Who is Buronson?

Buronson is the best-known pen name of Yoshiyuki Okamura, born June 16, 1947, in Saku, Nagano. After junior high school he entered the Japan Air Self-Defense Force to escape poverty, graduated in 1967 and served as a radar mechanic. There he befriended Hiroshi Motomiya; after leaving the service he joined Motomiya’s studio as an assistant in 1971 and made his writing debut in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1972. The name came from the studio: after watching Adieu l’ami, his colleagues decided he resembled its star, Charles Bronson, and the nickname, mustache and all, became his byline. (He also writes as Sho Fumimura.)

His first success was the hardboiled detective manga Doberman Deka (1975 to 1979) with Shinji Hiramatsu. In 1983 Jump assigned him to write for a young artist named Tetsuo Hara, whose pilot stories he liked but whose modern setting he rejected: the post-apocalyptic future was Buronson’s call, informed by Mad Max and by a trip he had taken to Cambodia, where the fallen Khmer Rouge regime’s killing fields shaped how he wrote his characters and their dialogue.

After Hokuto no Ken he wrote, among much else, Sanctuary and the award-winning Heat with Ryoichi Ikegami. He later founded a manga school in his hometown, the Buronson 100-Hour Manga School in Saku (2018). In his late seventies he was still, by his own account, walking new stories into publishers’ offices and being turned down, and submitting them anyway.