Japanese children, drawing, and imitation

These are a couple great articles by Brent Wilson about how children in different cultures learn to draw, particularly contrasting the Japanese with other cultures. Both articles contain more extensive discussions that I'll mention here, only focusing on some of the highlights...


Wilson, Brent. (1999). Becoming Japanese: Manga, Children’s Drawings, and the Construction of National Character. Visual Arts Research, 25(2), 48-60.

Here Wilson provides fairly striking evidence that over two-thirds of the drawings produced by Japanese children in primary education (K-6) are imitative of manga. However, even many of his "non-manga" types could have been drawn from manga and still might be drawn in that style. He also notes a developmental trajectory: There is a decline in non-manga drawings after kindergarten.

I would guess that this is in part a socialization process. Since kids at kindergarten start playing with other children in a structured arena, and all of them know manga, there is more of a motivation to draw in the style of the group than whatever way they might be drawing at home. Also, it reflects a growing sense of literacy. Since kids are learning to read, manga become reading material in addition to stimuli for learning to draw.


Wilson, B. (1988). The Artistic Tower of Babel: Inextricable Links Between Culture and Graphic Development. In G. W. Hardiman & T. Zernich (Eds.), Discerning Art: Concepts and Issues. Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing Company.

In this article, Wilson focuses on the argument against the belief that the Romantic view that children develop an inborn "artistic" capacity and that external influences are bad for it. He compares this in part to a sort of "Tower of Babel" phenomenon, where everyone has a universal inborn "language of art" that develops uniquely suited to each individual.

His theory against these claims is that graphic symbolism is a language that is transmitted through cultural patterns imitatively. He cites numerous evidence for this from numerous countries and time periods.

Pertaining to Japanese children though, he has a fascinating note that nearly all of the 6-year old Japanese children they studied could draw coherent sequential stories, compared with other countries where only about half of some groups of 12-year olds could. He also notes that Japanese children use increasingly more complex methods of graphic narrative as they age, (examples from 9 to 12), though they are all imitative of manga techniques.


These examples support that drawing ability is learned, as well as that imitation boosts abilities rather than hampers it.

Manga "decompression"

In Understanding Comics, McCloud made the claim that manga supposedly uses more circuitous storytelling because of the formats of their books.

In my paper on Japanese VL, I dismiss this on the grounds that nothing about longer formats gives people the drive to make slower paced narrative. Just because you have ample space doesn't mean you're going to use it to let the story linger more. You could use that space to fill in even more "compressed" storytelling.

Thinking more about this, webcomics are another good example against this theory: from my knowledge, we haven't seen a vast decompression of storytelling on the web due to the completely unrestricted "infinite" space allowing authors to freely use (though feel free to prove me wrong!). On the one hand, you could say that they aren't effectively using the space that they have at their disposal. However, the other side could say that they're using it to achieve just what they want: they have no restrictions, so what they're producing is entirely their preference.

Personally, I think that there are numerous explanations for what might be going on in manga storytelling. Here's a few, some of which were in my paper...

1) It's just an inherent part of the difference between Euro-American VLs and Japanese VLs. We don't expect spoken languages to be the same, why should visual languages? Could "decompression" simply be a result of the development of how JVL evolved?

2) They're using the VL as a language: Manga use less text than American and European books. With more reliance on visual modality over the written requires it to take on more expressive weight. The result is more complex structure in the visual sequences. This is comparable to studies asking people to only gesture with no speaking. The result is something that looks closer to patterns like in sign languages (though still not SL).

3) The cross-cultural differences focusing on environment over action requires more space devoted to "setting a scene." Research seems to suggest that Asian minds are more interested in the broader environment than the specifics and individuating different elements of the environment take up more panel space than simply presenting it as a whole, backgrounded to the actions.

Notice that in all of these cases, formatting is entirely secondary. Indeed, it's somewhat interesting to think that formatting is one of McCloud's explanations, because much of his work is about transcending formatting. Here, the explanations focus on cognitive reasoning — meaning we should see the effects no matter what the format.

America vs. Japan: Brains and Comic/Manga Panels

Via the TCJ message board, Nathan has pointed to an article in the Boston Globe that discusses the differences in brain activation between "Eastern and Western" perceptual processing. The study claims that "Westerners tend to focus on central objects more than on their surroundings" while Easterners "tend to focus more on the context as well as the object." From the article:

To use a camera analogy, "the Americans are more zoom and the East Asians are more panoramic," said Dr. Denise Park of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas in Dallas. "The Easterner probably sees more, and the Westerner probably sees less, but in more detail."

"Literally, our data suggest that people see different elements of pictures," Park said. "If you're looking at an elephant in the jungle, the Westerner will focus on the elephant and the Easterner is going to be more thinking about the jungle scene that has the elephant in it."

In a way, these findings are supportive of McCloud's claims that manga use more "wandering eye" type of panel "transitions." The evidence from my own more formal study comparing panels from Japanese and American comics (in my paper Cross-Cultural Space) seems to support this conclusion... somewhat.

My study found that American comics by far used more comic panels that featured a whole scene ("Macros"), while Japanese manga used equal amounts of panels with whole scenes and individual characters ("Monos"). Manga also used a great deal more "Micro" panels, which feature a "zoom."**

These results would seem to support a view that Japanese panels allow a focus on the broader environment, since they are breaking up the single environment into smaller parts. However those smaller parts are giving focus to the smaller parts instead of to the larger whole. So, in a way, manga panels are getting both the environment and the detail of the objects.

Unfortunately, my coding in this study was a little deficient, since at the time I lacked an "Amorphic" category that contains purely environmental information. These panels were coded as Micros at the time, but really should be their own category. On the plus side, I now have a larger and more diverse sample of comics to code and a richer coding scheme, I just need to get the peoplepower to do it (read: undergrad research assistants).

Update: An additional thought I just had related to this is the extant to which these claims are generalizable into two categories of East vs. West. At least regarding the graphic form, will we find that American books are the same/different as various European books? Can Japanese manga really be lumped in with Chinese, Korean, and other Asian comics' structure? Perhaps we'll find that there's a lot more diversity out there than we suspect...

**(The graph above shows a reanalysis of these numbers, getting rid of two American books that had "high manga influence" — the difference is slight but significant. Check the paper for initial interpretation/numbers)

New Essay: Japanese Visual Language

For the first time in a long while, I've got a new essay up for download. This one discusses the visual language that underlies manga, and will be part of the Manga: The Essential Reader collection published next year by Continuum Books. Here's the abstract:

Over the past two decades, manga has exploded in readership beyond Japan, and its style has captured the interest of young artists all over. But, what exactly are the properties of this "style" beyond the surface of big eyes and "backward" reading? This paper explores the structural elements of the Japanese Visual Language (JVL) that comprises the "manga style" — ranging from looking at the “big eyes, small mouth” schema as a “standard” dialect, to examining the graphic emblems that form manga’s conventional visual vocabulary. Particular focus will be given to JVL grammar — the system that creates meaning via sequential images — and how it differs from the visual languages from other parts of the world. On the whole, manga provide an excellent forum for understanding the scope of the visual language paradigm.

Manga facial symbols

I've been putting the finishing touches on my first draft of a book chapter for a textbook on Japanese manga recently. Mainly, the last things I had to do was draw my examples. Also being a "comic author" is a big advantage as a scholar, since I can create my own examples when I don't want to deal with issues of copyright and permissions.

For this one, the challenge was drawing in the "manga style," which I rarely do. For better or worse, here's some symbolic faces I've whipped up:

This section on graphic symbols/conventions was one of the hardest portions of the actual paper to write. While most of us know that manga uses a ton of wacky conventions, there aren't many places referencing them outside of informal listings like wikipedia. At most, various sources mention one or two different conventions, but I couldn't find any extensive type of cataloging. (though, if anyone is aware of such a thing, please let me know)

I started trying to make a cross-cultural list like this back when I used to have the forum, but that project seems to have stagnated. This is a research project just waiting for someone to take it up (like oh so many)...

Lessons from manga

I found an interesting discussion in this thread over The Engine discussing this quote from a PW article:

Still, if there’s a manga feel to the books, it’s not an accident. “I went into my local bookstore, and there were two shelves for the entire history of American comics and 12 shelves for manga,” Crilley said. “Whenever kids come up to me and say, ‘Look at this drawing I made,’ nine times out of 10 it is in the manga style. For this generation, comics are manga. This is the language of this generation, and I’d better learn how to speak this language or I’ll never reach them.”

Recently I've been finishing writing a book chapter for a new textbook on Japanese manga, so these sorts of comments and discussions are particularly salient for me right now. This quote is revealing about a lot of theoretical issues, beyond simply calling it a "language." Or, perhaps more accurately, I think manga shows us many of these issues, which are kindly wrapped up into this quote. Among these are:

1) It acknowledges that the system of representation and expression used in manga is different than in American comics. Underlying message: Graphic systems are not universal

2) It notes that one graphic system can influence another one (just like languages do when they have contact with each other). Underlying message: Graphic systems (or rather, human minds that produce graphic systems...) are fluid and changing

3) People who draw in one manner can adopt additional manners of drawing. Underlying message: Multilingualism in visual language!

4) Manga are extremely popular, and that popularity is tapped into by adopting its system of expression. Underlying message: Having a consistent style might increase readership (ahem... among many other factors)

5) Children are choosing the "manga style" en masse to draw in — a consistent style which is beyond the scope of a single author and belongs instead to a community. Underlying message: Children learn to draw by imitating others

Mannerism, Imitation, and Iconic Bias

Dirk (who kindly keeps linking to my posts) provides some thoughts on my last post about imitation by describing "Mannerism" (about halfway down the post).

He describes the Renaissance Mannerists (what I'll call abstractly as "cohort 2") copied the style of the first wave of Renaissance artists like Leonardo and Michaelangelo that came before them ("cohort 1"). Where cohort 1 actually studied the anatomy of real animals and people, cohort 2 simply copied cohort 1. As a result, cohort 2 is said by Dirk to have...

"the surface tics of the Rennaissance masters down pat, but his work displays none of the anatomical understanding by which they came to be able to create such accomplished illusions of form and light. Mannerism is an artistic game of Whisper, with details lost and distorted as they move further away from their point of origin."

Dirk goes on apply this same process to describe the work of Rob Liefeld and others (who I've oddly defended on this front before).

Now, this quote to me summarizes almost exactly the points I made last time that are inherent to the "Art" perspective. With Mannerism, it's not just about copying — it's that cohort 1 didn't copy at all, they drew from real life. This is what I've called Iconic Bias in past posts (parts one, two, three): The belief that the graphic modality of expression should resemble real life ("iconicity" in the semiotic sense). The "purity" of that first cohort is drawn from iconicity, and the lack of it in cohort 2 leads to their derision.

My response is that this isn't the way the human mind is primed (the "Language" perspective): the mind is primed for imitation, and any drawing "style" is a reflection of mental patterns that have become habituated within a drawer's long-term memory. Those patterns become set in this case through one of two ways: 1) copying other people's patterns, or 2) copying perception and siphoning that iconicity through one's mental structures.

The "Art" perspective says that only choice two should be acceptable, with minimal influence from choice one. Recall for instance, McCloud's Six Steps of learning from Understanding Comics: His first level is imitation, but then all subsequent steps require one to cast aside all other influences.

But, as I've pointed out in the past, rejecting the influence of any cohort before your own works against the establishment of conventional signs — which are what language is made up entirely of. The only reason there is a "graphic dialect" of a superhero style at all is because of imitation. Manga thrive on a style that was founded on imitation (Tezuka being largely considered cohort 1, but Walt Disney and others being cohort -1 for him).

Imitation hasn't hurt manga at all. In fact, I'd argue that it has probably helped them in numerous ways: 1) A consistent cultural style allows more focus to be placed on what that style is used to express story-wise than so much focus on the surface depictions. 2) A consistent style across numerous authors is more readily accessible to young readers, especially those who want imitate them. In America, when children want to "draw comics," they want to draw stories about stuff. But, when kids want to "draw manga" they want to draw stories in the style of manga because that's the visual vocabulary that they are now exposed to.

This is just like language: "Exposure + practice = fluency." With language, successive cohorts are always the manner by which it is transmitted. A great example of this is Nicaraguan Sign Language, where several deaf children who had created their own gesture systems combined their contributions to make cohort 1. Successive cohorts took what they did only to refine and alter it into further grammatical patterns. With the anti-imitation influence of Art, this process of conventionalization is largely lost (outside symbolic signs like word balloons and speed lines at least).

The Art pespective just wants to substitute the cognitive man-made exposure for that of real life, and with that, jettisoning an idea of fluency (proficiency in a system) for skill (accuracy at depicting real life): "Perception + practice = skill at representing perception."

While I won't go into it at length, I find it intriguing that in Dirk's same post, there is a damning attitude for Greg Land, who takes iconicity to the extreme by drawing wholly from photo reference — only that he picks and chooses parts of photos to combine thereby messing up the anatomy. So, here it seems to be the case of messing up iconicity through the most iconic method possible!


Final note, so my intentions aren't misunderstood: I should point out that this is not a post of advocacy; I'm not saying people should or shouldn't copy other people. I'm just trying to analyze the issues involved, and in some case, defend all strategies as being cognitively acceptable.

----
Update 2/26: Dirk has a short reply to this post (halfway down). I don't have much in response to it except that it still maintains the "Iconic bias" underlying the last couple posts . Beyond that, he makes some interesting points.

Manga Literacy

I've made a couple additions to the Reference Bibliography, including this one:

Nakazawa, Jun. 2005. Development of Manga (Comic Book) Literacy in Children. In Shwalb, David, Jun Nakazawa, Barbara (Eds). Applied developmental psychology: Theory, practice, and research from Japan. Pp. 23-42

This English piece is a nice summary of the work of Japanese Psychologist Jun Nakazawa, as well as several other Japanese studies on "manga literacy." His various experiments cover a lot of ground, usually looking at students from 1st through 8th grade. Most all his findings show increased understandings with aging and expertise. I'll discuss only a few of the many studies in it.

The study I liked the most asked children to arrange randomly given four panels into a strip, finding that correct answers grew from fairly low for kindergarteners and 1st graders (5.2 and 6.6%) to high for 4th and 6th graders (around 80%). Another task on that test asked for students to fill in the blank of a missing panel, which no K/1st graders could get right with increasing percentages along older grades. Comparatively, adult college students were far better than the children.

He also has designed a "story comprehension" test to examine how fully they can recall plot aspects of a ten-page Doraemon manga. He showed again that the biggest growth came between 1st and 4th grades.

He also did some eye-tracking studies comparing the eye movements of an "expert" versus a "non-frequent" manga reader. The "non-expert" fixated far more on word balloons than images and had higher reading times. On the other hand, the "expert" reader made "fewer useless eye movements" that were smoother, in addition to a higher rate of skipping over more panels and balloons. However, the expert also had higher story comprehension recall than the non-expert, despite reading faster and skipping elements.

The second part of the paper looked a lot at the role of manga in education. One interesting finding showed that frequent reading of manga correlated to achievement in language arts (particularly sentence comprehension) and a liking of social sciences, though "not significantly with liking for art class." Several studies also indicated a higher comprehension for learning from manga than from pure textual "novelized" writing.

In all, the piece presents several very interesting findings related to children's (and some adults) understandings of manga, and it is a veritible treasure trove of citations and studies. It presents a "cognitive processing model" based on this work, though it's so general that it could apply to any type of media. Along those lines, it doesn't really break up understanding into any sort of "grammatical" components as I'd like to see, lumping in aspects of things together (like manga consisting of pictures, emblems, text, etc rather than breaking those things down). The best part of the paper is its overall picture: that the skills required to understand the "comic medium" are learned and increase over age and practice.

Styles and genres

Cross-posted to comixpedia... I think a reasonable argument can be made that certain styles insinuate certain genres. This isn't to say that genres are drawn in those styles all the time or that those genres can't use other styles, but that when we see a certain style, we think of a certain genre. I'd like people's help in formulating a list of these, if we can...

In American styles, I have:

Superhero
Cartoony
Dramatic/Romantic comic strip (?)
Art comix

This is of course leaving out imported styles like "manga"... I'd even be up for hearing "substyles" within genres too. Got any more? (examples are always helpful)

Shojo Manga

I went to an exhibit today on Shojo (girls') manga, hosted by Masami Toku, who does research on art education, especially concerning manga. I have corresponded with her for several years now, so it was nice to finally meet her in person.

The exhibit itself was fairly interesting, and had a nice cross-section of manga covers and pages spanning the past 50 years. There was a good sized crowd, and you could see the displays from outside on the street in downtown Chicago.

What particularly interested me was the underlying mentality of displaying manga pages on the wall like fine art. Putting them on the walls like this completely invalidates the Language perspective for these works, treating them solely as an Art bound work of aesthetic representation (albeit narrative). I'm also assuming that most people in attendance could not read Japanese, meaning that all semblance of multimodality was lost on them – reinforcing the images alone as aesthetic objects.

To this extant, it wholly removes them from the social context in which they usually appear. They did have some actual books on display, though they were kept under glass – meaning people couldn't flip through them at all.

Of all print-culture visual languages, manga in Japan seem quite the paradigm example of using a Language over Art context. Seeing them pulled from that context and put into a dominantly Art setting was an interesting clash of these underlying cultural forces.

The Character of "Comics"

Recently, one of the elementary school kids that I teach found out that I “drew comics” after she mentioned that she wanted to be an artist. What intrigued me (besides a 10 year old girl's exuberance that drawing comics was “cool”) was her first response: “Have you made up any characters?”

Its rather striking that the defining feature of comics to kids is characters, as opposed to say, drawing one’s own book or writing a story. Though, this shouldn’t be too strange, since much of the industry of comics is permeated by a recurring theme of characters – in strips, in books, etc. Unlike stories, characters provide a foundation for merchandising, which is where the real money is. Marvel’s website directly totes them as “one of the world’s most prominent character-based entertainment companies.”

Characters versus story also becomes one of the defining differences, I think, between “comics” and “graphic novels.” As a form of literature, graphic novels are more plot/story based in contrast to the characters of comics. This difference underscores the business side of things too. Whereas publishers put out stories by authors, companies put out characters as corporate properties.

While these characters may undergo storylines, the characters are always the primary draw. No one reads X-Men or Batman because the character-titled books have a specific story that someone finds appealing. Rather, they read the books continuously because they like the characters, and seeing what various “creative teams” subject them to. And this is never ending, so the product can be pushed endlessly.

In contrast, the characters in graphic novels take a backseat to the stories. They exist solely as pieces in the greater whole of the conveyed narrative. And, it's a narrative that will have a conclusion at some point.

The web scene seems to balance both of these. Strips by and large remain character driven, while experimental and "artsy" graphic novel-esque works (like Derek Kirk Kim) remain story driven.

Japan meanwhile seems to have the best of both worlds. While they do feature very strong (and marketable) characters, there is almost always a specific story path that they traverse. No matter how much of a character oriented juggernaut Pokémon is, the outline of a story dominates those characters. The characters exist because of the story and don’t stray from its constraints.

This is different from say, X-Men, which merely creates a premise for having characters. The X-Men aren’t moving along some grand storyline, they just interact based on a theme that “mutants exist in the world as a superpowered minority” (and can thereby also cameo in other off-theme books).

Personally, I’d think that this can be added to the list of reasons why manga have seen success in recent years amongst American audiences. Its easier to get readers hooked onto good stories with interesting characters than by character driven soap operas where the plot is auxiliary.

Kid's sequential drawings

This is a summary/review of an article I thought had particularly compelling evidence for why understanding sequential images is a learned trait. Highlights are all mine.

Wilson, Brent, and Marjorie Wilson. 1987. Pictorial Composition and Narrative Structure: Themes and the Creation of Meaning in the Drawings of Egyptian and Japanese Children. Visual Arts Research, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Issue 26). Illinois: University of Illinois

Narratives of urban Japanese children (manga) were compared to those of village Egyptian children. The argument was made that development differs based on graphically “rich” versus graphically “poor” environments. Egyptian children teach each other how to draw (“world of childhood graphic imagery rather than adult imagery” p. 10). Egyptian children’s drawings were floating, static, 2D, and symmetrical– more a reflection of perception (“intrinsic and intuitive bias towards simplicity”…”reflect humans’ innate preference for simple nonoverlapping shapes” p. 15). Japanese children’s drawings were often occluded, cropped, with lots of visual elements, had some sort of plane to ground the images, and employed “cinematic” techniques– similar to that found in manga (Japanese children by 8 or 9 may have passed the point where they are inspired by innate factors– p.15).

Over 2/3 Egyptian children drew narratives where the contents of one frame was not sequentially related to the next frame. All Japanese children drew sequential narratives – and at a “higher level of story structure” (p.16). “Japanese children were three or four times more likely to depict a related series of events or process.”

Their conclusion is that the urban versus village lifestyle, plus other cultural factors encouraging drawing are what lead to the difference in representational ability. My response would be that its not the urban/village lifestyles that cause this, but exposure to VL and practice with it. Japanese kids live in rich visual language culture (manga), and actively develop those this graphic fluency. They do note though, that Egyptian children did not have access to comics, and “television for the Egyptian children seems not to provide a functional model for producing the structure of graphic narrative plots” (p16). Manga, of course, does provide that for Japanese children.

This is another example of how looking at graphic creation through a Language perspective alters the way data is interpreted. Because drawings look like what they represent, the Art POV will attribute influence to all sorts of perceptual and societal influences. A Language perspective focuses mainly on the exposure and devlopment of those particular structures in their cultural surroundings: if you're going to produce (visual) language, what (visual) language is around you?