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Description
From Viz: England. France. Germany. What common thread binds these three nations together? Answer: each is famous for producing unique, distinctive, delicious bread. But what of the island nation of Japan, home to rice and delicacies of the sea? Is there not a doughy, gastronomic delight they can claim as their own? The answer is no...until now! Kazuma Azuma, a 16-year-old-boy blessed with otherworldly baking powers, has taken it upon himself to create Ja-pan, the national bread of the land of the rising sun!
This series won the 2004 Shogakukan Manga Award for best shōnen manga.
Type
Manga
Related Series
N/A
Associated Names
日式面包王 烘焙王 焼きたて!!ジャぱん 焼きたてジャぱん Fresh Made Japan Fresh-baked! Japan The King of Bread Vua Bánh Mì
Read till then end of the Perriot arc. Then stop. Thats still quite a hard thing to say because, maybe besides Hajime no Ippo and G.T.O. have I laughed so hard throughout a manga. My dad knew when I was reading it because he could hear me laughing in another room. So I have good memories of this manga but yeah, story does decline and its nice to only see something at its best. I do recommend it to anyone, they can decide if the humor is for them. But I also recommend a stopping point too.
I really enjoyed this manga, about up to the amazing Pierrot arc. But afterwards, the reactions became really quite too insane even for me (i.e. people turning permanently into animals after eating bread) and the jokes either became worse or just repeated too often. Also, the reaction-based puns sadly often don't translate well from Japanese to English. For the amazing first ~120 chapters (until the end of the Pierrot arc) I give a 9, the rest doesn't really deserve more than a 7. So this manga gets an 8 from me. But really, just read everything until the Pierrot arc and then stop. Or read until then and then continue, aware of the fact that the story gets worse from that point on. (Also, the ultimate ending is horrible. How could a mangaka that did so much research on breadmaking end up with such a misguided treatment of global warming? I waited forever for the scanlations of the last volume, but after reading it, I'm not surprised it took forever to find someone willing to translate it...)
Yakitate!! Japan is too straight forward of a shounen. Take away the bread-making, and you would recognize the recipe anywhere. You have a hero. He has a dream, he has a talent, he has a backstory (reminiscent of HxH), and he has a butt-monkey sidekick. You have a bishoujo, you have a stern senpai, you have a mad-scientist-like mentor, you have a special plot device, and you have a shounen manga. Too perfect, too out-of-the-book, too boring.
Wow...What happened? This manga was so amazing, it should've been ended much earlier than 26 volumes. It starting getting ridiculous especially in the last few volumes.
i loved the first 7 volumes. But somehow it turned into something completly ridicoulus. Is the mangaka on drugs or something? Where is the spirit, where is the goal? No wonder the groups stopped scanlating it
I was so impressed by this manga... for the first few volumes.
But magic "solar" hands and ridiculous reactions have ruined it for me. I like cooking mangas and the bread making techniques in the beginning were pretty good and accurate but afterwards...
I have a great love for bread and pastry so I delved into Yakitate!! Japan with excitement. The first 5/6 volumes a terrific with a great combination of mouthwatering bread, a unique bread tournament and endearing characters. It then fell apart when the team made the trek to the Monaco Cup. I felt that Kawachi had a lot of potential as a character but the author messed it up and reduced him to a mere comical sidekick to Azuma. In fact, a lot of characters were left in the dust as the story progressed. And the main antagonist for the first half of the series fails to provide for sufficient suspense and intrigue. The bread-making techniques also grow more and more fantastic through the series and by the end of Volume 13 I had resigned to myself that there indeed existed a !magical! yeast as well as !Triple!Super!Zion! "solar" hands that could make bread in the space of 1 panel. I recommend for people who are interested in this manga to only read up to the end of the first arc and save yourself from boredom.
Yakitate!! Japan is one of the oddest of the long-running shounen manga that has ever competed serialization. Occasionally hilarious, and occasionally drab, but on the whole it does manage to be very unique in many respects, and I'm certain that the author had a decent time writing it.
Basically, it just suffers from inconsistency (though I suppose an argument can be made for this aspect as an intentionality). It's only genuinely funny about 50% of the time, and without a higher percentage it just becomes too difficult to give it full attention. Still, it merits a half-decent rating for the moments that it does get exactly right.
As always some manga just go downhill from what was a normal cooking manga with exaggerated reactions to just...outrageous and unrealistic ones. While this may humour a specific audience, this just didn't work out for me.
At first, I found the overjoyed reactions over the bread (yes, over bread) kinda funny. But that lasted about 4 chapters. Then, it just keeps getting weirder and weirder and by volume 4, the stupidity is just way out of hand. I'm embarrassed to read it. The unnecessary drama and embarrassingly stupid dialog actually makes me wince and roll my eyes.
I don't like any of the characters in this manga. And that's hard to do, considering how many characters there are. They're all just idiotic, overly dramatic, and flat. I can't relate to any of them.
And the tone of the manga is just all over the place. One moment, you have a guy screaming about bread and acting like a clown, and then the next thing you know, some girls are crying over their stupid family drama, which has nothing to do with the plot. My god, it's annoying. There is just no balance! I can't even take it seriously when the drama comes up. It's just too stupid.
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