J.C.STAFF is adapting Nabe ni Tama wo Ukenagara, and the official website opened with a teaser promotional video, the main cast, the main staff and a January debut.
That is a January 2027 premiere, with no exact date yet. The manga it comes from is one of the stranger titles Kadokawa has put out in the past few years: a gourmet report series about a character who travels to dangerous parts of the world to eat things most people would not touch.
Shū Uchida and Masaaki Mizunaka are voicing Juntarō. Both of them. The official announcement lists Uchida as the female voice of the character and Mizunaka as the male voice, which is not a mistake and not a stunt casting decision made for the trailer. In the manga, Juntarō’s gender is the running joke. The character is described as a beautiful girl, with a question mark attached.
Who is making it
Masahiro Hiraoka directs at J.C.STAFF. Hiraoka’s most recent credit is Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc., and moving from a workplace comedy about magical girls in a corporate structure to a food manga with an unhinged lead is a smaller jump than it sounds. Both depend on reaction timing.
Susumu Yamakawa handles series scripts. Natsuki Ōyama designs the characters and doubles as chief animation director. Yamakawa and Ōyama worked together on Wound & Bandage, which also premieres this January, on January 9. Two people who just finished one show arriving with another in the same season is normal in this industry, and usually means the second one was already in the pipeline while the first was finishing.
Yoshihide Otomo composes the music. His credits include the INU-OH film, which is a useful signal here, since that project leaned on performance and rhythm in a way most anime scores do not attempt. Yoshikazu Iwanami is the sound director, with Ajin, Gamera -Rebirth- and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure on his record.
What the manga actually is
Writer Juntarō Aoki and artist Shin Moriyama launched the series on Kadokawa’s Comic Newtype web manga magazine in 2021. The first compiled volume followed in January 2022, and the fifth arrived in October 2024. It made the top 20 list of manga for male readers in the 2023 edition of Takarajimasha’s Kono Manga ga Sugoi! guidebook.
The premise: Juntarō travels the world’s dangerous places to taste strange local dishes, and the stated goal is to accumulate 50,000 points of deliciousness. The series is billed as a non-fiction gourmet report, a claim the manga treats as part of the joke. It is a food manga with an unreliable narrator built into its premise.
Food manga is a hard genre to adapt because so much of it depends on how the food is drawn and how a character reacts to eating it. You need someone who can animate a bite. That is a different skill from animating a fight, and it is why so few food manga get adaptations at all compared to the number that get published.
The January pile-up
J.C.STAFF is entering a crowded month. The Winter 2027 season already has ten shows with exact dates and about fifteen more parked somewhere in January, and Nabe ni Tama wo Ukenagara is now one of the undated group. Our Winter 2027 season guide tracks the confirmed dates as they come in.
The other thing worth noting is Kadokawa’s involvement. The copyright line on the announcement credits Kadokawa and a production committee, which is the standard arrangement for a web manga adaptation and probably part of why a five-volume series got a green light at all. Comic Newtype has become one of the publisher’s main testing grounds for series that would not survive in a print magazine, and a title that started there and reached five volumes has already proved it can hold readers.
Whether that translates to an anime audience is the open question. The manga’s appeal is specific: gross food, a lead whose identity is a running gag, and a travelogue structure with no obvious arc. A television series needs to make that repeatable week after week without the joke wearing out by episode four.
The teaser promotional video is out now on the series’ official channels. No streaming platform or episode count has been announced.
Source: Anime News Network, citing the anime’s official website and Comic Natalie
Featured image: Character visual of Juntarō from the Nabe ni Tama wo Ukenagara anime, via Anime News Network.
