My wife is from the Philippines, so every once in a while, we make a trip to the nearest medium-sized city where she can go to an Asian market and find some of the products she likes.
We’d been talking about getting our daughter some training chopsticks, which come with a hinge at the top and a guide for where to place the fingers. Chopsticks are not commonly used in the Philippines, but I like to use them, and our daughter always snatches them from me and gets upset when she struggles to use them.
This weekend, while we were at the Asian market, she toddled off to explore—and immediately came upon a rack of training chopsticks. I bought her the pink, girlish-looking ones that she grabbed first, and which came with a matching spoon.
The chopsticks are decorated with a computer-generated image of a blond girl in a fancy gown, labeled “Secret Jouju.” After a little searching, I discovered that this is a Korean magical-girl title created by a brand called Young Toys. I’ve found only a little information about it: There are some minimal descriptions on the magical girl wikis, and there’s an English-language site, but it looks to have been written with a meaningless string of buzzwords its writers probably think English-speaking parents want to hear.
There is an official YouTube channel, but it’s entirely in Korean. It’s also on Netflix but unavailable in my country.
Near as I can make out, the protagonist of this cartoon, Jouju, was originally a fairy who could grant girls the power to become princesses. However, contrary to fairy law, she uses her power on herself in order to rescue a prince she loves and is thus banished to the human world where she has to restore the balance of magic while also singing in a rock band. Or something like that—with so little info available in English, I’m fuzzy on the details.
Out of curiosity, I loaded up an episode when we got home and watched it even though it had no subtitles. It’s obviously a glorified toy ad, as the characters wield magical smartphones and watches (collect them all!) and play plasticky-looking instruments (collect them all!).
My daughter was entranced and reacted with enthusiasm to the characters’ actions, though I know for certain she understood none of it—since I understood almost none of it. She swiftly picked up the main character’s name and was calling for “Choochoo” while waving her new pink spoon. My wife laughed and said I now have somebody to watch magical girl shows with.
Ironically, I’ve become less interested in magical girl shows since marrying and having kids, but I suppose I could rekindle my hobby. We’ll need to make it only an occasional thing, though: We try to keep the little girl’s screen time to a minimum, and I believe that’s why she has an enormous vocabulary, excellent fine motor skills, and a well-developed imagination for someone still under two, because she gets books, Montessori toys, wooden animal figurines, and practice gardening instead of television and computer tablets.
