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The story
The “Big Four female manga artists” are locked in at three — Rumiko Takahashi, Momoko Sakura, and Hiromu Arakawa — but a 5ch thread lit up over who should take the fourth spot. Names like Naoko Takeuchi, Machiko Hasegawa, Koyoharu Gotouge (Demon Slayer), Yukari Ichijo, Yumi Tamura, and Chie Shinohara got tossed out one after another, with some citing actual print-run figures and arguing sales should settle it. Others pushed back on the whole premise, saying there’s no point ranking a “Big Four” without clear criteria, and pointed out that the candidates skewed heavily toward shonen-style hits, with few of shojo manga’s own legends getting a mention. The debate sprawled on without ever reaching a conclusion.
What people said
If that counts, Naoko Takeuchi ranks above her anyway
Personally I'd pick Āmin Okada
If landing a hit anime counts, Naoko Takeuchi's right there too
So Gotouge's in and Arakawa's out, then?
Takahashi and Arakawa make it sound like we're talking shonen manga, but Sakura doesn't fit that at all
This is seriously going nowhere
Forget 'Big Four' or 'Three Musketeers' — just make her the one and only
Machiko Hasegawa is not a one-hit wonder
'Ijiwaru Baasan' (Mischievous Granny) was a hit too, you know
Plenty of ordinary people have seen Chibi Maruko-chan or Sazae-san but never touched anything by Arakawa, though
Takeuchi's credited as original creator, but that was a multimedia franchise from the start, so it's a bit different from a normal manga-to-anime adaptation.
Kind of like the Evangelion TV anime versus Sadamoto's manga
Shojo manga did have cases where the manga and anime launched simultaneously, right?
The anime's doing way too much of the heavy lifting there —
that's down to a sharp producer at Fuji TV
She's just got so many hits
Still active to this day — that's legend status right there
#1 Eiichiro Oda — approx. 500 million — One Piece
#2 Takao Saito — approx. 300 million — Golgo 13
#3 Akira Toriyama — approx. 290 million — Dragon Ball, Dr. Slump
#4 Gosho Aoyama — approx. 287 million — Detective Conan, Yaiba
#5 Rumiko Takahashi — approx. 275 million — Ranma ½, Inuyasha, Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku
#6 Masashi Kishimoto — approx. 251 million — Naruto
#7 Koyoharu Gotouge — approx. 220 million — Demon Slayer
#7 Takehiko Inoue — approx. 207 million — Slam Dunk, Vagabond, Real
#8 Mitsuru Adachi — approx. 201 million — Touch, H2, Miyuki, Rough
#9 Osamu Tezuka — approx. 172 million — Astro Boy, Black Jack, Buddha
#10 Osamu Akimoto — approx. 160 million — Kochikame (This Is the Police Station in Front of Kameari Park in Katsushika Ward)
Works with print runs of 10 million or more
Listed left to right in order of best-selling
So by the sales-figures logic, Tezuka would get dropped from the male manga artists' 'Big Four'?
Tezuka's in the 'pioneer' slot, so it's probably fine either way —
more like a hall-of-fame exemption
Honestly there's an argument he got deified partly because he died young — at the time, the general feeling was that Shinji Mizushima was actually bigger
Something at the level of Inuyasha, Ranma, or Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagaren) has no way of beating it
I'd say they do beat it, honestly.
Demon Slayer was a hit, sure, but that was a lot of lucky breaks stacking up — the manga itself is pretty average
Isn't Mizuno about the only one left alive from the Tokiwa-so group?
This whole thread and Yumiko Igarashi's name hasn't come up once.
Without her, shojo manga might still be seen as something only male artists drew — that's the kind of presence she was
That's just because the people in here don't know shojo manga well
Isn't Sakura technically shojo manga too, though?
I get you mean people like Moto Hagio or Keiko Takemiya, but still
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The term “Big Four female manga artists” isn’t an official award or statistic — it’s just shorthand that gets thrown around online, and posters in the thread were quick to point out there’s no concrete criteria behind it. The debate split into two main camps. One side argued the pick should come down to hard numbers like print runs, citing an overall print-run ranking spanning all genres and age brackets (including artists like Eiichiro Oda and Osamu Tezuka), which led some to call Demon Slayer’s Koyoharu Gotouge the “#1 female manga artist” — though opinion was divided on whether a shonen-category title like that should even count toward the “Big Four.” The other camp felt uneasy putting shonen-leaning artists like Rumiko Takahashi and Hiromu Arakawa on the same footing as a slice-of-life/shojo artist like Momoko Sakura, and noted that major shojo manga figures such as Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya, and Yumiko Igarashi barely got a mention at all. Worth flagging as an easy-to-miss detail: that print-run ranking isn’t a women-only tally — it’s a combined figure across all manga artists, regardless of gender.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from a thread on 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyo G (anything-goes live-chat) board, “The ‘Big Four’ female manga artists have three locks in Rumiko Takahashi, Momoko Sakura, and Hiromu Arakawa, but picking the fourth is tough.”
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