I finally have the name of the mysterious disease you see pop up in so many different anime: it’s malaria. THANK YOU, Sora no Oto, for finally giving it a concrete name! Seriously, I’ve been puzzled by ages at how weird the Japanese colds are: You keep seeing shows that talk about “cold” and “fever”, but it turns out that those were just too lazy to do any research. I think only Tokyo magnitude did the same. Apart from that I don’t think I can recall any other series that gave these “fevers” a descriptive name. I’ll give this show a number of inaccuracies though, like Kanata recovering very fast, and Rio seemed to think that only children could catch it, which I doubt is really true. But then again, I don’t see her for someone with lots of medical knowledge.
In any case, this was a good episode for Rio and Kanata: both of them were fleshed out pretty nicely in this episode, and we also got to know their background. Very nice to see that this series is making use of its episodes. There’s one thing I didn’t like, though: Kanata became fascinated with music when she saw a blond girl play the trumpet. It’s an event that shaped her entire life. Now coincidentally, Rio also learned to play the trumpet from a certain blond woman. I mean, coincidences are one thing, if they make the story flow better… but what’s the point of it here? There’s no reason whatsoever for Kanata and Rio’s past to be linked somehow…
What I’m asking for now is the same kind of depth for Kureha, Noel and Phylicia, and an end where all of this development comes together. Characters with depth are nice, but you also have to use them correctly.
Rating: * (Good)
Malaria has been eradicated from Japan since the middle of the XXth century, and the current cases (about a hundred per year) are imported from abroad.
The condition is so rare that local doctors sometimes have difficulties identifying it fast enough to rescue the patients.
Actually, there are more cases of HIV/AIDS declared per year than of malaria, so AIDS would be a equally plausible explanation for the colds in Japanese anime, except that recovery would not be so simple.
But in fact Japanese fiction has a lot of folklore about colds (like idiots are immune from it, etc) and is used simply as a handy (and tired) plot device. Anemia is another common choice. At the end of the XIX and beginning of XXth century apoplexy was a popular trope is some western literature, but I don’t know what’s the current popular “excuse disease” used in western fiction.
What you see normally in anime is the flu is not only a cold. That’s the reason why they have fever and all those harsh symptoms. Malaria is really a tropical illness which is unlikely to occur frequently in Japan. Probably in the context of Sora no Woto makes sense but I wouldn’t use it to explain all diseases you see in anime.
it’s a specific strain of malaria called plot aids.
Ofcourse the most resonable explanation is that the nun whom I seriously dubt have had any formal medical training at all is just naming some illness she has heard about that gives a fever. Just because she said “I think its Malaria” does not mean that it is. Its not like any blood samples where taken and analyzed by trained doctors.
Most likely Kanata just got some minor local illness. Normally the imune system would deal with it, but seeing how she has traveled for days getting to the fort pluss her fall into the lake and her working 100% to give a good impression to the others her imune system might have been weakened such that a minor infection could cause a fever.
Well the malaria kind that was featured this episode is called 三日熱マラリア or malaria tertiana. This disease normally, as the name implies, holds for about 3 days and is by far not as harsh as other types of malaria.
It is predominantly found in South America and Asia. But considering that the world of Sora no Oto seems to have undergone severe changes after the war, it is possible for the climate to have changed enough for it to spread over several parts of the globe.
As long as those changes are touched in later parts of the show I would think that’s okay.
malaria is a normal thing in a tropical country like mine 🙂
it explained everywhere in our science book…
Thanks chounokoe for the info on malaria. Sometimes you just think that the authors got something wrong but when you look into it, you find out you were the one who was wrong :).
It makes me think of a chapter in Gintama where Kondo said that gorilla’s scientific name was: “gorilla gorilla gorilla”, I was like wtf but it appears that the author was right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Lowland_Gorilla.
The ‘tertian’ refers to the periodicity of fever not the extent of the illness. Even with treatment, if she was infected with P. vivax, then her illness will recur unless they have a well disguised pharmaceutical industry hidden somewhere. Since it’s the future we can assume that the climate has shifted (assuming the show takes place in Japan and not simply somewhere the Japanese colonized in the future, say, the Korean Peninsula where P. vivax has reappeared) enough to make the disease viable.
They would be pretty familiar with malaria or it wouldn’t be an issue for them, since you need a regularly infected population of humans to keep it going. However she wouldn’t necessarily know if the person was infected with malaria, and could simply mistakenly assume some other infection was malaria. Since baka-chan did just recently take a dip to retrieve that bell she could have been infected by any number of other things.
I suspect that malaria might be a mistranslation. The word used in Japanese is 三日熱 (“mikkanetsu”, which literally means “three day fever”), not 三日熱マラリア (“mikkanetsu malaria”, or “tertian malaria”). It’s true that in modern Japan, when one says “mikkanetsu”, one usually means tertian malaria, but this is still technically an abbreviation, and the world of Sora no Woto is not modern Japan. Traditional medicines in a technologically backward society are prone to misdiagnosis, and the phrase “three day fever” is really describing a symptom rather than a pathogen. So I think the proper translation would have been “three day fever”, leaving it to the viewers to speculate whether this was indeed malaria, or something else.
As KoRoMi said, three-day fever ain’t no malaria. It’s actually a type of herpes and indeed (as Rio thought) it’s almost always small children who get it. In fact my best friend’s son had it last fall before turning two. The word “mikkanetsu” may be used for a type of malaria in normal Japanese, but you have to remember that this anime isn’t exactly Japanese in its setting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exanthema_subitum
I’m with KoRoMi as well. I was very surprised when the term “malaria” came up as it’s a tropical disease usually associated with mosquito bites. It’s been eradicated in alot of areas by wiping out the mosquito breeding grounds but from my impressions of the show so far, this show is pretty post apocalyptic so over the years, those old breeding grounds could have cropped back up. Stuff like vaccination may no longer be available too. Still, the place looks temperate rather than tropical. They’re next to the sea but I don’t see any coconut trees for example. And the girls are okay wearing those heavy looking military jackets – not easy in typical tropical humidity. The temperature reading in the cockpit of the tank was 27 degrees at night though. If it’s celsius then that’s in tropical range.
I’m just not sure where they are in the world – I don’t think it’s Japan. The architecture looks very pre-WW2 western – I thought it might be France, cos of all the written French everywhere. If it was Japan, I think you’d see alot more oriental style architecture around. I don’t think Japan has any of those high-walled cities on the coasts, do they? Instead I see alot of cultural hints instead. The nun’s habit had miko-like trim. The festival areas from episode 1 had shinto shrine like wards on the lines. Post-apocalyptic japanese schoolbooks with pictures of sailor uniformed girls. There’s not a hint of modern technology or architecture even in their uniforms, vehicles and weapons..until they sprang that walking mech on us. Then there’s the Amazing Grace theme of British origin dropping in on us. Just where the heck are they?
“There’s no reason whatsoever for Kanata and Rio’s past to be linked somehow…” Um…not directly but i’d say the blonde woman in both their past memories are the same person. It can’t be a coincidence that Rio’s necklace resembles the one worn by the blonde woman from Kanata’s childhood memories. Interesting that Kanata doesn’t recognize the necklace but it could be because she had forgotten that detail and mostly just remembered the horn and the song. I’m not disturbed by this story development. I’m pretty curious about who she was although sadly, I’m pretty sure she’s passed on.
I’m still a bit uneasy about how the story will go from here. I’m still haunted by bad memories of Elfen Lied and the opening of Sora no Woto has a creepy resemblance. If people, especially cute girls or children, start getting beheaded or dismembered, I’m never going to be able to watch K-ON the same way again. XD
first part of your post reminded me of an episode in the simpsons where one of the fans of itchy and scratchy was asking the voice actor about one of scratchy’s bones having two different notes. lol. my point is, how could you accept that sora no oto has its own world yet question the type of disease that goes around in it?
for some reason it feels like that something tragic is going to happen in the series. i really hope im wrong.
@kyuzo – Sorry. I missed that episode so I don’t catch the reference. XD But I’m facinated with what the creators might have in mind with this setting. Is it a made-up world that coincidentally has so many elements so directly inferenced from the real world, albeit from ordinarily distictly separate cultures/geographical locations? I think the creators are just dropping clues to a more interesting alternate distant future of our own world. Actually I was thinking of a French-Japanese space colony on another earth-like planet but the old-style architecture (trains, castles, village) and no hint of advanced technology, except that one mech just throws me off. Even after thousands of years, you’d think they’d take a different aethestic direction somehow – especially since it’s a blend of at least two distinct cultures. It makes more sense that they’re just using ancient buildings that survived whatever holocaust destroyed the old civilization. Well, I’m interested to see which of us is right.
Mm…about potentially tragic future direction, well there’s a strong hint that all the girls are going to have to pilot that mech to do something. From all that’s been shown so far, they are/were at war with some other country although they’re in the middle of an armstice. They don’t seem to have television and their main contact with their hq is an old style telephone landline. They do have some old-tech though, which might be worth the enemy trying to get their hands on since resistance may be relatively light? Alternatively, some group invading the town searching for the bird weapon’s corpse for genetic material so they can restore it and use it? And then there’s the mysterious no-man’s land. If there are more of those fire birds, maybe another one might come calling and the girls might have to sacrifice their lives to defeat them just like their predecessors. But yea..I’m pretty sure things won’t stay light-hearted. They wouldn’t bring in the Elfen Lied guy to do another K-ON. I just hope it won’t nearly be as grim and gory as Elfen Lied but I’m wary of any sudden gut punches.
I suspect the headless skeleton was a red herring and the demon was a malfunctioning machine and its fire-spewing head was its power source. The fire maidens, I think, sacrificed themselves to keep it under control while it was buried under a body of water. Chernobyl firefighters to the rescue.
There’s a tank with an English UI in a country with bits of Japanese culture that uses French as its primary language and whose name references Switzerland all to the east of a large desert. I don’t know that it’s really anywhere, or if it is that where it is would be recognizable. They may have experienced a severe population bottleneck as a result of the catastrophe and what they had for survivors ended up shaping the resulting civilization. I don’t really watch the show that closely, because it’s really boring for me, so I may have missed some obvious hints, but the creators may just be toying with the viewer. If you took out the mystery of how the world got to this point, this show wouldn’t have a lot else going for it.
The formula of mixing the saccharine slice of life in with the dark material in Elfen Lied came from the manga, so the show won’t necessarily fall into the abyss. Though they are lightly building up the endearing war orphan backstories. I have to admit that waiting for the light switch to go off is the only reason I watch this show, though. The intro scene from Elfen Lied where Lucy escapes was beautiful. If they can top that I would be impressed. That diabetes-inducing ED would be pretty funny when played after that kind of horror.
Re: malaria in temperate climates
Um… anywhere mosquitoes go, malaria can go. So can yellow fever and all the other fun mosquito-carried diseases. Malaria used to be very common in places like Italy and Ohio. The only reason it’s not common now, is that a lot of work, pesticides, and a hundred years of continuous effort went into killing mosquitoes and eliminating malaria in those particular temperate areas.
There is nothing to say that malaria can’t come back, either. In a post-holocaust Europe or Japan, I would expect the mosquitoes to survive, and the logistics to kill malaria carriers to disappear.
I have to admit… this plot device… I LOVE IT TO DEATH. Melodrama=YAY!
I don’t care how tired or cliché it is, I’m always glad it pops up. *cheezy pleasure*