(Part of a 12-day series fondly remembering some of the best moments in anime this year. Participants include: lolikitsune, lelangir, FuyuMaiden, IKnight, Zeroblade, Nazarielle, ghostlightning, TheBigN, ETERNAL, Mike, A Day Without Me, digitalboy, Josh, otou-san, Culchann and Pontifus, IcyStorm, Cokematic,
koneko-chan, and miz, and you’re welcome to join too!)

Am I a pedophile yet?

Certainly, twelve months ago, that’s what I would have thought about people who read Kodomo no Jikan.

After all, the manga features both 1) small children, 2) fanservice, and 3) fanservice of small children, which quickly draws people to the conclusion that anyone who reads it needs to burn at the stake.

The lolicon topic is a hot one on the anime scene, if not because it can arguably called one of the most illegal aspects of anime (piracy notwithstanding) and one that taints its face the most.

Because although harem pandering, pointless action, and flashy hair colors are kind of strange, what may equate to animated CP is much less ambiguous when it comes to the law.

This point can be argued relatively reasonably; although it certainly is not CP (given that no one comes to harm directly unlike it’s real-life counterpart) … it’s not exactly a high-brow art.

The problem of course, comes when we slowly slide down the scale of lolicon, with Kodomo no Jikan near one end and Cardcaptor Sakura near the other. At one point is the line white and what point is is black?

And the anti-lolicons will paint the line black on a huge part of the scale; anything even moe regarding young characters will fall under fire. If a character’s flat, suddenly they’re loli. And thus Touhou has been proven to be lolipron.

It’s this danger of the slippery slope, that gives Kodomo no Jikan such unnecessary flak.

12 Moments of Anime 2008
#09: Kodomo no Jikan (manga) – Chapter 42

I can’t deny that Kodomo no Jikan has some elements that might be awkward to some. After all, it wouldn’t get such a negative reputation otherwise.

Kodomo no Jikan has what can be termed in many instances, fanservice. Such fanservice may not be to everyone’s tastes.

But you have to remember, that fanservice does not automatically a bad anime make. Certainly, it may decrease the quality of an anime, at that local point; but it does not damn it to the lower levels of hell.

The best case in point is the 17th episode of Clannad I cited for moment 12; perhaps Kyou’s delicious thighs were not to your tastes. If so, I’m sure Clannad redeemed itself more than a little throughout the rest of the season, in one way or another, through the characters and stories of Nagisa, or Tomoyo, or Tomoya, or Kotomi (no, really).

(This is just an example of the subset of people who liked Clannad but hated Kyou; moe detractors as a whole need not apply.)

Kodomo no Jikan may have had a larger amount of service, and service with perhaps less class than that of Clannad’s, but I still believe the manga still has much redeeming value.


Even the fanservice, I think, has a point.

Many anime and manga try to get away with fanservice with absurd, if not pointless reasons. For example, kissing in order to infuse carbon dioxide into women (this is not a common theme at all in my 12 Posts).

However, the wildly sexual antics of Rin Kokonoe are actually, at times, explained, something unheard of to the perverted manga KnJ is often lumped in with.

The characters in Kodomo no Jikan mature like the best in a visual novel adaptation, showing multiple strengths and weaknesses that make them well-rounded and … well, realistic in a sense.

Sure, maybe it’s not incredibly realistic to have a panty-flashing, dirty-word-spouting, crotch-groping third-grader in real life, but Kodomo no Jikan does work to make it realistic – this is the crux of what makes it work.

For all the shouting done about realism in games and anime, people miss an important point – it’s not really realism that a lot of us is searching for.


It’s consistency, suspension of disbelief.

Realism is outside. We can go to realism anytime we wanted (and we should, for those NEETs in the crowd).

What we – or at least I – would rather have in an anime, instead of realism, is a gripping story, one that draws us in and never kicks us out.

It can be close to reality, in the case of Kodomo no Jikan. It can be distant, like Gurren Lagann. It’s not necessary for the universe in the story to be sensible in the real world – only sensible within itself.

And Rin’s perversion is explained through her family situation, her social introversion yet extroversion. It’s an elaborate cry for attention, with Aoki as the target.

Even the other characters; Usa and her awkward, naive demeanor, the various teachers (who as I may note are not pedobait for those doubters in the crowd) and their personality quirks, their emotional wants and needs, are explained in reasonable depth.

Kodomo no Jikan becomes not just a flat plane (insert DFC joke here), not just Aoki and Rin, but a three-dimensional world, where Aoki interacts with diverse groups of people, not just the kids, but the parents, the teachers, playing all sorts of roles in between.


And bringing us to the moment discussed here, I adore Kodomo no Jikan not just for how fully-fleshed it is, but for how daring it is, how much it charts new territory.

The ability to challenge the reader’s view of ordinary, to do something different from normal anime and manga, is something I prize greatly. It’s why I worship Higurashi. Why School Days is a 9 on my scale. Even why I originally had Welcome to the NHK slated for this slot instead.

And Kodomo no Jikan definitely goes to places no other non-hentai manga will do. I think I’ll just put it bluntly.

Rin, the fourth-grade girl, masturbates.

Not going to see that in any old manga, now will you?


And I can say that this moment didn’t offend me at all. It’s not nearly as explicit as you would imagine (it may be a bit gratituous, but not to the point of lewdness), and it made me happy to see such topics touched upon in the story.

After all, I can have the utmost faith that it will be touched upon with maturity. This is my faith in Kodomo no Jikan, in that it does things with a purpose, that it’s not characters built upon a story but a story built upon characters.

In the end, this is about all I can say about Kodomo no Jikan. For some reason, this post was a tough one, despite my strong feelings to convert people to the manga.

It really is a view-breaker, for those who are almost religiously anti-lolicon. It may be a tough start at first, but what appears to be straight-up fanservice quickly melts away to show a strong heart.

It’s a touching story about the power of … uh, I mean, the maturing of youth.

-CCY

Addendum: The day after I wrote this post, I had a little conversation with lolikitsune about Kodomo no Jikan. I feel that it adds a few useful points to the ones I made, in addition to countering a few; so on the whole, it makes the argument more fleshed out. I’m thankful to him for that, but a bit too exhausted to rewrite my post, so instead I’ll include the conversation as a whole for you to peruse:

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