Parents and children reading comics
The Great Xiangdudu Living Room: Osamu Tezuka's Grand Mural in Takadanobaba
My teenage bookshelf held many of Osamu Tezuka’s manga: Buddha, Phoenix, Black Jack, Astro Boy, The Book of Human Insects, and Legend of the Wolfman. Later, when Maitian Publishing released I Am a Manga Artist: The Only Autobiography by Osamu Tezuka, God of Manga, we couldn't put it down either. Yes, "we," because during the pandemic, we stockpiled these manga at home, but how could one read manga without a "fan organization"? So, naturally, we established the "Osamu Tezuka Book Club" at home.
On two recent trips to Japan with my children, we unexpectedly encountered Osamu Tezuka. One time was in Tokyo, when we transferred from the JR Yamanote Line at Takadanobaba Station to the Tokyo Metro. At Takadanobaba, we were lucky enough to see this large mural of Osamu Tezuka's work. When Osamu Tezuka was creating Astro Boy (ATOMU), his studio was nearby. So, in essence, Takadanobaba Station is Astro Boy's home.
The mural is located under the railway bridge. The huge rumbling sound is like the tension the protagonist of Legend of the Wolfman feels upon descending the mountain and arriving in the city. I imagine the setting of Legend of the Wolfman was also in Takadanobaba!
Black Jack 50th Anniversary Exhibition
These past few days, passing by the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum, I stumbled upon the "Black Jack 50th Anniversary Exhibition." I rushed in before closing time and was met with a huge surprise. The exhibition brought to life the worldview Osamu Tezuka presented in Black Jack. Beyond laying the foundation for his medical expertise before becoming a manga artist, Black Jack used human anatomy as a visual language in manga, presenting it in a groundbreaking way to audiences. Of course, this sparked many discussions. The exhibition also explored Tezuka's observations of the times expressed in this manga (often, events just reported in the news would immediately appear as plot points in the manga), its social commentary, and critiques of the medical system (such as the avant-garde discussion: "When we repair the human body, is a person still considered a person?"), as well as the modernity of medicine (Black Jack already addressed social order during epidemics, contemplating life, love, death, and even the future of epidemics and the Earth).
At the exhibition, we received another unexpected big surprise ⎯ Black Jack once visited Macau in the manga, to find his father and stepsisters who lived there!
A Manga Artist Who "Creates for Children"
Since Osamu Tezuka began creating, there has been a discussion about what manga children should read.
He worked with the premise of "creating for children." Among his published works were New Treasure Island and Youth Manga, aimed at boy readers in Taiwan during that era. The exhibition noted that when Tezuka was creating, he already had expectations for what the world would be like for children when they grew up.
In I Am a Manga Artist, we can see the struggles of such a manga artist who "creates for children": inflation was getting worse, illicit merchants continued to make large sums of money and live lavishly, restaurants ostensibly closed but secretly operated, and even after the "Child Welfare Law" was promulgated, the number of homeless children did not decrease at all.
Homeless children ⎯ pity or compassion had long faded, now they looked more like grotesque, eerie little goblins. Perhaps this was because two years after the war, they had adapted to their lives and began to fully utilize their survival skills. If you ate something at a diner in front of the station, about half of the food would probably be taken by homeless children. They would stand patiently in front of customers, waiting and waiting, without a trace of shame or longing, but rather as if blaming those of us who hadn't suffered the ravages of war and could still brazenly eat our fill. In the homeless children's gathering place in the Ueno underground passage, cleaning staff would patrol almost daily with grim faces, spraying them with DDT (a type of pesticide, full name dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane).
The children's manga artist felt deeply ashamed about this. What was the point of talking about "creating for children" if even giving manga to homeless children wouldn't truly make them happy? In the end, it was powerless, achieving nothing.
That was the "current situation" of children in 1944 during the Tokyo air raids, 1945 when Japan surrendered, and two years after the war in 1946. Was it possible to change the life circumstances of children through manga creation? Today, in 2024, have we found the answer?