by Matt Bird

Created on: June 09, 2009

Huh. A manga about bread.

...

Huh.

Yep, there's no two ways about it. Yakitate! Japan is a manga about bread. It takes the world of baking and turns it on its head, introducing all the usual anime and manga staples: rivalries, tournaments, battles with evil figures bent on insidious schemes... but, yeah, in the end it's all about bread.

Yakitate! Japan follows the adventures of Kazuma Azuma (quite a name, that - I prefer the Japanese original, which is Azuma Kazuma, but you can't get everything in translation), an aspiring young baker who has a talent for churning out strange and innovative breads. Kazuma's fervent wish is to create Ja-pan, a brand of bread that will represent Japan on the international bread-making circuit. (You know, like the fact that there's French bread, Italian, German... you get the idea.)

To do this Kazuma leaves his country home and heads to the city where he ends up on the team of a small branch bakery of the Pantasia company. He's not content with this position, however, and so when opportunity knocks in the form of a tournament Kazuma - along with his friends at the bakery - jumps at the chance to prove his skills. The story takes off from there, with Kazuma facing off against opponents from across Japan and, later, from around the world.

In its way Yakitate! Japan is a parody of your average shoujo manga. An enthusiastic but somewhat naive and clueless young man sets out, joins an elite group at the very bottom, proves his unnatural skills, acquires friends out of formers enemies and then battles through a series of tournaments, all the while training hard to improve his craft and defeat his next opponent. It's just centered around bread in this case, and because it is there's a lot of room for humor.

Yakitate! Japan seldom tries to take itself seriously. There's a serious enough plot, sure, but so much melodramatic silliness gets tossed in at the same time that Kazuma's various bread battles end up becoming big jokes. Usually it's the judging that provides the humor: every battle has some kind of taste tester, and the tester invariably reacts in different ways to the bread they're tasting. If they've been given bread made to taste like crab, for example, they'll scuttle around on the ground like a crab. If they're eating a flat bread, they'll be crushed paper thin. There are lots of other gags as well, but these reactions form the funniest parts of the manga by far, and it's difficult to convey just how funny they are without reading the manga.

For a bread manga, Yakitate! Japan looks stupendous. There's an incredible amount of style to be found in this manga, and much of it is very experimental in nature. Artist Takashi Hashiguchi went to a lot of trouble crafting his characters and then subjecting them to as many stylistic transformations as possible. I suppose a bread manga without ridiculous poses and crazy changes wouldn't be much fun, so Hashiguchi's unpredictable nature is a perfect fit.

Yakitate! Japan is likely to be one of the weirdest mangas you'll ever read. That said it's a lot more fun than you'd ever imagine, and well worth the time to try it out - especially given that it's consistently entertaining, and seldom skimps on overall value.

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