Manga museums preserve precious cultural tradition

Kenichi Sato / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

Manga and anime museums have sprung up across Japan since the 1990s. One of their functions is to promote tourism, and the Japan National Tourist Organization produces brochures for these museums to lure tourists to the country.

Until recently, the typical manga museum was a private memorial hall aimed at energizing a local community. But lately, more general manga museums with the goal of archive management have been popping up.

For example, Meiji University in Tokyo plans to open the tentatively named Tokyo International Manga Library in fiscal 2014, with the Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library of Manga and Subcultures as the centerpiece, to house a wide collection of manga, anime and game software.

The spread of these general manga museums was spurred by the Kyoto International Manga Museum, which opened in 2006. It is a joint project between the Kyoto city government and Kyoto Seika University, home to the first academic manga department in the country. It has a collection of about 300,000 items and attracts about 300,000 visitors per year.

What impresses visitors most at the Kyoto museum are the shelves that run for 200 meters and hold about 50,000 comic books. Visitors are allowed to sit and freely read the books. "Readers enjoy manga by reading their stories and we decided that an exhibition of just copies of their covers is not enough. So we allow visitors to pick up and read the books," said Shuzo Ueda, secretary general of the museum.

The number of universities that offer courses in manga has been increasing, but even public libraries do not house sufficient manga materials. Ueda said: "Ukiyo-e in the Edo period [1603-1867] was thought of as having little value, but it was highly regarded in the United States and Europe, causing Japanese to rethink its value. Our efforts will have a major impact 100 years from now."

However, except for those that focus on strong popular characters, most manga museums cannot survive without financial support from local governments or universities. They face problems with collecting materials and preserving the easy-to-deteriorate original drawings.

It is also important to strengthen cooperation among museums. The Association of Japanese Animations, made up of anime production companies, proposes setting up a liaison committee of nationwide manga and anime museums. "To that end, we have to overcome differences of opinion about how to organize such museums and the collection size of each museum," the association spokesperson said. It is also advantageous for industry insiders to share information about special events.

Under the administration of former Prime Minister Taro Aso, the Cultural Affairs Agency was criticized for wasting taxpayers' money when it proposed building a state-run facility dubbed the "animation pantheon" as a center for exhibiting comics and animation. The agency decided to use an existing facility for that purpose and is thinking of establishing a digital archive museum.

Kaichiro Morikawa, an associate professor at Meiji University, promoting the Tokyo International Manga Library project, said: "Precious manga materials are collected by individual fans. It's necessary that libraries and museums accept these collections and establish a system to hand them down to future generations."