The world can be stressful, with war, omicron variants, and many other things to give us stress and anxiety. When things get too much, sometimes it’d be nice to find a peaceful mountain to climb…or perhaps a slice-of-life anime about cute girls climbing mountains to relax us. That’s what we get in the new Yama no Susume: Next Summit!
Yama no Susume is Back! Should You Watch It?
Around 2013, a new innovation came to the anime industry: short-format episodes, which started with series like Chii’s Sweet Home and the original Yama no Susume. The idea of making 3- or 5-minute anime episodes seemed silly initially, and I felt that the format would make it harder for new shows to make a proper mark in fans’ minds. But the concept eventually proved itself, giving us a lot of experimental shows that couldn’t have gotten made in the full 22-minute episode format.
One of the big early successes of this new format was Yama no Susume, aka Encouragement of Climb, about Aoi, a cute but shy girl who’s slowly coming out of her shell thanks to her energic childhood friend Hinata helping her rediscover her love of mountain climbing. Eventually, she ends up with a circle of friends, including the pure-hearted Aoba and the mature Kaede, and they all climb mountains together… including Mt. Fuji, a scene I just loved.
If you haven’t watched the first three seasons of Yama no Susume, I’ve got good news: the fourth season is kind of a reboot, re-telling elements of the original story with higher animation quality. So feel free to jump in, even if you don’t know the entire story, since it’s just cute girls going mountain-climbing and exploring friendship together.
What’s our favorite short-format anime? We’ve got a list here!
Why I Love The Cute-Girls-Doing-Cute-Things Genre
The slice-of-life anime genre got underway with the influential Azumanga Daioh 2002, and later series like Lucky Star, Non Non Biyori, Is the Order a Rabbit? and Yuru Yuri made relaxing with cute anime girls and no proper story to speak of a pillar of what being an otaku was all about. In Japanese, the slice-of-life genre is known as nichijou-kei or “daily life anime.
I’d tend to put Yama no Susume in a slightly different sub-genre called Cute Girls Get a New Hobby. This genre lets us follow cute characters as they acquire a new hobby, feeling the excitement they feel as they learn everything about it. Some of the best examples of this subgenre of slice-of-life anime include How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?, Koisuu Asteroid, and Yuru Camp🏕.
All the places shown in Yama no Susume are real mountains you can easily visit on your next trip to Japan now that the country has reopened to foreign tourism. I’ve met people from such far-off countries as France, Denmark, China, and Thailand who were making pilgrimages to “holy lands” they found through anime.
What’s an ‘Encouragement of Climb,’ Anyway?
I love it when anime gives us slightly wonky or incorrect English titles. The name Yama no Susume references a famous book called Gakumon no Susume, or Encouragement of Learning, written by Yukichi Fukuzawa. He was a samurai who was one of the first to travel abroad, first to San Francisco and later to Europe, to observe the amazing technology and institutions of the West. He founded Keio University, where Albert Einstein would one day lecture, and is the guy on the 10,000 bill, making him very much the “Benjamin Franklin of Japan.”
Do We Need Anime to Go On Forever?
I got shade from a customer when I published the J-List Fall 2022 anime guide, showing what series I thought would find success with fans. I implied that maybe the world didn’t need endless ongoing seasons of Peter Grill, Idolish 7, or Yama no Susume.
While I still think it’d be smart for anime production committees to ask themselves questions about how to focus on quality rather than quantity going forward, I am certainly glad to have the opportunity to revisit the comfortable world of Encouragement of Climb once again.
What do you think of the new season of Yama no Susume and of the slice-of-life genre in general? Tell us below, or reply to us on Twitter!
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