Mr. Yanase and An-Pan Man
This year many Japanese died as with Mandela and Thatcher.
One of them is a cartoonist or a manga artist named Yanase Takashi (1919-2013).
Mr. Yanase is well known for his big hit "An-Pan Man" (An-pan is a round soft bread with azuki bean jam in its center; Pan means bread in Japanese). He is a super-deformed figure imagined from Superman. But it has been widely accepted by young children in Japan, since the An-Pan Man is a hero in the world of characters and personalities with faces of foods or snacks. In the work, bad guys are "Baikin Man" (Germ Man) and his henchmen.
However, this work of cartoon aroused some controversy among parents whose children loved to read this title. It was because An-Pan Man rescued a starving guy by plucking off part of his head, which was of course a part of bread, to have the guy eat it. As Japan is not a Christian country, nobody thought that it was an act of supreme love Christ Jesus tried to perform. Parents and some critics said that it was weird that a hero of a manga work took part of his head to feed a man. Nonetheless children didn't mind it. They must have known that the face of An-pan Man would be mended and recovered through a kind of plastic surgery. He would surely look complete in the next issue. And An-Pan Man never lost to bad guys such as Baikin Man.
Since it was first released in the form of a picture story book in 1973, it got gradually popular to expand its stage of activities into animation and TV. The An-Pan Man series earned totally more than 1 trillion yen ($10 billion) as of 2010. It has followed Pokemon in terms of popularity among children.
But why did Mr. Yanase create a hero from a food, bread. It was said that he suffered poverty and hunger after WWII. He also served the Empire of Japan as a soldier in the front line in China. He hated war and he wished to help people in poverty without much to eat.
After the war, he worked in a newspaper company in his home town, Kochi, in Western Japan and then came to Tokyo. (As a female worker in the newspaper company Yanase loved moved to Tokyo, young Yanase also came to Tokyo to marry her.) He became a professional manga artist in 1953. In 1969, Mr. Yanase worked with Manga King Osamu Tezuka. Mr. Yanase succeeded fairly as a kind of artist (he even wrote the words to some hit songs in those days).
But in 1973, Yanase Takashi focused his energy on his activities as a poet and an illustration book author. Then the great hit An-Pan Man was produced.
An-Pan fights a bad guy to help his friends in a manner children can easily understand. And in order to save a starving man, he even plucks off part of his head to have him eat it. He is truly a hero even in a sense of Christianity.
An-Pan Man is flying like Superman
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