Hanasaku Iroha: The hard workers' drudgery
Ohana has lived her whole life in a bustling city, where as a high schooler, most of her immediate needs are taken cared of. She has a shelter over her head, food on the table and a school to go to that would prepare her for her future. Having lived in such a forgiving and yet static environment, she laments boredly on how she will probably get a common job and get buried three blocks down the street. "Only a small fraction of the sky is visible, with the rest blocked off by tall buildings," is how she described it as. She thus wishes for motion, or a life of greater excitement. Which is why when she was sent off to the boonies to work in her grandma's inn, she welcomes it with open arms. "Dramatic" was the first word that shone before her path (at least, much more compared to the boring city scape). It's the kind of once-in-the-lifetime escape that we have all dreamed of as a kid, leaving behind the same ol' as we travel into the foreign seas of glittered dreams. But that's all that it is, a child's dream.
When she was actually sent to the inn, she didn't expect that she had to work as a maid to live there. And now for the first time in her life, the roof over her head and her three meals had to be earned through menial work. She no longer can just go to school and study, she has to juggle her work with study. And even something as simple as resting up early or waking up late is thrown to a halt when the inn's work consists of so much preparation even before the customers wakes up. To make it even worse, a service industry has rules that must be upheld and none of her co-workers seem to care enough to give her the time of the day (After all, their schedules itself are packed so full that they could hardly spare attention). And so what Ohana gets on her first day on the job was not only getting her co-workers into trouble, but also getting a mean scolding with a burnt mark slapped across her face. It's brutal and like Ohana mentions, her great escape turned out to be lonely and rotten. And of course it is, imagine being new to the job and none of the co-workers care enough to teach you, so you try to help but get scolded and called names, and even worse when you make a mistake, everyone gets into trouble, blames you and that's that -- That's your entire day at work.
It's unfair, unreasonable and yet painfully true to life. I remember them oh-too-fondly in my times in the army. You see people slacking off but they don't get scolded because the higher ups had already given up on them (And also because confronting them takes time and energy). Thus they throw a lot of the work on you because you can actually get things done but when you make a mistake from the copious amounts of work you are doing, guess who gets the bad rep? Working isn't fun and I think many of adults older than me has had even worse experiences that my immature self can't even begin to imagine. But in the end, that's just how things have to roll. Adults are given a job to feed themselves, and me as well being conscripted in the army, can't run away from our roles and responsibilities. In the end all we can do is complain, scream out into the sky and continue working. That is why when Ohana shed tears of frustration, memories flood back to me; And when Ohana screamed out into the sky with an "ORA!" as she continues working, this episode became one of the most human portrayals of the hard workers' drudgery I have ever seen.
The grind never stops.
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