If you wondering what this scene at the beginning of episode eleven (and the end of episode ten) of Ikoku Nikki was all about:
Morimoto Chiyo is one of Asa’s classmates, a hard working, diligent student. Top of her grade, she’s ambitious and has plans to study medicine and become a doctor. So far the anime hadn’t spent that much time on her. She was introduced in episode four as the representative for the new class of first year students. Apart from that she was occasionally shown talking to Togo Yuto, a huge football player also in Asa’s class. Just one of the incidental characters drifting in and out of Ikoku Nikki‘s story or so it seemed.
What’s she’s reacting to isn’t something made up for the series. Back in 2018 a huge scandal broke out when it was revealed one of the top Japanese medical universities had had deliberately set a quota of no more than thirty percent of its annual intake for female entrants:
It quotes an unnamed source saying officials adopted a “silent understanding” to reduce the number of female entrants over concerns female graduates were not going on to practice medicine in employment.
“Many female students who graduate end up leaving the actual medical practice to give birth and raise children,” the source told the newspaper.
The way it did this was by falsely reducing the scores of female exam takers and had been doing so since 2006, while also inflating the scores of male applicants who had donated to the school. Even in a country where societal expectations are indeed still are that women will only work until marriage, this was still a huge outrage. Chiyo’s anger here was and is widely shared, with various female authors responding to it in their stories that year and the next, the most well known probably being Sexiled, where a similar conspiracy is uncovered in the Adventurers Guild. The scandal was an insult to all Japanese women. It wasn’t just that society treats you as if marriage and children should be your highest calling, expects you to sacrifice your career for it, now these same expectations were used to deny you the chance altogether. With Ikoku Nikki the manga having started a year before the scandal broke, it’s unsurprising that Yamashita Tomoko too would incorporate it in her story.
And it fits so well too, even if it’s not directly relevant to Asa as it clearly is to her classmate Chiyo. As Makio tells Asa in episode eleven, “There isn’t a single thing in this world completely irrelevant to you” after all. One of the themes of the manga and the anime both have been her wrestling with the “infinite possibilities” that lay ahead of her afterall, of knowning at fifteen what you might even want to do with your life. Wanting to become the person you want to be but not necessarily knowing yet who that is. And here is Chiyo, who does know who she is and what she wants to become, having her nose rubbed in the fact that there are people deliberately setting out to make that impossible. It’s not as if this series offers a particularly naive or rose tinted version of growing up, but it’s still a painful dose of reality slamming down on it.
Now obviously this wasn’t planned; the manga started a year earlier after all, but that’s the genius of serialised manga, that it can incorporate such contemporary issues so quickly when the mangaka is up for it. this is a series which is partially driven by the conflict between Makio — unconventional, neurodivergent, not afraid to go her own way — and her older sister Minori, always seeking the societally approved way of doing things. Makio had to constantly fight her sister about how what she was doing was wrong, or strange, or couldn’t work to the point she still haunts her after hear death. Yet Minori could only argue with her, never force her to give up her ambitions, the way Chiyo’s could’ve been crushed by this conspiracy to deny women access to medical university. The scandal brings to the surface a feminist undercurrent that had always been lurking in the series, some of which we already say in episode nine. That manipulation of exam results is the ultimate expression of what Minori used to tell Makio: “we know better than you what’s good for us, so if you don’t listen, we will make sure you do what’s best for you”.
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