Machiko Hasegawa

Machiko Hasegawa (長谷川町子, Hasegawa Machiko), January 30, 1920 – May 27, 1992, in Taku, Saga Prefecture) was one of the first female manga artists.
She started her own comic strip, Sazae-san, in 1946. It reached national circulation via the Asahi Shimbun in 1949, and ran daily until Hasegawa decided to retire in February 1974. She also created the comic strip Ijiwaru Bā-san (Granny Mischief). All of her comics were printed in Japan in digest comics; by the mid-1990s, Hasegawa's estate had sold over 60 million copies in Japan alone.

Sazae-san was a popular postwar comic strip depicting the life of Sazae-san, a fictional Japanese housewife.

Her comic strip was turned into a dramatic radio series in 1955 and a weekly animated series in 1969, which is still running as of 2015.

Selected comics were translated into English, under the title The Wonderful World of Sazae-san.

She received the People's Honor Award in 1992.

Hasegawa died of heart failure on May 27, 1992, at the age of 72.