With the Kodomo no Jikan Kickstarter now funded, it seemed like a good time to publish these notes I made after I read the manga series in July of 2014.
Let me start by acknowledging that Kodomo no Jikan is one of the most reviled series ever. This is because its main subject matter is disturbing loli sexuality, and while it began as a lighthearted loli series about having sex with little girls (?), as it develops, it does not actually shy away from the disturbing parts of disturbing loli sexuality. This makes it simultaneously a much more disturbing and more complex work than its critics usually give it credit for; some parts of it even come close to something like a critique on the pedophiliac tendencies in anime and manga (and Japanese society in general). Then at the end, it sort of falls on its face. More about that later.
The premise is that Aoki Daisuke is a newly minted elementary school teacher who is assigned a third grade class at his first job out of school. One of the students in that class is Kokonoe Rin, a problem child who acted out so badly that Aoki's predecessor quit. Aoki discovers that Rin was getting back the teacher for her friend, Usa Mimi, who was tormented in ways I don't remember by the teacher and stopped coming to school. Aoki convinces Usa to come back to school, earning the respect and love of Rin and Usa and the ire of their other friend, Kagami Kuro, who has a lesbian crush on Rin.
Rin proceeds to start coming on to Aoki in all kinds of over-the-top ways, like showing him her panties and asking for him to have sex with her as a reward for good grades. Aoki resists, although the way he reacts is pretty much like the way To-Love-Ru's Rito or any other harem hero would react, except Rin is in third grade. I presume most people only made it through the first volume or two of the manga, so pretty much everyone said "Child porn" and proceeded to hate it. It does not help the series' case that the sexual content gets more and more extreme as it goes on and that Aoki does actually end up falling in love with Rin.
It turns out that Rin has a pretty screwed-up past; her mother, Aki, was unwed and thus shunned from the family, but refused to marry Rin's father because he asked her to get an abortion and she wanted to have the baby. Aki died when Rin was young, right before her eyes; at the time the series starts, Rin is cared for by her cousin Reiji, who moved in with Aki when his abusive parents were killed in a car wreck and ended up shacking up with Aki and falling in love with her. Reiji is totally fixated on Aki, and his mental state is none too stable; not long after he's introduced, he starts treating Rin like a substitute for Aki, giving her hickeys in bed and thinking disturbingly about how she's going to replace Aki when she gets old enough. Aoki finds out and ends up setting him straight by dressing him down about being a child-man; although still crazy, Reiji does get better over the series by trying to deal with his issues, and also by helping Rin's friend Usa, who doesn't get along with her own mother and who has a crush on Reiji.
Other characters' pathologies are also explored, including Shirai-sensei, a senior teacher at the school, whose parents pushed her to achieve while also lowering her self-esteem. Shirai bonds with Kuro, who befriends her by force when she takes over the class while Aoki is away. The main theme of the series is how the adults in a child's life, especially parents and teachers, influence the people they end up becoming. The series surprisingly does a pretty good job exploring this theme. In Shirai-sensei's and Kuro's and Reiji's stories, it focuses on non-sexual aspects; in Rin's and Mimi's and some of the shorter arcs, it focuses a lot on the sexual parts of growing up. Weirdly, the series comes out on the side of encouraging sex ed by having Houin-sensei, a busty teacher with a secret crush on Aoki, anonymously combat misinformation on a secret forum the students are using. When it got down to it, Kojikan was actually not bad at doing realistic stories about sex ed (the forum story and Mimi beginning her period), sexual harassment (the final story arc where the school principal is a pedo), and sexual exploration (Rin's discovery of porn and masturbation). Mostly, those stories didn't feel pornographic or exploitative at all, though they did deal very frankly with sexual material.
But the two faces of the story—the serious, realistic side and the lighthearted loli side—conflicted somewhat. The subject matter, even considering only the realistic stories, is so controversial that only a greatly skilled writer could deal with it and not end up offending someone. Actually, it may not even be possible for anyone to deal with this material and not offend someone. Kaworu Watashiya, the manga-ka, weakened her (yes, Kodomo no Jikan was written by a woman!!! Shocker!!) position almost irreparably with the things that did feel cheesecakey—the early stories, and the composition of certain scenes in the later stories. And yet, moments like Reiji's revelations about himself when he tries to ghost-write Rin's PTSD survey after she sacrifices herself to expose the pedo principal, or Shirai's honest attempts to change herself, were so well-written that it's hard for me to believe that Watashiya only wanted to make little girl cheesecake and just incidentally threw in a story. It's the opposite feeling I got from Chu-Bra, where I did think the original point was cheesecake and the stories about flowering youth were just tacked on because the series had to go somewhere.
In the end, Aoki falls in love with Rin, telling himself that he loves her as a person, and not because he's a lolicon. Which seems to be true in the context of the story, although I can see why people would find it still creepy and weird. He turns down Houin-sensei's confession and decides to wait until Rin is older so they can be together, thinking back to Rin telling him that he was born too early and that Reiji and her mother were thirteen years apart in age when they were together. Rin graduates to middle school and Aoki takes a new job, at a middle school, though not Rin's (she goes to an all-girls' school, along with Mimi and Kuro). They don't see each other for three years, and Aoki even stops responding to Rin's text messages. But Rin tells him her sixteenth birthday is coming up, and she wants to see him; Reiji also comes to Aoki and tells him to see her, and vaguely acknowledges the debt he owes Aoki for his self-revelations. Aoki goes to see her, wondering what she looks like, and finds that she...looks exactly the same as ever. They go to a love hotel and have sex anyway, although Rin is hurt and can't go on immediately.
I really liked the conclusions of Mimi's, Kuro's, and Shirai's stories, and I thought the ending was really good...but then Rin still looked like a ten-year-old girl. The situation actually had the potential to be pretty romantic, if still a little disturbing, and to reinforce the idea that Aoki isn't a lolicon. Instead, it reinforced the idea that he is a lolicon and also ended the series on a "little girl cheesecake" note instead of the serious note that all the other arcs ended on. Sixteen-year-old girl and guy in his thirties is still creepy, but not like ten-year-old-girl and guy in his thirties. But even though we were told that three years had passed, and even though Kuro and Mimi and even Aoki all looked different, the feeling I got from the final scene was that Rin was still ten and Aoki had decided to do a little girl after all. Which, you know, wasn't what I wanted. I wanted the series to end on the high ground. So I was kind of disappointed.
I feel like Watashiya or her editors were afraid that the later parts were too deconstructionist towards lolicons, who, after all, were almost certainly the chief audience for this series, and probably wouldn’t appreciate having their fantasies deconstructed like that. (Any more than I appreciate the Internet’s lame attempts to “deconstruct” cute girls doing cute things.) So they threw in the ending to comfort the lolicons, while also avoiding the fallout that would have resulted from having Aoki sex up the ten-year-old Rin for real. (Japan may be freer with that stuff than America, but it’s not a complete free-for-all; as evidence I submit the watered down ending of Ore Imo that came from the conflicting desires to have Kirino and Kyousuke get together while not appearing to promote incest.) Rin’s entire backstory was basically a deconstruction of the trope of the precociously sexual child. It demonstrated the kind of trauma that could lead a nine-year-old child to behave that way, and demythologized adolescent sexuality by depicting the gory details of puberty. If you’re a lolicon and you’ve been following along, your fantasies have all been smashed. Kojikan did always maintain a certain amount of humor to help the uncomfortable subjects go down better; the humor was also the usual excuse for doing blatantly lolicon stuff. So it was pressed into service one last time, and the “Rin is a pedomorphic loli who looks ten forever so Aoki can hump her without being a pedo” twist ending was born.
Does this series deserve to be so reviled? No, not when you just consider on its own merits, although I can see why people don't like the way it affects anime's image. I heard a news story not long ago about Japan officially outlawing child pornography featuring real children, which I somehow thought had been done a long time ago. The story specified that the law wouldn't affect the manga industry and added that representatives from the industry had said such a law would "destroy the industry". Which makes the whole anime and manga fandom sound like a bunch of pedophiles. Which some of us might be, but is it fair that people who have nothing to do with that kind of thing get stuck with that image?
Kodomo no Jikan’s subject matter is the kind of thing that's incredibly controversial no matter which medium or what country it comes from, and it makes some missteps that are akin to tripping and falling while carrying nuclear waste in an open pot. But it does have some artistic merit, which surprised me as much as anyone, and I don't regret reading it, although I'm definitely deleting it from my Kindle before I try to pass through customs.
The story of the failed attempt to release Kodomo no Jikan in the US is actually kind of interesting.
Seven Seas, the company that released the Toradora manga, almost released Kodomo no Jikan in the US. But there was a gigantic uproar and the company decided not to.
The Seven Seas head honcho, Jason DeAngelis, had read the first two volumes and was under the impression that Houin was Aoki's love interest and that Rin was just an annoyance and her inappropriate behavior was entirely for humor, like Crayon Shin-chan. That was a reasonable belief, but it turned out to be wrong. Apparently there was a scene in Volume 3 that he didn't like where Rin and Aoki were in the bath and Aoki got a stiffie from Rin rubbing on him (I don't remember the scene).
Kaworu Watashiya totally misunderstood the reasons for the uproar and thought that it was about taking baths together or the fact that Reiji and Aki are cousins. She got this from reading American forum discussions translated by Google Translate. Apparently she never got that people were complaining because of the sexual content involving a child, even though not even the Japanese just do that stuff willy-nilly. Or maybe she thought that people were okay with that since it was in evidence throughout the manga and you would've had to be an idiot to miss it, yet they were still considering it for publication.
According to DeAngelis, Watashiya insisted that the translated title be "Nymphet", which doesn't really sound that good and creates an unfortunate parallel with Lolita, whose protagonist is exactly the kind of predatory pedo that Aoki is not (whatever else you can say about him). After the Volume 3 scene, which DeAngelis singled out as the scene that went too far for him personally, and with the Internet trolls tossing rotting vegetables and orders from stores being retracted left and right, Seven Seas decided not to release the series...which was almost certainly the only winning move in this game. As my thoughts above indicate, you can almost defend Kojikan as a work of art, given how far it goes trying to explain why Rin is so screwed up and how realistic a great number of its plots are. But then it falls on its face with the ending, which would have been okay for American audiences if Rin had grown up like Mimi and Kuro (or even started to dress a little more mature), but as it is, basically gives everyone the pedo ending that it came so close to avoiding. If DeAngelis had read ahead, he almost certainly would have ended up tripping over something even more disturbing later on. I don't even remember that scene that got him all bothered. That's how hardcore Kojikan is—it got worse. And even if Seven Seas hadn't decided on its own that America couldn't handle the content, some jerk would have started waving it around and going on about an evil Japanese conspiracy to turn good American boys into child molesters in a shocking real life reenactment of Welcome to the NHK!.
Kojikan, with its serious themes and deconstructionist tendencies, feels in so many ways like a work created not to pander, but out of a real artistic drive—not just a drive to draw cute characters, but a drive to write a significant story. It's still with me now, needling me with its dark and complex story, making me question things. I have a hard time believing that Watashiya meant it as a run-of-the-mill loli story and happened to take it a little too far—Kojikan was meant to be how it is. Even when I consider that the pedophilia issue affects me more deeply than it would a Japanese person because of my culture, it still feels that way. And even though it was no masterpiece, there's something to be said for that.
But...I still feel that not releasing it was the only winning move. It would have taken a brave (and fully clued-in) manager who understood what the work meant to even have a chance of not being skewered in the media, or ducking skewering by simple obscurity. Watashiya's reaction to the controversy shows that she's not an author capable of explaining what her work means at that level, and she was separated from DeAngelis by a layer of corporate structure, and so probably incapable of explaining herself anyway.
There is also the alternate possibility that I am absolutely insane and Kodomo no Jikan is a work about diddling little girls for fun and profit, with some other random stuff thrown in just to fill in the space between.
This was all written two years before the Kickstarter campaign, which was fully funded on July 5th, 2016, about a month ago at this point.
The company backing the Kickstarter, Digital Manga Inc., is a company that seems to favor manga with more of an underground comics feel. They appear to do a lot of yaoi and unconventional shoujo. Just reading their description on the campaign homepage, you can tell they understand Kodomo no Jikan in a way that Seven Seas and DeAngelis did not—as an attempt to deal with controversial and complex material as a real work of art, rather than a run-of-the-mill gag comedy about obnoxious children. They also seem to be working closely with Watashiya, who is providing illustrations as special prizes for backers. So it looks like the second release is headed for success; it has a publisher that understands it, knows how to defend the work as art, and isn’t afraid of a little controversy. Whatever flaws Kodomo no Jikan has, I feel like this is the release it deserves—to be remembered as a flawed attempt at a commercial work that treats with controversial themes, instead of as a metonym for disgusting East Asian child porn.
No, I'd say you have the right of it. KnJ is a good story, though perhaps not a great one.
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