I’ve ruined anime for myself. I’m unable to watch any anime without trying to work out if I can write something about it or not. I analyze animation techniques and how the narrative fits into to greater “literature.” I compare whatever narrative I watch against touchstone narratives across different decades. I can’t watch a mecha, for example, without comparing it to Macross, Neon Genesis Evangelion. Eureka Seven, Gurran Lagann, and Darling in the Franxx and wondering where the narrative fits among those samples. In short, watching anime for pure enjoyment proves difficult. When I’ve watched the best of a medium, decent, good, and even okay stories become harder to enjoy on their own merits because I automatically “study” as I watch. I have to tell myself “Stop, just watch it. You aren’t going to write anything about this one.” Despite that, a voice still nags me: “how can you write about this?” That voice drives me to watch stories that make me roll my eyes, usually some sort of harem, for an article idea. I grew up watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, so I have a high tolerance for bad narratives. Few anime narratives approach that level of bad! I define bad narratives as stories that don’t go anywhere, that are disjointed and illogical, and that have poor characterization. Huh, I just described most harem and romance anime! But because I have a high tolerance (okay, it’s a fondness) for bad narratives, I will give bits of my life, which is what you do whenever you watch an anime, to stories I don’t enjoy so that I have a better frame of reference for writing. You can’t understand why good stories are good without understanding why bad stories are bad. Nor can you see why stories you don’t enjoy are popular among the anime community without watching them. I dedicated a year and a half to watching One Piece to try to understand why people like the series. I can see why the drama and characters appeal to people along with the adventure, but I also concluded One Piece isn’t for me. Each moment I spend watching a narrative I dislike takes a moment away from a narrative I could watch and enjoy. I gain knowledge that proves useful, often unconsciously, for my writing both here and in my book projects, yet I still could’ve used that time relaxing to something else. Relaxing is a problem when what you enjoy becomes your work–unpaid or paid work. If you don’t write about anime or create videos, you can sit back and get lost in the story. I can only do this with stories I’ve watched multiple times and have already squeezed for all the articles I want to write about them. While JP is a hobby–I don’t support myself through my writing–writing about anime has taught me the dangers of making what you love your work. You’ve no doubt heard people say “if you love what you do, you won’t work a day in your life.” The reverse is true: “you won’t ever stop working if you love what you do.” Making your calling or your hobby into your work makes it your work. You won’t be able to separate your work from your hobby any more. You won’t be able to watch anime without thinking about how you could write an article about the anime. The monetary aspect can further pressure and corrode your love for your hobby. This is one reason why I avoid trying to monetize JP. Yes, I peddle my books here, and I aim at making writing my livelihood. But I am under no illusions; few writers can make a livelihood from their books. The ones that do are unicorns against the masses of writers that cannot. If you approach your love-work with this realistic view, the view helps guard you from burn out and disappointment. Strive to make your passion into your livelihood if that’s your desire, but keep your day job and patience. I’ve been hammering at book writing for around 12 years. Longer, if you consider all the other novels and projects I wrote before I decided to become serious in my writing studies and production. Turning what you enjoy into your work, assuming you define work as livelihood, takes persistence over the long term. It can take decades or never happen at all. But if you feel truly called to do your work, you will do your work no matter the extrinsic outcomes. You will pay the price in rejections and failures. If you want to write professionally about anime, you will lose your ability to see anime as anything beyond work unless you learn to compartmentalize. I haven’t succeeded at that. On the other hand, I’ve gained a deeper appreciation for anime and animation in general after studying them for over 25 years. Even bad anime contains flourishes of greatness where the animators were having a good day or skilled up. These can be small things, like a particularly well-animated hair movement. You can also tell when the animators are enjoying themselves with a scene or, conversely, when the animators aren’t feeling the story. When you deep dive into your passion, you gain more frames of references and a greater understanding of techniques. You realize that you don’t understand as much as you think! No matter what the topic, mastery becomes a never-ending realization that there’s much more for you to learn. When you make what you enjoy your work, you unlock the option for mastery. It seems silly to say watching and writing about cartoons involves mastery, but literary experts do just that with books. There’s always more to learn about narrative techniques, meanings, animation techniques, color theory, and other parts. Mastery isn’t an endpoint; it’s a beginning. Not that I’ve achieved any level of mastery! So, what’s your take away from my rambling? Beware making your hobbies into your work without considering how this may impact you. It seems cool at first. Who wouldn’t want to be paid to watch and blog or vlog about anime? But there’s the possibility you will come to dislike what you love. If you love video games and make it your profession, will you want to play video games for fun? It will feel like you are going back to work instead of resting! Don’t let me deter you. If you feel called to make your passion into your work, be it a side hustle or pseudo-hobby like mine, go for it! Just do your homework before you start. Prepare to chip at it for years or even decades.

Books compete with social media, video games, and streaming for attention. We have only 24 hours to divide among sleep, work, chores, socializing, and entertainment. Books have to fight for a slice of this attention. And books are increasingly failing to do so. In Gallup’s most recent (that I can find–from 2022) report on American book reading habits…well, let’s say the results don’t look great. People read fewer books on average, from 15.6 in 2016 to 12.6. While reading three fewer books a year doesn’t seem like a big deal, extrapolate that across the entire reading population. The number of people who read books holds steady: 17% of American adults say they don’t read books compared to 18% in previous surveys. If we do some rough math, about 47 million American adults are readers, which means they read about 141 million fewer books each year. That’s a large slice removed from the publishing industry and public libraries! According to NPR (2025), 21% of American adults are illiterate or functionally illiterate. NPR also discusses a Duke study that found using AI to help with a reading task decreases reading comprehension by 12%. Literacy skills fall on a spectrum measured between levels 1 and 3. In a 2023 US government study of literacy, 28% of adults were at Level 1, 28% were at Level 2, and 44% were at Level 3 or higher (U.S. Department of Education, 2024). Level 1 is the ability to understand basic vocabulary and read short texts with simple instructions. Level 2 includes the ability to relate multiple pieces of information within or across a few texts. People at this reading level are expected to compare and contrast simple information and draw simple inferences. At this reading level, people can’t understand moderately complex texts. Readers at Level 3 and above are proficient readers with the ability to understand, interpret, and synthesize information across multiple complex texts. They also have the ability to evaluate the reliability of a text. For reference, I write for readers above Level 3. Levels 1 and 2 are people who read below reasonable standards. In other words, the majority of American adults are functionally illiterate. When I was a librarian, I encountered this illiteracy and reading comprehension problem daily. I even see it here with some of the comments left by drive-by readers. They usually rage about something I address within the article, but that’s understandable when we skim rather than read. Research suggests we’ve trained ourselves to skim text on a screen. Screen reading is also shallower than reading from a page. This training then carries over to all forms of reading, making it harder for people to read long texts. All of this combines to reduce the number of books people read. Books require more effort than other forms of entertainment. Television is passive, and video games can be more gratifying and exciting than books. So, all these data led me to wonder how this reading decline impacted manga in the US. I found estimated breakdowns of the top 10 manga sold from 2019 through 2024. The popularity of Demon Slayer during COVID made manga sales spike. Demon Slayer sold an estimated 82 million copies in 2020 (Japan Anime News, 2020). Following this blip, manga sales for the top 10 continued on a slow decline as this chart shows:   I compiled the estimated sales over the years into a single chart to show the estimated sales of each title over time. The most popular three titles tend to outsell the rest by a large margin. It’s interesting to see how titles drop off. Demon Slayer disappears from the top 10 lists soon after its popularity jump. One Piece remains consistently popular, which should come as no surprise. One Piece stands as one of the best-selling titles since it debuted in 1997. But even the mighty One Piece suffers from the general trend of people reading fewer books.  Top 10 lists hide long-tail sales. It’s natural for books to have a limited mass popularity but continue to sell units over the long term. Although Demon Slayer fell off the top 10, it continued to sell copies. The decrease in book reading also erodes manga reading when you filter out the Demon Slayer blip. I suspect book reading will continue to decline as easier, more engaging modes of entertainment eat into our free time. Artificial Intelligence can offer on-the-fly, custom stories and even “Choose Your Own Adventure” style stories. These are low quality, but when we consider the low literacy level of the majority of Americans,  AI-generated texts hit the literacy capability of that majority. The poor literacy level explains the popularity of dross in entertainment. I consider AI interaction as a new mode of entertainment. AI can take on personas which create a simulacrum of socialization. AI will eventually create manga to suit user tastes and request. You can even play text-based RPGS with AI. And this consumes time better spent on reading books. Economics also plays a role. People might be working several jobs or working longer hours to survive. Books are also expensive. Collecting a complete manga series can be more expensive still. But this argument also doesn’t hold much water; I buy most of my books second hand. While this doesn’t support publishers, buying second hand allowed me to build an extensive library for a fraction of the cost. Plus, you can find out-of-print books, and you never know what you will find. The thrill of discovery is part of the fun! It’s a rush to find an obscure Japanese book on your list hidden in a Mennonite thrift store, of all places, for only a dollar! Public libraries and legal online services further blunt the expense of book reading. I’ve written about the book reading problem before, but after running the estimated manga sales and seeing them drop off, even adjusting for the Demon Slayer sensation, my concern grew. While I still read more than 10 books a year, my reading time has been taken up with other concerns. I’ve been playing more video games to relax and working on writing projects a bit more. But then, my reading happens in phases. When I’m researching for a novel or a nonfiction project, I spend months reading and taking notes. When I write, I read less. But I read differently when I’m writing a book–like a biography about Kafka or something about the Roman period. If you want to read more, you have to make the effort to read more. Other forms of entertainment are easy–especially phone-based time wasters. Although phones offer another way to read, the temptation to check the Internet and social media is a bit too strong. That’s why I prefer physical books and dedicated ebook readers which can only display ebooks. Less temptation to check something and fall down a groundhog hole for the duration of my reading time. It’s encouraging that Gallup didn’t find fewer people reading. While I wish more people read books, this stable readership points to other pressures on book reading. Time and attention are limited. And there’s a lot fighting for our attention nowadays. Attention is money. And books are an ancient technology that can’t snag our attention as well as the glitz of AI, video games, and video. Books challenge our minds more than these mediums. Reading books makes you a more careful thinker–if you read books you agree with and disagree with. Reading books also makes you more empathetic. Research shows manga can help people learn to read social cues and facial expressions better. And books are fun if you give them a chance! References All Things Considered (2025) Americans are reading fewer books for less time. People want to know why. NPR https://www.npr.org/2025/02/20/nx-s1-5298185/americans-are-reading-fewer-books-for-less-time-people-want-to-know-why. De la Piedra, Matias (2024) SALES BREAKDOWN: Top 10 best-selling manga of 2024. Comics Beat. https://www.comicsbeat.com/top-10-best-selling-manga-of-2024/ Japan Anime News (2019) 2019 Annual Manga Sales Ranking Announced by Oricon. https://us.oricon-group.com/news/666/ Japan Anime News (2020) 2020 Annual Manga Sales Ranking Announced by Oricon. https://us.oricon-group.com/news/665/ Japan Anime News (2021) 2021 Annual Manga Sales Ranking Announced by Oricon. https://us.oricon-group.com/news/662/ Japan Anime News (2022) 2022 Annual Manga Sales Ranking Announced by Oricon. https://us.oricon-group.com/news/661/ Japan Anime News (2023) 2023 Annual Manga Sales Ranking Announced by Oricon. https://us.oricon-group.com/news/617/ Jones, Jeffrey (2022) Americans Reading Fewer Books Than in Past. Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2024). Highlights of the 2023 U.S. PIAAC Results Web Report (NCES 2024-202). Washington, DC. Retrieved [date] from https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp. Statistia Research Department (2025) Manga industry in Japan – statistics and facts.https://www.statista.com/topics/7559/manga-industry-in-japan/#topicOverview

Early in my anime writing, I tried to rank 100 good, bad, and influential anime. Now, over a decade later, I would make an entirely different list, adding obscure historical animations like Namakura Gatana or Hanawa Hekonai meito no maki because of their importance, and I would drop most of the anime that acted as filler on my original list. Live and learn! This new list doesn’t try to capture any important anime. This is my personal list, in no particular order, with some acknowledged recency bias baked into it. The titles on this list probably won’t surprise you if you are a long-time reader. I’m not avante garde in my story tastes, but I also don’t always like the stories the mainstream enjoys. If an anime is hyped, I tend to avoid it until the hype dies down so my expectations aren’t set by the more obsessive fans of the story. But why 35? It’s such an odd number! Well, I settled on that number after looking through all the different stories I’ve consumed after the years and after thinking about the stories I’ve either revisited, remembered with fondness, or continued to think about long after I finished the series. Some of the stories on this list are ongoing at the time I write this article. Depending on how the series goes, my thoughts may change. The title may even drop from this list! It’s my hope that this list will encourage you to check out a title you haven’t seen before, revisit a title, or consider how the story influenced your thinking. I also tried to include stories from a variety of genres. I’ve learned not to pigeon-hole myself to certain genres. This has allowed me to find a variety of stories that I wouldn’t have discovered if I remained within, say, the fantasy genre or within shonen. When I worked as a librarian, I often saw people avoid a story because it was “for kids” or had a “young adult” sticker on it. People worry too much about the labels and the opinions of others. Like what you like, and pay others no mind. Behind the scenes at the library, we used to pass around new picture books to read. The target audience doesn’t matter if the story is good. Samurai Champloo I enjoy Samurai Champloo a bit more than Cowboy Bebop. Both have the “found family” theme that I enjoy, and both are road stories. Champloo extends the same story beats as Bebop while remixing them in a way the still feels fresh and innovative. Next to Eureka Seven this is my most-revisited series. Visiting with Mugen, Jin, and Fuu feels like visiting with old friends. It helps that this series, along with Eureka Seven, provided me with sanctuary during a stressful, overly busy, and difficult section of my life. I would stay up late on Saturdays, sometimes until 6 am, to watch both of them on Adult Swim’s Toonami. Eureka Seven The second half of my supportive duo, the romance of Eureka Seven helped me through my own heartbreaks and through a time of death–a period where I was attending calling hours and funerals every few weeks it seemed. The love story between Renton and Eureka remains one of my favorites, aided by Bones’s animation that remains excellent even today. Everyone needs a story that provides sanctuary in times of trouble and heartache. Revisiting Eureka Seven still feels like tea and a warm blanket on a cold, blustery winter day. Inuyasha Inuyasha also stands with Samurai Champloo and Eureka Seven as comfort food, if not quite as homey as they are. Because Inuyasha was a staple on Toonami for so long, it’s not as bookended as those two stories are. Instead, Inuyasha was like an always-available comfort food, not special, but always enjoyed and welcomed.  The story got me interested in yokai and Japanese folklore, eventually leading me to write Come and Sleep: The Folklore of the Japanese Fox and Tales from Old Japan: Folktales and Legends of the Land of the Rising Sun, which took as many years to research and write as the years I watched Inuyasha, interestingly enough. Neon Genesis Evangelion Anime has several pivotal titles that changed the medium: Astro Boy, Akira, and Pokemon among others. Neon Genesis Evangelion stands among them, influencing anime even today. Anime before Evangelion was different from anime after, with many tropes, motifs, and story beats referencing how Evangelion gathered the pieces together and changed them. Rei, for example, brought together various character elements already present in anime. She isn’t original as a character, but she became the template for the quiet, mysterious type going forward. Likewise Asuka became the template for the tsundere character type. Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I first watched the series. I enjoyed the psychological tangle in the story, while I loathed the whiny, passive Shinji. I understand Shinji’s character now, but I watched in the hopes that he would grow a spine and mature into a hero character. The subversion of that expectation remains unique. Cowboy Bebop Anime needs more space opera westerns outside of Gundam. Yeah, some entries in that series feel like a Western story, but nothing like Bebop‘s mashup of genres. The story remains thought provoking with how it handles the characters and their stories. The series remains comforting and uncomfortable at the same time. Many people consider the series overhyped. Like Evangelion, anime changed before and after Cowboy Bebop, and for many fans at the time, the story showed how anime wasn’t only for kids and teens. Unfortunately, adult-oriented stories remain relatively rare, but Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo prove anime has something for all ages. I enjoy spending time with Ed, Ein, and the rest of the crew. Fullmetal Alchemist I don’t mean Brotherhood when I list Fullmetal Alchemist. While Brotherhood follows the manga more closely than the original series, I prefer the original anime series. Brotherhood reduces Ed and Al into the typical shonen meatheads. Well, they aren’t as meatheaded as many protagonists are, but compared to their thoughtful, problem-solving versions of the original anime, their bulldozing persistent versions never felt quite right to me. But then, I prefer intellectual protagonists. That said, Winry is much a better character in Brotherhood and the ending is more satisfying, if less thought-provoking than the original series. Brotherhood isn’t bad, and I’ve been meaning to revisit it. But, as with so many of Toonami’s anime, I have fond memories of relaxing to the original series after working until midnight or later. Pokemon XY-XYZ I remember the initial craze surrounding Pokemon back in the 1990s. The anime series went a long way toward normalizing anime in the United States, if still continuing the association that animation is for children. The original series’s animation quality hasn’t aged well, even though it remains charming. XY-XYZ, however, elevated the animation quality of the series, combining 3D and 2D animation together to create a cinematic feel. Ash also sees surprising character progress for a children’s story, only to revert back to his target audience’s age and relationship experiences in the next series. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End This story hasn’t finished, so adding it to my list may be a bit premature; however, Frieren offers an excellent exploration of death, memory, nostalgia, and time. The story explores how emotions don’t have to be overt to be deep and meaningful. It has a quietude that I appreciate while raising the questions of life and death, of how we don’t appreciate what we have until it is gone. Frieren also teems with likeable characters and explores what happens after the hero wins–something that needs more exploration than it receives. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Anime suffers from a dearth of adult characters and stories, at least among Western releases. Ghost in the Shell along with Bebop and Champloo stands out because of the adult characters and themes. Not many anime can get away with philosophical discussions among characters as Ghost in the Shell does. This is a crime drama with that raises still-relevant questions about our relationship with technology. Dan Da Dan There’s some recency bias with how I’m adding Dan Da Dan to this list, much like Frieren. But this story is a wild ride with fun, frenetic animation and zany events that I’ve enjoyed. It’s surrealist at times, making me think of artists like Giorgio de Chirico. The characters are likeable and funny without falling into the annoying as so many anime comedies do. The creativity of it all keeps you guessing about what will happen next. Bleach Bleach has many problems with its pacing, story, and massive cast. Not to mention the comedy of later seasons falls into grating annoyance. There’s a lot of padding episodes that I skipped during my most recent revisit, making the story became tighter and more enjoyable. Despite these problems, Bleach remains enjoyable with a cool, urban chic and exciting battles. Bleach was among the titles I looked forward to watching on Toonami after a long week. Puella Magi Madoka Magica Madoka Magica offers a darker take on the magical girl genre, contrasting the heavy story with the cute character designs. It offers an interesting surrealist collage design when the girls fight against witches. Even if you aren’t into magical girl stories, this one offers an exploration of ethics, sacrifice, and friendship that’s worth watching. Horimiya Many romance stories provide examples of unhealthy relationships: codependency, insecure attachment, and various other unhealthy representations. These make for emotional conflict within stories and even for comedy, but they aren’t good models. Horimiya depicts a healthier relationship story, centered on acceptance and secure attachment. It’s not without conflicts or difficulties. A story needs some type of conflict or challenge for the characters to progress through. The characters feel realistic and less as tropes, even though you can find the usual shojo/josei story beats. Kill la Kill With a unique art style and frenetic animation, Kill la Kill stands apart from most other anime. It’s an example of how fan service can be used as vital part of the story while also satirizing and providing social commentary. Kill la Kill‘s animation reminds me of American Saturday morning cartoons rather than traditional anime design. It helps show how anime is a diverse medium. Dan Da Dan‘s animation style shares many similarities with Kill la Kill‘s, such as simplified character designs that lend themselves to dynamic action and speed deformations. Dragon Ball Z Kai I find the original Dragon Ball Z difficult to watch because of the padded fights and asides. Kai compresses everything into a more succinct (for Dragon Ball anyway) package. The quirky macho feel of the story keeps the story fun, even if the animation is dated by today’s quality standards. Dragon Ball‘s not a serious story, focusing instead on action, overcoming challenges, and teamwork. Perfect Blue Another mature story, Perfect Blue‘s animation and story has stuck with me, exploring psychological breakdown and stalking that feels similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s explorations of the psyche. The story plays with how perception determines reality, suggesting how everyone may live in a type of delusion until they learn to face themselves. Hellsing Ultimate There’s a madness to Alucard that breaths a freshness to the usually controlled portrays of Dracula. Hellsing Ultimate looks deep into the psychotic void that merges with violence to the point where villain and hero are just as evil. The story merges Dracula with Nazi conspiracy theories and stirs in legends of the Catholic Church’s exorcists while adding a technological twist. The result of an exploration of how the legacy of eugenics and technology dehumanize. Castlevania I first played Castlevania games on the original Nintendo console and enjoyed the series ever since. So when I first heard Netflix was producing an anime, I felt excited. And yes, despite how it was produced in the United States, I consider this series an anime. Besides, Castlevania is a Japanese video game series. Anime isn’t limited to Japanese studios, considering how tweens and production for anime are often outsourced to studios outside Japan. Castlevania features many elements combining 1990s style animation with modern styling. The character banter, the depth added to Dracula himself in the first season, the “gray” character motivation, and moral developments stand out. Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion Mecha stories like to sit in moral ambiguity and tangled plots of war. Code Geass continues this tradition with Clamp’s focus on character development and interpersonal conflicts as the driving force behind the conflicts. Politics and war spin out of these rivalries, friendships, and loves. The moral ambiguity of the story can leave you feeling uncomfortable at times, particularly if you attach to certain characters. The action punctuates these questions while also having realistic stratagems, which many series fumble. I’m no military strategist, but I facepalm whenever I see characters abandon superior defensive positions to charge headlong into their enemies and into certain defeat. I’m staring at you, Marvel Studios. Attack on Titan Attack on Titan is a thrilling first watch, full of twists and unpredictable events. One a second watch, you get to see the foreshadowing and threads that tie everything together. The story is well structured and well paced, with room for character development. Eren has an interesting character trajectory, starting as a typical stubborn shonen protagonist and changing to–well, you will have to watch if you haven’t already! Princess Mononoke This story provides a good example of Studio Ghibli’s traditional cel animation and the themes they often visit: the conflict and coexistence of humans and nature, love, and redemption. Ghibli has made many, many films, but this is the one I keep returning to. Pokemon Concierge I normally don’t like stop motion animation. Many stop motion uses clay as a part of its character or environmental design, which triggers an odd quirk I have. The sight of clay or Play-doh makes me nauseous. I have no idea why. Squishing and holding it makes my stomach turn over. But Pokemon Concierge uses felting and dolls rather than clay-sculpted figures. The felting adds to the cozy, soft story, while giving all the Pokemon personality and liveliness. You’ll want to pet them. And yes, Pokemon Concierge is anime. Anime is far more diverse in style than many fans know. Ouran High School Host Club Ouran offers a classic reverse harem story following a Tom girl who gets in touch with her feminine side and comes to understand the boys by acting like a guy. This story is among the first shojo stories I watched. It set the frame for how I would later understand shojo art and story beats. The story offers a fun satire of these beats and character tropes. Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets Wise Wolf I enjoyed the original Spice and Wolf series even though it cut off abruptly. I often returned to the original series to escape for a time. So, when I heard it was going to get a new treatment with the original English voice actors, I was thrilled! The story centers on economics for its plot, which is unique, but the banter sells this one. Holo and Lawrence grow into a mature, adult relationship with teasing, misunderstandings, and arguments throughout. The story has a melancholy laced through the laughter. Holo and Lawrence’s loneliness offers something many today can identify with. Spice and Wolf is a great road story that I will revisit again and again. Violet Evergarden Violet Evergarden offers an tearful exploration of love, separation, and friendship with letters joining people together. The story centers on change. Violet changes throughout the story. The world also changes around her, moving toward a modernity that leaves letters behind. The story explores a different facet of love in a mature, thoughtful way. This is a coming-of-age story, but Violet has already been involved in war and killing, moving her beyond the usual teen coming-of-age concerns usually seen. Instead, she has to work to recover her lost humanity. Takopi’s Original Sin Including this story on this list is another case of recency bias. Takopi’s Original Sin is a dark exploration of toxic positivity and how innocence can be sinful. The story follows several fourth graders as they deal with abuse, loneliness, suicide, and other difficulties, amplified by the positivity of the alien Takopi. This is not a story for everyone. Insomniacs After School This teen romance and coming-of-age story looks at the difficulty of being out of sync with the rest of the world. Particularly, when your chronotype doesn’t align. Insomnia and astronomy provides the means to relationship and self acceptance. Ganta and Isaki’s relationship feels natural with how it develops. It’s a relaxing, cozy story for sleepless nights. Oshi no Ko I’m uncertain if this series will remain on my list once it finishes, but the first episode is gripping. Aka Akasaka’s characters are interesting, and the dialogue is enjoyable, if more serious than Akasaka’s other work Kaguya-sama. The story looks deep at the darker side of the entertainment business. This is a revenge-mystery story. The anime adopts Mengo Yokoyari’s illustrative style well. Kaguya-sama: Love is War It’s rare for me to find a romantic comedy humorous, but Kaguya-sama made me laugh throughout both the anime and the manga. Aka Akasaka’s dialogue and jokes are on point, but there’s also heart to the character interactions. The ridiculous intellectual battles between Kaguya and Miyuki are great, especially with how the well-developed supporting cast. The narrator’s observations punctuate the jokes well. Honestly, the narrator might well be the best character. Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie I liked this story more than I thought I would. The premise of a bad-luck boy being protected by a capable girl who is, in turn, emotionally protected by him offers a fun romantic comedy. There’s no will-they-won’t-they here. Rather, it focuses on Izumi’s male insecurities surrounding the part-biological and part-social male need to protect women and what happens when...

Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table, also known as Shiboyugi, is a bit of an experimental anime that requires some media literacy from its audience. I haven’t read the source material, but there are many literary hooks the first anime seasons establishes that future seasons could latch onto. Spoilers ahead. The story follows Yuki, a girl who plays death games as a career. Unnamed elites plan these death games for their own entertainment. They aim for around a third of the participants to die. The players have their blood modified with a drug that coagulates when their blood is exposed to air, turning their blood into a cotton-like substance. This helps reduce the risk of the players bleeding out too quickly and makes the death games more palatable for the audience. After all, these are just dolls killing each other, right? This unstated, but heavily suggested idea, is supported by how survivors receive medical attention and how any missing limbs or other body parts are replaced with cybernetics. Yuki decides to set the death game’s survival record by surviving 99 games, the goal Yuki’s mentor Hakushi originally had. During the Candle Woods game,  Hakushi suffers such a terrible wound that Yuki believes her dead. In reality, Hakushi survives and retires from the games. But the anime only suggests this. Shiboyugi does a lot of suggesting. The story begins with Yuki’s twenty-eighth game, shifts to her tenth game in the second episode, and hops to the time after her twenty-ninth game in the fifth episode. The first season ends with telling Yuki and Hakushi’s story during Yuki’s ninth game. Yuki herself is a mixed character. She doesn’t go out of her way to kill anyone, but she also doesn’t hesitate, at least after her ninth game, to kill when she must to win. During the tenth game Yuki saves the player Kotoha, who loses her legs to a trap. Yuki carries Kotoha on her back and protects her. Kotoha guesses that Yuki is a survivor of the worst death game, Candle Woods, Yuki’s ninth game. Yuki ends up saving Kotoha, but in another game Yuki kills a girl she feels rapport toward in order to win the game. This later fills Yuki with guilt, telling herself that she’s fine. Yuki sits in a morally ambiguous area. She doesn’t kill unless she must; she has a personal ritual at the end of each game where she remembers the dead, and she tries to save other players when it is possible. The story often sets small narrative hooks like Kotoha’s Candle Woods reference that appear to be offhand remarks or details that the nonlinear story structure goes back and grabs onto. But there are many hooks, such as the roles of the player’s agents, who appear to be possible family members, that the season leaves unresolved. Shiboyugi‘s nonlinear story can be confusing because it doesn’t offer explicit anchors between the time jumps. There are hints throughout the arcs to help ground you in the time period, such as Kotoha’s reference to the future-past Candle Woods game. This grounding, and Yuki’s behavior ties forward to when you are in the ninth game, making the backward time jump apparent if you are paying attention. The shift from the first episode, with the twenty-eighth game, back to the tenth relies on Yuki’s behavior. She behaves in a less experienced way in the second episode compared to the first. She acts in a less hardened and experienced way. The contrast of her saving Kotoha after killing Kinko in the first episode, keeps the audience guessing about Yuki’s morality, but it also helps ground how she becomes increasingly hardened as she plays the games. None of this is overt. The time gap between Yuki’s ninth game and her thirtieth game is linked by the similarities in the situation and the difference in Yuki’s behavior. Her confidence wanes during the thirtieth game. She’s unnerved by the thirtieth game wall, where players tend to make mistakes and lose their edge, dying in the process. Her waning confidence ties back to the ninth game where she is building confidence. They mirror each other thematically. If you watch closely, you can see enough timeline points to anchor you as you watch, but these aren’t immediate. It takes time for you to see enough to ground yourself in the time frame. I’ve read many books that do this, and while it’s not my favorite storytelling method, it is interesting. But many watchers won’t like the uncertainty you feel as you orient yourself. It requires you to engage with the story deeper rather than being a passive watcher. The discomfort, confusion, and uncertainty mirrors the feelings you see the characters contend with. It’s a clever way to make the audience feel the same as the characters. The avant-garde style animation style also requires the audience to use their media literacy skills. The anime shifts between simplified pastel, flat-color scenes and ultra-detailed scenes. That eye detail! The shift can feel disjointed at first. The flat-color scenes usually use a letterbox, the black bars you see framing some films. This is a death game that is being watched by an audience. The letterboxed, flat-color scenes denote the hidden cameras and the audience gaze. The ultra-detail scenes represent the experience Yuki and the other players are having. It’s their perspective or reality contrasted against the sanitized, dehumanizing gaze of an audience that doesn’t care about the humanity of the players. The gaze links to the polyfill blood and guts. The players are not human to the audience. The letterbox is used for various emotional effects too. Narrowing the field of view emphasizes the horror and aloneness Yuki and the players feel as the deaths begin. During the season finale, the letterbox combines with credits that Yuki herself watches as she considers her limited death game experience at the time and the looming end of her life. The effect is reminiscent of the final episodes Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s dive into Shinji’s psychology except it’s more orderly. While many may find these shifts in style confusing, they serve the story and aim at unsettling the audience with the shifts. There’s unspoken meta commentary going on. We join the death game audience at times. Although we don’t see the audience, knowing the flat-color scenes is what the audience sees, with the differing perspectives and camera angles, serves to characterize that audience. There’s a voyeuristic element to the audience and a disquiet to them. They don’t feel comfortable with the death game’s gore, but they relish the lack of predictability. As the audience of the audience, we can see all this suggestion. When the details scenes cut in, we know that we are seeing what the audience of the death game doesn’t–the humanity of the characters as they act inhumanly toward each other. Shiboyugi doesn’t make any of this overt. It relies on your media literacy to piece everything together, and, well, people’s media literacy isn’t the strongest anymore. If it was, short-form video wouldn’t have exploded in popularity because people would understand how such content influences and trains our thinking. But I’m digressing and soapboxing. Shiboyugi is interesting because of how the studio decided to rely on the audience’s media literacy to piece together the nonlinear story and how the two styles of animation work. I found Shiboyugi engaging with its morally challenging story and all the subtle audience engagement it uses. It’s a clever anime that will confuse some watchers. It’s unfinished with many aspects of Yuki’s story left untold, including how the rest of her life goes. There may yet be another season to tell the rest of Yuki’s story.

Short-form content has been shifting how people consume content, including anime and books. Short-form dramas take a story and cut it into tiny episodes while Tiktok video focus on spectacle. For many, short-form video offer ways to discover new anime. But this type of content focuses on visual spectacle above all else to get people’s attention. Having just a few seconds to grab attention favors certain types of anime over others. Stories that lend themselves to action and gripping visuals benefit from this type of discovery, but more verbal focused or thematic anime, such as Spice and Wolf, don’t perform as well. This growing discovery method encourages draws attention to just a few stories, encouraging studios to play it safer and produce copycats and genre saturation. I’m looking at you isekai. But relying on short-form content for discovery and promotion may not be good in the long wrong. Yep, it’s time for me to get into the research, and, as you may have guessed, short-form video is bad for your brain and perhaps for anime itself. This is Your Brain on Short-Form Video Short-form video uses algorithms to curate streams of brief videos designed to encourage continuous scrolling and regular, impulsive engagement. Most people call this doom scrolling, but researcher prefer the phrase “scroll immersion.” This is the habit of losing track of time and staying on a platform for longer than intended.Teens, university students, and young adults are the most intense users of short-form videos but this use of content extends to encompass entire countries (Reshaa, 2025): In Saudi Arabia, these global patterns are evident but take on particular social and cultural significance. Nearly four-fifths of the population are reported to use social media actively, with TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube Shorts among the leading platforms. And a study in 2019 found that the average daily use of short-form video in China estimates at 600 million hours (Chen, 2023). It is likely higher now. Research on short-form video is damning. Daily short-form use increases depression risk, lowers attention, reduces mental clarity, and hurts the ability to focus for prolonged periods of time. Both adults and teens show problems with working memory when “repeated cognitive switching” like short-form video involves, which contributes to learning difficulties and comprehensive tasks. Social media use also links to increased impulsivity and increases weakness to distraction, adding to the working memory problem. Short-form video doesn’t require much thought, or as academics like to phrase it, “requires minimum cognitive processing.” The algorithms encourage passive, thoughtless consumption that leads to dopamine release and what’s called fragmentation. Fragmentation refers to how your focus is broken by the constant flow of novelty and different videos. As Chen (2023) states: However, the fragmentation pattern could stimulate the pleasure centre of the brain intensively in a short time and result in a massive release of dopamine. Sustained exposure to intensive pleasure and massive dopamine would induce deeper indulgences and larger desires of users and decrease the activity of dopamine enzyme and the availability of dopamine transporters, which are the typical symptoms of addiction. Therefore, such a fragmentation pattern might lead to addiction. In other words, short-form video works like a slot machine where you never know how rewarding the next spin will be, encouraging your brain to release dopamine in large amounts. This reinforces the habit of doom scrolling and damages your self-control (Reshaa, 2025). Watching short-form video basically trains your brain to be unfocused and to enjoy that lack of focus (Zhu, 2025): For frequent short-form video viewers, impaired self-control makes them more susceptible to the influence of short-form videos, increasing the likelihood of frequent viewing. As a result, the association between ‘short-form video stimuli and watching short-form videos’ gradually strengthens, reflecting an enhancement of automaticity. After the enhancement of automaticity, individuals begin to assign greater value to stimuli related to short-form videos, causing value-driven attention to these stimuli to dominate the attention priority map, thereby making individuals more inclined to focus on them. Consequently, this further impairs self-control and ultimately contributes to problematic short-form video usage. Your brain begins to crave short-form video and the dopamine it brings as a means to escape and as a habit. It creates a feedback loop that becomes hard to break short of locking yourself out of all short-form content. You train yourself to have no self control or focus by consuming such content which can spill into your other behaviors. Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube, spoke out about the trend toward short-form video, expressing concern about how the content affects children’s attention spans. He stated he wouldn’t want his own children to consume that sort of content (Quiroz-Gutierrez, 2025). The Results of Brain Melting All this brain melting has damaged many people’s ability to focus long enough to read. I’m hopeful that with work this damage can be untrained, considering how all of this is brain training at the base of it. But it requires discomfort and effort to undo this. Social media companies certainly don’t want us to do this! But all of this also affects books and anime. Anyone who reads with any depth has noticed how simple and unchallenging best-selling books are nowadays. I suspect isekai’s saturation works like all the templated books: they are safe, capture shrinking attention immediately, and are easy to consume. Many anime fans, and readers for that matter, don’t want a conceptual challenge or a unique story. They look for easily consumed and shared content. Many fans fish for likes and views. This also ties into the remakes and sequels that anime has seen lately. Many studios are reviving anime from the 1990s and 2000s, in part, because they have a ready market that makes them safer bets. If you look at many of the recent remakes, like Ranma 1/2, they offer shareable visuals. This is a mixed bag. Remaking older, often excellent, stories can help those stories find new audiences that wouldn’t watch the anime otherwise. However, this also takes resources from new and equally great stories. The habit of short-form video may be creating market pressure on studios to produce the type of content that people share and discover on these content platforms. Isekai offers a safe, relatively low-cost bet for studios to make. Producing a book or an anime is a risk for a company, and companies need to make profit to keep producing. If the market doesn’t demand conceptually challenging stories, companies won’t produce as many of those stories. They still will make a few, funded by the mass market content. As long as people quite literally rot their cognitive abilities, as the research suggests, on short-form content, books, anime, and other content will likely continue to degrade in cognitive challenge level because of the market demands. Books will become shorter and lose their nuance. Anime will fall back even further into over-trod story templates and flash instead of trying to extend into new territory. Not all content will be conceptually simple, but not as much complex content will be made in such an environment. I’m optimistic. We’ve seen a lot of good, unique anime rise above the mediocre, like Dan Da Dan, and mature explorations of human problems appear like Journal with Witch. The template stories still remain the most common, but they are waning compared to previous seasons, mostly driven out by seasonal returns of well-developed series. However, every isekai copy-paste story that gets produces drives out a unique story from the production pipeline. The best action fans can make is to ignore these copy-paste stories and watch the unique, more conceptually challenging stories (relative to the usual fare). This would be a vote for studios to move away from conceptually simple stories. Watching short-form content also takes time away from reading and watching anime, time that cannot be recovered. I remember the days before the internet and smartphones when it was common to see people carry a mass paperback to read in waiting rooms and in queues. While we won’t return to that as a society, it would be better for our brains and for publishing if we did.  It would benefit manga and, in turn, anime that pulls from that source material. So, instead of watching brain-rot, perhaps you should consider picking up a ebook subscription or manga subscription. Not scanlation sites! The costs of subscriptions are so low nowadays that you don’t have an excuse for pirating and doing so hurts the industry now that official translations–even if they are machine translations–are widely available. Public libraries also provide a free option for putting ebooks on your phone. And books support short-form consumption. You can read a few paragraphs or a few panels at a time, which would eventually train your brain to focus for longer, unlike short-form videos. It will take time to retrain your brain because books won’t give you the same pleasure-chemical hit short-form video does. But it is well worth the effort. Perhaps as the evidence of how short-form content and social media use in general becomes more known, people will move away from it as they did tobacco use. It will take time, just as moving away from cigarettes took time. But such a move would be better for anime diversity, books, and our brains. References Chen, Y., Li, M., Guo, F., & Wang, X. (2023). The effect of short-form video addiction on users’ attention. Behaviour & Information Technology, 42(16),2893–2910. https://doi-org.oh0164.oplin.org/10.1080/0144929X.2022.2151512. Quiroz-Gutierrez, M. (2025). YouTube’s cofounder and former tech boss doesn’twant his kids to watch short videos, warning short-form content “equates to shorter attention spans.” Fortune.Com, N.PAG. Reshaa F. Alruwaili, (2025) Scroll immersion and short-form video use: Predictors of attention, memory, and fatigue among Saudi social media users, Acta Psychologica, Volume 260 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2025.105674. Zhu, J., & Fong, L. H. N. (2025). Self-control and problematic short-form video usage: the mediating roles of automaticity and value-driven attention. Behaviour & Information Technology, 44(14), 3609–3619. https://doi-org.oh0164.oplin.org/10.1080/0144929X.2025.2452367.

Journal with Witch offers a delicate exploration of sorrow and the difficulties that sometimes appear between personalities. The difficulties aren’t enough to cause any rifts, but they cause misunderstanding and require careful navigation like a blacksmith’s puzzle. I enjoyed the literary feel of Journal with Witch, but many will find the series dull with how deep in slice of life it sits. I’ll be getting into spoilers, but this story focuses more on how the characters interact than any mystery within the story. When Makio’s niece, Asa, is orphaned because of a car accident, she can’t tolerate how their extended family treats Asa as a burden. And so Makio takes her in despite her various difficulties with the arrangement. Makio’s problem isn’t with Asa, but with her deceased sister and socialness in general. Makio’s relationship with Asa’s mother, Minori, is strained to the point where Makio feels alienated. Makio is a novelist and felt like Minori held her passion for writing in contempt. Makio has a standoffish, reflective, introverted personality that I identify with. She prefers to let people work through their own problems and emotions.She appears to be frigid despite feeling deeply and working through her own emotional labyrinth alone. That aloneness–not to be confused with loneliness–adds to the rift between Makio and Minori. Minori tries to be well-liked and social, but as the series later shows, Minori quietly comes to admire Makio. Makio defies the usual simplistic portrayal of introverts as anime often shows: someone who is a misanthrope or is uncomfortable with their solitude and trying to break out of it. Makio is in her 30s and well beyond the teen identity building phase anime usually explores. Journal with Witch saves that exploration for the 15-year-old Asa. Makio is comfortable in her skin, a lover of solitude without feeling lonely. This part of her character resonated with me as someone who believes society is far too extroverted and needs more healthy solitude. Makio has a social life with a small circle of friends and a former boyfriend named Shingo. She has a complicated relationship with Shingo, feeling regret for pushing him away because of her desire for solitude and her unsettled fear of commitment. Shingo is secure in himself and loves Makio for who she is, so he doesn’t push her. He accepts her. He’s someone who is fairly quiet himself but still more of an ambivert compared to Makio. For anyone who wants to enter a relationship with a “thinks too much” sensitive introvert, Shingo provides a good model. Makio has been often told that she “thinks too much,” a habit that Asa also observes and doesn’t fully understand. Asa has the opposite personality of Makio. Asa wants to stand out and be noticed, have many friends, and is overall much more extroverted. Throughout the story, she struggles to come to terms with the death of her parents, lacking the emotional vocabulary and reflective skills needed to do so. She is only 15, after all. But the story points to how some of that lack of skill is also linked to her personality type. This observation doesn’t hold true with all extroverts, nor are all introverts masters of reflection. I’ve met many extroverts who have a rich inner life and many introverts with an inner life that could barely fill a thimble. But generally extroverts seek to work through problems externally by asking the views of others, sharing their problems, and outsourcing their answers. Asa feels lonely and lost, represented by desert imagery throughout the series. She can’t understand how Makio can be alone without being lonely because for her they are one and the same. She seeks answers from Makio, but Makio prefers to let Asa find the answers or come to terms that there no answers for what Asa is dealing with. She gives Asa freedom, but Asa doesn’t know what to do with it at first. Over time, Asa faces her sorrow about her parents’ deaths in a realistic way that takes the better part of a year in the story. She begins in a state of unfeeling shock. It’s not quite denial, but she feels a numbness surrounding the event. This freeze thaws until she begins to cry at night. Makio doesn’t really know how to handle the situation beyond being present and giving Asa space. The space, while natural for Makio who is coming to terms with her own lack of feeling surrounding Minori’s death, makes the struggle worse for Asa. Minori had left a journal for Asa that Makio discovers when they clean Asa’s family apartment. Makio is uncertain when she should give Asa the journal–it was meant for when Asa becomes an adult. Asa eventually finds it, which leads to more uncertainty within her grief. She’s uncertain if her mother had meant what she wrote as her memories of her family life and her sorrow interconnect in her confusion. But by the end of the series, Asa has worked through some of her sorrow through this hard-for-her method, making her a bit stronger in the process. The twelfth episode ends with Asa moving on in her school life, singing in her school club and learning how to write song lyrics. There’s many other smaller tensions in the story, such as Asa’s best friend Emiri. Emiri wants to support Asa, but finds Asa exhausting, especially Asa’s interest in romance. Emiri is discovering that she’s a lesbian and finds Asa’s prying about boys troubling. She also finds being around Asa awkward after the car accident. Makio and Shingo have their own light tensions with the ambiguity of their relationship. Shingo wants to draw closer to Makio, and Makio wants the same. But she remains troubled by how mixed she feels about the loss of solitude. She feels mixed about Asa too and her invasion on her solitude. Makio slowly grows more comfortable with Asa’s presence, showing that perhaps Shingo might have a place too. Journal with Witch refers to Minori’s journal, Makio’s writing, and the journal Makio suggests Asa keep. Witch can have negative connotations, and there’s some of that layer in the story too with Makio and Minori fulfilling the role of having connections with evil and black magic. But witch also references healing. Witches have links to medicine and herbology. The journals Asa encounters do both. They have hurtful “black magic” connotations along with helping her sorrow heal. The story has realistic dialogue with characters talking around uncomfortable issues and uncertainties. There’s warmth and understated humor among the adults, which contrasts with Asa’s more direct and innocent dialogue. The characters feel their ages. While there’s nothing wrong with seeking help externally, sometimes you have to walk your inner desert alone and find your answers in your solitude. Other times, reaching out to others, as Makio does concerning how she can help Asa, offers the best course. Knowing when to do each is a matter of wisdom. That’s the most difficult part. I enjoyed Journal with Witch. It’s a realistic feeling slice of life exploration of sorrow and the natural tension differing personalities can have. Often the anime released to the west remains locked to the old high school focus. It’s refreshing to see more adult-oriented stories. This one may be a bit too slow paced for many, but if you enjoy more character-centered stories, give this anime a watch. The spoilers I’ve discussed here won’t diminish the enjoyment of watching how events and interactions unfold.

I had been putting off watching The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You despite the apparent popularity. It’s a harem romantic comedy, and that type of humor doesn’t usually match my taste. For the most part, my initial assessment of the humor was right. The series is a love letter to harem fans. But the anime has a lot of heart to it and surprisingly decent character development. The girls within the series fit within the character tropes but also see more character development than harem stories with a smaller cast will give their members. Rentaro Aijo, the male protagonist, also avoids the flat projection character convention. Spoilers ahead! The story opens with Rentaro, a lover boy who had confessed to 100 girls and been rejected by all of them. On his final day of middle school, he goes a shrine and prays that he will find a girlfriend during high school. The God of Love appears and accidentally destines Rentaro to have 100 soulmates. And if he fails to reciprocate her feelings, the girl will die. The love connection begins whenever Rentaro and the girl make eye contact. The first two harem members, Hakari and Karane, see the most development, which makes sense considering they have the most time. Each girl represents a different -dere character type. 100 Girlfriends pokes fun at these character tropes, which I enjoyed–I’m a sucker for satire–but the jokes wore thin by the end of the series for a few of the characters, like with Hakari’s mother Hahari. Hahari has a mothering instinct toward everyone and a fetish for cuteness, which Rentaro shares. Each of the characters, however, have more to them then the character type they represent and parody. Hahari, for example, deals with the death of her first love–Hakari’s father through IVF. Hahari undergoes IVF at the age of 13 to have a piece of her first love live on. There’s many, many questions raised by this, such as Hakari’s father donating to a sperm bank as a young teen and Hahari’s age for an IVF regiment, but this is anime. Logic and legality don’t usually apply. This experience shapes her personality: she hadn’t experienced a normal teen romantic life and so tries to develop something of one with Rentaro. Each of the girls have some similar past event that adds a bit of depth to their personality and their relationship with Rentaro. Rentaro, for his part, accepts and loves each of the girls for their uniqueness and traits. He loves who they are and their physical traits (because of its a part of who they are). He loves both Hahari’s I cup and Karane’s A, barely B cup, which, as you know if you know anime, is a body image problem for them both. Rentaro genuinely wishes the best for all of them and respects their choices. He, like most harem protagonists, doesn’t choose one girl. He’s gotta catch ’em all: Pokémon! However, Rentaro doesn’t choose one girl because he’s indecisive like most harem protagonists I’ve seen. He simply can’t break his God of Love-enforced destiny and risk the girls dying. Although he isn’t a blank character, he is an embodiment of love that parodies the embarrassing cringe openly expressing affection can bring. This is part of the humor. Of the girls, Karane, in particular, sees the most development as the tsundere. Karane’s character arc has pins in a variety of episodes, leading up to when she loses her “tsunde-rays” at the end of season 2, leaving her inner deredere (cute, loving) core exposed but also leaving her without the aspects that make her who she is. The humor of 100 Girlfriends relies on your knowledge of anime tropes and title references, like with Karane’s “tsunde-rays.” Some of the best jokes break the fourth wall. If you aren’t familiar with this idea, the fourth wall is the boundary between the audience and a work or the work and its creators. The wall helps the audience suspend disbelief and immerse themselves into the story. Breaking the fourth wall happens when a work directly speaks to the audience, to the creators, or otherwise references itself as a fictional work. 100 Girlfriends does this in several episodes. The characters even reference their English dubbing and the show’s existence on Crunchyroll! There’s also a scene where the characters acknowledge the anime’s director and writers deciding to introduce some characters in a different order from the manga’s order. When the anime breaks the fourth wall, the characters temporarily appear as actresses rather than the fictional character they are. These scenes are great! Some of the parody jokes got a little old, falling into repetition with a little variety added to the formula, but that is more a matter of taste than anything else. 100 Girlfriends‘ comedy parodies anime tropes like breast groping among the girls, concern about bust size with most of the female cast having back-pain inducing busts, and the various other staples of harem plots. The humor is at its best when it parodies, but I found the humor flat when it goes into other jokes and antics. As I touched on a bit ago, it assumes a working knowledge of anime culture, tropes, and pacing for most of its best japes. I’m not a huge harem watcher, although I’m making an effort to fill my knowledge gap in that area, so I didn’t get some of the parodies or references. I could see they were referencing something harem-related at least. The English dub is funny with its delivery and choice of translation. Under all the comedy, declarations of love, and chu-chu-ing (kissing), stands a warm heart. Rentaro and family all support each other and want the best for each. The acceptance of faults also plays an important role in the story. There’s some light bickering among the girls, but this works more like sisterly arguments than true conflict. Many of the girls have relationships or pasts with each other, with a few of them developing bisexual relationships with each other, most notably Karane and Hakari. These intersections add another layer to the found family dynamic of the story. Each character plays a different role in the family with Hahari acting as the mother of the group. Considering she’s 30 years old and a mother, this makes sense. Together, they overcome the silly conflicts they encounter, often self-induced problems! With any harem, online fans seem to enjoy discussing the best girl. I find it more interesting to consider who the writer or anime team consider “best girl.” Usually, this happens through unequal development of the characters. Karane sees the most development across the first two seasons. I found her the more interesting character with her inner conflict. It is a typical tsundere trait, but the story explores it in unique ways. She also has body confidence and acceptance problems which are explored. Hakari is also a contender for “best girl” with her plot. Unlike Karane, however, she doesn’t undergo a major character change. Rather, her relationship with her mother changes. This is important, but she doesn’t really change internally as much as Karane. Nor is her development arc scattered across as many episodes. I get the impression that the writers behind the anime consider Karane “best girl,” at least for now. The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You knows its audience and pokes fun at everything about the harem genre. I enjoyed the satire. The story is well aware that its silly and ridiculous. It revels in it, and this self awareness makes the fourth wall breaking funnier. The “actresses” understand they are playing ridiculous roles in the farce. 100 Girlfriends had better humor and more heart than I had expected. It embraces the cringiness of its earnest declarations of love. Harem fans would likely enjoy this one and get most of what the story parodies and references. The fourth wall breaking jokes are the best of the gags. I can’t recommend The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You for general anime watchers, but if you think you’d enjoy satirical jabs at character tropes and don’t mind the other aspects of the harem genre, this one might be worth trying.

When I visit museums, I’m fascinated by the small artifacts of everyday life. After viewing two suits of samurai armor at a small museum, I spotted a single Golden Bat cigarette. The humble paper cylinder of tobacco contrasted against black paper with the informational placard dwarfing it. Artifacts like this single cigarette are the forgotten pieces of everyday life, consumed and thrown away without much thought of the roles they’ve played. Today, we all know the health hazards of cigarettes and how they are largely socially unacceptable in some countries. Japan, which had long been seen as friendly for smokers, also considers smoking largely socially unacceptable. But before this shift, cigarettes were considered a necessity and played a vital role in life and in the World Wars. During the World Wars, cigarettes provided temporary relief from the mental and physical stress of war whike also acting as a currency. Nicotine is a stimulant and “During WWI, the he U.S. military believed the effect of cigarettes on the troops was positive and thus provided tobacco as part of the soldiers’ rations.” Non-smokers would trade cigarettes for clothes, food, alcohol, and even sex, with U.S.-made cigarettes particularly valued. They played a surprising role for the sick and wounded (Blondia, n.d.): Since battlefield medical assistance was limited and often could not provide much-needed pain relief when supplies of morphine were low, soldiers relied on cigarettes to help them with pain management. Cigarettes also played an important role in de-escalating the brutal combat between the Japanese and American forces during World War II. The Pacific theatre was considered as more brutal and saw higher animosity between the factions than within Europe: “However, in both areas, cigarettes were used as an essential tool to de-vilify the enemy and bring a human perspective to prisoners.” Sharing cigarettes, in other words, appears to have reduced the dehumanizing elements of war. Cigarettes connected people with civilization and home. But they also played a more nefarious role. Japan once controlled a section of China, calling it Manchukuo or Manchuria. Opium was an important source of revenue for the government, following the British practice elsewhere in China a century before. Opium also allowed the military to control the population easier by lowering public resistance. The Japanese military pursued this aim by distributing opium-based medicines and cigarettes. The cigarettes were branded with the Japanese trademark “Golden Bat,” the same brand of cigarette I encountered in the museum. Only these cigarettes had their mouthpieces laced with heroin (Roberts, 1973). Golden Bat was one of the most popular brands of Japanese cigarettes at the time. But how did tobacco, a plant originating in the Americas, reach Japan in the first place? It’s unknown exactly when tobacco reached Japan. Tobacco trade appears in records from the late 1500s with links to early Spanish and Portuguese trading ships visiting Japan. Despite the restrictions on the West, tobacco grew in popularity with Japanese farmers starting to grow tobacco themselves by the 1600s. It became one of the most popular luxury items (Jenzen-Jones, 2023). Japan’s tobacco industry was one of the first to use machines to help with production, with machine shredding and other steps appearing as soon as Japanese farmers began to cultivate the crop. This production supported wider consumption along with all the artisan pipes, pipe cases, ashtrays, tobacco boxes, and other items. You can spot many of these items in ukiyo-e. Pipe smoking would eventually cross all of Japan’s social levels: merchants, farmers, samurai, and even the Shogun. Eventually, cigarettes would become the main way all social classes would consume tobacco. The importance of cigarettes even lead to an interesting letter sent to the Allied Powers during Japan’s occupation following World War II. Golden Bat cigarettes would be rebranded as Kinshi Cigarettes and “Peace Cigarettes” following Japan’s surrender, until around 1949 when they returned to their original branding. The Kinshi rebranding was aimed at sidestepping the anti-western views of the time. Golden Bat was the oldest cigarette brand in Japan with both the Japanese and English printed on the package before the war. Concerns about Kinshi Cigarettes appears in a letter written by Ichiro Yokoyama and backed by 22 members of a neighborhood association dating to 1945. The letter brings the issue to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, expressing the injustice of the expense of cigarettes and the “treasury lottery certificates” for the cigarettes. The letter argues that the common worker isn’t able to smoke without resorting to the black market to earn enough money to afford their habit: “The sale of these ‘Peace’ Cigarettes forces honest people to do unlawful business.” The letter goes on: How on earth do you account for such price? Instead of reducing the price to the prewar basis of eight sen per cigarette, the Monopoly Bureau is still selling cigarettes at the wartime price of 35 sen. Why doesn’t the Bureau take into account the condition of the smokers? Cigarettes are the only enjoyment for the masses and, we may say, a requisite for workers. The exchange of Kinshi Cigarettes for four treasury lottery certificates is very convenient. But this will perhaps not appeal to the common people. Only the wealthy people will find it convenient. Cigarettes should be made for us, the masses, who have patiently had to smoke leaves of trees during the war. We do not necessarily desire a return to prewar prices, but a suitable price must be found and a distribution of at least seven to ten cigarettes per day must be made. If this is done, then cigarettes may be sold at prices pleasing to the Bureau, be it 100 yen or more. We demand, therefore, a policy consistent with the people’s needs. The letter is interesting. The neighborhood association considered access to cigarettes such an issue that they would write to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces directly with a request to reconsider the coupon program and pricing policies. They outline how the cost could drive otherwise honest people to become involved in the black market and hints at the potential for social unrest because of the disparity of access between the worker and the rich, at least if you read between the polite lines. The fact the association reached out to the Supreme Commander concerning the issue, and how this document is still preserved, is unique. The association thought it was safe enough to politely protest an issue with an occupying military command and put their names to the letter. Among those names was Ichiro Yokoyama. I was unable to verify if this Ichiro Yokoyama is the same man who was a Navy Major General and who was present during Japan’s surrender. Yokoyama had participated in other negotiations with the Allied Powers before stepping back to work for an oil company. It’s possible he was involved in this letter, considering his name would’ve been known to the command, but I couldn’t find solid information supporting this. It’s just as likely this was a different Yokoyama who simply acted as the head of the neighborhood association. Either way, this letter points to the importance of cigarettes at the time, which is something many of us from societies were cigarettes are considered low class or disgusting now struggle to fathom. But throughout the World Wars, cigarettes were a common part of military rations, showing how they were viewed as important as food. Smoking in Japan Today Smoking has become largely socially unacceptable in the West, but even Japan has lost its tolerance. Historically, the Japanese government relied on non-binding “soft law” to regulate smoking–social norms, cooperation, and guidance. The government has been introducing more regulations on smoking in public places as public acceptance for smoking wanes. More than three-quarters of Japanese report “displeasure/discomfort” with “the smoke of others” with more women feeling discomfort than men, 86.4% against 69.5%. In the early 2000s, nearly half of Japanese men smoked and about 10% of women, but over time, smoking has become less socially acceptable, adding to the decline in cigarette consumption. The number of Japanese male smokers stands at around 27% now. Cigarettes sales have fallen from a height of around 350 billion to around 100 billion (Arrington, 2024). Japan’s legal restrictions reinforce the changing social norms surrounding smoking rather than trying to change the social norms. Restaurants and other public spaces have imposed their own policies against smoking on their premises before the government issued some regulations, for instance. Social rules like these started as far back as 1999 before local governments introduced fines for various violations, such as smoking on sidewalks. Although vaping has begun to become more common, vaping lacks the same historical connections that cigarettes have. While smoking (and vaping for that matter) is terrible for your health and shortens your life expectancy, The role cigarettes have played in history remains interesting and largely ignored in history books. When I encountered the single Golden Bat cigarette in the museum, I didn’t suspect I’d uncover these bits of history. While I researched, solid information was difficult to find, with ouroboros wiki articles referencing each other. This shows how everyday artifacts like a cigarette in the bottom of a display case are easily ignored and lost. With that loss, a piece of history that could teach us something about ourselves also disappears. References Arrington, Celeste (2024) Regulating smoking in Japan: from manners to rules. International Journal of Asian Studies, 1–22 doi:10.1017/S1479591424000020 Blondia, Amarilla (n.d.) Cigarettes and Their Impact in World War II. Perspectives. Jenzen-Jones, N.R. Phillips, Patrick, Randall Charles. (2023) A Brief History of Tobacco in Japan. Roberts, John (1973) Mitsui empire ; three centuries of Japanese business. New York, Weatherhill.

Sakura-ko was a samurai’s daughter who had become a geisha to feed her mother after her father died. She lived on a narrow street. Sounds of geisha practicing their shamisen filled the air at all hours. Sakura-ko proved gifted with the shamisen. She also played the koto and the biwa. Sakura-ko’s liquid eyes and ivory skin attracted many teahouse appointments. Her conversation skills and charm could melt the hardest man. She spent her days looking down on the street from the gallery of her geisha home. People would point and exclaim, “There’s Sakura-ko, the Flower of the Cherry. The most beautiful dancer of Edo.” But as she looked down at them, she often said to herself, “The narrow street is paved with bitterness and broken hearts. The houses are full of vain hopes and regrets. The flowers in the gardens are watered with tears, yet these people don’t realize this.” If you watched her dance, you’d never guess she had such a sorrowful heart. Gentlemen compared her to the rainbow-winged dragonfly and to the morning mist dancing in the new sunlight. She danced like the shadow of a willow tree on the river. They would never guess the resentment she carried from her three lovers. The first was a middle-aged, rich and great man. When he first tried to win her, he sent a servant with a lot of money. “You’re obviously lost,” she told the servant. “You should have gone to the merchant street and bought your master a doll. Let him know he won’t find a doll here.” She shut the door in the servant’s face. After the servant accounted this, the master visited her. “Come to me, Flower of the Cherry,” he said. “I must have you.” “Must?” She raised her eyebrow. “Must is the only word for how I feel.” “And what will you give me?” He didn’t hesitate. “You will have the finest kimono. I will give you a house with servants. Gold hairpins—whatever you want.” “And what do I give you in return?” She narrowed her eyes. “Just yourself, Flower of the Cherry.” “Body and soul?” “Body and soul.” He licked his lips. “Goodbye. I plan on remaining a geisha. It’s a fun life.” She laughed and shut the door in his face. The second lover was old. He hired Sakura-ko to dance at a feast he had scheduled, but he remained attached to her throughout it instead of being a proper host. “Sakura-ko, I am madly in love with you!” “I can easily believe it,” she said. “I’m not as old as you may think.” “If the gods are compassionate, you might have some time to prepare for your end. You’d best go home and study your scriptures.” Sakura-ko adjusted a hairpin. “It is time for me to dance.” After her dance, he made her sit beside him and called for wine. Her geisha sister, Silver Wave, served them. After making her drink with him he pulled her close. “Come, my love. My bride! There was poison in that cup, but you don’t have to be afraid. We will die together as lovers.” “Please. My sister and I aren’t children. Nor are we foolish. I didn’t drink the saké. Silver Wave poured me fresh tea. But I feel sorry for you. I will stay with you until you die.” He died in her arms. The third lover was a young, courageous man. He happened to see Sakura-ko one day during a festival and went out of his way to find her. He finally found her watching the street from the railing of her gallery. He stopped in the shadows to listen to her softly sing: My mother made me spin fine thread Out of the yellow sea sand. A hard task. A hard task. May the dear gods speed me! My father gave me a basket of reeds. He said, ‘Draw water from the spring and carry it a mile.’ A hard task. A hard task. May the dear gods speed me! My heart would remember. My heart must forget. A hard task. A hard task. May the dear gods speed me! When she looked down, her gaze met his. He wiped a tear from his eyes and called out, “Do you remember me, Flower of the Cherry? I saw you last night.” “I remember you well.” “I am not as young as I look. And I love you. Please be my wife.” Sakura-ko blushed. “My dear,” the young man said. “Now you are a flower of the cherry indeed.” She shook her head. “Child, go home and don’t think of me. I’m too old for you.” “Old? There’s barely a year between us!” At this point, people stopped and watched the two, tittering behind their hands. “No, not a year, but an eternity. Don’t think anymore of me.” Sakura-ko went inside. Of course, the young man could think of nothing else. He couldn’t drink or eat or sleep. After several days, he finally went out to the geisha street, fainting with weakness. Sakura-ko came home at dawn and found him slumping near her home. Without saying a word, she helped him to his house outside Edo and stayed with him until his health returned. Three months passed. One evening, they sat together admiring the stars. Sakura-ko smiled at them. Happiness filled her heart. “My dear,” the young man said. “fetch your shamisen and let me hear you sing.” The spell broken, she did as he asked. “I will sing a song you already know.” My mother made me spin fine threat Out of the yellow sea sand. A hard task. A hard task. May the dear gods speed me! My father gave me a basket of reeds. He said, ‘Draw water from the spring and carry it a mile.’ A hard task. A hard task. May the dear gods speed me! My heart would remember. My heart must forget. A hard task. A hard task. May the dear gods speed me! “What does the song mean? Why do you sing it? It is so sad.” He frowned. “It means it’s time for me to leave you. I must forget you. You must forget me.” He grabbed her hand. “I will never forget you. Stay.” She smiled. “I will pray for you to find a sweet wife and have many children.” “I don’t want any wife except you. I want your children, Flower of the Cherry!” She pulled her hand away. “That can’t happen.” The next day she was gone. The young lover looked all over for her, but she had disappeared. Eventually, his family found him a wife, and they had a son together. When the boy was five years old, he sat at the gate of his father’s house. A wandering nun came by, begging for alms. The servants brought her rice. “Let me give it to her,” the boy said. As he filled the begging bowl and patted the rice down with the wooden spoon, the nun caught his sleeve and gazed into his eyes. “Why do you look at me like that?” he asked. “I once had a boy like you, and I had to leave him.” “The poor boy! Why?” “It was better for him. Far better.” She turned away and continued down the road. This story can be found in my collection of over 170 modernized Japanese folktales, Tales from Old Japan.

No doubt you’ve noticed JP has burst apart this week with terrible load times, images not loading, and not even being available to view. Apologies for that! This has been going on for a bit, and I’ve been tweaking things in the background, but tweaks no longer cut it. Turns out the traffic JP sees has outgrown the ability of its server to handle it. It’s a good problem, but still a problem! I had upgraded the server last year to head off the problem, but it wasn’t enough of an upgrade. So, I’m in the process of moving to a much better–I hope–(and more costly) server. This takes some time, so JP will be a pretty bad experience until it finishes. With luck, the move will improve your reading experience for the next few years. After I finish the move, it may also take a few weeks for search engines to verify the move and for me to hunt down and fix problems. If you see any problems after the next week or so, please let me know! web master [[at]] japanpowered.com, remove the space between “web” and “master” to send your email. Yeah, I’m still old school with using email and the ancient “webmaster” moniker.

The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi offers an interesting and different way to approach a story. The story follows a researcher as he writes about the secret family history he discovered. The narrative combines a story about the researcher’s efforts to decipher the history and write a contemporary account of it with quotes from the history itself. The histories are invented by the author Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Tanizaki is considered to be one of the prominent authors in modern Japanese literature. He also wrote Devils in Daylight, Fumiko’s Feet, Naomi, The Makioka Sisters, and several other words that have been translated to English. In Secret History, he weaves several layers. First, you have the invented histories, which have an authentic-feel to them, the narrator’s voice as he researches the histories and accounts them to us, and Tanizaki’s narration of the narrator. Strangely, it works. The layers of narration remain clear. Sometimes the narrator accounts of the history as if it is a fictional story and then interjects a quotation from another source to support the veracity of the narration. Soon after the narration sections, complete with dialogue and other fictional elements, the narrator lapses into a more academic tone, such as this: According to the history books, Yakushiji Danjo Masataka fell ill during the assault on Ojika Castle in the Tenth Month of 1549, raised the siege and withdrew to Kyoto, where he died ten days later at his mansion on Aburakoji. It is clear from “Confessions of Doami” and “The Dream of a Night” that this account is untrue, but at the time only a few members of the attacking force–and, in the castle, only Hoshimaru himself–knew the real story. Sections like these gives the novella a feel of authenticity, which creates an interesting illusion: are you reading a history book or a work of fiction? Many strange events happen throughout the work. Namely, one of the main characters, Terukatsu, develops a strange fetish for women grooming the severed heads of defeated warriors, particularly those who had their noses removed. Samurai used to collect noses as proof of killing a warrior in a duel when they couldn’t take the warrior’s head as a trophy. Later, the warriors would match nose to face as proof of the victory and the honor the victor may receive. When Terukatsu begins an affair with the beautiful Lady Kikyo, they both conspire together against her husband, as the researcher accounts: In other words, Terukatsu’s morbid lust and Lady Kikyo’s desire for revenge coincidentally sought satisfaction in the same object: to render Norishige noseless without killing him. Terukatsu wants to see Lady Kikyo and her noseless husband together in a strange voyeuristic moment: [Terukatsu] longed to steal a look at the lady, preferably when she was alone with the harelip daimyo in their bedchamber. The lord of the pitiful face would utter sweet nothings in that peculiar voice, and his beloved wife Lady Kikyo would suppress a laugh, hide her sly malevolence, and smile coquettishly. This scene, doubtless repeated every night deep in the palace, was enacted to Terukatsu’s daydreams whenever he came before Norishige. This fetish is developed earlier in the historical account by the narrator. Later on, Terukatsu’s fetish drives him to abuse Doami, his court fool. The abuse takes place in front of Terukatsu’s wife, Lady Oetsu, who is shamed by her involvement as an audience. The entire fetish and story Terukatsu’s affair with Lady Kikyo are part of the secret history that the researcher uses to reveal the true character of Terukatsu as opposed to the official historical record. Of course, the official historical record is also an invention of Tanizaki. The level of detail Tanizaki stuffs into the novella makes you believe the secret history and the official history are real. The way Tanizaki writes the quotations and the researcher’s account suggests depth behind the quotations and narratives. The entire work becomes a satire of samurai practices–Terukatsu’s noseless head fetish–and that of historians as Tanizaki outlines his researcher’s debates about the fictional historical documents Tanizaki created. The effect these combined satires creates points to how history is a reconstruction. We rarely know the character of historical figures without some sort of agenda coloring it. Tanizaki’s focus on Terukatsu’s head fetish (I have to add is directed toward the women who groomed the heads and not the men, which makes the fetish even more specific) suggests how history seeks to besmirch character or exonerate it. Human details are often glossed over if the details are mentioned at all. The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi is a unique novella. I can’t recommend it for everyone. To get the most out of the story, you need to understand samurai culture and academic culture to see the more subtle satire. However, you don’t need to know all of this to read the main story. As a writer, I felt amazed at how Tanizaki layered the story. It didn’t always work. Some areas felt confusing or disjointed, and the shift from narrative to researcher and to Tanizaki’s voice didn’t always flow well. That might also have been a translation problem. I imagine translating the work would’ve been challenging. However, the work remained interesting. If you are into modern Japanese literature, this is a novella to read.

Overlord adopts Kugane Maruyama’s light novel series. When YGGDRASIL’s servers, a deep-dive massively multiplayer online role playing game, are scheduled to be shut off, Momonga remains logged in to see the shutdown. He’s the guildmaster of Ainz Ooal Gown and spends the last few minutes of the game’s life in the guildhall of Nazarick. He reprograms the non-playable character, Albedo, to be in love with him, overriding her original difficult personality. When the servers turn off at midnight, however, Momonga isn’t forcefully disconnected. Rather, he and all the non-playable characters he and his guildmates had created are transported to a different world. Momonga discovers that all the guild’s bot defenders, the Guardians, now appear to be alive. Each have their core personalities as programming in the game, but now they speak and behave as if they were people. He discovers he can smell and experience things that the original deep-dive game console couldn’t do. He concludes he’s somehow been transported into a new world. And so he and the Guardians begin gathering information about the new world and its residents. Spoilers ahead! Over Them All Overlord has a vast cast of Guardians and characters from the surrounding kingdoms. The Guardians view Momonga, who renames himself after the guild–Ainz Ooal Gown–as a god. After all, he and his fellow guildmates created everyone in Nazarick, and only he remains with them. Ainz is an Overlord class, the highest class of undead. While he retains his human soul–his internal dialogue acts as a comedic relief–he soon learns he is no longer human. He learns he feels no remorse in killing humans or anything else from the world he finds himself in. The Guardians were also designed to behave as villains. They disdain humans and the weak (which are the same thing) and stand at some of the highest levels possible in original game. Ainz is maximum level and has almost all the world items, powerful, game or in the case of the new world, reality-breaking items. He and the Guardians learn that the rules of the game apply to their new reality. They stand at the apex of power. Ainz decides to seek out other players because he feels isolated, but over time he starts to see the Guardians as his family. He decides to focus on protecting them and helping them flourish, which eventually extends to forging his own kingdom. To help gather information, he takes on the warrior persona of Momon and travels with the Guardian Nabe to join the adventurer’s guild in the city of E-Rantel. Much of what Ainz does as Momon works into his gamer behavior. Ainz realizes he and his Guardians aren’t invulnerable when Shalltear Bloodfallen, a vampire and one of the strongest of the Guardians, falls victim to a world item that takes control of her mind. Unable to break such mind control, Ainz fights and kills her in the hopes he can resurrect her like in the game and also break the mind control. The plan works. In the process, Ainz learns how much the Guardians all mean to him. Without them, he would be truly alone in the world. Although Ainz no longer feels anything toward killing humans, he still works to curb his Guardians’ bloodthirsty natures and complete disregard for humanity. When he was a gamer, he was as an office worker. He’s not mentally equipped to be the Overlord, so he often flies by the seat of his pants. The guardian Demiurge and Albedo are strategic geniuses. So, most of the time Ainz plays along with their plans. Demiurge folds Ainz’s alternative identity of Momon into his plans. Demiurge and Albedo believe he thinks far beyond them. In reality, he usually knows nothing of what they are talking about. His grasp of politics is simplistic, reducing to “carrot and stick,” and he leans on his and his guardian’s near-absolute power. This serves as  the story’s comedy. Ainz is forever suffering from imposter syndrome; he even reads a few books about leadership he has in his item storage from his world. Whereas Demiurge and Albedo have multiple plans working, all aimed at increasing Ainz’s power and fame at the cost of thousands of human lives. When Ainz makes an off-hand joke Ainz made about conquering the world, they misunderstand the joke as an order, and so act accordingly. Three powerful nations surround Nazarick: Slane Theocracy, Baharuth Empire, and the Re-Estize Kingdom. Demiurge seeks to conquer all of them. Ainz, at first, wants to trade with them, but as the story progresses, he concludes the stick needs brandished and the carrot reluctantly offered as Demiurge plans. He makes the nearby kingdom, together with a plot hatched by the kingdom’s princess and Demiurge, an example of the stick Nazarick wields. The village of Carne sits on Nazarick’s doorstep. The village serves as a model for how demi-humans and humans can live together. Ainz uses the humans Nfirea and his love, Enri, to research potions for him. The world’s potion making methods cannot yield healing potions of the quality the game world offered. Carne village offers an interesting side story of how Enri’s summoned goblins (thanks to an item Ainz as Momon gives her) help the village thrive. Her growth into a leadership role mirrors Ainz’s own leadership challenges. Only Enri does a better job as a “diplomat” that builds bridges between differing peoples. Ainz tries but doesn’t succeed as Enri does. Ainz functions like Rimuru from That Time I was Reincarnated as a Slime, but with a cruel, autocratic streak. The Guardians, while reticent about Carne at first, soon see the village as a template for their master’s grand design (he doesn’t have one) and so start to come around, if a little, toward the usefulness of humans. Ainz and the Guardians get embroiled with the Re-Estize Kingdom’s Eight Fingers, a shadow organization that pulls the strings of the kingdom. The involvement is part of a joint plan by Demiurge and Princess Renner to destroy the kingdom. The Princess, despite being the daughter of the king, has her personal goal of achieving immortality and power through Nazarick. Soon after the Eight Fingers are tortured (carrot and stick again) into service by the Guardians, official relations with the Re-Estize Kingdom sours. As a result of this souring, Ainz attempts to establish trade relations with the Baharuth Empire. He leaves Albedo to handle the official political relations with the kingdom while he focuses on the Empire. He bumbles through negotiations and involves himself in a yearly, ritualized battle between the kingdom and the empire on the side of the empire. His involvement escalates the kingdom’s response, fielding 140,000 troops against the empire’s 50,000 or so soldiers. Ainz casts a summoning spell that requires the instant death of 70,000 kingdom soldiers. The creatures he summons proceeds to massacre the remaining forces. Understandably, this terrifies the empire. Later, when Ainz enters into a coliseum fight in the Empire’s capital to advertise how his kingdom wants to employ adventurers for exploration, he terrifies the emperor. The emperor happened to be meeting with representatives from the Slane Theocracy. He aims to forge an alliance with all the human nations to fight against Ainz. Ainz’s appearance, however, makes him think Ainz knows of the plan. Knowing Ainz’s power, the emperor publicly swears the empire as Ainz’s vassal. Uncertain what a vassal even is, Ainz says Demiurge will get in touch after the emperor sends a written agreement, and carries on with his adventurer recruiting. It’s an amusing example of Ainz’s bumbling around as a gamer does. He really needed to play some strategy games! When Ainz discovers dwarves are able to create rune-empowered weapons, he wonders if another player had taught them how to do so. He discovers the dwarves had been forced from their home by a population of mole people known as the Quagoa. Ainz assigns the Guardians Shalltear and Aura with the extermination of all but 2,000 Quagoa. While they handled this, Ainz goes into the capital where he encounters Frost Dragons and proceeds to overpower them. Ainz gains an alliance with the dwarves, recruits the dwarven runesmiths, gains the 2,000 Quagoa, and the loyalty of the remaining dragons. Back in the Re-Estize Kingdom, one of Ainz’s food deliveries is stolen by one of the kingdom’s nobles. This prompts the long-running plans to destroy the kingdom by Albedo, Demiurge and Princess Renner. Albedo declares war. Ainz worries that the war would be too easy and that the Guardians won’t learn anything, so he imposes some handicaps on the war, barring himself from using his powers to level the kingdom. The invasion sets up a future conflict with the Slane Theocracy and some powerful adventurers. The destruction of the kingdom ends with Princess Renner earning her desire. She becomes a demon. Her love and knight, Climb, after challenging Ainz to a duel and dying, is resurrected. Renner asks him to become a demon like her so she won’t be alone. He accepts. A lot more happens. Albedo and the other Guardians have character development scenes, but few of them move much in their low opinion of humanity. They remain firmly villains from the human perspective. Villainy, Virtue, Veneration Unlike most isekai, Overlord‘s protagonists remain decidedly evil or, at best, gray. The Guardians were never human. They began as NPCs created within the video game to defend the guild. They were all created as demons, undead, dark elves, or other fell creatures and so follow their natures. Overlord touches on how they can grow a little from their original programming now that they are living. And they aren’t without virtues in their own ways. They see each other as a family and, at times, mimic their original creators in personality. They venerate Ainz as a god. From their perspective, he and the absent guild members are gods. The Supreme Beings, as the Guardians call them, created the Guardians and gave them everything. The veneration troubles Ainz, who wants the Guardians to become his equals and replace the camaraderie he enjoyed in the video game. But veneration becomes the chief virtue for the Guardians. All over actions do not matter, no matter how cruel, as long as they serve Ainz and the Nazarick family. Of course, they don’t view their actions as cruel. When they brutally torture the members of the Eight Fingers into servitude, the Guardians see it as a purification, as a virtue. Humans stand no better than insects to them. Several of the Guardians enjoy more development time, such as Shalltear, Albedo, Cocytus, and Aura. Shalltear and Albedo love Ainz romantically. Albedo loves him because he tweaked her settings just before the video game went offline. This makes her love for him a source for discomfort because he knows Albedo has little choice. Shalltear, however, develops her love for him over time. Her affection wasn’t an original setting. She points to how the Guardians can change and stretch beyond their original programming. In typical anime-male style, Ainz feels uncomfortable about this romantic love and tends to avoid it. In a few scenes, he reciprocates, such as when he kisses (as much as a skeleton could kiss) Albedo on her cheek before she leaves on a diplomatic mission. Ainz remains a villain. He can be kind to those who follow him, but he takes a hard, brutal line to everyone else. And he has the power to murder all resistance. As isekai power trips go, Ainz stands at the apex. Only other players, his Guardians, and world items pose a true threat. The story underlines his cruelty by developing a few adventurers over a few episodes, sketching their personalities, loves, and stories. Then, a few episodes later, they are killed by Ainz and the Guardians. Usually, anime doesn’t spend time developing characters destined to die. Other dark fantasy like Goblin Slayer fall into this problem. The deaths become another bit of fodder, a tool to underline brutality or evil. But this method falls short compared to Overlord‘s method of taking a little time to make a connection between the audience and the characters destined to die. All characters are tools, but their effectiveness varies based on how well the audience connects. Even brief sketches Overlord uses works well to show the darkness of Ainz and the Guardians, which, in turn, shows the bright spots of their kindness, love, and virtues. This makes them more horrifying too. Ainz’s seat-of-the-pants bumbling, for example, makes his planned brutality even worse, but his behavior also underlines his kindness toward the Guardians and his glimmers of kindness toward Carne. The Gamer Mentality Toward NPCs Ainz’s brutality toward humanity reflects the gamer mentality toward NPCs. I’m a real-time strategy gamer. Compared to the religious and cultural genocides I’ve committed in Total War, wiping millions of NPCs from the games, Ainz is a lightweight murderer. Ainz is no RTS gamer. His strategy remains a simple carrot and stick approach, and he acts in the moment. As the series progresses, he often says to himself, “That’s a problem for future Ains to deal with.” This offers a fair bit of humor to an otherwise dark story and makes me facepalm as a long-time video game strategist. Ainz’s blase attitude toward death, other than a few off-hand musings, shows the gamer mentality. Overlord quietly explores the question: what if NPCs are real people? Ainz comes to this conclusion with the Guardians and a few other side characters like Enri, but over all, he retains his disconnect to non-playable characters. Overlord doesn’t directly deal with this question, but it points toward this gamer thinking made me wonder about the future of NPCs. In the near future, large-language models and other artificial intelligence will be used to power NPCs in video games. This brings up the question of sentience. While right now these systems stand far from sentience, we struggle to put a finger on sentience in the first place. Some people don’t believe animals are as sentient as humans are. Sentience, in other words, has levels. AI systems simulate animal-like sentience. Poorly as of this article, but with increasing abilities. You don’t know if I’m sentient. You can read my words or, if you know me in person, observe my conduct. But you can’t know if there’s a ghost in the shell. All you can see is the exterior. We trust or conclude other humans are sentient because they are human, and we have an unexplainable ability to recognize sentience at different levels. While it’s not scientific, awareness seems to recognize itself. But you cannot know this with the certainty you know your own sentience. You can’t climb into another’s head and see their awareness. So too with the black box of “intelligent” machines. The difference comes down to blood and bioelectrics versus silicon and software. So if you deem an NPC that’s powered by an intelligent system as sentient, killing that NPC in a game could carry moral implications. Overlord points toward this question with how it contrasts Ainz’s gamer callousness toward the humanity of the characters he kills or has killed. We step into the definitions of life and consciousness. Overlord doesn’t dwell on these questions. It’s not Ghost in the Shell. But the story nudges and winks at gamers, encouraging them to think a bit about their own murderous behavior. The Over-Powered Trip Isekai stories focus more on the question of how than on if. Most stories play with both questions. If the hero is to rise to this challenge, how will they? With the overpowered nature, god-like abilities of most isekai protagonists, how becomes more important. We already know they will succeed. These stories are power fantasies with little chance for failure. Of course, not all isekai stories feature this. Inuyasha, Konosuba, Mushoku Tensei, and similar stories fall closer to traditional fantasy stories. They still have if as a feature. Overlord centers entirely on the how. There’s no if with how powerful Ainz and the Guardians are. Only another player and the suggestion that other “gods” like Ainz have appeared and died in the world’s past add ifs to the story. Stories like Overlord don’t rely on suspense. Isekai rely instead on interest and characterization. Ainz and the Guardians remain interesting with their behavior and gray-to-black morality. They offer slow character development with Shalltear offering the most, and most interesting, development arc. Over-powered stories like Overlord offer catharsis. There’s a certain pleasure in watching a villain strong-arming the world to kneel to him. As an RTS gamer and as a writer, that’s what I do. While it’s all harmless fun in the end, such catharsis makes me ponder my own mentality. Fiction isn’t reality, but fiction acts as a mirror for your subconscious. Fiction also feeds your thinking. Overlord offers an entertaining dark fantasy. It doesn’t offer a lot of depth despite what I’ve discussed, but there’s also more chipmunk-brained entertainment fare out there. Ainz stands, perhaps, as the strongest isekai character in one of the power-trippiest power-trip stories.

How you read matters as much as what you read. How I read varies. If I’m reading Spice and Wolf or other fiction, I just read. If I’m reading nonfiction, my approach depends on my goals. No matter what I’m reading, I try to read on a schedule. Reading, like so many other practices, requires discipline. Sure, it is fun. I’ve loved reading since I began reading around four years old. But with how many distractions we have now–phones, streaming, video games, social media–reading needs to be scheduled and made into a practice or you will fall out of it. Just like every practice, such as exercise, you will sometimes need to take a break. I take a break after reading heavy books, like The Rape of Nanjing, easing back into books using lighter fiction. I try to read before sleeping Monday through Friday. On weekends, I either don’t read, making time for my other interests, or I take an afternoon for a deep reading binge. If I’m reading a nonfiction book for my own edification, I don’t take notes. I skip chapters that don’t interest me or topics I’ve read about many times before. I also skip anecdotes and stories that illustrate the concepts of the book, preferring the concepts themselves and the data behind them. And, if the book spends a lot of time with sports-related anecdotes or illustrations, I often abandon the book. Sports bore me, so such illustrations  confuse me, don’t work as metaphors, or simply make me stop reading. In the past, I used to soldier through a book I didn’t like or felt meh toward, but time is short, so with those types of nonfiction books, I will skim and pull the information that interests me and then abandon the book. Now if I’m reading a nonfiction book for research, with the goal of using the information for my own writing project, I will read only the relevant chapters and sections, unless the entire book interests me, which is usually the case. I prefer to take notes using pen and paper instead of on the computer if I will be spending a lot of time researching. Piles of notebooks filled with research notes pile on my writing desk. Why take such an old-school approach?  If I’m researching for a JP article, which are much shorter, I will take notes on my laptop. But I prefer the old-school method because it’s how I grew up learning. I remember the world before the internet and computers were everywhere (and before they were even available in schools). Also, research has repeatedly shown writing notes and other information by hand solidifies learning compared to typing. If you want to truly learn a topic, you do it by hand using pen and paper. While I don’t have a photographic memory, when I recall my handwritten notes, I remember the layout, sketches, and overall look of each page. I then mentally find the information on each page. This sort of location-based mapping doesn’t happen when you use digital note taking methods. Everyone does this sort of mapping to greater or lesser degrees when they use analog methods, using the brain’s spacial navigation systems to help with recall. Doodles, even if you just use drawn arrows, also improve memory, learning, and focus. You don’t have to be an artist. Even stick figures illustrating the concepts you are noting improve your learning. My handwriting can sometimes get messy, as you can see below, but you should try to keep your handwriting as legible as possible. You may need to work to improve the quality of your handwriting. Generally, cursive writing is faster than print writing. Working out your own shorthand system can also help your hand follow the speed of your thinking a bit better, but the slower speed of handwriting compared against typing also helps you think through the materials better. When I’m writing notes, I don’t worry about the organizations or try to force the information into an outline. That step happens later when it’s needed. On the top of the section, I write a citation in a simplified version of the American Psychological Association (APA) style. Why APA? It’s what I’m most familiar with. Use whatever works for you. Below the citation, I write, in my own words, the ideas that grab me as I read. Whenever I find a quotation that may come in handy, I will write it down verbatim, marking it as a quote. The key to avoid plagiarism is to write your own understanding of the information you read. Inevitably, your notes will reflect the words the book uses, but the act of using your notes for your writing gives you further distance from the original text, which reduces the risk of inadvertent plagiarism. According to Merriam-Webster, to plagiarize is “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own.” Beside each idea, I jot down in the margins the page the idea is found. This helps me if I need to look the idea up again later and for when I include a footnote for the idea. Some styles of footnotes require a page number. As I read and take notes, I allow the information to flow in whatever order the book presents it, including writing down duplicate ideas or my impressions. My impressions about the subject helps me understand my own thoughts later. Sometimes I won’t return to my notes for several years! There’s no way I can know what I was thinking or what grabbed my attention after so long a time. If I’m working on a book-length project, I will sometimes have a hundred pages or more of notes. I aim to exhaust the information sources I can find. At the top of each page, I number the page. On a separate sheet I number the lines and then on each line I summarize in a few words each page of my notes. From this index I then build an outline if the project demands it. The index allows me to find the information in my notes easily. Building an outline from the index is also easy because all the information sits on a sheet or two compared to leafing through various notebooks or a hundred pages. This seems like a lot, especially if you are writing an article about anime. Many of my articles here in JP, as you’ve no-doubt seen, have many references. There’s no way to read these sources and then write by the seat of your pants while being accurate. Writing directly from the sources increases your risk of plagiarizing by accident. Beyond that, note taking helps me read deeper, looking for how the author connects the ideas together, and note taking forces me to consider how the information fits into my own understanding of the topic. Whenever I take notes while reading, I retain what I read better, even when I am making digital notes. Some people prefer to take notes within the book. I use the notebook method because it allows me to centralize information from multiple books. But if you prefer margin notes, do what works for you. I don’t expect to retain most of what I read, even when I take notes. If I come away with a single new idea, the book was worth reading. Although I remember a fraction of what I read, I’m reminded of a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Back when I first started watching anime regularly–during my early college years (I’m getting old)–I would sometimes get hooked on opening and ending themes. Two later favorites were Ichirinnohana by High and Mighty Color and Natsumi Kiyoura’s Tabi no Tochuu from the original Spice and Wolf. While I would find other opening and ending themes I liked, I never got into them as much as others in the anime community. It seems most fans go through a stage where they mix their own music videos using these tunes. While I’ve added several Japanese bands to my music list, they comprise a small portion of that list. That said, as a metal and rock lover, Japanese bands stand among the best. They combine modern with classic. Many singles by Nemophila and Band-Maid could sit in the 1980s and 1990s with their sound, yet other singles also cut new paths. Enter the Maids Maid cafes have become synonymous with Japan, which is interesting considering the design is a cute, anachronistic and sometimes erotic riff of Victorian French maid uniforms. Band-Maid takes this schtick and bring it into the realm of metal and rock. This band is one of reasons why I developed an interest in Japanese female metal groups. YouTube randomly slid a few of their singles into my grunge playlist many years ago. While I found their maid outfit idea a bit gimmicky, their sound certainly wasn’t. They combine a classic 1980s rock vibe with a modern take. Many of their songs made me think of hair-metal bands like Dio, Whitesnake, and Led Zepplin. Their song secret MAIKO lips hooked me with its mix of rock with traditional Japanese sounds. They remain mingled with my various playlists. Unlike many bands, Band-Maid doesn’t fall into the “sameyness” that defines popular groups: if you hear one song, you hear them all. While I enjoy Disturbed, most of their work tends to fall into this problem, for example. Band-Maid, however, continues to offer variety–sometimes slipping traditional shamisan-like elements to other-times adding hip-hop style rhythms. While they are not longer unknown, they continue to experiment. Enter Variety Nemophilia has many cover videos on YouTube, covering Iron Maiden, Kiss, and other greats that I enjoy. Their musical variety hooked me as soon as YouTube slipped them alongside Band-Maid. I’m not one for screaming usually, but Nemophila made me appreciate a good screaming-lyrics. While the group focuses more on classic rock and metal, they weave in fluffy, Japanese-pop punctuated by occasional raging lyrics. Whiplash contrast appears in many different Japanese bands, most famously Babymetal. Nemophila has a maturity. The rage that sometimes appears in their songs feels more genuine. Because they are older women–older relative to the usual teen and 20-something artists–the anger feels more genuine. Their covers of past songs feel fresh while their original songs. like Zen offer interesting sound punctuation. Whenever I need energy, I queue Nemophila. Enter the Bubblegum Rage Hanabie comes closer to Japanese pop than Band-Maid and Nemophila. Hanabie features just as much anger as Nemophila, but there’s a wink to their anger. They are more modern and younger than Nemophila and Band-Maid with their songs. They address problems like modern dating and hookup culture and poke at Japan’s corporate culture. Their songs, while poppy and sometimes bouncy, cut at various problems with Japanese society. They combine lyrical sections with metal-screams in a satirical take on Japanese pop music. Satire is my favorite type of humor and commentary. Most Japanese pop stands as too saccharine and cutesy for me. Hanabie toes that line for me. Some of their songs cross over in places, but I enjoy how they take on societal problems in a fun, elbow-nudging way. Preserving the Classics Japanese rock preserves the elements of classic American rock and metal. While hip-hop and country have infected most American music, Japanese rock and metal, at least with Band-maid and Nemophila as examples, appears to resist this trend. While Japanese pop has slipped into some of these groups, it hasn’t become as endemic as what I’ve heard in American music. If you like pop, that’s great! But variety is better than uniformity, giving everyone something to enjoy. But then again, I might also be listening to the wrong groups. Lately, I prefer non-American music, including “Scandinavian symphonic metal.” Country music dominates my area. All the women sound alike; all the men sound alike. They all sing about the same things too. Nemophila and Band-Maid, while sharing the same genre, sound unique. Even modern American metal tends to sound similar to each other nowadays. This might, of course, be part of my fading hearing. It might also be a factor of universality. American media exports around the world. In order to maximize its widest appeal across cultures, Hollywood and the music industry has watered down their stories and uniqueness. Whereas, Hanabie features a song focused on bowing at work like a chicken pecking at the dirt. I find the work of YouTubers more interesting than corporate music because their songs aren’t trying to maximize appeal in the endless chase for profit. Instead, these musicians make their profit through their unique takes, even when they cover popular songs. People outside the US may find American music as unique and interesting as I do these Japanese metal groups. People inside Japan may find these Japanese metal groups ho-hum. But consider how unique, even blessed, our situation is. We can encounter music from all over the world. Cultures mix to create new perspectives, commentary, and vocabulary. Nemophila covers American songs in both Japanese and English. Band-Maid interjects English to create interesting melodies of contrasting and complementing sounds. We have the neurological habit of getting used to things and taking unique, historically-unprecedented blessings for granted. The fact I can listen to music from around the world gets lost in the course of my daily life. It falls into the background–quite literally. But if you go back even just a few decades–I remember the world before the Internet–such a thing wouldn’t be easy or, in some cases, possible. We often don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone. And that theme appears in some of the songs Band-Maid, Nemophila, and Hanabie perform. I also listen to a variety of other Japanese groups, such as Scandal. I’ve listened to visual kei bands, but beyond a few singles, they aren’t the types of songs I prefer. But then my playlists also include Heilung, Dio, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Brass Against, video game covers, opera, Wardruma, Mongolian throat singing, jazz, traditional shamisen, and other genres. Just no bluegrass please! Japanese rock isn’t the best in the world; there’s no best anything. But Japanese rock can be quite good for my musical taste. It’s quirky, a bit weird (especially the ever-hilarious Ladybeard), sometimes culturally disconnected in its commentary, but overall enjoyable. These three groups lend me energy when I’m tired. Although I’m generally calmer than when I was younger (and I was pretty calm back then too), metal offers a great release valve for frustration and irritation or provides an external energy source. What Japanese groups do you enjoy? Please list a few favorites to help each other discover something new!

Anachronisms appear throughout anime. They take many different forms, sometimes impacting the story and other times erring in details that don’t matter. Merriam-Webster defines anachronism as “a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other.” Anachronisms can pull you out of a story by jarring the fragile illusion the story weaves. With fantasy stories, anachronisms can become a part of the world, depending on how they’re handled. For isekai, chronological misplacement becomes a part of the story. Most of the time, a modern person is transferred to a past world. The past world is often modeled after a Japanese Role Playing Game, complete with leveling systems and heads-up-displays (HUDS) that display statuses and other video game shorthands. In such stories, the historically accurate elements become the anachronisms, strangely enough. Many anachronisms are so common in anime that they become a trope of themselves. They appear across all historical periods depicted in anime and across most fantasy worlds. Most anachronisms involve our familiar modern fashion, words, accessories, and food slipping into history. As a writer, I try to guard against the modern slipping too much into setting and characters, but because I use modern language and write for a modern audience, my stories are anachronisms despite my historical research and effort. Many anime stories, however, don’t try to curb modernisms. Instead, these stories embrace modernisms, following anime templates like the beach or swimsuit episode down to the modern bikini. Chronological displacement can hurt stories by not taking the setting and world-building seriously if the stories are supposed to be serious. It depends on the story. French Maid Uniforms Perhaps the most common anachronism found in anime is the French Maid uniform. The uniform roughly dates to the 1800s, with a simple, modest and long dress covered with a white apron. The lace, thigh-high stockings, high-heels, and short skirts come from the modern-erotic take of the Victorian outfit. What we see in anime isn’t historical; it’s Halloween. Because of this, even when the outfit appears in a Victorian-era story, it’s still chronologically out of place. The anime version of the French Maid traces, as far as I can tell, to burlesque shows. Of course, the outfit appears in maid cafes which is what anime stories reference. The uniforms play into the fantasies of the audience. The uniform has several layers–referencing wealth, history, modern consumer culture, and an inverse of Victorian sexual strictness. For most people, however, it’s just eye candy and an expected beat in a typical comedy or slice-of-life template. Business Suits Like with French Maid uniforms, many anime men wear business suits in historically disconnected periods, particularly if they work as a butler. With isekai, this makes sense since the character is suddenly transported from our world to another. What the character wears at the time would influence their new world. Usually, the protagonist is shown as a hero, and, as such, others in that world would want to emulate his dress and mannerisms. This would explain how ties and suits could become more common in such a story. However, in historical dramas, particularly in shojo period romances, Western-style ties and business suits are pure anachronisms. They act as shorthand for social ranking or, as I mentioned, most often pointing to their job as a butler. But this shorthand is lazy. Every historical period had its own signals of social importance which would become apparent to the audience in short order. Butlers, like maids, also had their own historical uniforms. While this detail isn’t important, I find ties and other suit-related clothing niggling. They break the setting and the world a bit too much for my taste. Modern Accessories Related to suits are inappropriate accessories like suitcases, pens, pencils, large glass panels. I’m getting nitpicky in this section. Most of the time, these little details don’t matter for the story nor do they detract from the setting as much as salaryman suits, maid uniforms, and the other items on this list. Frieren, for example, has a singular jarring anachronism in an otherwise grounded story–her suitcase. The suitcase’s design is far too modern in design. A wooden box or a bag would’ve been more accurate for the world as it is portrayed. I’ve pondered if the modern suitcase is an intentional contrast. Frieren is often stuck in the past; her modern suitcase holds trinkets from that past. In other words, the future holds the past but is carried by the present. Perhaps I’m thinking too deep in this, but anachronisms can be used to point toward deeper ideas and themes, especially when the story otherwise avoids such anachronisms. Not all modern accessories hurt the story, but if they come from sloppiness, they can. They break the weave. Setting is a character too, and chronologically wrong items are akin to a character acting against their established nature without a good reason. Modern accessories creep in with earrings, glasses, and many other details that we take for granted today because they are a part of our world, but they would’ve been rare and limited to only the wealthy in other time periods. Schools and School Uniforms Schools and the concept of school uniforms can be anachronisms depending on how the world is established. Nobility hired teachers and tutors rather than sending their children to an academy. Academies existed, tracing at least back to the Greeks here in the West. But these academies weren’t schools as we know them, complete with dormitories and classrooms. Rather, academies coalesced around certain teachers. Socrates had his own academy–the students that followed and learned from him. They would meet outside in the city square. In medieval Europe, nunneries and monasteries acted as schools with students sometimes living on site as lay-monks or lay-nuns. Most of the time, teachers taught in the home of the student. While in a fantasy world there’s nothing wrong with centralized schools, the idea has folded so deep into anime’s tropes that other, more historically accurate, approaches rarely appear. Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, at least at first, features this historically correct at-home tutoring system, but it’s school system is mentioned and pointed toward early in the story, so it works. Because this is anime, most schools include uniforms. Many stories have the uniform designs grounded in their world–although Japanese ties and sailor ribbons still appear. Again, this can be fine if it works for the story, but the problem appears when these schools and their uniforms are forced into the world building. Schools force disparate personalities together in interesting ways, but it can be an artifice. Swimsuits There seems to be a clause in whatever contracts mangaka sign with publishers: swimsuits are required at some point. Depending on the culture and time period, historically accurate swim suits would be no clothes at all!Japan’s history is well-known for having coed hot springs, but such bathing practices appear throughout the world’s cultures. Loincloths would be accurate alongside no swimsuit at all. Of course, this wouldn’t work for most stories. But most of the time, we see modern bikinis and one-pieces during these scenes. Both are products of the last century, along with the characters’ reaction to those swimsuits. In cultures where coed nude bathing was the norm, such swimsuits would be considered odd and even modest–making the usual embarrassed reactions anachronisms too. Nudity wasn’t a big deal. In other, more modest periods, swimsuits were little different from normal clothes because skin was taboo for both men and women. In such cases the anime embarrassment beat would fit. It’s rare to see a fantasy or historical anime that avoids the swimsuit trap. Bras, just like bikinis, stand as anachronisms too. Women either used chest wraps or went without support for most of human history. Boxers, swim trunks, and similar underwear for guys would also be anachronistic. Food Japanese food often features in stories. In some isekai, characters crave rice and other food from home because their world doesn’t have such food. When the character can enjoy the food, or some approximation, from home, it’s an important beat in the character’s story arc. It ups their morale and fills a need they took for granted.  This is good for story telling. However, in other stories, the world inexplicably has ramen, udon, and other Japanese foods (sometimes even hamburgers) in an otherwise medieval European setting. Sometimes the story justifies this anachronism, which can add dimension to the world. Other stories just zero-in on the character’s pleasure and the excuse for some anime-food porn. Food reflects the culture and the world, fleshing out setting as a character. While compared to modern flavoring we’d consider the past’s food bland, food wasn’t as bland as often shown in anime. This too is a chronological displacement. Herbs, spices, salt, pickling, sauces, and other techniques were common throughout the ancient world. Pepper was one of the most valuable of spices, which often kept it out of the hands of the common people, but they still had access to herbs like rosemary, wasabi, basil, mint, and so on depending on time and place. Honey and other sources for sweetness would’ve been accessible too. Language This one is impossible to avoid. You can’t write a story for modern audiences without using modern language. If you tried to write a character in historically correct lingo, few of your audience would understand what’s said. However, writers ought to avoid modern slang even if it correlates with slang from the time period. It’s better to pepper that time-period appropriate slang–with some sort of context to make the meaning clear–than to resort to modern slang. After all, modern slang shifts fast with words rising and falling out of favor again within months. Of all the anachronisms we see, I’m most sympathetic to this one. It’s unavoidable because of the nature of language. Sometimes a character will say something that breaks the spell, but I can forgive that since the meaning and emotions behind slang doesn’t change even though the words have. Jesus, for example, spoke of the word Raca which means nothing to us now. But if you substitute a word like delulu the meaning and emotion remains the same, even if the word is an anachronism. The Custom of Breaking Custom Anachronisms break with the rules and customs of the story unless that is the rule of the story. Comedies can play with chronological displacement to good effect. Anachronisms can take us out of a story if they cut against that story and setting. They can do damage to setting as a character. At the same time, anime does this so often that not having an anachronism might be an anachronism, working against the current customs of anime and manga as a method of storytelling. In the end, chronological displacement is an error if it troubles you and pulls you from the story. It may not be an error for someone else. Stories are subjective; once released into the world, the consumer has the final say on how they relate to the story and what that story means to them. I just tend to be a bit persnickety about historical accuracy when the story is trying to be serious.

The Café Terrace and Its Goddesses is a harem comedy that focuses on the theme of a found family. Spoilers ahead for both the anime and manga, by the way. Hayato Kasukabe returns to Miura to close his recently deceased grandmother’s cafe, Cafe Terrace Familia. But he discovers his grandmother had taken in five women who also worked the cafe. Each of the girls also refer to her as their grandmother and have become a family. Each of the girls have differing reasons to turn away from their own families and to create one with each other and under Hayato’s grandmother. To honor this, Hayato decides to keep the struggling cafe open. Refreshingly, all of the women, except for the childish martial artist Ami, are adults in their late teens and early 20s. Their reasons to escape their biological family and their pasts weave into the present antics. And, as this is a harem, each of the young girls fall in love with Hayato and vie against each other to be picked as his wife. Except for Ami, anyway. Ami more loves him like an older brother, if in a “you can massage my boobs to help you feel better” anime-trope way. But in her defense, she is like that toward her adoptive sisters too. Because the story is a harem, I knew the story would teem with fan service. That fan service helped and hindered the story in equal measure. Some of it aimed at character development and character vulnerability. Other scenes hit on the usual harem beats. While the anime censors the nudity, this censorship matches the manga’s art. Anyway, the story explores each of the girls’ histories and personal difficulties with Hayato working as the supporter. Hayato cares about each of them, but he believes people should make their own decisions. For him, family is as much about stepping back and offering support when needed as much as it is about being involved. Losing his parents at a young age and his regret for how he treated his grandmother stick with him. This regret and appreciate grows when he learns his grandmother gave up her career as a Michelin star chef to raise him. He isn’t dense about the girls’ affection for him–there’s no way anyone could be with how assertive they are–but he does waffle as harem protagonists tend to do. He cares for all of them and fears picking one would hurt the others. Each of the women are also the granddaughters of the cafe’s original workers. Hayato’s grandfather had married one of those workers, and Hayato closely resembles his grandfather. Speaking of the women: Ami is the lone high schooler of the crew. She likes to wear masks and prank everyone, including customers. But under her sunny exterior, innocence, and airheadedness sits a deeply feeling character. This shows up during her character arc involving her grandmother, who cannot remember Ami. Ami, like Hayato, has only her grandmother as a relative. Because Hayato resembles his grandfather, he uses that to shock Ami’s grandmother enough to return her memory. Ouka is the tsundere of the group. Her character arc includes her twin sister, Kikka, and Ouka’s worry about putting too much pressure on Kikka. Ouka decided not to go to university and study at a fashion school instead. Kikka takes on their parents’ expectations and goes to university. Riho‘s past as a child actress and messy home life appears across a variety of episodes. Her mother tried to live vicariously through her, but when Riho failed to achieve fame, turned her back on Riho. Riho’s parents divorced when she was young because of their split on how to raise her, with her father promising not to reenter into Riho’s life until she’s 20 years old. Riho loves her mother but also resents her. Shiragiku lived with Hayato’s grandmother the longest among the girls. Her father, a Michelin star chef who had studied under Hayato’s grandmother, arranges for Shiragiku (nicknamed Kiku-chan) to also study at the cafe. She originally struggles with cooking in her own style, wanting to preserve Grandmother’s menu and recipes, until Hayato convinces her that Grandmother would want her to do her own thing. Akane comes from a rich, corporate-owning family and is the heiress. Her family disapproves of her love for music, how she works at a cafe, and how she is the vocalist and guitarist of a band. When Akane tells her grandmother of her feelings for Hayato, they both are kidnapped and brought before the matriarch so she can determine Hayato’s suitability for herself. The found family theme is charming within this story. Each of the characters get along as sisters would, harem-dynamics aside. They argue and support each other as they grow together. Hayato, too, benefits from the found family. As an orphan, he learned to stand on his own, pushing most everyone away. The women form a familial net that he can’t escape, which helps him realize his need for family. Family has little to do with blood relations. Many of the girls have no true family ties with their blood relatives. Their bonds with each other are stronger. This story captures a trend among many people today who find and create their own families. Economics often force people to travel far from blood relatives. The Café Terrace and Its Goddesses, Samurai Champloo, and other stories remind us that blood isn’t as important as bond. Hayato’s grandmother is also an interesting character in her absence. Her influence on all the characters shapes the family dynamics. Hayato often asks himself what she would do in a situation. The girls often reference her too. Her photo stands in a Buddhist shrine, overlooking their dinners and antics, with a soft kind smile. Each of the characters often reference her, showing the lasting, positive influence a person can have. Hayato’s grandfather is even more distant. But if it wasn’t for him, the characters wouldn’t have connected as they do. The threads connecting the characters and their grandparents across time creates a tidy mirrored circle. This sort of writing structure helps make a story feel more complete. Spoilers below!  I make all of this sound more serious than it really is. This is a harem comedy at the end of the day. But these story dynamics kept me interested when I would’ve likely dropped it otherwise. As for who Hayato ends up marrying, the anime leaves you hanging. Typical harem in that way. You have to turn to the manga for that answer. I did warn about spoilers at the start of this article, so I will go ahead and tell you: Akane. She seems to be a good fit for Hayato’s personality. Of course, this being a harem, the manga ends with all the girls still doing their thing despite Akane and Hayato’s marriage. The Café Terrace and Its Goddesses story kept me interested despite all the harem antics and humor that wasn’t to my taste. The harem genre’s tropes and beats are not what I prefer, but I can tolerate them for a decent underlying premise. The harem genre can be decent at found-family, growing-together stories. Harem fans will have enough to enjoy with the character dynamics.

I had hunted for a cheap English copy of Musui’s Story for several years. Finally, I stumbled across a copy buried in a used book store for $5. Katsu Kokichi wrote his autobiography toward the end of the Tokugawa period. Musui, to use his retirement name, wasn’t a scholar, administrator, or a samurai of any...

The journey story stands as one of the oldest types of stories, although the Cinderella story is likely the oldest story pattern. The journey pattern involves a hero of some sort traveling across various places, facing all sorts of challenges, and, at the same time, delving into their own psychology. This story archetype remains popular...

I enjoy a good yokai story, having studied yokai stories and even reworking versions of them for modern readers, freeing them from their late 1800s English and Latin (which were often the first time these Japanese stories were written down). If you are curious, I collected all of these into my Tales from Old Japan...

The year 2026 marks a milestone anniversary for JP. I’ve been writing at least one post a week for 15 years, totaling well over 1 million words. That’s hard to believe! Of course, I’ve studied animation for even longer, well into 25 years now. Over that course of time, I’ve seen animation in general and...

I’m a prose writer, but I dabble in bad poetry. Most of it are wordplay experiments and free writing that isn’t worth showing to anyone. Although I’ve read Robert Frost, Shakespeare, and many Western poets, Japan’s poetry resonates with me more. Japan favors succinct, symbol-coded poems that follow differing syllable patterns. The musical nature of...

Some stories linger for years after you experience them, floating within your mind like glittering snowflakes, touching your thoughts and actions in ways you can’t quite see. And yet you sense something has tinted your life’s painting more vivid where desaturated pigments once dominated, creating a more vibrant glaze that hints at how your mind...

If you want your love for someone to remain in the static gray area or unrequited, anime has the guide for you! The steps within this handbook will ensure you too can remain in the perpetual will-they-won’t-they zone! You too can remain indecisive and string romantic interests along, creating a space for perpetual confused connection....

Anime and manga don’t shy away from gentle, charming stories. And sometimes at the end of the day, a gentle slice-of-life story about friendship and love is just what the doctor ordered. The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity is one of those stories. I will spoil the story in this article: this is one I...

Urusei Yatsura stands as Rumiko Takahashi’s first serialized work. Rumiko, if you aren’t familiar with her, is one of the most influential manga artists: her career spans from 1978 to today. She created a range of works, including Inuyasha. Urusei Yatsura ran as an anime series in the 1980s and was remade in 2022. Urusei...

It seems everything in the United States has a political dimension to it, even to what type of bath soap you decide to buy! Anime, unfortunately, is no different. It’s not unusual for me to receive an ugly message that touches on political or racial topics. I’m more troubled by the lack of understanding such...

The idol fandom–Japanese and Korean–has many different aspects that can be positive, neutral, and negative. I’ve written a few times about the negative side, and I will touch on that side again in this article. Everything positive has a negative side built into it. Understanding that negative side emphasizes the positive. Unlike anime and manga’s...

Could South Korea or Japan disappear as nations? For those who asked this question: my apologies for taking forever to answer it. Modern nation-states, at least the developed ones, seem too solid to just disappear. Conquered, sure. But disappear? However, it has happened in the past. Amazonian and Mayan civilizations, for example, disappeared. Jomon civilization in...

If you’ve watched anime or read manga for any length of time, you will have come across the phrase “precious memories.” This phrase appears across all sorts of genres, most often in slice-of-life stories. When I first got into anime, in my early-to-mid 20s, the phrase made me cringe a bit. It struck me as...

Suzume released in 2022, and I only got around to watching it in 2025. You might be surprised to learn that I don’t watch cinematic, stand-alone anime films all that often. I find it hard to cordon two hours to watch a single film. I don’t watch live-action films for the same reason. I’m bad...