アニメの概要
So, I asked before we started recording what the Japanese word for grief was, and you said sadness, and I was like, time out.
Welcome back to 2AM OTTACK! I'm your host Mayu, a born and raised Japanese non-otaku, and...
I'm Cisco, an American otaku.
In this podcast, we share our reviews of anime and manga through our distinct perspectives with commentary on Japanese culture, history, and language.
Cisco, I don't know about you, but I've been crying watching this series of anime. It's really, really good.
Yeah, it is.
Just talking about it makes me want to cry.
Oh no.
From the beginning.
Okay, this is going to be an emotional episode. Brace yourself.
Oh my goodness.
Alright, so, I love this so much.
Oh my god. I don't know if I can do this.
Let's try.
Let's try. Okay. I'm telling you, this is that good.
Yeah.
I think manga is not out yet in the United States.
In English, yeah, that sounds about right.
But anime is out, and you can watch on Crunchyroll, or I think Amazon Prime too.
Today we are going to talk about...
Journey with Witch. No, excuse me, Journal with Witch.
Yes, it could be a Journey with Witch.
Yeah, I mean, they might as well be. It's so not a translation of the Japanese title that I actually forgot what the English title was.
But yeah, the Japanese title is Ikoku Nikkei, which translates to Diary of the Other Country.
You know, we talked about, well, if it was up to us, how would we translate it?
And I suggested Chronicle of the Other Country, but Ikoku just means Other Country.
Different.
Different Country.
Yeah.
Different Country. And Nikkei means Journal or Diary.
Right.
So, there's a lot of different ways you could potentially translate this, but Journal with Witch is not one of them.
Yeah, I mean, we don't know how it ends or how a story goes. Maybe the title is better?
Major spoilers ahead for the first three episodes, at least, of Journal with Witch. So, you've been warned.
Before we start, we'd like to hear from you. Share your thoughts, ideas, questions, or even suggestions for what we should talk about.
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All right, let's get into this. Could you introduce about this anime or, you know, tell us the setups?
The anime opens with a 15-year-old girl whose parents have both just died in a car accident.
And she's taken in by her mother's younger sister, who lives alone in what looks like a one-bedroom apartment and is a novelist and is not used to living with anybody else.
And the 15-year-old girl, Asa, obviously changes her aunt's routine quite a lot. It's not clear how old her aunt is, right?
35.
35, okay. And so they embark on a life together. The title is in part influenced by the fact that the aunt, being a writer, gives a diary to the niece to help her process her feelings.
So anime is really about dealing with grief. And both the aunt and the niece in their own ways are grieving.
I guess one more important plot point of the story is that the aunt and her sister, the niece's mom, had an awful relationship.
The aunt hated her older sister. And so that relationship colors her ability to sort of be there for her niece.
And we don't really see, or at least in the first four episodes, we haven't really seen very many other people from the family yet.
登場人物の関係性
No, only grandma.
Yeah. And so it's kind of not clear why no one else in the family stepped up to let the daughter live with them.
The relationship between the aunt and the dead mother is not fully clear, but seems to have been pretty negative.
Whereas the relationship between the daughter and her mom is more complicated.
We haven't really seen very much about the dad. He's been a nothing, literally out of the picture.
And so it kind of centers on both of these people's lives, the aunt and the niece, and the way in which their grief intersects with each other's,
and also with the rest of their lives and sort of the new life that they build together.
Thank you. So there are 11 Tankobon volumes and the story is completed.
I don't know how much we get to see in the season, but I'm really enjoying this story.
Before anime came out, a live action film adaptation was released in June 2024.
An anime television series adaptation premiered in January 2026.
Early episodes of anime received overwhelmingly positive reviews with praise for its writing, animation, and exploration of grief by Wikipedia.
Yeah, I mean, for sure. I agree with all of that.
The animation quality is really high, the opening endings are really good, the writing is great,
and the exploration of grief is unusual for anything in Japanese culture, and especially for anime, and it does it really, really well.
Was this a light novel or a book before it became a manga?
It doesn't sound like it. I think it would be perfect for a novel.
It really sounds like it has a lot of really novel-y qualities, and I think especially because the ant is a novelist in the setting,
it really feels like it might have been a novel before because of that connection.
So to know that it's not, that it started as a manga is very interesting.
Yeah, we haven't watched the live action version, but I'm curious to watch after we finish watching anime.
Yeah, I mean, anytime they make a movie out of something that's 11 tonkobons long,
you know it's going to be a lot of cutting in order to decide what is and isn't in the film.
So that doesn't mean it's bad, but it means that they're probably only telling a portion of the story that we're going to get to see in the anime or in the manga.
I think it's one of the rare stories which can fit in live action form.
Yeah, I mean, I think in a way, it sort of doesn't matter where you end the story because, I mean, that's probably not true,
but if the first four episodes we watched were a movie and it ended at the end of the fourth episode, you would be like, okay.
You know, there wouldn't be anything wrong with that.
So I feel like it might be harder to mess this movie up than a movie of a different anime.
エピソードの詩的表現
Okay, let's talk a little bit about four episodes we've watched.
I didn't know about this story at all until I started watching.
And the first episode was great.
It was so poetic.
And the way Aunt Makio talks, it's like, I mean, she's a novelist, that makes sense.
Right.
But it was pretty beautiful.
And you see each episode, either Makio or Asa, the 15-year-old girl, in a different country in specific situations.
Yeah, there are moments where they appear in this sort of other country that's from Asa's journal.
And the first one seemed like some desert.
They seem like mostly desert.
Mostly desert, nothing around except sand.
And sometimes like a Middle East-looking place.
Sort of.
Yeah, episode two seemed like Middle East with Makio's friend chatting.
Right, right, right, right, right.
Yeah.
But, yeah, first and the second episode was good.
And the third episode hit me really, really hard.
Yeah.
Because Makio and Asa started to clean up.
They clean out their, you know, the parents' stuff.
First thing you see is, and they explain, books which are supposed to be returned to the library.
Or planters which are supposed to get water.
Underwear nobody was supposed to touch except those people.
That was really bad.
It wasn't bad, it was just emotional.
It was so emotional for me because like I've seen the exact same thing in my life.
Right.
Because my mom passed away seven years ago.
But I was here in America.
Right.
I was flying to see my mom.
Yeah.
But the day before I was supposed to fly, she passed away.
Right.
And I went there anyway, of course.
And the day I got to my parents' house, I saw clams in the bowl with water.
So, you know, try to, clams to spit out sand.
Yeah.
Isn't this like what people do in America?
I've never seen.
Yeah, I've never seen it either.
So these are live clams.
It's pretty normal in Japan to get live clams.
Right, you buy live clams and you soak them to get to make sure they spit out the water before you,
or not the water, the sand before you eat them.
Yeah.
So your mom had clearly started the process.
Started, usually do like the day before and do overnight.
Right.
And because clams spit out in the dark and it was still there as if she was going to cook.
Right.
Before I flew and still talking to her on Skype, she told me that she saved some like my favorite treats in the refrigerator so that when I come over, I can eat.
Right.
And it was right there in the refrigerator.
Those like first moments reminded me of the time I was experiencing the same thing.
Yeah.
And after that, like there was a emotional episode between Asa and her friend.
Can you explain this?
Asa hasn't told any of her friends or the school that both of her parents died.
And it's sort of like, I think from an American point of view, it's sort of shocking that she was able to like hide it this long.
It doesn't seem like it's been that long, but it's clearly been like a week or something.
Right.
Like long enough that, I mean, I guess if you just keep showing up to school, like, you know, parents don't call every day or anything.
But she's she hasn't let anyone know.
She's only told her best friend and she's about to graduate from middle school, which is in Japan is the end of ninth grade.
And, you know, she seems to be holding it together pretty well most of the time, other than like experiencing some narcolepsy, basically.
But she gets to school and her her friend is like apologizing like really hard.
And she's like, what's wrong? Right.
And she's like, the friend told her parents and the parents told the school and the school activated the phone tree and told everyone in the school that her parents had died.
And she's like, why did you do that?
I just needed to make it through graduation and be normal.
感情の交差点
And instead, I'm going to be the girl with the dead parents.
And that's the only way anyone's going to remember me.
And so she leaves. She like walks out and doesn't attend her own middle school graduation, which is like a I mean, I guess it's a big deal in any country, but it's like a very big deal in Japan to like skip this kind of ceremony.
And she leaves and then gets lost and is like, you know, the aunt has to come and sort of retrieve her.
Right. But she has this huge blow up and like won't turn the texts from her friend is not even looking at them and is like, you know, distraught basically for the rest of the day.
And then talks it over with her aunt and then like eventually responds to the friend after like kind of leaving her on read all day, like apologizing, being like, oh, my God, I'm so sorry.
I hope you're OK. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they talk on the phone and, you know, the friend answers the phone being like, oh, my God, are you OK?
You know, like voice shaking and everything. And they they reconcile.
But it's like a hugely emotional episode because Asa's emotions are so raw and the experience of being a friend of someone who's lost somebody and sort of not knowing the right thing to do.
And like, you know, even having messed up and sort of done the quote unquote wrong thing, right, is so raw and well captured by the episode.
Yeah, like I'm sure like I've been in the same position as Asa and Asa's friend, both positions.
Yeah, I think, you know, for anyone who's lost someone, you can probably relate to Asa's feelings.
And for anyone who's tried to be there for someone else who's lost someone, you can probably see yourself in Emily, the friend.
And so, yeah, that's a that's a powerful episode.
So, yeah, after the episode, I was just bawling. Yeah. The third episode hit me really hard.
And I'm just thinking about, like, my mom, even though it's like it seems like a long time, seven years.
But it reminded me like everybody grief differently in a different way.
Yeah. And time doesn't fix. Right.
You know, it can come back anytime. Yeah.
But usually, like, I'm fine. I'm fine. But like when it comes to the topic like that, like, it's like it's like a flashback and then come back to.
Well, and I think especially the experience of watching the cleaning out of the house, because the burden of doing that really fell on you.
Like you're from what I understand, your dad and brother didn't really do a lot of the cleaning of the house afterwards.
And so in the same way that it's the women in the family who are doing that job afterwards, like, I think that was an experience that was really close to what you had to do.
Yeah, I was I was so into it. I was so ready to throw away or put away stuff.
I was doing it like every single day, crying, putting away, crying, throwing like repeatedly.
It was a hard process. So before this was interesting because like you brought this topic about bento, how it was to me, it's natural.
Like a bento is a culture, Japanese culture.
Sure. Especially moms put so much effort making bento look really cute and nice and delicious at the time with balanced meal.
So like when they were talking about bento, like, you know, Asa has to have bento or somebody has to make bento for Asa every day in high school.
悲しみのプロセス
And they were talking about like, how how do you make it and everything?
Well, and I think this is actually something to explain also.
But in middle school, you pay for a lunch fee and the kids in middle school have a cooking class where they prepare the food that people eat.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not only middle school, elementary school kids, too.
Yeah. Yeah. But in high school, that doesn't happen anymore.
There's no kushoku.
So it's a major shift in Japanese culture from middle to high school because there is no longer like food served as part of the curriculum, basically, that everybody eats every day together, either in the classroom or in a cafeteria.
Whereas in high school, everybody's eating solo.
And actually, you know, not that many anime depict middle school cafeterias.
I guess that's like partly because sometimes people just eat in class.
And I guess there's not that many anime that are really about middle school.
But I feel like there's enough that like it's notable that the cafeteria scene doesn't really happen very often.
Good point. Even though a lot of students for a lot of students, school lunch is the best part of school.
Right. Right. So that's kind of notable.
And then, you know, like I think like one of the things you can tell is like, you know, if you're watching an anime and you're like, is this middle school or high school?
Well, if the kids are all buying lunch, it's automatically high school because that's not a thing that happens in middle schools.
So the idea of like people fighting over bread, like the, you know, nama thing of having like the bread feud.
That's clear. Like, I mean, actually, now that I think about it, that's kind of weird. Right.
I guess Rama like transferred out to China in the middle of his sophomore. I don't know what year of high school they're even in.
Anyway, that idea of like a bread feud. Right. That's like a high school only thing, because in middle school you would have been eating Kyushoku like the school lunch.
So that's just context for like why they have this debate at all about making her bento is in middle school.
That is not necessary. No. But in high school it is. Right.
Yeah. Okay. Time out. This doesn't make sense because don't kids in primary school also take bentos to school sometimes?
No. Kindergarten. Kindergarten? Yeah.
I don't know about you. I've never been to you. So I don't know.
What about a hoikuen? Hoikuen? No. Preschool. Hoikuen. Nursery school. Yeah.
Nursery school. They serve you. I mean, you have to pay, but.
So you're telling me like elementary schoolers don't ever take a bento to school?
No, unless it's a field trip. So only on like special occasions. Yeah.
Or on a sports festival. Okay. So like days when there for one reason or another isn't any cafeteria lunch service.
Got it. Okay. Sorry. So that's like the that's the backstory of like why it becomes an issue and she like hasn't needed to worry about it up until then.
Yeah. And then Makiyo's not boyfriend, but like a friend came over and like.
Quasi at some point ex-boyfriend. Right. Right. And he was telling them his bento was brown.
Right. Which means to me as a Japanese, that means not enough vegetables and a lot of meat.
So I can't really figure out whether this is just because of like our household, but we don't eat very much meat.
弁当と文化の違い
But when I like heard my bento was brown, I just pictured like teriyaki sauce on everything, but like without necessarily a lot of meat in it or like things that have been like overcooked and burned.
No. Or like for some other reason were brown, like because they've been like boiled and like lost all their color and just become like a brown thing.
So I was like, God, yeah, that sounds like terrible or like, well, barbecue sauce, teriyaki sauce.
Like, I guess it's not that bad. Like I could I could eat brown stuff, you know, like, but it did not occur to me that would be meat in part because we don't really eat meat.
But also, I think for Americans, brown, I mean, like, yes, meat is brown after you cook it.
But somehow that's like not the color of meat. Huh? Like in America, meat is either white because it's pork or chicken or it's red because it's beef.
But when you cook it, yeah, beef, when you cook it turns from red to brown.
Yeah. But somehow I still just like that is like if you were like there were brown things in my lunch, like if you didn't specify they were meat, like I wouldn't think, you know, even hot dogs aren't brown.
They're red. You know what I mean? Interesting.
So like to me, like brown isn't a meat color usually unless it's been like put in sauce, even though like, yeah, of course, burgers are brown.
But like, I, you know, yeah, that's like, I didn't associate brown with meat.
Yeah, I think I'm pretty sure a lot of Japanese people when they hear brown bento means too much meat.
Interesting. Yeah. Katsu. Also, Americans don't have a notion of quote, too much meat. Like that's not a thing we can conceptualize.
So you're supposed to have well balanced meal, not only brown, but also green or red or yellow or some other colors.
Yeah. They follow up that comment by being like my parents like opposed using mini tomatoes in my bento.
And I was just like, what? Why would you oppose that? I don't know.
But you said it's because it's cheating because I don't have to prepare.
That's how I felt like because it's not a lot of work. You just put one stuff.
And if it's not a lot of work, it's not a good. Yeah. God, that's like so masochistic.
This is a problem in Japan. I don't know about now, but like a couple of years ago, caravan was such a like a big thing in Japan.
Caravan is character bento. So like moms wake up like 5 a.m. in the morning and do like artsy stuff on bento.
And then they can make Doraemon or whatever, you know, popular Pokemon.
I mean, at least it's like Pikachu. You can make Pikachu because Pikachu is yellow and black.
You can make it out of like egg and like sesame seeds. No. What? No.
And people cut out like, you know, naughty and they use scissors and then like, you know, tweezers.
And they're like they they put so much effort. If your kid don't have a caravan, you know, that kid is like so disappointed.
Like your parents don't really love you because they weren't willing to wake up at 4 in the morning.
It's like, you know, pressure you feel around the moms. I'm so glad I don't live in Japan because I can't.
I love cooking. I love cooking, but like I can't do that every single day.
I feel like the American response to this would be like, where do I buy one?
I think it could be a business, but Japanese people are too proud to buy. You have to make it.
Yeah. Anyway, the bento part was like it was natural to me. It was like I didn't question that at all.
Yeah. Well, one of the things I originally paused it for was the guy says in justifying his brown bentos that his family was quote down with brown,
which I just thought was like a funny, good translation, like way to make like a kind of like interesting pun there.
But it like to me, down with brown reinforced the idea of like fundamentally the bento is kind of gross or like not attractive or tasty.
But then you're like, whatever, like I'm fine with like burned stuff, you know, and then to like hear it's actually about meat.
I feel like, oh, all of America is down with brown. We would be like stoked to get that bento.
Oh, no, my bento only has fried chicken.
So like the guy said, you know, they say like it's the best kind or something.
That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
For guys. Yeah, definitely. But I don't know about girls like, oh, it's too brown.
Like it's not appetizing or something.
Yeah, maybe.
Anyway, let's do today's word of the day.
OK.
Otaku, word of the day.
What is today's word of the day?
悲しみと言葉の不足
So I asked before we started recording what the Japanese word for grief was.
And you said sadness. And I was like, timeout.
But apparently Japanese does not have a word that specifically means the sad feeling you get after a loved one dies.
Yeah, there is no equivalent word.
When I search it online, it says the feeling you feel when you lost somebody.
So you have to describe grief because there is no actual word for it.
Always I hear this word grief in English and I always can't find the word in Japanese.
Because it doesn't exist.
I don't think so.
So today's word of the day is that there is no word for grief in Japanese because you're not supposed to feel more than just regular sad about stuff.
Yeah.
That is so messed up.
Yeah. What's up with that?
Yeah. I mean, like, I get that it's a stoic culture and everything, but like not recognizing that you feel more sad than usual when someone close to you dies is crazy.
You gotta be tough, I think.
I think, you know, the other reason this felt important is the title being Journey with a Journey.
I said it again, Journal with Witch.
Like, yes, a journal is involved here.
And Makio-san kind of seems like a witch in some different ways.
She seems a little bit ageless, right?
That's like often you will call someone who doesn't appear to age majo or witch in Japanese.
And, you know, she's a little quirky and different from other people and stuff.
グリーフの国
But Ikokuniki, the Chronicle of the Other Country or the Diary of a Different Country, the other country is obviously grief.
And I think like, I mean, I don't know, I'm thinking of a song by the Wallflowers called Love is a Country.
But I think people absolutely have described grief as like a different country, right?
Or like, you know, like you're sort of wandering in like an unfamiliar or unknown land.
Like the landscape is different when you're in grief and stuff.
I feel like that's a very common metaphor in English for describing grieving is this idea of like being in another country or like everything being different.
And needing to explore or understand or sort of get your bearings in this new kind of country of grief.
And so Ikokuniki makes total sense to me as, you know, Diary of Another Country, the other country being just grief.
And, you know, the way it's depicted in the show as a desert, right, or like somewhere that doesn't look like Japan at all.
Like Japan famously has two sand dunes in Tottori, right?
Yeah.
The Tottori Sakyu.
Yeah.
And they are like, they're like sand dunes, but like, I've seen them, like, there's like two of them.
Where?
In Tottori, where the sand dunes are.
Two dunes in Tottori?
Two dunes, like next to each other.
Like you can see the whole thing in like one field of vision.
It's really small.
Okay.
But we've like seen it on TV.
Like it's not like, not the Sahara desert, you know, sand dunes as far as the eye can see.
It's like, there's the dunes over there.
Like that's all of them.
There are no more.
Like it's really small.
And they're disappearing because grass is growing on them.
You know, we've been to several sand dunes in America, right?
White sands, the great sand dunes in Colorado, like where like it's huge, right?
Like you could get lost and die in them because you cannot find your way back out.
And like the Sahara desert is the largest desert on earth.
Like you can't get through it in like, you know, forget seeing all at once.
Anyway, that is, I mean, I think one grief is often depicted as a desert because it's barren, right?
There's like no one else there.
It's this feeling of loneliness and deserts are really good at depicting that.
But also the desert is an especially foreign place for Japanese people because the only place even marginally resembling a desert in Japan is really small.
And like famous, but like not like a place you could get lost.
And so I think like understanding that piece of like, why is this another country or a different country?
Both works on a metaphorical level of like grief.
And it's especially because of that idea of being like, you know, so distanced from everything that's normal and regular.
And particularly for Asa, who's lost both her parents in a sudden accident, right?
There's no preparation.
There's no, I saw this coming.
Like you're ever really ready to lose your parents, regardless of like how much you know about it ahead of time.
Her experience is especially dislocating for her.
And so, yeah, there's no word for grief in Japanese.
That's crazy.
Okay, I'm glad I didn't cry anymore from the beginning.
I love it.
I love this story so much.
And I want to talk more about this kind of anime if we can.
Sure.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
Right.
エピソードのまとめとリスナーへのメッセージ
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