Tetsu Kariya and the "food" manga genre
When he finished university, Tetsuya Totsuka planned to be a nuclear physicist. Today he is one of the most respected writers of food manga in Japan. And with the release of new English-translation editions of his most popular series Oishinbo, a la carte, his impact is set to be much wider.
His Japanese friends know him by his nom de plume of Tetsu Kariya. Oishinbo started in 1984 as a weekly 22-page page comic strip. It now appears in two paperback editions a year, there have been more than 100 issues and it has sold more than a million copies.
Kariya was born in China and grew up in Japan, where he studied physics at Tokyo University then worked as an advertising copywriter. For the past 20 years, he has lived in Australia.
He came to Sydney as a student and went fishing at Church Point on the Hawkesbury. It was the most beautiful place he had ever seen: When the decision came to leave Japan, Sydney is where he came.
''Our children were our reason for moving to Australia,'' he says. ''I didn't want them to be subjected to the intensely competitive Japanese school system.''
He now lives in Castlecrag and spends a few months each year in Japan travelling and collecting background material for his books. He writes mostly at home in Sydney, then sends the scripts to Japan to the illustrator Akira Hanasaki, who has absolute freedom to interpret the story in drawings.
Oishinbo's themes over the years have included fish, sushi and sashimi, ramen and gyoza and sake. Coming soon are vegetables, the joy of rice and izakaya - pub food. Kariya is not just a successful writer, he's a social critic and food activist. He uses his manga stories as a platform for protecting regional produce and diversity, reducing pesticide use and restoring the ecology.
In the sake edition, he takes big manufacturers to task for watering down the proud national drink and criticises government rules that allow them to do it. He has opposed importing US rice to Japan because of the levels of dioxin used by US farmers.
The series has featured a number of Australian stories, including a storyline about bush tucker set in the Northern Territory. Kakadu is one of Kariya's favourite places.
''When the English editions came out my Sydney friends said 'Oh, so that's what you do!','' he laughs. ''For the first time in all these years they understood that while it looked like a comic, the subject matter was educational and serious.''
Oishinbo's background story line is simple. Journalist Yamaoka Shirou and his colleagues work at a fictional newspaper preparing for its 100th anniversary. They have been given the task of selecting the best Japanese food for an ultimate menu. They publish their explorations each week and the manga tells the story of their research, set against soapbox-style subplots of romances and rivalries.
Kariya credits his wife, Mitsuko, for pushing him to write about food. ''I asked her one day while I was working as a copywriter, 'How come we never have any money?' and her reply was: 'Because you eat and drink it all.' I knew that if I was going to make any use of my reputation as an opinionated gourmet I might as well be writing about food.''
He had written one popular, edgy manga story but despite the acclaim didn't want to continue in such a violent genre. When a friend who published manga kept pestering him, he told him he'd write about food, take it or leave it. The timing was right for the Japanese market with a growing interest in food and the title became a hit across age groups.
Shooting starts soon on a TV adaptation. Oishinbo's impact on Japanese food culture is seen in the Iron Chef TV series and other manga titles. Even small Japanese convenience stores, alongside the fast food and exotic carbonated drinks, stock their own specially branded Oishinbo editions.
Real restaurants and chefs are named in his stories; if it's positive, the result is a huge rush of customers. He hardly expected the same effect for his Australian story lines but restaurants he has mentioned in Melbourne and Sydney had an influx of Japanese tourists, all demanding the manga's ''supreme menu'' dishes. More at: smh
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Most manga series are so fictionalized that you wouldn't think of them as anything but entertainment. I wonder if any other series have hidden messages too! Maybe Sailor Moon is really about exposing political corruption... or maybe not. 
