Yowayowa Sensei: How Did This Lady Get a Teaching Degree?

Oh boy, here we go again.

Every once in a while, I watch an anime that makes me wonder less about how it got greenlit and more about how everyone involved avoided ending up on a government watchlist.

Yowayowa Sensei is one of those shows. It takes the relatively wholesome premise of a painfully shy young teacher struggling through her first job and turns it into 12 episodes of accidental nudity, impossible misunderstandings, and enough workplace violations to keep an entire school board busy until retirement.

I went into this expecting a dumb ecchi comedy, and that’s exactly what I got. What I didn’t expect was how aggressively committed the series would be to finding new ways to humiliate its title character. Every hallway, closet, swimming pool, and loose object becomes part of an elaborate trap designed to make this poor woman lose her clothes in front of a student.

Which brings me to the most important question:

How the fuck did this lady get her teaching degree?

Yowayowa Sensei follows Akihito Abikura, a second-year high school student, and his new homeroom teacher, Hiyori Hiwamura, a 22-year-old English teacher fresh out of college. The students call her the “Scary Teacher” because she barely speaks, constantly looks nervous, and carries around a notebook they mistakenly believe is full of curses. Akihito eventually discovers that Hiyori isn’t scary at all. She’s a timid, physically weak nervous wreck who can barely communicate without rehearsing everything beforehand, so he volunteers to help her become more comfortable in the classroom. What should be a wholesome comedy about a student helping his struggling teacher instead becomes 12 episodes of Hiyori losing her clothes and landing in compromising positions.

Seriously, how did this woman survive being a student teacher? I’ve heard plenty of teaching stories from both my sister and Heston, there’s no way Hiyori would have made it a week let alone actually completed a teaching degree.

After my accidental foray into the world of ecchi via Gushing Over Magical Girls, I’ve come to appreciate ecchi anime a little more. Not because of the nudity, of course. I definitely also read Playboy just for the articles too (anyone under 30 probably has no idea what the fuck I’m talking about).

What I enjoy about ecchi is how silly and over the top some of these shows get. A regular romantic comedy might have two characters accidentally hold hands and spend an entire episode freaking out about it. An ecchi comedy has someone trip over a pencil, rip off three articles of clothing, bounce off a wall, and land ass-first on another character’s face. It operates under the same basic laws of physics as Looney Tunes, except Bugs Bunny never had to worry about his pants mysteriously falling off every seven minutes.

Yowayowa Sensei takes that formula and pushes it about as far as anime series can without becoming outright hentai.

I mentioned this in my Gushing Over Magical Girls article, but I never realized just how lax Japan’s standards were when it came to sexualized depictions of teenage cartoon characters. It’s strange when you consider that this is the same country that legally requires genitals to be blurred in adult pornography. Apparently showing an adult penis is too obscene for Japanese society, but putting cartoon high schoolers into an endless series of awkward sexual situations with their teacher is perfectly acceptable. Japan really is a fascinating place.

Hiyori is at least an adult, but most of the people she keeps falling on top of are her students. Somehow, this poor woman always ends up exposed, trapped, tied up, or wedged into some position that would be difficult to explain during a meeting with the school board. She never means for any of it to happen, and Akihito usually gets dragged into the situation while desperately trying not to look like a criminal.

The general rule of thumb in this show is that whenever someone trips, either their ass lands on somebody’s face or somebody winds up face-first in someone else’s boobs. People in the world of Yowayowa Sensei are clumsy as fuck. These characters could walk across an empty gymnasium and somehow trigger a twelve-person pileup involving torn clothing, accidental groping, and at least one conveniently placed rope. After the third or fourth episode, you stop wondering whether something inappropriate is going to happen and start trying to predict how the writers are going to engineer it. Someone opens a closet door and you immediately know Hiyori is going to end up trapped inside with a student. The class goes swimming and you know somebody’s bathing suit is coming off. A character bends down to pick something up and you brace yourself for the inevitable “workplace incident”.

The show has somehow crammed a sampler platter of practically every fetish on the internet into 12 episodes. Bondage, domination, voyeurism, bathroom stuff, incest, and age-play all make appearances, along with several other things I’m probably forgetting. It feels like the writers found an alphabetical list of fetishes and tried to check off as many as they could before the end of the season.

Despite all of this, nobody actually has sex (thankfully). The entire show runs on accidental exposure, misunderstandings, and increasingly ridiculous physical comedy. Nobody is plotting to seduce anybody, and Hiyori isn’t secretly grooming her students. She’s just a walking workplace accident who probably shouldn’t be allowed near stairs, loose rugs, swimming pools, closets, ropes, medical equipment, or anything else that exists in the physical world.

Now, I realize I’m not going to make myself sound any better here, but I think my favorite character is Yuki.

Yuki’s entire gimmick is being a total pervert, to a level that’s outright criminal. While everyone else accidentally ends up in dirty situations, Yuki actively manufactures them. She’s constantly harassing Hiyori, tricking the other girls into doing questionable things, or manipulating events because she wants to see what happens. Forget sexual harassment, Yuki quite literally commits sexual assault in almost every scene she’s in, just straight-up groping Hiyori or the other girls. The complete lack of shame makes her hilarious. In reality, Yuki would have several restraining orders and probably be banned from owning a smartphone. She actually reminds me of a girl I used to mess around with back when I was in high school, who had no problem randomly grabbing other girls’ breasts or guys’ junk for a laugh. I wonder where Joyce is now. Maybe a women’s prison.

I’d say the scenarios presented in Yowayowa Sensei are completely unrealistic, but we live in a world where another story about a female teacher crossing the line with a student seems to hit the news every five minutes. At least Hiyori spends the entire series desperately trying to prevent anything inappropriate from happening. She may be incompetent, clumsy, and dangerously unqualified to supervise children, but she has more professional restraint than some actual teachers apparently do.

There’s no point pretending Yowayowa Sensei is anything more than what it is. This is a dumb, trashy ecchi comedy built around fanservice and impossible accidents. The story exists mainly to move the characters from one embarrassing situation to another, and nobody watching it is going to walk away contemplating the deeper complexities of the human condition.

Still, it made me laugh.

The situations become so absurd that the show eventually stops feeling provocative and starts feeling like a filthy cartoon version of The Three Stooges. Hiyori falls down, Akihito gets blamed, Yuki or one of the other girls makes everything worse, and the process repeats until the credits roll. It isn’t sophisticated, but it knows exactly what kind of show it wants to be and doesn’t waste time pretending otherwise.

You’ll probably know within one episode whether Yowayowa Sensei is for you. Anyone uncomfortable with fanservice involving high school characters should stay far away from it, because the series has absolutely zero restraint. Those who can look past the questionable premise and appreciate ridiculous slapstick comedy may find it surprisingly entertaining.

Anyway, I should wrap this up. There’s been a party supply van parked outside my house for the past three hours, and I could swear Chris Hansen is sitting in the driver’s seat pretending to read a balloon catalog.

Probably nothing to worry about.

Score: 10/10

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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