread intended for serialization in a Japanese-language newspaper. In 1927, the originals were exhibited at San Francisco's Golden Gate Institute. In 1931, it was self published in San Francisco as a one-shot manga. It was republished in Japan by Shimpu in August 2012. It was translated into English by Frederik L. Schodt and was published by Stone Bridge Press as The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco 1904–1924 in October 1998. In summer 2017, it was adapted into The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga at TheatreWorks (Silicon Valley).
Development
The manga drew from the experiences of Kiyama and his three friends when they were college-age Japanese immigrants to San Francisco between 1904 and 1924. The year 1924 is chosen as it was when the "immigration laws stiffened and some of the protagonists elected to return to Japan". Inspired by western comic strips, Kiyama drew each episode of Four Immigrants in a two-page spread, ending at 52 episodes for a year's worth of weekly newspaper comic strips. Jason Thompson notes that "each strip has sort of a punchline, but also tells a story; it's not so different from reading a yonkoma manga in which the story is broken up for gags every four panels." Kiyama tried to have Four Immigrants serialized in a Japanese-language newspaper in San Francisco, but was unsuccessful. In 1927, Kiyama exhibited the pages of the manga in a gallery of San Francisco's Kinmon Gakuen (Golden Gate Institute) in an exhibition titled "A Manga North American Immigrant History" (Manga Hokubei Iminshi). The manga covered the immigrants' arrival and quarantine on Angel Island as well as major events of the time: 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Panama–Pacific International Exposition of 1915 and the 1918 flu pandemic with criticism of "several Congressional acts designed to curtail Asian immigration." Most of the manga "concentrates on student immigrant experiences prior to the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907". In 1931, Kiyama had the book printed in Japan, then self-published it in San Francisco.
Kiyama had the immigrants speak in Meiji era Japanese, with the Americans speaking in broken English and the Chinese speaking in Cantonese. In his translation, Frederik L. Schodt had kept the Americans speaking broken English, with the immigrants speaking in perfect English. This had the effect of "[helping] readers see the Japanese characters as "us" and the Americans as weird, frequently baffling foreigners, consistent with the general viewpoint of the comic." Schodt found Kiyama's work in 1980 in University of California's East Asian Library. He began translating the work in 1997, which was published by Stone Bridge Press in October 1998. Through interviewing Kiyama's surviving relatives in Japan and studying his private papers and artwork, Schodt concludes that the characters Charlie, Frank and Fred "are roughly based on the people that Kiyama knew." He further claims that the manga is the "first journalistic comic books".
Racism between the immigrants and the locals was predominantly between Japanese immigrants and European-American locals, however "racial animosity . . . existed between Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the United States." Garrity comments on the prevalence of racism of that era: "a hundred years ago, everyone, of every background, was openly and casually racist." The "four immigrants [refer] to white people as keto and black people as kuroto."
