I was hearing good things about the new anime Kiniro Mosaic (Gold Colored Mosaic), so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s the story of Shinobu, a Japanese girl who travels to the U.K. to do a “homestay” at the home of a British girl named Alice, who’s as fascinated with Japan as Shinobu is with England. Back in Japan, Shinobu is surprised to find that a new student has transferred into her class…and it’s Alice, who has learned Japanese and come to attend high school in Japan. Once the initial story is set up, Kiniro Mosaic becomes what’s known as a “Nichijou-kei” series because of its light situational humor and 4-koma (4-panel) comic origin, ala Nichijou. I love the show because it’s the cutest thing ever, and also because it accurately captures the confusion that’s created when Japanese and Westerners come into contact with each other. I loved Alice’s frustration when she asks Shinobu to play the traditional card game Hanafuda but Shinobu doesn’t know the rules despite being Japanese, or the irony that ensues when Shinobu realizes that Alice is better at using chopsticks than she is. Shinobu is absolutely fascinated with blonde hair, and this made me recall my days as an ESL teacher, when the kids I was teaching would discover the golden hairs on my arms and spend the entire class pulling on them.
I addition to the doll-like Alice, there’s another girl with beautiful golden hair in Kiniro Mosaic, Alice’s friend Karen, a blonde-haired haafu (half-British, half-Japanese) girl who comes to Japan to study, too. To be of mixed Western and Japanese ancestry in Japan is often seen as the pinnacle of human evolution in Japan, combining Japanese sensibilities with beautiful European features like a 高い鼻 takai hana (a “high nose”) or 二重 futae (literally “eyes large enough for there two be two creases in the eyelid when the eyes are open”), both of which look very Western to the Japanese. The problem with Karen is that, while she speaks basic Japanese, she isn’t good at reading subtle social situations, making her KY, a Japanese word meaning someone who is 空気読めない kuuki-yomenai, lit. “cannot read the air around them.” A lot of the show’s humor stems from the many ways that Karen fails to understand what’s going on around her, and this is a feeling every foreigner who has lived in Japan can understand, since we’re usually KY too.
I’m a fan of the new Kiniro Mosaic.
