It’s funny the way a person’s perceptions of a place can be influenced by stereotypes. For example, there are many famous images of Japan, from ninja to geisha to the idea that Japanese live in paper houses, which we hopefully realize are not totally accurate today. (Actually, the paper houses part isn’t completely wrong, as my house has many shoji paper doors that separate rooms.) I once had an interesting conversation with a man from Iran — interesting in part because
were were speaking Japanese, as he didn’t know English, and we were both naked in a public bath at the time — who had somehow come to believe that Hollywood action films were an accurate representation of life in America. I did my best to correct this mistaken views, and wondered what erroneous beliefs about his country I might be holding. In a recent episode of the popular anime Ano Natsu de Matteru, aka Waiting in the Summer, glasses-wearing red-headed alien Mizuho Kazami Ichika Takatsuki confesses that she is in fact not from Earth. But she’s very nervous about giving away her secret. “What if the ‘Men in Black’ find out? Would they try to do an alien autopsy on me?” It made me smile.
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AnoNatsu is an anime about love, summer and aliens.
