00:11
OTTACK!
Welcome to Jump OTTACK!
Thanks for joining us for our take on the manga that appear in the Shonen Jump app.
I am your 2AM OTTACK! host, Mayu, and...
I am your Jump OTTACK! co-host, Cisco.
All right.
It's been a while we're doing this.
Yeah, the chapters from the most recent Jump Square just got added to the Shonen Jump app.
I read all of the free-to-read chapters on the Shonen Jump app
whenever they're released.
Okay, so you don't pay, but...
Well, I have in the past.
I'm just not currently subscribed right now.
So what's happening in this month's Shonen Jump app?
Lots of stuff.
I was going to introduce a couple specific series today
because I think rather than trying to cover literally everything
that's coming out in the Shonen Jump app,
which would take just like a lot of time and editing,
I wanted to focus on a couple of manga that people may or may not be familiar with,
but all of which are available through the Shonen Jump app
and which are all currently running.
So the one that I wanted to focus on today is from Jump Square,
which means it only comes out once a month,
and it's called Shouwa Shoten.
But I don't actually know if it's wa.
It might be shou-ha.
It looks like shou-ha in the alphabet.
So it's shou-ha-shoten.
And I assumed this was shou-wa-shoten because I think it's...
Actually, maybe it's set in the present day.
It's gotta be set in the present day.
I think I misunderstood and thought it was set in the Shouwa period, but it's not.
So it must be shou-ha-shoten,
which I guess I don't really understand the name that well.
Anyway, it's about the Japanese comedy art of manzai.
And I think manzai requires some explanation of its own.
Manzai is like a comedy duo always.
I guess there are some manzai that have three people.
Mm-hmm.
But most...
Yeah.
It's very unusual.
Mostly it's just two people.
One who's the bouke or the sort of like crazy...
Yeah, it means like crazy, right?
But the sort of the fool or the sort of joke setter-upper.
Joker, yeah.
And then the other one is the tsukomi, which is the straight man,
the person who reacts to the bouke's antics
and sort of like plays the role of a regular person in the audience member.
And so this is about a guy who's a really great joke writer.
He's a good sort of comic author.
And he teams up with a child acting prodigy
in order to make a manzai duo.
And they attempt to break into the world of comedy.
And so it's only 37 chapters long so far,
03:00
which to me is not extremely deep as a series yet.
But I've really, really enjoyed it.
It's got a little bit of like an explanatory feel to it
the way that Akane Banashi or another manga
that's about a particular art form has.
But it's also just quite funny.
And I think the thing that I like about it most
is that artist tries really hard to give every character in the story
a good full backstory that helps you understand where they came from
and how they got into manzai and sort of what they're doing
in competing for the sort of crown of underage manzai.
But it's just a really nice way of relating to comedy as an art form.
It's a sort of moving story.
And I like the art style quite a lot.
So that's Shouha Shoten and I recommend it.
I wanted to do two others that are not from Jump Square
but instead from Weekly Shonen Jump.
And I did a couple of these
or some of the things that are running in regular Weekly Shonen Jump earlier.
But today, the two that I wanted to introduce are also, again,
both fairly new titles.
One is Ichi the Witch and the other is Himaten.
So I picked these as a pair because they're both playing around
with some ideas around gender that I think are really interesting.
My obsession with how is gender being represented
goes way back to undergrad and college where I wrote a paper on this.
But I think Ichi the Witch is notable
in that the story of Ichi the Witch involves a society
where only women can use magic and men can't.
And Ichi is a hunter in the backwoods
who acquires a form of magic that only men can acquire.
And so is now a relatively powerful witch within a society of only female witches.
And so it's notable both because it's got a sort of gender reversal
going on in the society as a whole
and then has a main character who doesn't seem to care a lot about gender,
who's sort of focused on hunting stuff.
That's like what he cares about.
But it's just a very interesting story.
And I think depending on how much popular acclaim it gets
and where it goes in the next 20 to 30 chapters,
I think could easily become something that gets an anime series.
Although its popularity may fizzle out
or people may decide they don't like it enough for that to go that direction.
The other manga that I wanted to introduce is Himaten.
This has been running for 25 chapters so far.
And in this one, the main character is a high school boy
whose side job or his part-time job
is as an all-purpose house cleaner.
So he cleans houses, he cooks food,
he sort of like manages day-to-day details of the house,
and he winds up working for his classmate
06:00
who is a cosmetics magnate CEO and high school girl.
So there's already at least three girls who are interested in him simultaneously.
It's not exactly a harem anime,
but he's got like an old friend from middle school
that he's always had a crush on who's just a regular student.
I think maybe she's the class rep in their class.
There's the girl who's the CEO of the cosmetics company
who totally has a crush on him,
even though he's also her house cleaner and chef, kind of.
And then there's a third girl who is friends with the CEO
who is a pinup model.
Like she appears in, you know,
Young Magazine sort of frontispieces and stuff.
And so she is also head over heels for him.
And I like this because both it's like just a good romantic comedy
that's got a lot of will they, won't they kind of question mark,
you know, how will they deal with each other's feelings sort of stuff.
But also because it's a manga about a guy who cleans and cooks.
And I guess actually there are a lot of manga protagonists
who are good at these things, but it's his actual job.
And so I like the way that it articulates a kind of different version
of what Japanese masculinity could be.
Like, what if Japanese men were really useful around the house?
I mean, maybe I shouldn't just say Japanese men.
What if men, period, because this applies to me too,
we're really good at this kind of thing.
It also puts some of the girls in the series
in some positions of real power,
although they're sort of inextricably linked to traditional femininity.
One is a cosmetic CEO.
The other is a pinup model.
Like they're not, you know,
running a video game corporation or something,
but it's still, it's refreshing to see
some of the different cultural stereotypes being inverted
or adapted or whatever.
We're not quite at hakutaku levels
where the main producer of the video games and that is a girl,
but it's still like a, it's a very prettily drawn,
cute, romantic comedy with some,
you know, different gender roles being expressed.
And I like that.
So those are my three recommendations.
You should check them out.
All of them have the latest three chapters,
free to read in the Shonen Jump app.
And if you subscribe, you could read the whole series.
Just so you know, we are not sponsored.
Not sponsored yet.
Anytime.
Please pay me to read manga.
It's pretty cheap, right?
Well, it's actually free right now.
Just doing it for fun.
Anyway.
Yeah. Okay.
Let me tell you about Showa Shoten.
Um, I checked the website.
It's written in Katakana.
So even for Japanese people,
I can't really tell what it means.
Right.
Unless I think you read.
I mean, if you read in Japanese,
you might be able to kind of figure it out.
09:00
So what's the Shoten part?
Because I think of that as store,
but that's clearly not what it means.
It could be.
Yes.
Shoten means store,
like people associated with the sound,
it was store,
but it sure could be like warau, laugh.
And the ten, like a store.
Oh, so the show ha is the store of laughs.
Or show like S-H-O-W.
Oh yeah. It's transliterated as S-H-O-W.
Yeah.
So I get the show ha.
The Shoten doesn't like,
is just literally S-H-O-T-E-N in English.
Yeah.
And so it's really hard to know.
I googled it, but there's no clear answer for it.
Maybe the author will weigh in someday
enlighten us on what he meant.
Yeah.
And about Witch Watch, it's going to be on air.
No, no, no, no.
Witch Watch is a different manga.
Witch Watch is great too.
And I recommend that also.
Wait, what? Ichi Watch?
Ichi, the witch.
It sounds so similar.
I mean, they are both about witches, but...
Ichi, the witch?
Yeah. Ichi, the witch.
I often like call it Ichi, the witchy,
because one, that's for sure how it's written
in Karakana, right?
Witchy.
But also it rhymes.
But in English, his name's Ichi, so that's fine.
Except that, again, translating to English,
it'd be so easy to call this Ichi, the witchy.
It sounds so dumb.
I see.
Ichi, the witch.
Okay. I don't know about that one, but Witch Watch...
Witch Watch is getting an anime.
...animated this year in April.
Yeah. I can't wait.
I'm really excited for the Witch Watch anime.
I love Witch Watch as a series.
It's been really good.
The way they've transitioned between different arcs
has been really good.
The latest flashback arc was not my favorite
because it was so plot-heavy and just serious,
and usually the series is much funnier than that.
But I like how the different components
are coming together, and I'm psyched for the anime.
All right. Is there anything you would like to add?
I mean, if you have any comments on how frequently
we should release these episodes
and whether I should just be introducing stuff
or whether you want me to recap what's been happening
in them, that would be awesome to know.
Otherwise, I'm just going to keep doing whatever I want.
Yeah. Also, disclaimer, I don't read Jump App at all.
That's why it's just me talking the whole time.
Yeah. You can tell how I talk.
Yeah. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode.
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See you next time for more Jump Attack.
