“Manga” comics, ancient capital and post-quake Japan

May 25, 2011

“Manga” comics, ancient capital and post-quake Japan

Kyoto, Japan’s capital from the end of the eighth century to the middle of the 19th century, is so deep a city that accommodates very old and modern assets simultaneously. Not a few streets in the city are lined by time-honored national treasure-class buildings, mainly Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. But on the corners of other streets, American-style fast food shops like McDonald’s and new fashion brand boutiques can be found. The coexistence of buildings and items with quite different tastes gives nothing strange to people walking in the ancient capital.
Kyoto International Manga Museum is one of the newest tourist spots in the city, which attracts 4.5 million tourists, including about 500,000 from abroad, a year.
The museum serves as a library, with a collection of approximately 300,000 "manga" comic books published in Japan and foreign countries around the world. Some of them, such as valuable old books, are stored in its archives, but about 50,000 books are available to visitors, who can use the facility with an admission fee of 500 yen. The books, classified into sections for boys, girls and young adults, are kept on the “Walls of Manga” book shelves from the first to third floors. The Japanese books on the shelves include titles translated into foreign languages such as "20th Century Boys" and "Slam Dunk." Most of the books "have been donated by publishing companies or readers from around the world, but we sometimes buy important titles by ourselves," a museum official said.
The building which houses the museum is on a site formerly occupied by a closed elementary school. This gives the facility an educational element as part of its purposes, specifically research and studies of the manga-related activities and dissemination of related knowledge and information.
Visitors can read whichever book they want in a relaxed atmosphere, when it is sunny, on the lawn just in front of the building. The rooms inside the museum include a children’s library, where kids accompanied by mothers, sometimes students and other young visitors, can read books while lying on the mat.
Why does Japan’ s traditional cultural center host a facility aimed at spreading a new Japanese pop culture? This may be a frequently asked question about the museum, which calls itself MM. The museum was opened in November 2006, at a time when Japan’s manga comics began to be internationally known. Kyoto had already had a tradition of cartoon works dating back to the Heian period about 10 centuries ago. But another probable reason is that Kyoto has been a place which has an enterprising spirit. As Japan’ s capital city, Kyoto sometimes played a pioneering role in cultivating Japan’s culture and tradition. This is apparently one of the factors behind the project, engineered by a local private college, to establish Japan’s first comprehensive manga museum in the city.
Japan's economy is inevitably expected to enter a period of low, or minus, growth in the years to come following the unprecedented devastating earthquake and tsunami tidal waves of March 11, which have left nearly 25,000 people killed or missing mainly in northeastern Japan. The manga culture and MM are expected to be an important asset which demonstrates a new face of Japan’s unique pop cultures, not its economic strength, to the world from now on.