Tetsuya Chiba, the artist behind Ashita no Joe and seven decades of sports manga, has died at 87.
Tetsuya Chiba, the artist who drew Ashita no Joe and spent seven decades making sport a serious subject for manga, died on 22 October at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 87. The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a cancer of the blood-forming cells in the bone marrow. His death was made public on 27 October, after a private funeral at which his wife, Yukiko, was chief mourner.
Ashita no Joe ran in Weekly Shonen Magazine from January 1968 to June 1973, written by Ikki Kajiwara under the name Asao Takamori and drawn by Chiba. It followed Joe Yabuki out of a Tokyo slum and into the ring, and it refused to treat boxing as scenery. The training, the weight-cutting, the damage a fighter takes and keeps taking were all on the page.
That seriousness is why it lasted. The final image of Joe slumped in his corner became one of the most recognised panels in Japanese comics, and the story travelled well past its readership: two television anime series, in 1970 and 1980, and two films, in 1980 and 1981. Sports manga as a genre with weight rather than novelty largely starts here.
Chiba began publishing while still a teenager in the late 1950s and never really stopped. The baseball manga Chikai no Makyu ran across 1961 and 1962, Harisu no Kaze from 1965 to 1967. Notari Matsutaro, about a sumo wrestler with no discipline and a great deal of talent, ran in Big Comic over two spells between 1973 and 1998. Ore wa Teppei ran from 1973 to 1980, and the golf manga Ashita Tenki ni Naare from 1981 to 1991.
The honours came steadily, then exceptionally. He won the Kodansha Children's Comic Award in 1962, the Japan Cartoonists Association Award and the Kodansha Culture Award in 1976, and the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1978. He received the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2002 and the Order of the Rising Sun in 2012. In 2022 he and Yoshiharu Tsuge became the first manga artists nominated to the Japan Art Academy. In 2024 he became the first manga artist to receive the Order of Culture, which Japan gives to people who have shaped its cultural life.
He also carried the trade rather than just working in it. He took the chair of the Japan Cartoonists Association in 2012 and later served as its president, and the Chiba Tetsuya Award, a newcomer prize, has carried his name for decades.
He kept drawing to the end. Hinemosu Notari Nikki, an autobiographical essay manga, began in Big Comic in December 2015 and was still running this year, going on hiatus on 25 September when his health gave way. He had been treated for a throat tumour in 2021 and had a coronary stent fitted in early 2022.
He was born in Tokyo on 11 January 1939 and spent most of his early childhood in Shenyang, in northeastern China, where his father worked at a paper factory. When the war ended the family sheltered in the attic of one of his father's acquaintances until they could get back to Japan.
English-language readers came to him late. Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow, the first official English edition, appeared only in December 2024, sixty-six years after he started drawing and two years before his death. Anyone meeting Joe Yabuki now is meeting an artist at the end of his work rather than the start of it.
