Yoshihiro Takahashi

Yoshihiro Takahashi (高橋義廣) is a Japanese manga artist.

He writes under a pen name in which his first name Yoshihiro is spelled out in hiragana (よしひろ).

Takahashi was born on September 18th, 1953, in Higashinaruse, Akita, a village in the Tōhoku region of Japan.

He was very interested in drawing coming of age-related themes and, in the 1960s, started publishing small comics in several newspapers and magazines.

His first manga was Shitamachi Benkei, published in 1971, but his breakthrough came in 1984 when he published the popular manga Silver Fang, a story following a young Akita puppy, who goes in search of other dogs to fight the bear haunting his hometown.

He got the idea in 1980, after reading an article about domestic dogs that ran away from their owners and lived as wild dogs in the mountains.

The pure idea fascinated him, which eventually led him to create the aforementioned manga.

In 1987, the series won the Shogakukan Manga Award for shōnen manga.

Takahashi started to publish Silver Fang 's sequel, Weed, in 1999, and it soon became a hit as well, after the airing of the anime adaptation on September 17th, 2005.

He has been touted as the first manga artist to draw manga featuring a puppy as the hero of the story.

Takahashi was the guest of honour at the Finnish role-playing and anime fan convention Tracon, which took place from the 3rd to the 4th of September, 2011, in Tampere.

It was his first visit to Finland, and most likely his first time being a guest of honour outside Japan; he visited Finland for the second time in 2012, participating in the Animecon event in Kuopio.