This marks the first post written about the subject of mahjong on this site. Feel free to ignore this if the topic holds no interest. I suppose I only bring that up because I've only ever posted about THP before, but this is, of course, my personal site and a place to vent thoughts and share interests, as almost all websites were in the earlier days of the Web. I don't mean to speak so much about the game itself, as I'm hardly an expert and there are better treatments elsewhere on the basics, but rather recount what I know and make observations about what I see as 'the state of things' based on matters seen both on the ground and from afar.
So, mahjong, or more applicably, Japanese mahjong. I feel that it's got a fair deal of notice recently with the popularisation of mobile games like Mahjong Soul or Riichi City. There have been a certain number of non-Japanese fans of Japanese mahjong for some years because of, among other things, the Like a Dragon series (f.k.a. Yakuza) or anime like Akagi or Saki; I have memories of watching Saki as it aired when I was studying abroad. Whether because of pop culture or other reasons, interest in offline play has grown, driving would-be players to find local groups dedicated to Japanese mahjong. In the earlier years, especially pre-2020, that would have made for a difficult prospect for most outside of Japan, certain spaces online, or severely limited acquaintance groups offline. Flash forward to this year and the landscape hardly resembles what came before.
Just to note, I can only speak for the scene in the United States, as that is where I am resident and have the most active engagement. There is a whole separate history as far as Europe goes, and I can't even begin to guess at circumstances in much of Asia beyond second-hand factoids about Japanese mahjong's increased visibility in China and South Korea. I've also had some contact with South American groups, but getting a fuller picture is a daunting task as an outsider. I'd always be interested in learning more about the Japanese mahjong scene in other places, but language constitutes the largest barrier, as does relevant media being frequently barricaded inside content siloes like Instagram, TikTok, or Discord, things I generally lack the will to be literate in. If I ever find out more and feel I can speak on them, I might write further posts. That disclaimer out of the way, we can get into the main topic.
I think one of the bigger measures of whether a more 'traditional' tabletop game has become successful outside of its birthplace is whether or not there are recognised 'professional' players at home and abroad. In order to have those professional players, of course, there needs to be a professional organisation, that recognises those players as professionals. More than that, the respective pro orgs need to be able to communicate with other acknowledged organisations and together organise competitions on an international level. When it comes to Japanese mahjong, there is some degree of this. That said, there is a lot of work to be done before the United States can be considered full-fledged as a participant in Japanese mahjong.
As with a lot of things, the US is a fairly young country when it comes to having a history with mahjong, and its organisations are largely under a decade old as of the time this was written. The de-facto representative body for riichi mahjong in the US is the American Riichi Association — ARA for short. Technically formed in 2015 at a tournament in New York, it began life as the North American Riichi Mahjong Association (NARMA), meant to speak for the entire North American continent. Prominent players in Canada took some exception to the idea, some considering the organisation yet another manifestation of American imperialism, and went their own way to form Riichi Canada. I have no idea regarding Mexico beyond the fact that there are players there who are said to show up in Europe from time to time; contact has been reportedly difficult to establish from the US organisational end. Given the lack of will to put the whole of North America under one banner, NARMA was forced to rebrand itself as ARA in 2024 to better reflect the current state of affairs. In the same year, representatives from ARA announced that they had been working closely with officials from the World Riichi Championship (WRC) in order to define how contestants for the global competition would be chosen from the US.
Before I get further into ARA and WRC, I should give a bit of an idea of how things go on the more local level in the US. Unlike Japan, where there's a long-standing precedent of tolerating low-valued gambling in very specific forms, there is no infrastructure of mahjong parlours to facilitate widespread play. Naturally, given that mahjong is still not exactly mainstream, there can hardly be said to be enough players to make even attempts at such businesses tenable, legal issues notwithstanding. That leaves the business of playing and promoting Japanese mahjong as something of a grassroots activity carried out by local clubs. Most of these clubs are small affairs, rarely numbering more than ten or twenty active participants at any one time. Unsurprisingly, the most active clubs with the highest amount of investment and largest number of members are located on the coasts, skewing slightly toward the east; the largest club is New York City's Riichi Nomi, which has fairly strong ties to WRC through some of its leadership, having a strong enough member base to host a yearly series of league matches streamed on Youtube. There are some fairly sizeable and influential clubs on the west coast as well, of course, most notably LA Pride of Mahjong (LAPOM) and Pacific Mahjong League (PML), the former having official ties to the US branch of Japanese pro organisation Saikouisen.
As I see it, the biggest point of tumult for the US Japanese mahjong scene right now is an overall lack of cultural cohesion and arguably cultural literacy of Japanese mahjong itself. Currently, clubs are all largely independent bodies unto themselves, not bound to any sort of standards but their own normative ones. There are certainly valid reasons for this. After all, some clubs are more social in nature and are really just gatherings of people who, well, want to have fun playing mahjong. However, those who want a more regularised, competitive environment are left wanting most of the time, as 'having fun' is often prioritised over things that would be conducive to a more organised environment. This leads to the great mass of in-person players in the US having little consciousness of things like etiquette in play. For instance, I've played with a number of players from various parts of the country who do things like directly handing point sticks over when making payments or not pushing their walls forward during the dealing, things in violation of fairly basic dos-and-don'ts among Japanese players. Upon pointing out these sorts of faux pas, the reaction tends to be along the lines of "Well, that's how we do it in my club," assuming it's acknowledged at all. Of course, larger, more overseas-tied clubs like LAPOM or Riichi Nomi have more members who are aware and adept with those sorts of things, having more exposure overall to the Japanese scene via visiting pros or leadership that regularly visits Japan. In particular, leadership from LAPOM have spoken out about the need for US-based players to be aware of etiquette and how they present themselves when participating in overseas events.
Somewhat of an aside, but also part of the cultural problem, there's also general disagreement over how to present terminology — in Japanese or through arbitrary English translations. My own personal opinion is that people should make an effort to learn the Japanese terminology, as it is the most employed in discussions of things like strategy, but there are objections that requirements as such are exclusionary. Certainly, having to learn a set of terminology is perhaps daunting for many, but how many other games require knowing terminology? Why is it suddenly a sin of linguistic imperialism if someone says players ought to know Japanese terminology for Japanese mahjong? Still, you have players who came up on things like Mahjong Soul who lean towards the translations given there, or the odd person who has learned older European Mahjong Association translations or similar. Some simply are more comfortable this way and won't be budged. Others raise accusations towards the side preferring Japanese terminology of orientalism, elitism, and gatekeeping. In effect, the topic becomes a bit of a flashpoint when brought up in online spaces, occasionally becoming fairly heated. Many clubs do, to my knowledge, have fairly accommodating policies that acknowledge both points of view but ultimately encourage players to familiarise themselves with Japanese terminology. As I see it, if the player base can be grown, I think these sorts of policies are going to have to grow firmer to avoid deeper problems. Once the risk of alienating potential players becomes less of an existential crisis, the process of teaching others to play the game will also have to be a process of acculturation, helping them to become literate in the underlying background of the game itself. This shouldn't be a massive issue, as many who come to the game now are already fans of Japanese media and often have some very rudimentary Japanese under their belt. However, I do think it will be a battle fought for a long time until greater regularity is achieved among the US scene; the WRC has already taken the accommodational approach and provided its own set of translations to be used interchangably with Japanese terminology.
Another, arguably larger, complaint I personally have with the current scene is how reliant it is on Discord as a primary way of organising and as a point of contact. Because Discord 'servers' are principally invite-only, this leaves initial discoverability down to someone being diligent enough to communicate a link to all interested. In practise, this leaves many communities all but impossible to reach without having to repeatedly bother others in related communities for links. Due to the massive cultural issues with Discord around weird and abusive randoms, some also purposefully keep their community points of contact obscure, creating headaches in keeping contact outside of those communities. Besides descoverability, there's also the simple fact that Discord is a very poor fit for keeping any sort of persistent information available. Leadership on the ARA 'server' has to repeat themselves what feels like ad nauseum when people bring up questions about events-in-progress because no one has very convniently collated information from prior conversations; an events channel exists, but it mostly only notes time, date, and place for an event, far from a complete picture in most cases. In the case of ARA, though, that's largely a lack of resources, the individuals responsible for the website being very limited in number and engaged on a totally volunteer basis. Still, most of these groups would benefit from having proper web presences, if only to cut down on the amount of redundancies in conveying up-to-date information on things like tournaments or league standings. Then again, this is also a matter of resources, something most groups don't likely have, or aren't too willing to invest at present; I have noticed a great hesitancy on the part of a lot of clubs to do anything that would necessitate collecting club dues. Club dues are something of a controversial issue with clubs, and I've seen more than once denouncements of even considering such measures by some online, but I do think they will become a necessary evil for clubs with any ambition going forward. For the moment, it's something of a catch-twenty-two: Before any club can consider expanding their activities, they need resources and members; for any hope at getting resources and members, they need to expand their activities.
If it sounds like the US scene is chaotic, it is — but there is an upside at this point. As mentioned, the ARA publicised its close coöperation with WRC, but what does that really mean? To understand this, you have to know what the WRC does. The general purpose of the WRC is to organise an international championship event for what is meant to be the entire world. The organisation itself is a collective of representatives from major pro organisations in Japan and from the EMA, a coöperative effort to bring high-level players from interested countries together under a fairly unified set of rules and expectations. Being largely made up of Japanese groups who expect high degrees of organisation, there had long been hesitation in including the US in activities, as there was no one who could be designated as the country's 'representative' body. Ahead of the third championship, this role has at last fallen onto ARA. With every country given latitude to determine how to qualify players for the main WRC event, ARA had been invested with the power of building a system of qualification for the US. As I don't have the clearest picture, I won't get into full details, but the gist is that ARA has the ability to decide which events run by regional clubs 'count' towards qualifying 'points' for individuals. At some point in time, it's then decided that individuals' standings grant them entry into an invitational tournament, where (for 2025) sixteen people will go on to represent the US at the WRC.
You might find yourself already asking, "Was the process for deciding these things drawn out and more than a little painful?" The answer is, of course, yes. Partly because then-NARMA lacked a certain mandate among existing clubs, and because they were in the middle of a rebranding exercise, the process of consensus-building over qualifications was a protracted event that involved a lot of back-and-forth between members of the wider community and outside organisations. More than once, WRC representatives expressed frustration at what they saw as obstinance or a lack of understanding on the part of US-side parties. There were a great many pointless arguments over corner cases, exceptions to rules, application of penalties, amount of authority judges have, and sundry other issues. Of course, since a small number of clubs had representation on ARA's board at the time, I suspect there was a bit of forceful decision-making done to establish something resembling norms. I won't claim with any certainty that this is what led to more recent efforts at restructuring, but I've caught something of a lingering feeling that people from less-populated clubs were not all very happy about decisions made behind the scenes. After a lot of organisational wrangling to make decisions and set a framework in place, there still remains much open admin work to be done for ensuring everything is carried out as intended. Recently, the ARA has opened up a web-based service for testing among clubs to track tournament standings for individuals registered in ARA-approved tournaments. Before that, much of the data was tracked manually by people in private Discord channels sharing Google documents. Once this portal is open properly, perhaps there will be a stronger case for ARA's mandate as far as WRC goes.
However, having come all this way, can there be said to be proper 'professional players' in the US? The answer is not a simple one. At present, the only operating professional organisation in the country recognised in Japan is Saikouisen, having conducted their pro testing, qualified a handful of people, and established the Saikouisen USA branch in California, operated in tandem with LAPOM. Those given the pro title are qualified to represent the US at Saikouisen events in Japan, but that seems to be the great extent of things. Not enough time has passed for the USA branch to gain the sort of critical mass needed to stage its own initiatives. The WRC seems to be partnering with one of the oldest pro leagues in Japan, the Japan Professional Mahjong League (JPML), to start up its own international pro organisation. Thus far, no testing has been done, nor have any pros been qualified. Even supposing Saikouisen USA produced more pros or the WRC pro league gained ground in the US, what would these newly-minted pros be doing in the US? Not much, I suspect. They would certainly be able to participate in regional and national tournaments, but there's nothing home-grown that matches the same level as, say, the Saikouisen's Ryuuousen or JPML's numerous title matches in Japan. There aren't televised mahjong events in the US like in Japan, nor are there major streamed events either, beyond Riichi Nomi's N-League, which is certainly an achievement but very much an amateur showing. Thus far, beyond Japanese organisations hoping to modestly add to the player base in the west, no one is stepping forward to sponsor any professional players here. In all honesty, I'm not sure that will change until the US has its own pro organisation. What will likely result until then is a trickle of certified pros living in coastal states who occasionally fly to Japan to be shown off as novelties.
Granted, a completely original US-based professional organisation is a tall order as things stand. Even if such a thing was put together, getting recognition from other bodies in Japan and elsewhere would likely be difficult at first. There would probably be doubts as to whether or not pros certified by that organisation were 'up to standard', and coöperation would likely be minimal for a long time. Given the degrees of nastiness that come with rivalries between certain Japanese pro orgs, there could even be prohibitions, the fledgling US org being seen as an upstart competitor. As there's no critical mass of regular events in the country, any such pros would probably be left to mostly compete with amateurs in regional tournaments for a long time. Without a mass of funds to hold their own events, this figurative organisation would be hard-pressed to come out with their own title matches to match the Japanese ones. And, well, all of that is beside the point when considering that Japanese mahjong is still a fairly niche pursuit in the US, even if it has grown significantly and seems to keep growing in interest.
As things stand, I think I would sum it up as mildly organised chaos still. I don't believe things are hopeless, despite the tone of much of what I've said, but I also think there will be a great uphill struggle for relevance and recognition for the US in the greater worldwide community of Japanese mahjong. I do dream of a day when the US can have its own native professionals, without any reliance on outside organisations' approval or control. Being a mahjong pro is a life of mostly playing for the love of it, money being pretty scarce outside of sponsorships, but that level of environment is what's missing currently. That's largely a problem of awareness and engagement, and those things won't be solved easily. I would like to think that the hurdles presented can eventually be got over. Were there to be a US-based professional organisation that didn't require flying to California to engage with, I might entertain a shot at being a pro, myself. I suspect I wouldn't do very well, though. I'm far from great at the game.