Masako Watanabe, a manga creator whose career spanned more than seventy years, died on October 3 at 12:38 a.m. JST. She was 97. The news was posted to her X account on Tuesday.
Watanabe was born in Tokyo on May 16, 1929, and debuted in 1952 with the story “Suama-chan.” She kept working for the rest of her life, launching the manga Himegoto in 2020 at the age of 91.
A career in shojo and josei
Watanabe built her reputation in shojo and josei manga, the categories aimed at girls and adult women. She won the 16th Shogakukan Manga Award in 1971 for Glass no Shiro, known in English as Glass Castle. Her 1985 manga Hitori Matsuri was adapted into a live-action television drama.
Other works include Dai-San no Onna, Hakuba no Shōjo, Mimi to Nana, and Saint Rosalind. That range, from award-winning drama to long-running serials, is part of why her name carried weight in the industry for so long.
Recognition
In 2002, Watanabe received the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award at the 31st Japan Cartoonists Association Awards. In 2006, she became the first female manga creator to be awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, a national honour. She also served as a director of the Japan Cartoonists Association.
Those honours matter in context. Watanabe was already in her seventies when she received them, which means the industry recognition arrived decades after she had done the work that earned it. She was still drawing at that point, and she kept drawing for another fifteen years.
Her later output is worth noting on its own. She was 91 when Himegoto launched, which is unusual even for a medium known for long careers. The award she received in 2002 came at 73, and the Order of the Rising Sun followed in 2006, at 77. Both typically reward a lifetime of work, and in her case the work continued well past each ceremony.
Why her death matters to the medium
Watanabe belongs to a generation of women who built the shojo manga market from the ground up, at a time when the category barely existed as a commercial force. The creators who followed her inherited an audience and a set of storytelling conventions that she and her contemporaries established. Her debut in 1952 came before many of the magazines that later defined the field had even launched.
That longevity is worth pausing on. A career that starts in 1952 and continues into 2020 crosses almost the entire modern history of the medium, from the post-war years through the explosion of the anime and manga export market. Few creators see that much of it change under their own pen.
Her death follows the loss of other figures from the industry’s early era. Our coverage of animator Kenichiro Katsura, who died at 59, is another recent reminder of how much institutional knowledge sits with individual creators.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Masako Watanabe, via her X account / Anime News Network.
