ASIAN POP / Astro Boy Forever

On the heels of the Asian Art Museum's bold new retrospective of the work of Osamu Tezuka, Japan's "God of Manga," comes a new book by manga historian Frederik L. Schodt exploring the colorful life, action-packed times and hidden meaning of Tezuka's most beloved creation.

If he were alive today, Astro Boy would be about 4 years old. That's because the date that manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka arbitrarily picked as the fictional birthday of his resilient robot hero was April 7, 2003. Tezuka, who passed away in 1989, had no way of knowing how ironic his choice of date would become. After all, he'd conceived of his most famous creation as a symbol of diplomacy, cultural understanding, and the peaceful use of science.

But just as a national celebration of Astro Boy's birth was beginning in Japan, U.S. troops were rolling into Baghdad in the most overwhelming assault of the Second Iraq War -- a crushing armored advance that would turn the city into a fiery showcase for the "shock and awe" theory of warfare and begin an occupation that continues to this day, four years and some 70,000 American and Iraqi lives later.

Though the juxtaposition of events certainly would have disappointed Tezuka, it probably wouldn't have surprised him. After all, he'd seen the terrors of war and occupation firsthand, and it was into this well of dark emotions that he dipped the pen of his imagination. Those who know him primarily as the man behind crudely animated but button-cute TV toons like "Astro Boy" and "Kimba the White Lion" have encountered just the thinnest and glossiest slice of Tezuka's incredible output -- the heart of which is a body of manga, over 170,000 pages' worth, which essentially provided a blueprint for the contemporary manga industry and which still includes some of the most interesting and challenging stories ever put to the medium.

Of course, American audiences can be excused their ignorance: The complete canon of Tezuka's work is largely unavailable in the United States. Which makes the arrival of not one but two startlingly rich explorations of the artist and his work that much more of an occasion to celebrate. On June 2, the Asian Art Museum unveiled its monumental showcase, "TEZUKA: The Marvel of Manga," a provocative retrospective of the master's complete career, from his 1951 debut up to his untimely death in 1989. Later this month, Stone Bridge Press will release cultural historian Frederik L. Schodt's wonderful new book "The Astro Boy Essays," an in-depth look at Tezuka's first and best-loved work.

Together, the exhibition and the book provide a detailed portrait of a man of unquestionable brilliance and stark contradictions. He was a humanist obsessed with machines, a trained scientist who warned of excessive reliance on technology. But most of all, perhaps, he was an idealist who nevertheless used his cute, friendly creations to depict a vaguely Hobbesian worldview -- one that expects people to perpetually stumble into evil, even as they aspire to be good.

"Tezuka believed that humans are capable of transcending some of our most base instincts, but that we're invariably pulled back by them, too," says Schodt, who also served as the translator for the English-language version of the Astro Boy manga, as well as for Tezuka's self-proclaimed lifework, "Phoenix" ("Hi no Tori"). "It's a cyclical thing: His characters were evil people who were rehabilitated but then went back to being evil people again, or good people who did bad things but somehow got redeemed. That grand karmic cycle is a constant theme in his work; he didn't believe that humans could ever be completely pure."

Not even small ones. After all, the children of Tezuka's era had experienced things during World War II that made them far from untouched. "Part of what let Tezuka make his work so sophisticated is that, though he was doing entertainment for kids, they weren't kids as you and I know them," says Philip Brophy, curator of Asian Art Museum's Tezuka exhibition. "They probably had at least one dead parent. They were living in rubble, looking after their surviving siblings, and had experienced things that the 'Leave It to Beaver' generation in the U.S. had never seen. They were like children in Iraq now -- exposed to so much horror that they're no longer innocent."

Tezuka's decision to leave behind a promising medical career to pursue the uncertain path of the manga artist was motivated by his belief that the children of Japan needed to confront and understand the enormities they'd experienced. "Tezuka believed that a whole generation of kids were going to go through terrible emotional problems down the line, if they didn't grapple with these issues," says Brophy. "He rejected being a doctor in favor of being a manga artist because he felt there was a need to invest hope in future generations -- to not just heal wounded bodies but to heal souls."

"The Astro Boy Essays" recounts how, as a 16-year-old mobilized to work in a military asbestos factory in Osaka, Tezuka was distressed to see his neighbors drilling with bamboo spears to repel an expected invasion and chanting senseless, desperate slogans like "Destroy the American and British devils," and "An honorable death for Japan's 100 million." But U.S. forces arrived by air, not ground, laying down a thick carpet of firebombs over the city, an event that a nearly incinerated Tezuka describes as being like "Dante's Inferno," with masses of screaming, fleeing survivors swarming through rubble stacked with burning corpses.

Saving his young countrymen from the psychological impact of this hell on earth became Tezuka's obsession. His prescription: a dose of reality, sweetened (but not diluted) with futuristic fantasy, which would help them come to terms with the true nature of humanity, in all its good and evil. The series needed to be seen from the vantage point of an innocent -- by definition, someone inhuman, because humans, in Tezuka's reckoning, could not be innocent. For this purpose, the atomic-powered, iron-clad techno-naif Astro Boy was just what the doctor ordered.

Man-Machine Interface

The basic story of Astro Boy -- known as "Tetsuwan Atom," or "Iron-Arm Atom" in Japan -- was, like so much of postwar Japan, an import from the West. At its nuclear core, Astro Boy is a fast-forwarded update of the classic children's tale "Pinocchio." Like his wooden counterpart, Astro is built as a replacement for a flesh-and-blood child and recognizes quickly that he is both less and more than human.

The Pinocchio legend is a quest narrative, in which the animated puppet goes through trial, temptation, and tribulation before getting his wish of becoming a "real boy." Astro, meanwhile, seeks to comprehend and coexist with humans, but recognizes that crossing the boundary into humanity is both impossible and forbidden. Astro's status as a wide-eyed curiosity-seeker straddling both worlds, human and inhuman, gave Tezuka a means to explore human nature with a complexity far beyond that of his source material.

In the world of Astro Boy, humans are often flawed and stunted and weak, and they go from heroic to savage at a whim. Yet humans are redeemable, nonetheless -- and worth redeeming, because though they lack the 100,000 horsepower arms, X-ray vision and jet-propelled feet of Astro Boy and his kin, they have a far greater power within them. "To Tezuka, robots couldn't do good or evil unless they're programmed by humans to be good or evil," says Schodt. "We're not hardwired: The power to decide to do good or evil is what makes us human."

Astro's foster father, Dr. Elefun (Professor Ochanomizu in the original), recognizes that the little boy robot is special: Unlike most other robots, he has the ability to feel and the ability to sense malice or goodwill in others -- though, given his mechanical origins, Astro doesn't always understand what these emotions mean. Over the course of Astro's 78-volume manga journey, he experiences the best and the worst of humankind: kind, good-hearted souls like Dr. Elefun and the teacher/private eye Mustachio; dark and nefarious ones like the circus owner Hamegg and Atlas, the robot illicitly programmed to understand and do evil. He also learns firsthand what it's like to be a human, attending middle school, learning how to cry (in great gushing fountains) and even experiencing family life via Dr. Elefun's "gifts" to Astro of a robot mom and dad and siblings Astro Girl and Cobalt -- a "nuclear family" in more ways than one.

And, as Schodt points out in "Essays," while kids came for Astro's atomic action -- just about every installment included Astro harrowing a fellow robot who'd fallen from digital grace with his fission-powered fists -- they stayed for the textured, surprisingly complex stories. To take one example, in the tale of the man assassinated for his advocacy on behalf of robots (he even intends to marry a robot wife!), it's later discovered that his love for robots is because the replacement of all of his failing organs with robot parts saved his life. Other examples include "Yellow Horse," which explores drug addiction, and the first Atlas story, in which the evil robot is created as revenge on the Western world for having enslaved indigenous populations in the past and robot populations in the present.

Underneath these complex stories was a simple set of principles, as Tezuka himself articulated: "What I try to say through my work is simple: 'Love all creatures!' 'Love everything that has life!' 'Preserve nature!' 'Bless life!' 'Be careful of a civilization that puts too much stock in science!' and 'Do not wage war!'" It was these principles that millions of Japanese consumed weekly, throughout their youth.

The Tezuka Legacy

The word that most people -- admirers and detractors alike -- associate with Tezuka's cultural legacy is humanizumu, the Japanese transliteration of "humanism." A persistent theme of his work, over a career of nearly four decades, was one that extolled the importance of free will: our uniquely human ability to be good when we have the choice of being evil. It's a message all the more powerful in that it was rooted not in intellectual ideals but in Tezuka's real-life experience of wartime -- in memories that led him to believe that peace, love and understanding are the only bulwarks against mankind's ugliest impulses and that when we do not respect and celebrate our humanity, we are in danger of losing it entirely.

It isn't overstating it to say that Tezuka was a central force in socializing postwar Japan with this message -- an entire generation, as the original Astro Boy manga was published continuously for 17 years, long enough for readers born with the books in their hands to graduate from high school. "After Tezuka passed away in 1989, people from all across Japanese society acknowledged how much of an influence he had on them," says Brophy. "People of that generation, even those who claim not to read or like manga, if you go to their homes, you'll still find a Tezuka collection on their shelves. Tezuka's message persisted for them, because of what it said to them when they were young."

For that generation, even as they embraced technology as the solution to Japan's postwar economic crisis, Tezuka's human-centric message persisted, holding back the resurgence of the nationalist right and keeping the society from becoming excessively obsessed with progress at the expense of purpose.

But in the generations that have followed, one wonders if that message has become diluted or twisted over time. Though his works still sell remarkably well today, the deep themes he stood for have receded in prominence in contemporary Japanese society.

Tezuka asserted that flawed humanity was still more important and special than perfect technology, yet hundreds of thousands of young Japanese have replaced human interaction with adoration of the inanimate -- the so-called moe phenomenon, a sterile passion for idealized, impossible female images, has led to a cottage industry of lifelike dolls, sold by the hundreds to male worshippers content to dress and pose and photograph them in place of pursuing "imperfect" human females. He believed that peace at any price was better than war, yet in the past decade, Japan's right wing has built tremendous momentum around the push to rebuild the nation's military. "I think Tezuka would have been very disturbed by the movement to rewrite the constitution and to rearm Japan," says Schodt. "I think he'd be saddened to see how far backward that movement has reached."

There are signs that his message isn't truly dead, after all, but sleeping -- and sleeping lightly. As Schodt notes in his book, on April 8, the day after Astro Boy's birthday and the day that America announced that it was on the verge of establishing control over the Iraqi capital, Japan's venerable Asahi Shimbun newspaper ran a cartoon on its editorial page, showing a flying Astro dragging cartoon versions of George Bush and Saddam Hussein through the air by the napes of their necks, pointing out masses of suffering, wailing civilians. The editorial's tagline: "Look! Now, don't you two think this was really an 'avoidable' war?"

Point taken, Astro: Maybe it's just the time for a Tezuka refresher course -- not only in Japan but in the United States as well.

PopMail

Sure, Astro Boy has stylin' two-pronged hair and a body that just won't quit (unless his atomic fuel supplies peter out, that is). But at the end of the day, he's just a robot boy doing a robot man's job. If you're looking for a real super-size helping of Asian hunkhood on the hoof, I point you in the direction of Hyphen magazine's second annual Mr. Hyphen contest, featuring finalists Tingwei Lin, Luke Patterson, Anthem Salgado, Jeffrey Sichaleune, Jason Woo and Billy Yeh, plus "local wiseass" Ali Wong as MC and a bevy of screaming laydeez (and a few gennelmen) throwing clothing and possibly themselves onto the stage. No, seriously, it's not just about the hottness, although there'll be plenty of that, we're sure: The guys are doing this to win donations for their fave charities as well as to raise money for everyone's fave nonprofit Asian American mag, Hyphen. So turn out and root this Saturday at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 Ninth St., Suite 290, Oakland, from 7 to 10 p.m.! Tickets $20/$15 in advance.