Shin’ichi Hoshi was a Japanese novelist and science fiction writer best known for his "short-short" science fiction stories, often no more than three or four pages in length, of which he wrote over 1000. He also wrote mysteries and won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Mōsō Ginkō in 1968.

The Amazing 3, or Wonder 3 , is a Japanese comic series and a black-and-white Japanese animated television series created by Osamu Tezuka in the 1960s. It involves the adventures of three agents from outer space who are sent to Earth to determine whether the planet, a potential threat to the universe, should be destroyed. Landing on Earth, the characters take the form of a rabbit, a horse, and a duck, and make friends with a young human boy.