Manga. The Way of the Warrior

Museum of Caricature
Kozia 11, Warsaw

27 September – 22 December 2024
26 September | 6pm – Opening

Merely fifteen years ago, Japanese pop culture was still outside the mainstream in the West. Everything looked different back then. The Polish manga market was just taking off. Anime was only available on TV and occasionally on DVDs. Today, access to cultural goods and the manner in which they are consumed have undergone a major transformation.

Now, manga and anime are already mainstream. For the past three years, more than half a thousand new volumes of Japanese comics have been published annually in Poland (this year, that figure was surpassed in September!). Anime is available just a few clicks away, on various streaming services. Clothing with characters from popular series have popped up in chain stores.

Both the generation of forty-somethings who watched animated shows on the Polonia 1 channel as kids and their children regard Japanese pop culture as one of the more universal forms. The time has come for a comprehensive exhibition that will focus on only one aspect of manga, namely warriors. 


Warriors are not just samurai, ninjas or practitioners of martial arts. Battles are fought in the most diverse storylines depicting different times or even different worlds. But aren’t battles also waged by athletes and their teams, as they try to overpower their opponents on the sports field? Similarly, people struggling with their own limitations are fighting internal battles. Women working in corporations are warriors competing for their place in the organization. Even relationships between people have become an arena of struggle because, as Pat Benatar sings, ‘Love is a battlefield’. Every story is about warriors.

The manga story itself is fascinating and seems to be an ongoing series of skirmishes. The genre struggled to break into the mainstream. Publishers competed for market dominance. Authors fought for readers. Consequently, the path manga followed to shape itself has been immensely interesting.

Japanese pop culture produces a multitude of goods that have become virtually impossible to archive. The abundance of gadgets inspired by the most popular manga stories and their animated adaptations is overwhelming. There are action figures, stickers, mock-ups and posters. Manga characters also appear on food products or in computer games. Some items, such as sweet wrappers, are by definition transient, designed to please the eye only for a moment and then to end up in the dustbin. However, even these become collectibles. That is why the exhibition presents such artefacts alongside original drawings.