Introduction

I am just a regular, run of the mill mahjong freak. I learned about the game in 2005 when the Akagi anime released, and from there, I had to learn everything I could about the game. At this time, you basically had Tom Sloper's website (still up! sloperama.com), Jenn and Garthe's riichimahjong dot com website, and books like Jelte Rep's Great Book of Mahjong. Tenhou was the way to play online, and if you wanted a single player experience, you had to buy Mahjong Fight Club for your DS or PSP, as they were region free handhelds.

I have always tried to spread the love of the game to people I know. I have been more or less successful at different times from 2005 to now. If you wanna know what kind of stuff I would try to do, I have decided to publish the Maru-Jan guide that I had worked on a lot in the late aughts? mid 2010s? I can't really find on the google sites page when exactly I worked on this thing, but here it is. 

It's incomplete, as life took me away from finishing it, but I do still think Maru-Jan is a delightful online client still going today, even as I cannot fully recommend it to western users. What other online client gave in game currency only because Japan won the WBC? 
 
I feel like my efforts at trying to attract interest in mahjong with my American friends online and in person have given me a pretty focused view at what works and what doesn't. I have run mahjong panels at various small-medium sized anime conventions for almost a decade and change. And while my opinion can't really be anything but anecdotal, I believe there is reason to suspect that riichi mahjong is a game that COULD become fully established in the English speaking world, increasing opportunities for players AND for the industry ecosystem. I'll just use this blog to explain and defend my opinions on the matter. As always, this is just my anecdotal opinion. I do not live in a place with a major club like LAPOM or NYC's riichinomi. I can't afford to travel to USPML or WRC events. I cannot easily play mahjong offline with a large amount of other people, so I spend a lot of time trying to think about how I could create a riichi fanbase from the normal Americans around me that are not really express fans of Japanese media culture. After all, mahjong is not inherently tied to animated cute girls or video games, it is itself an artifact of culture from the countries that play it.

The Most Important Advancement In Mahjong for the West

I'll start with what, in my opinion, has increased interest in mahjong for the general public here in the west. It's this video game!

It's not fair to many of the dedicated mahjong clients, but young people don't ask me in my lectures how to play mahjong to become a tenhoui or a saint in  mahjong soul, they ask me how to play to try acquire the Mahjong Master title in XIV! The strongest benefit of XIV is the userbase of non riichi players that are incentivized to learn in service to the game they ALREADY love. Even though many of the stronger, localized online clients are free to play, XIV puts enthusiastic users in closer proximity to the table. People who don't know if they like mahjong will try it much more frequently in XIV than going to a dedicated client. 
But what I think I want to focus on SPECIFICALLY is one of the reasons I think XIV in particular entices players to learn how this game works.

The manzu tiles have arabic numerals. When I am playing mahjong in public, regular American people who do not know what mahjong is are most certainly curious! They will often approach and ask what the game is and that it looks interesting. But when they see the foreign characters, I see the light of enthusiasm drain from their eyes most of the time. Now, as any 7 year old kid in grade school can attest, learning numbers from 1 to 10 in ANY language is attainable knowledge, but even something as simple as -that- can discourage people. Americans just suck at learning second languages y'all. It doesn't make sense to me either, as learning how to play mahjong is WAY harder than learning how to count to 10, but even though it doesn't make sense, normal people are conditioned to feel that way. Plus, if I'm asking them to learn a bunch of rules, why do I also need to teach them a different language?
Of course, there are plenty of mahjong sets that have arabic numerals on them but they usually revolve around the Chinese or American mahjong tradition. And I'll be frank, they usually look very cheap.

So if I'm a theoretical riichi mahjong fan that wants to buy a set and convince my friends to play, or if I'm going to play in public and attract onlookers curious what this weird game they've never seen is, what should I buy? What is going to give me the biggest return on investment? 

Subs vs Dubs

If you're someone like myself that's been in the gleeful thrall of another country's media culture, I'm sure this is a topic you've seen hotly argued by internet warriors the world over. Which is better? Which is worse?
Watching shows and movies with subtitles respects the originally cast actors and their performances, and the translation is usually more direct.
Dubs allow more people to easily consume that media, and localization efforts can help people make more sense of the emotions and concepts portrayed, using the language that the target audience actually resonates with.

This context I feel is very useful in looking at how mahjong culture is spreading in the west. Riichi mahjong, in my opinion, is thoroughly a "subs only" movement in the West currently, as almost all currently available riichi english resources and roads to enthusiasm have a thru-line to other Japanese exported culture like anime, moe, and video games or are in service to the professional organizations in Japan. While there are plenty of people (including myself) that enthusiastically embrace this and think it's great, I always think about what a proper effort to find a successful localization for riichi would look like, and how it would be pursued. 
We can find "subbed" mahjong tiles to buy, with arabic numerals and N E W S letters for the winds, but I can't help but feel that these tiles look cheap. There is a level of quality that I've come to expect from vendors like AMOS that i feel is simply missing from these "subtitle" sets. I don't want to feel like i'm using bootleg tiles. In our current riichi culture, if you are an enthusiast, you simply buy a riichi mahjong set either from a western vendor or imported from amazon and just learn how to read the tiles. It's not a hard ask, and I definitely love the game enough to learn at the very least enough Japanese to play the game. 
But what about "dubbed" mahjong tiles? Or more specifically, mahjong tiles that are trying to convey what mahjong -is- with little to no language barrier? Well, if we were in the era of the jelly donut nigiri dubs, with bad localization that completely stripped the original cultural context, we may end up with a set that looks like this:

This is (maybe?) a Hong Kong localized set that attempts to completely separate the Chinese origin of mahjong from the tiles. The winds are now easy for any westerner to parse, just N E W S. The dragons are replaced by (kinda cool!) shapes, and the suits are just Os, Xs, and Is.  If I had a set like this, I'd probably be able to teach random Americans how to play riichi a lot easier!
It wouldn't be worth it however, as I wouldn't really be teaching them to play riichi mahjong, I'd be teaching them how to play THE OXI GAME. Stripping the aesthetics and visual style of mahjong completely away feels like cultural theft that should be avoided. 

If I called the shots on the best way to localize riichi mahjong tiles here would be my design choices:

How I Would Localize Riichi Mahjong Tiles

• Arabic numbers for manzu tiles, while leaving kanji on the tile, in some similar fashion to the FFXIV manzu tiles.

• Wind tiles localized with the words "East, South, West, North" or the letters NEWS as primary visuals, and kanji somewhere on the tile, perhaps like a flower tile.

• Dragon tiles are not localized in any way.

I think this would be the be the best way to make Japanese mahjong tiles that the West can use freely, while retaining as much as possible about the original look of the game. The arabic numerals and localized wind tiles eliminate nearly all of the barrier of having to learn how to read a different language to enjoy the game. Dragon tiles can stay unlocalized because new players do not have to understand what the kanji on them say, just what color they are. This gives western players the maximum feeling that they're playing a game that came from another country, without requiring them to learn how to read the language of that country in order to play.

This is the kind of mahjong set I would love to buy, with as much quality spent on any other middle grade or high end riichi set from a mass produce brand like amos or even a specialty set from a vendor like ichikawaya, but localized for maximum western adoption. I feel like mahjong is a game that could be way more popular worldwide if we can find ways to make it so. The M League has established a grand stage, so lets all work together and increase riichi's popularity! I'll try to do my part from this end. 

Thank you for reading this. I have left it in English to be machine translated.