Sunday October 21, 2007
Led by the captain
By IKUKO KITAGAWA
The creator of the footy manga Captain Tsubasa says his characters have come alive to him and are dictating the directions of his work.
AFTER 26 years of writing the football comic Captain Tsubasa, Yoichi Takahashi says he has come to believe his characters have a will of their own and that they guide him in directions he would never have imagined.
“Things like that happen, for example, when I’ve created a new character with the intention of having him do well in a game, and then he actually doesn’t do well as I expected. Sometimes Tsubasa wins a game that I had intended his team to lose. These unexpected twists and turns are part of the fun of writing comics,” Takahashi told The Daily Yomiuri.
Takahashi, 46, first became interested in football after watching a World Cup match televised from Argentina in 1978. A few years later, he decided to write a football story.
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In Captain Tsubasa – Road to Dream, Tsubasa will take on players in the European leagues. |
“I was writing Tsubasa thinking that it would be good if football percolated into Japanese culture in the way that it has in Europe,” said Takahashi, who currently manages a futsal team made up of female TV personalities, and also has his own amateur futsal team.
Before that, he was a big fan of baseball and was drawing manga about baseball. However, he found baseball very limiting in the sense that it prevented him from moving his characters around the field.
“If I want to make my character step up to the bat, he can’t do so until his turn comes. If the character wants to do some fielding, he won’t be able to until a ball comes to him,” he said. “But in football manga, characters can do anything they want once they get the ball.”
Such flexibility inspired Takahashi’s creativity and allowed him to draw whatever came into his mind, helping him create various miracle shots and acrobatic saves.
The manga has featured Tsubasa’s progress from primary-school boy to married man. Takahashi says Tsubasa has matured over the years, using every game to learn a little bit more about fellowship, determination and the will to succeed.
As Tsubasa steadily grows – doubtless a source of inspiration to many of Japan’s would-be professional players – the nation’s football scene has actually overtaken him, giving Takahashi yet more sources of inspiration.
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Captain Tsubasa is a long-running anime series based on the popular football manga by Yoichi Takahashi |
Even so, Captain Tsubasa has also influenced professionals overseas as the comic has been translated into at least 10 languages.
“I never imagined that my comic would find an audience overseas,” he said.
“I was simply hoping that football would become popular among Japanese boys so that the Japanese team could become strong. But maybe I ended up helping other countries to get stronger as well,” Takahashi said modestly, admitting that legendary Italian player Francesco Totti, among others, has said he was influenced by the comic.
Starting with the simple hope of making football more popular in Japan, Takahashi’s characters now seem to have taken on a life of their own. Asked how difficult it is to keep coming up with new storylines, Takahashi says: “Since my characters are now alive (to me), I’m depending on them. I’m hoping Tsubasa will do well.”
Takahashi says Tsubasa is a combination of his child, his alter ego, his ideal person and his favourite football player.
The author says he is still interested in writing short stories in other genres, but will always keep writing Captain Tsubasa, which he describes as his lifework. – The Daily Yomiuri / Asia News Network
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