The folks at AnimEigo have announced that on August 31st, 2012, their anime set for the first forty episodes of the classic series Yawara! will be going out of print and no more copies will be pressed. The series was one of the last big pushes by fans to get the company to release but issues behind the scenes ended with the company unable to acquire any more episodes, leaving the large bulk of the show unreleased. Yawara! has garnered lots of praise over the years, which you can see here, and was quite the sensation in Japan when it aired and through the Olympics at that time. It continues to be one of the more unfortunate losses when it comes to a series that was never fully released.
Series concept: Inokuma Yawara just wants to be an ordinary high-school girl. Unfortunately for her, she’s been trained since she was a toddler by her grandfather, Jigoro, to be a judo prodigy. Nothing less than an Olympic Gold Medal and the coveted National Merit Award will satisfy him, and he’ll do anything to ensure that she achieves it. And if that isn’t enough, a pesky sports reporter is on her trail, convinced she’s Japan’s next superstar — and that picture of her taking down a mugger (with her panties showing) on the front page of his cheesy sports newspaper isn’t helping matters at all!
