My Conversation with a Singapore Mahjong Expert

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Because of mahjong anime, I gained an interest in Japanese mahjong. And because I played so much Japanese mahjong and continued to consume anime and manga based on it, I began to wonder what it would be like if there was a series based on having to play all of the different styles of mahjong which exist around the world. This has led me to do some research and even attempts to play other styles of mahjong, and in fact the first post I made on this blog about other styles of mahjong was about Singapore-style. At the time, the only way I could play it was a single player java program, so no matter what my speculations about strategy and gameplay were the result of a very limited experience.

Since then, I’ve been able to find a website which allows me to play some form of Singapore mahjong against human opponents, and through it I’ve been able to put to the test some of my musings on Singapore mahjong from that post. Looking back, the post turns out to have been decently accurate, but I am of course still very much a beginner at it, so I wanted to find someone with more perspective and experience. That’s how I came across Singapore Sparrows, site dedicated to mahjong in Singapore (primarily the MCR—more on that another time—and Singapore styles), and through it managed to have an interesting and enlightening conversation concerning the similarities and differences between Japanese and Singapore mahjong.

I recommend reading the entire post as well as my follow-up comment, but to summarize I asked the blog owner Edwin a series of questions about strategy in Singapore mahjong, especially because the Singapore style has far fewer hands than Japanese and therefore the hands felt comparatively less fluid. Edwin brought up the fact that not only does Singapore mahjong have things called bonus tiles which can net you points just for drawing them, but it has more bonus tiles than probably any other style of mahjong, and so in his opinion the bonus tiles function in a capacity similar to cheap hands in Japanese-style such as tanyao and iipeikou.

Thinking about the function of bonus tiles, I speculated that rather than fulfilling the role of those smaller value hands, they were more akin to calling riichi: ways to empower worthless hands and give them some teeth and a chance to win. The big difference is that with bonus tiles they are the catalyst to deviate your hand into something simpler, whereas calling riichi always exists as an optional goal, beginning vs. end, but both carry risks unique to each version of the game.

Now, when considering how this would impact a narrative about a game of Singapore mahjong, the flower tiles really are wild cards, and I could see some maverick of a hero taking a risk to get just the right bonus tiles he or she needs, a foolish move normally, but one that the hero recognizes is the only path to victory. Along with all of that animal tile imagery of cats eating mice and chickens eating bugs, panels could be filled with really elaborate nature imagery.

Another fascinating point brought by Edwin was the way in which pinfu (or ping hu) hands in Singapore mahjong really influence the way the game is played. If you play riichi mahjong you may think pinfu hands are important because of how quick and probable they are, but their potency is nothing compared to Singapore pinfu. Not only can it be played open, but it has a special stipulation which makes it either a weak, simple 1 han (tai in Singapore-style lingo) or a monstrous and deadly 4 han hand, controlled by the presence or absence of bonus tiles (no bonus tiles means 4 han). As such, many players will aim for “ping hu,” but because it’s so clearly a good option no matter what, players of Singapore mahjong are also especially wary of its dualistic lamb/lion status. If you have no bonus tiles and a couple of open straights in your hand, people will get mighty suspicious and the player to your left will try to figure out ways to avoid dealing out tiles you need for your straights. It’s a dimension of strategy that is in many ways different from Japanese-style mahjong, and it’s the sort of thing that encourages me to try more styles.

And of course, the variable strength of Singapore pinfu is also a perfect place for some dramatic storytelling. Can’t you imagine a Washizu-esque villain playing his masterful 4 tai ping hu, ready to destroy his opponent, when suddenly he draws a flower bonus tile and all of his beautiful machinations slip through his fingers like sand? Can’t you imagine his agony as the hero willingly deals into the significantly downgraded hand, giving poor Singaporean Washizu a rather pyrrhic victory?

Fun times. Fun, fun times. Incidentally, thanks to mahjong comrade Dave I learned that Mahjong Hime allows you to play both Singapore and Taiwanese styles. Most likely, my next post regarding the hypothetical International Mahjong Manga will be about Taiwanese mahjong.

Psycho-Pass, the Forbidden Word, My Thoughts

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People have been making kind of a big deal about how the director of the new anime Psycho-Pass, Motohiro Katsuyuki, has mentioned banning usage of the word “moe” among the staff, in order to counter current trends in anime. I’ve seen some people take this as a psuedo-rallying point, a sort of “BOOYAH! In your face, MOE!” attitude. I’ve seen reactions taking it as an attack on moe, a “Why are you so unenlightened?” response. For me, when I first read about it, I laughed, not because I’m for moe or against it, but I immediately thought of how ambiguous a word like moe could be and how it can potentially impact the creative process by being so ambiguous.

Other than the information we already have, I don’t have any insight into the production of Psycho-Pass so everything from here is purely hypothetical and speculative.

When you think about actually having the word moe be a part of discussions when creating an anime, you inevitably have to deal with “moe” as a conscious effort, and I can imagine it impacting the direction of a work. This is not an inherently bad thing, but I feel that just by banning the word you might end up having to explain things more concretely, or at least in a way that doesn’t use such specialized language. In some ways, I can see how “make it more moe” as a way of describing how something should be can be about as helpful as asking someone to “make it 20% cooler,” as the My Little Pony saying goes.

To say a word is banned doesn’t meant that elements won’t slip back in. Let’s replace “moe” with “hardcore.” Imagine if the interview said, “We banned the word ‘hardcore’ from our staff meetings.” While you might not have direct references to pro wrestling or other similar material, there’s a fair chance some kind of physicality or extreme imagery might make it back in. I don’t know if it’ll really happen with Psycho-Pass, but moe does not need a specific directive for it to appear. Even without the intent behind it, it can still happen.

Don’t Play Tenhou on Firefox

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This is just a little public service announcement warning people of a problem with the mahjong client Tenhou when used in Firefox. The problem is that sometimes no matter what tile you select for discard, the game will automatically discard the one you just picked. In other cases, sometimes if you try to call for a tile, the client won’t listen to you. This is a documented issue on Tenhou’s website, and if you can’t read Japanese you’ll at least notice that some sentence pertaining to Firefox is highlighted in bold.

For those who play mahjong, I’m sure you can imagine the frustration of drawing just the tile you need only for the client to not listen and throw away your chances of winning that round, or worse yet, throwing away a tile you know is clearly dangerous and that you yourself would not have discarded in a million years.

I’ve switched to using Chrome when I play on Tenhou and it works out fine, aside from some strange squeezing of the image that can occur when you go from window to full-screen. At the very least, it’s not the game actively disobeying your orders.

Roger Klotz Dubbing

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There’s been a tendency in English anime dubs of children’s shows that I’ve noticed for a while now, which is this tendency to imbue characters with ATTITUDE where previously there was none, or at the very least not such an overt presence as such. Basically, what dubs do is turn Doug Funnie, nice average guy with some decent qualities, into a Roger Klotz, a snarkier sort who’s quick to deliver verbal jabs.

After I watched the first episode of toy commercial-as-anime Monsuno in Japanese, I got this feeling that the English dub (which actually premiered months before the Japanese version) would give to characters the voices their character stereotypes expected of them. Sure enough, the nerd was incredibly nasal, and the main character, who isn’t quite Doug Funnie but is the nice sort, is cracking wise at his friends, bits of sarcasm seeping through his dialogue.

A more interesting example comes from Yu-Gi-Oh!, not so much from Yugi himself but from Kaiba. Kaiba in the Japanese version is certainly no Doug Funnie. He’s ruthless and blunt and lives by his own agenda, but what happens is that his Roger Klotz dubbing just takes these qualities to the nth degree. Where he might say something in Japanese like, “Get out of my way. I have no time to waste on you,” in English it would become, “Get your worthless existence out of my way, you dweeb. I can’t have you breathing the same air as me or it might make me sick to my stomach.” Certainly it makes Kaiba memorable in an odd sort of way, but it also gives him an entirely different set of fangs.

Have you noticed this? Is my reference to Doug too old for people at this point? Do people still watch dubs?

The High School Setting

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Sometimes anime and manga as a whole are criticized for having too many stories take place in high school or involve high school students, and indeed there are a lot of titles, both good and bad, which fall into that category. While explanations range from “that’s how old a lot of readers are,” “there is a certain ideal to high school, the moment before you become an adult,” and even “so they can sexualize teenagers,” I have to wonder if it has anything to do with high school as a point of commonality among Japanese people.

Most young people in Japan go to high school (if someone can argue otherwise, please do), but once they go beyond high school their lives start to branch out more. Some go to college, some enter the work force, some go to technical training schools, and so on. This is even a plot point in some manga which make the transition out of high school such as Initial D. What this means is that, as a writer, if your aim is to have a position in life that the majority of your readers can directly relate to, then that period becomes harder to manage because not everyone will have that roughly similar experience post-high school.

Obviously this doesn’t mean that people cannot relate to characters outside of their own experience, or that people will reject heroes in unfamiliar settings, but that you end up losing that simple and easy connection. Such a loss can be overcome and frequently is, but high school perhaps remains that time people can look back to and say “I lived in that.” They might not have the magic powers or have gone to the rich school where everyone eats diamonds, but there is the thematic shorthand nevertheless.

The Fujoshi Files 56: Gen’ei Ryou

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Name: Gen’ei, Ryou (玄永遼)
Aliases: Tenmiko (てんみこ), Natiral Digital (天然デジタル)
Relationship Status: Single
Origin: Suzaku: Kabukicho Mahjong Legend

Information:
Gen’ei Ryou is a teenager living in Kabukicho, where she excels academically, is a member of the school’s public morals committee, and participates in her school’s archery club. Aside from her talents in those areas, Gen’ei is also a top-ranked online mahjong player, utilizing a primarily “digital” style of play. When she discovered that her friend/club mate/love interest Nanjou Suzaku quit archery to play mahjong, Gen’ei challenged her to a game, where her own victory would mean Suzaku would have to quit mahjong, but failed against Suzaku’s prowess. Since then, she has become somewhat more receptive to mahjong, though this is primarily motivated by her fondness for Suzaku.

Outside of school and mahjong, Gen’ei frequently attends doujin events, and is often seen in the company of the Hanaukyou family’s maid, Suzuki Ikuyo when at events. Her favorite series is Omakase Tentel, particularly the pairing Tentel x Mikoto, or “Tenmiko” for short.

Fujoshi Level:
Gen’ei does not create her own doujinshi, and is purely a consumer. According to certain metrics espoused by fujoshi and overall otaku expert Miyano Tamae, she has a fairly weak imagination but makes up for it with a lot of buying power.

Paths, Finding and Pursuing: Hanasaku Iroha vs. Tari Tari

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As an anime by the studio P.A. Works about a group of teenage girls growing up and strengthening their friendship, Tari Tari inevitably draws comparisons to last year’s Hanasaku Iroha, which has both a similar premise as well as visual style. In addition, both feature similar trios: a petite main character with a lot of pep, a more serious one, and a gentler one with a sizable bust. Yet, as close as they are, I find the two shows to feel quite different, and it has to do with aspirations, or lack thereof.

In Tari Tari, each of the girls (and the guys as well) each have a concrete goal they’re trying to pursue. Some of them are more long-term, like Sawa becoming a professional equestrian, while others are more immediate, like Konatsu forming a successful choir club or Wakana composing a song to fulfill a promise, but all of them have a conceivable end point to pursue which drives each character forward. This in turn influences the pacing of the show, as the sense of looking ahead gives the show a kind of momentum.

In Hanasaku Iroha, however, only Minko truly has an objective to push her forward: becoming a great chef. For everyone else, especially the main heroine Ohana, there are no particular goals or dreams associated with them. At the very best they have things they don’t want, like Yuina’s hesitation about inheriting her family’s inn or Ohana’s pensiveness towards responding to her friend Kouichi’s romantic confession, and this lends to Hanasaku Iroha on top of the rural setting a kind of slower and more subdued “day-by-day” feel.

Essentially, Tari Tari and Hanasaku Iroha are both about teenagers becoming adults, but they differ in focus. Tari Tari‘s sense of maturation comes from the characters moving along paths they’ve set out for themselves, learning along the way as a result. On the other hand, Hanasaku Iroha‘s characters are wandering through their growth to adulthood, trying to find their paths among many. Though both are about the everyday, Hanasaku Iroha sits a little more in the present, while Tari Tari shifts a little more towards the future.

My First Mahjong Tournament!

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This past weekend I was able to attend my very first ever “Riichi Mahjong Tournament” (quotes and capitalization used to convey my sense of awe), and to put it simply, I had a blast. I managed to do well at the tournament, and accomplished a number of things I can feel some sense of pride in. On the other hand, I made a number of mistakes that are a sign of my own greenness in competition. I’ll be trying to make this post fairly accessible, but keep in mind that I’ll be throwing a bunch of terms around, so it may wind up being obtuse for those unfamiliar with mahjong.

One thing that I realized while playing with the USPML over the last couple of years or so is that my mahjong stamina is not so great, and knowing that each day of competition would last many hours I tried to make up for it as best I could. I ate balanced breakfasts (making sure to include one egg for protein content) but also tried to avoid overeating (an easy problem for me to fall into), I took effort to stay hydrated, and I avoided overly sugary snacks in order to prevent a sugar crash at crucial points. I think it worked out okay in the end, though I still felt a sense of fatigue after a while which I think compromised my play.

In general, I’m not much of a tournament person for games at all (in my life, I’ve attended one Guilty Gear XX tournament, a handful of Smash Bros. tournaments, and some online Pokemon stuff back in the day), but I have to say that it was genuinely fun and exciting. This offline tournament was an intense experience with a really fun social component, both outside the game talking to fellow players, as well as inside the game. I think on some level riichi mahjong feels especially social because the rules, however daunting they may be for players to learn, encourage a high level of interactivity where you have to battle your opponents machinations as well as your own greed and cowardice. I might even go as far as to call mahjong a kind of window into people’s souls because of how the luck component combined with the potential decisions one makes in response to them shows how people may end up responding to situations beyond their or anyone else’s control. Go watch Akagi, and Akagi’s comment about someone being “weak against coincidence” makes that much more sense.

Interestingly, unlike the USPML which consists of mostly young folks who were exposed to mahjong through anime, the Dutch mahjong scene consists of older people (most at least 40 and up I would reckon), who came to it after playing other forms of mahjong. Talking to some, they had started to tire of the other formats and found riichi more exciting and interesting. I’ve never played other forms so I can’t agree or disagree, but I feel like I can see where they’re coming from given the interactivity of riichi mahjong. There was also a smaller contingent of international European players who just do this sort of thing semi-regularly, a world for which I hold a tiny bit of envy.

As for my accomplishments (which I hope you’ll let me bask in until I get smashed the next time), I played through nine full east-south (hanchan) matches and managed to avoid getting 4th in every single game. I even had a game where I was in dead last at the end of the east round (I was down 20,000 points!) and was able to surge back with some well-timed risky play to take first by the end. On the other hand, I actually misread one tile for another which cost me a round, drew from the wrong part of the wall at one point, and even dealt into a super obvious hand because I had too much tunnel vision while playing that round.

The tournament used the European Mahjong Association’s “Riichi Competiton Rules” (or RCR), and it made for a somewhat different dynamic compared to playing on the Tenhou ladder. The most obvious peculiarity of the European rules is the restriction of closed tanyao only (which means people cannot steal tiles to make this normally very basic hand) in combination with the presence of red 5s, tiles which can easily bolster your score and can turn weak hands into monstrous ones, but the one that caught my attention the most was the points system. Normally, you begin with a set of points (on Tenhou it’s 25,000) and whoever has more points by the end wins a match, and there is the added risk where if you go under zero points the game ends with you in dead last. However, with RCR there are no default starting points and everything is counted in terms of the points gained or lost. What this ends up meaning is that it is impossible to go bankrupt, and you can lose 1 billion points and still be able to play in subsequent rounds, though your morale might be shot.

The reason this was done, I think, was so that no one felt left out early in the tournament and everyone could play as much mahjong as possible. Supporting this was the fact that the format of the tournament was almost but not quite a round robin tournament, in the sense that it was not an elimination tournament like you’d see in Saki or Starcraft where 64 players/teams enter and then 32 advance and so on. Instead, everyone got the chance to play nine games (with time limits), so everyone wound up playing roughly the same amount of mahjong overall, whether they got 1st place or dead last. It’s quite a different format, but because it fosters enjoyment I like it all the same.

There was a second factor to the scoring system as well, what is known as “Uma” or the amount of points you gain or lose at the end of a match. In the most recent incarnation of the European rules, you get added to your existing score +30,000 points for a 1st place finish, +10,000 for 2nd, -10,000 for 3rd, and -30,000 for 4th. Thus, if in a game the 4 players wound up getting 10,000 points, 1000 points, -1000 points, and -10,000 points respectively, the final score of that session would be 40,000/11,000/-11,000/-40,000, and then you carried your score to subsequent matches. Thus, if the same results happened again to each player, they would end up with 80,000/22,000/-22,000/-80,000 going into their 3rd game. The gap isn’t entirely insurmountable, but the more 4th place finishes you have, the tougher it gets, which is why I was glad to not have any.

As a result of this format, your placement in a  match alone doesn’t matter as much as your place in a match alongside your points earned, which is different from other forms of riichi mahjong. In my case, I was in a game where I was practically guaranteed 2nd place at the end of a match, and was in potential range to get 1st so I took a risk and went for a hand and ended up dealing in and losing 8,000 points. While I still got the 10,000 point bonus for being 2nd, I would’ve had an additional 8,000 added to my total score if only I had played it safer. Similarly, if you’re in 4th and there’s no chance for you to take 3rd place, do you try to get as close to 3rd as possible to mitigate the damage, or do you just play safe in case you end up falling even more, and what would’ve been a big loss is now a gigantic one?

Mahjong, especially in this particular tournament style, is a funny thing in terms of competitiveness because you really have to decide what’s more important, your chance at claiming a top spot (or even the top spot), or being satisfied with where you are and not wanting to fall further. If you’re in 2nd in the overall tournament ranking with 1st place is 50,000 points ahead of you but 3rd through 10th place all nipping at your heels, do you avoid risks and try to hold onto your 2nd place position as much as possible, or do you take a chance and aim for 1st with the likely possibility that you’ll crash and burn and fall 10, maybe even 15 places? Which do you value more? It’s an interesting psychological test, I think, and I realize in hindsight that every time I imagined myself getting a top spot I ended up doing worse. Maybe it’s a lesson I need to learn better.

So overall, I’m more than glad I decided to participate. If I get the chance to attend another one, I most likely will.

Dreams, Resolution: Genshiken II, Chapter 80

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Chapter 80 of Genshiken II is a big deal, so much so that I have to ask if you want to read further.

Continue reading →

Reality TV: Humanity Has Declined

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Anime is often praised for their sheer diversity of topics and approaches to those topics, but biting comedic satire is a rather uncommon occurrence. This is what the Summer 2012 series Humanity Has Declined brings to the table, and I consider it to be the #1 show of the season.

Based on a light novel, the show takes place in a world where humanity’s population is a smallfraction of what it once was. and many of its technological advances no longer feasible given a scarcity of resources. Life in some ways resembles the 17th century more than it does the 21st. The story is told from the perspective of an unnamed woman—referred to in some material as “the Mediator” but in actuality is only ever mentioned in the show as “I” (Watashi)—whose job it is to communicate with the “fairies,” small, human-like creatures with large smiles permanently plastered onto their faces, who are a source of great frustration for the main heroine.

In the story, the fairies are referred to as the “new humanity,” a title which makes sense in two ways. First, with humanity in decline, they are now in a way the dominant species on Earth. Second, and this is in my opinion the more significant allusion, is that the fairies are like a hyper humanity. More technologically advanced than the humans, they’re able to create almost anything practically overnight (the one exception is that they are incapable of creating desserts), but their incredibly poor memories and utter carelessness cause them to make the same mistakes repeatedly. Most of the time, when asked any question, whether it’s a difficult one (“Where do you expect society to go”) or a simple one (“Where do you live”), their response is a simple “who knows.” In addition, the fairies have a tendency towards jumping on fads at an accelerated rate, accomplishing the most astounding feats of civilization only to abandon them days later. Strangely naive, the fact that they often get ideas from the humans means that, much like the Twilight Zone episode “The Little People” (or its Simpsons parody), they mirror the follies of mankind.

The humans she communicates with are also prone to folly, just that their impact is nowhere near as severe as the fairies. As such, the heroine takes this all in stride, at least on the surface. Presenting a pleasant demeanor on the surface, her inner thoughts reveal a harsh cynicism that is all-too-appropriate. In one case, she mentions to herself (and the audience) a meeting between people in her town which accomplished nothing but allowing the people to say they held a meeting so that they can show that they made an effort. The way in which the heroine casually holds back her mild disdain actually becomes one of her more charming features, and she never winds up feeling like a whiner.

The series couches its subtly dark humor in a bright, pastel palette, giving Humanity Has Declined a visual aesthetic reminiscent of a European children’s book. At first, this cute appearance can seem like a concession to convention, and in some ways it might well be, but what becomes apparent from episode to episode is that it winds up having the opposite effect. That fairytale-like surface, when combined with the actual content of the series, winds up actually making the entire show even more bizarre. Because of this, even when the show seems to be undergoing a significant tonal shift, it actually isn’t all that unusual in the context of the anime.

Overall, Humanity Has Declined is an anime quite different from the norm, whether that’s the norm of typical light novel output and adaptations, or the norm of trends in anime both new and old. It’s a clever show that’s hard to box in any particular categories (though I definitely tried), and it’s all the better for it.