From Wastepaper to High Art: Japan Seeks to Save Manga Heritage
TOKYO—When Keiko Takemiya made her manga debut in 1968, her publisher told her that her original drawings for the comic books could be thrown out. She insisted on getting them back, stamping “Please return this to me" on each page. More than half a century later, she has a collection of 26,000 drawings from the 180 manga titles she has published, including pioneering works in the genre of manga for girls.
The drawings are piled up in her house in southern Japan. Takemiya was on to something. What people in the business used to consider no more than wastepaper is now seen by many around the world as high art.
Some drawings are exhibited in museums such as the British Museum, where a 2019 show included work from Takemiya’s science-fiction manga “Toward the Terra." At a Paris auction in 2018, one of the drawings for the classic sci-fi manga “Astro Boy" by Osamu Tezuka sold for €269,400, equivalent today to about $290,000. Now some in Japan, awakened to the country’s cultural heritage, are taking steps to prevent manga drawings from ending up overseas. They are recalling the late 19th century, when Europeans and Americans encountered ukiyo-e woodblock prints—pictures of the “floating world" by artists such as Hiroshige that depicted courtesans, the theater and Mount Fuji.
Japanese people considered the prints cheap and disposable. Today, some of the finest ukiyo-e collections are found in U.S. museums such as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art.
Takemiya, 73, said it was important to keep the drawings in a story together. “What worries me the most is a situation where the pages of story manga get scattered in all directions as happened with ukiyo-e," she said. She is looking for a museum
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