1. Kazuo Umezu or Kazuo Umezz was a Japanese manga artist, musician and actor.
21 Facts About Kazuo Umezu
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Kazuo Umezu created successful manga series such as The Drifting Classroom, Makoto-chan and My Name Is Shingo, until he retired from drawing manga in the mid 1990s.
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Kazuo Umezu was a public figure in Japan, known for wearing red-and-white-striped shirts and doing his signature "Gwash" hand gesture.
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Kazuo Umezu's mother motivated him to start drawing when he was seven years old.
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Kazuo Umezu was inspired to start drawing manga by reading Osamu Tezuka's Shin Takarajima in fifth grade.
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Kazuo Umezu was part of a drawing circle with others called "Kaiman Club".
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Kazuo Umezu's specialty was to include paranormal elements in his stories.
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Kazuo Umezu became a well established author and was at times working at up to five serials at the same time.
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In 1975, Kazuo Umezu started becoming a public figure apart from creating manga.
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Kazuo Umezu recorded songs based on his horror manga and released them as the solo album Yami no Album.
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Kazuo Umezu then became even more of a public figure, appearing regularly on TV in a red and white striped shirt.
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Kazuo Umezu was famous for the architecture of his candy-striped home in Kichijoji, inspired by his Makoto-chan series.
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In July 2024, Kazuo Umezu was hospitalized after collapsing at his home in Kichijoji, Tokyo.
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On November 5,2024, Shogakukan announced that Kazuo Umezu died on October 28.
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Manga artist and critic Sakumi Yoshino explains that his horror manga is related to religion in Japan, as monsters and demons are not considered completely evil, and Kazuo Umezu wants readers to sometimes feel compassion for the monsters in his works.
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Kazuo Umezu initially focused on this topic as he found that relationships between mothers and children in manga in the early 1960s were portrayed only as caring, never as scary.
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Kazuo Umezu's works inspired a new generation of horror manga artists.
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Kazuo Umezu's reputation gave him the nickname "god of horror manga" in Japanese media.
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Kazuo Umezu's manga broke with the norms of the commercial manga industry at the time that he started publishing in major magazines in the mid 1960s and created a boom around horror manga in the late 1960s.
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Kazuo Umezu regularly received complaint letters from parents in the beginning of his career due to his horror visuals and editors of magazines would ask him to scale down the violence in his imagery.
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In 2019, Kazuo Umezu received the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs award from the Agency for Cultural Affairs.