Tohai settles gang wars with mahjong, and maybe also some spare organs

(As a general content warning, Tohai— yes, this mahjong anime— contains frequent graphic violence, including dismemberment, mutilation, torture, and sexual violence. Do not watch this series unless you are ready for anything; the violence escalates as the show goes on.)

All the different Japanese manga magazines have a brand, and that brand implies certain content. You kinda know what you’re getting from Shonen Jump (mainstream fight manga), Shonen Sunday (anime-ish, less battle-focused), or Yuri-Hime (the good stuff).

And when you think of Shonen Champion, you think of stuff like Baki. Earthy, edgy, violent manga. Tough guy stuff for tough guys. Comics that aren’t afraid to draw blood.

Well, Tohai is a Shonen Champion series about mahjong, and it knows you might already be yawning at that subject matter… so to prove its point, it brought along a hell of a lot of blood.

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Teen mahjong prodigy Kei (scene name “Ice Cold K”) makes an uncharacteristically foolish move when he responds to an online stranger’s invite to a private game. Finding himself forced to play a rigged game for exorbitant rates against human traffickers who want to sell him into sex slavery is only the first of K’s many deadly gambles in the underworld. Indebted to the mob and taking in the trafficked girl who saves his life during the game, K has no choice but to keep on risking his life for big money in underground, high-stakes games run by dangerous people… but really, deep down, this true lord of edge lives for the thrill.

Tohai is aware that there’s already a certain famous mahjong manga (Fukumoto’s classic Akagi) about a poker-faced boy genius who becomes a legend in the gambling underworld. As such, it adds shock value to the formula in the form of cruel and unusual yakuza violence, along with a certain misanthropic point of view common to the darker side of shonen manga.

As we’re dealing with yakuza, mutilation and torture are common. (A darkly funny scene has K trying to offer his pinky in the yakuza style, and the “real” mobsters giving him a “kid, don’t embarrass yourself” reaction.) Body parts and organs can pay your buy-in if you run out of money: one of K's rivals– someone we're supposed to like!– is introduced collecting them as a hobby. The people who get sucked into these gambles tend to be at the end of their ropes, the winners are all insane sadists, and of course, failure in this world tends to get you tortured to death.

Hell, you’ll probably get tortured even if you win: K gets initiated by having his toe sliced off before he’s sent into a mahjong parlor, where he’s got to win a certain quota of cash before the toe starts to rot. He decides, cackling to himself at his realization, that of course mahjong is more important than a stupid toe. Later he’ll be sitting at the mahjong table with his belly sliced open, holding his own guts inside his body. Don’t worry, they staple him up. With an office stapler.

As you might imagine, nobody we meet in Tohai is exactly “good”; in this world, any shred of suspected kindness towards one’s fellow human being is a very naive and thus dangerous thing. There are people who can survive in K’s violent underworld, and there are those who just weren’t meant to last. In aggressive support of this thesis, any character who K might call a friend is beaten, tortured or killed, often at the very moment they show him kindness. In a setup that borders on parody, K finally finds himself enjoying mahjong and making friends in a normal civilian tournament, only for a smash cut to TV news to reveal that all those people— including a child— were killed by arson the same night. This builds up to a player who has any potential rivals killed to protect his spotless win/loss record. This series is pure edge.

There is also mahjong. All the gory situations I’ve described to you are but the seasoning for the main dish. Who gets mutilated and who doesn’t is of course settled at the table, and that’s where the “action” of this show lies. Speaking as a fairly serious competitive player, I found that Tohai strikes a pretty effective balance between showing the kinds of situations and tactics that real players actually see in normal games, and finishing big moments with appropriately dramatic, absurd Yu-Gi-Oh “heart of the cards” bullshit.

A luck-based game like mahjong challenges the shonen battle format where a hero gets stronger and stronger, because that’s just not how luck of the draw works: you can improve your mahjong skills, sure, but you can’t just decide to draw better tiles. So inevitably K also loses, sometimes he's driven into a corner, and perhaps he might put a body part or two on the line. As the series goes on, K proves himself to be more impressive as a hero for his grit, endurance, and willingness to do anything to survive than he is for his prodigious mahjong abilities.

Then, dramatically, in the depths of his suffering, K thinks of the dead kid and goes UOOOOOHHHH!!– and oh, wow, I suppose you can draw kokushi musou that way. How about that! Never works when I try it.

Tohai is two seasons of simple, effective pulp, animated at a bare-minimum level. You might get a little more out of the mahjong matches if you understand the game, but that’s not really necessary for its bloody spectacle to entertain. After all, if a guy’s bleeding out at the poker table, “what cards is he holding?” becomes a secondary consideration.

If you loved Akagi, you finally have another gritty gangster mahjong anime to watch. And if you’ve never watched or read Akagi… you should probably do that instead. It's much better.

Tohai is streaming only on Youtube via its publisher Pony Canyon, and is also available via fansub for those who know where to look.

Post-article aside here: If you’re into mahjong like I am, you should be looking for manga rather than anime. There still isn’t a lot, but of the titles available in English I strongly recommend the Kirinji series (super accurate to the real game), Mukoubuchi (exactly like Golgo 13 but with mahjong: the life stories of the hapless schlubs the hero crushes), and Obaka Miiko (solid beginner mahjong advice and also a romcom).