Yawara!

Yawara Inokuma is a young girl who aspires to an ordinary life but due to her innate talent is forced to practice judo by her authoritarian grandfather, Jigorou Inokuma, with the aim of achieving the championship in Japan and the gold medal at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. Because of the pressure from her grandfather she generally has a bad attitude about judo, avoiding it as much as she can. However, over time she comes to understand why her grandfather loves judo and appreciates it more.

While Naoki Urasawa was pitching the idea of writing a manga about the medical field, he could tell his editor was not enjoying it. Knowing that the editor was a big fan of baseball, he jokingly proposed a story about women's judo, but the editor lit up at the idea. Urasawa said that he then scribbled out the whole of Yawara! during that meeting in about 30 minutes, from the characters to the story.

The series started in 1986, women's judo became a demonstration sport just before the 1988 Summer Olympics with it set to be a fully competitive sport at the 1992 Summer Olympics, so it was perfect to include that goal in the manga. But the author never thought the series would last long enough to reach the latter. Urasawa revealed that with Yawara! being so different from his previous works as a comedy about a cute girl, some of his fans and colleagues felt betrayed and that he had sold out.

As of March 2021, Yawara! had over 30 million collected volumes in circulation. The manga won the 35th Shogakukan Manga Award for the general category in 1990. The significance of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in the story is that in the real world, this was the first time that Women's Judo would be a full competition event and would thus see the awarding of the first Olympic gold medal for Women's Judo.

Yawara! was very popular in Japan, so when real life Japanese teenager Ryoko Tamura won a silver medal for judo at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, she was seen as a real-life Yawara (her age, stature, and ability all being strikingly similar to those of the fictional character) and promptly nicknamed "Yawara-chan". She was still known by this name eight years later, indicating perhaps the enduring popular recognition of the series as well as that of Ryoko Tamura.