Yoshihiro Takahashi began his manga career as a teenager and started out his association with Weekly Shonen Jump by working for Hiroshi Motomiya as an assistant (with Motomiya being one of the biggest stars of the magazine at the time). Yoshihiro's solo debut in the magazine was with a one-shot published in 1972 but his serialization debut in the magazine didn't come until a little over three years later in 1976 when his Akutare Kyojin series began. A baseball-themed manga, it proved successful enough to last for several years and through the decades has remained his longest manga to not be about dogs.
Technically, Akutare debuted at the same time as his other series, Shiroi Senshi Yamato (which was running in Monthly Shonen Jump) but since Akutare was in the higher profile magazine, it was collected much more quickly (though Yamato ended up running longer in the end). After the end of Akutare, Yoshihiro had several shorter series run in Weekly Shonen Jump (Otoko no Tabidachi, Aozora Fishing, Shō to Daichi) but in 1983 he began Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin which became the defining franchise of his career.
Though from the era, Ginga was relatively overshadowed by the fact it was sharing a magazine with what became many of the best-selling manga of all time (as Jump was beginning its Golden Age), three of Yoshihiro's assistants went on to be some of the biggest creators of this era of Jump (Tetsuo Hara, Akira Miyashita and Masami Kurumada) and through its various sequels, Ginga has published well over 100 volumes.
After Nagareboshi Gin ended in 1987, Yoshihiro tried one more time in the magazine with Kacchū no Senshi Gamu (1988) but after its end he left the magazine to branch out to others. Through the 90's he had his most varied career in terms of publishers he worked with, doing short series for a number of them (but still working with Shueisha, primarily through seinen magazines). Then in 1999, he began working on Ginga Densetsu Weed at Nihon Bungeisha where he has published most of his work ever since (primarily through works in the Ginga franchise).
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