I legally married Black Jack

Alabaster (James Block) from Tezuka Osamu's Alabaster 💀🔪

#DSC 2022-12-12 ALABASTER

#DSC 2022-12-13 DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO

The English Alabaster official translation made it more racist for no reason

Uhh yeah...

I post it here so more people will have awareness about this.

It's this edition of Alabaster, published by Platinum Manga. There are two volumes

I purchased it last year in November i think. I didn't know much about it otherwise i prolly would have just uh. Read It Some Other Way.

Well, if you didn't know, this is one of Tezuka's more "controversial" stories. cuz it suuuucks bad. It sucked so bad he didn't want it printed into tankobon in the first place, but here we are with it in my American hands.

(from memory) The story is about a black American athlete who gets racially profiled and later accused of rape by a white woman so he gets put in jail because he is black. He becomes friends with a scientist and so when he got out he makes his own skin transparent so he won't get racially profiled anymore. Also the famous Tezuka Star Rock is here and he is white and Ultra Racist and he rapes a girl.

So yeah, pretty shitty writing on Tezuka's part. That's why he hates it, and it almost ruined the character of Rock for him. Fans at the time also thought this depiction was untasteful.

So why translate it to English? I don't know... I don't know who this would appeal to compared to like, anything else from Tezuka's enormous library but again here we are.

Now with the context, how'd they make it more racist than necessary? I think these images speak for themselves

There was no reason to use the n word as there was a more accurate translation yet they still used it anyway? This is just really confusing to me. I feel like someone nonblack just wanted to type the n word and get away with it.

Also the icing on the cake is in the back of both volumes, there's this page

Who the hell is this? I looked up their name and found no one relevant. Why is this printed inside the book? Why is this person being wanted for possessing books?

Being persucuted for owning books... this has never really been the case in the USA. yes banned books are a thing, but you're not going to be send to jail for them. Coupled with the fact that this book was NEVER challenged, NEVER banned, just offensive... PRINCESS KNIGHT was more challenged in the USA than this book! What the fuck!

This printing is from 2015 but it wasn't acceptable then and it isn't acceptable now. It's fine to publish Tezuka's books as-is, racism and all but don't treat it all "teehee so problematic!" like this, it's awful and shows you don't understand the severity of the issues present within the work and in real life.

Honestly, having Alabaster be repeatedly republished and still get attention feels wrong. There have been multiple times Tezuka has stated he regrets making Alabaster and wanted it shelved.

In the postscript for the Osamu Tezuka Complete Manga Works release, he said. "I wanted to write a grotesque and lewd work like Edogawa Rampo's 'The Beast in the Shadows' or 'One Dimensional Man,' but it turned out to be a thoroughly unsalvageable and nihilistic work. I am not a fan of the work that I did."

He listed it as one of his “pet peeve” works and one he disliked. He requested it to only be republished once, as part of his “Osamu Tezuka Complete Manga Works” collection in 1978, and then let it be forgotten.

It feels wrong that this is one of the few Osamu Tezuka manga that’s officially translated into English. There are many other works (such as Rainbow Parakeet, Midnight, and Zero man to name a few) that are seen much more positively and had more of an impact that don’t have any official English translations. Some of them have fan translations, others don’t, but they all don’t have official physical English releases. Yet, Alabaster does.

To put it bluntly: This translation is bad. When you’re a translator, you want to keep your translation as accurate to the original as possible. There’s going to be times where certain words and phrases are harder to translate, but you never want to insert words or phrases that weren’t there unless it’s absolutely necessary to the translation work. I tracked down the original Japanese panel that op used in this post and translated it, thank you to @thelilithmachine​ for checking if my translations were accurate.

The speech bubble in the top right corner uses the kanji 黒人 (kokujin) which directly translates to black man or black person. This is a generic term and isn’t a slur, its the exact same thing as saying “black man”. There is absolutely no reason to use the n-word here, as it’s not in the original text and makes it needlessly offensive. I’m shocked Tezuka Productions approved of this translation.

I don’t know why a wanted poster for, I assume one of the editors or translators, was added into this release. I also don’t know why Tezuka Productions approved of this as well. I guess making a manga needlessly more racist makes you wanted for “challenging literature”.

It’s one thing to want to preserve a work an author didn’t like, you can educate people on it and say why it was disliked in something like the manga museum. It’s another thing to continually republish, translate, and make adaptations of it for the sole reason of money. I know this is what they’re doing, because there’s absolutely no other reason to be making an Alabaster musical.

Yes, Alabaster the musical is very much real. Even without the offensive material the original manga has, it’s an incredibly weird manga to be making a musical based on. This is a spit in the face to Osamu Tezuka. You’re against the original authors wishes to retire it and actively reminding people that it exists.