(Photo by Avriana Allen / Noda Satoru from Golden Kamuy)

Editor’s Note: This piece was written by journalism student Avriana Allen and originally published as part of ‘Forty-Two,’ an entirely-different publication launched by the Unplugg’d Team at one point. We decided to republish it under UNPLUGG’D MAG because we believe it holds true to our editorial mission.

You choose your addiction. Maybe it’s three cups of coffee, League of Legends, Game of Thrones or just a morning run; a little piece of your life that you find yourself returning to, repeating. Maybe it’s normal. Mine’s probably not. My addiction leaves me curled up under my covers, giggling to myself, high on plot. I’m addicted to manga, a form of Japanese storytelling and art that covers every genre from romance to horror, slice-of-life to fantasy.

With over 50,000 results on Amazon, manga has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry with a worldwide following. In 2015, over 100,000 visitors attended two small manga exhibits at the British Museum, prompting the museum to open the Citi exhibition Manga, a six-zone exhibit on manga, its history, and forms on May 23 in the Sainsbury Exhibition Gallery, the largest and most coveted exhibition space in the museum.

While Nicole Rousmaniere, head curator of the exhibition and IFAC Handa Curator in Japanese Arts, says that Japan has never had an exhibition in that space, the country will be hosting the World Rugby Cup, Olympics, and Paralympics within the next year. With a year of cultural exchange between the United Kingdom and Japan officially starting this September, the timing for the exhibit felt right.

Rousmaniere, passionate reader and fan of manga for the past 30 years, has proposed other exhibitions without success. “There’s a rigorous process in place so that everything is vetted, and the outcomes are in the safe range,” she says. “You have to be very careful with expenditure and the British Museum brand.”

But drawing upon the museum’s stealthily growing collection of manga and the prospect of reaching a younger audience, Rousmaniere’s proposal for an exhibit on manga made it past the meetings and committees to the marketing research group where it consistently got the highest marks in focus groups. Its high scores convinced the museum, “which doesn’t generally do work on contemporary artists, and certainly not manga,” to work with publishers and artists to create the largest exhibition of manga outside of Japan.

Four years ago, I could not have cared less. Even though I grew up in Torrance, California — a city whose population is 35% Asian and home to the second largest Japanese community in the U.S. according to the World Population Review — I didn’t really understand what manga offered. I’d walk past the wall of white covers and black characters at my library without wondering what stories were held between their covers.

Once I worked up the courage to open one, glancing at the angular faces and long hair before guiltily sliding it back on the shelf before my mom or siblings noticed I what I was looking at. I’d grown up on Peanuts, Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbs, not these gray sketches full of magic. But as I pushed the paperback between its neighbors, I wondered if I would have enjoyed it. If I’d known how to read it.

“In English, obviously you read from left to right,” says Rousmaniere, “in Japanese you read upper-right to bottom-left. It’s a different thing and if you don’t understand how to read manga, you’re not going to get the content.” With Japanese exhibitions laid out counterclockwise, the opposite of European and American displays, she was inspired to make the exhibit user friendly. “We decided to make this like an immersive learning course,” she says, “By going through this exhibition, you will become fluent in manga.”

Broken up into six zones, the exhibit begins with an Alice in Wonderland theme to help disorient the visitor. “There’ve been over a hundred manga on it,” says Rousmaniere. “You have these Alices that look like Alice but they’re not. How it’s being translated in Japan is an entirely different version. Alice is often a male, sometimes Alice is a teddy bear, and Alice is normally very murderous.”

However, the exhibit continues with a white rabbit from the famous Japanese hand scroll and national treasure, “Choju-Giga-Jinbutsu” (or “Frolicking Animals and Humans”) as its guide. “We’re taking this white rabbit theme but doing it a Japanese way,” says Rousmaniere.

The exhibit is split into six zones, each one focusing on a different aspect of the art. “What you’re going to have in this exhibition,” says Rousmaniere, “is really a unique chance to look at the artists’ drawings and put them into context: the publishing houses, the culture of manga, the influence, the historical roots and the future trajectories.” Beginning with the reading, writing, drawing and producing of manga, the exhibit explores manga’s history and its uses in society; the exhibit ends by considering the expansion of manga into other forms such as gaming and anime.

I began with anime. Despite my firm belief that it was weird to be so obsessed with what could be described as Japanese cartoons, I nevertheless craved a taste of the magic. It was a special bond that my friends shared, one that I wanted in on. I finally caved in my senior year of high school. “Hunter X Hunter” — an anime about fighting monsters — was my first love, and that summer, I picked up a manga called “Skip Beat!”. I’d seen it on the shelves of the library, and though none of my friends had read it, I loved it. I laughed as Kyoko Mogami refused to believe in love on her path to becoming a world class actress, stubbornly ignoring all signs. And suddenly, like millions of readers around the world, I was hooked on manga.

It may not have been one of the big names like “One Piece”, “Naruto”, “Sailor Moon” or “Attack on Titan.” The British Museum will be showing the original drawings for these manga and though I’ve never read them I’m still excited. “We obviously had to leave out a few,” says Rousmaniere, “but we do have what a lot of people are expecting. We have ‘Dragon Ball’, and it’s the first time ever outside of Japan” that original drawings are being shown.

But it wasn’t one of the biggest names in manga that convinced me that I was missing out. It wasn’t a realistic story of friendship, work or even life. It was a highly dramatized romance that tugged on my heart strings and promised me a story and a style I would return to over and over, ruining my prejudice against the art form forever. Once, I would have thought a manga exhibition at the British Museum was weird. Now, I think it’s a moment of cultural acceptance, an acknowledgement of the power of art and storytelling that is inked onto a page and called manga.

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Manga in the Museum

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