Taichung: An exhibition celebrating Taiwan and Japan’s comic culture opened on Saturday in Taichung, featuring a section that explores Taiwanese reproductions of Japanese comics from when martial law limited Japanese representation.

According to Focus Taiwan, “A Century of Manga Culture: An Encounter of Taiwan and Japan’s Youth” held its Taiwan opening ceremony at Taichung’s National Taiwan Museum of Comics after an initial one-month run in Japan’s Kyoto International Manga Museum between May 24 and June 24. Much like the Kyoto exhibition, the show mainly celebrates the comic connection between Taiwan and Japan through late Taiwanese comic book publisher Tsai Kun-lin, and Shin Takarajima Magazine started in 1947 by Japan’s “god of manga” Osamu Tezuka and Shichima Sakai, another Japanese comic giant.

However, the Taiwan leg of the show features a special section that explores a time when Taiwan plagiarized Japanese manga. The section showcases old comics such as “Professor Chin the Strange Doctor”, which was itself a publication that both reproduced and at times plagiarized Tezuka’s “Black Jack.”

According to the Taiwan show’s curator Lee I-yun, the reason behind Taiwanese artists directly copying the art style and adapting stories of famous Japanese mangakas was for the sake of publication. In the 1960s in Taiwan, laws meant that any art or language referencing Japan would have to be taken out, leading to altered art and words, according to Lee.