The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution

249 Pages·2007·9.2 MB·English

by  Frederik L. Schodt

e
ASTRO
h
T
BOY
ESSAYS

e
ASTRO
h
T
BOY
ESSAYS
Osamu Tezuka,
Mighty Atom,
and the
Manga/Anime
Revolution
Frederik L. Schodt
Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California
Published by
Stone Bridge Press
P.O. Box 8208
Berkeley, CA 94707
tel [phone] • [email protected] • www.stonebridge.com
All images were supplied by the author and are copyrighted by their
respective rightsholders. Credits and copyright notices accompany
their images throughout.
Astro Boy images in the front matter and on chapter-opening pages
are used by permission of Tezuka Productions. Front cover Astro
Boy image is used by permission of Tezuka Productions.
Text © 2007 Frederik L. Schodt.
Cover and book design by Linda Ronan.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without
permission from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America.
2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Schodt, Frederik L., 1950–
The Astro Boy essays : Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the manga-anime
revolution / Frederik L. Schodt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-933330-54-9 (pbk.)
1. Tezuka, Osamu, 1928–1989—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Comic books,
strips, etc.—Japan—History and criticism. 3. Animated films—Japan—History and
criticism. I. Title.
NC1764.5.J32T4937 2007
741.5’952--dc22
2007017227
This book is dedicated to
Osamu Tezuka (1928–89)
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
1
A National Icon 3
2
How “Mighty Atom” Came to Be 16
3
Designing a World 34
4
Mighty Atom, TV Star 55
5
Go, Go, GO Astro Boy!! 76
6
An Interface between Man and Robot 98
7
A Medley of Messages 119
8
A Complicated Relationship 145
Afterword 167
Appendix A: Japanese and
English Manga Titles 177
Appendix B: Japanese and
English Animation Episode Titles 185
Notes 197
Bibliography 204
Index 212
Introduction
The death of Osamu Tezuka on February 9, 1989, at the age
of sixty, sent shock waves throughout Japan, especially among
those raised in the postwar period on his manga and anima-
tion. Japan’s much beloved and aged Shôwa emperor had passed
away the previous month, but the emotion surrounding Tezuka’s
death seemed greater and resulted in an outpouring of not only
grief, but endless media retrospectives and eulogies. On Febru-
ary 10, the day after Tezuka’s death, Japan’s prestigious national
newspaper, the Asahi, ran a prominent editorial titled “Mighty
Atom’s Message,” urging younger artists to pick up the torch
that Tezuka had dropped and to maintain the values symbolized
by his most popular work. It noted that Japanese seemed to love
comics far more than in other countries, and that foreigners
often found this strange. After rhetorically asking why, it an-
swered its own question:
It is because in other countries they did not have Osamu
Tezuka. The postwar comics and animation culture of
vii
viii • introduction
Japan would never have happened without him. He was
the creator of both story-based manga and television an-
ime, and the influence of his attractive and androgynous
boy character, Atom, with his long eyelashes, is easy to
detect, not only in boys’ manga, but also in the protago-
nists of the now oh-so-popular girls’ manga.1
For most of his life Osamu Tezuka was largely ignored
outside of Japan. It is only recently, with the Godzilla-like glob-
al rise of Japanese popular culture—and especially with the new
overseas popularity of manga and anime—that his name has
begun to slowly percolate into any sort of mainstream English
consciousness. Tezuka’s animated TV series, Mighty Atom—
known as Astro Boy outside of Japan—achieved considerable
popularity in the mid-sixties in North America and temporarily
opened the gates for other Japanese TV-animation series, but
Tezuka himself received little exposure. In the late 1990s and at
the beginning of the new millennium, some of Tezuka’s works
began appearing in translation in English, but it is safe to say
that most people outside of the manga-fan orbit have still never
heard of them or of him, even today. There are, as of this writ-
ing, no books in the English world specifically on Tezuka, yet in
Japan there are scores of books on him. In fact, the Japanese re-
gard Tezuka one of the greatest people of the twentieth century,
up there along with John F. Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi, and
the Beatles, and he is sometimes compared in the media with
Leonardo da Vinci. There are many reasons for this chasmic
difference in perception, but the biggest is the high status com-
ics and animation enjoy in Japan and the low status they have
until recently had in North American culture.
During his over-forty-year career, Tezuka created hun-
dreds of stories and thousands of characters. Which raises the
question: Why write a book focusing on Astro Boy/Mighty Atom
and Tezuka, and not Tezuka and his entire canon? The answer
introduction • ix
to the first part is simple: Mighty Atom is Tezuka’s best-known
work, and it is the work that helped create the framework for
the modern Japanese manga and anime industries. The answer
to the second part is more complex and involves both a con-
fession and a digression to explain how I came to write this
book.
I did not grow up reading Mighty Atom manga or watch-
ing Astro Boy animation, and only came to know Tezuka’s most
famous work much later in life. I first went to Japan in the fall
of 1965, at the age of fifteen. At that time, the first Mighty Atom
television series was still being broadcast on the Fuji TV chan-
nel, and while I did watch television, it was not a show that par-
ticularly sticks in my memory. I could not yet understand Japa-
nese, and it was a series designed for much younger children, so
even if I had been a fan it would not have been very “cool” for
me to admit it to my friends. But in addition to the TV series, I
do recall seeing Mighty Atom–themed toys in stores, and espe-
cially Atom masks at temple festivals, so I was very aware of the
popularity of the character. My real exposure to Mighty Atom
came much later in life, when I was old enough to admit enjoy-
ing the stories and also old enough to appreciate what Tezuka
had accomplished with them. In fact, I came to know Atom best
after first knowing Tezuka’s other, more adult works and after
knowing Tezuka himself.
I began reading manga seriously around 1970, when I was
attending a Japanese university in Tokyo and intensively study-
ing the language. I lived in a dormitory my first year there, and I
was astounded to see the huge weekly manga magazines that my
roommates and other friends were reading (usually when they
were supposed to be cracking their textbooks). At that time,
manga were not the mass medium that they are today in Japan,
but they had become a badge of pride for many university stu-
dents, an important part of youth culture the way rock and roll