Tetsuya Chiba, the manga artist behind the boxing series Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow, has died at the age of 87.
His publisher, Kodansha Ltd., said Tuesday that Chiba died at a Tokyo hospital last Thursday. No cause of death was given.
Chiba’s beloved series, which focuses on an orphan becoming a professional boxer, became a national sensation in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His masterpiece series became so popular that fans even attended a mock funeral for the protagonist Joe Yabuki’s rival.
While he depicted aspiring young athletes fighting for their lives and careers, Chiba was a vocal supporter 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, where Chiba spent his early childhood under Japan’s occupation of the region, while his father worked at a printing factory.
The family survived with the help of his father’s Chinese translator, who hid them in an attic, where Chiba drew pictures for his three younger brothers.
They eventually fled to the Chinese port city of Huludao and returned to Japan in 1946.
Those harrowing memories of war as a child later influenced his work and activity with an anti-war theme.
He first began working as a manga artist in 1956, initially drawing comic books for girls before moving on to works for boys in the early 1960s.
In 1961, he debuted in a boys’ comic magazine with a baseball manga Chikai no Makyu (The Magic Ball), paving the way for a new genre of sports-themed manga in Japan.
His sports-themed manga also included Ore wa Teppei (I’m Teppei), a story of a high school student training in the martial art of kendo, Notari Matsutaro about sumo wrestling and Ashita Tenki ni Naare (Let’s hope the weather’s fine tomorrow)about a teenage golfer.
