is a Japanese publishing executive and former manga magazine editor, who is currently serving as an outside director at Bushiroad. He formerly worked at Shueisha, where he began as an editor in 1976, before becoming a senior managing director (CEO), and later a Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions director. When he moved to Hakusensha in 2015, he first served as president, then representative director, before taking on the role of advisor. He began working for Bushiroad at the end of 2022.
Torishima has been called one of the most important figures in the history of manga, and has been credited with pioneering the media mix business strategy. He is often associated with works from the manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump, for which he was editor-in-chief from 1996 to 2001. Torishima discovered Akira Toriyama and was his editor throughout the run of Dr. Slump (1980–1984) and during the first half of Dragon Ball (1984–1995). He received a Special Achievement Award at the 2022 Japan Media Arts Festival for his work in manga.
Early life Kazuhiko Torishima was born in the small community of Ojiya, Niigata on October 19, 1952. He described his mother as very positive, but said he did not have a good relationship with his father. Torishima has repeatedly spoken of his dislike for his hometown, which he described as a "stifling" place where nothing changes, and its residents, who he feels are "incredibly complicated" to deal with. Because they had nothing in common to talk about, he had no friends and spent his youth alone reading books; "when you don't have the financial background to escape that kind of community, your only option is read a lot of books. As they allow you to escape into a different world. So reading a lot helped me to survive". While still in elementary school, he would read a lot of Confucius, Friedrich Nietzsche and Blaise Pascal. In middle school, he tried to read one book a day by going to multiple libraries every day, reading anything that caught his interest. When he had enough of philosophers writing different and contradictory things, Torishima switched to erotic novels such as Story of the Eye and Story of O. Torishima said that because he could not get into a university, he moved to Tokyo to enter a college-preparatory school, where he was liberated having found people that were smarter than himself and who shared his interests. He went on to attend Keio University, which he chose because its tuition was cheap, against his father's wishes because he thought it would be the best way to achieve financial independence. Although he wanted to major in French literature in their Faculty of Letters, he chose the Faculty of Law because of its employability and because his parents refused to pay tuition for anything else. He later stated that the people he met at Keio became lifelong friends.
Career Manga editing career (1976–1992) As a bibliophile, Torishima believed the only career prospects he had were either as a writer or an editor. He chose the latter because he said he lacked almost all the skills needed for the former. Torishima wanted to work at Bungeishunjū, but they were one of many publishing companies not hiring due to the recession from the 1973 oil crisis. He claims to have applied to 48 companies across various industries and to have only heard back from two, a mid-level life insurance company and Shueisha. Torishima joined Shueisha in 1976, the year he graduated. He wanted to work on Monthly Playboy because of their high-quality short stories and novellas by famous authors, both domestic and foreign. 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. He said he considered quitting after only a week. Torishima was put in charge of Buronson and Shinji Hiramatsu's Doberman Deka. After this series jumped from around seventeenth in the reader rankings to third and going to the Shogakukan archives to study classic manga, he finally became interested in his job. Preferring shōjo manga such as Kaze to Ki no Uta and Poe no Ichizoku, Torishima felt that Jump manga at the time "had no intelligence or depth" and decided to help foster manga he found interesting to rank 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 throughout Dr. Slump (1980–1984) and for the first half of Dragon Ball (1984–1995). The two began working together after Torishima read a work Toriyama submitted for Weekly Shōnen Jumps Newcomer Award. He thought it was beautiful and funny, but it was ineligible to compete because it was a parody, so Torishima sent the artist a telegram and encouraged him to keep drawing and sending him manga. This resulted in Wonder Island, which became Toriyama's first published work when it appeared in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1978. However, it took 18 months, with Torishima rejecting 500 pages of work, until Toriyama began his first serialized work in Dr. Slump. It was an immediate success, ranking second in the reader rankings. Despite its success of regularly selling one million copies and having an anime adaptation that was about to debut, Toriyama wanted to end the manga after only six months. The magazine's chief editor told them that if they could come up with something more interesting and successful then they could end Dr. Slump. The two worked on numerous one-shots until Torishima suggested Toriyama make a manga based on the kung fu films he enjoyed so much. This became Dragon Boy, which was very well-received and developed into the serial Dragon Ball. Dragon Ball began as an adventure/gag manga but later turned into a martial arts fighting series, considered by many to be the "most influential shōnen manga". It was one of the main reasons for Weekly Shōnen Jumps circulation hitting a record high of 6.53 million copies (1995), and became Shueisha's second best-selling manga series of all time.
Ryuji Kayama of Bunshun Online and Taro Kawashima of AERA dot. both wrote that the now-commonplace media mix production method was triggered by the success of the Dr. Slump anime adaptation. However, Torishima felt the anime was unsuccessful because it greatly deviated from the original manga. He believed the reason for its deficiency was due to no one at Weekly Shōnen Jump knowing how to manage an anime adaptation based on one of their manga as this was "the first real time" it had been done. He has also said that a lot of "terrible" merchandise was released under the Dr. Slump name without prior consultation. Therefore, he decided to study both the creative and business sides to anime creation. This included talking to the team for Doraemon at Shogakukan. When it came time to adapt Dragon Ball, he and the Jump team had a huge "bible" created for the series before production even started on the anime, and were much more hands on. Merchandise could not be released without his approval, a system was created to control the products being released each season so as not to flood the market, and these products were introduced in Jump. When he felt the Dragon Ball anime's ratings were gradually declining, Torishima went so far as to ask the studio to change the producer because he had a "cute and funny" image connected to Toriyama's work due to previously working on Dr. Slump, and was missing the more serious tone of the new work. Impressed with their work on the Saint Seiya anime, he asked its director Kōzō Morishita and writer Takao Koyama to help "reboot" Dragon Ball; which coincided with the beginning of its second anime adaptation, Dragon Ball Z.
Torishima also discovered Masakazu Katsura, and worked as his editor on Wing-Man (1983–1985) and Video Girl Ai (1989–1992). He cited Makoto Isshiki as the most difficult manga artist he has worked worth, explaining that she wanted to end Hanattare Boogie (1986) as soon as he told her it had been approved for serialization.
Video games and V Jump (1982–1996) Torishima became a fan of video games around 1977, and prefers them over manga. "Manga is something you read once and then it's over, but games have a learning effect. If you hit a wall once, you can learn and analyze 'why you failed', and try again, and you can move forward." He would often visit a store in Shinjuku that had playtests for new games with his friend Akira Sakuma, a writer who worked for Seventeen and whom Torishima met after he asked to interview Toriyama for Weekly Playboy. Sakuma eventually introduced him to fellow writer Yuji Horii, who joined their gaming group.
Because they were short on staff, Torishima was made editor of Weekly Shōnen Jumps reader submissions page in 1982. He agreed on the condition that Sakuma, who later created the Momotaro Dentetsu video game series, be put in charge of it. They increased the page count from four to eight, and hired illustrator Doi Takayuki (who also worked on Momotaro Dentetsu). This was the creation of the magazine's , which ran until 1995. The column reached tenth in the readers survey, surpassing half of the manga series. Torishima also brought Horii into the Jump fold to write articles about video games. Torishima's colleagues were against his bringing of outsiders into the company, for reasons such as worrying about the survey results being leaked. Thus, they had to work in a conference room and were not allowed inside the editorial department. Also in 1982, Weekly Shōnen Jump was approached by Yukinobu Chida of Enix to sponsor their "Game Hobby Program Contest", which offered a cash prize for video game prototypes. Torishima agreed as long as Jump was the exclusive magazine sponsor, and assigned Horii to cover the event. Horii secretly also entered the contest and took home an honorable mention.
When his manager told him to figure out why Shogakukan's CoroCoro Comic was doing so well, Torishima determined it was because of the sealed pages that had to be cut open to reveal cheats and tips for video games. So Jump began doing the same with Horii and also began to rate games, something new at the time. This was the birth of , the irregularly published video game section of Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1985 to 1988. Its title was derived from the Family Computer gaming system, which is abbreviated to "Famicom", and Hokuto Shinken, a martial art from Jumps own Fist of the North Star. Horii had the idea to use a rating system based on a famous onomatopoeia from the same manga. The column was a hit that reached third in the magazine's readers poll and led to non-stop phone calls about the games, forcing Torishima to pay Horii and Hiroshi Miyaoka just to answer the phones.