News
Town of Evening Calm Manga Made into Planetarium Show
posted on by Egan Loo
The Hiroshima Children's Museum has adapted Fumiyo Kōno's Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Hiroshima Yunagi no Machi, Sakura no Kuni) manga into a planetarium show that is running from April 24 to September 5. The story follows two young women in a family dealing with the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing — a woman in 1955 and her niece decades later. Kono, who is a Hiroshima native, supervised the 50-minute planetarium show.
The show's footage takes 130 frames of Kono's manga art and adds motion, voices, and special effects. (The museum emphasizes that the show is not animation in the traditional sense.) The program marks the 30th anniversary of the museum's opening.
The original 2003-2004 manga won the Grand Prize at the 2004 Japan Media Arts Festival and the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize's Shinsei Award in 2005. After Last Gasp Publishing and jaPRESS released it in North America, the manga won one of New York Magazine's 2007 Culture Awards. It was also adapted into a live-action film in 2007.
Source: Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun
