I live about ten minutes from a Book Off, and the manga section is always the busiest aisle in the shop — teenagers crouched on the floor, salarymen flipping through a volume before deciding, a few tourists taking photos of the covers without buying anything. It’s easy to assume manga is a modern invention, something that arrived with Pokémon and Studio Ghibli in the 1990s. It didn’t. The habit of telling stories through sequential pictures in Japan is close to a thousand years old, and the word “manga” itself is over two centuries old. What changed after the Second World War wasn’t the idea — it was the speed, the scale, and one doctor-turned-artist who rebuilt the medium from the ground up.
Here’s how a medieval picture scroll became the industry that now ships hundreds of millions of volumes a year, and where to see the real objects if you’re curious while you’re here.
The quick answer
- Manga’s roots go back to 12th-century picture scrolls (emaki), long before the word “manga” existed.
- The term “manga” was first recorded in 1798 and later popularized by the ukiyo-e master Hokusai through his sketchbook series Hokusai Manga (1814–1834) — though his “manga” meant loose, whimsical sketches, not ongoing stories.
- The modern, story-driven manga we know today starts with Osamu Tezuka, the so-called “God of Manga,” whose Mighty Atom (Astro Boy) began in 1951 and brought cinematic pacing to the page.
- Weekly Shonen Jump launched in 1968 and became the engine of the industry, serializing Dragon Ball, One Piece and dozens of others one chapter at a time.
- If you want to see the history in person, the Kyoto International Manga Museum and the Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum in Takarazuka are the two best stops.
Before the word existed
Long before anyone called it manga, Japan had a tradition of telling stories in sequential images. The best-known early example is the Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga (“Scrolls of Frolicking Animals and Humans”), a set of 12th-century picture scrolls traditionally attributed to the monk Toba Sōjō. They show frogs, monkeys and rabbits acting out very human scenes — gambling, wrestling, posturing as priests — painted in flowing ink lines that read left to right across the scroll, panel by panel in spirit if not in literal boxes. Art historians consider them a direct ancestor of manga’s visual grammar, centuries before the word itself was coined.
The Edo period (1603–1868) added the next layer: cheap, mass-produced woodblock-printed books called kibyōshi, satirical picture books sold to a literate urban public, plus the broader explosion of ukiyo-e print culture. This is the world the word “manga” was born into.
Hokusai and the word itself
The first recorded use of “manga” — written with characters meaning something like “whimsical” or “impromptu” pictures — appears in 1798, in a work by the writer Santō Kyōden. It didn’t become a household term until the ukiyo-e master Katsushika Hokusai, already famous for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, published a series of sketchbooks between 1814 and 1834 under the title Hokusai Manga. These were loose collections of drawings — people, animals, ghosts, everyday scenes, bits of landscape — not narrative comics in the modern sense. But the name stuck to the format, and “manga” gradually came to mean any loose, humorous, fast-sketched pictorial work. Ukiyo-e: The Woodblock Prints That Changed Western Art goes deeper into how this same print tradition reshaped art outside Japan entirely.
The gap: Meiji satire and early 20th-century strips
Through the Meiji era (1868–1912), as Japan absorbed Western newspapers and political cartoons, “manga” shifted again, this time toward satirical single-panel and short comic-strip work in magazines, closer to what a Western reader would recognize as a cartoon. Children’s comic strips appeared in newspapers in the 1920s and 30s, and a nationwide readership for serialized picture stories existed well before the war — but the industry was still small, aimed mostly at children, and nothing like the hundred-million-copy business it would become.
Tezuka’s revolution
Everything changed with Osamu Tezuka. Trained as a doctor before he chose comics, Tezuka began serializing Mighty Atom — known internationally as Astro Boy — in April 1951. He brought techniques straight from cinema: dramatic close-ups, extreme camera angles, pages that used dozens of panels to stretch out a single second of motion instead of compressing a whole scene into one static frame. Readers who had only ever seen static, gag-strip comics suddenly had something that moved like a movie on paper. Tezuka followed with an enormous body of work — Black Jack, Phoenix, Kimba the White Lion — and became known as manga no kamisama, the God of Manga. When Astro Boy became a TV anime in 1963, it also helped found Japan’s entire animated-TV industry, a story told in full in A Short History of Anime: From Ukiyo-e to Global Export.
Tezuka’s influence on the next generation of artists was so total that almost every major manga creator who followed built on techniques he introduced in the 1950s.
Weekly magazines and the industry machine
The postwar manga boom needed a delivery system, and Japan built one: thick, cheap, weekly anthology magazines, each running a dozen or more ongoing series in parallel, chapter by chapter. Weekly Shonen Magazine launched in 1959; Weekly Shonen Jump, the title most foreign readers now recognize, followed in 1968. This weekly-chapter format is the reason so many iconic manga ran for years or decades — Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto and Slam Dunk were all built chapter by chapter inside these magazines before being collected into the paperback volumes sold today. Alongside the magazines, a parallel “rental manga” (kashi-hon) culture of lending libraries and manga cafés kept the format affordable for readers who couldn’t buy every issue — an echo of which survives today in Japan’s manga kissa (manga cafés), where you can still rent a booth and read for hours.
Going global
Manga’s export abroad rode on the back of anime. Television series like Astro Boy, Speed Racer and later Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon and Pokémon introduced international audiences to the visual style first, and the source manga followed once Western publishers realized there was an audience for it. By the 1990s and 2000s, English-language manga had its own shelf in ordinary bookstores, something that would have been unimaginable to Tezuka’s generation. Today digital platforms and web-native “vertical scroll” comics have added a new branch to the format, but printed, right-to-left manga volumes remain the dominant form at home.
Where to see the history in person
If this kind of thing interests you, two stops are worth building into a trip. The Kyoto International Manga Museum, housed in a converted 1869 elementary school, holds around 300,000 items and lets visitors pull volumes off open shelves and read on the lawn outside — one of the most relaxed museum experiences in the city. The Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum in Takarazuka, Tezuka’s hometown near Osaka, is smaller and more personal, built around his sketches, letters and the evolution of Astro Boy. For a more retail-minded afternoon, Nakano Broadway in Tokyo is the densest concentration of secondhand manga, art and collectible shops in the city, built around the famous Mandarake chain.
FAQ
Is manga the same thing as anime? No. Manga is the printed comic; anime is the animated adaptation. Many major anime series, including Astro Boy, Dragon Ball and One Piece, started life as manga first.
Do I need to read Japanese to enjoy a manga museum? No. Both the Kyoto and Takarazuka museums have English signage, and much of the appeal is visual — original art, sketches and the physical evolution of the medium.
Why does manga read right to left? It follows traditional Japanese book-reading order, inherited from vertical Japanese text. Most English translations now preserve this original right-to-left panel order rather than flipping the artwork.
What’s the single most influential manga ever made? Historians and critics most often point to Tezuka’s Mighty Atom (Astro Boy) for establishing the visual grammar nearly every manga artist since has built on.
The verdict
Manga didn’t start with Pokémon cards or a shelf at your local bookstore — it started with monks drawing wrestling frogs on a scroll, picked up its name from one of the most famous print artists in history, and only became the medium we know today when a former medical student decided comics could move like film. If you want the full arc in one afternoon, Kyoto’s manga museum lays out eight centuries of it under one roof, open shelves included.
Written from Japan by the Wayfarer Japan team.
Featured image: “008 Anime and manga bookshop in Japan – bookstore in Kyoto, Japan” by Marek Ślusarczyk ( Tupungato ), CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
