Mizuki Shigeru Museum

The Mizuki Shigeru Museum in Sakaiminato is dedicated to manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, who was born in the town in 1922 and became one of Japan's most influential postwar manga creators, best known for GeGeGe no Kitaro, a series that popularized yokai (folklore spirit) characters for a mass audience beginning in the 1960s. The museum opened in 2003 along Sakaiminato's Mizuki Shigeru Road, a shopping street lined with bronze statues of Mizuki's yokai characters, and traces his career from wartime service, in which he lost his left arm in combat in Papua New Guinea, through his postwar rise as a manga artist and folklorist who researched and popularized regional yokai traditions. The permanent exhibition displays original manga artwork, hand-drawn storyboards, and reconstructed dioramas of yokai figures drawn from Mizuki's illustrated folklore encyclopedias, organized thematically by character and by phase of his career rather than in strict chronological order. Later gallery sections use darkened, immersive room design with sound and lighting effects to recreate the eerie atmosphere of Mizuki's yokai stories, a curatorial choice distinct from the object-case format of a conventional art museum. The museum has undergone periodic renovation and gallery expansion since its opening, most notably an enlargement completed in the 2020s to accommodate growing visitor numbers tied to the continued popularity of the GeGeGe no Kitaro franchise.