Manga Museum and Kyoto Imperial Palace

On the way to the Imperial Palace we stumbled upon the Manga Museum. I read about this before and thought about going, but totally forgot about it. Then suddenly we came upon a fenced area with a bunch of people walking around in costumes.

Manga for those who don't know is a Japanese style comic book. Its popular. To be honest its insanely popular. You see people reading them everywhere, from kid to old man. Unlike the western comic book, which is the size of a magazine and pretty thin, these are more novel book size (not always though) and a good few hundred pages. There is a large following in the west too, mostly in the geeky circles (thus I am aware, although not a reader) and there were many westerners here too (mostly quite geeky looking as well who all had a look in their eyes you would get when you set your sights on the holy grail. Although for them, I suppose this is it).

I took a couple of pictures before I realized what place I was at, and then saw the sign saying no photos (which you can see blatantly in the second one..oops). Nobody said anything though. You can take pictures if you ask the people first though, in case your ever in the area. We thought, what the heck! Lets go inside, it will probably be an experience. It was. I am pretty sure in the one picture you can see someone dressed as Ronald McDonald.. What these people are doing is called Cosplay, Costume Play basically. Dressing up as your favourite characters and hanging out..or battling or whatnot. You see similar things in the west at sci-fi conventions.

Inside you could not take pictures almost everywhere since its full of original artwork from various artists. This place was a weird mix of museum and library. Throughout the building there are shelves of various Manga you can take and read. Lots of seating all over. They had booths where you could learn to draw, get your picture drawn, paint some models (tried to convince Naomi to do this one, but to no avail), learn how to write etc. Kind of neat.

The displays were mostly showing various history of manga and manga from around the world.

All over this place you would see people dressed up, and I mean dressed to the nines. They were taking photos in hallways and stairwells of themselves in various..odd poses. I can't really put into words the things I saw here. Its extreme to say the least.

This is a place you truly have to experience yourself to fully appreciate. The museum also tag teams as a museum of what this building once was, an elementary school. So some rooms are simply of old school offices from the early 20th century.

After this experience and a bit more walking, we ended up at our destination, the Imperial Palace of Kyoto. Now for some history!

The Imperial Palace in Kyoto is where the Emperor resided from around 800 AD until 1869 when he moved to Tokyo during the Meiji restoration (which was the modernization of Japan). This palace here has been burnt down 8 times (tends to happen to many of the old buildings in Japans history sadly). The current palace was built in 1850 and the buildings are styled from　around the 9th to 12th century.

The actual place is basically a huge park. In the center is the actual palace, which is totally walled and gated up, with no way to see inside except for a guided tour. At the time I thought only fancy shmancy people got in, but I now know a little bit to late, that anyone can just apply to go on the guided tour..oh well.

This is the main gate into the park. It takes probably 10 minutes to walk to the center where the palace is. Plus in this heat it takes even longer. Following this are some shots of the park on the way to the palace.

Up next, the Palace itself. First is the front gate, then various shots of the walls and other gates on the sides.

Not much to tell really, what you see is what all we could see. Police patrols are constantly driving past the place too. I truly wish I researched this one a bit more beforehand so I could have arranged to get in on a tour. But it was still a pretty cool place to visit.

Next is some pictures from a temple inside the park near the eastern exit.

After this we headed out and on to our last planned spot in the day, the famous Kinkaku-Ji, The Golden Temple. I shall write about that next!