Turkey!-Time to Strike-

Episode 10

It took a while, but our main girls have finally returned home to the modern era—which is seemingly wholly unaffected by their jaunt through time. But they quickly learn from a museum exhibit that it's probably because their beloved Sengoku squad got slaughtered shortly after they left.

Let this episode be a testament to the value of learning and preserving local history. Large museums and archives are super cool—many of my favorite places in the whole world are large museums—but small museums and libraries that are dedicated even partially to preserving local history are just as valuable. Imagine how much differently this episode might've gone if the girls didn't have easy access to this information—if they didn't have a local history museum, and if they instead had to go about historical research the old-fashioned way. Actually, you don't have to, because I'm going to explain what probably would've happened, so you can appreciate how fortunate it was that they had a local history museum that they could go to and easily find this information. You're stuck in here with me, not the other way around:

The next best-case scenario for the girls would've been if the Sengoku squad were written about in any books. But just because that information's in a book, that doesn't inherently make it accessible. In fact, when it comes to history (especially more distant history), my anecdotal experience has been that it's kind of a crapshoot. A lot of history books are older, and with a small number of exceptions, the more academically focused ones especially aren't exactly frequently republished (if they get republished at all). So at best, a lot of them tend to be either old or rare. At worst, they're both, and expensive to boot. Back when I was working on my dissertation for my MA in medieval history, the Internet Archive was extremely vital for this reason—they have a great selection of books that were relevant to my area of study, but also older and harder to come by, so they would've been difficult (if not impossible) to access otherwise. And luckily, my university's library was able to fill in the gaps. To reiterate: libraries are awesome.

This is all to say that, at best, maybe this information could've been in a book. The girls can get it! But if it's not, or if the book is otherwise inaccessible to them (e.g., it's too old, it's too hard to find intact, too expensive, etc), I doubt they would've pursued this further. In fact, it's possible the information just wasn't archived, full stop. It would hardly be the first time. Admittedly, I'm unsure how historical archive access works in Japan. But if it works anything like it does in, say, England or the US, then as high schoolers (which is to say: not history grad students, or otherwise in historical academia) the girls could've potentially faced a lot of red tape. Plus, if they're interacting directly with the source, they face possible linguistic hurdles in the form of coming face-to-face with how much Japanese, as a language, has changed in the past several hundred years. Something that, admittedly, they should've had to learn whilst they were in the Sengoku era, but I'm not going to derail this review into me going on a tangent about how desperately I wish there was more historical fiction that embraced what's otherwise generally (and, to be clear, very understandably) regarded as something too inconvenient and requiring way too much research to bother integrating: the evolution of language. But before I start rambling about Middle English—and secretary hand and medieval minims especially—I'll cut myself off there.

There's definitely a branching path the anime could've gone down here, where the girls decide to put the work in and research as much as they can about the lives of their friends in the Sengoku era, and discover a passion for learning about history. And admittedly, I would've loved to have seen this. Still, the girls are deciding to dedicate themselves to training so they can save them—that's a fun prospect, too. Unexpected, obviously, but I think this anime knows this, given how it tried to fake us out with Nanase's whole, “Aw yeah, let's wreck this timeline!” bit. Old habits die hard, I suppose. We've ended the episode on a really exciting note, and while I'm disappointed that it's coming to a close soon, I'm so curious about what's going to happen next.

Rating:

Turkey!-Time to Strike- is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.