When you become a fan of Japanese animation, you expose yourself to a world of cultural concepts that are strange and unfamiliar at first, but which are always fun to learn about. Like the nuances between senpai and kohai, or senior and junior in a school or organization, something that doesn’t generally exist in America. (The high school I went to went from 8th through 12th grade, and Japanese are always amazed to hear that many classes were taught with students of different grades learning together, which would be unthinkable here.) Another meme you see in anime a lot is a girl or boy who gets a love letter from an admirer wanting to confess their love. In Japanese schools, there are racks of geta-bako or “shoes boxes” where you put your dirty outdoor shoes and change into soft shoes that are worn inside the school. The popularity of a given anime character is often communicated to the audience by how many love letters fall out of his or her shoes box when they open it, a cultural message that would likely be difficult for Westerners to understand at first
“Love letter in the shoes box” is a popular anime meme.
