The death of the manga artist and animator Leiji Matsumoto in February, at the age of eighty-five, marked a sad moment for his fans around the world. His œuvre ran the gamut from teen romances and erotic comedies to the iconic space-opera series “Space Pirate Captain Harlock,” “Queen Millennia,” and “Galaxy Express 999.” Outside of Japan, he is better known for his collaborative projects: “Interstella 5555,” which is a linked series of music videos that he designed for Daft Punk, and, even more popular, the long-running epic “Space Battleship Yamato,” which débuted on Japanese television in 1974 and appeared in the United States, as “Star Blazers,” in 1979. Co-created with the producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki, that series recast the Imperial Japanese flagship Yamato as a spacecraft on a daring mission to save humanity from the aftermath of an alien attack. “Yamato” was a major hit, integral in raising the first generation of serious anime fans.
Born Akira Matsumoto in Fukuoka in 1938, he came of age during a pivotal time for manga as an art form. Matsumoto had his work published for the first time in 1954, at just fifteen. After graduating from high school, he purchased a one-way ticket from his home town, in southwestern Japan, to Tokyo, where he fell in with a talented group of like-minded peers. These included such established stars as Osamu Tezuka, the creator of “Astro Boy,” along with up-and-comers such as Shotaro Ishinomori, who would, decades later, create the framework for the shows that became “Power Rangers.” At this point in the fifties, Japanese society at large considered manga a medium fit only for the young. Matsumoto toiled for years in penury and obscurity, penning romance comics and making ends meet by assisting more successful manga artists with their work. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, he adopted the pen name that he would use for the remainder of his career: Leiji, written with the ideographs for “zero” and “warrior.” “Akira is a common name that did not have sufficient impact,” Matsumoto told Le Monde. “Since my mother comes from a line of samurai, I chose to be called Leiji, which means ‘fighter of infinity.’ ”
It wouldn’t be until 1971 that he created the series that put him on the map: “I Am a Man.” Written in the midst of Japan’s high-growth period, after the nation successfully emerged from postwar poverty, Matsumoto’s manga starred a young man struggling to eke out a living in a big city. The protagonist, Nobotta Oyama, who is clad for much of the narrative in nothing but boxer shorts and a tank top, lives in a shabby one-room apartment without heat or running water, and subsists on a diet of ramen and white rice, supplemented by mushrooms harvested from the sodden laundry moldering in his closet. His tribulations resonated with young Tokyoites, many of whom had arrived from afar, like Matsumoto, and lived in similarly squalid conditions.
The success of “I Am a Man” marked a turning point for Matsumoto personally, while also reflecting great shifts in the manga industry generally. Unfettered by anything like America’s draconian Comics Code Authority—a set of guidelines, established in 1954, that forbade “lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations” and insisted that “in every instance good shall triumph over evil”—Japanese creators had great freedom. Over the course of the sixties, manga artists pushed the medium in new ways in comic anthology weeklies. Perhaps the most widely read of these was Weekly Shōnen Magazine. It carried Tetsuya Chiba and Asao Takamori’s “Tomorrow’s Joe,” the story of a working-class boxer punching his way up through the ranks of the ring and society, and the work of Sanpei Shirato, whose ninja tales recast Japanese history in Marxist terms, with samurai as cruel oppressors of the working masses.
Dramatic, violent, and nakedly political hits resonated deeply with sixties revolutionaries. The seeds of Japan’s radical movement were sown by 1960, when parliament rammed through an unpopular revision to a military security treaty with America. By the end of the decade, large numbers of students had joined campus protest groups, driven in turns by anger at their government’s support of America’s war in Vietnam and dissatisfaction over conditions at overcrowded, understaffed universities. In the West, folk and rock music nourished student demonstrators; in Japan, the protest movement was metered out in the panels of manga. A famous phrase credited to young demonstrators was “Asahi Journal in our right hands, Shōnen Magazine in our left.” When members of the Red Army hijacked a Japanese passenger jet in 1970, they declared, “Never forget: we are ‘Tomorrow’s Joe.’ ”
Matsumoto never openly embraced politics in the way that some of his contemporaries did, choosing instead to focus on broader, more universal themes. “As my father used to say, ‘We are born to live, not to die,’ ” he wrote, in a 2013 essay collection. “This became the main theme of ‘Yamato.’ ” It’s a platitude that sounds obvious, even trite, in the twenty-first century. But Matsumoto, born during wartime, was old enough to remember otherwise, recalling an era when the idea of living life on one’s own terms was unthinkable, even treasonous. He modelled the Yamato’s resolute, resplendently bearded Captain Okita on his own father. A former Imperial Army Air Force pilot, Matsumoto’s father was so traumatized by his military experiences that he abandoned flying altogether, instead choosing a humble career selling vegetables and working on charcoal kilns.
Yoshinobu Nishizaki, the producer of “Yamato,” brought Matsumoto aboard as an art supervisor. The manga artist so thoroughly overhauled the plot, designs, and characters, however, that one could be forgiven for mistaking the entire enterprise as his own. The story opens with Earth in dire straits after an attack by a race of aliens with advanced technology. Our space fleet, outnumbered by superior opponents, is unable to prevent the enemy from mass bombing the Earth with irradiated meteorites, and what remains of humanity is forced to relocate deep beneath the surface. Even still, radiation leaches through the crust, and we are told that the human race will go extinct in just one year. Suddenly, a message arrives from a distant star. Starsha, a beautiful queen from a planet called Iscandar, delivers to humanity the plans for a faster-than-light “wave-motion engine.” If Earthlings can use it to reach her home world, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, she will provide the technology to cleanse the Earth of radiation. So as not to arouse enemy suspicions, the Earth forces secretly construct their spacecraft within the confines of the hull of the long-sunken Yamato, which is now sitting in plain sight, as Earth’s seas have evaporated away. Once it takes off, the Yamato and its crew race a hundred and forty-eight thousand light years across the galaxy and back, with the enemy in hot pursuit.
The sight of the former Imperial Navy’s pride and joy literally rising again might at first seem a straightforward metaphor for remilitarization. Yet Matsumoto had a distinctive knack for fetishizing the machinery of war without fetishizing the war machine. “I was shocked at how utterly unlike any televised anime or live-action drama it was,” the anime critic Ryūsuke Hikawa told me. He was in high school when the show’s first episode aired, and soon organized one of the most active Japanese fan clubs for the show. Matsumoto exposed the misery of “the initial battle in great detail . . . then showed us that planet Earth had been reduced to a red ball of fire . . . Yet all the while he portrayed that terrible, apocalyptic tragedy with a sense of beauty.”
Matsumoto walked this fine line again and again in his work, most delicately in his war comics, which portrayed the air war in the Pacific as a sort of crucible for the human spirit. For Americans raised on triumphalist narratives, Matsumoto’s war work can shock, lingering, as it often does, on the losing sides of battles. “My father once told me he’d cornered an enemy in a dogfight and had to shoot, but then he thought about how sad their families would be to lose them, and he hesitated,” Matsumoto recalled, in a 2018 interview. “Hearing about enemy families really hit me. It’s awful for both sides. It’s when I realized what a dirty business war was. I was just a boy. I guess that’s why my stories turn out the way they do.”
Perhaps because of this ambiguity, “Yamato” did poorly when it first aired. It was only in subsequent reruns that it began to gain momentum among a wider, and older, audience. Their voices, expressed through fan clubs and anime magazines, led to the production of a film that opened in the late summer of 1977. The feature would eventually gross over two billion yen at the Japanese box office, a surprising success that hinted at the potential of anime as something more than kids’ entertainment. The promise was fulfilled two years later, with the release of “Galaxy Express 999,” which was based on another Matsumoto manga series, this one about a spacecraft that resembles a vintage steam locomotive and embarks on a journey through the cosmos. “Three Nine,” as aficionados called it, proved an even bigger hit than “Yamato.” It emerged as the top-grossing Japanese movie of 1979, outearning such Hollywood blockbusters as “Alien” and “Rocky II,” and triggering what Japanese fans now refer to as the “anime boom.” As animators delivered increasingly sophisticated and successful productions in the years to come, illustrated entertainment emerged from the shadows of subculture to become a widely shared pastime, even an identity, for legions of young adults in Japan, and eventually the world.
“Yamato” also introduced viewers to Matsumoto’s distinctive characters, and in particular his women, or, perhaps more accurately, his woman: a willowy beauty with flowing blond hair and angular features, her glittering eyes accented by lashes so large they seem to float beyond the confines of her face. Matsumoto claimed to have modelled her on a nineteenth-century photograph of a Japanese woman, and on the German actress Marianne Hold. This feminine ideal appeared over and over again in his works, with minor variations, from Starsha of Iscandar to Queen Emeraldas to Maetel, the mother figure to the young protagonist of “Galaxy Express 999.” To those who grew up as anime enthusiasts during its initial boom period, as I did, she was an inescapable, ethereal presence. She was “utterly unlike the women drawn by other manga artists and illustrators,” the director Shinji Aramaki, who helmed a 2013 Matsumoto adaptation called “Harlock: Space Pirate,” told me. “Less like a lover than a subject of longing.”
Anime has changed greatly in the nearly half century since the arrival of “Yamato.” A medium that once existed on the fringes of Japanese society now represents a global market worth close to thirty billion U.S. dollars, available on demand in virtually any place with an Internet connection. And manga, the source from which a great many hit anime are derived, top best-seller lists around the planet. Matsumoto and his peers worked in an era when little was expected of their art forms. Now that illustrated entertainment has become a massive enterprise, a certain risk aversion, even conservatism, has set in. Sequelitis is endemic. “Dragon Ball,” one of the industry’s most enduring hits, débuted as a manga, in 1984; “Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero,” released in 2022, is the twenty-first anime film in the franchise. “One Piece,” another long-running success, spans more than a thousand animated episodes and fifteen films. In the streaming era, a massive back catalogue, so conducive to binge-watching, is as much of an asset as creative vision is.
Above all, the romantic idealism that shaped Matsumoto’s creative output feels notably absent from recent works. “Attack on Titan,” one of the biggest hits of the twenty-tens, captures the hopelessness of a dying city circumscribed by walls, under constant siege from zombie-like giants; it won prestigious awards around the world—and also accolades from far-right fans who interpreted the series’ grotesque foreign invaders and fascistic swerve as a dog whistle to antisemitic conspiracy theories. A popular genre is aspirational isekai, literally “other-world” fare, in which protagonists unable to deal with real life slip into alternate realities where they can be masters of their own universes. And then there is one of the current chart-toppers, the hyperkinetic 2022 anime series “Chainsaw Man.” It opens with a teen-ager caught up in a twisted parody of the gig economy, selling his organs in order to pay off a crushing loan whose principal he can otherwise never seem to dent. Anime is as imaginative as ever. It’s also a lot bleaker than it was in Matsumoto’s heyday.
“We’re off to outer space, we’re leaving mother Earth, to save the human race,” the opening lines of the theme song to “Yamato” and “Star Blazers” went, but modern audiences seem more interested in escapes into inner space and saving themselves. Part of this is simply due to changing tastes and styles, inevitable in any youth-oriented medium, and part to how even the most radical subcultures inevitably get co-opted—witness how hip-hop and punk, so edgy and threatening in the eighties, morphed into mainstream pop. Days after Matsumoto’s death, a column about the artist expressed concern about how “cold and cynical many recent anime seem to be.” But is this a criticism of the current crop of animators and fans—or a reflection of Japanese society itself?
Matsumoto rose to popularity in a Japan ascendant from the ashes of the Second World War, filled with hope for a bright future. His visions of apocalypse, informed by lived experience, contrasted greatly with the affluence of Japan in the seventies and eighties. But Japan’s so-called bubble economy popped in the early nineteen-nineties, leaving younger generations to pick up the pieces. To Japanese millennials and zillenials, wartime defeat and economic triumph are both ancient history. Their futures are far less bright, marked by threats of recession, political gridlock, and a hyper-aging society, not to mention the traumas of the COVID era. They’re living through another apocalypse, of the socioeconomic variety. Is it any wonder that their animated dreams are more down to earth? ♦
