永井 豪
Born 1945
The provocateur behind Devilman, Mazinger Z and Cutey Honey, who invented the super robot and pushed shonen manga into violence and taboo. Read from the closing, as a 9.
9A 9 by its name: humanitarian & sage, and therefore the closing.
Go Nagai was born in 1945 in Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture. He began as an assistant to Shōtarō Ishinomori and became famous, and notorious, with Harenchi Gakuen (1968), a school comedy whose risqué humour caused a national controversy and campaigns against it by parents' groups.
In 1972 alone he launched Devilman, a demon-fighting saga with an apocalyptic ending, and Mazinger Z, in which a boy pilots a giant robot from inside its head. Cutey Honey, an android heroine who transforms between identities, followed in 1973. Each became a franchise.
Mazinger Z created the super robot genre: giant piloted machines with named weapons and a new enemy every week. Its toys and anime, and countless successors, made it one of the most influential concepts in Japanese pop culture, and it was hugely popular in Europe and Latin America.
Nagai's willingness to break rules, mixing sex, violence and religious imagery in work for young readers, opened doors for later creators. His studio, Dynamic Production, has kept his characters alive in many remakes, among them Devilman Crybaby (2018).
Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 36, which folds down to 9. The weight sits in “Nagai”, which carries 23 on its own and reduces to 5.
Nine is humanitarian & sage — endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles. The reference files it as a completion. Read that way, what the entry is really recording is the 9's sense of a cycle closing and something being released.
The vowels alone reduce to 8, the consonants to 1. Power underneath, initiative on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
人格 core is 18, a 9, 総格 total is 23, a 5 and born is 1945, a 1. That the 9 turns up in 人格 core as well as in the letters is the sort of coincidence this reference collects rather than explains.
The 9 sentimentalises. An ending is not automatically a meaning, and the reference tries not to pretend otherwise. What the 9 still asks is that you work out what survived the ending. The other entries that reduce to 9 are collected on The Closing.