Kyoto International Manga Museum

A few days ago, I finally visited the Kyoto International Manga Museum. It’s a gorgeous museum, quite clean and sleek and well-put-together. It all looks quite new, as well it should I suppose, since it only opened in 2006, on the grounds of a former primary school.

The school folded under perfectly normal circumstances – as is happening all over Japan, and as happens around the world to one extent or another, sometimes there just are not enough children in a community to merit a need for as many schools as there are, and so schools are merged and old school buildings are either destroyed or repurposed. While Tatsunoike Elementary School is hardly a historical monument – no more historical than any other elementary school built and operating since the early Meiji period – I am quite glad that they kept its structure intact, repurposing it rather than tearing it down. The school atmosphere really suits a manga museum quite well, and helps make one feel like a child again, a bit. Piano music piped throughout the building, very similar to the light music reminiscent of the innocence of childhood expressed in Joe Hisaishi’s soundtracks for various Ghibli movies, contributes to this feel.

(The museum also maintains one room as an exhibition on the history of the school, and plaques throughout the museum explain what certain rooms were used for back when it was a school. The principal’s office is maintained just as it was, I guess, more or less, as a showpiece, and the Museum Director’s office is in the Vice Principal’s office.)

On the other hand, I thought the environment and atmosphere a bit sad, in that reverse backwards sort of way that bright, happy music and scenes can be quite sad when the children are gone. Like parts of movies when someone remembers all the wonderful times that were had in a place now destroyed, or with a person now gone. An elementary school devoid of children is a pretty sad place, the cheery music only adding to that feeling, 逆に, rather than dispelling it. Or maybe that’s just me…

In any case, I could have loved this museum’s design and architecture if it were a brand-new shiny steel and glass building in the ultra-modern mode. But I love it just as much if not more like this, with hardwood floors and steps, at least one room lined with tatami (oh how I love that smell), and the furnishings and such in the (closed to the public but visible through the hall windows) principal’s office and such.

…

The museum consists primarily of shelves and shelves and shelves of manga – roughly 50,000 in all, with another 250,000 volumes in the closed stacks. Though there are some permanent exhibits and temporary exhibit halls, the chief thing to do at this museum, it would seem, is to sit and read manga. A quite enjoyable way to spend a day, I must say, if a bit unorthodox for a museum (if it were a library, there wouldn’t be an admission fee, and there would be a way to take out books; so, really, it’s more like a manga café).

I was, admittedly, disappointed at this, as I don’t read much manga. I never felt particularly confident about my ability to read manga, since they have so much casual language and weird sound changes (much like how Japanese people might have trouble with words like “gonna” that don’t really represent “going to”, or the way things are misspelled to indicate the pronunciation of different accents), and so many strange words and jargon words referring to the magic or spaceships or whatever it may be for a given series. But… after not even trying to read any manga for a number of years, I picked one up (the first volume of Ranma 1/2 – natsukashii na!), and made my way through the first chapter, moving quickly and smoothly, and smiling all the way. Spending a few hours at the museum could be a fine way to get through series without having to buy all the volumes yourself… it’s a fine atmosphere for reading – clean, brightly lit, welcoming – though there’s no food or drink, and nowhere to really lay down and stretch out.

In any case, the one main permanent exhibit hall is really quite well-done. The walls are lined with manga organized chronologically, so one can skim the selections and sort of get a sense of how manga developed and changed over time. Actual exhibition displays address a number of fundamental questions and themes relating to manga, including some that we really take so much for granted, it’s great to see them addressed. First, there is a display or two or three on the history of manga. I was most pleased to see that the museum does not take a stand on where manga starts, since basically any answer one could give would be controversial and debateable. Does it start with the Chôju giga, a 12-13th century handscroll depicting anthropomorphized animals and something resembling an early relative of the speech bubble? Or does manga start with ukiyo-e prints? Or with kibyôshi illustrated novels? Or Hokusai’s sketchbooks that he just so happened to call manga (漫画, lit. something like “rambling, aimless, wandering pictures”)? Or does manga start in the Meiji period, with the introduction of satirical political cartoons from the West? That the Manga Museum didn’t set themselves up for being argued against by taking a stand on any one of these was a very smart move in my opinion.

The exhibits also address standards, symbols, and forms, pointing out that a lot of things we take for granted in comics are in fact quite artificial. The convention of the speech bubble, as opposed to the narrator’s speech which goes in a box, for example; and the ways thought bubbles are shown differently. In American comics and cartoons, we show that someone is asleep by having Z’s float in the air above his head; in manga, a small bubble (of snot?) emerges from the character’s nose to indicate they’re asleep. All kinds of lines and marks and symbols appear on or near people’s faces to indicate certain emotions, and lines and shapes can be used in other ways to indicate speed of motion, or great power… A small hands-on bit of the exhibit lets you mix and match eyes, noses, mouths, and other features to sort of show how versatile manga style can be, I guess, and yet how remixed. It’s amazing to realize just how much a certain mouth or a certain nose indicates a certain character type, and yet also how combining a different set of eyes with that same mouth or nose can change the impression of the character type completely.

The exhibit highlights a manga from the 1970s called “Bakabon,” which apparently was quite experimental in how things were rendered inside the panels. Sometimes he would use no words; sometimes no pictures; sometimes a scene would be laid out as if it were drawn as a picture, but just with words placed in different parts of the panel, where the images should be. Characters changed size and art style dramatically, highlighting the artificiality of the medium, but its versatility and value as well. Of course, any expert of American comics (whether he be a scholar or just an obsessive fan) could tell you quite a bit about innovation in the way the panels themselves have been used by various artists over the years, something that goes on in manga as well, but doesn’t seem as dramatically emphasized or as extensively used, even.

A kami-shibai performance rounded out the day; somewhat related to manga, kami-shibai (紙芝居, lit. “paper play” or “paper theatre”) was a street entertainment mainly in the early postwar period. Scenes would be drawn out on separate cards, and a storyteller would show each card as a visual aid while telling the story, serving both as narrator, and delivering all the characters’ lines, in different voices of course. I had never seen kami-shibai before, and actually had a very different impression of it, thinking it was more like shadow puppets, when in fact it’s a bit more like an anime with only one frame per scene.

I hope to post soon a separate post about the Murata Range exhibit that was up in their temporary exhibits gallery.

For now, then, I suppose that’s it. There is of course some controversy over the founding of the museum, since I gather it was sort of the pet project of a politician who is no longer in power… and while the especially strong prominence of manga in concerted, intentional, efforts by the Japanese government to represent the country and its culture, and to exert soft power, etc etc, is certainly bizarre and controversial in its own ways, I think it is great that such a place exists for those researchers who are in fact researching pop culture phenomena… And for the wider public as well, of course.

I’m glad I went and checked it out. If I were living here more permanently, I really might actually make a habit of spending time there, reading through another volume or two or three on each visit, slowly making my way through series without having to buy them myself.