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Tetsuya Chiba, Creator of the Boxing Manga Ashita no Joe, Dies at 87

Kodansha says the manga artist died Oct. 22 in Tokyo. He worked for seventy years, led the Japan Cartoonists Association and was the first manga artist given the Order of Culture.

The Publishing Times Staff · October 27, 2026 · 4 min read

Tetsuya Chiba, Creator of the Boxing Manga Ashita no Joe, Dies at 87

Tetsuya Chiba, the manga artist who drew Ashita no Joe and spent seventy years at the drawing board, has died at 87. His publisher Kodansha announced on October 27 that he died at 6 p.m. on October 22 in a Tokyo hospital. Public broadcaster NHK reported that the cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disorder.

The funeral has already taken place, with only family present. Kodansha says it is looking at holding a public farewell event later and will post details once they are set. The family has asked the press not to approach them, and they are declining flowers, telegrams and condolence gifts.

His studio, Chiba Production, posted its own notice on his official site. It says he worked as an active artist for all 87 years of his life and that being read by so many people for so long made his life "truly happy" as a cartoonist (PT's translation). It thanks the colleagues who helped him and the readers who loved his work. The notice names his wife, Yukiko, as chief mourner.

A career that began in rental manga

Chiba was born Tetsuya Chiba (千葉徹弥) in Tokyo on January 11, 1939. According to the profile in Kodansha's notice, his family moved that November by way of the Korean peninsula, and in 1941 settled in Mukden, in what was then Manchuria (today's Shenyang, China). After the war ended they came back to Japan.

He turned professional in 1956, at 17, with a book made for the rental-library market, the lending shops where many postwar manga artists got their start. His first magazine serial, Mama no Violin, began in 1958. In 1961 he moved into weekly boys' magazines with Chikai no Makyū, written by Kazuya Fukumoto.

The works Kodansha lists include Shidenkai no Taka, Harris no Kaze, Ore wa Teppei, Ashita Tenki ni Naare and Notari Matsutarō. The best known is Ashita no Joe, the boxing story he drew from a script by Asao Takamori. His last work was Hinemosu Notari Nikki, a diary manga.

Honors and the Japan Cartoonists Association

The awards on his official site run from a Kodansha children's manga award in 1962 to the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1977 for Notari Matsutarō. He was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 2014 and joined the Japan Art Academy in 2022. In 2024 he received the Kikuchi Kan Prize and the Order of Culture. The Yomiuri Shimbun notes that he was the first manga artist ever given the Order of Culture.

He also spent years working for other cartoonists. He became head of the Japan Cartoonists Association's board in 2012 and its chairman in 2018, the Yomiuri says, and from 2019 he was president of Bunsei University of Art in Utsunomiya, which runs a manga program. The association posted its own notice on October 27. It thanked him for his long service and for what it called his great contribution to spreading manga, encouraging new work and raising the standing of manga and the people who make it.

Why it matters for writers

Chiba's career followed the whole arc of modern manga publishing, from postwar rental shops to the weekly magazines and then to the country's top cultural honor. In his last decades he also gave a lot of his time to other people's careers, through the cartoonists' association and a university that trains manga artists. For comics creators and the publishers who work with them, that is worth noting: the honors came to a man who kept drawing to the end and who also put real hours into the field around him.

Sources

Photo: Tetsuya Chiba at the Prime Minister's Office in Tokyo, November 1, 2023. Photo by the Cabinet Public Relations Office, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 4.0.