WOWOW announced on Friday that the live-action Golden Kamuy saga is continuing with a new series, Golden Kamuy: Karafuto Pursuit Arc. The series begins streaming on January 24 at 10:00 p.m., carrying Saichi Sugimoto and Asirpa's hunt for the Ainu gold north into Karafuto.
The new series brings back key hands from the earlier productions. Kenji Katagiri returns to direct, joined by new co-director Masaaki Yoshimura, while Tetsuo Kamata — who wrote the live-action BLUE LOCK film — takes over scripting duties. Yutaka Yamada and Yoshiaki Dewa are again composing the music, Hiroshi Nakagawa and Debo Akibe return as Ainu language and cultural advisers, and CREDEUS is once more producing.
Karafuto — the southern half of Sakhalin, under Japanese rule in the story's era — marks a change of scenery for the adaptation, which has so far ranged across Hokkaido's wilderness and the walls of Abashiri Prison. In Noda's manga, the northern pursuit raises the stakes of the gold hunt, drawing Sugimoto's party further from home as rival factions converge on the same trail.
Watch the announcement video here:
The Karafuto Pursuit Arc is the fourth chapter of the live-action adaptation. The first film opened in Japan in January 2024 and topped the Japanese box office in its opening weekend, selling 356,000 tickets in its first three days before reaching international audiences on Netflix that May. A follow-up series, Golden Kamuy: The Hunt of Prisoners in Hokkaido, continued the story in October 2024, and the second film, Golden Kamuy: Attack on Abashiri Prison, opened in March 2026 with Kento Yamazaki and Anna Yamada reprising their roles as Sugimoto and Asirpa.
The franchise shows no sign of slowing down on the anime side either, where the television anime's final arc is set to continue this winter with its climactic storyline. Between the two adaptations, 2027 opens with Golden Kamuy very much still on the march.
What is Golden Kamuy about?
The live-action productions adapt Satoru Noda's Golden Kamuy, a historical action-adventure manga that ran in Shueisha's Young Jump magazine from 2014 to April 2022. The manga has also inspired four anime seasons.
Set in Hokkaido in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, the story follows Saichi Sugimoto, a battle-hardened veteran known as "Sugimoto the Immortal," who joins the hunt for a hidden cache of Ainu gold after learning that the map to it is tattooed across the bodies of escaped Abashiri Prison convicts. He teams up with Asirpa, a young Ainu girl whose knowledge of the land and its people keeps them both alive — while soldiers, outlaws and rival hunters close in on the same prize.
Golden Kamuy: Karafuto Pursuit Arc begins streaming on WOWOW on January 24 at 10:00 p.m.
Sources: Golden Kamuy film official website, WOWOW official YouTube channel
