Hisone to Masotan – 06

「君の名前を叫ぶから」 (Kimi no Namae o Sakebukara)
“I’ll Shout Your Name”

Public service announcement: don’t mess around with waves. They’re no joke. Here in Australia we have indisputably the best beaches in the world^{[citation needed]} beloved by locals and tourists alike, but they’re also dangerous. Our giant sharks and deadly, invisible jellyfish have something to do with that but the main threat is really the water. It may seem a brain-dead thing to say, but the ocean is a lot fo water (very wet) and humans are stubborny land-based, oxygen-breathing creatures through and through. Yet, we have no respect for the water. Every once in a while you’d read a story about some fool fishing on the rocks and getting swept out to sea by a tall wave. Even confident swimmers can get caught in a rip and dragged away. So when I saw Hoshino’s raft plan I could only judge it as… impractical. She’s stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere and she just expects to float back to her airbase in two days? For someone who’s so insistent on being taken seriously all the time it was hardly a rational course of action.

Then again, none of this drama was really about rationality at all, was it? Hoshino’s dream of being a fighter pilot was more than just a goal; it was an obsession. And unfortunately, as the wise say it’s hard to make a virtue of stubbornness and Hoshino’s obsesssion was manifesting itself in unhealthy ways. On the one hand, it’s good that she was driven to work so hard for what she wanted, but on the other hand her frustration at putting in all that effort only to hit her head on the glass ceiling was turning her into a horrible person. Perhaps she gets harassed at work, perhaps she hasn’t been treated fairly, but none of that really justifies lashing out at the people who care for her. If anything, that just makes it worse. Many people are dissatisfied with their jobs like Hoshino is. Many people think their talent and effort are disrespected. And adults deal with it by — actually, we don’t deal with it well at all. Mostly, we drink. I’m not telling Hoshino to descend into the dark abyss of alcoholism; on the contrary, I’m saying that there’s no good in destroying your current life in the name of a more ideal one. The great tragedy of Hoshino is that in her quest to be a fighter pilot she had put the cart before the horse, forgetting that it was the joy of flight that attracted her to aeroplanes in the first place and that F2s are just a means to an end.

Well, hopefully Hooshino has now worked out her feelings and resolved her hatred towards all around her. But I don’t want her to just give up here and settle. Hoshino’s frustrations are fundamentally a problem with respect, and I feel like career-oriented women don’t get as much of it as their male counterparts do. HisoMaso hasn’t exactly been subtle about the plight of the working Japanese woman, and I think it would be a disservice to the narrative if it just drops the issue after a bit of a cry. Yeah, I know it wants to move on with the plot about a fancy ritual or whatever, but let’s not trample the concerns of these women with some other ambition. That would be much too ironic.

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