A Kenya Boy retrospective

Here’s my words on the evolution of Sōji Yamakawa’s best known work not related to Isamu of the Wilderness. 

Behold the official instalments! Not many people know that they have inspired two bootleg translations, a couple of Taito video games and a bunch of live action knockoffs. They are in turn inspired mainly by Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel In Desert and Wilderness and Don Moore’s international smash hit Jungle Jim comic strip. 

The Kenya Boy franchise likely began with a proposed Kamishibai play by the Ishinomori school progenitor Sōji Yamakawa, which was so forced and so sleazy that it luckily got canned due to WW2 and various other factors. Thank goodness, it’s good news that the picture story strip came first instead. 

The hit picture story strip series was made from the 7th of October 1951 to the 4th of October 1955 on the ever infamous Sankei Shimbun newspaper. Children, teens and young adults were addictively reading the unfortunately disposable strips and their longer lasting volumes, not only for their charm but also for their inventive ideas, which ain’t bad for a story whose first lifespan is messed up, mainly because the 1950s workplace culture was behind it all. 

There was an infamously lost radio drama with its bragging theme song, which aired on JOQR from 1953 to 1954. A board game and a card game sharing the same name were made at the same time. Later on, the first Kenya Boy movie, a live action piece of sleaze distributed by Daiei, was released on the 13th of October 1954, a year before the strip ended hastily on a messed up note. 

But then came the 1960s. Except for the unluckier few, most African nations as we know now were becoming independent from their messy European colonisers. At the same time, a live action tv show adaptation of Kenya Boy replaced National Kid, a more obvious merch bragger on TV NET, a Japanese broadcasting tv channel now known as TV Asahi. Although quite different from its immediate source material, it was still a fairly sound, domestically popular smash hit, which would finally gain a decent but pricey remaster on DVD in 2017. 

The Tokusatsu show also has a manic manga companion drawn by Kyuuta Ishikawa (1940-2018) for Shogakukan’s currently venerable Weekly Shōnen Sunday magazine, which otherwise followed the older Sankei volumes a bit more faithfully and became a locally popular Kashihon in the following years onward. There’s also a Manga Home Run rerun/sequel which was only printed once! It wasn’t only physically reprinted by Pan Rolling’s Manga Shop in 2002 and again in 2005, it also gained an ebook form from 2017 onwards. 

Descending largely from the tv show are a pair of works by Souji Yamakawa himself, the rewrite for the creator’s own Wild magazine in 1968 and a tribute for a short lived collaboration between the now defunct Nippon Reader’s Digest and the still extant Suntory in 1974. From February to July 1976, a ten volume series of somewhat redrawn books was made for the Sankei Shimbun’s Sankei Junior Books imprint. 

September 1983 to February 1984 were the months when the unremarkable twenty volume Kadokawa Bunko edition was released. At the same time, light novels were starting to gain steam, while the picture stories (at least those for preteens and teens) were still seen as clunky and old fashioned even in that decade.

Released on the 10th of March 1984, the definitive Kenya Boy instalment, a nutty anime film mistaken easily for an average OVA (or a Gordon Scott period Tarzan movie in some European nations), flopped at the Japanese box office during its bubble economy years, to the point that it mainly gained modest success on the home videos and tv screens of some Middle Eastern and European nations instead. Maybe it’s because Kadokawa as a conglomerate has a rather notoriously extreme tendency to dump so many franchises as if they don’t live up to Sword Art Online’s international mockery nor A Certain Magical Index’s inevitable Zombification, which sadly makes sense in hindsight. 

Despite this factoid, even the relative over-saturation of 1980s Kenya Boy merch still looks quaint yet is actually quite good quality in comparison to that of tried and true global blockbusters like Star Wars. Interestingly, the film not only was retold for a series of fun picture book companions (read by youngsters of the time), but also had its screenplay scenario being turned into a light novelisation! In the same decade, a manga tie in, replete with the anime film pictures, was also made by Fujimi Shobo’s Fujimi Comics imprint. There were also picture books made by the same company. 

From the spring of 2017 onwards, Ebooks for both the Sankei Junior Books Edition and the Kyuuta Ishikawa manga’s Shōnen Sunday run (itself a more source faithful tie in to the show) have been released in online stores.