I watched the most recent episode of 16 bit Sensation, a mostly-original adaptation of Wakaki Tamiki’s Manga of the same name.

It is a good show, but like is common in his work, there’s surprising amounts of themes and views portrayed that hint at a leftist worldview. When I went to investigate by reading his blog, I was not able to discover much even from his political posts. Making sense of Japanese politics is hard, especially when filtered through a bad machine translation.

I would like to know if there are any, particularly modern, mangaka or anime directors you know of that explicitly identify with the political left or are anticapitalist in spite of the nature of bourgeois media.

Hayao Miyazaki is of course the big example, explicitly identifying as a Marxist until the second half of the 1980s. He abandoned those positions afterwards, but his utopian environmentalist pacifism remained.

Mamoru Oshii was a member of the 1960s/1970s new left and his works heavily lean on those experiences. An episode of Patlabor’s second OVA is a parody of the whole era in fact. The live action version of this Mecha show is filled with random hammer and sickles, Mao Zedongs etc. for seemingly no reason. Vlad Love features a joke mocking the social democrats’ “you can’t do that” attitude.

Riyoko Ikeda of Rose of Versailles’ fame was a member of the Japanese Communist Party youth in the 1970s. Iirc she would later deradicalize and even have a high profile affair with a right wing politician in the mid 80s.

Osamu Tezuka was reportedly a member of the Communist Party. He died in 1989.

Are there more modern examples?