“Yokote City, we did it, didn’t we?”

These words, spoken before the guests who attended the Manga Museum’s Reopening Ceremony in 2019, are still being shared among the staff. At the time, securing so many public funds for a museum dedicated to something like manga had been an uphill battle. The fruits of their biggest efforts lie in the Manga Archives that we are about to show you. This trail-blazing initiative brought to you by the city, the locals, and the manga artists may also have been realized because of the special history of the region.

The Manga Museum is located in Masuda Town in Yokote City, which is home to countless important relics of traditional architecture from the Edo period in the form of warehouses and storehouses. Being built here among many historical buildings and becoming a modern storehouse where people can see, know, and study Japan’s manga culture is a cornerstone of the Manga Museum’s foundation.

The concept behind the Manga Archive is making a “captivating collection.” Every room inside is glass sided, from the Archive Room where information about the original drawings are recorded and turned into digital data, to the storage rooms that are designed to properly store the drawings and prevent the acidification of the paper. Here you can get a realistic sense of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into archiving the drawings, which was not something people had access to before this museum.

They also have a huge touchscreen panel where you can search for and pull up digitized works. With it you can see the fine details of the pen strokes, how each drawing was made, and how each of the artists and the works have their own form of expression.

What’s more, there’s a drawer system where you can take your time and look at each of the drawings yourself. They have whole chapters of manga in the form of original drawings stored in order from top to bottom, which allows you to experience reading the story in its original form.

The people of this town believed in the museum’s possibilities, of its endeavor to speak to the manga artists of the future through the storage of original drawings of today. They decided it was important to maintain the relatively new culture of manga, and to preserve it for the next generations, just like the people of this town have carried on the traditions of its warehouses from the times of their ancestors.