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Comment by gerjomarty | Hacker News Reader

Note that this article shouldn't necessarily be used as a way to find new things to watch; there are some clangers in there to avoid.

I also need to call out Takayama in Gifu prefecture, which is the basis for the fictional Kamiyama from Hyouka, an absolutely wonderful school-life-cum-mystery series from Kyoto Animation.

It would also be remiss of me not to mention Zombieland Saga, where a mad idol producer resurrects dead entertainment stars as zombies to form an idol group to revitalise Saga prefecture.

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Hyouka and Zombieland Saga are both really good shows. I especially loved Karatsu in Saga prefecture when I visited it back in 2019.

Apart from Yuri no Ice, Karatsu is also very aware of Zombieland Saga. I walked up to the tourist information desk at Karatsu station and asked if they had a map with spots for Zombieland Saga, and the guy not only got me one, but also marked a few additional spots while guiding me like "You know that scene in episode 1 where the girl was walking in the rain? That's this bridge right here", and lots more which even I didn't remember! I was really impressed how much knowledgeable he was.

Also kinda neat for the Saga <-> Zombieland Saga interaction is the saga government leaned into it a bit: https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/latest/2019/8/15/saga-gover...

> Note that this article shouldn't necessarily be used as a way to find new things to watch; there are some clangers in there to avoid.

Are there any “much watchers” in the list? For someone who is visiting Japan later this month, has been a couple of times before, and has some (very!) basic language?

Well, taste is subjective and all that but out of that list, I'd say these are fairly objectively successful and popular if you're willing to take that as a rough proxy for "good": Haikyuu, Yuru Camp, Summer Wars, Wolf Children, Girls und Panzer, K-On, Haruhi, and the Shinkai films

I personally also quite like Hanasaku Iroha, Barakamon, Natsume Yuujinchou, Night is Short and Summer Time Rendering

Kinda depends on what you're looking for, e.g. Haikyuu is very much a sports anime and does a lot with the tropes of that genre. If you just want to watch a single good thing that has a bearing on a locality in Japan and isn't a project in and of itself (cough Haruhi cough) or otherwise cult, I'd say just watch Wolf Children.

FYI for "The Shinkai films" it's Your Name and 5 Centimeters Per Second.

The first is the second largest domestic box office ever for Japan (after Spirited Away) while also being critically acclaimed.

The latter is quite well received critically, but was less popular (without spoiling anything, the ending is somewhat divisive). Still at a 63 minute runtime it's well worth watching, IMO.

Also, I'll second the Wolf Children recommendation. Everybody in my family liked it, and that's rather rare for a film.

Thanks, Wolf Children is a good place to start I think!

Thanks, I'll take a look at some of those.

Also note that anime is not even remotely a realistic portrayal of Japan and should not be used as such like the article is proposing.

It used to be a common phenomenon for western "otaku" to think anime represents life in Japan, then travel there and come to find out that it's deeply racist and xenophobic, has an extremely repressive criminal justice system, a strong "we did nothing wrong in WW2" attitude, and so on.

Having lived in Japan for multiple years in the past and knowing other foreigners who've lived there for a decade+, I'll say that while it's true it's no anime dreamland and skews insular, one's experiences there will vary a lot depending on approach.

For example if you're running with a younger crowd in Tokyo and have become reasonably adept at speaking the language you'll run into a lot less of that kind of thing — a lot of the time people there just aren't comfortable with dealing with those who don't speak Japanese well, and older individuals and more out of the way cities might be less accommodating of outsiders. Often when I see writings online about having a bad time, it's from jaded Eikawa teachers who've made no effort to learn Japanese or branch beyond their friend group of other foreigners despite having lived there for many years.

That said young people aren't running the government there due to being solidly outnumbered, so national policies are naturally going to be more reflective of its older population.

Which ones are the clangers? So that I can avoid them

The one that jumped out was Magical Girl Raising Project, which a younger me might have described as dark and edgy, but me today would call misery porn (it's not actually porn, just to be clear).

Now that I browse again, most are really good, but some are just a bit dull while being great examples of being from a certain place. Not to call it out in particular, but I ended up dropping Robotics;Notes for being kinda dull, despite it being part of the 5bp semicolon extended universe (Steins;Gate et al).

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