Hanasaku Iroha – Episode 15

Last time on Hanasaku Iroha the girls of Kissui Inn were out on a school trip when the waitresses of the inn they were staying at suddenly quit en masse.  I am assuming it will fall to Ohana and her friends to play the role of strikebreaking scabs and ensure that organized labor never gains any bargaining power against the capitalist class.  It would be terrible for the future owner of the inn to have to learn a lesson about not mistreating his workers.  I guess we shouldn’t expect Ohana to show solidarity with the workers though – her grandmother is literally a landlady, a parasitic rentier. Let’s watch Ohana crush the Red menace in episode 15 of Hanasaku Iroha.

…thirty minutes pass…

Don't be fooled! She's just trying to depress your wages and remove your bargaining power.

The rival inn heiress Yuina really is a great character, it’s a shame to end this arc and see less of her, although it means we’ll see more of the other characters, who are mostly also great.  What they need to do is spin off a show just about her, so she doesn’t have to compete for screentime with Ohana and Minchi and Tohru and the rest of them.  It’s just so refreshing to see a spoiled rich girl character that acts like an actual human being and displays intelligence and people skills.  Poverty builds character, maybe, but you can go a fair ways without character.  Maybe you lack the basic skills of how to mop floors, but if someone’s kind enough to show you, you can pick it up pretty quick.

Kind of a weird moral to this episode – apparently the solution to Yuina’s troubles is to give up on her dreams of being a designer or a creator or an artist, and take on the career that runs in her family so that she will be good enough to marry the man she got engaged to as a child.  That’s not the sort of moral I’m used to seeing, it’s not something I’m used to seeing held up as an ideal.  It might be a good moral, though.  There was a study that supposedly showed that arranged marriages are on average happier, and it’s a fact about human nature that having more choices makes us ceteris paribus more dissatisfied.  And working hard can indeed be enjoyable in its own way, even if you don’t especially enjoy the thing you’re working hard at.  Heck, maybe she’ll even come to enjoy the work of an inn.  It’s amazing what you can enjoy when it becomes a part of your identity.  I’m a little sad to think about her identity becoming that of a landlady, though.  I like her identity as is.