Tochi Ueyama is a Japanese manga artist and the original creator behind the long-running series Cooking Papa. Born on February 22, 1954, in Fukuoka Prefecture, Ueyama began drawing manga in elementary school and decided to pursue it as a career by his first year of junior high school. Before dedicating himself fully to manga, he worked as a teacher, a profession he left in 1977 to become a manga artist. His debut as a creator came in 1979 with the story Deai Haruki kun no Nikki, published in Weekly Shonen King. In the early 1980s, he published several works, including a one-shot manga titled Cooking Boss in 1982, which featured a high school protagonist who loved to cook. He achieved his first serialization with Oaza Aza Basara Chuzaijo, a slice-of-life story set in a rural police station, which ran in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning magazine.

Ueyama is best known as the author and illustrator of Cooking Papa, which began serialization in Weekly Morning in June 1985 and continues to run, making it one of the longest-running manga series by volume count. The series follows Kazumi Araiwa, a salaryman in Hakata who is a skilled cook, a fact he initially keeps secret from his colleagues. Each chapter includes a complete recipe. Ueyama’s production process for the manga involves personally preparing the featured dish, photographing each step, and then having his assistants illustrate the process, with all recipes taste-tested before publication. The series is set in Hakata, where Ueyama lives and works, and emphasizes the use of common ingredients to make the recipes accessible. In the manga’s 22nd volume, Ueyama introduced a dish called onigirazu, which his wife had invented for their child, and this item later gained international popularity through recipe-sharing platforms. The manga’s depiction of a capable male homemaker began serialization during a period when Japanese media rarely showed men cooking, and Ueyama has stated that his intention was to present an interesting family dynamic where both parents contributed to their home and careers, rather than to make a progressive statement. The work’s stated motto is that cooking is fun.

Cooking Papa was adapted into a 151-episode anime television series produced by Eiken, with animation by Sunshine Corporation, which originally aired on TV Asahi from April 1992 to May 1995. A live-action television drama adaptation was also broadcast on Fuji TV in August 2008. In 2015, Cooking Papa received a Special Award at the 39th Kodansha Manga Awards in recognition of its enduring serialization. Beyond this work, Ueyama has held the position of head of the Kyushu branch of the Japan Cartoonists Association.