86-year-old illustrator and painter Seitaro Kuroda appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on October 1st. He spoke about manga artist Osamu Tezuka, illustrator Makoto Wada, and his memories of his late mother.
Kuroda said of his first encounter with Tezuka's work, "After the war, I went with my mother to the ruined city of Osaka to look for things to sell to people. At that time, I saw a pile of mandarin orange boxes in the burnt-out city, and it looked to me like the tops of them were glowing. I wondered what they were, so I went in and found many of Osamu Tezuka's manga books, including 'Shin Takarajima' and 'Metropolis', lined up, and as soon as I saw them I knew this was it." He revealed, "I only met Osamu Tezuka once, but he is an important person to me. Tezuka Productions even allowed me to draw (Astro Boy)."
As a child, he dreamed of going to America. He heard that there was a 102-story building in New York, and decided, "Okay, I'll go up to the top of the Empire State Building." A decade later, when he was in his twenties, he took a ride in the bottom compartment of a US cargo and passenger ship to San Francisco, and from there he took a bus for 45 days to reach New York.
"I wanted to let people know about that trip, so I sent (my drawings) to a Japanese publisher, with no promises or anything. (Illustrator) Wada Makoto saw them and said, 'This Kuroda guy is interesting,' so he took me on," he says. "Wada was a very important person to me. Now I live my life through things like paintings. And that's because I met such a person."
He also said, "I feel like my mother is watching me from somewhere." He said that they were constantly fighting from a young age, but "my mother was worried. She would say, 'If you keep going like this, you'll kill someone one day. Have you ever imagined something like that?' I replied, 'Of course not.' 'It's terrible for someone to kill another, so please don't live your life with that in mind.'" He said he always cherished that.
