It's always fun to observe the little bits of Japanese culture that are communicated through anime. I was re-watching the moe anime K-On! the other day, and I caught an interesting gesture that seemed to speak volumes about Japan's group-oriented society. Tsumugi had just joined the keion-bu (light music club) and was eating in a fast food restaurant with her new club members. As the other girls talked about how to find the fourth member they needed to keep their club from being closed, Mugi (who has some awesome eyebrows, let me tell you) picks up her "potato" (french fries) and adds them to the pile Mio and Ritsu are eating from. It's the ultimate gesture of group membership, mingling one's food with your new friends so you can all eat on equal terms, and it communicates a lot of information about what kind of girl Tsumugi is to viewers. I'd probably have hoarded all my fries, and when they were gone I'd steal from the others...
Mugi-chan shares her french fries with her friends as a gesture of group membership.
8 comments:
And here I interpreted it as, "Aww, how cute, Mugi doesn't understand the concept of dumping your french fries on your tray." But your view makes more sense, considering how she generously she donates her tea, her sweets, her tea sets, instruments from her father's music store, her summer villa(s)...
That and the whole living in Japan for 14 years thing. Some things I can just take your word on.
Heh, yes. You could make alternate captions for the picture like, "French fries give me explosive diarrhea, would you like mine?"
Not a pleasant image...I couldn't figure out why she had dumped the fries on Ritsu's tray, and now it's been explained it still doesn't make much sense :D
I can't quite imagine why you would do that...
Basically, "let's all eat these together." Just turning three servings of fries into one big pile of fries for everyone to partake of. It's similar to the practice of opening a bag of potato chips along the middle so that the chips are sitting on the opened foil wrapper, for everyone to take. Also it's like saying, these will go bad now, can't be put back in the bad since I destroyed it. So let's everyone eat some equally.
Japanese girls are really strange though. I'm glad I am out of the business of trying to catch them, since I'm married now. Well, except for Love Plus, which I'm playing right now. Got to figure out what makes Rinka tick... ^_^
My first reading of the situation described was that it was Mugis first time in a fasst food restaurent, so she copied the others. But reading this post it is so obvious. I have of course read about the japanese group culture. How fitting in is much more important than in the European culture beased sphere of the world. I also know about how this is rooted in kungfutsianism and how other specifically Japanese circumstances have made it a community to stress belonging and group culture. From the handen taxation system in the Heian period, where each person was only allowed to cultivate a specific amount of land, it became important in the villages to pool resources to survive, because not all land was equally good and some didn't yield enough to survive, but since the landplots were rotated every few years, everyone in the village had the misfortune at some point or other to have to cultivate bad paddies. So it was in each individuals interest to pool recources and help out, because you might be next. Thus it continues up untill the Tokugawa period where the shogunate used communal punishment to a great extend, as seen in fx. the brilliant alternative Edo period anime Oh! Edo Rocket. Also, from the thirties on in the fifteen years war, the whole nation sacrifices together. Of course today is not the same as either of the above, but I still don't have a true understanding of how important group culture is today seeing that I missread that scene. Anyhoo enough of my ramblings, I was allways a Mugi fan myself, while most of the internetz seemed to prefer Mio.
You sure know a lot about Japanese history Rune, how did you come by all this information?
I don't get why the internet loves Mio so much, i mean she is great and all but CLEARLY Azunyan (Azusa) is the best one.
@RA long time interest in Japan that has led to my studying Japanese at university. So I've read my share of books on Japanese history and spend more than one idle hour trawling wikipeia and the internet at large for info on Japan.
I could tell something was going on because they spent so much time animating that scene but I didn't really understand until I read your commentary. Now the scene is so much richer for me because you can see Mugi working out why Ritsu dumped her fries, then adding her own, and finally looking at the other two as if to say, "Look! I'm being a friend, too!"
Thanks for enriching the show for me!
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