MoshiDora 1-3
“What if a Female Student Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker’s ‘Management’” is a pretty fantastic name for a business novel. The book can’t have been that bad either since it became a massive best-seller in Japan and now has a 10 episode anime and a live-action film (June 2011) based on it.
The first few episodes of MoshiDora were a little slow on the pacing, but honestly I’m just happy to have another baseball anime to watch this spring. Sometimes I forget to watch anime otherwise. Most baseball animes are only peripherally about the sport anyway and this one is obviously no different. Manager Kawashima Minami (whose name must be homage to the most famous of fictional joshi managers, Asakura Minami) attempts to determine who the stakeholders are in high school baseball, how to market to them, methods of translating technical language to the consumer (coach-to-team and vice versa) and motivating through responsibility.
It looks like she’ll be dealing with the issues of a different team member in each episode (le sigh, problem-of-the-week) with some underlying problem to eventually resolve surrounding her own relationship to baseball (childhood trauma?!) and a few earnest hand-grasping “sports-yuri” pairings (Minami and her sick childhood friend Yuki, star pitcher Asano and his freckled kohai) a la Oofuri thrown in the mix. I’m into it.
