Bonus Chapter
Title: “200 Yen” (200円/Ni-hyaku En)
Length: 23 pages
Adapts: Nothing! The first original side-story
In Short: 12-year old Saitama deals with
problems all adolescents must face: school, bullies, and giant mutant piggy banks.
Milestones: So, the first chapter fully original
to the Murata remake (but presumably ONE still wrote the story). It’s the first and so far only extended look
at Saitama’s childhood, though we get a glimpse of kid Saitama in Punch
14. If you’re reading through the
printed editions in order, this will be your first encounter with (the person
later known as) Mumen Rider. On the same
note, it’s stated that the frequency of monster appearances is increasing, a
recurring idea throughout the series, formally explained in the main story in
Punch 40. Saitama wears a shirt with a not-so-subtle reference to ONE's other manga series, Mob Psycho 100, the first of such shout-outs.
Timeline Stuff: This story is set when Saitama is 12,
placing it ten years before he begins training to be a hero (at age 22) and
thirteen years before the proper start of the series (when he’s 25). A news broadcast says that it’s been 9 months
since a monster last appeared back in July, putting this story in April, which
not coincidentally is when the school year begins in Japan. The broadcast also notes that data from the
past ten years shows that monsters are appearing more and more frequently. We can see that this trend has continued up
into the present timeframe of the series, with monsters now appearing on an
almost daily basis.
Translation Notes: More a cultural note than a
translation note, but 200 yen is worth about 167 US dollars at the current
exchange rate. The exact exchange rate
constantly fluctuates of course, but generally speaking one yen is closer in
value to a US penny than a US dollar.
Case
in point, the smaller Japanese paper bill is for 100 yen, while 1
yen is a small coin. The bullies make
fun of Saitama for only having such a small amount of cash on him, and at the
end when Saitama tells the teacher the bullies stole 200 yen, the teacher
assumes Saitama is just screwing around with him. To someone raised in the US, 200 of a
currency automatically sounds like a lot, so there’s a danger of this joke
being lost without that bit of context.
Speaking of
culture, at the end of the chapter Saitama freaks out when he remembers that he
forgot to put out his trash for “burnable trash day”. In Japan you have to sort your trash into
categories, which are collected on different days, similar to recycling being
collected on a separate day in the US. The
Viz translation glosses over this and just says “garbage day”.
The name of
the latest monster of the week: 怪人・豚の貯金バコン/Kaijin:
Buta no Chokin-Bakon. So, the
typical Japanese word for a piggy bank is 豚の貯金箱/buta no chokin-bako. This breaks down to 豚/buta=pig, 貯金/chokin=saving money, and 箱/bako=box. The wordplay here is that by sticking on ‘n’
onto the end of bako, it’s morphed
into bakon, which sounds kind of like
a generic Godzilla/Ultraman Tokusatsu
monster name, which have a tendency to just take the name of whatever the
monster is based on and stick random extra bits on (and, in the Japanese
writing system, using katakana instead of kanji to write the name). See for instance Mothra, and (from earlier in
OPM) Slugrus and Kamakyuri. As it
happens, Bakon looks like it ought to be a play on bacon, what with the pig
connection and all, but I’m fairly sure this is just a coincidence: in
Japanese, the English word bacon is actually written as ベーコン/bēkon.
Meanwhile, バコン/Bakon
happens to be how the Japanese write the name of the Cambodian temple of
Bakong. One learns the darndest things researching
monster names…
Oh yeah, the 怪人/kaijin
bit at the beginning is just describing the creature as a monster, and isn’t
part of the name proper (that’s why it’s separated from the actual name with
the ・ mark, equivalent to : in English). So overall, this name could be adapted into
English as something like “monster: Piggy Bankon”. Which still
ends up sounding like a joke on “bacon”.
In Viz it’s simply “monster: Piggy Bank”.
Characters
Saitama: A disaffected 12-year old just
entering his first year of junior high school.
Spends his time between classes reading books on basic physical fitness
(a reference to his future training regime, perhaps?). When he forgets to do his homework for his
third day of class, he doesn’t understand why the teacher makes such a big deal
of it, landing him in even more trouble.
Later when heading for an after class meeting with his teacher, he
stands up to some bullies who try and extort money from him, even though he can’t
fight worth beans, and only has 200 yen (~1.67 USD) on him anyway. Then when a piggy bank monster suddenly
appears and takes his 200 yen instead, he chases after it not only to get his
money back, but also perhaps because it “came from outside my everyday, boring
life”. In the end he’s tackled by the
monster and loses consciousness for an hour, but still manages to make it back
to the school staff room in time for his teacher to chew him out for being a
slacker. Walking back home, he wonders
how he can go on in life being so weak.
Flash
forward to the present day: Saitama has saved a kid from a monstrous snowman
and is telling him the above story from his childhood. He assures the kid that there is no perfect way
to live life; he was scared of society when he was little, and things aren’t
much easier today, even though he’s become so strong. When an even more gigantic snowman monster
appears ahead, Saitama is nonchalantly confident he can defeat it, but suddenly
freaks out when he realizes he forget to put the trash out for garbage day.
Piggy Bank(on): Monster of unknown origin that appeared
in City-Z, nine months after another monster
appearance in July of the previous year. Appropriately enough, it looks
like a giant piggy bank (about the size of a small car) with human-like arms
and legs sticking out in place of pig feet. Primary MO: tackling people
and demanding they give it their coins. It first appeared one day shortly
after 4 PM and fled after severely injuring several police officers, leading to
calls for the government to mobilize Special Forces against it. The next
day it attacked the bullies at Saitama’s school, getting Saitama’s 200 yen in
the process, and tackled Saitama in a back alley after he gave chase. In
the end it was surrounded and defeated in a joint maneuver by the police and
Special Forces (this makes it sound like a pretty strong monster, although on
the flipside none of the humans it attacked ever died, and it’s apparently not
fast enough to outrun Saitama).
Scummy Upperclassmen: Two bullies with ripped school uniform
who lure lowerclassmen out behind the school and extort money from them. The black-haired one uses this money so that
his little brothers can buy lunches. Or
so he says, anyway.
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