Our first episode of the year features UME, a two-person mangaka unit based in Tokyo composed of writer Takahiro Ozawa and artist Asako Seo. UME is behind the Tokyo Toy Box series, which takes place in the game industry. The manga was a big success in Japan and has also recently been adapted for television. First, we will head towards Akihabara, a place of inspiration for UME as it is where the Tokyo Toy Box story is set. Besides recreating the city’s backgrounds, a few local companies were also taken as reference in the story, one of them being Acquire, a studio that is behind renown series such as Tenchu, Way of the Samurai or Akiba’s trip. UME did several collaborations with the studio, and some of its manga characters were also featured in Acquire’s game Akiba’s Trip 2. We will then head towards the Yanaka Ginza shopping street, where UME often go to take walks and enjoy drinks after a hard week’s work. Its atmosphere is representative of Shitamachi, the Eastern Tokyo, with its small shops and a scenery that remains almost unchanged for the past decades. Our last stop will be at UME’s atelier, where we will learn more about the mangaka’s backgrounds, their work philosophy and their attachment to technology. The latter was a trigger for Ozawa to write the story of UME’s latest series STEVES, a story about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. UME were also the first mangakas in their magazine to completely switch to digital and more recently they were the first Japanese mangaka to self-publish their work on Kindle.

• Koji Yamamura
• Akira Yasuda
• Hisashi Eguchi