Living next to North Korea sucks, but at least there’s anime

Another anime I started watching this season is Alice and Zouroku, a dramatic and surprisingly cute series about a group of esper girls being experimented on a government facility that’s trying to create some kind of Kwisatz Haderach super moe being or something. One day a gruff old man named Zouroku encounters one of these girls named Sana in a convenience store, and gets his life turned upside down. I find I like the anime because of the characters — especially the cute interactions between Sana and the grumpy old man Zouroku, and the way that even the enemies the main characters are working against have realistic goals of their own. Also, I liked that the first episode was 45 long minutes, the studio basically signaling their intent to tell a high quality story at a time when so many shows are just 3 minutes per episode. Viewers in a recent episode were surprised to see blatant product placement for the American fast food restaurant Carl’s Jr., which recently opened a location in Akihabara. No doubt the company is hoping for a Pizza Hut-style reaction from fans, when sponsorship of Code Geass a decade ago caused sales of the company’s pizza to spike not just in Japan, but all over the world.

There are many fun things about living in Japan. Made cafés.Vending machines that accept the equivalent of $100 bill then bow to you in thanks as they give change. Toilets that wash your butt for you. There is a downside, however: unfortunately we have to live next to one of the worst countries in the world, North Korea, a nation that has engaged in state-sponsored manufacturing of drugs and counterfeiting Japanese and U.S. currency and has kidnapped (officailly) 17 Japanese citizens including 13-year-old Megumi Yokoto. Although I’ve never visited the Korean Penninsula, I have been to North Korea in a fashion, back when I was a teacher trying to recruit students for our language school. (There are millions of “Koreans” who were born, raised and largely acculturated to Japan, but who maintain South or North Koreans citizenship by choice. There are 60 South or North Korean-run schools in Japan, including the North Korean High School I visited. The Japanese government provides financial support for the school as they’re located inside Japan.) Recently tensions are on the rise again, to the point that the Japanese government is giving public service announcements on what to do if a missile does fall on a Japanese city, which they’ve never done before. Gunma is pretty much where a hypothetical missile shot at Tokyo would fall if it ran out of fuel along the way…