Gintama’s editor has confirmed Gintoki Sakata’s real age! Although ages play a huge role into how well Shueisha’s various Weekly Shonen Jump magazine series find their audiences (given the demographic for the long running action magazine), it’s often rare that we get a confirmed age for each of the main heroes. This goes even further for characters that grow up over the course of their respective battles in each series. But Gintoki’s always been different. Not only does Hideaki Sorachi’s series separate itself from the others in terms of tone and delivery, but in terms of the main character’s age as well.
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During a special live-stream event for the release of Gintama: The Final in Japan (h/t Crunchyroll), Gintama‘s former editor (along with series such as One Piece and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba) Kohei Onishi revealed Gintoki’s real age. Remembering when he spoke to series creator Hideaki Sorachi when Gintama was first starting out, Sorachi confirmed to the editor that Gintoki was actually 27 years old at the start of the series.
Surprising even further, Onishi then stated that by the time of the events of Gintama: The Final (which lines up with the ending of Sorachi’s original manga series while adding new content exclusively for the feature film) Gintoki was actually 29 years old. So not only is it a further confirmation that Gintama is definitely in a much different world than many of its fellow contemporaries in Shonen Jump (which skews toward teenage heroes for the most part), Gintoki was just a much older and more worldly protagonist.
This also further confirms why Gintoki seemed to have so much knowledge about the way his world worked in both manga and anime. Having this older protagonist allowed Sorachi to play with all sorts of ideas that helped to separate it from other action series, and it’s part of the reason why the series — and thus the release of Gintama‘s final anime outing — all the more successful in the eyes of many fans.
But what do you think? How do you feel about learning Gintoki’s real age? Did you expect to see him being that much older than some of the other Shonen heroes? What age did you think he was? Let us know your thoughts in the comments or you can even reach out to me directly about all things animated and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!
