Masako Yashiro

is a Japanese manga artist. An artist of both shōjo manga (manga for girls) and shōnen manga (manga for boys), her 1970 manga series has been described as the first manga in the yuri (female-female romance) genre.

Biography Masako Yashiro was born Masako Yamamoto in 1947 in Iyomishima, Ehime. As a child, she read the manga by Osamu Tezuka, Hideko Mizuno, Tetsuya Chiba and Sachiko Shinjō and wanted to become a manga artist herself. She began her career as a with the short story "Chiisana himitsu" ("Small Secret") in the rental shōjo manga magazine Sumire in 1962. She moved to Osaka, then the center of the rental book market, and kept producing works for the rental book publisher Wakagi Shobō. She married Masaharu Yamamoto in 1964, himself a manga artist and the younger brother of Sachiko Shinjō. Her most popular series, , published a total of 28 volumes from 1964 to 1966, and had a strong impact on Japanese youth culture of the era.

Yashiro went on to become one of the most popular artists in the manga magazine Margaret following the publication of her 1970 manga series , considered by some scholars be the first manga in the yuri genre (female-female romance). Its status as the first yuri is contested: manga critic Yoshihiro Yonezawa claims Secret Love was particularly controversial and debated at the time of its publication, while manga scholar Yukari Fujimoto contends that it did not have a strong influence. Regardless, Secret Love is generally regarded as an obscure work, with most critics identifying Shiroi Heya no Futari by Ryōko Yamagishi, published in 1971, as the first yuri manga.

By end of the 1960s, she became one of the leading figures of the avant-garde magazine COM with her manga series ;