“War and Peace in the Manga of Tezuka Osamu” Lecture by Yuki Tanaka

Lecture information
In Japan, as well as abroad, Tezuka Osamu is widely known as the cartoonist who created the immensely popular sci-fi manga series Astro Boy (1952–1968). Yet Tezuka produced many other manga and animated films over his prolific career, the themes of which often centered around issues of war and peace. This lecture examines the interrelation between Tezuka’s experience of Osaka’s aerial bombing by U.S. forces during the final year of the Asia Pacific War and a number of his ‘epic manga’ such as Next World (1951) and Adolf (1983–1985), in which he dealt with such difficult but important themes as the alienation and brutalization of human beings, racial prejudice and hatred, nationalism, and political corruption. The lecture also analyses various philosophical influences on Tezuka’s work. His early experience as a medical doctor and the work of Dostoyevski and Karel Capek, a Czech writer persecuted by the Nazis, are considered in detail. Finally, the lecture contrasts Tezuka’s creative legacy with more recent manga produced by nationalistic cartoonists such as Kobayashi Yoshinori, who tries not only to sanitize the crimes and atrocities that Japanese troops committed against other Asians during the war, but even to glorify Japanese military conduct. What this comparative analysis serves to illustrate is the tremendous power popular culture forms like manga and films have in shaping public images of “national history.”

Lecturer information
Professor Tanaka is Research Professor of History at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, Hiroshima City University. In 2008 he was Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, the University of London and the Sir Ninian Stephen Visiting Scholar at the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law of the University of Melbourne. Professor Tanaka is an acknowledged international expert on the history of Japanese war crimes during World War II. His two books Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation (2002) and Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (1996) both remain seminal works in English. The latter volume provided extensive background material for a BBC documentary series entitled ‘Horror in the East’ produced in 2000. Professor Tanaka’s most recent book in Japanese, Sorano Senso-Shi (A History of Aerial Warfare), was published in Japan in 2008 to critical acclaim. In 2009, he co-edited the book, Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History, together with Marilyn Young.