BY NASUKAWA KEN
There are probably no Japanese who don't know the cartoonist Tezuka Osamu. Most of us have read many of his works, and we have been taught his ideas unconsciously. And there is one consistent theme in his massive work. It's the "dignity of life," which is the universal proposition that he himself sought.
The catalyst which made him draw about that subject was his experiences during World War �. He described his mental state of those days. "When the scene turned to hellfire and a pile of bodies by air raids, I was in despair, feeling an end of the world." Realizing the value of life, he intended to study medical science, and he finally achieved a Doctorate in Medicine. But then he became aware that medicine cannot help everything, and that troubled him greatly. In the end, he chose to be a cartoonist so that he could express his feeling about the dignity of life.
"It's my belief, therefore, this theme turns up in my work over and over again," Tezuka once said. Above all, the works which come to indeed emanate this theme are the two long works, "The Fire Bird" and "Black Jack." In the former, he dramatically drew spectacles of several of mankind's prosperities and ruins from the view of the phoenix "Fire Bird," spreading from the past to the future. Whenever one mankind becomes extinct, the Fire Bird thinks, "Noticing their mistakes some day, the next species will use their lives correctly." In the latter, he drew about the unlicensed doctor "Black Jack" who faces the life and death of his patients, his agony about human's dissipated spirits, and the distortion of society which can not be cured by medicine. Black Jack's dilemma against the limits of medicine, that is science, was also a dilemma Tezuka himself faced as a medical doctor.
Of course we treasure our own individual life, but how about life on a world scale? Do we value life? Is our civilization going in the right direction? We must always keep watch on it by ourselves. This is the massage from Tezuka through all of his life's work. I want readers, even those who once read his works without knowing his intentions, to reread them again and be conscious of the theme "dignity of life."