Shigeru Mizuki’s Yokai Night Parade Exhibition at the Shizuoka City Museum of Art x Lazy Blog.

The whole reason I went to Shizuoka was a Shigeru Mizuki exhibition.

This is it…

The Shizuoka City Museum of Art is right in front of the station, so I grabbed a meal at the station before heading over. Turns out the soba place in town isn’t that far from the station either, so eating at either one would’ve been fine.

This is it…

The artwork is incredible.

Yokai descriptions

No photos were allowed inside, so I only shot the stuff near the exit where it was OK. The character art is unique, but the backgrounds are on another level. I’d say Shigeru Mizuki was pretty much the starting point of Japanese gekiga. Ryoichi Ikegami’s manga, for example, clearly shows Mizuki’s influence.

All sorts of characters

The detail is insane. He must have drawn it all by hand, so how did he get it this good? And this is a man who lost an arm in the war.

Nurikabe, the one yokai you can photograph

They had the old Japanese documents that Mizuki’s yokai were based on on display, and he drew them almost exactly the same. I guess that shows how creative those original Japanese documents were. But bringing them into the modern age and turning them into finished characters was Mizuki’s work. Honestly, taking yokai that already existed in the past and turning them into characters feels, how should I put it… more real than inventing yokai from nothing. And because those characters aren’t originals but ones that already existed, they end up being used in countless works… Nurarihyon, the lord of the yokai, for example, shows up in all kinds of manga, and I think that’s only possible because he isn’t anyone’s original creation. You could call it an effort that helped complete Japanese subculture… Anyway, after the exhibition I thought, so Japanese culture has this kind of work by a true master behind it, and that this is exactly the kind of thing we ought to learn from.

Medama-oyaji pudding