Kirk here. It seems that Kumamoto University is establishing an “International Manga Education Research Center” and that they hope it will attract students and researchers from overseas.
It seems that the university has been keeping this under wraps until now – I’ve asked a person who I thought would be intimately involved with the such a center and they/he/she hadn’t heard about it. I looked for websites (both English and Japanese) but came up empty-handed.
About thirty years ago, fairly soon after I started teaching at Kumamoto Gakuen University, I asked if they would buy some copies of The Silent Service (Chinmoku no Kantai) because there was some controversy about it and I thought it might be interesting to read it with students and then discuss it in a seminar I was teaching. The reply was “We won’t buy any comic books. That would lower the level of our university.” I thought it was a little odd that the person who was telling me this was not on the faculty but rather a full-time member of the staff. He’s retired now but if I had a time machine I’d sort like to go back to the 1990s show him this RKK segment and say “My idea isn’t crazy. Look what Kumadai is going to do!”
P.S. In regard to the controversy about The Silent Service, the Wikipedia article about it says this:
“Some international readers and viewers were uncomfortable with the storyline. There were many arguments among international critics that the series is promoting the idea of militarism. The manga was discussed in the Japanese Diet and was popular with the Self-Defense Force.” https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/rkk/171548?display=1
