[WE CAN BLAME TEZUKA OSAMU FOR MOE CULTURE!](http://adf.ly/141259/www.arr-soarin.blogspot.com/2011/03/fushigi-na-merumo-renewal-1998.html) | [\#[email protected]](irc://irc.rizon.net/arr) [I consulted an expert on moe, Honda Toru, famous for advocating that men marry characters from anime, manga and games and cast off the oppressive system of dating women: “I THINK WE CAN BLAME TEZUKA OSAMU FOR MOE CULTURE. Tezuka started making story manga after World War II, and it was a cheap, accessible outlet that spread quickly and continues to this day. The stories were interesting and the characters were extremely cute, and this tendency continued. For kids of all backgrounds, manga and anime are a part of growing up. Tezuka drew characters that appeared to be children, and they were small and cute. Even when Tezuka drew adults that look small and cute. If you compare these drawing to American comic books or Disney animation, you notice that even when the age setting is supposed to be the same, Japanese characters look much younger and more innocent. They also are more sexually appealing. This became a convention. People grow up with that and develop desires through that image. You get used to seeing cute characters. Many people learn to draw them.” Ito Go, who suggests in his provocative book "Tezuka is Dead" that criticism focused on story manga is outdated, agrees that Tezuka manga is moe. “The most moe of all Tezuka’s manga were released during the early to mid-1960s, which originates in his power of circular lines. Moe is the discovery of the pleasure of these circular lines, which would not happen again until the 1990s. There were people in between, however. Azuma Hideo...is the person who exposed the erotic aspects of Tezuka’s drawings. Takahashi Rumiko and Fukuyama Keiko were also influential in their round lines and soft characters. There are a type of picture called 'puni-e,' which capture the feeling of squishy flesh, and it is the style that came out of the latent moe in Tezuka’s round lines. Once Natsume Fusanosuke \[the famous manga critic\] said that he does not understand moe, but he could connect it through the eroticism of lines in Tezuka’s works.”](http://www.otaku2.com/articleView.php?item=699) [The more you experience Tezuka’s work, the more you realise how astonishingly prescient he was. He first nailed moe, not in 1979, but in 1948, in Lost World. He was almost twenty years old and a superstar in the postwar Osaka comic market, churning out page after page of comics alongside his medical studies. Many of his early works reflect these pressures, cobbling together influences and ideas from his wide reading and the store of drafts and doodles he’d amassed since childhood. Lost World is a patchwork of ideas, but looming over all is the shadow of Osaka’s war and its aftermath. Like most teenagers Tezuka had been pressed into war work, had watched his father go to war, had seen the piles of corpses after firebombs hit the city. During the Occupation he travelled between Osaka and Tokyo, seeing at first hand the shortages and starvation, the orphans and homeless elders, the Japanese girls selling themselves to Allied soldiers, and the Japanese black marketeers and industrialists exploiting their own people. Tezuka had a powerful and well-fed imagination, but real life is at least as influential as science fiction. One of the scientists in Lost World has developed a method of genetically engineering females from plants. Naturally, like every savvy manufacturer, he makes his prototypes Ayame and Momiji attractive to possible buyers. He fully intends to exploit their sexual potential himself, but he sees them mainly as a cheap workforce. When Ayame is molested by another character, heroic teenage scientist Kenichi Shikishima comes to her aid and beats off the cowardly groper. “Don’t be afraid, Ayame, I won’t let anyone harm you.” As he leaves the scene, she muses that if he were her big brother, she wouldn’t have anything to fear. Later, the pair are stranded on a prehistoric planet, the only humans for millions of miles. Kenichi proposes that they should live as brother and sister, and Ayame is overjoyed. This is essential moe – an innocent, literally budding, girl, a geeky young man with the heart of a hero and protective instincts to do any father proud, and a completely non-sexual relationship. It may have blossomed in 1948, but it budded before then, in a bullied geek’s passions for science and science fiction, and a young man’s revulsion at the way he saw women and children treated in war and its aftermath. Tezuka made it into entertainment, but gave it a dark undertow that urges us to question our own attitudes and relationships. For all the ‘development’ of moe into its own self-consciously postmodern industry, I don’t think many current practicioners have even begun to approach his depth and daring.](http://helenmccarthy.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/and-tezuka-created-moe/) [](http://fastpic.ru/)