Akira Toriyama

• 1. Introduction

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  Akira Toriyama, the Japanese manga artist behind Dragon Ball, made his final contribution to that story by changing one drawing. In chapter 103 of Dragon Ball Super, the warrior Piccolo is shown departing. Toriyama instructed his collaborator Toyotarou to redraw the end of the page so that Piccolo seems to wave back at the reader. A short tribute sat at the bottom of the page when it was published on the 28th of March 2024.

  That small wave leaves the listener with questions. How did a young man who hated early mornings, and who walked out of a poster-design job, end up shaping an entire genre? Why did a hero who was short, cartoonish and funny change what readers expected from action stories? And what kind of person avoids public life so thoroughly that a robot stands in for him in his own interviews?

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• 2. From Last Place to Arale

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  Kiyosu, a town in Aichi Prefecture, is where Toriyama was born, and as a small child he drew the animals and vehicles he loved. The film One Hundred and One Dalmatians, from 1961, amazed him so much that he wanted to draw pictures that good. A classmate's older brother owned a stack of manga that shocked him again, as did his first sight of a television at a neighbor's house. He credited Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy with sparking his interest in manga, though in middle school he drifted toward films and television. Ultraman and the Gamera monster movies were among his favorites.

  At a high school focused on creative design, Toriyama cared more about enjoying himself with friends than about studying. His parents strongly opposed his plan to go straight into work. He did it anyway, and spent three years designing posters at an advertising agency in Nagoya. He picked up the job quickly, but he was often late and was scolded for dressing casually. The routine wore him down until he quit.

  At the age of 23, jobless and borrowing money from his mother, Toriyama randomly grabbed a copy of Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine in a coffee shop. He sent a story to its amateur contest, but the timing was wrong. Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump ran a Newcomer Award every month, so he tried there. Editor Kazuhiko Torishima enjoyed the entry, yet it could not compete because it parodied Star Wars rather than being original. Torishima sent a telegram urging him to keep drawing.

  Wonder Island, published in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1978, became Toriyama's first printed work, and it placed last in the readers survey. He planned to quit manga as soon as he was paid. Wonder Island 2 flopped as well, and his stubbornness refused to let it end there. For a year he kept producing failed stories, around 500 pages in all. He later said he learned a great deal and even enjoyed himself. When Torishima asked for a female lead, he reluctantly drew Tomato the Cutesy Gumshoe in 1979, which did reasonably well. Encouraged, he gave another female lead a try, and Dr. Slump was born.

  From 1980 to 1984, Dr. Slump ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump and made Toriyama a household name. It follows a perverted professor and his small but super-strong robot, Arale. The humor leaned on puns, toilet jokes and innuendo, with aliens, time travel and parodies of Godzilla, Star Wars and Star Trek mixed in. One running gag involving feces has been reported as an inspiration for the Pile of Poo emoji. In 1981 the series won the Shogakukan Manga Award. By 2008 it had sold over 35 million copies in Japan.

  Toriyama wrote people he knew into the story, including his assistants, his wife and his colleague Masakazu Katsura. The main villain, Dr. Mashirito, was modeled on Torishima himself. The anime began in 1981 in the Wednesday 19:00 slot on Fuji TV. Adaptations of Toriyama's work held that slot for 18 years, through Dragon Ball, its two sequels, and a rebooted Dr. Slump that finished in 1999.

  Within roughly six months of starting Dr. Slump, Toriyama already wanted it to end. Shueisha agreed only if he promised to begin another serial soon after. So he worked with Torishima on one-shots instead. In 1981, he was one of ten artists chosen to draw a 45-page story for the Reader's Choice contest in Weekly Shōnen Jump, and his Pola & Roid won first place. He returned in 1982 with Mad Matic, and Pink appeared in the December issue of Fresh Jump. In his third contest he drew the unlucky first slot and spent New Year's working on Chobit in 1983. Annoyed by its poor reception, he drew Chobit 2 as a second attempt.

  An official fan club for Toriyama was founded in 1982, and its newsletters, called Bird Land Press, were mailed out until the club closed in 1987. He also set up Bird Studio in the early 1980s, a name that plays on the meaning of his own. He hired an assistant, mostly to handle backgrounds. The newsletters kept coming for years after he turned to a very different kind of story.

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• 3. Dragon Ball Takes Off

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  In August and October 1983, the monthly Fresh Jump printed a two-part story called Dragon Boy. Torishima had noticed that Toriyama loved kung fu films and suggested a kung fu manga. The result follows a boy skilled at martial arts who escorts a princess back to her home country. Readers liked it, and it grew into the serial Dragon Ball in 1984. A one-shot called The Adventure of Tongpoo, printed in the 52nd issue of Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1983, already carried elements that Dragon Ball would use.

  Journey to the West, the classic Chinese novel, gave Dragon Ball its early outline, with Goku standing in for Sun Wukong and Bulma for Tang Sanzang. Jackie Chan's films were another strong influence. The setting was an invented world built from Asian cultures, including Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Central Asian, Arabic and Indonesian ones. At first Toriyama kept his comic style, and the series read as an adventure with plenty of gags.

  Over the near-11-year run, the tone slowly hardened, and the series became what Toriyama called a nearly pure fighting manga. He never mapped out what would happen next. He drew as he went, and he sometimes forgot what he had already put on the page. That left him writing his way out of corners of his own making.

  Between 1984 and 1995, Toriyama produced 519 chapters, gathered into 42 volumes. In Japan alone, Dragon Ball sold 159.5 million collected volumes, and sales abroad across Asia, Europe and the Americas reached the hundreds of millions. In 1995, Weekly Shōnen Jump hit a record circulation of 6.53 million copies, and Dragon Ball was one of the chief reasons. The success spread into five anime adaptations, animated films, video games and a flood of merchandise. When the series finished, Toriyama said he had asked everyone involved to let him end it so he could take new steps in life.

  Dragon Ball GT began airing in 1996, though it was not adapted straight from his manga. He still shaped the series name and the designs of the main cast. During the weekly grind of Dragon Ball, he kept finding time for one-shots. Mr. Ho appeared in the 49th issue of 1986, and Young Master Ken'nosuke, set in a samurai-era world, followed in 1987. The Elder and Little Mamejiro came out in 1988, and Karamaru and the Perfect Day arrived in issue 13 of 1989. In 1986, though, Torishima pulled him toward a project that was not manga at all.

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• 4. Sloppy in a Good Way

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  Mysterious Rain Jack is the story where Torishima first spotted something unusual. Sound effects in manga are normally written in katakana, but Toriyama wrote his in the Roman alphabet. Torishima found that refreshing.

  The 15-page limit for gag entries, against 31 pages for story manga, steered Toriyama toward becoming a gag artist in his early contest days, Torishima said. Toriyama, with no money for screentone when he began, excelled at using solid black areas. Torishima called him a master of convenience, sloppy in a good way. Destroyed scenery in Dragon Ball and the blond hair of the Super Saiyans were both ways to save drawing and inking time. Torishima also said Toriyama drew what interested him, paid little attention to readers, and avoided reading other manga, a habit Torishima supported.

  The 2023 book A History of Modern Manga paints a different side, calling him "a perfectionist at heart" who "didn't hesitate to redraw entire panels under the worried eye of his editor at Jump". Perfectionism also showed in how he colored. Watching the animator Toyoo Ashida and the Dragon Ball anime, he learned that separating colors rather than blending them keeps a picture clean and makes coloring easier.

  Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon from 1973 and Jackie Chan's Drunken Master from 1978 were Hong Kong martial arts films that deeply shaped his later work. Alien from 1979 and Galaxy Quest from 1999 were two science fiction favorites he named as influences.

  Critic Jason Thompson pointed to Toriyama's "extremely personal and recognizable style" as a reason for Dragon Ball's popularity. Shōnen hits of the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as City Hunter and Fist of the North Star, starred "manly" heroes. Dragon Ball starred the small, cartoonish Goku. Toriyama said he deliberately broke the convention that the strongest characters should be the biggest, giving many of the most powerful fighters small bodies. Thompson called the series "an action manga drawn by a gag manga artist."

  James S. Yadao, author of The Rough Guide to Manga, noted that the art itself changed as the story went on. The round, innocent faces Toriyama introduced in Dr. Slump gave way to sharper angles full of energy and intensity.

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• 5. Games, Cars and Crossovers

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  Dragon Quest, a role-playing video game from 1986, was where Torishima next sent him as a character designer. Toriyama has said he joined without even knowing what an RPG was, and the work made an already crowded schedule even busier. Still, he was glad he took part once he played the finished game. He was hired partly to make the game look different from other role-playing games of the time. He then designed for every installment until he died, and the series stretches from 1986 to 2023.

  Yuji Horii starts each Dragon Quest design by sending Toriyama rough character sketches and background notes. Toriyama redraws them, and Horii gives final approval. In 1995, Toriyama explained that sprites are so small that a character only needs one distinguishing feature, so he can make detailed designs without worrying about copying them again and again. He also painted the box art and, for Dragon Quest VIII, designed the boats and ships. By 2016 he admitted that the series' fixed era and setting limited his options, making each new game harder than the one before. The Slime became the franchise mascot and one of the best-known figures in gaming.

  Chrono Trigger, a Super Famicom RPG from 1995, also used his designs, as did the PlayStation fighting games Tobal No. 1 in 1996 and Tobal 2 in 1997. In 2006 he was character designer and artist for Mistwalker's Xbox 360 RPG Blue Dragon. He reunited there with Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu, both of whom he had known from Chrono Trigger. At the time of the 2007 Blue Dragon anime, he thought it might be his last animation work.

  On the 23rd of September 1988, the film Kosuke & Rikimaru: The Dragon of Konpei Island marked his first substantial contribution to animation. He came up with the original story, co-wrote the script with director Toyoo Ashida, and designed the characters. It screened at the Jump Anime Carnival, held for the 20th anniversary of Weekly Shōnen Jump.

  The QVOLT, an electric car Toriyama designed, went on sale from CQ Motors on the 27th of March 2005. This one-person vehicle belonged to the company's Choro-Q series of small electric cars, and only 9 were made. It cost 1,990,000 yen, about 19,000 US dollars, and reached a top speed of 30 km/h. Buyers could pick from five colors. Toriyama said the design took over a year but credited his "genius mini-model construction skills" for getting to the end of "a very emotional journey."

  On the 6th of December 2002, Toriyama made his only promotional appearance in the United States, at the New York City launch of Shonen Jump, the North American counterpart of Weekly Shōnen Jump. The first issue carried Dragon Ball and his Sand Land, plus a long interview. Between 1999 and 2005 he also wrote Neko Majin, a self-parody of Dragon Ball told in eight one-shots, which were gathered into one volume in April 2005.

  Cross Epoch, a 2006 one-shot made with One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda, brought characters from Dragon Ball and One Piece into the same story. In 2008, Toriyama teamed up with his good friend Masakazu Katsura on the one-shot Sachie-chan Good!!. They worked together again in 2009 on Jiya, a three-chapter story.

  Dragonball Evolution, a live-action American film from 2009, hired Toriyama as a creative consultant through 20th Century Fox. It failed critically and financially. He said in 2013 that he found the script bland and not true to his series, and that he warned the producers and offered changes. They ignored him, "And just as I thought, the result was a movie I cannot call Dragon Ball." The pop singer Ayumi Hamasaki had a portrait drawn by Toriyama on the CD of her 2009 single "Rule", the film's theme song.

  Delicious Island's Mr. U, from 2009, grew out of a request to illustrate a pamphlet for Anjō's Rural Society Project, a nonprofit group teaching children about agriculture and nature. Toriyama liked the idea and turned it into a story, now included in an environmental booklet distributed by the Anjō city government. Kintoki appeared in the 15th of November 2010 issue of Weekly Shōnen Jump as part of its Top of the Super Legend project. After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on the 11th of March, he joined Weekly Shōnen Jump in making a video to raise support for those affected. Within a year, a new Dragon Ball film was announced.

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• 6. The Late Return

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  Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods was announced in 2012, the series' first theatrical film in 17 years. For the first time, Toriyama helped from the screenwriting stage. It opened on the 30th of March 2013. A special dual ticket for it and One Piece Film: Z featured new art by both Toriyama and Oda.

  On the 27th of March 2013, the exhibit "Akira Toriyama: The World of Dragon Ball" opened at the Takashimaya department store in Nihonbashi. It drew 72,000 visitors in its first nineteen days. Seven areas covered the series' history, more than 400 characters, manuscripts from memorable scenes, color illustrations, rare materials, design sketches and anime cels, and videos. The show moved to Osaka for a week in April, then ended in Nagoya from the 27th of July to the 1st of September.

  Jaco the Galactic Patrolman launched in the 13th of July 2013 issue of Weekly Shōnen Jump, celebrating the magazine's 45th anniversary. Viz Media began publishing it in English two days later in its digital magazine. The final chapter reveals that the story takes place before Dragon Ball and includes some of its characters. It was the last manga that Toriyama wrote and drew himself.

  Resurrection 'F', released on the 18th of April 2015, was written from an original script by Toriyama himself. Dragon Ball Super began in V Jump in June 2015, with an anime following in July. Toriyama supplied the basic story and some character designs. After the anime ended in 2018, he kept providing story ideas while Toyotarou illustrated the manga. Dragon Ball Super: Broly arrived in theaters on the 14th of December 2018. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero followed on the 11th of June 2022 and was his last complete work on the franchise.

  In January 2024, a logo Toriyama created to mark the 20th anniversary of his hometown Kiyosu was revealed. He also wrote a new story arc for the 2024 original net animation of Sand Land. For the Dragon Ball Daima anime series, he created the story and character designs. Daima was still in the future when he made them.

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• 7. A Private Man

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  On the 2nd of May 1982, Toriyama married Yoshimi Katō, a former manga artist from Nagoya who used the pen name Nachi Mikami. When Toriyama and his assistant ran short on time during Dr. Slump, she sometimes pitched in. Their son Sasuke was born in 1987, and their daughter Kikka in 1990.

  Kiyosu is where Toriyama lived and worked, in a studio at his home. He was a well-known recluse who steered clear of public appearances and the media. Since 1980 he had used a robot avatar to stand in for him in manga and interviews.

  His father raced motorbikes and ran an auto repair shop for a short time, even though he did not understand the mechanics. From him, Toriyama inherited a love of cars and motorcycles.

  Animals filled his life, from birds, dogs, cats and fish to lizards and bugs, all kept as pets since childhood. Some became models for characters, among them Karin and Beerus. He had a lifelong passion for plastic models and designed several kits for the Fine Molds brand. He also collected autographs from famous manga artists, over 30 of them including Yudetamago and Hisashi Eguchi, and gave the hobby to his character Peasuke Soramame.

  In 2010, Toriyama said, "The truth is, I didn't like being a manga artist very much. It wasn't until relatively recently that I realized it's a wonderful job."

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• 8. Mourning and Legacy

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  On the 1st of March 2024, Toriyama died of an acute subdural hematoma at the age of 68. Only his family attended the private funeral. His production company, Bird Studio, announced his death a week later, on the 8th of March. Sources close to him said he had planned surgery for a brain tumor in February 2024.

  Eiichiro Oda, Masashi Kishimoto, Tite Kubo, Kōhei Horikoshi, Yoshihiro Togashi, Masakazu Katsura and the game designer Yuji Horii all offered tributes. In Tokyo, fans mourned at the life-sized Goku statue outside the headquarters of the toy maker Bandai. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, credited Toriyama with playing an "extremely important role in demonstrating Japan's soft power" around the world. French President Emmanuel Macron shared a photo of an illustration Toriyama had signed and given him. French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal remarked that not even "the Dragon Balls and Shenron" could bring him back. The foreign ministries of China and El Salvador also issued condolences. Justin Chatwin, who played Goku in Dragonball Evolution, apologized on Instagram, writing "sorry we messed up that adaptation so badly".

  Mexico City's Plaza de la Constitución saw hundreds of fans strike the Genki-dama pose, arms raised with palms toward the sky. At the 18th Seiyu Awards on the 9th of March, there was a moment of silence for Toriyama and for the voice actress Tarako, who had died on the 4th of March. On the 10th of March, thousands gathered at the Obelisco monument in Argentina. In Lima, Peru, over 40 artists led by "Peko" painted a mural six meters high and over 110 meters long.

  Patrick St. Michel of The Japan Times compared Toriyama with Walt Disney and Stan Lee, saying each had a personal style that became shorthand for their medium. Thompson said in 2011 that Dragon Ball was by far the most influential shōnen manga of the previous thirty years. Professor Patrick W. Galbraith of Senshu University said that the DNA of Toriyama's work can be sensed in all later shōnen.

  In a rare 2013 interview about Dragon Ball's worldwide success, Toriyama said, "Frankly, I don't quite understand why it happened." He added that while drawing it weekly he only wanted "to make Japanese boys happy." Artists who named him as an influence include Oda, Kishimoto, Kubo, Hiro Mashima, Mikio Ikemoto, Atsushi Suzumi, Kentaro Yabuki and Shinya Suzuki. The German artist Hans Steinbach and the Thai cartoonist Wisut Ponnimit did so as well. Ian Jones-Quartey, a producer of Steven Universe, uses Toriyama's vehicle designs as reference, and French director Pierre Perifel named him an influence on The Bad Guys.

  In a 2008 Oricon poll of favorite manga artists, Toriyama placed second behind Ai Yazawa, and first among men and among people over 30. A 2010 poll on mangaka who changed manga history put him second after Osamu Tezuka. At the 2013 Angoulême International Comics Festival, he received the Special 40th Anniversary Festival Award, and he actually earned the most votes for the Grand Prix, which the committee gave to Willem. A 2014 NTT Docomo poll ranked him third as the manga artist who best represents Japan. That year, the entomologist Enio B. Cano named a beetle Ogyges toriyamai after him, and another Ogyges mutenroshii after Muten Roshi.

  On the 30th of May 2019, France made Toriyama a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was also a 2019 nominee for the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. In 2024 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Tokyo Anime Awards Festival, and IGN ranked him number 74 among its Top 100 Game Creators of All Time. On the 11th of October 2024, the Harvey Awards named him one of five creators entering its Hall of Fame, with a ceremony on the 18th at New York Comic Con. In reply, Bird Studio and Capsule Corporation Tokyo said he had always maintained that his work says it all, and asked American fans to keep supporting it for many years.

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