About Hajime Isayama

Hajime Isayama is an award-winning and bestselling author of the manga series Attack on Titan, which has sold over 100 million copies in circulation as of December 2019.

Hajime Isayama was born in 1986, Attack on Titan is his first manga published as a professional manga artist. He managed to create a record-breaking mega hit manga as his debut series.

He has mentioned Tsutomu Nihei, Ryōji Minagawa, Kentaro Miura, Hideki Arai and Tōru Mitsumine as artists he respects, but stated that the manga that had the biggest influence on him was ARMS.

Born

He was born in Oita prefecture, which most Japanese think of as being a rural and remote place. Take a look at a map of Japan. A long journey from Tokyo towards the west takes you to the cities of Osaka and Kyoto, and you need to travel much further west to get to Oita.

The area where Isayama was born is a structural basin surrounded by mountains, which reminds me of the town surrounded by walls in Attack on Titan. The imagery of Titans surging in from between mountains must have developed in him while he grew up there. Oita was chosen as one of the venues for Attack on Titan exhibition, since he was born there. The people in Oita must be proud of him.

Careers

It was in high school that he began submitting manga works to contests. After graduating, he matriculated in the manga design program of the arts department at Kyushu Designer Gakuen.

In 2006, he applied for the Magazine Grand Prix known as MGP promoted by Kodansha Ltd. and a short version of Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) was given the “Fine Work” award.

At age twenty, he moved to Tokyo and worked at an Internet café in order to pursue a career in writing manga. This one-shot would later be included in the series’ guidebook and included with the first Blu-ray of the anime adaptation. Originally, he offered his work to the Weekly Shōnen Jump department at Shueisha, where he was advised to modify his style and story to be more suitable for Weekly Shōnen Jump. He declined and decided instead to take it to the Weekly Shōnen Magazine department at Kodansha Ltd.

In 2008, he applied for the 80th Weekly Shōnen Magazine Freshman Manga Award, where his work Heart Break One was given the Special Encouragement Award. His other work, Orz, was chosen as a selected work in the same contest the following year.

In 2009, his first serial work, Attack on Titan, started in the monthly Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine. It won the Shōnen category of the 35th Kodansha Manga Award in 2011, and was nominated for both the 4th annual Manga Taishō award and the 16th annual Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize. Attack on Titan is released in English by Kodansha USA and has inspired five spin-off manga series, three light novel series, a televised anime adaptation, several visual novels and video games, and a two part live-action film. The resort Bungo Oyama Hibiki no Sato in his hometown of Ōyama, ran a free exhibit displaying copies of Isayama’s manuscripts for the manga in 2013. A special Attack on Titan event was held in Hita on November 1, 2014, with Isayama and approximately 2,500 spectators attending. The following day, Isayama gave a speech at the Patria Hita cultural hall and was officially named the Tourism Ambassador of Hita by the city’s mayor Keisuke Harada.

In December 2018, he announced in his blog that he had gotten married earlier that year.