Criticism: The Basement Archive - Relics From Tezuka's Mid 70s Fandom

 

(Volume 0 of Tokyo no Shirase, one of the oldest Osamu Tezuka FCs of their time. Published and printed via the now archaic blueprint method, this particular FC seemingly suffered from an extreme lapse in funding and club participation, re-releasing by the late 70s into the early 80s as Metropolis In The 21st Century. Personal collection, acquired via M.)

There is a very particular smell that accompanies old paper. Take it from someone who haunts thrift shops, antique stores and estate sales - it's not merely mildew or damp cardboard, it's the scent of the  decades collapsing into one another. The sweet, nostalgic scene of rotting wood pulp, oxidized ink, and dust that has settled long enough to become part of the object itself really does stand out. Where every collector may know it, I've come to find that some archivists even fear it. In fact, I was almost one of those who cowered when I found what I did find.

In a basement in Hyōgo, my colleague M and I found that smell in abundance. While visiting some months ago, I was invited to tag along while M and a few of his fellow old head Otaku pals. Greeted with warmth and familiarity, I helped assist in cleaning out a lower level area that hadn't been traversed in some time - a family friend had passed away, and while abatement was happening in parts of the upstairs area, M and his friends were invited to sift through boxes of old newspapers and manga. 

The room itself was unremarkable. Shelves bowed under their own weight and many boxes had long ago surrendered to moisture. Water had seeped through concrete sometime in the distant past and seemingly the upper floor boards, and the paper had remembered every single drip and drop. Entire stacks leaned like exhausted, abandoned apartment buildings I'd seen in the countryside some years ago. We weren't searching for treasure so much as conducting triage as many of M's friends were salvaging old copies of Shonen King and varied works for their own junk shops and more. 

Then, tucked beneath piles of forgotten magazines, they appeared.

(Variances in cleaned copies salvaged - volume 1 of Tokyo no Shirase and its Shoujo sub-imprint Tea-Time, of which is volume 0 or 1. Personal collection.)

About ten mimeographed fan publications devoted almost entirely to Osamu Tezuka, the Godfather of Manga, were acquired. M's connection with Tezuka is varied and vast as is - upon our very first meeting some two years ago, M shared personal letters that Tezuka had written to not only him, but his father and uncles, who were a part of a variety of official fan clubs dedicated to the prolific mangaka. M's association with the family friend seemed to extend further into this territory, though upon looking at a variety of the texts salvaged, some were barely even books anymore. 

Much of the purple spirit-duplicator ink had faded into ghosts - much of my suspicion had been proven from working with various works printed on Ditto machines from the pre-Comiket days, and while the smell is usually one thing, many of these books were simply incomprehensible. Staples had, much to my general premeditation, had rusted. Covers peeled away with almost no encouragement. Some pages had fused together where rainwater had dried decades earlier. 

Others simply fragmented in my hands from turning into literal mulch. Every instinct as a conservator says not to touch paper in that condition, even with the archival gloves I brought in hand, however, leaving them there any further or disposing of these works would have been another kind of destruction all in itself. You don't rescue objects like these because they're valuable, you rescue them because nobody else knows they exist.

Modern fans often imagining the enclaves of Otakudom pre-Comiket unfortunately still don't have adequate resources to draw from. In the West, much of this boom is still misconstrued over statements made by Hideo Azuma even that carry on into the modern day, however, history is less convenient to those who aren't actively looking for answers and operates in a broader scope than that.

These publications in particular belong to an earlier generation, however, a period before the terminology we associate with Otaku had even become either an insult or a badge of honor. In the mid-1970s, there wasn't a real term used in singularity to describe the phenomenon or attribution of individuals who were uber fans. Based on some general scholarship available in the West, the terminology was used in a general basis for early anime & manga-centric fan creators, SF fans, doujin artists and university club members as a distinctively quirky way to address one another at conventions and gatherings. It wouldn't be until the early 1980s, namely 1983, that columnist Akio Nakamori used it in an essay published in the magazine Manga Burikko to describe the then still quite broad subculture and phenom. 

As all of these works are regaled to an era that is distinctly pre-Internet, if fans wanted to discuss works like Phoenix or Dororo, they typed essays on manual typewriters or wrote them carefully by hand. Many of these works seemingly were pre-production copies, namely volume 0, as it contains a mix of blueprinting and handwriting. Communication moved, quite frankly, at the speed of the postal service, or via phone calls as many members of Tokyo published their lines. Tokyo itself is not associated with the official Mushi no Shirase imprint, which was ran and overseen by both Tezuka and those close to him personally, and existed on its own volition. 

("The weather is pleasantly warm, the sky is blue, and it's the perfect day to stay home reading books. After waking from a long winter's sleep, I finally feel like doing something. The sunshine has put me in good spirits.

Tokyo is such a vast city, and there are so many people here. It really feels like you're standing in the middle of culture itself. Sometimes I think that if we all put our minds to it, surely we could create something worthwhile. After all, there are nearly three hundred members in the Tokyo area alone. I can't help wondering if we might be capable of accomplishing something together.

The power of people, and of the world itself, is a mysterious thing. There's an old saying: "Sit on a stone for three years." In other words, patience bears fruit. If you truly want a certain book, and you keep wishing for it, somehow, three years later, it often turns up. (I mean this quite seriously!)

Let's begin with small things. One small step at a time will eventually grow into something much larger. A relationship with one person can naturally lead to relationships with many others.

I hope we can remain a group with a positive spirit, one that enjoys creating things. Anyway, let's all do our best.

— Mori")

Lead by a Mori, Tokyo boasted 300 members from the Tokyo alone - other metrics can't currently be measured, however, based on these numbers, it lead me to understand the basis for the blueprinting to reach vast numbers of subscribers. Before photocopiers became commonplace and less expensive, countless fan publications were produced using spirit duplicators or even mimeograph machines. Purple ink became an aesthetic almost by accident, one that I reflect on in this day and age as a means of not letting either funding or printing access limit the spread of information. The text, when printed over and over, slowly would disappear with every reproduction, giving these magazines their unmistakable faded appearance today. Ironically, the technology that democratized amateur publishing also guaranteed its impermanence.

As noted, these works didn't present themselves as elegant offset prints or glossy magazines - they were simply points of conversation and sharing made tangible. Even so, this sort of creative energy gives credence to Tezuka's own positionality during the later half of his immense career. Osamu Tezuka occupied an unusual position within this world and in the realm of animation itself by the mid to late 1970s. By the mid-1970s, the "God of Manga" was also experiencing a complicated renaissance. Television animation had altered the overall public perception of his work, and while adult readers increasingly rediscovered and or began to pick up titles like Phoenix, fans of the Gekiga genre were besotted with a side of Tezuka that extended past the amicable views of Astro Boy and Princess Knight. 

Titles like MW, Ode to Kirihito, Black Jack and Ayako were thrust forward with a breadth of experience that challenged Tezuka's status quo. As an artist, Tezuka was seemingly jaded by a variety of events that had delineated his professional career and stance in Japan's visual culture at the time, however, it would be these works that staunchly analyzed society via symbolism, chronology and cinema that would come to infer a new language that fans simply couldn't get enough of.  Even so, Tezuka faced early fandom outrages when fans, namely female acolytes of his titular 'good boy' Rock Makube, was depicted as a narcissistic rapist in his title Alabaster in 1971. By 1976, fans had a breadth of works to call back on and discuss with gusto, as seen in Tokyo no Shirase:

(Name: Takemi Keiko (くら・ケイコ) - Age: 17 years old -  School: Third-year student in the general studies course at Tokyo Metropolitan Tamanodai High School.

I hope to continue on to college, but that probably won't be easy. Still, I don't think anyone could call me an "elite" just because I read Dr. Tezuka's works, so please don't misunderstand. Most of the illustrations I've done come from from The Book of Human Insects. 

Many people in the fan club seem to have been fans since long ago. I can't really say, "I've been an enthusiastic Tezuka manga fan for years..." That would simply be untrue. Actually, until fairly recently, I was just another foolish girl who mainly read shoujo manga. (Thinking about it now makes me blush.)

Because of that, my acquaintance with Tezuka-sensei's work is still rather shallow. Only recently have I begun steadily reading and collecting his older works one after another. People often say that to truly understand his work, you should also study films and classical music. Unfortunately, I hardly watch movies, and I know almost nothing about music.

Even so, I suppose I still put on the face of someone who "understands" his work. To all the knowledgeable veteran fans, I apologize for acting so confident. Please be kind to me.

Since I'm Here... A Few Words About Tezuka's Works. Favorite works: several stories from Phoenix (Hi no Tori), several stories from The Book of Human Insects (Ningen Konchūki), several stories from Lion Books, Barbara, Astro Boy, The Mysterious Underground Men (Chitei Koku no Kaijin) ...among others.)

Some of the documents M and I recovered demonstrate exactly this impulse. One page painstakingly reconstructs the chronology of Moto Hagio's The Poe Clan in a sub-imprint of Tokyo titled Tea-Time, which connected shoujo fans who just to happened to be Tezuka aficionados. As it would come to pass, Tezuka's alignment with shoujo via Princess Knight and his industry friendships with Moto Hagio, among others, created a wealth of opportunities for both realms to align. Another references publication history and narrative inconsistencies within Tezuka's famous 'Star System' with an enthusiasm recognizable to anyone who has ever spent hours on a modern wiki, only these installments predate the internet by decades.

Looking through those pages, I was struck less by nostalgia than by continuity. Today, a lot of online archivists obsess over metadata and seemingly lost works rather than by the linear quality that works like so represent - changing attitudes and focals from fans of yore announced changes that would inform the here and now, and if not indirectly, a capacity was still met. Where today's social media rewards instant reactions and acknowledgements, many of these readers waited months for a manuscript to be printed or to even hear back from one another post studies or on summer breaks. There is a tendency to romanticize discovery in that, however, in approaching these works, I don't wish to speak about them as if I'm Indiana Jones. There is a mysterious power that they hold all the same, however, the truth of what they are is also considerably less glamorous and more of a humanistic record. 

Mostly, you crouch in uncomfortable places, gently clean mold from corners, and wonder if a page can survive being scanned under hard museum quality light one more time. Many of these works are now stored in humidity-dispelling OPP bags and are in my own climate controlled warehouse storage, however, I will always remember how damp my shoes felt when I left that basement. Sometimes, the most exciting object you find looks like trash until you realize no library has ever catalogued it. As I packed those fragile publications away, I couldn't help wondering how many hands had held them before mine. Who typed these pages? Who folded them? Who addressed the envelopes? Did they imagine someone, fifty years later, pulling them from a damp basement in Hyōgo? Probably not.

Fandom culture has always been ephemeral by design. It lives in conversations, temporary gatherings, cheaply printed magazines, and enthusiasm that rarely expects permanence. Most of it disappears exactly as intended, but occasionally, something survives. A record is here in these works that proves that ultimately, there were young and old people alike willing to spend evenings collating pages by hand because they loved Osamu Tezuka enough to believe that their thoughts deserved to exist in print.