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Man of Many Faces
Man of Many Faces is a 2-volume story written by CLAMP. It centers on Akira Ijyuin, a 9-year-old attending Clamp School. As you may remember, he is one of the three Clamp School Detectives. In Man of Many Faces, Akira periodically dons an eye-mask and a top hat (looking very much like Tuxedo Mask, from Sailor Moon!) and steals highly-prized items for his two mothers, who ask him to do so. In addition to stealing for them, Akira also does all of the cooking and cleaning for his mothers (remember, this is ALSO in addition to all of his work with the Clamp School Detectives, receiving perfect grades, being on the Student Council, etc.).
One night while evading the police, Akira happens to meet Utako Ōkawa, a kindergarten student at Clamp School who is nursing her broken heart. Verily, at the tender age of 5, Utako has fallen in love. With her teacher. See, CLAMP has this tendency to make young girls between the ages of 5 and 9 fall in love with their teachers, and it is oh, so romantic! Also, WTF. Oh well. Thankfully in this series, the teacher has refused her love, due to their 22-year age difference. Also, Utako is only 5. 5!
Anyway, the series is overall fluffy and cute, detailing their romantic encounters. At least, it's mostly cute except for my mind constantly going, But they are only 5 and 9 years old! WTF! They are impossibly intelligent and mature for their ages. But. Still. Weird.
It was nice to get a lot of characterization for Akira, as Nokoru and Suoh were the two who were most-developed in the Clamp School Detectives manga. The interwebs tell me that these three boys will also appear in X/1999 and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. I wonder if they'll still be elementary school students, or if they will be older. Utako will also have a cameo in Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle.
One night while evading the police, Akira happens to meet Utako Ōkawa, a kindergarten student at Clamp School who is nursing her broken heart. Verily, at the tender age of 5, Utako has fallen in love. With her teacher. See, CLAMP has this tendency to make young girls between the ages of 5 and 9 fall in love with their teachers, and it is oh, so romantic! Also, WTF. Oh well. Thankfully in this series, the teacher has refused her love, due to their 22-year age difference. Also, Utako is only 5. 5!
Anyway, the series is overall fluffy and cute, detailing their romantic encounters. At least, it's mostly cute except for my mind constantly going, But they are only 5 and 9 years old! WTF! They are impossibly intelligent and mature for their ages. But. Still. Weird.
It was nice to get a lot of characterization for Akira, as Nokoru and Suoh were the two who were most-developed in the Clamp School Detectives manga. The interwebs tell me that these three boys will also appear in X/1999 and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. I wonder if they'll still be elementary school students, or if they will be older. Utako will also have a cameo in Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle.
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Like what's-her-face in Card Captor Sakura! (Altho' are they a bit older than 9? Not that it would make it any less dodgy, natch.)
Do you know anything about how this kind of stuff is received by a Japanese audience? I don't, & I wonder if there's some reason why this keeps coming up (I also don't know if this is just a quirk CLAMP has, or if other folks do it too).
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I always chalked it up to being a CLAMP trope, like someone always having to lose an eye. I know that there are some men (and, probably, women?) who have "Japanese schoolgirl" fetishes. But in CLAMP, it's always very much a 2-sided and romantic love. Maybe one of the members of CLAMP has a former unfulfilled love from their school days? I don't know.
I'm trying to remember another series with a teacher/student romance in manga, but the only ones I can think of are high school students with teachers who are still in their twenties.
Because I'm a fan of Wikipedia (which I'm sure will one day bite me in the ass), there's a section on Sakura's friend Rika (in love with the teacher), and it says, "The student-teacher relationship is not uncommon in Japanese fiction, as it can be interpreted as very romantic for a young girl to follow an older man as a student and mentee, only to fall in love with him in the end." Come to think of it, Tristan and Isolde started this way?
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(Buffy and Angel take place in real time as well, which I've always loved--esp. when they skipped time between the show and the comic, so that it would sync up again).
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I knew that X took place in real-time, but I guess that I didn't know that about Detectives, etc. Does Tokyo Babylon, too? It seemed like it did.
That is also good to know about Buffy! I knew that the two different shows took place at the same time (given all of the crossover, etc.), but wasn't sure if it was our time, or a couple years earlier, etc. Of course, since I'm watching both shows for the first time, it's more like 5 years ago, but whatever.
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Based on this, however, we can infer that Suoh, the 5th grader, is the same age as Buffy. (Buffy graduated in 1999, hence the hairstyles in the first season.)
Also, Japanese schools are quite different from US schools. For one thing, there are very few tests, but those tests are more important (well, important, but you don't have to pass them). There isn't much in the way of homework, either. Not doing your homework doesn't really affect your grade, and let's be honest--grades don't matter because schools don't look at your transcripts, anyway. They especially don't look at them if you attend an elevator school such as the CLAMP one. So really, being a genius is plenty to get by on.
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Heh, I should've checked Wikipedia. Oh well. I can get the whole "young girl eventually marrying her teacher"--but it just seems like in CLAMP they're SO much younger. I mean, they're not high schoolers, y'know?