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The story
Old event photos have reignited talk that Nagano, the creator of “Chiikawa,” is a woman. The thread spiraled into a debate over what it takes to be a “female creator who still gets respected,” citing names like Rumiko Takahashi and the creators of Demon Slayer and Fullmetal Alchemist, with some pointing to differences in editorial backing as the real factor.
What people said
There are cases like the creator of Wakako-zake, so it's not unheard of (a manga about a woman who drinks alone).
That's probably modeled on a parent or relative of hers.
Sorry to disappoint.
What's that supposed to mean?
Because female creators get dragged online.
It should be phrased as 'for disappointing you,' not 'for being disappointed.'
Is your Japanese not so good?
There was a photo floating around, right?
Is that actually confirmed to be her?
The whole backstory around the flying squirrel character is exactly that.
What is this guy even talking about.
Confirmed. Before she blew up she used to attend events as a regular illustrator — every longtime fan knows this.
Whoa, I should've gone too.
Goes to show the masses fall for the same trick every single time (B層 = the easily-swayed general public).
LOL you understood literally nothing.
It comes down to the editors backing them. Apparently a former Morning editor at the same publisher, Kodansha, planned the Mii-yama creator's move into print — but it just seems to have fed her delusions of grandeur instead of actually developing her as an artist. The difference is night and day.
There are social-media manga artists by the thousands — these two are just the cream of the crop.
The fact that Nagano drew this to match is just brutal.
No way that's a coincidence — she did it on purpose.
Rumiko Takahashi
The Fullmetal Alchemist creator
The Demon Slayer creator
The Chiikawa creator
Anyone else belong on this list?
Meanwhile male creators are mostly the ones people love to hate — One Piece, Naruto, Kingdom, that whole crowd.
Demon Slayer just brute-forces past complaints about the cringey stuff typical of female authors with pure sales numbers. That Pixiv-tier school-AU final chapter was a genuine stain on the series.
Does the Jujutsu Kaisen creator not count?
Stuff like Tanjiro's line 'You're a creature that shouldn't exist' or that whole ohagi scene — there really is a lot of the cringey directing people criticize female authors for. It's just that the good parts outnumber it by even more.
There's a similar line — 'I deny your entire existence' — but that's just a rephrasing of a classic trope line. Has nothing to do with the author's gender.
If we're going down that road, what about 'You are already dead'? LOL that makes zero sense either…
The art style's just a little similar, that's all.
Background and Key Points
Chiikawa’s phenomenal reach is the backdrop that gives this thread its charge. Nagano, the pen name behind the character, began as an anonymous social-media illustrator posting short comics on Twitter/X around 2020, and the strip snowballed into one of Japan’s biggest merchandising properties — anime adaptations, department-store pop-ups, and collaborations across convenience stores and fashion brands — all while the creator’s identity stayed deliberately obscure. That opacity is itself a Japanese industry norm: many manga-ka, especially those who rose through web platforms rather than a traditional magazine system, keep their face and even gender undisclosed, since the work is expected to stand apart from the person. Event photos resurfacing as “proof” of Nagano’s gender fits a recurring pattern on 5ch, where fandoms treat unconfirmed sightings as detective work.
The thread’s actual fault line isn’t whether Nagano is a woman — posters treat that as settled — but whether she belongs on a shortlist of female creators (Takahashi, and the Demon Slayer and Fullmetal Alchemist artists) who are “respected even by men,” and whether that respect tracks talent or editorial packaging, as the barbed comparison to the “Mii-yama” creator’s Kodansha backing suggests.
What outsiders will likely miss is that this “respect gap” discourse is a long-running 5ch trope applied to nearly every successful female creator, not a Chiikawa-specific controversy, and that Nagano’s gender had already circulated as semi-open knowledge among longtime fans — several posters note this outright — making the “shocking reveal” framing largely a rhetorical device rather than genuine news.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Chiikawa Creator’s Gender Revealed wwwwwwwwww.”
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