Interesting Japanese Culture in Anime

Being an anime fan means more than just enjoying pretty moe [mo-EH] girls and watching robots battle each other: it’s a journey of discovery in which you often find yourself grappling with cultural concepts that go well beyond what your Japanese dictionary tells you. Like the idea of senpai and kohai, senior and junior members in a school or organization, labels which carry nuances of responsibility and respect that aren’t easily translated into English. Another potentially difficult concept is osana-najimi (oh-sah-nah nah-jii-mee), or childhood friend, which describes a special kind of close friendship between people who grew up together, very common in anime, manga and games. Yet another word that has a larger cultural footprint to it than it appears at first is tenkosei, meaning a student who has transferred from another school in the middle of the school year. Life in Japan is a lot more stable than it was for me in the States, and while I thought nothing of changing schools 5-6 times between the first and eighth grades, this would be quite rare here. Imagine moving to a new city and attending a school filled with people who have known each other all their lives, and you’re the only one who’s different — it might make fitting in quite difficult. The drama of this kind of human interaction is apparently interesting to anime creators, and there are plenty of tenkosei characters around, such as Koizumi, the “mysterious transfer student” that Haruhi is so happy to have found in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Our game YUME MIRU KUSURI has an arc where you must save transfer student Aeka from being teased by her classmates.