Next time I play poker, I'm shouting out my hand as if I were a giant robot pilot.

Crazy awesome, that is. The first 8-minute episode of The Legend of Koizumi, AKA Mudadzumo Naki Kaikaku, is now streaming on both YouTube and Nico Video. The show, a weird combination of political parody, over-the-top comedy, and Hikaru no Go-style epically overblown game-playing, will see a full DVD release on February 26th. The DVD will feature a half hour of major political figures morphed into mahjong-playing macho men, and I may or may not have already pre-ordered it from Amazon. The writer for this one has been behind some of my favorite “what the hell did I just watch” anime, like Dai Mahou Touge. This one doesn’t disappoint, managing to be both epic and incomprehensibly strange at the same time.

Hit the jump for the video and a summary for people who don’t understand moonspeak.

“Pei” (“North”) begins with an apology that the opening sequence hasn’t been completed yet, and some ads for both the manga and the February DVD release. Then the awesome starts: after an assassination attempt, former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirou heads out to an aircraft carrier to have a diplomatic team match of mah jong against a pair of characters who are based on North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Il and one of his sons. The losing nation must agree to the winning nation’s terms – a situation made dire for Japan by Koizumi’s injuries and the uselessness of his assistant, Sugimura Taizou.

The day is saved by gun-totin’, cigar-smokin’ former Prime Minister Asou Tarou, who easily takes out a sniper and allows Koizumi to both stifle the opponent and complete his god hand: an instant-win known as Thirteen Orphans or Kokushi Musou (though Koizumi shouts out Rising Sun as if it were a Dragon Ball Z technique). The sore losers launch a ballistic missile aimed at Japan. Koizumi hijacks an F-16 fighter jet from Papa Bush and Bush Jr. and intercepts the missile, returning alive from the explosion with what can only be assumed to be the sheer power of machismo.

The episode ends with a foreboding shot of what you can assume to be the Chinese delegation,

Seriously, if the opponent had been the Russians and not the North Koreans, this episode could have passed for an animated interpretation of the Lonely Island’s “Like a Boss” video.