Taishou Yakyuu Musume - Marathon Baseball Girls
Well I said I wanted to watch it. I didn’t plan on watching all 12 episodes in a row but heck, this was a great show! I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to judging from the blogposts I read while it was airing last season, maybe as a result of seeing it all in one go so it never lost momentum. Even the “filler” episodes (street batters, the movie shoot, training camp) contributed to plot and character development. This might actually be the first baseball anime I’ve watched (still haven’t gotten around to Oofuri yet though) where you get a glimpse of the unique personalities of ALL NINE PLAYERS. No funny-nosed or squinty-eyed extras at the bottom of the batting order! Ouka-kai is pure killer no filler!
Set in mid-1920s Japan, Taishou Yakyuu Musume is about a group of 14 year old girls forming a baseball team in an attempt to prove to one girl’s fiancee that he’s a chauvinist dumbass. (He tells her women belong at home, and since he plays baseball she decides to take up the sport and challenge his school’s team to learn him good.) It’s your standard scrappy-little-team-with-a-lot-of-heart story, all about friendship and hard work. That kind of thing gets me EVERY time. But the period setting fills it with loads of character in the little details - from arranged marriages to old-fashioned names, the juxtaposition of Japanese and Westernized clothing, the American exchange teacher Anna Curtland (kind of anachronistic or was she supposed to be a missionary?) and the flagrantly ubiquitous “girl crushes” between team members. This all sounded a bit gimmicky to me when I was reading about it on other blogs but seeing it fit together it definitely creates a sense of era and charm.
From style to substance, there’s even some decent baseball strategy courtesy of resident meganekko right fielder Kawashima, and later from newspaper club president and stats scout Noriko. It’s hardly Tom Tango but combined with all the time-outs between pitcher Akiko and catcher Koume it keeps the games from getting stale. And of course, I loved it for the occasional touch of romance too - Koume and Saburou (her fiancee/the apprentice at her family’s restaurant) were so, so cute. Even Iwasaki, the original chauvinist, turned into quite the dashing, upright young man by the end. Ain’t nothing like a sports romance anime to make me forget about schoolwork for an afternoon! Ughhhhh
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