Ashita no Joe Review: The Boxing Manga That Got a Real Funeral

Somewhere in the history of manga fandom, a Japanese publisher held an actual funeral – Buddhist rites, incense, a posthumous name given to the deceased – for a character who only ever existed in ink. That’s not an urban legend. It happened in 1970, and it happened because of a boxing manga called Ashita no Joe.

I finally read all twenty volumes, and this is my full review: what it’s about, why it’s still considered one of the most important sports manga ever made, the genuinely bizarre true story behind that funeral, and whether it’s worth your time in 2026. There’s a spoiler-free section up front and a clearly marked spoiler section further down, so read as far as you’re comfortable.

Video version of this review is at the top of the page if you’d rather watch it – the written version below goes even deeper into the historical side of the story.

Quick Facts

What Is Ashita no Joe About? (No Spoilers)

Joe Yabuki isn’t a hopeful kid chasing a dream. He’s a homeless drifter who wanders into Tokyo’s San’ya district – a real slum built for day laborers with no safety net and no future – and that detail matters more than it looks like it should. Ashita no Joe isn’t really interested in the “underdog works hard and becomes a champion” pitch that most boxing manga are selling. It’s interested in what happens to someone who has nothing left to lose the moment boxing becomes the only place where his existence gets acknowledged.

He’s taken under the wing of Danpei Tange, a washed-up, alcoholic former boxing trainer, and the two of them build something that looks, on the surface, like a classic mentor-and-protégé sports story. It isn’t. Joe ends up in juvenile detention almost immediately, teaches himself to box by shadowboxing a cell wall out of pure spite, and comes out the other side already half-feral. From there, the manga spends twenty volumes asking a much darker question than “will he become a champion”: what is this actually going to cost him?

If you want the plot laid out with zero spoilers, that’s it. Homeless drifter, alcoholic trainer, boxing as the only language of dignity left to him. Everything else is where the story gets interesting – and where it stops being polite.

The Manga That Got a Real Funeral

Here’s the detail that makes Ashita no Joe genuinely unique in manga history, and it’s not an exaggeration or fan myth – it’s well documented.

In March 1970, roughly a month after a major character in the story died on the page (more on who and why in the spoiler section below), an actual funeral was staged for him in the auditorium at Kodansha, the publishing company behind the manga. This wasn’t a quiet, informal gathering. It was a full Buddhist funeral service – sutras, incense, a portrait of the character brought in alongside elements from Korakuen Hall to stage it like the fight itself had a memorial. A Buddhist priest gave the character a posthumous name at the service, the kind of rite traditionally meant to stop a spirit from being called back into this world.

Somewhere around seven hundred people showed up. So did an actual former world boxing champion.

And it gets stranger from there. The funeral wasn’t just grieving fans getting together – it was staged by Shuji Terayama, a countercultural poet and avant-garde theater director, who used the eulogy to read the entire manga as political theater. In his interpretation, one character represented Japan’s moneyed establishment, and Joe represented a slum revolutionary; the death in the ring became a symbolic knockout of the radical left by the establishment. Eight days later, Japanese Red Army hijackers seizing a plane to North Korea cited the manga directly in their manifesto, declaring “we are Tomorrow’s Joe.”

For a few strange weeks in 1970, a boxing manga wasn’t just something people read. It was something people used to explain the entire country to itself. That’s the kind of cultural weight that doesn’t happen by accident – it happens because the story earned it first.

Why Ashita no Joe Breaks the Sports Manga Formula

Most sports manga are selling you a promise, whether they say it out loud or not: work hard enough, and the work redeems you. Suffering has a payout. Take Hajime no Ippo, probably the genre’s most famous modern heir – Ippo trains, Ippo suffers, and every ounce of that suffering eventually converts into confidence, respect, and wins. That’s the deal the genre usually offers.

Ashita no Joe takes that exact promise and looks it dead in the eye and says: not for you. Joe doesn’t train to get better. He trains because fighting is the only language he has left that anyone respects, and every gain he makes in the ring costs him something real – his body, his relationships, eventually his ability to see any future past the next fight. The manga never once pretends otherwise, and it’s decades ahead of when this kind of genre subversion became a recognizable move in sports fiction.

If you’re looking for the manga that shares Ashita no Joe’s specific stomach for unsentimental defeat rather than its structure, it’s not Ippo – it’s Real by Takehiko Inoue, the series about wheelchair basketball and the limits of the body. Same refusal to look away from what competition actually costs. Same insistence that dignity and victory are not the same thing.

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⚠️ Spoilers From Here On

Everything above is safe to read even if you haven’t touched the manga. Below this line, I’m discussing plot details from the back half of the story, including the ending. If you want to go in completely clean, bookmark this and come back after you’ve read it.

The Rikiishi Rivalry

The rivalry with Toru Rikiishi is where Ashita no Joe stops being subtext and becomes the actual plot. Rikiishi is everything Joe isn’t – disciplined, technical, from the same juvenile-detention background but processed into precision instead of chaos. Their fight should be the manga’s triumphant centerpiece.

Instead, Rikiishi – who cut an extreme, dangerous amount of weight to make the match – collapses after the fight and dies. Not from one dramatic panel. From the slow, grinding physical toll of what boxing actually does to a body pushed past its limit. Chiba draws the aftermath with none of the stylized drama you’d expect from a sports manga death. It’s quiet. Clinical. A body that simply stops.

Joe doesn’t get a redemption arc out of it. He gets guilt that never fully resolves, that follows him into every fight afterward like a second opponent standing just outside the ring. And Rikiishi’s death doesn’t function as a cheap gut-punch – it indicts the entire system both boxers were operating inside. He did everything the “correct” way and the sport killed him anyway. That’s a far smarter piece of writing than “rival who loses,” and it’s the single strongest beat in the whole twenty volumes.

The Ending, Explained (As Much As It Can Be)

The manga eventually pushes Joe toward Jose Mendoza, a genuine world-class champion, and by this point every fight has stopped being about whether Joe can win. It’s about what winning is even going to cost him at this point. The manga stops asking “will he become a champion” and starts asking “is there anything left of him by the time he gets there.”

The final fight against Mendoza is where the whole argument of the story lands, and I’m not going to walk through it panel by panel – some things you genuinely need to see cold. But here’s the shape of it: Joe gives everything, not metaphorically, and the manga ends on an image so ambiguous, so quietly devastating, that it’s been debated by readers for over fifty years. Did he die in that corner, burned down to “pure white ash,” as the story’s own recurring phrase puts it? The manga doesn’t say. It doesn’t need to. Whether he lived or not, the story had already told you, chapters earlier, exactly what this fight was going to take from him.

Ambition and self-destruction were never opposites in this manga. They were the same motion, wearing different gloves – that’s the closest thing to a thesis statement Ashita no Joe gives you, and the ending is the last time it makes the point.

The Characters

Joe Yabuki is a genuinely difficult protagonist to root for in the traditional sense, and that’s on purpose. He’s reckless, arrogant, and for long stretches seems almost allergic to his own survival instinct. The manga never asks you to admire his choices – it asks you to understand the specific hunger driving them. Watch how he treats every victory like it barely happened, and every near-loss like the only honest thing that’s occurred all week.

Danpei Tange is the quieter tragedy of the two leads. He’s not a wise mentor doling out life lessons – he’s a broken man using Joe as a second chance he probably doesn’t deserve and definitely can’t fully control.

Toru Rikiishi, covered above, is the manga’s best piece of character construction: a rival whose death indicts the sport itself rather than simply clearing the path for the hero.

Yoko Shiraki, the wealthy patron who bankrolls Danpei’s gym, gets less page time than I’d like, and her arc is thinner than the men around her – a fair criticism of a manga from 1968. But where she does land, her quiet, unspoken concern for Joe gives the story one of its only sustained moments of tenderness in a book that otherwise refuses you comfort.

The Art Style

Tetsuya Chiba’s art predates the clean, polished house style most modern sports manga use, and that’s a deliberate choice, not a limitation of the era. Punches don’t land with stylized speed-lines and heroic silhouettes. They land with exhaustion – bodies that look genuinely worn down, faces that visibly age across twenty volumes. A manga from 1968 that decided boxing shouldn’t look glamorous already knew exactly what story it was telling before the plot caught up to it.

Ashita no Joe vs. Hajime no Ippo vs. Real

If you’re deciding what to read next, here’s the quick version:

• Read Hajime no Ippo if you want the genre’s classic promise – hard work pays off, and the story rewards you for believing it will.
• Read Real if you want Ashita no Joe’s stomach for unsentimental defeat, applied to a different sport and a different kind of body.
• Read Ashita no Joe if you want the foundational text both of those owe something to – the manga that asked, in 1968, whether the whole genre’s promise was ever honest in the first place.

Final Verdict: Is Ashita no Joe Worth Reading in 2026?

I’m rating it 8.6/10. The 0.6 is covering for genuinely dated pacing in the early reform-school arc, and some side-character writing – particularly around Yoko – that hasn’t aged the way the central Joe/Danpei/Rikiishi relationship has.

What it does exceptionally well more than makes up for that: it commits, fully and without a safety net, to refusing the sports-manga promise that hard work equals a happy ending, decades before that kind of genre subversion became common. It handles its central death with a clinical restraint that hits harder than melodrama would have. And it built toward an ending still being argued about half a century later – which is either the best or the worst thing you can say about an ending, depending on what you want from your fiction.

Read this if: you want the foundational text of the entire “tragic underdog” genre, you’re curious why Japanese boxing fiction looks the way it does, or you want to understand a story so effective that real athletes once organized real mourning for a fictional death.

Skip this if: you need your protagonist redeemed by the end, or you need a sports story that rewards effort with a clean, uncomplicated victory.

FAQ

Does Joe die at the end of Ashita no Joe? The manga never confirms it either way. The final image shows Joe slumped in his corner after the Mendoza fight, described as burned “pure white ash” – deliberately ambiguous, and it’s been debated by fans for over fifty years.

How many volumes is Ashita no Joe? Twenty volumes, serialized in Weekly Shōnen Magazine from 1968 to 1973. It’s a completed story.

Is Ashita no Joe shounen or seinen? It was serialized in a shōnen magazine, but its tone – tragic, unsentimental, willing to kill off major characters without redemption – reads far darker than most shōnen sports manga, closer to seinen sensibilities.

Did people really hold a funeral for a manga character? Yes. In March 1970, an actual funeral was staged at Kodansha’s headquarters for a character from the manga, organized by countercultural theater director Shuji Terayama, with roughly 700 attendees including a former world boxing champion.

What should I read after Ashita no Joe? Hajime no Ippo for the genre’s more optimistic version of the same premise, or Real by Takehiko Inoue if you want the same unsentimental honesty about the body applied to a different sport.