Chapter 2 of Shiratama!, the seinen 4-koma manga about a high school girl who creates a baseball team on a whim after watching a game with her sister. This is one of those “seinen in name only” series. It’s only seinen because it ran in a magazine aimed at young men. The contents are therefore largely safe for work.
This chapter is mainly a character exploration, teaching us more about main character Tsubame, her sister, Leona and Mr. Suzuki. As I mentioned in my first post on Shiratama! most of the character traits established early on are established just for establishment’s sake and will rarely, if ever be brought up again. It’s not a very good manga, even by the low standards of 4-koma moe loli-type manga series.
Chapters 1 and 2 should be enough to give you a taste of what Shiratama! is about. If you really like it, buy it…? There are better sports series and better 4-komas out there though, so only buy it if you’ve run out of everything else.
A less than stellar baseball 4-koma manga about a girls’ baseball team. Shiratama! (しらたま!) is written and illustrated by Yuki Azumi, who I’ve never heard of before and never expect to hear of again. Frankly speaking if this manga hadn’t had a ‘loli’ protagonist and loli-like character art, it would never have been published. It still shouldn’t have been published anyway, but in the absence of a time machine all I can do is review what I’ve been given.
The art
Cutesy, but not too cutesy, loli but not too loli. The lines are clean and the action, what little there is, is simply laid out and easy to follow. Since the characters are supposed to be in high school, it feels silly to have them randomly flashing their panties and all the other things that count as ‘loli fanservce’ because they’re far too old to be behaving that way. But then again nobody ever reads 4-koma manga for their logic.
Sample done by me. This manga is only available in Japanese.Story
Tsubame Takatsu is a high school girl who isn’t very interested in baseball. One day she goes to watch a match with her sister and falls in love with the drama and excitement of the game. When she returns to school, she resolves to form her own baseball team. All that is chapter 1. The rest of Shiratama! covers her attempts to gather members, design uniforms, learn to play the game and finally have matches against… grade schoolers?
Is Shiratama! any good?
As a sports manga, not really. The team does play some games eventually, but the focus tends to be more on the novelty factor: *gasp* they’re girls! And they’re playing baseball! rather than on the actual sportiness of it. This is a common feature shared with other girls-baseball series like Princess Nine and Taisho Yakyuu Musume, and I always wonder what the point is of making a manga about girls’ baseball if you’re not going to take them seriously.
In particular I can’t help comparing Shiratama! to Macmillan Koukou Joshi Yakyuubu, another short 4-koma manga about a girls’ baseball team. While both series start with the usual character introductions and amusing occurrences, the latter half of Macmillan is taken up by a well-drawn and interesting national tournament on par with any other sports manga and the whole “girls! and they’re playing baseball!” issue never comes up at all. Shiratama! on the other hand ends without Tsubame and her team ever playing any official matches, but they do have fun pretending to be a team. The distant end of the future shows that their juniors do eventually make the team a serious contender, but it’s really no thanks to our gang.
As far as moe manga goes, Shiratama! doesn’t have any interesting characters to latch on to. “Loli-lites in high school” has been done a hundred times before, in far more interesting ways as well. Furthermore, probably because it’s so short, the series never focuses enough on any one character. Thus character traits are raised and quickly abandoned, certain characters don’t appear for long periods of time (Kaname for example, but even main characters like Tsubame can drop out of sight), some characters appear so late that not much can be done about them, etc etc. You really don’t know who to follow or who to support and you’re never given any reason to do so either.
As a comedy manga Shiratama! barely cracks the ‘slightly amusing’ line. If you can’t see the jokes coming a million miles away, you need to read more manga. For example our main character, Tsubame is a high school girl who looks all of 10 years old. You can’t expect the author not to joke about this, but you can and should expect something better than 10 different “mistaken for a grade schooler” gags. It gets old after number 0.
tl;dr Shiratama! is not very good. Whether you like loli, moe, sports, characters skits or comedy you’ll still be disappointed if you try it. On the other hand if you do somehow like it, it’s only 1 volume of fairly simple Japanese, so pick it up if you can find it.
Earlier this week, I read volume 1 of Ganbare!! Tabuchi-kun!! (がんばれ!!タブチくん!!), a 4-koma baseball manga by Ishii Hisaichi. Western fans might know him best as the guy who wrote the original manga that Studio Ghibli later adapted into “My Neighbors the Yamadas.” I’m on a baseball manga kick right now (as opposed to a real life baseball kick. I’m not that into real-life baseball), so I started this on a whim, but it turned out to be pretty good.
The most interesting thing about Tabuchi-kun – apart from the content, of course – is that it was based on the career of a real-life catcher/first baseman/cleanup hitter. In fact, “based on” is too mild. It straight up caricatured Koichi Tabuchi, right down to using his full name and team. Basically apart from his wife “Miyoko”, any named character in the manga is an actual human being.
Naturally this makes for interesting reading, but it can also make you uncomfortable when the comic gets a little mean-spirited. The whole series is aimed at pointing fun at Tabuchi, but sometimes it’s done in more cruel fashion and sometimes it’s mild and heart-warming. It’s sad to see Tabuchi booed out of the stadium or ostracized by his peers for no good reason other than that the mangaka just doesn’t like him.
It becomes even sadder when you go to J-wiki and read that the manga started right at the time when Tabuchi was playing poorly because he was recovering from a career-threatening injury that put him in the hospital for over three months and led to him gaining some weight. It’s like that tasteless “Derek Eater” headline the New York Post ran a couple of years ago, except imagine they ran that headline every week for 10 years, even long after Jeter had retired (not a Jeter fan, just saying).
Sample done by me. The real manga is in Japanese only.
However, it turns out that the real Koichi Tabuchi is a huge, open fan of the manga and absolutely loves it. He even credits it with helping him meet his current wife, so if anything he’s grateful for its existence. So if Tabuchi isn’t mad, then I’m not mad either. No one knows what other recurring characters like Yasuda (my favorite), Suzuki, Oh and Hirooka think of the series, but since they generally come across in a better light than Tabuchi does, they probably don’t have much to complain about.
This frees me to enjoy the silly, slightly mean humor of volume 1 for all it’s worth. I’m looking forward to reading the rest, because part of the humor comes from the interplay between characters like Yasuda and Ooya, and Tabuchi and Kakefu, and much of the first volume is spent just introducing and establishing those characters.
There are 3 volumes of Ganbare!! Tabuchi-kun!! and a further 5 volumes of the follow-up, Tabuchi-kun. You don’t need to know much about Japanese baseball to enjoy this manga, though it helps to know Sadaharu Oh, current holder of the world-record in career homeruns (868) since he shows up a lot. Apart from that, just substitute your favorite team and players and enjoy.
Chapter 2 of Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubuintroduces the pitcher and the catcher, which is very kind of it because you can’t really have a baseball manga without them. What’s more, it illustrates what I said in the last post about the tsundere catcher making everything awkward.
When you think about it, she probably has the most natural reaction to having a guy suddenly show up and become manager of a girl’s team (i.e. wtf is this guy’s problem?) but her prickly reaction stands out all the more because the rest of the team have resolutely determined that this it is not a problem.
Anyway, spoiling a bit here, but Ueda does relax a bit and get along better with the rest of the team as the series goes on (all 30 chapters of it). Unlike what you might expect, Masakiyo doesn’t pull a “mighty whitey” and solve all the girls’ problems for them. For the most part they work through their issues together as a team, and Masakiyo is mostly there on the sidelines supporting them. Also there isn’t really any romance in the series, so don’t get your hopes up.
Apparently, after series ended after 30 chapters in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine, it was picked up by Weekly Shonen Magazine and rebooted as the rather more fanservicey 2-volume “Macmillan no Joshi Yakyuubu” series I thought the original ended very well, so I have no real interest in following the ‘sequel,’ but it’s out there if you finish this and are interested in what happens next. Happy reading!
In English Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubu would be mean something like “The Macmillan High School Girls’ Hardball Baseball Club.” A 2-volume 4-koma gag manga about girl’s hardball baseball, which is apparently a real thing in Japan, even though there are only 16 teams at the high-school level, in this manga at least.
One would think that premise would be interesting enough, but the author went further. Male sports teams in manga tend to have female managers, so the author gave the Macmillan team a male manager instead.
Since Masakiyo is a rare breed of high school boy (even in this ‘politically correct’ age) who loves cooking, sewing and laundry and has relatively no interest in or knowledge about sports or girls, it would seem he’s not much different from your female regular team manager. And indeed, possibly because the manga is so short that there was no time to explore complex concepts, remarkably little fuss is made about his presence on the team. His classmates tease him only a little, with one exception the girls get used to having him around quickly and don’t really treat him as a ‘boy’ and he himself doesn’t spend any time thinking about gender roles, he just gets on with the washing and mending.
Macmillan Yakyuubu is short, but it does manage to cover the ‘essentials’ of baseball manga – training, rivals, team bonding and, of course, Koshien. Everything is handled lightly but not necessarily comically. This is one of the least gag-heavy 4-koma I’ve ever read. It’s very laid-back slice-of-lifeish, though the last few chapters have quite a bit of sports action and some rather predictable drama.
I wish I could say the characters are all likeable, but the pitcher really lets the side down. Apart from her, all the other team members are hardworking, friendly, fun-loving and cheerful. The pitcher is just your typical high-maintenance tsundere who often ruins the mood for everyone concerned, the reader included. She’s also the one who just can’t get over the fact that Masakiyo is a guy, and keeps making things awkward all the time. Still, she gets better quickly, and in any case there’s no time for that kind of drama once the Koshien Tournament rolls around.
All in all, Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubu is a pretty good read. I liked that the author didn’t try to shoehorn laughs in where they didn’t belong (Mr. Fullswing, are you listening?!), the sports action was well-drawn and easy to follow, the series is short enough that it ends before it get tiresome, and apart from the first chapter it has very little fanservice. Most of all, I really appreciate the existence of at least one manga about a guy surrounded by girls that doesn’t devolve into a harem manga. Most of the characters keep their heads on and their eyes on the prize the whole time, even when they’re having fun. Good stuff!
is written and illustrated by Yuki Azumi, who I’ve never heard of before and never expect to hear of again. Frankly speaking if this manga hadn’t had a ‘loli’ protagonist and loli-like character art, it would never have been published. It still shouldn’t have been published anyway, but in the absence of a time machine all I can do is review what I’ve been given.![Shiratama 0011[Animefangirl.com]](https://animefangirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Shiratama-0011Animefangirl.com_.png)
![Shiratama 0014[Animefangirl.com]](https://animefangirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Shiratama-0014Animefangirl.com_.png)
if you finish this and are interested in what happens next. Happy reading!
would be mean something like “The Macmillan High School Girls’ Hardball Baseball Club.” A 2-volume 4-koma gag manga about girl’s hardball baseball, which is apparently a real thing in Japan, even though there are only 16 teams at the high-school level, in this manga at least.