About two episodes in to Hello!! Kiniro Mosaic, I looked back on my vague memory of the first season to remember why I hadn’t enjoyed it as much as what was playing in front of me at the moment. Unfortunately I have very little in the way of time for that sort of investigation, and so I was forced to conclude that either my standards have gotten lower or Kiniro Mosaic has gotten more relatable. By about the halfway point, I realized that either one would be fine. If I weren’t a person who could gleam some level of enjoyment from this bright-colored torrent of broken English, I wouldn’t be able to give fair treatment to Hello!! Kiniro Mosaic, whether or not that says anything about how cruel my sense of humor would be.
I wonder if it's acceptable to find the show funny in large part due to the poorness of the English being spoken. The show works around the gimmick of having native English speaking girls in a Japanese high school, and so ignoring the English would be disingenuous, but is its lack of quality really an intentional source of humor? It's certainly a comedy, with plenty of jokes revolving around cultural barriers and the Japanese fascination with blonde hair. So the purpose of English may have been to make the show exotic; to the Japanese audience, English is ever-present but often elusive, especially in high school. Or maybe it was a vehicle for explaining a host of characters with blonde hair. Either way those moments of English made me laugh.
I'd forgotten about the odd romantic subtones going on between the tomboy Yoko and her studious and bashful childhood friend Aya, but their characters worked together quite nicely, with Yoko also being the most realistic of the whole cast as far as portraying high school girls, and Aya playing the perfect flustered lovestruck maiden character to her best friend. Is she lesbian? Not really, but I really wish she were, because while Japan might think that her character doesn’t go too far for a joke, if she had confessed true romantic love Kiniro Mosaic may have made history. Not that anime has never had homosexuality before, but few shows can slip in a lesbian pair without making it into a big deal, and Kiniro Mosaic seems to be good at not making a big deal out of anything.
Another new cast member is the equally bashful Ms. Kuzehashi, whose character revolves around the struggle of a teacher being familiar and friendly to students while also remaining true to the strict Japanese power hierarchy. It then makes sense that Karen, who is British, extremely outgoing, and refers to everyone formally no matter how close she is (presumably due to her inability to actually learn proper Japanese) is the one to pose this struggle to Kuzehashi in the first place. In my time in high school there were teachers as close to me as most of my friends, but with Japanese having clear language to mark the difference in social class between speakers, this case seems a bit more complex. So Karen actually uses her language barrier to break the internal barriers within the Japanese language, at which point I can only presume the crowd goes wild. Kuzehashi takes on that struggle in an adorably shy manner, aided by the ever-hilarious and completely daft Ms. Karasuma, and so the fun continues on a new stage.
The Japanese sense of exoticism towards foreigners is certainly well-represented by blonde hair, and what seems to make Hello!! Kiniro Mosaic work where other shows might have fallen short—and indeed possibly the first season may have lacked this as well—is how that exoticism is ever-present among the friends as they go about their everyday lives, but rarely rises to the forefront in the form of direct comments or plotlines. As time goes by the British girls become more and more like regular Japanese high school students, and while they might get plenty of comments on their blonde hair they rarely are confronted by the question of whether they really deserve to be there with the real Japanese students. Towards the end they take a trip home to England without their classmates to spend time with their families, and besides being a weird experience in how anime portrays the constant switching between languages, it served both to remind us that while they are primarily British, Japan is slowly seeping into the fabric of their lives.
And remember, if you study Japanese hard enough, you too can go there one day and spend day after day speaking flawlessly to a group of adoring high school girls as you split watermelons, eat shaved ice, and leave your summer homework to the last day. Alternatively, for the Japanese who may be reading this, if you get lucky enough a couple of blonde British ladies will show up in your class one day. If not, at least with Hello!! Kiniro Mosaic you have a group of characters to live vicariously through as they do exactly what you would do in those circumstances: absolutely nothing extraordinary. Sounds fun.