Archiving and Utilization of Manga Materials:
in the case of Kyoto International Manga Museum
Abstract†
Tadahiro Saika
Innternational Manga Research Center,Kyoto Seika UniversityKyoto International Manga Museum
604-0846 Karasuma-Oike,
Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto
Japansaika@kyotomm.jp

KEYWORDS
manga, Kyoto International Manga Museum, popular culture

1

INTRODUCTION

Kyoto International Manga Museum is a communal project ofKyoto Seika University and the city of Kyoto; it opened inNovember 2006 and aims to collect, preserve, and exhibit manga(comics) and related materials, and its project is to research manga
culture. From the perspective of regular visitors, it is a cultural
facility that combines the function of a library specialized in manga
and a museum that regularly holds exhibitions. The aim of thispresentation is to consider the meaning of this facility'sorganization as a library and its efforts to archiving mangamaterials.

Figure 1: The exterior of the Kyoto International Manga
Museum2

published between the 1970s and 2005, and fill the books shelves
you can find against almost all walls in the museum, what we callthe “Wall of Manga”.

MANGA MATERIALS AT THE KYOTO
INTERNATIONAL MANGA MUSEUM

As a manga archive, the Kyoto International Manga Museum
currently holds over 300,000 manga materials. Most of them areprimary sources like single manga volumes, manga magazines, butthere are also books on manga research. This is where it is different
from Western comic museums who archive original comic art as a
primary resource. Our museum doesn’t put much effort intocollecting original art, and we don’t have much in our holdings.
There is a public library space where visitors to the museum canperuse 50,000 of our 300,000 manga. These volumes were mainly

Figure 2 and 3: “Wall of Manga” in a public library space ofthe Kyoto International Manga Museum
These collection of the Kyoto International Manga Museum ismade up from donations for the most part. Therefore the most of
the manga related materials Kyoto International Manga Museum
collects are not original manga art, but manga books. That we areable to build a collection out of donations from the general publicshows how many people enjoy manga as popular culture in Japan.
Our mission to collect manga magazines is also very important
given that most of the time. Manga magazines do not just containmanga, but also background information of manga as popular
culture. It is very hard to gain this sort of background from one pageof original art.
One of our most important policies on collecting manga materials
is that when collecting, we don’t discriminate based on content. We
do not limit our collection to manga and the work of manga artists
that has historical value, we also collect the work of manga artists
forgotten by history, works that have arguable, or little to none
artistic and literary value, equally. Of course, we also collect worksof adult nature not collected by general libraries. We even collectillegal material such as pirated books, because of their cultural
historical value.
This presentation shall introduce on detail of our effort to collectand utilize manga materials as mentioned above, and examine
current issues on archiving manga culture comprehensively.