20th Century Boys

• 1. Introduction

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  Naoki Urasawa was relaxing in the bath when a television speech handed him the title of 20th Century Boys. He had given his editor the final chapter of his series Happy! that very day. A speaker from the United Nations said, "Without them, we would not have been able to reach the 21st Century..." Urasawa found himself wondering who "them" might be. He pictured those people stepping out in front of a cheering crowd. Then the T. Rex song "20th Century Boy" began to play in his head.

  The Japanese manga series that grew from that moment follows a convenience store owner named Kenji Endo and the friends he made as a boy. Around them rises a cult leader known only as "Friend." His followers carry a symbol that looks strikingly like one the children once invented themselves. Who Friend really is drives the story across decades. A second question runs beside it. How does a childhood game turn into a plan to end the world?

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• 2. The Book of Prophecy

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  In 1969, four young boys named Kenji, Otcho, Yoshitsune and Maruo built a hideout in an empty field and called it their secret base. There they traded manga, passed around stolen adult magazines and listened to a radio. Otcho marked the occasion by drawing a symbol to stand for their friendship.

  Yukiji and Donkey soon joined the group, and the six friends invented a game of make-believe. They pictured villains who set out to destroy the world, and boys who rose up to stop them. Someone wrote the scenario down and gave it a name, the Book of Prophecy.

  By the late 1990s, Kenji runs a convenience store and looks after his baby niece Kanna and his mother. He still finds comfort in memories of those childhood adventures. Then Donkey is reported to have killed himself, and Kenji stumbles onto a large cult led by the man called Friend.

  The truth about Donkey is darker than the report. He had become a science teacher, and he started investigating the cult after learning that his student Masao Tamura had joined it. During a confrontation with Masao and another member, he was pushed off the school roof.

  Soon after, bombings and virus attacks hit San Francisco, London and a major Japanese airport, and each one echoes the Book of Prophecy. Kenji and his former classmates try to work out who else ever knew the book existed. Their search uncovers a plan for New Year's Eve of 2000, a night later called Bloody New Year's Eve.

  The weapon on that night is a giant robot, which turns out to be a giant balloon with robotic limbs. It spreads a virus across the city and beyond. Kenji climbs inside to plant a bomb. The robot explodes, and Kenji is presumed dead.

  After the explosion, the Friendship Democratic Party wins widespread popularity and power by presenting a vaccine against the virus. Its members take all the credit for saving the world. Kenji's older sister Kiriko, a virologist, would later realize that her own research had resulted in the deaths of 150,000 people.

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• 3. The Era of Friend

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  Fourteen years after Bloody New Year's Eve, Kanna is a teenager working at a Chinese restaurant. She steps in when mafia groups clash, and she learns that a patron's friend saw a Chinese mafia member killed by a corrupt policeman. That member had spoken of an attempt to assassinate the Pope, who is about to visit Japan. Members of the Friends begin hunting Kanna while she tries to unite the mafia groups behind her cause. Meanwhile, Otcho escapes from a maximum security prison.

  Kyoko Koizumi, who attends Kanna's school, impulsively picks Bloody New Year's Eve as a school assignment. She is soon tangled up with both the Friends and the people who oppose them. She survives a brainwashing program and joins Yoshitsune and his resistance force.

  Sixty million is the number of followers Friend plans to spare in his new scheme, a continuation of the Book of Prophecy. Every other human being on Earth would die. His chief scientist, Yamane, assassinates him before it can proceed.

  Friend's funeral becomes a worldwide spectacle in a stadium, with the Pope giving the address. Partway through the service, Friend appears to rise from the dead, and his own assassin shoots him in the shoulder. Because he saved the Pope, he is raised to something like the status of a deity. At the same time, a viral outbreak spreads across the world and threatens everyone except those who have been vaccinated.

  An Earth Defense Force, reputedly built to protect the planet from an imminent alien invasion, is one of many strange changes in the Era of Friend. People without vaccinations are exiled. Travel between regions is forbidden, and breaking the rule carries the death penalty. Kanna, who is revealed to be Friend's daughter, leads an insurgency against this government. She enlists survivors of rival gangs and mafia organizations.

  The chronology runs from 1969 to 2017, and that final year is called 3FE, the third year of the Friend Era. The story makes three jumps in time, from 1971 to 1997, from 2000 to 2014, and from 2014 to 3FE. Flashbacks supply most of the childhood backstories from the 1970s and 1980s. Each one feeds the hunt for the identity of the man behind Friend.

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• 4. Behind the Mask

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  By 1997, Friend's followers already fill venues such as the Budokan, yet his face stays hidden in shadow or behind a mask. His true identity is one of the great mysteries of the series. The answer involves two different men.

  Junichiro Manjome, a junk-peddling con artist, meets the boys in the early 1970s. He sells knick-knacks such as space food and spoons, and he claims they are cutting-edge inventions from NASA. He later becomes a leader of the Friendship Democratic Party and works under the name Inshu Manjome.

  A schoolmate nicknamed Fukubei changes Manjome's fortunes. His nickname comes from a misreading of the kanji in his real name, Hattori. Manjome notices that Fukubei can bend spoons, and in 1972 he recruits the boy for a television show. The two are labelled frauds.

  Fukubei vows revenge on a world that did not recognize him. He wants to conquer it and destroy humanity. In 1980 he reunites with the struggling Manjome, and together they create "Friend." Fukubei wears a mask of the title character from the manga Ninja Hattori-kun, both as a child and when he plays Friend.

  Fukubei is a charismatic and deeply unbalanced man. He has nursed a pathological envy of Kenji since childhood and dreams of being hailed as a hero. His supernatural powers are only stage magic, used to pose as a superhuman prophet. He also seduces Kiriko into marrying him so that she will develop vaccines for the viruses his scientists create.

  On Bloody New Year's Eve, Fukubei seems to die in a fall from a building while unmasking a man who appears to be Friend. He later shows himself to Kenji as the true Friend. Yamane, the classmate who developed the deadly viruses, had left the Friends in 2003 after Kiriko told him what the research was for. By then he had already made an even stronger form of the virus. When Friend summons him to a meeting on New Year's Day 2015, Yamane expects to die. He goes anyway and shoots Fukubei dead, and the Friends kill him at once.

  Katsumata is the name revealed in the last chapter of 21st Century Boys as the man who takes Fukubei's place. He once wore a double of the mask that Sadakiyo wore. His hatred of Kenji dates to a prize stolen from a candy shop, for which Katsumata took the blame. Afterward he became a social pariah whose existence his schoolmates refused to acknowledge. A rumor spread that he had died the day before a fish dissection he was looking forward to, and that his ghost carried it out in the science room that night.

  Unlike Fukubei, Katsumata seems to have real precognitive powers, which he has had since childhood. He wants to destroy the whole planet because he considers it unnecessary. Right after Fukubei's death in 2015, he takes over the Friend identity and has plastic surgery to look identical to Fukubei. He dies in the final confrontation at his old school. Sadakiyo holds a knife to him to stop him from crushing Kanna with the robot, and a flying saucer crashes down on him.

  The kanzenban edition of the series gives a different ending. In it, Kenji realizes that Fukubei died after graduating from elementary school. Katsumata learned everything about him and copied him perfectly from childhood, so Katsumata was Friend all along.

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• 5. The Boys Grown Up

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  Yabuki Joe is the alias Kenji uses when he returns in 3FE as a traveling musician, a reference to the hero of Ashita no Joe. He carries his trademark guitar. After barely escaping the robot's explosion in 2000, he lost his memory and wandered through Japan, and he recovered it during the events of 2015. His song becomes an underground anthem against Friend's oppression.

  Yoshitsune earned his nickname from the samurai Minamoto no Yoshitsune, because his family name is Minamoto. He is the nervous, self-deprecating one of the group. Yet he is among the few who answered the call to fight on Bloody New Year's Eve, and he was believed to have died there. By 2014 he reluctantly leads an underground organization against Friend. By 3FE it is known as the Genji Faction, after the Minamoto or Genji clan.

  Maruo, also believed dead after that night, is the manager of the singer Haru Namio in 2015. He uses the pseudonym "Marukobashi." Namio is one of Friend's favorite entertainers, the singer of the official theme song of Expo 2015, and a former bandmate of Kenji. The two secretly work against the Friends, for example by inserting subliminal messages into videos. After Namio meets Friend, he draws his face, which lets Maruo identify him.

  Choji Ochiai, nicknamed Otcho, vanished for a week around 1988 after his trading company sent him to Thailand. When he returned he quit his job and divorced, and a year later he was in India. Many suspected he was Friend, partly because he had thought of the symbol. In fact he had gone to seek enlightenment from a monk after his son died. In 2000 he was working in Thailand under the alias "Shogun," rescuing kidnapped tourists. In 3FE he takes the job of riding the robot and shooting down the flying saucers meant to disperse the virus.

  Yukiji was a tomboy who could fight off the bullying twins Mabo and Yanbo. She and Kenji had crushes on each other as children, but neither dared to confess. As an adult she is a customs official, often mistaken for a narcotics officer. She meets Kenji again at a Tokyo airport when her disobedient sniffer dog, Blue Three, attacks him. The name is a Japanese pun on Bruce Lee. After Kenji disappears, she becomes Kanna's guardian, as he wished. Kanna shows signs of ESP and weak telekinesis, and she earns the moniker "Ice Queen" as a faction leader.

  Saburo Kido, nicknamed Donkey, grew up in a poor family with many siblings. Kenji and the others first made fun of him, then befriended him. He was obsessed with science and logical thinking.

  Kyutaro Kaminaga is a homeless old man nicknamed "Kamisama." Shortening his surname gives "Kami," the Japanese word for god, and the suffix -sama underlines it. He wants ten-pin bowling to return as a major sport in Japan, and he can see the future before it happens. He turns out to be the businessman who unknowingly evicted the boys from their secret base to build a bowling alley. Later he grows extremely rich by using his foresight on the stock market, and he becomes the first Japanese civilian to travel into space.

  Keroyon's nickname comes from the sound a frog makes, and he has frog-like features. He ignored Kenji's call on Bloody New Year's Eve and fled as far from Japan as he could. Fifteen years later, guilt-ridden in a soba food truck in America, he saves Kiriko's life. The Friends capture them and send them to Japan. After their release they found the "Frogdoom" commune in Higashimurayama, where Kiriko develops the vaccine for the events of 3FE. Konchi, who also ignored the call, spends 3FE as a radio disc jockey in Hokkaido, playing Kenji's song again and again.

  Shimon Masaaki, called Mon-chan, played rugby in Germany before returning home to care for his mother. He was diagnosed with a terminal illness after Bloody New Year's Eve. In 2002 he leaves his hospital bed without warning to contact Sadakiyo about the Friends. He does not know that Sadakiyo belongs to them. Sadakiyo kills him and takes the information he had gathered.

  Kiyoshi Sada, nicknamed Sadakiyo, was bullied in elementary school. He wore an alien-like mask and left after one semester, so most of the gang never saw his face. As an adult he is the caretaker of Friend's replica childhood home. After killing Mon-chan and watching Kanna stand up to the Friends, he begins to doubt his side. In 2014 he burns the house, hands over Mon-chan's information, and seems to die in a fiery car crash. He returns in 3FE, masked, to stop the new Friend from killing Kanna.

  Chono is a young detective in the Kabuki-cho police in 2014, and the grandson of a legendary detective called Cho-san. He arrests National Police Agency director-general Yamazaki, once his grandfather's partner. In 21st Century Boys he heads the United Nations investigation into the Friend cult.

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• 6. How Urasawa Built It

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  Around 1998, with the end of the century approaching, Urasawa felt he had to begin the series right away. He had planned a break from weekly serialization after drawing Yawara! and Happy! on that schedule. He admitted he was not looking forward to drawing. But the idea had come to him, so he faxed it to the editorial department at Big Comic Spirits.

  Urasawa pictures a "movie trailer" in his head when he starts a new series, yet he does not plan the story in advance. In the first chapter, a young woman pulls open a curtain to reveal a giant robot, exactly as the trailer showed. While he wrote that scene, he could hear a baby crying in the convenience store next door. He put the sound into the manga, and that is why the story cuts to 1997 and a crying baby Kanna in Kenji's store. He did not yet know that Kanna would grow into the young woman from the opening scene.

  About one-tenth of the scenes, Urasawa said, reflect his own childhood. The spoon bending in the series is based on Uri Geller. The manga also makes many references to manga and anime from the 1960s and 1970s, and to classic rock.

  A few weeks before the September 11 attacks, Urasawa submitted a manuscript in which two giant robots fight and destroy buildings in Shinjuku. After the attacks, he could not bring himself to draw that scene. Instead he made a chapter almost entirely devoted to Kenji singing a song, to express how he felt.

  When he began 20th Century Boys in 1999, Urasawa was already writing Monster twice a month, and he kept both going at once. He was briefly hospitalized for exhaustion. Monster ended in 2001, and in 2003 he began another series, Pluto, alongside 20th Century Boys. At one point he injured his shoulder so badly that he could not draw, and he even considered retiring.

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• 7. Page and Screen

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  The 4th of October 1999 is the date 20th Century Boys began its run in Shogakukan's seinen manga magazine Big Comic Spirits. It ended on the 24th of April 2006. The 249 chapters were collected in 22 tankobon volumes, released from the 29th of January 2000 to the 30th of November 2006. Takashi Nagasaki is credited as "co-producer" of the story.

  The sequel that concludes the story, 21st Century Boys, ran in the same magazine from the 25th of December 2006 to the 14th of July 2007. Its 16 chapters filled two volumes, released on the 30th of May and the 28th of September 2007. An eleven-volume kanzenban re-release of the original appeared between the 29th of January and the 30th of November 2016. A single-volume kanzenban of 21st Century Boys followed on the 28th of December 2016. In February 2009, Big Comic Spirits also published a one-shot titled Aozora Chu-Ihō, credited to "Ujiko-Ujio," the pen-name of the fictional manga duo Kaneko and Ujiki from the series.

  Viz Media licensed both series for English-language release in North America in 2005, but delayed publication until after it had finished its translation of Monster. The first English volume appeared on the 17th of February 2009, and the last of 21st Century Boys on the 19th of March 2013. A report said Urasawa asked for the delay because he felt his art style had changed over time. When asked about it in 2012, he was surprised and said he knew nothing of such a request. He suggested instead that Viz had not known which order to publish the two series in. Madman Entertainment distributed the release in Australasia. In 2017, Viz licensed the kanzenban editions, and 20th Century Boys: The Perfect Edition began on the 18th of September 2018.

  Yukihiko Tsutsumi directed a trilogy of live-action films, first announced in 2006. In February 2008, the main cast was named, along with a budget of 6 billion yen, about 60 million US dollars. Urasawa would contribute to the script. T. Rex's "20th Century Boy" served as the theme song.

  The first film premiered in Paris on the 19th of August 2008, at the Publicis Champs-Elysees cinema. A press conference followed at the Louvre Museum, attended by Toshiaki Karasawa, who played Kenji, and Takako Tokiwa, who played Yukiji. The three films reached Japanese screens on the 30th of August 2008, the 31st of January 2009 and the 29th of August 2009. The first film covers volumes 1 to 5 of the manga, and the second covers volumes 6 to 15 with some key differences. The third covers the rest, again with several changes to the main story.

  Expo '70 is a crucial element of the films' plot. The films use it as a symbol of the financial prosperity of Showa era Japan, and their depiction of it is an example of Showa nostalgia. In North America, Viz licensed the films, and the first had its US theatrical premiere at the New People cinema in San Francisco on the 15th of August 2009.

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• 8. Acclaim and Verdicts

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  Thirty-six million copies are in circulation, which places 20th Century Boys among the best-selling manga series of all time. In Japan it was the third top-selling manga series of 2008 and the ninth of 2009. The awards began early. It won the 2001 Kodansha Manga Award in the General category, an Excellence Prize at the 2002 Japan Media Arts Festival, and the 2003 Shogakukan Manga Award in the General category.

  In 2004, the series won the first Angouleme International Comics Festival Prize for a Series. In 2008 it took the Grand Prize at the 37th Japan Cartoonists Association Awards. It also won the Seiun Award in the Comic category at the 46th Japan Science Fiction Convention that year. Viz Media's English releases won the Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material in the Asia category in 2011 and again in 2013. UK fans voted it Favourite New Manga at the 2012 Eagle Awards.

  Critic Jason Thompson called the series "an epic saga of nostalgia, middle age, rock n' roll, and a struggle against an evil conspiracy." He compared its reunion of childhood friends to Stephen King's novel It. Thompson wrote that, although aimed at a male audience, the series won fans of all ages with its premise, storytelling and the mystery of Friend. Thompson and Tom Speelman of Polygon both suggested that the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult also inspired the manga.

  Carlo Santos of Anime News Network praised the pacing, the interlocking plot and the well-developed characters. He wrote that "it takes real skill to build a story as multi-layered as this one and still have it make sense as the characters explain things." Matthew Meylikhov of Paste praised the cast as one of "the most expansive and diverse" in any manga, and he noted how each character stays recognizable as they age through the decades.

  The first film debuted at number two at the box office with 625.61 million yen, about 5.78 million US dollars, then rose to number one in its second week. The second film opened at number one with approximately 6,955,472 US dollars. The third also opened at number one and earned approximately 22,893,123 US dollars by its second week.

  Critics split on the films. Justin Bowyer of Empire gave the first film three out of five. He praised its action and its faithfulness to the manga, but warned that newcomers might find the cast and plot confusing. Cath Clarke of The Guardian and Trevor Johnston of Time Out London gave it two out of five stars each, and they counted that same faithfulness against it. Burl Burlingame of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin felt the steam had run out by the third part, which he called "simply an OK capper to the series," though he praised its special effects. Variety's Russell Edwards also singled out the special effects in the final installment as the best of the trilogy.

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