Akebi's Sailor Uniform

Episode 9

It's often difficult for anime that whiffed hard at the beginning to keep swinging and knocking it out of the park, but somehow, Akebi's Sailor Uniform, a blissful go no-where series centered on kids being kids in middle school, keeps my serotonin so high these days that I find myself grateful that this series exists because it's just become this lovely bright spot in my Sundays, coming right before I look towards the next week.

“Ready… Up!” is another bright spot, only this time, we're not at school, but on an outing for school. Komichi and crew are heading to the local department store (which is essentially a shopping mall for us Americans) to get ready for the sport's festival, and their little adventure is so utterly sweet that I got a brand new cavity. That said, there's definitely a strong b-plot this week, one that revolves around a handmade bookmark.

Things are peaceful for the first half of the episode until tragedy strikes: Kojou Tomono (our bespectacled kiddo) realizes that her bookmark is missing. This leads to a frantic chase through the mall, followed by an intimately relatable scene: Tomono tries to act like an adult, a thing that so many kids do in the face of pain. She forces a smile, reasons that she and the girls need to get ready for the bus, and on the brink of tears, almost willingly forgoes the bookmark. But thankfully Komichi's world is kind; even when there's a good bit of drama, you know the day will be saved and things will end on a high note, and that's exactly what happens.

Episode 9 is a personal favorite because this was my life in Japan. It was visiting the local AEON department store in Fukushima City, just north of the central station. It was perusing the grocery store on the main floor, popping into the 100-yen shop on the second floor, going to the top floor to the theater. It was going to the karaage restaurant in the food court where they served up heaping mounds of juicy fried chicken, cabbage, miso soup, and pickled veg for 700 yen. And while I certainly wasn't a middle school student, I think that nostalgia has no bounds: there's a lot of good feelings that this episode evokes, even if you've never had the specific circumstances I experienced abroad.

It's also my favorite because I just love female friendships in anime so darn much, especially the way it is portrayed in Akebi. So often, middle school relationships are heralded as the beginning of feminine cattiness, borne out of a brutal social minefield that punishes those who don't wear the right things, behave according to socially acceptable norms, or perform your (assigned) gender in all the right ways. And while this is often the reality for a lot of teenagers, there's something beautiful about friendship being upheld as such a powerful tool for good, which Akebi consistently does. I love that Komichi's got lots of friends, that friendship is a healing thing for her, that she's happy. I like that there's an anime that doesn't demonize young girls for being silly and feminine and playful, but treat them as building blocks for making fantastic memories. They even get the sakuga treatment, resulting in one of the most beautiful scenes to date that peaks right as the BGM swells.

Akebi's Sailor Uniform has gone from a series with enough “ick” to make me anxious to a pleasant watch on a week-to-week basis. "Pleasant" perhaps doesn't adequately describe how wonderful this series has become, but I suppose the joy of slice of life is that you don't always have to have big words: you can simply have feelings and luxuriate in the joy that is seeing a bunch of people experience the world.

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Akebi's Sailor Uniform is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.

Mercedez is a JP-EN translation and localization light novel editor & proofreader/QA, pop culture critic, and a journalist who, when not writing for ANN, writes for Anime Feminist, where they're a staff editor. They're also a frequent cohost on the Anime Feminist Podcast, Chatty AF. This season, they're reflecting on their youth with Akebi's Sailor Uniform. When they're not writing and reviewing, you can find them on their Twitter or on their Instagram where she's always up to something.