BODY: A father and son have been arguing about food for 43 years. Now they're coming back to television.
Oishinbo, the towering monument of Japanese culinary manga, has been confirmed for a new TV anime titled Shin Oishinbo ("New Oishinbo"), with a teaser trailer released on YouTube. Production is handled by Shin-Ei Animation — the studio behind Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan, and the same studio that produced the original Oishinbo anime that ran from 1988 to 1992.
Written by Tetsu Kariya and drawn by Akira Hanasaki, the series began serialization in Shogakukan's Big Comic Spirits in 1983 and has reached 111 volumes. The premise is deceptively simple: newspaper reporter Shiro Yamaoka and his colleague Yuko Kurita are assigned to build the "Ultimate Menu" as a company project, only to find themselves repeatedly facing the "Supreme Menu" supervised by celebrity gourmet Yuzan Kaibara at a rival paper — who also happens to be Yamaoka's estranged father. Between the duels, the pair get drawn into the lives of farmers, fishermen, chefs and diners whose problems turn out to be food problems.
The manga has been on hiatus since 2014, following a widely debated storyline involving Fukushima. No cast, broadcast window, or streaming details have been announced; the production says those will come later.
The insider take
It's hard to overstate how deep Oishinbo runs in Japan. This is the work that taught a generation of readers to care about where their dashi comes from, to distinguish wild from farmed, to treat a bowl of rice as an argument. Bookstores here still stock the à la carte themed reissues near the registers, and "Oishinbo said so" remains a real conversational move in Japanese kitchens. The choice of Shin-Ei Animation is the telling detail — this is a studio that makes national anime, the kind that runs on a fixed weekly slot for years and becomes furniture in the living room. Reading the tea leaves, Shin Oishinbo looks less like a nostalgia revival aimed at collectors and more like a bid to install Yamaoka and Kaibara back into Japanese family TV, where they arguably belong.
Originally reported by GIGAZINE (Japanese).