is a yonkoma

Yonkoma

thumb|right|150px|Traditional Yonkoma layout, a comic-strip format, generally consists of gag comic strips within four panels of equal size ordered from top to bottom...

 manga

Manga

Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...

 series by Masashi Ueda

Masashi Ueda

is a comic book artist who wrote Kobo, the Li'l Rascal .Ueda began drawing comic book strips when he worked in his brother's cram school. Ueda began producing Furiten-kun, a comic book strip about a mahjong player, in 1979. In 1982 Ueda won the Bungeishunjū Manga Award. During that year he began...

 which has been serialized in several magazine. In the early 1980s, the manga was published simultaneously in Takeshobo's

Takeshobo

is a major publisher in Japan.Takeshobo was founded in 1972 by Kyōichirō Noguchi, starting Japan's first Mahjong magazine . Other magazines, such as a magazine dedicated to mahjong-themed manga, as well as a magazine dedicated to yonkoma manga, were published. Furthermore, a mahjong museum was...

 Kindai Mahjong, Kindai Mahjong Original, and Gamble Punch. It was then published in Manga Life

Manga Life

is a manga magazine published monthly by Takeshobo in Japan since the November 1984 issue . Its original title was , and the change to Manga Life was made to better compete with Manga Time, a rival magazine published by Houbunsha. Most of the series appearing in the magazine use the yonkoma format...

magazine from November 1984 (in the first issue of the magazine) to 1994. The series was started again in January 2001 and is currently running in Manga Life. The title of the series was changed to in March 2002. The manga was adapted into a theatrical film and an OVA in the early 1980s.

Several pachinko

Pachinko

is a type of game originating in Japan, and used as both a form of recreational arcade game and much more frequently as a gambling device, filling a niche in gambling in Japan comparable to that of the slot machine in Western gambling. A pachinko machine resembles a vertical pinball machine, but...

 systems have been released which feature Furiten-kun as the theme.

Staff

• Director: Taku Sugiyama
• Producers: Seishi Nishino, Satoshi Sakai
• Executive Producer: Katsuo Seijō
• Original story: Masashi Ueda
• Screenplay: Noboru Shiroyama, Tsunehisa Itō, Haruya Yamazaki, Taku Sugiyama

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