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.