Bonus Podcast (with Transcript) 2022 September: Back to School

Chiaki, Meru, and Caitlin shake off summer and look ahead to the school year, with a few recommendations of school-set (or at least school-related) anime.

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CHIAKI: Hello and welcome to a bonus episode of Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. I’m Chiaki, one of the editors for AniFem. You can find me @Chiaki747 or @AnimatedEmpress on Twitter. And today we’re going back to school with Caitlin and Meru.

CAITLIN: Hi. Chiaki, you sound like an NPR announcer.

MERU: You really did. You were giving a… Who’s the…? My favorite person is Ira Glass.

CHIAKI: [Chuckles]

MERU: You were giving, like, “should be getting six figures a year.” And I love that.

CHIAKI: Okay, so we’re gonna do a true crime podcast instead today…

MERU: [ironic] Oh, no!

CHIAKI: [Laughs]

MERU: Oh, no, there’s a lot of true crime in anime, though.

CHIAKI: Yeah.

CAITLIN: Oh, no. A lot of anime is truly a crime, so…

MERU: Oh, yeah. No, I’m excited to go back to school with y’all.

CHIAKI: Yeah. How’s your memories of going to school?

MERU: Well, I mean, for me, I thought I was straight and a woman. So, complicated!

CHIAKI: Same here. Well…

MERU: But I was in marching band. So that was cool.

CAITLIN: Oh, I did orchestra.

MERU: Ooh!

CHIAKI: I was in jazz band.

MERU: Did you do viola [pronounced vie-OH-lah], Caitlin?

CAITLIN: Viol— Viol— Wait, you said “viola” [pronounced vie-OH-lah], and I needed to say “violin” [pronounced vie-oh-LIN], but I said “violin” [pronounced VEE-oh-lin]. What the hell?

MERU: [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: What is wrong with my brain? [Sighs]

Well, I’m a teacher. So…

CHIAKI: So you never escaped.

CAITLIN: Yeah.

MERU: [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: I mean, I’m an early childhood educator, so it’s not 100% the same. We don’t really do summer vacation. But there’s changing classrooms and switching things around. And even if we don’t have summer vacation, we have a week where we get ready for the new school year. And I am about to start my first year as a primary teacher at the school.

MERU: Nice!

CAITLIN: So there’s much, much to be done. Much to be done. It’s a little stressful.

MERU: [crosstalk] You got this.

CAITLIN: It’s so much.

CHIAKI: You’ll get it.

MERU: Do you get to take naps when naptime happens?

CAITLIN: No, that would be considered abandonment.

MERU: Oh, oh, oh. Yeah. Oops.

CAITLIN: So, yeah, back to school.

CHIAKI: Excited to go back to school already.

CAITLIN: It’s a lot.

Full disclosure: we are recording this in August, so I am very much in the throes of getting ready for the new school year. We have two weeks left in the current school year. It’s a lot. It’s a lot.

MERU: Though I should say, since it’s going up in September, it’s my birthday month!

CHIAKI: Ay! Happy birthday!

MERU: [crosstalk] I’m turning 30!

CAITLIN: Yay!

MERU: Yeah, I’m turning 30.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] You’ll be a real grown-up. You’ll be a real grown-up.

MERU: Maybe. Patent pending on that.

[Chuckling]

MERU: I don’t know. I’m very excited to turn 30.

CHIAKI: Oh.

MERU: But I bet it’s still gonna be hot!

CHIAKI: [Sighs] 30 years old. Okay. Congratulations.

CAITLIN: Hot 30-year-old summer.

[Laughter]

CHIAKI: So, I’d like to suggest a school-ish story. [Chuckles]

MERU: What’s your school-ish story?

CHIAKI: Okay. As always, whenever I recommend things, I don’t care if it’s translated or not. And the thing is, this one you can kind of get away with. If you are interested, you can go watch the anime in English on Netflix, Hi-Score Girl, which is, itself, a pretty fun show.

CAITLIN: Yeah!

MERU: Chiaki, the manga is out in English for Hi-Score Girl.

CHIAKI: Oh, cool, great. That, too. So, what I’d like to actually talk about, though, is Hi-Score Girl Dash, which started coming out last year and is the continuation of Hi-Score Girl. It takes place ten years after the initial story. And it stars Koharu, the rival for Akira who shows up midway through Hi-Score Girl. Of course, being the non-main girl in a pseudo-romance story about a boy and a girl slowly getting together…

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] That’s rough, buddy.

CHIAKI: Yeah, she’s gonna be important for maybe four, five volumes and then she gets kind of like, “Oh, well, you’re not actually going to win, so bye.” And ten years later… And of course, Hi-Score Girl itself takes place in the ‘90s during the whole arcade boom, the video arcade boom in Japan. In 2007, things have cooled off a lot more. Internet gaming hasn’t started quite up yet, but it’s not quite as hopping as what it was in the past. And… Yeah. And so it starts with—

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Oh, Chiaki, do I get to tease you for being old now?

CHIAKI: Oh God!

MERU: I was gonna say, you’re the grandparent this time.

CAITLIN: [Chuckles]

CHIAKI: [with mock offense] Oh, excuse me! [Resumes normal tone] So, it’s ten years later, Koharu has graduated from college, has gone to teaching school, and is starting her first day as a middle school teacher at her old middle school. And everything about her life kinda sucks.

MERU: [Chuckles sympathetically]

CAITLIN: Yeah, teaching middle school is a rough break.

CHIAKI: [Chuckles] But being a former gamer, she kinda takes back her youth and her own magic, I guess, by getting back into gaming, mostly to keep her class of troublemakers out of trouble by teaching them how to game really good. So, it’s nice because it’s giving a person who kinda just got written to the wayside in Hi-Score Girl to have her own moment to shine. And it’s about an adult coming of age as an adult. So, it’s a fun series to get into, I think, for a lot of folks.

CAITLIN: Yeah.

CHIAKI: So I hope—

CAITLIN: Never finished Hi-Score Girl, but it’s a sweet series. I should go back and actually finish it.

MERU: I was gonna say, maybe I need to pop over to Netflix this afternoon.

CHIAKI: Yeah. And Hi-Score Girl itself is really fun. I enjoyed it. And the kids are really sweet. The physical, visual humor is great. Art style is a little special, I guess. People really love it or hate it. Actually, I think most people just either hate it or put up with it. But I personally like it.

MERU: Okay.

CAITLIN: All right. Okay.

MERU: How about you, Caitlin? What are we going back to school with?

CAITLIN: Well, I had a couple of choices. But I think maybe if we still have time at the end, I’ll talk about my second one later. But first I want to talk about School Babysitters. You know, I have already talked about working in early childhood. And when I watched School Babysitters, I found it a, honestly, very charming representation of what it can be like to work with a mixed-age, early-childhood group. It’s got a solid understanding of how children think and how they function. It’s actually one of my favorite series to use for my panel—that I have done once and I hope to do again, but you know… [Chuckles] Conventions, y’all, right now!

MERU: Right.

CHIAKI: Hmph.

CAITLIN: —about child development as represented in anime. So, the premise of School Babysitters, if you haven’t seen it (and the anime is available on Crunchyroll, though I don’t believe the manga has been translated), is that… Oh, God, I can’t remember the main character’s name.

CHIAKI: Oh, no.

CAITLIN: Someone look it up for me quickly while I keep talking.

MERU: I’m looking it up! I’m on it! I’m on it!

CHIAKI: [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Okay, Meru to the rescue. Anyway—

MERU: The main character… Let’s see. Is it Ryuichi Kashima?

CAITLIN: Sounds…

MERU: Yeah, yeah? Two brothers?

CAITLIN: Yeah.

MERU: Ryuichi Kashima and his younger brother Kotaro.

CAITLIN: Yes, that sounds right.

MERU: [crosstalk] Oh, it’s this! It’s this, with that [trails into a broad Australian accent] cute li’l baby! [Returns to normal voice] Yeah!

[Laughs]

CAITLIN: Anyway, so, yeah, Ryuichi Kashima and his little brother Kotaro, their parents were killed. So they get—

MERU: Oh, Jesus!

CAITLIN: —they get adopted by the headmistress of this school, and she offers to give them free tuition and room and board as long as he works at the preschool that she has for the teachers’ children. There are some issues with this premise. For example, he is a child who is grieving and has suddenly become the parent to his little brother.

MERU: I was gonna say, how are you gonna tell a dead kid that he needs to work?

CAITLIN: Yeah, and she’s basically making it so that he has no time, himself, to be a child. The actual teacher at this school, I want that man fired. He does sleep during naptime.

CHIAKI: Oh, no.

CAITLIN: He watched one of the children, a girl who I would say is three or four years old, try to figure out how to fly on a broom stick to prove that witches are real, and he’s like, “It’ll be fine as long as she doesn’t try to jump off of anything tall.” And then he walks away.

MERU: Oh, no.

CHIAKI: Hm.

CAITLIN: [Sighs]

MERU: Oh, no!

CAITLIN: I want that man fired.

MERU: He sounds like a real Bean Dad.

CHIAKI: [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: He’s like the opposite of a Bean Dad, honestly, because he doesn’t do anything. He’s not like, “This is a great educational opportunity.” He’s like, “Well, I’m gonna go to sleep now. Just gonna take a nap with the baby here.”

MERU: He really is from that school of “mess around and find out,” huh? That’s not good as a teacher!

CAITLIN: We call it “natural consequences.”

MERU: Oh, okay.

CAITLIN: I’m a big fan of it. Sometimes, when a child does something like falling off the table, I just kinda look at the other teachers and go, “FAAFO,” because I can’t say the word “fuck” in school, but it means “fuck around and find out.”

CHIAKI: [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: But we also call that “natural consequences.”

MERU: Yeah, I guess that is natural consequences. That’s a bad teacher, though.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] But there are limits to that.

But other than that, the issues I have, there’s just so much really solid understanding of how children think, how they understand the world, how they learn. At one point, Kotaro, who I would say is like two, is trying to make honey lemon for his brother when he has a cold.

MERU: Aw.

CAITLIN: And he’s trying to squeeze out enough lemon juice with his little hands. And he’s just working so hard and he’s persisting, and when he does it, he’s so proud of himself. It’s like, yeah! He’s learning persistence and he is learning to do things himself. Or, there’s a pair of twins who… they don’t see their dad very often because he’s a famous actor. So their mom decided to show them a video of one of his dad’s movies, where the dad plays a villain, and now they’re scared of him!

CHIAKI: Oh no! [Chuckles]

MERU: Uh-oh. That’s bad parenting.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Because they don’t understand the difference between TV and the real world. And there’s a lot of little things like that. So I found it really charming and a lot of fun. If you like young kids, if you know about young kids, it’s really nice to just sit back and see, because a lot of children in fiction are written by people who don’t know anything about children.

MERU: Yeah, they write children as if they’re aliens, which, like, children are weird…

CAITLIN: Right. Or they write five-year-olds like they’re babies or they write two-year-olds like they’re 15, or stuff like that. They are not written to be like the little, small people that they are. So I really enjoyed seeing that in School Babysitters.

CHIAKI: As far as the depiction goes, do you know or think the author has any kind of connection to early childhood care or anything?

CAITLIN: I honestly don’t know.

CHIAKI: Okay.

CAITLIN: I’ve only seen the anime.

CHIAKI: [crosstalk] Oh, good point.

CAITLIN: I don’t know anything about the author, really. It’s a shoujo. It’s a nice little non-romantic shoujo manga.

MERU: [crosstalk] Because the author’s only other really notable series that got localized into English is Me & My Brothers, which I think was a Tokyopop title.

CAITLIN: Unfortunate.

MERU: And let me tell you, it’s a drama comedy, but Me & My Brothers should be setting off all the alarms in your head because one of those brothers is gonna be a love interest. So…

CAITLIN: Unfortunate!

MERU: I don’t know if that says anything about the author, but maybe they did some research and were like, “Oh, let me learn about early childhood development.” We can only hope.

CAITLIN: Yeah, and it’s done in a way that feels very intuitive. It’s not sitting down and is like, “This is how four-year-olds think. This is how three-year-olds think.” They don’t even state the children’s age. One of them is obviously a baby. But other than that, you just observe it, and if you know what you’re seeing, you see that it’s accurately portrayed.

MERU: Nice.

CHIAKI: So, Meru. What are you recommending?

MERU: I am going to recommend Flying Witch as a back-to-school… And I’m doing that because it is not a traditional classroom but it is a story very specifically about learning and the community of education and the community of learning from others. And I mean, it does also feature a student transferring.

I’m going a little loosey-goosey with this one because I think Flying Witch is a really good high school anime about learning that’s not quite in a high school. And I feel Flying Witch is one of those series that I don’t necessarily think a lot of people have watched.

But it is about a witch named Makoto, who moves from Yokohama to Aomori, and she moves as part of her training. And it kind of came to mind when I thought “back to school” because classrooms are not always bound to an actual classroom. Sometimes the most practical learning happens just in everyday and experiencing life. And yeah, this is one of my favorite anime about a high schooler learning some good stuff, in this case, witchcraft, and I just really love it.

CAITLIN: All right.

CHIAKI: I like that.

CAITLIN: Yeah, I’ve watched a little bit of it. It’s definitely not a traditional classroom, but there’s a lot of value in that. There are whole philosophies of education around that, about how children need to get out of the classroom, they need to be out in the world, experiencing things for themselves, exploring their interests.

MERU: I kind of wrestled with it because this is not really necessarily specifically a classroom, but I was like, you know what? I think there’s a lot of value to the practical application, even in a fantasy series, of learning from a community and having your education in something specific be more freeform.

CAITLIN: I mean, that’s kind of… Have you heard of unschooling?

MERU: Mm, I haven’t.

CAITLIN: So, unschooling is… The pedagogical philosophy behind it is that children have a natural drive to learn, so if you find a way to foster that drive, you don’t need to do worksheets or things like that or read out of textbooks. Their interests drive the study, and through that, they will get a complete education. So, yeah, it’s interesting, I haven’t really looked too deeply into it because, as a teacher, it’s not really something that I can personally participate in. We do a lot of child-centered learning, child-driven learning at my school, so it is a little bit connected to that, but fully unschooling is something that a parent has to be committed to full time.

MERU: That’s really interesting, though.

CHIAKI: So, Meru, you said the main character moves to… what, Aoi?

MERU: Aomori. [Chuckles]

CHIAKI: Yeah.

MERU: Like deep countryside Aomori.

CHIAKI: Yeah, no, that makes… That is the perfect place if you are going to do some kind of nonstandard classroom. Aomori is probably a great place to do it in the country.

MERU: Yeah.

CHIAKI: You know, I used to go… This was in Osaka, but my schooling was in the middle-of-nowhere mountains of Osaka, in the south. I was in a six-room schoolhouse, one room per grade level, and some of the classes was like five people large. And we didn’t spend a lot of time in the classroom. I mean, we had the state-mandated book learning stuff, but during the summers and stuff, we were out there, hiking, learning about plants, learning about animals, crawdads, everything, like how to catch them. That was part of the curriculum. [Chuckles] So, yeah, I can totally see the appeal, and it kind of goes back to—

CAITLIN: That’s awesome.

CHIAKI: Yeah, it goes back to a really lowkey, I guess, and naturalist education that you used to get out in the countryside.

MERU: Yeah, and I think that’s a lot of the appeal of Flying Witch, just watching this young girl on the cusp of adulthood just learn from others, not necessarily always about witchcraft, things that are often tangential to witchcraft, but just learning outside of her traditional high school classroom where she’s doing the state-mandated kind of studies, just learning how to use these abilities she has and how to orient herself in this environment with that same kind of natural curiosity. It’s a really good iyashikei show.

CAITLIN: So, can I present some bonus recommendations?

MERU: Do it.

CHIAKI: [crosstalk] Go right ahead.

CAITLIN: Okay. Well, for one thing, Meru talking about the Flying Witch did remind me that I am almost caught up on Witch Hat Atelier.

CHIAKI: Mm-hm.

MERU: Yes! [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: So, I don’t think we really even need to recommend this series. It is not like some underdog that people really need to know about. It has won a fucking Eisner Award. It is a massive crossover hit.

MERU: Gorgeous.

CAITLIN: I am still so upset that Kamome Shirahama was supposed to come to TCAF right when COVID hit.

CHIAKI: [remembering] Yeah!

MERU: [indignant] Why y’all can’t put on a mask?

CAITLIN: I was working so hard on getting an interview. She would have been such a great person to interview, in so many ways! I’m so angry about that.

MERU: Sad! Just sad.

CAITLIN: That is something that I feel like COVID really took away from us and would have been great. And listen, COVID has taken a lot of things: COVID has taken lives, COVID has taken livelihoods. Those are obviously much more important than having an interview with a cool manga creator. But also, God fucking dammit, COVID!

But what I think is really exciting about Witch Hat Atelier from the perspective of an educator—and we actually already have an article about this that someone has written (I’m late to the party on this)—is that in a lot of ways, it’s about learning differences.

MERU: Mm! Very much so.

CAITLIN: There’s the hint that Qifrey’s Atelier… the students he takes on, there are witches that struggled to learn in the traditional master–apprentice relationships, that the standard forms of schooling wouldn’t work for them. And so, what Qifrey is doing with them is he is taking them out of that environment and he’s taking them to somewhere where they can figure out how they learn, because they have failed in the one-size-fits-all system. And it addresses a lot of different kinds of differences: differences in ability, differences in background, differences in learning styles.

MERU: It’s really, really good.

CAITLIN: It is, and it is so direct about it. You know, it is such a clear metaphor that this isn’t something that’s obvious that just happened to emerge in the story; this is something that Shirahama thought about and looked up and talked to people about.

MERU: Well, and it’s quite integral to the story. The story does not function if you remove this element of an adult meeting the needs of his students versus having the students rise to the expectations of the system that is pre-established. And that’s what I think makes it really engaging. It’s also beautiful. It is very, very beautiful.

CAITLIN: It’s gorgeous. And I mean, some people don’t like it when series are very clear in their metaphor. And that’s really the only condition in which I wouldn’t recommend Witch Hat Atelier to someone. Literally everyone else in the world, I think, could get a lot out of it. It’s just a stunning series in so many ways.

And then, do either of you have any other bonus recommendations that you want to do real quick?

CHIAKI: Nope, not me!

MERU: Nope.

CAITLIN: No, no?

MERU: No, I can’t think of any.

CAITLIN: All right, I’m gonna toss in one for Honey and Clover, which I just finished rewatching. I am working on an article—not for AniFem—about how… I watched it in college when it came out, and I was like, “Ha, look at them! They’re just like me.”

CHIAKI: [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Bunch of college students, living, loving, laughing, being weirdos, having a great time, figuring out their lives. But it’s also very nostalgic in the moment. Like, the main character had some monologues about how, “Oh, you know, eventually these times will pass, and they will all move on with their lives and these moments will just be memories.” Now I’m watching it at 35; I’m like, “Yeah! Yep. That sure is how that went!” You know?

I’m still in touch with some of my college friends. One of them lives next door to me and also does some work for AniFem. Another one of them does a podcast about giant robots that I have guested on, which is wild because that means he’s completely separately acquainted with a portion of AniTwitter. It’s so strange. It’s so wild when these coincidences come up.

But a lot of it has just… Those times… I can’t live like that anymore. I couldn’t live like that anymore if I tried because I’m 35 years old. But those were such precious memories to me and precious times, and so Honey and Clover really just hit very, very hard for me. Fantastic.

MERU: Aw.

CAITLIN: Fantastic series. Not without its flaws, but you know.

CHIAKI: I haven’t watched Honey and Clover since I was in college, so maybe it is time for me to revisit.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] You should revisit it.

MERU: I was gonna say, I’ve never watched it, but maybe…

CAITLIN: I mean, it’s still good to watch even if you didn’t watch it in college. It just has a real special kind of impact watching it in parallel that way. You know what I mean?

MERU: [agreeing] Mm, mm!

CAITLIN: So, yeah, got my bonus recommendations in.

CHIAKI: Cool, cool.

MERU: [crosstalk] Love it. I love it.

CHIAKI: All right. Well, with that I think it’s time to say thank you for supporting us. Your contribution on Patreon really helps so that we can come together like this and talk about our bonus recs.

And we’ll see you next month on Chatty AF. School’s out!