Hi! I decided to make this blog as an old-school-internet-style way to show off some photos I took during my trip this past weekend to the Special Exhibition “YOTSUBA&! Exhibition of Original Manga Drawings” (よつばと！原画展 / Yotsuba to! Gengaten) at the Tokiwaso Manga Museum in Toshima-ku, Tokyo. I figured some other people online would want an English-language trip report, so here we go! Below are 85 pictures in full resolution. (By the way, if you use these somewhere, please do let me know, and give credit by linking back here – it’d be appreciated.)
The entrance in Tokiwaso Park
Yaaaay, made it!
Quick backstory: I moved to Nagoya, Japan last month and took the Tōkaidō Shinkansen up to Tokyo (only a 1.5 hour ride on the Nozomi train, at nearly 300 km/h!) this past weekend in order to see this exhibition of Kiyohiko Azuma’s work before it closed at the end of the month. I was (and still am) elated that I was able to move to Japan in time and go, just before it wrapped up, especially as I have commitments the following two weekends this month! I went right when it opened at 10 a.m.
The Yotsuba&! exhibition itself is housed in a museum that’s a masterful reproduction of Tokiwa-sō, an apartment building that was inhabited by numerous famous manga artists in the mid-20th century, including Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy, Dororo), Fujiko F. Fujio & Fujiko Fujio Ⓐ (Doraemon), Shotaro Ishinomori (Super Sentai, Kamen Rider), and Fujio Akatsuka (Osomatsu-kun). The upstairs showcases the original living quarters, and the downstairs floor hosts revolving exhibitions like this one.
Danbo is in one of the rooms! This is a faithful recreation of Tokiwa-sō in the 1950s and 60s, surely!
A big Yotsuba greets you at the end of the hallway, next to the small elevator to head downstairs. Hi!
Heading downstairs and going around the corner, you turn left and find yourself in the main room. But we’ll talk about what’s there later! For now, we’ll turn left again and walk through these sliding doors, which takes us into the exhibition space.
