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Hiro Mashima

Japanese manga artist

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 17, 2026
Entity authorityQ471137
Source-derived summary

Hiro Mashima (真島 ヒロ, Mashima Hiro; born May 3, 1977) is a Japanese manga artist. He gained success with his first serial Rave Master, published in Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine from 1999 to 2005. His best-selling work, Fairy Tail, published in the same magazine from 2006 to 2017, became one of the best-selling manga series with over 72 million copies in print.

Fairy Tail won the Kodansha Manga Award for shōnen manga in 2009, and Mashima was given the Harvey Awards International Spotlight award in 2017 and the Fauve Special Award at the 2018 Angoulême International Comics Festival.

Early life

Mashima stated that he knew he wanted to be a manga artist for as long as he can recall. His father was an artist that aspired to turn professional, but died when Mashima was young. Living in the mountains as a child, his grandfather would bring him discarded manga that he found. After reading them, Mashima would draw from them. In middle school, he began to rebel and get into trouble, but still drew everyday. In high school, he became guitarist in a rock band named Night Meeting, which played a show every two or three months.

Editorial summary

“Hiro Mashima” enters the record as japanese manga artist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hiro, Mashima and Japanese can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1977, 1999, 2005, 2006—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1977-05-03. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Hiro, Mashima and Japanese.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Hiro Mashima” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Hiro, Mashima and Japanese provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q471137. VIAF identifies the subject as 32225957. The Library of Congress control number is n2005006590. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1999, 2005 and 2006.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Hiro Mashima”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Hiro Mashima primary sources, Hiro Mashima archive and Hiro research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Hiro Mashima”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Hiro Mashima” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.