Kazuhiko Torishima
| Kazuhiko Torishima | |
|---|---|
| Native name | 鳥嶋 和彦 |
| Born |
October 19, 1952 Ojiya, Niigata, Japan |
| Alma mater | Keio University |
| Occupation | President of Hakusensha, Shueisha magazine editor |
| Years active | 1976–present |
| Employer | Hitotsubashi Group |
Kazuhiko Torishima (Japanese: 鳥嶋 和彦 Hepburn: Torishima Kazuhiko?, born October 19, 1952 in Ojiya, Niigata) is the president of the Hakusensha publishing company. He formally worked at Shueisha, where he began as an editor before becoming a Senior Managing Director (or CEO), and later a Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions director. He is mostly associated with works from the manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump, for which he was editor-in-chief from 1996 to 2001, and is best known for being author Akira Toriyama's editor during the run of Dr. Slump and through the first half of Dragon Ball.
Although Torishima grew up in Niigata Prefecture, he did not like the people there as they had nothing in common to talk about, so he spent his youth alone reading books. He said that because he could not get into a university, he moved to Tokyo to enter a prep school, where he was liberated having found people that were smarter than himself and shared his interests.
Torishima joined Shueisha in 1976, the year he graduated from Keio University, wanting to work on Monthly Playboy because of their high-quality short stories. However, he was assigned as an editor at Weekly Shōnen Jump, despite having never really had any contact with manga until Shueisha sent him their products for reference, and put in charge of Doberman Deka. After this series jumped from around thirteenth in the reader rankings to third and going to the Shogakukan archives to study classic manga, Torishima finally became interested in his job. Preferring shōjo manga such as Kaze to Ki no Uta and Poe no Ichizoku, he felt that Jump manga at the time "had no intelligence or depth" and decided to help foster manga he found interesting as long as they ranked high with readers. He also studied the first chapter of Ore wa Teppei panel by panel and the layout and angles in each one, because he felt it was the easiest manga to read and tried to impart this basic structure to his artists. Torishima was most notably editor to Akira Toriyama during Dr. Slump (1980) and the beginning of Dragon Ball (1984), and to Masakazu Katsura during Wingman (1983).
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