Japanese Mahjong

The tile set: 136 tiles and what was left out

Japanese mahjong uses 136 tiles instead of the 144 found in many other versions, because the flower and season tiles are omitted entirely¹. That single change shapes the whole game: there are no bonus tiles to draw and set aside during play, no flower payments, and every tile in the wall belongs to the three suits or the honors.

The set breaks down like this:

• Three suits of 36 tiles each: characters (man), circles (pin) and bamboo (sou), numbered 1 through 9, with four copies of each tile.
• Four winds: East, South, West and North, four copies each.
• Three dragons: white, green and red, four copies each.

The tile names are largely borrowed directly from Chinese, so if you already know Chinese mahjong terminology you will recognize most of the vocabulary⁶. What you will not find are the eight flower and season tiles, nor the jokers that some other regional versions add. In rules that do keep flowers, collecting all four flowers or all four seasons is worth 1,000 points from each player, but in the Japanese game that bonus simply does not exist⁷.

How a hand works

Each player is dealt 13 tiles, and the dealer starts with 14. On your turn you draw a tile and discard one, aiming to build a complete hand. A winning hand is four sets of pungs (three identical tiles), chows (three consecutive tiles of one suit) or kongs (four identical tiles), plus one pair².

Players can also speed up their hands by claiming each other's discards: calling a pung or kong on a discarded tile, or a chow on the discard of the player to your left. One thing you may not do is call a chow and then discard a copy of the tile you just claimed in the same turn; this is called kuikae and it is disallowed under standard riichi rules⁸.

The dealer position matters throughout. When the dealer wins, or in most rules when the dealer is one tile from winning at a drawn hand, the dealer keeps the seat for another hand; this is called renchan⁹. When the dealer's hand ends without that, the deal rotates to the player on the dealer's right, called rinchan⁹. Some venues and rules use a stricter version, agari renchan, where the dealer only continues after actually winning, not merely being ready at a draw⁹.

Riichi: declaring ready and adding a han

Riichi is the rule that gives the game its name. When your hand is complete except for one tile, you may declare riichi: you bet 1,000 points, place it on the table, and lock your hand. From then on you can only draw and discard, waiting for your winning tile. If you win, the riichi declaration adds one han to your hand's value⁴.

Two conditions apply. You cannot declare riichi with fewer than 1,000 points¹⁰. And after declaring, your hand is fixed, with one exception: you may still form a concealed kong after riichi, provided the change does not alter which tiles you are waiting on¹¹.

The 1,000-point riichi bet is not lost to the other players in the usual way. If you win, it comes back to you as part of your score; if the hand is drawn, it carries over to the next hand. In some rule sets, such as the Mangan variant, players do not have to bet 1,000 points to declare riichi, but in standard Japanese play the bet is required⁸.

How scoring works: base points and doubles

Riichi scoring starts from two ingredients: fu, the base points of the hand, and han, the doubles. Every winning hand is awarded 20 fu automatically, called the fuutei, before anything else is counted¹². Han come from yaku, the patterns and situations that make a hand valid: riichi itself, a hand with no triplet and an open wait (pinfu), self-draw, and so on. Dora tiles add han too: a typical dealer win might combine riichi (1 han), pinfu (1 han), one dora and one hidden dora for a total of 4 han¹².

The base points are then multiplied by the han, and the payment is rounded up, with any fraction under 100 points rounded up at the moment of payment¹². A worked example from the standard score tables: a 40 fu, 2 han hand won by self-draw as a non-dealer means the dealer pays 1,300 points and each other non-dealer pays 700; won by discard, the discarder alone pays 2,600¹². The same waiting shape can score differently depending on how you take it: a 30 fu, 3 han win taken as a closed wait scores as 40 fu, 3 han, paying 1,300 to 2,600¹².

Two limits keep the tables manageable. The highest fu count that appears in a standard score table is 110, because any hand of 120 fu or more under 5 han always has at least 4 han and reaches the mangan tier anyway¹². And under unlimited-fu rules, the theoretical maximum fu is 170, from four concealed kongs of terminals plus an honor pair wait¹².

Some local rules reject the pinfu-plus-self-draw combination, scoring such a win as 20 fu base plus 2 fu for the draw, rounded up to 30 fu¹². It is worth asking which convention a parlor uses before you sit down.

Payouts: what the winner collects and who pays extra

The payment multipliers are fixed and easy to remember¹²:

The principle behind the table: East always pays and receives double³. The winner receives in full from the players according to these multipliers and pays nothing out to anyone else³.

In the three-player game, sanma, the same idea is adjusted because there are only two payers. Ron wins are scored exactly as in four-player mahjong, the dealer's self-draw is split between the two non-dealers, and a non-dealer's self-draw is paid by the dealer and the other non-dealer at a 5:3 ratio¹³. Because a self-draw collects from two players instead of three, a tsumo win is worth roughly one third less for the dealer and one quarter less for a non-dealer than the same hand won by discard; this is called tsumo-son¹³. Some rules compensate: in the baidori variant common in Kyoto and Tokyo, the winner receives the full ron-equivalent amount from both players, doubling the income¹³. Another adjustment, sen-ten kafu, adds 1,000 points to each of the other two players' payments on a self-draw¹³.

Special hands and bonuses

The top of the scoring ladder is the yakuman, a limit hand worth 32,000 points as a non-dealer or 48,000 as a dealer. In the three-player game the yakuman payouts under the common rulesets look like this¹³:

Dealer ron: 48,000

Non-dealer ron: 32,000

An optional rule for the ambitious: if agreed beforehand, when the dealer wins eight hands in a row, paarenchan kicks in, letting the dealer finish with a win whether or not the hand contains a yaku, and scoring it as a yakuman if completed¹¹.

Dead hands and penalties at the table

You must always hold exactly 13 tiles at one time, other than the dealer at the start of a hand. If by error you have more or fewer, your hand is considered dead³. A dead hand is a serious position: you may no longer win, you receive no points, but you must still pay the other players when someone else makes mahjong¹³.

Other table penalties are lighter. If the rules require announcing discards and you name the wrong tile, the penalty is 50 points⁷. When a hand ends with no winner, each player who was not ready pays 1,000 points to each player who was ready, which is the pressure that keeps everyone pushing for a complete hand¹¹.

Where to play

Mahjong parlors (jansou) are found across Japan; a parlor in Osaka where people play mahjong is a typical example of the venue¹⁴. Play is usually settled in points converted to money at a rate: at the common "pin" rate, 1,000 points equals JPY 100⁵. A session's win or loss is the difference between your final points and your starting points, multiplied by the rate.

Three-player mahjong, sanma, is widely available too. Dedicated three-player parlors exist west of the Chukyo area around Nagoya, and a small number of set-free parlors in the Tokyo capital area now offer it; most online mahjong sites have three-player tables, and current automatic tables can usually be set for three players¹³. The standard sanma set uses 27 tile types and 108 tiles, excluding the 2 through 8 of characters¹³, though some regions, especially on the Seto Inland Sea side of western Japan, remove the 2 through 8 of bamboo instead¹³. In most sanma rules you cannot call a chow on another player's discard, only on tiles you draw yourself¹⁵, though some local versions such as Yokosuka mahjong do allow chow calls¹³.

Online, the biggest name is Mahjong Soul, a Chinese-made game that follows the Japanese riichi rules and has drawn a large international following¹⁶. It has been described as an online game that adopted the classic Japanese mahjong gameplay, and it became one of the most-played games on Steam. For a first taste of riichi without money at stake, it is a reasonable place to learn the flow of a hand.

If you are in Japan and want the broader gambling landscape, see gambling in Japan and the traditional Japanese gambling games page.

M.League: professional riichi in Japan

Riichi went professional in October 2018 with the founding of M.League, Japan's professional mahjong league. It selects and trains professional players from across Japan, and its high prize money has attracted many young players into the game⁶. Matches are team-based, played under standard riichi rules, and broadcast, which has done a great deal to move mahjong's image in Japan away from the smoky parlor stereotype.

For a sense of how seriously the rules are standardized at that level: tournament play such as the MSMC annual tournament uses standard Japanese riichi rules with no red fives in play⁸. The same rules you would learn in a parlor or on Mahjong Soul are the ones on television, which is part of why the game is so approachable for a visitor who puts in a little study first.