Japanese manga on Vietnamese football to be published in May

“Sơn Goal,” created by Japanese artist Baba Tamio, will tell the story of a young boy named Son who has a Vietnamese mother and a Brazilian father.

With his love for soccer, he moves to Vietnam, makes a bunch of friends and they form their own soccer team.

Aoyagi Masayuki, director of publishing company Kadokawa, which will publish the comic together with Vietnam’s own Kim Dong Publishing House, told Vietnamese ambassador to Japan, Vu Hong Nam, at a meeting Monday he hoped “Sơn Goal” would spread the joy of sport and teamwork among children in both countries, Vietnam News Agency reported.

The manga would feature Vietnamese tourist destinations and other sites such as the Dragon Bridge and My Khe Beach in Da Nang, he said.

“Japanese publishers, including Kadokawa, mainly cooperated with Vietnam to translate works from Japanese to Vietnamese in the past,” and the characters in those stories did not accurately reflect Vietnamese culture.

“So we decided to create a manga with Vietnamese settings and cultural characteristics.”

Kadokawa will gift 1,000 manga titles to Vietnam through the Japanese embassy in Vietnam.

Nam hailed the timing of the publication as appropriate since Vietnam and Japan are set to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations.

He believed the manga would be well received in Vietnam thanks to a love for both the genre of comics and football.

Masayuki said Kadokawa will also collaborate with the Hanoi University of Industrial Arts and some Vietnamese publishers to produce more manga by local authors.