Hajime no Ippo

• 1. Introduction

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  Hajime no Ippo opens its hero's boxing life with a test involving falling leaves. A professional boxer named Mamoru Takamura sets a bruised high school boy a task. Catch ten leaves from a tree at the same moment, with a single week to prepare. Takamura expects failure and jogs away. The boy, Ippo Makunouchi, trains through the nights. When Takamura runs past on his usual route, Ippo catches all ten leaves using only his left hand. That motion, Takamura tells him, is a boxing jab.

  The manga that grew from this scene was written and drawn by George Morikawa. It has been running for decades, and its volumes now number in the hundreds. Why would a story about a painfully timid boy hold readers for so long? What does he find in the ring that he could never find outside it? And how did one weekly magazine series spread into television, home video, games and streaming on two sides of the Pacific?

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• 2. The Boy and the Gym

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  Ippo Makunouchi spends his days helping his mother run the family fishing charter business. He has no time for friends, and he is shy enough that a group of bullies led by a boy named Umezawa makes a habit of picking on him. One day they beat him badly. A middleweight pro boxer happens to pass by, drives them off, and carries Ippo to a gym owned by the retired boxer Genji Kamogawa.

  Ippo wakes to the sounds of men training. To lift his spirits, the rescuer, Takamura, lets him hit a sandbag and vent his frustration. Ippo punches it harder than anyone in the gym except Takamura himself. Afterward Ippo thinks the matter over and announces that he wants to box for a living. Takamura scolds him, convinced that the boy treats the profession as a casual choice. Yet he cannot flatly refuse someone with that kind of power, and so he invents the leaf challenge.

  Once the challenge is met, Takamura brings Ippo back to the gym for introductions. Kamogawa is unimpressed. He sees no fighting spirit in the boy. Takamura pushes for a practice spar, and Kamogawa answers by choosing a severe opponent, Ichiro Miyata. Miyata is 16, the same age as Ippo, and he is regarded as a prodigy and one of the gym's future hopes. Takamura is alarmed, since Miyata's skill is far beyond that of a four-round pro.

  Ippo loses by knockout. Miyata has trouble dodging his punches and only ends the bout with his trump card, a move called The Counter. Even so, Kamogawa decides that the beaten boy has real fighting sense and spirit. He resolves to train Ippo toward the Japanese championship and a world ranking.

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• 3. Learning From Opponents

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  Miyata, in the meantime, is aimed at the OPBF title, the championship of the Oriental Pacific Boxing Federation, and he eventually wins it. The friendly rivalry between him and Ippo is the main attraction of the series in its early stretch. Later, the story turns to Ippo's climb toward the Japanese Featherweight Championship and then toward a world title.

  The series leans hard on character development. Even inside a bout, the reader picks up something about both fighters. Ippo has a habit of running into his upcoming opponents before a match. These chance meetings let him learn where each man comes from, and sometimes he ends up sympathizing with the person he must fight.

  Ippo is modest to a fault and never assumes he is strong. His courage comes from a different place. He sees how formidable his opponent is, and that sight convinces him that he is able to stand up to it. Along the way the story opens windows onto other characters, showing their pasts, their motives, their ties to other people and their current struggles in boxing. A colorful cast of supporting figures and rivals, along with side stories about their own paths, fills out the world.

  Kamogawa's two prospects are expected to rise through the rankings and meet one day for the world champion's belt.

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• 4. A Magazine Marathon

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  Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine began publishing the series on the 11th of October 1989. The first collected volume followed on the 17th of February 1990. By December 2012 the serial had reached its 1000th chapter, and by 2025 it had passed 1,500 chapters in Japan. As of the 16th of January 2026, 145 volumes had been published, which places the series among the longest-running manga.

  For most of that history, readers needed paper. In June 2021, Kodansha announced the first digital release in 33 years of publication, starting on the 1st of July that year.

  English-language readers got their own digital route in September 2023. Kodansha's K Manga service put out the first ten volumes, covering the first 87 chapters, and then added new chapters every week.

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• 5. Numbers and Praise

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  In 1991, only a couple of years after its debut, the series won the 15th Kodansha Manga Award in the shōnen category. Recognition kept coming. In 2019 it received a Special Award at the 43rd Kodansha Manga Award, given to mark 110 years since the founding of Kodansha.

  Popular votes tell a similar story. For the Manga Sōsenkyo 2021 poll run by TV Asahi, 150,000 people voted for their top 100 manga series. Hajime no Ippo placed 47th.

  Circulation figures show the long climb. By September 2008 the manga stood at over 73 million copies in circulation. By November 2019 the total was over 96 million. By July 2023 it had passed 100 million, which makes it one of the best-selling manga series of all time.

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• 6. On Screen

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  The first anime series was produced by Madhouse, Nippon Television and VAP, with Satoshi Nishimura directing. It aired on Nippon TV from the 4th of October 2000 to the 27th of March 2002, running 75 episodes. VAP gathered the episodes into 25 DVDs, released between the 16th of March 2001 and the 21st of March 2003. The last disc carries a bonus, a 76th episode that never aired in Japan.

  Two more releases arrived in 2003. A television film, Hajime no Ippo: Champion Road, aired on the 18th of April. An original video animation, Hajime no Ippo Mashiba vs. Kimura, followed on the 5th of September.

  A second series, Hajime no Ippo: New Challenger, ran on Nippon TV from the 6th of January to the 30th of June 2009. That same year, Rikiya Koyama, the voice actor of Takamura, revealed on his blog that a sequel to it was being planned. In July 2013 came a report that a third season would air that year. Hajime no Ippo: Rising ran for 25 episodes, from the 5th of October 2013 to the 29th of March 2014.

  Critics took notice. At Anime Academy, all five reviewers rated the first series above 90 percent. One called it the cream of the crop of sports anime, and another said that fighting and character development had never tangoed so well together. Gia Manry of Fanboy.com put the series on a list of the top ten underrated manga. IGN named Rising among the best anime series of the 2010s.

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• 7. Music and Games

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  Tsuneo Imahori composed the score for the first anime series. He wrote for guitars, drums, piano and horns, alone or in combination, so that the music would sharpen the mood and the action of each scene. The soundtrack came out in Japan on two CDs, titled First KO and Final Round. Yoshihisa Hirano scored the second series, and for the third, both Hirano and Imahori are credited.

  The opening themes began with "Under Star" by Shocking Lemon for episodes 1-25. The same band supplied "Inner Light" for episodes 26-50 and the TV movie. Imahori himself wrote "Tumbling Dice" for episodes 51-76. Later entries include "Hekireki" by Last Alliance and "Yakan Hikou" by Wasureranneyo, covering episodes 77-102 and 103-127.

  The endings changed too. Mori Naoya sang "Yuuzora no Kamihikouki" for episodes 1-25 and the TV movie, then "360°" for episodes 26-50. Saber Tiger's "Eternal Loop" took over for episodes 51-74. Coldrain's "8AM" and Shikuramen's "Buchikome!!" cover the later numbering.

  Nine video games have been based on the series. They appeared on the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance, Wii, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS and PlayStation 3. Three of them were released in North America and in PAL territories. Ippo and Takamura also turned up as playable characters in the 2009 crossover game Sunday vs Magazine: Shūketsu! Chōjō Daikessen.

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• 8. Fighting Spirit Abroad

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  Geneon Entertainment licensed the first series for North America in 2003 and released it under the name Fighting Spirit. The run covered 15 DVDs with five episodes on each disc. The first disc appeared on the 6th of July 2004, and the fifteenth on the 19th of December 2006. The film Champion Road reached North America on the 9th of January 2007. No release was planned for the OVA Mashiba vs. Kimura, and disc sales of the series did not do well.

  In September 2020, Discotek Media announced it had licensed the series, including all 76 episodes and Champion Road. For the first time in North America it also took on Mashiba vs. Kimura. Blu-ray sets followed. The first, with episodes 1-24, came out on the 26th of January 2021, and the second, with episodes 25-48, on the 30th of March 2021. The third set, on the 26th of October 2021, held episodes 49-76 along with Mashiba vs. Kimura and Champion Road.

  Streaming opened further doors. Rising began on Crunchyroll in 2013, and the first series, with its 76th episode, joined the platform in 2021. Rising has since been removed. In June 2024, Netflix began streaming the 75 episodes in Japanese with English subtitles and with the original English dub. The 76th episode came only in Japanese with English subtitles.

  Then in January 2025, Netflix added New Challenger and Rising. That made New Challenger officially available in English for the first time.

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