Ryuuichi Yokoyama

Ryuuichi Yokoyama was a Japanese mangaka and anime director, picture book author, essayist, sculptor and painter. He was the son of silk wholesalers, grew up in Kochi and left for Tokyo after finishing junior-high school. In Tokyo he was an apprentice to sculptor Hakuun Motoyama. Inspired by manga published in magazines such as Shin-seinen, he began to draw manga during his free time. He submitted his work to the magazines and before he knew it he was a regular contributor. Soon he was able to earn a living from drawing illustrations and manga for magazines.

His Edokko Ken-chan, running since 1936 in the Asahi Shinbun’s Tokyo edition, had been one of the first manga to be adapted into a live-action film (1937). The titular Ken was an average Japanese boy, although readers favoured the antics of a supporting cast member, a mischievous street urchin called Fukuyama Fukutarou. As the star of the spin-off Fuku-chan, running in the Asahi Shinbun’s national edition from October 1936, the character would find enduring fame in manga form until 1971, becoming the mascot of Waseda University and, in the war years, being put to militarist use. The series was adapted for film, television and animation, became a national favorite and was awarded the first Children Culture Prize by the Japan Culture Association. It influenced many manga artists of the next generation including Osamu Tezuka and Takashi Yanase. Tezuka’s drawing of Fuku-chan is displayed at the Yokoyama Memorial Manga Museum.

Yokoyama cherished ambitions of becoming an animation studio boss like Walt Disney, whom he had met in 1951. With Japanese still restricted from travelling abroad during the Occupation, Yokoyama had pulled strings to get himself assigned to cover the San Francisco Conference as a journalist, and then spent two days at Disney’s studios. A comfortably well-off artist with influential family connections, who had enjoyed bestseller status in both the pre- and post-war periods, Yokoyama had already seen his work adapted into several media, including live-action cinema and post-war radio. The year after the critical success of his experimental cartoon Onbu Obake (1955), Yokoyama started his own animation studio, Otogi Pro.

In 1957, they released the eighteen-minute movie Fukusuke, based on one of Yokoyama's picture books, which received the Blue Ribbon Award and the Educational Culture Prize at the Mainichi Film Festival. Animator Shinichi Suzuki described Yokoyama's management and direction at Otogi Pro as haphazard and the production process as experimental. Otogi Pro’s pinnacle came in 1962, when the TBS television channel broadcast the first of what would be 312 episodes of the animated series Otogi Manga Calendar and its obscure predecessor Instant History (1961), which are regarded as the ‘first animated television series’ in Japan. However, Yokoyama had already taken his animation experiment as far as he desired, and did not expand his capacities beyond those required to make Otogi Manga Calendar.

Yokoyama received the Ministry of Education Prize, was named Honorary Citizen of Yasu Town, Kochi City and Kamakura City and named Person of Cultural Merit. He passed away at age ninety-two in a hospital in Kamakura City, Kanagawa Prefecture, due to a cerebral infarction.