The Spring 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Yowayowa Sensei

Hiyori Hiwamura is a new high school teacher who just graduated from college. With Hiwamura's weak voice, weak stamina, and being basically weak in every aspect, one might have the urge to protect her. Ironically, students misread her meekness and fear her as the rumored "Ms. Scary" who will curse them if she gets upset. Nevertheless, she works hard for her students, and one student, Akihito Abikura, recognizes her true nature.

Yowayowa Sensei is based on the manga series by Kamio Fukuchi. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Saturdays.

A couple weeks ago, I had a stress dream where I absentmindedly took my pants off in the middle of a class I was teaching. Within the dream, I was actively convinced that it was reality and I was going to be arrested. Watching Yowayowa-sensei feels a bit like if all my worst, completely unsexy stress dreams were being used to make a deposit in the world's most boring pervert's spank bank.

There is something deeply mean-spirited at the core of this show. There are three kinds of jokes: Hiwamura makes a fool of herself by failing at something simple, Hiwamura accidentally exposes her comically large breasts and/or butt, or some combination of the two. That's it. She is stalked, I mean supported, by the point-of-view character Akihito Abikura, who is the only student who understands that she's actually painfully shy and not scary, and has no personality of his own. He frequently gets an eyeful by virtue of being near her when she fails at basic tasks, like buying books on a rainy day, doing jump rope, or remembering to put on underwear in the morning. I'm sure fans will say it's about rooting for her as she struggles to become a better teacher, but let's be real: it's about watching a woman with huge breasts and the face of a five-year-old humiliate herself, over and over.

To add insult to injury, it rarely even thinks through its ludicrous situations. Unbuttoning your shirt so you can take deeper belly breaths when you have helium balloons attached to your chest doesn't make sense, since the fabric would be hanging over your core, not constricting it. Jumping rope requires a lot of stamina and coordination–there's a reason it's a mainstay of high-level athletic training. Torn sheer tights wouldn't snap back with enough force to make a snapping sound or elicit a cry of surprise from their wearer. I know it's not the point, but I'm annoyed that I had to sit through this crap so I will complain as much as I want to.

And the voice acting! It feels insulting to cast Kakeru Hatano as this blobby melvin after he played Tamon. You know, the title character of one of last season's most popular anime. Marika Kōno, on the other hand, almost exclusively plays squeaky anime girls. Hiwamura is the encapsulation of every negative stereotype about how anime women talk: high-pitched, breathy, ear-piercingly shrill when distressed. I'd rather spend a whole season listening to Kujima's wobbly warbling than spend another episode with Hiwamura.

There is nothing here. It's tacky, ugly, and viscerally unpleasant to listen to. I wish I could give it negative stars.

There's a classic saying when it comes to writing: “Write what you know.” On one level, this anime clearly follows that. The creators know exactly what the “girl failure” trope is along with its appeal. They have made Hiyori utterly hopeless. She's a klutz, terrible at social communication, and physically weak. She needs all the help she can get—which is the draw to her character. It's the old “I can fix her” mindset. Then, on top of this, they've made her insanely physically attractive with a butt and boobs that make both finding correct sized clothing and jumping rope a seeming impossibility.

But while the creators of this anime know the fetish they are embodying, they don't seem to know anything about being a teacher—or at least don't care enough about the job to let reality get in the way of the fantasy they want to portray. Simply put, there is no way that Hiyori could ever become a teacher—or at least a fully accredited one that would be given a home room. There are tests and certifications needed along with classes taught while seasoned teachers observe. The idea that someone as inept as Hiyori could pass their exams to become a teacher, much less get hired as one, is laughable at best.

But you may be asking, “Richard, this is just this side of softcore porn. Why are you overthinking things?” The answer is, I had nothing else to think about while watching. The episode is just one over-the-top erotic situation followed by another and Akihiko, the only other character in the episode, is nothing but a one-note accidental pervert with a heart of gold. I will say that the animation quality was fine but there's really nothing else to talk about when it comes to this anime. So, if girl failures/teachers are your fetish you may find something to enjoy in this show. If not, this one is safe to pass on.

Gee, isn't it just so funny that Hiwamura-sensei is so anxious that she can barely function? How her shirt pops open and her boobs are huge? How she forgets to put on underwear and then snags her tights? How she keeps falling on or against her student Abikura? I hope you agree, because that's pretty much all that Yowayowa Sensei is!

Poor Hiwamura is the latest in this season's string of heroines who don't appear to have two brain cells to rub together. Her earnest wish is to become a teacher, but I have to question how she got hired, because she's emphatically not suited for the position – at least, not with her raging anxiety disorder untreated. She can barely get words out when she's in front of a class, can't walk without slipping or tripping, and her handwriting is illegible when people are watching. The middle issue could be overlooked, but the other two are pretty darn important when teaching high school. Right now, most of her students find her inexplicable and terrifying, but Abikura, who keeps bumping into her outside of school, realizes that she's simply an ongoing disaster of a human being.

I believe we're supposed to feel protective towards her. She's earnestly trying her best and failing utterly. Abikura's desire to make her teaching life a little easier is our entry point into the story; we're meant to assume that we'd take on his role were we in the show. He's “rewarded” by glimpses of her breasts (tastefully covered by her bra, of course), her bare butt, and her falling up against or on top of him. The problem is that she's humiliated by all of these things, so it just ends up feeling mean. By the time we hit the late-episode joke of her falling on her megaphone and then on top of him in such a way that when he speaks, the megaphone vibrates against her clitoris, the whole thing just feels kind of gross.

Compounding the problem is Marika Kōno's breathy delivery of all of Hiwamura's lines. It gets to be very nails-on-a-chalkboard, mostly because it's constant. Really, only Hiwamura and Abikura speak in this episode (though more girls are going to come in, per the opening and ending themes; I dread the advent of the boob-obsessed girl), and that makes the whole thing feel claustrophobic. Not a great combination with Hiwamura's inescapable breathiness, although I do applaud the subtitler for landing on keyboard-smash versions of her unintelligible speech that use the same basic sounds.

Obviously, this is not a show for me. If you don't mind Hiwamura's voice and are looking for some fanservice, it might work better for you. But if mean humor isn't your thing, this is an easy skip.

Oh dear. I was bracing myself for Yowayowa Sensei purely because I know that teacher-student romance anime just do not work for me 99-percent of the time, and I figured this show got onto Hi-Dive because of the service's willingness to flaunt the sauciest entries in its catalog. What we ended up with, though, is actually so much worse than a sleazy fanservice-fest. Instead, Yowayowa Sensei is an occasionally and quite awkwardly sleazy fanservice-fest that is also determined to be an earnest comedy about a busty new teacher who is too incompetent to live and the concerned-but-also-horny student who saves her from her own accursed failures. In other words, we have a show that is too goofy and stupid to be genuinely sexy, and too poorly executed to function as a funny comedy. It's the worst of both worlds, people. Run, before it's too late.

The most misbegotten element of this show is easily the titular sensei herself, Hiyori, aka Hiwamura-sensei, though I hesitate to award her any honorifics that might imply a modicum of competence or respect. The central joke of this character, aside from how unwieldy and massive her boobs are, comes down to how she sucks at everything and doubles-down on her embarrassment by talking like a Stupid Sexy Baby all of the goddamned time. Honestly, the subtitles work too hard to dignify a character who is unworthy of such effort.

For instance, the words on screen might tell viewers that Hiyori is saying, “This morning I tripped and hit my head on the door and it made a big noise, so I ended up scaring everyone…” What we all really know she is saying, based on her grating performance and the stupid script, is “Poor widdle me fell down and went boom on the floor, and my bouncy boobies just popped out of my dwess all of a sudden, and then I went and crawled all over da floor and scared everyone with my big dumb-dumb stupid face. If only a stwong teenager who is capable of dwessing himself and holding a conversation with another scawy teenager could help me learn how to do adulting good…also, I'm going to shove my big ass into your face now, okie-dokie?”

It's maddening. It'd be one thing if Hiyori were a klutzy teacher who kept stumbling into provocative situations with her shocked students. I've seen my fair share of smut before. I know the score. It would be another thing if Hiyori were an anxious newbie who needed the support of other, more experienced coworkers, and maybe even sometimes relied on the good graces of her students. That's a classic sitcom premise right there. But this unholy combination of trash and dumb sitcom shenanigans just does not work at all. The end result is not just boring and lacking in sex appeal. It is downright painful to sit through. Yowayowa Sensei is one of the worst comedies to premiere this season, and I don't recommend it to anyone but the most shameless freaks and masochists. You've been warned.