The longest-running anime series of all time
There’s no doubt that anime is one of the most popular visual narrative mediums in the world, whether hand-drawn or computer-generated. Fans from all over the world can’t get enough anime, from original ideas to manga adaptations and to child-friendly or adult-themed. Quite simply, anime is big business indeed.
Some anime series have proven to be wildly popular and have run for several decades. Take, for instance, Nimtama Rantaro, which first arrived in 1993 and is currently in its 31st season, or Lan Mao, which premiered back in 1999 and remarkably has over 3,000 episodes in circulation.
But when it comes to the longest-running anime series of all time, there can, of course, be only one winner, and that title proudly goes to Sazae-san, the television adaptation of Machiko Hasegawa’s Yonkoma manga series of the same name, which was first published in 1946 in Hasegawa’s local paper the Fukunichi Shinbun.
When Hasegawa moved to Tokyo in 1949, Sazae-san was taken on by one of the four biggest newspapers in Japan, the Asahi Shimbun and the characters in the manga also moved from Kyushu to the Japanese capital, with the first strip arrived in the newspaper on November 30th, 1949.
The manga ended with Hasegawa’s retirement in 1974, but in October 1969, the first episode of the anime adaptation was aired on TCJ (later called Eiken). The anime remains the longest-running anime series of all time, and as of late 2022, it had run for over 53 years.
Sazae-san tells of relatively everyday experiences and simple social situations in urban and suburban Japan through the eyes of the titular Mrs. Sazae, a liberated woman who bosses her husband around. In that sense, Sazae-san is rather progressive in eschewing the hegemonic belief that a man should be the head of his household.
There’s undoubtedly a comic element to the series, but it also explores some of the deeper societal issues that East Asian cultures face. The format of the anime is three vignettes, each telling its own story, and they arrive on television every Sunday between 6:30pm and 7pm.
The original seasons of Sazae-san were more slapstick than what the anime series eventually became, which was more of a family drama. As the longest-running anime series of all time, Sazae-san remains something of a Japanese cultural artefact and still enjoys widespread coverage and public influence.
Check out a collection of Sazae-san episodes below.
