HONOLULU.- In 2019, the Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA) acquired the 1975 hand-drawn short story “Vagabond Plain” by acclaimed alternative manga artist Tadao Tsuge (b. 1941). Tsuge’s illustrations capture the social crisis of postwar Japan.

Opening Dec. 19, “Drawn from the Street: The Politics of Poverty in Postwar Manga” features this milestone graphic narrative. Fourteen excerpts from Tsuge’s story highlight the problems of urbanization and socioeconomic disparity in Japan during the Allied Occupation (1945-1952), a story that was largely overshadowed in the media by what is known as the “economic miracle.”



Included in the exhibition are “Vagabond Plain” precursors — Japanese woodblock prints and woodblock-printed books from HoMA’s collection that are honest depictions of poverty and houselessness from the 17th to early 20th centuries, such as the 1926 print “Temporary Refuge Near Honjo” by Kiriya Senrin.



Tsuge’s sophisticated work focuses on a lower-class neighborhood, making art historical allusions to early European modernism (the paintings of Vincent van Gogh) and postwar Japanese photography by artists such as Moriyama Daidō (b. 1938).



The artist was born and raised in Tokyo’s Katsushika Ward, one of the areas that were excluded from the country’s economic recovery. In the semiautobiographical “Vagabond Plain,” Tsuge offers a rare, realistic glimpse of urban poverty in Japan and exemplifies the genre of gekiga (dramatic pictures) that was intended for an adult audience.



“Tsuge defied the aesthetically and politically conservative standards set by mainstream manga magazines of his day,” said Stephen Salel, HoMA’s curator of Japanese art. “His images are quickly drawn and the tonal contrast is intense. The honest style suits the unsettling social issues he addresses.”



“Vagabond Plain” begins with the narrator describing how around the year 1949, war veterans wandered aimlessly through Japan. Then it focuses on the development of a shantytown, which becomes a locus for drug addicts, prostitutes and gangsters.



While the short story touches upon financial want and lawlessness, Tsuge is more interested in the milieu, which he offers in a montage of textless scenes that transforms the disadvantaged neighborhood into an otherworldly domain. He conveys an intense sense of alienation and despair by obscuring the figures with shadows, shutting their eyes, hiding their faces behind sunglasses or turning them away from the reader. Tsuge’s crosshatching intensifies this unsettling mood. The characters’ clothing is wrinkled and ill-fitting, their faces look badly scarred and even the air above them looks choked with rolling smoke.



The first half of “Vagabond Plain” was printed in the October 1975 issue of the alternative manga magazine Garo, while the remainder was published in the January 1976 issue. The magazine defied the aesthetically and politically conservative standards set by previously mainstream manga magazines. With his unconventional drawing style and his willingness to focus on social ills, Tsuge became a highly respected contributor to Garo.



Tsuge has cited the “beggar photographs” (Kojiki Shashin) of Domon Ken (1909-1990) as a source of inspiration for some of his stories. The stylistic influence of Domon’s contemporaries Moriyama Daidō (b. 1938) and Tōmatsu Shōmei (1930-2012) are also evident in “Vagabond Plain,” and reproductions of photographs by these two artists accompany Tsuge’s drawings in the exhibition.

“Drawn from the Street” reveals how Japanese manga responds in an emotionally evocative manner to socioeconomic issues that are of increasingly pressing concern in contemporary Hawai‘i, the rest of the country and the world.