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TOKYO — The famous Japanese manga artist Tetsuya Chiba, who caused a national sensation with his boxing series “Ashita no Joe” or “Fighting for Tomorrow”, a story about an orphan who becomes a professional boxer, has died. He was 87.
Chiba’s masterpiece series became so popular that fans even attended a mock funeral for the main character’s rival Joe Yabuki.
Chiba died at a hospital in Tokyo last Thursday, his publisher Kodansha Ltd. said. Tuesday, without giving a cause of death.
While portraying aspiring young athletes fighting for their lives and careers, Chiba was a vocal advocate of peace and freedom of expression, telling stories of his harrowing memories of war as a child in autobiographical stories and manga.
Months after he was born in Tokyo in January, 1939, his family moved to northeastern China and Chiba spent his childhood there when Japan was in the area, where his father worked at a printing factory.
At the age of 6, Chiba and his family celebrated Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, while still in China. There, they faced danger and hunger in the face of anti-Japanese riots, but survived with the help of his father’s Chinese translator who hid the family in an attic, where Chiba drew pictures for his three younger brothers.
The family eventually fled to the port city of Huludao in China and returned to Japan in 1946.
The famous memories later influenced his work and his anti-war activism.
Chiba began as a manga artist in 1956, initially drawing comic books for girls and later moving on to works for boys in the early 1960s.
In 1961, he appeared in a boys’ comic magazine with the basketball manga “Chikai no Makyu (The Magic Ball),” paving the way for a new genre of sports-themed manga in Japan.
Chiba’s sports-themed manga also included “Ore wa Teppei (I am Teppei),” the story of a high school student training in the martial art of kendo, “Notari Matsutaro” about sumo wrestling, and “Ashita Tenki ni Naare (I hope the weather will be good tomorrow)” about teenage golf.
