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Masakazu Morita Joins Kuroko's Basketball 3rd Season's Cast

The sixth issue of 2015 of Shueisha's Jump Next is announcing Saturday that Masakazu Morita will join the cast of the third Kuroko's Basketball television anime season. Morita will play the character Shōgo Haizaki, a former member of the Teikō Junior High basketball team and a current player at Fukuda Integrated Academy.

The website for the series describes the first episode, which will premiere in Japan on January 10:

Seirin High School's basketball club has gained the right to go to the semi-finals of the Winter Cup. Seirin has become the topic of conversation after beating Aomine, a member of the Tōō Academy's "miracle generation," and Murasakibara of Yōsen Academy, and the team renews their determination for the semi-finals.

Pushed on the back by Kuroko, Kagami tries to reconcile with Himuro off the court. However, he saves Himuro and Alex when they are being attacked by a man. The man attacking them is Shōgo Haizaki of Fukuda Integrated Academy. A former student at Teikō Middle School, Shōgo was one of the starting members of the basketball team, but...

The returning cast will include:

Kenshō Ono as Tetsuya Kuroko
Yūki Ono as Taiga Kagami
Chiwa Saito as Riko Aida
Yoshimasa Hosoya as Junpei Hyūga
Hirofumi Nojima as Shun Izuki
Kenji Hamada as Teppei Kiyoshi
Ryōhei Kimura as Ryōta Kise
Sōichiro Hoshi as Yukio Kasamatsu
Daisuke Ono as Shintarō Midorima
Tatsuhisa Suzuki as Kazunari takao
Junichi Suwabe as DAIKI Aomine
Kenichi Suzumura as Atsushi Murasakibara
Hiroshi Kamiya as Seijūrō Akashi

New cast members include Wataru Hatano as Reo Mibuchi and Takahiro Fujiwara as Eikichi Nebuya.

Shueisha's Jump Next magazine announced that Fujimaki would launch a sequel manga in the magazine's next issue on December 29. Fujimaki launched the main manga series in Weekly Shonen Jump in 2008, and Shueisha published the 30th and final compiled volume earlier this year. As of April, the series had more than 27 million copies in circulation.

The first anime season based on the manga ran from April to September of 2012. The second season premiered last October and ran through March. The third season is scheduled for next year, although the exact month was not announced until now. Crunchyroll streamed the anime outside of Japan as it aired.