Yasuhisa Hara

Yasuhisa Hara is a Japanese manga artist well known for his manga series Kingdom. His manga won the grand prize in the 17th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Bunkashō in 2013.

In 2012, Kingdom was penned in the Guiness Book of World Records for being the manga drawn by the most people in recorded history (1087 in total). This was during the 'Social Kingdom' campaign celebrating the airing of the Kingdom anime in the same year. The likes of Eiichiro Oda, Hirohiko Araki, Takehiko Inoue, and Kishimoto Masashi were amongst the participants during the event.

Kingdom has a grand live-action movie that released on April 19, 2019 with a nifty budget of 2 billion yen (~$18 million) according to comicbook.com. The movie covers the first five volumes of the original manga and is loyal to the scripts verified by Yasuhisa Hara, with TOHO aiming for it to gross 4 billion yen. The likes of Yamazaki Kento, Yoshizawa Ryo, Hashimoto Kanna, and Nagasawa Masami are amongst the lead cast of the movie, with Shinsuke Sato as the director.

Amongst the most selling manga in the past decade, Hara Yasuhisa's Kingdom remains the only one without any license from an English outlet. VIZ, who are largely loyal to Shueisha, have been reluctant to pick it up despite it being one of the most popular series in Japan.

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