No question about it, I’m already very fond indeed of Ooi! Tonbo. There’s no denying that there are cliche elements to this series. We have the city guy running away from his past being healed by salt of the Earth types in a remote place (if it’s an island so much the better). The cute kid whose parents died in a car crash (I mean, probably – this is animanga). But as my friend in the film biz says, “you can’t copyright an idea, only the execution of an idea”. Originality is great but, if we’re honest, it’s overrated. That’s true of cooking, and it’s true of entertainment. I’ll take familiar and skillfully made over original and distasteful (or tasteless) any day of the week.
The bonding we’re seeing between Tonbo and Kazuyoshi is very genuine. They have golf in common of course, but the fact is, he’s the perfect age to be her dad. She may love Gon-ji, but he’s an old man. She may love the island, but she’s still curious about other ideas (and she’s from the mainland herself, as it turns out). Tonbo is the perfect age to be an absolute sponge, and Igaiga is at the perfect place on his journey to be a mentor. Both in golf and life, they’re a match made in Heaven.
Igaiga is naturally very curious to see more of Tonbo in action on the golf course. He heads out himself to try and replicate her miraculous escape from the pot bunker with a 3-iron, and can’t do it. Pro golfers who likely learned through teaching pros aren’t going to hit bunker shots with 3-irons. I mean, why would you? Unless that was all you had, of course. Tonbo takes on the role of teacher here, showing off how her practice with ropes and Gon-ji’s boat helped her perfect a swing action for this seemingly impossible task.
Yeah, the golf stuff gets pretty geeky here, and that’s going to interest you a lot more if you follow or play the sport (which I do, though the latter is too expensive in Japan). No helping that, though I feel like there’s plenty here to appeal to everybody. Tonbo is a little miracle of imagination on the course – using a wide-open stance to get her club to slice through thick rough and escape as if it were a wedge, tweaking the way she putts with the 3-iron to affect the way the ball rolls based on length of putt and break. No one taught her any of this, presumably – she learned out of necessity, which of course can be the best teacher of all.
Igaiga is so fascinated by this display that he and Tonbo stay out on the course until after dark, which has Setsu-san worried enough to send the local constable and Bunpei out to bring her home (they knew where to look). Igaiga is rightly embarrassed and contrite about this, as he’s aware he should have known better. But he’s more put off by the fact that the others refuse to hold him accountable for this – he’s still a guest in their eyes, as he observes. Gon-ji even makes sure he comes over for dinner (fresh caught sashimi, naturally) and in his gruff way makes it clear that Kazuyoshi is welcome to take his time and figure out how he lost the plot in his life.
Over some star-gazing (which has to be pretty insane in a place that remote), Tonbo confides why she carries only the 3-iron (which she just calls a number three). It was the club her father left behind (too hard to hit) on the morning he and her mother went golfing and never came back. She’s resolved to stay on the island forever after it welcomed her when no one else in her own family would, but there’s an obvious problem with that in a place with no high school. A kid doesn’t have to attend high school in Japan, but what’s Tonbo’s future if she doesn’t? That’s the terrible dilemma places like this face, because once the kids leave they very rarely move back.
The wild card in all this is golf, of course. Tonbo is obviously a natural at it, and if someone is truly exceptional (very exceptional) at a sport, that can represent a future in its own right. But not here, surely – a place with only one course and only a few holes at that, where there are no tournaments and no peers and no obvious paths to becoming a professional. Except Igaiga of course. And how he chooses to address the question of her golfing future – and his role in it – is certain to be a central theme in Ooi! Tonbo.
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