context: comics > Subjects

Tetsuya Chiba's classic boxing epic, Ashita no Jo

Sport

Countless people have written at length about sport as sublimation for warfare, or as domesticated war, war made safe. Nowhere is this more true than in Japanese comics. After the war, the US banned stories of war, fighting, samurai - and even sport. When the ban on sport stories was lifted in 1950, these stories had to take the weight of all of those other forms too, and this has continued since.

The stories often run a very long time, starting with the immensely hard and unpleasant work of learning the sport (these are mirrored by many job-focussed comics, the learning the trade chapters), then working one's way up in a series of big matches. The account of an individual match can stretch to hundreds of pages.

Note also that there are dozens of magazines devoted to games such as pachinko and mahjong.

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