The new Manga book about the British Museum (& also involving the Parthenon Marbles) has now been published in English.

From:
Guardian

The British Museum: marbles, murals… and manga!
Meet Professor Munakata, the crime-fighting archaeologist who saves one of London’s best-loved institutions from looters
Mike Pitts
Sunday 14 August 2011 19.59 BST

With its crumbling pillars and fading frescoes, the British Museum isn’t the first thing you’d associate with Japanese graphic novels. So it’s a slight surprise to learn that the museum will soon publish its own manga-based book.

Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure was serialised last year in Japan and has now been now translated into English. Its star – a portly ethnographer-cum-archaeologist who solves crimes and explains civilisations – is already well known to millions of Japanese readers, who follow his exploits in a series of Hoshino Yukinobu-penned comics. Hoshino’s work is blend of science fiction and thriller, layered with a rich mix of western and Asian myth and history.
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The Korean manuscripts that ended up in Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale have now returned to Korea. Agreements have also been made for the return of various artefacts held by Japan.

From:
Art Daily

Korean Royal Books Looted by French Soldiers in the 19th Century Get Colorful Welcome
Friday, June 24, 2011
By: Kelly Olsen, Associated Press

SEOUL (AP).- South Korea celebrated the return of nearly 300 royal books looted by French soldiers in the 19th century with solemn ceremonies Saturday bringing alive the color and pageantry of a bygone royal age.

Bearers dressed in bright red costumes of the Joseon Dynasty carried a palanquin containing some of the books to central Seoul’s Gyeongbok Palace to the piercing sound of traditional horns and gongs.
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Korea has recently had the Oegyujanggak documents returned by France & Japan is also planning on returning other documents to them soon. There is still a lot of the country’s heritage located in foreign museums however and the ownership of many of these items continues to be disputed.

From:
Joong Ang Daily (Korea)

Bringing our cultural treasures home
April 26, 2011

The massive needle-shaped stone monuments known as the Egyptian obelisks are still a mystery, but it is widely believed that they are symbols of fertility. In most civilizations, the sky is often represented as male while the earth is female. In Greek mythology, Uranus was the god of the sky and Gaia was the goddess of the earth. But in ancient Egypt, Geb was the god of the Earth, and his wife Nut was the goddess of the sky. The obelisks are said to be phalluses constructed to point up at the sky for Nut.

Although the obelisks were built in Egypt, most obelisks are found not in Egypt but in Italy. There are 29 obelisks remaining around the world, and nine of them are in Egypt. Italy has 11. Roman emperors had admired the majestic beauty of the obelisks when they conquered Egypt and took them to Italy. That was over 2,000 years ago. Italians’ infatuation with obelisks returned in the 20th century. When Italy won the second Italo-Abyssinian War, Benito Mussolini looted the Obelisk of Axum.
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In a story that has uncanny parallels to the (rejected) April 1st EDM by Andrew George MP in 2009, a Japanese Manga comic is serialising a story based on the repatriation of treasures from the British Museum – in exchange for other British artefacts that are held hostage.

From:
Economist

The professor to the rescue
A cartoon strip takes on the repatriation of treasures from the British Museum
Aug 26th 2010 | tokyo

“THE Stonehenge megaliths have been stolen!?” So exclaims Professor Munakata at the outset of a rollicking adventure set at the British Museum, in the form of a manga, or Japanese cartoon. Over the past five months, readers of Big Comic, a Japanese fortnightly magazine, have followed the exploits of the fictitious ethnographer as he gets embroiled in a bizarre plot to force the repatriation of the museum’s prized objects.

The strip, called “The Case Records of Professor Munakata”, was introduced 15 years ago by Yukinobu Hoshino, one of Japan’s most notable manga artists. Portly, bald and impeccably dressed with cap, cape and cane, the professor is Japan’s anti-Indiana Jones. He does not invite danger but bumbles into it. The strip does not follow any set formula but takes on serious issues.
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Korea like other countries has been observing the approach taken by countries such as Italy & Egypt in retrieving their cultural property, whereby they have switched from a diplomatic approach to more hard-line measures with a certain amount of success.

From:
Joong Ang Daily

More than treasure lies beneath a historical trove of Korean art
[NEWS IN FOCUS:First in a two-part series]

Determining who has the rights – legal and natural – to the relics is a complicated question.
March 01, 2010

For much of its tumultuous history, Korea was invaded by stronger nations. Time after time, dating back to the fifth century, invaders ravaged the helpless country and none went home without spoils: They carted off cultural treasures ranging from texts from royal libraries to paintings and sculptures.
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