You know how long Raphael was the main character of this show?
No.
Three episodes.
Oh, really?
Yeah, three.
Okay, what can happen?
I was saying as a joke that at the end of the episode we were watching
there could have been an earthquake where the whole church just collapsed
and killed everybody inside and the next episode starts with new people
because that's the type of show this is.
So I'm not ruling out that everyone dies and there's another new character
in the last three episodes because this show would go there.
Okay, well maybe they can say,
Oh my god, Earth is moving.
You guys are right!
Sisqó, is it only me who cried when I listened to the full version of Kaiju
by Sakanax-chan this week?
No, I also teared up.
I think I didn't fully break down crying or anything,
but it was really moving.
It was moving and the song itself was great.
Yeah, I do think you need to understand the backstory of the guy who wrote it
and also probably know Japanese.
And to fully understand it, we're going to get into that.
So hopefully we'll be able to share it with everybody else.
So we are going to talk about this amazing epic anime.
Orb on the Movements of the Earth.
We will dive into episode 20, 21, and 22 today.
If you haven't listened to our previous episodes about Orb,
you can go check those Orb episodes by us before or after listening to this episode.
Also, we are going to talk about the goat theme song Kaiju by Sakanax-chan.
I can't believe you said goat.
Why?
That's really funny now.
Why?
It was super cute.
Isn't that what a native speaker says?
Not native speakers of our age.
Oh, okay.
But I think you would say it was the goat of all anime theme songs.
Yes.
Anyway, with the new information about it.
And finally, today's word of the day.
Before we start, please follow and subscribe to AMO TALK
on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube.
Or you can spread the word and tell your friends, family, coworkers,
and whoever might be interested in knowing about anime, manga, Japan,
Japanese culture, and language.
Okay, let's talk about episode 20 first.
Okay.
Episode 20 is the Yolanta time.
Yolanta seems she was about to meet her own father.
Did that happen at the beginning of the episode?
Not the beginning.
Not the very end?
I think Yolanta was telling a story about history,
like how history is important to Duraka.
It was a pretty long conversation.
Yeah.
And then Duraka had no idea what was going to happen.
Right.
She's like, I'll help you get away.
And you think, oh, this is the part where Novak and Yolanta
are finally reunited.
And they have either a confrontation or a heart-to-heart
or some kind of meaningful reconnection.
And instead, Yolanta just builds a bunch of flammable,
explosive objects around her.
Novak does not even see or notice that it's her,
and she explodes and dies.
And he finds her arm, hand, and holds it.
Doesn't know it's her hand, right?
I don't think he knows that.
Finds a piece of her body and is like, oh, too bad she blew up,
but doesn't know it's her.
It's so sad.
It's so sad.
It's just like, this show never stops surprising me
with its willingness to abruptly kill characters
without any kind of dramatic resolution.
I mean, I guess it's very dramatic,
but without the dramatic resolution you might expect.
And this is where it really feels just so Game of Thrones to me.
The shock of Ned Stark dying at the end of the first season of Game
of Thrones, where you're like, wait, they can't kill him.
He's the main character.
I know.
Just gets repeated over and over again in this show in a way
that's just so painfully real.
I often feel that I wish video games, anime, et cetera,
did a better job of recognizing the fragility of human life
and the ways in which nobody's that important
and people just die kind of randomly for bad reasons all the time.
And, oh, man, this is the show that does that.
And it's just like, whoops, you slipped and landed on your neck.
Like, now you're dead.
Too bad.
Oh, yeah, God.
But even though you think you get used to it and are going to see it coming
and be like, oh, yeah, well, they still managed to just slip it by you
and be like, whoops, now this character's dead permanently.
When you're just about to think, oh, Yolanda's back.
She's going to be great.
Right.
Oh, it's going to be she's going to carry on.
Nope.
Yeah, exactly.
Get me every time.
Yeah, Yolanda was ready to sacrifice herself for what she believed.
Yeah.
At the age of 39.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, that was a shock.
Yeah.
That was a shocking episode.
And episode 21, it is focused on what do you call print press?
The printing press.
Yeah.
Printing press.
Heritage Liberation Front.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People are trying to use it to print Oxy's book.
Right.
Oxy's the one who writes it down as kind of a story.
They try to do it, but letters are broken.
Yeah, the movable type.
One of the ends are all broken.
And they had to fix it.
And Juraka offered her precious coins that she got from her father.
Yeah, the lead money.
Yeah.
When you make movable type, it has to be pretty narrow if you're going to
put a lot of words on a page, because the thickness of the movable type
corresponds to the font size.
So when you make it really thin, I'm sure it becomes much easier to break,
regardless of what kind of metal it's made from.
I was trying to think of things made out of lead in the modern world,
and the only thing I came up with was the stuff you have to put on top
when you're taking an X-ray of your body.
Oh, really?
Yeah, that's made out of lead, because lead is impenetrable to X-rays.
And so it protects you from radiation from those machines.
Interesting.
They used to make pipes out of lead for water to go through,
but that can give you lead poisoning.
And so that was a major problem in the Roman Empire.
And afterwards, I think engineers figured out it was not a great idea
to use lead pipes.
But yeah, plumbing is related to the word lead because of the connection
between lead and pipes.
Any history about print press?
Printing press, yeah.
So the first printing press was made by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1500s,
called the Gutenberg printing press.
And the first book ever printed with a printing press,
want to take a guess as to what it was?
Bible?
Of course.
It's the Bible.
You told me.
You're a good teacher.
Yay, you remembered.
Good job.
Well, anyway, yeah, so it's the Bible.
And for a very long time, most things that got printed were about religion.
That was the main thing that was being used.
And I think it helps that the printing press is developed in the 1500s
right around the same time that the Protestant Reformation is happening.
And so the people involved in the Protestant Reformation
are intentionally using the printing press as a way to spread their ideas.
And in Orb, Draca is,
I think the Heretic Liberation Front's plan is to try and get the book
and materials to people in the Reformation because they feel more sure
that they will print it than that the Catholics will.
And so interestingly, that's not what happens.
And I think historically, I don't know,
I'd have to do more research to know how important Protestant leaders were
in embracing heliocentrism.
And I'm sure that they were.
They offered protection from the church and the Inquisition.
But I think knowing that Draca is using a printing press helps us locate
in time when this story is supposed to be taking place.
And given that the technology is meant to be new, again,
it really seems that this is taking place in the 15,
in like the mid 1500s, probably in Poland, you know,
next door to Germany where the printing press has developed.
Yeah, that was interesting.
And I was like, they were trying to make new letters by melting.
Yeah.
And that seems plausible that you would,
all you have to do is melt the metal into, you know, and I think lead probably,
I don't know,
I'm just going to guess that lead melts at a lower temperature than other
And then episode of 22,
which we just watched after Drucker suggested, you know, she,
she's a good pitch salesperson, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think she succeeded running away from Novak.
Right.
Where she reached was like surprising.
Yeah.
She goes back to the same church run by the archbishop she encountered in the
village several episodes ago.
The from my view,
totally corrupt archbishop who had Yolanta or was ready to put Yolanta to
death for no crime,
just to undermine Novak 25 years ago and who totally attempts to like buy
Draka from her uncle.
Right.
As like a,
I don't know,
it seems like she's going to be like a sex slave or something.
Right.
And then she goes to him being like,
well,
this dude is definitely corrupt and persuadable by greed to do things and
pitches publishing the book directly to his face.
And I can't totally understand why she doesn't go to somewhere controlled by
the reformation,
which is the plan she pitches to the heretic liberation front members when
she's getting them to agree to like cover her escape.
Is it,
do you think it's just because that would be so much farther away and she
doesn't want to make sure that she escapes or was her plan always to go back
to the archbishop because she knew she could get them on the hook?
Well,
maybe that'll come become clear in the next couple episodes,
but she succeeds in selling him on it being like, well,
essentially you're the bishop.
You get to say what's,
you know,
heretical and what's not.
If you just decide that heliocentrism isn't heretical because it's quote,
just a theory,
then that's okay.
And no one will get in trouble.
And you know,
isn't it true that no one else is being persecuted for heliocentrism except in
this area?
And I think,
I don't know whether this was a thing that Uoto-san researched and knew about
or whether he just assumed that this is how it worked and was right.
But this does seem to have been the case that how intensely heretical ideas
and heliocentrism specifically were suppressed was a function of like the top
ranking person in that area's personal,
like desire to either suppress it or not suppress it.
And the arguments that Draca uses to convince the bishop are the actual
arguments that were made in real life about the theory when it was presented.
So Copernicus sort of recognized that his heliocentric model could potentially
land him in hot water and it didn't get published till after he was dead.
But his argument in it was,
this is just a theory that I'm using to help the church better be able to
predict stuff that's coming in the future and like understand the world.
So I'm not actually arguing that it's true.
I'm just suggesting we think about it in order to like have better math
essentially.
And different people within the church either were like,
yeah, whatever theory,
it's just a theory.
It doesn't matter.
Or this is counter to God's plan.
How dare you even suggest this?
And so I think that there was a little bit of a pendulum and people had
different positions even within the church.
And I think Draca's ability to convince this particular bishop that as long as
you don't have a problem with it,
it's probably going to be fine is very,
very accurate to the way that heliocentrism was treated by church figures and
roughly this time period.
And the reaction of Novak was like,
was I the only one who did cruel stuff?
Or yeah.
Who opposed this?
Was this all like my quote unquote misunderstanding?
The realization of it?
Yeah.
And I thought Novak knows that the bishop killed Yolanda,
but which is not the case.
No, nobody I think ever tells him that and definitely not the bishop.
And I don't even think the other monks, I think.
Bishop was the one who told Novak like this happened.
Right.
He now she's like that.
Yeah.
I'm so sorry, but I saved the gloves.
Right.
Right.
Right.
He,
the bishop pretends like he feels sympathy for Novak and that he had
nothing to do with the decision that just some other inquisitors caught her
and she was killed right away,
which is both not true and he totally set it up.
And Novak might be smart enough to know that I wouldn't put it past him to
like connect the dots and realize that,
but you got to expect that in the next episode,
Novak's going to see Draco wearing Yolanda's hood and be like,
timeout, where did you get that?
She's going to be like, oh,
I got this from a woman named Yolanda who was leading the heretic liberation
front.
And Novak's going to connect the dots and be like,
I'm going to kill you to the bishop. Right.
That's probably, I mean,
that's what we sort of thought that might come in this episode and it didn't.
So, so maybe it won't work out, you know,
but yeah.
It was emotional when Novak realized the realization of a misunderstanding.
And what about those people like Rafael,
Oxy, Badeni.
Yeah. He says their names.
He clearly remembers all of them.
Each of them.
Each of them.
Right.
That tells something.
That he felt bad about being a torturer.
Yeah.
Or that he just,
he needs to feel justified about what he's done because it's been terrible.
He's been a horrible person for his whole life.
Yeah.
And, you know,
he's been punished with the separation from his daughter.
Right.
And now her death that he doesn't know about.
But a lot of his explanation during the show seems to be,
I just do what I'm told.
Right.
The church tells me I'm supposed to do this.
And so I do this.
Yeah.
Especially post-World War II.
There's like a lot of soul searching that happened among,
not just,
I think psychologists,
but like everybody to be like,
how did the Nazis like do this?
Like,
how did they get so many people to go along with the Holocaust?
Like,
how could anyone have just said,
yes,
I'll participate in the mass murder of 6 million people.
There's a really famous psychological study called the Milgram experiment
where a psychologist,
potentially unethically,
recruited volunteers for an experiment where he told them their job was to
administer electric shocks to a person in another room when they got answers
wrong on a test.
And so the person conducting the experiment was the quote unquote scientist
who was telling the subject,
the person who's participating,
like give him another shock,
give him another shock,
like give him another shock.
And they played audio.
Like there actually was nobody getting shocked.
That was just a setup,
but they played audio that was supposed to be from the person getting the
shocks in the other room.
And the higher,
as the shocks got like more and more intense,
the audio that played was of the person hypothetically in the other room,
like screaming in pain and eventually like not responding at all as if they'd
had a heart attack and died.
And they found that some like obscene percentage of people kept giving the
shocks.
Even after the person was like,
obviously being tortured and potentially like in serious life threatening
danger.
And the conclusion of the experiment was if you put someone in a lab coat and
tell people in the participant,
tell the participants they quote have no choice,
they must continue.
Many people will not stand up and be like,
this is messed up.
I'm not doing this anymore.
They'll just keep going.
And I think the reason is because their justification is someone with
authority is making me do this.
It's not my choice.
It's not my decision.
I'm just doing what I'm told.
And so Novak really feels like that kind of character who isn't able to stand
up to the church and be like,
I'm not going to torture people just because you tell me to,
or who attempts to convince himself that what the church teaches him about,
you know,
heretics and everything else is true and therefore must be acted on.
And so it really seems like the series wants to comment on that part of human
nature.
The part of us that does what we're told,
even when we kind of know in our hearts that it's not right.
And the dangers of not contesting something,
you know,
is wrong.
Sorry,
went on a little longer.
No,
that's okay.
That's okay.
Yeah.
I can't wait to watch.
That was 22 episode.
So there will be three more.
Three more.
Three more feels like a lot.
Really?
Yeah.
You know how long Raphael was the main character of this show?
No.
Three episodes.
Oh,
really?
Yeah.
Three.
Okay.
I was saying as a joke that at the end of the episode we were watching,
there could have been an earthquake where the whole church just collapsed and
killed everybody inside.
And then the next episode starts with new people because that's the type of
show this is.
So I'm not ruling out that everyone dies and there's another new character
in the last three episodes,
because like this show would go there.
Okay.
Well,
maybe they can say,
Oh my God,
RC is moving.
Yeah.
I didn't even think of that.
When I said earthquake,
I said a hurricane earlier and then this time I changed it to earthquake
and yeah,
the earth is moving.
Oh God.
Let's talk about theme song.
Kaiju.
Kaiju's full version is finally out.
That's right.
After five months,
I think of release of animation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like everybody waited and NHK waited patiently.
That's which is amazing.
Cause like NHK didn't like,
Hey,
you guys hurry up.
We have to really,
you know,
we,
we want the full version or anything.
They were really chill about it.
See,
that's the power of a not for profit TV station.
It's a government run TV network.
Yeah.
So they're not trying to make money.
Right.
Nobody's like,
nobody's getting a profit.
There's no stocks like,
you know,
so they can,
they don't have to like rush the artists to be like,
Hey,
we're trying to make money here.
Finish the song.
They're like,
Oh,
did you have enough for the opening?
Good.
That's all.
That's all we really wanted.
Because there's a reason why,
uh,
Sakana actions,
main vocalist,
uh,
Ichiro Yamaguchi,
he has been suffering from,
um,
depression at least two years.
And then it was,
um,
hard time.
And he just,
he,
he needed to figure out how to make music.
He,
he made a comeback last year and the sudden tour,
but like,
he needed to figure out how to schedule himself with,
uh,
you know,
work balance and everything.
So,
yeah,
but he did it.
He made almost 80 patterns of lyrics.
Wow.
And towards the end,
he went back to the earlier lyrics he wrote and he was like,
this actually matches.
So impressive.
Yeah.
So that's what he decided.
And he made the song,
he finalized the lyrics a day or two days before their reveal of the
song.
Performed it for the first time.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
Wow.
Yeah.
He needed a time and it's worth it.
Yeah.
Or it's the weight.
Yeah,
I agree.
Yeah.
And I want to explain about the song because we watched him singing on
YouTube live streaming for the first time on the,
like on any media.
Right.
I set the alarm.
Woke up super early in the morning.
No,
it started early in the morning in LA time.
Right.
But I remember setting the timer and we started watching and it was
about 7 AM in the morning.
And you were,
you kind of leave around that time or leave earlier for the work,
but he,
you decided to wait for the song.
We watched it.
And then I started crying.
Well,
understandably.
I mean,
you know,
knowing what a big deal this has been in his life and how much struggle
he's gone through to try to compose this thing.
And then to hear some of that struggle represented in the lyrics.
And just to have like,
waited so long for this thing to come out after enjoying the TV size
version so much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was like a powerful moment.
There are two aspects,
right?
Like an anime aspect and his life aspect,
and then both go so well.
Right.
And I can like,
feel it from the lyrics.
Yeah.
And,
uh,
it was just perfect,
perfect song.
And then I can tell it's like my 2025 best anime theme song already.
Is it the best song of 2025 total?
I don't know if anybody can beat this seriously.
Okay.
Yeah.
Let me,
um,
share the information about how Kaiji is doing on Spotify.
Uh,
when you check top 50 Japan playlist,
Kaiji is number one for now.
524,993 plays.
That's a lot.
Kaiju was released like a few days ago,
and then they already have this many of plays.
So it's a,
it's a big deal.
Cool.
I'm really happy for them.
I don't think they knew about this,
but the day they started streaming the live performance on YouTube.
The life was February 19th,
which is birthday of Copernicus.
Whoa.
And I don't think they knew that.
I don't think they knew serendipity.
And then this song Kaiju is,
uh,
Sakana actions,
first anime theme song.
That is also sort of surprising to me.
Like they have such an anime sound to me that,
well,
I mean,
I guess whatever their Japanese pop band,
they all sound a little bit anime,
but yeah,
I,
I would like to hear them do more.
And if you check them,
Kaiju's music design covers,
like it says Kaiju Sakana action in Japanese,
but when you see it,
it looks like a mirror.
Yeah.
I think it's meant to be a written with movable type.
And so it looks like they're going to print it using a printing press,
which is pretty cool.
Pretty cool.
That actually reminds me incidentally,
China was the first country to invent movable type.
Which is sort of shocking to me because of the number of different
potential like woodblocks they'd have to carve in order to be able to like
make that happen.
And so I'm not sure if the movable type they invented,
it was metal or not,
but it's like,
I always have a hard time reconciling that because there's like over 10,000
Chinese characters.
Did they make 10,000 different tiny metal pieces in order to make
movable type with or like what's going on there?
But I think that's historically true that China invented it first and it only
came to Europe much, much later.
There's just,
that's ironic since it's so much easier to use a Western alphabet to print
stuff.
There's so many fewer different pieces of movable type to use in English.
There are only 26.
Oh,
by the way,
Right.
Yeah. Which is a little bit unusual, but it works, works out and the sounds great.
Oh yeah. When we watched a live streaming, there were 130,000 people watching at the same time.
That is also a lot.
I don't have a really good handle on like how rare that is. Like,
I guess I don't really know Twitch numbers.
And obviously Japan's population is a lot smaller than the United States.
I mean, not only Japan, I think, or we watched it from Los Angeles.
Yeah. No, no, no. I know. But like,
there can't have been that many people from outside Japan watching. Right.
The live stream was all in Japanese. Right. And I don't think
it would have been very easy to find out that it was happening unless you were like
a hardcore enough fan to be translating stuff that's only on the web in Japanese
into English, using like Google Translate or something. Cause you just like love
Saken Action that much, or you happen to live outside Japan, but you know, Japanese.
And I think that's why I'm sort of saying, you know, yeah, 130,000 people watched this.
Do you think more than 30,000 of them were outside of Japan?
Could be.
Okay. You know what? I'm not going to fight this. Yeah, sure. Whatever.
So for now, for the limited time only,
you can watch Kaiju's music video collaborating with Orb.
Yeah. And I got to say, this is one of my favorite things ever because way back in the day,
I think this was more common where you would have a music video with animation from a series or,
you know, or from a movie or whatever that had the original sounds from the animation
mixed together with the sounds of the music.
Yeah.
And so for me, we haven't done a Bubblegum Crisis episode and I really hope that we do.
I think that I can convince like a guest star to come on for like a Bubblegum Crisis episode,
but Bubblegum Crisis produced, I think maybe a whole VHS tape of just music videos
of Bubblegum Crisis animation together with songs.
Like, I think part of the conceit was that they were by either Press and the Replicants,
which is the band that one of the main characters belongs to or by other people from the show.
And that has like, because it's a, you know, sci-fi mecha near future anime has like a lot
of like gunshots and squealing tires and other sound effects that are like present in the music
video alongside of the music.
And I love it.
And so this particular video that has some, you know, major lines from the show and like
characters speaking layered together with the other stuff is also just really cool.
And I recommend it highly.
Yeah.
I'm going to put the link to the description of this episode so that you can check it out.
All right.
Let's do word of the day.
Should we do Seisho?
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
Oh, great.
Okay.
Because we didn't talk about this.
So Seisho means literally holy writings.
And it's the word in Japanese that's used to describe the Bible.
And so, I mean, there's also the word Bible in Japanese, right?
Yes.
Okay.
That is the, I am thinking of it from the Neon Genesis Evangelion theme song.
It's true that I haven't heard people use it in any other context.
No, no, no, people.
I think I've heard people using that.
But yeah, when Japanese people say Bible, they don't actually mean the Bible.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
They mean like a Bible.
Yeah, like my rule, not rule book, but something like that.
Yeah.
So, but then Seisho, does that only mean like the Judeo-Christian Bible?
Or does that mean any holy writing?
I don't know the difference.
Sorry.
Do you know the Quran?
The Quran?
Yeah.
Is that Seisho also?
Kyuuyaku Seisho.
Okay. Kyuuyaku Seisho means the Old Testament, I think, which is also weird.
Because yaku means translation, right?
Or is it a different yaku?
No, it's promise.
Oh, old promise.
Okay.
Then actually, that's really accurate for Old Testament.
That implies like the original covenant made between Jews and Christians.
Jews and God.
And then so Shinyaku Seisho is the New Testament,
meaning the covenant established by Jesus with Christians.
Okay.
So then the Quran is just the Quran.
It's not a Seisho at all.
I feel like that reflects some Western biases about or some non-Muslim biases
about what's a Seisho and what's not a Seisho.
Okay.
It's not like Daisan Shin Seisho, right?
Or Daisanyaku Seisho or something.
Never heard of it.
Because that's for sure how Muslims see it, right?
To be like, there was Abraham and then there was Jesus, but now there's Muhammad.
Okay, whatever.
Point being, so Seisho just means holy writings.
But I guess we have a old promise holy writings and a new promise holy writings,
meaning the Old Testament and New Testament, respectively.
Okay.
I'm just going to assume that because I don't think you can actually confirm it.
Sorry, you're looking up whether or not there's a bit,
there's another translation word for the Quran, right?
How is that different from Seisho?
Also, like when I googled Quran, it doesn't appear.
It says Kuru and Japanese people decided to say it differently.
Like when I didn't notice.
I think that's been kind of actually true in English too,
is we've like gone through some different spellings of Quran in English in the last
10 to 15 years.
And so I think, you know, a long time ago, it was probably K-O-R-A-N.
And now we're using like Q-U apostrophe R-A-N and stuff like there's,
there's some turnover in like what the appropriate transliteration from Arabic is.
Anyway, so that's Seisho means the Bible.
And there's the Old Testament and the New Testament.
And so that's part of it.
Is there anything you'd like to add before we end?