Japanese King of Gag Cartoons: Fujio Akatsuka
Japanese manga comic artist Mr. Fujio Akatsuka died recently.
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Fujio Akatsuka is one of Japan's greatest humor comic artists of the time. His humorous style and many anti-heroic comic characters have transformed the field of manga, and continue to attract fans as more and more of his series are adapted as animated cartoons.
http://www.lambiek.net/artists/a/akatsuka_fujio.htm
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If the late Mr. Osamu Tezuka is an aristocrat in the Japanese manga world, Fujio Akatsuka is a lord of a local clan.
Osamu Tezuka graduated from the faculty of medicine of Osaka University. He could have simply enjoyed a proud life with the first-rate certificate in the Japanese society. But he knew where his talent lied so as to become the King of Manga after WWII. The essential lack of meanness, indecency, and violence is the main feature of Tezuka’s works. But, as Tezuka was a genius, his works appealed not only to children of middle class families but also to families of the working class.
Fujio Akatsuka only graduated from a middle school or a junior high school, which did not promise an automatic escalation to the middle class at all. You had to work typically as a salesclerk in a small shop or a manual laborer in a small factory. Unconcealed meanness, indecency, and violence were always close. What is worse, Japan has been always an education-conscious society. You must be always worried that your lack of education might bring you to contempt or put you to shame in your behaviors when you talk to someone with a background of higher education.
Osamu Tezuka and Fujio Akatsuka once lived in the same humble wooden apartment house in Tokyo when Tezuka was already a top manga artist moving up to Tokyo from Osaka; but Akatsuka also moving up to Tokyo alone was a young man yet trying hard to come up with his own hits in the manga comic industry in the era when TV broadcasting had just begun in Japan.
Cheap comic books or manga-bon have been always easy entertainment for children and youths in general in Japan. Even today, TV, manga, and baseball are three major opportunities for Japanese children to enjoy themselves, though nowadays a cellular phone and the Internet are penetrating with a sense of hidden danger.
Akatsuka’s manga title featuring sextuplet boys was a big hit. As one of the sextuplets was named “Osomatsu” with an implication of poor behaviors, the work was actually titled “Osomatsu-Kun.”
After WWII or in the middle of the high-growth era in Japan, though the majority of people did not have a car and never traveled overseas or did not live in a condominium building, there was a vibrant atmosphere in the whole society. Children were everywhere running, shouting, and playing on the street or in any empty lot yet to be developed. Energy of the sextuplets really mirrored the era.
All the characters Akatsuka depicted in Osomatsu-Kun are apparently born poor and living poor. They are all residents of the down-town kingdom. But, there is one exception: a character called "Iyami" meaning affectation.
Iyami was depicted ugly in that he boasted that he had come back from France while his manner was so mean and his behaviors so poor. He pretended to be a middle-class person who once travelled to and lived in Paris. Akatsuka made him take a really comical posture when Iyami was surprised, which became a great hit not only among readers but also in the whole society of Japan.
A conceited man who abruptly took a comical posture no others, poor and humble, would dare to take was actually proving that he was just a fool. But, the gesture amused so many Japanese readers of those days, including grown-ups.
However, Akatsuka did not politically attack the Iyami type of persons in the society. It is just funny and super funny to see a man boasting his past travel to Paris which only rich men could do then taking a stupid posture. Akatsuka was really a professional manga entertainer.
But, it is still interesting to know that Akatsuka’s daughter after growing up went to London to work as a modern artist, though she does not look mean at all.
What I want to say is that behaviors of Japanese political conservatives can be regarded as being on the extension of the spirit of characters of Akatsuka’s manga comics.
On the other hand, behaviors of Japanese political liberals, brainwashed by Europe-born Marxism and mainly driven by coarse hate for political enemies, are not on the extension of the spirit of characters of Akatsuka’s manga comics.
When China and North Korea produce or accept an artist like Fujio Akatsuka, they will abandon the authoritarianism and start to think that North Korea must release Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean secret agencies for these decades.
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Osamu Tezuka and Fujio Akatsuka could draw attractive lines in depicting their manga characters. Their touches were soft, careful, and humane, though Tezuka’s is of the middle class flavor and Akatsuka’s of working class’.
Yet, there was a real Japanese artist painter who was senior to Tezuka and Akatsuka and could paint and draw better than they in presenting portraits of girls and women.
He might have influenced those manga artists, since the painter had traveled to and worked in Paris in late 1920's gaining high reputation.
http://www.fukiyakoji-museum.com/goods.htm
What I mean is that a genius is a product of the whole tradition of the society.
Indeed, Fujio Akatsuka and Osamu Tezuka had their big hits in a genre of comics for girls, though I cannot still understand their motivations to professionally earn money in such a genre.
Nonetheless, who the gold medalist in the women's marathon in Beijing will be is the only my concern nowadays.
(If you don’t mind listening even in Beijing:
http://homepage3.nifty.com/yodonokofune/m_pianoconcert_no1_op23f_tchaikovsky.mid
Source: http://homepage3.nifty.com/yodonokofune/concert2_017.htm)
Luk 8:8 And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.