Hakozume: Kouban Joshi no Gyakushuu

Hakozume is an anime about a duo of cops that do cops things to let you know that cops are useful, and that would be it. It could sound like a gross simplification, but that is the whole argument. The anime shows a girl that wants to quit her position of a cop in a kouban because she feels disappointed at her job, forgetting the reasons to be a cop in the first place. Then, another cop appears, and shows her, through a completely dull and generic set of occurrences, that cops can save lives, families, the whales, the world, and the aliens. If I ... were paranoid, I would think that the main girl is supposed to be the audience, an audience that have forgotten the importance of cops in modern society and thinks about them as beasts that rob money and applies violence into the populace. And while I live in a complete shithole, so the past definition fits the cops here, I suppose that in Japan it is not the case. So, ignoring the fact that this is an advertisement to get people into the police, is this anime worth to be watched?

I would go with no; this anime is just riddled with an utter lack of creativeness. The dialogues are beyond horrible, they add absolutely no energy, personality, or life to the series, it somehow just explains the line of thought that one can infer from the events that are being shown in screen, in the most agnostic and straight form. One could easily replace the dialogues with a chatbot powered by GPT-3, and that chatbot would give us more humanity to whatever was described here. The abhorrent dialogues just flat the interactions of the criminals and cops, they feel cartoony and preachy, was that the intention? The same lack of creativeness can be found in the diverse set of criminal events that happens through the series, I will do a game here, answer the next questions:

- An underage girl is having compensated dating, have a high body count, and have a new stepfather. Why is the girl like that?
- A grandmother is lonely and do criminal acts to get the attention that she doesn’t get from her family. Which is the solution?
- A person asks the number to a cop. Which is the punchline?

Maybe I’m a disturbed person that have read too much hentai and watched too many detective shows, but the way the anime presents any of the past premises makes the whole experience just a continuous eye-roll. It can’t catch the attention to anyone who have watched more than one cop show in their life, because it doesn’t add anything to the viewer, it is just a portrait of anything you should already know, without characters that add flavor. The problem is that there is no fun in having a set of events with a direct moral direction and a direct cause-consequence that can be easily inferred, the fun exists on the dilemmas, contradictions, argument fights, problems related with how the cop world functions. And that doesn’t exist in Hakozume, the problem of Hakozume is that the intention of the show is nothing but to pander and create a common ground where nothing can be debated, the characters are uncharismatic so you don’t feel alienated by their presence, the events are easy to grab so you don’t get a multidimensional interpretation, the jokes have the same wittiness as your uncle after drinking way too much in a dinner, it just doesn’t try to provoke anything but admiration.

While all those problems exist, there are some good aspects of this show. The colorful palette and crisp designs make you fall easily in a comfort zone, it is just an anime that is easily digestible by the eyes. There are also some interesting intersections between the role of the woman in a male dominated field and their perspective, and most of the events have a moral lesson that can be useful for a person that have never been watched or read anything about it, or to confirm your ideas about it too, confirming your own morals in an anime is really fun!!

In conclusion, the worst aspect of this show is how offensive its unoffensive narrative is. The show is just worth watching if you are either a want to be cop (So you get motivation), a person that is unaware of what a cop is (So you get a solid biased perspective about it), or a cop that is about to retire because the ACAB sentiment is growing strong. In any other case, the anime fails at being funny (Can we get an episode about this anime being arrested for comedy homicide?), interesting, innovative, emotive, surprising, and any other positive adjective that could make it watchable. The main conclusion is, if being a cop in Japan is this boring, why couldn’t they include some non-robotic characters?

Had this been a pure police drama, I would probably be giving this anime an eight or nine right now. During the few times the anime strictly focused on the drama and dropped the jokes, it was quite good, but those times are so few and far between that it just highlighted how bad the rest of the show is.

The problem is that the anime has a bad case of identity crisis. It doesn't know if it wants to be a gag comedy or a serious drama. The anime will go from all out comedy one minute then become knee-jerkingly serious the next. There ... is no build up to the serious scenes and by the end they were even using jokes and gags during the serious parts. Considering the type of crimes and accidents this anime tackles, the jokes make the show seem insincere and juvenile - it felt cowardly, as if the writers and director were too scared to tackle serious crimes or accidents and were hiding behind poorly timed jokes.

The comedy was not very funny; some of the jokes, especially during the later episodes, come in at inappropriate times. Throwing in jokes and gags during episodes that discuss the assault of young girls felt very distasteful. Not only do the jokes take away from the seriousness and tone of the situation, it makes the Japanese police in this anime look incompetent and foolish, especially the protagonist.

By the end, I came to hate the Kawai. All she does the entire show is complain about being a police officer and how hard the job is. It's the police, it's supposed to be a difficult and demanding, selfless job. There is no personal growth in the series at all. She starts out hating her job and wanting to quit and it feels the same at the end as well. She doesn't do much the entire series. Instead, it’s those around her that actually do the heavy lifting. Who wants a superstitious, out of shape cop who is always scared and complains all the time as the protagonist?

Hakozume: Kouban Joshi no Gyakushuu is all over the place. It wants to be a bunch of different things at once; it reminds me of that figure of speech “jack-of-all trades, master of none”. Comedy-dramas are notoriously difficult to pull off as you have to time the dramatic scenes very carefully around the comedy and this one fails miserably.

3/10