Shopping Guide
 greeting the freshly enrolled first years...)
The protagonist, Hachiken Yugo, gets christened on the first day of school.
The story starts from the teachers of Oezo Agricultural High (aka Ezono) greeting the newly enrolled freshmen. During the explanation, the protagonist, Hachiken Yugo, starts chasing a calf that ran out of the cow shed. Although he manages to capture the calf, he gets lost on the school grounds. Then, his classmate Mikage Aki appeared in front of him, riding a big horse.
When his classmates talk about their dreams of the future and their goals during their self introductions, Hachiken feels inferior. The next day, they go catching runaway chickens from early in the morning, for which they are rewarded with a chicken cut on the spot. Next, they go collect chicken eggs. Hachiken is shocked when he learns that eggs come out of the birds’ anuses, and his shock grows even bigger when he sees his classmates enjoying their lunchtime meal with eggs, knowing fully where they came from.
After their first lesson has ended, one of Hachiken’s classmates asks him to teach him math in a simple way. Looking at his classmates’ poor academic ability, it seems he might make it to be the top student of his year...but then, his classmates start talking about cows cloned from somatic cells and related agricultural problems – the subject is so difficult that it frightens him! Their next lesson is PE, with one lap around the school being 20 kilometers... Ezono is just too vast!
Just when he thinks their lessons have ended at last, they are recruited to help mend the plastic greenhouse, and the wind blows them off the ground. After finishing the repairs, they are given rice and freshly harvested eggs as refreshments. Losing to his appetite, Hachiken tries eggs mixed with rice, and is moved by the tastiness of it. While sitting in the dorm bath together with his friends, Hachiken runs through the memories he’s made in Ezono in the last few days...
This anime is based on Hiromu Arakawa’s original manga, serialized in Shogakukan’s Weekly Shonen Sunday, a manga that takes place in an agricultural high school of Hokkaido. What makes this manga special is that it is full of the author’s firsthand experiences, as Arakawa himself was also born into a family of dairy farmers and he is also an agricultural high school graduate. Arakawa delivers with big hits like Fullmetal Alchemist one after another, and there is also the tag with noitaminA, a TV programming block that mass produces hit anime. We are anxious to see how the fresh youth of the students going to Ezono will be depicted.
Staff:
Original creator: Hiromu Arakawa (manga is serialized in Shogakukan’s Weekly Shonen Sunday)
Director: Tomohiko Ito
Script: Taku Kishimoto
Storyboard, supervisor: Tomohiko Ito
Animation director: Jun Nakai, Masako Matsumoto, Takahiro Chiba
© Hiromu Arakawa, Shogakukan Inc. / Ezono Festa Executive Committee
This is a Tokyo Otaku Mode original article.
*Written by Nobuyuki Hayashi*
