“Tetsuwan Atomu no nazo”
Episode 12 of “Natsume Fusanosuke’s Manga Yarns” (“Natsume Fusanosuke no manga yotabanashi, sono 12”), posted on November 30, 2022.
Translated by Jon Holt & Teppei Fukuda
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Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu) originally began in the monthly magazine Shōnen (Boys, published by Kōbunsha), with the character first appearing in the Ambassador Atom story serialized from 1951 to 1952, before he was repurposed as the protagonist picking up with the April 1952 issue of the magazine; his series would continue until the magazine folded with its final March 1968 issue. At the time the series began, Tezuka was just a young man, 23 years old. In 1951 he had graduated from Osaka University’s medical school. The year 1952 was when he was finally able to shift his place of work from Osaka to Tokyo.
I was born in the year 1950, so it is not that I was reading Astro when his series started. If at the age of 5 I could have read his stories, I might have been able to see the famous episode “Electro” (“Denkō ningen,” which appeared as a mini-supplement booklet [furoku] in the January 1955 issue of Shōnen).1 When the 1959 story “Secret of the Egyptian Conspirators” came out, since I was by then 9 years old, there is a higher probability that I could have read it. However, back then, I was already reading older works through reprint editions [tankobon]. This was a time when it was rare for a manga serial to be reprinted in tankobon books, so any such work would have to be quite a hit series for that to happen.
The Complete Works of Tezuka Osamu’s Manga had been published by Kōbunsha, the original Shōnen magazine publisher. Of course, it was not actually a “complete” works, though several [important Tezuka] series, like his Jungle Emperor Leo (Jangaru taitei), Golden Trunk ( Ōgon no toranku), Astro Boy and others like them did appear in these Complete Works editions. In 2022, the publisher Kawade Bunko reprinted in three volumes the “First Book Editions” of Kōbunsha’s Astro Boy. These were facsimile editions that included things like the color (two-color) pages, the original opening splash pages (tobira-e) and Tezuka’s manga reminiscences. Because they are the original Kōbunsha paperback editions, they match the old stories of Astro I'd never known as a little boy. Gosh, this kind of facsimile edition really makes me so happy. Wow, it really takes me back.
With Figure 1, which shows the second volume of the Kōbunsha Astro Boy First Book Edition, we see the May 1957 issue [cover of Kōbunsha’s Shōnen magazine]. I was still just 6 years old then. In that volume is collected the “Cobalt” episode (June to September 1954 issues), and I was shocked at one of its panels (Figure 2). It was Astro receiving an infusion of “oil” by his mom pouring it into his butt! Wait a second, was that oil? I always thought Astro was powered by atomic fuel! For example, in “The Ghost Manufacturing Machine” (“Yūrei seizōki,” Shōnen January 1957 issue supplement booklet), there he is, as I thought, with his mother “fueling energy” into him. I guess Astro’s mother has the role of pumping atomic energy into him through his bottom.
That image from the [later] “The Ghost Manufacturing Machine” story was collected in the Sun Comics edition of Astro Boy 4: Robotland (reprinted by Asahi Sonorama in 1975): the lines are clearly a trace and not done by Tezuka’s own hand. And yet, what remains from my memories [of first reading it] was, strangely, some kind of erotic impression - from Astro “getting an infusion of energy through his butt.” Why, why the heck does it have to be through his bottom? In a totally different episode, there is a scene where Astro opens up his own chest hatch and fuels up energy through that port. If that is so, it would seem the chest port would be good enough, but for some reason such fuel must go into his butt. I think it probably is half due to the intention of Tezuka himself. I feel that this sort of stuff gives us hints for the secret of eros in Tezuka’s manga.
At any rate, it seems that if Astro does not have some oil poured into him at the same time he receives his atomic fuel, he will not function well. What’s more, atomic power is what keeps him moving - and yet he has that [interior cavity] vacuum tube mechanism, right? Come to think of it, we know that in the older Astro stories, like what we can clearly see on the cover of the Astro Boy First Book Edition Vol. 2 (Figure 1), Astro has lines that meet at his limb joints. Although he is a machine made of metal, he has soft plastic skin that helps him seem more human-like - and yet I suppose Tezuka puts in the joint seams to indicate that he is a machine after all. On one hand, Astro is a robot that possesses an extremely high amount of human emotionality, and his moods can get quite unpredictable—that strong sense of justice of his can almost become downright tiresome—but on the other hand, as a robot, he can also be quite fragile.
For example, in the story “Crucifix Island” (“Jūjika-jima,” January to April 1958 issues of Shōnen), there is a scene where Astro has his chest hatch blown open by a villain’s gun, and he ends up suddenly becoming like a wooden doll, frozen and unable to move (Figure 3). On top of that, he gets kicked, and we see him with a face that looks so utterly pathetic. As a kid, what really pained me was the fact that Astro was a being that could, in just an instant, alternate from a lifelike state to one where he was just an automaton. There was no such element in Yokoyama Mitsuteru’s Gigantor (Tetsujin 28-gō), which was more popular than Tezuka’s Astro Boy. That fragile sense of life left a deep impression on me as a young child, and I’m sure it is what drove me in my later years to work at writing my Tezuka books; it was also what would become the reason why I saw that erotic quality in Tezuka. There was no other hero and no other robot like Astro.
However, this “special” sense about Tezuka was not something felt only by me. It was something beloved by many in my generation; it especially had great influence on those people who would, in their later years, gain the ability to write things like manga criticism. It was also one of those facts that helped establish the myths surrounding Tezuka. Those of my generation who loved manga were shaped by the information in the magazine COM, which was run by Tezuka’s production company and office through the years leading up to and shortly after 1970. It was there that we saw the formation of that Tezuka chestnut, which goes something like: “Postwar story manga was established when Tezuka Osamu brought in techniques from cinema.” There too was the infiltration of the historical view that modernity in manga was due to Tezuka. Those ideas became commonly accepted because of criticism and writing in the 1990s (including my own). That kind of “Tezuka-centric history” would, as we went into the new millennium, come to be criticized by the next wave of manga researchers. Human beings ultimately are not free from the forces of cultural context; they are not free from the frame that their history and society create. Now, it might seem like I am just making excuses for myself, but I cannot help thinking about this sort of thing. People are made to think that they can get away from their history and their society as long as they try to make their escape from those forces—and they may try to do so—but eventually, once time goes on, they realize how impossible it is to really escape.
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- [Translators' Note] All titles of the Astro Boy stories cited in this essay have been rendered as they appear in the English-language series published by Dark Horse, 2002-04, translated by Frederik L. Schodt. For example, we have used Schodt's title “Electro” for “Denkō Ningen,” as opposed to “Lightning Man,” as it may also be translated. See Schodt’s complete list of episode titles in both English and Japanese in his collection The Astro Boy Essays (Stone Bridge Press, 2007), pp. 177-184.
