When Anime Takes on Sex Education – This Week in Anime

Lucas


Steve, I’ve built half of my career on writing about how media intersects with current sociopolitical issues, so you better believe that I’m watching Nukitashi and am ready to talk about it!

While I’m sure we’ll get into both the (maybe accidental) highs and (almost entirely avoidable) lows of the show, I’d like to start by saying that I feel more represented in this anime than in any other show I’ve watched, so it will forever hold a special place in my heart.

I know. We’re going to both do our best to keep screen grabs tasteful; there’s almost certainly going to be an 18+ content warning on this one.

For those unfamiliar, Nukitashi focuses on a brother and sister who return to their ancestral home island following the passing of both of their parents. While at first blush the island appears to be in line with mainstream Japanese society, it has a deeply hedonistic culture that makes participation in public sex acts mandatory and criminalizes abstention. This poses an issue for the brother-sister duo, as the former has some deep-seated hang-ups about physical intimacy and the latter is a lesbian.

Nukitashi is such an interesting chestnut to crack! These first two episodes feature several rape and sexual assault scenes that have a campy, dramatic flair that’s evocative of a Danganronpa game, and pretty tonally inappropriate considering the subject matter. The opening segment paints the island as a sex vacation theme park, which is literally the backdrop of several Kei Mizurai hentai!

However, this anime also beats the viewer over the head with its political messaging, which is ultimately that marginalized people shouldn’t be forced to conform to restrictive social norms; which feels super topical in a world where queer and trans folks are being legislated and adjudicated out of public life in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States.

The TWIA column has long been a safe space, and you can process your trauma however you need to!

Even if we were to be reductive and put Nukitashi in the same “high budget hentai” genre as World’s End Harem, Nukitashi is MILES better than its competition. Background characters notwithstanding, there’s a pretty wide array of body types in this anime, and I respect it for not falling into the “big boobs, same face” trap that a lot of shows do when making characters attractive for the audience to ogle.

I’ll be honest, I was floored when Nukitashi introduced a petite character that I assumed was going to be the token loli in this harem anime, only to give her a shockingly grounded internal conflict of wanting to be sexually active but not wanting her body type to be fetishized.

I was not expecting such a real and rarely talked about kind of body dysmorphia to appear in an anime that features a guillotine that forces people to have sex, and I’m interested to see what other based takes Nukitashi has in store!

Highs and lows are a great way to think about Nukitashi in general! While the OP is instantly in contention for one of the best of the season on spectacle alone (where else can you see a man planking using nothing but the strength of his erection?), some sequences and even still frames in the anime looked rough.

While I think the visuals are largely saved by the character designs and surprisingly dynamic lighting, the inconsistent quality and handling of serious sexual material means that I’m only recommending this show to people who are on the same wavelength as I am.

That being said, outside of the show explicitly having a better health care system than America’s, it largely focuses on the social politics around sex and sexuality, and that’s so rare that I can’t help but be intrigued! A bit of messiness can be forgiven, considering just how rare it is to have an anime that’s explicitly about societal norms around sex and sexuality.

Agreed. While I think the ideas around identity and body images that Nukitashi touches on are fairly universal, it couldn’t be airing at a better time. Still, I worry that it lacks the necessary political focus and writing chops to dig into how society and the individuals within it are affected by these regressive policies and laws. If only there were a cult classic anime that also tackled this subject matter…

Oh shit! Visa and Mastercard found out my Crunchyroll subscription lets me watch SHIMONETA!

Lmao, I was half expecting that one-way mirror van to show up in this montage, but a cameo by The Pool is also a great way to establish early on that the folks at J.C. Staff who worked on this anime are real ones!

100%! In comparing the two, I find that SHIMONETA is more focused on hard politics around sex and sexuality, while Nukitashi centers on the soft politics of a sex obsessed society and how individuals are affected by that climate. While both have their place, I was a Political Science major, and I found myself more quickly gravitating towards the anime featuring a world where distributing prophylactics is a federal offense.

You would think the juxtaposition between Jamie Marchi giving her second most sexually graphic performance as a voice actress while also espousing about how sexual ignorance is damaging to both individuals and broader society would be jarring, but it comes together brilliantly! I’ve burned through the first three episodes for this column, and can’t wait to binge the rest of the show once I have a bit more free time.

While I was initially concerned with Anna and her mom seemingly being the driving force of this chaste society, even by the end of episode three, it becomes clear that they only feel this strongly about these issues because they’ve been the most impacted by anti-sex propaganda. As is becoming clearer by the day, this phenomenon is true to real life, and this radicalization pipeline is a growing issue that more sensible folks need to respond to.

For as in-your-face (or crotch) as SHIMONETA can be, its politics are deeply considered and nuanced. Kids need to know about sex and sexuality to be functioning members in society, and while the idea of adolescents exploring and developing this part of their identity is understandably uncomfortable to many adults, it’s something everyone goes through. Even the barest amount of empathy and willingness to remember our youthful awkwardness around this stuff makes all of the political grandstanding around “protecting the children” ring hollow immediately.

I completely agree, and will go one step further and say that even the inciting event, the male lead Tanukichi Okuma, getting accepted into the prestigious Tokioka Academy, is incredibly subversive and political! More anime than I can count begin with the lead attending an institution that’s only thinly coded as “the good private school.” As someone who owes most of my success in life to a robust, public school education, this has always bothered me, as private schools in real life are largely signifiers of privilege that don’t prepare kids for real-world challenges.

Having this informed belief of mine validated by a borderline pornographic anime from a decade ago was the absolute last thing that I expected to experience in the year 2025. I’m so happy to see this regressive trope called out and private schools revealed as the privileged identity incubators they are in SHIMONETA!

I feel like I’ve learned a lot from SHIMONETA and Nukitashi already, and if this column gets the response we’re hoping for, readers can look forward to a “Things We Learned From Ecchi Anime” column in the semi-near future!