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Damaged Ishinomori Manga Museum Displays Art in Shops

The Shōtarō Ishinomori Manga Museum is lending art to stores in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture to raise the damaged city's spirits and prepare for the museum's reopening. Miyagi Prefecture was one of the areas hit hardest in the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai) disaster of March 11, and the museum received heavy damage.

The displayed art features Ishinomori's science-fiction manga Cyborg 009. The museum is loaning duplicates of about 80 of Ishinomori's art pieces to 35 local shops and expects more to participate in the initiative. The museum is lending the reproductions to stores until it reopens this summer with Ishinomori's original art.

The manga museum's first floor flooded almost to the ceiling during the 2011 disaster, but 90,000 pieces of manga artwork on the second floor remained safe. The museum went without electricity for months after the disaster but hosted a Children's Day event last May to support earthquake and tsunami victims.

The space-ship shaped museum, dedicated to the city's most famous manga creator, opened in 2001. Over the course of his career, which started in 1954, Ishinomori created 770 individual stories which were collected in a total of 500 volumes of manga. He assisted Osamu Tezuka on Astro Boy and went on to draw and write such manga as 009-1, Cyborg 009 and The Skull Man. Ishinomori, who passed away in 1998, was also the original creator of the Kamen Rider live-action franchise.

Images of the damaged museum and clean-up efforts can be seen at the museum's blog. The travel agency Destination Japan ran a "Volunteer in Japan” tour to bring people to earthquake relief efforts in Ishinomaki City from May to September 2011.

Source: The Mainichi Daily News