Life With Manga God Osamu Tezuka: An Interview with Frederik Schodt
Author
https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-feature/2017/11/10-1/life-with-manga-god-osamu-tezuka-an-interview-with-frederik-schodt
This is an interview with Frederik Schodt who was better known as the interpreter and personal friend of Osamu Tezuka, one of the first artist to form the basis for all manga and anime to date. Scodt discusses his introduction and initial relationship within manga as well as anime on the whole. He goes in depth to talk about him not being able to read manga with the rest of his friends due to his limited knowledge of Japanese. Schodt continues to explain that he is a fan of Tezuka and hoped to translate his mangas for others who couldn’t understand Japanese, who is one of the most famous writers to develop one of the first mangas. Schodt and a group of his friends began a small company in which they began to translate mangas, leading them to appear at Tezuka’s production studio and Tezuka introducing himself and allowing the group to translate their mangas for the world. Schodt also discusses the times when him and Tezuka travelled to the United States to expand their influence of anime and manga within America.
I truly believe this interview was important and interesting within the impact and growth of anime. With Schodt and his group helping to translate manga for the world the fandom was able to grow more rapidly. Also, this interview allows readers to see the impact manga had on the United States. Schodt and Tezuka as well as the rest of the production crew put in a lot of time and effort into growing their business into something memorable and popular. Schodt said that as the crew was filming no one slept and everyone’s knees were buckling and were physically drained. This was interesting to me because it shows how much dedication everyone put into their work in hopes that the industry would grow and become something. In the overall interview, I believe it would have been interesting if it was asked on the development and improvement of the industry as well as his personal view and impact of anime and manga. Not to mention, it would also have been interesting to see if Schodt knew Tezuka to a personal level in which he possibly knew his hopes and dreams in which Tezuka had for his production company. However, on the whole it was interesting to see where the first translations came for the first mangas and anime to exist.
” And I remember this one guy, I’ve never seen this any other time but he actually fell asleep on his feet, because he just hadn’t slept. It was the Japanese work ethic. His knees buckled. And Tezuka also hasn’t slept. That’s just an example of how exhausted everyone was.”
“Myself and three friends, my friend Jared Cook and two Japanese, formed a group called Dadakai because we were big fans of manga and we wanted to translate manga and maybe, possibly, introduce them to the outside world because we thought they were just fabulous and everyone should know about manga.”