Toshiko Ueda

Toshiko Ueda (上田 トシコ) was a Japanese manga artist.

Toshiko Ueda was born on August 14, 1917, in Tokyo City.

She moved with her parents to Harbin, Manchuria (located in present day China) several days after her birth, where her father worked as a businessman for the South Manchuria Railway Company.

Ueda grew up in Harbin, where she lived with her parents, an older sister, a younger brother, and a servant, and learned to speak both Japanese and Chinese.

When Ueda finished elementary school in 1929, she returned to Tokyo to study at the Shoei Girls' Junior and Senior High School.

While attending school in Tokyo, Ueda discovered the manga series Poku-chan (ポクちゃん) by Katsuji Matsumoto in the manga magazine Shōjo Gahō, which inspired her to become a manga artist.

At the time, manga artistry was a male-dominated profession; it was thus an unusual career for a woman to pursue, and one that Ueda's father did not approve of.

In 1935, at the age of seventeen, Ueda met Matsumoto through an acquaintance of her brother and convinced him to take her on as an apprentice.

This makes Ueda one of the earliest published female manga artists, preceded by Machiko Hasegawa, who made her debut two years earlier in 1935.

Following Kamuro-san, Ueda illustrated the series Buta to Kūnyan (ブタとクーニャン), which was serialized in the daily Tokyo newspaper Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun for a year.

Upon the conclusion of Buta to Kūnyan, Ueda joined a yōga (western-style painting) workshop to develop her artistic technique, where she studied with painters Junkichi Mukai and Conrad Meili.

She continued to create illustrations and manga for various magazines while living in Tokyo.

After apprenticing under the manga artist Katsuji Matsumoto at the age of seventeen, Ueda published her first manga in 1937.

Like her mentor, she drew mainly humorous manga, both in shōjo (girls) magazines and in the general press.

She is, along with Machiko Hasegawa, one of the few female manga artists to begin their careers in the pre-war period.

Through this apprenticeship, Ueda published illustrations in the magazine Shōgaku Rokunensei published by Shogakukan, and in 1937 published her first manga series Kamuro-san (かむろさん) in Shōjo Gahō.

In 1943 she suffered a decline in health, and the manga artist told her that she was too "naive" to be a manga artist and that she should "work and see the world".

Subsequently, she decided to leave Japan to return to her family in Harbin.

In Harbin, Ueda worked for the South Manchuria Railway Company and later for a local newspaper, while also working as a freelance poster illustrator.

Following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945 and subsequent takeover of Manchuria by the Eighth Route Army, the Ueda family took refuge with Chinese friends until 1946, after which they were forced to flee.

Ueda and her family returned to Japan, though her father was imprisoned after being accused of economic war crimes as part of his work with the South Manchuria Railway Company.

Ueda's father was executed after several days in detention, though the Ueda family did not learn of his death until three years later.

Upon returning to Japan in 1946, Ueda was hired by NHK, Japan's public broadcaster, where she worked under the Civil Information and Education (CIE) department of the Supreme Allied Command.

Simultaneously, she worked as an illustrator and manga artist, publishing Okinu-chan (お絹ちゃん) and Meiko Hogaraka Nikki (メイコ朗らか日記) in the magazine Shōjo Romance in 1949.

By the early 1950s, an increasing proportion of manga artists were women, allowing Ueda to return to the career as a full-time profession.

Shōjo Romance folded in 1951, and she resigned from NHK after the broadcaster asked her to relocate to the United States for work.

During this time she also married, but was unable to accept her new role as a housewife, and divorced shortly thereafter.

In 1951 she published the manga series Boku-chan (ぼくちゃん) in the magazine Shōjo Book, followed by Bonko-chan (ぼんこちゃん) in the magazine Ribon from 1955 to 1961; the popularity of the latter series was such that its heroine became the magazine's mascot for the duration of its serialization.

Born in the Empire of Japan, Ueda split her youth and early adulthood between Japan and Manchuria; her most popular manga series Fuichin-san, serialized in the magazine Shōjo Club from 1957 to 1962, follows the life of a Chinese girl living in Manchuria.

Ueda's time in Manchuria, from her idyllic childhood to the arrest and execution of her father during Japanese repatriation, was a significant influence on her manga.

From 1957 to 1962, Ueda published the manga series Fuichin-san in the magazine Shojo Club, which would become her best-known work; the protagonist of the story was similarly the mascot of the magazine for the duration of its publication run.

The success of Boku-chan and Fuichin-san allowed Ueda to contribute frequently to shōjo magazines and the general press, though she remained generally less successful than her colleague and shōjo pioneer Machiko Hasegawa.

She was still actively publishing her manga series Ako-Bāchan (1973–2008) at the time of her death at the age of 90.

Beginning in 1973, Ueda began to focus solely on serializing the manga series Ako-Bāchan (あこバアチャン) in the magazine Ashita no Tomo, a lifestyle magazine for older women.

On March 7, 2008, Ueda died from heart failure at her home in Tokyo at the age of 90.

She was still actively serializing Ako-Bāchan at the time of her death.

Ueda's manga is generally light-hearted, energetic, and humorous, with the artist stating that her repatriation from Manchuria taught her that "humor is the food of the mind".

Her works are typically slice of life stories with a comedic or educational tone, with the author stating that in order to create these works she kept abreast of current events, ranging from politics to sports to the price of supermarket products.

She reported frequently reading newspapers, spending time shopping, and talking to people in order to discover potential subjects for her manga.

As the titles of most of Ueda's works are constructed from the name of the protagonist with an honorific suffix – Fuichin-san, Bonko-chan, Ohatsu-chan, etc. – she earned the industry nickname "mangaka chan-chan".