Trivia / Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl

• Life Imitates Art: Ryoko Tamura is a extra lightweight judo athlete with seven world championship gold medals and two Olympic gold medals. She won a silver medal in her first Olympic appearance; the same 1992 Barcelona Olympics that is Yawara's goal in the manga. She was even nicknamed "Yawara-chan" by the Japanese media.
• No Export for You:
  • Only the first 40 episodes of the anime – covering the first major story arc and a couple episodes into the second – were released in North America. After more than two years passed with no news of any sort, fans pestered AnimEigo for answers, whereupon AnimEigo finally admitted they did not have the entire series as they had led fans to believe, and either would not or could not (depending on how one interprets their statement) get the rest of it.^note  Although Yawara probably did sell poorly for AnimEigo, it's also known that the Japanese production company, Kitty Films, went bankrupt around this time and most of its assets fell into legal limbo. So AnimEigo may actually not have been able to license the rest of the series. The series quietly fell out of print in 2012.
  • The manga remains completely unavailable in English. Viz Media, which has the English rights to every other Naoki Urasawa series, almost certainly has this one too… or at least gets first-refusal power. Likely the reason it remains unpublished is because it is essentially a sports manga, and that genre is infamously difficult to sell in North America.

---