In the West, we are obsessed with the arrow of time. Storytelling in the West is typically concerned with getting characters from point A to point B. The space of the story is of secondary importance to the one way flow of time. The here and now is of central importance.
This is not the case in Eastern cultures. Japanese culture has been heavily influenced by Vedic religions, as well Shintoism and Taoism.
A central concept of Vedic religions is Samsara[1], which can be thought of as a cyclical view of the universe. Time itself is merely an illusion, because ultimately the same cycle of birth, sustainence, and death is repeated infinitely.
That's why space is the focal point in manga. As another commenter stated, certain events are happening in the present. But the next scene may have non-linearly taken place in the future, or perhaps in the past, or even with no reference to the current time period. What ties everything together is the common space.
afaik there was never any influence of hinduism on Japan at all - barely a contact with it before late 19.century and modern ways of migration.
And it would be the height of irony to call buddhism a vedic religion, as it along with other sramana movements (such as jainism or ajivika) of the time precisely rejected the vedas.
This may be related to Scott McCloud's analysis of comic frame transitions in Understanding Comics [0]. I don't have my copy in front of me, but from memory he observed that Japanese manga has a much larger amount of aspect-to-aspect transitions, whereas traditional American super hero comics are more heavily saturated in action-to-action and subject-to-subject.
yarou might mean things like, for example, characters having long conversations or extended introspective flashbacks during events drawn as only taking a few seconds to happen.
Allow me to gather my thoughts for a moment.
In the West, we are obsessed with the arrow of time. Storytelling in the West is typically concerned with getting characters from point A to point B. The space of the story is of secondary importance to the one way flow of time. The here and now is of central importance.
This is not the case in Eastern cultures. Japanese culture has been heavily influenced by Vedic religions, as well Shintoism and Taoism.
A central concept of Vedic religions is Samsara[1], which can be thought of as a cyclical view of the universe. Time itself is merely an illusion, because ultimately the same cycle of birth, sustainence, and death is repeated infinitely.
That's why space is the focal point in manga. As another commenter stated, certain events are happening in the present. But the next scene may have non-linearly taken place in the future, or perhaps in the past, or even with no reference to the current time period. What ties everything together is the common space.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saṃsāra
afaik there was never any influence of hinduism on Japan at all - barely a contact with it before late 19.century and modern ways of migration.
And it would be the height of irony to call buddhism a vedic religion, as it along with other sramana movements (such as jainism or ajivika) of the time precisely rejected the vedas.
> buddhism...precisely rejected the vedas
It's a lot more complicated than that...
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I don't get it. Can you please list 3 examples I can look up?
This may be related to Scott McCloud's analysis of comic frame transitions in Understanding Comics [0]. I don't have my copy in front of me, but from memory he observed that Japanese manga has a much larger amount of aspect-to-aspect transitions, whereas traditional American super hero comics are more heavily saturated in action-to-action and subject-to-subject.
0: http://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/ideas/assets/mccloud_transiti...
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yarou might mean things like, for example, characters having long conversations or extended introspective flashbacks during events drawn as only taking a few seconds to happen.