Kyoto International Manga Museum

This guide to the Kyoto International Manga Museum traces the building's original life as Tatsuike Primary School, funded in 1869 by neighborhood families pooling their own money years before Japan had a national school system. It follows the school's closure in 1995 as the surrounding neighborhood emptied out, and the unrelated closing of a Kyoto rental bookstore whose decades of manga stock needed a new home. Those two endings left the old school's corridors and stairwells lined with shelves of manga.