Hikaru no Go

Hikaru no Go (ヒカルの碁) is a popular Japanese anime and manga coming of age story based on the board game Go written by Yumi Hotta and illustrated by Takeshi Obata. The production was supervised by Go professional Yukari Umezawa (5-dan). more...

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The manga is largely responsible for popularizing Go among the youth of Japan in recent years, and in other areas such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea.

First released in Japan in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1998, Hikaru no Go has achieved tremendous success, spawning a popular Go fad of almost unprecedented proportions. Twenty-three volumes of manga were published in Japan, comprising 189 chapters plus 11 "omake" (extra chapters). The anime series, which was created by Studio Pierrot, ran for 75 half hour episodes from 2001 to 2003 on TV Tokyo, along with the 77-minute extra New Year's Special that aired in January 2004.

In January 2004, the manga series debuted in the United States in the English language periodical Shonen Jump published by VIZ, now VIZ Media. In 2005 it was announced that VIZ Media also has the license to the anime. Hikaru no Go Volume 1 DVD was released on December 27, 2005. A Hikaru no Go "Sneak Preview" DVD (first episode) was released in the January 2006 issue of Shonen Jump (Volume 4, Issue 1) to subscribers.

The title is sometimes abbreviated 'HGO', 'HikaGo' or 'HnG'.

Hikaru no Go premiered on Toonami Jetstream on July 14, 2006.

Series Premise and Story

The same basic storyline was followed by the manga and anime, with a few changes between versions.

Hikaru Shindo, the title character, is a 6th grade elementary school student in Kita Ward, Tokyo. While exploring his grandfather's shed, he stumbles across a Go board haunted by the spirit of Fujiwara-no-Sai, a fictional Go player from the Heian era. Sai wishes to play Go again, having not been able to since the late Edo period. Because Hikaru is apparently the only person who can perceive him, Sai inhabits a part of Hikaru's mind as a separate personality, coexisting, although not always comfortably, with the child.

Urged by Sai, Hikaru begins playing Go despite a lack of interest in the game. He plays Go by mimicking the moves Sai dictates to him. In a Go salon, Hikaru defeats Akira Toya, a boy his age who plays Go with professional-caliber strength. Akira subsequently begins a quest to discover the source of Hikaru's strength, an obsession which will come to dominate his life.

English-language adaptations

Hikaru no Go is published in English in the United States Shonen Jump magazine, and in individual graphic novels. The anime is now being shown in English on streaming video one episode at a time on www.toonamijetstream.com to USA residents, although there have been no announcements that it will be shown on their television block on Cartoon Network.

Read more at Wikipedia.org