Astro Boy Research Articles

Design and application of a warming fixation device for premature infants

A warming fixation device for premature infants was made and its clinical application effect was discussed. The warming fixation device for premature infants was designed and used in clinic. Sixty premature infants admitted to the neonatal ward of Baoding Hospital, Beijing Children's Hospital, Capital Medical University from January to June 2022 were selected as the control group, and 60 premature infants admitted from July to December 2022 were selected as the experimental group. In the control group, umbilical vein catheterization or central vein catheterization were performed using Astro Boy heating box, restraint band or artificial restraint. The preterm infants in the experimental group were radiated into the Astro Boy warm box with self-designed preterm warming fixation device for catheterization. The time of catheterization, the number of limb protrusion, the number of participants in catheterization operation, and the body temperature from 20 minutes of catheterization operation to the end of catheterization operation were recorded in the two groups. The frequency of hypothermia (< 36.5 centigrade) was calculated, and the differences in various indexes between the two groups were compared. (1) The warming fixation device for premature babies consists of two parts: warm sleeping bag and soft pad. The warm sleeping bag includes 4 parts: head, arm, chest and abdomen, and lower limbs. The chest and abdomen were designed with rectangular covering cloth, which can be opened to facilitate umbilical vein puncture for premature infants. There were 3 groups of restraint belts on the rectangular soft pad, which can respectively fix the arms, chest and abdomen of the warm sleeping bag and the lower limbs. During the catheterization operation, use Velcro to secure the warm sleeping bag to the cushioned surface, and select the area of exposed skin according to the piercing site. (2) There were no significant differences in gender, body weight and gestational age between the experimental group and the control group [male: 48.3% vs. 46.7%, body weight (kg): 1.86±0.06 vs. 1.82±0.06, gestational age (weeks): 31.33±0.31 vs. 32.25±0.34, all P > 0.05]. Compared with the control group, the catheterization time of experimental group was significantly shortened (minutes: 21.30±0.43 vs. 30.02±0.64, P < 0.01), the number of limb protrusion was significantly reduced (0 time: 70.0% vs. 33.3%, 1 time: 26.7% vs. 50.0%, P < 0.01), and the number of participants in catheterization operation was significantly reduced (people: 1.77±0.06 vs. 2.37±0.06, P < 0.01). The frequency of hypothermia in experimental group was significantly lower than that in the control group [6.12% (6/98) vs. 26.50% (31/117), χ2 = 15.536, P < 0.01]. The warming fixation device for premature infants is convenient to use, which can effectively shorten the tube placement time, save human resources, and reduce the incidence of hypothermia in premature infants.

A Wide Range of Possible Expression from Tezuka's Manga to Gekiga , from Azuma Hideo to Doraemon

ABSTRACT: In his seminal work Manga wa naze omoshiroi no ka: sono hyōgen to bunpō ( Why Is Manga So Interesting?: Its Expression and Grammar , 1997), Natsume Fusanosuke (1950–) refined his ideas for his "theory of manga expression" ( manga hyōgenron ). In the present translation, which consists of chapters 3 and 4 from that work, the author describes changes that took place in the expression of faces and bodies from the time of Tezuka Osamu ( Astro Boy ) through the gekiga revolution in the 1960s and 1970s up into the 1980s and 1990s. Looking at creative character designs by a diverse range of artists, including Saitō Takao, Azuma Hideo, and Fujiko F. Fujio ( Doraemon ), Natsume argues that changes over time indicate the development of the industry's studio system as well as vacillations in Japanese society and readership up into the 1990s. To do so, Natsume demonstrates his unique method of manga analysis by "copying" and playing with those pictures to further drive home his point.

Robo sapiens japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation by Jennifer Robertson

Reviewed by: Robo sapiens japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation by Jennifer Robertson Rodrigo Ochigame (bio) Robo sapiens japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation By Jennifer Robertson. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. 260. "Robotics" is a notoriously difficult field to define and delimit. The word "robot" has highly specific connotations in popular culture, shaped by science fiction ever since Czech writers Karel and Josef Čapek coined it in their 1920 play to describe artificial humans serving as tireless workers. Robotics is also a broad field of professional research and development in academic, commercial, and military institutions. It encompasses such a wide range of products, from Mars rovers to kitchen appliances, that it is almost impossible to specify what distinguishes them from many other machines. [End Page 591] This tension between popular and professional, broad and specific understandings is central to Jennifer Robertson's anthropological study of robotics in Japan, Robo sapiens japanicus. The book focuses on humanoid—and, to a lesser extent, animaloid—robots, particularly those designed to interact with humans in everyday life, for example in households, retail stores, and religious temples. As Robertson acknowledges, such robots hardly represent the larger field of robotics, only accounting for a small fraction of research and development. The industrial and military robots dominating most investments are neither humanoid nor designed for interaction with nonspecialist users. Nevertheless, studying the subfield of humanoid robotics helps us understand the wider field, especially as it operates in Japan. Humanoids play an oversized role in the marketing and popular representation of robotics. In Japan, this is not merely thanks to public relations tactics but largely reflects engineers' priorities. The author argues that humanoid robotics is more significant for Japanese engineers than for their counterparts in the United States and elsewhere. Unlike in the United States, where most research is funded by the military, robotics in Japan is oriented toward a civilian consumer market despite the state's recent attempts to reinterpret its "peace" constitution and create a military market for robotics. Importantly, Robertson is interested in how robots' design reflects cultural anxieties and visions of the future in contemporary Japan. She demonstrates convincingly that robots are imagined as solutions to perceived social problems, such as population aging, labor shortages, declining marriage and fertility rates, and also as preserving the patriarchal extended family, particularly by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's nationalist government. The author conducted fieldwork and archival research between 2006 and 2017, coinciding roughly with the two Abe administrations. She offers critical readings of official documents, including a peculiar "fictional ethnography" written by government policy-makers, which depicts a heteronormative family with a male-gendered humanoid robot. This fictive future family illustrates the "coexistence" of humans and robots. To show how Japan embraces human-robot coexistence, Robertson points not only to public discourse but also to the adoption of robots for providing care, companionship, and entertainment. She contrasts this with the more common vision of human-robot "convergence" in the United States and Europe (like anxieties about technological unemployment or "singularity"). Her articulation of Japan's cultural particularities is generally careful and compelling. For instance, Robertson skillfully guides readers through Japanese conceptions of "nature" (shizen), which animate robots as "living things" in the Shintō universe. She also demystifies the theory of the "uncanny valley," explaining how most interpretations have diverged from Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori's original 1970 formulation. However, the analysis sometimes rests on less convincing depictions of Japanese cultural differences, such as the "mostly favorable acceptance [End Page 592] among Japanese of things mechanical, including robots, from the 1920s onward," and the claim that "the general trend in Japanese popular media and culture has been to characterize robots as benign and human-friendly" even before the 1960s (p. 5). The author mentions only a few examples, centering on the cartoon series Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), and draws sharp contrasts with American and European works. But her selections are not necessarily representative. The author could have just as easily picked dystopian representations of robots in Japanese media, like some of Unno Jūza's 1930s science fiction novels. Euro-American representations of benign and friendly robots are similarly abundant. Overall...

Value Analysis and Comparison of Animation Markets in America, Japan and China

From the invention of the Fenech mirror in 1832 to the release of Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in 1906, from Astro Boy, Space Battleship Yamato, to Neon Genesis Evangelion, from Toy Story to Frozen II, after nearly two centuries of development, The animation industry in various countries has become mature and formed different production technologies and industrial chains: the 3D animation industry led by the United States and the 2D animation industry led by Japan have overwhelming power over the global animation market. With China's active cultural output and capital investment in the world, the animation industry, as one of the best channels, has begun to develop rapidly and become one of the major animation-producing countries. This article will analyze the market value of the above three major animation-producing countries in recent years, elaborate on their respective characteristics and compare them, to try to analyze the trend of the animation market in the future.

1960 YILINDAN GÜNÜMÜZE ANİMASYON FİLMLERDE MİMARLIK, KENT VE MEKÂN: GELECEK GÖRÜNDÜ

Ever since the first manmade object entered space in the 1950s, the human imagination has been captivated by the future. Nowhere is this clearer than in cinema, whose representations of the future are forced to reckon with the topic of design, especially as related to the city, urban space (fictional space), interiors, and, naturally, architecture. Since both cinema and architecture involve a focus on notions of human experience, movement, time, and visuality, the two fields are intimately related. This relationship is the starting point for this article, which uses the lens of fictional space to analyze the interaction between architecture and cinema during the First Space Age (1957–91) and the Second Space Age (1991–present), including the social, cultural, and theoretical aspects of that relationship, with a particular focus on representations of interior space and urban design. To analyze this interaction, we employ a qualitative research methodology and a historiographical lens that emphasizes the evolutionary process of the representation of the future in architecture and cinema. Because only the imagination limits human fictional space and the technology, materials, and spatial qualities within it, we draw the particular cases we examine in this article from animated series and films (The Jetsons; Astro Boy; Transformers: The Movie; My Life as a Teenage Robot; Love, Death &amp;amp; Robots; and WALL-E), which we select and analyze through stratified random sampling. These particular cases were chosen with an eye to their representation of the First and Second Space Age and their ability to provide grounds for comparison within and between the two eras. Additionally, the fact that few of these have yet been addressed by researchers makes their analysis here another of this study’s contributions to the scholarly literature. Because fictional space in cinema, its reflection in architecture, urban space, and interior design, and representation are critical themes for this article, we employ Stuart Hall’s representation theory and underline the benefits of his constructivist representation approach. The animated series and films dealt with here offer diverse perspectives on the topic. We examine the sorts of representations of the future they employ, while also dividing them by period to ascertain differences between these representations in the First and Second Space Age. By comparing the cases under study, we identify different urban and architectural approaches unique to each period that reflect its social and cultural context, theoretical horizons, and consumption habits. In doing so, we reveal that each period has its own representational language, with the First Space Age marked by an emphasis on physical space and equipment that is replaced in the Second Space Age by an emphasis on changes in social life. The examples that reflect the First Space Age emphasize futuristic, space-themed details in interior design, while those reflecting the Second Space Age content themselves with today’s technology and current materials and represent the theme of the future instead mostly through façade organizations and urban patterns. Furthermore, the samples reflecting the Second Space Age introduce a new type of future in which humans are positioned as passive and technology, technological devices, and equipment are positioned as active. Cases from this later era reckon more deeply with the role of the technology that is ostensibly meant to serve humans, eschewing the earlier emphasis on design variety, specifically interior design, in favor of grappling with and developing a perspective on the theme of the future. These differences are a reflection of the different social, cultural, and economic conditions and background of the First Space Age and Second Space Age, revealing the reciprocal interaction of the historical conditions and the particular approaches of cinema and architecture. Cinema is influenced by the social, cultural, and architectural features of its era. And, as a powerful mass media tool with the power to spread trends and developments across the world, it also has an important impact on its era. Therefore, cinema, architecture, and the facts of social life nourish one another and, as a result, evolve together.

I Want to Create a World Like That of Astro Boy, Where People and Computers Share the Same Sound Space and Can Freely Cooperate with Each Other

I Want to Create a World Like That of Astro Boy, Where People and Computers Share the Same Sound Space and Can Freely Cooperate with Each Other

The Manifestation of Classism in the Astro Boy Animation

Utopia is an appropriate word to describe about the ideal, worthy, and perfect life depicted in a city called Metro City in the Astro Boy animation. This study examines the animation movie Astro Boy and how the world that is being told in the works could be defined as Utopian world like it is being described through the movie. The purpose of this study is to proof whether the setting successfully conveyed the Utopian world or whether it still has some deficiency as Utopian is known as impossibly perfect world to be created. The corpus of this study is the movie of Astro Boy focuses on the setting and relationship between human kind and robots. This research uses a qualitative descriptive method which describes social phenomena by conducting in-depth understanding and analysis. The aims of this research is to analyze more deeply the picture contained in the animation, which shows how humans and robots are able to create a new world also coexist. Moreover, the conceptual framework that will be use is the theory of Capitalism and Classism in order to examine the setting of Utopian world.

Pollution as a Paradigm: Property, Dignity, and Absorption in Poth and Tezuka

Pollution, this article suggests, challenges the fundamental structural premises of contemporary state institutions such as the law. These institutions are based on the premise of human exceptionalism via the construction of a human-nature divide. This divide only allows one point of connection between human and nature: the human ability to absorb nature as property. Such metaphorical understandings of absorption become a problem as soon as the physical human body is faced with a situation in which we constantly absorb pollution (e.g. nitrogen oxides, microplastic, ionizing radiation, but also other life forms such as airborne viruses). As a result, contemporary institutions are ill-equipped to deal with pollution as a central element of the contemporary human condition.&#x0D; This article suggests that comics are a model for rethinking these categorical issues productively and sustainably. By using visual elements, comics have already been able to reframe and recontextualize categorical premises such as the human-nature divide that otherwise tend to be reproduced in critical theory and the law. To make this point for the potential of a new categorical language that centrally draws on visual elements in text, the article uses two central examples from Japan and Germany: Osamu Tezuka's story "Space Snow Leopard" from the Astro Boy series, and Chlodwig Poth's short comic "Jörg the Limelight Hog."

Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture: From Crime Fighting Robots to Dueling Pocket Monsters

Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture: From Crime Fighting Robots to Dueling Pocket Monsters

でんきの礎 検定 「鉄腕アトム～国産初の連続長編アニメーション放送～」

でんきの礎 検定 「鉄腕アトム～国産初の連続長編アニメーション放送～」

Suburban Samurai and Neighbourhood Ninja: Shintarō and Postwar Australia

In the 1960s and early 1970s a wave of Japanese programs were broadcast on Australian television. Among these were anime such as Astro Boy, Gigantor and Kimba the White Lion. For Australian viewers of these programs the Japanese connection was not obvious. However, in contrast and airing around the same time was the black-and-white series The Samurai. Clearly Japanese, it was a chambara-type period drama complete with samurai and ninja battling it out in the streets and countryside of Edo-period Japan and featuring backdrops of villages, shrines and castles. The Samurai was extremely popular, attracting a large audience of Australian viewers. However, the show also attracted controversy and criticism from the public. The show and the reaction it created provide an opportunity to explore and comment on aspects of Australian social history and Australia’s relationship with Japan. I argue that The Samurai was an early form of transnational popular culture, and it introduced a type of ‘oriental cool’ that spectacularly disrupted postwar Australia’s perception of Japan as a wartime enemy.

Osamu Moet Moso: Imagining Lines of Eroticism in Akihabara

Osamu Moet Moso:Imagining Lines of Eroticism in Akihabara Patrick W. Galbraith (bio) September 18, 2010: the Tokyo Anime Center in Akihabara is hosting a preevent for a new exhibition on Tezuka Osamu. I walk in expecting to see a tribute to the father of modern manga and anime, a man deified as a "god," but find instead Osamu Moet Moso (Osamu moetto mosso). The exhibition claims as its mission "to extract and embody Akiba-like elements contained in Tezuka Osamu's works."1 This seems to mean extracting "moe elements," or those elements that trigger an affective response in fans, from Tezuka's characters and aligning them with popular manga, anime, and games in Akihabara, a hotspot of otaku consumption and culture.2 Among those contributing illustrations to the exhibition are Itō Noizi, Kei and Yoshizaki Mine, known for their bishōjo (cute girl) characters.3 In line with contemporary and local tastes-and despite the involvement of Tezuka Productions, a company entrusted with preserving the creator's legacy-many of the characters on display look more erotic than wholesome. I stop in front of a rendition of Astro Boy, noting that his red boots have been elongated to look almost like "knee socks." This is unmistakably the work of Pop, whose focus on the thighs has been a trademark since his debut with Moetan (2003). Even a cursory examination [End Page 279] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Tezuka Osamu's Astro Boy character illustrated by POP, famous for his work on Moetan. [End Page 280] of signage in Akihabara demonstrates wide support for Pop, but his sexualized girl characters have also drawn criticism from mainstream and global audiences. Nonetheless, one of his illustrations has made its way into the Tokyo Anime Center, a tourism hub and showcase for Japanese popular culture, in the form of Tezuka Osamu's most beloved character. A global icon has been redrawn in the style popular in Akihabara. But Osamu Moet Moso did not stop there. After the pre-event, it traveled to Marui One in Shinjuku, Printemps in Ginza, the Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum in Takarazuka and so on (Figure 2). The more it traveled, the more attention it gathered, connecting unlikely sites and audiences. Printings of Pop's Astro Boy were sold at both high art galleries and Comiket. Even as elements of Akihabara moved across Japan along Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Pamphlet for Osamu Moet Moso exhibition at the Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum in Takarazuka in 2011. Used by permission of Tezuka Productions Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. [End Page 281] with the exhibition, Tezuka was connected ever more intimately to Akihabara as otaku saw elements of their favorite characters in his work. This exposure to an Astro Boy made strange disrupted assumptions about Tezuka and opened up new possibilities. In Osamu Moet Moso and Akihabara, one could comment that "Astro Boy is practically the original moe!"4 Akihabara is not the source of any specific mode of representation. Rather, in the 1970s and 1980s, otaku actively appropriated from mainstream manga and anime and formulated a style in fan works, niche magazines, and related markets. As these elements converge in Akihabara, it has become a frame for retrospectively recognizing stylistic antecedents in Tezuka. In this article, drawing on personal and published interviews, I reconstruct the discourse integrating Tezuka into the history of the "cute erotic" (kawaii ero) aesthetic in Japan. Philip Brophy states that the "hyper-kawaii face" of Japanese manga appears equally in "saccharine kiddie stories and extreme pornographic scenarios," but we must remember that this was not always the case. Contemporary historicizing of cute eroticism begins with people like Tezuka telling mature stories using manga forms (as opposed to gekiga), moves through the mainstreaming of shōjo manga in the 1970s, and ends with the rise of fans and artists responding to and appropriating Tezuka and shōjo manga characters.5 Due to issues of space, and the theme of this issue of Mechademia, I will for the most part focus on Tezuka in this article and leave the discussion of shōjo manga for a later date. Rather...

Tezuka's Anime Revolution in Context

Tezuka's Anime Revolution in Context Jonathan Clements (bio) The broadcast of Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu) on New Year's Day 1963 is generally taken to mark the beginning of a new age in Japanese animation.1 There are, however, some dissenters who argue that Tezuka could never have created his animation company Mushi Production (Mushi Pro) so swiftly were it not for the Tōei studio labor pool available to poach from,2 or even that the anime industry required no "Great Man" to transform itself, and that had Tezuka not made Astro Boy, someone else would have surely produced something similar by the mid-1960s.3 The Tōei studio certainly provided an inspiration and an impetus for Tezuka, as it was there in the 1950s that the subject of Astro Boy on television was first discussed, during Tezuka's time at Tōei storyboarding the cartoon Saiyūki (1960, released in the United States as Alakazam the Great). During a post-Sputnik fad for futurism,4 animators mooted the possibility of a short theatrical Astro Boy film, or perhaps a TV series, but any discussion of television soon favored a look inspired by kamishibai-in other words, a story read out over still images with minimal zooms and pans. The director Shirakawa Daisaku recalled a discussion about the possibility of a truly animated series, ridiculed by the veteran animator Yamamoto Sanae as an absurd idea, [End Page 214] impossible even with the manpower of the entire animation industry.5 The idea of animation was dropped, and Astro Boy appeared on TV instead as a live-action series running for sixty-five episodes from March 1959 to May 1960.6 Notably, however, the "live-action" series featured an animated credit sequence, clearly prefiguring the look of the later anime. The production company Matsuzaki Films subcontracted the animation work to the Murata Eiga Seisakusho, a film company established by Murata Yasuji after the collapse of the Nihon Manga Eigasha in the 1940s.7 Tezuka was unable to resist the temptation to become a TV animation producer in his own right—an ambition to which he had often alluded.8 However, the production issues seemed insurmountable. A Limited Animation Revolution? Assuming a weekly output of "thirty minutes" of Tōei-quality animation, Tezuka's assistant Yamamoto Eiichi calculated an improbably huge staff requirement of three thousand employees and a budget of between 60 and 70 million yen. The entire population of animators then working in Japan would only account for 20 percent of the necessary labor force, and it would be too expensive for any television channel to afford. Even with standard deductions to make space for ads, sponsorship announcements, and recyclable credits dragging the actual new weekly animation to a more manageable 25 minutes, "limited" animation was the only option, although the general sense among Japanese animators in 1962 was that Hanna-Barbera and UPA's limited animation from the United States was of poor quality, and had been poorly received.9 Tezuka slashed costs to a mere 2.5 million yen per episode through a number of drastic measures, telling his staff that this amounted not to "full" animation but "limited" anime. Such is the commonly held chronology, although we need only look at Mushi Pro's previous Tales of the Street Corner (1962, Aru machikado no monogatari) to see that Tezuka was already working with clearly "limited" animation more than a year before he was supposedly compelled to do so by the strictures of the Astro Boy production.10 At no point, however, did Tezuka define what this notional "anime" actually was. His staff came to regard it as a style, perceived as opposite to what was regarded as the "realistic" animation style of the Tōei studio. Posterity has recorded a series of elements, much cited among anime scholars, and first [End Page 215] found in the semifictionalized autobiography of one of Mushi Pro's founding staff, Yamamoto Eiichi.11 These include shooting "on threes" (only using eight frames of the available 24 per second); using single still frames for prolonged periods; pulling one cel behind another to imply movement; using loops of animation and recycled...

(Un)making the “Korean” Astro Boy Atom: National Manhwa, Korean Pop Art, and Cultural Hybridity

(Un)making the “Korean” Astro Boy Atom: National Manhwa, Korean Pop Art, and Cultural Hybridity

An Algebra by Don Bogen

An Algebra by Don Bogen

The Greatest Robot on Earth. Vol. 3 of Astro Boy by Tezuka OsamuPluto. Vols. 1-7 (of 8) by Urasawa Naoki, Tezuka Osamu

The Greatest Robot on Earth. Vol. 3 of Astro Boy by Tezuka OsamuPluto. Vols. 1-7 (of 8) by Urasawa Naoki, Tezuka Osamu

God of comics: Osamu Tezuka and the creation of post-World War II manga

Cartoonist Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989) is the single most important figure in Japanese post-World War II comics. During his four-decade career, Tezuka published more than 150,000 pages of comics, produced animation films, wrote essays and short fiction, and earned a Ph.D. in medicine. Along with creating the character Astro Boy (Mighty Atom in Japan), he is best known for establishing story comics as the mainstream genre in the Japanese comic book industry, creating narratives with cinematic flow and complex characters. This style influenced all subsequent Japanese output. God of Comics chronicles Tezuka's life and works, placing his creations both in the cultural climate and in the history of Japanese comics. The book emphasizes Tezuka's use of intertextuality. His works are filled with quotations from other texts and cultural products, such as film, theater, opera, and literature. Often, these quoted texts and images bring with them a world of meanings, enriching the narrative. Tezuka also used stock characters and recurrent visual jokes as a way of creating a coherent world that encompasses all of his works. God of Comics includes close analysis of Tezuka's lesser-known works, many of which have never been translated into English. It offers one of the first in-depth studies of Tezuka's oeuvre to be published in English.

Anytime, Anywhere

Japan's first weekly, 30-minute animated TV series, Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), is not only commonly regarded as the first instance of what is now known as `anime'; it is also regarded as the point of emergence of the commercial phenomenon of character-based merchandizing. Interesting enough, it is not so much Tetsuwan Atomu the TV series as the practice of including Atomu stickers as premiums in the candy maker Meiji Seika's chocolate packages that really ignited the character merchandizing boom. The key to the success of the stickers — along with the use of the already popular figure of Atomu — was their ability to be stuck anywhere, and seen anytime. This anytime-anywhere potential of the stickers arguably led to the new communicational media environment and the cross-media connections that characterize the anime system and the force which drives it: the character. Part historical, part theoretical, this article will explore the thesis that it was the `medium' of stickers that led to the development of the character-based multimedia environment that is a key example of — and perhaps even a precursor to — the ubiquity of media that is the theme of this journal issue.

On the Anticipation of Ethical Conflicts between Humans and Robots in Japanese Mangas

The following contribution examines the influence of mangas and animes on the social perception and cultural understanding of robots in Japan. Part of it is the narrow interaction between pop culture and Japanese robotics: Some examples shall serve to illustrate spill-over effects between popular robot stories and the recent development of robot technologies in Japan. The example of the famous Astro boy comics will be used to help investigate the ethical conflicts between humans and robots thematised in Japanese mangas. With a view to ethical problems the stories shall be subsumed under different categorical aspects.

"He wanted to be just like Bruce Lee": African Americans, Kung Fu Theater and Cultural Exchange at the Margins

In Eastern Standard Time: A Guide to Asian Influence on American Culture from Astro Boy to Zen Buddhism, Jeff Yang, Diana Gan, and the staff of A. Magazine make the effusively upbeat claim that: