, January 30, 1920 – May 27, 1992, in Taku

Taku, Saga

is a city located in Saga Prefecture on the island of Kyūshū, Japan.The city was founded on May 1, 1954 through the merger of several towns and villages.-Elementary Schools:*Hokubu Elementary School*Midori-ga-Oka Elementary School*Tobu Elementary School...

, Saga Prefecture

Saga Prefecture

is located in the northwest part of the island of Kyūshū, Japan. It touches both the Sea of Japan and the Ariake Sea. The western part of the prefecture is a region famous for producing ceramics and porcelain, particularly the towns of Karatsu, Imari, and Arita...

) was one of the first female manga artists

Mangaka

is the Japanese word for a comic artist or cartoonist. Outside of Japan, manga usually refers to a Japanese comic book and mangaka refers to the author of the manga, who is usually Japanese...

.

She started her own comic strip

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

, Sazae-san

Sazae-san

is a Japanese comic strip created by Machiko Hasegawa. It was first published in Hasegawa's local paper, the , on April 22, 1946. When the wished to have Hasegawa draw the comic strip for their paper, she moved to Tokyo in 1949 with the explanation that the main characters had moved from Kyūshū to...

, in 1946. It reached national circulation via the Asahi Shimbun

Asahi Shimbun

The is the second most circulated out of the five national newspapers in Japan. Its circulation, which was 7.96 million for its morning edition and 3.1 million for its evening edition as of June 2010, was second behind that of Yomiuri Shimbun...

 in 1949, and ran daily until Hasegawa decided to retire in February 1974. All of her comics were printed in Japan in digest

Digest size

Digest size is a magazine size, smaller than a conventional or "journal size" magazine but larger than a standard paperback book, approximately 5½ x 8¼ inches, but can also be 5⅜ x 8⅜ inches and 5½ x 7½ inches. These sizes have evolved from the printing press operation end...

 comics; by the mid-1990s, Hasegawa's estate had sold over 60 million copies in Japan alone.

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 2011.

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

She received People's Honor Award in 1992.