Hoshie Tenma

Tenma Hoshie is Tobio's mother and the wife of Umataro Tenma.

She appears in only one series in the manga Once Upon a Time Astroboy Tales, which spans volumes six, seven, and part of eight.

Here, she adds great emotional depth to one of these chapters (“Astro goes to the circus,” volume 7). For, when Umataro presents her with the robotic version of Tobio, she immediately rejects him. However, after a few days, she embraces him, and loves him as though he were her son. She teaches him the mannerisms of her departed son, and as he adopts these ways, she loves him all the more. Yet, while she was warming to the robot boy, her husband's affection for him was just as rapidly diminishing.

Upon her husband's rejection of Atom, and his selling him to the circus ringmaster, she divorces him and regularly attends the circus, hoping for a mere glimpse of the little robot boy she had learned to love as her own son.

She is the model upon whom Dr. Tenma, in an act of repentance, bases Atom's robot mother (A Declaration of Robot Rights, Volume 8). He teaches the robot mother all of Hoshie’s mannerisms and attitudes, so that she will behave towards Atom (Tobio), just as Hoshie herself did.