Re-Kan! Episode 9: The Secret Valentine

Okay, so Amami doesn’t have a secret admirer. Damn you preview for tricking me.

Don’t you think this was a missed opportunity? Most of the episode was a little boring, and I kind of wish they could have taken a different direction with this episode. The Amami/Inoue ship is teased at times, this would have been a cute episode for them. But all this episode was, was just a silly misunderstanding. That if they actually used their brains, they would have known that from the start instead of thinking Amami was into older men.

It’s almost Valentine’s Day and the whole school is talking about it, girls deciding if they should make chocolate or buy it. I really wonder how big a deal this holiday is in Japan. I know it’s different to how it is here in America, with the girls only giving chocolates. They treat it like it’s a big deal, so when Yamada rushes into the class, saying how Amami is going to make homemade chocolates, the group of friends freak out. They wonder who she’s going to give them to, a boy or a ghost. They follow her and see her staring at an old man in the park. This old man is known for just randomly yelling at people that walk by him in the park. And they think Amami wants to give the chocolates to him. Romantically. Yeah, okay then, sure. And for some reason they didn’t even ask her, and Amami couldn’t pick up on their assumptions. So it was a misunderstanding the whole time.

But of course when it comes to Amami, this type of situation deals with ghosts in some way. To get to the point, yes, Amami wants to give chocolates to the old man. But not romantically. At some time, Amami met an old woman, the wife of the old man and she taught her how to make a certain type of chocolate with azuki beans. Amami makes them and hands them to the man on Valentine’s Day. Put two and two together, and you know that the old woman is a ghost. The old man’s wife passed away the year before, and Amami made the chocolates for her to give to her husband. You can guess why the old man was so bitter and angrily yelling at the people around him is that he’s lonely and angry that he can’t be with his wife on such a romantic day. He’s just really bitter, and I guess that he just took out his anger and loneliness by screaming at everyone. Which isn’t cool, but I guess I understand. He eats one of the chocolates in front of Amami and says they’re terrible, but when he’s away sitting on a bench alone, he finishes them all and says to his wife, without knowing that her ghost was sitting next to him, that they were delicious.

This was an obvious set up. Knowing what kind of person Amami is, of course she would do something like this. For some reason some of her friends didn’t even realize this. I just kind of wish that they used this episode to further the development among the friends, and I guess hint more at the yuri ship, because I think they’re cute together. But this was okay too. I just don’t get why Amami’s friends didn’t just outright ask her who she was giving the chocolates to and why, but I guess it was just for the comedy affect.

I thought it was cute that Uehara and the others thought that Amami was going to give roll-call samurai the chocolates because the azuki beans meant a more traditional Japanese sweet, and him being flustered about it and Kogyaru making fun of him for it. I’m glad these two are sticking around, they’re just so fun.