First of all, let me say that I am a Yakitate!! Japan fan – more the manga than the anime, but I loved it to bits anyway. Can’t believe it started airing more than 3 years ago. Was addicted to the boardgame-styled DS game for ages too ^^; The only disappointing thing about the series is my crushed feelings when I discover that most bread actually tastes pretty crap.

Someone on Nico Nico Douga uploaded the video of one of the Yakitate!! Japan DVD bread-making specials recently which brought back all sorts of nostalgic memories for me. I used to have the full HQ version of the video but it’s lost in my archives somewhere T_T It’s a must watch for Marina fans!

Part 1

Kobayashi Yumiko, who voices Azuma Kazuma starts off the clip by talking about her loss to Otsuka Chihiro in the previous DVD specials and says she had to go back and study the ‘art’ some more. She then introduced her opponent for the day, the voice of ‘idiot boy genius’ Kanmuri Shigeru – Inoue Marina.

They introduced the pastry chef Wakamatsu Takayuki, who was wearing Tencho-like sunglasses and a horrible afro. He then produced a jar from under the table and plonked it on the table, and the two girls just stared at it. A Jar (壺)? They asked him what it was they were supposed to be making, and Wakamatsu-sensei pulled a toy turtle/tortoise out of the pot. Lame pun time! It’s a kame (亀 – turtle/tortoise) inside a kame (瓶 – earthenware pot)!

They’re making Green Turtle Bread (ミドリ亀パン), which was made by Kazuma in episodes 16-17 of the anime during his battle with Koala. The bread has also been part of the line-up of the Yakitate!! Japan bread sold in shops.

So Wakamatsu gave them the ingredients and took them through the recipe step-by-step. Neither of the girls are particularly good in the kitchen unlike their animated counterparts, repeatedly messing up instructions and having to beg for help from the pastry chef.

Kobayashi rolled her dough up faster, and declared that this is when factorisation (因数分解) is needed. X=Y! Eh? More like W + X + Y^2 = Z methinks. Marina protested that it had no connection whatsoever, pointing out that X=Y meant a diagonal line (斜め線) running through the origin on a Cartesian graph. Yay, we got a mini-maths lesson whilst learning to make bread T_T

Part 2

More playing around with dough. Marina totally failed at one bit which involved rolling the dough around in the palm of one hand and she ended up throwing a mini-tantrum. Yumiko also failed at the part which involved pushing the red bean grains into the dough (You’re not supposed to leave the cling film inside, Kobayashi-san!).

Then it was Art Attack time, forming the actual turtles. They had enough dough to form a family of Papa Turtle, Mama Turtle and Baby Turtle. Yumiko said she had fallen in love with her family of little green pastries -_- They looked more like blobs of duck poo to me. Into the oven they went, and they turned out… ugh. I don’t think I wanna eat any of that – I prefer Betty Crocker’s nice looking one. Recipe here.

Part 3

Judgement time! They each had to choose one of their turtles to eat – Marina went for the mother cos ‘The baby still has a bright future ahead of him’. Yumiko and Wakamatsu-sensei both went for the father. Aww, it was cute when Marina kissed the turtle before she ate it ^^;

I then began wondering why the heck Marina was starting to strip off her shirt before I remembered…”Ah, a Kuroyan reaction!” She was just making like a tortoise. It must’ve been planned all along, as she buried her head in her hands in embarassment while Kobayashi laughed.

Yumiko was violent, tearing her turtle in half before consuming in but her ‘reaction’ was even lamer. She placed one of the toy tortoises on the front of the table and then crawled under it. “Ah, I’ve become a turtle!!” Very not funny.

They then went to talk on about the taste of the bread, and Kobayashi again brought up the subject of ‘factorisation’. XYZ! University graduate Inoue started to explain what the term meant but then Yumiko said something completely random that I did not understand. I felt like how Marina looks in the screenshot above.

It was Wakamatsu’s turn to try out his bread, and his reaction involved pulling out a Gamera figure and swinging it by its tail. Then it was time to decide the winner, and the criteria was stupid T_T Not by taste, but by appearance.

Result
Inoue Marina – 90
Kobayashi Yumiko – 95

Winner: Azuma Kazuma
The chef gave some lame and rather biased reasons for the extra 5 points – that Yumiko had formed a V sign for one of the turtles and that the tail was curled around for another -_- Not fair! Marina was cheated! She reflected on her defeat by saying that she needed to return to Harvard and start over (referring to Kanmuri, obviously).

There were lots of little nods to Yakitate running throughout the segment including Taiyo no Te, Kuroyan’s reactions, and lame puns and I thought it was pretty fun. Too bad I never got hold of the other DVD specials with Otsuka Chihiro (Tsukino’s seiyuu) when I had the chance to.

That’s the real Green Turtle Bread that was in shops. I can’t remember where I pinched the picture from, so all credits.

Ingredients for anyone who really wants to know:
Instant Dry Yeast…………………………3g
Water (to mix with yeast)…………. 33g

Bread flour…………………………………200g
Sugar…………………………………………..30g
Salt……………………………………………….3g
Eggs (beat)…………………………………20g
Water…………………………………………70g
Butter………………………………………… 27g
Green tea powder…………………… 4g
Red bean grain………………………… 140g
Poppy seeds……………………………….20g
Raisins………………………………………..10g

I have a bit of experience baking cakes and cookies and I LOATHE recipes that tell me to measure XXg worth of eggs. I wish they’d make my life easier by saying 1 or 2 eggs -_- I actually have the whole recipe typed out as well but I’d like to save it for a future post where I attempt to make some Ja-pans and Go-pans…hopefully.

I thought I’d mention it here – my arse got banned by ***tube for ‘repeated offences’ including uploads of an interview with the seiyuu from the Tactics anime, and some footage + cast talk from a sentai movie which had Kikuchi Mika in it… oh, the weird things that these companies object to. I didn’t even give two hoots about those videos, but I’m particularly annoyed that some of my prized stuff like Kuwashima Houko live performances and Inoue Marina interviews got the boot in the process. So I can’t be bothered to upload stuff there ever again. Harumph.

*Er sorry if the post screwed up a bit just now – I pressed the back button by mistake -_- *

But since I have a brain full of rubbish trivia, I’ve decided to start a new corner that will consist of seiyuu-related stories and anecdotes that I’ve been itching to say for ages but never quite found the correct avenue for them. It’s called Seiyuu Tales, and is er…somewhat inspired by my vague childhood memories of the Veggie Tales series. But as promised, here’s the rest of the Nakahara Mai + OMG! No Pants?!? story.

To promote the Stopani ending theme single Ichigo Tsumi Monogatari, Nakahara Mai and Shimizu Ai appeared on the Kikaku-shitsu segment of Anispa on episode #126 back in August 2006. In the 2+ years I’ve been listening to the show, this was definitely one of its best moments – I couldn’t stop laughing throughout the 15 minutes.

Playing on the name of the song, Anispa producers turned it from 苺摘み物語 (Tale of Picking Strawberries) into 一・五罪物語/十五の罪物語 (The 15 Tales of Sin). The premise was that the 4 people in the studio (Ai, Mai & presenters Asano Masumi & Washizaki Takeshi) would each write an ‘Unspeakable Sin’ (some horrible thing they’d done that they’d never told anyone about) on a piece of paper and throw it into a box along with 11 other similar tales sent in by listeners. To prevent recognition of handwriting, all of the notes were typed up on a computer & printed out by staff members. Then one by one, the 3 seiyuu + Washizaki would pick out one of the papers from the box and read it out aloud. Of course, they had to try hard not to give away whether it was their own story they were reading.

With me so far? So there was only a 6.67% chance of say, Nakahara Mai’s tale being read out in the first round, but that probability increased with each passing round that she didn’t get picked (7.14% in R2, 7.60% in R3 etc). Simple maths, yeah? Time constraints meant that only 9 out of the 15 tales were read out on air. No objective to the game, just a bit of fun and to see how good Ai & Mai were at lying through their teeth.

You can listen to the clip below or DL it @ http://sharebee.com/c469aa57

Most of the fun comes from the seiyuu’s incredulity at being accused of crimes they may or may not have committed, so perhaps some of the humour will be lost on those who don’t understand moonspeak.

The running order of the ‘game’ was Nakahara Mai, Shimizu Ai, Asano Masumi & Washizaki Takeshi. The intro song to the segment was Ozaki Yutaka’s 15 no Yoru if anyone actually wanted to know.

So Mai was up first – she was a little nervous that she’d end up picking her own story and would then have to put on a poker face while reading it to avoid suspicion.

1. There was a time when I was younger, I was playing in the park and needed to go to the toilet. But I was too scared to go and ended up peeing in the park’s playground.
This has got to be a guy right? The quartet debated the most suitable parts of the playground that one could pee without being detected by the other people and they settled on the slide (the ones with the tube), ahead of other senseless options like the swing and the sandbox.

2. Once, when I was working in an izakaya, I served a customer a fried potato that had dropped in the sink. The customer asked me “What are all those black spots on the potato?” I just smiled and said “Black pepper ♥ “. I think it was actually sand.
They all started accusing Shimizu of being filthy and cruel, which she vehemently denied. Washizaki then asked “Who’s worked in an izakaya before?” and amusingly, all 4 of them raised their hands, so they couldn’t identify the culprit.

3. I was drinking at a friend’s house once, when out of curiosity, I decided to pee in his cat’s litter box.
2 out of the first 3 stories are peeing stories, geez. Masumin tried to deny that she has any interest in cat’s litter boxes.

4. I throw away fans’ presents that cost less than ¥3000.
…Fans? The probability of this having been written by someone in the studio is very high. I mean, how likely is it that any of those 11 geeky male listeners would have fans anyway? Masumin insists that she has never gotten gifts from fans that cost more than ¥3000, and everybody else tries their utter best to distance themselves from the statement.

5. The majority of the things I write on my blog are lies.
Nakahara & Washizaki were both immediately ruled out as neither of them keep blogs. I don’t think it’s Ai-chan as her blog hardly has any text content on it. Probably not Masumin either, her blog has mostly poetry and philosophical ramblings on it. There’s not much reason for them to lie, is there?

6. When I was in middle school, I ran through an empty classroom completely naked.
Asano Masumi said she wants to see Nakahara Mai completely naked. Mai told Masumin that she’d be able to if she went with her on an uchiage party (it’s one of those parties that are usually held after a job has been completed i.e. recording for an anime episode). Mai doesn’t like going to onsen cos it’s embarassing but Masumin says she doesn’t care, cos people only stare at others’ boobs anyway. Oh, Masumin has a sort of nude fetish,

7. When I was in grade school, I buried my friend’s uwabaki (those slippers that school children change into when they arrive at school).
Asano denied that it was her, and said that although she once poured water onto somebody’s uwabaki, she’d never thought of burying them.

8. I split Mr. T’s mobile phone in half.
The mystery of ‘Who is Mr. T?’ arises. (O)to-san? They all think it might be Tsuda-san, which just happens to be Nakahara Mai’s manager’s name.

9. I once went to work without wearing any underwear.
Mai says that she’d never go to work without wearing underwear, but thinks that it’s OK going commando to the convenience store ¬_¬ For some reason Ai-chan seemed unusually quiet whilst the other three were arguing. Masumin suggested that that was because going pantsless was the norm for Shimizu, but she denied it. Mai pointed out that it was probably up top rather than down bottom that Ai-chan usually went ‘without’. Ai didn’t refute it and said that it was pointless for her to wear a bra anyway. She also revealed that she had gone out with Asano a few days prior to the show, was in a hurry to leave and forgot to wear her bra, something which Masumin confirmed. Masumin also said it was better (for guys) if girls went braless instead of pantsless XD

After the last story was read, Washizaki asked “Will the people whose ‘sins’ were read out today please raise their hands?” And waddya know – a perfect 4 out of 4! They’re all good actors, these people. None of them were willing to reveal which ones were their stories though, leaving it up to listeners’ imaginations to match the sin to the seiyuu.

Mai denied that her sin was any of the toilet ones. Personally I think hers was the “I throw away cheap gifts from fans” story. It totally sounds like something she would do, haha. I have no idea which one was Shimizu Ai’s…. probably the pants one. Masumin – I think one of the peeing ones, heh. Washizaki…gosh. Maybe the running around nude one.

This might be a really fun game to play amongst your own friends too; assuming you know enough people who have plenty of naughty stories to tell.

You know I can’t resist spamming with random pictures from my library of ‘Seiyuu Pics I Want to Upload Someday, Somewhere, Somehow’.

Random and completely unrelated seiyuu trivia #478: Co-host Fukuen Misato once caused a ruckus on Mizuki Nana’s Smile Gang radio show by calling Nana “Konishi Nana”, insinuating that Nana had some sort of “connection” with Konishi Katsuyuki. Nana started screaming at Misaton, apologised to all of Konishi’s fans and insisted that she only saw him as a “onii-san” figure and nothing more.

I dunno, I just had to get that bit of info out of my system. It’s something I heard on the show like… a year ago and found rather amusing. So yeah, that’s all for the Nakahara Mai pants story. Hope you weren’t too disappointed