The Diet Members for Manga, Anime, and Games suprapartisan lawmaker group announced last Friday that it plans to submit a bill when the Japanese Diet convenes on January 22 that aims to establish a “Media Arts National Center” that will be tasked with collecting original manga materials and anime cels for preservation.
The bill aims to prevent the acquisition of cels and manga material by foreign collectors and minimize the foreign dissemination of the materials.
The DPJ also criticized the project by noting that facilities such as the International Manga Museum in Kyoto already exist.
Following the succession of Hatayama as Prime Minister after the DPJ won the 2009 general elections, the 11.7-billion-yen project was shuttered.