🎴 What is Emaki?

Emaki (絵巻) are traditional Japanese picture scrolls that combine images and text to tell a continuous story across a long, horizontal format. They flourished from the 11th to 19th centuries, covering themes such as religion, court life, folk tales, historical events, and philosophical concepts like life and death.

---

📜 Basic Features of Emaki

• Narrative unfolds horizontally across a scroll, not as separate pages
• Combination of images and calligraphy (text passages, known as kotobagaki)
• Continuous flow of time and space within the same visual plane
• Read from right to left, which reflects traditional Japanese writing styles

---

🧭 Why Right to Left?

In contrast to modern Western habits, Japanese emaki scrolls are read from right to left.

This directionality is deeply rooted in Japan’s traditional writing system, where:

• Text is written top to bottom, columns ordered right to left
• Visual flow in artworks follows the same pattern

Culture	Writing Direction	Reading Flow	Scroll/Art Flow
Japan/China	Vertical (Right → Left)	↓ then ←	Emaki: Right → Left
Western Europe	Horizontal (Left → Right)	→	Tapestries: Left → Right

---

🧵 Western Counterpart: The Bayeux Tapestry

A notable example of similar narrative art in the West is the Bayeux Tapestry (11th century France), which depicts the Norman conquest of England.

Despite visual similarities to emaki, it flows left to right, following the natural reading direction of Latin-based alphabets.

Feature	Japanese Emaki	Bayeux Tapestry
Direction	Right → Left	Left → Right
Medium	Ink on paper or silk	Embroidery on linen
Language/Text	Classical Japanese (vertical)	Latin (horizontal)
Theme	Religion, folklore, daily life	Historical military record
Expression Style	Seamless story + text	Continuous scenes + captions

---

🐸 Famous Emaki Examples

• Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga (Scrolls of Frolicking Animals and People)

  Often considered the oldest manga, this humorous scroll features anthropomorphic animals in action.

• Kusōzu (Nine Stages of Decay)

  A profound Buddhist visual sequence depicting the decomposition of a human body in nine stages.
  Recently, it gained pop-culture relevance through the manga Jujutsu Kaisen, which named a cursed technique after it.

---

🌐 Why Is Emaki Ideal for the Web?

The horizontal storytelling of emaki translates perfectly into a modern web context:

• Seamless horizontal scroll UX (like sliders or infinite canvas)
• Encourages continuous engagement and narrative immersion
• Ideal for image optimization tools (like Cloudinary) for fast rendering
• Flexible for multilingual and interactive applications

---

🧭 In This Project

This project reimagines emaki for the digital age using tools like:

• Next.js
• Cloudinary for image optimization
• Internationalization (i18n) support
• Open-source collaboration and global sharing

We aim to reconnect the beauty of emaki with the world through intuitive, culturally-aware web design.

🧵 Writing systems shape how we see the world — and how we tell stories across time and space.