Customer Reviews

Yakitate!! Japan, Volume 1

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

...entertaining!

Yakitate!! Japan tells the humorous story Kazuma Azuma and his quest to find (and bake) the ultimate bread of Japan, a bread all Japanese can love and enjoy and that the world will take notice of.

Volume one introduces that basic characters as well as giving Azuma his backstory (something very rare in modern storytelling, where backstories are often the stuff of glazed over flashbacks to keep the mystery). We meet Azuma as a bread-hating/rice-loving child whose sister forces him to discover the delciousness of well made bread. Thus begins his quest and the action proper...

Fast foward a few years and Azuma has been invited to tryout at Japan's foremost bakery, Pantasia. There he meets and competes with several members of his future bread making team... the ambitious Kawachi, the stern Kai Suwabara, and cute Tsukino.

While techniques are presented as hooks in this volume, actual bread recipes (unless I missed one) will have to wait until volume 2. Still, it's nice to know the author actually did some homework about baking before diving headfirst into the series.

The art is typcial shonen with recognizable archetypes in basic character design, with a few catchy stretches here and there (such as in the much be-Afro'd manager of the Southern Branch, Ken Matsushiro).

If you're looking for a fun little series with a theme, this is a good title to get. It's light and airy, with some great humor and a few subtle touches to keep the mature reader interested.

Kazuma Azuma (or Azuma Kazuma on the English cartoon) has a life dream to be a baker - but not just any baker. He dreams to be the one who makes a national bread for Japan. He wants Japan to have a staple bread that will be as well loved as rice. And many countries have their own signature breads (France, Germany, etc.) and he wants Japan to also have one.

So he does all these bread experiments and names them Ja-Pan (it's a play/pun on the word pan which is a Japanese word for bread). So with each Ja-Pan # experiment, he gets closer to creating that national bread.

I like the play on words and seeing all the interesting bread combinations that Azuma makes. What is REALLY funny is when someone tastes one of his breads. They're whisked off to other worlds in their minds, other places. It's funny to see their reactions. If you have a chance to watch the anime series, it's even funnier.

This first manga seems to cover quite a few of the anime episodes. The cartoons keep quite in line with the manga, but expand a bit on it - so when I read the manga I noticed really that nothing was missing that was in the anime episodes.

Quite enjoyable stuff, and I'd be interested in finding more anime/manga that run along these lines. There's no violence and no romance from what I've seen, just a really great story.

i don't know anything about baking, but regardless the fantasy take on it makes this book fit right at home alongside other "boy genius" manga like pokemon and hikaru no go. the boy genius here is typically happy-go-lucky and determined, but other than his puppy-dog-like enthusiasm there's not a whole lot of characterization. but this is just the first volume so he certainly has time to grow. there are some nice twists with the baking audition and although the setup is a little generic and the lead-in to volume 2 didn't really grab me, i definitely enjoyed volume 1 enough to check out the next one.

I like cooking mangas. I like food, pretty boys, well-done art, and humor. That's why, despite the horrible misconceptions the author has about making bread, I forgive all that and give him three stars. Honestly though, no matter how many well-drawn funny faces Azuma makes, he's a really lackluster character. Really. I can't even remember the other boy's name cuz he just outright annoyed me. Not in an impressive way either. In a sort of 'oooh, there's a fly, but i'm too lazy to kill it' way. Still, I was laughing 50 percent of the time while reading it, partially because Azuma's 'solar hands,' were so ridiculous. WTF? Trust me, in the baking profession, warm hands are NOT a good thing. Anything with butter in it quickly becomes sticky. I'm just wondering where Hashiguchi got his info, because half of its humor came from its entertaining inaccuracies. 310 layers in a croissant doesn't make the dough burn faster. It just doesn't. It makes a costco croissant. Still, there were some original and amusing moments, for example in the same croissant gag, where the croissant sheds its burnt skin and becomes a butterfly. I recommend this for no one above middle school. The humor is just not smart enough. But for those 13 and under, it's a light entertaining read with lots of pictures to look at, and sappy friendships, and all those other formulaic elements that glue a shonen manga together. For anyone who does any actual baking, stay away... or don't. It might be one of those things that's so bad, it's good. Most of the fallacies had me rolling- it seems like Hashiguchi pieced together everything he googled from the nets, along with spatterings of actual humor, instead of just pure stupidity. For me, however, the laughter was not enough to outweigh my sarcastic inner voice, saying, "Solar hands? NO IT CAN'T BE!"

As probably everyone knows, the staple food of Japan is rice, whereas in most Western countries, including the United States, bread takes that place. When he was a kid, Kazuma Azuma was introduced to Western bread by his more open-minded sister and met a baker whose goal it was to make a bread that the Japanese would like more than rice. He would name this bread "Ja-pan" and make a bid to make it a nationalistic food that would conquer his country with its flavor! Now many years later, 16-year-old Kazuma is ready to carry on the dream of his mentor by making his own Ja-pan. He's such a good cook that he's been invited to try out for a job at Pantasia, one of the best and most prestigious bakeries in Tokyo. He'll find that the business of making breat is a bit more cutthroat than he imagined as he vies for a job with a limited number of openings.

I WANTED to like Yakitate Japan but I just couldn't. First of all, Azuma just didn't interest me because he's just too stupid. He's so dumb that I couldn't work up the will to root for his success, even though I admired his passion for Ja-pan. While some aspects of the technicalities of baking bread in different forms was interesting, the cooking aspects of this manga were just plain dull. The art, for the most part, was very good, and the character designs were well done. But the story didn't grab me. I respect what Viz has done with the release of this book. I mean, it's good to have all kinds of manga out there, even cooking manga, because there are readers that would enjoy it. Just not me.