Uramichi Oniisan – 07

「一人でできるもん」 (Hitori de Dekirumon)
“You Can do it Alone”

This week’s Uramichi Oniisan spices things up by focusing more extensively on some of Iketeru’s flaws as he comes across a few situations in life that have him questioning his own abilities. But as he begins to recover, Uramichi is given a whole new set of issues when he gives the director Amon a good idea for a segment.

The last episode gave us a little insight on Iketeru, but this time around, there was much more attention given to his weakness of cracking under pressure. With arts & crafts as the focus of the first segment, Iketeru’s insecurities about being unable to use scissors end up causing him to have a panic attack during the show. Likewise, his initial response towards being kicked out by his sister Mabui is to try to pawn someone else off on her to get the two to make up.

It shows how much of a difficult time Iketeru has towards being able to handle adversity or obstacles that are far from his reach. The people skills to handle his sister might be one thing, but he has a hard time accepting that he’s unable to just act through anything he’s unable to do, causing him to place higher expectations on himself than he could possibly provide.

It’s also here where we see how Uramichi has a knack for communicating to others through stealthy cues. Although he puts on the veneer of being a hateful curmudgeon, he makes an effort to try to give Iketeru pointers to help steer him in the right direction.

As Iketeru is recovering from his arts & crafts-induced panic, Uramichi uses a question about his condition as an opportunity to tell him not to let the expectations from those around him dictate how he operates. Similarly, as Iketeru is finding a way to make up with Mabui, Uramichi instructs a younger brother and sister to make up by having them confront the issue with each other before they let their personal pride get in the way. It gives you those small shades of Uramichi that are genuinely optimistic and don’t rest entirely on seeing only the worst in people.

Unfortunately, not all of Uramichi’s contributions end up working out for him. The episode’s funniest segment came from Uramichi paying the price for giving Amon a great idea about how to structure the Sunday program around Yakumi Shinobi. While it was a fun section of the morning program to teach kids how to properly season their food with condiments, Uramichi has to dress in a mesh top to play the God of Shiso as a means to helping them understand that piling on yakumi will make your food bitter. The hilarious kicker was how the child ended up being more eager to eat shiso because shiso’s bitterness has nothing on the indignity of wearing Uramichi’s outfit.