A skylight inside the museum displays Tezuka's family of animated characters. Image courtesy of the Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum.

If you're traveling in Japan and want to pay tribute to one of Japan's pioneers of manga, the Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum should be the first place on your list. Located in the small town of Takarazuka in the Kansai region you can take the local train at Osaka Umeda station, change at Amagasaki and get off at the end of the line. Walk down Flower Avenue past the souvenir shops and quaint restaurants until you come to a silver futuristic building, resembling an astro-lab. The dome will remind you of a space movie and the faces of Atom Boy, Leo, Princess Knight and Phoenix, etched on the titanium walls, will tell you that this is the place, the memorial to the legacy of Osamu Tezuka.

The Manga memorial prides itself on being one of the most popular attractions in Japan, claiming thousands of visitors per month. With its charming theme park as a backdrop, the museum is somewhat akin to the Disney Empire on a smaller and less commercial scale. None the less, even after his death, Tezuka remains one of Japan's most important cultural heroes and his cartoon characters have captured Japanese hearts since the 1940s.

Tezuka's Legacy
Tezuka began his career as a cartoonist in 1947. An avid storyteller interested in western literature, his modernized version of Treasure Island placed him on the literary map with book sales around 400,000 copies. Throughout his long career, he drew nearly 150,000 pages of comics which filled some 500 different titled works. The museum has a remarkable archive of material and the main exhibition hall houses the permanent collection which includes drawings, photographs, notebooks and volumes of comic strips.

Born in 1928, Tezuka's childhood in the environs of Takarazuka brought him close to nature, a theme he often used in his stories. One of the wonders of the museum exhibition are the notebooks of finely detailed insect studies. Another attraction are his portraits, in particular actors from the Takarazuka theater review which marked his taste for theatrical lighting and design. His first cartoon strip, Diary of Ma-chan (1946) appeared regularly in a children's newspaper Shokokumin Shimbun and launched his career as a commercial artist.

Osamu Tezuka. Image courtesy of the Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum.

Although Tezuka studied medicine at Osaka University, he became one of Japan's rising literati with his first forays into cartoons. His early stories were sophisticated adaptations of world literature or staunch social comments on universal problems. His long narratives, complex plots and cinematic style, often reminiscent of German or French movies he saw as a child, paved the way to a new and innovative manga style. Also, Tezuka was not interested in the American happy ending syndrome. His works contain grief, anger and hate, thus giving him a reputation as being a "philosopher of manga." The early Tezuka comics were linked to his impressions of World War II, the devastation of Japan during this time and post-war development. Naturally, they bore a heavy overtone. With time, he changed his views toward more humorous, religious and theoretical subjects. Whatever the subject matter however, he was never a lighthearted figure.