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Toru Nanamine (Nanamine Tooru) - Mangaka, who was a big fan of Muto Ashirogi's work, which inspired him to become a mangaka. Nevertheless, he is very distrustful of the relationship between the editor and the author and creates a scheme to undermine them, believing that there is no opinion other than his own questions, and angrily attacks when his statements are not true.

In particular, he believes that the more reader opinions can be obtained in advance, and the more offers will be included in the manga, the better the manga will be. As a result, he uses unscrupulous means and with great contempt refers to his editor, Kosugi. although the skillful artist, the tools he uses to build his story, leads to a growing destruction of the plot, and he is ultimately forced to yield to the stronger Ashirogi team when his dwindling pool of online consultants leaves him after learning how he lied to him.

He later returns using an even less ethical method of using paid advisors to create the perfect manga for himself, first testing the system with manga veteran creators and then abandoning them. This act outrages most of the creators and editors of the manga. The editor-in-chief permits Nanamine to submit his work only when Ashirogi and other artists express a desire to defeat him in direct competition and wagers a deal with Nanamine: if he doesn’t get into the top three with a one-shot, he is forbidden to ever write for Shonen Jump again. Ultimately, Nanamine cannot take one of the top three places in the ranking and is banned from Shōnen Jump.

Personality[]

Nanamine is initially introduced as a cheerful, overly talkative person. However, his bubbly personality is revealed to be just a facade. He is actually a calculative and extremely manipulative individual as shown in Chapter 118, primarily using several other people gathered online to help him edit his manga instead of his editor Kosugi (going so far as to refer to him as "Opinion #51). Nanamine additionally lies to his online chat friends about his manga's rankings in order to boost their morale.

However, Nanamine's manipulation and confidence of such makes him overconfident of his abilities (and those of his online editors). Such is seen when both Yoshida and Niizuma Eiji, analytical manga editor and mangaka respectively, read his manga independently, and both state that the manga does not reveal his personality and that he's effectively superimposing mainstream lines onto his manga to make it popular. When his confidence is broken (as when his online editors abandoned him), he is quick to devolve into near madness.

Toru

Nanamine's true colors

Nanamine persists in his arrogant methods, but only due to the pressure his estranged businessman father puts on him to become the best. He is revealed to have taken a large amount of money from his father and started his own company, where he pays high school students to read manga and come up with ideas for veteran authors to follow.

Plot Outline[]

Nanamine has been a huge fan of Ashirogi since junior high. He consistently sent fan letters to his favorite mangaka throughout the course of their work since "Detective Trap ." He emulates Ashirogi in his story by using similar themes and motifs as the ones used in their earlier work.

Classroom of Truth[]

He submits a story called "Classroom of Truth" for the Treasure award when Ashirogi is judging. The story is dark and cynical in a similar fashion to Ryu Shizuka's "True Human", and is interesting enough for some pages to be shown full-scale in the Bakuman manga. Due to its incredible deviation from mainstream manga, however, and despite its clear-cut superiority over the other manga submitted for the award, it does not win. Though he is only eighteen, his manga is

Nanamine

possibly better than both Shizuka's and Ashirogi's, and he is hailed as a genius by JUMP's editorial department and requested for a lighter version of the Classroom of Truth.

Right after his first meeting with Kosugi, he uploads the "Classroom of Truth" online, causing the editorial department a frenzy that bombards them with protests of the means they use to edit their stories. He eventually deletes the blog at Kosugi's request, but his manga still remains online by people who've made copies of it.

Upon visiting Ashirogi, Nanamine reveals his true colors to the pair, causing both of them to react with disapproval. Disappointed by the disagreement of the authors he idolized, Nanamine challenges them to a managaka popularity contest, each group using their respective methods.

His one-shot "The Thing That Comes with Being Nervous" is made drastically more real as opposed to his editor's requests for him to tone it down and make it slightly more comical. It takes the top spot in the issue it is presented in. Nanamine then works to get a serialized version of an alternative version of "Classroom of Truth" to the magazine, called "What is Required for a Good School Life". Meeting with Kosugi, Nanamine lets slip that he has been consulting fifty others from online to improve his manga, with editors and former editors among them. He effectively ransoms Kosugi with Jump's declining popularity and Kosugi's decreased reputation should Kosugi refuse to agree and become "number fifty-one".

When Kosugi mentions that Nanamine's backgrounds are relatively low quality to Ashirogi Muto, Nanamine reveals that he has hired Nakai as his Chief Assistant. Nanamine frequently lends pizza money to the obese man and reveals to Nakai that he was working with others to come up with ideas for manga. Most notable, however, is that Nanamine expressed fury that he was second to Aoki Ko's What God Gave Me, and stated that his manga was too high a caliber for the readers to understand, refusing to listen to Kosugi's opinion in the matter. After tearing up the early results sheet, he went online and told his 50 editors that it had taken the first place spot.

While Nakai's art does sustain What is Required's second place in the second chapter, the resulting chapters drop their place dramatically, and over half of Nanamine's cowriters leave the chatroom when Nanamine proves stubborn and starts to cut out some of their ideas. Nanamine's drop to fifteenth even causes him to call Takagi in hopes that they would write the same story and compete with only artwork. Though Takagi initially rejects the deal, Kosugi's worry over Nanamine's mental state causes him to allow the deal to be made, and the two chapters compete with the same story. This deals an even greater blow to Nanamine, as while people who voted for PCP also tended to vote for What is Required, the effect of copying the story cost Nanamine everybody who also voted for PCP. Nanamine considers quitting, only to be repeatedly punched by Kosugi, who refuses to allow Nanamine to quit and advises him to write a more Shonen plot, which Nanamine seems to be able to do.

Nanamine is next seen at the New Year's Party with new resolve, telling Ashirogi that he will defeat them with another method. Ashirogi welcomes his challenge and Nanamine leaves the party to work on a new series. What is Required is revealed to be cancelled in later chapters.

Veteran Author Bonanza[]

This part of the story is exclusive to the Manga, please read the manga for the full story.

Nanamine reappears

Nanamine reappears

It is revealed that Nanamine was behind Mikihiko Azuma's submission of Panty-Flash Fight, having previously discussed the matter of his success with his father. Four floors of a building was rented out and his old methods are put into play to fuel the stories of veteran authors who've lost touch with their readers. Several of these veteran authors immediately go to JUMP to publish their stories, much to the chagrin of several authors and editors, who believe that younger authors now have less of a chance to publish their manga. In this operation, he hired Kyoichi Murasaki as his second-in-command.

When Mashiro and Takagi are invited to Nanamine's company to observe his methods of creating manga, Nanamine demonstrates his significant improvement in the system, but fails to win the approval of his favorite mangaka. Later on, Nanamine abandons the veteran authors, inciting the fury of the members of Team Fukuda, who express their anger and determination to their editors about crushing Nanamine's new series. Nanamine is then contacted by Editor-in-Chief Sasaki, who expresses his disapproval of Nanamine's abandonment of the veteran authors and challenges Nanamine to get in the top three with a one shot, lest he be banned from writing for JUMP. Despite getting a good score from his company's reviewers and due to shooting down Kosugi's suggestion to make his one-shot more shonen, Nanamine only manages to get fourth. Especially upset at having lost to Mikihiko Azuma, who was among the veteran authors he left, Nanamine tears apart the PCP poster on his wall and angrily tells Kosugi to leave his presence.

Manga[]

  • Classroom of Truth: a dark manga about a higher being who plays a survival game with students in a classroom. The manga is dark enough to be Seinen, and as such is rejected from the top spot of the Treasure Award and subsequently uploaded online. A serialized version called What is Required for a Good School Life is an alternate version of Classroom of Truth. It is later revealed that the difference between Classroom of Truths success and What is Requireds success is due to the restriction in numbers of its staff, as Nanamine had only discussed Classroom of Truth with five online editors as opposed to the fifty in What is Required. When Kosugi attempts reasoning on Nanamine for the latter to see the error of his ways over the utter failure of What is Required for a Good School Life a resigned Nanamine disclosed that the only thing he ever contributed with creating Classroom of Truth was him coming up first with the main idea about the characters in the latter manga getting killed if they were telling a lie.
  • The Thing That Comes with Being Nervous: a one-shot romance that works its charm based on the reality of its artwork rather than the comic moments of most artwork. It takes the top spot in the issue it is presented in.
  • What is Required for a Good School Life: Known as What is Required for short. it is an alternate version of Classroom of Truth. The manga was written to directly combat PCP, and as such has been on a downward trend in rankings due to its lack of originality. Nanmine incorporated fifty online editors in this manga, causing the original five that helped him in Classroom of Truth to remark that it was getting crowded and leave the chatroom.
  • 100 Million and the Beautiful Girl: a one-shot that Nanamine intended to have serialized. It is about a competition of many to become the suitors of the daughter of a rich businessman. However, due to the lack of a Shonen feel to the one-shot, it only manages to place fourth, and leads to Nanamine's ban from JUMP.

Trivia[]

  • Nanamine is similar to Death Note's Light Yagami that first uses a very nice personality that hides an evil heart and intention, also when Light Yagami is using Death Note to kill all criminals in the world to create a perfect world which is the people are against at, Nanamine is using a lot of people to create a perfect manga that is also what other people find to be wrong in the eyes of the manga department.
  • Nanamine's introduction in Bakuman differs markedly from that of other antagonists or antagonistic characters in the story. While both Niizuma Eiji, who is introduced as wanting to end one manga he hated, and Fukuda, who is introduced insulting Nakai, are antagonistic at first glance, they turn out to be friendly not long after their introductions. Nanamine is the antithesis: he is friendly at first glance and turns out to be bitterly antagonistic not long after his introduction.
  • Among the first of Nanamine's buddies to leave are "pai", "LL", "e231", and "osaru". "LL" seems to refer to L, the most intelligent detective in Death Note, and "osaru" seems to refer to the giant monkey form in the Dragon Ball series. Both are highly respected manga in the real world.
  • In the anime he will be voiced by Shinnosuke Tachibana, who voiced Akito Takagi in the pre-anime drama CD.
  • In the last episode of the third season, Kaya see “The problems of a good guy” by Nanamine in a comics shop: he continue his mangaka career in another magazine. 
  • It seems Nanamine's poor personality was somewhat accidentally caused by Muto Ashirogi. After reading The World's All about Money and Intelligence, he become fixated on the idea that money is the only way to get things in life.

Site Navigation[]

Mangakas
Moritaka Mashiro + Akito Takagi = Muto Ashirogi | Eiji Niizuma | Yuriko Aoki | Shinta Fukuda | Kazuya Hiramaru | Takuro Nakai | Aiko Iwase | Shoyo Takahama | Shun Shiratori | Toru Nanamine | Koji Makaino | Mikihiko Azuma | Nobuhiro Mashiro | Kisaku Arai | Ryu Shizuka | Hino Kunimi | Ikiki Kajiwara | Kyoichi Murasaki | Kyotaro Hibiki | Shigure Yanagi | Shun Hanshaki
All Characters
Shōnen Jump / Shōnen Jack
Mangakas

Moritaka Mashiro + Akito Takagi = Muto Ashirogi | Eiji Niizuma | Yuriko Aoki | Shinta Fukuda | Kazuya Hiramaru | Takuro Nakai | Aiko Iwase | Shoyo Takahama | Shun Shiratori | Toru Nanamine | Koji Makaino | Mikihiko Azuma | Nobuhiro Mashiro | Kisaku Arai | Ryu Shizuka | Hino Kunimi | Ikiki Kajiwara | Kyoichi Murasaki | Kyotaro Hibiki | Shigure Yanagi | Shun Hanshaki

Assistants

Ichiriki Orihara | Natsumi Kato | Naoto Ogawa | Shinta Fukuda | Shoyo Takahama | Shuichi Moriya | Shun Shiratori | Takuro Nakai | Yasuoka

Editors

Akira Hattori | Goro Miura | Hisashi Sasaki | Kim Songyu | Koji Yoshida | Masakazu Yamahisa | Yoshihisa Heishi | Yujiro Hattori | Tatsuro Kosugi

Family / Friends / Classmates
Azuki family

Miyuki Haruno Azuki | Miho Azuki | Mina Azuki

Mashiro Family

Masahiro Mashiro | Kayoko Mashiro | Moritaka Mashiro | Nobuhiro Mashiro | Fumi Mashiro

Miyoshi Family

Yosshi Miyoshi | Kaya Miyoshi

Takagi Family

Akito Takagi's Father | Akito Takagi's Mother | Akito Takagi | Akito Takagi's Brother | Kaya Miyoshi

Classmates

Hidemitsu Ishizawa

Others
Studio 92

Ehara | Tonaka | Ōbayashi | Tamiya

Together Movies

Gotō and Furuike

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