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Anime Review: Please Teacher! and Ai Yori Aoki
Please Teacher! and Ai Yori Aoki have, in their separate ways, called out for me some significant cultural differences between Japan and the US more starkly than any other anime or manga I've seen.
As with all my anime reviews, this is long. Sorry 'bout that. (I'm not really sorry, you know. Love me, love my prolixity.)
Please Teacher! is set in the "near future", though the march of realtime has turned that to "present day". Anyway, our main character is a boy named Kei Kusanagi, who is subject to unexplained bouts of suspended animation (not a coma, full temporal stasis), the worst of which had him out of it for a full three years, so although his calendar age is 18, his physical and emotional age is only 15. The friends Kei had before his three-year "standstill", as he calls his episodes, aged normally during that time, and when he came out of it, had moved on without him. So by the time the series starts, Kei has found a new set of friends, but has been afraid to tell them of his secret.
Enter the alien. While Kei sits on the shore of the local lake one evening, a cloaked spaceship lands in the water. Out beams the pilot, a--get this, you will not believe it--hot babe. Kei runs, the pilot briefly gives chase, Kei falls into the lake and has a standstill (maybe it was the other way around), and the pilot checks his wallet and returns him to his home, the house of his doctor uncle and nurse aunt (he lives with them so they can help him out with his condition). So Kei wakes up in his own bed, not sure whether what he saw was real or a dream.
Next day, Kei is in class with his friends, only to discover that the alien babe is now his teacher, Mizuho Kazami, the old teacher having suddenly, conveniently retired. She apparently recognizes him, but does nothing at that time.
After school, Kei looks out his bedroom window to find the alien teacher moving in next door. She asks for help unloading the moving van, he complies, they trip over each other in the process, Kei gets "accidentally" transported into the spaceship, Hijinks Ensue.
The essential disconnect with US culture happens right around this point. Kei for some reason agrees to keep Mizuho's secret, even from his aunt and uncle. There may have been some coercion going on there, of the "I will erase your brain" type, but I don't recall for sure. So Kei and his teacher start spending an inordinate amount of time together, and when Kei's uncle notices, he immediately leaps to the conclusion that they are romantically involved. Me, I'm thinking "Mary Kay LeTourneau", but rather than remonstrating, Doctor Uncle Legal Guardian declares himself "jealous" and conspires to help the "couple" conceal their "relationship".
Alas, Uncle Procurement is also an unmitigated goof, and when through no fault of their own, Kei and Mizuho get locked in the equipment room at school after hours, Uncle Dork finds a school official with a key. Unfortunately, the official in question is not the janitor as thought, but the principal, who leaps to the same conclusion as has already been presented, but reacts altogether less well to the idea. Mizuho's job is in jeopardy! What can we do? How can we explain without revealing Mizuho's extraterrestrial origin? Why do we care?
"It's OK, they're married!" blurts out Uncle Foot-in-Mouth.
"They can't be!" retorts the principal, with some justification. "The boy's only fifteen!"
"Um, actually, I can," says Kei. "Because I have this affliction I never, ever, ever wanted to tell anybody about which means I'm really eighteen, and legally able to sign a marriage contract!"
"Bullshit!" cries the principal. "No, really," says Doctor What-Have-I-Gotten-Us-Into. "Prove it!" says the principal. So Kei and Mizuho go down to City Hall with Uncle Big-Mouth and Aunt Remind-Me-Again-Why-I-Married-A-Moron and sign the paperwork. Poof, they're married. Poof, the principal looks up the marriage license the next day, sees that it is in order, and completely fails to notice that it's dated the day *after* the Big Reveal. But that's OK, because it turns out that the principal is married to one of his former students, who looks to be at least twenty years younger than he is, and was obviously just barely legal when the deed was done.
The rest of the series follows Kei and Mizuho's budding romance. Along the way, Kei has to dump the girl who'd been crushing on him from the beginning, because when you've got a hot, grown-up woman like Mizuho to go home to, who wants a little fifteen-year-old girl? Distraught (but trying to hide it), the girl in question takes up with the shop teacher on the rebound. Yeah.
Oh, and in a nod to propriety (/sarcasm), it turns out that Kei's loli-chick friend who looks thirteen (at most!) also suffers from Kei's disorder, and her big standstill was actually six years, so she's "really" twenty-one. Which, I guess, makes it OK for those who groove on the little girls to groove on her, because she's all grown up. Me, I like my wimmen a bit more developed and found Mizuho pretty much right in my wheelhouse. (And even more so, Mizuho's mom, Katsuho. Rawr.)
All in all, it was an enjoyable show to watch, with the requisite and stereotypical misunderstandings, jealous siblings, and sticky situations over a pound note that you find in romance comedy. But through US eyes, it's a story that essentially revolves around the appearance and acceptance of statutory rape, and I spent a fair amount of time overcoming the little voice in my head that kept saying, "Not OK! Not OK!"
I've read in the past that the legal age of consent in Japan is lower than in the States, and I get that anime is not intended to give a representative (or even realistic) view of Japanese culture, and I am well aware, thank you very much, that it's dumb to try and impose my insular morals on others who don't have the same background as I do, but teacher-student romances seem like an abuse of authority in any society, and I felt like there should have been more to dealing with it than a handwave and, eventually, a repetition of the theme in a sideplot.
Ai Yori Aoki is also a romance series, with less statutory rape and a more serious tone. It still has a fair amount of comedy, and plenty of Other Girls Falling For The Hero, but unlike most harem anime I've watched, there's never a question in anyone's mind who the Right Girl is, and the Romantic Misunderstandings are for the most part pretty minimal and dealt with quickly.
The cultural disconnect here is also fundamental to the plot. Kaoru Hanabishi is an average college student, except he's not. The son of the heir to the Hanabishi business conglomerate and his lower-class lover, Kaoru lived with his mother away from the Hanabishi estates because his grandfather, the head of the household, refused to allow Kaoru's parents to marry. But when Kaoru was five, his father died without any other heir, and Grandpa came down and took Kaoru away from his mother, planning to raise him to take over the family business. But Kaoru was too soft and sensitive for Grandpa, and bears the scars on his back from frequent, vicious beatings. Eventually, Kaoru would decide that no inheritance was worth that level of bullshit, and walked out on his grandfather, the business, and everything that was associated with them, deciding to make his own life however he could manage it.
But very early in his life in the Hanabishi household, Grandpa made arrangements that Kaoru would marry the daughter of the smaller Sakuraba conglomerate, Aoi. Kaoru is maybe six, Aoi perhaps four when this happens. Kaoru barely remembers this, and rightly assumes that, since he is no longer Hanabishi, the marriage has been canceled. In this, he reckons without the will and determination of Aoi, who on the basis of a single meeting of a six-year-old, has decided that she is going to dedicate her life not only to being Kaoru's wife, but to being the best possible wife he could ever possibly hope to have. Think domestic goddess, but without any irony. When Kaoru walks out on Hanabishi, Aoi is devastated--she worries that he was deliberately rejecting her when he decided that regularly getting the crap kicked out of him by his grandfather was a suboptimal lifestyle.
So she tracks him down. She finds him in his college apartment, (re-)introduces herself, and as he was nice to her a second time, announces her intention to pick up right where she left off--as Kaoru's fiancee. (Creepy girl!) Fortunately for her, Kaoru is just as kind and sensitive as he was when he was six. There's a brief flutter when Aoi's parents discover that she's decided to shack up with a disgraced, inheritance-bereft nobody, but Aoi shows her determination to her mother, and her mother decides to allow the liaison, but with conditions. First, they can't let anyone find out about their relationship. Second, Mom's going to cut loose one of the Sakuraba mansions, conveniently located near Kaoru's college, for them to live in, but Aoi's going to live in the main house and Kaoru will live as if a boarder in the servant's house on the property. Third, also part of the deal is Miyabi Kagurazaki, Aoi's longtime tutor (and hot-alternate-babe #1--remember this has aspects of a harem comedy) as live-in chaperone.
Remember that Aoi has now met Kaoru twice in her entire life, and has made this decision and faced down her mother because as far as she can tell, he is Apparently Not A Complete Jerk. (It will turn out that Kaoru's primary characteristic is that he is Actually Not A Jerk, but we only have intimations of this at this point.) And that Aoi's initial decision to be Kaoru's Perfect Wife was based on one instance of Six-Year-Old Kaoru Is Not A Jerk. Creepy Obsessed Girl shows (among other things) through her cooking that she is Good With Knives.
Anyway, Kaoru's college friends find out he's moved, and the female members of that group, for one reason or another, end up also living in the Sakuraba mansion. They think Aoi is the owner of the property and that Miyabi is the property manager. Each girl who moves into the house exemplifies a different harem-comedy stereotype or three, every one (except Miyabi) believes or comes to believe that she has the inside track on dating Kaoru, and so Hijinks Ensue.
Through it all, Kaoru and Aoi's romance blossoms, and as I mentioned earlier, the Hijinks never cause any long-term doubt that Kaoru and Aoi are and will be together, and they don't even argue about it.
I should note here that Aoi's idea of the perfect wife would be right at home in Stepford, CT, so from my gaijin point of view, she is throughout this series showing her unshakable determination to be Kaoru's, and only Kaoru's, doormat. Again fortunately for her, Kaoru is not the sort to take advantage of a doormat, so it should be a match made in heaven for them both. But this, along with the creepy stalkerishness of the beginning of the series, again call out a significant difference between how I see the world and how the characters and (I guess) the target audience do. So a sweet and enjoyable series, but not something I'd want my son (or God help me my daughter if I had one) to be watching until they were old enough to enjoy the story without thinking that there was any expectation that they should emulate it.
Though M., if you wanted to dress up in a kimono and serve me tea sometime, I would be all over that. Probably literally. :b
As with all my anime reviews, this is long. Sorry 'bout that. (I'm not really sorry, you know. Love me, love my prolixity.)
Please Teacher! is set in the "near future", though the march of realtime has turned that to "present day". Anyway, our main character is a boy named Kei Kusanagi, who is subject to unexplained bouts of suspended animation (not a coma, full temporal stasis), the worst of which had him out of it for a full three years, so although his calendar age is 18, his physical and emotional age is only 15. The friends Kei had before his three-year "standstill", as he calls his episodes, aged normally during that time, and when he came out of it, had moved on without him. So by the time the series starts, Kei has found a new set of friends, but has been afraid to tell them of his secret.
Enter the alien. While Kei sits on the shore of the local lake one evening, a cloaked spaceship lands in the water. Out beams the pilot, a--get this, you will not believe it--hot babe. Kei runs, the pilot briefly gives chase, Kei falls into the lake and has a standstill (maybe it was the other way around), and the pilot checks his wallet and returns him to his home, the house of his doctor uncle and nurse aunt (he lives with them so they can help him out with his condition). So Kei wakes up in his own bed, not sure whether what he saw was real or a dream.
Next day, Kei is in class with his friends, only to discover that the alien babe is now his teacher, Mizuho Kazami, the old teacher having suddenly, conveniently retired. She apparently recognizes him, but does nothing at that time.
After school, Kei looks out his bedroom window to find the alien teacher moving in next door. She asks for help unloading the moving van, he complies, they trip over each other in the process, Kei gets "accidentally" transported into the spaceship, Hijinks Ensue.
The essential disconnect with US culture happens right around this point. Kei for some reason agrees to keep Mizuho's secret, even from his aunt and uncle. There may have been some coercion going on there, of the "I will erase your brain" type, but I don't recall for sure. So Kei and his teacher start spending an inordinate amount of time together, and when Kei's uncle notices, he immediately leaps to the conclusion that they are romantically involved. Me, I'm thinking "Mary Kay LeTourneau", but rather than remonstrating, Doctor Uncle Legal Guardian declares himself "jealous" and conspires to help the "couple" conceal their "relationship".
Alas, Uncle Procurement is also an unmitigated goof, and when through no fault of their own, Kei and Mizuho get locked in the equipment room at school after hours, Uncle Dork finds a school official with a key. Unfortunately, the official in question is not the janitor as thought, but the principal, who leaps to the same conclusion as has already been presented, but reacts altogether less well to the idea. Mizuho's job is in jeopardy! What can we do? How can we explain without revealing Mizuho's extraterrestrial origin? Why do we care?
"It's OK, they're married!" blurts out Uncle Foot-in-Mouth.
"They can't be!" retorts the principal, with some justification. "The boy's only fifteen!"
"Um, actually, I can," says Kei. "Because I have this affliction I never, ever, ever wanted to tell anybody about which means I'm really eighteen, and legally able to sign a marriage contract!"
"Bullshit!" cries the principal. "No, really," says Doctor What-Have-I-Gotten-Us-Into. "Prove it!" says the principal. So Kei and Mizuho go down to City Hall with Uncle Big-Mouth and Aunt Remind-Me-Again-Why-I-Married-A-Moron and sign the paperwork. Poof, they're married. Poof, the principal looks up the marriage license the next day, sees that it is in order, and completely fails to notice that it's dated the day *after* the Big Reveal. But that's OK, because it turns out that the principal is married to one of his former students, who looks to be at least twenty years younger than he is, and was obviously just barely legal when the deed was done.
The rest of the series follows Kei and Mizuho's budding romance. Along the way, Kei has to dump the girl who'd been crushing on him from the beginning, because when you've got a hot, grown-up woman like Mizuho to go home to, who wants a little fifteen-year-old girl? Distraught (but trying to hide it), the girl in question takes up with the shop teacher on the rebound. Yeah.
Oh, and in a nod to propriety (/sarcasm), it turns out that Kei's loli-chick friend who looks thirteen (at most!) also suffers from Kei's disorder, and her big standstill was actually six years, so she's "really" twenty-one. Which, I guess, makes it OK for those who groove on the little girls to groove on her, because she's all grown up. Me, I like my wimmen a bit more developed and found Mizuho pretty much right in my wheelhouse. (And even more so, Mizuho's mom, Katsuho. Rawr.)
All in all, it was an enjoyable show to watch, with the requisite and stereotypical misunderstandings, jealous siblings, and sticky situations over a pound note that you find in romance comedy. But through US eyes, it's a story that essentially revolves around the appearance and acceptance of statutory rape, and I spent a fair amount of time overcoming the little voice in my head that kept saying, "Not OK! Not OK!"
I've read in the past that the legal age of consent in Japan is lower than in the States, and I get that anime is not intended to give a representative (or even realistic) view of Japanese culture, and I am well aware, thank you very much, that it's dumb to try and impose my insular morals on others who don't have the same background as I do, but teacher-student romances seem like an abuse of authority in any society, and I felt like there should have been more to dealing with it than a handwave and, eventually, a repetition of the theme in a sideplot.
Ai Yori Aoki is also a romance series, with less statutory rape and a more serious tone. It still has a fair amount of comedy, and plenty of Other Girls Falling For The Hero, but unlike most harem anime I've watched, there's never a question in anyone's mind who the Right Girl is, and the Romantic Misunderstandings are for the most part pretty minimal and dealt with quickly.
The cultural disconnect here is also fundamental to the plot. Kaoru Hanabishi is an average college student, except he's not. The son of the heir to the Hanabishi business conglomerate and his lower-class lover, Kaoru lived with his mother away from the Hanabishi estates because his grandfather, the head of the household, refused to allow Kaoru's parents to marry. But when Kaoru was five, his father died without any other heir, and Grandpa came down and took Kaoru away from his mother, planning to raise him to take over the family business. But Kaoru was too soft and sensitive for Grandpa, and bears the scars on his back from frequent, vicious beatings. Eventually, Kaoru would decide that no inheritance was worth that level of bullshit, and walked out on his grandfather, the business, and everything that was associated with them, deciding to make his own life however he could manage it.
But very early in his life in the Hanabishi household, Grandpa made arrangements that Kaoru would marry the daughter of the smaller Sakuraba conglomerate, Aoi. Kaoru is maybe six, Aoi perhaps four when this happens. Kaoru barely remembers this, and rightly assumes that, since he is no longer Hanabishi, the marriage has been canceled. In this, he reckons without the will and determination of Aoi, who on the basis of a single meeting of a six-year-old, has decided that she is going to dedicate her life not only to being Kaoru's wife, but to being the best possible wife he could ever possibly hope to have. Think domestic goddess, but without any irony. When Kaoru walks out on Hanabishi, Aoi is devastated--she worries that he was deliberately rejecting her when he decided that regularly getting the crap kicked out of him by his grandfather was a suboptimal lifestyle.
So she tracks him down. She finds him in his college apartment, (re-)introduces herself, and as he was nice to her a second time, announces her intention to pick up right where she left off--as Kaoru's fiancee. (Creepy girl!) Fortunately for her, Kaoru is just as kind and sensitive as he was when he was six. There's a brief flutter when Aoi's parents discover that she's decided to shack up with a disgraced, inheritance-bereft nobody, but Aoi shows her determination to her mother, and her mother decides to allow the liaison, but with conditions. First, they can't let anyone find out about their relationship. Second, Mom's going to cut loose one of the Sakuraba mansions, conveniently located near Kaoru's college, for them to live in, but Aoi's going to live in the main house and Kaoru will live as if a boarder in the servant's house on the property. Third, also part of the deal is Miyabi Kagurazaki, Aoi's longtime tutor (and hot-alternate-babe #1--remember this has aspects of a harem comedy) as live-in chaperone.
Remember that Aoi has now met Kaoru twice in her entire life, and has made this decision and faced down her mother because as far as she can tell, he is Apparently Not A Complete Jerk. (It will turn out that Kaoru's primary characteristic is that he is Actually Not A Jerk, but we only have intimations of this at this point.) And that Aoi's initial decision to be Kaoru's Perfect Wife was based on one instance of Six-Year-Old Kaoru Is Not A Jerk. Creepy Obsessed Girl shows (among other things) through her cooking that she is Good With Knives.
Anyway, Kaoru's college friends find out he's moved, and the female members of that group, for one reason or another, end up also living in the Sakuraba mansion. They think Aoi is the owner of the property and that Miyabi is the property manager. Each girl who moves into the house exemplifies a different harem-comedy stereotype or three, every one (except Miyabi) believes or comes to believe that she has the inside track on dating Kaoru, and so Hijinks Ensue.
Through it all, Kaoru and Aoi's romance blossoms, and as I mentioned earlier, the Hijinks never cause any long-term doubt that Kaoru and Aoi are and will be together, and they don't even argue about it.
I should note here that Aoi's idea of the perfect wife would be right at home in Stepford, CT, so from my gaijin point of view, she is throughout this series showing her unshakable determination to be Kaoru's, and only Kaoru's, doormat. Again fortunately for her, Kaoru is not the sort to take advantage of a doormat, so it should be a match made in heaven for them both. But this, along with the creepy stalkerishness of the beginning of the series, again call out a significant difference between how I see the world and how the characters and (I guess) the target audience do. So a sweet and enjoyable series, but not something I'd want my son (or God help me my daughter if I had one) to be watching until they were old enough to enjoy the story without thinking that there was any expectation that they should emulate it.
Though M., if you wanted to dress up in a kimono and serve me tea sometime, I would be all over that. Probably literally. :b