Kazuhiko Torishima

Torishima smiling with a volume of Dr. Slump

Kazuhiko Torishima (鳥嶋 和彦, born October 19, 1952) was a long-standing editor of publications printed by Shueisha and was an key figure in the creation of the original Dragon Quest, assigning artist Akira Toriyama to the project as the main illustrator.

Biography

Early life

Torishima was born in Ojiya city of the Niigata prefecture in the central part of the Honshu island. Upon graduating from the faculty of law at Keio university in 1976, Torishima applied for a position within Shueisha publishing. This decision came after a period of introspection, in which Torishima concluded that the only thing he excelled at was that he read books more than others. This left him with the choice of becoming a writer or an editor, choosing the latter on the grounds that he felt he could not maintain the creative flow crucial for a successful writer.

Editorial career

Torishima had originally wanted to become an editor for the Japanese version of Playboy Magazine, but instead was assigned to the staff of Weekly Shonen Jump―a development he surmised as disappointing. Prior to his employment, Torishima had never heard of the magazine nor did he read manga as a child, and upon browsing the back catalog of older issues he found Jump's material to be uninteresting at best. The situation was so frustrating that Torishima considered resigning from his position within a single week, but began to reconsider after discovering the collection of competing manga magazines within Jump's offices. He took particular interest in Ore Wa Teppei, which was published by the rival Weekly Shonen Magazine, and used the manga as a tool to teach newly hired artists the ways of the trade

Torishima would leave his first mark on the industry when he was assigned to be the editor for Detective Doberman, an unpopular vigilante series illustrated by Shinji Hiramatsu and written by Buronson. The manga ranked thirteenth in overall popularity among reader of Jump and upper management had decided to cancel it within three months, placing Torishima on the project just to give him more experience. The rookie editor would quickly turn the situation around, however, after identifying the key flaw in Hiramatsu's art: the man was good at drawing action, but terrible at drawing women. When presented with the concept art of the new character Saki Ayakawa, Torishima handed the artist a photo of the most popular idol in Japan at the time, Ikue Sakakibara, and instructed him to model Saki's face on her's. The redesigned heroine proved to be a smash hit among readers, catapulting Detective Doberman from dead last to third in popularity rankings almost overnight. This incident showed Torishima how interesting the job of an editor could be, and motivated him to continue his career.

Torishima first encountered the work of Akira Toriyama in 1978, when the amateur artist submitted his entry in Jump's newcomer competition for the prize of ¥500,000. Toriyama entered into the comedy division because the prize money was the same as that of the story-focused division, but the page count minimum was half. In the end Toriyama's manga was rejected outright on the grounds of being a parody of the film Star Wars when the rules stated that all submissions must be original works, but his use of the English alphabet for onomatopoeia instead of the traditional katakana, the amount of detail he gave to his drawings, and the masterful ability of conveying a three-dimensional space in drawing form immediately caught Torishima's attention. The two entered a dialogue via telegram that lead to the creation of the one-shot Wonder Island. Despite ranking dead last on a reader survey, the duo would continue to work together over the course of the next year until Toriyama began his first serialized work: Dr. Slump.

Involvement with Dragon Quest

Torishima developed a passion for video games very early in his adulthood, becoming fascinated with Space Invaders] upon it's release. He would actively participate in arcade game location testing with fellow Jump employee Akira Sakuma. Sakuma would introduce Torishima to Yuji Horii, having been friends since their school days. The editor and freelance writer would quickly strike up a friendship of their own and Torishima would join Horii in writing game articles for Monthly OUT.

At one point a promotional contest was held within Jump, with the prize being a Nintendo Game & Watch. The task of managing this contest was given to Torishima due to his fondness for games being common knowledge amongst Jump's editorial staff, but he felt that it wasn't very interesting to just hand out games as prizes in unrelated contests. Instead, Torishima proposed that Jump dedicate pages to featuring video game content unrelated to the manga printed within a given issue, something he expected to face serious backlash for from his superiors. These pages would focus on PC games at first before shifting attention to the less-expensive and more popular Famicom and MSX platforms that were more readily accessible to Jump's key demographic of young boys. When it became apparent that rival magazine CoroCoro comics was garnering more attention from young gamers thanks to printing tips and tricks in sealed pages that could not be read in stores, Torishima followed suit but in a grand fashion by launching a new game section that included full colour pages and written reviews in addition to cheats. The review section was important to Torishima as games were still quite expensive for children, and thus he felt that guiding his readers towards worthwhile titles would be a necessary undertaking.

This new section would be called "Famicom Shinken" (ファミコン神拳), a play on the term for the fictional martial art used by the character Kenshiro in Fist of the North Star which was being published in Jump. The connection to the series wasn't limited to just the name as review scores were given in amounts of "Atatatata", the war cry that Kenshiro shouts in battle, and the writers for the articles were credited as "successors" in the same way that the protagonists of the post-apocalyptic manga were the successor to their respective school of combat. Yuji Horii was contracted to write for Famicom Shinken, using the pen name of Emperor Yu (ゆう帝)

With Weekly Shonen Jump being the trendsetting magazine that it was, it wasn't long until competitors began copying Torishima's winning formula and entire magazines dedicated to games were also beginning to appear on shelves. These magazines were fully staffed where as Famicom Shinken was worked on by only three or four employees at a time, and were able to push the discovery of cheats and techniques to a whole new level in addition to providing reviews from a larger pool of players. Having felt that he had already pushed his writing staff's capabilities to their limit, Torishima decided a different approach was necessary: instead of covering games that were already on store shelves, Jump would teach it's young readers how games were made.

Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura had already begun development on the original Dragon Quest in November of 1985, with Torishima hearing of the project thanks to his working relationship and friendship with Horii. The game was still in it's conceptual form but Torishima convinced his superiors that the exclusive coverage would be worth taking the risk of dedicating pages to an unreleased title, and to sweeten the deal he used his authority as Toriyama's editor to assign him the responsibility of illustrating the game. As Toriyama was under a very strict contract with Shueisha that stipulated that his work could only be printed in periodicals published by the company, this guaranteed that Famicom Shinden would have the best coverage of the game by including his illustrations alongside the written articles.

The first world would first learn of Dragon Quest in the pages of the eleventh issue of Jump, February 11 1986, showing the prototype of the title screen, an explanation of the game's nature as an RPG, as well as several screenshots of towns and battles, all accompanied by Toriyama's artwork. Jump would continue to feature exclusive content about the game until it's release on May 27 1986 and publish a strategy guide as well, with Shueisha circumventing the digital publishing rights of Enix thanks to a contract with Horii.

Torishima's gamble paid off handsomely, with his friend Horii benefiting from the preferential coverage in the widest-circulating Japanese magazine of the time and himself demonstrating his shrewd business cunning and impressing his upper management.

Involvement with Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai

In 1989 Torishima planned to have a one-shot manga based on the series be featured in an issue of Jump as part of a promotional campaign. Horii disapproved of the idea, however, stating that it would be boring to create a manga based on the specific games because the fans would already know how the story would unfold. Considering this, Torishima instead proposed an original manga that was based on the worldview and themes of Dragon Quest instead of the individual games. Horii approved of this approach and Torishima hand-picked Riku Sanjo to write the one-shot due to his experience as a writer for Jump's video game articles in the late 80's and Sanjo's friendship with Horii insuring familiarity with the source material. Jump artist Koji Inada was approached to illustrate the project, but was initially hesitant as he wanted to work on a wholly original manga instead of a derivative work. Torishima was able to convince him otherwise however, and the trio began the planning phase of what would be titled Derupa! Iruriru!.

The two chapter one-shot proved to be a tremendous success, so much so that a three chapter sequel titled Dai Bakuhatsu!! was quickly approved. The follow up garnered an ever greater reception amongst readers and full blown serialization would commence within the same year, with the manga officially being titled Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai. Torishima would withdraw from the project once seralization began, leaving it in the hands of his junior editors.

Other projects

Torishima had become editor-in-chief of Weekly Shonen Jump by the early 90's, and sought to create an entire magazine dedicated to covering video games in a way that the handful of pages allotted to him in a given issue of Jump could not. After a false start in 1990 that was tied up in copyright complications, the first issue of V Jump magazine would hit store shelves in July of 1993. The cover art was provided by Toriyama, featuring several Dr. Slump characters cosplaying as heroes and villains from Dragon Quest II: Luminaries of the Legendary Line.

Gallery

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  Torishima, as drawn by Toriyama

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  Toriyama depicting his artist/editor relationship with Torishima in a playful way