George Morikawa

• 1. Introduction

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  George Morikawa has been telling one story for over three decades, and he still has not finished it. Hajime no Ippo, his long-running boxing manga, reached its 142nd tankōbon volume as of December 2024, making it one of the longest continuously serialized manga series in publishing history. Morikawa was born in Tokyo, and from the beginning his ambitions were shaped by what he read as a child. What pulled him toward the craft? What kind of working life does it take to sustain a single story across 142 volumes? And how did a boy inspired by a single manga grow into someone that future legends of the art form came to learn from?

• 2. A Childhood Reading

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  Tetsuya Chiba's Harris no Kaze was the manga that changed everything for Morikawa. He read it as an elementary school student, and that encounter planted the decision to become a manga artist. Harris no Kaze belongs to a tradition of Japanese sports and boys' drama manga, and its effect on a young Morikawa in Tokyo was immediate and lasting. Before he could publish his own work, he apprenticed in the industry's established way: working as an assistant to Shuichi Shigeno, whose own career in serialized manga gave Morikawa a direct view of the professional demands of the form. That training relationship placed Morikawa inside a lineage, learning the pace and discipline required before striking out with his own voice. His debut work, Inside Graffiti, appeared in 1983.

• 3. The Gym He Built

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  Morikawa owns JB Sports Gym in Tokyo, a detail that speaks to how thoroughly boxing has shaped his life beyond the page. Hajime no Ippo is a boxing series, and running a gym suggests a commitment to the sport that goes past research. Few manga artists are also gym owners. The physical world of Morikawa's manga and the physical world he inhabits in Tokyo have overlapped in an unusual way. That grounding may help explain why the series has sustained its technical credibility across more than three decades of publication, with Hajime no Ippo launching in 1989 under Kodansha and still continuing today.

• 4. Assistants Who Became Legends

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  Kentaro Miura, the artist behind Berserk, once worked as an assistant to George Morikawa. So did Kaori Saki. The assistant system in manga is a formal training structure, and the names who passed through Morikawa's studio carry considerable weight in the art form. Miura in particular became one of the most celebrated manga artists in the world before his death. That Miura spent time in Morikawa's studio places the two careers in an unexpected connection. Morikawa himself had learned under Shuichi Shigeno, creating a chain of creative influence running across generations of Japanese manga.

• 5. 142 Volumes and Counting

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  Hajime no Ippo won the Kodansha Manga Award in 1991, just a couple of years after the series began. That early recognition arrived while the story was still in its early chapters. The series has since expanded into anime across three separate productions. Madhouse studio produced the first anime adaptation, which began airing in 2000 and ran for 76 episodes. A second series began in 2009 and contained 26 episodes. The third, titled Hajime no Ippo: Rising, was produced in 2013 and contains 25 episodes. Each adaptation caught the series at a different stage of its growth, with the manga itself continuing to accumulate volumes long after the anime productions concluded. The 143rd volume, listed among his works for the ongoing series under Kodansha, marks where the story stands in the current count.