is a Japanese

manga Manga ( Japanese: 漫画 ) are comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Most manga conform to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century, and the form has a long prehistory in earlier Japanese art. The term ''manga'' is ...

series written and illustrated by Satoru Noda. It was serialized in

Shueisha (lit. "Gathering of Intellect Publishing Co., Ltd.") is a Japanese company headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. The company was established in 1925 as the entertainment-related publishing division of Japanese publisher Shogakukan. The fol ...

's manga magazine ''

Weekly Young Jump is a Japanese ''seinen'' manga magazine published by Shueisha. Launched in 1979, it is published under Shueisha's ''Jump'' line of magazines. The chapters of series that run in ''Weekly Young Jump'' are collected and published in ''tankōbon'' v ...

'' from August 2014 to April 2022, with its chapters collected in thirty-one ''

tankōbon is the Japanese term for a book that is not part of an anthology or corpus. In modern Japanese, the term is most often used in reference to individual volumes of a manga series: most series first appear as individual chapters in a weekly or ...

'' volumes. The story follows Saichi Sugimoto, a veteran of the early twentieth-century

Russo-Japanese War The Russo-Japanese War ( ja, 日露戦争, Nichiro sensō, Japanese-Russian War; russian: Ру́сско-япóнская войнá, Rússko-yapónskaya voyná) was fought between the Empire of Japan and the Russian Empire during 1904 and 1 ...

, and his quest to find a huge fortune of gold of the

Ainu people The Ainu are the indigenous people of the lands surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, including Hokkaido Island, Northeast Honshu Island, Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, the Kamchatka Peninsula and Khabarovsk Krai, before the arrival of the Ya ...

, helped by a young Ainu girl named Asirpa. The

Ainu language Ainu (, ), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu, is a language spoken by a few elderly members of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, itself considered a language family isolate ...

in the story is supervised by Hiroshi Nakagawa, an Ainu language linguist from

Chiba University is a national university in the city of Chiba, Japan. It offers Doctoral degrees in education as part of a coalition with Tokyo Gakugei University, Saitama University, and Yokohama National University. The university was formed in 1949 from ex ...

. An

anime is Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japane ...

television series adaptation produced by

Geno Studio is a Japanese animation studio subsidiary of animation production company Twin Engine. Establishment In 2015, previous Fuji TV's Noitamina producer Kōji Yamamoto established the studio after he founded his own production company, Twin Engine ...

aired with two seasons from April to December 2018. A third season aired from October to December 2020. A fourth season produced by

Brain's Base is a Japanese animation studio founded in 1996 by former Tokyo Movie Shinsha staff. Works Television series Original video animations Films See also * Shuka * Lapin Track * Platinum Vision is a Japanese animation studio founded in ...

premiered in October 2022. A live-action film adaptation has been announced. The manga has been licensed for an English-language release by

Viz Media VIZ Media LLC is an American manga publisher, anime distributor and entertainment company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1986 as VIZ LLC. In 2005, VIZ LLC and ShoPro Entertainment merged to form the current VIZ M ...

since 2016. The anime is licensed by

Crunchyroll Crunchyroll is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service owned by Sony through a joint venture between Sony Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment Japan's Aniplex. The service primarily distributes films and t ...

and

Funimation Crunchyroll, LLC, previously known as Funimation from 1994 to 2022, is an American entertainment company owned by Japanese conglomerate Sony as a joint venture between Sony Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment Japan's Aniplex that specializes ...

. As of June 2022, ''Golden Kamuy'' had over 22 million copies in circulation, making it one of the

best-selling manga series The following is a list of the best-selling Japanese manga series to date in terms of the number of collected ''tankōbon'' volumes sold. All series in this list have at least 20 million copies in circulation. This list is limited to Japanese m ...

. The manga won the 9th

Manga Taishō The is a Japanese comics award recognizing achievement in manga. It is awarded annually to a manga series published in the previous calendar year of eight or fewer collected volumes in length. The Manga Taishō was founded with the aim of re ...

in 2016 and the 22nd

Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize Named after Osamu Tezuka, the is a yearly manga prize awarded to manga artists or their works that follow the Osamu Tezuka manga approach founded and sponsored by Asahi Shimbun. The prize has been awarded since 1997, in Tokyo, Japan. Curre ...

in 2018.

Synopsis

Background

''Golden Kamuy'' takes place in the aftermath of the

, primarily in

Hokkaido is Japan, Japan's Japanese archipelago, second largest island and comprises the largest and northernmost Prefectures of Japan, prefecture, making up its own List of regions of Japan, region. The Tsugaru Strait separates Hokkaidō from Honshu; th ...

and the surrounding regions, detailing the many real-life political, technological and cultural developments of the era; several key parts of the series, such as the character

Hijikata Toshizō was a Japanese warrior. As of the ''Shinsengumi'', he resisted the Meiji Restoration and fought to his end. Background was born on May 31, 1835, in the Ishida village, Tama region of Musashi Province (present day Ishida, Hino, Tokyo), Ja ...

, are fictionalized versions of real-life people and events. Specific focus is given to the indigenous

and their culture, such as exploring their

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

and the way they respectfully use all parts of nature to thank the

Kamuy A ''kamuy'' ( ain, カムィ; ja, カムイ, kamui) is a spiritual or divine being in Ainu mythology, a term denoting a supernatural entity composed of or possessing spiritual energy. The Ainu people have many myths about the ''kamuy'', passed ...

that they believe provide them. Later parts of the story also explore the different subcultures within the Ainu, and the hardships they suffered by being caught in Japanese-Russian territorial conflicts. The plot also explores the severe struggles of soldiers and war veterans, with

moral ambiguity In philosophy, ethical dilemmas, also called ethical paradoxes or moral dilemmas, are situations in which an agent stands under two (or more) ''conflicting moral requirements'', none of which ''overrides'' the other. A closely related definition c ...

, survivor's guilt,

honour Honour (British English) or honor (American English; see spelling differences) is the idea of a bond between an individual and a society as a quality of a person that is both of social teaching and of personal ethos, that manifests itself as a ...

penance Penance is any act or a set of actions done out of repentance for sins committed, as well as an alternate name for the Catholic, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox sacrament of Reconciliation or Confession. It also plays a part ...

and

virtue ethics Virtue ethics (also aretaic ethics, from Greek ἀρετή arete_(moral_virtue).html"_;"title="'arete_(moral_virtue)">aretḗ''_is_an_approach_to_ethics_that_treats_the_concept_of_virtue.html" ;"title="arete_(moral_virtue)">aretḗ''.html" ; ...

being common themes. The central

MacGuffin In fiction, a MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin) is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself. The term was originated by Angus MacPhail for ...

comes from an in-universe tall tale of a gold discovery by a group of Ainu miners, said to have yielded 20 kan of gold that ended with one man murdering the others. Hiding the gold and racing to tell his comrades, the survivor was discovered and captured by Japanese authorities who falsely claimed his execution and hid him in

Abashiri Prison is a prison in Abashiri, Hokkaido Prefecture that opened in 1890. The northernmost prison in Japan, it is located near the Abashiri River and east of Mount Tento. It holds inmates with sentences of less than ten years. Older parts of the prison ...

, hoping to torture the location out of him. Hobbled and watched closely to stop him escaping or communicating with the outside world, the survivor tattooed many parts of a ciphered map onto his fellow prisoners, offering them a cut of the gold for sharing it with his comrades outside. Eventually recognizing but unable to read the code, the prison attempted to transport the tattooed men elsewhere, only for the convicts to overpower and kill their captors before scattering into the night.

Premise

Saichi Sugimoto, a veteran of the Battle of 203 Hill, works as a panner in

in order to provide for the widow of his dead comrade. Sugimoto is approached by a drunk old man, who tells him a dubious legend of gold that can only be found by following a map of tattoos, ones located on a group of convicts who escaped Abashiri Prison. Laughing off the story as a tall tale, Sugimoto wakes the next day to find the old man pointing his gun at him, apologizing for saying too much. Overpowering the old man, Sugimoto pursues him into the woods, only to find him disemboweled by a bear and with a large map tattoo across his chest, back and shoulders. Saved from the bear by a young Ainu girl named Asirpa, Sugimoto realizes the story is true and suggests they recover the Ainu gold together; Asirpa is uninterested in the gold but wants vengeance for her father, one of the Ainu miners who was betrayed. Examining the body, they realize the tattoos have seams, meaning that the prisoners were always intended to be murdered and skinned; due to her opposition to needless killing, Asirpa suggests they try to co-operate with prisoners they find by simply tracing their tattoos. Soon recruiting Shiraishi, an escape artist and tattooed convict, Sugimoto's group soon finds themselves in conflicts with First Lieutenant Tsurumi, the insane leader of the 7th Division, and Hijikata, who is touted as the last living

samurai were the hereditary military nobility and officer caste of medieval and early-modern Japan from the late 12th century until their abolition in 1876. They were the well-paid retainers of the '' daimyo'' (the great feudal landholders). They ...

. Due to the significant allure of the gold, as well as the traitorous nature of multiple parties, each group routinely forms and betrays truces to prevent any one party collecting all tattoos and deciphering the map.

Media

Manga

Written and illustrated by Satoru Noda, ''Golden Kamuy'' was serialized in

's ''seinen'' manga magazine ''

'' from August 21, 2014, to April 28, 2022. Its 314 individual chapters were collected into thirty-one ''

'' volumes, released between January 19, 2015 and July 19, 2022.

announced that they licensed the manga at

New York Comic Con The New York Comic Con is an annual New York City fan convention dedicated to Western comics, graphic novels, anime, manga, video games, cosplay, toys, movies, and television. It was first held in 2006. History The New York Comic Con is a ...

2016, and they have been releasing volumes in North America since June 2017.

Anime

Japan Expo 13 - MAN WITH A MISSION - 2012-0705- P1400914

The

television series adaptation is produced by

. It is directed by Hitoshi Nanba and written by Noboru Takagi, with music by

Kenichiro Suehiro is a Japanese composer and arranger, known for his work on many television dramas, anime series, and movies. He is currently represented by ONE MUSIC, a music production company. Biography Suehiro was born in Saitama. When he was a teenager, ...

, art direction by Atsushi Morikawa, and CG direction by Yuuko Okumura and Yasutaka Hamada. Kenichi Ohnuki is adapting the character designs for animation, while Koji Watanabe designs firearms, Shinya Anasuma designs the props, and Ryō Sumiyoshi designs the animals. The series' opening theme, "Winding Road", is performed by

Man with a Mission Man with a Mission, stylized as MAN WITH A MISSION or sometimes as MWAM, is a Japanese rock band which was formed in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, in 2010. The band currently consists of five band members, with stage names of Tokyo Tanaka (vocals, lead ...

, and the ending theme, "Hibana", is performed by

The Sixth Lie The Sixth Lie (stylized as THE SIXTH LIE) is a Japanese electronic rock band formed in May 2015 in Tokyo, Japan. Their music is known for its hybrid style inspired by the latest western music, and their overall science fiction-inspired theme con ...

. Like with the manga, Hiroshi Nakagawa, an Ainu language linguist from Chiba University, works on the anime as an Ainu language supervisor. The anime was announced in July 2017 in ''Weekly Young Jump'', and aired for twelve episodes starting from April 9 to June 25, 2018, on

Tokyo MX JOMX-DTV, branded as Tokyo MX (officially stylized as TOKYO MX), is an independent television station in Tokyo, Japan, owned by the . It is the only television station that exclusively serves the city. It competes with Nippon TV, TV Asahi, NH ...

, ytv, STV, and BS11. ''Golden Dōga Gekijō'', a series of 25-second animated shorts based on extras included in the ''Golden Kamuy'' manga volumes and ''Weekly Young Jump'', is directed by Kenshirō Morii and produced at DMM.futureworks and W-Toon Studio. It premiered online on April 16, 2018. At the conclusion of the first season broadcast, a second season was announced and aired from October 8 to December 24, 2018. The second season's opening theme, "Reimei", is performed by Sayuri and My First Story, and the ending theme, "Tokeidai no Kane", is performed by

Eastern Youth Eastern Youth is a Japanese punk rock trio formed in 1989 in Hokkaidō. Their sound blends many different styles, and is especially complex for a three-piece band. Their lyrics express the helplessness of Japanese youths. Their influences includ ...

. On July 7, 2019, it was announced that the series will receive a third season. On March 13, 2020, it was announced that the third season would premiere in October 2020. The season aired from October 5 to December 21, 2020, for 12 episodes. The third season's opening theme, "Grey," is performed by Fomare, and the ending theme "Yūsetsu", is performed by The Sixth Lie. On December 5, 2021, it was announced that the series will receive a fourth season.

is producing the season, replacing Geno Studio. Shizutaka Sugahara is serving as the chief director, and Takumi Yamakawa is designing the characters. Noboru Takagi is returning to write the scripts. The season premiered on October 3, 2022. The opening theme, "Never Say Goodbye," is performed by ALI featuring Mummy-D, while the ending theme, "Subete ga Soko ni Arimasu You Ni," is performed by The Spellbound. The first season of the series was released across three DVD and

Blu-ray The Blu-ray Disc (BD), often known simply as Blu-ray, is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released on June 20, 2006 worldwide. It is designed to supersede the DVD format, and capable of st ...

volumes in Japan, starting in July 2018; they had originally been planned to release starting in June, but were delayed one month to allow for improvements to the footage compared to the TV broadcast version. The Japanese home video volumes include the ''Golden Dōga Gekijō''

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

shorts, including episodes that are exclusive to the video release. An

original video animation , abbreviated as OVA and sometimes as OAV (original animation video), are Japanese animated films and series made specially for release in home video formats without prior showings on television or in theaters, though the first part of an OVA ...

(OVA) based on the manga's "Barato" arc was released on DVD in a bundle with the manga's 15th Japanese volume on September 19, 2018. A second OVA was released with the manga's 17th Japanese volume on March 19, 2019. A third OVA based on the manga's "Monster" arc was released with the manga's 19th Japanese volume on September 19, 2019. A fourth OVA based on the manga's "Shiton Animal Record" arc was bundled with the 23rd manga volume on September 18, 2020. The TV series is simulcast on

, and an English dub started streaming on

starting on April 30, 2018. Crunchyroll streamed the third season in North America, Central America, South America, Europe, Africa, Oceania, the Middle East, and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Funimation streamed the third season with an English dub later.

Live-action film

On April 19, 2022, it was announced that a live-action film adaptation has been greenlit.

Reception

Manga

''Golden Kamuy'' won the 9th

award in 2016. It was nominated for the 20th and 21st annual

in 2016 and 2017; and won the 22nd in 2018 in the Grand Prize category. It was also nominated for the 40th

Kodansha Manga Award is an annual award for serialized manga published in the previous year, the event is sponsored by the publisher Kodansha. It is currently awarded in three categories: '' shōnen'', '' shōjo'', and general. The awards began in 1977, initially ...

in the general category; and for an

Eisner Award The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, are List of Eisner Award winners, prizes given for creative achievement in American comic books, sometimes referred to as the comics industry's equivalent of the Acad ...

for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia. It was ranked second in the 2016 edition of the ''

Kono Manga ga Sugoi! is an annual reference mook series published by Takarajimasha since 2005 featuring yearly rankings and reviews of manga. The rankings are compiled by surveying people in the manga and publishing industry. The series is part of Takarajimasha's ...

'' list for male readers. The series won the Social Impact Award at the 24th

Japan Media Arts Festival The Japan Media Arts Festival is an annual festival held since 1997 by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs. The festival begins with an open competition and culminates with the awarding of several prizes and an exhibition. Based on judging by a ...

in 2021. The series also won the Grand Prize at the 51st Japan Cartoonists Association Awards in 2022. The

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

in London used an image of the character Asirpa to promote '' The Citi Exhibition: Manga'', which ran from May 23 to August 26, 2019.

Sales

''Golden Kamuy'' had five million copies in print as of April 2018. It charted on the

Oricon , established in 1999, is the holding company at the head of a Japanese corporate group that supplies statistics and information on music and the music industry in Japan and Western music. It started as, which was founded by Sōkō Koike i ...

Japanese Comics Rankings for the week of April 18–24, 2016, with volume seven placing eighth place. As of June 2019, the manga had 10 million copies in circulation; over 17 million copies in circulation as of August 2021; over 18 million copies in circulation as of December 2021; and over 22 million copies in circulation as of June 2022.

Notes

References

External links

* * * {{Navboxes, list1= {{Weekly Young Jump - 2010–2019 {{Manga Taishō {{Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize {{Geno Studio {{Brain's Base 2014 manga 2018 anime ONAs 2018 anime OVAs Adventure anime and manga Ainu in fiction Anime and manga set in Hokkaido Brain's Base Comics set in Russia Crunchyroll anime Funimation Historical anime and manga Manga Taishō Meiji period in fiction Muse Communication NBCUniversal Entertainment Japan Seinen manga Shueisha franchises Shueisha manga Viz Media manga Western (genre) anime and manga Winner of Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize (Grand Prize) Yakuza in anime and manga

Synopsis

Background

Premise

Media

Manga

Anime

Live-action film

Reception

Manga

Sales

Notes

References

Further reading

External links