From the New World

I've had a rocky relationship with Shin Sekai Yori. A lot of the early episodes felt meandering, but usually had an intriguing scene or revelation at the end to tempt me into the next one. It didn't seem to be going anywhere, and then there was a multi-episode arc that felt like filler, or at least a distraction from the massive unaddressed surprise in the preceeding installment.

There are some really interesting ideas in the series, not to mention utterly arresting mythology and terminology - naughty children being erased from existence by "Trickster Cats", for instance - introduced in the very first episode, but to begin with it feels like a lot of worldbuilding that's quickly forgotten about in favour of a storyline focusing on something entirely different.

It's only in the last few episodes that things have started to come together, with plot threads, minor character moments and even that apparently pointless arc all suddenly being massively important not so much to the plot, but certainly to the characters and what the show seems to be trying to say.

The second most recent episode in particular had a fairly accusatory tone, pointed squarely at two of the main characters' naivety and apparent recklessness. This in addition to questions about the nature of young democracies versus the preceeding structure or other competing societal models. The show also generally seems to be warning of the unforseeable and major consequences that come about following what seem like harmless lies or rash decisions - sometimes taking years after the fact to become apparent. There've also been a few moments about racism and imperialism into the bargain, and I've not even touched on the unusual sexual politics of the society the show is set in.

There's no doubt it's a much more complicated - and adult - story than the early, seemingly confused episodes had me believing; it's a bit of a pity it takes so long to get to the point, but at the same time rushing into such heavy moral quandries could have been even more off-putting.

I can see more than a little bit of Lain in the philosophy and even the art style, but really I can't think of anything quite as multifaceted as Shin Sekai Yori; if you've got the time to watch the fourteen episodes released so far, I highly recommend it. I would urge you to watch them in quick succession too, otherwise the slow pace might put you off altogether.

Impassionate Gods

難波津に
咲くやこの花
冬ごもり
今は春べと
咲くやこの花

It's weird, the things anime will expose you to. A few weeks ago I'd never heard of Karuta, a Japanese card game; now, I'm fairly annoyed that I don't know enough Japanese to be able to play it. The show in question, Chihayafuru, follows the members of a high school club taking part in competitive karuta tournaments, with a version of the game that plays like a cross between bingo and snap.

The players' deck has one hundred torifuda cards, each of which has the second half of a Japanese poem printed on it¹. There's a second set of one hundred yomifuda cards with the entire poem on it, which is held by the reader. Each player gets 25 of the 100 cards and sets them out in their own "territory" in three rows - the actual placement of cards is apparently up to the player. The reader picks a torifuda card at random and reads out the first half of the poem; the first player to grab the corresponding torifuda card wins it and, if it's in the opponent's territory, passes a replacement card to the other player. The first one to empty their territory wins.

I'd assumed, when first watching Chihayafuru, that the speed and skill that the characters possess when it comes to identifying the poem and its corresponding torifuda - not to mention the lightning speed with which they grab it - was unrealistically fast. Then I watched a YouTube video of a real match. It's stunning how quick they react to the first one or two syllables of a card, and it only reinforces the importance of the players' strategy when placing their cards and how good their memories are of the overall layout.

The only other sports anime I've watched is Princess Nine, and as much as I love the its characters, the actual sport itself is a bit of a weak link. The Kisaragi Girls' High School baseball team's strength comes more from innate abilities of the characters - especially Ryo's pitching - than from any hard work or skill progression of the team as a whole. More games are won single-handedly by Ryo's "Lightning Ball" than is really necessary for dramatic purposes, which leaves most of the rest of the cast as little more than filler, at least when it comes to the "A" plot.

While Chihayafuru still gives its progagonist a little bit of a natural edge over some competitors, Chihaya's better-than-average hearing is far from the superhuman feats displayed in Princess Nine. It's not enough on its own to let her win games either; while she can pick up on verbal queues from the readers, enabling her to "hear the next syllable" before it's been read, her memory skills and speed are frequently outmatched by opponents, which makes the games less predictable.

While I'm sure there are cynical business reasons to want the characters' progression to the top of their game to take longer, it's also reassuring that the series is willing to take its time developing the characters rather than giving them a shortcut to the Master and Queen titles. They've got to earn their place to even play at those games, and it's not going to be a quick or easy road even to get to the qualifiers.

The main subplot of the first season is the unusually good-natured rivalry between two of the male characters, Taichi and Arata. It could easily have become bawdy or childish, but the way their relationship is approached by the story feels a lot more realistic. To begin with, Taichi's hanging around to keep an eye on Arata, who he fears might be making moves on his childhood friend. (It's fairly obvious that Taichi has a thing for Chihaya but doesn't know how to tell her.) The romantic rivalry is downplayed a lot, however - mostly by Arata's absence from large parts of the series, but at one point Taichi even admits (although only to himself) that "Chihaya belongs to both of us". Instead, it's their karuta that's the main focus of their competitive streak - although for Taichi at least, a large part of his motivation is probably to get Chihaya's attention away from Arata.

But Chihaya's not interested in either of them romantically. She's briefly jealous when Taichi gets a girlfriend, but doesn't seem to have any worry beyond how it'll affect his (and her own) karuta training schedule. As far as she's concerned, he's primarily her training partner, as he's initially the only person in the school karuta club capable of challenging her reflexes.

Her relationship with arata is different in a lot of ways - when he leaves Tokyo, having inspired Chihaya's borderline obsession with karuta, she's fixated on the game as a way to reunite with him. As a child she didn't have anything that she loved for herself; Arata introduced her to karuta, and her love for the game and for him are indistinguishable. It's intriguing that her driving force in becoming Queen is her need to be with Arata again, but without the romantic hopes that would entail in an only slightly different story. I can't help wondering how their relationship will change once they are together again; their few brief meetings have a hint of deeper feelings than Chihaya maybe realises, but is playing karuta enough to keep them together?

It's one of the things that keeps me going with the show, though - Chihaya's excitement at playing karuta, with old friends, new club members or other semi-pros at the local karuta society is infectious. She's so focused on it, and her gradual improvement - depite her failures along the way - is hugely different from the path of endless victory I'd expected from a sports-focused anime coming in.

Even the opponents she faces are more varied than I anticipated; rather than all high-school students, Chihaya faces off against everyone from a six-year-old girl to old men - and in almost all her matches, seems to refine her technique.

The second season started airing recently in Japan, and is being simulcast on Crunchyroll. On one hand I'm glad that I'll be able to follow along with the series as it unfolds - and I don't have to worry about hitting any spoilers, except from people who are up to date with the manga. On the other, having spent the last few weeks watching three or four episodes at a time, the seven day wait between each episode is going to be tough.

The title of this blog post is the opening phrase from one of the most important cards in the show; the full text is Impassionate gods have never seen the red that is the Tatsuta River. In Japanese, "Impassionate" is "Chihayafuru"and begins with the same kanji (千早) as the main character's name, so she has a special attachment to the "Chihaya card".

¹ The poems are taken from a collection called Ogura Hyakunin Issu (Ogura Hundred Poets), compiled in the 13th century by Fujiwara no Sadaie to decorate the sliding doors of the Ogura mountain villa, the summer home of the general and poet Utsunomiya Yoritsuna. Each poem in the collection is by a different author, and are arranged based on when they were written, between the 7th and 13th centuries.

Kokoro Connect

I was almost 100% sure that this was a much older show than the Wikipedia article suggests - was there another show with a similar name a few years ago? Or maybe I'd seen something about the light novels this was based on.

I don't really understand what it is about (primarily romantic) high school anime that gets its hooks in me like this. The social structure is different from what I experienced at school; the culture of clubs and groups is different, we never had a student council with its fingers in everything, and there's something slightly weird about how all the schools in these shows have the exact same classrooms, staircases, staff rooms and rooftops, and the same lockers in the entrance hall¹. They're familiar places after you've seen one show, no matter what year or which part of world the next one is set in.

The main benefit of this familiarity, for a western viewer, is that you instantly know where everything's taking place. You have a sense of geography right away, which lets you concentrate on what's different about this particular show.

Kokoro Connect follows the experiences of the five members of the Student Cultural Studies club as they're experimented on by a powerful intelligence that calls itself Heartseed, beginning with apparently random instances of body-swapping but soon moving on to more emotionally perilous tests. The members of StuCS are forced to face their own - and their friends' - darker sides and insecurities that are brought to light as a result.

This show could be a lot darker than it is. Having teenagers swap bodies obviously has some potential for serious mischief, but the show manages to keep its mind mostly out of the gutter. The second of Heartseed's experiments, which is constantly and distractingly referred to by the characters as "unleashing desires", has even more dangerous possibilities - although aside from the very first instance there's nothing risque, and there doesn't seem to be any clear indication of when anyone - apart from Taichi, ostensibly the main character² - is actually suffering from an "attack".

It's this second part of the show that's my favourite; the body-swapping is kind of fun and does actually come closest to the sinister ideas that could have been much more common with the material, but the group dynamic changes much more as a result of the "unleashed desires" problem and it's an interesting stress to put on a group of people who are really only friends by chance. It forces them to reassess their relationships and causes some promising conflicts, although once it's all over there's really only one character with a long-term change as a result - though they are in position to have a sizeable impact on (at least two of) the others.

The romance plot is one of the weak links for most of the early episodes, but a development towards the end of the second experiment does shake things up a bit³. It also makes the earlier, token confession stuff more worthwhile and results in higher stakes and one of the most emotional scenes in the show. It's a shame that, as with a lot of the fallout from these experiences, the status quo in the group isn't disturbed much by this shift. It'd be nice to see more realistic reactions to these events, rather than either no reactions or melodramatic self-exile.

¹ These might be accurate depictions of schools in Japan - a lot were probably rebuilt after World War 2, which would explain the almost-identical architecture.

² I'm strongly of the opinion that Inaban is actually the main character, as she's the only one who seems to go through any kind of meaningful character development as the series progresses.

³ I'm trying to be vague, but making sense is proving difficult. Unlike Sword Art Online I think this one's actually worth watching, though - so I don't want to spoil anything.

Sword Art Online

I'm generally pretty forgiving with TV shows. The potential I see in a series is usually interesting enough for me to keep coming back, apparently without ever getting disappointed by continuing story failures, character stupidity or bad writing. It's why I was able to put up with two seasons of Stargate Universe, the first season of Dollhouse and all of The Walking Dead so far. I'm an optimist.

That's the only explanation I can come up with for why I stuck through Sword Art Online for the duration. Because this is not a good show, despite what I kept telling myself - for the first eleven episodes, at least. There's a kernel of good ideas somewhere under the pseudo-fanfic story progression, and the setup - real-world death for anyone who dies in the MMO they can't log out of - could be a really interesting look at how people behave in online environments, and why they act the way they do.

Sword Art Online tries to stick with that thought for most of two episodes, then gives up in favour of illogical character development, poorly-explained exploitation of game mechanics and a romantic subplot that, if I'm honest, goes nowhere - but gets there too fast.

Warning: spoilers ahead. Also, this is a bit of a long one.

GIRLS und PANZER

I have made my opinion known to anybody who'll listen (and, no doubt, several who would have preferred not to listen) how I feel about moé anime. Traditionally, the word "moé" is followed by the word "bullshit".

This outlook is based almost entirely on my experience with a single show, K-ON!, which I found to be a tepid, cynical and borderline offensive waste of animation, music and voice talent. The show's bloody-minded determination to avoid its own central premise - that of a musical club learning to play their instruments - comes close to the most frustrating viewing experience I've had with anime.

I was fairly certain that GIRLS und PANZER would stray into similar territory. With a bright, primary colour palette, perpetually upbeat characters in their mid-teens and the familiar "setting up a school club" premise, my hopes were not high.

However, I neglected to take into account that tank battles are awesome.

Starting in the 1920s "Tankery", the maintenance and driving of tanks, was seen as an essential pursuit for young women - similar to a martial art - which gives them an opportunity to learn teamwork, self-reliance and, according to a promotional film in the show, makes girls "more polite, graceful, modest and gallant".

After a traumatic experience with tanks, Miho Nishizumi transfers to the Ooarai High School ship in an attempt to avoid Tankery, but her family's long history and illustrious reputation in the sport results in her being drafted by the school's student council to start a new Tankery club.

All the tanks in GIRLS und PANZER are real vehicles, and great attention has been paid to the way they operate, their strengths and weaknesses, and real-life tank tactics. Once the club starts competing, there are some brilliant tank action set pieces and the tension's palpable when the teams start taking each others' machines out of commission*.

There's also a much bigger cast than you might expect. Each of Oorai's five tanks has its own crew with distinct traits and unique ideas about camouflage: for instance, the Hippo team are military history buffs who constantly compare their situation to historical battles while the Duck team are the former volleyball club, hoping to boost their flagging membership numbers. The variety of personalities - even if they are universally cheery - keeps things interesting where a smaller group of just the main characters could get boring.

So far, only ten episodes (plus two recaps) have shown up on Crunchyroll; the remainder of the series is due to begin airing in March. Unless it goes seriously off the rails in the last two, and even if I have a strong sense of how it's going to end (I'm definitely expecting a Princess Nine ending), I'm really looking forward to it. The next battle is building up to be pretty epic, and if the series has proved anything so far, they know how to deliver an exciting confrontation.

I'd also like to point out that the comments under each video on Crunchyroll are brilliant; rather than the usual quality of internet debate, you have tank enthusiasts geeking out over strategy, armour and the correct use of an M4 Sherman in battle.

* A solid hit from an enemy shell causes a white flag to pop up from the hit tank, which also seems to cut its engine and prevent firing. There are apparently never any serious injuries resulting from shell hits, even though Miho spends most of her time sticking her head out of the tank during live fire games.

Kids on the Slope

I bought my first jazz album sometime in 2003 or '04. It was almost immediately after reading the Tokyo chapter of David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, which name-checked a number of performers and records. After Yoko Kanno's soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop, I'd been wondering where to start with "real" jazz, and the novel had given me a list of albums to check out.

I was trying to find Undercurrent by Bill Evans and Jim Hall, but the Belfast HMV didn't have a particularly large jazz section at the time and I ended up buying Waltz For Debby by the Bill Evans Trio* - the only Bill Evans they had.

Jazz and anime seem to have overlapped quite a lot in my interests, until I left Belfast for Dundee in 2007. I'd all but burned out on anime and the move to Scotland meant that my enthusiasm for running my anime website (which had basically supplied me with free titles for a few years) completely died.

With jazz, I'd been content for a long time to just stick with the three or four albums I had, especially with CDs costing up to £16 a pop and an aversion to buying digital music (I don't pirate it either; I buy the CD and rip it) that still persists. I still listened to jazz, but wasn't especially eager to buy more.

For the last few months - basically since being exposed to Puella Magi Madoka Magica - I'd been wondering what other stuff I've missed. I asked on Twitter for recommendations of recent titles, and someone mentioned - almost in passing - Kids on the Slope.

I'd never heard of it before. I didn't reading anything about it before watching. And the first episode kicked my ass in a way that nothing has for a long, long time.

This is the moment, in the first episode, that I fell entirely in love with the series.

Everything about Kids on the Slope was different from what I thought I'd find when I came back to anime; the art and the animation, the way the characters act and the way the music sounds. There are no supernatural forces at work, there are no heroes or villains, there are only people who don't really know who they are or who they want to be, and who've ended up figuring it out together.

It's difficult to express how much - and even harder to explain why - this show stuck a chord with me, but I was so excited by every episode. Not just waiting to see where the story went, which I was, but waiting for the music - to see what pieces they picked and to watch them play it.

If you'll forgive this temporary digression into internet vernacular: OH MAN, THE FEELS.

I wish I could say that everybody would get such a brilliant experience out of the show, but I have a feeling that if you don't like jazz (and some people don't; nobody's perfect) then you won't understand Kaoru's, for want of a better word, "awakening" the first time he hears Sentaro play.

The show has really reignited my interest in jazz, though. I've already bought two new albums off the back of this series (Portrait in Jazz - because you can never have enough Bill Evans - and Moanin'), and I'm already looking into where I should start with Charles Mingus.

The video embedded above was the moment that I knew Kids on the Slope was going to be something special, when I knew it was going to be something that stuck with me. But my favourite sequence in the show (arguably surpassed by the very last performance in the final episode), is when they perform this medley. Music seems like a fitting way to stop myself talking about the show, because now that I've started it's getting very difficult to stop.

One final word, that might convince otherwise hesitant anime fans to give it a shot: the show was directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, and the music's produced by Yoko Kanno. How far wrong could that pedigree lead you?

*I wish I had a specific memory of the first time I heard those opening notes. I wonder if it was a big deal? I know it was a positive experience, just judging by my CD collection, but was it transformative?

Maybe that's why was such a powerful, exciting moment for me, to see Kaoru's face when Sentaro finishes that first drum solo - hearing that music somehow makes it feel like it's okay to just wing it until you find a rhythm where everything clicks into place.

Back on the anime bandwagon

Despite running a website about the stuff from 2003 to 2007, I've been out of the loop on anime for years - basically since I moved to Dundee (or, more exactly, since I stopped running the website and was no longer sent new stuff for free).

Recently, the newest stuff I'd seen - other than the Rebuild of Evangelion movies - were Dennou Coil (2007), Eden of the East (2009) and Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011). I've been keen to get back into the habit though, so the arrival of the Crunchyroll app on Xbox 360 seemed like as good a reason as any to sign up for the service (I hadn't realised until that point that it was even available in the UK) and see what's out there nowadays.

Even the free offerings on Crunchyroll are decent, although a fiver a month gets you HD video and iOS/Android/Xbox streaming, as well as removing all the ads. Trying out the first couple of episodes of a show to figure out if you like it isn't a problem, and it means there's a lot less time (or money) investment to try something out - it starts playing instantly. The downside - such that there is one - is that they have a lot of stuff, going back to the start of 2009, and it's a bit overwhelming to know where to start when you've not been following any of this stuff for a couple of years.

So far I've watched all of Kids on the Slope (my new favourite show) and Sword Art Online (decent first half ruined by the second), and have seen most of GIRLS und PANZER (surprisingly awesome), BTOOOM! (really stupid but irritatingly moreish) and Shin Sekai Yori (f--king weird, in a mostly-offputting way).

As part of this 365 posts thing I'm planning to write a full post about each show as I finish it, as well as (probably shorter) posts about the stuff I give up on partway through. I've got drafts written for a few shows already, but I'm praying that inspiration strikes about something else soon and I don't end up writing about Japanese cartoons all the time.