While watching Gundam[1] I understood single words like 「あかい」 (red)[2], 「わたし」 (I/me), and 「これ」 (this). Then, suddenly among all the war stuff, there was a subplot about cake. Now I was on familiar territory! I was thrilled when I understood a whole sentence: 「ケーキはおいしいですか。」(Is the cake delicious?)
I joked that if I watched a cooking anime, I might get the thrill of understanding whole sentences more often. Ideally, it should be a workplace situation so everyone is using polite forms, because that's what I'm learning first[3].
Polite and about food #
In that mood, I started looking for cooking anime set in a workplace and found Red Cat Ramen on Crunchyroll[4]. It's a gentle workplace comedy about a ramen shop run by cats, and one human. Her job is to brush the cats. It's even cuter than it sounds. Because it's set in a workplace, they use mostly polite Japanese. It's about food and cats, two subjects where my Japanese vocabulary is best.
In the first episode, the cats hire the only human member of the staff, Tamako Yashiro. As the show progresses, her duties expand and her relationship with the cat staff develops. Tamako serves as a proxy for the audience, and we learn about each cat's background and personality along with her. Not all the cats are happy about a human team member, especially at first, and resolving interpersonal tensions in the workplace is the main dramatic engine.
I don't want to oversell these interpersonal tensions. To give one example, Tamako proposes making a poster to advertise the Aka Neko Special. It's special because it's prepared with hand-made noodles--well paw-made, actually. These special noodles are made by the tiger, Krishna, who works in the back kitchen because she's shy. Tamako wants to use a photo of Krishna-san on the poster to promote the tiger-paw made noodles, but only if Krishna agrees. Persuading the shy tiger to be on the poster and thus be publicly praised for the delicious noodles she makes is the dramatic material of several episodes.
This is not a tense show, is what I'm saying. Even at its most intense, it's still sweet and cute. It's perfect.
Food motivated language learning #
The only danger of watching this show is it makes me crave ramen. Cats plate perfect bowls of ramen. Patrons taste the beautiful ramen and enjoy it so much they are overcome with emotion, which is how I felt when I had my first bowl of ramen in Tokyo this February.
Simplifying a bit, that is why I decided to learn Japanese in the first place. I want to be able to go back to Tokyo and order food politely. And take trains and buses to places where I can order that food. And read menus. And ideally, have pleasant small talk about food with people I meet so I can find even more delicious food.
Now, I'm watching an anime about ramen to help me learn enough Japanese to have polite conversations about delicious ramen which motivated me to learn Japanese. It's all one great circle of ramen[5].
Image credit #
The header image for this post is a publicity image for Episode 3: "Nothing wrong with that" "Service First" and "The Masked Engineer" from the official Red Cat Ramen website .
Specifically, the most recent one, Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX ( 機動戦士). ↩︎
Sorry, I'm not fancy enough yet to write these in kanji, even though I know common words like this would normally be written with kanji. I know the one for 「わたし」is 「私」 but I don't know the one for red and I thought it would look silly to mix and match, so you get hiragana. ↩︎
In addition to vocabulary difference, Japanese grammar is different depending on the level of politeness you use. Grammatically, there are three levels, with "polite" being the middle one. Most people start with polite because it's what you use with strangers and in workplace situations. It also has the most regular grammar. ↩︎
Crunchyroll is a streaming service just for anime. ↩︎
And other noodles, as well. ↩︎