And, in a sense, the way that the iconography of Japanese cartoons is now pollinating Western kids' culture is no more than a favour returned.
For as alien as the cartoon kiddies and tentacled space monsters of some manga can seem (even to a comics-literate Westerner), modern manga are in large part the product of the way Japanese pictorial and narrative traditions – first, under trading links and, subsequently, under post-war occupation – absorbed the influence of Western cartooning. Mr Punch might be dead and gone, but his bastard children are still scampering all over Japan.
