Profile
手塚治虫（1928-1989）は大阪府出身の漫画家・アニメーター・医学博士。「鉄腕アトム」「ジャングル大帝」「ブラック・ジャック」「火の鳥」など数百作を残し、ストーリー漫画と日本のテレビアニメーションの礎を築いた。没後「漫画の神様」と呼ばれる。
Osamu Tezuka was born on November 3, 1928, in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, and spent his childhood in Takarazuka, Hyogo Prefecture. His father was a company employee who loved photography and film, and his mother was an avid fan of the Takarazuka Revue, exposing young Tezuka to cinematic and theatrical staging from an early age. He also became passionate about insect collecting, and is said to have added the character for a type of beetle, “mushi,” to his given name “Osamu” to form his pen name “Tezuka Osamu.” In 1945, while attending Osaka Prefectural Kitano Middle School (an old-system secondary school), he survived the Osaka air raids and came close to death while mobilized for wartime labor. This firsthand experience of the horrors of war is widely regarded as the origin of the reverence for the sanctity of life that runs through his entire body of work. That same year he enrolled in the medical specialist course (senmonbu) attached to Osaka Imperial University to study medicine, while also submitting cartoons to newspapers; he debuted professionally with Diary of Ma-chan in 1946. In 1947, Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island), based on a story by Shichima Sakai, became an unexpected sensation, thrilling postwar children with bold, cinematic panel layouts and profoundly influencing the generation of manga artists that followed. He graduated from that medical specialist course at Osaka University in 1951 and earned his medical doctorate in 1961.
After moving to Tokyo, he released one landmark work after another — Kimba the White Lion (1950-54), Princess Knight (1953-56, one of the earliest and most influential shojo manga), and Astro Boy (1952-68) — establishing “story manga,” a form built on cinematic direction and substantial narrative, in a children’s publishing world that had until then been dominated by simple picture stories. In 1961 he founded his own animation studio, Mushi Production, and in 1963 Astro Boy became Japan’s first full-fledged weekly television anime series. By developing “limited animation” techniques to convey motion within tight budgets and schedules, he laid the foundation for Japan’s entire television anime industry. In 1967 he launched the manga magazine COM as a venue for nurturing young artists and showcasing experimental work. Throughout his career he produced works exploring life, death, and the dignity of existence, including Black Jack (from 1973) and Phoenix, the lifework he continued drawing, unfinished, from 1954 until his death. Over his lifetime he produced more than 700 manga works comprising over 150,000 pages, ranging across science fiction, history, medical drama, shojo manga, and experimental animation.
In 1973, Mushi Production collapsed under heavy debt, a major setback, but Tezuka continued working prolifically afterward. His health began to decline around 1988, and he died of stomach cancer on February 9, 1989, at Hanzomon Hospital in Chiyoda, Tokyo, at the age of 60. According to Takayuki Matsutani, president of Tezuka Productions, who was at his bedside, Tezuka’s last words were, “Please, let me work.” The essay collection he had been writing until just before his death, addressed to the youth of the 21st century about the fate of the global environment, was published posthumously by Kobunsha in April 1989 as Save the Glass Earth: For You in the 21st Century. After his death he came to be known as “the god of manga,” and his body of work and storytelling techniques continue to exert immeasurable influence on generations of manga artists and animators worldwide. The Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum in his hometown of Takarazuka, Hyogo Prefecture, continues to draw fans from Japan and abroad.