It’s no secret that Japan isn’t having a lot of sex. Modern women more career-driven than not are entering the workforce en masse, while men are growing up with a fear of 3D partners, and coupled with longstanding economic insecurity the net result is that they have a lower birthrate than anywhere else in the developed world. But when we look at the younger generation, STD and abortion rates are rising among Japanese teenagers, and the fact that sexuality is culturally a taboo topic of conversation just makes the blowback even worse. The fact is that most people have sexual urges and needs, and covering up the conversation doesn’t erase the problem, let alone stigmatizing the biological impulses that cause them.
Enter SHIMONETA, a normal-ish world where dirty jokes don’t quite not exist, but are rather punishable by law. The writers have done a comprehensive job on restricting sexuality, with collars to track dirty words, drawing erotic images, and the like. I also find it amusing that as an afterthought, they put in a bunch of nifty features like PMing into their functionality, but I digress. It begs the question of why they didn’t just use the collars to crack down on all crime, but the point is that sexuality is the number one crime, warranting its own police force, national movements to equip high school students with chastity belts, and the like. It certainly brings a new meaning to the phrase “erotic terrorist.”
Whether the choice to focus on a student council with a straight-man and the most foul-mouthed high school girl around is a tip of the hat to the unabashedly dirty Seitokai Yakuindomo or not is a matter of personal opinion, but it brings that sort of pressure where you are just waiting for the pin—or in this case the sex joke—to drop in the silent room. It won’t, because the girl is an erotic terrorist hiding in the student council of one of Japan’s most sexually pure high schools. The straight man, Tanukichi, enrolled in the school for the sake of having a pure love for the student council president Anna, as well as to atone for his erotic terrorist father and put his intimate knowledge of sexuality to good use stamping out impurities. Of course he ends up as an unwilling terrorist himself right off the bat, and so begins the war against Anna’s regime of innocent terror.
Or so it seemed to be headed, but quickly we see SHIMONETA explaining the dangers of no sexual education through Anna’s example. She shares a kiss with Tanukichi in a classic rom-com slapstick mishap, but she broods over it, obsesses over it, and eventually begins to act on it. She becomes sex-crazed, seeking his warmth, affection, kisses, and much much more. And yet because she has no idea what the sexuality she tries so hard to stamp out of the school looks like, she confuses her sexual assaults with pure, innocent love. While the joke wears out rather fast as it becomes a hundred variations on her breaking all physical barriers on her single-minded quest to get in Tanukichi’s pants (not to mention being a joke predicated on sexual assault in the first place), it's an interesting angle the show has chosen to take on this dystopian caricature of sex ed.
Most of the rest of the focus is on Tanukichi and his partner-in-crime Ayame as they find hidden stashes of pornography, distribute drawings of sex anonymously, and recruit the other burgeoning terrorists around the school, from the sadistic artistic wunderkind Saotome to the curious intrusive scientist Fuwa to a girl whose hairstyle makes her look like a giant phallus herself. What ensues is slapstick, scuffles with the police, and an endless stream of dirty jokes and BL comics enabled by some weird plot-driven hacks to get around the collars.
Towards the end there is a transition to a central plot, with their collective erotic terror organization running up against a pervert who clothes himself in used white panties, truly the natural extension of the weird erotic boogeyman Japanese society seems to think it defeats every time it refuses to educate the youth about sex. By taking on this boogeyman, the true erotic terrorists attempt to show society that their goal is education about natural processes and the freeing of people’s imaginations (and quick-witted tongues), not amoral debauchery and sexual harassment. Yet while the message is clear, watching it as a story was rather unamusing, streamlined with the most basic good vs evil tropes and mandatory character-driven double crossings. Nothing that occurs in these last few episodes of the show couldn’t be summarized in a few short sentences, nor were they quite enjoyable enough on their own to warrant watching besides seeing the usual fun characters going wild.
The ultimate goal of SHIMONETA then is a bit of a mix. First, there are the characters, who personify their various roles in Japanese society and do a good job at being funny, if not a bit canned. Second, there are the moral lessons about sexuality in Japan. I wish they had given a view of what actually happens to kids who have no education on safe sex, more focused on diseases and pregnancies than obsessed superhuman stalkers, but I’m glad the show has chosen this platform of anime aimed at teenagers to remind us all that education is important in the formative years of puberty and adolescence. Finally, there is the shock factor. Seitokai Yakuindomo may have had the more creative and dirty jokes by far, but there’s nothing quite like the sight of a high school girl wearing only a sheet and panties, with the panties covering up her head rather than her lower bits, or a middle-aged man smelling the perfume of used underwear from a wine glass like a connoisseur. It isn’t just the train wreck in slow motion, too absurd to avert your gaze; it’s the cock slap right upside the face, which makes you wince but ultimately peek just to see if it’ll happen again.