I never thought I’d be utterly sucked in by an anime with the gen­res of sports, com­edy, and slice-of-life. After all, I’m hardly a sports fan, and I’m a believer that com­edy and slice-of-life is best viewed in a bal­anced and drawn-out pace. But tonight, on the first day of my winter-time anime catch-up spree, I find myself so engrossed and emo­tion­ally invested in this base­ball anime that I was able to tem­porar­ily for­get about the fact my car crashed merely hours before: that’s an achieve­ment in and of itself (okay, it’s a “light” crash, but still going to cost a few hun­dred dol­lars to fix it).

Taishou Yakyuu Musume is a series I picked up from Honya thanks to his excel­lent review. As the name indi­cates, it’s an anime about girls player base­ball dur­ing year 14 of Taishō Era (1925 to be pre­cise) Japan. Just like Honya, the time period helped to catch my inter­est. Anime set dur­ing the Taishō and the early Shōwa eras in Japan (1912–1950) tends to present a philo­soph­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tion into Japan­ese social growth, as both peri­ods were some of the more tur­bu­lent years as far as Japan­ese cul­ture goes: west­ern­iza­tion & indus­tri­al­iza­tion, fol­lowed by mil­i­ta­riza­tion and WWII, finally for­eign occu­pa­tion and the roots of Amer­i­can­iza­tion. Taishou Yakyuu Musume is no dif­fer­ent as it presents the story by explor­ing the gen­der role — a group of rather priv­i­leged girls, after being told that a women’s place should be in the house­hold (and nowhere else), decides to chal­lenge the tra­di­tional social out­look on women by tack­ling the manly sport of baseball.

In many ways, Taishou Yakyuu Musume reminds me of K-ON! Read the rest of this entry »