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As a bibliophile, Torishima believed the only career prospects he had were either as a writer or an editor. He chose the latter because he said he lacked almost all the skills needed for the former.

Philosophy

Torishima stated an important part of being an editor is to have a lot of different conversations with the author to discover their potential points of interest; "Artists really open up and talk when it's not their own work they're dissecting." So he would take manga creators to see movies, ask their opinions on other people's manga and anime, and take notes for future reference. Through the trials and errors he went through with Toriyama leading up to the creation of Dr. Slump, Torishima said he inadvertently developed something akin to a training method for new artists.

He believes manga can be either easy or hard to read, and that this readability is determined by panel layouts and their perspectives. He would read a manga 50 times, researching and analyzing where each and every panel should go, so that he could then explain this to the artists. He said every artist improved significantly after they understood page structure.

Torishima said every new artist has something they desperately want to depict, but these often end up as copies of manga that they like and you can not make a hit out of an imitation. He explained, the only way to realize their originality is through trial and error, writing and drawing like Toriyama and his 500 failed manuscripts. "A little soul-searching can lead to a big hit."

Influence on fiction

In 2016, Torishima claimed that when he became a deputy editor at Weekly Shōnen Jump he created teaching materials for how the editors should help their manga artists that are still used to this day.

As a rookie editor, Torishima was put in charge of Doberman Deka, which had already been chosen to end in a few months due to low rankings in the reader surveys. Believing that its artist Shinji Hiramatsu was good at action but bad at drawing women, Torishima gave him an issue of the actor and idol magazine Myojo and told him to model the face of a new policewoman character after that of the most popular idol at the time, Ikue Sakakibara. After which, Doberman Deka jumped from around seventeenth in the reader rankings to third, and made Torishima finally interested in his job.

Torishima convinced Toriyama to make Arale the main character of Dr. Slump instead of Senbei Norimaki, which the author agrees turned out better. Toriyama stated that Torishima enjoys romance and that the relationships of Arale and Obotchaman, Akane and Tsukutsun, and Taro and Tsururin in Dr. Slump were all his ideas. He also stated that when starting Dragon Ball, Torishima had wanted Goku and Bulma to form a relationship. Toriyama also created the Dragon Ball character Cell after Torishima, no longer his editor, was disappointed with Androids 19 and 20, and later Androids 17 and 18, as villains.

Masakazu Katsura credits Torishima with coming up with ideas for Video Girl Ai. It was Torishima who brought Tetsuo Hara the offer from Capcom to create the character designs for the video game Saturday Night Slam Masters.

Torishima has been parodied often in many manga series serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump. The most notable being the character Dr. Mashirito in Toriyama's Dr. Slump, who serves as the series' most prominent antagonist and has the same name as the editor but with the syllables reversed. He also inspired other manga characters such as Matoriv in Dragon Quest: Dai no Daibōken, Torishiman in Tottemo! Luckyman, the character King Bonbi in the board game Momotaro Dentetsu, and Doctor Mashirito in I Become a Gedoh-Man. by Shinji Hiramatsu. Direct parodies of Torishima appear in Kinnikuman written by the duo Yudetamago and Bakuman by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata.