“Shigechi’s Harvest”

Fridays at 12:30 pm EST on Crunchyroll

Josuke and Okuyasu meet Shigechi, a local Stand-user, and together they concoct a get-rich-quick scheme.

Iro’s thoughts

Yes, this post (and consequently the next couple, sorry) is late. No, I don’t have an excuse. Let’s get on the road, shall we?

As is generally the theme with JoJo and its pretty-much-directly-on-the-nose episode titles, with this pair of episodes we meet Shigechi, a portly middle-school student with a Stand of his own. Harvest Harvest is similar to Worse Bad Company in that it’s made up of dozens of small units, but it has a secondary purpose of laying slightly more groundwork for the rules of how Stands work. In Stardust Crusaders, it was established that the more powerful a Stand is, the shorter its range, and (barring Red Hot Chili Pepper’s ability to manipulate power lines) that rule has stayed mostly consistent. For example, Echoes ACT 2 – with its greater abilities – has a shorter active range than ACT 1. Harvest, while not terribly “strong”, has a much bigger range than basically any Stand we’ve seen so far; the rationale here is that while acting at a long range, it can only follow the most basic of commands. We’ll see a bit more of this type of Stand pretty soon, and it shows up again in Part 5.

Shigechi himself is, uh… borderline offensive? The 90s were a different time, and JoJo doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record for this sort of thing in the first place, but looking at the guy with a modern lens is sort of uncomfortable. One could make an argument that he is just normal levels of Gonk for something as over-the-top as JoJo, but Kappei Yamaguchi’s grating voice work and the dialogue make Shigechi seem like a kid who belongs in special ed. Thankfully, he’s also portrayed as a fundamentally decent person who isn’t really out to hurt anyone. It’s plain ol’ greed that makes him turn on Josuke and Okuyasu, and in the end that’s much more relatable a motive than the type of hokey shit that can come out of this series.

Speaking of hokey shit, who couldn’t see a Stand-related get-rich-quick scheme happening at some point? Tonio is already using his Stand for personal financial gain (and we’ll meet another person doing as such in the next post), and if I had a Stand like Harvest then I’d sure as hell gather myself loose change. Watching the crew sweat bullets as they try to turn in a lottery ticket that they miiiight have (I mean, technically, but who’s counting?) stolen is the right kind of mundane bullshit I love in Part 4, including Josuke using Crazy Diamond to straight up cheat. Best of all, though, is that the scheme actually works. The kids get away with winning the lottery, splitting five million yen three ways. When was the last time that ever happened?

Dorarara-bservations

• “Harvest” is named after a Neil Young album.
• Many of Harvest’s scenes use CG, which is understandable given that it is a horde of tiny creatures.
• In the goofy fireworks sequence, one of the random words in the back is WRYYYY.
• Kappei Yamaguchi reprises his role as Shigechi from All-Star Battle. He’s most famous around these parts for voicing Teddie from Persona 4.