We’re back in action with the penultimate episode.
What They Say:
Shinobu Omiya is a 15-year old school girl. She may look like a classically Japanese girl with raven black hair and sweet eyes, but when she was a junior high school student, she actually went to stay with a host family in the UK. She misses her time abroad and one day a letter arrives for her by air mail.
The Review: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
It’s Christmas time in KINMOZA and we’re talking about Yoko’s clothes. It’s actually interesting (the Christmas, not the clothes) because we get a point of view of two English girls in Alice and Karen about what Christmas is compared to the Japanese view, which seems to me to be a couple’s holiday. They point out that Christmas is more like New Years and vice versa in England compared to Japan. This kind of cultural difference is what originally interested me in the show that’s largely fallen to the wayside. Moments like Karasuma-sensei saying she’s going to pray on Christmas and Alice mistakenly believing she’s going to a Christian Mass were extremely prevalent in the early episodes and they’re what I miss about the series.
And when the girls come to Shinobu’s house for a Christmas celebration, the entire house is decked out in Christmas decorations. But everything else is pretty much business as usual with the same old gags. There is one other good moment when Alice is talking to her mom on the phone. Alice was asked to come home for Christmas, but declined to go because she wanted to spend a Japanese Christmas with Shinobu. That was kind of touching, and later hilarious when they get to gift giving. The thought that Shinobu’s most treasured possession is a rock from England and gives it to Alice is the kind of absurd comedy that makes the show good. Unfortunately, these kind of jokes also skew the jokes from amazing to awful really quickly.
A few days after New Year’s, the girls are back at school, but Alice can’t speak Japanese anymore. She’s forgotten. There’s apparently a thing in Japan where if your first dream in the New Year is a nightmare, bad things will happen to you. The last part comes back to the first episode when they’re yelling “Hello” and “Konnichiwa” to each other to say goodbye. It’s not nearly as good as that moment, but they’re finally calling back to their best moments in this episode.
In Summary:
This was, in my opinion, the best episode in the series since the first few. It had few, if any, weak points—though there were times when it was merely mediocre. I’ll give the show a pass for being mediocre since it’s been outright bad in a few of its skits. The episode actually reminded me why I liked the show to begin with, which is both good and bad. It’s good because I’m liking it again, but it’s bad because it hasn’t been at its best in so many episodes. I hope the last episode will be just as great as the first.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Equipment: Radeon 7850, 24 in. Vizio 1080p HDTV, Creative GigaWorks T20 Series II