Manga which shouldn’t work… but do! – “Yakitate! Japan”

Impossibly, picture is related.

We’ve all done it. We’ve all stumbled across the stupidest plot lines and shittiest characters you could ever imagine and thought to ourselves, “ Well this is fucked up. How’d they even get published?” Shocking thing is we can’t seem to put it down. We know it’s repetitive, we know that our brains are probably melting out of our ears only to leak down the sides of our faces and onto the floor where they proceed to burn, because the manga is just that bad. Yes, that character we couldn’t stand the sight of, that plot line we mocked, that art style we gagged at…it got us hooked.

They are the manga which should never work in real life. But for some strange obscure and godly reason they do. And this manga? It just takes the cake.

Yakitate! Japan – Takashi Hashiguchi

Yakitate! Japan has all your stereotypical shounen elements: some jail bait to keep the guys happy, big evil corporations out to do generic evil things; it even has a tall, muscular token black guy with an afro! Why, the main character Azuma has the stereotypical personality; sucks at life except for one thing, that one thing being the focus of this manga. There’s nothing wrong with that, we’ve all been baking our brains in the simplistic joy that is the shounen genre since we were children. But what makes this one so different is the subject matter it’s based around. No, it’s not sword fighting or ninja skills or sports or anything remotely interesting. Azuma is good at baking.

This is a manga about bread French bread, German bread, English bread, Turkish bread, Indian bread and Eygptian bread. But it doesn’t stop there, it looks at the making of bread, the kneading of bread, the baking of bread, the philosophy of bread even the super human techniques one must employ to create perfect breads, and the super human powers bakers must obtain to make their super human breads. And if you haven’t spotted the pun in the title by now, holding a loaded gun beside your right ear and firing should help. (hint –‘pan’ means bread in Japanese)

Why does it work?

It accomplishes the basics of the genre, so well in fact that it won a Shogakukan Manga award in the shounen category. It makes, theoretically, loveable and well drawn characters; then offers plenty of character development. The plot line is understandably thin, but satisfactory given subject matter. I mean seriously, lets see you come up with a plot line about bread.

But what the manga does best is it quite elegantly captures the reader in a typical construct of many shounen mangas – the one-on-one battle. Most of the series is composed of these vs. battles to make bread fulfilling certain criteria, sometimes in impossible situations. It is surprisingly suspenseful. What will they make this time? Will it even win? You have to give the author a lot of credit for the amount of time he wasted researching bread and world wide food products to give the series it’s credibility.

What makes the series is the judging of this rounds. Judgment is given in the form of a ‘reaction’ from the judge. These often involved spurting out random words which are ‘so bad they’re good’ Japanese puns relating to some abnormal event in the judge’s past which they later go onto to explain. Many are also parodies of other popular mangas and it is rather entertaining to pick them out when they occur. Sure, this sounds like crap, but I swaer it’s got some good laughs in it.

All in all, though, there is only so far you can take a plot line about bread, even if at one point you add cannabis to it. And while the first introductory arc, as well as the second and third, managed to keep my attention, the series suffered from the fatal flaw of repetition. It then continues to drag out multiple gags to keep the audience interested, eventually killing itself. The obvious truth is that no matter how much character development or plot twists you throw in around it there’s only so much you can do with bread. Like many of it’s shounen brothers, Yakitate! Japan fades into mediocrity.

Stats:
Manga – 26 volumes, complete
Anime – 69 episodes, complete

– Written by Toraya_Tatsu

~ by KT Samurai on July 22, 2008.