MURASAKI Shuzo

Born in 1937 in Kumamoto Prefecture. As a second-year junior high school student aspiring to become an illustrator, he began collecting girls’ magazines to use as reference material. He later gave up on his dream to become an illustrator and began a new career as pastry chef. In 1967, he opened his own pastry shop in Kumamoto City, and at the same time started avidly collecting girls’ magazines again. After retiring from his pastry business in 2003, MURASAKI donated his entire magazine collection to the newly built library of Kikuyo Town in Kumamoto Prefecture. His donation is now listed in the library catalog as “Kumamoto Kikuyo Town Library Girls’ Magazines, Murasaki Collection.” As an interim official of the Kikuyo Town Hall, he was in charge of the Girls’ Magazine Section for many years before retiring in 2019.

This collection was instituted through private funding and has become extremely valuable, as it contains a profuse amount of rare materials that cannot be found in the National Diet Library or the Gordon W. Prange Collection of the GHQ. Furthermore, after donating his collection to the Kikuyo Town Library, MURASAKI took great effort to establish it as a special section, thus paving the way to pass on his legacy as a private collector to the next generation with this collection now determined as a public asset. The roots of Japanese manga can be traced back to magazine media, so in order to study its development it is necessary to examine magazine publications dating all the way back to the Meiji period. We would like to present this award to MURASAKI Shuzo in recognition of the achievements that establish him as one of the great pioneers who created the foundation for the development of modern media art in Japan. (OMOTE Tomoyuki)