Tetsuya Chiba in 2023. Via Wikimedia Commons. Photo by The Prime Minister of Japan’s office.
Tetsuya Chiba, the renowned Japanese manga artist behind the boxing series “Ashita no Joe” (“Fighting for Tomorrow”), died at a Tokyo hospital last Thursday. He was 87. No cause of death has been announced.
Chiba was born in Tokyo in 1939. Shortly after, he and his family moved to then-Japanese-occupied China, where they would live for the remainder of WWII. He was just 6 years old when Japan surrendered.
The family only managed to survive with the help of Chiba’s father’s Chinese translator, who hid the family in an attic. Chiba remembered drawing pictures for his three younger brothers.
The family eventually managed to return to Japan in 1946, but the war never left Chiba, and continued to influence his work and life. He was a vocal anti-war advocate and supported freedom of expression, and told stories of his wartime childhood in both manga and autobiographical pieces.
Chiba’s work starting in the 1960s would pave the way for sports manga, a staple in manga genres today.
His most popular series, “Ashita no Joe,” follows a young man who discovers boxing while incarcerated in prison. It was serialized in Kodansha’s Shūkan Shōnen Magajin (Weekly Shōnen Magazine) for five years, from 1968-1973. It has been widely adapted, including into the equally popular Megalobox, an anime with a futuristic theme, and had a heavy influence on Japanese culture.
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