That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Blogpost #7 OADs 1-2: Home Improvements

Tensura Season 1 was an allegorical retelling of postwar Japanese history up through the 1950s as an “animal” (monster) fable, focusing on broad strokes and foreign relations. I wondered if we would see anything about domestic events, and here we are. The first two episodes of the OADs focus on elements that became prominent in Japanese life during that time period. On the surface they’re silly comedy sketches, but there’s a lot more going on underneath.

The first episode is called, “Hey, Butts!”, and it has a simple premise. In spite of his indestructible body and spectacular successes Rimuru is suffering from an unspecified dissatisfaction, so he has his pet mad scientist make him some sleeping pills. Rimuru takes one and dreams that his people are also suffering from an unspecified dissatisfaction. To alleviate it, he introduces community sports, specifically Japan’s national sport of Sumo wrestling. Hilarity ensues. But underneath that story is a problem that goes back to the beginning of the modern city in the 19th Century.

Technological advances in the 19th Century made modern cities larger, denser, and more efficient than ever before, while public health advances made them cleaner and safer to live in. In spite of these advances, residents reported feeling a widespread unspecified dissatisfaction which they couldn’t shake. In order to deal with it, European and American intellectuals invented psychology, sociology, communism, modern physical fitness culture, several religions, and countless other cure-alls, to little avail. In 1946, the term “stress” came to be used to describe the unpleasant feeling caused by the “cumulative, non-specific dissatisfaction with modern life”.

The mid-century answer to stress was drugs, drugs, and more drugs, at a rate that makes today’s fentanyl crisis seem tame in comparison. The two favorites, easily available at any doctor’s office for any, all, or no complaints, were tranquilizers or “sleeping pills”, and amphetamines marketed as “diet pills” or “fatigue killers”.

Sleeping pills were the most prescribed medication of the 1950s. At that time there were no really useful treatments or medicines for psychological ailments that didn’t require hospitalization, so people were given sleeping pills not just for sleep disorders, but for anxiety, depression, and anything else that caused a patient disquiet. People with reasons far more vague than Rimuru’s were given tranquilizers by the fistful.

Amphetamines had been widely used during WWII by the German, American, and Japanese armies as an alertness pill; kamikaze pilots were given a special dose before being sent on their missions. “The Japanese called war stimulants ’ "senryoku zokyo zai” or drug to inspire the fighting spirits’ (Kato 1969: 592). Pilots were expected to fly planes for many hours beyond their physical capacity; soldiers were expected to fight as long as days at a time with no rest; submarine commanders and midshipmen were required to endure months of maritime service on meagre rations; factory workers laboured in subhuman conditions with deteriorating and broken equipment. Taking stimulants to enhance performance was a mark of patriotism.“ (Captain America’s "super soldier serum” was probably based on an injection of amphetamine cut with vitamins popular with upper class executives that was shown in an episode of Mad Men.) After the war amphetamines were heavily marketed to women as “diet pills”, specially manufactured in a rainbow of bright, cheerful colors so that, as the pharmaceutical companies told doctors, if a woman was unhappy with one dose, she could be prescribed the same dosage in another color to make her feel better. Japanese men also felt “compelled to take ‘fatigue killers’, which were advertised aggressively as therapeutic and beneficial.”

In the mid-century it was quite possible for a respectable middle class person to have one prescription for amphetamines, another for sleeping pills, AND to be advised by their doctor to use coffee for energy as well as alcohol and tobacco for relaxation – a condition that these days would call for an intervention. Popular opinion wouldn’t start to turn against tranquilizers and stimulants until the late 1960s to early 1970s, partly as a result of in-depth reporting on their overuse. After that, recreational drug use began to look like what’s available on the black market today.

(Meanwhile, back in the early 20th Century when the problem of modern psychological stress first showed up, Asian intellectuals were also watching the malaise develop in Europe and the European colonies in Asia and taking notes on the various attempts to treat it, knowing that it was only a matter of time before it showed up in Asian communities as well. Before the war they started kicking around the idea of treating these problems with exercise and traditional Asian practices such as yoga, Tai Chi, and mindfulness, but these ideas didn’t catch on until doctors stopped prescribing mood-altering drugs in the late 20th Century. It’s a lot easier to pop a pill than it is to practice Sun Salutations.)

Today we know the answer for that general malaise is rest, connection, and civic engagement. A widespread early to mid-century attempt to foster connection and civic engagement was through community sports. The Japanese love of traditional sports like Sumo wrestling goes back centuries. Interest in Western sports spread through the school system, which became universally available in the post-war era. By the mid-century Japan was considered to be one of the most sports-loving countries on the planet.

In the end Rimuru decides against the use of drugs and orders them locked in a vault, but I hope he does decide to introduce community sports. Soccer, with it’s global appeal, is probably a better choice. (I once saw an anthropological film of a Stone age village engaging in a communal rabbit hunt which looked like half a soccer game. Soccer may very well be close to being instinctive.)

The second episode is titled “The Tragedy of M?” Rimuru gets tired of being excessively manhandled by girls (something his former self could barely conceive of) and decides to make them bean bag cushion substitutes. This calls for obtaining special sand from a lake with a lake monster. Beach-related hilarity ensues.

I’m not what the “M” in the title refers to, but it could be Modernism, as the episode is a celebration of Modern design. Modernism was an umbrella term for overlapping congruent movements in the arts and philosophy that began in the late 19th Century and dominated the early 20th Century. While most Modern movements had died out by the mid-century, Modern design, with it’s emphasis on clean lines, functionality, and mass production, kept going through the 1970s. According to this episode Modern design’s greatest contributions were beanbag cushions, bikinis, Spandex, and pinup pictures.

(Y'know, I can’t argue with that list.)

The newest item on the list is the beanbag cushion, invented in Italy in 1968 to showcase Italian expertise and new materials. The oldest item on the list is the pin-up picture, originally invented in the late 19th Century to promote exercise to a public that was highly dubious of it’s benefits. Only later did the pin-up come to presented in a risque style. Either way, pin-ups were banned in Japan until the Occupation.

The bikini was invented in France in 1946 when designers took a wartime injunction to “use 10% less fabric on women’s swimsuits” as a creative challenge. Spandex wasn’t invented until later, in one of my favorite 20th Century stories.

Chemical companies came out of WWI with blackened reputations due to the invention of poison gas. DuPont wanted to turn this around by inventing a product that would make life easier for women. They decided the biggest problem they could make money by solving for women revolved around the girdle. In those days almost every woman in Western garb wore tight, constricting underwear reinforced with rubber and steel. They were painful and severely limited movement. DuPont set out to invent a fabric that would be just as supportive as rubber and steel but more comfortable to wear. The R&D took over a quarter of a century but finally in 1958 Joseph Shivers invented Spandex, the miraculous supportive fabric with four-way stretch. DuPont ordered thousands of yards of the new material in all colors and thicknesses, sure that they were about to dominate the girdle industry.

Then woman solved their own problem with girdles by abandoning them for feminism and pain-free movement. All that miracle fabric piled up in warehouses in what looked like one of the biggest boondoggles in manufacturing history. But what feminism taketh away, it returneth tenfold. Women stopped wearing girdles so they could exercise, for which they needed supportive clothing. It wasn’t long before designers were reaching for Spandex, to invent the sports bra in 1977 and the aerobic leotard in 1978. Modern athletic wear had arrived, and Spandex hasn’t stopped flying off the shelves yet.

In the end Rimuru has a new monster friend and the town has some new fashion and home decor choices that may or may not take off. It would be nice to see the beanbags again at a later time.

The final three episodes concern Rimuru’s days as a teacher. I’ll cover them next time.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Blogpost #6 Episodes 20-24: Hopes, Dreams, and Monsters

Episodes 20-23 are the last story arc of Season 1. Episodes 24 sets things up for later.

We start with the wrap-up of the Charybdis story. The smiths are slavering over the monster scales, bringing to mind how postwar Japanese industry got off the ground by making toys out of the Occupation force’s thrown-away tin cans. Everyone else is slavering over filleted Megalodon. Which brings up a question I’ve been meaning to ask – how are they feeding everyone? They’re apparently feeding hundreds of thousands of sedentary people using hunter-gatherer techniques designed to feed small groups of mobile and semi-mobile people. That’s not sustainable. Granted, it’s clearing out the local dangerous wildlife, but it won’t last over the long term. Eventually they’re going have to either introduce some form of large-scale agriculture or import food by the tonne.

And that brings up a bigger problem. Tensura is an allegorical fable retelling of the fantastic growth of Japan’s postwar period, with an emphasis on foreign policy issues. So far we’re skipping domestic issues of the day like strikes and student movements. But Japan has lingering problems that went along with their superfast growth, including urban sprawl and environmental degradation. Are we going to cover those issues or not? They’re familiar enough to the target audience that their absence would probably be noticed. And how are they going to handle them? Satori was in general contracting. He’s no doubt aware of such problems back home, and theoretically could take steps to prevent or mitigate them in Jura. But if he does that, this story will no longer be a straight allegorical fable. But if he DOESN’T prevent those problems from showing up, the audience will wonder why.

At that point, the story will have to decide if they want to go on telling a straight-up allegorical fable, or if they are going to veer into wish fulfillment. We’re not there yet, but that crossroads is coming up.

Rimuru is enjoying the lady’s side of the bathhouse. Compliments are flowing, and Milim once again suggests that Rimuru become a Demon Lord. Once again Rimuru can’t see any merit in it. He asks Milim why she became a Demon Lord, but she can’t remember.

Milim gets ready to leave to speak to the other Demon Lords about the Jura Forest. Everyone begs her not to be tricked, but she claims she’s too smart – yet intelligence by itself is no immunization from the subtle forms of trickery that Clayman practices.

With everything finally calm, Rimuru gets a dream message from Shizu to honor her last request and see to her Otherworlder students in Ingrassia, the human kingdom that sent the mercenary scouting party. No one wants to see Rimuru go, but he assures his people they can handle their jobs in his absence.

A few days travel brings Ranga and Rimuru to the human kingdom, whose city shows even higher tech than the dwarves have. Judging from the tall buildings and the plate glass I would say about 1900-level.

(Hmm, plate glass and plate armor. That’s an interesting juxtaposition. So they have the magical equivalent of early 20th Century technology, but no firearms. That’s problematic. Maybe they’re fueling everything with magic instead of coal, but to extract that much metal and minerals they need dynamite (or the magical equivalent). And if they have dynamite they should have gunpowder (or the magical equivalent). Either way they should have some version of firearms.)

Rimuru makes his way to the adventurer’s association Shizue belonged to known as the Free Guild. There’s a tense moment with the Grandmaster Yuuki Kagurazaka, who recognizes Shizue’s mask and assumes the worst, before Rimuru and the young Japanese Otherworlder bond over otaku-lore from home with the help of a pile of manga recreated from Rimuru’s memories.

It turns out the Free Guild runs a school and makes a special effort to collect Otherworlders like Shizue and Yuuki. Some arrive spontaneously, while others have been ported over by cadres of wizards and stuffed with magicules in an attempt to create superweapons in a process called “summoning”. The summoning ceremony is apparently unpredictable and sometimes summons children too young for the process. Their immature bodies can’t handle the stress caused by the influx of magic, and they die within five years. The Free Guild currently has five such children, who were Shizue’s special students. Rimuru realizes that the children are Shizue’s lingering regret, and agrees to take her place as their teacher.

On the way to the classroom Yuuki explains how the immense effort needed to pull off the spell usually involves entire nations. Rimuru is stunned.

“Whole nations are involved in Summoning?”

“Yes. I suppose that was this world’s choice. Rather than strengthening armies so they can face monsters, it may be more effective to summon an Otherworlder of incomparable strength. That’s what they thought.”

Ah, that’s what this tale about. We’re covering the 1950s, and the most tragic story of 1950s Japan was the lingering deaths of the youngest victims of WWII by radiation poisoning.

Allied strategists planning the invasion of Japan confronted a dire reality. Japan was gearing up for what today we would call a “Vietnam scenario”, but one that would have made Vietnam look like a cakewalk. Every Japanese person had been ordered to kill the invaders, including children, the elderly, and the disabled. The anticipated death toll was between 5.5 million - 11 million people, including all the Allied POWs, whose mass execution had been ordered to take place immediately after Allied forces landed on Japan. Nothing the strategists had tried to mitigate that grim calculation had worked. So the US military deployed an untested superweapon in an attempt to save the lives of infantrymen, civilians and enemy combatants.

The conventional damage was shocking enough for Japan to call off the war. But no one anticipated the extent of the radiation damage. They couldn’t. The injuries shattered the known laws of medicine in 1944. While radiation could harm physical bodies in close proximity, they knew it couldn’t travel through the air like light and harm distant bodies. They knew light-type energy couldn’t poison those distant bodies as if it were a toxin. Even if it could, there was no proof that any environmental toxin could cause cancer. And everyone knew no toxin could penetrate a woman’s “cast iron” uterus (the metaphor used at that time) and poison her fetus.

They learned a lot after the bombs fell.

Yuuki explains that the summoning nations have abandoned the kids as defective and don’t care what happens to them. Tragically, this is similar to the fate of the hibakusha, the explosion victims, who at first were officially denied long-term treatment by both Japan and America. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the world first began to comprehend the magnitude of the injuries – just in time to watch the last of the children with serious radiation poisoning die. Their story would be immortalized in Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, as well as the burgeoning anti-nuclear movement Moms For Peace.

But they soon became mythologized, and not just for paper cranes. As mid-century people struggled to wrap their minds around the New World Order, the lethal fuel of modern superweapons was portrayed as giving powers to everything from insects to people in a bunch of mid-century horror movies – and especially giving dangerous powers to children, first in The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), then in Village of the Damned (1960), and most memorably to the most famous Children of the Atom, Marvel Comics The Uncanny X-Men (1963).

Rimuru pledges to do what he can to save the children. Yuuki is grateful.

Rimuru meets the kids. They behave like children who know they have a terminal illness but still have their energy – they run wild. There’s no nihilist like a hopeless child. On top of that, they’re extremely powerful because of the magicules they were given. Needless to say, they’re not impressed with Rimuru. But apparently Veldora, still deep inside Rimuru, reacts to the most perceptive child, a ten-year old girl named Chloe. Since Veldora’s been bound for 300 years they couldn’t have met before, so we’re likely looking at intergenerational, time-distortion, or reincarnation shenanigans.

Rimuru wins over the kids after beating them at magic dodgeball. He remembers that Shizue survived by being bound to a fire ifrit, and begins searching for gentler spirits to help tame the children’s out-of-control energy. A new merchant contact helps him find the hidden Dwelling of the Spirits. After they pass some tests, the Queen of the Spirits, aka Demon Lord Ramiris, agrees to help them call spirits to aid the children, as she did long ago for Leon, the Demon Lord who enslaved Shizue, back when he was the Hero.

(Rimuru files that tidbit away for later.)

One at a time, the children call spirits to come aid them. Three of the kids get a lot of smaller spirits too weak to do the job individually; acting on a suggestion from Ramiris Rimuru combines the small ones who appear for each of those children into a larger entity strong enough to help contain the child’s power and bonds them to the child. The class firebrand attracts a male fairy Ramiris knows, presumably a trickster spirit. And then there’s Chloe.

Chloe attracts SOMETHING, something female, insanely powerful, and that appears to already have a bond with the little girl. Once again, Veldora appears to react to her from deep inside Rimuru. Ramiris has no idea what it is, but babbles about possible intergenerational, time-distortion, or reincarnation shenanigans. On the way to Chloe the apparition – kisses Rimuru? Or is the kiss meant for….

Veldora, you sly worm. You completely forgot to mention that you were romantically involved with the Hero who sealed you up 300 years ago. The Hero whose mask Shizue inherited and gave to Rimuru, which Chloe has an affinity for.

With the help of the bonded spirits, the children appear stable. They should now be able to grow up in control of their powers. A final favor satisfies Ramiris, apparently the creation of a golem, although we don’t get the details.

Rimuru and the children return to the Free Union. Now that their powers are tamped down, they can be integrated into regular classes with other children. As a parting gift, Rimuru gives them Japanese schoolchildren’s clothes. Chloe is still reacting strongly to Rimuru, and Veldora-inside-Rimuru is still reacting strongly to Chloe, so Rimuru gives Chloe the Hero mask because “it just felt right”.

This story marks a significant departure from the established pattern. Previously the plot has been a fairly straightforward allegorical retelling of historical events, much as Tolkien did with Lord of the Rings. The perspectives were changed with which person was representing what entity being fairly fluid, but the outcome stayed the same. This is the first time an outcome has been changed, although if you’re going to veer into fantasy wish fulfillment at some point the fate of the hibakusha children is a good place to start. If there’s anything from the 1950s that Japan would want to change, that would be it.

Rimuru’s leave-taking is observed by two shadowy figures. One wears the clothes of a Champion, perhaps it is Shizue’s former protege Hinata? The other appears to be a demon who has been waiting for a summon from Rimuru – do what? – and a chance to “finally learn the truth of this world”. It’s obviously a setup for next season, and a reminder that we still don’t know who, how, or why Rimuru was summoned to this world in the first place.

The final episode is a continuation of the setup and a flashback to Shizue’s adventuring days. A demon has taken over a kingdom and turned it into a trap for adventurers. A dying adventurer summons an ancient and powerful demon for revenge, the very demon we saw stalking Rimuru in the future. Shizue and the demon team up to eliminate the threat. We learn that Shizue’s mask has some sort of time distortion abilities and that the demon is – already waiting for Rimuru? Curiouser and curiouser.

And that’s the season. It’s covered the postwar era and the 1950s, so the next season should cover the 1960s and Japan’s emergence as an economic superpower, which should correspond to Rimuru’s ascendance to minor Demon Lord status.

Retelling recent history as animal fables is a much more traditional use of the “journey to another world” trope than I’ve seen in other isekai, and it’s got quite a punch. That’s too big a topic just to tack on to the end of this essay, but I’ll write a separate essay on it if anyone asks for it. Dredging through the old horrors for this essay got pretty intense. I’m looking forward to taking a break while watching the lighter-weight Slime Diaries before diving into next season. See ya later!

ETA: On the advice of my Slime Guru, I’m doing the OADs next.

Kotetsu

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I feel this anime is very underrated. And lack fanart in this site. Thought I’d add something to the collection.

Here’s to hoping for good things in season 2

٩(｡・ω・｡)و

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Note: To any one curious this anime is called That time I got reincarnated into a slime

[03.13]

Our new Demon Lord

• Tensei Shitara Slime datta ken

Happy Chinese New Year 2022 ! - Year of the tiger (in a little late)

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Joyeux Nouvel An Chinois 2022 ! - Année du Tigre (un peu en retard)

Satsuki

Figma / Good Smile Company / Max Factory

Alice Gear Aegis

Rimuru! With gummies, jellies and (obviously) slimes!

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nostalgia

chara: “What a meaningful conversation!”

…lol

forgive me if something wrong. i drew in online class so i didnt research what they look like. i draw from my memory.