Osamu Tezuka

Water has four of his ten planets, fire three, earth two and a single one air, and five of the ten sit in cardinal signs. Water registers everything; the element that would talk a thing over is down to one planet. The record says Tezuka was called the god of manga and that he trained as a doctor.

The Sun sits on the eleventh degree of Scorpio, which commits completely and gives very little away. The Moon, Mars and Pluto sit across thirteen degrees of Cancer, the sign that keeps what it is given and defends it, so private feeling, drive and concentrated force are all gathered there together. Mercury sits at twenty four degrees of Libra. For an artist who qualified as a doctor and then drew instead, a Scorpio Sun over a Cancer group is the division that matters: the commitment is total and the protecting is where the work came from.

Nothing in this chart comes inside half a degree and no named pattern forms anywhere in it, which makes this a loose birth and the honest thing to report. Jupiter sits in quiet contact with Uranus at just under three fifths of a degree, being in the right place when something shifts. Saturn stands at an awkward angle to Pluto at just over a degree and a third, and Jupiter sits a fifth of a turn from that same Pluto at just under one and three quarters. Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. In an artist who also qualified as a doctor, a loose chart is the honest finding rather than a tight pairing talked up.

He died at the Hanzomon Hospital on 9 February 1989, at sixty. Three planets stood on his natal Sun that day: Saturn sixty degrees from it at half a degree, Neptune the same at just under nine tenths, and Mars directly opposite it at just under a degree and a half. Uranus stood square its own natal place at just over a fifth. The Moon was new and eleven per cent lit, a phase that starts things without waiting to see the whole of them, which in the record of an artist still working at sixty is the sky worth noting.