This Week in Anime

Is Salaryman's Club Worth Watching

Jean-Karlo
I can't do it, just leave me to die from a tragic encounter with a hippo

Alright, alright, I'll do my best as we cover Salaryman's Club.

Sports anime tend to get unfairly passed over given their subject matter. I can imagine a sports anime where the characters spend moments outside of the court composing SWOT comparisons is a tougher sell to anime fans. But I gotta say, the solid THWOKs of rackets smashing shuttlecocks definitely drew me in. Salaryman's Club brings the visual and sonorous impact it needs to make these badminton games gripping.

Oh yeah, because the title isn't very clear about this: this anime about salarymen focuses on badminton, giving us "Badarymen."

The careers of these men is part and parcel with their performance on the court; when the show begins, we find our protagonist Shiratori fired from his position at Mitsuhoshi Bank, partly because he suffers from a serious hang-up that hinders his badminton performance, partly because the guys at Mitsuhoshi are horrible. If this were a sports movie, they'd be the Hawks from The Mighty Ducks: pathologically obsessed with winning without any regard for who they have to step on along the way.

The good news is Shiratori is about to bounce back: a stroke of luck gets him a job as a salesman at Sunlight Beverage, a company that makes his favorite natto-flavored soda (also: for those who don't know, natto is fermented soybeans, so yes, the joke is that this weird, nasty, bad-selling drink is this straight-laced guy's favorite thing in the world). His position also allows him to play badminton in the corporate league.

The bad news is he's forced into playing doubles with the Riggs to his Murtaugh, Tatsu: a loud, gruff type who lives loud, laughs louder, and could bench press Shiratori in a heartbeat. Guy loves nothing more than getting Shiratori's goat.

The show agrees with you—a major chunk of the first few episodes is getting Shiratori's proposed drink to even taste good outside of him having to go through the logistics of proposing the product and pitching it as viable. It's not enough to put a wacky drink out for giggles, it needs to make money. It's not enough to just slap it into a ramune bottle to appeal to nostalgia, you need to find a specialty manufacturer that'll produce glass bottles for you. Shiratori is put through his paces off the court just as much as on the court.

Also, Shiratori is about as good at using a computer as Sailor Moon is; guy types with his index fingers. It's 2022, Shiratori and Usagi Tsukino. Get your crap together!

As I'd expect it would for a lot of people. There is a reason most office comedies skip over the minutiae of the daily grind, like My Senpai Is Annoying. It's enough for us to know Futaba messed up an order slip; we don't need to know the ins and outs of how the order slip was messed up. We do get some bits of genuine humor from Shiratori's job as a salesman (like when he bangs up a client's fancy car), but half the show is nevertheless Valium.

Yeah, that scene also left a sour taste in my mouth. The guy is clearly destitute, you could have found a better solution to this than tackling the guy.

This is where the dynamic between Shiratori and Tatsu comes in; Shiratori's foresight is keen and makes him a terror on the court... when he guesses right. He can still get juked by opponents because even if you know how a guy's gonna move, the shuttlecock can go several ways. At the end of the day, Shiratori needs someone who can back him up in the eventuality that he guesses wrong. Tatsu is perfect: he's big enough to cover the whole court along with Shiratori, and he's strong enough to just demolish any spike Shiratori sets up for him.

Shiratori only accepts Tatsu's partnership begrudgingly: he'd much rather play badminton as a singles player, and his foresight would make him good enough for it... if it didn't have a 50/50 success rate. This is on top of his PTSD making him incapable of jumping, which was what cost him his career with Mitsuhoshi in the first place.

Again, the heavy sounds of shuttlecocks getting smashed by rackets rings in my head even now. These games are kinetic and heavy and gripping—everything you need out of a sports anime.

Shiratori's team wins some games and loses some games, and the show never gets dull no matter the outcome.

I'd argue in favor of the businessman stuff if only because it did give us some good comedy bits ending with a shot of some killer decotora trucks—and if there's something I wish appeared more often in anime, it's decotora culture!

See, we do find out why Shiratori can't jump: he has PTSD after having hurt his old doubles partner in high school, Azuma, with a mistimed jump. The resulting injury to Azuma's elbow put Azuma's badminton career in jeopardy; Shiratori couldn't even face Azuma after the fact. So he resigned to singles play, where he struggled until meeting Tatsu.

Shiratori manages to overcome his trauma and prove himself to Azuma, and the two even make up after the fact. It's a nice thing, but yeah, it should have taken more than just one episode.

There's a phenomenal payoff when Tatsu calls in a favor to help keep Shiratori's taste-test for his green onion ginger ale from failing before it begins: the favor is carried out by Tomari Transport, with bookish Azuma himself driving a tricked-out decotora to save Shiratori.

Tomari Transport has an entire fleet of the things, which makes me ask: how did Azuma end up with these wild freaks?

Tatsu's no stranger to physical therapy either; being in his 30s, his knee is getting to the point where a wrong move could end his badminton career. It happens to any athlete sooner or later, no matter how much care you take. He goes so far as to take training from a badminton trainer who specializes in disabled athletes, and he's even got a prosthetic leg. It's wonderful to see diversity like this in anime, especially in anime. Made me think of Takehiko Inoue's Real!. There are also some snatches of last year's water polo anime RE-MAIN, which also focused on athletes recognizing their limits and adjusting their playstyle to accommodate to their new needs.

Also, it's extremely rare for disabled athletes to get any kind of representation in media, outside of anime or in. Kudos to Salaryman's Club.

Turns out, there's a reason Shiratori sticks to fermented bean-flavored soda: guy's got no filter once he's drunk.

Also, sweet Ultraman pose.

We touched on older badminton players earlier; Usayama is vital to that. Formerly a player for Shiratori's team, he's a hard-assed member of the Quality Assurance team. He's currently a dedicated husband and father who feels he can't in good faith continue to pursue badminton because of his responsibilities to his family. He loves badminton, but he also wants to help his wife's career as an author. That, and the guy really does love his family.

This is another thing I think would make Salaryman's Club a hard sell for anyone under the age of 30; a lot of older folks, regardless of whether they start families or not, struggle with enjoying their hobbies. But you don't just trade your hobbies for income tax forms when you hit 30—and it wouldn't be healthy to do so anyway. Just saying, all you young anime fans are gonna have to confront being fans of Black Clover when your 30s roll around.

There is also a good twist in that Shiratori teaming up with Tatsu is actually quite fated: it's revealed later that Shiratori's interest in badminton had been kickstarted by meeting a younger Tatsu as a child. When Tastsu saw Shiratori was a free agent, he pulled a lot of strings to get him hired at Sunlight Beverages.

It's not a sports anime without a degree of homoeroticism, but maybe don't rob the cradle?

That there is Takeda, who apparently has bad performance anxiety. At the suggestion of one of the Tomari Transport players, he starts imagining people in the buff to curve that. It's funny, but it doesn't work enough for him to stay on the team; he soon pulls out to take a position as a coach.

With Takeda out of the ring, that leaves Sota and Toya as the other doubles pair in the team. They're brothers and Sota takes the news fairly badly, but Toya looks up to his older brother and that gives him direction.

Yeah, it's hard to feel bad for Sota when it just comes off as him being too lazy to even try to catch up to the people around him. Tatsu's looking for a specialized regimen just for his weakening knee; Sota's way younger than Tatsu, what's his excuse?

Unisics has some wild players, like this pretty boy who goes around kissing shuttlecocks for Instagram clicks.

Your average sports anime lives or dies off of the personalities of its cast. It's a real shame that the wild characters are from all the other teams outside of Sunlight Beverages. Like, imagine that guy being in the team instead of Takeda, and Sota has to learn to deal with such an eccentric player; Sota thinks he doesn't take the game seriously, but it just turns out he enjoys the game in a different way.

Yeah, I really want to recommend Salaryman's Club but it's just too dry. RE-MAIN had colorful characters to rely upon. Half of Salaryman's Club is just boring office comedy that could stand to be lighter and breezier. The drama is there, the action is there—but there's not enough of it.