LONDON NEWS

TUPNews has just now visited an exhibition on manga production at the Japanese Embassy on Piccadilly.

The exhibition is a modest one-room affair in the lobby, with about twenty boards demonstrating manga manufacture from sketch form to final version. The examples are drawn from the work of Kiriko Kubo, a popular female manga artist who is hugely popular in Japan despite having lived in London for the last ten years. Disconcertingly, you are made to walk anti-clockwise around the room, reading right to left like the Japanese.

You’d be stretched to spend more than ten minutes here, but it’s free and you get to go through a metal detector. You can’t really complain about visiting an embassy.

I’m hardly the first reporter to bang on about the incredible imagination of the Japanese, so I won’t go on about it here. Other than to say that I wish I’d grown up reading Buckets de Gohan, a comic strip about a bunch of animals who work at a zoo, but commute home to their own cities full of their own species.