Editing Yuji Horii (section)

===Early Life===
Yūji Horii was born to a family of glass artisans in Sumoto city of the Hyogo prefecture, helping in the family store during Summer. When he was young he alternated between wanting to be a manga-ka (cartoonist) or a lawyer, deciding by high school that manga was more practical than legal affairs. Horii's dedication to this career path was so great that, in his own words, he traveled to Tokyo during his third year and "''barged into the office of [[Wikipedia:Go Nagai|Go Nagai]] and requested to be made his assistant''". 
After being politely turned down, the young Yūji considered his options and decided to join a ''Manga Kenkyu-kai'', a circle of manga enthusiasts, under the assumption that working a regular job and being an artist would be too difficult and that being a student would allow him to draw as much as he liked.

After graduating high school Horii applied for admittance to [[Wikipedia:Waseda University|Waseda University]] in 1972, which stood out to the young man for its strong reputation as ''the'' school of humanities and social sciences of it's era. During his time at Waseda Horii would join the university's Kenkyu-kai, serving as an editor and writer for a biannual magazine called Waseda-man. During university festivals, he would help gather funds for the magazine by drawing street portraits for 50 yen. Horii would meet and befriend the late [[Wikipedia:Yoshihiro Yonezawa|Yoshihiro Yonezawa]], who would go on to create [[Wikipedia:Comiket|comiket]], at such a festival and Waseda-man is still sold at the comic market to this day.

Due to the nation-wide students protests of 1972, as well as the murder of [[Wikipedia:Daisaburo Kawaguchi|Daisaburo Kawaguchi]], the administrative staff of Waseda effectively shut the campus down for an entire year. This abundance of free time allowed Horii to build stronger friendships with his classmates, many of whom would go on to enter the entertainment industry and hire him to write articles for their magazines. Horii would work as a professional free-lance writer during his six year stay at Waseda, producing content for a variety of avenues such as the daily newspaper ''Sankei Sports'' and Katsura Bunshi VI’s television program ''Itazura kamera da! Daiseiko''. His focus on free-lancing was also influenced by a serious motorcycle accident in his fourth student year that severely damaged several internal organs and prohibited anything more strenuous than operating a type-writer, actively forbidding him from pursuing a more typical vocation during his six month recovery period.