Manga Museums

As manga has become internationally popular, the people of Japan are realizing that they have a cultural treasure very much worth preserving. To that end, the cultural arm of the Japanese government, as well as the most respected universities, are collaborating to preserve a unique cultural art form.

In 2006 The Kyoto International Manga Museum opened its doors for the first time. A joint partnership between Kyoto Seika University and the city of Kyoto, the museum has a huge collection of over 200,000 items, including Meiji era magazines, postwar "rental" books, a complete press run of the Japanese version of Punch from 1862 to 1887. Manga has increasingly been a major cultural artifact and export for Japan, so much so that there are art schools and technical schools offering courses and degrees explicitly designed to train artists and technicians to work in the manga industries. Among other, restricted and specialized collections, the museum includes three floors of publicly accessible manga in what the museum calls "Wall of Manga," where visitors to the museum may read any of the 50,000 manga on the shelves. You can find the Museum site here, and even search the entire collection here. In the first year, the museum attracted 30,000 foreign visitors, which tells you just how very popular manga has become in lands beyond Japan.

Just this week, Meiji University in Tokyo publicly announced their plans to create the worlds largest museum of animation and manga, with an initial collection of over 2.5 million items, including everything from manga, to video to film, to magazines, and figurines. They are already creating an arcade section for working arcade games based on comics and manga.