This Week in Japan: Eat-Man Comes Back for Seconds
Four stories this week. A 1997 cyberpunk anime came back from the dead, a stealth game got dropped by one console and picked up by another, a cat-thing beat a magical girl for the second time, and a manga about two kids in a library is graduating them. In that order.
Eat-Man gets a new anime, 28 years after the last one
Announced September 10: EAT-MAN: The Over Order, a new anime project from Akihito Yoshitomi's manga. No studio, no staff, no format, no date. Just the title and the fact of it. The original ran in MediaWorks' Dengeki Comic Gao! from 1996 to 2003, 19 volumes, and Studio DEEN made two TV series out of it, twelve episodes on TV Tokyo in early 1997 and a second run, Eat-Man '98, that fall. A sequel manga, The Main Dish, ran in Kodansha's Monthly Shonen Sirius from 2014 to 2019. So the property never fully died, it just went quiet on the anime side for 28 years.
If you never saw it: Bolt Crank, a mercenary who eats metal, screws, bullets, whatever, and pulls it back out of his hand as a working object when he needs it. Episodic, drifting, moody, late-90s Trigun-adjacent. The '97 series is one of those shows that a certain kind of person taped off TV and kept. Whether The Over Order is a remake, a continuation, or a film is anyone's guess and nobody's confirmation. Real.
Sony dropped Kojima's Physint. Xbox picked it up.
Physint is Hideo Kojima's return to the Metal Gear lane, an action-espionage game he has talked about wanting to make for years. It was announced under PlayStation. Per reporting this week, Sony cancelled it in mid-June with a statement that said the company continues to have great admiration for Kojima's vision and gave no reason. On September 10, Xbox announced it will publish the game instead, and Kojima put out a note calling Physint important to him personally and to Kojima Productions and saying development continues.
So the man whose name is on Metal Gear Solid is shipping his next stealth game through Microsoft. Why would PlayStation drop a Kojima game with no stated reason? Money, timeline, the film-and-TV ambitions attached to it, something none of us will hear about for years? Every one of those is a guess and none of them is a fact. What is a fact: Xbox already publishes OD, his horror project, and now has both. Sony's statement is two sentences long and says nothing. Cool.
Chiikawa retakes number one, Sekiro opens at nine
Last week the story was Madoka Magica: Walpurgisnacht Rising opening at number one and knocking Chiikawa the Movie off the top after weeks. This week the cat-thing came back. Chiikawa rose back to first for the September 5 to 6 weekend, and per ANN it has now passed 13.9 billion yen, which makes it the biggest film of 2026 in Japan, ahead of Detective Conan. Madoka slid to third in its second weekend, sitting at 1.53 billion yen and 900,000 admissions through its first ten days, which is a fine number for a film that waited thirteen years and a rough one for a film that led the week before.
Down at number nine: Sekiro: No Defeat, a hand-drawn 2D theatrical film adapting FromSoftware's game. Qzil.la animated it, KADOKAWA and ARCH produced, Kenichi Kutsuna directed, and it is in Japanese theaters for a three-week window only, opening September 4. A FromSoftware game turned into a hand-drawn film and given three weeks is a strange product. Ninth place on a limited run is not a failure. It is what a limited run looks like.
The Dangers in My Heart ends September 15
Norio Sakurai's BokuYaba finishes in Champion Cross (Akita Shoten) on September 15, about eight and a half years after it started, 14 volumes. Two anime seasons already, a third scheduled for 2027, Seven Seas on the English side. The publisher's line is that readers can celebrate the graduation of Kyotaro Ichikawa and Anna Yamada alongside the series' conclusion. Graduation is the right word. The series was always about two middle schoolers and the space between them, and it is ending where it should, on time, with the author still in charge. That is rarer than it sounds. Good.
On the desk
No dispatches this week. The Chainsmoker Cat ranking is still owed, the Interspecies Reviewers verdict is still owed, and Ghost in the Shell is still on the pile unwatched, which is allowed. The desk has had a plush problem to deal with. Loops stay open. Next week, or the week after.