Tezuka’s Buddha at the Tokyo National Museum: An Interview with Matsumoto Nobuyuki

In the summer of 2011, the Tokyo National Museum held an unprecedented exhibition titled Buddha: The Story in Manga and Art, featuring Tezuka Osamu’s landmark Buddha manga (1972–83). ¹ This was the first exhibition to include manga in the 140-year history of the museum, the flagship cultural institution that anchors museum row in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. But what was most remarkable was the visual and cultural context in which it placed Tezuka, by juxtaposing pages from the manga with twenty examples of premodern Buddhist sculpture, ranging from second-century Pakistani stone reliefs to medieval Japanese statuary.

The exhibition demonstrated something that has been argued several times in the pages of Mechademia: that we can discover a great deal about manga and anime as media by examining how they have been translated for display, study, or consumption in the space of the museum. ² To learn more about the Buddha exhibition, I spoke with its curator Matsumoto Nobuyuki, director of the Curatorial Planning Department at the museum and head curator in Asian Art. I have translated our conversation, which took place two weeks after the opening in early May of 2011. It was also just two months after the earthquake and tidal wave in eastern Japan, and in the midst of the ongoing nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plants 150 miles north of Tokyo. I had threaded my way through darkened streets to the museum for the interview: many streetlights and neon signs still remained eerily extinguished at night, to conserve electricity and observe a respectful austerity. As discussed at the end of the interview, this provided both a poignant and a pointed context for the exhibition.

In addition to revealing how the show came together, Matsumoto’s comments shed light on several senses of “origin” that are taken up in this volume: the connections between premodern and contemporary art, the status of an original artwork in the context of mass media like manga and anime, and the issues of historical and artistic biography that inevitably seem to dominate our thinking about a work like Tezuka’s Buddha.

christopher bolton:

I saw the exhibition this week, and I thought it was wonderful. The individual artworks are striking in their own right, but the way they are juxtaposed is also very thought provoking. My own work centers very much on media comparisons, and what we can tell about anime and manga by contrasting them with other media. Comparing Tezuka’s Buddha manga with Buddhist statuary is an inspired idea. What was the initial impulse for this show, and where did the idea for that comparison come from?

matsumoto nobuyuki:

I’m delighted you liked the exhibition. As you know the anime film based on Tezuka Osamu’s Buddha manga is due out later this month. Tōei Company contacted us last fall to say they were making this film and asked us if we would consider an exhibition related to Tezuka’s Buddha. But because this museum deals with traditional Japanese and Asian culture (basically pre-nineteenth-century materials), a show just on Tezuka falls outside our purview. So at first I suggested that Tōei approach one of the modern art museums in Tokyo; the National Museum of Modern Art had a large-scale Tezuka exhibition several years ago. But they were very interested in doing something with us, and I was interested myself—I read the manga when it came out and I’m a fan. So I started to think about how to combine contemporary manga and anime with traditional culture.

The hero of Tezuka’s manga is obviously the historical figure of the Buddha, so I thought if we brought it together with Buddhist statuary, one could see the manga in a historical context, and we could get fans of anime and manga interested in traditional culture. And since most of our usual visitors are interested in traditional culture or history, I thought with this exhibition we could also show them the merits of manga and anime. That was the origin...