Yūji Aoki (Japanese: 青木 雄二, Hepburn: Aoki Yūji; June 9, 1945 – September 5, 2003) was a Japanese manga artist and essayist born in Fukuchiyama, Kyoto, Japan. He is best known for his 1990 debut manga Naniwa Kin'yūdō (ナニワ金融道; literally The Way of Osaka Financing, colloquially translated as The Way of the Osaka Loan Shark), for which he won the 1992 Kodansha Manga Award for general manga and the 1998 Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize Award for Excellence. Takahiro Kochi was his assistant.
Source: “Yūji Aoki”, English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), excerpt