There are some cases of Tezuka's manga adaptations with more distinctively Japanese elements. We can sense Tezuka's criticism of Japanese society, which was undergoing rapid mechanization and industrialization.

While humans struggle with each other seeking dominance of the robotics industry, Robiette and Robio strive to use robotics for peace. Tezuka created Robio and Robiette as robots with human shape and hearts, and minds more human than the humans they fall in love with each other because they are equipped with mechanic hearts of the same design.

'Robio and Robiette,' an episode in Astro Boy in 1965, is a tragic love story between Robio, a robot, and Robiette, another robot. It is intriguing that this manga was published in the same year as the first commercial television network for education was launched, when education was, as it were, made into commercial merchandise packaged for television broadcasting. The scenes are set in present-day Venice, with Portia as the only daughter of a 'media tycoon who televises his dying moments' (Minami 813). Osamu Tezuka created his manga abridgement of The Merchant of Venice for educational purposes in 1959. As Stephen O'Neill writes about user agency of YouTube Shakespeare, manga/anime uses Shakespeare as 'an open-source property exceeding any single ownership.' Shakespearean texts, as being outside of copyright, function as 'a freely available repository of stories' (134). Manga/anime uses the cultural phenomenon known as 'Shakespeare' in unpredictable ways which could be resistant to/subservient to the authority and cultural hegemony of Global Bard. Fazel and Louise Geddes's conviction that 'the value of Shakespeare lies in its usability, in that the texts, as well as the myth of the man, can be broken down and reassembled by a body of users whose valuation of Shakespeare is unpredictable and often resistant to pre-conceived notions of cultural hegemony' (3-4). I regard Shakespeare in manga/anime as constituting what Douglas Lanier calls 'Shakespearean rhizomatics'-'the aggregated web of cultural forces and productions that in some fashion lay claim to the label 'Shakespearean' but that has long exceeded the canon of plays and poems we have come to attribute to the pen of William Shakespeare' (27).

Romeo x Juliet, Vol. 01 by GONZO