Alternative title(s): Okinawa de Suki ni Natta Ko ga Hougen Sugite Tsura Sugiru
Manga Adaptation by Millepensee
Streaming on Crunchyroll
Premise
Teruaki Nakamura has moved to Okinawa and is making friends at his new high school. However, the girl he likes speaks in a very thick Okinawan dialect, meaning he rarely understands what she’s saying.
Euri’s verdict: Visit Okinawa, I guess
It’s been a while since I’ve watched an episode of anime that really feels like it’s trying to sell me something, so uh, that’s good. To be fair, when the thing it’s trying to sell you is an entire Japanese island and its culture, it’s a bit easier to forgive it.
If Okitsura‘s goal is to teach people about Okinawan culture, then I’d say episode one was a pretty big success. I had no idea that the dialect was so far removed from the Japanese you’d find in Tokyo, so seeing the Okinawan way of saying familiar phrases was genuinely really cool. I’m already an expert in all things sata andagi, but I got to learn about things like the prevalence of the Higa surname, and that’s not something I was going to stumble across otherwise.
All that being said, Okitsura is a tough show to recommend.
While there’s a lot of interesting things to learn about Okinawa in here, the show just isn’t that fun to watch; the characters are one-note, the jokes are very flat and the show feels more like educational material rather than a piece of entertainment. However, while that’d be pretty damning for most shows, I think Okitsura will have its fans because the Okinawan content actually is interesting.
So if you’ve come to this show looking for the Okinawa edition of Hokkaido Girls, you’re not going to find it. However, if you just want to learn more about the dialect, their sayings and fun details about the island, there are certainly worse ways of doing that.
