اجرى موقع ANN مقابلة مع مانجاكا المنجا الشهير Slam Dunk تدور فيها عن اهم اعماله واعماله القادمة وكيفية بداية كتابته ل Slam Dunk
وعن كيف اانه كان من اكبر العوامل لزيادة شعبية هذه اللعبة في اسيا
المقابلة هنا

ANN: Your seminal works Slam Dunk and Buzzer Beater are credited with increasing interest in basketball throughout Asia. Any thoughts on differences with American audiences, who are much more likely to be familiar with basketball and played it themselves?

INOUE: Well, while Slam Dunk is technically about basketball, I don’t think it’s essentially a basketball story. It could have been about soccer just as easily. Really, I just wanted to convey the feeling one gets from playing sports in general, and hopefully anybody can relate to that.

Where does your personal passion for basketball come from?

I was on my high school basketball team for three years. I wasn’t so good back then. (laughs)

Have you been able to step it up since then?

Oh, absolutely nothing has changed since. (laughs)

You’re involved with a new athletic scholarship for promising young Japanese basketball players. What are your thoughts on players like Yuta Tabuse trying to make it to the NBA and the future of Japanese players in American basketball?

I really have a lot of respect for Tabuse. He’s opening up a path for others to follow, and he’s had to make a lot of sacrifices in order to do that. But it’s thanks to those sacrifices that others will be able to follow his lead in the future.

Your period works like Vagabond often reflect sumi-e artistic styles. Both the story of Musashi and sumi have deep roots in Japanese tradition. Are they linked symbolically, do you feel? Is there a relationship between brush stroke and sword stroke, for example?

I…haven’t really thought much about that. Let’s see…. I’m not really much of a history buff, so I couldn’t say. Uh…When I was younger, I did some kendo. Does that help? (laughs)

Tell us about your book Sumi.

In Japan, when they bring out illustration collections, they’re almost always in color. Not many of them are just in black and white. In the case of Vagabond, I have a color one already, called Water, but I wanted to express myself in black and white.

What about black and white is so important to Vagabond?

Well, manga is fundamentally black and white! (laughs) Similarly, using brush and ink allows me to convey the feel, or the atmosphere of that era. I’m able to show the dirtiness and the greasiness. The dirty clothes, the dirty hair…. It’s similar in atmosphere to an [Akira] Kurosawa movie.

You’ve recently worked on your first video game, doing character designs for the upcoming Xbox 360 game Lost Odyssey. Could you tell us a little about it?

I’m really not a gamer myself, so to be honest, working on video games is something I never thought I’d be doing. However, I don’t think Lost Odyssey is a game in the traditional sense of the word. [Creator Hironobu] Sakaguchi is a friend of mine, and he approached me to work on the game. The idea behind it was to use the game medium as a way to portray people. In that way, I think of it as an effort to expand the medium.

You’ve just unveiled a mural here at Kinokuniya’s flagship NYC store. Tell us about it.

When you create manga, you basically sit at a desk for a long, long time, and I’ve been doing that for many years. This, however, is a big space! I had to come here on a plane to draw it. It’s something different, and that’s refreshing. It gives me more motivation. I’ll be using that motivation for whatever I work on next.