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Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl

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Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl
YAWARA! (YAWARA!)
Demographic	Seinen
Genre	Sport
Manga: Yawara!
Author	Naoki Urasawa
Serialized in	Big Comic Spirits
Original run	1986 – 1993
Volumes	29
TV anime
Director	Hiroko Tokita
Studio	Kitty Films
Network	NTV series CTV
Original run	16 October 1989 – 21 September 1992
Episodes	124

Yawara! (also known as Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl) is a manga series by Naoki Urasawa which ran in Big Comic Spirits from 1986 to 1993. In 1990, it received the 35th Shogakukan Manga Award for general manga.^[1] The story is about Yawara Inokuma (猪熊柔, Inokuma Yawara^?), a young girl who aspires to an ordinary life but who, due to her innate talent, is forced to keep practicing judo by her authoritarian grandfather, Jigorō Inokuma (猪熊滋悟郎, Inokuma Jigorō^?), with the aim of achieving championship in Japan and the gold medal in the Barcelona's 1992 Olympic Games. Because of all the pressure from her grandfather, she has a generally bad attitude about judo, avoiding it as much as she can. However, as the manga continues, she begins to understand why her grandfather so loves judo, and she begins to appreciate it more. In 1989, Yomiuri TV (part of the Nihon TV network) began broadcasting an anime adaptation, which ran from October 16, 1989 through September 21, 1992 for a total of 124 episodes. Each episode ended with a countdown to the number of days remaining to the start of the Barcelona Olympics. AnimEigo licensed the TV series for North American distribution in August 2006.^[2]

Cultural Context

The significance of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in the story is that in the real world, this was the first time that Women's Judo would be a full competition event, and would thus see the awarding of the first ever Olympic gold medal for Women's Judo.^[3] Yawara! was very popular in Japan, so when real life Japanese teenager Ryoko Tamura won a silver medal for judo at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, she was seen as a real-life "Yawara" (her age, stature, and ability all being strikingly similar to those of the fictional character) and promptly nicknamed "Yawara-chan".^[4] She was still known by this name eight years later,^[5] indicating perhaps the enduring popular recognition of the series as well as that of Ryoko Tamura herself.