Notes of Silver Spoon Episode 4

Things to learn at school: how to blackmail ensure cooperation of others

• In last week’s Silver Spoon, we watched Hachiken learn quite a bit about horses.

• Summary of episode four: Hachiken receives the results of the mid-term exams. While he almost aces every subject, there is always someone who has better scores. Nonetheless he has the best overall score among first-years. The students then proceed to clean-up the whole campus, and find all sorts of assorted junk, among them a brick oven. This gives them the opportunity to bake pizza, and Hachiken gets shouldered with this task instantly. After finding out that he doesn’t have to buy all the ingredients for like fifty people, he goes on a mission to collect everything from various departments of the school. Finally the day to bake a ton of pizza arrives, and even the teachers pop in for their share. Speaking of teachers, Hachiken’s middle school advisor pays him a surprise visit.

• My impressions: This episode takes a more laid-back approach with more jokes and less serious stuff.  The charts where the abilities of the teammates of Hachiken were shown were a nice touch (mimicking the stat displays in online games, but you get Math instead of Wisdom and Japanese instead of Magic spells). Poor Hachiken couldn’t enjoy being top among first-year students.
  

  He may suck at math but he’ll dominate you in agriculture stuff

• We learn that Nishikawa is a big fan of robots. When no robots are available, he is content with tractors. Also, driving one is a cool thing to do (tried and tested).

  This tractor has some surprising features.

• With the midterm tests being over, the teachers task the students with clean-up of the campus. Recall when it was mentioned in the first episode that one lap around the school is twenty kilometres? They sure do have a large area to cover… And they uncover some interesting stuff as well while collecting assorted garbage.

  I wonder if these fungi are edible…

• One thing Hachiken uncovers buried in the trash is a brick oven. It can be used to bake various food, including pizza… which his classmates never had the chance to taste. Just how rural of an area they live in is made butt of different jokes.

  And to think that city people pay extra to have time-shift like this on their TV… absurd.

• Nonetheless, the ball quickly gets rolling and Hachiken, the only one of them ever to have tasted pizza, is tasked with baking. Hearing his favorite girl (or maybe we can already say hidden crush) say that she’d also want a slice, he no longer can oppose the plan.

  Hachiken, you are so easily manipulated by these girls…

• Hachiken remembers that Buddha look-alike guy Nakajima sensei hinted that the school is capable of producing food to sustain themselves and he doesn’t have to buy ingredients for what eventually turns out to be like fifty people or so. The only thing left is to collect the ingredients from various departments, and there are some hilarious moments as well…for example when they find out that the very Nakajima has a secret stash of Gouda cheese.

  Something is definitely wrong with the scale of things in this school.

  They ambush the poor teacher and coerce him into giving them cheese in return of them keeping quiet about the stash.

• Knowing that Japanese society highly values cooperation, I wonder if the scenes where Hachiken trades favors for repairing the oven, gathering wood etc. were intentional and carry a hidden meaning, or should they be seen as only increasing the number of pizza eaters and nothing more? Coming from a post-soviet satellite state where it is still common to trade favors to have things done quicker or with less hassle, this might just be my predisposition.

• The pizza party is obviously a big success – food is always delicious in anime, isn’t it?

  Cheese can be really disgusting sometimes

  Tamako is already planning to expand it the coming year and making a nice profit from it. As expected from someone who aims to be an agricultural manager.

• I really wanted to avoid making any comparisons to Moyashimon, but upon seeing this scene where the teachers are planning to expand the curriculum with brewing is hard not to see a spoof of the other recent agriculture-themed show.

  Rejected unless you have cute microbes.

• Speaking of spoofs, there was one more I couldn’t place my finger on. I wonder if someone knows what this is supposed to be a spoof of?

  A mannequin named Colonel… suspicious.

• We also get one step closer to solving the mystery why Hachiken opted to go to this school. Last episode his middle school teacher decided to pay a visit to Ooezo High School and indeed he does arrive, just in time to see Hachiken organize the whole pizza party. He has a friendly chat with the principal which begs the question if he is also a former student of Ooezo High School…

• All in all, a rather funny and relaxed episode this week. I really like how slowly but steadily the plot is advancing (if there is one to speak of); how slowly but surely Hachiken is fitting into his new environment.