The Japanese government says Fist of The North Star is important cultural heritage
Which means I'm right.
I just watched this excellent documentary on the making of Tetsuo Hara, Buronson, and Nobuhiko Horie’s manga masterpiece Fist of the North Star. As it centers the creators directly— summarizing the series and stating its cultural impact only briefly— fans of the series might learn a bit that they didn’t know.
Fans probably do know about Horie at this point. He’s a Shonen Jump editor who had a massive amount of pull in the creative direction of the comic, and he’s said to have been responsible for most of the twists that elevate Fist of the North Star to masterpiece status. In later works, like the remake movies from the 2000s, he’s fully credited as co-creator.
While it mentions Hara’s eye damage— almost certainly caused by overwork— the doc shies away as much as it can from the brutal, creative-meat-grinder reality of making weekly comics for Shonen Jump. Horie is mentor, whip-cracker, and creative go-between for Hara and Buronson, who it is mentioned seldom met in person. The way the doc tells it, Horie seems to have been their main medium of communication. It’s easy to see how he was in a unique position to steer the story directly.
The doc takes a few key moments— the old man with the seeds, the final battle— as examples and sprinkles its story with some of the most powerful lines. “You are already dead” opens the proceedings, of course, but stuff like “Love makes people grieve! Love makes people suffer!” is pretty universal.
Fist of The North Star is a classic work I still strongly recommend today, among my very favorites. It’s hard to express how different it is by the end: because it always focuses on the emotional core of its stories, its larger-than-life characters gain powerful humanity as their stories go on.
It’s true that the creators wrote Fist of the North Star as they went along, but it’s not a thematic coincidence that Kenshiro’s most transcendent power comes from the memory of his friends and their tragedies.
The main hook of a Jump comic is certainly the endless fighting, but it’s strong characters that create the emotional attachment in the readers that makes a title a true hit. It’s why so many hit shonen stories, from My Hero Academia to SpyXFamily, start with a sob story for the ages.
And like most Fist of the North Star material over the years, the documentary does its best to pretend the manga ended after the final battle with Raoh. Yes, the manga and anime both continue past the greatest ending ever, but the “sequel” to Fist of the North Star mostly finds itself chasing its own former glory, an impossible peak. So we don’t talk about it.
In any case, the doc will be up on the website for a year. I recommend looking through NHK World’s site if the videos show up in your region; the various documentaries and tourist propaganda about Japan are some of my favorite relaxation TV.
