Jiro Nitta

Jiro Nitta (1912-1980) was the pen name of Hiroto Fujiwara, a Japanese novelist born in what is now Suwa, in Nagano Prefecture. He spent his working life as a meteorologist with the Japan Meteorological Agency, and the mountains he observed there became the subject of most of his fiction: Death March on Mount Hakkoda, drawn from the 1902 army disaster, is his best known book outside Japan. His two-volume 1973 novel Koko no Hito, about the solitary climber Buntaro Kato, is the source of The Climber, the manga drawn by Shin-ichi Sakamoto that VIZ Media publishes in English.