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!, except for where K-ON! was very light-hearted in its musical-band approach and focused on the Moe shenani­gans, Yakyuu is heav­ily invested in its base­ball. There are a lot of sim­i­lar­i­ties, be it the Moei­fied cute char­ac­ters and the Yuri. But even dur­ing the mid­dle filler episodes Yakyuu did not devi­ate from its goal: to present the hard work and guts shown by these girls as they tack­led a ter­ri­tory that they were not accepted in. That’s what really drew me in and made me fin­ish the show in one run: The under­dogs’ sheer deter­mi­na­tion in spite of all the obsta­cles they face took hold of my sym­pa­thies and gained my undi­vided atten­tion. Before I real­ized, I couldn’t help but cheer for the girls’ Ohka-kai team and anx­iously watch their every swing and pitch with my heart on the line like some diehard base­ball fan.

I mean seri­ously, they went from this, nine com­plete ama­teurs whose never even watched baseball:

The catcher doesn’t even know how to crouch

What, was, that.

And man­aged to even­tu­ally play with the top rank­ing team from the Tokyo region at a seri­ous level. That took A LOT of rig­or­ous train­ing, not just from a phys­i­cal per­spec­tive but also from the social and men­tal sides. The girls had to fight every step of the way. First they had to assem­ble a full team, which seemed almost impos­si­bly hard by itself. Then they had to train up not only their base­ball skills but also their basic ath­leti­cism, since these ojou-samas sim­ply didn’t get any work­out back in those days. Finally, since they were phys­i­cally infe­rior to the guys, they had to focus on pol­ish­ing their tac­tics, tech­niques, and infor­ma­tional prepa­ra­tion against their oppo­nents. Along every step of the way, they also had to fight an upstream bat­tle against naysay­ers and crit­ics, includ­ing the school admin­is­tra­tors and their par­ents, most of whom doubted them sim­ply because of their gender.

It’s almost like watch­ing the movie Major League all over again, except the road to suc­cess was much, much harder. Thank­fully, it was also no Nanoha Strik­ers, as the train­ing sequences were sped up to well-paced scenes with­out need­less repetition.

More than you can pos­si­bly imagine

Another thing I loved about this series is that one again, it man­aged to fit both awe­some and cute­ness into the same char­ac­ters once again, and stir it together with a healthy serv­ing of com­edy. Not to men­tion some Yuri eas­ily blended in as a part of the base­ball scheme:

But wait, another com­peti­tor enters!

Sorry, but Koume already has her One True Pair­ing, and he’s cuter than both of you.

Even the fillers tie into their train­ing sched­ule, as episode 7 boosts the show’s com­edy rank­ing with the Leg­end of the Street Bat­ter!!! (one of their more amus­ing train­ing schemes), where the girls improve their bat­ting, learn to throw a curved ball, while becom­ing vig­i­lante heroes.

A nightly occur­ance on the streets of Tokyo

It shall drain your pow­ers through your baseball!

We’re not just lim­ited to bat­ters either!

There’s a full team of us!

Shit Cops, Run!

Run­ning from the law is just another obstacle!

And we also gained your pantsu!

Give us back our underwear!

Pin­cer attack succeeded!

We have you now!

Hostage GET!

UFOs always work, even in 1925

Ini­tia­tive! Sneak Attack!

A close miss

Flank! Sneak Attack again!

+6d6 dam­age!

I catch and throw again!

Attack rolls: 20, 20, 20, insta-kill!

On that night, a Leg­end was born

So yes, I enjoyed this show way too much. It cer­tainly deliver far above and beyond my expectations.

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Recipe for Suc­cess: Rem­i­nisc­ing Gurren-Lagann thru the Buster Series
• The Heroine’s Strength Is Not Phys­i­cal: Hana Yori Dango
• Simoun’s Cre­ative Fan­tasy and Setting-driven Storytelling

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 02:47 and is filed under Analysis, Anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.