Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey

Author:Peter Carey [Carey, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-54971-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2004-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

6.

Heart of Animation

Beats in a Robot Boy

By James Brooke

TOKYO, April 6— Back in 1951, Osamu Tezuka, a Japanese cartoonist, dreamed up Astro Boy, a lovable robot with laser fingertips, search-light eyes, machine guns in his black shorts, and rocket jets flaming from his red boots.

To make the 100,000 horsepower tyke seem really futuristic, the artist gave his creation a truly far-out birth date: April 7, 2003.

Tokyo may not yet have flying cars, but Astro Boy’s official birthday on Monday marks the coming of age of Japan’s animation industry. No longer marginalized, the bare-chested rocket boy with the spiky hair, known in Japanese as Tetsuwan Atom [literally Iron-Arm Atom] is being hailed with fireworks, costume parades, intellectual seminars, an exhibit in Parliament and a $1 million diamond-and-ruby likeness in a downtown department store display.

“We Japanese want to live alongside robots, that is why we love Astro Boy,” said Takao Imai, a 72 year old lawyer, dressed in a white smock and a white wig of cotton curls to look like Professor Elefun, Astro Boy’s eccentric scientist protector.

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