Hajime no Ippo — what you can read in English, and what you can't

Affiliate disclosure. The “Buy” links in the volume table go to Rakuten and earn this site a commission if you order through them. That costs you nothing extra, and it does not decide what appears here: all 145 volumes get a row, including the 3 we found nothing to sell you and therefore earn nothing from.

The short answer

You can read Hajime no Ippo in English, legally, right now. You can read 237 chapters of it.

The Japanese original is at 1,515 chapters, collected into 145 volumes.

Both of those numbers come from Kodansha. Not from a fan wiki, not from a retailer — from the publisher’s own two apps. K MANGA is Kodansha’s official English service; Magazine Pocket is its Japanese one. Same company, same series, two different apps, and a gap of 1,278 chapters between them.

There is no English book

This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth being precise about.

Kodansha USA’s catalogue does not list Hajime no Ippo at all. Searching their site for “hajime no ippo” returns Hajime Isayama (Attack on Titan) and Hajime Segawa (Tokyo ESP) — the first name, not the series.

Amazon.com’s book search returns the series, but look at what it returns: a Spanish edition and the Japanese original. No English printing.

So a Spanish-speaking reader can put Hajime no Ippo on a shelf. An English-speaking reader cannot. The only official English text is chapter-by-chapter on an app, and it stops at 237.

How far behind is “behind”?

When Kodansha added the series to K MANGA in September 2023, 87 chapters went up at once, and it said new ones would follow every week. By 11 August 2026 the count was 237. That is 150 chapters in about 150 weeks — the announced schedule, kept almost exactly.

At one a week, the 1,278 chapters between 237 and 1,515 are 1,278 more weeks. Call it twenty-four years. That is division, not a forecast — but it is the only honest way to answer “how far behind”.

The Japanese side has stopped too

Chapter 1,515 ran in Weekly Shōnen Magazine’s 14th issue of 2026, dated 5 March. There has not been another one since.

On 30 March 2026 Morikawa posted on his own account that he was going into hospital; he had abdominal surgery on 1 April. On 2 July he reported that he was out and walking daily, with one chapter drawn and several more in storyboard, and that his editors had decided to hold the return rather than restart in fits and starts. On 2026-08-16 Magazine Pocket still showed 4 March 2026 as the newest chapter.

So the gap is not growing at the moment. The English side is still moving; the Japanese side is waiting.

What it costs to buy the Japanese volumes

If you want the rest of the story, or if you simply want the books, they exist — in Japanese, from Japan. Volume 145, the newest one, came out on 16 January 2026.

Here is what we found on Rakuten on 2026-08-16, checking all 145 volumes:

Almost nothing is in print. 13 volumes out of 145 are available new. The rest exist only as second-hand copies. A 145-volume series that has been running since 1989 does not sit on shelves; it circulates.

Scarcity shows up in the price, cleanly. The three cheapest volumes we found — 14, 15, 16 — were ¥109 each, with 13 to 22 sellers listing them. The most expensive, volume 129 at ¥1,353, had exactly 1. Volume 127, ¥1,127: 1. Volume 131, ¥1,042: 2. The price is not about which volume is good. It is about how many copies happen to be for sale this week.

What none of this tells you is whether Rakuten will take your order. That depends on where you live. Buying manga from Japan sets out the whole route: the seven countries Rakuten stopped accepting orders from, what a card issued outside Japan can and cannot do, the four ways a parcel gets home, and what we could not measure.

Every volume

All 145 of them, including the ones we could not find. Prices are the cheapest single copy on Rakuten on 2026-08-16.

About the buy links. Each one points at a single second-hand copy — one physical book, in one shop, at the price in the row. When somebody buys that copy, the link stops working. We do not have a “compare every seller” link for this series, so we are not going to dress these up as durable ones. The Sellers column is the honest guide: a volume with a dozen sellers will still be buyable next month, and a volume with one may not be.

The link is always a used copy, even for the 13 volumes still in print — that is simply the listing we recorded, not a recommendation. It is worth checking the row before you click: of those 13, the cheapest used copy came in under the list price for 10 and above it for 3. If the New column is the smaller number, buy it new.

What we could not measure

Volumes 134, 137 and 141 did not appear as a physical listing in the 2,198 Rakuten listings we read. We are not saying they are unobtainable. Of those listings, 23 had a title we could not read a volume number out of, and any of those could be one of these. We are saying we did not find them, which is a different sentence.

The ¥28,036 figure is the sum of 142 cheapest copies at one moment on 2026-08-16. Second-hand prices move. Treat it as a scale, not a quote.

We did not price the complete 1–145 sets that some sellers offer as a single product. They exist; we excluded 83 set listings from the per-volume counts on purpose, because a set is not a volume. Whether a set is cheaper than 145 separate purchases is a question we have not measured.

Where these numbers come from

145 volumes — National Diet Library search, and Kodansha’s own product catalogue.

1,515 chapters — Magazine Pocket (Kodansha), series page, 2026-08-16. 237 chapters in English — K MANGA (Kodansha), series page, 2026-08-16, latest chapter dated 11 August 2026.

87 chapters at launch, and the weekly schedule — Anime News Network and Screen Rant, both reporting Kodansha’s announcement, 27 and 30 September 2023. We did not take the weekly claim on trust: 237 minus 87 is 150 chapters, and September 2023 to 11 August 2026 is about 150 weeks.

Chapter 1,515 dated 5 March 2026, and the hiatus — Anime News Network, 30 March 2026, and Manga Watch (Impress), 31 March 2026, both citing Morikawa’s own account. The 2 July 2026 update on his recovery and his editors’ decision is from Comirock, 2 July 2026. We link no fan wikis for any of this.

No English print edition — Kodansha USA catalogue search and Amazon.com book search, both 2026-08-16. Both 2023 reports above also describe the K MANGA release as the first official English release of the series.

Prices and availability — Rakuten Books API (BooksBook/Search) and Rakuten Ichiba API (IchibaItem/Search, +itemPrice, 電子書籍は除外). 2,198 marketplace listings read across 74 pages, cheapest first, with no truncation. 145 digital listings and 83 complete-set listings excluded.

Measured 2026-08-16. Every number here is something we counted or read, not an estimate. The one exception is the twenty-four years above, which is 1,278 divided by one, and is labelled as arithmetic where it appears.

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