Disorders, Disputes and other factors in Star of the Giants

Disorders in Star of the Giants are mostly ambiguous and not much realistically representable, partly due to one of its two fairly infamous creators trying not to offend his audience and partly because the true scope of an actual disorder is so hard to comprehend with. 

Look at Hyuma Hoshi’s dad, Ittetsu Hoshi from Star of the Giants; he might have been a Cold Heartedly Scary Dude by 60s anime and manga standards at least in the first part (and definitely one of the scariest and most complex parents in postwar manga and anime history), but he did have a few good intentions in mind. It’s mostly due to the fact that, even though he’s often manipulative and cold (the chances are likely that he was raised mostly by his horrible former friends, who probably didn’t even care about him for the most part), he’s trying to stay alive due to how WW2 seriously affected his life, and often in a rather bad way. His son isn’t always the all time best and could indeed be mentally traumatised when his father’s tactics went too far, but his chances of survival are still not as bad (along with his older sister), since one part of which is due to himself being quite a rebel; although another thing is that his brain is surprisingly resilient given the rather sour initial tone of the home situation. 

However, there are much worse parents than the still complicated (though rather over-criticised albeit with a fairly good reason) Ittetsu Hoshi. As South Korea wasn’t truly a modern and mostly independent country until the summer of 1948, I think it’s very likely that he was a half-South Korean born at the very end of World War 1 in November 3 1918, a decade before Osamu Tezuka was also born. 

Even before that, Hyuma’s own plausible Ryukyuan grandmother would have been just as bad as her middle son Ittetsu, but suffering under much worse circumstances. Named Chinatsu Yamamuro, she also met Ittetsu’s actual Zainichi Korean (who’s her ex boyfriend’s youngest employee) in 1912 (she was about 30 years old in that year). Said father, Zainichi Korean Sanpei Hoshi, did his best to protect his only three sons (both a singleton and fraternal twins, mind you) from terrorist attacks at all costs, primarily during Kyōhei’s and Akiyoshi’s first 14 years of existence in this super horrible world. 

Given how much worse that might’ve been than perhaps even Ittetsu’s already messed up parenthood, Sanpei’s wife Chinatsu had to be imprisoned for wrecking propagandistic statues by a ton of unrelated fashies in 1933, meaning that she definitely suffered from being locked up by hypocritical extremist terrorists under a fashy government. With Kyōhei (renamed as Ittetsu Hoshi under beyond messed up foster care by his paternal aunt, a calculating terrorist born in Jeolla) being the middle son, he seems to look slightly more like Sanpei, while his younger brother Akiyoshi looks somewhat more like Chinatsu.

 

Given that they’ve been forcibly trained by their similarly dysfunctional oldest brother Yuu Hoshi and his fellow messed up friends for much of their early life, it’s pretty telling when he indeed had to get them out of fear from their way too aggressive and bold hypocrite of a Zainichi Korean aunt (perhaps because she already was connected with her husband and his fashy terrorist friends for a long time!) before WW2 had even begun. 

While Star of the Giants is a very sad yet rather touching story about familial dysfunction junction, it is also a part of a plausible dynastic saga, which would’ve been fully finished when the very troubled Ikki Kajiwara (aka Asaki Takamori) was still alive (albeit sometimes in prison for a crapload of infamously troublesome conflicts, raging mental health outbursts and many other agitating factors) until 1987, which was when he took his own life, much to the increasingly retroactive dismay of almost everyone in parts of sub-Siberian Asia. But a decade after that, something way (too far) worse came through; his half-Taiwanese Hokkien daughter, with the sometimes controversial Ms Pai Bing Bing nonetheless, had her own life cut short in 1997. 

The infamous kidnapping, torture and forced passing of a dastardly ballsy manga writer’s own daughter, by a really depraved dude, was a major reason, though not the only one, for the death penalty’s infamously complicated reintroduction into Chinese Taipei, which is mostly out of apathy (though there are other reasons, such as most criminals, although bad in their own right, being not as ridiculously depraved) and still continues to this day.

Newfound ideas for such a saga can be plausible, but both the Takamori estate and Kawasaki Pro are still trying to mend their sometimes troubling differences in the present day, mainly for the better. Also complicating the long but rather recent situation is the introduction of yet another estate, which is that of Ms Pai Bing-Bing’s. I also think the lack of good enough, canonically official follow ups being made is somewhat of a hindrance, but they can still be produced nonetheless. 

Now these are amongst some of the numerous factors which explain why only Ikki Kajiwara’s writing for Star of the Giants will simply become public domain in 2058 for almost all the world’s nations.