Profile
やなせたかし（1919-2013）は高知県育ちの漫画家・絵本作家・詩人。従軍経験から独自の正義観を育み、69歳で国民的アニメとなった『アンパンマン』や童謡「手のひらを太陽に」を生み出した。
Takashi Yanase was born on February 6, 1919, in Takinogawa, Kitatoshima District, Tokyo Prefecture (now part of Kita Ward, Tokyo), and soon moved with his family to his father’s hometown of Zaisho Village, Kami District, Kochi Prefecture (now the Kahoku area of Kami City), where he was raised by an uncle and aunt. In 1937 he entered the design department of the Tokyo School of Industrial Arts (a predecessor of the Faculty of Engineering at Chiba University), and after graduating took a job in the advertising department of the pharmaceutical company Tanabe Seiyaku. In 1941, at age 22, he was drafted into the army, and in 1944 he was sent to Fuzhou in Fujian Province, China, where he was assigned to a propaganda unit that used paper theater performances to encourage local residents to cooperate with the Japanese military. During this period he lost his younger brother Chihiro, two years his junior, who died serving in the navy. This firsthand encounter with the question of what justice truly is would remain the foundation of his thinking for the rest of his life.
After being demobilized in 1947, Yanase joined the advertising department of the Mitsukoshi department store as a graphic designer, while also joining the manga artist collective Dokuritsu Manga-ha (later Manga Shudan) and contributing cartoons and illustrations to magazines during years of struggle to establish himself. In 1949 he married Nobu Komatsu, an editor. Around 1953 he went freelance, taking on a wide range of work as a broadcast writer, stage designer, and lyricist, but as an era of gritty gekiga comics took hold, he continued to go largely unnoticed as a cartoonist. It was in 1961, while working late one night, that he held his hand up near a desk lamp and noticed his fingers glowing red with the light shining through them — an experience that became the seed for the song for children titled “Hands Up to the Sun” (music by Taku Izumi), which opens with the line “We are all alive.” In 1969 the song was adopted into the sixth-grade music textbook and went on to be sung by generations of Japanese children as a beloved national song. In 1973 Yanase launched and became editor-in-chief of the poetry and illustrated-story magazine Poem and Fairy Tale (published by Sanrio), and that same year he also published the picture book Anpanman, the original version of the character that would later become famous.
The television anime adaptation of the Soreike! Anpanman picture-book series began airing on the Nippon TV network in October 1988, when Yanase was 69 years old. Its premise — a hero who tears off pieces of his own bread-bun face to feed the hungry — drew some early criticism, but the image of a hero who gives of himself to save others gradually won over children nationwide, and just shy of his seventieth birthday, Yanase became the creator of a truly national character. After his wife Nobu died in 1993, Yanase, at age 75, published in 1995 the autobiography The Will of Anpanman (Iwanami Shoten), in which he set down his wartime experiences and the story of his life. He served as chairman of the Japan Cartoonists Association from 2000 to 2012, and devoted himself to social causes including support for the areas devastated by the Great East Japan Earthquake. He died of heart failure on October 13, 2013, at the age of 94; the underlying cause is understood to have been bladder cancer that had progressed over time. The Kami City Takashi Yanase Memorial Museum now stands in his childhood home of Kochi Prefecture, and the Anpanman Museum was established near Azabu-Juban in Tokyo, where he spent his later years — his work and philosophy continue to be loved across generations today.