Field day or Undoukai (運動会) which can also be called Taiiku-sai (体育祭) is another key event in school life anime. It’s an all-school event where classes are typically divided into the white team and red team. Competitions are held in the track including Tamaire (玉入れ) which is seeing which team can throw the most balls in a basket, Kibasen (騎馬戦) which is where 3 people create a horse below and one person goes on top […]
Valentine’s Day is a huge event in Japan especially for those in school. But..it is quite different from other countries (at least very different from what I was accustomed to in the US). Valentine’s Day in Japan typically is the day that girls/women give chocolate to boys/men. So why do all the female people have to take the burden you say? Well, there is a “White Day” in Japan which is March 14th, and is […]
Kuro-rekishi (黒歴史) is often cited in anime and other sub-culture media and resembles “dark history” – or a period during your youth where you may have acted/produced content that when you look back in several years makes you want to put your face in the pillow and scream. Typical references of Kuro-rekishi include situations such as pretending to have a different personality within or having special powers. The term for acting these ways are also […]
Remember when you imagined that you had some hidden superpower to summon dragons from the hells, or you are actually a secret descendent of a forgotten god? We’ve all been there – just around when you are in the 8th grade – or a disease (byouki) that you get in Chuuni (2nd grade in middle school), thus “Chuunibyou”. Chuunibyou is reference often made for characters who are caught in this era and are associated with […]
There’s a whole genre in Japan known as Narou-type (なろう系). These are anime/manga/novels that originated from a site called Shousetsu-ka ni Narou (小説家になろう) which is one of the largest sites in Japan where people can publish their original stories. There are approximately 800,000 stories published as of February 2021, and many well-known titles have originated from this site including the Overlord series, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (転生したらスライムだった件), and the Re: Zero […]
An iconic event in school life anime is students rushing towards the cafeteria lunch to buy the ever so popular “yakisoba pan”. Japanese school lunches are a combination of students bringing their own lunches (bento “弁当”) or school-arranged meals (Kyushoku “給食”), or a cafeteria where students can choose what to eat (Koubai “購買”). What you see in these anime are students rushing towards the Koubai in order to buy their favorite yakisoba-pan and plowing through […]
Often times, “school life” related anime have students wearing uniforms. These uniforms can be very iconic for an anime series, and are often used for cosplay. So, is it actually typical in Japan for people to wear uniforms? Yes. Starting from junior-high, it is very typical that students wear school uniforms, and schools that do not have uniforms are seen as being liberal. The focus many times is on the uniform itself, but it is […]
Hello, this is Jack here. I love anime. I grew up with it, and I still catch an episode or two (or more) every night. I have the privilege of being a Japanese national living in Japan but having grown up in the US. I have seen way too many cases where people can better enjoy Japan anime content if they better understood the context or culture of Japan. The objective of this site is […]