This is brilliant throughout all its roughly 550 pages. Shigeru Mizuki is a master storyteller. Very much looking forward to picking up the other three installments in this manga series.

An amazing and interesting history of Japan told in graphic novel format. It took me awhile to get used to the different styles interspersed throughout the book. There are gorgeous realistic depictions of things right along with very simple, cartoony drawings. I'm excited to read the whole series, and I know that I will refer back to this often.

SHOWA 1926-1939: A History of Japan by Shigeru Mizuki, translated from the Japanese by Zack Davisson, 2013 by @drawnandquarterlyJust finished Part 1 (of 4) of Mizuki's epic manga history of Japan and memoir of his own life. Started this one in the last days of #JanuaryinJapan and wanted to take my time with this monumental work. There are great end notes referenced throughout, providing context on cultural and economic touchstones and events. This volume covers rising Japanese imperialism, incur...

The drawback is a little bit too much detail that you'd soon forget (names, characters, events in a yearbook review format instead of storybuilding of a certain key characters). Feeling a moral obligation to retain info, youre soon exhausted at the very factual and narrative description of events-unfolding (Jason Lutes' Berlin comes to mind as a stark counterexample). The narraters own story as a child/adolscent matches with the parallel developments in the political/world stage merely chronolog...

An amazing insight into one man's growing up and how the war in China and the beginning of WW2 affected him. The art is excellent as is the writing.

Incredibly compelling history that strikes a great balance between the author's personal experience and the cultural and political context. Looking forward to the rest of the series.

I'm completely the wrong person to review a manga.My sum knowledge of the art form is from stolen glances on the Tozai Line at salarymen's copies that looked to me slightly less enticing than lugging around multi-coloured phonebooks through Tokyo's underground. But that was 15 years ago. The comics were impenetrable to me, being in Japanese. And upside down (I was invariably standing and the manga were on the laps of folk who had got on before me and so got seats.)Well, that was until tonight.To...

I first read Mizuki's Onwards to Our Noble Deaths, a bitterly anti-war story based on his own experience as a soldier. In the US we know little of the Japanese experience of WWII, so this is a fascinating and often ugly castigation of bureaucratic stupidity and mindless patriotic war-mongering. If this had been the only thing I had read I would not have experienced his humor in Kitaro, which he is perhaps best known for in Japan. He's a purveyor of monsters and mysticism and mythical beasts. And...

In general, I am not a fan of comic adaptations concerning history. But, in this superb manga, I have now found a comic version of the history of Japan that is quite well done.Shigeru Mizuki grew up in Japan right before the outbreak of war. His "Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan" is excellent. Part biography and part history, it is not only well written and full of interesting historical information, but it also serves as a look into the life of ordinary Japanese civilians.Starting with the K...

One of the best histories of Japan...period. This book will allow you to see the events that lead to WW II form the perspective of the Japanese people, a perspective that is often neglected.

I started reading 'Showa 1926 – 1939 : A History of Japan' by Shigeru Mizuki as soon as I got it a few days back. This first part of the 4-part book covers the history of Japan from the beginning of the Showa era in 1926 till the beginning of the Second World War. The book has two strands of stories which are woven together. The first is the history of Japan as the title indicates. The second is the author's own memoir. So we get to see the Japan of that era through both the big and the everyday...

Anyone interested in this period of Japanese or world history, should read this book, and, I suspect, the volumes to follow.NOTE BENE: Showa: 1926 - 1939 is published in the traditional Japanese style. The book is opened with the spine to your right, and you read the panels right to left, from the top of the right hand page. Basically "backwards" from a Western point of view.Generally speaking, I am not a regular reader, or fan of, manga. Further, my tastes in anime are pretty common: Akira, Cow...

SHOWA, 1926-1939 is the first of a four-volume history of modern Japan, its overall chronology corresponding to the long reign of Emperor Hirohito (also known as the Showa era). The author devotes some attention to his own autobiography, to a childhood dominated by elaborate gang battles and an adolescence marred by a listless apprenticeship. Most of the volume Shigeru Mizuki devotes to the larger story of his homeland, whose civilian government lost legitimacy in the financially straitened and

I read this a couple years ago but at the time I wasn't patient enough to enjoy the political aspects of the story - and even now much of the information goes right through me. I don't have much groundwork for appreciating Japanese politics. I wish Canada had a creator of Mizuki's talents write a similar book for my country's 20th century history. This kind of resource must make it so much easier for Japanese students to get good grades in school!I had just read Mizuki's Nonnonba which focuses m...

I actually took a course in college about Japanese history and I remember how dull my teacher turned something so intriguing. It was nothing short of a crime in my opinion. I wish she had just recommended this series to the class or even mentioned the word manga. This book has a lot of details packed in and the footnotes are great starting off points for further research. Sometimes the names can get a bit confusing because they are a bit unusual and there’s so many. But for the first time, a dec...

Can I just say how happy I am that we're finally seeing English translations of Shigeru Mizuki's work? He's almost as legendary as Osamu Tezuka, but less well-known here in the west. The Showa series is part autobiography, part history. Mizuki created this series in part because he worried that younger Japanese were forgetting the lessons of the early Showa era (the whole era ran 1926-1989), particularly the militarization leading up to WWII. Having lived during this time, he hoped his personal

Shigeru Mizuki's "Showa: 1926 - 1939" is a fascinating era in Japanese history. Also a very hard life in most of those years due to worldwide depression as well as Japan launching the war and invading parts of Asia. Mizuki tells the tale, by adding his personal childhood narratives throughout the manga. So what you are getting is very much a straight ahead history book, but with some inner observations from the artist/creator. I like it that he goes back and forth from memoir to tell the history...

Amazing manga. I'm upset that I don't have the second volume to start reading at once. This is such a momentous period in Japanese history which is fairly impenetrable if you are a westerner. You can read a series of events which took place, but the social changes and the effects on the Japanese psyche which the upheavals of modernization and militarization wrought cannot be conveyed with precision except by someone who lived through it. This is a treasure and I cannot wait to read the next volu...

Bottom Line FirstShowa 1926-1939: A History of Japan (Showa: A History of Japan) Paperback – November 12, 2013by Shigeru Mizuki (Author), Zack Davisson (Translator) achieves most of it purpose. Shigeru tells and illustrates his autobiography as a child of the period of Japanese history he is also telling. He reason for this history as picture book if that Japanese students tend to receive a very sanitized version of Japan’s role as aggressor in more than the 15 year period that the Imperial Japa...

Incredible, simply incredible. I've already learned to appreciate the graphic novel as an excellent medium for history, but Mizuki's work is superlative. The artwork is stellar (contrast between photorealism for historical panels and simplistic for the personal); his account of Japan's road to war is not rote and actually added to my knowledge; and the bottom line is that the Japan that went to war was a modern society, and therefore there are numerous uncomfortable echoes of the road to war in