List of Yakitate!! Japan Characters - Bread Judges

Bread Judges

Ryou Kuroyanagi (黒柳 亮, Kuroyanagi Ryō?)

• Voiced by: Takehito Koyasu

The 22-year-old head at the main Pantasia branch, and a Harvard graduate with a Food Science diploma (There he had a girlfriend named Cathy but they got separated when he needs to go back to Japan). His passion and talent is food tasting, at which he excels. He has incredible physical senses, as he could deduce the cooking and fermentation times as well as the proportions of ingredients of a loaf of bread just by smelling it: he is even used as a sniffer to track down a runaway Suwabara during the match in Ōmagari. His strait-laced no-nonsense attitude belies his very silly quirk of making strange pun-based reactions to the delicious bread he's eating (during the match in Uppurui he married an extremely ugly woman just for the sake of a pun, getting a divorce five minutes later.) He used to be the student of Ken, but Ken drove Ryou away with his behaviour. He is given the opportunity by Yuuichi Kirisaki to fully utilize his skills as a judge for the Yakitate!! 25 competition (Yakitate!! 9 in the anime). As shown in episode 60 he cares about bread more than he cares about his or anyone elses life. Ken and Tsukino called him a bread zombie. He is also one of the many people who make fun of Kawachi.

Pierrot Bolneze/Leonhart XV/Leol (ピエロ・ボルネーゼ, Piero Borunēze?)

• Voiced by: Tomokazu Seki

A world class clown working as a bread judge, aged 22. Can speak 135 languages, divide into over a hundred copies of himself, and do all sorts of amazing things due to being 'world-class' clown. Heir to the throne of Monaco, though he doesn't know it at first until the second Monaco Cup competition. Pierrot learns that he is heir to Monaco only through blood loss, he has an ultra-rare blood type called Bombay blood, which the king of Monaco also has. He became a world class clown so that his parents might find him, who he believed had abandoned him at the circus as an infant. In fact, he was given up to be brought up by ordinary foster parents away from the Royal palace, according to Monaco tradition. But these parents ran away with the money paid to them, leaving Pierrot behind. When they committed suicide, he was pronounced dead, but actually ended up in the Quedam circus.

His real mother had died at his birth. The King of Monaco (discovering he shared the same rare blood type with Pierrot) sacrificed himself to donate blood, after one of Pierrot's reactions (Kawachi's Final Victory) turns into 'murder' and he reveals his true background. He is later nicknamed 'Miracle Prince' and both teams decided to make a bread that let him see his parents once again. Azuma's Japan #61 allows him to change history, save his mother and father, and alter his entire life for the better, it seems. Pierrot is the predominant character of the Monaco Cup Arc, who gives the series a fresh aspect, away from just bread-making.

Dave Hachiguchi (デーブ 橋口, Dēbu Hachiguchi?)

An exceedingly fat bread judge. The character was a self reference by the author, Takashi Hashiguchi. He used to be a successful manga artist, but he became too successful and gorged himself on only fine foods. That resulted in his excess fat and now he only says, "Busy, busy." His only means of judging is by screaming, louder meaning that its better. Hachiguchi's first name is also a pun: while "Dēbu" is the Japanese pronunciation of the name "Dave," as it is written (デーブ) is translated as "Fat" or "Fatty."