Akira Toriyama
Personal life

Akira Toriyama was raised by both parents. He has one sister. All that is known about her is that she is married and has two kids.

​

The artist himself is married, too. His love's name is Nachi Mikami and she is a manga artist. Mikami wasn't popular and her art is hard to trace. We know about her involvement in the book Illustrations of Rock, for which Japanese artists drew images reflecting what specific popular rock songs are about (or rather what emotions they produce). Mikami chose John Lennon's 'Imagine' and Aerosmith's 'Dream On'. Her other known work is Sei Mephisto Konranden, which she drew in 1985.

The couple got married three years earlier, in 1982. Not coincidentally, two Dr. Slump characters Senbei Norimaki and Midori Yamabuki got married in the manga around the same time. After the wedding, Nachi stopped drawing and took the traditional responsibilities of a housewife.

Together, they have two kids: a son named Sasuke, who was born in April 1987, and a daughter born in October 1990. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know her name (hopefully her parents do).

This lack of transparency is not coincidental. Toriyama was always secretive, and with time that has only increased. He shielded his family from public eye, which is always hungry for private information, to give them and himself a chance to have a normal life.

Privacy was what he has always wanted and his lifestyle reflects that. He was born in a city whose population today is below 70,000 and back in his childhood, that number was even smaller. Around his house, green pastures were spreading in all directions.

I do plan to leave and go to Tokyo, but I really am a country boy by nature, so it seems that I’m better suited to the countryside.

Akira Toriyama

He enjoyed the setting immensely and was not happy when more and more houses started appearing in the vicinity as time went on. Nature is where he works most effectively (no distractions) and where he regenerates fastest as well.

Another character trait of Toriyama is his humility. Even after achieving huge commercial success with Dragon Ball, he still gave low to moderate estimates of his abilities, depending on what he was asked about specifically. In interviews, he often half-openly admitted to shortcuts that he was taking and big improvisations, whereas fans were certain that he had everything planned from the beginning. For a man of his reputation, he is surprisingly normal and humble.

Trying to compensate for his (supposed) shortcomings, Toriyama has worked very hard. If a drawing doesn't satisfy him, he will redo it over and over again until it does. This meant long work hours and plenty of frustration, but in that area he's not the kind of person who makes compromises.

To compliment that persistence, he can remain surprisingly positive, even when the going gets very rough. Before finally breaking through with Tomato, Girl Detective, he claims to have had written more than 1000 manga pages. And that's not his private total, but the amount of unique pages that have been submitted and rejected from various publications!

A scenario that would give normal person a mental breakdown didn't seem to affect him at all. Toriyama himself claims he didn't mind all that and just continued working.

Even though the artist has spent huge chunk of his career chasing deadlines, the clock ticking over head is his nemesis. Whenever possible, he tries to prevent extended periods of intense work from happening.

When Dragon Ball became popular, the demand for next episodes became so big that he had to make many sacrifices to be on schedule. As his enthusiasm started to wear off, ideas no longer came naturally and all the years of hard work started to take their toll. He finished the series and decided to press the pause button and rest.

Toriyama came back to work probably faster than he expected, but since then it was on his own terms and his following inability to produce another hit which would start a series has actually helped him in that regard. When a short story was finished and sent for publication, he chose when to write the next one.

That's not to say that he is a lazy person - it's the opposite of that. In his most work-fueled times, Akira used to sleep less than an hour in the space of 6 days!

One more personal characteristic of Toriyama is his impatience. Even though he will repeat the drawing endless amount of times to get a satisfying result, it makes him very frustrated and he prefers to get through his chores quickly without encountering too many roadblocks.

The Dragon Ball creator also admits to being very thrifty, not being able to just spend money carelessly, but instead engaging in endless calculations to make sure that the money is well-spent.

Poor merchant, drunken local, eccentric old geezer - in kung fu movies, often the characters we would least suspect turn out to be martial arts masters defeating the obvious types - tall and heavily-muscled men sporting a predatory look.

As a fan of kung fu flicks since his early years, Toriyama has quickly picked up on this theme and has later started using them himself. Goku is a funny sympathetic little boy so sweet that it's impossible to notice at first glance that he is one of the most powerful men in the universe. Arale Norimaki (Dr. Slump's main character) is even stronger than young Goku, yet she is equally miniscule and even sweeter than him! On the other hand, Mr. Satan is all talk, but when the heat is on...

Akira plays around with this a lot. He believes that when characters surprise, it adds depth and realism. He takes great pleasure in reversing the situation - supposedly weak end up powerful, supposedly powerful end up weak. And of the two, the first one is the more attractive to him - an underdog going against all odds to snatch the title - the story of every Dragon Ball tournament.

My first memory of a satisfactory drawing was that of a horse. I still remember it. I got the joints right.

Akira Toriyama

The manga creator has always preferred his own alternative reality than our physical modern, or medieval setting. He does that for one reason: it's easier. Making manga in a specific setting means taking into account all the items that exist in it. If something looks completely different than in the real environment, the whole world starts to look phony.

In an unspecified alternative reality, the writer, and nobody else, decides how everything looks. King Kai's planet is so tiny that it can be circled by foot on a 3-minute walk and has a gravity 10 times bigger than on Earth? Sure, why not?

Drawing fighting is easier when the character is large. When it is small and has a big head and short hands, like Goku, drawing an entertaining fight scene becomes hard. Despite that, plenty of Toriyama's central characters were very little, compact people.

On the other hand, there were also many large characters and the difference in height between the two fighting characters is often big. When the Dragon Ball manga has hit season two and fighting was to become its core part, the writer had to compromise. And so Goku has become an adult and has grown.

Differences in height are just the beginning of various peculiarities that separate Toriyama's protagonists from each other. From dwarfs to giants, from totally naive to devilishly perfidious, from graceful to milksops. Animals of all sorts, robots, children, scientists, military men, all types of unique races and more.

It is this rich and often unique palette of characters which have made people fall in love so much with Toriyama's best works. Character design was definitely his strongest quality.

The second strongest was his sense of humor. Toriyama naturally gravitates towards a lighter side to the extent that even the antagonists that come from under his pen have some funny qualities about them. It is his style and he is good at it.

When the earlier mentioned second part of Dragon Ball was shaping, Toriyama knew that he will have to turn off his gags and substitute them with more serious story. He fought that switch but ultimately gave up due to commercial worries (manga's popularity was going down and introducing more fights was a sure remedy for that). In the end, he enjoyed the new direction more than he thought, but when the opportunity presented itself, again came back to the lighter style.

Probably Akira's favorite hobby is assembling scale models. Together with his good friend Kunihiro Suzuki (owner of Fine Molds Corp., which builds models) they have cooperated on many occasions (Toriyama designed, Suzuki built). At his home, the manga creator has a collection of many models and assembling them is such a draw for him that he often admits to evading work and constructing instead.

Another of his hobbies is motorcycle riding. When he got a driver's license in 1984, he started doing it and instantly fell in love with it. He enjoys it to this day.

Finally, he takes great pleasure in such simple things as taking a break from work to take his dog for a walk.

Both dog and cat lover, he owned many of both. He had a Siberian Husky named Mato, Welsh Corgi named Toma and at least two more dogs of unknown races named Turbo and Turbo 2.

One notable cat he had was a Cornish Rex named Ohiru. Beerus from Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and Dragon Ball Super was based on it. Ohiru also served as a lesser inspiration for Neko Majin, the main character from manga with the same name, a cat who is Goku's student.

Finally, Akira also loves birds and has owned many, including even a crow. (crows are surprisingly capable of living as domestic pets, but require a permit to own in most countries, including Japan)