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Mainichi Kāsan Manga to be Animated for TV Next Spring
posted on by Egan Loo
Mantan Web, the special interest website of the Mainichi Shimbun paper, has revealed that the newspaper's Mainichi Kāsan (Daily/Everyday Mom) gag manga by Rieko Saibara will be animated for broadcast television next spring. Mainichi Kāsan describes the humorous everyday experiences of Saibara's own life with her two children. It has been running in the newspaper's morning edition every week since 2002, and over one million copies of the four compiled volumes have published so far. The fifth volume will ship on December 13. Saibara received the Japan Media Arts Festival Award in 2004 and the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2005 for her work on Mainichi Kāsan.
Saibara famously got into a dispute with her eldest son's school after she drew a Mainichi Kāsan installment that described five school children as "the five class dummies" in November 2004. Her son's class teacher asked her to refrain from depicting school scenes. Saibara said that her work was fiction and that she had the right to freedom of expression. However, the school said that she should take more consideration for the other children and that her manga clearly depicts that school — right down to even the school's name.
The animation studio and cast will be announced at a later date. Saibara's other works include Chikuro Youchien, Ura-Mishuran, and Bokunchi. Bokunchi was adapted into a live-action film, but Mainichi Kāsan will be her first manga to be animated.
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