Anime columnist Andrew Osmond profiles the great artist, famed for ‘Galaxy Express 999,’ ‘Captain Harlock’ and ‘Space Battleship Yamato,’ and offers a glimpse of what’s on show.
Leiji Matsumoto took fans to outer space on pirate ships, battleships, and steam trains. Two years after he died in February 2023, he’s the subject of an extensive exhibition in Tokyo’s Roppongi district. The exhibition’s full name is “The Galaxy Express 999” 50th Anniversary Project Leiji Matsumoto Exhibition - Journey of Creation. You’ll find it on the “Tokyo City View,” on the 52nd floor of the Mori Tower until September 7, from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m daily, with the last admission at 8 p.m. Adult tickets are 2,400 yen (2,200 yen if purchased online). The closest subway station is Roppongi station on the Oedo and Hibiya lines.
Matsumoto may be known for fantastic vessels to the stars, but his childhood was grounded in war. He was born in 1938; unlike Ghibli’s Takahata and Miyazaki, he didn’t experience bombing as a child, but he saw the poverty and hunger of Japan’s postwar years. He suffered personal tragedy in his early 20’s, when his sister died in an accident. Like the manga of Osamu Tezuka, Matsumoto’s designs look cartoony, and there’s playfulness and whimsy in his stories. But there’s also a strong awareness of death, a tragic sensibility and spirituality, and no assured happy endings.
Matsumoto started drawing manga as the medium evolved into a mass industry, without any of the restrictions of American comics. Born Akira Matsumoto, he started using the pen name Leiji Matsumoto in 1965. “Leiji” can be read as “Reiji,” Zero Man or Warrior Zero. However, as Helen McCarthy explains in a book anthology, Leiji Matsumoto: Essays on the Manga and Anime Legend, there’s more to the choice of the letter “L.” Matsumoto wanted to refer both to lions and also to Lion L, a manga character he loved from his childhood.
In Japan, his first “breakout” success was 1971’s Otoko Oidon, or “I Am a Man,” about the poverty he’d seen first-hand. The manga’s hero is a hard-up student, struggling to pass his college exams. A year later, Matsumoto created Gun Frontier, a comedy about two outlaws in the Wild West. (It became an anime series in 2002.) The hero was a swordsman called Tochiro; his ally was a wine-drinking sharpshooter named Harlock. Both characters would be reincarnated in Matsumoto’s stories many times over.
Then Matsumoto was brought onto a new anime project, which in one early form was about a massive asteroid which is hollowed out and turned into a spaceship. By the time it was broadcast in 1974, it was about something very different: Space Battleship Yamato. The Yamato is as real (and legendary) in Japan as the Titanic is in Britain. It was one of Japan’s greatest warships, sunk in 1945. In the series, it’s remade as a space vessel, sent on an epic interstellar mission to save an Earth bombarded by aliens.
Initially, the series was little-noticed in Japan, except by a small group of fervent fans. That fandom grew with a 1977 movie version, and today Yamato is counted as one of the most influential anime series in history. Hideaki Anno swears by it. In America, it was dubbed in 1979 as Star Blazers and picked up its own small core of fans. And so American anime fandom began, a decade before Akira.
Yamato is one of three epic franchises that made Matsumoto’s name. The others debuted as manga in 1977, with anime versions following close after. The scarred hero of Space Pirate Captain Harlock presides over a crew that mixes humans and aliens in his skull-and-bones ship. Fighting and defending Earth, Harlock is a maverick hero who obeys no code but his own.
In Galaxy Express 999 (the number is read “three-nine”), a spud-faced boy called Tetsuro rides the titular space train. He’s accompanied by Maetel, a beautiful, slender and motherly woman, who was partly inspired by Marianne Hold, a German actress. Maetel is an archetypal Matsumoto female. She looks very much like Emeraldas, a space pirate who appears in her own Matsumoto stories, and sometimes teams with Captain Harlock. According to at least some stories, Emeraldas and Maetel are sisters.
However, Matsumoto fans know the perils of getting hung up on story consistency in the “Leijiverse.” Yamato, Harlock and 999 all had umpteen sequels, remakes and reworkings, and it’s often ambiguous which is which. The stories changed through decades across manga, TV series, movies and videos.
Captain Harlock was shown in France, renamed Albator, seeding yet more young fans. They included two boys called Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Honem-Christo. Decades later, Matsumoto would design and supervise music videos for their songs; the duo was now called Daft Punk. The resulting movie, Interstella 5555 in 2003, may be the part of the Leijiverse that American anime fans are likeliest to know today.
If you want to see the richness of Matsumoto’s legacy, you need only go to France, and see the anime shops and cons full of Albator (Harlock) box-sets and merchandise. Or you can read about early American anime fandom, and the huge role that Star Blazers (Yamato) played in it. Or if you’re in Japan, at Odaiba, an artificial island in Tokyo Bay that’s like the set of a 1970s sci-fi anime, you may notice a sightseeing boat that looks for all the world like a movie spaceship, with sleek curves and shiny windows. No prizes for guessing who designed it.
On Crunchyroll, you can find the 113 episodes of the 1978 Galaxy Express 999 TV series; the 2006 The Galaxy Railways series, which uses similar ideas; and the spectacularly retold Space Battleship Yamato anime, which was screened both in cinemas and on television in the 2010s.
As with my report on the Isao Takahata exhibition three weeks ago, all photographs of the exhibition were taken by my friend Carlos Nakajima. My grateful thanks also go to Miri Yasuda of Kyodo P.R. Corporation.
