HUNTER×HUNTER 420's Kaiji Reference Went So Viral That Young Magazine Made "The Bog" Free

Chapter 420 spends a page on Hisoka doing nothing plot-relevant at all. He is sitting at a machine in the Black Whale's casino, in the middle of a military lockdown, playing it. The machine has a name printed on it — SWAMP BALL, glossed スワンプボール — and he is holding a can of Asahi Super Dry up against the glass.

Japanese readers needed about a minute. Swamp is 沼 — numa — and 沼 is the most famous rigged pachinko machine in manga. Within a day, Kaiji's own publisher had responded by making that entire arc free to read.

What is actually printed in 420

Everything in this section we read directly from Weekly Shonen Jump 2026 issue 41.

• The machine is named SWAMP BALL, in Latin letters, with スワンプボール as the reading. Tserriednich clocks it from a distance and thinks the man must be an addict to be playing it during martial law.
• Hisoka is holding an Asahi Super Dry can, drawn clearly enough to read the label, raised against the machine rather than resting anywhere.
• His sound effects are がっがっ♥, ぎぎっ♥, ぎっ♥ — the grinding register of a pachinko machine, with his own hearts attached.
• Tserriednich gives him a working nickname: 沼男（仮）, printed with the reading ヌマヲ — roughly "Swamp Man (provisional)". The chapter never prints Hisoka's name, so this placeholder is what the fourth prince calls him for the rest of the chapter.

That last detail is the one that makes the whole thing land in Japanese. The prince does not know who this man is, so he names him after the machine — and the name he lands on is the name of the Kaiji arc.

What "The Bog" is, for readers who have not read Kaiji

This is the part that does not travel, so here is the context.

沼 — "the Bog" or "the Swamp" — is an arc of 賭博破戒録カイジ (Gambling Chronicle Kaiji), the second series in Nobuyuki Fukumoto's Kaiji sequence. Note the title: the Bog is not in the first series most English readers know.

The Bog is a pachinko machine in an underground casino, built so that it effectively cannot be beaten. Kaiji, carrying money entrusted to him by other people, takes it on anyway. The arc is long, agonising, and famous — the kind of sequence Japanese readers can identify from a single visual cue.

And the specific cue is the can. Part of beating the machine involves a magnet concealed inside a beer can, held against the machine to influence where the ball goes. A man sitting at a rigged pachinko machine holding a beer can to the glass is not a general gambling image in Japan. It is one particular scene.

Then Kaiji's side answered

This is where it stops being a fan observation and becomes an event.

On 7 September, the official account for 1日外出録ハンチョウ — a Kaiji spin-off — posted about the Bog with a nudge that named nobody: 「どうやら最近もどこかでハマっている男がいたとか‥‥」, roughly "apparently there's been a man getting hooked on it somewhere recently…". ハマる carries both meanings: to be stuck in something, and to be hooked on it.

Later the same day, ヤンマガWeb — Kodansha's Young Magazine platform, Kaiji's own publisher — went further:

何やら『賭博破戒録カイジ』の沼編が話題になっているようで、楽しんでいただきありがとうございます。福本伸行先生の許可をいただき、緊急で"沼編無料"を実施することになりました。

"It seems the Bog arc of Gambling Chronicle Kaiji has become a topic — thank you for enjoying it. With Mr Fukumoto's permission, we've decided to run an emergency 'Bog arc free' campaign."

87 chapters — 48 through 134 — free on Yanmaga Web until 13 September. The announcement has been seen well over a million times.

Then the publisher added a line that is funnier than anything a commentator could write:

是非、缶ビール、缶ジュースを片手にお楽しみください。

"Please enjoy it with a can of beer, or a can of juice, in hand."

Kaiji's publisher telling readers to sit down with a can is the closest thing to an official acknowledgement anyone is going to get — from the side that did not draw the panel.

What is not confirmed

We are going to be careful here, because the fun of this story is making it bigger than it is.

Togashi has said nothing. His account posts manuscript progress and very little else, and there is no statement from him or from Shueisha about Kaiji, homage, or intent. Everything above is a set of things printed on a page, a set of readers recognising them, and two companies reacting in public. That is a lot. It is not authorial confirmation, and this piece does not treat it as one.

Nor is there any sign the two publishers coordinated in advance. The visible sequence — chapter on sale, readers react, spin-off account posts, free release follows later the same day — reads as a response rather than a plan, and Japanese readers have noted the timing runs about as fast as a company plausibly can.

Some are also pointing out that Hanchou has previously built a chapter around HUNTER×HUNTER's 円 (En), which would make this an exchange rather than a one-way nod. We have not verified that ourselves, and flag it as something readers are saying rather than something we are asserting.

And nothing here touches the chapter's actual content. Hisoka is at that machine for the same reason he does most things, and 420's real news is elsewhere: the ability Tserriednich tests on him, and the charge limit it turns out to have.

How to read it before it closes

The Bog arc is free on ヤンマガWeb until 13 September 2026, in Japanese. The campaign is a Japanese-language release; there is no English simulpub of it attached to this promotion.

For the chapter that started it, see Tserriednich appears to meet Hisoka in HUNTER×HUNTER 420 — including the reason the encounter ends without a fight. When chapter 421 turns up is its own question, still unanswered.

Chapter 420 was read directly from Weekly Shonen Jump 2026 issue 41 rather than from a secondary summary. The Bog arc release and both publisher statements are linked to their official posts in the sources below.