Kodama Tales Inc. to Publish English Debut of Baki the Grappler Manga
SANTA MONICA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Kodama Tales Inc., a subsidiary of Kyodo Printing Co., Ltd., is proud to announce the debut of the highly anticipated English-language publication of Baki the Grappler (Complete Edition, 24 volumes, originally published by Akita Publishing). This marks the first official English release of Keisuke Itagaki's legendary martial arts manga.
Official sales of the English edition will begin worldwide in October 2025, with preorder dates to be announced at a later date.
Baki the Grappler is the first installment in Keisuke Itagaki's long-running Baki series, originally serialized in Akita Publishing's Weekly Shōnen Champion. With over 100 million copies sold worldwide as of May 2024, the martial arts franchise stands as one of Japan's most emblematic and best-selling manga, loved for its intense action and iconic characters.
Kodama was established in the United States to share the cultural and literary value of Japanese manga and strives to serve not only as a vehicle of entertainment but also as a medium for learning and personal reflection. Our goal is to present carefully selected titles to readers worldwide, preserving the care and authenticity of the original editions at the highest quality and distributing them globally in both print and digital formats.
Our print editions will be produced in Japan by Kyodo Printing, a company with over 120 years of history and the official printer of Weekly Shonen Jump, the magazine that originally serialized renowned titles such as Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto.
Beyond Baki the Grappler from Akita Publishing, our upcoming lineup will feature titles from a range of respected Japanese publishers, including:
Asahi Shimbun Publications, Coamix, Daiwa Shobo, HERO'S, Nihonbungeisha, Shodensha, and Shonengahosha.
We invite everyone to stay tuned for more details on preorder dates and exclusive release information, which will be announced soon on the official Kodama website.
About Kodama Tales Inc.
Kodama is a U.S.-based manga publisher headquartered in Santa Monica, California. Led by representative Kiyotaka Hirai, Kodama is dedicated to bringing compelling stories from Japan to readers worldwide. With a small but passionate team of seven, the company strives to deliver high-quality manga that celebrates both creators and fans. Learn more at https://www.kodama-tales.com or follow us on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/kodama-tales-inc/.
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London's V&A Storehouse museum lets visitors get their hands on 5,000 years of creativity
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an hour ago
London's V&A Storehouse museum lets visitors get their hands on 5,000 years of creativity
LONDON -- A museum is like an iceberg. Most of it is out of sight. Most big collections have only a fraction of their items on display, with the rest locked away in storage. But not at the new V&A East Storehouse, where London's Victoria and Albert Museum has opened up its storerooms for visitors to view — and in many cases touch — the items within. The 16,000-square-meter (170,000-square-foot) building, bigger than 30 basketball courts, holds more than 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives. Wandering its huge, three-story collections hall feels like a trip to IKEA, but with treasures at every turn. The V&A is Britain's national museum of design, performance and applied arts, and the storehouse holds aisle after aisle of open shelves lined with everything from ancient Egyptian shoes to Roman pottery, ancient Indian sculptures, Japanese armor, Modernist furniture, a Piaggio scooter and a brightly painted garbage can from the Glastonbury Festival. 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London's V&A Storehouse museum lets visitors get their hands on 5,000 years of creativity
LONDON (AP) — A museum is like an iceberg. Most of it is out of sight. Most big collections have only a fraction of their items on display, with the rest locked away in storage. But not at the new V&A East Storehouse, where London's Victoria and Albert Museum has opened up its storerooms for visitors to view — and in many cases touch — the items within. The 16,000-square-meter (170,000-square-foot) building, bigger than 30 basketball courts, holds more than 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives. Wandering its huge, three-story collections hall feels like a trip to IKEA, but with treasures at every turn. The V&A is Britain's national museum of design, performance and applied arts, and the storehouse holds aisle after aisle of open shelves lined with everything from ancient Egyptian shoes to Roman pottery, ancient Indian sculptures, Japanese armor, Modernist furniture, a Piaggio scooter and a brightly painted garbage can from the Glastonbury Festival. 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Parsons said there has been 'a phenomenal response' from the public since the building opened at the end of May. Visitors have ranged from people seeking inspiration for their weddings to art students and 'someone last week who was using equipment to measure the thread count of an 1850 dress.' She says strangers who have come to view different objects often strike up conversations. 'It's just wonderful,' Parsons said. 'You never quite know. … We have this entirely new concept and of course we hope and we believe and we do audience research and we think that people are going to come. But until they actually did, and came through the doors, we didn't know.' A new cultural district The V&A's flagship museum in London's affluent South Kensington district, founded in the 1850s, is one of Britain's biggest tourist attractions. The Storehouse is across town in the Olympic Park, a post-industrial swath of east London that hosted the 2012 summer games. As part of post-Olympic regeneration, the area is now home to a new cultural quarter that includes arts and fashion colleges, a dance theater and another V&A branch, due to open next year. The Storehouse has hired dozens of young people recruited from the surrounding area, which includes some of London's most deprived districts. Designed by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, the firm behind New York's High Line park, the building has space to show off objects too big to have been displayed very often before, including a 17th-century Mughal colonnade from India, a 1930s modernist office designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and a Pablo Picasso-designed stage curtain for a 1924 ballet, some 10 meters (more than 30 feet) high. Also on a monumental scale are large chunks of vanished buildings, including a gilded 15th-century ceiling from the Torrijos Palace in Spain and a slab of the concrete façade of Robin Hood Gardens, a demolished London housing estate. Not a hushed temple of art, this is a working facility. Conversation is encouraged and forklifts beep in the background. Workers are finishing the David Bowie Center , a home for the late London-born musician's archive of costumes, musical instruments, letters, lyrics and photos that is due to open at the Storehouse in September. Museums seek transparency One aim of the Storehouse is to expose the museum's inner workings, through displays delving into all aspects of the conservators' job – from the eternal battle against insects to the numbering system for museum contents — and a viewing gallery to watch staff at work. The increased openness comes as museums in the U.K. are under increasing scrutiny over the origins of their collections. They face pressure to return objects acquired in sometimes contested circumstances during the days of the British Empire Senior curator Georgia Haseldine said the V&A is adopting a policy of transparency, 'so that we can talk very openly about where things have come from, how they ended up in the V&A's collection, and also make sure that researchers, as well as local people and people visiting from all around the world, have free and equitable access to these objects. 'On average, museums have one to five percent of their collections on show,' she said. 'What we're doing here is saying, 'No, this whole collection belongs to all of us. This is a national collection and you should have access to it.' That is our fundamental principle.'
