Shammy 1000 (Manga)

Also known as シャミー1000 (Shammi Sen)

Tezuka’s sci-fi tale about a race of alien cat-people, Shammy 1000 (1968) was originally serialized over the course of six months in High School Course 1 from April to September, 1968.

What it’s about

High school student Shimura and his two friends decide to skip town and head off to a “hippie hut” in the mountains.  When they arrive, however, they are disappointed to find it burned to the ground.  Just then they are approached by a strange woman with a cat tucked under her arm who leads them to a strange tower-like building near by.  After entering the tower, the trio are shocked to find out that the cat is in fact a being known as a “Shammy” – a race of sentient cat-like aliens from outer space.

Although the Shammy are a race of highly intelligent beings from a technologically and scientifically advanced planet, they seem to lack one thing – the ability to fall in love.  As such, they have come to Earth to collect samples of “love” in order to more closely study its effects.  Of course, this means that Shimura and his friends are considered specimens and are now trapped.

Shammy World

Although, at first, Special Investigator Shammy 1000 only sees Shimura as a curiosity in need of study, after he saves her life during an earthquake, she begins to experience a strange emotional fondness for him.  Shimura, for his part, begins to see past her feline exterior and the pair begin to fall in love.  Unfortunately things are not all rosy for the young lovers.  When the rest of the Shammy investigative team discover the relationship, they accuse Shammy 1000 of trying to hoard all the love for herself and sentence her… to death.

A lover’s quarrel

What you should know

Despite it’s sci-fi trappings, at its core, Shammy 1000 (1968) is a tale of forbidden love.  Similar to other short stories from around the same period, such as Miraculous Conception (1970), Tezuka uses the sci-fi wrapper to keep then taboo topics, such interracial or perhaps homosexual love, well within the “safe zone” of the absurd – a boy falling in love with an alien that looks like a cat, or a man falling in love with a robot – while still managing to impart a message of tolerance to his readers.

Shammy 1000 (1968) is a contemporary of Swallowing the Earth (1968-69) and much of the same shonen-to-seinen transitional elements can be seen.  While the artwork still has many of the hallmarks of his earlier works (including the famous “Tezuka walk”), the story seems almost too big to be contained in such a short serial.  While the concept of love as a “commodity”  that one can be accused of hoarding, is interesting but only anecdotally explored here.  It is an interesting forerunner to Tezuka’s other, slightly later, but more in-depth explorations of the nature of love, such as Apollo’s Song (1970) and Yaketpachi’s Maria (1970-71).

Finally, although it will most likely pass most English-speakers by, it should be noted that the title “Shammy 1000 is actually a creative play on words. Read using the actual Japanese word for thousand, sen (千), the title sounds exactly like shamisen (三味線), a traditional three-stringed Japanese instrument, similar to a banjo.  Although they are manufactured from many materials, tradition holds that the best sound quality is produced from those shamisen that are bound in cat skin.