Serious Business/Anime and Manga

"Chazz: "Who cares if he's better looking and so what if he's richer than I am. I'm really good at playing card games! And that's what life is really all about, anyway!""
 * To Tomoki in Sora no Otoshimono, everything perverted is extremely serious business. To the extent of spending half a year building a system that would allow him to monitor the best peeping spots in the city without leaving his room and using a Peeping Satellite for a similar purpose. He actually almost won a wrestling tournament through sheer pervertedness.
 * In the world of Yu-Gi-Oh! and especially the sequel Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, the card game of "Duel Monsters" is a global phenomenon. National tournaments, academies, politics, etc. all revolve around a fairly simple collectible card game. And this isn't even including the mystical occult properties, known only to a few: that Duel Monsters is actually based on magical games powerful ancient Egyptians used to play. Yes, ancient Egyptians.
 * The main villain of the Battle City arc is fond of making the game serious with human lives at stake.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series shows that by replacing the term 'Duel Monsters' with 'a children's card game,' every conversation sounds ten times more ridiculous.
 * GX's protagonist Judai attempts time and again to convince his opponents that their reasons for getting into the game are wrong, and need to remember that the main point of the game is to have fun. Pretty amusing when you consider that these people go to a prestigious boarding school for the sole purpose of learning how to play it better.
 * Judai eventually stops enjoying the game in Season 4 after spending most of Season 3 playing with his and/or other's lives at stake. The two-part finale, after all the villains have been defeated, consists of him regaining the sense of fun he'd lost...
 * Yu-Gi-Oh GX has pushed this whole nonsense even further by revealing.
 * Jeez, that was just a metaphor... probably.
 * At one point during GX, Duel Monsters is placed next to business and politics in terms of importance and world-control. You heard me. A CHILDREN'S CARD GAME HAS REPLACED RELIGION IN TERMS OF GLOBAL IMPORTANCE.
 * Only logical given the above spoiler.
 * At one point early in GX, it takes an entire fleet of ships with plenty of air support to deliver a single briefcase of rare cards to Duel Academy, and the captain implies that there were actually people willing to attack them over the cards. Note that there weren't any Egyptian Gods or anything with supernatural powers involved; they were just really good playing cards.
 * One offhand comment in the dub suggests that it is possible to get a friggin' PhD in dueling.
 * How serious is this children's card game Duel Monsters? Well, the only people who actually enjoy playing it are apparently people like Judai. You know, the kind that is usually really bad unless they're the protagonist. There's also sciences and mathematics entirely devoted to dueling, and a pro duelist named Eisenstein with an equation for dueling that starts E=MC... something or other.
 * The English dub for Yu-Gi-Oh! GX lampshades this at one point. Chazz is upset because he's being upstaged by a new guy who's absurdly wealthy.

"Sky High: Thanks to you, our surprise party was ruined. I worked hard to remember my lines."
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's brings out the absurd even more where this card game has reshaped the class system of the world and people are willing to risk their lives in deadly motorcycle crashes to play the stupid game. And least we not forget all the broken friendships over a single stupid move.
 * You think that's crazy, the card game has taken importance in the justice system of 5Ds. When police encounter a criminal escaping on a D-Wheel they hack its computer and force the criminal to duel, the looser forcibly stopped. If they could force the duel they should be able to just force the D-Wheel to stop and skip the duel all together, but they deliberately give runaways the chance to resist arrest! If the runaway wins, they don't even challenge him again, they just let him go!
 * And if that world doesn't become more insane for Yu-Gi-Oh Ze Xal, this troper will eat his deck.
 * Kaiba actually goes over his duel with Yugi (which ends in Yami Yugi's Mind Rape of him) from every angle, including quantum analysis. What the carbon-14 of Kaiba's Blue Eyes White Dragon turning into nitrogen-14 (for example) has to do with anything is beyond the viewers.
 * "Stop Having Fun!" Guys like Seto Kaiba and Siegfried often mock Joey for using luck-based cards, claiming that he's not a real duelist. At one point in 5Ds, Kiryu uses a luck-based card, and Yusei starts flipping out and asking what the hell he's doing. Kiryu tells him to relax, it's just a game.
 * Akagi breaks people's minds by playing Mahjong.
 * The fact that there is an extreme amount of money riding on each game, which is enough to easily break and ruin a person, probably helps.
 * Initial D: Street racing + Serious Business. That some people get like this in real life just makes it all the more hilarious.
 * One of the main charming quirks of Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure is how it presents utterly ridiculous concepts, takes them very seriously and actually makes them genuinely feel serious. As an example there are serious, life-threatening battles involving things like betting the characters' souls on a baseball video game and playing a game of deadly rock-paper-scissors while flying high above a town with high speed WITH NO EXPLANATION WHATSOEVER.
 * In Beyblade, the sport of Beyblading itself. It seems like if anyone wants to Take Over the World, they have to do it with duelling tops.
 * It is not so much as the tops as the "Bit Beasts" - artificial or spiritual entities of animals that allow the tops to pack as much yield as a nuclear bomb without the nasty side effects. Serious Business however.
 * Incredibly powerful spirits of animals that are used mainly utilized for playing a children's game. As powerful as nuclear weapon, and they are put in spinning tops used by children to win a game.
 * Even without the "take over the world" angle, the sport of Beyblading is able to fill stadiums specifically built for it, so there is some serious money there.
 * In Code Geass there are luxurious underground gambling clubs for chess, frequented by millionaires, Mafia bosses and the like. Bring your own extremely expensive chess board and bet a fortune.
 * Also: using a giant robot to make pizza. And everything else related to the Absurdly Powerful Student Council, for that matter.
 * As far as Gintoki from Gintama is concerned, Shonen Jump and sugar are both extremely serious business.
 * EVERYTHING is serious business in Gintama; eating hotpot, eating contests, gambling, collecting beetles, strawberry milk, pet pageants, being a fanboy, being an otaku, gaining weight, losing weight, separating your garbage, being hado boerudo, playing console games/MMORPGs, acquiring paper to wipe your butt. Even being a neet. And it's hilarious.
 * Bakugan suffers from this, to the point where it almost seems to be a parody of the Mon genre. Sadly, it is not. It's just an anime that apparently has children who are overly attached to their Bakugan, and.
 * Subverted in Kidou Tenshi Angelic Layer, CLAMP's version of a typical Shonen battle-game series. At first, it seems to fit perfectly, as Angelic Layer matches are broadcast on the sides of buildings to large crowds, Angels are treated as Companion Cubes, and However, as we progress through the series, we realize that it was just a busy public place where people wanted to watch a sport (much like football), people that take the game too seriously frequently learn from being defeated that they should just have fun, and  Most people see the competition as just a game--albeit a tad odd.
 * Duel Masters is another card game anime. It's not quite as blatant about it as Yu-Gi-Oh!, but stadiums are still packed full of spectators watching our heroes play cards.
 * The dub made it into an explicit parody.
 * It helps that both Duel Masters and Yugioh started off as parodying Magic: The Gathering, which has it's own fair share of serious business (but sadly, the latter is a real life phenomenon).
 * Bread is treated as Serious Business in Yakitate!! Japan, although given the wondrous properties of the hero's own bread, (including the ability to rearrange the fabric of reality and send people back in time), perhaps this shouldn't be surprising.
 * The whole point of the series is hanging lampshades on this trope.
 * Saijou no Meii, by the same author, takes this trope in a completely different direction by applying an over the top Shonen Manga mindset to something that actually is serious, namely Pediatric Surgery.
 * In Ai Kora, quite a number of characters seem to take their personal fetishes far too seriously (including the protagonist!) Chapter 42 involves Maeda butting heads with a band of militant Meganekko fetishists, who are up in arms over a fake glasses fad and go around breaking the glasses of "false" meganekko. And according to chapter 45, pantyhose is serious business.
 * Arguably, the moral lesson of Martian Successor Nadesico is that treating Humongous Mecha Anime as Serious Business can cause, or at least exacerbate, all manner of death and destruction. If nothing else, the series constantly employs Mood Whiplash to keep its own audience from taking it too seriously.
 * Of course the whole thing kind of falls apart when you realize the Space Whale Aesop buried within: "Don't be a fan of Super Robot anime, or else you'll go crazy and try to destroy humanity!" More so, the interesting Fridge Logic sinks in when you realize they made a Giant Robot anime to teach people the lesson that... you shouldn't be learning any lessons from Giant Robot anime.
 * The gondolier business in Aria consumes all of the protagonists' lives. Sure, it's their profession, but they're basically just transporting tourists through the canals of New Venice and it is indicated that they'll stop once they get married.
 * As Hayate the Combat Butler advances its plot, it seems the butler career becomes more and more Serious Business. The bare minimum seems to be equivalent to applying for a shounen fighting manga's character job. Props if you also have a Finishing Move.
 * You act as though having a Finishing Move is a bonus. It is made abundantly clear early on that all butlers should have at least one.
 * Lucky Star's Anime Tenchou brings gallons of hot blood, various superpowers and nuclear explosions to the humble business of running a comic and animation store. Why can't real managers be like this guy?
 * Bonus points for being voiced by Tomokazu Seki.
 * In the manga Iron Wok Jan, Chinese cooking competitions can fill stadiums and attract celebrity judges, and a particularly famous food critic is a popular celebrity. There's even a shadowy organization that secretly controls all food production and distribution throughout Asia and is trying to take over the Chinese cooking industry of Japan by defeating Japan's top young chefs in a cooking competition.
 * Characters in Hunter X Hunter think deeply and strategically about everything they do, in hilariously excessive detail, from playing rock-paper-scissors to using Internet search engines to making sushi to buying antiques to guessing a secondary character's gender. At one point, a character haggles down the price of a cell phone, and a crowd bursts out into applause.
 * Somewhat justified in that the haggling took place during a famous annual auction that lasts at least a week. At that point, it was several days into the event, so most of the people clapping were probably professional merchants, veteran auction goers, and people trying to make money buying and selling items (like the main characters). As such, they're the kind of people who would be impressed by successful haggling.
 * Averted in Hikaru no Go: The main characters take the game of go very seriously... but this is justified, as they ARE professional players (much like go players in the real world). Additionally, it is made clear that the world at large doesn't particularly care about the game, even when it knows it exists.
 * Grander Musashi takes sports fishing very seriously, to the point that anglers call out a technique whenever they throw fishing lines into the water, and treat their fishing rods and lures as Companion Cubes. There's even an academy that trains would-be anglers in the dark arts of fishing. In the sequel, seven divine lures that everybody is after created by Poseidon are the reason for the sinking of Atlantis.
 * Keroro Gunsou plays with this trope by having Keroro and Giroro treat everything from vacuuming, to going to the beach, to jumping rope, as though it were either a major military operation or a Cooking Duel to decide the fate of the galaxy.
 * Lunch becomes serious business in one episode of Ah! My Goddess, with Skuld and Mara fighting over a boxed lunch with bombs and magic, culminating in Skuld throwing herself off a roof to catch it before it hits the ground.
 * Metal Fighter Miku makes women's wrestling serious business. Arguably justified in that this is a basic tenet of pro wrestling in the first place (see below).
 * Likewise, Kinnikuman features wrestling matches that can decide the fate of the earth, and are frequently to the death.
 * The Japanese junior high school tennis circuit in The Prince of Tennis.
 * Stock up on tennis rackets in 2012
 * Rika (Ruki) in the English dub of Digimon Tamers. While all the characters are perhaps a little overly into the Digimon card game even before having to use their cards to save the world, Rika is by far the most intense. She is even appalled at her mother for not taking the childrens' card game seriously enough.
 * This is the whole reason she got a Mon in the first place.
 * In Macademi Wasshoi, a good portion of the school is made to run a magical Death Course, no holds barred, to decide the next school uniform. The students who aren't putting their butts on the line watch this in a large stadium with commentary, video cameras, the works. Serious Business indeed.
 * You can also mention Sakuma, who takes dramatic deaths (going so far as to hand a person a gun), and Moe fetishes seriously (he wreaks explosive violence on someone for tricking him with fake moe glasses)
 * In Suzumiya Haruhi, a baseball game of all things decided the fate of the world given that Team SOS-dan were playing against a really good baseball team. Their loss would aggravate Haruhi as she's a Reality Warper, and a sore loser, and would literally mean The End of the World as We Know It.
 * The Deep-Immersion Gaming duel between the SOS Brigade and the Computer Society, with Haruhi promising severe punishments to the Brigade if they lose, and even Kyon getting into it by the end.
 * Come to think of it, Haruhi takes pretty much everything this way, game or no. Which makes it Serious Business for the rest of the SOS Brigade: if losing a baseball game means Haruhi will throw a world-destroying sulk, that really does up the ante.
 * It's a little different from the usual Serious Business you see in anime since most of the world is entirely unaware of it, but it is no less serious.
 * Battle B-Daman. Apparently, in the "B-Da World", a person's social position, level of respect and moral actions are defined by playing marbles. Not playing B-Daman is something so bad that people don't even recognize you as a person (that's the message that the first episode gives to us). And of course, playing with marbles is also a good way to take over the world and be a world-threatening criminal. But to be fair, the marbles can rape physics. Freely.
 * 801 T.T.S. Airbats has a ramen-eating contest bet on by not only the entire JSSDF, but Chinese and American troops as well.
 * In Mahou Sensei Negima, Negi and Fate attempt to have a diplomatic meeting and nearly come to blows while arguing about whether tea or coffee is superior.
 * To be fair on Fate's side, coffee
 * One H-manga by Shiwasu no Okina applies this to fellatio, of all things. The competition between one high school's competing fellatio clubs is a matter of life or death.
 * "Oral sex is hard work. That's why it's called a blow-JOB!"
 * Welcome to The NHK does this with Hentai games, though that might just be an exaggeration to reflect Satou and Yamazaki's respective mental derangements.
 * Of course, it becomes much more serious if you want to make money by making a hentai game.
 * In Shuffle, the instant fanclubs in the anime have carried over into real life, with Ship-to-Ship Combat, of course.
 * Never say Kaede is a psycho Knife Nut Stalker with a Crush in front of members of Kitto Kitto Kaede-chan if you value your life.
 * XxxHolic: Watanuki pretty much Hannibal Lectures a woman he is teaching cooking Yea, that's right. If you don't eat your own cooking or others, it means
 * Air Gear: roller skating is serious business, with a huge subculture, tournaments, gang wars, and a special police force dedicated to catching (read: often brutally injuring) unruly Air Treckers. It should be noted that the manga makes a point of addressing this trope. Both Simca and Ikki state that A.T.s should be for fun, and not used as tools for violence or control.
 * Not to mention further on in the Air Gear manga, a cameo appearance from Barack Obama reveals that the roller-skates are pivotal to his plans of change. Seriously.
 * It's later revealed that in-universe So yes, Serious Business.
 * Beauty Pop treats styling this way, to the point where heroine Kiri inherits her super-stylist father's special techniques: The Corkscrew, the Whirlwind, the Wizard, and their signature faster-than-the-eye-can-follow precision hair-cutting.
 * In Read or Die, books are most definitely serious business.
 * Justified in the TV series, where
 * Bakusou Kyoudai Let's and Go is a series about racing miniature cars, which is serious business.
 * Strangely, it starts out rather normal since mini 4wd is somewhat a serious hobby (car modification and care) in the first place. It's Big Bad who's trying to turn racing into war and the heroes' responses that makes things ridiculous.
 * Kitchen Princess, like the Beauty Pop example above, treats baking and pastry-making as though it could create world peace if heroine Najika could just make the perfect flan.
 * In Chuuka Ichiban, also called Cooking Master Boy, cooking badly in an established restaurant and insulting certain chefs are federal crimes. Impersonating a renowned chef is like treason. Being the emperor's chef and/or taste tester makes you one of the highest ranked persons in China, even when retired. There is an exam that takes place every four years to become a "Super Chef", which officially makes you as high ranked as a military general or even higher. Then there's the Underground Cooking Society that aims to control China through the cooking industry and magic cooking utensils.
 * In Saki, Mahjong is Serious Business, with "hundreds of millions of players" and tournaments get media coverage, announcers, and high-tech anti-cheating devices.
 * To sum up: media coverage=a couple reporters (who seem more interested in a high schooler's boobies) and some special interest mags (which ANY hobby has), announcers=a couple Mahjong vets (including a local pro player who probably has some general interest in the game) who also serve as a narrative devices to relate Mahjong-specific strategy to the possibly uninformed readers/viewers, "high-tech anti-cheating"=cameras, which you can find at almost any tournament event for any game/sport (unless you count Hajime's chains as "high-tech"). And "hundreds of millions of players"=the fact that it's the most popular gambling game in China. Not to say it isn't Serious Business, but I'd go more for the earthquakes and flashes of lightning for every tile discarded as proof of that. Or the indications that without Mahjong, students in the same school can't continue friendships with one another.
 * And the fact that players of the game have superpowers, which they are heavily implied to have gotten by playing the game.
 * And in The Legend of Koizumi mahjong is even more Serious Business. World politics are decided by secret high-stakes Mahjong games.
 * Not just world politics, but whether or not
 * According to the Pope, God used Mahjong to create the world.
 * Jumbor Barutronica: Construction workers are heroes and knights, riding giant robots equipped with excavator equipment, and cloned children implanted with the memories of worker-heroes with shape-shifting, liquid metal hands that turn into giant shovels and drills. Justified, as it is set two-thousand years in the future, with the world in shambles because of pollution, so re-constructing the earth is vitally important. But... Construction Knights! On Giant Robots! Shape-Shifting Clones!
 * This can be argued for the Pokémon universe, with its hospitals, schools, and criminal organizations centered around Pokémon.
 * To be fair, the games make it quite clear that Team Rocket is using Pokémon for money and is implied to have a number of other business ventures, some of which (judging by the anime) are even completely legit. The other criminals... have different goals, let's leave it at that. There have also been human doctors in the anime and a human hotel in the games.
 * The anime has an episode where Ash and Co. take Pikachu to a hospital for humans, so I guess that's not entirely true.
 * Justified, if you think about it. If something, such as anything having to do with owning Pokémon, is so big, there would have to be a lot of Pokémon-related things. Pokémon are the animals of the Pokémon regions. Also, the games just show the important stuff, human hospitals, etc. aren't important in a Mon battling game.
 * Beat the bad guy threatening to take over the world in a Pokémon battle, and his plan is foiled.
 * Because you just beat his last line of defense. Failure to comply with you could result in burning them to death, slow death by poisoning, or just plain beating them to death.
 * Unless he's a sensible professional criminal and simply purchases an illegal firearm. While many Pokemon are otherwise far too powerful physically (being made out of rock or something) or far too quick (the absurd ninja-speeds some Pokemon move at) many seem to have no practical defense against one, and it would be even easier to simply shift the aim towards the trainer, which no villain seems evil enough to do during a match between trainers. The whole world is based around justifying the usage of Pokemon for everything really.
 * In terms of the pokemon games, it is mentioned that a number of pokemon can't defend against conventional weaponry; a storybook in a library says that a man with a sword killed dozens of pokemon easily by himself. The text then heavily implies that Arceus interceded and threatened humanity that he would take all pokemon away forever if a human ever used a weapon to kill pokemon again. This means most conventional weapons probably don't exist by divine mandate in the pokemon universe, and a team leader that tried using a sword or gun to fight on after his pokemon were defeated would be risking divine intervention against himself, followed by Arceus taking away the pokemon that were likely central to his plan anyway.
 * Given Pokémon created the universe, control time, make plants grow, regulate the tide, and, it might be justifiable.
 * I HAD TO SEND IN A MILLION POSTCARDS TO WIN THAT HAT!
 * In Sinnoh Ash and co met up with a villain who was willing to turn weapons and pokemon on humans, as well as deal with the issue of pokemon poaching and kidnapping. Hunter J was by far one of the more terrifying villains, and show that there are people in the pokemon universe who are evil, practical and downright ruthless (which is a stark contrast to the hilarious Rocket trio, who half the time forget they're even villains). Even more so was that she had the same reason as Rocket: To kidnap rare and powerful pokemon to sell to the highest bidder. Unlike the Rocket Trio, she succeeded most of the time.
 * In Bartender, making cocktails is most definitely serious business, with businesses and futures hanging in the balance.
 * Hachimaki are Serious Business in the world of Afro Samurai, with the Number One headband apparently conferring the powers and responsibilities of a God, and only the Number Two headband has the right to challenge the holder of the Number One headband.
 * Two Words, Slam Dunk!
 * I can beat that: One word, Basquash!
 * Ultimate Mop Daisuke DX - Janitorial competitions.
 * In Bakuman｡, working on manga is treated as a true calling that could very well threaten your life, like firefighting or something.
 * In fact, the main character's uncle before the start of the series.
 * However, this can be justified by the Truth in Television of the staggering amount of people in Japan who die of overwork. His uncle had been focusing only on his manga and setting aside sleeping and eating properly.
 * Ranma One Half. Martial arts is serious enough in real life, but when you have martial arts tea ceremonies, martial arts take out races, martial arts cooking, and many, many, many others, you know it must be Serious Business.
 * Sex is serious business in School Rumble. Guy students stampeding towards the museum to see Itoko's nude portrait or conducting clandestine meetings to determine who is the hottest girl in their school (again Itoko) is nothing new.
 * Truth in Television?
 * Not to mention the GUN BATTLE OF DEATH. The stakes? Who gets to choose the event for the culture festival. Guns. Blood. Death. Culture Festival is Serious Business.
 * While the game itself isn't an incredible amount more popular (possibly unintentionally) than current MMO's are, The World in .hack//Sign has players who take it a little too seriously sometimes. Especially groups like the Crimson Knights, who are becoming thuggish police types in a video game. The serious business was probably more obvious when the show was new and MMO's did not have nearly as high a number of player bases and twenty million seemed an absurd number.
 * Though it should be noted that it's pretty much the only big MMO in the setting. There are other small ones, but they never took off. Basically a past super virus wiped out every operating system except Altimat, and as The World came with Altimat, literally everyone with a computer had the game.
 * With the exception of the super virus, that still sounds like Truth in Television. WoW is so popular that all other MMOs could be called "other small ones" by comparison.
 * That said, the popularity of The World is still incredibly head tilting, given that outside of the Virtual Reality portion, it's less intricate than Diablo 1.
 * All that aside, it's partially justified in SIGN's case; for Tsukasa, it really is a matter of life or death.
 * Axis Powers Hetalia: "Whether it be games or cleaning, it's Serious Business to me!"
 * A lot of characters have this, despite Germany being the worst: Italy, China and France are a little too obsessed with food, England's got Busby's Chair, and... well, anything America does, really.
 * Bleach is an unusual example. Shunsui Kyoraku's sword has the ability to make the reality of a life or death duel conform to the rules of children's games, with the player's life still being on the line. Even extremely powerful entities like the # 1 Espada are vulnerable to the lose conditions. Shunsui also has no control, other than deciding whether to release his sword's power in the first place, over which game is chosen. These games include: Takaoni (whoever is higher up "wins", ie you can only damage your opponent with attacks from above), Kageoni (whoever gets their shadow stepped on "loses", ie you can damage your opponent by hitting their shadows), and Irooni (you and your opponent take turns calling out a color, you are only allowed to hit that color, the damage is increased by the amount of that color on your own body).
 * How has this not had an Arc, or at least ten billion Fanfics written about it?
 * Three... two... one...
 * Parodied and inverted in Detroit Metal City, where music fans assume that the titular band has demonic power over the universe, commit terrorist crimes and that the lead singer is a god. None of that is true whatsoever, but the band's fans act as if it was. On a smaller scale, the police assume that DMC is the root of all crime in the area.
 * The band Helvete actually does what DMC claims to do, their fans even blew up buildings for them.
 * D Gray Man's Kanda is willing to fight his way through the entire staff of the Black Order to fix his Slipknot Ponytail after Bookman steals his hair tie. There is epic posing and Battle Aura involved.
 * Gil from Pandora Hearts removes the Power Limiter on an Eldritch Abomination to get his hat back. The Eldritch Abomination in question was engaged in an arm-wrestling match at the time.
 * Eyeshield 21 takes football to the extreme. While the players are a bit more justified, since, well, they spend nearly everyday training for the game and will break into tears at losing, the audience, on the other hand, has no excuse. It's a full crowd for all the later games and some schools focus almost entirely on the sport. Note: this is American football. In Japan. And it's constantly being lampshaded that the audience (both in the series and real life) has no idea what is going on.
 * To be perfectly fair, Japan won two American football World Cups and even hosted the latest one, where they came in second. In real life.
 * Taken to the extreme with the Teikoku Alexanders, who have over 200 players from across Japan divided into 6 strings, while your average NFL team has a maximum of 53. And to advance in the ranking you have to memorize over 1,000 plays and run 40 yards in under 5 seconds.
 * While not Truth in Television, it's actually not all that unbelievable for a sports club in Japan. For example, high school baseball is so insanely popular that a team with a good chance of making it to the Koushien (the Christmas Bowl of baseball) will have 150+ members (and like Teikoku, most of those players are 2nd-6th stringers who act as lackeys).
 * So while there aren't actual football teams in Japan that are that big, if the sport were to get extremely popular (and presumably that's the sort of universe Eyeshield takes place in), a team like Teikoku would not be unrealistic, unlike in America.
 * Club games in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.
 * We all know that Tests in Real Life are Serious Business. In Baka Test? Waaaaaaaaaay too serious.
 * Similarly, in one episode of Dai Mahou Touge, Punie threatens to blow up the solar system if she fails a test.
 * P2! Let's Play Ping Pong! is a manga where... well, you can probably guess what's Serious Business there.
 * Smiles in Grenadier. I'm not kidding. If Rushuna's got a dirty look on her face, and informs you that you're not getting a smile, Run. Like. Hell.
 * Truth be told, you really have to push Rushuna extremely far for her to stop smiling.
 * In Nononono, ski jumping is apparently a very important sport in Japan--important enough to have masses of people threaten the safety of an athlete and his family for not winning a medal.
 * In the Nue arc of Mononoke, "The 'Hearing' of Incense" is such serious business that a game where the players try to determine minute differences between pieces of incense made from the same type of tree is used to to decide whose marriage proposal is accepted!
 * An omake for To Aru Kagaku no Railgun involves a group of scientists dispatching a special ops force in order to find out what type of panties Misaka Mikoto wears. They also sent a request to the supercomputer Tree Diagram, who told them not to use it for such a small thing.
 * Future GPX Cyber Formula: Auto racing is already serious business in real life, but when it's set in the future, you got AI-computer equipped race cars complete with booster engines and there's insane racing courses (in the TV series), you know it's really serious business.
 * Your car has an engine with three times the power of the M1 Abrams, Without the booster, what did you expect from that?
 * Shakugan no Shana: Ike planning a theme park trip. That is serious business. Overlaps with Mundane Made Awesome.
 * A short scene in One Piece depicts Luffy getting angry over the fact a restaurant doesn't serve meat. When offered shellfish, he replies with "Shellfish isn't meat! Meat is serious business!"
 * The Delta Force class (especially Touma, Aogami, and Tsuchimikado) in To Aru Majutsu no Index take Serious Business Up to Eleven. Seeing Komoe-sensei shed a tear? Go pull off an all-out war in a a school festival! No more food in the cafeteria because the class was dismissed late? Organize a small scale break out so some members can go get some food from a local store. Someone mention Nabe? Let's all go out too eat~!
 * In Toriko, food is serious business. Seriously. Gigantic supermonsters that could level cities are hunted by warriors, not for the treasure they might guard, but because they're insanely delicious. Gourmet meals can cost billions, if not trillions, of yen, and they have special jails dedicated just for food related crimes. Including dine and dash.
 * Justified in-universe since, due to Gourmet Cells, people can gain super powers by consistently eating their favorite foods, and from eating certain ultra-rare foods, and a centuries long war was once stopped by a legendary chef who created the ultimate food, called
 * In Summer Wars, the Japanese card game Hanafuda is used to decide marriages and fight the Big Bad using Cyberspace accounts to set the stakes.
 * Strawberry Cake is VERY serious especially the Strawberry on top just ask Mio, Yui, another Mio, Erza,Yotsuba and Mrs. Ayase.
 * The show Dog Days manages to invert this trope. War is serious business in Real Life, but in their world it's a perfectly safe sporting event.
 * Blue Exorcist has an overly dramatic cooking fight in episode 6.
 * To Tiger and Bunny's Sky High, birthday parties are very serious business.


 * Sawako of Kimi ni Todoke and Erza from Fairy Tail take everything seriously.
 * In the manga Gamble Fish, gambling is SERIOUS BUSINESS. In a prestigous private school, once main character Shirasagi Tomu enters, it descends into the the insanity of gambling, where people not only bet millions of yen, but even body parts. In. A. School.
 * In K-On!, cake is very serious business.
 * And light music, naturally.
 * Makoto from Wandering Son takes female clothing very seriously.
 * Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran: Ran almost started a fight over watered down sake. She says it's as precious as blood.
 * Ben-To: Half-priced bentos are VERY serious to the point there is all out war, and even rules regarding combat.
 * THE iDOLM@STER - Well, the 765Pro Agency is a Serious Bussiness.
 * An example predating many of these: In Speed Racer, racing is serious business. Lots of drivers play rough and several people are rammed off the road to their deaths over the course of the show.
 * Sora from Family Compo takes manga making very serious. It's his job and all, but sometimes he seems a bit extreme.