Rakuten Kitazawa

Yasuji Kitazawa (北澤 保次^?, 20 July 1876 – 25 August 1955), better known by the pen name Rakuten Kitazawa (北澤 楽天, Kitazawa Rakuten^?), was a Japanese manga artist and nihonga artist. He drew many editorial cartoons and comic strips during the years from the late Meiji era through the early Showa era. He is considered by many historians to be the founding father of modern manga because his work was an inspiration to many younger manga artists and animators.

He was the first professional cartoonist in Japan, and the first to use the term "manga" in its modern sense.

Rakuten was born in 1876 in the Kita Adachi district of Ōmiya in Saitama Prefecture. He studied western-style painting under Ōno Yukihiko and Nihonga under Inoue Shunzui. He joined the English-language magazine Box of Curios in 1895, and started drawing cartoons under Frank Arthur Nankivell, an Australian artist who later emigrated to America and became a popular cartoonist for Puck magazine.

In 1899, Rakuten moved to Jiji Shimpo, a daily newspaper founded by Yukichi Fukuzawa. From January 1902, he contributed to Jiji Manga, a comics page that appeared in the Sunday edition. His comics for this page were inspired by American comic strips such as Katzenjammer Kids, Yellow Kid, and the work of Frederick Burr Opper.

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