Yes, I still do watch anime. Recently I've started catching up on old series buried in my pile of "Shows to watch" and "Things to resume watching". Of course, I've found a few entries on those lists which I've given a second thought to and then scratched them off. Initially I wasn't going to watch any new series this winter but ended up sampling a handful. Of that bunch, only one really caught my attention. Its description on an anime site I frequent started with the words "A story of troubled girls...". The title, "Wonder Egg Priority". Its themes; alienation, the effects of bullying, and loss. Those are addressed by characters in their early teens...junior high school girls.
A couple of Sundays ago I was out for drinks. A fellow came wandering in around 10pm or so and I sort of recognized him. Couldn't recall his name off the top of my head. Later on, I caught his name and then had a good lock on who he was. I don't think I've seen him in a couple of years. Through the course of the night's conversation I heard that he had opened up a "magic bar" business in Tokyo. It's a bar when the staff do magic tricks to entertain and attract customers.
What caught me off guard was when this fellow turned to me at one point and said "The daughter of a friend of mine is a student of yours". That obviously wasn't going to be enough for me to figure which student of mine he was talking about so he mentioned her name. I felt then I ought to say something about her as a student...but I held off on what I was initially going to say. It wasn't the best thing to mention and so I went with something safer, "Ah, yes, she's a shy girl but a really nice kid". She's not the most academically inclined student I've taught and how I ended up being her teacher wasn't exactly the best set of circumstances. She had transferred into my class, even though it was a level higher than the class she was enrolled in, because she was the subject of some type of scorn or hostility from one or more students in her class. Essentially it boiled down to one Saturday evening where she refused to set foot in that classroom. Thus my class became a place of refuge for her. The material was harder but there was a student in my class she was chummy with. She was a second year junior high school student at that time.
That short exchange brought me back to "Wonder Egg Priority" the next day. I'm still not sure how to put it into words but, if anything, the show served to remind me of the severity of the difficulties young people face in their early teens. At least in one case I was the attendant of a route out of one such difficulty....
