Category Archives: mahjong

Channeling Miyanaga Saki

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Saki Tacos: Yes This is the Best Promotion

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In a move I would have been angry about if no one ended up doing it, Japanese taco chain Taco Derio has decided to start using the face of this year’s most popular taco enthusiast in Japan, Kataoka Yuuki from Saki. Order at a Taco Derio and you can get a Yuuki-themed tray mat to show off to your friends and co-workers, and score hot dates with taco-loving ladies. The mat, by the way, says, “With Tacos Power, Victory is a Cinch!”

For those who don’t know, Saki is a manga and recent anime about girls who play Mahjong and possibly definitely like other girls, a one-two punch that few dare to attempt. In it, Kataoka Yuuki is a supporting character, voiced by Kugimiya Rie, who is a strong and aggressive player despite her diminutive stature, and is mostly characterized by her love of tacos. So great is her taco addiction that she cannot play at full strength unless she has a steady supply to keep her going.

To put it simply, this is an awesome idea and everything that I want out of anime cross-promotions. Code Geass and its Pizza Hut angle was great and all, especially with all the imagery of CC chowing down on pizza, but that was practically built in during conception. It’s almost cheating, in a way. But with this, Yuuki was originally from a manga and so the tacos thing was designed not so much to promote tacos but to add an additional moe aspect to Yuuki (as if the cat belt wasn’t enough already).

It’s not quite as extreme as the rise in sales of left-handed basses caused by the popularity of K-On! or the increase in tourism to one Japanese town due to Lucky Star, but it’s a step in the right shameless propaganda direction. And there’s no propaganda like shameless propaganda.

I’m going to end off on a personal message directed at something significant: Akikan.

You totally missed the boat! Why didn’t I hear of any soft drinks sporting Akikan characters, or custom Akikan flavors that are just the older flavors with new names, e.g. Akikan Cooler?

For shame. Learn your lessons from those mahjong-playing tribades and try again!

One of the Strengths of Modern Animation as Displayed by Mahjong Anime

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Incorporating 3D animation into 2D animation has always been a tricky thing, but as technology has improved the integration has become better and better. It can be a time and budget saver, and all it takes is using it intelligently.

Enter the modern mahjong anime. The first screenshot is Saki, and the second is Mahjong Legend Akagi: The Genius Who Descended into the Darkness. What they’ve done in each of these shows is designed a full set of mahjong tiles in 3D, and basically use those same tiles throughout, aside from Akagi’s trip through WASHIZU MAHJONG. There’s no need to redraw the delicate details of a mahjong tile every time when you can meticulously etch out the details in Maya or whatever. Maybe YOU should make a mahjong anime with fully rendered tiles!

Go on, I’ll wait.

So you’ve got their mahjong tile set in 3D and you’re wonder, what to do with it? Why, EVERYTHING YOU CAN. Tiles spin around and taunt the players. One tile floats in a player’s head as he contemplates his decisions. Tiles form an unpassable mountain, or perhaps even a golem or giant robot! These are all just representational metaphors for the game of mahjong!

Integrated 2d and 3d which saves time and money! Behold the power of modern animation!

The Exciting World of Ron Sharks: Akagi

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When you first look at an anime like Akagi, there might not be much to grab you especially if you’re an anime fan. The art style is very unusual, some would even say “awful.” You’re not even entirely sure what the show is about, and all you’ve seen of it are screenshots of a guy with a chin so pointy he could use it to assassinate people. But that’s when you look at the full title and realize that’s all you need: It’s not just Akagi, no it’s Mahjong Legend Akagi: The Genius Who Descended Into the Darkness.

Akagi is based on a manga about mahjong by Fukumoto Nobuyuki. This might be an unusual topic for you. “Who would make a comic about mahjong?!” However, unlike most cases where this might be shocking (“Who would make a comic about breadmaking?!”), what you have to know here is that mahjong manga are actually quite common in Japan. There are entire magazines devoted to the subject, like if you took Shounen Jump or Shounen Magazine and instead devoted all of the content to how-to-play mahjong guides and mahjong comics. This is the world Akagi comes from.

The titular character is Akagi Shigeru, who when we first see him is a boy in his early teens, who the narrator (voiced by Furuya Tohru i.e. AMURO RAY) tells us will “some day” be a legend in the underworld. Akagi is a lad with a penchant for deadly games which push his body and will to their limits. At this point, Akagi has never played mahjong in his life, but his intelligence, fearlessness, and incredible capacity for gambling with all of his soul without succumbing to pressure make him a perfect match for a game like mahjong, a game where your entire psyche is mapped out in the actions you take. Needless to say, the entire show revolves around Akagi playing Mahjong with a) Yakuza b) people known by the Yakuza c) Yakuza-esque people, and every moment at the mahjong table is filled with the kind of intensity you can only get when your life can be decided by a single, seemingly insignificant action.

You might think that with all this talk of mahjong, you would need to know how to play the game in order to properly understand Akagi. This is not the case at all, and I will attest that I watched the whole show before ever learning anything about mahjong. There’s a lot of strategy involved, but it has little to do with the actual rules of the game and everything to do with human psychology. The way the show is presented makes every moment as tense as possible, as the characters’ minds are assaulted by doubts and fears that come from trying to read another player’s moves.

The art style for Akagi is pretty unusual, but my only complaint about it is that the anime doesn’t quite match up to the art style of the manga. Neither one is very conventional, but when you look at the manga, you’ll see that it has a vibrancy and “ugliness of the world” that is lessened due to the consistency of the animation in the anime adaptation.

The Akagi manga practically looks like a gag manga, but it only makes the comic better, especially when combined with the game of mahjong. One advantage of the anime though is that they were able to create a CG set of mahjong tiles to use throughout the show, and are able to do some pretty creative things with it.

It does seem like the animators got a little bored with the show after a while and began to do more creative things. In the early episodes, Amuro Ray would describe a metaphor for how a character was feeling at the time and that was it. Towards the end however, it ends up being a situation where the narrator will describe a metaphor, and then the anime will shift to a visual scene to accompany the metaphor. So if the narrator says, “AKAGI’S SITUATION IS SIMILAR TO BEING A COBRA IN A DESERT WITH ONLY A CAN OF PICKLES AT ITS SIDE,” you will be sure to see a scene with a cobra, in the desert, with a can of pickles. Some might call it stalling for time, I think it’s the animators wanting to do something special. This would continue into the next anime adaptation of a Fukumoto work, Kaiji.

Ultimately, Akagi might be about mahjong but what they’re playing matters less than how they’re playing it. Again, if you’re worried about not understanding it, do not let that stop you. This is Initial D with mahjong tiles instead of cars. This is Yu-Gi-Oh! for 40 year olds (especially the early chapters of Yu-Gi-Oh!). If either of those descriptions make you hesitant, don’t let them stop you either. Watch this show.