The cute anime girl. The bread and butter of seemingly every anime series these days. If you were an anime fan in the early 2010s, you probably remember the proliferation of high school centric cute girls shows like K-on, Azumanga Daioh, Kiniro Mosaic, Yuru Yuri, Yuyushiki. Well, I could go on. Despite its virulent presence during the first half of the 2010s, the prevalence of cute girls slice of life shows has been pushed to the wayside for the isekai shows that dominate the current anime zeitgeist. Unlike the typical pathway into anime, which usually seems to consist of a linear progression from long running shounen, to universally popular slightly shorter shounen to classic anime snob before finally accepting slice of life and cute girls, I basically got started on slice of life anime. Some of the first anime I remember watching were Haruhi Suzumiya and Lucky Star, both entirely on Youtube before people figured out the copyright system. The cute girl anime craze of the late 2000s and early 2010s holds something of a special place in my memories, with this video serving as a discussion of the genre: where it came from, why people like it and its decline.
To begin, it’s important to define what exactly is meant by “slice of life” as a genre descriptor. If we go on My Anime List, we find that their list of slice of life anime is not particularly helpful. Their classification includes a wide variety of shows from romance focused works like Toradora and Horimiya, to the more action oriented Mob Psycho 100 and dramas like Violet Evergarden. Clearly a highly diverse range of shows unified by not much more than some vague notion that they depict a sense of everyday life. The term “slice of life” originally came about as a way to describe film, theatre and books that focus on presenting mundane or ordinary experiences. Slice of life was then probably co-opted in the context of anime and manga to describe works with a focus on ordinary life, though the term has come to encompass such a diversity of shows it’s not particularly useful as a descriptor.
When people use the term slice of life or the more pejorative “cute girls doing cute things” to describe the late 2000s early 2010s trend of anime focusing on cute, high school aged characters it’s probably more useful to use the Japanese term “nichijou kei” (日常系), nichijou meaning ordinary life. In his article “Trends of Fiction in 2000s Japanese Pop Culture” Tanaka Motoko suggests that three factors define nichijou kei. First, the setting is limited to daily life in contemporary Japan, often revolving around a suburban high school or neighbourhood. Furthermore, these works generally do not feature any kind of drama, conflict or romance. This is perhaps best exemplified by the opening scene of the 2007 anime Lucky Star in which the characters have a nearly three minute conversation about eating a chocolate cornet, a type of common Japanese pastry. Second, characters in nichijoukei works are all cute girls designed to conform to “moe dynamics.” with few, if any male characters. For instance, you could probably count the number of male characters that appear in K-on on one hand. Finally, nichijoukei often feature of blend of fiction and reality, with real settings appearing alongside the clearly fictional characters. Famously many of these locations become real life tourist attractions and the sites of anime fan pilgrimages, like the high school depicted in K-on or Washinomiya Shrine that appears in Lucky Star.
To understand the seeming sudden rise of the nichijoukei genre in the late 2000s, it’s necessary to understand the literary, social and technology trends of Japan and otaku culture during the late 90s and early 2000s. Chief among these is what Azuma Hiroki, one of seminal figures in the study of otaku subculture describes in his essay “The Animalization of Otaku Culture”. Central to Azuma’s argument is what he deems as the collapse of the grand narrative. The term grand narrative, popularised by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, is a sort of overarching narrative that explains historical meaning, experience, or knowledge. According to Azuma, one of the central characteristics of otaku culture is the abandonment of the grand narrative, caused by failure of Japanese student movements of the 1970s and 80s and more prominently the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.
Azuma argues that this collapse of the grand narrative can be exemplified in Neon Genesis Evangelion, which coincidentally also aired in 1995. While the show itself retains its elevated position within the anime community for its deeper philosophical or grand narrative-esque themes. Azuma also observed how the show also coincided with the rise and embracing of moe amongst anime fans. EVA became famous just as much for its narrative substance but equally, if not more, because of fans’ attraction to characters like Rei Ayanami or Asuka Langley Soryu. Azumanga Daioh, often considered the first nichijoukei work, would begin its manga run not much later in 1999.
This collapse of the grand narrative sets the scene for the popularity of what Tsuneshiro Uno describes in his book Imaginations in the 2000s as the sabaikukei genre. Pioneered by the 1999 novel Battle Royale and its more famous movie adaptation, sabaikukei fiction describes that of the death game. Works that feature characters, usually teenage boys, pitted against each other in a game of death. The genre is epitomised by the manga anime series Death Note but also includes works like the light novel/anime Fate/Stay Night or the popular 2006 anime Code Geass. Central to the sabaibukei genre is the absence of grand narratives, indeed that is one of the major themes of Death Note. The world of Death Note is a dystopian society where grand narratives of absolute justice or morality cease to exist and every individual is left to believe in their own small narratives.
Another consequence of the collapse of the grand narrative is what Azuma describes as “database consumption” or the tendency of otaku not to consume grand narratives but to build databases of the characters or anime they have watched. Moe, to Azuma, is representative of this mode of database consumption where characters are remembered by their ability to fit into a database of character moe attributes rather than for distinctive personalities. Lucky Star, in particular, is laden with reference and parody of the otaku pop culture of the time, building its work not around an independent narrative but by pulling from otaku pop culture databases. In his 2010 essay “Imagination after the Earthquake: Japan’s Otaku Culture in the 2010s” Uno argues that use of the otaku pop culture database in nichijoukei “is simultaneously a technique employed by the show’s creators and a movement among its consumers that creates “pilgrimage sites” out of locations associated with the show.” Plain landscapes, like the shrine from Lucky Star, become part of this database, rendered holy sites amongst otaku regardless of their independent history or their relationship to otaku outside of the context of anime. Read this way, the vapid conflictless stories of the nichijoukei genre is the collapse of the grand narrative brought to its extreme. Works where there is literally no narrative at all and all that matters are the small details of the everyday.
Furthermore, the rise of nichijoukei also happened at a technological as well as narrative precipice within the anime industry. While most of us today have only known a world in which basically every anime we could ever watch is readily available to us through distributors like Crunchyroll or piracy, watching anime, especially internationally, was significantly more complicated before the advent of digital distribution technologies during the 2000s. During the age of VHS and laserdisks, if you wanted to fansub anime, someone had to first physically acquire a VHS or laserdisk of the anime in question. You then had to subtitle it into English with clunky and expensive subtitling software and then do some technical mambo jumbo with VHS players and computers to re-record to anime with the subtitles, only for the quality to severely degrade everytime you rerecorded it. This is why the most famous anime from this era are generally highly successful feature films like Akira or Ghost in the Shell. The difficulty of acquiring anime is what defined the Western anime community during the 90s and early 2000s. Anime conventions were primarily places to acquire physical anime to watch and anime clubs at colleges or high schools were often necessary venues for people to watch new anime. The side effect of this is that only anime that was reliably popular would be brought to the West because of the high cost of fansubbing anime.
This all changed with the advent of digital distribution of anime online. Series that were previously not popular enough to warrant being brought over to the West were now being introduced. Older slice of life anime like Crayon Shin Chan or Sazae-San have existed since the 90s but limits on distribution meant that the genre was only really “discovered” by Western anime fans during the late 2000s. Furthermore, the advent of informal distribution of anime on video sharing sites like Nico Nico Douga also played a key part in the popularisation of nichijoukei anime like Lucky Star or its industrial precursor The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Clips and derivative content from Haruhi and Lucky star rapidly spread across the Japanese online anime community, playing a large part in the popularisation of moe oriented nichijoukei works. I, myself, was first exposed to anime after I saw a video of the Hare Hare Yukai on Youtube in 2008 and probably mentally processed as my eight year old self that I thought Haruhi was attractive.
In summary, the rise of nichijoukei fiction can be attributed to cultural and technological changes in how anime and manga were consumed during the 2000s. But perhaps the more interesting question is why these types of shows became so popular and prolific during the early 2010s. It’s almost quaint today, but I distinctly remember back then, debates over nichijoukei, or cute girls doing cute things as it was more commonly referred to in the West, was the subject of fierce debate in the online anime community. At certain points discussions over these shows would devolve into straight vitriol, with people accusing fans of these shows as being borderline pedophelic. Compared to the early 2010s, works like K-on have a much better reputation than they did at the time.
It’s easy to understand why people don’t like nichijoukei shows, the objection can basically be boiled down to “nothing happens.” More cynically, some critics describe the attraction to nichijou and moe more generally as voyueristic or even pornographic in nature. Tsuneshiro draws a direct comparison between nichijoukei and pronographic bishoujo games. While bishoujo games often feature plain or featureless protagonists for the player to project into, most nichijoukei works don’t have male characters at all, ostensibly to protect the illusion of pureness of the girls. It’s this sort of fetishization of the lives of ordinary young girls that many onlookers find disturbing about nichijoukei and often anime more broadly.
The issue of moe is complicated and probably deserves an explanation all its own, but a more generous reading is otaku’s preference for moe is not a product of psychosocial dysfunction, but rather a conscious preference for the comfort of fiction. In Japan, the country’s persistent economic malaise for the past thirty years, combined with the strict expectations for men in Japanese society has created a system that has left many men disillusioned. The Japanese salaryman is held up as the platonic ideal of the working Japanese man, but the ailing economic conditions have made that ideal increasingly unattainable. Nichijoukei works provide the exact opposite of the bleak reality of daily life for many Japanese men. These shows present the mundane as fun and peaceful. High school settings are often used because high school is often the last time Japanese people have a sense of freedom in their lives. Nichijoukei acts as a sort of bridge between the real and the fictional, combining real locations and settings with decidedly fictional characters.
It’s probably not surprising that nichijoukei never really caught on in the West because it’s oddly probably one, if not the most, distinctly Japanese genre of anime. Most anime, in reaching international appeal, do so by sacrificing a sense of “Japaneseness.” Many shows are ostensibly set in Japan without anything actually identifiable as Japanese. Nichijoukei usually focuses on the Japanese highschool experience and life in a Japanese town or city, not to mention the real depiction of real places in Japan. The international distribution tendencies of anime, in focusing on popular, critically acclaimed works like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, or Cowboy Bebop cultivated an image for western anime fans as a medium supposedly focused on “intellectual works” that did not mesh well with the apparently vapidness of most nichijoukei stories.
But seemingly as fast as the genre appeared, it quickly disappeared to be replaced with the current anime trend: isekai. Spurred on by the massive commercial success of Sword Art Online in 2013, Isekai soon replaced cute girls as the tired anime trope for everyone to hate on. These shows, of course, have cute girls but they aren’t necessarily the primary draw. The answer for why nichijoukei seemingly disappeared as soon as it appeared is probably just boils down to that isekais are better for business. Contrary to what some people believe, writing a good nichijoukei story is actually reasonably challenging. That’s why K-on remains the peak of the genre and most of the subsequent works have been forgettable. Without the ability to really modify the setting or premise to create the illusion of novelty, like many low-brow isekai do, the quality of a nichijoukei really lives and dies by its characters or its humour. Two things that are surprisingly difficult to execute on. Isekai, by virtue of being set in an alternate, non-Earth world, have the benefit of being able to appeal to a wider array of people, rather than being constrained by the inherent Japaneseness of nichijoukei. Isekai is ultimately easier to write and easier to sell to people.
However, I’d argue that the core appeal of isekai and nichijoukei is probably not all that different. Realistically, you’re probably not meant to really identify with a stereotypical overpowered isekai protagonist, much in the same way there are no males to project onto in nichijoukei. Isekai is similarly voyueristic in the sense that, at the genre’s worst, it serves as little more than a sort of wish fulfillment power trip for anime watchers. Much in the same way that someone might try to escape their reality by enjoying the comfort of the idyllic lives of a group of Japanese school girls, a similar feat can be accomplished by projecting into Kirito from SAO for instance.
The legacy of the nichijoukei genre is ultimately complicated and checkered, though its image seems to have been rehabilitated by chronic isekai fatigue. With the absolute deluge of isekai that come out every season, the genre has been parodied, deconstructed and lampshaded six ways from Sunday. By comparison, the concern over nichijoukei seems quaint by comparison. While the creation of pure, high school focused nichijoukei aren’t super common anymore, the genre’s immediate legacy was the ushering in of the broader “cute girls doing x” types of shows. Whether that be driving World War 2 era tanks, manning World War 2 era warships or acting as the replacement for World War 2 era planes. I’m sensing something of a pattern here. The shift in recent years seems to be away from strict high school settings and more towards situational or workplace comedies such as New Game or Miss Kobyashi’s Dragon Maid. These works maintain many of the same aesthetic trappings of earlier nichijoukei anime while incorporating more diverse settings and scenarios.
Looking back on the meteoric rise of moe slice of life anime serves as an interesting case study in the cyclical, trend driven nature of the anime industry. After some massive popular anime comes out, whether that be Eva, Lucky Star or Sword Art Online, the industry seems to spend years spinning its wheels attempting to replicate that success. Who knows, maybe ten years later we’ll look back on Isekai with fond memories after some even stupider, even more vapid trend emerges.
Sources and Further Reading:
Azuma Hiroki. “The Animalization of Otaku Culture” Introduction by Thomas Lamarre. Translated by Yuriko Furuhata and Marc Steinberg. Mechademia 2007
Motoko Tanaka. “Trends of Fiction in 2000s Japanese Pop Culture” Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 2014.
Okamoto Takeshi. “Otaku tourism and the anime pilgrimage phenomenon in Japan” Japan Forum. 2014.
Patrick W. Galbraith. The Moe Manifesto. 2014.
Rayna Denison. “Post-Video Anime” in Anime: a critical introduction. 2015.
Uno Tsunehiro. “Imagination after the Earthquake: Japan’s Otaku Culture in the 2010s” Translated by Jeffrey C. Guarneri. Verge: Studies in Global Asias. 2015.
