Machiko Hasegawa
![Hasegawa in 1955](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Hasegawa-Machiko-1.jpg)
was a Japanese
manga artist and one of the first female manga artists. She started her own
comic strip, ''
Sazae-san'', in 1946. It reached national circulation via the ''
Asahi Shimbun'' in 1949, and ran daily until Hasegawa decided to retire in February 1974. All of her comics were printed in Japan in
digest comics; by the mid-1990s, Hasegawa's estate had sold over 60 million copies in Japan alone.
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