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Pseudonym of Osamu Sakata (1923-2004), an author and translator instrumental in the dissemination of Anglophone sf in Japan. Graduating in Law from Chuō University in 1943, he was drafted into the Japanese armed forces. In post-war Japan, he famously scavenged the trash dumps of US Occupation bases, discovering in the process a lifelong love of the garish sf Magazines he found there.
In 1953 he was the first Japanese fan to make the trip to a US sf Convention. The following year, he published the first and only issue of Seiun ["Nebula"], Japan's first commercial sf magazine, which included translations of stories by Robert A Heinlein and Judith Merril. He wrote for Uchūjin from 1957, the same year he published the first issue of his own Kagaku Shōsetsu ["Science Stories"].
Yano's nonfiction included popular science, and several works on military history, including an early account of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, composed of American-born Japanese who served in the US army in Europe in World War Two. He put his military knowledge to fictional use in Chikyū 0-nen ["Earth Year Zero"] (1969), an ironic Post-Holocaust scenario in which the superpowers destroy each other, leaving the Japanese to occupy America's west coast as UN peacekeepers. Reversing Yano's own memories of the war and its aftermath, it combines elements of both Yellow Peril and Hitler Wins genres with a pacifist motive.
His best-known work abroad is the non-sf Kamui no Ken (1970), not for the untranslated original novel, but for the Anime feature based on it (1985; vt Dagger of Kamui; vt Blade of Kamui; vt Revenge of the Ninja Warrior, 1987 US). The Japanese release carefully adheres to the plot of the original, in which a patricidal, treasure-hunting outcast is one of the first Japanese to leave the homeland at the end of Japan's period of isolation in the 1860s, travelling to America and meeting Mark Twain. Among the variant English-language film versions, Dagger of Kamui is a faithful translation, Blade of Kamui risibly claims to be set "on a faraway planet", and Revenge of the Ninja Warrior loses 40 minutes from the 135-minute running time in a futile attempt to cram it into a children's video brand.
In Yano's "Miminariyama Yurai" ["Origins of Mount Miminari"] (in Sekai SF Zenshū, anth 1969 ed [not ascertained]; in Samayoeru Kishidan no Densetsu coll 1980), an odd Japanese place-name is revealed as a garbled reference to an ancient Alien visitation: the "roaring mountain" being the sound of a departing spaceship (see Linguistics). He would refine this concept lifted from Erich von Däniken in his undisputed masterwork, Origami Uchūsen no Densetsu (1978; cut trans as "Legend of the Paper Spaceship" in Chrysalis 10, anth 1983, ed Roy Torgeson), a melancholy rustic idyll whose narrator comes to realize that the nursery rhymes of the village children are half-forgotten system checklists for a rocket launch sequence.
Yano's 300+ translations have been arguably even more influential than his own fiction, as a point of entry to the Japanese market for, among others, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Martin Caidin, Edmond Hamilton, Frank Herbert, Frederik Pohl, Robert Louis Stevenson, Olaf Stapledon, Theodore Sturgeon and Wilson Tucker. But it was as the Japanese voice of Robert A Heinlein that he was most lauded. Yano openly proclaimed his debt to Heinlein, whose Starship Troopers (October-November 1959 F&SF as "Starship Soldier"; 1959) he translated into Japanese in 1967, indirectly inspiring many anime incidences of pilotable Mecha in imitation of Heinlein's "mobile infantry" battle-suits. There is also much of Heinlein to be found in Yano's seven-volume Space Opera Renpō Uchūgun ["Space Federation Fleet"] series (1990-1993), co-written with Toshiya Takahashi, and depicting the adventures of the teenage space cadet Jin (Jim) Munakata. Like Heinlein's, Yano's later reputation may have suffered from the repackaging of certain earlier juveniles in adult lists. His heartfelt eulogy to Heinlein is included in Requiem: New Collected Works and Tributes to the Grand Master (coll 1992) edited by Eric Kotani.
Yano was active in the founding of the Japan SF Writers Association (now the SFWJ) and served as its chairman 1978-1979. Late in life, he developed a passion for computing, and wrote widely on both it and on his enduring obsession, the Computer Role Playing Game Wizardry. He received the Karel Čapek award for services to translation in 1985, a Seiun Award for his essay collection Wizardry Gensōkyoku: Pasukon Bunka no Bōken ["Wizardry Fantasia: Adventures in Computer Culture"] (1987), and a special Nippon SF Taishō ("Grand Prix") award in 2004, the year of his death. [JonC]
born Matsuyama, Japan: 5 October 1923
died 13 October 2004
works
series
Renpō Uchūgun ["Space Federation Fleet"]
Despite some English-language titles, all books are Japanese-only.
individual titles
nonfiction
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 16:52 pm on 10 October 2026.
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