Part 300: The God of Manga Has Two Numbers: Osamu Tezuka, Astro Boy, and the Proof the Lens Was Always a Lens

Three hundred essays. This series began with a promise it has spent much of its length quietly undermining: that reading manga through the numbers its names reduce to might reveal something. For the three-hundredth part it is right that the subject should be Osamu Tezuka — the God of Manga, the man from whom, in one way or another, the entire medium descends — and it is right that his own most famous creation should be the thing that proves, more cleanly than any argument I could construct, that the lens was always only a lens.

Osamu Tezuka reduces to a Destiny 9 — the Humanitarian and Sage, endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles. It is, of all the readings in this series, perhaps the one I would least want to give up, and I will come to why. But first the demonstration, because part 300 should be honest before it is sentimental.

One Robot, Two Numbers

Tezuka's most famous creation is a small atomic-powered robot boy with a pure heart. In English he is Astro Boy. In Japanese he is Tetsuwan Atom — "Mighty Atom," literally "iron-arm Atom." They are the same character. The same robot, the same stories, the same creation of the same hand.

Astro Boy reduces to a Destiny 7 — the Analyst and Seeker. Tetsuwan Atom reduces to a Destiny 1 — the Leader and Pioneer. One character. Two names. Two entirely different numbers, from two different profiles, describing two different archetypes — and both, supposedly, the "destiny" of the identical being.

There is no way around what this means, and I am not going to look for one on the series' three-hundredth page. The number is not a property of the character. It cannot be, because the character has two of them, and which one you get depends entirely on which language's marketing department named him. Part 165 of this series demonstrated the same thing statistically, across twenty titles — that only one in twenty preserves its Destiny number between the Japanese and the English. Tezuka's robot is the demonstration made singular and undeniable: the most beloved character the founder of the medium ever drew, holding a 7 in one hand and a 1 in the other, proving that the whole apparatus of this series measures the spelling and not the soul.

The Number That Fits Anyway, and Why That Is the Trap

And yet — here is the seduction, laid bare so the reader can watch it operate — both numbers can be made to fit. Astro Boy the 7, the Analyst and Seeker: yes, he is a searcher, a robot forever inquiring into what separates him from the humans who made and abandoned him, a seeker after his own reality. Tetsuwan Atom the 1, the Leader and Pioneer: yes, he is the pioneer, the first of his kind, the trailblazing hero who leads the way for every robot-with-a-heart that followed. Give me any number and this manga, and I will write you a paragraph proving the fit. That is not a strength of the method. It is the whole disease of it. A frame that can accommodate any result explains nothing, and I have spent three hundred essays being, at my worst, extremely good at accommodating any result.

The Sage Who Contained Everything

So why do I not want to give up Tezuka's own 9? Because the 9 — the Sage, the Humanitarian, compassion and the closing of cycles — describes something about Tezuka that is not a coincidence of spelling but a fact of his life's work, a fact I brought to the number rather than found in it. Tezuka's great theme, across Phoenix and Buddha and Black Jack and the whole vast body of it, was the sanctity and tragedy of life itself — the cycles of death and rebirth, the compassion owed to all living things, the humanitarian's grief for a suffering world. Phoenix is literally a work about the eternal closing and reopening of the cycle of life across cosmic time. If a number could describe a man, the 9 would describe this one.

But a number cannot describe a man, and the honest thing — the thing part 300 exists to say — is that I am not reading Tezuka's soul out of the letters of his romanized name. I am reading it out of having read Tezuka, and then enjoying that the arithmetic happened to agree. The 9 did not tell me Tezuka was a humanitarian sage. Sixty years of his work told me that, and the coincidence of the number is a small pleasure laid on top, worth exactly nothing as evidence and something real as delight. The Serialization Machine essays on this site discussed his enormous, ambiguous industrial legacy — the man who underpriced animation for a generation. This series has only ever been about the other Tezuka: the one whose subject was mercy.

The White Lion, and the Close

One more, because it is too apt to omit. Kimba, the white lion of Jungle Emperor — Tezuka's other world-famous creation, the one whose resemblance to a certain later Disney lion has been argued about for thirty years — reduces to a Destiny 9, matching his creator exactly. The Sage's number, on the gentle lion-king who dreams of harmony between beasts and men. It fits. Of course it fits. Everything fits, when you are willing to make it.

That is the lesson of part 300, and it is the lesson this series has been walking toward since it first questioned itself back in part 165. The numbers are empty. They are artefacts of romanization, they contradict themselves the moment a character has two names, and they can be made to agree with anything. And they are, nonetheless, worth something — not as measurement, but as a reason to stop, and look, and ask what a work is actually doing. Tezuka's robot has two numbers because a name is only spelling. Tezuka's work has one meaning, and I did not need the arithmetic to find it. The lens was always a lens. What mattered was that it made me look at the God of Manga and see, clearly, the thing he spent his life drawing: that life is sacred, that the cycle closes and opens again, and that compassion is the only number that was ever really being counted.