Tetsuya Chiba - 1939-2026.
Kyodo News, Mainichi, and Yomiuri report that the illustrator of "Ashita no Joe", Tetsuya Chiba, passed away at the age of 87 due to Myeoldysplastic Syndrome, a type of cancer that affects the blood cells in the bone marrow, on Thursday, October 22nd.
Chiba was born in Tsukiji, Chuo City, Tokyo, but lived most of his early childhood in Shenyang, Liaoning, in Northeast China, which was occupied by Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War, on January 11th, 1939.
His father worked in a paper factory when they lived in China. At the end of the Sino-Japanese War, Chiba's family lived in the attic of a work acquaintance of his father until they could find a way to get back to Japan.
Two of his younger brothers are manga artists: Akio Chiba and Shigeyuki Chiba, who is almost completely unknown outside Japan, despite writing many popular sports manga in Japan. Shigeyuki Chiba works under the pen name Taro Nami. He also had another brother named Ken Chiba.
He started his manga club with his friends in 1950 and created his first official manga, "The Hunchback Avenger", in 1956. Two years later, in 1958, he made his professional manga debut with "Butokai no Shojo" in Shojo Book.
In 1968, Chiba joined with writer Asao Takamori, whose pen name is Ikki Kajiwara, to illustrate a boxing manga, "Ashita no Joe", also known as "Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow", serialized in Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine from January 1968 to May 1973.
Chiba received several awards, including the Kodansha Children's Manga Award for "1, 2, 3, and 4, 5, 6", the Kodansha Culture Award for "Ore wa Teppei", and the Japanese Cartoonist Association Award and the Shogakukan Manga Award for "Notari Matsutaro". In 2001, he was awarded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology for his work on youth sports manga.
The following year, in 2002, he received the Purple Ribbon medal from the Japanese government, and in 2012, he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, by the Japanese government. In 2024, he was awarded the Order of Culture Award, becoming the first Japanese manga artist to receive this honor.
Aside from becoming a manga artist, he served as the chairman of the Japan Cartoonists Association in 2012 and was the first manga artist to be nominated as a member of the Japan Art Academy alongside Yoshihide Tsuge in 2022.
Chiba became a legendary manga artist whose masterworks transformed manga from a simple youth entertainment into a respected, high-impact literary and artistic medium. Having spent his early childhood in Manchuria and experienced the hardships of WWII, Chiba initially focused on energizing readers with vibrant youth stories.
Standing alongside giants like Osamu Tezuka and Shigeru Mizuki, Chiba bridged the early days of rental-library manga straight into the modern weekly magazine era, mentoring and inspiring generations of subsequent mangaka.
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