Oishinbo

Oishinbo (Japanese: 美味しんぼ, lit. “The Gourmet”) is a long-running cooking manga written by Tetsu Kariya [ja] and drawn by Akira Hanasaki [ja]. The manga’s title is a portmanteau of the Japanese word for delicious, oishii, and the word for someone who loves to eat, kuishinbo.[3] The series depicts the adventures of culinary journalist Shirō Yamaoka and his partner (and later wife), Yūko Kurita. It was published by Shogakukan between 1983 and 2008 in Big Comic Spirits, and resumed again on February 23, 2009,[4] only to be put on an indefinite hiatus after the May 12, 2014 edition in the weekly Big Comic Spirits as a response by the publisher to harsh criticism of Oishinbo’s treatment of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.[5]

Before this suspension, Oishinbo was collected in 111 tankōbon volumes, making it the 10th longest manga released and the twelfth best-selling manga series in history. The series was a perennial best-seller, selling 1.2 million copies per volume,[6] for a total of more than 135 million copies sold.[7]

The series received the 1986 Shogakukan Manga Award for seinen/general manga.[8] It was adapted as a 136-episode anime television series broadcast on TV Asahi from October 17, 1988, to March 17, 1992, followed by two sequel TV anime film specials in 1992 and 1993.

It was adapted into a live-action film directed by Azuma Morisaki starring Kōichi Satō and Rentarō Mikuni, and premiered on April 13, 1996.[9] The manga is licensed in English in North America by Viz Media.

In March 2016, writer Tetsu Kariya announced on his blog that he wanted to end the manga after it returned from hiatus. He wrote that “30 years is too long for many things” and that he believed “it’s about time to end it.”[10]