Ep17: In the Straw
w00t! Finished this episode quickly; hope that makes up for last week in which it took me until Wednesday to get it finished.
Anyway, this was a VERY interesting episode. No plot development, but who cares when Yama-waro is… well, see for yourself. I’m not going to spoil the surprise! ^_-
Anyway, random notes I decided to write; most information is from Wikipedia:
03:22 The date is 1944-08-21. Though you’d might like to know. This is during World War II, when the Dumbarton Oaks Conference began as the precursor to the United Nations.
03:48 Osaka World Expo – also called EXPO’70 and Japan World Exposition, it was during 1970. According to Wikipedia, “This fair was one of the largest and best attended expositions in history.”
09:56 Ambrosia is the food which the Greek gods eat to attain eternal life. Ashiya Risaburo is trying to develop that using biological practices of selectively breeding Caterpillar fungus.
10:43 Caterpillar fungus is a fungus used in traditional Tibetan medicine, which went to China and then to Japan later. It’s Japanese name, 冬虫夏草 (To Chuu Ka Sou, same characters as the Chinese name), means “that which is an insect in the winter, and becomes grass in the summer,” showings its parasitic relationship to insects, in which the parasite invades a moth (usually), kills it, and grows into a fungus in the summer. It’s used as everything from an aphrodisiac to medicine for fatigue to cancer. It’s apparently also good for radiation poisoning. Oh how I love Wikipedia, with information about everything!
14:27 Yes, this means Yama-waro is not human. He’s a mountain-child of nature! Too bad he doesn’t have Tarzan surfing-on-trees skills Confirmed at 21:07.
19:09 If you remember from season 1, this was one of the older methods of accessing the Hell Correspondence, via a blank ad in the newspaper at 12:00.
22:49 Notice how the candle goes out – I checked older episodes, and this is the first time I’ve noticed this. It might mean the person on the candle died already.
24:45 This title is romanized really weirdly… Radio is usually ラジオ but here it’s レディオ. レディー means “lady” so it might be a play on words.
Well, that’s it! Hope you enjoyed this week’s episode – because when people read this, it’s after they watched the episode. Hopefully. Or else I spoilt how Yama-waro was actually not human for you guys. Anyway, now we know his background – it’s kind of cool and disgusting at the same time. I mean, a host for Caterpillar fungi? Eww…
That’s some interesting info,
Thanks.
comment to 22:49 – it hapened in season 1 already, and yes, it means that the person died
He seemed to be some kind of mushroom/fungus sprite to begin with. Also, correct on the candle thing, the candle is blown out if they are dead by the end of the episode(which means they already went to hell)
Did it happen in S1? The first case I remember is episode 5 of Futakomori, which was the one with the thuggish guy who’s hit by a truck right after damning someone. (In one of the creepiest Kikuri moments ever, she tells him while he’s dying that Hell does exist, then tosses some flower petals on him and runs away giggling.) I remember the candle thing because I rewound the final scene a lot — there was a cool musical lead-in to the end theme.
It’s nice to finally know more about Yamawaro, but I’m actually a little disappointed. I had a theory that he was somehow very different from the other helpers — that he’d been somehow involved in Ai’s resurrection and we’d eventually find out what he was really up to. But now it seems he’s just like the first three. Ah well; it’s an interesting enough origin story.
By the way, this was a lot like episode 10 of the live-action Jigoku Shoujo. The show didn’t last long, but that’s one of the more original episodes. A woman mistakes Ai for her dead daughter, and she actually plays the part for a while — apparently as a rare act of kindness, but it’s always hard to tell what’s going through Ai’s head.