Heteroglossic Space in the Please! Series

The following is a rough script of the video, Heteroglossic Space in the Please! Series

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Please Twins’ Heteroglossic Space

Please Teacher and Please Twins Script

I want to start with Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heteroglossia, primarily because I think it’s a good way to get us thinking about the various vantage points of a narrative. More specifically, I want to look at the way in which we can somewhat disassemble the various threads of a story to focus on particular contexts and thoroughlines, crafting new perspectives on story points.

So what is Heteroglossia, and why is it important? Heteroglossia, roughly, is a precise extension of Bakhtin’s work on dialogism, where speech acts are crafted in anticipation of the other. This constant negotiation of anticipation and to be anticipated, for Bakhtin, consists of a dialogism, where the meaning doesn’t rest by itself, static, but is in conflict flux, always in motion between various configurations of meanings. This very passage is itself dialogic in that someone unfamiliar with Bakhtin might find what I’m saying interesting or new, but for someone familiar, this might be dead space; empty air. And these contexts end up becoming major epistemological players in determining the shape of (not just) narratives.

Nevertheless, it’s narrative I want to look at, specifically narrative that extends beyond just the image.

But if we’re mindful of the heuristics of meaning-making, we can think about what a framework says. And so that’s why I want to start with Heteroglossia, that moment where, to quote Michael Holquist, “at any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions – social, historical, meterological, physiological – that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions” (Holquist and Emerson 428). In other words, the combination constructs a sort of path to a meaning, never necessarily the meaning, but to Bakhtin, we can’t really ever reach the meaning, since a structural, pedestalized point remains elusive.

I want to explore, if briefly, just one. I want to look at space as it’s used in the Please franchise.

Let’s begin with Ide Yasunori and Kuroda Yosuke’s 2002 show, Please Teacher, in which a young man named Kusangi Kei suffers from a condition called a ‘standstill’, upon which the most recent one left him virtually comatose for three years. Because of that standstill, Kei finds himself isolated when he emerges. But the show doesn’t start with that – it starts with a focus on locations, setting up both real spaces and space as an abstract idea. Kei speaks of space in relation to time, an emphasis on a sort of everydayness. The lake in which he first shows up, upside-down, as if he was almost suspended, is the very real and famous Lake Kizaki in Nagano. But that space – he notes – is broken with the introduction of Kazami Mizuho, an alien observer. Kei’s initial response to Mizuho is pretty straightforward – he runs – but this is juxtaposed with the pre-credit scene where he’s just languishing quite comfortably in the night. The after-credit scenes, in other words, is about Kei in motion, both physically as someone, animated in the constant movement of layers and cuts, and metaphorically, as someone coming out of a standstill.

In fact, it’s no surprise that the first episode climaxes at a rather pitched struggle with Kei and Mizuho. And it’s no surprise that Mizuho – someone who heralds change in Kei’s life – is someone who commands space. She is, quite literally, setting his life in motion by acting as a disorientation of space. She is someone who teleports him to and fro. Just as he comes out of the standstill to – in his words – move forward, the space where he lives is challenged by this other.

And how does the first episode end? Well it ends in this other dimension, where space is collapsing, threatening to take him. It’s here that Mizuho saves him, and again, while its’s a rather common thing to say, Mizuho’s words bear a striking thematic relevance: “If you let go of me, you’ll be stuck in this dimension forever.” Mizuho is change, she saves him both literally and figuratively. The dimension isn’t just a strange place, but it’s a space that should be avoided, a place to be stuck, here, it seems to be a metaphor for Kei’s standstill.

And so time in relation to space threads itself throughout the show, connecting the quiet and seemingly unchanged town, curious yet barely shaken by the introduction of alien observer. The show loves to establish with the noise of cicadas or a pillow shot, to forcefully slow down time, to rest, by depending on space. The town is draped in a perpetual summer, that everyday lingers almost in perpetuity. Kei, in the second episode, wistfully describes the town as unchanging, that, as he says, “it’s as if time rolls by as slowly as the clouds in the sky.”

Again, until Mizuho. Of course, later on, the two of them have to pretend to have this relationship that very much becomes real, and for a lot of the show, it focuses on this romance and the comedic challenges they have to face. But Please Teacher returns to this relationship between space and time at its very end, almost as if it were some sort of personal, cyclical apocalypse. Kei falls into another standstill, where it’s represented in the school, a symbol of what someone like Ueno Tsunehiro would consider the everyday, and in this case, a dangerous endless everyday. Here, in this space, the images slow down, both for dramatic effect, but also to tick down to the moment in which Kei falls to another standstill.

On a broad narrative level, it seems like Kei was mistaken – time didn’t start to move, it fell back, recycling, unchanging after all. But who breaks him out? It’s Mizuho. When Morino reveals that she also suffers from the standstill, Kei locked to the town. His physiological state is locked to this one space, but Mizuho urges him to move forward. “Let’s go to space,” she says.

Eventually, Mizuho, breaks him out. Please Teacher’s emphasis on space lines up with its general media mix – as I said, because it’s based of Oomachi in Nagano on the banks of Lake Kizaki, Please Teacher’s use of space is both to give a particular animistic power to it, but also to really emphasize the role of time in the image. It keeps up this perpetual ‘other place’, that while it might’ve been a rather troubling space for Kei, paints a rather idyllic wistfulness. Here, the town is painted as a perpetual summer, but it’s a perpetual summer that you can visit, that you can feel. 

But I started this video by briefly talking about heteroglossia, of many tongues, because with Please Twins, this is where it changes.

Because space is different in Please Twins, but it’s because of Please Teacher that it’s so noticeably different.

They share the same general visual design. The boldly coloured character choices, distinctive hatched cheeks, y’know they’re a visual language that draws considerable influence from the galge (girl games) that preceded it. And on its surface, Please Teacher! and Please Twins! are remnants of a late 90s, early 2000s aesthetic and storytelling ethos. This isn’t entirely one-for-one, mind you – after all, Kuroda did note that pre-visual novel storytelling influenced the romantic elements, particularly the works of Mitsuru Adachi.

But, a surface level look at Please Teacher! and Please Twins! suggests that it’s about a pair of stories happening in a town. In a few ways, that is correct. Cythoplazma has made some very critical connections in his pilgrimage blog, such as noting Ano Natsu de Matteru’s spiritual connections (“Onegai! Pilgrimage to Lake Kizaki”). However, there is a reflexivity in the two that he hints at.

Remember, Please Teacher! is a fictional town set up around a general location. Not only do we have Lake Kizaki, but the high school is based on the old Matsumoto High School at Agatanomori Park. Another is where the tower in the show is a tower at Joyama Park.

In other words, Please Teacher!, in short, is a media mix franchise that co-opts real life locations to encourage fan visitation. Referred to as seichi junrei (translated to ‘pilgrimage’), the act consists of fans of works visiting locations that have been found or encouraged in works. And there’s a lot more to it, but that’s the general focus of this video. In this case, Please teacher would fall under the first digital wave of contents tourism, the digital wave beginning roughly in the late 90s and early 2000s. Broadcasted in 2002, Please Teacher!’s Lake Kizaki (and its surrounding areas) would have been a significant site of pilgrimages in the early and mid-2000s, riding what Philip Seaton and Takayoshi Yamamura would consider the ‘second wave’ of multi-use pilgrimages (Seaton and Yamamura 2).

But this isn’t the only text, and it’s arguably not even the only most widely studied or affect. By itself, Please Teacher would be a straightforward example of a text taking advantage of this media-mix relationship. It would be no different than the city of Nishinomiya (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya) notable for garnering some backlash, the town of Oarai (Girls un Panzer) notable for it’s post-3.11 reconstruction contents tourism, or the town of formerly named Washimiya (Lucky Stars), notable for its hyper-productive integration of local and tourist economic symbiosis. Though early and well-known, Please Teacher!, Lake Kizaki, and Oomachi are hardly the earliest or the most well-known. We Hikawa Shrine in Azabujuban, made a famous pilgrimage location by Sailor Moon (Okamoto 22). Popularity is eclipsed by Toyosato Elementary (K-On!) and that’s not even to talk about places like Takarazuka, thanks to Osamu Tezuka. Akiko Sugawa-Shimada traces it even further, tracing contemporary women’s pilgrimage practices to the 70s with visitations to An-an and Non-no (Sugawa-Shimada 37).

Therefore, why is Please Teacher! a particularly important piece in the context of pilgrimages? Because it’s a media-mix property, we could consider Please Teacher! on its media-mix grounds. And so this is where we get into Please Twins!

Please Twins! happens in the same location with different characters and a different time. Though some of the original Please Teacher! characters return, they’re mainly cameos. Please Twins! revolves around different characters with different motivations. It’s about a young man named Kamishiro Maiku who goes to Kizaki because that’s where he believes he grew up. However, he’s not the only one, and we’re joined with Miyafuji Miina and Onodera Karen. However, because the photo has only two of them, one of them is Maiku’s sibling, the other, ostensibly, a stranger. And so there’s a sort of romantic tension that’s tempered by the fear of incest, a kind of sexual Russian roulette in some ways, and the story, for the most part, follows that beat.

But like Please Teacher, the establishing sequence of Please Twins is telling and quite illuminating.

The very first scene establishes a location that looks very similar to Akihabara. It mixes busy lights and advertisements with computer parts, referencing the area’s numerous hardware locations. There, on the display, we see the news, showing a house at Lake Kizaki, referencing the alien spaceship crash from Please Teacher! This connection is a link to both Please Teacher! as well as the awareness of its otaku audience. And this is no surprise: Director Yasunori Ide spoke about how Please Teacher was planned along characters, with Mizuho summarised in keywords such as glasses and pink hair. This is a rather orthodox example of what Azuma Hiroki would consider the otaku consumption practice, the database reading.

In other words, Please Twins leverages Please Teacher’s locations to transform space, not as an abstraction of being stuck and moving forward, but this time, of memory. All three are driven by a memory that doesn’t exist of a place they never knew, and yet, the image drives them, it gives them a purpose. That space, that seemingly shallow space, has a different purpose to them. In this context, Please Teacher! and Please Twins! inhabit the ‘Lake Kizaki’ world, fleshing out and depending on a sort of (to reference Ueno Tsunehiro) ’augmented reality’ upon which the pilgrimage might occur. However, recall the opening scene and inciting action in Please Twins: Lake Kizaki, from Please Teacher!, is on display. The previous work is on display, and that gives Maiku the drive to visit that location because, to him, it has a punctuating reverence. He is, in other words, going on a pilgrimage.

As a media-mix property, both Please works build off each other to set up a general ‘world’ ripe for pilgrimage. Anime and Manga scholar Eiji Ōtsuka describes the way in which media materials depend on ‘premium-value’ (omaketsuki) contents as a means of differentiation:

In the field of animation [grand narratives supporting commodities] is what is known as the 'worldview'…The ideal is that each one of these individual settings will as a totality form a greater order, a united whole. (Ōtsuka 107) 

In other words, the consumption of a singular, linear narrative (like how we might see in a show) is sometimes of secondary interest to the otaku. To Ōtsuka, the text builds up a world in which a multiplicity of storytelling emerges. Various stories in various ways, complementing or challenging each other. He akins it to a game, where “the totality of the data programmed into one video game would correspond to the worldview” (108).

What is the world of Lake Kizaki? It’s a world of spaces, but both Please Teacher! and Please Twins! tackle what space means through very different dimensions.

Though it might not be the most popular or the oldest or the most innovative, Please Teacher and Please Twins is a rare media mix in which the two texts form a ‘worldview’ that bears its own reflexivity. In setting up the Please Teacher! connection from the beginning, Please Twins! not only calls back to the ‘worldview’ habit, but it also leverages the pilgrimage as the inciting incident for personal, meaningful travel. But unlike real-life seichijunrei, Maiku doesn’t ‘come back home’ from the pilgrimage.

He is home.

Yasunori Ide partly hails from Matsumoto in Nagano, and so Kizaki has a very specific meaning to him. He himself recalls when, during his second year of high school, he’d hang out at Lake Kizaki, that, “I guess I was doing the same stuff the characters did.” And so these images of real and fictional would blend, becoming memories. And so it seems, on some level, that Please Twins leverages the feelings people would have for Please Teacher to ‘return’ there, almost like how Yasunori himself might’ve felt that ‘return’ through this creative expression.

And we can see it, right? Please Twins!, through its use of the photograph, emphasizes the sense of furusato (hometown). In this situation, the furusato is a sense of belonging space distanced from the immediate lived location of the person. It is the ‘native home’, the “place where I am from,” always distanced. This feeling isn’t new: Philip Seaton, Takayoshi Yamamura, Akiko Sugawa-Shimada, and Kyungjae Jang note the sense of ‘home over there’ as early as the 1960s, where Japanese tourists would describe Prince Edward Island as a “[hometown] away from home” due to the popularity of Anne of Green Gables (Seaton et al. 151). To these tourists, it’s no different from Maiku – this other space is my hometown, I feel at home here. But what legitimises it? Signs, images, nothing particularly as concrete as memory, but the façade of memory.

Whereas Please Teacher! leverages space through time, Please Twins! leverages space through Please Teacher! 

It’s an early critical engagement with a sense of space that has found considerable momentum due to advances in digital technologies in the early 2000s, and ultimately shapes numerous, various voices, about our sense of space.