is a Japanese animator, manga artist, and anime director. He is best known for being the character designer and animation director of the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime, which began in 1979. That same year, he began working as a manga artist, which had been his dream since childhood. His manga have been critically acclaimed and have won numerous awards. Early life Born 1947 in Engaru, Hokkaidō, Yasuhiko started to draw manga in third grade of elementary school. In high school, he learned the basics of Marxism from a teacher and was inspired by it. At the time, the world's focus was on the Vietnam War, a proxy war between the capitalist United States and socialist Soviet Union. Yasuhiko said seeing a superpower such as the US burn down a small country, naturally made him "anti-American". Additionally, he viewed Japan as complicit in the war by supporting the US through Yokota Air Base and Misawa Air Base, while claiming to have a pacifist constitution, something he called unforgivable. Yasuhiko began attending Hirosaki University in 1966. A member of the New Left, he became a leader in the Zenkyōtō student movement and involved in the anti-war protests. In September 1969, Yasuhiko was arrested on suspicion of breaking and entering into Hirosaki University, and subsequently expelled. Career After moving to Tokyo at age 22, Yasuhiko joined Mushi Productions' training school and began working as an animator despite dreaming of becoming a manga artist. He has since admitted that he had no interest in animation and did not know what the job would entail, he simply applied to the newspaper advertisement on a whim in order to make a living. It was not until he storyboarded Space Battleship Yamato (1974) that he began to find the job interesting. Yasuhiko later went freelance and worked on various anime productions for film and television. Some of his most notable works as character designer and director are Brave Reideen, Combattler V, Mobile Suit Gundam, and Giant Gorg. Less well known is the fact that he was the original character designer for Dirty Pair, when he illustrated the Haruka Takachiho short stories that became the 1980 fixup novel The Great Adventures of the Dirty Pair. Yasuhiko said he had given up on manga because he was under the impression that manga artists had to use pens and he was personally unable to draw sufficiently with one. But