Yakitate!! Japan

by Takashi Hashiguchi
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How can I describe Yakitate!! Japan? Take some kind of action manga like Dragonball Z or Naruto and replace all the fighting and martial arts and ninja stuff with baking. Or maybe it’s like an all-bread comedy version of Iron Chef, except where the main character is dumb. There’s action and difficult training and secret techniques and excessive drama, all focused around making bread products. There are actually a lot of manga like this in Japan, but they never seem to get translated into English. The basic plot of a lot of these manga, including Yakitate!! Japan, is that some extremely talented cook travels around and defeats many rivals in cooking contests.

Yakitate!! Japan isn’t just about cooking, though. It’s also about comedy. Everything is just over the top – people often have out-of-body experiences after eating a particularly good pastry, for example, and the characters are all a little bit crazy. There are a lot of puns. Other times there will be a parody of some other manga. There is also crude humor from time to time, just so you know.

The hero is Azuma, a sixteen-year-old who wants to invent the best bread in Japan. He calls this Ja-pan, which is a pun, since “pan” means “bread” in Japanese. He’s dumb as a post, but he’s a genius when it comes to bread.

Kawachi is Azuma’s rival/sidekick. They meet when they both apply for the same job at the start of the series. Kawachi knows more than Azuma does about almost everything (he knows what a croissant is, for example), but he is nowhere near as good at actually doing the baking. Even though they work together, he would really like to beat Azuma one of these days.

Tsukino is the manager of the store where they work. She is about Azuma’s age, but she has a talent for finding and hiring skilled people. She is actually fairly normal.

Matsuhiro works at the same store. He’s big, loud, and fond of horses. Oh, and he has an afro. He might be the craziest of the bunch, but he is also very skilled.

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Where to Find It

[linkplus name=”Yakitate!! Japan” url=”http://csul.iii.com/search/X?SEARCH=t:(yakitate)+and+a:(Hashiguchi)&SORT=DX&l=eng” series=true]
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