Panel from Push Man and Other Stories
(Yoshihiro Tatsumi: June 10, 1935 - March 7, 2015)
When you move to the metropolis, and you don’t know where you are, and you don’t have any work, I think that that can be a very alienating experience. Furthermore, I think that, when you’re living in those conditions, you start to envy other people that are around you, you start to imagine that everyone around you is living a better life than you are. I think that that’s a basic condition of living in the city. And when you’re with just one other person, and you envy them, you can just not see them. That’s fine. But that becomes very difficult when you are living in the city.
- From The Comics Journal
I tend to write about everything that’s happening in Japan. Socially, I’m inspired by that. Even if they’re good or bad incidents, I find myself interested in them, and then create stories. So before I write something, I’m always determined to include the things that are happening in society at the time.
So after the war, American troops came in, and got things settled in Japan. I drew this image of a Japanese man pulling a rickshaw – and there‘s a drunk American soldier waving around a bottle of alcohol around, getting kind of crazy. So just in that one panel, it sums up the exact situation of Japan after the war in that one panel.
- From About Manga
In Japan they weren't really making a lot of films at that time, so I watched a lot of European and American films. I pretty much watched everything from overseas. In American films, the bad guy always gets it in the end and justice wins. It was fun to watch American films, but everything was just so good, though. I thought there weren't very many people that could actually live like that.
In European films, the bad guy wins and justice loses out. That's when I started creating manga, where sometimes the bad wins and the good loses.
- From The Star
