Mangaka profile (3): Hideko Mizuno

• Name: Hideko Mizuno
• In Japanese: 水野英子
• Date of birth: October 29th, 1939 (70 years old at the time of the interview)
• Hometown: Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi
• Debut: 1955 (15 years old), with one illustration and one cut for Shōjo Club. Her first story, Akakke Pony (Red-haired pony), was published in 1956, when she was 16 years old.
• Main works: Hoshi no tategoto (The Harp of the Stars), Honey Honey no suteki-na bōken (Honey Honey’s Lovely Adventures), Fire!, Gin no hanabira (Silver Petals), Shiroi Troika (White Troika)...
• Awards: 15th (1969) Shōgakukan Manga Award (for Fire!), 39th (2010) Japanese Cartoonists’ Association Award’s Education and Science Minister’s Award (for her lifetime work).

Facts:

• She was very influenced by Osamu Tezuka’s works and she decided that she would be a professional mangaka because of them. She managed to become one of the first female mangaka at a time when even shōjo manga (manga for girls) was created by men.

• As many artists of her generation, she sent samples of her work to the reader’s corner of Manga Shōnen magazine. She never got the main prize, but the one in charge of reviewing the works and giving the prizes at the time was Osamu Tezuka.

• Shōjo Club magazine’s editor Akira Maruyama, who was in charge of Tezuka’s work for his magazine (Tezuka produced the first version of Hi no Tori – Phoenix for it), discovered Mizuno’s artwork by pure chance at Tezuka’s place when he was living in the Tokiwa-sō apartments and decided that he would give her an opportunity.

• She made her debut in 1955, when she was only 15 years old, with some drawings for Shōjo Club. A year later she’d publish her first story in the same magazine.

• Akira Maruyama wanted more manga works for Shōjo Club, but the main authors were very busy at the time, so he came up with the idea of having some authors working together. Thus they would produce stories twice or thrice as fast (in theory, of course). He first tried with Shōtarō Ishinomori –Ishimori at the time– and Fujio Akatsuka, who created two or three stories with the penname Asuka Izumi. Then he had the idea of having Mizuno working with them as well. Mizuno would design the main characters, Ishinomori would draw the secondary characters and animals and Akatsuka would draw the back scenes and other stuff. They authored some stories under the penname U. MIA (M for Mizuno, I for Ishinomori and A for Akatsuka).

• Working from her parents’ house in Shimonoseki, which is quite far from Tokyo, was very hard for Mizuno. Maruyama had the idea to get a room for her in Tokiwa-sō. Thus, she could live under the same roof as Ishinomori and Akatsuka and work together with them. She only lived in Tokiwa-sō for a few months in 1958, but she didn’t belong to the Shin Manga-tō (New Manga Party) group. She is the only female mangaka to have ever lived in the famous “manga apartments”.

• In the 1960’s she created great works of shōjo manga that made her very famous. One of her most popular works is Fire!, a story about a rock band that earned her the Shōgakukan Manga Award in 1969.

• Her story Honey Honey no suteki-na bōken (Honey Honey’s Lovely Adventures) was made into an anime later broadcast in many Western countries. In English, its title was changed to Honey Honey.

• In the 1970s, as other female mangaka of her generation as Miyako Maki and Masako Watanabe, she started creating manga specifically aimed at adult women (ladies comics), a genre we in the West know now as josei manga.

• In 2009 she self-published her memories about her time in Tokiwa-sō, with the title Tokiwa-sō Nikki (review here –in Spanish).

• In 2010, the Japanese Cartoonists’ Association gave her the Education and Science Minister’s Award for her lifetime work.

I had the honor of interviewing Hideko Mizuno, living manga history, along with legendary editor Akira Maruyama. You’ll see samples of this interview in later posts!!

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