‘So bad that it’s good’: the Japanese graphic art of heta-uma

King Terry

The beginnings of heta-uma in Japan are usually dated to the early 1970s and the emergence of illustrator Yumura Teruhiko, who also goes by the pennames Terry Johnson and King Terry, among others. Following in the footsteps of Pop designers like Push Pin Studios and Yokoo Tadanori, Yumura was interested in retro and sometimes nostalgic forms of Japanese and American mass culture, although he broke with Pop’s usual hard-edge and mechanical look for a hand-drawn style that was closer to the refined doodles of illustrator Wada Makoto. Drawing for a variety of chic magazines, but most famously the Tokyo town guide Shinjuku Play Map between 1969 and 1971, Yumura offered a simple, artfully artless version of the standard pop iconography of consumer goods, youth fashion, rock ‘n roll, Mickey Mouse, and the ‘American life,’ rendered in a way that emphasized the scratchily handmade, personably human, and compositionally freeform. Hollywood and California beach and car culture were his initial iconographic reference points, then disco and R&B, and from there hip-hop music and album design. These poles are represented by the two Yumura works in the exhibition WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts: Untitled (Mr. George) and GONZO'S Underground Mix Vol.7.

Garo and Alt-Manga

If any single institution is most identified with heta-uma, and was most responsible for its spread, it was the legendary alt-manga magazine Garo. Founded in 1964 as a venue for comics that challenged the political and economic norms of mainstream manga publishing, around 1970 Garo began featuring artists such as Abe Shinichi and Suzuki Ōji who drew confessional, quasi-autobiographical, and sometimes dreamlike stories in an open, expressionistic, and naïve style. They, like the Garo pioneers Tsuge Yoshiharu and Hayashi Seiichi who were their main influences, are often seen as quasi-heta-uma, with the ’quasi’ due to their distance from Pop sensibilities, their obviously elevated technical skills, or both at once. 

Heta-uma Manga

Then, in 1973, the cartoonist Ebisu Yoshikazu arrived. His angsty, hilarious, and dreamlike takes on the grind of school, romance, family, and working life marked the arrival of a true heta-uma spirit in comics. In 1976, Yumura commenced his first manga, Penguin Rice, for Garo. He drew the magazine’s covers for the entirety of 1977, returning in 1982 and remaining its ‘ugly but charismatic’ face until 1987. He also designed the cover for Ebisu’s first book, Teachers Damned to the Pits of Hell which quickly became a bestseller. Other heta-uma artists who arose from Garo’s and its successor Ax’s pages include Nemoto Takashi, Shiriagari Kotobuki, Suzy Amakane, Moto Hideyasu, and Hanakuma Yūsaku. Heta-uma is a very male world, but it also has its female adherents, including the riot grrrl-esque Yamada Hanako and junk action cartoonist Gotō Yuka. Shiriagari, Amakane, and Moto are represented in this exhibition by paintings that demonstrate the range of heta-uma style and subject matter.   

A Revolution Without a Movement

Even if it was not organized consciously as such and issued no manifestoes per se, heta-uma was as influential as any well-oiled movement. After rising in illustration and comics, it spread to fashion, copywriting, prose, painting, sculpture, and many other practices within mass culture, subculture, and contemporary art. By the mid 1980s, it was a buzzword on the level of ‘punk’ and ‘new wave.’ Its artists have designed so many album covers for such a wide variety of musicians and bands that it’s hard to visualize independent music in Japan outside of its look. Tanaami Keiichi has also drawn lots of album covers, starting with San Francisco prog rock bands in the 1960s, but he only kind of counts as heta-uma in his later years when his compositions were looser and he turned to pastiche. The Tanaami works in this exhibition show him reveling in one of the pop culture icons of his youth in the 1950s, Yamakawa Sōji’s Japanese Tarzan stories. 

Legacy

In recent years, heta-uma has sometimes been elevated to a descriptor for a wide variety of jokingly deskilled and unintentionally charming but poorly created works of visual art dating back to the 17th century. Zen painters have retrospectively become proto heta-uma, although some people prefer the less chronologically-bound term ‘soboku-e’ (naïve pictures). Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604-51), the third Tokugawa shogun, may have been a notoriously strict and brutal ruler but you wouldn’t know it from his poorly but cutely executed ink paintings of cute owls and rabbits, which, likewise, have become retroactively heta-uma. 

Within contemporary art, the global success of Murakami Takashi’s Superflat in the late 1990s and early 2000s lodged anime and the polished amateurs of otaku culture as the cultural wellsprings of note from the 1970s and 1980s. But it is impossible to understand equally important artists like Ohtake Shinrō and Aida Makoto, and by extension guerilla performance groups like Chim-Pom, without acknowledging Garo and the ’bad taste’ of heta-uma. You can also see its influence in the neo-modernist work of (just to name two currently active artists who are in WAVE) painter and illustrator Hayakawa Motohiro and avant-garde manga artist Yokoyama Yūichi. As long as art is created by humans torn between higher thoughts and base bodily functions, there will be variants of heta-uma.