Akira Toriyama was born on April 5, 1955 in Kiyosu City, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. He died on March 1, 2024, at the age of 68. Toriyama had one younger sister. He liked drawing since he was a child. As for his inspiration to become a manga artist, he said that he was amazed after watching the Astro Boy animation by Osamu Tezuka, which was the origin of his interest in manga. Toriyama said that when he was in elementary school, all of his classmates drew pictures imitating the anime and manga they liked. He did the same because at that time there was no other entertainment besides drawing and going out to play with friends. He was also very obsessed with drawing manga. Until middle school, he stopped drawing because he was more interested in movies and TV shows than drawing.
Until high school, he joined the manga club with his friends and drew his first manga, called No-Brainer. The teacher admitted that he drew it for fun and not seriously. At that time, he had already stopped reading manga. While drawing manga for fun with his friends, Toriyama's parents were not happy that he was drawing for fun instead of studying. After graduating from high school, Toriyama did not continue his studies but worked at an advertising company in Nagoya as a poster designer for three years. Although Toriyama said that he adapted to the job quickly, he did not like it and was often criticized for waking up late and dressing casually to work. In the end, Toriyama quit.
After quitting his job at the age of 23, Toriyama was on an island and had to ask his mother for money. Toriyama said that he went to a cafe and picked up a magazine in the cafe, which was Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine, but there was nothing interesting in it, so he picked up Weekly Shonen Jump, which was holding a Newcomer Award contest every month. At that time, Toriyama was interested in submitting his work to a contest in Weekly Shonen Magazine, and Kazuhiko Torishima was interested in his work, but his work was not eligible for the contest because it was a parody of Star Wars instead of an original work. Torishima, who saw his potential, sent a telegram to Toriyama asking him to draw a new story, and the result was Wonder Island, which became Toriyama's first published work in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1978, and ended up at the bottom of a reader's opinion poll (manga that was unpopular was canceled).
At that time, Toriyama said that he planned to quit manga after receiving his last payment from the publisher, because even the Wonder Island 2 manga was a flop and was canceled. Torishima continued to let him draw manga for another year on Today's Highlight Island. He said that he learned a lot at that time and enjoyed it so much that he didn't want to quit manga. Later, Torishima asked him to draw a female lead in Tomato the Cutesy Gumshoe in 1979, which was somewhat successful. When he was inspired to write a female lead, he decided to draw a female lead again, and the manga Dr. Slump was born.
The Dr. Slump manga, which was serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1980 to 1984, was a huge success. The Dr. Slump manga won the Shogakukan Manga Award for the best shonen (muscular boy manga) and shojo (girly manga) of the year. Dr. Slump is a manga that both boys and girls can read, and an anime series aired the same year. The Dr. Slump manga has sold over 35 million copies in Japan. Despite its popularity, the author wanted to end the series within about six months of its creation, which dragged on for four years.
After finishing Dr. Slump, Torishima recommended to his teacher who liked kung fu movies, so he asked him to write a kung fu shonen manga. This led to the Dragon Boy manga, which was published in the August and October 1983 issues of Fresh Jump magazine. It was about a boy who is skilled in martial arts and takes a princess back to his home country. The Dragon Boy manga was very well received, and this manga became the prototype for Dragon Ball in 1984, which was published in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine from 1984 to 1995. It has sold 159.5 million copies in Japan alone. At that time, Dragon Ball was one of the best-selling manga of all time and was known all over the world.
Toriyama died on March 1, 2024, at the age of 68, from an acute subarachnoid hemorrhage. The funeral was held privately, attended only by his family, and on March 8, his company, Bird Studio, announced his death a week later. According to sources close to Toriyama, he planned to undergo surgery for a brain tumor in February 2024. The news of his death deeply saddened his fans, and on Twitter (which has since changed to X), the topic of Toriyama and Dragon Ball surpassed then-US President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. Many fans and writers also paid their respects at the time, and a life-size statue of Goku outside Bandai’s headquarters was visited by people to pay their last respects to the master.
This is just a brief history of Professor Toriyama. The real thing has much more details. Anyone who is interested can go read it on foreign websites that have compiled it. From that day until today, I believe that the Dragon Ball series will continue and there will definitely be new sequels coming out all the time. It's just that right now it's stuck with the problem of overlapping copyrights. When everything is settled, we will definitely be able to read the Dragon Ball Super manga. And I would like to ask for this space to mourn and remember Professor Akira Toriyama once again, who created an excellent and fun work for many children in that era up until now. Thank you Akira Toriyama.
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