Manga / Silver Spoon

Welcome to Hokkaido! ♫

Yugo Hachiken is tired of people asking him about his dreams for the future. He may not know what he wants to be when he grows up, but he has the perfect plan to get ahead in school. Some kids break their backs trying to rise to the top of a tough institution, but Hachiken decides to enroll at a rural vocational and agricultural high school instead.

At Hachiken's new school, the textbooks on real subjects like math and English are all magazine-thin, and his classmates are countrified rubes, most of them the kids of farmers themselves. Sure, the textbooks on animal husbandry and produce are doorstops, but that's just memorization, right? If everything goes according to plan, Hachiken will rocket effortlessly to the top of his class...

There's just one teensy little problem; it hasn't dawned on Hachiken yet that, at an agricultural school, the main focus will be on agriculture... and he was raised in Sapporo and knows little to nothing about farming.

Silver Spoon (銀の匙, Gin no Saji) is a manga by Hiromu Arakawa of Fullmetal Alchemist fame, which ran in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 2011 to 2019. It draws heavily on the author's childhood on a dairy farm in Hokkaido, and puts a new spin on the high school drama formula. (Just try to name another school-days manga in which the hero gets roped into helping chop off a chicken's head within the first chapter).

An anime adaptation by A-1 Pictures aired in Summer 2013, and a second season followed in Winter 2014. A live-action film also came out in 2014.

Both seasons are available for streaming on Crunchyroll, and can be viewed here, for people living in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Central and South America.

For another manga based on agricultural schooling, try Moyashimon. Or if light novels are more to your liking, there's No-Rin.

---

This manga provides examples of:

• Aborted Declaration of Love: A moment between Yugo and Aki almost turns into a confession, but she stops herself, blushing, when she realizes what she was about to say. He seems to urge her to continue, but they naturally get interrupted.
• Adopt the Food: Subverted; When Hachiken declares that he wants to buy Butadon, Fuji-sensei initially thinks he wants to keep Butadon as a pet due to how attatched he's been towards the pig and starts pointing out how that would be impossible for a high-schooled student like him. That's when Hachiken specifies he wants to buy the meat that Butadon will be turned into.
• All Girls Like Ponies: Played with. Aki, love interest of Hachiken, is in the equestrian club. But since the gender ratio is heavily skewed towards males, she's actually outnumbered. She also doesn't love ponies so much as she loves huge draft horses.
• Alliterative Title: The translated title "Silver Spoon".
• All There in the Script: The first names of upperclassmen Okawa, Toyonishi, and Inada were revealed in the anime's cast list. The rest of the Equestrian Club received the same treatment in Season 2's credits.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Said verbatim by Nakajima-sensei after the students get depressed when Alexandra says 20 kilometres is small to her compared to where she comes from.
• Always Someone Better: Hachiken managed be the undisputed top student by getting incredibly high scores on every one of his midterms. Unfortunately for him, in every subject someone always beats him with a perfect 100... even Tokiwa!
• Anal Probing: The technical term when it comes to animals is "Insemination" or "Rectal Exam", and it's an important aspect of good livestock care. Hachiken was unfortunate enough to be picked to administer one, so to speak.
• Anchored Ship: Ultimate ends up becoming an Invoked Trope for a while. A good ways into the story it becomes apparent, to both each other and everyone around them that Hachiken and Aki are attracted to each other. The only reason Hachiken doesn't try to confess sooner is that he made a promise to her dad to help tutor her into getting into college and not distract her with romance.
• And Your Reward Is Edible: The standard reward for exceptional tasks, like participating in the campus clean-up, or winning the inter-school athletic competition, is a Mongolian barbecue.
  • Ooezo High's baseball coach motivates his team to win by promising them dinner. Usually meat (a big deal in Japan, since the lack of arable land makes animal husbandry, and thus meat, fairly expensive), sometimes sushi.
• An Entrepreneur Is You: Yugo is thinking about running his own business after he graduates - and winds up founding Silver Spoon as a student.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Played with when a blushing girl wants to talk to Hachiken outside of class. She wants to buy some bacon from him. Gets a callback with the formation of the Pork Fund, though this time, Hachiken knows the score from the start.
• Anti-Climax: Done deliberately in the "Memory of a Summer" side story (Episode 5). Yugo's roommates engage in an epic, life-risking quest to sneak out of their dormitory at night and catch a glimpse of a mysterious entity spoken of only as "him". The story follows a dramatic "The Rest Shall Pass" pattern, leaving only Yugo and Nishikawa to witness the midnight arrival of...a combine harvester. Of course, anyone who had read even one chapter of this manga knew how all this would end. To rub it in, though, Tamako then reveals that her farm has several of these harvesters, meaning that the guys went through all that trouble for nothing.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Hachiken is asked one by Mikage's father in Episode 3 of Season 2, when he bluntly asks if the two are dating.
• Arranged Marriage: Tokiwa's biggest worry during the summer break is attending omiai (marriage interviews), since he would be taking over his family's farm right after he graduates.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: A light version when Nakajima-sensei reprimands Yugo for not concentrating on his riding lessons.
  Nakajima-sensei: I can't let you ride when you're too caught up in your own thoughts to properly focus. It's dangerous. And it's rude to the horse, as well.
• Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: It's a common saying in Japan to tell someone providing the sole source of aid in a time of need that, if there really is a Buddha, He would look just like that person. The advisor to the equestrian club, who's introduced saving Hachiken from the Holstein club, literally looks like the Buddha. He even prays for the injured while a halo appears behind him.
  • Later subverted. Though he is kind-hearted and often gives out sage advice, he's also a degenerate gambler who has a penchant for abusing the school's cheese-making resources for his own personal stash.
  Nakajima-sensei: If cheese is at stake, I will become an Asura if I must!!
• Bait-and-Switch: Hachiken sees three students in a dark corner, huddled over a magazine and discussing "curves"... the students were part of a club that breeds cows and were looking at the champion cows for last year. (One even yells out "Who needs women when you've got cows!?" as a closing remark while Hachiken declines to join them and leaves)
  • See Anguished Declaration of Love
  • A troupe of scary-looking seniors shows up in Yugo's class, demanding some of his fresh-cured bacon. One of them even sneers, "We don't have any money, so you know what that means, right?" It means they resort to the barter system, exchanging other high quality farm products for the bacon.
  • Just before his turn in the riding competition, Hachiken is nervously telling himself to stay cool. Then, suddenly, he seems to snap, and raises his riding crop to whip his horse.... Only to smack it down on his own leg, admitting that he can't be cool at all, and entrust the outcome to Chestnut, his horse. Chestnut obliges.
• Bears Are Bad News:
  • Played for laughs in the first chapter, when a Beware Of Bears sign in the woods makes our hero so nervous that he mistakes an approaching horse for a bear.
  • Comes back in a later chapter when it's mentioned that bears are in the area, inspiring Aki's great-grandmother to tell a scary story about how a single bear killed several people in their area, back in the pioneer days.

• And then inverted: a brush with Grandpa Mikage and his truck ends up with Yogi on the dining table.
• In a late-series omake panel, it's noted that a cellular service repeater has been installed near the Mikage ranch, resulting in cell service being available for the Mikages and Komabas. As a result, the Komaba twins are given cell phones...because the local government sends out bear alerts via SMS.

• Beautiful All Along Tamako loses a mountain of weight over the summer in chapter 22. Possibly a case of Chekhov's Gun, since there was earlier commentary on what a knockout she would be if you removed the fat from her face and frame.
  • She gains it all back in two chapters, though.
  • The special provides a rather interesting example: Toku is a woman with a Face of a Thug. Turns out, she is very near-sighted and has to squint. She is revealed to be very beautiful, once she puts on glasses.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: The Holstein Club are slightly too enthusiastic about their cows, much to everyone else's discomfort.
  "Who needs women when you've got cows!?"
• The Big Damn Kiss: Hachiken and Mikage finally kiss in chapter 120.
• Big Game: Can the Ooezo High baseball team make it to the Koshien finals with talented freshman pitcher Komaba on the mound? Unfortunately, no. Not this year, anyway.
• Big Eater: Justified. Everyone at Ooezo High puts away food at a rate which would make a short-order cook sweat, but since all the characters are growing teenagers with extremely physical lifestyles (farm work and mandatory sports being the tip of the iceberg), it isn't that strange. The owners of the food stalls at the local festival apparently consider feeding the Ooezo High students their greatest challenge, and treat it with due amounts of ham.
• Bilingual Bonus: The Russian words Yugo rattles off in a blind panic during his first conversation with Aleksandra are two different terms for Soviet collective farms and the Russian names of four islands in the Kuriles that have been disputed territory between Russia and Japan since World War II.
• Bland-Name Product: Geegle.
  • Zapporo Beer.
  • Mr. Pepper soda.
• Blue Blood: Ayame, a childhood friend of Aki, acts like this, though her family only recently became wealthy because the government saw fit to put a highway through her family's farm.
• Boarding School: A rare Japanese example.
• Book Dumb: Keiji, and he seems to be proud of it. However, when it comes to practical farming subjects like Animal Husbandry and Produce, he excels.
• Book Ends: The first chapter begins with Yugo who arrives on the first day of school ends up in the middle of nowhere, The Final chapter begins with Yugo who is supposed to arrive on Komaba’s farm in Russia ends up in the middle of nowhere
• Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: Aki's father does not approve of Hachiken, and does not want him taking his little girl away.
  • In chapter 63, Hachiken starts to understand what Aki's father meant after being asked to name a female calf he helped deliver.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: The catalog of research projects at Ooezo includes such things as free-range chicken breading, creating cheesecakes for sale, and processing vermin meat.
  • Some of the ingredients the boys put into their Mystery Stew while cleaning out their rooms to move out of the dorms. Tokiwa's Men's Bath Yogurt isn't even the worst of it!
• Breather Episode: After the school festival and the regional baseball tournament (followed by Komaba's disappearance after the team loses), Nakajima-sensei recruits Hachiken, Mikage, and others to help make cheese. It's almost meditative with Nakajima-sensei's slow, deliberate explanations. Subverted by the end of the same manga chapter when it returns to the question of Komaba's disappearance.
• Brick Joke: After successfully asking Aki for a 'date' right before the school festival, Yugo talked to Nishikawa about places to take Aki for a date and mentioned that they would end up in the racetrack if they were to go where Aki wants to go. Fast-forward to the end of the school-year...guess where Aki and Yugo went when Yugo offered to treat her to anything she wanted...
  • About 90 chapters after Yugo had come to terms with the fact that eggs come out of a hen's anus, Okawa-senpai called him an 'Anus Hater' out of the blue.
  • In the first episode, Tamako mentions that the happy picture on food labels is nothing like the real unhappy farm animals. In the last episode, when Yugo's mother shows up to school, they say "it's reassuring to meet you, to know that Yugo comes from a good place. Just like the label on food."
• Butt-Monkey: Keiji. He tends to get extra mandatory labor sentences, a school punishment worse (in the short term) than suspension. Most infamously, he mistakenly spread a rumor that Hachiken had gotten Mayumi pregnant after overhearing them discussing responsibilities (they were really talking about "taking responsibility" for a pig).
• Call-Back: A racy pillow Nishikawa bought in Tokyo over the summer break returns in A Memory of Summer, being used to prop up a shirt for some reason.
  • There's a competition in the festival called the "Escape From the Dorms Race".
• Call to Agriculture: Despite his obvious genius and potential to choose any of several life paths, Hachiken seems to be hearing the call more and more as the series goes on. It's good news for Aki's female relatives, anyway!
• Can't Catch Up: Hachiken feels this way during Episode 3 of Season 2, when he fails to jump the small fence on horseback, but the other club members do it effortlessly. When they talk about it amongst themselves, he suffers from some FlashBacks of seemingly falling behind other students in school.
• Cast of Snowflakes: As in her previous works, the variety of faces Arakawa can draw from such an uncluttered style is quite astonishing, not including the expies.
• Citizenship Marriage: Alexandra, Hachiken's Russian sister in law.
• City Mouse: Hachiken (he's from Sapporo).
• Cliffhanger: Hachiken collapses the morning of the school festival at the end of Episode 5.
• Combination Attack: The epic asskicking delivered by Ichiro, Aikawa, and Nishikawa to a watermelon thief. On second thought, only Aikawa did the actual asskicking...the other two used more devastating attacks.
  • Keiji was later the rightful recipient of another combo, attacked by almost all the girls in their class to allow Yugo and Aki to go on their "date" unmolested.
• The Comically Serious: As can be seen in this article's picture, with Yugo pressing a calf's head down who is trying to eat his shirt while maintaining a stern look toward the viewer and only Cross-Popping Veins on his hand to imply his actual emotion about the situation.
• Computer Equals Monitor: A variant of this with a cellphone is subverted when Yugo breaks Shingo's cellphone in half at the hinge. Yugo wanted to keep him from sending an embarrassing photo to their mother, but Shingo isn't too worried because the part the memory was stored in wasn't damaged. Then Ayame's horse shatters the thing to bits.
• Continuity Nod: The crack on the left lens of Yugo's glasses, acquired during his fall in the competition.
• Cool Horse: Almost every horse featured.
  • Subverted to an extent, since the school pretty much only owns reject horses due to them being a lot cheaper than ones fit for their original use.
• Crazy-Prepared: Hachiken took such detailed and thorough notes during the school festival preparations that the rest of the students are able to follow his advice in it to pull off the festival without him there.
• Credits Running Sequence: Hachiken does one in the first opening, along with some farm animals that slowly overtake his slow pace.
• Cruel to Be Kind: Hachiken is initially disgusted at some of the things farmers do, such as separating a newborn calf from its mother the moment it's born. However, they tell him that they do that because if the animals grow a bond, separating them later on becomes even more difficult, so it's best to do it before one can be established. Tamako also headlocks a baby calf to force feed it, because it's unfamiliar with a bottle, and will starve if it's not trained to suckle one. They also warn him not to bond with animals too closely, as they are often butchered after a short while, such as the piglets.
• Crush Blush
• Cuteness Proximity: Everybody upon encountering the piglets.
  • And Hachiken's stray dog.
• Death Glare: Do NOT try to eat Aki's great-grandmother's food.
  • For that matter, don't get between Nakajima-sensei and his need to gamble... or make cheese. Heaven help you if you've been anywhere near natto for the latter.
• Description Cut: As the boys decided to run back to school from the stadium instead of taking the bus...
  Aki: Hachiken-kun! We still have to take care of the horses tonight, so make sure to save some energy!
  Yugo: Roger!
  [Two panels later...at the Equestrian Club:]
  Tokiwa: Good afternoon. We've got a delivery for you. [Tokiwa and Nishikawa are carrying Yugo trussed to a spit.]
  Nishikawa: [deadpan] He died on the way back.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: The main theme of the series, particularly in Hachiken's case.
• Dissonant Serenity: Played for Laughs, numerous characters are not above (attempting to) inflict grievous bodily harm on Hachiken—as he unintentionally rubs his budding relationship with Mikage in their faces—with very blank smiles.
• Double Entendre: During a quiet moment on their visit to Giga Farm, Mikage tells Hachiken about how he reminds her of a horse. This leaves the latter puzzled, but when he tells the Inada family about it, the mother and father give this reply:
  Mr. Inada: "Maybe she's hungry for horse meat?"
  Mrs. Inada: "Oh my!♡"
• Down on the Farm: Hokkaido is the Japanese equivalent of this region. It shows.
• Down to the Last Play: It's the Big Game, and Ooezo High is up against the local champions for the chance to go on to the finals! Bottom of the ninth! Bases loaded! The toughest batter on the team is at the plate! And freshman wunderkind Komaba is pitching! The batter gets a hit on the first pitch and wins the game, shattering Ooezo's chances and Komaba's self-esteem.
• Downer Ending: Played for laughs in one chapter, a porn site ends up popping up on peoples computers and the principal gets wind of it. Since it's well, porn, the males of the school are blamed and given an ultimatum of the culprit to step forward or all of them will be punished. They all accuse each other of doing the act but no one confesses. As a result they're barred from a party they had been planning, allowing the girls to enjoy it. At the end, it turns out none of the boys were the culprit, because the site was generated by a trojan virus caught from a website one of the teachers had went to. Of course by that point it was too late to do anything about it and the teacher decides to just quietly not mention it.
• Drama Bomb: The later Autumn/early Winter chapters or the 8th and 9th episode of the second season serves as this, when Komaba's Ranch went under and Hachiken and Aki had to witness the depressing consequences, Aki reaches a turning point in her life when she finally found the courage to stand up to her parents and convice the to allow her to pursue her dreams of working with horses.
• Dramatic Drop: Every time Aki gets hit with a Heroic BSoD, something seems to hit the floor.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: The man in charge of the rotation Hachiken is on gives Hachiken this impression (the man isn't that terrible, but Hachiken has a few dramatic Imagine Spots...). His jacket having a camo-pattern probably doesn't help Hachiken's opinion of him.
  • Deconstructed for laughs in chapter 46. The junior students of the equestrian club ask an upperclassman for advice for their upcoming match. He ends up giving them a sadistic lecture which amounts to how they'll be useless without their horses. Naturally, they end up having a collective Heroic BSoD. Their club adviser manages to salvage the situation with a few kind words. Later reconstructed when the lecture's contents are what Hachiken needs to be able to compete.
• Elaborate University High: Less egregious than most examples, considering the curriculum, and a few lampshades are hung, but still, a high school with a fully equipped genetics lab?
  • It's been mentioned early in the manga that the school is attached to or affiliated with a nearby agricultural university.
  • Said university winds up being a major plot point in the Tale of Four Seasons, as Mikage, Aikawa, and in a late move Hachiken look to be admitted to it (and all of them make it in.)
• Everyone Can See It: Yugo and Aki's mutual feelings aren't exactly a secret around school, or anywhere else for that matter. They do seem to realize it themselves (Yugo at least), but there is the issue of Aki's dad.
• Expo Speak Gag: Shinichiro goes off on one of these to Hachiken about additives when Hachiken notices the smoked chicken Shinichiro gave him tastes different.
• Extreme Omni Cow: That calf refuses to leave Hachiken's clothes alone.
• Eyes Always Shut: Shinnosuke.
• Face Fault: Hachiken does one in Episode 10 when Keiji asks a monumentally stupid question.
• Fish out of Water: Hachiken is a City Mouse, and is completely bewildered by how physically demanding farm work can be. Contrast that to his classmates, who all grew up on farms, and don't think of getting up before the sun rises as unusual at all.
• Food as Bribe: Tamako tells the crew pulling her sled in Episode 6 of Season 2 that she would give them a lot of meal tickets in the lunchroom if they win. Later, they use Nakajima-sensei's secret cheese stash as the prize, causing many others to volunteer and race as well.
• Food Porn: When the pizza is completed...dear GOD!
  • In the author's extra manga about the drawing process, she mentions that the assistant who is in charge of drawing the food in the manga pretty much deprives herself of food during drawing sessions, so as to make the food look more delicious on paper. It's kind of like drawing pretty girls when you're single (according to the author).
• Forcibly Formed Physique: After betting what little money Hachiken and friends have left after their student project on a horse race, Shin'ei Okawa gets kicked in the face so hard his face caves in. Moreover, he's still like this several panels later, and is even shown drinking via a straw through the crater in his face. This is especially notable as Silver Spoon is fairly down-to-earth as manga go, and rarely deals in these kind of gags.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In chapter 23, Komaba scolds Tokiwa telling him he may not be able to graduate, and then Hachiken reassures him, saying he'll help Tokiwa so they can all graduate together. Heartbreaking when you realize that it's actually Komaba that won't be able to graduate, not Tokiwa.
  • The Curse of the Colonel is apparently a very real thing. Cue another major baseball upset...
  • Early in the manga and Episode 6 of the anime, Hachiken finds himself in the unenviable position of being forced to swing at Komaba's pitching. Through sheer luck, he manages to hit a ball. It's just a pop fly to the pitcher, but it shows that for all his skill, Komaba is hardly invincible. Later, during a vital game, someone gets a much bigger hit, to devastating effect.
• From Bad to Worse: Hachiken really found walking up at five in the morning every day for his rotation's week that month to be uncomfortable. Then he found out he had to join a club, so he joined the equestrian club because he's not a sports person, and then learned the club would have to wake up at four in the morning daily to care for the horses.
  • One favour owed by Hachiken eventually turned into many down the road, which were all called in at the same time before the Cultural Festival.
• Funny Background Event: Tamako. In chapter 2, Tamako pulls a surprising jump in her ping-pong match. Later in that chapter, despite being so overweight her body-shape is compared to an egg, she is shown being being blown away into the wind while holding onto a canvas everyone is trying to tie down lampshaded by Tokiwa). Three chapters later she's seen entering a bet at the horse races. She's also seen eating in every stall during the summer festival, and chomped on a whole slab of bacon belonging to Hachiken without him noticing.
  • In chapter 52, while Nishikawa talks with Hachiken about where he should go for his date, the 2D girls in the Dating Sim he's playing actually say lines that match the conversation.
• Genre Savvy: In chapter 11, Yugo proves that he can be quite savvy when he feels like it!
  Aki: Well, if you don't have anywhere to go, why don't you come stay at my place? My parents are both going to be gone.
  Yugo: "Stay at my place? Parents both gone?" [strikes poses of joy...then pauses] And later I'm supposed to discover the twist that your grand-parents will be there or something, right?!
  Aki: [puzzled] Yeah, they'll be there.
  Yugo: [thinks] Alright! Unnecessary shock evaded! I'm getting the hang of this!
• Goal in Life: Hachiken feels like the only student who doesn't have one.
• Gonk: Tamako, though subverted with a tasteful touch of She Cleans Up Nicely — the boys are shocked to realize that if you ignore her weight, Tamako is gorgeous. Put simply, Tamako has an egg-shaped body but the face of a super-model. And now, after returning to school and losing her weight... HOT DAMN.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Used rather tastefully when Hachiken was asked by Aki's grandfather to butcher a deer.
  • Inada-senpai cutting a fluttering chicken's head off in Chapter 1.
  • Bacon-san's graduation in Yezo Animal Husbandry University left no details spared!
• Groin Attack: Early in the anime's first episode, Hachiken gets one from the calf.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat: Tamako engages in a brief one with her parents during Episode 7 when she reveals her plans to takeover her parent's farming business in a hostile manner upon graduation from college, rather than succeeding them after they retire.
• Held Back in School: Subverted when Okawa-senpai unsuccessfully tried to invoke this and refuse graduation to avoid becoming a NEET. The principal's and Todoroki-sensei's actions implied that this had happened before.
• Heroic BSoD: Aki had one when she heard rumours of Yugo×Mayumi. Also when she mistakes a classmate's interest in buying some bacon from Hachiken for a love confession.
  • A different sort of BSOD hit Aki when she was introduced to Nishikawa's artistic handiwork.
  • Yugo had one when he saw chickens getting beheaded. At least he didn't faint like Aikawa.
  • Also happened to Yugo when Aki told him her problems were none of his business.
  • A more serious one happened when Yugo failed at jumping the obstacles in riding practice, while the other students were able to do it easily. It hit Yugo especially hard because it reminded him of his failures in middle school, and he got so desperate that Aki had to snap him out of it.
  • Nakajima-sensei after his cheese stash were given away as prizes for the draft race by Toyonishi-senpai during autumn festival.
  • Hachiken suffers another one after his father sees him in the hospital during Episode 6 of Season 2. More specifically, he still doesn't approve of his son being at that school, although his Wham Line of telling the poor kid that he never mentioned liking the bacon Hachiken sent home hit him pretty hard.
  • Almost everyone gets one whenever Tokiwa casually suggest very practical and useful solution to a problem.
• High School: The agricultural boarding-school kind.
• Honorable Marriage Proposal:
  • Due to Hachiken getting too friendly with the pigs who are going to be slaughtered for meat, they're getting too used to humans. One of the students, Yoshino, gets mad at him, and demand he make it up to her if she can't eat pork after this. Hachiken promises to "take responsibility"...which is the point when Tokiwa wanders by. The rumor that Hachiken got Yoshino pregnant spreads around the school, and of course those two only find out when they get dragged into the teacher's office, and everything is made clear.
    Hachiken: She was talking about a pig, you moron, a pig!
    Tokiwa: Huh? Hachiken, you got a pig pregnant?
    Yoshino: Hachiken, I think you can hit him now!
  • When Mikage tells her parents that she wants to get into an illustrious horse college despite her poor grades, Hachiken tells her family he'll take responsibility if she fails. While her mother and grandmother are ecstatic about the idea (and her father tries to throw a table at him), what he was trying to say is that he's planning to tutor her, so it will be his fault if she fails.
• Hope Spot: In Episode 6, Hachiken's father visits him in the hospital, and doesn't hold back his criticism of the school and his homeroom teacher of allowing him to collapse from exhaustion in the first place. As he's leaving, Hachiken attempts to find at least one good thing regarding him being there, and mentions the bacon he sent home. His father does remember eating it, bringing a smile to his face, only to then say he never claimed to like it, causing his son to fall into a Heroic BSoD.
• Hot Teacher: Fuji-sensei, the teacher in charge of pigs, has a general Amazon appeal and the face of a supermodel. Seriously.
• Hypocritical Humor: Students trying to sneak out of school consider the teachers "rotten" for installing security cameras like they don't trust the students. It happens in Chapter 30 of the manga.
• I Ate WHAT?!: Hachiken is less than enthused about eating eggs after Keiji explains the concept of a cloaca.
  Keiji: Stop saying anus!
• Imagine Spot: Hachiken is prone to these from time to time, such as when he imagines a horse biting his hand off after offering it a carrot.
• Inconsistent Spelling: Yezo/Ooezo/Ezo High School/University. It's worth noting that the official Yen Press translation wavers between the latter two translations.
• Innocent Innuendo: When Yugo innocently mentions "the young cow's udders that will keep getting bigger" while looking in Aki's direction. Her father misunderstands a bit...
  • And Tokiwa misinterpreting Hachiken's declaration to take responsibility for what he did to Yoshino (during a discussion of how the drama over his pet pig had ruined her taste for pork) got way out of hand.
• Insistent Terminology: The running gag of Hachiken referring to the cloaca as an anus.
• Inspirational Insult: Ichiro, at several points after his family farm went bankrupt, continues to remember Ayame calling him out on his character after it happened, which leads him to keep practicing his pitch, be more sociable with old friends, and finally moving out of the countryside to find better work elsewhere.
• Insult to Rocks: It is pointed out to Mikage and Yugo that, as a percentage of their total body mass, pigs have less fat (15%) than humans (10-20% for men, 20-30% for women), which makes Yugo sadly realize that when he called one of his teammates a pig he was insulting pigs.
• It Can't Be Helped: Yugo does not like this excuse. At all. Especially regarding Komaba dropping out to start working and giving up on his dreams.
• Last Episode, New Character: Hachiken's parents are seen briefly at the end of Episode 11 receiving Yugo's bacon, after being only referred to most of the first season of the anime.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Hachiken did not go to the National Equestrian Tournament at Gotenba and did not rack up 255 demerit points right out of the gate. He had a very productive summer where nothing like that happened.
• Lethal Chef: Yugo's older brother Shingo. Has become a bit of a legend, being the only person in recent memory able to stop the hoards of hungry Yezo students from consuming all food at the local festival. The only one who can eat his food is Aki's great-grandmother, because she's had worse.
• Loophole Abuse: Near the end of summer, Aki's grandfather gave 'hints' to Yugo on how good raw milk is...despite a law mandating that all milk slated to be sold are to be pasteurized.
• Love Epiphany: Mikage finally starts to think about Hachiken in that way during Episode 5 of Season 2, after several of the girls around her paint the obvious for her, such as the way he asked her out, and wanted to spend time with just her alone. It understandably makes her uneasy as she wonders how she'll act around him.
• Love Revelation Epiphany: Mikage freezes in place when she thinks someone's about to confess to Hachiken but still doesn't realize she likes him. Then he asks her to go out, just the two of them, and her friends spell out the meaning of this in no uncertain terms. Afterward she finds herself blushing in bed and wondering just how she should act around him now that she realizes this.
• Made Myself Sad: When rumors pop up of Hachiken and Yoshino being in a sexual relationship (which against school regulations) that the school counselor calls them up to his office to address, Hachiken fervently declares it untrue because his schedule couldn't possibly give him time for it after which he quickly and quietly realizes "Although, saying it like that makes me a bit sad".
• Manly Tears: Hachiken, at every opportunity a City Mouse can get, and lampshaded at least once.
• Marshmallow Hell: Vice President experiences this when Alexandra makes her appearance and is shown around the farm.
• Master of None: Hachiken is rather upset to find out that although he has the best grades overall (apparently by a pretty significant margin) he's not the best in any single subject.
• Meaningful Name: The title can be seen as a reference to the English expression of "being born with a silver spoon in one's mouth", which means being born into wealth and prosperity.
  • Pretty much confirmed by Aki's grandfather's (spot-on) assumption that Yugo and Shingo only ate high-quality food when they lived with their parents.
  • Brought up again in chapter 63. Mayumi explained that the silver spoon in the cafeteria represents the belief that those who study farming will, at least, never suffer from hunger. Then we get the news of the Komabas' bankruptcy...
• Miniature Senior Citizens: Aki's great-grandmother, who is 107. That means she was born in the Meiji Period (1868-1912)!
• Moe Personification - Done for varieties of potatos by Nishikawa in volume 12 of the manga.
• Moment Killer: Almost averted when the girls prevented Keiji from becoming a third leg on Aki and Yugo's "date" at the shrine. Unfortunately, the rest of the Equestrian Club didn't seem to have gotten the message.
  • Played utterly straight when Aki's accidental Love Confession is cut off short by an upperclassman barging into the barn.
  • Played for laughs on Hachiken. When he attempts to tell Aki how he feels, both Kino and Maruyama stop him by suplexing him into the snow. Or an animal interrupts him if no people are around.
  • Hachiken's own father in chapter 109. He was only looking for the way out of Yezo and came upon his son and Mikage by chance.
• Mood Whiplash: So. Freaking. Much. Typically, almost every funny or heartwarming moment involving animals is followed by a discussion about killing or butchering them.
  • In "Autumn 21", just when Hachiken finally catches a break by making a date with Mikage, he passes out from overworked exhaustion.
  • Chapter 63 (Autumn 32). A lighthearted reflection of the past 6 months is broken by the revelation of Komaba's family going bankrupt.
  • Played for laughs with the fact that anytime everything winds down and some of the student body feels good about an oncoming break, Yamada is always around to drop a bombshell like the prospect of getting a girlfriend.
  • Episode 7 of Season 2 has one near the end. Ooezo lost their semi-finals baseball match. While the other students are talking about trying again next year, they notice Komamba's desk has been vacant for a while. The cheerful ending song starts to play right afterwards.
  • The first half of Episode 8 is almost like a Breather Episode, with several students learning how to make cheese. Then the second half covers Komaba dropping out to start working to repay the debt his family owes on their farm.
  • A minor one in Chapter 98 has Yoshino traveling to France for two weeks to study abroad. She thinks she'll get to work on her cheese-making skills, but the host school is an aquaculture farm, and she winds up caring for and feeding fish for the entire time. She does view the experience as positive, as she got to taste different cheeses at each and every meal she ate, so it gave her some basis for taste comparisons.
• Mum Looks Like a Sister: Tamako's mom got mistaken for her sister when Hachiken and Aki met her.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Hilariously common.
  • Hachiken and Nishikawa get a little too worked up over the power of the tractor the latter drives, even comparing it to a Humongous Mecha.
    "It can turn in a radius of only 4.5cm and it's got a top speed of 33 kph!"
  • And all that effort to escape the dorms just to see a gigantic combine harvester in action.
  • Hot-blooded pizza preparations.
  • Tamako vs. Komaba at ping-pong.
  • Hachiken bursts into tears after eating an egg and proclaiming it delicious, while exclaiming that it's amazing how chickens can shit out something so tasty. He had been having misgivings about ever eating eggs again, due to having the concept of a chicken's cloaca explained to him.
  • At a summer festival, the concession-booth proprietors and the students taunt each other over who will triumph this year, followed by a page that shows both sides jumping at each other in poses that would be fit for an action comic.
  • Nishikawa's personal digital catalog of potato cultivars includes Moe personifications of each variety. That's right, Nishikawa manages to make potatoes look downright adorable.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Hachiken forgetting to connect the milk pipes to the holding tank, literally causing milk to spill at the end of his summer job. After calculating how much the milk would have sold for and how much was invested in producing the milk, Hachiken unsuccessfully tried to refuse his paycheck.
• Mysterious Teacher's Lounge: Ironically, the student dorms becomes this during the New Year's vacation, since all of the students are usually away with their families, except Hachiken.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Aki's great-grandmother whenever she starts talking about the good ol' days.
• Nice Guy: Yugo, aka "The Man Who Won't Say No".
• No Animals Were Harmed: Averted, in-universe, within the first chapter. This is not your momma's Arcadia, boy — those chickens are for eatin'.
  • Averted again when Aki's grandpa roadkills a deer. Sucks to be you, Bambi! The Mikage and Komaba families are having venison for dinner!
    • The return trip doesn't fare well for ol' Yogi.
  • A series of chapters were focused on Butadon's (Pork Bowl's) eventual fate.
• No Dead Body Poops: Averted and discussed; the day before the pigs at the school are sent to the slaughterhouse, their food supply is cut off. Fuji-sensei explains that this done to purge their digestive systems of waste so the slaughterhouses can be as hygienic as possible.
• Noblewoman's Laugh: Ayame, constantly.
• No One Else Is That Dumb: After Keiji gets a bizarre makeover during summer vacation, Yugo identifies him by asking what 1+1 equals. (His answer is, of course, 3.)
• Not What It Looks Like: When Hachiken first sees Mikage in Episode 6 of Season 2 after returning from the hospital, the first thing she does is to turn away from him. He immediately starts imagining bad things, but in reality she's happy that he's okay, but couldn't find the words to tell him at that moment.
• Ocular Gushers: Hachiken, after eating a chicken's egg in Chapter 2 (It Makes Sense in Context, see Mundane Made Awesome above).
  • Also Tokiwa, after he "got a good score" on his math test in Chapter 3 - except the score was still terrible, just better than he'd ever done in his life.
• Oh, Crap!: Hachiken has this look in Episode 6 of Season 2 when his father shows up at the hospital he's at. Even his hospital roommate feels extremely uncomfortable while he's in the room with Hachiken.
• Older Than They Look: Tamako's mother. To the point that Yūgo and Aki mistake her for Tamako's sister.
  • And apparently, Alexandra (Yugo's sister-in-law) given the fact that she remembers the fall of the Soviet Union...
• Out-of-Context Eavesdropping: Tokiwa overhears Hachiken and Yoshino talking about "taking responsibility" and starts a rumor about them having a sexual relationship. They were talking about raising a pig.
• Perpetual Frowner: Hachiken rarely smiles. Komaba even less so.
• Perpetual Smiler: In contrast to Aki, who is always smiling (though she fakes it when "necessary").
• A Pig Named "Porkchop": Hachiken got attached to a piglet, which he named Pork Bowl (with suggestions from his friends since the pig will be raised for meat and slaughtered eventually...). He later did the same with a bunch of other piglets (much to his friends' dismay).
• Precision F-Strike: After 116 chapters with little to no hard profanity, Hachiken, Beppu, and Tamako have this reaction to the new that Okawa just bet all their pizza earnings on the next horse race:
  '''ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!?"
• Punny Name: Tamako, whose name sounds like "tamago" (egg).
• Raging Stiffie: Implied when Hachiken and his roommates are in the bath and contemplate the girls' bath being directly above them. The next group of bathers yells at them to leave, but Hachiken's group refuses to stand up out of the water.
• Real-Place Background: Ooezo High is based on a real school, and there are enough clues all over the manga (starting from Chapter 1) to figure out where all this is happening.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Applies to most of the teachers.
• Relax-o-Vision: In chapter 87, after Nishikawa tricked Okawa to try a potentially lethal pot of borscht which the other students in the dormitory were hesitant to do so because they were unsure whether it was cooked by Hachiken's brother or his wife Alexandra, the next panel was blacked out with an icon of a pig head adorning the middle. And then it is revealed the borscht was indeed lethal, with Okawa passed out over a bench!
• The Rest Shall Pass: Parodied in chapters 30-31.
• Reused Character Design: Compare the cast of Silver Spoon and Fullmetal Alchemist and you'll start seeing familiar faces; for the most part though the main character designs for one are used as the supporting/background designs for the other. There is absolutely zero design difference between the P.E. Teacher and Major Armstrong.
• The Rival: The inter-school competitions between the Industrial School and the Agricultural School are Serious Business. Outside the competitions, the two student bodies get along just fine, though.
  • Ayame thinks of herself as Aki's rival in horse competitions, Aki herself doesn't really notice.
• Running Gag: Whenever someone uses a large unit of measurement (such as hectares), Hachiken will ask how many Sapporo Domes that is. They won't know, but will hazard an answer that doesn't really help Hachiken.
  • Various characters wondering if someone is "Speaking in Tongues" when overhearing conversations that take place outside their expertise such as Hachiken not understanding farmers talking about college level biotechnology.
  • Apparently, Crab Fishing is a great way to make money.
  • After he starts tutoring Aki, Hachiken gets abused by jealous boys whenever he offhandedly brings it up.
  • Hachiken and his roommates are going to stay in that bathtub until the cows come home. See Raging Stiffie above.
  • Nishikawa's 'great ideas'.
• Scary Shiny Glasses: Hachiken, often, though not scary at all.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Ayame goes about this when she buys luck charms at a local mountain shrine. When she means she'll take one, she literally means she'll take one entire box.
• Self-Deprecation: Yugo's advice on knowing your limits involves going to hospital.
• Settling the Frontier: Discussed — Mikage's great-grandmother tells stories of the time when the Japanese settled Hokkaido. Wild animals (bears) and natives (Ainu) appear.
• Serious Business: Pizza. Most of the students, being from farm families, have always been out of pizza delivery range, and only ever had pizza maybe once or twice, if at all (deliveries to the school are also forbidden). So when Hachiken finds a brick oven, he spends days researching everything needed to make pizza, and goes all over the school looking for ingredients. He eventually gets the entire school involved in his pizza party schemes.
  • And sometime after that, establishing who gets final authority over the oven (and future pizza-making) turns quickly into a heated argument between members of the different courses in school.
• Share the Male Pain: Invoked whenever castration is mentioned.
  • On the topic of rectal exams:
  Yachiyo-sensei: If you were a cow, would you want some beginner feeling around your rear end?
  All the boys: No way! I don't care if it's a beginner or a professional!
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Hachiken claims this in Episode 3 of Season 2 when Mikage's father asks if they're dating.
• Shout-Out: The manga contains quite a bit.
  • When Mikage is first introduced, she's shown as a shady figure riding a angry-looking horse. Hachiken's first thought is "The conqueror of the century's end!!?", an impression which has stuck with said horse^note appropriately named "Black King" ever since. It also appears during some of Yugo's imagine spots about some thugs stealing Butadon's meat.
  • A straw hat that one of the students picks up while cleaning up trash looks suspiciously familiar. The striped boxers (and mushrooms) from the same scene are also an Iconic Item from Leiji Matsumoto's Rōnin series Otoko Oidon.
  • In the very same scene, Yūgo finds a statue of Colonel Sanders amid the trash. He doesn't take it home with him though.
  • Yoshino uses The Rose of Versailles to study French.
  • The manner in which Beppu disables a dorm security camera with a lump of pizza dough during the "Area 51" segment is reminiscent of the Rasengan.
  • During Nishikawa and Hachiken's dialogue on farm machinery and taking up engineering in college, the former mentions wanting to make a Beam Saber to till the fields with.
  • When Mikage's grandfather mentions the Mori Girl and Yama Girl fashion trends during Hachiken's first attempt in butchering a dead animal, the latter mistakes them both for Princess Mononoke.
  • When Hachiken and Mikage ask Nishikawa to help refurbish and decorate their Ban'ei horse sleds, the result is a large "NPK48" poster mounted on one side.^note The "NPK" stands for Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium, the three key elements in fertilizer.
  • Nishikawa himself is one big Shout-Out to fellow Weekly Shounen Sunday series The World God Only Knows, right down to his love of Visual Novels and Manipulative Bastard tendencies. And not to be outdone, Hachiken also manages to channel Keima Katsuragi in order to keep Aki from being sexually harassed by a student from another school...with Nishikawa's help, no less.
    Hachiken: "He who controls the knowledge controls the world!"
  • In a meta example, the live-action adaptation of the manga was referred to when a teacher mentioned that a TV drama filmed in Yezo U caused the number of applications to that university to skyrocket.
  • this stance◊ of eating chiken seems awfully familiar.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • Aki's mother seems to have found a potential son-in-law in Yugo. Her father, on the other hand, loudly declares his disapproval at every opportunity.
  • Mika Toyonishi of the Equestrian Club boards the Yugo × Aki ship right after summer vacation. Eventually joined by most of the girls in their social circle. They even taken to shipping Yuko x Aki to a more direct and physical level evident in the way they tackled (or more precisely, brutally assaulted) Keiji when he was about to ruin their first date.
  • Most of Aki's and Yugo's friends have practically boarded the Yugo x Aki ship, actively trying to get them together, though both of them are rather clueless of their friends' efforts and motives. Witness the girls' "mission" to deliver Aki's Valentine's Day chocolate to Yugo.
  • Aki and Yugo's friends have seemingly become more aggressive shipping the couple in their second year. Sakae has even roped in the newest member of the Equestrian Club, a small female Freshman, to help. They're no longer even trying to hide the fact that all of them think Aki and Yugo are should end up together.
  • Sakae eventually dumps any and pretense of subtlety and shouts at them to, "JUST BANG ALREADY!"
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Tamako and Shinichiro Inada.
  • Hachiken and his brother, Shingo.
• Sick Episode: Hachiken collapses right before the school festival in Episode 6. While he's not technically sick, he is bedridden for the whole day at the hospital.
• The Simple Life is Simple: What drove Hachiken to sign up. Eh...no. The manga, in fact, gives an insight into the enormous breadth of knowledge and physical endurance necessary, even in a modern, mechanised farm setting.
• Skewed Priorities: A running gag that the students (apart from Hachiken) tend to focus heavily on the agricultural side of things. When they get a computer virus that manifests as cartoon pigs having babies, they proceed to criticize how it misrepresents the actual breeding habits of pigs.
  Yugo: You got a virus and that's what you complain about?
  • When watching a movie about a man-eating minotaur, the students focus on the fact a minotaur's cow head would have the teeth of a herbivore and complain about how unrealistic the movie is.
• Snow Means Love: It starts snowing as Yugo and Aki finally have their first kiss.
• Spit Take: Yugo appears to do this in chapter 89 when Aki casually mentions he asked her to make him chocolate because she didn't realize it was almost Valentine's Day. We didn't see him drinking anything before and the following pages make it clear it was actually spitting out his own blood.
• Spoiler Opening: The opening of Cour 2 shows Vice Prez, Ayame, and if you're observant or have seen the manga before, the fact that Ichiro is not in school uniform and is standing with the school staff instead of the students.
• Squeamish About Slaughter: One of the realities that Yugo Hachiken has to accept when he decides to attend to an agricultural-vocational high school is that the animals used for the practicums are sometimes slaughtered for meat. The first time he encounters this is when a third-year student nonchalantly beheads a chicken right in front of him in order to make smoked chicken as thanks for Hachiken's practicum group helping him catch all the meat chickens that got loose. Then Hachiken gets quickly attached to a runt pig he names Butadon despite knowing that he's destined for the slaughterhouse once he's three months old. The first sign that he's accepting this reality is when he's staying with Aki's during summer break, her grandfather accidentally kills a deer while driving his truck and he asks him to show him how to butcher it. Another sign that he accepts this reality is when he decides to buy the meat that Butadon will be turned into.
• Stepping Out for a Quick Cup of Coffee: After having tasted everything else grown on the Mikage farm fresh, Yugo asks to try fresh milk. Grandpa Mikage pointedly tells Yugo that it is forbidden to sell unpasteurized dairy products, after which he happens to mention that if someone were to sneak a sip from the bulk cooler while he... steps outside... he can hardly be held responsible.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Tamako has her mother's face and father's rotund shape.
  • In the backstory special, "Hachi" is a near carbon copy of Hachiken.
• Southern-Fried Genius: Despite the Ooezo High students' country bumpkin background and typically poor performance in traditional academics, many of them are prone to going into lengthy, university-level discussions on such subjects as the mechanical specs of farm equipment, food processing chemistry, and biotechnology.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: This hits home rather hard in Episode 8 of Season 2, after Hachiken finds out why Komaba has been missing classes for a week. Due to his team losing in the semi-finals, his chances of becoming a professional baseball player went down the drain. To make matters worse, his father died shortly after expanding their farm, the Mikage family co-signed the loan for them, and the debt is so big that he feels he has no choice but to drop out of school and start working to avoid burdening Aki's family. Hachiken being Hachiken, he refuses to believe that there's nothing that can be done, but practically everyone around him tell him not to worry about it, and farms go out of business all the time. He also hates that they probably are boiling up inside, but seem unable or unwilling to help each other out here and instead seem to accept their lot in life.
• Sustained Misunderstanding:
  • See Out-of-Context Eavesdropping for the first example.
  • Happens again in Episode 3 of Season 2, this time with Mikage. This time however, Hachiken is right behind him to immediately clear up any misunderstandings Tokiwa may have with the two.
• Take a Third Option: When Hachiken is asked an Armor-Piercing Question by Mikage's father if they're dating, he runs two scenarios in his head. Both options cause him to get a Mega Ton Punch, so he skirts it by claiming he admires her as a person due to all the things she's done for him, such as finding him when he got lost at the beginning, and inviting him to the equestrian club.
• Team Pet: Yugo finds a stray dog that is soon adopted by everyone. He personally takes responsibility for it, of course.
• Tears of Blood: Played for laughs, when Hachiken cries these over Shingo's cavalier attitude towards education.
• Time Skip: More like a Time Fast-Forward, in which the Four Seasons Arc covers Yugo's entire second year of school and then some in one arc. Compare this to the previous four arcs, which cover one season per arc.
• Title Drop: In Chapter 2. However, we aren't told what the silver spoon in the cafeteria stands for until chapter 63. In the anime, it's explained in the same scene it shows up in.
  • That late drop was quite dramatic in the manga, especially when contrasted with the news of the Komaba Ranch's bankruptcy a few scenes later.
  • Hachiken named his pork business GINSAJI.
• This Is Reality: Aki's uncle, a horse-handler, rather loudly laughs at Komaba and Hachiken for thinking he or anyone else could perfectly understand a member of another species outside of a work of fantasy. Amusingly, the horse is also laughing at Komaba and Hachiken with him.
• Through Their Stomachs: A non-romantic example by the school, which hosts a wrap-party barbecue whenever the entire class has completed a hard task. Hachiken even commented early on that food was the only thing he was looking forward to in Ooezo Agricultural High.
• Tragic Dropout: Ichiro Komaba. By the time the other students learn that his continued education is/was riding on their school's continued baseball victories, they've already lost.
• Twinkle Smile: Used in the first chapter... by Shinichiro Inada, who is holding the body of a freshly-beheaded chicken, telling Aikawa and Hachiken he'll give them some smoked chicken when it's ready, as thanks for them helping him catch the chickens that got loose. The moment gets a Call-Back when Shinichiro smiles again with the same twinkle when he brings them the promised smoked chicken, which gives Hachiken flashbacks to the previous context.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Tamako's parents.
• Underdogs Never Lose: Heartbreakingly subverted when the Ooezo High baseball team blazes their way through the qualifying matches for the Koshien, only to lose their match against the local champions by one run and fall just short of going to Sapporo for the Big Game.
  • Proceeds to become heart-shattering when it's revealed that their loss also indirectly cost Komaba's family their farm, by damaging his odds of becoming a professional player at exactly the wrong moment.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Definitely starting to accumulate between Hachiken and Aki.
  "Should I lock the door?"
  • Lately, the Shippers on Deck spare no effort to resolve it... with often awkward results. Her father, on the other hand, wants to make damn sure it stays unresolved.
• Visual Pun: The anime's opening is called "Kiss You" (in English), and animals are seen "kissing" Hachiken when the words are sung.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 52/Episode 5, Season 2. Mikage starts to feel unsure about how to feel about Hachiken and Hachiken faints from all his hard-work .
  • Chapter 53. Hachiken's father visits.
  • Chapter 61/Episode 7, Season 2. The Ooezo baseball team loses their Big Game...while Komaba is pitching. And Komaba doesn't come to school after that.
  • Chapter 63/Episode 8, Season 2. We learn why Komaba hasn't come back — his family has gone bankrupt. Worse, Mikage's family co-signed the loan for them, so they're on the hook for it as well, which is more reason why Komaba wants to work, so that he doesn't burden them as well. Hachiken doesn't like it, despite Mikage and others tell him not to worry about it.
  • Chapter 120. Hachiken and Mikage finally become a couple.
• Wham Line: Hachiken's father delivers one in Episode 6 of Season 2, when he mentions that he never said he enjoyed the bacon Hachiken sent home from Season 1. This hits him pretty hard and puts him in a Heroic BSoD.
  • He delivers another (very different) one in Chapter 127: "I already believe in him."
• Walking the Earth: Parodied with Yugo's older brother Shingo, who believes that the ramen chef he was apprenticed to sent him on a journey to do this until he found the perfect ramen ingredients, when in actuality he fired him.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • In Episode 3, Komaba asks Hachiken why he went to their school, considering how out of the way it was, and that he had no set goals for the future. Hachiken tries to counter, wondering how Komaba can take it so easy considering how hard farm work is. He thinks Komaba has it easy, since he has a job as soon as he graduates from high school. The former wonders why the latter seemed to be throwing his future away in the meantime. A short while later, Hachiken learns that Komaba would like to go to college, but his family can't afford to send him, and both apologize to the other for not knowing their respective situations.
  • Mikage yells at Hachiken during Episode 3 of Season 2 after the latter contemplates practicing more horse jumping after school. Mikage tells him not to do it, because the horses need rest too, and basically gets mad at him for thinking only about himself, and not caring about the horses at all.
  • Hachiken does this towards Komaba, and the other students indirectly in Episode 8 of Season 2. When Komaba drops out of school so he can start working and repaying the debt his family owes, Hachiken asks about his dreams. Komaba seems content with giving it all up, and the other students largely worry about reality as their own families have debts as well. Hachiken however, hates that they seem okay with their lot in life, and seem unwilling or unable to help each other out at all with situations like this, and despite Mikage telling him not to worry about it, he tells her he wants to.
• Webcomic Time: It took about three years in real time (2011-2014) for the manga to advance one year in-story (2011-2012). The following arc, however, progresses through time much faster than real time, advancing about fifteen months within about four months real time.
• We Need a Distraction: Mikage seriously needs one in Episode 3 when Komaba and Hachiken get into an intense argument about each other's lives and how "easy" one thinks the other has it. Fortunately for her, her uncle sends her a text which gives her a pretext to interrupt them and cool down the situation.
• The World Is Just Awesome: Bonus points for only elevating the view by about 6 feet.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are:
  • Hachiken's Brutal Honesty statements and Armor-Piercing Question to the other students often sum up to this. He's a bit jealous that they all have goals they're striving for, regardless of how out of reach they may be, either because of a lack of grades, or in many cases, lack of finances. Compared to them, he's Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life, and has no idea what he wants to do, largely due to his overbearing parents expecting him to achieve high grades and go to a prestigious college.
  • Mikage gives one to Hachiken when he arrives back at school and felt extremely upset at himself for missing the school festival. She also gives him the notebook he was using for notes during the festival, and had people write their comments in it. While some weren't too thrilled about it, others seemed to enjoy it a lot, which helped snap him out of his Heroic BSoD. She also tells him the reason they didn't visit him was because they felt he'd want them to make sure the festival went well, and the hospital doesn't allow night visitations. When several characters show up at the end, they are genuinely happy to see him safe and sound.

---

The special backstory chapter provides examples of:

• The Glasses Gotta Go: Inverted for Toku, whose frightening expression turns out to be nothing more than a severely nearsighted squint. When "Hachi" lends her his glasses, her face relaxes and she turns out to have beautiful eyes.
• Great Escape: "Hachi" apparently effected one before the events of the chapter.
• Samurai Cowboy: The story centers on the lives of the actual Samurai Cowboys (and cowgirls) of historical Hokkaido. After the conflicts that began the Meiji period, many samurai families were driven north to the province of Hokkaido, where they began new lives as farmer pioneers...which leads to an unfortunate fate for the native Ainu tribes.
• Working on the Chain Gang: The harsh conditions of "Hachi"'s imprisonment forced his escape. Little did he know, slavery was banned shortly after.

---