The Perfect Anime for Girls? And Tokyo’s Huge Population
One thing that’s very clear about anime and related game, manga and light novel culture is that it’s often about fantasy fulfillment, a chance for us to be taken away from our ho-hum lives to a better place for a while. I like to compare the differences between “escapist” anime intended for guys — fighting monsters vicariously as Kirito, being the center of the story in a harem anime like Saekano — and see how they’re different from anime aimed at girls. Here are some recent anime aimed at female viewers:
- The currently-airing 25-year-old High School Student, a short series about a 25 year old girl who goes back to high school, impersonating her lazy cousin to keep her from getting expelled. There she encounters a steamy world of romance she certainly didn’t learn the first time through high school. (There’ll be a broadcast version and a full 18+ version.)
- Love is Like a Cocktail, a short anime about a professional woman with the “perfect” husband, who’s younger than her and loves mixing her alcoholic drinks all night long before cleaning her house.
- My Arranged Marriage Partner Is My Troublesome Student, about a teacher who finds the handsome man she’s going to marry is really her student, who is rough and violent but madly in love with her.
The newest anime to follow this genre is IDOLiSH7, a fun male idol anime that takes the classic Idolmaster premise — a single male Producer (us) surrounded by multiple cute female idols-in-training — and reverses it. When new hire Tsumugi Takanashi starts her job at her father’s talent agency, she’s surprised to find herself made Manager — for cultural reasons impossible for westerners to fathom, males are apparently Producers while females must be Managers — of a new team of seven male idols called IDOLiSH7. Naturally all members are incredibly handsome, and will all fall in love with Tsumugi as the story progresses. It’s the perfect anime for girls!
Tokyo is Japan’s capital, a sprawling city of 13 million that’s been the administrative center the country since 1603. Tokyo isn’t really a single city but a prefecture comprised of 23 different cities, called wards. A few weeks ago I tweeted an infographic showing countries whose entire populations are less than that of just the Tokyo area, and it was like 40% of the world. Big countries like Australia, Canada and all Scandinavian countries, plus Saudi Arabia, Portugal and Mongolia, all have populations smaller than the Tokyo area. Every time I go down to Tokyo I’m amazed how well everything functions, with every train and taxi and hospital and police station operating exactly as it should, like pieces of a clock. So, how does your country’s population compare to Tokyo?
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