137. Life Lessons from Nichijou

Episode 16 of the popular Kyoto Animation series, Nichijou, can be summarized with the word, "Awkward". The characters get themselves into wildly absurd situations due to their inability or embarrassment to reveal certain truths about themselves. Let's have a closer look:

Yuko, like me, obviously does not go to Starbucks often. Once she does, she is baffled by the Starbucks lingo. In the above picture, she mistakes "Tall" (To-ru) as the Japanese word for "clear" (透). She changes her mind and orders other items, but is even more confused than before.

What makes the situation worse is that the store clerk, who is a trainee (see: name tag), cannot explain what the lingo means either. She only presents more and more options for Yuko, who looks like she is talking with aliens.

Eventually, through gestures, Yuko orders a drink. It turns out to be a really awful-tasting thing in a tiny cup. The exact same situation happened to me at Starbucks, even though I had no problem with ordering the size of the drink I wanted. I ended up getting an orange-flavored tea that did not taste like anything except for orange seeds. I added honey and it tasted even worse.

Skip forward to the next big scene, we have Mio being approached by a police officer to check her bag, which she adamantly refuses. Actually, she does not even refuse at first, but instead presents the officer with a 1000yen bribe, and does a Dogeza out of the blue.

Once the viewers and Yuko understand the reason for Mio's rash behavior -- her drafts of the Yaoi hentai manga -- she flips out on all of them, literally.

After the dust settles, Mio walks away dejected. The embarrassing truth about her has been revealed. I can relate. During the making of one of my paintings, I made enlarged photocopies of male underwear models at a local copy shop. It was only after I had printed them that I remembered to care about what others in the shop thought about me. I stayed calm, and the clerks did not say anything.

Finally, we have Yuko at the Shinonome house. Like always, Nano is trying her hardest to avoid telling Yuko directly the fact that she is a robot, and tries to get Hakase to follow suit. Hakase does not care, and reveals Nano's hidden robot powers to Yuko. However, to Nano's surprise, Yuko takes it really well. Her curiosity about Nano's identity, once settled, was nothing more than a curiosity. It did not lead to discrimination of any kind and Nano comes to better terms with her identity. Many fans commented that Yuko's bonding moment with Nano is one of the most surprising moments in the series.

But what all of these things have in common is that fact that what a person finds embarrassing or ugly within themselves might not appear as so in the eyes of others. If Yuko and the store clerk had both admitted that they did not understand what the hell they were buying and selling and chose the drinks based on taste, then everything would have worked out. If Mio had told the police officer that what was in her bag was manga submissions for her circle (albeit a yaoi circle), he might have sympathized. The message of these scenes is, "chill the fuck out, because the world is actually a really simple place".

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A post by micr0q. Copyright 2011.