Riichi Mahjong Repaint

Welcome to my post. This one’s for all the Riichi Mahjong fans out there. From my own research, I have found that information on the acquisition and treatment of Japanese Mahjong sets is extremely scarce. Particularly, if you’re looking for those juicy green tiles, which you might have grown fond of because of legendary shows such as Akagi. Same with me. During my stay in Japan I set myself the goal to find a beautiful set with green tiles. I searched many places, exhausting even all recycle shops in my area. Sure there were many nice riichi sets for cheap, but none of them satisfied my craving for green color. It seems like sets with vibrant green have simply gone out of production, leaving us only with uninspired giga dark green designs, which I would go so far as to simply call them black… For all the people who are striving to have someone deal into their Ryuuiisou yakuman hand, the black bamboo tiles are surely an imperfection. Since I couldn’t find much information on this topic and I found some other frustrated non-Japanese posts, I just went ahead and did it myself. I can only encourage you to try it yourself! It’s not even that hard and well worth your time. That said, if you plan on buying an automatic mahjong table, you may want to check out the Amos tables, which supposedly still come with old school vibrant green tiles in some cases. If you have some Japanese tiles at hand or plan to get them and want to do the work yourself, let’s jump right in!

First of all, the tiles. I got this set from a recycle shop for roundabout 30$ particularly for it’s nice design and additional tiles to also play the Chinese variant one day. These are made from plastic combined with bamboo rears, which is a good choice if you are hellbent on getting the old-style bamboo feel but like the uniformity of machine molded tiles. In practice, after playing a bunch of tiles, I would recommend you to go with all-plastic tiles instead, because the rounded back side will certainly lead to too many unintended falling stones. The wall is simply not secure enough and the slightest bump will result in some tiles falling off the sides. I understand, you want quality in terms of material, print, size and weight, which is why I’d recommend you get an Amos Max set. Actually, that’s what I will do before I leave Japan.

Here you can see my setup in the middle of repainting the green dragons. Everything you need will either be at your house already, or you will easily be able to get it at the mall. The most important things will be:

• a rug and/or newspaper to prevent a mess
• some paper towels to remove excess paint
• paint solvent or nail polish remover
• some Q-tips cotton swabs (to apply the right amount of paint remover)
• a super small round brush for painting
• a stiff flat brush (cut shorter to increase stiffness) and something pointed like a needle for scraping
• model paint (I heard nail polish also works)
• an elevated flat surface, e.g. some cut plywood
  (as a base for the paper towel to pull off excess paint evenly)
• riichi mahjong tiles (of course)

To start out, you will want to place the tile on an even surface and have a level “soaking” spot prepared as well. Take your cotton swab and partially dip it into the paint solvent. Then cover the entire imprint with a film of the hellish liquid – try to make it look like a flat bubble resting on just the target area. Once the proper amount is applied and the sides have been cleaned of potential dribbles, put it away and let it soak for some 20 minutes or longer. Repeat with the other tiles. Regarding the use of the proper paint solvent, you will likely struggle to find any information on the type of color that was used with your particular set. In my case, the solvent I got from the Japanese hobby shop worked great only on the paint, which I used to paint the tiles. In the production process they likely used some industry grade paint, which would not budge with at least my paint solvent. Now, it might be different in your case and being able to cleanly remove excess paint is still worth getting a cheap paint solvent, IMO. To get the tough industry paint off, you’ll have to resort to the most toxic of substances, nail polish remover… Removing all the paint with nail polish remover surely made me feel like I lost 5 years of lifetime. Be careful and maybe wear gloves, ‘cuz that stuff isn’t just going to destroy your lungs but also eat through your fingers. Seriously, ladies, HOW?!

This is what your tile should roughly look like, once you’ve scrubbed off the soaked paint. It might take you more than one round of soaking, depending on the thickness of the paint layer. The best way I found to scrub off paint is to just keep the area wet with nail polish remover and stab the piece from all angles with a cut back flat brush. To start out you can also use a needle, wood splinter or toothpick to get the rough removal out of the way quickly. To see your progress, wipe the surface with your rug once in a while – it’ll be super dirty in no time. Your tile is squeaky clean with all paint gone? Congrats, let’s move on to the easy part.

To color the tile it’s best to waste minimal time and get every nook and cranny covered with an amount of your choice. Too thin and the white will shine through, too thick and the intricacies of the brushwork might be compromised. After hopefully less than a minute comes the fateful moment of pulling the excess color off, leaving you with a beautifully painted work of art. To do that take a clean paper towel, put it on the even wood plank and clamp the overlapping flaps under the plank as to fixate it on top. Then wet a point at the covered surface’s top with some paint solvent (or nail polish), put the face-down tile on diagonally and pull it down while pressing down. Check your tile. If there is smears left, try again with another clean area or use a soaked cotton swab for finishing touches. You should now have a beautiful tile. If you messed up big time, you can always just get it all off and start again. The model point is way easier to handle, after all.

Here’s my solution for partial recolors. You will likely want to leave the red parts on your bamboo tiles, since they are on there for a reason (they actually don’t count towards ryuuiisou) and also they are beautiful that way. I simply used some tape, which I made sure sealed off the excluded area properly – easy! Just to clarify, the tile in the photo was still in the scraping process. I’d urge you to get it as clean as possible so that the old color doesn’t interfere with the new coloring and texture. On the recoloring part, however, you can get as funky as you want. Why not for example recolor your tiles with multiple colors as to create a top to bottom gradient.

Et voilà! All done. Naturally, the red dora tiles were recolored just as easily. At this point you will feel super satisfied and happy that it’s finally over. From now on this set will be truly one of a kind and you will look at them with a smile on your face. After all, they are bright green and were colored by the mahjong god himself, you! I also heard from an old mountain ascetic that doing this will increase your odds at getting Ryuuiisou by 5%. If you look carefully at the above photo you will see that the bamboo 1 is still not painted. That’s mainly because I still haven’t decided on the recolor and because I like the way the peacock looks right now. For all those who cleared their perception check, you will also have spotted that the color on these Hatsu is different from before. The reason for that is me buying a hue too bright and having to do them again. The first color was also water based, which did work, but wasn’t as good a choice as the later purchased acrylic paint turned out to be. Alright, that’s gonna be it for my post. Hopefully, it was of use to you and inspired you to repaint your own mahjong set in whichever way you can imagine. I’d be stoked to see your recolor or hear about your green riichi mahjong experiences, just post a comment below. Dom, your mahjong pal from downtown Japan, peacing out!