Rare Copies of Yomiuri's Wartime Paper Found in Nagano Pref. Library Bearing Forgotten Strips of Popular Manga

Yomiuri Shimbun

12 hours ago

Copies of a newspaper published by The Yomiuri Shimbun during the latter years of the Pacific War have been found in a library in Nagano Prefecture, a discovery revealing of life on the home front at that time.
Many of the Yomiuri's own copies of the daily were lost during a U.S. air raid.
The wartime newspaper was aimed at laborers across the nation and carried articles about the war and other topics written from an everyday point of view. It also carried a four-panel comic called 'Norakuro,' which was a popular manga drawn by Suiho Tagawa before the war. These strips of 'Norakuro' had been forgotten, so the discovery of the wartime newspapers means there is a new trove of lost comics.
Kyushu University Prof. Hiroki Nagashima found the newspapers in the Nagano Prefectural Library in Nagano City. Nagashima will report his findings at a meeting of the Japan Society for Studies in Cartoons and Comics that will be held in Yonago, Tottori Prefecture, from Saturday.
Record of life on the home front
The Yomiuri's wartime edition was published for about 13 months from March 1, 1944, until the end of March 1945. The newspaper was edited separately from The Yomiuri Shimbun and issued in tabloid form, half the size of the regular Yomiuri.
However, The Yomiuri Shimbun has hard copies of only about four months' worth of the wartime daily — from the first edition through to the end of May 1944, as well as those editions printed in September that year. The Yomiuri's head office in Tokyo's Ginza district burned down in an air raid and numerous documents were destroyed by the fire. It is believed that many copies of the wartime edition that had been kept at the head office were lost at that time.
The copies recently found at the Nagano Prefectural Library were issued from June 1944 to March 1945, a span that neatly overlaps with the gap in the Yomiuri's own collection. As a result, there are now hard copies of almost every single issue, from the very first right through to issue No. 395.
The Yomiuri's wartime edition was aimed at laborers working in factories, mines, agriculture, forestry and the fisheries industry under the country's total mobilization policy. The newspaper assumed that its readers had completed primary school. It carried easy-to-understand news as well as entertainment. The daily offers a valuable record of day-to-day life for average people on the home front through its many articles dealing with the war, such as those offering tips on how to get by.
'Norakuro' on hiatus'Norakuro''s four-panel comics were carried 224 times in the wartime paper, from the inaugural issue until October 1944.
The manga was a major hit when it was published in a boys' magazine before the war, but it ended its run shortly before the Pacific War started. The manga resumed after the war, but even Tagawa's autobiography made no mention of the comic strip printed in the Yomiuri's wartime edition. Consequently, the wartime years had been considered a fallow period for his work.
The 'Norakuro' comics in the recently discovered newspapers at times sprinkle humor into their depictions of the home front and are a valuable window into the wartime atmosphere in Japan. The comics also provide an important link between the prewar and postwar history of manga.