Now some in Japan, awakened to the country’s cultural heritage, are taking steps to prevent manga drawings from ending up overseas. This year, 15 Japanese manga publishers established an organization called the Manga Archive Center that plans to preserve at least 360,000 sheets of original manga drawings over the next five years. The year before his death in 2020, Yaguchi wrote, “The original manga drawings are drawing attention from people overseas. Its chairman, Masuzo Furukawa, once worked as an assistant to a manga artist and opened a small bookshop in 1980 selling used manga. Oishi, of the manga archive, said there were probably tens of millions of manga drawings in Japan, but the number might not rise much higher.

Source: Wall Street Journal December 17, 2023 10:02 UTC