Scummy Manga Reviews: Prince Shotoku

Title: Prince Shotoku (聖徳太子)
Serialized in: Shonen Sunday from November 1st, 1977 to March 21st, 1978
Script: Kai Takizawa
Gekiga: Fukushima Masami
Genre: Super Gekiga

Prince Shotoku is a prominent religious figure in Japanese history. He is celebrated for bringing Buddhism to the country and sending the first envoys to China.

What it’s about:

Lightning tears the sky asunder. The earth quakes, the seas boil—Prince Shotoku has returned from beyond the grave to extract his terrible vengeance upon the Soga clan for betraying his lineage. His callous self-resurrection breaks the laws of Hell, prompting Enma, the judge, jury, and executioner of the Buddhist underworld, to send his best shock troops to apprehend the renegade prince. Shotoku is dragged to Hell and finds its supposed ruler squeezed into submission between the meaty thighs of the muse Benzaiten, while a legion of restless undead plot a revolution. With the threat of nuclear war looming, will Shotoku side with the historic Buddha Shaka and his United Red Army, or with the piss-drinking Enma and his Machiavellian power fantasies?

The skeletonized United Red Army, presumably modeled after the domestic terrorist group of the same name, display the writing duo's panache for reckless black humor.

Why it’s awesome:

How Eisner-nominated Urasawa Naoki handles a cliffhanger:

Close ups! Big noses! Dangle that carrot in front of us for another 100 issues!

How Fukushima handles a cliffhanger:

Dino-rockets from Hell are racing through the universe to eat your face! Carnage guaranteed!

It’s criminal that such purposefully plodding pacing has become the standard for serials, while electrifying artists such as Fukushima have fallen by the wayside. His break-neck style bucks the system, cramming so much into each chapter that you’d forget you were reading a serialization if not for the lavish title pages breaking up the action. His trademark use of jarring two-page spreads would never fly with the current conservative administration. Which is a shame, because they form the nitro that propels his stories to increasingly outrageous heights. Half the fun is seeing how Fukushima will top himself, and he never fails to deliver.

Don’t write off the gushing intestines and hardcore perversion as mere shock value. Takezawa’s scripts are a lesson in intelligent excess. The concept that Japan’s benign father of Buddhism would return as a vengeful God is entirely acceptable given his tragic history. His family was assassinated for political gain, he himself was denied the exonerated funeral standard for royalty, and to top it all off, his image (a fabrication drawn 100 years after his death, no less.) was disgracefully placed upon the ten-thousand yen note, the ultimate embodiment of the earthly desires his beloved Buddhism seeks to liberate us from.

Yeah, I think a little vigilante ultra-violence is in order.


Even the most extreme gags have religious precedence. The demonic hosts of Fukushima’s Hell are taken directly from the ancient lore of the Kojiki, the Shinto Bible/Monster Manual. For example, the Shikome (seen above) were sent by the goddess Izanami to drive her husband Izanagi from the underworld. And what better way to send a man packing than saggy breasts and vagina scorpions? It’s like learning about world mythology though an X-rated Ray Harryhausen movie.

Why it won’t come out in English:

First there’s the question of taste. Shotoku and Enma engaging in a literal cock fight where they ejaculate buckets of ropey snakes at each other. The aforementioned Dino-Rockets (Genbu, if you want to get technical,) are equipped with a posterior hatch to shit on people from orbit. Misogynist undertones bulge from the page like Shotoku’s ever present erection.


More damning is the fact that the series was never completed. Fukushima went into hiding mid-serialization, and following his insane sense of artistic stoicism, burned the originals. These scans are yellowed because they came directly from 30 year old weeklies. Unfortunately for the rest of us, no publisher in their right mind would go through the effort to digitally re-master a derelict such as this.

Even accepting Prince Shotoku as collateral damage, I doubt we’ll ever see a major release of his completed masterpieces, Saint Muscle or Nyohanboh. Fukushima’s works pose as a threat to the status quo. His red-hot pages illuminate readers with the intensity of a super nova, revealing everything else being fed to them as mere shadows on the wall. To walk with Fukushima is to relinquish your life as manga fan, but it is the way towards enlightenment.

Learn History From Nyohanboh: The Defiler Monk

Title: The Defiler Monk (女犯坊)
Serialized in: Erotopia (1974-1976)
Artist: Fukushima Mashima
Writer: Kai Takizawa
Genre: Historic flesh bomb

“If the stalk of a man is the root of life and the valley of a women the origin of the cosmos, than anything barring their union is an abomination in the eyes of the Buddha”


Thus spoke Ryusui, protagonist of Nyohanboh, Masami Fukushima’s Buddhist sexual adventure manga from the mid 70’s, . A Nyohanboh is a monk who has broken his precepts and slept with a women, a title that Ryusui wears with pride. The defiler monk travels the land spreading his doctrine of free love while crushing non-believers and the Shogun’s many lap dogs. Mighty and stoic, our virile hero laid the groundwork for the muscle-bound solitary wanderers who came later, such as Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star and Guts from Berserk. Yet while other heroes have martial arts or brute strength to rely on, Ryusui brings his foes to their knees with nothing more than throbbing sutras and inexhaustible potency.


1796 was a bad year for deviant monks. On August 16th, the Edo government cast a dragnet to snatch monks slinking home from brothels in the early morning hours. Altogether 67 monks were apprehended, fettered, and placed on display for three days on Nihon-Bashi for public humiliation. This punishment was merely a symbolic precursor to their excommunication and the shame of being caught.

Nyohanboh begins its fiction with this documented fact. Many of Ryusui’s escapades are taken from the lurid pages of Japan’s history. The manga is a time capsule preserving the most heinous laws and punishments that the nation would rather forget. Which is precisely the reason I’m sharing them with you!

National law barred monks from indulging in meat, alcohol, or women—especially women. Not because these things cloud the mind with earthly desires, the very thing which Buddhism seeks to expunge, but because they are impure. If this strikes you as misogynistic, you’ll rejoice in Ryusui's exploits that spit in the face of institutionalized conventions by reinserting sexual freedom back into the faith, one nun at a time.

Such prohibitions against women were not limited to intercourse. They were barred entry from temples for fear that they would distract the monks, but also because their menstrual blood was said to defile the holy inner sanctum. Koya-Ji, a major temple in the Shingon sect, maintained this restriction until 1872. The seven trails leading up the mountain were each barricaded by a Nyonin-Do, or women’s temple, which served to intercept those who would desecrate the demarcated ground. Let’s see what Ryusui has to say about this nonsense!


During his wanderings, he encounters a mother with her son attempting to climb Mount Koya to reunite with her husband, a monk who has fled beyond her reach into the depths of the temple. Ryusui’s initial attempts to indoctrinate the woman are cut short when he realizes she is suffering from late stage tuberculosis. In his infinite pity he decides to fulfill her dying wish. He delivers the boy to his father, and, in delicious Dante-esque irony, drowns him in a bucket of his wife’s coughed-up blood while his gay lover watches on in impotent horror. Perhaps they were right about the menstrual thing after all.


If bureaucracy exists as the most efficient way to pass the buck, than the Shima Nagashi, or Island Banishment system, is the most efficient way to pass the executioner’s axe. On paper, Shima Nagashi is reserved for crimes too minor for the death penalty but too weighty for jail time, such as larceny and aggravated assault. In reality, the system allowed politicians a means to do away with undesirables without getting their hands dirty. The hopelessly destitute living hand to mouth, the familyless drifters adopted by the Yakuza, those who failed to contribute to the group—These were the people who, lacking the social influence and wealth to buy the courts, found themselves swept under the rug and shipped off to remote islands to live out the rest of their days.

Similarly, no one wants the weight of a dead monk on their conscious, even an impious one. Nyohanboh of high social standing were sent to the most distant of locales as an example to the rest of the clergy. But the logistics of ferrying prisoners across unforgiving seas hide the sinister truth. One in three boats sent to the far isles capsized along the way, meaning that those sentenced to Shima Nagashi were essentially given a death penalty with a 66% chance of error. Heaven forbid you be later pardoned for your crimes and invited to tempt fate once more in returning to the mainland. Off the record, this was a convenient way to deal with political enemies.


Ryusui’s transgressions hardly went unnoticed, and he found himself exiled to Sado Island, renowned as most brutal of all Shima Nagashi destinations. I’m sure you’re wondering, “How did he get captured if he’s such a bad ass?” Let me set the record straight—He wasn’t captured so much as he willfully volunteered to subject himself to Hell on Earth for the sake of aesthetic training. Ryusui found himself surrounded by absolute squalor. Food scarcity had driven many to cannibalism, with aborted fetus as the hour ‘devours. The souls of the living were beyond saving. Instead, he opted to liberate those whom had died, binding their remains into a raft of bones upon which he sailed back to the mainland where the deceased could finally rest, vindicated.

In reality conditions in exile were livable, if not pleasant. Individuals were free to spend their time as they saw fit, so long as they acted within the law. Those who had grown up in poverty experienced many positive firsts. Convicts received their own field to tend to, and with it a means to finally contribute to the group. Ironically they were allowed to participate in society only after being torn away from it.

Sado Island was an exceptional case, however. The discovery of gold deposits transformed the prison colony to an off-shore labor camp, and not all those sent to mine the mountains came back to tell of it.

The island was also once home to Nichiren, who was exiled in 1272 for his radical teachings that challenged established doctrine and the government. Like Ryusui, he was vocal in his view that Buddhist doctrine had been corrupted by those in power to further tighten their control over the populace. In hindsight, his precepts went on to be misappropriated by Sokka Gakkai, so perhaps his temporary exile wasn’t entirely unwarranted.


More severe acts called for more severe punishment. If intercourse alone was enough to get you exiled, then adultery and rape were grounds for death. Gokumon was the favored method of execution by the Shogunate. The guilty were decapitated in a public execution, than had their head spiked onto a special stand to be displayed for three days and two nights, usually in front of a castle or jail.


In the manga, Ryusui conspires with his loyal hunchback assistant, Iwamatsu, to usurp power from his temple’s high monk who enforces punishment for Nyohanboh. Ryusui slips a home-milled aphrodisiac into the abbot’s tea, sending into a frenzy that results in him raping a girl paying respects at her ancestors’ gravesite. The executioner’s sword is swift to respond.

Ryusui's rise to power has begun.

We still have much to learn from the defiler monk.