Talking Meme: Detective Conan!

[mithen]

ran_dezvous asked me about Detective Conan, a popular anime here in Japan!

When my husband and I first moved to Japan 15 years ago, we decided to watch some Japanese shows to try and practice our Japanese. One of the shows we chose was Meitantei (Famous Detective) Conan.

This was a terrible choice.

Meitantei Conan is a long-running animated series about a high school boy and amateur detective who, when he runs across the nefarious Black Organization, is given an experimental drug that is supposed to kill him, but (unbeknownst to the villains) de-ages him instead. He decides to pretend to be his own young cousin, taking the name Edogawa Conan (Edogawa sounds like Edgar in Japanese, from Edgar Allen Poe; Conan from Conan Doyle). Through a rather convenient set of plot devices, he eventually moves in with his semi-girlfriend Mouri Ran (who doesn't know who he is) and her incompetent detective father Mouri Kogoro. While searching for the secret of the Black Organization, he ends up helping Kogoro solve crimes by using a special dart that puts Kogoro to sleep at convenient times and a microphone that lets him impersonate and throw Kogoro's voice. Kogoro starts to become famous as "The Sleeping Detective" who solves crimes while in a sleep-like trance (it's Conan solving them, but Kogoro is happy to take the credit and even kind of believes he's doing it somehow).

It's a great show, but it's a terrible show to to be practicing your Japanese with, because a lot of the cases revolve around language riddles, and...wow, Japanese is not an easy language for that. So after a while we had to kind of give up watching it unsubbed, but years later we came back to it, because we had liked the characters and the conceit! We’re not caught up anymore, but for a while we were watching it very regularly. I think we’ll get back to it at some point, once the English subs have made some progress--we’re too invested in the long-term overarching plot not to find out how it all gets wound up someday...