Yasuji Tanioka

Yasuji Tanioka is one of the most popular mangaka in Japan. His outrageous and crude "gag" manga appeals to people from all walks of life, and unlikes most of his contemporaries, Tanioka fits comfortably in bot hthe underground and the mainstream worlds. At the height of his fame in the early seventies, Tanioka was drawing more than two hundred manga pages for forty different magazines every month. At that time, he not only record a 45-rpm record, "Yashuji no Ora-Ora Bushi" ("Yasuji's Ora Ora Song"), but was the star and subject of two films - a live-action movie and an animated cartoon, both entitled "Tanioka Yausji no Mettametta Gaki-dou Koza" ("Yazuji Tanioka Lectures on the Rascal's Messy-Mess Road"). The cartoon was distributed in the United States and actually did quite well. Tanioka was born August 29, 1943, in Ehime Prefecture. While he was still a child, his father, a thrift-shop owner and local politician, went bankrupt, and the family was forced to move to Tokyo. Unlike many of the artists featured in Comics Underground Japan, Tanioka was actively encouraged by his parents to pursue a career in manga. At age sixteen he debuted in a magazine targeted at elementary school students, where his comics were a regular feature for two years. He soon moved to the adult market and started publishing in major magazines in 1966. Reminiscent of the American cartoonist Bill Holman (of Smokey Stover fame), Tanioka has always employed a number of nonsensical catch-phrases in his manga, which has gone on to become vital parts of Japanese slang. The best-known of these is "hana-hi bu." Hana-ji (literally "nose blood") is a visual device indicating sexual excitement, and bu is the sound of spurting blood. There have been over sixty published volumes of Tanioka's collected manga, yet most of his work these days is in advertising.