Rannyuu Koshien Foul (乱入甲子園ファウル) is a seinen high school baseball manga by Hideo Iura. It tells the tale of Naoto Yoshimura, a naive high school freshman who joins his high school baseball team in the hopes of making it to Koshien. Why? Because of a girl. There’s only one small problem: the Irokawa High baseball team is filled with cranks and weirdos of every shape and form. Do they stand a chance in hell?
Heh heh, good question. It’s a 2-volume manga so the odds are against them, but I won’t tell you how it ends. I encourage you to seek it out and buy it if you can (volume 2 is here) because it’s funny and interesting stuff and I particularly like the characters. In most baseball manga everyone feels like an extra except the main character and one or two others, but even though it’s so short everyone in Rannyuu Koshien Foul (except one who is supposed to be overlooked) gets plenty of time in the spotlight.
But we can discuss the details of the series at a later date. Incidentally it seems the real title of the manga is Foul and the [Rannyuu Koshien] part is supposed to be kind of in brackets or something like that. Typical bizarreness for a typically bizarre series. ‘Rannyuu’ means ‘run-in’ and Koshien stands for the National High School Baseball Tournament, though you probably know that if you’ve ever read a baseball manga before. So Rannyuu Koshien Foul = Baseball Tournament Run-in Foul, more or less. What could it mean? Does it matter? Read the manga and find out for yourself!
Shikotama, an ecchi sports manga by Jun Nishikawa, ran in Bessatsu Shonen Champion in 3 volumes from 2012. There are two other manga also called Shikotama, but this one is about fanservice+baseball so don’t confuse them. This is the one I’m talking about: Shikotama on Mangaupdates. Ignore the nonsensical description over there.
Shikotama is about a girl named Tama who is a phenomenal pitcher (in name only. She’s not really all that good). She enrolls in a famous sports academy with the hopes of becoming their ace pitcher only to be told that girls can’t play with boys at the high school level. Interestingly enough it seems they can play with boys at the grade, middle school and college levels, though I’ve never actually seen a girl playing baseball at the college level with boys
She talks the boys on the team into giving her a pitching test, which she fails, but when she plays the “It’s because I’m a girl, isn’t it?!” card and they give her another challenge: form your own team and play against us. The winning team becomes the official school team. Thus Tama sets out to get people together, starting with a girl named Shiko, who has trained all her life to be a sumo wrestler. Shiko (catcher) + Tama (pitcher) = Shikotama.
I wish I could tell you how the manga ended, but I stopped reading after chapter 3 so I wouldn’t know. Since Shikotama is only 3 volumes long, it’s quite likely that the girls’ team failed to beat the regulars and continued playing normally, but I’m just guessing here. Like most manga about girls’ baseball, Shikotama is going to spend a lot of time first getting the team together before anything of note happens. There isn’t much sports action to be found in the earlier volumes, at any rate, apart from one pitch or one at-bat challenges.
The real reason I quit though, was because it’s a sports comedy manga that isn’t very sporty and isn’t very funny. It tries to make up for that lack with a truly ridiculous amount of fanservice, which is fine if you’re into that sort of thing but I’m not. If anything it makes Tama look even less talented than she already is when she resorts to showing off her bra and panties in every single game.
If you distract a world-class batter with your goods and manage to get a single strike against him, that does not make you a pitching genius. I’m not discounting the possibility that there might be female pitchers out there as good as male ones at the high school levels, but Shiko and Tama’s shenanigans and excessive fanservice only make them look desperate and inferior. It’s like Princess Nine all over again.
If you like fanservice, though, you might enjoy yourself. As a sumo wrestler big-busted Shiko wrestles takes on the whole sumo team dressed in only a skimpy loincloth and a few strategically-placed strands of hair. Then at the start of chapter 4 she wins a bet that lets her decide what the rest of the team will wear as training uniforms and chooses loincloths… Yup. I stopped reading at that point because it exceeded my acceptable levels of ecchiness. Shikotama is for fans of excessive fanservice and borderline nudity only.
Otasukebito Hashiru! (or: Help comes Running! おたすけ人走る!) is a shoujo sports manga from 1979, written and illustrated by Hikaru Yuzuki. Yuzuki is probably best known for Amai Seikatsu/Sweet Life, the barely worksafe long-running manga about a naive young man who goes to work for a lingerie company.
That is that and this is this. Otasukebito Hashiru is worth a read at best, but it’s not the kind of manga that really sticks in anyone’s memory. The story is simple: PR Academy is an ex-girls’ school on the verge of collapse. To save their skins and get more students, they decide to become famous for sports. But why start from scratch when you can recruit the best (and dumbest) sports students from across Japan? First, though, you have to put them through their paces… with a set of increasingly ridiculous tests.
It could have been good. And I suppose it really was considered funny back in 1979. Now, though, the gags are cheesy and stale and while the art is clean and the story is amusing, the manga suffers most of all from a thoroughly unlikeable cast. The main female, Kana has a short temper, a sadistic streak and a tendency to look down on those who don’t conform to her ideals.
On the other hand Sukesake Oda, the “hero” is a hero in name-only. He’s a lazy, perverted and uncooperative cheat, though those qualities don’t come out till later in the manga. The worst character of all, though, is Kana’s mother the principal, who is willing to do anything (and I mean anything) to see that her plan succeeds. Money comes before everything else, her own daughter included.
As a character manga, therefore, Otasukebito Hashiru! will leave you fuming at every turn. It’s quite amusing as a sports manga, though. Volume 1 ends with one of the most ridiculous ‘tennis’ matches I have ever witnessed, though for people who’ve read Prince of Tennis it will barely be a blip on their radar.
Still, I picked this up because it promised to have baseball in it. And it does, as the team strives to win the national Koshien tournament, the quickest and most reliable way for a school to become famous in Japan. That’s the good news. The bad news is, they only play baseball in volumes 2 and 3 so… yeah. If you want to find out whether they win or not, buy the Otasukebito Hashiru manga on Amazon (and ignore the wacky Google Translate titles).
A less than stellar baseball 4-koma manga about a girls’ baseball team. Shiratama! (しらたま!) is written and illustrated by Yuki Azumi, who I’ve never heard of before and never expect to hear of again. Frankly speaking if this manga hadn’t had a ‘loli’ protagonist and loli-like character art, it would never have been published. It still shouldn’t have been published anyway, but in the absence of a time machine all I can do is review what I’ve been given.
The art
Cutesy, but not too cutesy, loli but not too loli. The lines are clean and the action, what little there is, is simply laid out and easy to follow. Since the characters are supposed to be in high school, it feels silly to have them randomly flashing their panties and all the other things that count as ‘loli fanservce’ because they’re far too old to be behaving that way. But then again nobody ever reads 4-koma manga for their logic.
Sample done by me. This manga is only available in Japanese.Story
Tsubame Takatsu is a high school girl who isn’t very interested in baseball. One day she goes to watch a match with her sister and falls in love with the drama and excitement of the game. When she returns to school, she resolves to form her own baseball team. All that is chapter 1. The rest of Shiratama! covers her attempts to gather members, design uniforms, learn to play the game and finally have matches against… grade schoolers?
Is Shiratama! any good?
As a sports manga, not really. The team does play some games eventually, but the focus tends to be more on the novelty factor: *gasp* they’re girls! And they’re playing baseball! rather than on the actual sportiness of it. This is a common feature shared with other girls-baseball series like Princess Nine and Taisho Yakyuu Musume, and I always wonder what the point is of making a manga about girls’ baseball if you’re not going to take them seriously.
In particular I can’t help comparing Shiratama! to Macmillan Koukou Joshi Yakyuubu, another short 4-koma manga about a girls’ baseball team. While both series start with the usual character introductions and amusing occurrences, the latter half of Macmillan is taken up by a well-drawn and interesting national tournament on par with any other sports manga and the whole “girls! and they’re playing baseball!” issue never comes up at all. Shiratama! on the other hand ends without Tsubame and her team ever playing any official matches, but they do have fun pretending to be a team. The distant end of the future shows that their juniors do eventually make the team a serious contender, but it’s really no thanks to our gang.
As far as moe manga goes, Shiratama! doesn’t have any interesting characters to latch on to. “Loli-lites in high school” has been done a hundred times before, in far more interesting ways as well. Furthermore, probably because it’s so short, the series never focuses enough on any one character. Thus character traits are raised and quickly abandoned, certain characters don’t appear for long periods of time (Kaname for example, but even main characters like Tsubame can drop out of sight), some characters appear so late that not much can be done about them, etc etc. You really don’t know who to follow or who to support and you’re never given any reason to do so either.
As a comedy manga Shiratama! barely cracks the ‘slightly amusing’ line. If you can’t see the jokes coming a million miles away, you need to read more manga. For example our main character, Tsubame is a high school girl who looks all of 10 years old. You can’t expect the author not to joke about this, but you can and should expect something better than 10 different “mistaken for a grade schooler” gags. It gets old after number 0.
tl;dr Shiratama! is not very good. Whether you like loli, moe, sports, characters skits or comedy you’ll still be disappointed if you try it. On the other hand if you do somehow like it, it’s only 1 volume of fairly simple Japanese, so pick it up if you can find it.
Chapter 2 of Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubuintroduces the pitcher and the catcher, which is very kind of it because you can’t really have a baseball manga without them. What’s more, it illustrates what I said in the last post about the tsundere catcher making everything awkward.
When you think about it, she probably has the most natural reaction to having a guy suddenly show up and become manager of a girl’s team (i.e. wtf is this guy’s problem?) but her prickly reaction stands out all the more because the rest of the team have resolutely determined that this it is not a problem.
Anyway, spoiling a bit here, but Ueda does relax a bit and get along better with the rest of the team as the series goes on (all 30 chapters of it). Unlike what you might expect, Masakiyo doesn’t pull a “mighty whitey” and solve all the girls’ problems for them. For the most part they work through their issues together as a team, and Masakiyo is mostly there on the sidelines supporting them. Also there isn’t really any romance in the series, so don’t get your hopes up.
Apparently, after series ended after 30 chapters in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine, it was picked up by Weekly Shonen Magazine and rebooted as the rather more fanservicey 2-volume “Macmillan no Joshi Yakyuubu” series I thought the original ended very well, so I have no real interest in following the ‘sequel,’ but it’s out there if you finish this and are interested in what happens next. Happy reading!
(or: Help comes Running! おたすけ人走る!) is a shoujo sports manga from 1979, written and illustrated by Hikaru Yuzuki. Yuzuki is probably best known for Amai Seikatsu/Sweet Life, the barely worksafe long-running manga about a naive young man who goes to work for a lingerie company.
(and ignore the wacky Google Translate titles).
is written and illustrated by Yuki Azumi, who I’ve never heard of before and never expect to hear of again. Frankly speaking if this manga hadn’t had a ‘loli’ protagonist and loli-like character art, it would never have been published. It still shouldn’t have been published anyway, but in the absence of a time machine all I can do is review what I’ve been given.![Shiratama 0011[Animefangirl.com]](https://animefangirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Shiratama-0011Animefangirl.com_.png)
![Shiratama 0014[Animefangirl.com]](https://animefangirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Shiratama-0014Animefangirl.com_.png)
if you finish this and are interested in what happens next. Happy reading!