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Major 2nd New Anime Series Confirmed

NHK announced on Friday that Takuya Mitsuda's Major 2nd baseball manga will have a second television anime series that will premiere on the NHK Educational channel in April 2020.

Shogakukan briefly listed the anime adaptation earlier this week, but removed it soon afterward.

The sequel manga inspired an animated commercial in December 2015, and a television anime adaptation premiered in April 2018. Crunchyroll streamed the series as it aired in Japan, and it describes the story:

Shigeno Daigo is an elementary school student whose father, Goro, is a professional baseball player. Inspired by his father, who was once a Major League player, Daigo started playing baseball with the Mifune Dolphins, a youth league team. He was unable to live up to the expectations of being the son of a professional, however, and quit baseball after less than a year. Then, in the spring of his sixth-grade year, Daigo's school welcomes a transfer student who's just returned from America. The transfer student is Sato Hikaru, and it turns out his father is Sato Toshiya, a former Major League player and Goro's close friend. The fate of these two young men begins to move forward!

Mitsuda launched the manga in Weekly Shonen Sunday in March 2015 as the first new installment in the manga series in five years. The manga recently returned from a five-month hiatus in April.

Mitsuda serialized Major in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1994 until 2010. Shogakukan published 78 compiled book volumes for the series. The story begins when Goro Honda's father, a professional baseball player, dies in an accident. This gives him the motivation to try and become a pro baseball player himself.

The manga inspired its first television anime series in 2004, and the sixth television anime series ran in 2010. The manga also inspired an anime film titled Major: Yūjō no Winning Shot in 2008.

Source: The Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web