Context: In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for those Japanese language words and grammatical inflections which kanji does not cover, the katakana syllabary usage is quite similar to italics in English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively "gairaigo"); for emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia; for technical and scientific terms; and for names of plants, animals, minerals, and often Japanese companies., American football, referred to as football in the United States and Canada, and also known as gridiron, is a sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with control of the oval-shaped football, attempts to advance down the field by running with or passing the ball, while the team without control of the ball, the defense, aims to stop their advance and take control of the ball for themselves. The offense must advance at least ten yards in four downs, or plays, or else they turn over the football to the opposing team; if they succeed, they are given a new set of four downs. Points are primarily scored by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone for a touchdown or kicking the ball through the opponent's goalposts for a field goal. The team with the most points at the end of a game wins., A touchdown is a means of scoring in both American and Canadian football. Whether running, passing, returning a kickoff or punt, or recovering a turnover, a team scores a touchdown by advancing the ball into the opponent's end zone., Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each sound in the Japanese language (strictly, each mora) is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. This may be either a vowel such as ""a"" (hiragana ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as ""ka"" (); or ""n"" (), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English "m", "n", or "ng", or like the nasal vowels of French. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of  "n"), the kana are referred to as syllabaries and not alphabets., Play Ball ( Japanese :  Hepburn : Purei Bru ) is a manga series by Akio Chiba which ran in Weekly Shnen Jump from 1973 to 1978 , which was adapted in 2005 and 2006 into an anime series by Magic Bus , aired across Japan on the anime satellite television network , Animax . The series was released concurrently with Chiba 's other major work , Captain , the other series for which he won the 22nd Shogakukan Manga Award for shnen in 1977 . Chiba originally wanted to make the series a rugby or American football , but he began to be held up by collecting all the materials needed to make sure he understood the rules well enough to draw an accurate depiction . In order to catch up , he began creating a manga about the high school baseball career of his main character , Takao Taniguchi . This eventually developed into the series Captain . Play Ball follows the story of the junior high school years of Taniguchi and his teammates . Nearly twenty - five years later , in 2005 and 2006 , the series was adapted into two seasons of an UHF anime TV series in 2005 , which was broadcast across Japan by the anime satellite television network , Animax ., Kanji, or "kan'ji", are the adopted logographic Chinese characters (') that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana and katakana. The Japanese term "kanji" for the Chinese characters literally means "Han characters" and is written using the same characters as the Chinese word '., Japan ("Nippon" or "Nihon" ; formally "" or "Nihon-koku", means "State of Japan") is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, It is lying off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland (east of China, Korea, Russia) and stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and near Taiwan in the southwest. , Baseball is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of nine players each, who take turns batting and fielding., The term "manga" (kanji: ; hiragana: ; katakana:  or ) in Japan is a word used to refer to both comics and cartooning. "Manga" as a term used outside Japan refers to comics originally published in Japan., The history of comics has followed different paths in different cultures. Scholars have posited a pre-history as far back as the Lascaux cave paintings. By the mid-20th century, comics flourished particularly in the United States, western Europe (especially in France and Belgium), and Japan. The history of European comics is often traced to Rodolphe Töpffer's cartoon strips of the 1830s, and became popular following the success in the 1930s of strips and books such as "The Adventures of Tintin". American comics emerged as a mass medium in the early 20th century with the advent of newspaper comic strips; magazine-style comic books followed in the 1930s, in which the superhero genre became prominent after Superman appeared in 1938. Histories of Japanese comics and cartooning ("") propose origins as early as the 12th century. Modern comic strips emerged in Japan in the early 20th century, and the output of comics magazines and books rapidly expanded in the post-World War II era with the popularity of cartoonists such as Osamu Tezuka. had a lowbrow reputation for much of its history, but towards the end of the 20th century began to find greater acceptance with the public and in academia., Subject: play ball , Relation: main_subject, Options: (A) american football (B) baseball (C) canada (D) europe (E) game (F) history (G) kanji (H) language (I) running (J) russia (K) sport
Output: sport