[Atuhor's Nose: This was meant to be posted yesterday, but things got in the way again. You know what that means.]


Chika Suzugamori is a college student who's been shopping some manga pitches around to publishers ever since she won a rookie manga award, but keeps getting rejected. Just as she was about to lose hope in ever breaking into the industry, she decides on a whim to go travelling without any particular goal. She gets the idea while watching a TV program where they roll a die and assign a place to each participating presenter, who then visit the spots they've rolled. Chika does the social media equivalent, launching a poll and going in the direction that gets the most votes.

Zatsu Tabi -That's Journey- is the kind of flagrant advertising I can kinda respect because it's at least successful at its stated goal of making me want to spend my money. Would I walk out of my front door right now and hop on a train to Aizuwakamatsu for a cheap bento lunch and a refreshing afternoon hike up a beautiful mountain landscape? You bet I would, if it didn't require me booking a $2,000 round trip to Japan and I wasn't poor and physically unwell and recent economic developments hadn't made a simple trip to the grocery store a matter of carefully balancing my ever-dwindling budget.

Sorry about that. The point is, a soul-rejuvenating trip to Japan is something I've long dreamed of but will likely never be able to have, and so I'm forced to satisfy my wanderlust by vicariously experiencing Japan through others, including the cozy overnight trips of anime characters. Zatsu Tabi lets me do that, which is pretty neat. Even if the show itself isn't doing much beyond serving as a moderately entertaining vacation planner, it's still got me interested as someone who's spent the last couple years near-obsessively studying pretty much the entirety of Japan, and that means that whatever dark pact Zatsu Tabi has made with the Japan Tourism Agency is paying off in some way.

I know anime promoting tourism is nothing new, neither are hobby anime, or even anime combining the two. Usually the intersection of the two things involves a group of girls involved in some sort of local craft or location-specific activity. But I've never seen one so blatantly saying "Please go here!" as Zatsu Tabi. Rather than using a location as a setting for a story that gives the characters opportunities to enjoy the local specialties, eat local food or walk through the beauty of nature, Zatsu Tabi is about a young manga artist who decides to use her manga prize money to travel to small tourist towns based on cryptic social media polls. She first goes to Aizuwakamatsu, describing in detail how much things cost, how to get there by train, how she gets a room at a local inn, and so on. Chika herself doesn't bring a lot to the table, but that's because she's not really as much the focus of the premiere as the location is.

To be fair to the show, it does have a bit more going for it than just its chill travelogue vibes. Chika is a perfectly likeable and relatable lead. While I hope she gets a supporting cast to liven up the proceedings, she makes enough of an impression for her show to technically function as a narrative slice-of-life comedy. There was one sequence that even made me chuckle a bit, where she goes through the various stages of exercise-induced psychosis while climbing up a famous landmark of 1,200 steps that turns out to lead to a very anticlimactic reward for her efforts. As a bit of an introvert who prefers to stay home and/or work on her manga, Chika has little in the way of real-world experiences, as her journey shows. She's never thought about the logistics of travel or how travelling has changed with technology. She's never done the cliche things she's seen in manga like having a bento on the bullet train or staying at a countryside ryokan. She's never experienced how spread out things really are outside the big city or what it's like to go somewhere without a set plan. She's never climbed a mountain just because it was there. Over the course of her two-day trip, Chika gains a world's worth of knowledge she can put into her writing. And while a single excursion naturally isn't enough to suddenly up her game, she's certainly on the right track.

The episode puts a lot of effort into showing us how gorgeous and new this whole thing is for her. Sparkles adorn mundane things like what seems to be a rather basic hotel room and a very nice breakfast buffet. She marvels at electrical outlets on trains and local pastries. There's a photorealism to every background Suzugamori wanders through. While the juxtaposition of her very anime form and the highly detailed backgrounds don't hold a candle to Shigeru Mizuki's work (which is always my association with the style), it still works and is the draw of this episode. Most of it is just focused on her wandering around; she interacts with people online and with the editor she's trying to get to accept her manga for publication, but otherwise, this is mostly just Chika talking to herself. That stands to change if the opening theme sequence is to be believed--in particular, the woman she sees overindulging in the hotel bar looks like she'll become a regular.

Overall, while it's not the most riveting thing airing right now, Zatsu-Tabi might be worth checking out for folks who are feeling a bit restless and want to get some virtual sightseeing in. It's a decent time, and while it's not likely to be priority viewing for me in such a powerfully stacked season full of surprising gems, I'd still like to see where Chika's journey goes from here.