Following an interesting discussion in comments on my earlier post, David Welsh digs out an editor’s note from Dark Horse’s edition of Astro Boy to show how one publisher gracefully handled the problem of offensive images in an older manga.
Thinking about Tezuka made me remember that some of the caricatures in Ode to Kirihito struck me as unfortunate as well. Tezuka’s style, particularly with incidental characters, was so cartoony that it didn’t stick out as much, but I read the book for the first time in the hospital where my father was having a procedure done, and being in such a public place, I got a bit self-conscious about it. (Well, that and all the nudity.) I think an editor’s note would have been appropriate there, too, not that it would have helped me any.
It’s much harder to justify reproducing such images in current manga, though, as people nowadays are supposed to know better.
Speaking of Tezuka, I must add that most manga-ka worship him like a god, and most of them simply adopted his way of drawing black people. Tezuka’s own Sambo-esque way of depicting blacks is directly inherited from the way American media used to portrait blacks with black faces. If there’s Japanese manga racism, it’s an imitated racism originated back that kind of treatment of blacks were the mainstream views. Some Japanese are indeed very racist, but they tend to direct their hatred toward the koreans or Chinese. Black is very, very low on their discriminatory radar; if they do any kind of racially-based treatment, it’s basically on par on how they treat White gaijin. For some women, blacks are definitely regarded higher than your average white person. :)
Adding to my previous post:
“If there’s Japanese manga racism, it’s an imitated racism originated back that kind of treatment of blacks were the mainstream views IN THE US.”
I know what you mean about Ode to Kirihito. Though I’m sure this wasn’t the case at the time, I found extreme irony in the fact that one of the main messages was promoting tolerance and equality regardless of appearance, and yet caricatures appear more than a few times.
The note in Astro Boy also appears in all of Dark Horse’s editions of Tezuka’s manga, including the Lost World/Metropolis/Future World series. I’ve not read very much of Astro Boy yet, but it seems like more of a cover, as I have yet to run across caricature in that series.