Shouwa Ichidai Onna

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When I finished reading this manga and I searched it on MAL, I couldn't believe so few people had read it or at least had it in their must read list. Maybe no one will ever read this but I need to explain why this manga should be readed.

Showa Ichidai Onna is a manga made by Kazuo Kamimura (teacher of the also amazing mangaka Jiro Taniguchi), known by being the cocreator of Lady Snowblood between others; and Ikki Kajiwara, the screenwriter of Ashita no Joe.

The manga's main character reminded me in some ways to the main character of Lady Snowblood, she's a young woman with ... a strong character and a facility to beat your ass easily. In the manga, we follow her since her childhood to her young adulthood, and with her we see the Japanese society evolve. We see the american occupation troops and the inhabitants of a country that had just lost a war and was completly ruined, and we progressively see how Japanese culture occidentalizes itself and how people starts to work to improve their country.

Surely because it's an unfinished cancelled comicbook, this manga's story isn't brilliant, and it's character development can be confusing or nonexistent. But Kamimura's art (though it isn't his best work) and the background stories that tell how people lived in that era turn this manga in a must-read comic that every manga reader should enjoy.

Created by two renowned artists, Kazuo Kamimura and Ikki Kajiwara, you would be in your good right to expect good things from this but Shouwa Ichidai Onna could be summed up as Ashita no Joe if it tried to ruin everything that ever made it great.

It follows Shoko Takano, daughter of a man who tried to overthrow the government and had to leave his family. Due to his status, her mother will get senselessly beaten up by the police and die soon after in the explosions. Shoko, left all alone without a home or a family, has to survive by herself in the ruins of ... Japan.

Under the context of World War II and the cruel fate of an orphan, it's just the occasion for "A Woman of Showa" to be completely caricatural and to have no nuance at all in the depiction of its environment and of the people living in this era. None of the violence represented here has any meaning or nuance to it and is just there to somehow make you feel bad.
Literally everyone that is supposed to be slightly antagonistic to the plot is shown as a monster with a wide smirk, bulging eyes and contorted face. You get the police at the beginning stripping Shoko's mother and taking pleasure in making her a bloody mess, you get the Americans only thinking about sex, wildly raping women in back alleys and they're apparently so degenerate that they get all crazy about the puss of a 10 year old, you also get this ridiculous chief of women called Osei Yozakura who collects all their earnings and if they dare to try avoiding her, they get whipped, burned, cut in the private parts with a broken glass bottle and get their wounds rubbed in salt, whoosh!

Here comes a timeskip of a few years which is apparently enough for Shoko to become a master hitman with godly agility. She kills Osei and eventually ends up in a rehabilitation center which starts the second part of the manga. You get the necessary scenes of bullying (because it just HAS to,right?) so clichéd and overused that they're not worth expanding on. Tutors are of course also trying to humiliate the girls that they don't like, for example by making them stand buck naked outside all day and having to bow and apologize to everyone. Shoko is of course going to be respected and feared by everyone because she's just that strong, yadda yadda yadda. Oh and I forgot to mention to it but there's also a sappy romantic subplot between Shoko and one of her tutors that comes from nowhere and makes absolutely no sense but there has to be some romance in this type of story I guess?

Another timeskip, Shoko is now a young woman, she's out of the rehabilitation center and has become a….GEISHA???? I don't make sense of this part and never will because a timeskip is enough to justify changing a character completely in this mediocre manga. At least this part doesn't last long because the magazine it came out in, Apache, was discontinued, only lasting from July 1977 to January 1978 which is a surprisingly short amount of time, especially when a lot of big names like Baron Yoshimoto, Shotaro Ishinomori or Leiji Matsumoto had series serialized in it.

I won't talk that much about Kamimura's art on this review because it doesn't contribute to anything in this manga except making everything look gross and shitty and there isn't a single panel that I think looks good here.

Showa Ichidai Onna is the bottom of the barrel of anything Kamimura has ever been involved in and has close to no redeeming feature, it even seems more misogynistic than it is liberating . Avoid it if you can.

I just finished reading this unfortunately unfinished work from the 70's, although at least it ended just for the end of its first "arc" and although it is an ending that leaves you wanting more, it's no ended in the middle of nowehere

Although his drawing style doesn't excite me (although that doesn't mean it's bad) I found it very interesting. It's a raw, adult story that transports you to post-war Japan and is very critical of Japan's role in the war and also of the American occupation. It's nice to find this because, unfortunately, I usually find a disturbing lack of self-criticism. The first ... vignette of this manga, however, with a circle of spilled blood on a white background already makes a tremendous simile with the flag of Japan. Otherwise, it is the story of the daughter of a geisha who, in order to survive, becomes someone amazing: A girl capable of anything with the skills of John Wayne and the cold blood of a warlord. For those who know Japanese cinema, this manga is as if Akira Kurosawa had made a film with Mizoguchi's topic (geishas, prostitutes, sexualization of women...etc)

Could have become a good enough manga if it wasn't cancelled so abruptly

The beginning really sucks. We get two back-to-back rape scenes used as shock value, and sadly all women's only purpose throughout is to be sympathetic and get tortured, or be evil and get tortured. The second act is somewhat better but not great, and the third act is still generic, but could have had to potential to become a decent series

Art-wise, I'm not a big fan of the artstyle, it often has awkward poses and characters are often off-model, but some panels have neat staging that's very reminescent of theatre

Overall, the manga feels ... like an extremely awkward introduction to a long-running series with the actual series missing