Hajime Isayama

• 1. Introduction

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  Hajime Isayama was born in Ōyama, a small town in Ōita Prefecture, Japan, and by the time he turned twenty-five, he had created one of the best-selling manga series in history. Attack on Titan ran for twelve years, from 2009 to 2021, and by November 2023, it had reached 140 million copies in circulation. That number puts it in rare company. But the more striking detail is how close it came to never existing at all. Isayama first offered the work to Shueisha, the publisher behind the most powerful manga magazine in Japan. They told him to change it. He refused. What made a young artist from a mountain town walk away from the industry's most prestigious front door, and what did he do next? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Country Town and the Café

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  Ōyama, Ōita Prefecture, is now part of a city called Hita. That is where Isayama grew up, and where he began submitting manga to contests while still attending Hita Rinko Senior High School. After graduating, he enrolled in the manga design program of the arts department at Kyushu Designer Gakuen, a college built around the craft he wanted to pursue. In 2006, he applied to the Magazine Grand Prix, a competition run by the publishing house Kodansha. A short version of Attack on Titan was entered and received the Fine Work award, a recognition that placed it just below the top prize. That same one-shot would later be included with the first Blu-ray release of the anime adaptation, giving early fans a window into where the story began. At age twenty, Isayama left Ōita behind and moved to Tokyo. To pay the bills while writing, he worked at an internet café, a job that placed him among the very audience he was trying to reach.

• 3. Two Doors, One Choice

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  Weekly Shōnen Jump, published by Shueisha, is arguably the most influential manga magazine in the world. Isayama brought his work there first. The editors' advice was clear: reshape the style and the story to fit their format. He declined. Instead, he carried the manuscript across town to the Weekly Shōnen Magazine department at Kodansha, the same company that had already given him the Fine Work recognition. In 2008, he applied to the 80th Weekly Shōnen Magazine Freshman Manga Award, entering a different work called Heart Break One. It won the Special Encouragement Award. A second work, Orz, was selected in the same competition the following year. Those results confirmed that Kodansha was the right home. In 2009, Attack on Titan began its serial run in Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine, a monthly publication, rather than the weekly format Jump favored. That slower rhythm would shape how the story was paced and how its mysteries were rationed out over the years ahead.

• 4. Awards and Global Reach

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  The 35th Kodansha Manga Award in 2011 gave Attack on Titan its first major competitive victory, winning the Shōnen category. That same year, it was nominated for the 4th Manga Taishō award and the 16th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize. The recognitions kept arriving from outside Japan as well. A Harvey Award followed in 2014, in the category of Best American Edition of Foreign Material. In 2014, the series also won at the Attilio Micheluzzi Award in Italy, the Saló del Manga de Barcelona in Spain, and took home a prize at the True Believer Comic Awards. By 2015, the Goodreads Choice Awards had named it the best graphic novel or comic of the year. The breadth of that list is worth pausing on. Manga awards from Japan, Spain, Italy, and the United States, covering an eight-year stretch, reflect a readership that spread far beyond any single market. The series was released in English by Kodansha USA and inspired five spin-off manga series, three light novel series, a televised anime adaptation, visual novels, video games, and a two-part live-action film. In 2023, the 50th Angoulême International Comics Festival in France honored Isayama personally with the Fauve Spécial award, one of the most prestigious recognitions in European comics.

• 5. The Hometown Connection

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  Isayama never severed his ties to Hita. In 2013, the resort Bungo Oyama Hibiki no Sato, in his hometown of Ōyama, ran a free exhibit displaying copies of his manuscripts. On the 1st of November 2014, a special Attack on Titan event was held in Hita, and Isayama attended alongside approximately 2,500 spectators. The following day, he gave a speech at the Patria Hita cultural hall. After that speech, the city's mayor, Keisuke Harada, named Isayama the Tourism Ambassador of Hita. A manga artist who had left a small mountain town at twenty to work in an internet café had come back as the town's official face to the world. In November 2022, he made his first-ever appearance in the United States, at Anime NYC in New York City, an anime convention. That appearance came more than a decade after the series launched and a year after it ended its run.

• 6. Beyond the Titan

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  While Attack on Titan was still running, Isayama found ways to collaborate outside the boundaries of his own story. In 2014, a crossover work called Attack on Avengers appeared in Brutus magazine; Isayama wrote the story while Axel Alonso and Joe Quesada handled the art, pairing his world with Marvel Comics characters. That same year, he wrote The Killing Pawn, a one-shot with art by Ryōji Minagawa, which was later included in Minagawa's 2021 short story collection Tensousha. In December 2018, Isayama announced in his blog that he had married earlier that year. Then in 2025, years after the conclusion of Attack on Titan, a new one-shot appeared: The Theory of Ill-Natured Men and AI, published by Kodansha, with art by Kai Noshigami and featuring a character created by voice actor Yuki Kaji. That project marked a clear step into new creative territory, suggesting that the artist who once refused to change his story for Weekly Shōnen Jump has no shortage of ideas still waiting for a page.