Hasegawa returns
Moyashimon (Tales of Agriculture) Two young men from the country, Sawaki and Yuuki, enrol in an agricultural college in the fringes of Tokyo. Sawaki has a most unusual talent in that he is literally able to see microbes and mold spores! Their first day at college is rather disrupted by a police search for a missing student, Miss Haswgawa. In the college grounds Sawaki follows a trail of microbes and a bad smell to a grave-like hole in the ground, and alerts the authorities. However the person to seize a shovel and excavate the grave is an elderly tutor, who unearths a very dead seal stuffed with rotting seagulls, and explains that this is an Inuit delicacy known as “Kiviak”. (complete with details about vitamins)
At this point Miss Hasegawa herself shows up and complains about the tutor digging up her experiment.
One thing one can say about this anime is that it is different. How many others can you name that are set in an agricultural college, or have screen captions about yeasts, or inform you about revolting Inuit foods? Or have a character who can see microbes? (Not to mention Hasegawa, who is definitely a babe.)
Shugo Chara puts a fresh spin on a very familiar magical-girl theme. Schoolgirl Hinamori Amu has a reputation as a cool and rebellious girl, feared by bullies and school principals, and admired for her style by her classmates. However secretly she yearns to be ordinary. After making a wish she finds three brightly coloured eggs in her bed. After a moment of bewilderment and wondering if she has given birth to them (I am female, after all, she muses), she puts them in her schoolbag.
Soon she encounters the School Guardians, developing a crush on one of them, and discovers that one of the eggs hatches into a fairy, and that Amu herself can both transform and fly.
Shugo Chara is very funny and achieves the remarkable feat of giving a fresh twist to a very familiar set-up.
Shion no Ou is a much darker tale, about Shion, a schoolgirl orphan who is skilled in the Japanese board game of Shogi. Both her parents were brutally killed, and Shion, threatened by the killer, lost the power of speech. She enters a shogi tournament for women, and does quite well. However the player who beat her is revealed not to be what she appears to be, and at the end of the episode a stalker grabs Shion.
This is quite good and I want to see what happens in episode 2.