Saki ch178: Link, Biyori ch67 & Ritz's blog update

There's been two new updates on Ritz's blog recently. The first thing she does is to apologize for Saki's incomplete chapter (she calls it the most "rough draft" chapter ever) and also for the long break until the next chapter but she needs time to work on the tankobon corrections and all the special promotional drawings that go with it.

More on that later, but first here are the Saki and Saki Biyori chapters.

Saki ch178 (Mega)

Saki ch178 (Mediafire) 

 

Saki Biyori: Miyamori's Story 5.

Biyori ch67 (Mega)

Biyori ch67 (Mediafire)

By the way, in this chapter Saya styles herself "Donkatsu Girl". "Donkatsu" is not a real word in Japanese. It comes from the Japanese version of the video game PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS. In the original English version, there's a victory message that reads: WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!, but in the Japanese translation "chicken" was changed into "donkatsu". It seems the translator considered a dish like tonkatsu (pork cutlet) or katsudon would be more appropriate for the Japanese audience, given that these dishes are generally associated with "winning" since the word katsu also means "to win". But instead of putting the proper name for the dish, they made up the word "donkatsu" (just for fun apparently). In any case, it has recently become a popular buzzword among players of that game. This was too long to put as a TL note so I wrote it here.

Now finally let's get back to Ritz's blog updates.

Ritz-sensei's blog posts 17.07.05 & 17.07.06

One of the posts contains some questions and answers. Let's start with the Toki-related ones:

- Character designs in the Toki manga
There is one girl that's based on a design by Aguri, the rest are all designed by Mekimeki. Ritz admits she would like to draw Chie-chan and Youko-chan herself.

- Toki and Ryuuka's schools
Sekirenji Elementary → Senriyama Middle → Senriyama Girls'
The middle school and the high school are both called Senriyama but the two schools are not connected.

- Osaka's pro-teams
They work similarly to soccer teams but the high school tournaments are so important that rival those of baseball. Both teams are club teams so they receive their funds from sponsors and such. The top teams are like pro teams but below that there are teams for each age group. The teams Izumi mentioned admit players up to 1st year of middle school.

- Yoshida's profile
It's still a long way off but Ritz asks her fans to please wait until the individual tournament. By the way, the girl in the color cover (of Round 145) is indeed Yoshida. 

Yoshida lost to Sawaya in the South Hokkaido tournament.

- About the Poland part/person
Ritz says: personally I'm ok with it, but it might be safer to get it accepted by SquareEnix.

This is very unclear. Did someone ask if a character from Poland could appear in Saki? That's my best guess. No one seems to really understand what Ritz is talking about here, except that it has to do with Poland.

- There were some minor errors on the score of Shinohayu's latest match. Terado's riichi stick was not counted on South 1 and Shino's points on East 4 Bonus 2 were wrong as well.

- Apparently some readers went crazy looking for the real life location on the cover of the latest Shinohayu chapter. Ritz says sorry for wasting your time but you probably won't find it. It's not in Japan or Germany or Norway. It's not even a place you can see on StreetView and it's hard to find with Google Maps, etc.

- For the special promo illustrations (that go with the volume releases), Ritz says sometimes the bookstores have specific requests and this make things easy, otherwise she goes with whatever she's in the mood for.

- It seems that all of a sudden lots of questions about Teru's team arrived (might have something to do with what Ritz said last time). She'll try answering all the questions at once later. 

Speaking of Shiraitodai, the other post simply contains colored drawings of Teru's team members from the Shiraitodai flashback and a table from Ritz's own notes telling how each character calls each other (like -san or -chan, etc...). This might be the "answer" to all those questions she received. You can visit Ritz's site to see the drawings and it would take too long to reproduce the table here. It's not that interesting anyway.

Ritz ends by saying she'll try making another post to answer more questions whenever she takes a break from working on the tankobon.

THE END