We gathered at the friend's house that sold Jump.

When I was little, manga was the doorway to excitement.

My friend's house was a small shop. Not a bookstore. Still, they sold Jump. After school, we gathered there.

Fist of the North Star. Kinnikuman. Open the page, and there was a world we didn't know. A martial artist walking the wasteland. A superhuman standing in the ring. A world that exists nowhere in reality. All of us, together, were taken there.

Manga gathers people. It always has.

Kinnikuman's serialization began in 1979. Fist of the North Star began on September 13, 1983, and ran until 1988. Both in Weekly Shonen Jump. The magazine was launched on July 11, 1968. The issue on sale in December 1994: 6.53 million copies. A record that has still not been broken.

Taking people to worlds they don't know, through pictures. That method is far older.

Kyoto. Choju-jinbutsu-giga, kept at Kozan-ji temple. A picture scroll painted from the end of the Heian period into the Kamakura period. Animals, drawn as people, at play. Even without words, the story comes through in the pictures alone. It is called the source of Japanese manga.

The first to use the word "manga" is said to be Hokusai. He gave that name to pictures drawn casually.

For hundreds of years, pictures have been taking people away. The excitement of the day we opened Jump is a continuation of that.

We gathered at the friend's house that sold Jump.

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