Mitsuteru Yokoyama

• 1. Introduction

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  Mitsuteru Yokoyama died at 10:00 in the evening on the 15th of April, 2004. He was 69. A fire had broken out in his house that morning. Burns covered his entire body and he fell into a coma. He died in a hospital near his home. In the weeks before, while still under medical treatment, he had won the MEXT Prize of the Japan Cartoonist Association. His career had run for nearly five decades. It had left a mark on manga and anime that few artists come close to in a lifetime. How a cartoonist born in Kobe came to define so many entire genres is worth understanding. And what does it mean that two major artists of the generation that followed both singled out his works as direct models for their own?

• 2. Films, Robots, and Tokyo

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  In 1955, Yokoyama had a title serialized in a manga magazine for the first time. His very first book had been enough to catch Osamu Tezuka's attention. By 1956, he had left his job at a movie company and was publishing Tetsujin 28-go in a shōnen magazine. The giant robot serial reached the same level of popularity as Tezuka's own Astro Boy. Its animated adaptation also performed strongly. Both prompted Yokoyama to move to Tokyo and commit to manga as a full-time profession. His years at the movie company had given him an extensive familiarity with popular entertainment. He drew on that background throughout the decades that followed, producing consecutive popular hits. In 1964, he founded Hikari Production as an incorporated company. By 1967, he had turned his attention toward Chinese and Japanese historical material. That shift would come to shape much of what followed.

• 3. Founding Forms

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  Sally the Witch was one of the first magical girl manga and anime ever produced. Yokoyama created it. Iga no Kagemaru and Kamen no Ninja Akakage launched what became known as a ninja boom. Both depicted ninjas as figures with superhuman fighting capabilities, a premise that proved widely imitable. Giant Robo extended the giant robot concept beyond Yokoyama's earlier work. Babel II went in a different direction: science fiction driven by supernatural powers. Princess Comet was aimed at shōjo readers. An adaptation of the Chinese classic Water Margin joined a growing body of work drawn from literary sources.

  Sangokushi, begun in 1971, was the most sustained of all these projects. Running until 1987, it stretched across sixteen years of work on a single narrative drawn from Chinese historical sources. In 1991, it won the prize for excellence from the Japan Cartoonist Association. An animated version was broadcast on TV Tokyo that same year. In July 1997, a myocardial infarction put Yokoyama in hospital. He had an operation and returned to work in March of the following year.

• 4. Deliberate and Dry

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  Elaborate settings and calculated story deployment were what most defined Yokoyama's craft. He built his narratives with deliberate care and worked out his fictional worlds in detail. He preferred light characterizations. He did not let his characters show their feelings too much. That restraint ran through everything he produced. He was better suited to serious drama than to comedy, though he drew comic material as well.

  Yokoyama was realistic and tolerant about changes to his work when it moved to animation or Tokusatsu. Many manga artists resist such alterations. His openness meant that many of his works were adapted into animation and Tokusatsu productions. Osamu Tezuka had established the core techniques that defined how Japanese comics were drawn and read. Yokoyama had done something different: he established the format of the various genres in Japanese comics and anime. Hirohiko Araki said he was conscious of Yokoyama's hard-boiled style. In his own work, he sticks to suspense and describes hero characters drily, a quality he traces back to Yokoyama.

• 5. Specific Debts

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  Katsuhiro Otomo said that Akira carries the 'same overall plot' as Tetsujin 28-go. That is not the language of general tribute. Otomo embedded four characters in Akira under the numbers 25, 26, 27, and 28, a deliberate homage to Yokoyama's robot serial.

  Araki's account was more concrete. He pointed to a specific moment from Babel II. Jotaro Kujo wearing his school uniform in the desert, a central image in Stardust Crusaders, has its roots in that earlier work. Araki also said that if he were to draw Stardust Crusaders over again, he would base the Stands on Tetsujin 28-go. These are not impressionistic acknowledgments. They are named, specific debts, stated in precise terms by the artists themselves. Tetsujin 28-go first appeared in a shōnen magazine in 1956. By the time Araki named it as the model he would reach for, that robot had been generating new ideas for decades.