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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For the record, this is a really silly, fluffy, almost stupid manga (and occasionally the jokes or visual gages are tasteless enough that my feminism twitches a little) but it’s also entertaining and it doesn’t take itself seriously at all. And if you like bread of all types–croissants, naan, French bread, etc.–as much as I do, you’ll enjoy this. Even though oven-based baking is not native to Japan, bakeries are extremely popular there, and Japanese bakers are extremely skilled at turning out both familiar stuff and interesting new things. (Chinese bakeries too; I have no idea where bakeries first got started in Asia.) If you read this manga and want to try eating at a real Japanese bakery, I recommend Clover on Saratoga Ave. in San Jose, in the same shopping center as Mitsuwa. They even have a wooden sign in Japanese advertising their “yakitate” bread–“yakitate” means “freshly baked.” :)
This manga is an example of a genre that doesn’t exist in the US (cooking comics), and if it did, it’d probably be aimed at women only. (Sigh.) But this comic was originally written for guys. Go figure. Later volumes of it even include recipes! (At least, in Japan it did–I don’t know if the US translation does or not.)