Character · Hajime no Ippo
Ippo Makunouchi
A boy who runs home from school every day to help his mother, and gets punched for it until somebody teaches him how to punch back.
In Otakana the clue reads: Bullied boy who takes up boxing
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Hajime no Ippo
- Letters
- 4 · Hard
Makunouchi Ippo works at his mother's fishing boat rental business, which is why his hands and shoulders are already stronger than a high schooler's have any right to be. He is being beaten up regularly by classmates when a professional boxer, Takamura, interrupts one of those beatings and carries him to the Kamogawa gym. Ippo hits the sandbag once and Takamura notices what everyone else missed.
What he has is a punch that arrives with far more weight than his frame suggests, and almost nothing else. He is short, his reach is bad, and he takes damage that should end fights. The training answers that with the Dempsey Roll, a weaving in-close attack borrowed from Jack Dempsey, and with the question the series keeps asking out loud: what does it mean to be strong.
George Morikawa began Hajime no Ippo in Weekly Shonen Magazine in 1989 and is still drawing it, past 1,400 chapters, which makes it one of the longest running sports manga in print. The boxing is researched properly. Real fighters turn up in the technique names, the training scenes are close to what a gym actually does, and the fights are decided by conditioning as often as by heart.
Spelling IPPO
IPPO is four letters with a double P, and the doubling is doing real work. The Japanese is 一歩, one step, written with a small tsu that stops the sound before the P lands. That pause is the second P. The series title, Hajime no Ippo, means the first step. Type it with one P and you have written a different word.