If you have not read a variation on this article yet, please take the time to read it now. This is very serious business. Scanlations have been operating in a legal grey area for a while now. You will have noticed that most groups don’t scanlate something after it has been licensed in North America to minimize the chances of their getting a Takedown Notice, but that still doesn’t make it technically legal. While I would argue that scanlations are just a natural trend of the internet obviously old giant publication companies like Kodansha, Sueisha, TokyoPop, Viz et al. don’t feel that way and they are perfectly within their legal right to seek to shut down every scanlation group on the internet. I read a lot of scanlations and it’s disappointing for me too, I don’t want to lose the ability to read so many of my favourite series, but I don’t think they’re worth getting sued over either! I am sure most other scanlation groups on the internet are having this same talk right now and deciding what to do.

I’ll is an old property and Kodansha has bigger titles to deal with, but it still worries me. I’m going to be finishing off Volume 12 translation for sure, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do from there. There are some extreme tactics I could take should they actually start shutting down sites like Mangashare, Onemanga, and MangaStream but it will be a lot of work and mean a lot of hassle for you fans so I would like to put it off if I can. Yet security through obscurity never lasts for long. Mangatraders may already have been taken down.

If you have been reading your manga online and not downloading it to your computer for convenience reasons, if you would like to continue reading it now might be the best time to start downloading. I personally recommend stoptazmo as one of the last bastions of illegality on the internet. It’s not fancy, but it works. A lot of groups might be moving to IRC completely now, like entropy, so now might be the time to learn how to use that for downloading.

The collective we of the internet had a good run of it, but got too big and attracted too much attention. Unfortunately, I predicted this happening a few months ago and it’s not a prediction I’m happy to see come true. But here we are, I’ll take it day by day and you should keep your eyes and ears open too.

That said, some very smart person over at the downloads page pointed out that the Volume 6 extras are not on the site whose link I put up. So everyone who has visited this site since I put it up has been lacking them all along. Imagine how much of an idiot that makes me feel, and then go download these two extras, Chapters -4 and -5. They are sidestories like all the other minus chapters, and with -5 is a little 00 extra, both centering around Tachibana when he was younger. Needless to say, very cute.

And because I am even more of an idiot I somehow missed out on scanlating Chapter -9 in Volume 10 for three-odd years. So I’ll post the raws and get on a translation at the very least for that.

The Download Page

Since today is my day off, I took a bit of time to upload the I’ll OVA (anime) to the downloads page. It has an English dubbed audio, Japanese audio, and fansubs. The subs aren’t great, there are in fact a few mistakes that are obvious even to my pidgin Japanese, but it’s better than nothing! The OVA is two episodes which cover the second half of Volume 5 and Volume 6, basically Hitonari’s visit to Obata’s training camp and then the match afterwards. Sadly excluding Saki and much of Kondo, but makes up for that by being almost ridiculously Hiiragi/Tachibana.

It had been a while since I’d watched these, but when I did I was astonished to realize the calibre of the VAs in this. One immediately recognizable voice is Kamiya Hiroshi who voices Hiiragi Hitonari. You will recognize his voice also behind Orihara Izaya of the now hugely popular anime Durarara!! not to mention Teiria Erde from Gundam00 and Araragi-kun from Bakemonogatari. You can click through and read the rest here, but suffice to say it’s a pretty star-studded cast for our humble manga. The animation and character design was done by Sekiguchi Kanami who also worked on The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and the original groundbreaking Ghost in the Shell movie, for example, and Gaku, though he has only a few lines, is voiced by the fantastically sexy Sakurai Takahiro who has also played the Medicine Seller from Mononoke, Cloud Strife from Advent Children, and Heine from the DOGS OVA! I’ll stop fangirling now.

I’ve also uploaded the two closing songs that play during the credits of each episode. They’re by the J-Rock band ELLEGARDEN and I had a hard time finding them once upon a time, but a very kind fan emailed them to me so I’m sharing them with you guys as well.

Download and enjoy~

Nonetheless, two chapters have been scanlated and posted to the downloads page, Chapter 57 and Chapter -10. Everyone owes a big thank you to kamen and plchat for finishing off the volume! I’ve now put all of Volume 11 into one .zip and upped that as well, in case you were holding out on downloading until now. I also got rid of all the non-mediafire links from the page, since the formerly good upload sites I was using when I started the site have gone to shit, apparently. Please continue letting me know if you find dead links or if one of the sites isn’t working for you, I am usually much faster about this than I have been lately.