Tsukasa Hōjō
5The Turn · 32北条 司
Born 1959
The creator of Cat's Eye and City Hunter, whose polished, realistic style shaped the urban action manga.
5Filed under 5. The Turn takes a turn, and this entry is changes one.
Career
Tsukasa Hōjō was born in 1959 in Kokura, now part of Kitakyūshū. While studying design, he entered a manga competition and was soon published in Weekly Shōnen Jump. His first series, Cat's Eye (1981–1985), about three sisters who run a café by day and steal art at night, was a hit.
The work
City Hunter (1985–1991) made him one of Jump's major artists. Its successor, Angel Heart, which began in 2001, is set in an alternative world built from its characters. In 2000 he co-founded the publisher Coamix with Tetsuo Hara and others, and he directed a film, Angel Sign, in 2019.
The style
Hōjō draws with a clean, realistic line, giving his men and women adult proportions and drawing weapons, cars and city streets in detail. He moves easily between slapstick, action and quiet emotional scenes.
Why he matters
His work helped bring an adult, cinematic polish to shōnen manga, and City Hunter has been adapted in Japan, Hong Kong and France. Many later artists cite his draughtsmanship as an influence.
The name by its numbers
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 32 across 2 words, reducing to 5. The weight sits in “Hōjō”, which carries 21 on its own and reduces to 3.
What the 5 brings is change. The reference files it as a turn. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 5's restlessness and hunger for change.
Heart's Desire 8, Personality 6: power underneath, responsibility on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The letters give 5; the subject's own figures do not agree. 人格 core is 12, a 3, 総格 total is 17, an 8 and born is 1959, a 6. Where the two part company the reference trusts the figures, because the romanisation is a convenience for readers abroad, while the strokes are what the pen name was actually built from.
The 5 asks you to ask what was abandoned, and whether it deserved to be. The 5 moves for the sake of moving. Not every break documented here led anywhere, and the reference says so where it did not. The other entries that reduce to 5 are collected on The Turn.