Mangaka Calls for the Cancellation of the Mii-chan to Yamada-san Anime

The announcement of the Mii-chan to Yamada-san anime adaptation has been showing me sides of people in the industry that I never imagined I’d see. First, there was animator Terumi Nishii, who said she despises everyone involved in the anime. Now, I bring you the case of mangaka Kashiwagi Daiki, who asked on his Twitter for the anime to be canceled.

Kashiwagi Daiki is a mangaka with around 15,000 followers on Twitter who, from what I could tell, mainly publishes his manga independently on the web through his own profiles rather than in a traditional magazine (though I could be mistaken).

He became a topic of discussion after publicly asking that Mii-chan to Yamada-san not be adapted into an anime. His reason is that he fears his daughter, who has developmental delays, may one day come home from school saying someone called her “Mii-chan.”

Here are Kashiwagi Daiki’s tweets:

“As the father of a daughter with developmental delays who will be entering elementary school next year, I really don’t want Mii-chan to get an anime adaptation. I truly don’t. It scares me.

If one day my daughter comes home saying, ‘They called me Mii-chan at school… they laughed at me,’ I don’t know how I’ll react.

Is anything acceptable as long as it sells?

I think this could become a dangerous trend that could undo all the efforts that people with disabilities, their families, and society as a whole have built over the years so they can live a little better.

In this country, there is a world of ‘disability support’ and ‘developmental support’ that almost never appears in commercial media, and even when it does, it rarely sells.

Mii-chan has become a work whose portrayal makes it easy for people to casually throw stones at everything these professionals and families have painstakingly built over the years, while also hurting those who live this reality themselves.”

I have only read five or six chapters of Mii-chan to Yamada-san. From what I could tell, Mii-chan, one of the protagonists, displays significant developmental and cognitive difficulties in everyday situations. She cannot read and also struggles greatly to learn and understand what is happening around her.

For example, early in the story, several people make fun of her because she cannot read kanji. Later, another girl offers to teach her, but Mii-chan has great difficulty following the lessons. She gets distracted, bangs on the desk, becomes frustrated during the lesson, and eventually the girl gives up trying to teach her.

There is another point as well: apparently, the term “Mii-chan” has started being used as an insult in some parts of Japan (even before the anime). Some people have already been using the nickname in a derogatory way to refer to women who display certain behaviors associated with the character.

Kashiwagi Daiki’s concern is that, with the anime’s popularity, this offensive use of the term could spread even further. I have to admit I was surprised to see one mangaka publicly asking for another mangaka’s work to have its anime adaptation canceled.