Rare audio of Osamu Tezuka, the so-called God of Manga, has surfaced from a press conference with the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan held in 1983. In the clip, Tezuka discusses the freedom of speech and the importance of touching on taboos, particularly as it relates to his manga Message to Adolf.
Beginning in 1983 and ending in 1985, Message to Adolf was one of the last series completed by Tezuka before his death. It follows the lives of three men named Adolf as their lives are distorted by the Nazi regime through a mixture of conspiracy and brainwashing. What's more, Adolf Hitler is depicted in the story as the son of a Jewish woman: a detail that goes squarely against reality and still causes controversy today.
Partly in response to this, Tezuka remarks in the clip that "I can say this because I'm here with international reporters, but I do think that most manga these days is pretty much made for Japanese sensibilities. What I'd like most of all is if the manga industry could produce its own Akira Kurosawa."
Having drawn thousands of pages across hundreds of serialisations in his life, Tezuka relays the story of when a politician to offence to one of his works. Apparently, that politician's secretary went as far as to call the publisher and told them not to run the series anymore.
"When government authorities start to decide what you can and can't do, that becomes an issue of freedom of speech. Even before any complaints come in, we end up censoring ourselves. I'd like to hope that we don't have that problem in the next century."
As to why Tezuka decided to produce Message to Adolf in the first place, he explains that "I'm more interested in Hitler's personality than Nazism itself. I wanted to draw something that depicted the folly of discrimination, the stupidity of nationalism, as well as the flaws of Nazism while drawing on the dual nature of Hitler's personality."
There's even more in the full clip, including a live demonstration of how Tezuka thinks that different art styles in America and Japan reflects their cultural sensibilities. Message to Adolf is available in English via Vertical.
