Based on the manga created by Toshinao Aoki and Studio Bones, the animation in Dragon Pilot brings to mind the comic strip art of Bill Watterson. The premise of Dragon Pilot as well is the crazy kind of gross but hilarious and yet clever idea that Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes would come up with.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the world (and most Japanese), a select few of Japan's military aircraft, including an F-15J and an F-2 (Mitsubishi's made-in-Japan version of the F-16), are dragons disguised to look like fighter jets.

Hisone Amakasu is a rookie airman at the Japan Air Self-Defense Force Gifu Air Base. One day out of the blue she learns she has passed a "qualification" (she wasn't aware of) and is summarily transferred to a huge hanger way off in the corner of the base that no one seems to know about—except for an odd old woman who pushes a food cart around the base.

When Hisone finally finds the hanger, she walks in and is confronted by a huge dragon (she later names "Masotan") that promptly eats her.

The ground crew is delighted. It's been a while since a pilot passed muster with this particular OTF (an "Organic Transformed Flyer," as the military labels them). You see, the pilot doesn't ride atop the dragon like a horse. The dragon swallows the pilot, who "flies" the dragon from its guts. And when the flight is over, regurgitates her back out.

And, yes, the pilots have to wear special flight suits to keep from getting digested.

Needless to say, the dragon has a lot of discretion about who gets swallowed, and some, like Masotan, can get picky. The dragons are perceptive about the personalities of their pilots. They can even pick up mechanical issues with the real F-15Js they fly with (via the heads-up display in the helmets the pilots wear). But they don't talk.

It's eat or don't eat. Once they've formed an attachment, the one thing that really gives a dragon an upset stomach is his pilot forming a romantic relationship with another human being (which reminds me a similar plot device in My Zhime). No surprise, then, that the girls who make the best "D-Pilots" are not very socially adept.

For all its inherent silliness, Dragon Pilot raises fascinating questions about choice and free will. Hisone got something she didn't know she wanted. Nao wants something she can't get. Elle got what she didn't want instead of what she did. Moriyama gave up what she wanted and walked away to happily make another life for herself.

As Hisone tells Okonogi, a member of her ground crew and also, by family lineage (not something he had a lot of choice about either), a Shinto priest, "It's always best when the things you like and the things decided for you are in agreement."

That religious angle is no small matter. One of the old gods of Japan is a whale-sized monster, literally the size of a small island. It briefly comes out of hibernation every seventy-four years. The job of the dragon pilots is to escort it to a new resting place before it goes all Godzilla on Japan, and put it to bed with an ancient Shinto ritual.

The old school ritual required one of the miko attendants to stay behind in the "belly of the whale," so to speak. As far as Hisone is concerned, that is very much not okay. As it turns out, the food cart lady is the last living member of her squadron from the last time, when her reaction was the same as Hisone's.

In Calvin and Hobbes style, Hisone figures out an unlikely solution. It's a credit to the writing that the series manages to take these serious turns—and turn back again—without spoiling the comedic mood created earlier or making light of the dramatic decisions that Hisone faces (but be sure to stick through the final closing credits).

Masotan ultimately gets a character arc too, which suggests that perhaps the dragons will figure out how to compromise on the whole personal boundaries thing, and not force their pilots into the kind of all-or-nothing choice that Moriyama was left with. We have every reason to hope that the dragons will mature alongside their pilots.

Dragon Pilot is streaming on Netflix.

Labels: anime reviews, japanese culture, netflix, religion, shinto

International media distributor Remow teamed up with Nihon Eiga Broadcasting to bring historical dramas to overseas audiences with its Samurai vs Ninja website and YouTube channel. Remow has also gotten into anime licensing and continues to refrain from exclusives, sharing content on Tubi and YouTube.

Tonbo! (2024) is the best title in their anime portfolio so far. The manga by Ken Kawasaki and Yu Furusawa has been serialized in Weekly Golf Digest since 2014 and currently totals 52 volumes. So the viewer would do well to keep in mind that this isn't your usual shonen sports drama. It is written for golfers.
In other words, if you don't find Tonbo's inventive use of a 3 iron inherently fascinating, then the series probably isn't for you.

The plot merges the premises of Barakamon (2014), in which a professional calligrapher with a troubled past exiles himself to a tiny island and meets a bunch of quirky kids, and Rising Impact (2024), in which an eight-year-old golfing prodigy from the sticks is recruited to the elite Camelot Academy.

For idiosyncratic reasons I never divined, the names of several characters in Rising Impact are derived from the aforementioned Camelot, like Gawain and Lancelot. And speaking of Gawain (Misaki Kuno), a good part of the fun is listening to him (her) speak in a Tohoku accent you could cut with a knife.

In Tonbo! a professional golfer with a troubled past exiles himself to a tiny island in the Tokara archipelago and there encounters a quirky island girl named Tonbo, who turns out to be a golfing prodigy. He sees in her great potential, potential that will remain dormant and untested if she remains an island girl.

Along with smoothing out her more eccentric golfing habits (while not interfering with her unique approach to the game), he nudges her to leave the island when she graduates from junior high. The island has no high school. Students continuing their education live with relatives or attend boarding schools.

The Tokara archipelago is collectively governed as a village of Kagoshima Prefecture, so the favored destination for transfer students is the port city of Kagoshima and the surrounding areas.

While thoroughly entertaining, Birdie Wing (2022) and Rising Impact are so over the top that they more resemble superhero franchises that have to constantly invent new comically overpowered villains (and golf courses designed by M.C. Escher) to challenge the skills of the comically overpowered protagonists.

Tonbo! is far more realistic and treats the subject with the most technical accuracy. The main characters have actual character arcs, so there's no need for vaudevillian villains to create dramatic conflict. Instead, we focus our attention on how Tonbo evolves as an already gifted golfer and grows as a human being.

It's been an entertaining journey so far and I hope we can follow her all the way to a professional career.

The second cour is a continuation of season 1 starting with episode 14.

Related videos

Tonbo! (Tubi YouTube Prime)
Barakamon
Birdie Wing
Rising Impact

Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, geography, japanese culture, manga, remow, samurai vs ninja, sports, tubi

If you needed a reason to get a Crunchyroll premium subscription, Spy x Family is it.

If nothing else, Spy x Family is a great homage to classic spy series from the Cold War era like Get Smart, It Takes a Thief, Mission: Impossible, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, and The Saint (in which Roger Moore plays a better James Bond than when he was cast as James Bond).

You know, back in the good old days when we could safely assume that democracies were superior to autocracies and the good guys acted on behalf of the greater good.

In Spy x Family, the European setting is roughly based on East and West Germany during the 1960s, though this East Germany is economically freer and more politically turbulent than that East Germany. A better comparison might be Taiwan and post-1997 Hong Kong.

Operating under the code name Twilight, super spy Lloyd Forger has been tasked with establishing a diplomatic back channel with reclusive party leader Donovan Desmond. Desmond's sons attend Eden Academy, so Forger's handlers conclude that the best cover story is for Forger to enroll his child at the academy.

To do that he will need a child. And a wife. And a dog. A family, in other words.

He rescues Anya from a shady orphanage and arranges a paper marriage with Yor Briar, who has reasons of her own to shed her single status. What Forger doesn't know is that Anya is a telepath and Yor is a professional assassin. And the dog can see the future, except only Anya can communicate with him.

Because of her psychic powers, Anya is privy to the secret lives of her pretend parents, though this knowledge is filtered through the eyes of a precocious six-year-old child (who is probably five but said she was six because she knew that's what Lloyd wanted and was desperate to get out of the orphanage).

As far as Anya is concerned, her top priority is keeping the family together, as fake as it may be, while helping Lloyd complete his mission. And while Lloyd and Yor are always telling themselves they'll go their separate ways, they find themselves growing increasing comfortable with their artificial family life.

There are additional sitcom complications, such as Yor's younger brother being a member of the State Security Service (the equivalent of the Stasi). While Yuri is aware that a foreign agent named Twilight is in the country, he is is too flustered by Lloyd's marriage to his sister to realize that he's right under his nose.

Yuri is equally unaware of his sister's sinister side job. Undoubtedly one of those siloed need-to-know things.

Directors Kazuhiro Furuhashi and Takahiro Harada deftly walk a thin line, keeping the tone of the story simultaneously smart and silly without being stupid. Lloyd's side missions are quite thrilling in their own right too.

If we could go back in time, the perfect cast for a live-action version would be Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as Rob and Laura Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show. I'd love to seem them play against type and switch on a dime from normal (if somewhat goofy) middle-class parents to steely-eyed operatives.

The difference between the two leads is that Yor naturally defaults to Laura Petrie mode. For her, assassin really is just a side gig. Switching out of full-time spy mode is more difficult for Lloyd.

The second half of the second season reverses the roles. Yor is sent on a mission that constantly throws her into precarious situations that call on her talents as a cool and competent cutthroat killer. In her absence, Lloyd has to figure out how to be a full-time father figure.

In the universe of secret superheroes, the controlling half of the dual personality—Clark Kent or Superman, Bruce Wayne or Batman—will ultimately determine the direction of the narrative. For Bruce Banner and the Hulk, the conflict arises out of the irradicable nature of the struggle.

This is the question that Lloyd will ultimately have to answer. The decision would end the show in its current form, but given such wonderful characters, I would very much like to see how our family of spies adapts after the Berlin Wall falls.

Spy x Family is a well-crafted series where the long arc of the show can be stretched out without frustrating the audience, allowing the writer and director to get creative with one-and-done episodic plots. Exactly what former network executive Paul Chato identifies as the recipe for a successful television series.

Crunchyroll has both seasons of Spy x Family and Spy x Family: Code White. Tubi has five seasons of The Dick Van Dyke Show and six seasons of The Saint.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, business, crunchyroll, geography, politics, streaming, television reviews

Tubi has anime and Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama. Tubi doesn't have language filters either, so the only way to sift through Tubi's catalog, aside from third-party sites like Reelgood, is to look up specific titles, actors, and directors, or do global searches for Japan and Japanese.

Even there, the Tubi search engine is fuzzy, so the hits will be all over the map and may have nothing to do with Japan. And because Tubi licenses just about anything as long as it's cheap and available, everything from art house to grindhouse to documentaries and travelogues will show up in the results.

I've curated a list of Japanese language titles on Tubi I thought were worth a second glance. I will update this list on a semi-regular basis.

• Kamen Rider: Kuuga (2001) A young Joe Odagiri sets this entry in the long-running franchise apart from the rest. Alas, it suffers from the monster-of-the-week formula and is further hurt by the bad guys having no clear-cut motivation, which turns it into serial-killer-of-the-week. The body count is astronomical. But you can watch it to enjoy Joe Odagiri and a talented supporting cast.
• By contrast, Kamen Rider: Zero-One (2020) follows the George of the Jungle (1997) rule: "Nobody dies in this story. They just get really big boo-boos." Zero-One also illustrates how far budget CGI has evolved in twenty years. Alas, good CGI can't compensate for bad scripts. The series might have worked as a smarter Terminator prequel than the usual but instead gets painfully repetitious.
• Liz and the Blue Bird (2018) is a side story from Kyoto Animation's Sound Euphonium franchise. The movie revisits the first season from the perspective of two members of the high school brass band (supporting characters in the main series) as they rehearse a duet to be featured in the prefectural band competition.
• Onihei (2017) is based on the crime novels by Shotaro Ikenami. Heizo Hasegawa is police superintendent with an intimidating reputation (oni means devil). He and his men specifically investigate crimes of theft, armed robbery, and arson. This action-heavy Edo period police procedural doesn't flinch from depicting the complete lack of due process rights afforded to suspects at the time.
• Priest of Darkness (1975) shares a similar premise with Zankuro (2001). Like Ken Watanabe's Zankuro, Shintaro Katsu (of Zatoichi fame) plays a tea master with a high social rank but a meager stipend. Constantly hustling to pay the rent, he and his little gang settle disputes, investigate crimes, and dispense unofficial justice around the neighborhood.
• Sonny Chiba again plays the historical figure Yagyu Jubei in Shogun's Mission. Jubei's brother is an inspector on the famed Tokai Highway. Yagyu Jubei and his band of ninjas tag along as his bodyguards. This is classic road movie material with at least one big fight scene per episode. The Japanese title translates as "Yagyu's Unruly Journey."
• Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan (2017) is a live-action spin-off from Hirohiko Araki's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure series. I never got into the latter but quite like the former. Kishibe Rohan is a mangaka who investigates paranormal mysteries for inspiration when he gets writer's block. Basically he and his editor are Mulder and Scully. Issei Takahashi does well in the lead role.
• Speaking of road movies, from 1962 to 1989, Shintaro Katsu made twenty-six Zatoichi films, along with four seasons of the Zatoichi television series. Each episode has the itinerant blind masseur running into a bunch of bad guys who will get sliced and diced in his inimitable style by the time the end credits roll.

Related posts

Tubi in Japanese (1)
Tubi in Japanese (2)
Tubi in Japanese (3)
Samurai vs Ninja
Japanese language links

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, crunchyroll, kyoani, samurai vs ninja, streaming, television reviews, tubi

Back in 2020, the weekly Japanese women's lifestyle magazine Anan featured Major Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 on the cover of its July 8 issue, with feature articles about directors Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki and voice actress Atsuko Tanaka.

Atsuko Tanaka was the voice and soul of Motoko Kusanagi. Alas, the past tense is necessary here, as Atsuko Tanaka died on Tuesday at the age of 61. Her list of credits on ANN includes over four hundred video game and anime roles, including Harumi Kiyama in A Certain Scientific Railgun and Flamme in Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

But she will be forever remembered as the Major, one of my favorite characters of all time in any medium and the one that truly ignited my interest in anime.

A fascinating cultural conundrum revealed by the advent of manga and anime in America is that traditional Japan is so much better at creating believable female action characters than progressive Hollywood. Motoko Kusanagi is a girl boss you never doubt deserves to be in charge.

Nor is there any mystery about why Aramaki has her back or why her mostly male team is so willing to follow her lead.

Although the movie directed by Mamoru Oshii made Motoko and Ghost in the Shell famous, it was Kenji Kamiyama's Stand Alone Complex series and Solid State Society that defined the canon, into which Kamiyama and Aramaki have done a good job retrofitting their latest installment.

The opening arc of the new series takes place in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. Yeah, a bit on the been-there-done-that Mad Max side. But the series returns to form and Kamayama's classic Stand Alone Complex cyberpolice procedural roots once we get the Scooby Gang together again and back in Japan.

I like Purin taking over from Batou as the Tachikoma wrangler. The only real mark against SAC_2045 is that the Post Human storyline falls too far down the AI-as-antagonist rabbit hole. Granted, this AI is more interesting than most and Purin is the driving force during the concluding arc.

I wouldn't mind an episodic spin-off series that focused on Purin and the Tachikoma solving odd problems and investigating street-level cases.

At its best, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is a cyberpunk Blue Bloods, and I consider that high praise. I can easily imagine Section Chief Aramaki and Commissioner Reagan trading places or teams and soldiering on with barely a hitch.

The origins story Ghost in the Shell: Arise is on Crunchyroll (with a younger Motoko voiced by Maaya Sakamoto). Netflix has Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. Unfortunately, the rest of the installments in the Ghost in the Shell franchise are scattered all over the map.

Tubi has a dubbed version of the original movie. Many of the titles are on YouTube and Amazon Prime, though it might be more affordable to track down the DVD and Blu-ray editions. Anime News Network has an encyclopedic media review for the entire franchise.

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, crunchyroll, ghost in the shell, japanese culture, streaming, technology, thinking about writing, tubi

The human species has been going places ever since our ancestors learned to walk upright. With our restless feet taking us to every corner of the planet, it was only a matter of time before we started telling stories about how we got there, who we met, what we saw, and the interesting stuff that happened along the way.

And thus was born the road trip genre.

Convergent literary evolution consequently produced epic road trips as far-flung as The Odyssey from the western tradition and Journey to the West from the eastern tradition. The theme established here and elsewhere is that getting there isn't so much half the fun as it is pretty much the entire point.

So it comes as no surprise that, at the end of the story, there is no there there, no end of the line, no actual destination in mind. Just the journey. Consider the rootless gunman from classic American westerns, epitomized by Shane and Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.

They're going someplace. We don't know where and they don't either. They'll know where they're going when they get there.

The Man with No Name was inspired by Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, a ronin wandering across Edo period Japan. He had plenty of company. In fact, at one point in the Zatoichi series, he crosses swords with the blind masseur, who is also always on the road in search of a good dice game and a righteous cause.

In the world of narrative fiction, the eternal road trip is a neat device to keep the writer from telling the same story in the same place.

Written in the 16th century, Journey to the West follows the legendary pilgrimage of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled from China to Central Asia and India to obtain sacred Buddhist texts. The story and characters have inspired countless adaptations, Dragon Ball perhaps being the most famous.

More recent examples of the road trip include Kino's Journey and Spice and Wolf. The road trip can show up as an arc in a longer series, as when Yuuta bikes off to the northern tip of Hokkaido in Honey and Clover. And often turns into a heroic journey, as in Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

But Girls' Last Tour may present us with the road trip in its purest form.

The story begins in medias res with no explanations, no backstory. Chito and Yuuri are driving a halftrack through a huge and desolate industrial complex, looking for a way out. They finally emerge into a gray winter day. The whole world is gray. All around them are the remains of an apocalyptic military conflict.

They are apparently the only survivors of an unnamed military organization that fell apart through sheer entropy. Their uniforms and helmets place them in the first half of the 20th century.

Chito's halftrack is based on the Kleines Kettenkraftrad HK 101. Yuuri carries a bolt-action rifle and has what appears to be a Balkenkreuz on her helmet. Early on, they stumble across a graveyard of military equipment, including the wreckage of a Cold War era Tupolev Tu-95.

The remnants of every war ever fought everywhere. From there they venture into a ruined and depopulated megalopolis built by a highly advanced civilization. They are wandering through the decline and fall of a 22nd century Roman Empire that has so far regressed to the early 20th century and will certainly fall further.

And maybe that's not such a bad thing. Rather than with a bang or a whimper (T.S. Eliot), or with fire or ice (Robert Frost), this is a world destined to simply fade away. Hopefully to be reborn again another day.

Related links

Girls' Last Tour
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
Honey and Clover
Kino's Journey (2017)
Spice and Wolf (2024)

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, geography, history, japanese culture, manga, politics, thinking about writing

Perhaps the best known poems in anime are the tanka (or waka) recited during the Uta-garuta competitions in Chihayafuru. These poems are taken from the Hyakunin Isshu, an anthology of one hundred tanka compiled during the late Heian and early Kamakura periods by the scholar Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241).

Tanka are also featured in the Utakai Hajime ("First poetry recital") held annually at the Imperial Palace on New Year's Day. Tanka are distinguishable by a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern while haiku follow the more familiar 5-7-5 format.

Haiku are built upon a poetic framework that goes far deeper than just the syllable count. A well-formed haiku should demonstrate the appropriate use of kireji, words comparable to sounded-out punctuation marks that shape the pacing and prosody of the poem. And kigo, words that refer metaphorically to the specific season of the year.

In Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, haiku enthusiast Kouichi carries a saijiki (a kigo dictionary) around with him should the inspiration strike. Haiku is a serious enough literary subject to have its own dictionaries. And periodicals and associations and recitals and awards and, of course, school clubs.

What people outside Japan generally think of as haiku are often senryuu. The prosody of senryuu is the same as haiku but the use of kireji and kigo are not required. Moreover, senryuu takes human nature as its primary subject matter, with an emphasis on clever juxtapositions and comical turns of phrase that can resemble puns or aphorisms.

That makes senryuu popular in improvisational comedy shows like the long-running Shouten.

Along with Kouichi in In Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (and Komi in Komi Can't Communicate), Nanako in Senryu Girl would rather write than talk (this has become something of a trope of late). Senryuu is her preferred medium. Nanoko is a member of the high school literature club and attends the senryuu association at the local community center.

There Nanako meets classmate Eiji, a punk who got tired of being a punk and is reforming himself (another popular trope). He developed a love of senryuu along the way and hasn't shed his habit of reciting poems like a punk cruising for a bruising.

The Heike Story is a recent adaptation of the classic Heike Monogatari, about the decline and fall of the Taira clan. It is a historical drama and not about poetry per se. But the story is told from the perspective of Biwa. Traveling bards like Biwa are believed to have preserved the story until it was put down on paper.

Related anime

Chihayafuru
Komi Can't Communicate
Senryu Girl
The Heike Story
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop

Labels: anime, anime reviews, japan, japanese, japanese culture, literature, thinking about writing

Tubi has anime and Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama. Tubi doesn't have language filters either, so the only way to sift through Tubi's catalog, aside from third-party sites like Reelgood, is to look up specific titles, actors, and directors, or do global searches for "Japan" and "Japanese."

Even there, the Tubi search engine is fuzzy, so the hits will be all over the map and may have nothing to do with Japan. And because Tubi licenses just about anything as long as it's cheap and available, everything from art house to grindhouse to documentaries and travelogues will show up in the results.

I've curated a list of Japanese language titles on Tubi I thought were worth a second glance. I will update this list on a semi-regular basis.

• Bakuman (2013) presents an unflinching account about what it takes to become a manga artist. The process has largely gone digital in the last decade and emanga outsell paperbacks but the merciless challenges of the creative process haven't changed. Check out Sleeper Hit (2016) on Viki for a more modern take from the publisher's perspective. Also see my longer review.
• Daughter of Lupin (2019) is a live-action spin-off of the popular anime action comedy. Like Marilyn Munster on The Munsters, Hana is the only normal person in her odd family. She's a librarian engaged to a police officer from a family of police officers, which causes no end of comedic problems when her crime family gets framed for a series of crimes they didn't actually commit.
• Lupin the Third (1971–2023) Along with six television series, there are at least fifty Lupin the Third movies at the latest count. Tubi has about three dozen of them.
• Pinwheel Hamakichi's Spell (1992) A disgraced Edo period police officer, banished from the capital for accepting a bribe, returns five years later to search for his daughter. Still respected as a detective, he is prevailed upon to solve crimes in an unofficial capacity, and makes ends meet by selling pinwheel toys from a roadside stand.
• Shadow Warriors (1980) Sonny Chiba reassembled the cast and crew from Shogun's Samurai (1978) to play ninja leader Hattori Hanzo (like Yagyu Jubei, a documented historical figure). By day, he's the layabout owner of an Edo bathhouse (if you're looking for gratuitous nudity, look no further). By night, he and his ninjas fix the nasty problems the shogunate wants swept under the rug.
• Steamboy (2004) is about a boy named Edward Steam. Yes, the whole thing is that obvious. This steampunk adventure takes place in Victorian England and includes a big nod to George Stephenson, the "Father of the British Steam Railways." If nothing else, the constant whirring, hissing, clanking, and grinding of gears will be a visual delight for any gearhead. Also see my longer review.
• Summer Days With Coo (2007) Coo is a kappa, a mythological water-dwelling reptile with a penchant for cucumbers and sumo wrestling. The story asks what happens when a fairy tale character ends up in modern suburban Japan and meets a boy named Koichi. Based on the novels by Masao Kogure.
• Toradora (2008) As both a plot device and a well-used anime trope, perhaps no anime series exemplifies the tsundere character type better than Ryuji Takasu and Taiga Aisaka in Toradora. This high school romantic comedy works on every level and ends on exactly the right note. Tubi has English dubbed and Spanish subtitled versions as well. Also see my longer review.
• Uzumasa Limelight (2014) looks at the samurai action genre through the eyes of an aging stuntman who has difficulty getting cast in new productions after spending his entire career on a weekly historical drama like Abarenbo Shogun, that was on air from 1978 to 2008.

Related posts

Tubi in Japanese (1)
Tubi in Japanese (2)
Tubi in Japanese (3)
Samurai vs Ninja
Japanese language links

Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, jdrama, streaming, television reviews, tubi

In a previous post, I discussed what has become a perennial problem in the entertainment business: spending too much time on too little plot.

One example I offered for efficient scriptwriting is Three Star Bar in Nishi Ogikubo, that tells a satisfying tale in six half-hour largely standalone episodes.

Gamera Rebirth also does a good job in six forty-five minute episodes, integrating a backstory with the complexity of The X-Files without dragging the audience through all the nitty gritty details.

It then queues up a sequel (a single scene following the credit scroll) without resorting to a cliffhanger ending.

But perhaps the epitome of a tightly written teledrama is Monsters: 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation. In all of twenty-five minutes, we get a beginning, middle, and end, a (somewhat predictable) twist halfway through, and a conclusion that provides the promised payoff with another clever (and foreshadowed) twist.

Followed by a brief coda that ties it back to the One Piece universe.

This may be a bit of a spoiler, but Monsters takes a cue from the "management by walking around" governing style on display in samurai action classics such as Abarenbo Shogun and Mito Komon, that has a high government official mingling among the common folk into order to ferret out the bad guys.

It's an approach favored as well by Emperor Shouryuu in the Twelve Kingdoms.

This little gem was penned by One Piece mangaka Eiichiro Oda. Granted, if you're not familiar with One Piece, you may wonder what a French swordsman, a samurai, and a dragon are doing in a town straight out of the American West. But you quickly stop wondering because the narrative can carry that weight.

I don't follow One Piece closely and wasn't aware of the connection before watching the show. And yet despite the odd anachronisms, it was still one of the most entertaining movies I've seen in quite a while.

Monsters: 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation is streaming on Netflix.

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, jdrama, netflix, thinking about writing, viki

Honda will stop selling motorcycles with 50cc and smaller internal combustion engines in the next fiscal year. That means drawing the curtains on the Super Cub, once the most popular motorcycle in the world. With a four-speed clutchless transmission geared for utility, the Super Cub sold 100 million units since going into production in 1958.

Alas, in recent years, the popularity of the 50cc motorcycle class has waned due to the

proliferation of electric bicycles and the rise of electric scooters. Around 1.98 million motorcycles in the category were shipped in 1980 but the number plunged to around 90,000 by 2023.

Stricter emissions regulations factored into the equation as well.

I had a 400cc CB400T Honda Hawk in college. When I first lived in Japan almost half a century ago, Super Cubs equipped with delivery rigs were ubiquitous on the backstreets of Tokyo.

My rekindled affection for Honda motorcycles this time around is thanks to one of my very favorite anime. Super Cub is based on the light novels and manga by Tone Koken and was made into a 2021 series by Studio Kai.

Koguma is a high school student living a lonely life in the exurbs of Yamanashi Prefecture. Her life undergoes a major change when she buys a vintage Super Cub to commute to school. Her Super Cub catches the attention of classmate Reiko, a Super Cub fanatic, and Shii, whose eccentric parents run a German-style bakery and coffee shop that Reiko frequents.

What follows is textbook slice-of-life storytelling. The only episode with a traditional narrative arc has Reiko attempting to conquer Mt. Fuji on a Super Cub (which actually has been done). The rest might better be called "Zen and the Art of Super Cub Maintenance." Of course, one of those classic Super Cub delivery rigs makes a cameo appearance.

The series concludes with a Super Cub road trip chasing the cherry blossom season down to the southernmost tip of Kyushu. Yeah, it's basically a six hour commercial for Honda, but what a great commercial it is!

The Super Cub C125 is available in North American. Its 125cc engine makes it a full-fledged motorcycle and not a scooter. (The original Super Cub had a 49cc engine to avoid being legally designated a motorcycle in Japan.) If the day comes that I find myself with a couple of grand burning a hole in my pocket, I have to hope it will still be on the market.

Super Cub is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, business, japanese culture, personal favs

Starting perhaps with the Sakura Wars franchise, the two decades from the end of the Russo-Japanese War through the Taisho era (1905–1926) have come to encompass Japan's steampunk period.

Also known as the Taisho Democracy, a flowering of democratic ideals leading to a short-lived parliamentary system, it is the setting for My Happy Marriage, Otome Youkai Zakuro, Demon Slayer, Golden Kamuy, Taisho Otome Fairy Tale, Taisho Baseball Girls, and many others.

My Happy Marriage and Otome Youkai Zakuro also share a similar premise. Though the modern age is upon them, they still live in a demon-haunted world and those demons have to be dealt with.

In My Happy Marriage, Kiyoka Kudou is the stoic leader of the Special Anti-Grotesquerie Unit, while in Otome Youkai Zakuro, Kei Agemaki is the stoic second lieutenant in the Ministry of Spirits.

Kudou's team pacifies rampaging youkai while Agemaki (aided by two fellow officers and three youkai allies) is tasked with dispatching the worst of the lot while reaching negotiated settlements with the rest.

Though as the title suggests, My Happy Marriage primarily concerns itself with the relationship between Kudou and Miyo Saimori and the complications that ensue. As a result, he ends up spending more of his time fighting other human magic wielders than actual youkai.

Miyo Saimori is the Japanese Cinderella in this story and Kudou is her prince charming, except he is not at all charming when they first meet. He's more like Fitzwilliam Darcy on a bad day and his reputation precedes him.

Even during the Taisho era, the aristocracy used marriage to conduct business and politics. Kudou, for one, is tired of the gold diggers and opportunists showing up on his doorstep and assumes the worst of Miyo as well. Once he realizes that all she wants is to be nowhere near her stepmother and stepsister, he begins to warm to her presence.

I was wary at first about My Happy Marriage for fear of being drenched in Miyo's misery. But the worst of it is over by the end of episode one, with the evil step-people making a return visit in episode five.

Convinced that Miyo had no supernatural powers, Miyo's father was eager at first to get rid of her and was surprised when Kudou accepted. A little genealogical research later, it becomes apparent that Miyo is a descendant of the powerful Usuba bloodline on her mother's side. Even if she has no powers now, they are likely to manifest later.

So now they want her back. But in the meantime, Kudou has grown quite fond of her. He is not about to give up this diamond in the rough without a fight. You really don't want to get Kudou mad and have him go all Hulk Smash! on you.

A big difference with Otome Youkai Zakuro is that we don't actually see Kudou doing his job until the second half. In the first half of the series, he's got his hands full dealing with his in-laws. In the second half, Miyo's connection to the Usuba clan has caught the attention of the powers that be, who fear she will upset the status quo.

My Happy Marriage concludes with the Taisho emperor (Yoshihito in our world) going off the rails (which he did in our world too) and Takaihito (Hirohito) stepping in as regent. Miyo is safe and the situation has stabilized for the time being. But hardly permanently. So a second season is in the works.

My Happy Marriage is streaming on Netflix.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, fantasy, history, japanese culture, netflix, politics

Why do western audiences like anime? One reason is precisely because anime doesn't pander to western audiences. Or rather, anime in general does not make a concerted effort to appeal to modern audiences outside Japan.

The Critical Drinker deserves the credit for turning that expression into a pejorative. To be sure, any trending social and political movement will inevitably show up in Japanese popular culture (often using the same English terminology). But in almost every case, it is an ephemeral surf that leaves the deeper societal currents undisturbed.

Dating back at least 2500 years, Confucianism is the common cultural cornerstone of the Sinosphere. In particular, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam share a worldview with deep roots in Confucianism. Especially in South Korea, that worldview "shapes the moral system, the way of life, social relations between old and young, high culture, and much of the legal system."

It's easy to spot an almost identical postmodern veneer around the developed world and assume that all such societies are essentially the same. But no matter how contemporary a society may appear on the surface, the bedrock culture remains. If only for the sake of verisimilitude, it must constitute an inextricable part of any story being told in that context.

The payoff is that understanding and respecting the immutable nature of the culture makes for a reliable source of tension and conflict and narrative depth.

Challenging traditional values is one thing. Eliminating them entirely is quite another. That's what China did during the Cultural Revolution. The result was the wholesale destruction of an entire generation. It comes as no surprise that those very same communists are now hawking the ancient cultural heritage and Confucian teachings they once vilified.

China learned the hard way the value of Chesterton's Fence.

Granted, aside from a handful of trending topics and popular political slogans, most people would have a hard time identifying what those cultural values are. But they do recognize their absence. Like a living organism deprived of a necessary nutrient, though its absence may go unnoticed at first, its loss will inevitably exact a toll.

Regardless of the genre, anime is deeply rooted in Japanese culture. Even when seemingly lost in translation, it shores up the story being told. From the hierarchal language to the education system, to food, fashion, architecture, and a myriad of other customs that are centuries old and very much alive.

A great example of this is Dragon Pilot, that starts at a modern JSDF air force base, and then tosses dragons, miko (Shinto shrine maidens), and ancient religious rites into the mix. Dragon Pilot introduces the shrine maidens in the last third of the story, while Otaku Elf takes place entirely in the shrine maiden genre.

The Japanese title for the latter is Edomae Elf and Elda has been hanging around Takamimi Shrine since the dawn of the Edo period. More recently in the early twentieth century, the Taisho period has become the go-to setting for Japan's fantasy steam punk era, as in My Happy Marriage and Demon Slayer.
In an interview posted on Anime News Network, My Happy Marriage director Takehiro Kubota was asked if he was concerned about how viewers outside Japan would enjoy and interpret the anime.

"Not really," was his reassuring answer.

In fact, I never imagined that it would be seen so widely in so many different countries, so I was grateful when I heard that it had been watched by so many people overseas and had such a positive response. Perhaps due to Miyo's uniquely Japanese character? It's somewhat hard to express the nuance, but Miyo is a quite modest person who clearly doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve. I found it very interesting that her character was accepted in other cultures where being able to assert one's own opinion is a highly valued character trait.

A big part of what draws western audiences to anime is precisely because it is not made for western audiences. The aesthetics of anime create an additional level of remove that paradoxically makes reality all the more real. So as it turns out, then, I do like the isekai genre very much, because watching anime takes me on a voyage to another world.

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Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, culture, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, politics, streaming, thinking about writing

Thinking about slice-of-life anime, I believe the genre often has an clear-cut narrative structure, what I call the outsider-to-insider learning curve.

In Super Cub, Koguma starts out as a novice. Learning the ropes first from her mechanic and then from Reiko, a Super Cub aficionado, Koguma goes from outsider to insider over the first half of the series. But neither of them have ridden their motorcycles in the winter, so a whole arc is devoted them learning how to adapt their Super Cubs (and themselves) to the cold, again going from outsiders to insiders.

In the last episode, their friend Shii buys a Super Cub and so she as well is on her journey from outsider to insider.

Non Non Biyori begins with Hotaru moving from Tokyo and attending her first day of school. The quintessential outsider. Laid-Back Camp has Nadeshiko biking to a scenic overlook for a view of Mt. Fuji. There she meets Rin and gets interested in camping. As in Super Cub, the first season follows Nadeshiko as she learns about camping from Rin and the school's camping club. As the POV character, what she learns, the audience learns.

In the food genre, Solitary Gourmet features Yutaka Matsushige eating at a different (real) restaurant every episode (being the proprietor of a one-man import-export business is the pretext for him traveling all over the place). Every episode begins with him as an outsider at that particular restaurant and ends with him an insider, having observed the cooks and clientele and eaten practically everything on the menu.

Samurai Gourmet and Wakako Zake follow a similar formula. The latter even includes details about the restaurants visited at the end of each episode.

What makes Akebi in Akebi's Sailor Uniform more of a Mary Sue (though an entertaining one) is that she goes from outsider to insider in one episode. By contrast, in Snow White with the Red Hair, earning her insider status takes Shirayuki most of the first cour.

As a general rule, the romance genre always benefits from a learning curve unrelated to the romantic relationship, such as Sawako in Kimi ni Todoke using her nickname as an impetus to study up on Japanese folklore, which pays off brilliantly at the end of the second season.

And in Insomniacs After School, given the task of revitalizing the astronomy club, Ganta takes up the hobby of astrophotography and finally learns how to use the expensive digital camera his father gave him.

In the last third of the season, Ganta and Isaki travel around the Noto Peninsula searching for shooting locations, a narrative arc now made all the more poignant in the aftermath of the 2024 Noto earthquake. A realistic learning curve can't help but touch upon the real world.

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Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, japanese culture, thinking about writing

Tubi has anime and Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama. Tubi doesn't have language filters either, so the only way to sift through Tubi's catalog, aside from using third-party sites like Reelgood, is to look up specific titles, actors, and directors or do global searches for "Japan" and "Japanese."

Even there, the Tubi search engine is fuzzy, so the hits will be all over the map and may have nothing to do with Japan. And because Tubi licenses just about anything as long as it's cheap and available, everything from art house to grindhouse to documentaries and travelogues will show up in the results.

I've curated a list of Japanese language titles on Tubi I thought were worth a second glance. I will update this list on a semi-regular basis.

• Blue Thermal (2022) follows Tamaki Tsuru as she learns to fly gliders in the college soaring club. The movie makes the common mistake of cramming in too many plot points from the manga, and relies on angst as an excuse for doing really dumb stuff, but the unique subject matter kept me interested.
• Cats of Japan (2020) is a cute travel documentary about cats lounging around and being cool. The kind of show to watch when you just want to kick back and relax.
• Detective Dobu (1991) is an Edo period Columbo, whose slovenly and bumbling ways disguise his keen mind and relentless drive to catch the criminal (although Columbo never drank as much as Dobu does, if at all). The series covers the same material as the earlier made-for-television movies, also on Tubi.
• Crisis: Special Security Squad (2017) Shun Oguri heads a secret team of specialists tackling threats the regular cops can't handle. In both good and bad ways, it's pretty much by-the-numbers for the genre.
• The Great War of Archimedes (2019) The first six minutes documents the sinking of the battleship Yamato. The rest of the movie is a political drama (that feels like a stage play) about how Admiral Yamamoto tried to scuttle the project in favor of building more carriers. Also see my longer review.
• Kamen Rider Zero-One (2020) This comedy action series in the long-running Kamen Rider franchise could be a Terminator prequel. Enjoyable in small doses as practically every episode is the same and not all that different. It gets old fast if you don't pace yourself.
• The Life of Bangaku (2002) is an Edo period action comedy starring acclaimed actor Koji Yakusho as an expert swordsman who is simply too honest and principled for his own good. Directed by Kon Ichikawa.
• Shogun's Samurai (1978) was broadcast in Japan as The Yagyuu Conspiracy. Sonny Chiba stars as the historical figure Yagyuu Jubei. Together with his brother and father, Yagyuu carries out a palace coup in order to install Iemitsu as the third Tokugawa shogun, and then has to deal with the violent blowback.
• Zankuro (2001) Ken Watanabe is a retainer of the shogun during the Edo period. Despite his position in the low aristocracy, his bad habits and his mother's spendthrift ways constantly outstrip his stipend, leaving him to moonlight as a bodyguard or executioner or detective, whatever it takes to make ends meet.

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Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, japanese, japanese tv, jdrama, streaming, technology, television reviews, tubi

As with Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the title character of A Certain Magical Index, many of the seemingly farfetched religious references in the series are based on actual historical people and events.

For example, Stiyl Magnus and Kaori Kanzaki are members of Necessarius, the Special Forces sorcery squad of the Anglican Church.

Okay, that part is fiction.

Kaori Kanzaki is a former leader of the Amakusa Catholics, descendants of the "Hidden Christians" that preserved the faith after the disaster of the Shimabara Rebellion in 1637.

That last part is not.

Jesuit missionaries arrived in Japan in the 1540s in the company of Portuguese traders. They were followed by Franciscans and Dominicans under the aegis of Spain. During the latter half of the sixteenth century, they enjoyed the patronage of Oda Nobunaga, the first of the Three Great Unifiers of Japan during the Warring States period.

Nobunaga had no interest in Christianity per se, but he was very interested in the firearms provided by the Spanish and Portuguese. Christianity was also a useful political check on the Buddhist factions in Kyoto that were a constant thorn in his side.

Alas, several years after Nobunaga's assassination, Spanish conquistadores were caught saying the quiet part out loud and Christianity quickly fell out of favor with the powers that be. As Hisaki Amano explains,

A Spanish ship en route from the Philippines to Mexico suffered serious damage in a series of typhoons and drifted ashore in Tosa (modern-day Kochi Prefecture). Under interrogation, the ship's crew responded that Spain was a world power that dispatched missionaries to convert the local population before occupying the countries.

Nobunaga's successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, began persecuting Christians with a vengeance, culminating in the martyrdom of twenty-six priests and believers in Nagasaki in 1597. Under the Tokugawa shoguns, Christianity was outlawed. Especially after the Shimabara Rebellion, simply being a Christian was deemed a capital offense.

That legal status was not amended until the late nineteenth century.

The Shimabara Rebellion erupted in 1638 on the island of Kyushu. Nagasaki was once a major Portuguese trading port and Shimabara had the highest percentage of Christians in the country. The rebellion began as a peasant uprising, and was soon joined by Catholic Christians chafing under the heavy hand of local leaders and the shogunate.

Although the rebellion was not without cause and the governor of Shimabara was later executed for misrule and incompetence, such a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Edo government could not go unanswered.

At the age of seventeen, Amakusa Shiro became the leader of the Japanese Roman Catholics in Shimabara. After a tortuous siege, Shogunate forces overran Hara Castle in 1639 and killed upwards of 37,000 rebels and sympathizers. But the Hidden Christians persevered until the anti-Christian edicts were removed two and a half centuries later.

This is a case where the winners wrote the history books, so Amakusa Shiro was made the villain. He is one of the bad guys in Makai Tensho, a 1967 fantasy novel by Futaro Yamada that has Amakusa Shiro rising from the grave to exact revenge on the shogunate.

Three movies have been made from the book, the most recent in 2003. The best known remains the 1981 version starring Sonny Chiba as Yagyu Jubei, a role he returned to often in samurai action series such as Shogun's Samurai. Overseas releases appended Samurai Reincarnation to the title.

Tubi has a generous selection of Sonny Chiba films and series, including a dubbed version of Samurai Reincarnation and half a season of Shogun's Samurai.

Over the past century, and certainly since 1945, the image of Christianity in Japan has been thoroughly rehabilitated. Christian style weddings (fake pastor included) have become all the rage. Former prime minister Aso Taro is a Catholic. And Christmas (along with Santa Claus) is now one of Japan's most popular unofficial holidays.

Along the way, as evident in series like A Certain Magical Index, Hellsing, and The Ancient Magus Bride, Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, became a rich source of dramatic material. Unconstrained by the usual cultural preoccupations, Japanese writers often push those religious tropes in quite unexpected directions.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, geography, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, politics, religion

As I mention in my review of Little Witch Academia, the philosophical and legal dilemmas at the center of Captain America: Civil War and the Incredibles are more often than not settled issues in manga and anime. The existence of superpowered individuals is widely known and they work within a regulatory framework.

One-Punch Man is another recent example. When it comes to consistent world building across an entire franchise, I've taken a particular liking to the three anime series based on the light novels by Kazuma Kamachi.

Sharing many of the same characters and storylines, A Certain Magical Index, A Certain Scientific Railgun, and A Certain Scientific Accelerator take place in Academy City. Imagine if every major high school, university, research institute, and corporate lab in the country had extension campuses within the same prefectural boundaries.

This being Japan, students are tested and ranked from zero (no superpowers) to six (out of this world). Following a normal distribution, there are a lot of zeroes and ones, and only seven Fives. Even the Fives are ranked, with Accelerator at the top. The ranks are logarithmic, so similarly ranked espers can still be orders of magnitude apart in their powers.

Espers are seen as "scientific," as distinguished from skills derived from magic. When Index Librorum Prohibitorum (her name derived from the 103,000 forbidden magical books she's memorized) shows up in Academy City with a bunch of sorcerers and miniskirted Catholic nuns in her wake, her presence throws Toma Kamijo's life into turmoil.

Incidentally, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was an actual list of publications deemed "heretical or contrary to morality." It was revised and updated until 1966, though it contained thousands of volumes, not hundreds of thousands.

As the title makes clear, more than the rest of the franchise, A Certain Magical Index switches back and forth between magical and religious forces or scientific and superpower forces as main drivers of the conflicts. The result is an interesting mix of fantasy and hard science fiction.

Railgun and Accelerator belong almost entirely to the latter genre while half or more of Index could share the same world as The Ancient Magus Bride.

In the second and third seasons of Index, it's the English Reformation redux as the Anglicans and Puritans go to war with the Catholic Church. I get a real kick out of the tossed salad of Western and Eastern religious tropes that show up so often in manga and anime, like Jesus and Buddha sharing a Tokyo apartment in Saint Young Men.

Toma Kamijo, the protagonist in A Certain Magical Index, is actually a negative infinity in the esper superpower rankings. With his right hand, he can negate both magic and esper skills. He seems to be the only one who can do this, which means that all the espers milling about in Academy City create a unique law enforcement problem.

Working alongside the regular police are two additional organizations. "Judgment" is run by the students, who basically form patrol units of glorified hall monitors. Though when the hall monitors have superpowers, they tend to stray outside their jurisdictional boundaries. "Anti-Skill" is comprised of heavily-armed SWAT teams.

But when high-level espers go off the rails, even Anti-Skill can find themselves out of their depth. Then only another Five (or Toma Kamijo) can hope to match them. Kuroko Shirai (a level Four teleporter) is a member of Judgment. She's also roommates with Mikoto Misaka, a level Five, so Mikoto often ends up getting drawn into the fray.

Mikoto has a skill set similar to Magneto in X-Men. Her preferred technique is to propel a coin through a self-generated electric field to hypersonic speeds, hence her "Railgun" moniker.

Despite the proliferation of so many superpowered individuals in Academy City, there is, refreshingly, no one ring to rule them all, no big bad, no supervillain. Accelerator certainly has the potential to step into the role, though his reasoning is that if he really could become the biggest big bad in the world, everybody would leave him alone.

There are, to be sure, a whole bunch of little bads, espers renting out their skills to government and private sector and black market organizations. But they usually play supporting roles to the actual villains. If there is a consistently distinct and identifiable antagonist, it is the academic establishment itself and the accompanying state bureaucracy.

The underlying motivations for these actors come down to ordinary human failings like arrogance, envy, and greed, though A Certain Scientific Accelerator starts out as Magnum Force and turns into the sixth season opening arc of Buffy, where the Scooby Gang resurrects Buffy (with near apocalyptic results in this case).

The crazies aside, they don't perceive themselves as bad people doing bad things. They're too busy filling out grant proposals and delivering papers at conferences to worry about the moral implications of their experiments. Surrounded by so many fascinating labs rats, who can blame them for the odd ethical lapse? Scientific progress justifies all!

Tying the three series together is the kind of underground experiment that the Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files would love. It involves the manufacture of 20,000 Railgun clones that have been specifically designed to raise Accelerator's powers to the mythical Level Six through the brute-force use of real-time Darwinian selection.

The fate of the clones draws Mikoto into a no-win conflict with Accelerator, the most powerful level Five in Academy City. When we first meet him, Accelerator is a bona fide sociopath. But not beyond salvation. The terrible things we see him doing were not his idea. But he is the reason the Railgun clones were created.

Mikoto's low point comes when she realizes that fighting the establishment using the "Hulk smash!" approach simply results in one Pyrrhic victory after the next. Wreck a laboratory and they'll build another. The only way to stop these Doctor Frankensteins to make them question the validity of the experiments themselves.

This is when Toma steps in to settle things with a good old-fashioned fist fight, he being the only person who can literally reduce every superhero to his level.

Toma takes so much damage getting close enough to deliver the beat-downs that he's got his own hospital room reserved for him. Luckily for him, he can count the Frog-Faced Doctor as an ally. Also known as Heaven Canceller, the Frog-Faced Doctor can reattach limbs and bring practically anybody back to life as long as they're not stone-cold dead.

Along the way, Toma likely sets some sort of cinematic record for getting into brawls with women. As Arnold Schwarzenegger's Harry Tasker says in True Lies, "Yeah, but they were all bad." Academy City is an equal opportunity employer on both sides of the equation and thus home to some of the more interesting female villains in the genre.

Though as they all eventually discover, defeating someone in physical or supernatural combat doesn't change them unless what gets them up in the morning changes as well. It doesn't help that when you're the top dog, somebody is always trying to take you down a notch.

Accelerator's attempts to resolve his own moral quandaries eventually restores a portion of his humanity when choses to defend the final Misaka clone (known as "Last Order") from yet another mad scientist. Though doing so doesn't make him nice. He's like Spike in Buffy after he gets his soul back.

The substance of the conflict is told from the POV of Toma Kamijo in Index, Mikoto Misaka in Railgun, and then with Accelerator as the main character. The result is often great superhero storytelling without any spandex or the world ending every other week.

One ongoing flaw in Railgun is an odd scripting quirk that frontloads each of the narrative arcs with all the comic relief at once. Granted, this approach quickly dispenses with most of the dumb stuff, after which the narratives turn increasingly dark, at times descending from science fiction into outright horror.

The fan service in Index that gets tossed in at random intervals is no less juvenile, though pretty typical of shonen-oriented content. Accelerator is mostly free of slapstick. I guess Accelerator getting stuck with the chirpy Last Order and her third-person self-references was considered punishment enough.

All of the Misaka clones do this, something to do with their programming. It does help to tell who is a clone and who isn't.

The first five series follow a fairly cohesive narrative, interspersed with standalone arcs. Index begins with Toma meeting Index and explains her relationship to the Church of England. Starting with episode ten, we get an abridged version of the Mikoto Misaka clone arc that is significantly expanded upon in the first season of Railgun.

The first season of Index concludes with a segue to the Accelerator series and then adds a short arc that brings the Anglicans back into the story. Season two returns to the religious wars heating up between Academy City and the Catholic Church and the renegade Amakusa sect.

The Index story arcs at this point can get pretty scattershot and confusingly complex. In season two, the best Index episodes are those that feature Accelerator. I think Railgun has better overall consistency in terms of the plotting and writing.

1. A Certain Magical Index (1)
2. A Certain Scientific Railgun (1)
3. A Certain Scientific Railgun (2)
4. A Certain Scientific Accelerator (1 season)
5. A Certain Magical Index (2)
6. The Miracle Of Endymion
7. A Certain Magical Index (3)
8. A Certain Scientific Railgun (3)

The timeline plays out in approximately the above order. Except for Accelerator, the series have two-cour seasons so we're talking about a ton of content. The core of the franchise can be condensed to series 1 – 4. Crunchyroll places The Miracle Of Endymion between seasons two and three in the Index series.

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, japanese culture, japanese tv, religion, streaming