YAWARA!
A teenage judo prodigy who wants nothing more than an ordinary life is trained by her grandfather for the Olympics. Read from the care, as a 6.
Created by
6A 6 by its title: nurturer & harmonizer, and therefore the care.
Naoki Urasawa's Yawara! ran in Shogakukan's Big Comic Spirits from 1986 to 1993 and was collected in 29 volumes. Yawara Inokuma has been trained in judo since infancy by her grandfather, a former champion who is determined she will win Olympic gold. She is extraordinarily gifted, and would rather be a normal girl with a boyfriend and fashionable clothes.
It is a sports comedy with a romance inside it. Yawara keeps trying to escape judo; her grandfather, a hard-drinking schemer, keeps dragging her back; and a sports reporter, Kosaku Matsuda, keeps chasing the story. The matches are exciting, but the real tension is whether Yawara will choose the sport for herself.
It won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1990 and was a hit anime. It was so popular that the judoka Ryoko Tamura, who won Olympic gold in 2000, was nicknamed "Yawara-chan" by the Japanese press.
It is Urasawa's first major success and shows his gift for character and pacing in a lighter key, years before the thrillers Monster and 20th Century Boys.
Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 24, which folds down to 6.
Six is nurturer & harmonizer — care, community, and the weight of duty. The reference files it as an obligation. Read that way, what the entry is really recording is the 6's pull toward responsibility, care, and the people involved.
The vowels alone reduce to 3, the consonants to 3. The subject wants exactly what it appears to want, which is expression — an unusually undivided reading.
It does not rest on the letters alone. Volumes is 29, an 11, years serialised is 8 and debut year is 1986, a 6 — and the 6 arrives there too, by a route that owes nothing to the alphabet. A title can be translated; debut year cannot.
The 6 smothers. The same instinct that protects a readership produces the paternalism several of these entries document. What the 6 still asks is that you name the people this was answerable to. The other entries that reduce to 6 are collected on The Care.