With Japanese anime films now regularly outperforming American releases at the box office, recent exhibitions devoted to manga — including at the Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts, Paris, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco — have set new standards for scholarship in the field. Ahead of Shojo Manga Infinity: Moto Hagio, Ryoko Yamagishi, and Waki Yamato at the National Art Center, Tokyo, next autumn, it is an opportune moment to consider how Japanese popular culture shapes the global visual imagination.
A natural starting point is Osamu Tezuka, the godfather of manga. Best known as the creator of Astro Boy — which he adapted into the first broadcast television anime — Tezuka also pioneered early shōjo manga with Princess Knight, a work that influenced later global successes by other authors, such as Sailor Moon and The Rose of Versailles. This original ink and watercolor on paper was created as an opening illustration for the Princess Knight series, and was later published in a 1953 issue of Shōjo Club (Girls’ Club). Among the earliest illustrations from Princess Knight, one of the earliest and most influential works in the shōjo manga genre, and is offered in Anime Starts Here: Japanese Subculture Reimagines Tradition.
Samurai, an exhibition at the British Museum (through 4 May 2026), borrows an idea from 20th-century historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s 1983 book The Invention of Tradition for a timely re-examination of the Japanese samurai as a co-creation of medieval reality and modern imagination.
One contemporary iteration of the samurai myth can be found in the 2019 Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art award–winner Shiomi Ryosuke’s Wolf on the Amour (2019).