The folks at Manganews have translated, for your reading pleasure, an interview with Japanese manga-ka Hikaru Sato. Sato is the creator of Edomae no Shun (apparently, a manga about sushi), which appears in Weekly Manga Goraku in Japan. It’s an interesting peek into the life of a manga creator, but it also reads like a how-to manual for aspiring writers. He started out motivated by passion:
When I was in middle school I used to read “Circuit of Wolf” by Satoshi Ikesawa and Akio Chiba’s “Captain”. I was so touched by “Captain” one time that I started to cry. I was thinking, “One can be so moved by manga”, and wanted to write manga myself. I started to draw manga until late at night.
Then he made an important connection: Undeterred by the fact that he wasn’t any good, he sent his manga to an established cartoonist, Tokuhaka Nakashima. When Sato graduated from high school, Nakashima’s editor remembered him and he ended up as an intern for Nakashima. There he learned the most important lesson an artist or writer can learn:
“Finish the draft fast, the deadline is a high priority” is one of the lessons I learned from Mr. Nakashima.
His first manga debuted in Shonen Jump when he was 20. He focused on building a solid career, although it was almost derailed at one point by a brush with fame. Sato seems attribute his success to that old (and very true) chestnut about applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair:
Also, this may be just professional pride, but I trained myself to “just keep working.” You lose your skill if you don’t work. You need to keep going in this line of work.
And I thought this was kind of sweet:
I feel that manga is really for kids and it is something you continue to enjoy from your childhood. So, I don’t want to fake it or be mediocre.
All reporters end an interview by asking what’s next. For Sato, who listed deep sea fishing as his hobby, the logical followup to a sushi manga is a fishing manga, and it will be interesting to see what comes of this:
Fishing has a lot of romance.
DMP, Del Rey, are you listening?
Cooking manga is a general category in Japan. There are sub-categories such as Chinese cooking, bread making (bread is big in Japan), French cooking, speed cooking, etc etc, and a host of manga about various Japanese favoites. The most popular cooking manga above all was probably sushi manga. The biggest and my personal favorite was probably Shota no Sushi, which has been made into a live action dorama as well. But in order to gain popularity you need to really know your stuff, as many Japanese actually see cooking manga as a way to learn cooking (manga is the most popular learning tool in Japan), so you can’t just BS your way through and the technique you talk about must have some ground in truth cus people will attempt it at home. Much like baseball and other manga grounded in reality, like Fishing manga… oh boy… another BIG category with major educational value. One of the most influential and popular manga of all time is the fishing manga “Tsurikichi Sampei”, about a genius fishing boy. It ran for 13 years and something like 67 volumes, and sold over 30 million copies. I still remember how they print the fish on paper with ink, and what kind of fish bites a certain bait, and I HATE fishing!
The journey from fan artist – intern – mangaka is one taken by almost every major mangaka out there. His story is rather typical IMHO.