The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904-1924

AUTHOR: Kiyama, Henry Yoshitaka

ARTIST: Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Kiyama Yoshitaka gashitsu (Japanese); Stone Bridge Press (English)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION:Manga yonin shosei, 1931 (English translation, 1931, 1999)

Publication History

In February, 1927, forty-two-year-old Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama held an art exhibit in San Francisco, California, titled “Manga Hokubei Iminshi” (“a manga North American immigrant history”). In the early twentieth century, most cartoon artists serialized their work in newspapers. Kiyama, however, presented his story in its entirety at the art exhibit and then resorted to self-publication. He published his work in book format, predating what has become known as the “graphic novel” by decades.

Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904-1924 was printed on January 25, 1931, by Kuyama Printers in Tokyo and published on March 3, 1931, by the Yoshitaka Kiyama Studio in San Francisco. The hardcover book of more than one hundred pages was published under the title Manga yonin shosei (the four students comic). The book was written in English and Japanese and had a listed sale price of three dollars. Kiyama was identified as the author as well as the publisher. The book includes forewords and favorable comments from Kaname Wakasugi, the Japanese consul general in San Francisco at the time, and well-known local artists and intellectuals such as Chiura Obata, Koh Murai (known by his pen name, Hibutsu), and Kazuo Ebina (identified by his pen name, Shunshuro), a columnist for the Nichi Bei (the Japanese American news).

Frederik L. Schodt, author of Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983), Inside the Robot Kingdom (1988), and Native American in the Land of the Shogun (2003), discovered Kiyama’s book around 1980 while doing research on Japanese comics. A few years later, Schodt briefly introduced Kiyama’s work in his book Manga! Manga! Not until almost two decades later did he finally have the chance to translate Kiyama’s book. Berkeley-based Stone Bridge Press released Schodt’s English translation, accompanied by his introduction and notes, under the title The Four Immigrants Manga.

Plot

The episodic narrative begins with the arrival of four Japanese immigrants—Henry, Frank, Charlie, and Fred—in San Francisco in 1904. Henry comes to study art, Fred wants to thrive in farming, Frank is interested in business, and Charlie hopes to study the democratic system of the United States. Despite their differing career aspirations, the characters follow a path shared by many Japanese immigrants at the time: With the help of the local Buddhist temple, they become “schoolboys” who work as house servants and go to school after finishing their chores. The following nine episodes describe the schoolboys’ sense of isolation and displacement as they adjust to being domestic laborers in the United States. The characters’ interactions with American families and other immigrants illustrate the miscommunication and misunderstandings caused by language barriers and cultural differences. Their experience also reflects certain social issues in San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, including street robbery and racial discrimination.

Kiyama’s work not only reflects the Japanese American experience but also documents some events in American and world history. The textual narrative and drawings tell the reader about the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, school segregation in California, the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, “picture brides,” World War I, and the Spanish flu in 1918, among other events and cultural developments.

As the subtitle of Kiyama’s book—A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904-1924—suggests, The Four Immigrants Manga documents multiple aspects of Japanese immigrant life, including the community’s social standing, economic status, and relations with Caucasian Americans and other ethnic minorities in an era of increasing anti-Asian sentiment in the United States. Throughout the book, Henry’s autobiographical narrative is intertwined with Frank, Fred, and Charlie’s stories as well with as the experiences of other Japanese immigrants and Americans with whom they interact.

Characters

• Henry is loosely based on Kiyama. He comes to the United States to study art. While attending art school in San Francisco, he works mostly as a domestic laborer. He is cheerful and optimistic and usually appears with his brush and easel. At the end of the story, Henry and Frank return to Japan for a visit.

• Charlie is Henry’s friend and loosely based on a man named Chuji Nakada. He is the tallest of the four friends. He comes to the United States to learn about democracy and the American social system. Throughout the story, he appears to be politically conscious. He enlists during World War I and serves in the U.S. Army in Europe. After the war, his application for American citizenship is denied because of his ethnicity.

• Frank is loosely based on Kiyama’s friend Sakuji Hida. He comes to the United States with an interest in business and hopes to make a fortune by importing goods from Japan. He and Charlie seem to be close to each other; they appear together in many of the episodes.

• Fred is loosely based on a man named Kiichiro Kato. He is interested in farming and becomes successful late in the story, making one million dollars with one harvest.

Artistic Style

Schodt’s English edition uses the panel from the cover of Kiyama’s original 1931 edition as part of its cover image. It is a portrait of the four main characters: Henry, Charlie, Frank, and Fred. The art throughout The Four Immigrants Manga is black and white, and there is no clear progression in the Artistic style as the story unfolds.

Kiyama adheres to a standard layout throughout. In total, the book includes fifty-two episodes; each episode includes two pages and twelve panels, and each panel is numbered continuously from one to twelve in the lower right corner. This structure defines the nature of the book and presents a series of vignettes.

The layout of images is consistent, and the pages are not crowded with overwhelming visual details. Such a style allows the reader to engage the story without too much challenge. There are minor variations in the artist’s use of dialogue bubbles, but overall, there are no drastic changes. In some cases, it is difficult to distinguish the characters from one another. As Schodt points out in his introduction to the 1999 edition, the background images are important, as they illustrate easily recognizable landmarks of San Francisco such as the Ferry Building at the end of Market Street, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Seal Rock, and Golden Gate Park.

Themes

Generally speaking, The Four Immigrants Manga is concerned with social issues such as immigration, racial discrimination, class, school segregation, and legislation. The list of episodes at the beginning of the book is in essence a table of contents that clearly indicates the historical coverage of Kiyama’s work: It not only addresses issues and phenomena specific to Japanese immigrants at the time—such as “schoolboys,” picture brides, and the Alien Land Law—but also reflects historical events at large.

Anti-Japanese legislation forms the background of the characters’ stories. In the continental United States, Japanese immigrants were a racial minority in 1920, accounting for roughly 2 percent of the California population. As Kiyama’s book reflects, in San Francisco, the local objection to Japanese immigrants was strong in the early twentieth century. In addition to documenting the difficulty and obstacles in Japanese immigrants’ integration into American society, Kiyama’s book goes further to reveal social prejudices of various kinds. Episode 12, “Working on a Farm,” for example, shows how Charlie and Frank face discrimination within the Japanese American community. When the two characters seek out seasonal jobs in Stockton during harvest time, fellow Japanese immigrants inform them bluntly that they will be paid less because they are “city boys.” The Four Immigrants Manga emphasizes the fact that discrimination can occur within every segment of society.

Impact

Initially self-published in San Francisco as a bilingual work, The Four Immigrants Manga is one of the first book-length comics of an autobiographical nature published in the United States. The critical reception of the book at the time of its first publication is hard to determine, as it likely had a limited readership. Nonetheless, the acclaim included in the 1931 edition seems to suggest the approval of educated Japanese Americans in the local community. Schodt’s translation was a finalist for the USA Pen/West translation award in 2000. In the same year, Schodt received Asahi Shimbun’s Osamu Tezuka Award in a special category for helping promote manga. In March of 2000, a memorial for Kiyama was erected in Neu, Hino-cho, Tottori Prefecture, Japan.

In 2009, the First Annual Asian American ComiCon presented the inaugural Henry Y. Kiyama Award, an award intended to recognize the contribution of Asians and Asian Americans to U.S. comic book culture. Kiyama’s career represented the convergence of two worlds and industries, and his work pointed the way to the future of graphic storytelling. His autobiographically inspired work predates the comics trend of graphic memoirs by decades and provides refreshing ways to evaluate the creative potential of comics.

Further Reading

Eisner, Will. Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories (2007).

Nakazawa, Keiji. Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima (2004-2010).

Okubo, Miné. Citizen 13660 (1983).

Bibliography

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Humphrey, Robert L. “Book Notes.” Review of The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904-1924 by Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama. American Studies International (June, 1999): 107-108.

Ichioka, Yuji. The Issei: The World of First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924. New York: Free Press, 1988.

Johnson, Mark Dean. “Uncovering Asian American Art in San Francisco, 1850-1940.” In Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970, edited by Gordon H. Chang, et al. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Schodt, Frederick L. “Henry Kiyama and The Four Immigrants Manga.” In The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904-1924. Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 1999.

Takada, Mayumi. “The Four Immigrants Manga and the Making of Japanese Americans.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 39, no. 4 (Winter, 2006): 125-139.

Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (Winter, 2006): 965-979.