Bleach

Bleach follows the life of Ichigo Kurosaki, a 15-year-old high school student with the ability to see ghosts, and a shinigami (Soul Reaper or, literally, "death god") named Rukia Kuchiki, who crosses paths with him one day while searching for a hollow (an evil spirit). During the ensuing confrontation with the spirit, she is wounded and forced to transfer virtually all of her powers into Ichigo. Thus the adventures of Ichigo and Rukia begin. Together they search for hollows and perform soul burials on wayward souls, cleansing the spirits and sending them to Soul Society. The early parts of the story focus mainly on the characters and their past, rather than the actual occupation of the shinigami. However, as events unfold, the story begins to delve deeper into the world of these gods of death on the "other side" called Soul Society.

Media information
The Bleach manga was first released in August of 2001 in Japan's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. New Japanese chapters are featured weekly in the same magazine; 262 chapters have been released as of February 8, 2007. The manga has been compiled into 26 tankōbon by Shueisha. The first volume of the manga has sold over 1.25 million copies in Japan, and the series as a whole has sold over 34 million volumes. In 2005, Bleach was awarded the prestigious Shogakukan Manga Award in the shōnen category.

The Bleach animated TV series is broadcast on Wednesdays by TV Tokyo and affiliated stations throughout Japan. Studio Pierrot does the animation work. The first episode aired on October 5, 2004. Two OVAs have been produced in addition to the current episodes. The first 63 episodes were based on the manga, and the next 46 were original to the anime. Starting with episode 110, the anime has returned to the manga storyline yet with originalities from the previous 46 episodes. The series has no plans to end production. An animated film, Bleach: Memories of Nobody, was released in Japan on December 16, 2006. In a 2006 internet poll by TV Asahi, Bleach was ranked as Japan's seventh-favorite anime program.

VIZ Media has released 17 English-language volumes of the manga in North America, and several scanlation groups continue to release unofficial English translations of new chapters. On March 15, 2006, VIZ Media obtained foreign television, home video, and merchandising rights to the Bleach anime from the TV Tokyo Corporation and Shueisha. Subsequently, VIZ Media contracted Studiopolis to create the English dub of the anime. The English voice acting is directed by Michael Sorich.

The English version of the Bleach anime premiered on Canada's YTV channel in the Bionix program block on September 8, 2006. Cartoon Network's Adult Swim began airing Bleach the following evening. A Tagalog dub of the anime will begin to air in the Philippines on the GMA Network in the spring of 2007.

Introduction
Ichigo Kurosaki is a rough-and-tumble teenager who has always had the special ability to see spirits. The story begins with the sudden appearance of an oddly-dressed stranger in Ichigo's bedroom. This stranger is the shinigami Rukia Kuchiki, who is surprised at his ability to see her. Their resulting conversation is interrupted by the appearance of a hollow, an evil spirit. After Rukia is severely wounded during battle trying to protect Ichigo, she decides to transfer half of her powers to Ichigo, hoping to give him the opportunity to face the hollow on an equal footing. Ichigo absorbs almost all of Rukia's powers during the attempt instead, allowing him to defeat the hollow with ease.

The next day, Rukia turns up in Ichigo's classroom as a transfer student. Much to his surprise, she now appears to be a normal human. She theorizes that it was the unusual strength of Ichigo's spirit that caused him to fully absorb her powers, thus leaving her stranded in the human world. Rukia has transferred herself into a gigai — an artificial human body — while waiting to recover her abilities. In the meantime, Ichigo must take over her job as a shinigami, battling hollows and guiding lost souls to the afterlife.

Main characters

 * Ichigo Kurosaki
 * Rukia Kuchiki
 * Orihime Inoue
 * Yasutora "Chad" Sado
 * Kisuke Urahara
 * Uryū Ishida
 * Renji Abarai

Character types
All Bleach characters are souls. Living humans contain souls within their bodies. Disembodied souls, spirits, have a form composed of particles of spiritual energy called ectoplasm (霊子), with an anatomy similar to an ordinary flesh body. This form encompasses all of the spirit's being; there is no distinction between mind and body. Specific character types are described below.


 * Human: The humans of Bleach are much like the residents of modern Japan. Most humans cannot see or sense spirits in any way. However, souls can inhabit artificial human bodies that are visible to ordinary humans. One in 50,000 humans is a medium with some awareness of nearby ghosts, but only a third of these are able to see them clearly. Some humans naturally have both the power to sense and the strength to fight with spirits. Other humans can gain the ability to do so by spending time around a large source of spirit energy.
 * Plus: Benign ghosts in Bleach are known as pluses (Wholes in the official English editions). A plus is the spirit of a person who has died. A chain, known as the Chain of Fate (因果の鎖), protrudes from the chest and binds the plus to a location, object or person that they felt close to in life. The soul can move about freely if the chain is broken, but this also causes the chain to corrode. Normally, pluses are sent to Soul Society by shinigami in a ritual called soul burial (魂葬) before this corrosion becomes significant. However, if the Chain of Fate is corroded entirely before a soul burial can be performed, a hole will form in the chest of the soul where the chain was once anchored. Such souls are driven mad and become evil ghosts known as hollows. If the Chain of Fate is torn out deliberately, this also leads to spiritual degradation.
 * Shinigami: Shinigami (Soul Reapers in the official English editions, Death Gods in most subtitled versions) are the psychopomps of Bleach. They are souls with inner spiritual power, recruited from the ranks of the residents and nobility of Soul Society. Like all spirits, they cannot be detected by normal humans. Shinigami use their soul slayers (zanpakutō) to perform soul burials on pluses. Shinigami also use zanpakutō and demon arts (kidō) to fight their archrivals, the hollows. Some shinigami have acquired hollow powers using illegal methods; they are known as the vizard.
 * Hollow: The hollows are the major antagonists of Bleach. They are evil ghosts who reside in Hueco Mundo but travel to the living world to feed on the souls of the living and dead alike. Like shinigami, hollows are made of spiritual matter, cannot be detected by ordinary humans, and use their internal spiritual power to fight. While most hollows can be overcome by the average shinigami, some can surpass a shinigami captain in strength. All hollows wear white masks, except for a few called arrancar that have been able to remove most of their masks and tap into the powers of the shinigami. Although they carry zanpakutō, the sword is used to modify the body of the arrancar itself. Tite Kubo has used a Spanish motif to name hollows and arrancar throughout the series.


 * Artificial soul: Artificial souls are a type of soul mass-produced by the shinigami. Issued in pill form, they are used to to force a shinigami out from his gigai during protracted stays in the living world, and come with a pre-programmed personality that animates the shinigami's body until his return. In addition to the mundane versions, a series of experimental souls authorized and created by shinigami researchers also exists. Known as modified souls, these were meant to hunt hollows by possessing soul-less human bodies and supercharging a particular aspect of them (for example, strength or speed). The shinigami decided to scrap the project due to the inhumanity of forcing dead bodies to fight, leading directly to the destruction of all modified souls. Only one is known to have survived and to still exist, though in the anime at least three more modified souls have been manufactured in the time since.
 * Quincy: The Quincy are a clan of spiritually aware humans who once fought against the hollows, using weapons composed of spiritual energy to slay them. As opposed to shinigami, Quincy absorb and channel energy from their surroundings. When a shinigami slays a hollow, this cleanses the hollow's soul and washes away its sins, allowing it to enter Soul Society. The Quincy technique to slay hollows simply destroys the soul entirely. Furthermore, using this method has the propensity to shatter the balance of the universe. When souls are destroyed, the number of souls entering and leaving Soul Society cannot remain equal. This issue prompted the shinigami to conduct a campaign to exterminate the Quincy about 200 years before the main storyline. However, at least two Quincy remain.


 * Bount: Introduced in the anime, the Bounts are, like the Quincy, a clan of human beings with high spiritual energy and special powers. They were accidentally created by shinigami scientists looking for a way to create eternal life. Bounts consume the souls of human beings to survive; theoretically, a Bount could live forever by doing so. Although the Bounts have a strict rule to consume only the souls of the dead, the final group of Bounts has chosen to drain souls from living humans in order to become more powerful and destroy the shinigami world. Each Bount uses a "doll" in combat, a type of familiar possessing its own special abilities. Every doll is unique and is a manifestation of the user's power. If the doll is destroyed, its owner is destroyed as well.

Setting
There are several planes of existence in the Bleach universe. These broadly correspond to the life and afterlife of human belief systems. The living humans of Bleach reside in a world resembling the present day; buried souls live in a kind of Heaven called Soul Society; neglected spirits passed over by the shinigami reside in a purgatory called Hueco Mundo; evil souls are sent to Hell. Once in Soul Society, a spirit is able to live much longer than humans in the living world, with many aging into the thousands. Once a spirit dies in Soul Society, its soul is sent back to the living world and reborn as a new human. This provides the two worlds with balance.


 * Human world: The human world of Bleach is modern Japan, or more specifically, a fictional area of Western Tokyo called Karakura Town. In this world, Ichigo attends school and fights hollows. Places of note are the high school, the Urahara Shop, the river where Ichigo's mother was killed, the cemetery, and Ichigo and Orihime's homes.
 * Soul Society: Soul Society consists of a giant walled city in the center, known as the Seireitei (Court of Pure Souls), and four regions (north, south, east, and west), each with 80 districts, outside of it. The districts outside of the Seireitei are known as the Rukongai (Town of Wandering Spirits) and are the place where non-shinigami and non-nobles live. The district number of the Rukongai (ranging from 1 to 80) also describes its conditions. District 1 is peaceful and orderly, while District 80 is filled with criminals and has the poorest living conditions. A king resides in another realm within Soul Society, but very few details about him have surfaced.
 * Hueco Mundo: Hueco Mundo is the area between the human world and Soul Society. Literally meaning "hollow world" (the word 'Hueco' can also mean Empty) it is where hollows reside when not hunting in the human world or Soul Society, and where they are nigh undetectable. The entrance to Hueco Mundo is a rip in the fabric of the human world or Soul Society.
 * Hell: Hell is the destination of those who committed unforgivably evil acts during their lives in the human world. When a hollow whose mortal soul is too wicked to enter Soul Society has its mask split by a zanpakutō, the gates of hell (giant doors held by skeletons) appear and begin to open. A giant, laughing spiritual being with a blade spears the wicked spirit and drags it down into hell.

Bleach characters move from world to world by several means. Human souls usually cross between planes through birth into the human world or soul burial by shinigami. However, living humans can also use special portals to move between worlds. Shinigami open passages between worlds by means of their zanpakutō. Moths created during soul burial, called hell butterflies, make these routes safe. While hollows are portrayed as able to move between planes at will by opening rifts in space, they usually remain in Hueco Mundo due to the risk of discovery in Soul Society or the human world. Encounters between roaming and displaced characters are a driving plot force in Bleach.