The Manga Kaikan (Cartoon Art Museum) in Saitama is located inside the Omiya Bonsai Village, a small area dotted by bonsai gardens.
Run by the Saitama municipal government, the facility commemorates the life and works of Rakuten Kitazawa (1876-1955), who drew cartoons satirizing politics and society using his extraordinary drawing skills and artistic sense. The museum was built on the site of a house where he lived in his last years.
About 30 works by Kitazawa are on display in the permanent exhibition room on the first floor, which faces a traditional Japanese garden.
One work titled "Zeitaku-nan" (Trouble with luxuries) shows a small boat named Kyoei Maru (Vanity ship), which is loaded with fine clothes and antiques, and a man aboard trying to scoop up a car floating on the sea with a net. The satirical work caricatures the vanity of the man who fills the vessel only with luxury goods, not life's necessities, in a voyage over the troubled waters of this world.
When examining Kitazawa's works, you'll find social issues of the time in each one, such as dismal job prospects, price increases and austere fiscal policy. The cartoons also show his view on those issues from an ordinary person's perspective.
"Manga used to be regarded as lowbrow and was looked down on back then. He completely changed that with his highly artistic and easy-to-understand works," said museum curator Hiroyuki Matsumoto, 41.
Kitazawa was born in a long-established family from an area that served as the Omiya-shuku post station in the Edo period (1603-1867).
He liked drawing from his childhood and was employed by a Yokohama publisher of a magazine for foreigners when he was 19.
Learning drawing from an Australian cartoonist at the company became the starting point of his career.
He was 23 when he became a member of the art department of Jiji Shinpo, a newspaper started by the famous writer and educator Yukichi Fukuzawa. While drawing cartoons for the newspaper, Kitazawa also started Tokyo Puck, the country's first full-color manga magazine, when he was 29. The magazine took society by storm.
He retired from the newspaper company at age 56 and built a house in Omiya, now part of Saitama, at 72. He was 79 when he died.
He reportedly spent the latter days of his life drawing nihonga traditional Japanese paintings, which was his hobby. Visitors to the museum can take a look at his studio, which was relocated from his now dismantled house and reconstructed in the facility.
After retirement, Kitazawa worked hard training his apprentice cartoonists. He left words full of confidence as the pioneer of satirical cartoons in this country: "Satirizing by manga has more power than a great number of characters or a language with 10 million words."
-- Manga Kaikan
Opened in 1966, this is the first public manga museum in Japan and houses about 50,000 items, including works by Rakuten Kitazawa and some of his personal belongings. The manga archive on the second floor is generally open on Saturdays, Sundays and national holidays. About 5,000 manga and related materials are available to the public in the reading room. The museum is about a five-minute walk from Omiya-Koen Station on the Tobu Noda Line.
Address: 150 Bonsaicho, Kita Ward, Saitama
Open: 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Closed on Mondays in principle
Admission: Free
Information: (048) 663-1541
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