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This is a guest post by Daav Puke, be sure to give them a follow @puke.bsky.social and check out their other writing!

Hentai mahjong games are a dime a dozen, but every now and again there's one that has a domino effect. It's not so much that this smut would directly be influential per se, because the ceiling on gameplay is pretty low, but its existence turns out to be substantial nonetheless. Mahjong Gakuen, which translates to Mahjong Academy, has one of those butterfly effects.

There are a few layers to its intrigue. Obviously, the core of the game is that you play mahjong with a few girls. If you win against one of the nine ladies here, they're forced to get naked. All but one of the targeted women at the academy are minors. In 1988, when the original arcade title was created, this underage fixation was regrettably standard. There are few mahjong releases that don't feature minors. So, that's where we're setting the bar. We'll get back to all of that.

Yūga is credited with its creation, but Mahjong Academy was really made at Capcom, kind of in secret. Yoshiki Okamoto, designer of classics like 1942 and Gun.Smoke, spearheaded the project while working on more official items. Okamoto, who has been open about the clandestine development in his old age, unleashed quite some stories about the atmosphere there. In an interview, the developer talks about how they'd prank employees who were sleeping at the office, which in itself reveals the crunch culture at Capcom. The director would duct tape victims to bind their mobility or throw water on their face. It doesn't stop there. Okamoto jokingly admits to coaxing female employees into taking provocative poses, which he'd then photograph for reference material. Additionally, as the audio is all performed by employees, he'd scold these female colleagues while having them record sounds for the moans in the game. “The culture is different in Japan” is always something that gives me pause, whenever a weeaboo tries to defend this behavior. This sounds like a bad time, no matter where I'm at in the world, but I digress.

When the project was finished, Capcom ultimately didn't want their name associated with releasing smut, hence the handover of distribution to Yūga. However, Mahjong Academy would become majorly favorable for the studio. For one, Capcom was in financial trouble at the time and the title’s release ended up being a huge hit, selling 17,000 units. That boost alone saved the company from bankruptcy. Imagine that; one of the biggest Japanese developers was bailed out by a hentai mahjong game. Secondly, the snappy artificial intelligence that was programmed in Mahjong Academy, which helped to set it apart for the public, would later be used in such titles as Street Fighter II and Final Fight. You may have heard of those. It's safe to say that Capcom’s legacy owes a lot to this filth that they didn't even want to acknowledge.

Another feature of the arcade version of Mahjong Academy is that it comes with a dip switch to enable "H mode." When turned on, players can mash the H button at certain points, to perform pranks. Japan loves “pranks.” For context, mahjong tables at the time came with 14 alphabetized buttons, A to N, which symbolized the amount of tiles in your hand. Available pranks include molesting the girl with a pair of hands or imprisoning her with shackles. You can really see the antisocial pattern of how Mahjong Academy was created, since that's considered to be a joke. Okamoto was adamant that these events had to be done using the H button, because that's the hentai button. What a visionary. A side effect of the game's popularity was that the letter H on these cabinets saw a ton more action than the others, which would require their replacement much more often. It got to a point where cabinet owners started complaining about these damned, faulty H buttons. I can see the humor in that occurrence, at least.

Mahjong Academy’s booming success eventually saw a sequel with several changes. Most prominently, the prank system was removed, what with all the aforementioned manufacturing complaints. Instead, the game now has you play both male and female opponents. Girls still get forced to strip when defeated. The bar is still there. Bizarrely enough, however, when players defeat a male, they are instructed to beat them to a bloody pulp. Once again, this is done by mashing the letters on the table, which repeatedly punches victims in the face, until their visage distents. Now, I'm an openly misanthropic person. I can empathize with a lot of nihilism for the sake of video game art, which is why some of the prior themes don't faze me as much. Still, even for me, this is a particular combination of sociopath mentality that feels pretty irredeemable. Your reward is revelling in sexual assault or just regular assault. Either way, you're playing the role of someone whose goal is to inflict harm on others for your personal gratification, over a game of mahjong no less. Just one of these options wasn't enough. I don't know; I've played rage bait Steam games that are less edgy. Still, we can go one step further.

While the arcade version of the sequel is called Mahjong Academy 2, this successor was later ported to PC Engine as just Mahjong Academy. Well, technically they all have differentiating subtitles, but this is the first PC Engine one, based on the second one in the series. It's more confusing to explain it, honestly. In full, the ported title is named Mahjong Gakuen: Tōma Sōhirō Tōjō. In late 1989, this new version achieved its own milestone, as it became notable for being the first official hentai mahjong game on home consoles. Prior to that, there had been plenty of hentai on Japanese computers, such as the PC-8801 or FM Towns, but this release lowered the barrier of entry considerably to an over-the-counter affair at game stores.

The home public reacted much differently than the core audience of pachinko hall perverts. Developer FACE, who was in charge of the port, received enough complaints about the problematic nature of the game’s extreme content that it had to stop production and, instead, recreated a censored version, called Mahjong Academy Mild. Yet, the Mild version does not also remove the beatings. You still punch the fluids out of the men. That's still okay! The only difference in Mild is that the nudity is covered up, with things like swimsuits and such. There's no time to get into the societal acceptance of sex and violence, however. Let's just say that this franchise’s priorities have a pretty bewildering trajectory.

As a secondary result of this reissue, a tape that came with the first edition of Mahjong Academy was not brought back for the Mild version. The developmental appeal of mahjong games was that they were usually cheap and cost effective, so any reason to cut costs would do. This omission in later versions has made the video extremely rare and it was only recently preserved on the Internet Archive by an archivist, flemishdog.

BAACHAN RAKUEN - お米ができるまで　林檎牌編 (VHS) VHS tape that came packaged with Mahjong Gakuen Toumasou Shirou Toujou (麻雀学園 東間宗四郎登場) for the PC Engine. Thanks to @lostturntable.bsky.social for purchasing the tape. https://archive.org/details/baachan-rakuen

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— Rhys 📼 (@flemishdog.bsky.social) March 13, 2025 at 4:28 AM

Baachan Rakuen is a story that has little connection to Mahjong Academy, despite the branding on the VHS box. Instead, the live action story is a comedic time capsule of early green screen shenanigans. Aliens come to Earth, searching for the best game ever created. It really is a rare find, so I can only highly recommend taking a look at it, even if it seems like nonsense. A YouTube version exists, but that is always up to the whims of corporations and the platform has been on an erasion spree lately, especially surrounding hentai games. Preservation of this kind is important, as corny as it sounds, because we're always closer to this material being gone forever than we are to it being preserved. Shout out your local archivist. They show you things you would've never seen otherwise.

Hentai mahjong would continue to be a point of contention in Japan, despite its roaring success. There's an entirely different story there. After the initial impact of Mahjong Academy, the board of JAMMA, which stands for Japan Amusement Machine and Marketing Association, asked its members to stop engaging with strip games, fearing a decline in social standing for the amusement industry. The institution would seek more regulation eventually, enforcing more censorship for certain depictions, such as any explicit act that could be deemed as criminal. In 1999, Japan would also pass legislation around the protection of children, which superseded any JAMMA ruling. This new law prevented developers from further fixating on minors as much and hentai mahjong would, strangely coincidentally, start to fall out of favor. Game centers would still blame the organization for a decline in sales instead. The bar was never all that high. That's Japan, baby!