Love and Language Barriers — Okitsura — first Impressions

I feel sorry for the unfortunate subtitler on this series:

Teruaki moved from Tokyo to Okinawa and has become besotted with his class mate Kyan, but there’s one problem. She speaks Uchinaaguchi, the indigenous language of Okinawa which almost entirely but not quite unlike standard Japanese. Luckily there’s his other classmate Hina who does understand her and translates for him. Which she doesn’t do out of the kindness of her heart but because she fancies him. Teruaki loves Kyan, Hina loves Teruaki and Kyan is just an adorable gremlin who seems to be rooting for her friend. An incomplete love triangle romcom that’s also about selling Okinawan culture to its audience.

But how do you represent one character speaking in basically another language on screen? Clearly thinking it was not enough to just have Kyan speak Uchinaaguchi, the Japanese production added subtitles for her as well. And at times these subtitles show both the original Uchinaaguchi as the Japanese translation, both of which the English translator also shows, the Uchinaaguchi done in romanji. Which means there are four different subtitles covering the screen. Not sure why the original subs couldn’t have been removed beforehand, but maybe they were hardsubbed into the master file? It makes watching this a lot more difficult than it could’ve been.

Apart from the subtitle issues this is a fairly unremarkable mix of romcom and tourist information; charming enough to continue watching though the gimmick started wearing thin already by the end of this first episode. The various explorations of Okinawan culture and behaviour also felt slightly patronising? Very much as made by outsiders to the island, enthusiastic and well intentioned perhaps, but not maybe that familiar with the culture to show more than the surface details of it. Having Teruaki, an outsider himself, as the main viewpoint character reinforces this. A series like this does probably need a character like this, as clueless as the audience presumably is about Okinawa, to have its culture explained to. Nevertheless currently the series treats Okinawan culture like a Slice of Moe show would treat a hobby like fly fishing and that grates.

You probably cannot expect a light and fluffy romcom like Okitsura to go into the colonial relationship between Japan and Okinawa, and the reasons why a young girl speaking Uchinaaguchi is extremely unlikely, but it does colour my perception of the show. Japan, not unlike the Netherlands, has a very rose tinted view of its own colonial past, to the point where it’s hard to recognise Okinawa (or Hokkaido for that matter) was once its own country. Even a ‘harmless’ comedy like this will be coloured by this. Personally, I can ignore this in favour of just enjoying the show, but I fully understand why somebody like Cy Catwell cannot:

It’s a shame that this is where I’m landing because I don’t think this is necessarily bad, but I think it’s uncomfortable. I think my lived experience in Japan and my lived experience as a second class citizen in my own home country have left me at odds with being able to igonre the potential for issues when it comes to colonizer student and colonized classmates. Maybe things will stay the course and the crush Teruaki has will fade into the background in lieu of more linguistics and exploration of his time in Okinawa. I have a sinking feeling it won’t, which is why I’ll be saying guburii sabira to my time with this show.