“Choju-Giga” — First manga in the history of Japan
The tradition of telling stories with a series of images in sequence has been a part of Japanese culture for a long time. This is the case of the “ Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga (鳥獣人物戯画)” which translates as “cartoons of anthropomorphic animals”, a series of very famous and somewhat mysterious scrolls of images since there are various assumptions about who and where made these. drawings and for what purpose these patterned scrolls were created. Given its structure and the way it is “read”, it has been named “ the first manga in the history of Japan” on many occasions.
It is a picture scroll consisting of 4 volumes in total, and its total length is about 44m, but it is not clear what the various caricatures drawn on it are intended to represent. It is a treasure of the Kozanji Temple in Kyoto and was designated as a National Treasure in 1952 .
The author is said to have been a high priest of the late Heian period (794 to 1185) named Toba Sōjō , who specialized in caricatures aimed at humor and satire, but there is no confirmation of this. Due to the difference in the brush strokes of each volume or scroll, it is believed that several painters were involved in creating the drawings on these image scrolls.
In these scrolls all kinds of animals appear, from monkeys that are playing in the water, jumping and swimming in the mountain stream (first scroll), horses, cows, dogs and chickens, there are drawn many fantasy animals such as kirin , dragons and baku (second scroll) to monks and lay people playing with each other by pulling their necks and playing sugoroku (third and fourth scrolls).
