00:01
It was funny like when my dad went to China for the first time and he basically made a like a letter exchange friend.
And then the first time he received a letter from the girl.
It was a girl.
Yeah, it was like my dad's name plus sensei, teacher, and my dad got so confused.
Like why does she call me teacher?
Later found out that means like...
Welcome back to 2AM OTTACK! I'm your host Mayu, a born and raised Japanese non-otaku, and...
I'm Cisco, an American otaku, your co-host.
In this podcast, we share reviews of anime and manga through distinct perspectives with commentary on Japanese culture, history, and language.
Cisco, you have been playing some kind of video game about China for a while.
Yes, that's true. I have.
Which I joke about all the time because the main character looks like a regular dude from like modern days.
Yeah, he definitely looks like he's in like a K-pop band.
Is there anything similar to the topic we're going to talk about today?
Well, it's set in an earlier period of Chinese history. It's a Three Kingdoms game.
So this is Dynasty Warriors Origins that I've been playing.
And yeah, I don't know that it does actually have a lot to do with the same topics we'll be discussing today.
Because we can debate about when the anime we're talking about today is set, and it's kind of out of time.
But the Three Kingdoms period is a lot earlier.
I would say the thing that it has most in common is the game developers take a lot of liberties with the history in order to make a better story.
That's why you like it.
I think that is why I like it.
I also really like hearing you make up stories about what you think the game is about.
He's definitely in Isekai, the main character.
I mean, I don't know anything about the video game. It's just from how he looks.
He looks like someone from the modern day who was in like a pop band, somehow got reborn as an incredible warrior in Three Kingdoms China.
Yeah, right.
That is the visual impact of the game.
I mean, it's not Isekai. It's the real...
You know what? Let me take that back.
It's not the real history.
It's the version of the Three Kingdoms history as presented in the book, The Romance of Three Kingdoms.
It's meant to be historical-ish.
All right.
アポセカリー・ダイアリーズの紹介
So today we are going to talk about...
The Apothecary Diaries Season 2.
We actually talked about the Apothecary Diaries before.
Back then, we talked about the Apothecary Diaries, fictional Chinese setting, Chinese history, very real toxic plans that appeared in the show.
How to say medicine in Japanese and then what the Chinese character means and more.
So click the link in the description below and listen to it before or after this episode.
So we are going to talk about the second season of the Apothecary Diaries.
I've got a couple of questions about history behind the Apothecary Diaries setting.
Something like the invention of printing, caravan, women's literacy...
Literacy.
Literacy?
Why are you putting an H in it? It's just literacy.
Oh, literacy. I guess I don't know how to spell.
There's no TH.
I know.
Literacy.
In my image, there's a TH.
Okay. You may need to literally learn literacy.
Exactly. That's why I want to ask.
Okay. All right. Bring it on.
And finally, the word of the day.
Okay.
Before we start, please subscribe and follow 2AMO Talk on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, YouTube, and YouTube Music.
The more followers, the more fun episodes.
Okay.
Right?
I'll do some more research if we start reaching a larger audience.
That's true.
Because I'll be more embarrassed to let everyone know what an idiot I really am.
We do a lot of research.
I thought you were going to say everyone already knows what an idiot you are.
No. Are you serious?
Who are you talking about?
Me more like.
No.
Oh, my God.
エピソードの内容
All right. Let's start with episode one.
This is an episode that Gyokuyo's daughter, Rinri.
That's a cute name.
It is really cute.
Rin is like a bell.
Ri is like beautiful.
It's a cute name.
It's a cute name.
It finds a cat.
And later, the cat was named Mao Mao.
I wish I know how to pronounce Chinese right.
It's a shame.
I learned Chinese for two years at college and I forgot.
I was going to say, it feels like the pronunciation would be the one thing you might remember.
There are too many Chinese characters and too many pronunciations, I think.
毛沢東の誤解
You know, just hearing you say it, I actually had not even had this thought occur to me until just now.
From an American point of view, one of the most famous Chinese people in modern history is Chairman Mao.
Mao Zedong, the guy who founded the Communist Party in China.
So this is the problem.
In Japan, it's not a good thing, I think.
It's a terrible thing, yeah.
Japanese people read the Chinese place or people's name in Japanese way.
So when we talk, I have no idea who you're talking about.
Yeah, I think this is a huge problem.
I can't even conceive of...
Oh, you know what? I can.
It's kind of like how people in America call Germany, Germany, which is based on a French word.
Oh, that's where Germany comes from.
Yeah, it's from the way that French people talk about Germany as Allemagne.
Whereas German people refer to their own country as Deutschland.
And it wouldn't be that hard for Americans to say, oh, that country is Deutschland.
It's not like we don't know how to say that.
But we say Germany because we're influenced by the French.
Yeah.
I mean, it's more complicated than that.
But that's the basic thing.
I don't think there's a lot of examples of that in English.
It seems pretty wrong not to refer to people or countries in the way that they call themselves.
Yeah.
So if I see kanji, I would know.
Okay, well, I know world history isn't your strong point.
But do you know the guy who won the Civil War in China and then was the leader throughout the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?
How does he look like?
He only has hair on like the sides of his head and he's like bald on top.
Okay.
And he's kind of pudgy.
Yes.
And he looks like he's trying to look happy in most of the images.
Okay.
What's that guy's name in Japanese?
I forgot.
Oh, my God.
That's why I'm learning.
That guy's name is Chairman Mao.
Mao, okay.
And so it's probably a different Mao than Mao Mao or than the cat.
Yeah.
But I think, you know, interestingly for Japanese audiences watching this show, her name being Mao Mao or the cat's name being Mao Mao probably does not trigger any association with the personage Chairman Mao.
Whereas for an English speaker, that might well be like one of the only things you know about China is the guy who started the Communist Party there is Mao.
And so you might be like, whoa, why are they using his name?
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
In Japanese or Chinese, Mao Mao, the main character's name is Neko Neko Cat Cat.
Right.
So it's like, oh, that's a cute name.
And the cat's name is like Fur Fur.
Hmm.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's a cute name.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, okay.
So we discovered an interesting fact about...
Like me not knowing the most famous Chinese person in the world.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
You know, he's been dead since the 70s.
So like, I think...
I know.
I know his face.
Okay.
Good.
Yeah.
I mean, I think arguably the most important person in the 1900s in China.
So the cat appears and then cat was named Mao Mao.
And then I don't know Chinese.
毛毛の密輸の試み
Oh, and also in this episode, Mao Mao tried to smuggle books.
The very special books.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know how to call it, but it's like a sex ed kind of book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then she got caught by Jin Shi and Gao Shen.
To be like, if you just got elevated to the role of consort or concubine, then you ought
to know this first.
That's like really considerate of her.
Considerate of her.
But when you think about her age, like how much does she knows?
Well, she grew up in a brothel.
I feel like she probably knows everything.
Yeah.
That's surprising.
Anyway, so she was trying to smuggle the books.
Okay.
But she got caught.
And then Gao Shen, Jin Shi, and Mao Mao started talking about like how the book was printed.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then Jin Shi was like, are these wood lock print?
And she was like, no, metal print.
Right.
Yeah.
So we talked about printing press history on Orb's episode.
And you can find out more about printing press history around like Orb time period.
Uh-huh.
When is that time period?
Mid-1400s is when the Gutenberg press is first invented.
Okay.
Let's talk about more about printing press or wood lock press, what you know about them.
印刷技術の歴史
Okay.
So I did some, I finally did some actual research.
You do research.
I don't do enough research.
And I'm not going to say I did enough research, but I will say I did some research and learned
some more things that I did not know before about printing presses and the history of printing.
So one of the, I mean, woodblock printing has been around for a really long time, that
its history goes much farther back than I'm going to discuss here.
And woodblock printing is pretty simple.
You carve a woodblock.
The parts that you carve away become the white spaces and the parts that you allow to stick
out become the surfaces that the ink attaches to so that when you make a print onto some
kind of paper or another surface, the parts that were sticking out become what you see.
And woodblock printing makes a lot of sense for ideographic languages like Chinese, because
there are so many different characters that you would have to use if you were going to
try to use type, that it would take a really long time to make them all.
And then it would take a really long time to find the ones that you wanted to use.
And you might have to have multiples of more commonly used characters.
So woodblock printing had been around in China even, you know, like I think since hundreds
of years before the first movable type was invented.
And the first movable type in China was ceramic based.
It was made out of clay.
And as you can imagine, ceramics break kind of easily.
So I do think they were using a particular form of ceramic that did not break as easily
as we associate most ceramics breaking.
But there's a, you know, there's a direct relationship between the thickness of the
ceramic and its breakability.
The more thin you make it, the easier it's going to be to break.
And so there were some reasons why it was not great, but it did hold ink pretty well
or it held the type of ink that Chinese people used better than the other types of printing
surfaces, which is one of the reasons that it was more popular.
And so I think it's invented in around the Song Dynasty by a guy named Bisheng.
So he created it, but I don't think it caught on like other people did not continue making
it and it didn't like spread out and become the norm.
There's also a lot of experimentation with wood based movable type.
So here again, you're carving each individual piece of type out of wood.
And one of the challenges was making them standardized in terms of their size because
some Chinese characters have a lot of strokes, meaning you're going to need to really have
a very finely carved piece of wood for this.
And then, you know, wood degrades kind of quickly.
So you can only use it for so many printings before you have to make another one.
You have like 20,000 characters.
That's a lot of small pieces of movable type.
So wood was also used.
And then finally, they experimented with metal based type too.
And this is especially in the Song Dynasty.
And I think like right after that, where I think the main metal was tin in China that
was used for this printing.
And I think metal type broke less frequently and was definitely used in the creation of
money in particular, where you would like have two of the characters and they had to
be like the right two characters in order to know that it was the money from, you know,
whatever, like the official government's money or something to prevent counterfeiting.
I think the problem with the tin type, the tin movable type in China was that it did
not hold ink very well.
And so even though it was maybe harder to break than ceramic or wood, it had its own
problems and also did not catch on as a major way of doing it.
I think like more like moreover, just for most things that were getting printed, it made
more sense to do woodblock prints.
And Japan went through like a similar sort of process in experimenting with movable type
that was brought over by Europeans originally, and then kind of like just deciding it wasn't
worth it and being like, yeah, like we could do this, but woodblocks reproduce the kind
of characters we want to see better.
They are prettier, like we're not printing things that need this.
And, you know, and so they, they kind of were like, nevermind.
Yeah.
Went with woodblock printing instead.
Whereas alphabetic languages like German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, whatever
for them movable type made a lot of sense.
And so it became the norm very quickly, even though medieval Europe had woodblock printing
before it had movable type also.
And there were plenty of things printed with woodblock methods in Europe during and after
the Renaissance.
In Japan, hokusai used woodblock printing, right?
It's not for letters, but pictures.
For pictures and often letters also that are in there.
But yes, a lot of like most famous Japanese art from the Edo period is woodblock print
based.
Did they like mass produce?
Yeah.
It was a way to make a lot of copies so you could sell it to the masses.
And so a lot of the ukiyo-e prints are of famous actors, especially from kabuki and stuff.
So more of like, you know, famous courtesans, etc.
Like those were all topics that generated a lot of like popular prints.
Hmm.
I see.
In the first episode, by the way, you see Lindy, the Gyokuyo's daughter, like she can't
talk yet.
She's like mumbling and trying to speak.
If you watch the anime with original audio, you might realize that's basically Anya.
Because...
It sounds exactly like her.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's the same person.
It's by Tanizaki Atsumi.
And the Gyokuyo is by Tanizaki Atsumi.
And the daughter is by also Tanizaki Atsumi.
So that was cute to hear.
It was cute.
Oh, that's so Anya.
I agree.
Yeah.
キャラバンの交易
Let's move on to episode two.
Episode two is all about caravan.
And in this episode, it didn't really say which country the caravan was from.
Well, given that even the Chinese country in this show is totally made up, I think it
was probably wise for them to not even bother.
Also, some of the people who come in the caravan have blonde hair.
So like, okay, like theoretically, I guess the caravan could have come like all the way
from a place where people have blonde hair, but there's not like that many of those in
Central Asia.
So I think it was probably smart of them not to specify.
But there was like some sort of like trading in old days and then caravan came to China
and it was their Chinese caravan too?
Yeah, absolutely.
When you're talking about caravans going back and forth, sure.
There's people on both sides like doing the caravanning.
It's not like Chinese people refused to participate in trade.
We're like, come to us.
We don't trade at all.
And I think this is one of the moments where the Li dynasty, the fictional dynasty that's
in the show, is more like the Tang dynasty than other dynasties.
Like the Ming is definitely a bad match here.
The Tang dynasty marks the high watermark of China's control over like the areas to
the west of China that reached all the way into like what is today, Pakistan, through
those mountains, through all of like, you know, the Central Asian countries, you know,
through Uzbekistan, through Turkmenistan, into like almost the border with Iran, really,
or at least Afghanistan.
So I think the implication is that this is a caravan coming from that direction, from
somewhere probably in Persia via, you know, the mountain routes and the Silk Road into
China.
And yeah, those things went both ways, but the Tang dynasty successfully sent its armies
into Central Asia and made alliances and, you know, married off princesses to people
who lived there and controlled the trade as far as, you know, the Talas Basin and beyond.
Like a simple question, like how-
Tarim Basin.
I said Talas Basin.
Talas is the battle where they finally like lose control of it in 751.
Okay.
Okay.
Tarim Basin.
There you go.
Also, how did they deal with currency?
Like country by country, they use different money.
Yeah.
Now we have like current currency exchange.
Yep.
But how did they do that?
I think currency exchanges existed in the ancient world also.
Anytime you're trading anything for anybody else, you've got to make sure that what you're
getting back is of equivalent value.
Now, if you're a merchant who's, you know, personally walking the distance between different
countries, you might have a sense of how much one currency is worth in one place according
to another, but all money is only worth what people will accept it in exchange for it.
So merchants had to make those calls about what kinds of things they would take in payment.
And sometimes rather than currency, it made more sense to take payment in kind, in goods
rather than in money because you weren't going to be able to spend the money that you got
in the place that you went to anyway.
And other times you would like take payment in the money of the place and then use that
money to buy another thing that you could bring back to wherever you came from that
you knew would be worth currency in the other place rather than carrying the currency back
and forth.
タング王朝と女性の地位
In a few episodes, you see some more like scenes of gejo.
Oh, gejo are just the servants?
Yeah, like nandri or like mama was gejo too.
Okay.
So who are the girls in the Verdigris house?
Gijo.
Gijo.
That's gijo.
Why did it have to be so close?
Okay.
Gijo are courtesans.
Yeah.
Gijo are servants or maids.
Servants.
Okay.
Just servants.
Yeah.
We might also call them maids given that they're all female.
Scenes of like maids trying to learn alphabets and then jinshi wants them to learn more and
then want them to read.
Their terraces situation was like for women.
Well, again, so like it's impossible to say because this isn't a real time in Chinese
history.
Again, this is another place where it makes more sense that this is based on the Tang
dynasty because the Tang dynasty was a better time to be a Chinese woman than most other
times in Chinese history.
There are a variety of different reasons for that.
the Tang emperors were Xianbei, I think, on their maternal side.
Like the mother of the first Tang emperor was Xianbei as opposed to Han.
Xianbei had less restrictive gender roles than Han Chinese did.
And also more women got a chance to learn and do stuff in the Tang dynasty.
And some of the more oppressive parts of Chinese culture with regards to women had not yet
become widespread.
Like foot binding was not a thing yet.
And Neo-Confucianism had not yet been really articulated or enacted.
During the middle of the Tang dynasty is the one time in Chinese history we get a really
powerful female empress, Wu Zetian, who usurps power from her husband, then deposes her own
son and makes herself the empress.
I don't know what you just said.
Should I try to say it in a different way?
Yeah.
There was a woman who was married to the emperor and she was really smart and clever and like
cunning and ambitious and everything.
She convinced him to give her all the power.
And when he tried to resist, she like politically outmaneuvered him.
Then he died.
And she had two sons with him who were supposed to be the emperor next.
But instead of giving them power, she like kept the power for herself and then eventually
forced them to resign being emperor until eventually she was like, I'm not even going
to let it go to the next boy.
I'm just going to be the emperor.
And she started a new dynasty in her own name.
Wow.
Yeah.
And ruled for like another, I don't know, a couple decades, maybe not a couple decades,
another 15 years, something like that.
But she like basically was in charge for like a quite a long time, like several decades
between getting her husband to hand her the power and when she finally died.
And even after she died, there were like a series of other women who basically tried
to do the same thing to like get power away from the men and keep it for themselves.
And that ultimately didn't work out.
Like eventually some men like took the power back and reestablished the Tang dynasty instead
of the other dynasty.
And I guess it's not even like eventually, like the next generation, the men got the
power back.
But that didn't stop a lot of women from trying.
And there are a number of really notable women during and right after Wu Zetian's usurpation
of the throne.
詩と教育
So there's one woman who was a, I guess like her grandfather was important, but he got
executed.
And so her family was in disfavor and she and her mom became slaves in the palace because
their grandfather was a traitor or whatever then, but she knew how to read and write.
She had been well educated and the Empress found her poems.
She was like writing poems as a 13 year old or something.
And the Empress saw them and was like, Oh, you're really smart.
And eventually made her her secretary.
And she like climbed through the ranks to eventually become basically like the prime minister,
almost like she was like working directly with the Empress doing stuff and remained like
an important political figure for the rest of her life.
So it's not as rags to riches a story as you want it to be because actually her lineage
is from the high ranking people in politics anyway, but she definitely had like a major
reversal early in life and then kind of clawed her way back up.
Yeah.
唐朝における女性の識字率
I mean, there was a lot of, there was more female literacy in that period than in others,
but there's always been some amount of female literacy in China, even going farther back
to like the Warring States period before even the first unification of China under the Qin.
There were still some women whose parents, I think probably especially fathers taught
them to read and were like, no, you should get an education too.
The estimates are all over the place, but like two to 10% of Chinese women were probably
able to read at different times.
And then like for men, the number was much, much higher because it was expected that if
you were from a even kind of wealthy family, you were going to learn to read and like master
the Confucian classics.
So there are plenty of men who were illiterate because they didn't come from a high enough
status family to bother learning to read and were laborers and stuff.
And the overwhelming majority of Chinese women were illiterate because no one would educate
them.
But the Tang Dynasty probably had more female literacy than other time periods.
And there are these well-attested historical examples of women in the palace, I mean like
right at the core of the economy and of politics who learned how to read and write and then
used it to get political power.
Thank you.
色盲の概念とその影響
Mao Mao solves the mystery in the shrine with colored doors, which was an interesting episode.
You know, I learned this word colorblind after I moved here.
They do make like a big deal in the episode of the colorblindness having come through
like the emperor's lineage from the original person.
I don't know the woman who had the first emperor of this particular dynasty.
And it's also pretty heavily implied that she's not quote unquote Chinese, right?
She's like a foreigner or she's.
And so again, this really sounds like the Tang Dynasty where the maternal ancestry is
Xianbei.
But like it's possible that colorblindness is just not as common in East Asian populations.
It's definitely a thing in the West.
Right.
And I think among like, I mean, I don't know.
I do know people who are colorblind and it's not the first thing they typically tell you
about themselves.
Like it's a thing that only comes out if it's like, you know, there's a reason to talk
about it.
It's like an interesting fact as opposed to something else.
But I still think people like don't love letting other people know about it.
And so there are actually multiple different kinds of colorblindness, which present as
the inability to distinguish different types of colors.
The most common one or the one that people know about, I think the most widely is green
red colorblindness.
And that's the type that's referenced in this episode where the colors green and red
look the same to people who don't have or who are colorblind or who don't have like
the right, I don't know, cones, rods in their eyes in order to be able to distinguish
those colors.
And so, yeah, I thought that was a really interesting way to incorporate that idea into
the show.
Yeah.
That's why we check our eyes and with like red and green.
Right.
When you go see an eye doctor.
What do you mean?
When you want to make like glasses or contact lenses, doctors or whoever in church check
your eyes, you always look at green and red.
Maybe I'm just not remembering this because it's been a while since I had my eyes checked.
I mostly remember seeing red and not green.
Both, at least in Japan.
That's always you have to see green.
And then do they ask you, can you see this green?
Can you see this red?
Yeah.
Maybe.
Maybe.
And I just don't.
I didn't like register for me.
Maybe.
I don't know if that is a focus of US eye tests.
Interesting.
敬語と文化
It does always strike me as odd that like we've known about colorblindness for a long
time, yet we still decided to make traffic lights be red and green.
Like, why would you do that?
Like, just make one of them blue.
That's true.
It seems.
I mean, like I get the like red to stop green go, but like we could have just picked a different
color for go.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
Let's do word of the day.
If you watch the Apothecary Diaries with Japanese audio, you probably wouldn't notice the word
blah, blah.
Summer a lot.
Like Jinshi-sama, Riha-sama, or like Gyokuyo-sama.
So, Sisqó, take it away.
What's sama?
Okay.
So, sama is an ending that's appended to people's names in order to show greater respect.
Uh, it gets translated in a lot of different ways, like Lord or Lady, because those are
archaic English terms that also show greater respect to a particular person.
So, those are specific titles and sama is not a specific title.
Anybody can be sama if you are trying to show them increased levels of respect.
So, it doesn't imply anything other than the respect that you're showing them.
But there are social consequences in Japan for getting the level of respect in your speech
wrong.
Keigo, polite speech, is really complicated.
There's like, you know, nasaimasu, and like, is the polite form, right?
And then like, what's the opposite?
For yourself?
Yeah.
Suru?
No, below that.
Below the...
Like itashimasu, right?
Which is the same as suru, but like lower.
There's actually like a bunch of levels.
It's not even like three.
But like, the emperor uses specific words for themself, right?
They say like, yowa, right?
Or something.
There's like these really, really, really different levels of what you're allowed to
call yourself, right?
Yeah, there are many ways.
Yes.
And sort of like the royal we.
Below that, you know, like, some people will be like, ore sama, like being like, I'm so
important, right?
Like, worship me, right?
Then people will be like, watashi, right?
Which is like, normal and humble.
And then people will be like, sesha, which means like, this humble one or something.
Yes, yes.
So all of those words just mean I, depending on what level you're using, they're radically
different.
So sama is an ending showing greater respect to someone.
And whether or not you use it indicates your relationship to the person you're talking
to.
One of the reasons it's so common in this one is Jinshi, who's, I mean, I guess like
we know now, like royalty, in addition to being a really important palace eunuch, supposedly,
everyone he interacts with in the rear palace is less important than him, except maybe the
four main consorts.
And so I think even them, they refer to him as Jinshi-sama, right?
They don't call him Jinshi-san.
No.
And they definitely don't yobiste, right?
They don't like not refer to him with anything.
They always give him this honorific.
But whether they have to use those honorifics with each other depends on their relative
social status.
So mama will call Jinshi Jinshi-sama unless they get like really intimate in the future.
And then, you know, like all of the gejo, right?
Like mama's friends also have to refer to him as Jinshi-sama.
But when they're talking to each other, they can drop these honorifics and just call each
other by their names.
Just Maomao and just Xiaoran.
Xiaoran.
Yeah.
Xiaoran.
So they don't use any honorifics at all.
When Maomao is talking to someone who is just slightly above her in status, she might use
san instead of sama because it's not that big a gap, but she still wants to be polite.
In Chinese, there's an equivalent for sama, which is Xiangxian.
It's pretty long.
It's written like sensei, teacher, which is confusing for Japanese people.
And it just means sama?
That means mister, especially for men.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So all men are sensei in China?
I don't know.
All important men are sensei in China.
But it doesn't mean teacher.
It doesn't mean teacher.
Yeah.
But in Japanese, if you see the Chinese characters, people recognize the kanji as teacher.
It was funny.
When my dad went to China for the first time, he basically made a letter exchange friend.
And then the first time he received a letter from the girl...
Ooh, it was a girl.
It was a girl, yeah.
It was like my dad's name plus sensei, teacher.
And my dad got so confused.
Like, why does she call me teacher?
We later found out that means like mister.
Teacher has different kanji for Chinese.
It's like, it's called...
Let me try.
Are you sure it's shi and not she?
I learned Chinese.
Okay.
There's a teacher at the school that I work at, Zhou Laoshi.
And like, everyone says laoshi.
And like, they're all studying Chinese and have to call her that all the time.
Okay.
I don't know.
I'm not confident.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I robbed you of your confidence.
I think it's laoshi.
I think laoshi.
Okay.
Okay.
Somebody please...
Fix...
Correct our both wrong Chinese pronunciations.
I know my name.
Yeah.
I'm Mario.
That didn't sound that confident either.
I'm Mario.
Okay.
I think.
I got this.
Yes.
Jiayou.
Jiayou.
I don't know any Chinese.
You got me.
Ganbare.
Okay.
アニメーションの進化
Before we end, any comment about the Apothecary Diaries?
The second season...
We didn't talk...
We're not going to talk about this this time.
But the second season's opening is good.
They like really leveled up the animation quality for this one.
And like, you can see it in the opening.
The first opening was good too.
And I think I actually might have liked the first opening.
But you know what?
I like them both.
They're both really good.
But the second one, like, they really, really did a good job with the animation.
And so I'm glad the first season did well enough that they got more money for the second season.
And like, used it to great effect.
The theme song is by...
Not Yuasobi, but the vocal of Yuasobi.
Yeah.
It sounds like a Yuasobi song, even though it's just the lead vocalist.
キャラクターの秘密
I'm looking forward to find out more about Jinshi.
I just want the reveal that he's not really a eunuch.
Can we, like, please get that already?
I think that's pretty, like, 80% clear at this point.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No, 100%.
It was clear from the end of the first season.
There are, like, couple scenes, like, found service-y kind of thing.
Very.
Like, when Jinshi had to disguise...
Not disguise, but, like, dress with, like, a beautiful outfit.
And then dance in front of, like, those, like, foreign guests.
And, like, he was half naked.
And, like, training or something.
And lie on the floor.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah, that was really funny.
Did we really need that?
Absolutely.
Do people really do that on the cold floor?
Definitely.
He had to cool off because he was so hot and sweaty.
So that was...
That was very interesting to me.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm, like, kind of here for it, to be honest.
I don't mind the Jinshi fan service.
Also, it feels just, like, only fair,
given, like, how much courteous fan service we got in the first season.
エピソードの締め
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