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Sport-related anime sites
Being that the Olympics are currently underway in Sydney, I thought it might be fun to dedicate this month's column to sports anime. I decided to stretch the definition of "sports" a bit, to include any anime centered around some kind of competition. Before I get to the picks, I want to list three anime that I intended to feature, but for which I couldn't find any sites worth mentioning: Touch (baseball), Ayane's High Kick (kickboxing), and Metal Fighter Miku (battlesuit-assisted pro wrestling). So if you're wondering why these aren't in the column, now you know.Captain Tsubasa
Soccer! My most favorite thing to watch on TV (besides anime, of course). As the United States men's team has just defeated Japan to move to the semifinals of the Olympic soccer tournament for the first time in history, I felt I should lead off with this title.was the site I liked best. As I've made clear in the past, I consider the character page to be the most important part of any information site, and this site has a good one, giving brief, but well-detailed descriptions of the eight most visible characters, illustrating each with a manga scan. This site has a curious structure, with each of the pages actually being different sites by the same author, spread over four different hosting services. The linked sister sites feature fanfic, an image gallery, and manga summaries for volumes 15 and 16.
Yawara!
Life imitates anime. For those unfamiliar with Yawara!, it's about a young girl and her quest to win an Olympic medal in judo. Last week, she did. Sort of. Ryoko Tamura achieved her dream by winning the gold medal in the women's extra-lightweight class. (If you're curious, that means she weighs no more than 48 kg/105 lbs.) This was her first Olympic gold, after taking silver in Barcelona and Atlanta. At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, she was only 16, so the Japanese press nicknamed her "Yawara-chan", after the anime character whose goal was to win at those same Olympics.By far and away, the best Yawara! site, and the only one I felt worth a mention, is , a site created by Turnpike author Jei Harvey, a fact I swear I didn't know until I read it on another website. You could've knocked me over with a feather. The site has two character pages, one for nine major characters, and another for some twenty minor characters. There are some inconsistencies between the two. For example, the the major character page uses images to display names in Japanese characters, while the minor pages uses double-byte characters many browsers will display as gibberish without help. Also, only the major page has illustrations. Still, it's more character info than I found on any other site. The site also sports a decently-sized image gallery, and information on the sport of judo itself.
One Pound Gospel
Boxing is also part of any Olympics, but not one the Japanese do particularly well in. That didn't stop Rumiko Takahashi from creating a manga around the sport. A site named simply One Pound Gospel is worth a visit. I like the design of this site. It uses frames, and is well-organized, but uses few images. The author uses standard HTML text rather than any flashy graphics, and it is all the faster loading for it. This site consists almost completely of character pages, one for the leading man, one for the leading lady, one for all the leading man's boxing opponents, and another for miscellaneous supporting characters. A good introduction to the series.A brief digression: It's a shame I couldn't find any anime or manga about distance running. I've just seen a Japanese woman, Naoko Takahashi, take the gold in the marathon. In fact, the Japanese women have medalled in the marathon for three straight Olympics now.
Battle Athletes
Yeah! This is what the Olympics should be like! Full of cute girls playing ridiculous sports! I really didn't find anything I would consider the best general information site, so allow me simply to run through some sites with fun content:Harlem Beat
For a country full of short people who aren't even competing in the Olympic tournament, the Japanese sure seem to love basketball, at least judging by the manga devoted to it. Harlem Beat is by far the lesser of the two manga covered here. I found one site that's barely good enough for me to mention; in fact, I'm being a bit generous. But I like this manga, and this site is a good try. has a nice enough introductory description of the manga. The author really needs to use a ordinary font, though. There's no reason to write the whole thing in the "h2" font, so you have to scroll and scroll and scroll to read. The character page isn't worth mentioning, but it looks like a work in progress. The "teams" section has manga scans for each of the teams that participate in the first tournament. The basketball section is a neat idea, using manga scans to illustrate basketball skills, but none of the images seem to be there. The image gallery has scans of the Japanese manga volumes (and plenty of broken images). I hope the site author is still working on this site, because it seems like it has some good ideas, but right now this site isn't ready for prime time.Slam Dunk
This is a much more popular basketball manga and anime, popular enough to have its own page on the Turnpike. Again, I'm just going to fly through a list of sites that caught my eye.That's all! I'm done! No more links! Just mail!
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Last Update: 9/25/00