The Buddha: The Story in Manga and Art, Tokyo National Museum

FINANCIAL TIMES
By Mure Dickie

Illustration for “Buddha” vol.3 from Osamu Tezuka Manga Complete Works,
1983, BB Kent paper, watercolor, 38.1 x 27cm. Credit: Tezuka Productions

JAPAN - Mounting an exhibition that matches some of Japan’s most precious Buddhist sculpture with the work of a comic book artist might sound like an exercise in going from the sublime to the ridiculous. Not so. Though Buddha: The Story in Manga and Art, which runs until Sunday at the Tokyo National Museum, is certainly an unusual cross-genre exercise, it offers some intriguing parallels between the work of late artist and author Osamu Tezuka and more classical Buddhist iconographers. Nor would many Japanese see anything silly or sacrilegious in this unprecedented exercise in putting manga, as comics are known here, on a level with sacred art. Thanks in no small part to the work of Tezuka – who died in 1989 but is still revered as the “god of manga” – comics and animation are now almost  universally seen as part of mainstream Japanese culture. [link]