43 year old Lee Chi Ching from Hong Kong was won Japan’s first International Manga Award - which manga enthusiast and Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso called a “Nobel Prize” for manga when he announced the competition last year.

The award was created to showcase artists outside of Japan whose work best contributes to the spread of the manga worldwide. It’s perhaps the most well known of Japan’s efforts to use Manga and Anime as a diplomatic tools, as I’ve written about previously here

Lee Chi Ching won the award for “Sun Zi’s Tactics”, a manga that ran from 1995-2006 in China. It portrays the life of a Chinese military strategist at the end of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty. It beat out 145 other entries from 26 countries. Lee along with three runners up will get a 10-day visit to Japan and receive tropies at a ceremony in tokyo.

Runner-up awards also went to Kai, a 28-year-old from Hong Kong; Benny Wong Thong Hou, 30, from Malaysia; and Madeleine Rosca, 26 from Australia. Go ozzies!

Popularity: 6% [?]