A Trip To Japan: Kyoto Manga Museum
Aug. 12th, 2023 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennariaIt's a small museum, we said. We can fit it in on a travel day, we said. We'll have time to sign up for a slot to get our portraits dawn manga-style, perhaps poke our heads into the conference being held there at the same time.
Ha. Ha. Ha. Some day we will remember, when making plans, that we are middle aged and disabled, and do not move all that fast even when we're in a place we know, let alone a place we don't.
We did get to the manga museum, but far too late for a manga portrait slot - not least because portrait slots are not like a caricature artist, trying to get through as quickly as possible: the slots are half an hour minimum, 50 minutes maximum, depending on number of people and what kind of portrait was being drawn. (Boo, I say, and Boo again.) Another couple panels remained of the conference, but after giving up on the manga portrait slot, we admitted to each other that we didn't have enough energy left for academic panels. Slow exploration it was!
This is why people really come to the museum - to look at manga. They have an entire room of various translations of manga (English here, Portuguese there, French a third place), but halls and halls of Japanese originals. I took a few pictures of random individual manga so I could try to track down translations.
This is by the official front entrance - which is not the entrance we used. The statue makes sense: PHOENIX is the self-declared "life's work" of Osamu Tezuka, the 'Father of Manga.' But it makes the kind of sense where I had to go look up why the hell there's a giant phoenix there. Not sure if this is just a 'I am not Japanese' thing, where I haven't picked up certain osmosis due to not growing up there.
The biggest exhibit is on Manga Through The Years, which of course included samples of said manga, from the earliest possible up through the present day. Also bunches more manga, in part because the Manga Museum is in a building that used to be a school, and the exhibit was in the old gymnasium, and fuck it, if you've got twenty foot ceilings you should fill the wall space available. (And in part, I suspect, because they were making a point about the omnipresence of manga in Japanese life and culture.)
I wish I had more pictures from this exhibit - one part in particular had a list, with examples, of 'adaptations of manga,' which included the obvious suspects (anime, live-action, musical), the 'oh, huh, I guess that is legit in Japan' (cosplay) and the 'wait what' (not only a Kabuki adaptation of NARUTO, but also a Pachinko "adaptation' of FIST OF THE NORTH STAR). But photos were officially forbidden, and I didn't want to get kicked out. Wife was braver.
Apparently the Executive Director gets a little mini-exhibit of 'hey, isn't this neat,' and his current-at-the-time exhibit was on that common trope, Evil Cats! (Which, given my own cats and their repeated attempts to kill me via Not Getting Out Of The Way, can't be disproven.) Or, more prosaically, horror combined with cats, as portrayed in manga.
We wandered around, and discovered the mostly-for-kids section. We were going to leave after taking pictures with the mascot (as you do), only then one of the people there insisted that the activities aren't just for kids, come on over…
So they had this whole storyline (for the Manga Workshop Expo, only open for three months) about how a kid's taking care of the Museum, and someone opens something they shouldn't have, and Oh No manga characters are coming alive! Which are characters invented just for this, so kids can have fun drawing them. Or adults can ditto. Who, uh, aren't expert at drawing or anything.
Look, I was very proud that my drawing came out looking like the original at all! Also that my Duolingo knowledge of katakana was enough to reproduce its name legibly. This cannot be seen in the photo, but it's still true.
(Also true: Wife drew a character too, and the lady offered to take a picture of the both of us with our pictures. We linked hands, and the lady said wisely, "Ah, friendship!" It was not worth arguing, so we didn't.)
By this time, the museum was closing, so we headed for the gift shop, as you do. The items for sale were many and varied, but the best weren't actually for sale.
I mean, it's probably better for my pocketbook that Yuri and Victor weren't for sale, but still. WAAAANT.
...and then we headed out and it was raining. Womp womp.
Ha. Ha. Ha. Some day we will remember, when making plans, that we are middle aged and disabled, and do not move all that fast even when we're in a place we know, let alone a place we don't.
We did get to the manga museum, but far too late for a manga portrait slot - not least because portrait slots are not like a caricature artist, trying to get through as quickly as possible: the slots are half an hour minimum, 50 minutes maximum, depending on number of people and what kind of portrait was being drawn. (Boo, I say, and Boo again.) Another couple panels remained of the conference, but after giving up on the manga portrait slot, we admitted to each other that we didn't have enough energy left for academic panels. Slow exploration it was!
This is why people really come to the museum - to look at manga. They have an entire room of various translations of manga (English here, Portuguese there, French a third place), but halls and halls of Japanese originals. I took a few pictures of random individual manga so I could try to track down translations.
This is by the official front entrance - which is not the entrance we used. The statue makes sense: PHOENIX is the self-declared "life's work" of Osamu Tezuka, the 'Father of Manga.' But it makes the kind of sense where I had to go look up why the hell there's a giant phoenix there. Not sure if this is just a 'I am not Japanese' thing, where I haven't picked up certain osmosis due to not growing up there.
The biggest exhibit is on Manga Through The Years, which of course included samples of said manga, from the earliest possible up through the present day. Also bunches more manga, in part because the Manga Museum is in a building that used to be a school, and the exhibit was in the old gymnasium, and fuck it, if you've got twenty foot ceilings you should fill the wall space available. (And in part, I suspect, because they were making a point about the omnipresence of manga in Japanese life and culture.)
I wish I had more pictures from this exhibit - one part in particular had a list, with examples, of 'adaptations of manga,' which included the obvious suspects (anime, live-action, musical), the 'oh, huh, I guess that is legit in Japan' (cosplay) and the 'wait what' (not only a Kabuki adaptation of NARUTO, but also a Pachinko "adaptation' of FIST OF THE NORTH STAR). But photos were officially forbidden, and I didn't want to get kicked out. Wife was braver.
Apparently the Executive Director gets a little mini-exhibit of 'hey, isn't this neat,' and his current-at-the-time exhibit was on that common trope, Evil Cats! (Which, given my own cats and their repeated attempts to kill me via Not Getting Out Of The Way, can't be disproven.) Or, more prosaically, horror combined with cats, as portrayed in manga.
We wandered around, and discovered the mostly-for-kids section. We were going to leave after taking pictures with the mascot (as you do), only then one of the people there insisted that the activities aren't just for kids, come on over…
So they had this whole storyline (for the Manga Workshop Expo, only open for three months) about how a kid's taking care of the Museum, and someone opens something they shouldn't have, and Oh No manga characters are coming alive! Which are characters invented just for this, so kids can have fun drawing them. Or adults can ditto. Who, uh, aren't expert at drawing or anything.
Look, I was very proud that my drawing came out looking like the original at all! Also that my Duolingo knowledge of katakana was enough to reproduce its name legibly. This cannot be seen in the photo, but it's still true.
(Also true: Wife drew a character too, and the lady offered to take a picture of the both of us with our pictures. We linked hands, and the lady said wisely, "Ah, friendship!" It was not worth arguing, so we didn't.)
By this time, the museum was closing, so we headed for the gift shop, as you do. The items for sale were many and varied, but the best weren't actually for sale.
I mean, it's probably better for my pocketbook that Yuri and Victor weren't for sale, but still. WAAAANT.
...and then we headed out and it was raining. Womp womp.