‘Basketball was a taboo in this world’ – The Release of Slam Dunk

By Alfie Stubbs, Third Year History

On 8 February 1991, the Japanese publishing company Shueisha printed the first volume of what would become one of the most influential and best-selling sports manga of all time. Its name: Slam Dunk.

The cover of Volume 1 of Slam Dunk.

As the title suggests, the story is about basketball. It follows Hanamichi Sakuragi and his journey alongside Shohoku High School’s basketball team to try and win the national championship. Whilst the series starts with Sakuragi only playing basketball to impress a girl named Haruko, he learns to genuinely love the sport for what it is.

Despite Volume 1 being published in 1991, the series started in October of the previous year, with a new chapter published weekly in Weekly Shōnen Jump, Shueisha’s manga magazine. The series would go on to be published up until the release of its final volume in October 1996, and across its six-year lifespan would greatly influence both the manga and basketball scene in Japan forever. But none of this would have been possible without the great mind behind it: Takehiko Inoue.

Slam Dunk’s creator, Takehiko Inoue, holding an illustration of Hanamichi Sakuragi.

In the 1990s the NBA and professional basketball in general was almost unheard of in Japan, despite it having been a sport in the country as early as 1902, and many teens in the 1980s already playing the sport for school teams. One of these teens was Inoue himself.

Inoue started playing solely to impress girls but soon fell in love with the sport (sound familiar?) and became a superfan, with his favourite team being the Los Angeles Lakers. It was this love for basketball that inspired him to create Slam Dunk. His passion can be seen throughout the story, whether through his characters that are inspired by famous basketball players like Dennis Rodman, or the fact that the series portrays the realities of the sport, its crushing lows and soaring highs.

One of the final, emotionally-loaded panels of Slam Dunk, featuring the protagonist Sakuragi on the left and team member Kaede Rukawa on the left high-fiving after the winning shot of the game. Taken from Slam Dunk, Volume 31, Chapter 276, Shohoku High School Basketball Team, p. 2.

 With Weekly Shōnen Jump already having a weekly readership of over 2 million people in 1990 thanks to the popularity of other manga like Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk never struggled to find its footing. Additionally, younger readers of the manga would write to Inoue stating that the series had brought them into the world of basketball. This pushed Inoue to make the series more detailed, realistic and exciting for those who either already loved the sport as he did or had no other access to information on basketball. With the series acting as a bridge between the worlds of manga and basketball, Slam Dunk’s impact on basketball in Japan was quickly felt among the youth.

A panel featuring Sakuragi scoring. Taken from Slam Dunk, Volume 25, Chapter 224, Tensai?, p. 5.

Inoue’s push to develop basketball’s popularity in Japanese culture did not stop with Slam Dunk. He would go on to publish 2 other manga series about basketball titled Buzzer Beater and Real, and in 2006 Inoue and his publisher founded the Slam Dunk Scholarship. This would pay for a Japanese student to study in America and play for a high school team with the hopes of opening up the chances of being drafted into the NCAA (College Basketball League). Despite the sport never reaching the same popularity in Japan as in America, combined with the levels of people playing basketball in school dropping by about 200,000 after Slam Dunk finished serialisation in 1996, the series still holds an important part in public memory today.

Slam Dunk is the seventh best-selling manga of all time, with 185 million copies being sold worldwide, and is frequently regarded as one of the best sports manga to date. Various fans of Slam Dunk across the world attribute it to being their first introduction to the sport, inspiring them to start playing just as it did with the Japanese youth when it started 35 years ago. Slam Dunk undeniably popularised basketball in 1990s Japan, and even with the decline of people playing the sport after its end, the series taught it’s fans that no matter what, “the game you love will be waiting for you”.

The conclusive panel of the national championship. The back row features a range of the manga’s side characters, including Coach Anzai (second from the left). The front row features the core team, left-to-right, Kaede Rukawa, Ryota Miyagi, Takenori Akagi, Hanamichi Sakuragi, Hisashi Mitsui. Taken from Slam Dunk, Volume 31, Chapter 276, Shohoku High School Basketball Team, p. 14.

Additional Note 1: Part of the title of this article was taken from the afterword of Slam Dunk Volume 31, in which Takehiko Inoue states that, before even beginning the manga, his editor told him that ‘basketball was a taboo in this world’. This inspired Inoue to defy all odds and create a manga that truly represented the sport that he loved.

Additional Note 2: The final quote of this article was taken from Slam Dunk Chapter 276, where Sakuragi receives a letter from Haruko, promising him that once he has recovered from his injury, that ‘the game you love will be waiting for you’.

Edited by Ben Bryant