Hiroshima City Manga Library

This guide to the Hiroshima City Manga Library traces its start in 1983 as a small open-air reading room on Hijiyama hill, and its slow fade once nearby district libraries drew its readers away to a fifth of their old numbers. It follows the council's unusual gamble to stop lending everything and lend only manga, with staff spending three years studying manga halls in Kawasaki and Saitama before reopening on May 1, 1997 as Japan's first public library built entirely around comics. Settle in under the trees on Hijiyama and pick something off the shelf.