Social Commentary, Horror Manga and the Left: From Ero-Guro to Junji Ito

Content Warning: gore and body horror

Horror manga has always had ties with revolutionary politics. Its beginnings, in fact, start with a Marxist-oriented magazine in the 1960s. Garo, an early gekiga magazine for avant-garde art, was one of the most important magazines for the development of horror manga. Its publication lasted almost 40 years (starting in 1964 and ending in 2002) and the earliest works of horror manga can be found in its pages, as well as a career starting point for the majority of early horror manga artists. Aside from this, horror manga has ties to the ero guro nansensu movement of the 1920s (arguably earlier if certain woodblock prints are considered “ero guro”), which has a clear revolutionary bent. Horror manga today may be more detached from this history, but there are still traces of this revolutionary ethos in modern works.

Garo, The Legend of Kamui, and Burakumin

Garo was an alternative magazine published in kashi-hon stores during the 1960s which became the center of the Japanese counterculture movement. At the time, manga’s main distribution channels were weekly magazines made to correspond to TV series, such as Astro Boy or Speed Racer. Because these magazines’ main demographic was children, stories catering to mature audiences had to find somewhere else to be published. This is where the kashi-hon’ya industry comes in; kashi-hon refers to a for-profit rental service for books (similar to the old video rental stores in the U.S.). These stores allowed for the publication of more mature stories and the rise of gekiga, a form of graphic novel that dealt with more explicit themes.

Garo was the most popular magazine distributed within this network. At its peak in 1970, 80,000 copies of the magazine were published. Its main artist, Shirato Sanpei, had notoriety because one of his stories, Ninja Bugeicho, received a film adaptation in 1967. Shirato was a Marxist known for his social commentary; Ninja Bugeicho itself is a story about a left-wing uprising among the peasant class.

He was deeply interested in the burakumin, a group of people with a long history, starting from the eta-hinin outcaste in the Chusei period. The names themselves show the discrimination that they faced, as “eta” means “filthy” and “hinin” literally means “non-human”. “Eta” referred to those who worked with corpses, such as butchers and tanners, while “hinin” referred to beggars, street performers, and so on. The eta-hinin were excluded from Japanese society, not allowed to marry anyone outside of their class, prevented from changing occupations, and forced to wear clothes that marked their social status. Popular consciousness holds that their discrimination was due to religious taboos against working with blood. 

During the Meiji Period, the status of “eta-hinin” was abolished with the Emancipation Edict in 1871. Still, the social structures which the caste system created did not go away overnight; disenfranchised people moved to the segregated neighborhoods of the eta-hinin, which then became known as tokushu buraku or special districts/hamlets, and so the people became burakumin, “people of the hamlets”. 

The burakumin have faced massive discrimination. In 1975, address lists of buraku neighborhoods (Buraku Chinmei Sokan) were found that had been used as a means for employment discrimination, their neighborhoods often did not appear on official maps, and there were many examples of public discrimination, such as the Sayama incident. This history led to Dowa policies intended to solve the inequalities of the buraku districts, though many areas initially did not receive funding.

To this day, the burakumin face discrimination, having lower education rates, impoverished communities, and marriage taboos against them. Many of the policy reforms directed towards the burakumin in the 1960s became absorbed under universal “human rights” policies, and it seems that there is a difficulty in thinking about buraku discrimination today. 

Shirato’s main work and the main work of Garo magazine, The Legend of Kamui (1964 -1971), was made to tell the history of the burakumin, as this history could not be told through other channels, because of factors such as the heavy censorship in Japanese textbooks. The gekiga tells the story of Shosuke, a buraku descendant who fights for his community through “agonistic debate, legal petitioning, literacy education, the development of new agricultural industries, and technological modernization”. 

Shirato’s focus on telling the story from the burakumin’s perspective is clear even from its earliest chapters, such as the second chapter which depicts the heavy taxation by the feudal lords that left them without food, or the fourth chapter which shows Shosuke being discriminated against for being a genin (literally “lowly person”), the lowest rank of the peasant class. There are many text-only panels dedicated to explaining the context of the burakumin’s way of life. The Marxist-oriented nature of the story is clear from these text-only panels, which give a materialist account of Japanese history and use many Marxist phrases, such as “fundamental contradictions between classes” to describe the relation between the burakumin and the social order. In the beginning chapters, the story of Shosuke is told alongside the story of a white wolf with five siblings who is ostracized on the basis of being white (the other wolves are black). From Shirato’s comments on this story, this is not only used as an analogy for the burakumin but also as a means to explain Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation. This type of storytelling runs throughout all of the manga and therefore, throughout all of Garo (at least, during its early years).

Horror Manga Artists in Garo 

At the same time, Garo was also used as a site for experimental manga and stories that dealt with explicit themes, such as violence and death. A prime example of this is Tsuge Yoshiharu’s Screw Style (1968), considered to be the first experimental manga. Explicitly, it is about a young boy trying to find a doctor for his injury, though its interpretations range from being about the contradiction between the urbanized and rural character of Japan to depicting how Japan struggles to come to terms with those who died in World War II. The manga is experimental in its art style as well as its story-telling. It uses colored panels, has depictions of mental anguish, and uses a more realistic style. 

It seems that this space for more adult-oriented narratives is what allowed horror manga to flourish; many early horror manga artists started or had the majority of their careers through Garo magazine. The first instance was Mizuki Shigeru whose Hakaba Kitaro (Graveyard Kitaro) appeared in the April 1966 magazine; before that, Mizuki drew a cover for the March 1966 magazine.The manga was inspired by a kamishibai of the same name (today, it is lost media) and told of Kitaro’s adventures in dealing with yokai. Mizuki would write multiple series in the manga, being a frequent author, and Hakaba Kitaro continued in Garo until 1969. 

Under the suggestion of the TV producer Watanabe Ryotoku, Mizuki made a more child-friendly version of the manga. This led to him changing the tone of the manga as well as its name. “Graveyard” was considered too scary, and so Mizuki changed the name from “Hakaba” to Gegege no Kitaro, the sound that was initially used in Hakaba Kitaro to signify children laughing at the main character. Though it became a light-hearted story, there are still elements of horror in how the yokai themselves are depicted. There are also chapters where the characters face horrific ends, such as being burned alive. 

Aside from Mizuki, the works of Hino Hideshi are also in the magazine, who was something like a Japanese Tim Burton. From 1968 onward, he published in the magazine, putting in Hino Hideshi’s Shocking Theater. Though his style is cartoonish, it is clear that the works are horror from their subject matter; Hino’s Panorama of Hell (1984) deals with a disturbed family fascinated by blood, mutilation, and dismemberment, and The Laughing Ball shows a child who can do nothing but smile, even in the face of death. 

Furthermore, many of the ero-guro artists had prominent roles in Garo. Maruo Suehiro, the often dubbed “king” of ero-guro, appears as early as Garo #9, and much of his artwork, including pictures from his well-known manga, The Caterpillar, appears in one of the 1993 editions.  Hayami Jun and  Hiroguchi Hiromi, prominent horror ero-guro manga artists, also appear in this edition as well. 

Ero-Guro: A Brief History

Ero-guro itself is another tie to revolutionary history; its roots are the ero-guro nansensu movement during the 1920s which started as a form of protest against conservative Showa-period values. The term literally translates to “erotic grotesque nonsense,” a fitting description of this genre’s content.  A good example is Kago Shintaro’s Lament of the Headless (2015) which is about a yokai who tries to find a boyfriend but can’t because her head detaches from her body every time she has sex. 

The movement started due to a variety of social factors, the most prominent being censorship by the Japanese Home Ministry. The Ministry censored both “morally obscene” and “politically extreme” content, which led to their combination in artwork opposing such censorship. The first piece of ero-guro nansensu literature is generally considered to be Urehara Hokumei’s Grotesque magazine, published in 1928. The magazine took every opportunity to criticize censorship practices, even going so far as publishing pictures of banned books showing that they were easy to obtain.  

The movement spanned multiple artistic mediums, including film, literature, and theater. There were clear queer and feminist undertones in the movement.  Ranpo Edogawa (known for his story, The Caterpillar, which later received a manga adaptation by Maruo Suehiro) provides a clear case. Ranpo himself was homosexual and spent the later years of his life interested in queer history (in particular, he tried to popularize the work of one of his anthropologist friends who was doing research on the subject).

Furthermore, there are depictions of female desire and sexuality in the ero-guro movement. Many ero-guro works revolved around what is known as the moga (modan garu, from “modern girl” in English), a figure that represented the newfound freedoms of Japanese women in the 1920s. Ranpo’s works certainly have depictions of female desire in his short stories, though they are subject to the male gaze. The male gaze was constitutive of the moga in much of ero-guro art across all of its mediums. Still, there were truly feminist depictions of female desire, such as in the works of Osaki Midori. 

The manga artists who were inspired by this movement carry this history with them. Maruo Suehiro, the often-dubbed “king of ero-guro”, frequently depicts crossdressing and queer sexuality in his artwork. 

Even in more recent works, similar themes can be found. A good example is Kago Shintaro’s Town of Japan’s Best Beauties (2015), a story where all the most beautiful women are made in a factory. Their beauty must be maintained in increasingly absurd ways, for example, by not going to the bathroom but instead having their stomachs cut open in order to defecate. This satirizes the common notion that women must be so pure and clean that they cannot even be associated with basic bodily functions like needing the toilet. 

Some scholars argue that the ero-guro movement is revolutionary insofar as it pushes the “limit of what is permissible.”  On the other hand, others have argued that the ero-guro movement is bourgeois because it often revolved around the middle class (many ero-guro artists were university educated students, Grotesque magazine did not have furigana to make reading more accessible, etc.). Though ero-guro was not explicitly leftist in the same way as other artistic movements, there is still a connection between ero-guro and marginalized groups. 

New Beginnings 

Often called the “god of horror manga,” Umezz Kazuo marks a new beginning for the genre’s history. Kazuo became popular after the fall of the kashi-hon industry where the original magazines were distributed. As such, Umezz’s history does not have the same ties to left-wing politics as earlier horror manga. Since Umezz’s work was published in more mainstream channels (shounen and shoujo magazines), his work led to a rise in the popularity of horror manga, and he inspired a new generation of horror manga artists. In some instances, he even helped with their careers, as in the case of Inuki Kanako, who started her career in a magazine compiled by Umezz himself.

Though Umezz does not have explicit ties to the countercultural movement, there are still similar themes in his works. His most popular work, The Drifting Classroom (1972 – 1974), is a story that deals with concepts of environmentalism and nationalist ideology. It is a story about a school that gets transported to a post-apocalyptic world and its students  learning how to survive with the little resources they have. The story begins with the collapse of existing authority under pressure, as the teachers turn on each other, hoard resources, or take their own lives.The children are left to fend for themselves, and eventually divide into two factions: one that replicates authoritarian rule and one that emphasizes a communal mindset. It is only when they learn to work together as a community that they overcome the obstacles they face. Umezz’s supernatural setting uses scenes of starvation and mass death that would be equally at home in Barefoot Gen (1973 – 1987), and the children must navigate a world left barren by the previous generation’s failure to safeguard the environment.  

Even today with modern authors, there are still revolutionary themes and critiques of the Japanese government. Just look at Ito Junji’s Gyo (2001 – 2002), which takes the Unit 731 experiments as its basis for the entire story. The walking machines were made in the aftermath of the experiments, and the gas shows the souls of those affected by them. Ito has explicitly stated that Umezz was a huge influence for him, especially in terms of story structure, so it is not surprising that the authors share this connection. 

From the beginning to now, horror manga has always gone hand-in-hand with revolutionary politics. It was initially published in a left-wing magazine (aside from the manga, Garo had numerous political essays), and its themes always dealt with the violence of Japan, the oppression of marginalized people, and other progressive themes. This history is only possible because manga was initially published in well-defined distribution channels that served as barriers to entry; the manga were expected to fit the theme and the tone of the magazine, artists would only know about the magazine if they were in a certain social setting, etc. 

However, even outside of Garo, critiques of the State still permeate throughout modern works. Eventually, horror manga was accepted by mainstream publications, and yet the revolutionary character of it remained (even if it had to be damped down a bit). A good example is Mizuki’s The Great Yokai War (1966), published in a shounen magazine, which critiqued the United States’ invasion of areas such as Korea and Vietnam. 

This raises a question: why is it that horror has such a close association with this form of politics? With the decentralization and accessibility offered by the internet, it would stand to reason that horror manga would become completely detached from this history. One could argue that influence plays a major role; new artists still look to those of the past, and in that way, come to absorb the politics within those works. This may be true on some level, but it misses a more fundamental point. 

It seems that there is something inherent in horror itself which makes it align with revolutionary politics. Even outside of manga, horror has always been used for social critique; from the cenobites of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) to Mary Harron’s razor-sharp satire in American Psycho (2000) to the many-layered works of Jordan Peele. The best horror seems to have an inherent alliance with the oppressed, and that’s just as true in the world of horror manga. Even in the present day, this connection remains.