#244: Eiken (2003)

Studio: J.C. Staff

Director: Kiyotaka Ohata

Screenplay: Tomoyasu Okubo

Based on the manga by Seiji Matsuyama

Voice Cast: Akeno Watanabe as Densuke Mifune; Miwa Oshiro as Chiharu Shinonome; Emi Yabusaki as Yuriko Shinonome; Mai Kadowaki as Kyoko Morooka; Marina Ono as Komoe Harumachi; Masumi Asano as Kirika Misono; Touko Itou as Lin Grace

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

J.C. Staff are a prolific company who have worked on some acclaimed titles - the TV series Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) and Azumanga Daioh (2002) spring to mind - but they are still a company who worked over the years, leading to an eclectic catalogue which includes legitimately curiosities, ones you may have never heard of and others that you will scratch your head about. The straight to video work is a great example of this.  You can have Cat Soup (2001), a highly regarded and surreal avant-garde animation based on the work of manga author Nekojiru. You can however also have Garzey's Wing (1996-7), a notorious Yoshiyuki Tomino work, and they are a company who have put their hands into a curious number of tangents. Probably one of the most infamous, least in the USA because Media Blasters released this two episode work and the manga, is Seiji Matsuyama's Eiken. Eiken, if you just look at the screenshots, will lead to many running far from it as far as possible. Hell, the still images may even cause problems for those who maintain free blogging sites, unless you have the warning page for sensitive content up. Eiken, with fair warning for someone expecting this to be a review just viewing it as a gross perversion of anime sex comedy tropes may be mortified that this review, dare I say, may even become pretentious. Not to defend the anime at all, but from someone who viewed it only in mind to a morbid fascination, and left finding it a sexual nightmare tale masquerading in cute clothes with a lot to unpick. Even in terms of Matsuyama's accidental contributions as a manga author in real life Japanese politics, Eiken is a perfect example, whether a good anime, a bad anime, or an infamous one, you could write so much about even if entirely personal opinion, and it is all worth having written down.

This all also stems into the past. Let us not kid ourselves, even if the later sentence will sound crass, but anime and manga over the decades has had an obsession with the female bust, and this leads to the term "bakunyu", literally "exploding breasts" and means "enormous breasts", when you take the fixation found in many cultures for heterosexual males to its most extreme level. Eiken is infamous, even when larger busted characters have become commonplace within anime and manga, for being the one title to bring bakunyu to Shonen manga as, yes, this was targeted to adolescent boys in Weekly Shōnen Champion. The story is complicated knowing that its most notorious creative decision, the bust size of a lot of its female cast, was not from the get-go, but a decision made with the editor (with the author's interest) to redraw the characters from volume four in the manga tankōbon onwards, which is also notably where, in the US releases, Media Blasters' publications had to switch from an age rating of 16 plus to 18 plus¹. Even if I advise caution against anyone watching this without warning, I came to this anime fully aware of what I was getting into, and finding rather than feeling dirty, as I will warn most will, the anime adaptation fascinated for what it inadvertedly became. The entire thing by pure accident comes as an adolescent male sexual neurosis onscreen even if that is clearly not the intention of the production at all, all with a perverse air to it that is more interesting to have witnessed for myself than the shock many would have with this title. 

It is not a parody, as it was clearly made as a tale with sex appeal if one with a kink or two few have, and as we will get into later, Seiji Matsuyama created a manga much more controversial, with wide scale effect on Japanese censorship, which is likely to be less defendable and place a more damning eye on this title too with hindsight. Coming to this, Eiken has all the tropes of other anime and manga which can be questionable and clichéd, the high school romance a common story line which can be done well and has questionable aspects to challenge, including the obsession with having so many and the idea one's high school life in a fantastical form is more worthy of anime over the worlds of adults. The difference is that this is anime high school if filtered through an adolescent hormonal nightmare. Our lead Densuke Mifune is so bland, like so many male protagonists in these in terms of his meek inability, that he is immediately set upon by the notorious Eiken club and its leader Kirika Misono on his first day at Zashono Academy, a place which is literally located on a blatant Freudian landmass. It is not redeemable as an anime, but the stereotypical clichés over these two episodes are here and they find themselves being more scrutinised due to how tasteless this show gets, exaggerating them to an extreme whilst still disguising itself as cutesy. The clichés are found in other shows - cute love interest Chiharu Shinonome, who is shy and Densuke crushes on, the school competition that could bring them closer, the former student who studied in the USA who is a threat as another romantic interest, and Densuke's own unfortunate curse to stumble into every clichéd moment of anime sex comedy at the worse moments. The differences beyond its lewdness could almost have been notable changes that the show never actually winked at, in that the most notorious part of the show, the breast sizes of several key female characters, could have just been shown onscreen and everything about the plot could have played out without ever raising the character designs as the anime actually does constantly, forcing one to register it and react with how even a crass choice undercuts everything. This anime is not subtle in the slightest so instead with Chiharu, the bakunyu change forces her to become distorted, the change turning these characters into hyper exaggerations that for a viewer may be a step into the off-putting. And some of the characters are younger and more ridiculously proportion, which makes this even moe perverse let alone more dubious in general before those aesthetic touches. 

If it was not obvious this was a bizarre product beamed from a specific series of circumstances, the alternative world version of this, which was more focused on being a twisted little parody, would have been inspired if off-putting for someone. Even in this dubious form it is in reality, I cannot help but view it like a two episode nightmare from another television show, censored for television censorship, where our lead dreams all of this in a state of delirium, representing all of his sexual anxieties and hang-ups as a teen boy, before he wakes up and encounters these characters with sensible proportions and with less lewdness onscreen. In another context, this would have still be uncomfortable viewing, but could have been a really twisted satire less on these tropes but on teen hormonal anxieties. This is more so considering how many anime sex comedies already have the curious "reward-punishment" trope that I find more and more curious to witness. Far from embarrassment, when I get older as an anime fan, watching work with fan service content, a lot of it is now, if not defendable as good sex comedy, becoming more psychologically compelling to unpick for how they represent sexual hang-ups and relationships. Whether the lead deserves it or by pure accident, any encounter with the opposite sex in terms of something lewd or sexual usually involves a male lead being humiliated and/or beaten up afterwards, something which has come off as more an anxiety of sex in general the more I see it in these stories, whether they are defendable or not.

Even the obsession with breasts, exaggerated here to an incredible extreme and an obsession for many men, filters through this anxious accidental tone; the idea that, whether any psychological or sociological reasons this part of the female anatomy is an obsession for many heterosexual men erotically, a large part of this likely as much due to an integral part of adolescence being how we all go through significant physical change. When one goes through puberty, male or female, your body physically changes and these changes, even if you suddenly become taller or stay short, become the aspect which others take in as they themselves physically and emotionally change, sometime they exaggerate in how they perceive you; this is including those who become attracted to you, and what they may take into consideration, as they themselves suddenly feel attraction to the opposite sex unless they go through the discovery of being gay or bisexual. All of this is amateur observation, so heckling in the comments is acceptable, but it is apt that, if this was a parody, Densuke's nightmare distorts the most prominent features of the girl he has a crush on. These are her shyness, with the Japanese vocal performance from Miwa Oshiro, a model whose only voice acting role is this show, exaggerates through the timidness in her high voice, and her figure, which if this was a sensible show, and not a fetish work, would be through the mind's eye of how one teen boy views her through this over-the-top physicality as the other female characters with similar proportions. Considering the hair styles of the female cast, regardless of figures, is just as exaggerated with how large they are, it befits this distortion. Someone like the leader of the Eiken club Kirika Misono and others are even more exaggerated in their proportions, and even with those which are not, their seemingly sexual openness, whilst not subtle and well done, could have been in a satire his fears of girls he is attracted to but are absolutely more aware of themselves physically and in desires then he and most of the males in the school ever can. The crass phallic food jokes do not help among many moments in this show, particularly with Kirika's obsession with things like bananas and not eating them conventionally, sight gags that you the viewer will hope no one comes into the room (with the whole work) when you are watching this; even those though would make sense if this was an actual satire if still crass. That being Densuke a case of someone with a sudden desire for the opposite sex but is terrified of them as confident, hypersexual figures in his view of them.

This is all death of the author logic, but I am coming to this title with its legacy being hyped, that I had heard for years this was to be approached with caution, a title you would scratch your eyes out in immediate contact of. Instead I watched Eiken only to find myself admitting I was not affected by it at all, even with some of the worse jokes that appear between the two twenty plus minute episodes, even finding a sick sense of humour to this with distance for how unintentionally un-erotic it is. My tastes for readers is also one that, appreciating the best of art, is also being someone with the taste for the weird, even a cinematic trash panda who can try to wonder what formed work that is never going to win many people. Again, let sanity come and point out this is all a viewpoint to a work proudly, and brazenly, perverse on purpose, but still I find one of the stranger moments in this anime was not sexual at all, that among the duo of female commentators on the sports events, both classmates, one of them decides to hold her finger to her top lip like a moustache and talk in a faux deep male voice to sound like an expert, which is stranger than anything else that is lewd and sexually symbolic. Far more disturbing for me is that the male student returning from the States is a predator, someone claiming to be Chiharu's knight in shining armour but emotionally twisting her, and forcing her to be intimate with him in the sports games in a non-consensual way as a team. That content is more problematic over the years in anime, making his punishment (even with the cheap joke at bald people) actually justifiable. 

This is all in mind that, even if you manage to get through episode one, episode two is going to be more off-putting for some. The first has a yoghurt water slide as a challenge, which is sexual innuendo giving up subtlety, but the later has a chocolate waterslide, which is unfortunate in what it looks like instead, and one off jokes, including involving eels, which will cause even those who got through that first episode to give up the anime broken. Yet it still feels like the sexual nightmare of Densuke, causing me to wonder why Seiji Matsuyama for his manga made most of the humour, if accurate to the manga in the adaptation, a male lead who is the butt of these jokes. There are moments when Densuke has some very kinky fantasies of his own about Chiharu, but they truly feel adolescent and are constantly undercut by how at a disadvantage he is in every situation, like a guy whose learnt of these in a dirty mag but would be in the deep end in an actual relationship with another human being. This is probably the one thing in this entire anime arguably close to real life even if I do not want to give Eiken credit for being smart. Even jokes that it has which are eyebrow raising, such as Chiharu's younger sister being openly flirtatious with him, are a) jokes we need to critique in other anime for having too, and b) itself another of the moments this show accidentally feels like one poor boy's hormones being his own enemy. The entire "gag" (with air quotes) of Densuke  being forced to wear a woman's swimming one piece (with ponytails) for the chocolate water slide challenge is loaded in itself, and would be still the same even if Seiji Matsuyama was to have admitted, if from the manga, he never considered anything more to it beyond thinking it a "gag" to casually include for one chapter.

A weird amount of sexual anxiety comes into anime even when it is playing to questionable tropes of girls being seen undressed or nude in changing rooms for a joke and titillation, not forgetting hot springs episodes or when by pure accident a slip of clothing in a pratfall transpires. There is likely afterwards to be the scene of the guy being physically injured in the transgression, or in this case Densuke constantly at the end of humiliation and belief from others he is a pervert. The Japanese voice performance, unlike the one from Bryce Papenbrook in the English dub, is a female voice actress Akeno Watanabe who plays him uncomfortable young in how high pitch he is, like a middle scholar including in his short height, but it adds to the sick joke of the poor lad trying to wrap his head around this world of hyper-figured women even taller than him let alone with a few wrapping him around their fingers. Suffering at the cruel hands of the writers (and manga author Seiji Matsuyama) falling back on the dated tropes of sex comedy, that this still feels like a conventional comedy barring its lewd details adds to this adds to this twisted nature. With its early 2000s look of bright colours, its nineties mah-jong videogame music score, and how cute it is all meant to be, the idea this is all meant to be like a regular anime comedy is weirder than any of the perversity onscreen. There is even a bear creature no one raises questions about being in the Eiken club with everyone else just to toy with any viewer who can tolerate how extreme it is, finding a new way to baffle.

Considering the stuff I have sat through where I have found more disturbing content in more inappropriate places, I find Eiken just perverse. Anime with uncomfortable levels of non-consensual eroticism like VS Knight Lamune & 40 Fresh (1997), a straight to video work which presents itself as a sexy action show only to be nasty in misogynistic ways in tonal whiplashes, make Eiken a lesser of two evils, more curious to prod as an oddity. It is tasteless and one I understand the reactions to, that it is gross and deserves the most negative reviews; the only things are that I have suffered through worse, and that this is a weird artefact too loaded with psychosexual aspects and unintentional weirdness that are compelling. It is not pleasant to watch the anime, but it was compelling in its own way. If someone like Guy Maddin made a story like this in live action, imagining now the perversity and surrealism of the Canadian filmmaker of Careful (1992) adapting this story, Eiken would be a film that would put people off, but it would one damn curious trip, considering that a film like Cowards Bend the Knees (2003), one of Guy Maddin's more transgressive films dealing with sexual kink, was a film about male sexual neurosis if by way of ice hockey. The fact this has no actual nudity either adds to its tone too. It is tame in what you do not see, but has content kinkier here than in actual animated porn, which will make people feel very filthy for watching this but adds to this perverse feverish idea even if entirely from this viewer's perspective. There is a lot of anime and manga which is entirely with this tone, meant to titillate with having sexy schoolgirls with ridiculous proportions and near undress, which has its own moral and gender issues rightly to unpack, but also usually come with a need to punish its male characters as if to punish the male viewers.  It is fascinating to watch what is held as one of the most notorious straight to video anime for many people and, rather than take it as it is, imagine what Sigmund Freud would have thought of it. Even if Freud's ideas on sex and women were always dubious, just to see him trying to figure it all would have been something I wished happened.

The one sobering point though, and this is something I have been wary to reach, is that the history after this for Seiji Matsuyama would let to him get into legitimate controversy with another of his works, a title called Oku-sama wa Shōgakusei (My Wife Is an Elementary Student), which, yes, does raise alarm bells as a premise even if a gag comedy. This controversy over this manga and others in 2011 was connected to a revised bill to amend the Youth Healthy Development Ordinance², one that not only restricted those manga³ but was marked with concerns, under its new revised guideline, to restrict the sales of materials that were considered "to be excessively disrupting of social order"³. Bill 156 as the final revision became, through failures and revisions beforehand, was controversial, and whilst the material it targeted includes work which for many is difficult to defend, including manga that involve sexual relationships with minors, unfortunately one of the men who helped this revision finally get passed in 2010 was then-Tokyo governor Shintarō Ishihara. Ishihara, until the end of his tenure in office in 2012, is an incredibly problematic figure, a former novelist whose beliefs have been slammed as racist^4a, misogynistic^4b, and pertinent to Bill 156, included openly homophobic comments from 2000 that homosexuality was abnormal^4c. The problem with Bill 156 at the time was a conundrum; that the materials it targeted would be incredibly difficult for many to defend, such as work in the lolicon and shotacon genre, minority genres of manga yet ones that challenge what freedom in manga as art is, but that it could have been abused for censoring LGBTQ voices under the auspices of protecting children, alongside those promoting views on controversial subjects done with intelligence and grace. Especially as difficult work for many, even those who believed in the freedom of art, could be pointed to as evidence to justify the censorship, the bill could have had great lasting damage, and considering it was Seiji Matsuyama's Oku-sama wa Shōgakusei that was shown on television by Tokyo Vice Governor Naoki Inose as corrupting and needing to be restricted⁵, part of a campaign leading to the birth of this bill, Matsuyama got his fingers burnt by this and it does reflect back on Eiken. Whilst it is its own perverse little thing, least in this short anime adaptation, the tone of Eiken if accurate to the manga does show a lewdness, including that it was sold for teenage boys, could have gotten more confrontational if he was allowed to push the envelope. It was a different title of Matsuyama's which got him in hot water, but he could have raised controversy from certain groups even from Eiken if remotely like the anime. 

Eiken itself managed to return, least the anime adaptation, when Media Blasters came back from a long hibernation in 2020. Media Blasters, who were founded in 1997, are fascinating as the little independent distributor in the United States who has never refused to give up the ghost, and despite a long period of absence, founder John Sirabella has kept the company afloat, coming back with a vengeance in 2020. The manga arm of the company is gone, but Eiken got a Blu Ray re-release that year^6a and would be made available to watch on Crunchyroll for streaming by the end of 2020^6b. I would not be surprised , whilst Media Blasters sells actual porn anime and lewd ecchi anime, that Eiken's re-release comes with the knowledge of its notoriety after the passing time. Eiken is the title which, after its first release and its manga being published in English in the US, could be seen as the ultimate infamous title to dare to watch for some, the one too weird or perverse for others to see, and in my case the notorious title I spied with the aforementioned morbid curiosity. It is to be approached with caution, and if this had been a full television series of just thirteen episodes, my comments from these two episodes may have lead instead to me becoming a husk of a demoralised anime viewer after my initial cockiness. Considering the manga had eighteen volumes, even my perverse interest in the title may not want to know where it went with this premise beyond these sixty minutes, and knowing full well this is loaded with innuendo, sometimes something shorter is less painful over something significantly longer in terms of watching anime. As I have found, short anime, even those considered the worst, do not have that much power for me because they do not take too longer to sit through. At sixty minutes, Eiken is the kind of show John Sirabella's Media Blasters could re-release and take advantage of even negative legacy, and honestly, I admire them for taking advantage of this even if other people may not, probably regretting watching this even if they ignored warnings like mine in this review. 

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1) Who Was Responsible For This Anime?, an insanely (and applaudably) detailed and intelligent YouTube documentary on Eiken from Hazel ("@hhhazel"). The video here and the channel here.

2) Full Tokyo Assembly Passes Youth Ordinance Bill, written by Egan Loo and published by Anime News Network on 15th December 2010.

3) Akamatsu's J-Comi Site Posts Adult Manga Restricted by Tokyo Law, written by Egan Loo and published by Anime News Network on 3rd October 2011.

4a) Alternative Report to the First and Second Periodic Report of JAPA on the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. Section "3. Control of expression, incitement and violence related to racial discrimination", under "(2) Absence of provisions regulating and punishing discriminatory expression by public officials", under "C. Position of the JFBA". Written by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations  (JFBA) in January 19, 2001 and published online by Nichibenren.

4b) Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, The Third Consideration of Japanese Governmental Report: Proposal of List of Issues for Pre-sessional Working Group, written by the Japan Civil Liberties Union and published on 27th January 2003, archived on 23 November 2012.

4c) FEATURE: Ishihara's homophobic remarks raise ire of gays, written for Japan Policy & Politics and published April 3rd 2000. Archived on the Free Library.com

5) 4,000 Protest Takashi Murakami's Versailles Exhibit, written by Egan Loo and published on Anime News Network on 30th August 2010.

6a) Media Blasters to Release Eiken, Jungle de Ikou!, Jubei-Chan 2 Anime on Blu-ray Disc, written by Crystalyn Hodgkins, and published by Anime News Network on 21st February 2020.

6b) Crunchyroll Adds Eiken Anime to Catalog, written by Rafael Antonio Pineda and published by Anime News Network on 25th September 2020.