A Kitazawa Rakuten cartoon

Kitazawa Rakuten is widely called the father of modern Japanese cartooning. Beginning his career around the turn of the twentieth century, he absorbed the imported ponchi-e tradition and the Western magazine format, then reshaped them into something distinctly Japanese and thoroughly modern.

Rakuten was the crucial figure who took the word manga and fixed it in its contemporary sense — the professional, published cartoon. He worked as a salaried newspaper and magazine cartoonist, treated the craft as a career rather than a pastime, and developed recurring characters that readers followed from issue to issue. In doing so he helped turn a scattering of imported gags into a homegrown mass medium. This cartoon stands for his decades of output across the first quarter of the century, the bridge between the Meiji satirists and the manga industry to come.