Buronson
1The Opening · 37武論尊
Born 1947
The writer of Fist of the North Star, whose pen name comes from Charles Bronson.
1The letters of this name total 37, a 1 — the number of beginnings, leadership, and the will to act alone.
Career
Buronson, whose real name is Yoshiyuki Okamura, was born in 1947. After serving in Japan's Air Self-Defense Force he worked as an assistant to the manga artist Hiroshi Motomiya, where he began writing stories. His pen name is a Japanese rendering of the American actor Charles Bronson, chosen with tough-guy heroes in mind.
The work
His great success was Fist of the North Star (1983–1988), drawn by Tetsuo Hara. He later wrote Sanctuary (1990–1995), drawn by Ryōichi Ikegami, a seinen thriller about two friends who set out to take control of Japan, one through politics and the other through organised crime.
The style
Buronson writes about male pride, loyalty and sacrifice, often in violent settings, and is willing to make his stories openly melodramatic. Many of his villains receive a backstory that makes their defeat tragic as well as triumphant.
Why he matters
As a writer who rarely drew, he is one of the best-known examples of the manga writer and artist partnership, a model that later produced series such as Death Note. His lines for Kenshirō are some of the most quoted in manga.
The name by its numbers
Set against the Pythagorean table, the name totals 37. Reduced, that is 1.
The reference files it as a first move. The number's contribution is beginnings, leadership, and the will to act alone — and with it the 1's appetite for a clean, decisive beginning, which is the thread the reference follows here.
Beneath the 1 sit two smaller figures: 6 in the vowels, 22 in the consonants. Responsibility underneath, construction on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The letters give 1; the subject's own figures do not agree. Born is 1947, a 3. Where the two part company the reference trusts the figures, because the romanisation is a convenience for readers abroad, while the strokes are what the pen name was actually built from.
Read on the 1's terms, this entry asks you to notice what had to not exist for this to be possible. The 1 mistakes being first for being right. Several of these texts describe launches that mattered enormously for a year and then mattered to nobody. The other entries that reduce to 1 are collected on The Opening.