Slam Dunk (manga)

• 1. Introduction

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  Slam Dunk, the Japanese sports manga by Takehiko Inoue, had over 185 million copies in circulation by 2024. That figure places it among the best-selling manga series in history.

  Its hero is neither a prodigy nor a champion. He is a short-tempered teenager who mostly wants one particular girl to notice him. Somehow his story pushed readers to start playing basketball themselves.

  This documentary follows three questions. How does a misfit's comedy turn into a national habit? What did its creator borrow from his own life? And why did the story keep finding new audiences, in print and on screens, for decades?

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• 2. The Misfit Roster

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  Hanamichi Sakuragi has already been turned down by fifty girls when the story begins. He is a delinquent and a gang leader, and he starts his first year at Shohoku High School, in the Shōnan area of Japan, with no hope of changing his luck. Then he meets Haruko Akagi, who is neither frightened nor repelled by him. He is overjoyed.

  Haruko recognizes Sakuragi's athleticism and introduces him to the Shohoku basketball team. Sakuragi resists. He has no experience with sports, and he believes basketball is a game for losers, because the girl who most recently rejected him preferred a basketball player. Still, he joins to impress Haruko. Despite his temper and immaturity, he proves to be a natural athlete.

  Kaede Rukawa arrives as the star rookie, a boy nicknamed a girl magnet. Sakuragi sees him as a bitter rival on the court and in romance, since Haruko has an unrequited crush on Rukawa. Meanwhile Sakuragi's reasons for playing slowly change, and he develops a genuine love of the sport.

  Two more players then rejoin the team. Hisashi Mitsui is a skilled three-point shooter and a former junior high school MVP. Ryota Miyagi is a short but fast point guard. These four players work toward the dream of team captain Takenori Akagi, which is to win the national championship. After Shohoku beats one of the powerhouse teams at the national high school championship, the misfits gain publicity. The once little-known team becomes an all-star contender.

  Sakuragi's route from a crush to a real passion has an echo in the life of the man who drew him.

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• 3. Inoue's Own Court

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  Aka ga Suki appeared in the Weekly Shōnen Jump Summer Special in 1990, before Slam Dunk began. This one-shot carried an early prototype of Hanamichi Sakuragi and of Haruko Akagi. Its story and character dynamics laid the groundwork for the series.

  Inoue's love of basketball dated from his high school years. As a youth he began playing to become popular with girls, and only later developed an interest in the sport itself. Sakuragi's journey mirrors that path.

  "Basketball was a taboo in this world," his editor told Inoue. Inoue had been surprised to receive letters from readers who took up the sport because of his manga. Those letters made him want to draw better basketball games.

  Inoue attended the NBA Finals in the United States and the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, counting both as research for the manga. He wanted to show the feelings and thoughts an athlete might have when winning, losing or improving.

  When he later began work on Vagabond, Inoue noticed that Slam Dunk had a simpler outlook on life, because it focused on victories and success. He also commented that, although Slam Dunk is technically a basketball manga, its story could have been told with another sport such as football. The artwork, he added, was more "mangalike" than in newer works such as Real.

  Inoue believed his success as a manga artist owed a great deal to basketball. He began looking for a way to give something back to the sport, and one answer would be a scholarship for Japanese students.

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• 4. Pages and Chalkboards

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  On the 1st of October 1990, Slam Dunk debuted in Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump, and it ran until the 17th of June 1996. Its 276 chapters were first gathered into 31 tankōbon volumes under the Jump Comics imprint. The first volume appeared on the 8th of February 1991, and the last on the 3rd of October 1996.

  Between the 19th of March 2001 and the 2nd of February 2002, the series was reassembled into 24 kanzenban volumes under Jump Comics Deluxe. A 20-volume shinsōban edition followed, published from the 1st of June to the 1st of September 2018. On the 8th of November 2022 came Slam Dunk Jump, a book imitating an issue of the weekly magazine and collecting 24 select chapters.

  Gutsoon! Entertainment, a North American company now defunct, brought an English version to readers from 2002 to 2004 in its anthology Raijin Comics. Five collected volumes appeared under its Raijin Graphic Novels imprint, from the 2nd of July 2003 to the 5th of May 2004.

  After Gutsoon! went out of business, Viz Media purchased the license. It published a preview in the December 2007 issue of the North American Shonen Jump, and serialization began with the May 2008 issue. The first tankōbon followed on the 2nd of September 2008. The 31st and final volume was released on the 3rd of December 2013.

  Misaki High School in Kanagawa Prefecture had already closed when Inoue chose its former campus for an epilogue in 2004. Slam Dunk: 10 Days After was drawn on 23 chalkboards. It was shown to the public for three days, from the 3rd to the 5th of December.

  Switch magazine printed the epilogue, along with coverage of the event, in its February 2005 issue. A documentary of the event reached DVD in May 2005. The printed version proved popular, ranking sixth and then 15th in Oricon's weekly manga ranking. On the 10th of April 2009, Flower published it in book form as Slam Dunk 10 Days After Complete.

  The story's life on television had started much earlier, in October 1993.

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• 5. Screens and Spin-offs

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  TV Asahi first broadcast the Slam Dunk anime on the 16th of October 1993, and the run lasted until the 23rd of March 1996. Toei Animation produced the 101 episodes, with Nobutaka Nishizawa directing. The anime followed the manga storyline but omitted the National Tournament games. The satellite network Animax aired it later.

  Takanobu Masuda composed the music for episodes 1 to 61, and BMF took over for episodes 62 to 101. Three CD soundtracks were published in Japan during the broadcast. The Best of TV Animation Slam Dunk, released on the 21st of July 2003, gathered the openings, the ending and other themes.

  Seventeen DVDs of the series came out in Japan between the 10th of December 2004 and the 21st of May 2005. In 2008, Toei collected the series again in three DVD boxes holding the same seventeen discs. To celebrate 20 years since its broadcast, the anime was released on Blu-ray.

  In North America, Toei and Geneon briefly teamed up for DVD releases. The first DVD arrived on the 15th of March 2005, and volume 4, released on the 14th of June 2005, was the last before cancellation. Various episodes were also downloadable through IGN's Direct2Drive service. Toei made the series available for streaming on Crunchyroll in 2008, and Joost began streaming it in May 2009.

  Between 1994 and 1995, while the manga and TV series were still running, Toei produced four Slam Dunk films. They contain largely new material, either only hinted at in the manga or absent from it. The first premiered on the 12th of March 1994 and is simply titled Slam Dunk. It is set after Shohoku's practice game against Ryonan and focuses on a practice game against Takezono High.

  Before that game, Sakuragi runs into Yoko Shimura, the girl who rejects him in the very first scene of the series. With her is Oda, the basketball player she rejected him for.

  The second film, released on the 9th of July 1994, takes place during Shohoku's fourth round qualifying game against Tsukubu High. It brings in original characters. Godai is an old friend of Akagi and Kogure. Rango is a wild show-off who loves Haruko and quarrels with Sakuragi. Coach Kawasaki is a former pupil of Anzai-sensei.

  The third film, released on the 4th of March 1995, is set after Shohoku's loss to Kainan, during a practice match against Ryokufu High. In the fourth, released on the 15th of June 1995, Ichiro Mizusawa, a junior from Rukawa's middle school, is about to be paralyzed. He wishes to play one last game against Rukawa.

  From the 1st to the 4th of August 2006, NHK broadcast all four films on its satellite network NHK BS-2. TV Osaka aired the last three from the 3rd to the 8th of January 2007. A DVD box titled Slam Dunk The Movie had already been released on the 10th of December 2004.

  On the 7th of January 2021, Inoue announced on Twitter that Toei Animation would make a new anime film, titled The First Slam Dunk. Inoue is both its director and its writer, and Yasuyuki Ebara designed the characters. It premiered in Japan on the 3rd of December 2022.

  Banpresto developed most of the video games based on the series, and Bandai produced them for the Japanese market. The Game Boy received two basketball sims, including Slam Dunk 2. The Super Famicom received three games, among them SD Heat Up!!. Others appeared on the Game Gear, Mega Drive and Sega Saturn.

  A coin-operated arcade game, From TV Animation Slam Dunk: Super Slams, was developed by Video System and published by Banpresto in 1995. During development it was called 3 on 3 Dunk Madness and did not yet have the Slam Dunk license. Characters also appear in the Nintendo DS games Jump Super Stars and Jump Ultimate Stars. Fans have made unofficial modifications for the PC version of NBA 2K13.

  On the 2nd of December 1994, a novel with an original story by Yoshiyuki Suga was published. Illustrations from the series fill the art book Inoue Takehiko Illustrations, published on the 4th of June 1997, and Plus/Slam Dunk Illustrations 2, which followed on the 3rd of April 2020. On the 5th of October 2000 came Slam Dunk Shōri-gaku, a book by sports psychologist Shuichi Tsuji that uses the series as a reference for the psychology of winning.

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• 6. Numbers and Records

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  Volumes 21 through 23 of Slam Dunk held the record for the initial printing of a manga, at 2.5 million copies, until it was broken in 2002. Collected volumes sold over 100 million copies in Japan by 2004. The total passed 118 million by 2012 and 121 million by 2014. By 2017, worldwide circulation exceeded 170 million.

  The 2018 shinsōban edition brought a fresh surge. Its first six volumes all reached the top eight of their release week, and the first volume placed second. That made Slam Dunk the fourth best-selling manga of 2018, with 5.2 million copies sold. It was also the ninth top-selling media franchise of the year, with estimated sales of ¥3.4 billion. In the period from November 2022 to May 2023, it was the third best-selling manga series, with 4.2 million copies sold.

  In 1994, the 40th Shogakukan Manga Award in the shōnen category went to Slam Dunk. A poll of close to 79,000 Japanese for the 10th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2006 voted it the number one manga of all time. A 2009 Oricon survey ranked it first among manga that fans wanted turned into a live-action film.

  In November 2014, readers of Media Factory's Da Vinci magazine voted it the fourth greatest series in the history of Weekly Shōnen Jump. In 2017 it ranked second, behind only Kingdom, in the All-Time Best Section of the first annual Tsutaya Comic Awards. In TV Asahi's Manga Sōsenkyo 2021 poll, 150,000 people voted for their top 100 manga. Slam Dunk came third, behind One Piece and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.

  TV Asahi's 2005 Top 100 Anime survey of multiple age groups ranked the anime the eighth most popular. Another TV Asahi poll, developed by a website, placed it tenth. The home video releases also sold well enough to appear on Oricon's Japanese Animation DVD and Blu-ray rankings.

  The first three films grossed ¥2.47 billion, ¥1.9 billion and ¥2.16 billion in Japan. Together that came to ¥6.53 billion by 1995. The First Slam Dunk, released in 2022, had grossed over US$281 million worldwide as of August 2024. That places it among the top ten highest-grossing anime films of all time.

  The English edition earned its own honors, beginning in 2008.

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• 7. What Critics Saw

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  Publishers Weekly listed the English translation of the manga among the best comics of 2008. In early 2009, the Young Adult Library Services Association named the first volume one of its "Great Graphic Novels for Teens." The French newspaper Le Figaro chose the series as one of six recommended manga at the 2019 Paris Book Fair.

  Carlo Santos of Anime News Network wrote that "With solid characters, eye-popping action, and a classic underdog story, Slam Dunk is what all manga series (and basketball players) should aspire to be: the complete package." He argued that the heart and soul of the manga lies in what happens off the court. Each character has a story to tell and a goal to reach, and the court is a stage to "act out these universal struggles."

  Santos noted that Sakuragi lacks the "mind-blowing superhuman skills" usually associated with shōnen protagonists. Watching him grow into a sportsman and a decent human being is just as exciting, he said. He called the art solid for its visual flow and sense of motion, despite "school-punk" character designs that are now generally considered comedic.

  His colleague Carl Kimlinger judged, from the first volume alone, that it read more like a romantic comedy than a sports manga, since it spent its time establishing the cast. Even so, he called Sakuragi an "inspired choice" for a lead. Sakuragi is a thug with a hair-trigger temper and all the wrong motivations. Kimlinger said the humorous scenes let him do the "seemingly impossible" and balance likeability with extreme hubris.

  Kris Kosaka of The Japan Times wrote that Slam Dunk is not a typical sports story dominated by heroics on the court. Inoue's love of basketball, she added, is evident on every page.

  Ben Sin of Sports Illustrated listed many reasons for the series' popularity. They included a hilarious rivalry between the main character and his teammate, and a handsome star player with a large female fanbase. He also praised "many other characters and subplots which have since become a crucial part of manga lore." Sin proclaimed Inoue to have the greatest mix of serious and goofy artwork in the history of comics. In his words, "Inoue can draw a stunningly detailed and emotional portrait of a human being in one panel and then do a 180 on that character's facial features the next."

  Alex Wong of Yahoo! Sports would put the effect on readers more bluntly.

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• 8. A Generation Picks Up a Ball

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  Wong wrote that the work "inspired an entire generation of basketball players in Japan." Cornell University PhD student Dexter Thomas stated in a dissertation, "The first wave of basketball in Japan was pushed forward by Slam Dunk." Professional players Rui Hachimura and Yuta Watanabe have both cited the series as an inspiration. J. R. Sakuragi, on becoming a naturalized Japanese citizen, partly took his surname from the character Hanamichi Sakuragi.

  Azusa Takahashi of the Japanese website Real Sound wrote that the impact of Slam Dunk on the sport is rooted in its realism. Besides flashy game scenes, it includes scenes of steady practice.

  The Slam Dunk Scholarship program was created in 2006 by Inoue and Shueisha. A winner aged 17 to 18 receives a fully paid academic and athletic scholarship to a university-preparatory school in America, provided they pass the school's admission interview. Past recipients include Narito Namizato and Daichi Taniguchi. In 2010, the Japan Basketball Association gave Inoue special commendations for helping popularize basketball in Japan and for the scholarship program.

  Outside Japan, the story is different. According to Wong, as of 2019 Slam Dunk "has never crossed into the mainstream in North America." Viz editor Michael Montesa stated that manga about sports have generally not sold as well in the United States.

  The Kamakurakōkōmae No. 1 railroad crossing on the Enoshima Electric Railway appears in the opening credits of the anime. It has become a popular tourist attraction for fans, a pilgrimage known as seichi junrei. The resulting overtourism led the local government to assign security guards to the spot to curb troublesome behavior. Many of the visitors come from foreign countries such as China and South Korea. In Taiwan, a replica of the crossing now stands in the town of Taimali.

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