In this section, we present the results obtained in the following three aspects: (I) The trend of Heta-Uma works during the 1980s, (II) differences between the two representative artists (Yumura and Kawamura), and (III) the role of text in Heta-Uma works.
4.1. The Trend of Heta-Uma Works during the 1980s
The number of Heta-Uma works increased through the early 1980s, while a relative decrease was observed by the end of the 1980s.
Figure 2 depicts the trend between the year and the Heta-Uma works of Yumura and Kawamura during the 1980s. First, we observed that a large number of Heta-Uma works were produced by both of the representative artists. For instance, 273 works were produced by Yumura and 241 works were produced by Kawamura. These empirical results suggest that the 1980s would be a golden era for Heta-Uma.
Second, taking a closer look at the years, as shown in the figure, we found that the Heta-Uma works of the two representative artists presented a similar trend. In detail, the number of works by Yumura and Kawamura gradually increased in the early 1980s; however, the number of their works relatively decreased afterwards, dropping to less than 10 per year by the end of 1980s. For example, as shown in
Figure 2a, the number of works by Yumura was on the rise from 1980 to 1982 and reached a peak in 1982 (i.e., 73 works). From 1985, the number of works by Yumura showed a significant drop (i.e., one work, one work, three works, and one work for 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988, respectively). Similarly, as shown in
Figure 2b, the bar plot shows that the production of Kawamura’s works gradually increased in the early 1980s and reached a peak in 1983, with 68 works being produced in this year. Then, from 1984, the figure indicates a decline in the number of works by Kawamura. Although 41 works were produced in 1987, the overall trend presented a relative decrease, when compared to the early times. The second observation above opens a future avenue towards understanding the relationship between the year and the production of Heta-Uma works. We assume that such a trend may have been affected by the economy and social culture of Japan during 1980s. One potential reason is that, at the end of 1980s, Japan slowly suffered from the effect of the bubble economy, which may have had an impact on the significant decrease in Heta-Uma works.
4.2. Difference in Heta-Uma Work Types between Yumura and Kawamura
Different Heta-Uma artists tend to have different types of work.
Figure 2 shows the results for the manually labeled work types, with respect to the works of Yumura and Kawamura. First, we observed that the variety of works by Yumura was larger than that for those by Kawamura. For instance, there were a total of 19 work types (i.e., badge, book cover, editorial, fan, furoshiki, magazine advertisement, magazine cover, mural, original, package, panel, postcard, poster, record jacket, seal, stage setting, stationery, T-shirt, and TV stage setting) observed in Yumura’s works, making it a highly diverse collection. On the other hand, Kawamura’s works were divided into only 11 categories (i.e., book cover, calendar, editorial, exhibition original, magazine advertisement, magazine cover, original, postcard, poster, record jacket, and T-shirt).
Second, our manual classification indicated that the two representative Heta-Uma artists had their own dominant production types. The most prolific works by Yumura during the 1980s were mainly produced for magazine covers and posters. He drew many magazine covers, for magazines such as Garo, Bikkuri House, WET, and Takarajima. After 1987, his work on Garo covers decreased significantly, as Shinbo Minami’s works replaced the full-year Garo covers in 1988 and 1989. Between 1980 and 1984, Yumura was very active and created various types of Heta-Uma works; after 1985, the genres produced dwindled, concentrating mainly on original illustrations. Original illustration was the most common work type for Kawamura during the 1980s. This is due to his participation in several exhibits and the creation of numerous series, such as the “JUNGLE FEVER” series of illustrations in 1987 and the celebrity portrait series of illustrations in 1983. In 1989, as a music aficionado, Kawamura was one of the founders of the music magazine known as “Bad News”, for which he was responsible for the graphics and designs. Kawamura previously created a number of original illustrations, consisting of personal portraits of singers as well as his favorite Latin music. In the early 1980s, in addition to original illustrations, one of his primary genres of work was magazine covers, and he was responsible for the covers and illustrations of “MUSIC MAGAZINE”.
4.3. Text in Heta-Uma Works
Many Heta-Uma llustrations were originally designed to be accompanied by text. Illustrations have the meaning of “explanation”, and appear as a complement to the text; for example, in the relationship between the illustration and the title on the cover of a novel or the like, the illustration is what provides a sense of atmosphere to the novel. In the case of Heta-Uma works, the illustrations look very interesting; however, as the illustrator has deliberately used a distorted and childish approach in their creation, people may not understand the meaning of Heta-Uma works very well. Considering this, the text may play an important role in supplementing an understanding of the illustration.
In particular, the text in the illustration can be divided into two types: Hand-drawn text and printed text. Hand-drawn text refers to the text that is complementary to the image vision in the process of creating the illustration, and can be considered part of the illustration content. Meanwhile, printed text denotes text that is added later during the printing progress in a commercial activity, such as a preview of magazine content or an advertisement on a poster. As the illustration itself plays the function of a textual description, the text occupies a very significant place in the illustration.
We illustrate two examples from the studied Heta-Uma works, in order to demonstrate the role of the text in understanding these works.
Figure 3 shows a poster work by Yumura, which was used in a shopping mall for promotion. As can be observed in the figure, many Japanese characters are hand-drawn in this work, with the topic, time, and location of the event all drawn by hand, making it apparent what the poster is attempting to express at a glance. Without this text, the customers may not understand the goal of the childish illustration. To further address the significance of the text in Heta-Uma works, we show a comparative example.
Figure 4a shows a work originally by Yumura with hand-drawn text, while
Figure 4b shows a edited version, in which the hand-drawn text has been removed. In
Figure 4a, the following text is written: “夏だ!!「タクましひ体」には熱い視線が集まるぜ。” (translated to English: “It’s summer!! A hot gaze is drawn to a “tough body”.”). The reader may instantly comprehend the meaning of the artwork if they read the text; however, when the work is presented without this text, the reader may not fully understand what information is expressed, and could simply think the man in the figure is too hot and, thus, sweats a lot.
It was found that 82% of Heta-Uma works by Yumura contained hand-drawn text, while 42% of Heta-Uma works by Kawamura did not contain hand-drawn text.
Figure 5 shows the proportion of Heta-Uma works that contain hand-drawn text, while
Figure 6 presents the distribution of different Heta-Uma work types that contain hand-drawn text.
Figure 7 shows the proportion of printed text and non-printed text among the works. Four kinds of works were classified, based on hand-drawn text and its language: Hand-drawn Text (Japanese and Non-Japanese), Hand-drawn text (Japanese), hand-drawn text (non-Japanese), and no hand-drawn text. Hand-drawn text (Japanese and non-Japanese) refers to the case where the text is written in both Japanese and other foreign languages (e.g., English). Hand-drawn text (Japanese) denotes when the text is only written in Japanese. Hand-drawn text (non-Japanese) refers to the case where the text is not written in Japanese (e.g., in English). Now, we discuss the related results, with respect to the works of Yumura and Kawamura, below.
In terms of Yumura, as shown in
Figure 5a, our manual classification results demonstrated that 82% of his works (72 + 56 + 97 = 225 out of 273 works) contained hand-drawn text. In addition, we observed that there was a high proportion of English words appearing in works by Yumura with text, with 43% being classified as such (72 + 25 = 97 out of 225 works). This result indicates that Yumura often used English words in his works. One potential reason for this is that, during the 1980s, Japan was widely influenced by Western cultures. Upon closely looking at the kinds of works, as detailed in
Figure 6a, we observed that poster, original, and editorial works were likely to contain hand-drawn text. Furthermore, we found that, among these work types, the proportion of non-Japanese text was relatively similar to that of those containing only Japanese. Regarding printed text, the results in
Figure 7a show that the works of Yumura without hand-drawn text were slightly more likely to use printed text (i.e., accounting for 55%).
In terms of Kawamura, as shown in
Figure 5b, we found that less than half (42%) of his Heta-Uma works included hand-written text. Interestingly, the results demonstrated that almost 90% of his works that contained text involved non-Japanese words, which was even higher than that in the works of Yumura. We imply that this technique may have been affect by the pioneer (Yumura).
Figure 6b shows that original works tended not to contain hand-drawn text, when taking the frequent work kinds into account. Such a difference could have been the result of the different aims of these two Heta-Uma illustrators. For instance, the works by Yumura were mainly intended to meet commercial illustration purposes, while the works of Kawamura were intended to reflect personality.
Figure 7b shows the proportion of Kawamura works that contain printed text. As can be observed from the figure, in the works that did not contain hand-drawn text, around 30% of them contained printed text. In general, when compared to the works by Kawamura, printed text did not frequently appear in the works of Kawamura.