Baking Anime


Kazuma and his passion for bread star in Yakitake! Japan.

Now I've seen everything. Surely, after seeing Yakitake! Japan it's pretty much definite that the Japanese can make an anime out of ANYTHING.

Yakitake! Japan is a series about baking bread. BREAD. How mundane is that? Well, apparently not mundane at all, given how passionate and driven the characters are about kneading, baking and producing the Holy Grail of dough-based products. The series is all about young Kazuma Asuma, who as a young boy growing up in Japan was inspired to love bread while he was a kid by his older sister and a friendly neighborhood Frrench-trained baker. The baker instills in Kazuma the belief that Japan, like many other countries in the world, deserves its own national bread. At that young age, Kazuma also discovers that he has the almost legendary 'Solar Hands'- supernaturally warm and strong hands that can produce the finest and most delicious of breads.
So, ten years after that first meeting, Kazuma goes to Tokyo to start his quest for Japan's national bread. Along the way, he'll have to compete in various baking competitions, meet rivals, make allies and friends and do a lot of kneading before he reaches his goal.

Yakitake is certainly very similar to series like Cooking Master Boy and Grander Musashi, titles which take otherwise boring or unexciting professions and inject into them over-the-top anime flavor to make them more acceptable to wider audiences.
This involves always having a young, good-looking lead with incredible talents, give him cartoony rivals and enemies of varying levels of antagonism (from friendly competition to megalomaniacal psychos) and make the products of the profession (in this case, the bread) be delicious to the point of delirium. As in Cooking Master Boy, eating bread made by Kazuma seems to induce hallucinations and visions of pleasure... you'll wonder what kind of weed he's using in his baking. Brownies, anyone? Along with reactions to bread that border on orgasmic, the series also inserts real facts about baking and breadmaking which are strangely interesting, though probably not very useful unless you find yourself hankering to bake your own pandesal sometime.

Despite the cookie-cutter (heheh) template tendency, it's hard not to enjoy the good-natured and hilarious premise of this series. I have to admit, this is a bit more particular than Cooking Master Boy was (which I really enjoyed), but I certainly find it quite watchable, if not thoroughly entertaining. This is probably not surprising given that I AM a bread lover myself.

I'll probably try and get me some VCDs of Yakitake! Japan if I get the chance, despite the HERO channel dub being quite good (I've really gotten used to tagalog anime, unfortunately), if only because I can't wait to see the episodes. Fortunately, the series has been out for a while, so it's readily available in most anime shops in the Metro.

I recommend watching Yakitake! Japan with a big bag of freshly-baked goodies from Bread Talk and a cold glass of soda. Enjoy!