Shin Janki is about a guy who always looks at people like this.
When I'm combing Nico and Youtube for pro mahjong stuff (RIP mahjong-douga) I find some really weirdo videos. The best stuff was always from Shin Janki, a series of movies about the adventures of the legendary underground mahjong player Shouichi Sakurai. In addition to having been undefeated in the illegal circuit for 20 years, he also directs!
Sakurai was a bad, bad dude at the mahjong table. Obviously you don't consistently win at a gambling game for twenty years straight if you aren't cheating, and cheat Sakurai did. Just like everybody else at the table. They're all mobsters, after all!
Of course, just like Golgo 13, it isn't too exciting to know that our hero will never lose at any point. So Onearm's Rep Player, the movie we have in English, is about a rival of Sakurai's. He's trying to "completely achieve the aesthetic beauty of mahjong". Within the first three minutes of the movie he has his arm chopped off in the trunk of a car by another rival, a mad dog who can only use mahjong to destroy! Without giving a lot away that you couldn't guess, ol' Onearm trains himself a protege, attempting to clone his skills into him (there is a training montage in which Onearm criticizes his protege for not slapping down the tiles firmly and loudly enough) to defeate the man who took his arm, and for the final battle against Sakurai that he could never have himself.
This is the eleventh Shin Janki movie: from this fact, and from the low production values and cheesy acting (insert your joke about major Japanese studio films here), it's safe to presume that this was a direct-to-video thing or a TV movie series. After all, these aren't movies that need any special effects or fancy camera tricks; though I imagine that either doubles are used or the actors are performing all the sleight of hand themselves. The scenes at the table are cheater's duels where no matter how flagrant the trick, every move is considered to be "faster than the eye can see," even though everybody is cheating all the time.
It was kind of fun. Low-budget, total B-movie. Still kind of fun. I'd watch another.
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