Character · Captain Tsubasa
Tsubasa Ozora
A primary schooler who took a football to school, to bed, and eventually to Europe.
In Otakana the clue reads: Boy who says the ball is his friend
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Captain Tsubasa
- Letters
- 7 · Normal
Tsubasa Ozora dribbles everywhere. He is eleven when the series starts, already the best player anyone in Nankatsu has seen, and his line about the ball being his friend has followed him for forty years. Yoichi Takahashi drew the pitches enormous, so a single run can take several chapters and the goal at the end of it arrives like the end of a battle.
The football is not realistic and never pretends to be. Shots bend around defenders, drive keepers into the net, and get names. What the manga does have is a real feel for the schoolboy circuit: rivals from other towns, tournament brackets, and the slow climb from a local side to the national team and then to Brazil and Europe.
Its achievement is off the page. Takahashi began Captain Tsubasa in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1981, and a generation of professionals grew up on it. Hidetoshi Nakata did. So did Zinedine Zidane, Alessandro Del Piero and Fernando Torres, who all named it when asked what started them playing. In Spain the boy was renamed Oliver, and in Italy he became Holly.
Spelling TSUBASA
TSUBASA is seven letters and the first three are a single Japanese kana, つ, which English has to spell out as TSU. Drop that T and you have the usual mistake. The name means wings. The vowels run u, a, a, and the two S's sit either side of the B, so one confirmed S tells you a lot about TSUBASA.