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Post by Prof. Rachel Thorn 🍉🇺🇦🏳️‍⚧️🏳️

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Prof. Rachel Thorn 🍉🇺🇦🏳️‍⚧️🏳️ @RachelThornSub@famichiki.jp

Manga artist CHIBA Tetsuya has passed. He was 89. I had the privilege of meeting him several times at manga-related gatherings, and he was a humble, funny guy. He's famous for such shōnen manga as ”Ashita no Joe" and "Ashita Tenki ni Naare," but his shōjo manga were groundbreaking and loved by girls back in the day. Before SATONAKA Machiko made her professional debut, she was convinced that no man could have written shōjo manga like that, and believed it was a woman using a man's pen name. 1/5

Chiba when he was much younger, with wavy hair, black-rimmed glasses, oudgy cheeks, and a sweet smile. Chiba just 3 years ago. The hair is almost all gone, and now his glasses are wire-framed round glasses, but the sweet smile is unchanged.

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Prof. Rachel Thorn 🍉🇺🇦🏳️‍⚧️🏳️ @RachelThornSub@famichiki.jp

It's not surprising she would think that. Up until he finished "Mama's Violin" (his first lengthy serial), he drew the way the male editors told him to, but didn't like what he was making and decided to just draw them without obsessing over the gender of the protagonist or that of the reader. He drew girls as human beings, and girls loved it. In the late 1950s, the shōjo manga drawn by men portrayed the heroine as passive, sweet, and waiting for some guy to rescue her. 2/5

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Prof. Rachel Thorn 🍉🇺🇦🏳️‍⚧️🏳️ @RachelThornSub@famichiki.jp

They drew their heroines with what I call "squirrel eyes." You could hardly see the whites of their eyes. They had big, black eyes, like cute little mammals. But starting with "The Ocean that Calls to Yuka" (1959), Chiba started drawing girls with intelligent, assertive eyes. They also behaved differently. They acted, rather than waiting for someone else to save them. 3/5

A closeup of Yuka on the beach. She wears a red short-sleeved shirt, has a beach towel around her neck, holds a pair of white sunglasses in her left hand, and wears a white visor with a pink floral pattern. The ocean is behind her, and she's looking at something on the beach with a gentle smile on her face.

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Prof. Rachel Thorn 🍉🇺🇦🏳️‍⚧️🏳️ @RachelThornSub@famichiki.jp

This was what girls like Satonaka, sick of the tear-jerker stories of girls being separated from the mothers, had been waiting for. His work was wildly popular. His portrayal of girl heroines continued to evolve through such stories as "1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, Six," "Yuki's Sun," and "Island Girl." Unfortunately, he started doing more work in boys' magazines and less in girls' magazines. His last shōjo work was "TV Angel" (1968). 4/5

Yuki, wearing a red and orange one-piece dress, with a glorious blue sky behind her, swings her badminton racket with a big smile. A cover for "1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, Six," divided horizontally into two parts. The top half features Mie, the third child, lying on the floor, while the fifth and last child, Itsuko, rides on her back. The bottom half features the protagonist, Kazue, who is the eldest child. She has a scarf around her neck and stands in front of a tree with pretty white blossoms while looking something we can't see. All the children are smiling.

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Prof. Rachel Thorn 🍉🇺🇦🏳️‍⚧️🏳️ @RachelThornSub@famichiki.jp

Although it isn't well known, the famous opening scene of "My Neighbor Totoro," showing a bird's-eye view of a truck driving along a country lane, is actually an homage to the opening sequence of Chiba's "1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, Six." The "sick mother" storyline is also featured in both works. 5/5

These four images are the first seven pages of Chiba's "1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, Six." The first page is a single, very large panel. We see, from rather high up, a pickup truck driving on a road with rice paddies on either side. The second page is three panels. The camera gradually zooms in on the truck. The driver honks at children playing in the middle of the road. The third page is a smallish panel and a large, square panel. One of the children jokingly scolds the children in the road. Then they see a persimmon tree. We are still in birds-eye mode. The fourth child, a boy named Shiro, grabs a branch of the tree, which breaks off. He stole three persimmons in the process. This page is a single large panel, with the camera looking directly down on the truck, the road, and the tree. The fourth page is two vertical panels. A car coming the other way passes them, and just then one of the boys yells SAYONARA! BANZAI! and the other driver, startled, swerves. The other car stops just short of a telephone pole. The father scolds the children. When they all respond "YES, FATHER!" they startle a boy on a bicycle, who actually crashes into a telephone pole. Clinging to the pole, the boy says, "Well, of all the...!" Now the youngest child child drops her toy bugle into the road. Father stops the car, the youngest boy runs to fetch it, jumps back on to the back of the truck (Did I mention that all five children are all riding in the back of the pickup truck?), and Mie-chan, the third child shouts, "OK! MOVE OUT!"

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