Profile at a glance

  • Full name: Miyagi Ryota (宮城 リョータ)
  • Jersey: Shohoku #7, Point Guard
  • Height / weight: 168 cm / 59 kg
  • Birthday: July 31
  • Hometown: Okinawa (flashback), Kanagawa (present)
  • Shoe: Converse Accelerator
  • Film: Protagonist of THE FIRST SLAM DUNK (2022)

Who Miyagi is (and why the film changed him)

Ryota Miyagi is Shohoku's starting point guard and, in the original manga, the least-developed member of the starting five. The manga gives him a few pages of backstory — a history of brawling, a crush on team manager Ayako, a stay in the hospital after a fight — but his interior life is mostly implied. He is the setup man, the lightning-fast 168 cm player whose job is to deliver the ball to Sakuragi, Rukawa, and Mitsui so that they can score.

In 2022, THE FIRST SLAM DUNK rewrote that reading. Takehiko Inoue directed the film himself, wrote the screenplay himself, and made the decision that re-centered the entire franchise: the Sannoh match would be told from inside Ryota's head. The film begins with a child's drawing of a family and a boat, zooms out to reveal Ryota as a small boy on an Okinawa beach, and then jumps forward to the opening tip-off of the Sannoh game. For the next two hours, every flashback between plays is about the same thing: Ryota's older brother Sota, who was the one who first taught him basketball, who drowned at sea at the age of twelve, and whose ghost Ryota has been carrying across every game since.

The Okinawa flashbacks and Sota's shoes

The film's emotional engine is a pair of objects: a hand-me-down pair of basketball shoes and a small wooden boat toy. Sota was a prodigy; the town of their Okinawa childhood talked about him as a future Japan representative. Ryota was the younger brother who idolized him. When the boating accident took Sota, the family broke — the mother could not look at Ryota because he looked too much like her dead son, the younger sister withdrew, and Ryota developed a habit of running away from home that eventually took him across the water to Kanagawa. The film stages all of this in a slow, non-chronological intercut with the real-time Sannoh match, and the effect is that every fast break Ryota leads in the present is powered by a small boy trying to show an older brother he will not stop.

The most-discussed scene in the film is a late flashback in which Ryota finds one of Sota's old shoes still in the family closet, tries to wear it, finds it too big, and does not cry. He simply puts it back and goes outside to keep practicing. Audiences in Japan in 2022 described the scene as the exact moment they understood why Inoue had chosen Miyagi as the perspective character — the film is not a sports movie about winning, it is a film about what a surviving sibling does with the years after.

In the Sannoh match: the assist that broke Sannoh's press

On the court, Miyagi's Sannoh performance is the single most technically impressive point-guard showing in the series. Sannoh's press defense is built on trapping a shorter point guard in the backcourt, and the early minutes of the second half show exactly how dangerous that press is. Miyagi responds with a sequence of one-handed passes, behind-the-back dribbles, and a famous pass in which he flicks the ball through two defenders' legs to find Mitsui on the wing for a three-pointer. It is the moment the Shohoku bench stands up. In the film, Inoue paints the moment as Ryota hearing Sota's voice for the first time since the accident.

Pilgrimage: walking where Ryota walked

Okinawa — the Miyagi family sites

The Okinawa flashbacks are based on real coastal locations in northern Okinawa, with the family home and the beach sequences modeled after a composite of small fishing villages. Since the 2022 release of the film, the Okinawa tourism office has produced unofficial pilgrimage pamphlets listing the seawall and the small harbor used as the model for the shipwreck sequence. A respectful, quiet pilgrimage — the sites are working communities.

Akibadai Cultural Gymnasium, Fujisawa

The final Sannoh match is staged in a gymnasium closely modeled after Akibadai in Fujisawa, Kanagawa. It is where the film's present-day action takes place and the backdrop for every assist Ryota delivers to Mitsui, Sakuragi, and Rukawa.

Hiratsuka General Gymnasium

The model for several of the Kanagawa prefectural tournament venues, and the place where Miyagi's earlier-round games are set.

Why Miyagi still matters

The 2022 decision to make Ryota the protagonist of THE FIRST SLAM DUNK changed how the rest of the franchise reads. He is no longer the setup man whose job is to deliver the ball to the stars — he is the surviving younger brother whose job is to keep playing so that his older brother's last memory of him is not a boy who stopped. Visiting Kamakura, Fujisawa, or the Okinawa model sites in 2026 is about walking the geography of a grief that Inoue waited twenty-six years to draw.