Advent Calendar: Day 21

By Circe -

The Wonderful World of Sazae-san (サザエさん) is a daily yon-koma, or four-panel, manga that chronicles the quotidian life of a housewife named Sazae. The genre is referred to as "slice-of-life"; there are no monsters, no psychic abilities, nobody stares into the camera for four solid minutes to "power up". Just Sazae, and her family. With respect to American daily comic strips, Sazae-san covers topics similar to Sally Forth or The Family Circus, with a market penetration right up there with Garfield.

The strip was published daily from 1946 until 1974, moving from a small local paper to the enormous Asahi Shimbun in 1949, and creator Hasegawa Michiko always envisioned Sazae as the modern, forward-thinking wife and mother of post-war Japan. Sazae argued with her husband at a time when men were very much head of the household in Japan (the word now used for "husband", 'goshūjin', originally meant "master"), and she later became a card-carrying feminist, attending women's lib meetings, much to the consternation of her more traditional neighbors.

Sazae-san of course became an anime, and that anime is actually "lost media" with an unusual story. When she was negotiating with FujiTV over the rights, Hasegawa stipulated that Sazae-san would never go into re-runs. Each episode was scripted, voiced, shot, broadcast, and then shelved forever. The anime started in 1969, and is still airing. Hasegawa's estate has softened on this a bit in recent years; Amazon.jp Prime Video has about 500 episodes available, but that's a drop in the bucket for a series that has nearly 10,000 episodes in the can. The vast majority of Sazae-san is known to exist, in the Fuji Television archives, but is also completely inaccessible, making it "lost" in the sense that there is no longer any way to view it.

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