10 Surprising Facts You Didn’t Know About Junji Ito

Ito, Junji. “Junji Ito – Master of horror manga.”. Fans are fascinated and surprised that Ito is so kind and healthy.

Junji Ito is universally hailed as the absolute master of horror manga. He is loved everywhere for his remarkable capacity to capture the deepest and wildest fears that are beyond human imagination by means of art. His best known works are Uzumaki, Tomie, and Gyo, as well as dozens other short stories and serializations, which have created a fan base no one anticipated in horror media enthusiasts. By using Ito’s hyper-detailed, unsettling, and uncanny art style, the readers are evoked with their primal fears, resulting in an art that can be very appalling and disturbing.

Nevertheless, a human being who can produce such horrifying horrors proves to be a nice and decent person. In such case, Junji Ito had an unusual personality, which combined an ability to conceive the most horrifying horror with good-nature, life-loving character and that’s why it was very hard to not to like the author himself just as much as his works However, much of Junji Ito remains puzzling, which adds intrigue to exploration of the mind and context of the most recognizable author in horror manga.

Junji Ito Does not Have a Specific Plot for Most of His Works

However, Ito acknowledges that constructing a storyline before sitting down to draw has never been among his means of work for most of his manga because some incredible storytelling is captured in them. Unlike him, Ito feels a powerful attraction towards striking or climactic images.

Visualizing this first, Ito forms a compelling story on its own. However, Ito himself admits that it is much tougher for him to make adaptation because when drawing from already established stories like Dazai’s No Longer Human and Sato Masaru’s The Trap of the State.

RELATED: 35 Best Isekai Anime You Should Watch Right Now (2023)

Junji Ito’s Older Sisters Introduced Him to The World of Horror

The first one is Ito who was born in Nakatsugawa, Japan and developed an early interest in horror media. Four or five years old was when his two older sisters initiated him to horror manga by Kazuo Umezu and Shinichi Koga that would later fuel the interest of the future horror master.

However, Ito did not seem bothered with the fear of media at a very tender age. Before long, he started locating it himself, watching TV films such as Dr. Jekyll versus Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Frankenstein and The Exorcist, as well as reading horror Mangas in magazines. While already at the same age, he was drawing his own horror manga although this was just a hobby for a long time.

Junji Ito Took Much of Inspiration from His Childhood

Ito’s birthplace was a rural region dotted with mountains, making this particular environment where the artist grew up special and exerted its influence on his works later. In Ito’s manga, the mundane elements of countryside life manifest themselves as horrifying in the descriptions of the spider crickets that used to be found in his family’s shed and in the narrow alleys between the buildings where you play hide.

The Hanging Balloons is one of them that got the inspiration from dreams Ito had in his childhood and deeply etched the mangaka’s memory. In addition to her own experiences, Ito also refers to some other artists and authors like Yasutaka Tsutsui, Edogawa Ranpo, H. P. Lovecraft, and Salvador Dalí, whose works have provided her with an inspiration.

Junji Ito Was a Dental Technician Before Becoming a Mangaka

Unrelatedly again, Ito had previously been a dental technician before he decided to devote his time fully to manga horror drawing. Ironically though, his medical proficiency was instrumental in his art. His knowledge of anatomy through attending a vocational school and experience of work in the medical field provided Ito with a deeper insight into human body that made his terrifying pictures all the more frighteningly accurate.

Ito’s short-lived career as a dental technician. He tried for three years to mix work with making manga, but his dedication to art soon overruled and he decided to do it completely.

Junji Ito Was the First Mangaka to Win the Eisner Award for Best Writer/Artist

The Eisner Awards was founded in 1988 by Will Eisner and it is considered to be the highest honor in comic books, analogous to the Academy Awards in motion pictures. At first its attention was restricted to the American creators, but then went international with Junji Ito becoming the first Japanese manga artist to gain the most prestigious Best Writer/Artist Eisner Award in 2021.

This was not the first time the mangaka won at the Eisner Awards, this honor was granted to Ito for his works Remina and Venus in the Blind Spot. Junji Ito’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 2019 won me the best adaptation from another medium prize. Here, I have been able to portray how extensive of a worldwide presence and popularity this artist has.

Junji Ito’s First Work Was Based on A Traumatic Experience from His Past

In 1987, Umezu Prize-winning artist Junji Ito released his first published work, and it was a short story he had submitted to the monthly shojo Magazine Halloween. This manga, one of Ito’s best known works turned into the popular fourteen tomie series running as many years in serial. Nevertheless, the creation of Tomie has a more sorrowful tale.

Ito got the concept of Tomie when he felt bewildered and despondent at the tragic passing of one of his classmates, which seemed to take the young man away from everyone. Thus, Ito created a character Tomie – a seemingly dead girl, but alive, in fact, which came out of the life trauma experienced by Ito.

Junji Ito Has Very Few Real-Life Fears

Like any horror mangka, Junji Ito is not scared with many things. Though he is so engrossed with the grotesque and fearsome, he has some things that are truly dreadful. His basic fears include sharks like those that star in his Gyo manga. It had begun with Ito’s fear of sharks that he nurtured ever since he had seen the movie Jaws by Steven Spielberg and then gradually came to incorporate itself into his manga.

Ito is more afraid of war and death that among other things. As far back as he can remember, he’s always had this overwhelming fear of war that was not as visible in his works most of the time.

Junji Ito Likes Cats

Junji Ito is an incredibly nice, normal guy who enjoys very down-to-earth activities outside of making horror; but dedicates his life to it. Outside manga drawing, he enjoys cats very much. On the pages of Ito’s works, cats are usually depicted as grotesque and frightening, but he also has a much more cutesy manga dedicated to his favorite felines — Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu.

It is an autobiography about horror manga artist Junji Ito and his fiancée coping with two cats, which offers a pleasant change from the mangaka’s tales of terror. Despite that, the drawing in Cat Diary still has a tinge of horror.

When Creating Uzumaki, Junji Ito Was Very Thorough with The Development

This is without question one of the scariest of Junji Ito’s stories. It is about the failure of the society driven by the enigma of the spirals, and it is well deserved to be counted among his creepiest stories. It was after witnessing the strange pattern on the mosquito coil as a child that the concept for Uzumaki dawned on Ito. The creation of Uzumaki necessitated very much unique research for Ito, who is not unfamiliar with drawing strange things.

Ito notes staring at spirals, studying spirals, constructing spiral patterns with draining bathing water; eating spiral patterned foods; and farming snails, all as a way to crack the code of the spiral. Ito believed that spirals stand for infinity after concluding this uncommon method.

Junji Ito Collaborated with Hideo Kojima

Junji Ito has admitted several times he is not interested in video games. However, he was involved in several initiatives for the medium. Since 2012, Kojima Productions had been developing the Silent Hills video game with many celebrated creators such as Guillermo del Toro, Norman Reedus and Junji Ito working with Hideo Kojima on the project.

However, the game was cancelled in 2015 as a result of a quarrel between Hideo Kojima and Konami. Instead, Ito appeared in Kojima’s next game, Death Stranding, in which Kojima had a cameo.

Junji Ito has contributed immensely to the world of horror manga. He is a master of the genre, able to explore the darkest depths of the human mind and create riveting horrors. As we explore more of Junji Ito’s disturbing tales, we can only speculate about what other nightmarish scenes he still has in stock for us.

FAQ