As child marriage laws are being looked at all over the world, what better time for Japan to go all in on adults marrying 14-year-olds.
What They Say:
“One day, there’ll be a girl who’ll fall head over heels for me.” Nobunaga was a teacher who was waiting for that kind of dating sim event to happen in real life. One day, a 14 year old girl named Kicho appears in front of him, saying that she’s his wife?! Apparently she came from the Warring States era and seems to have mistaken Nobunaga for the Oda Nobunaga and tells him that she wants to have his children. An age-gap love comedy featuring a teacher with a dating sims brain and a princess with a warring states era brain!!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based on the manga Nobunaga Sensei no Osanazuma, Nobunaga teacher’s young bride is being released in both censored/broadcast and uncensored form, with the uncensored form coming first. The show is based n the manga by Azure Konno that began in 2017 and has four volumes out so far. The anime makes out decent with studio Seven on board to produce the animation with Noriyoshi Sasaki directing it based on the scripts by Arikura Arika. I’ve watched and read so many different shows involving the Nobunaga Oda character over the years that it really is all a blur but there’s still something to be said for taking the historical material and bringing in a lot of fanservice.
The just over seven-minute episode focuses on 28-year-old Nobunaga, a teacher at a high school where he’s doing decently but still has that pervy aspect where he’s jealous of his students that have girlfriends. There’s an awkward moment where one of the students say she’ll date him eventually that he’s way too happy about but you can understand why when you see how his parents are pretty tough on him over his lack of prospects. And how his sister wonders if he even likes girls, which is a line you don’t hear too often. Where things change, however, is when the two siblings are sent to clean out the storage building and they knock over a container from the Warring States period and a young woman emerges from it.
Women fall from the sky into the laps of men all the time in anime so that’s fairly normal and Nobunaga even basically cops to that aspect. What complicates things is that the young woman, who introduces herself as Kichou, was on a journey to Nagoya where she was to become Nobunaga’s wife. Since he looks like the Nobunaga she’s aware of from the past, she’s all in on marrying him – which everyone else is kind of panicked and worried about. His sister actually does some of the digging with Kichou to figure out who she is which plays nicely and fills in some of the blanks that she really may be on the up and up on all of this. And she may be just fourteen at that, which is even more problematic. It’s interesting to see how he fills her in on the reality of what year it is and how she reacts to it. Which is even worse when she basically just tries to keep things as she originally was and offers her body to Nobunaga, but not her heart. Which leads to the awkward uncensored fanservice bit.
In Summary:
This may be the kind of series where you’ll end up preferring the censored version just because of the ages involved and how creepy the whole thing can become. While there are a few shows that have threaded the needle on this before, you can tell quickly that this is going to be a series of miscommunications and lots of awkward situations that will be amusing in some form for many but will also be pointed to as the kind of projects that are giving anime a bad name. I’m curious to see how far they’re going to take it and will be watching for a bit and will also note that the fanservice side only hit briefly and wasn’t truly uncensored. But the general bit is there in that this is the kind of show casual observers will point to as to what’s wrong with anime.
Grade: C
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
