Mirai and Yuuki.
One: There is an estimated 70% chance that an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or higher will hit Tokyo, Japan within the next three decades.
Two: Mirai Onozawa is your typical rebellious thirteen-year-old—bored with school, frustrated with her seemingly-distant parents, and annoyed by her cheerful younger brother Yuuki. Her single point of solace at home is her cell phone, with which she texts her friends and organizes her thoughts.
On the first day of summer break in 2012, Mirai takes Yuuki to a robotics exhibition on the artificial island of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay, upon the insistence of her mother. Feeling humiliated and alienated by this and a couple of encounters during the trip, she quietly wishes to herself that the world would break.
The next moment, the world does. An earthquake of the eponymous magnitude 8.0 erupts from northern Tokyo Bay, causing buildings to come crashing down, iconic landmarks to crumble, and fires to erupt in the city center. In the chaos surrounding the initial tremor, Mirai and Yuuki meet Mari, a motorcycle delivery woman and single mother. Together, the three of them set out on the long journey to the Onozawa home in western Tokyo.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 started running in July 2009 with 11 episodes, with direction by Masaki Tachibana (Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit) and music from Kou Ootani (Shadow of the Colossus, Haibane Renmei). It succeeded Eden of the East in Fuji Television's noitaminA late-night timeslot.
Beware: Most spoilers present in this page will ruin your experience of the series if you haven't seen it yet.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 contains examples of:
- Agony of the Feet: In Episode 4, a running man accidentally steps on Mirai's toes.
- All Just a Dream:
- Mari has a vivid nightmare of her family trapped in a fire in episode 6.
- In episode 8, Mirai has visions of Yuuki dying after his hospitalization. Subverted a couple of episodes later when in fact this was not just Mirai's imagination.
- Particularly subverted in that of all the visions, the most dreamlike one turned out to be the real thing.
- Animal Motifs:
- Frogs for Mirai (her cellphone is decorated with them, and one of Yuuki's nicknames for her is "frog alien"), and sometimes all the Onozawas. In particular, when Mirai resolves to be kinder to her family in episode 7, it's interspersed with shots of a statue of a family of four frogs.
- Mari goes the entire series wearing a jacket with a cute stylized tiger on its back.
- Annoying Younger Sibling: Yuuki's persistent optimism frustrates his sister, who takes a much more cynical view of their situation.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Mirai's wish for the world's destruction.
- Bittersweet Ending: Mari's family is alright, and so are Mirai's parents, and life is going slowly back to normal. On the other hand, Yuuki—the brother Mirai took for granted—is dead.
- Chekhov's Gun: The rescue-bots from episode 1, predictably.
- Coming of Age Story: For Mirai.
- Dead All Along: Yuuki dies halfway through episode 8; Mirai hallucinates his continued existence throughout the next couple of episodes. The other shoe finally drops when his apparition says "I'm dead" at the end of episode 10.
- Death by Newbery Medal: It wouldn't be a Coming-of-Age-Story without it.
- Disaster Series: Everything is caused and constantly influenced by the earthquake and the subsequent disasters it triggers.
- The Ending Changes Everything: Mari is always concerned for the kids safety and health and tries to engage them to keep their spirits up. After the reveal that Yuuki died after his collapse and all his subsequent appearances were in Mirai's head however, a rewatch will reveal that after the stop at the hospital she stopped interacting with Yuuki entirely.
- Emo Teen: Mirai has this in spades.
- Empathy Doll Shot: In episode 2, while Mari and Mirai scavenge the mall to find Yuuki, there's a few abandoned stuffed animals lying around.
- Empathic Environment: Sunny day before the quake, rainstorms and gray clouds after.
- Guardian Entity: Yuuki. Although given the show's otherwise realistic tone, one can assume Mirai's subconscious is doing all the work, her hallucination of her brother is really helpful and drives all the positive developments in the rest of the series.
- Harmful to Minors: Yuuki and Mirai come across a lot of corpses due to the earthquake.
- Identifying the Body: Mari is asked to identify the body of her toddler daughter. However, she didn't check the face. It turns out her daughter's alive.
- Invisible to Normals: After Yuuki's death, Mirai can still interact with him, possibly because he is a hallucination. The story goes out of it's way to make this seem to not be the case by having him "run off" the second he would have interacted with anyone other than Mirai. After several hints that Yuuki is dead, it's shown that this trope is in play when a perspective switch to a minor character reveals that Mirai is talking to empty air.
- Limited Wardrobe: Mari's daughter Hina is always shown in photos wearing pink hair ties. This causes Mari to believe that Hina is dead when she discovers the corpses of an older woman and a young girl wearing pink hair ties were found together. However, Yuuki and Mirai find Hina alive and well nearby and she's wearing yellow hair ties.
- Meaningful Name: "Mirai" means "future;" "Yuuki" means "courage".
- Missing Child: Just consider the multiple times Yuuki and Mirai get separated. In the first episode in particular, Mirai let her brother go to the bathroom alone just before the earthquake happened. She couldn't find him and risked her life looking for him. He ended up fine, though he was stuck under rubble with a woman on an evacuated level of the museum; if Mirai and Mari hadn't found them it's unknown how long they would have been there or if they would have survived.
- Mood Whiplash: The latter half of the series constantly swerves between hope that Mari's family is alright or dead. Just when all hope seems lost they turn out to be alive. Then the whiplash hits even harder when it's revealed Yuuki has been dead and Mirai has been in delusional denial for the past day.
- Next Sunday A.D.: Takes place in 2012. three years after the show was aired.
- Nobody Poops: Averted. Early on, Yuuki has to use the restroom and goes by himself (which leads to the scene of Mari and Mirai searching for him in the mall), and another time, Mirai needs to use it when she has a stomachache. She gets in line for a portable toilet, but after a fight breaks out in the line, she uses a paper toilet instead.
- Not So Stoic: Mari seems positive and calm most of the time however in episode six she becomes distressed over the thought of her family being dead or injured. In a later episode it is even worse when she truly believes they are dead.
- 1-Dimensional Thinking: When the Tokyo Tower falls, the characters run parallel to the direction of the falling tower rather than running off to the side.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted. One of the main characters is named Yuuki, and in episode 8 we see a news anchor also named Yuuki.
- On the Next: The brief newscaster blurbs after the credits hint at upcoming events.
- Otaku: Mirai calls Kento a "robotaku."
- Potty Emergency: After eating a cake several hours earlier, Mirai suddenly needs to go to the bathroom. Considering the emergency situation everyone is in there aren't normal bathrooms to use. Mari notices Mirai's discomfort easily and gets her a disposable, paper toilet, but Mirai is too embarrassed to use it. She tries to use a portable toilet; however, a man cuts in line which causes the man in back of Mirai to get into a fight with him. Mirai ends up using the paper toilet instead.
- Product Placement: Sort of — Fuji Television seem to enjoy dropping references to themselves during the series. Among them:
- Mirai and company, as well as a couple of hundred other survivors, take shelter from the post-quake storms on the steps of Fuji Television's Odaiba headquarters. In fairness, it's a newer building and presumably more strongly retrofitted than the ones that we do see collapsing.
- The news broadcasts seen on various cell phones in episode two are labeled "8ch", channel 8 being Fuji TV in and around Tokyo (on analog dials, at least).
- Yuuki's backpack has a "Fuji Staff" sticker on it.
- Really Dead Montage: Yuuki, in the closing minutes of the final episode.
- Scenery Gorn: Sequences of the earthquake's effects on the city, done in high detail.
- Scenery Porn: Establishing shots in the first episode. Even normally-aloof Mirai is awestruck by the sight of the Rainbow Bridge overhead.
- Shout-Out: One of Yuuki's nicknames for Mirai is "frog alien".
- Shown Their Work: Possibly the entire point of the series, as indicated by the opening disclaimer of each episode.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The series falls mostly on the idealistic side, with a couple of exceptions — Mirai constantly runs into criminally-insensitive strangers in early episodes, for instance.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: Several cliffhangers segue directly into the upbeat ED "M/elody", accompanied by pictures of the main cast happily walking through an intact city.
- Special Edition Title: The final episode has different pictures in the ending credits of everyone moving on after the quake, mixed with a presumably older one of Yuuki running and beckoning ahead at the camera.
- Spoiler Ending: Subverted. The opening and ending show all of the main characters alive, which looks like a case of this for the first few episodes. They then proceed to become progressively less and less appropriate as the series enters its latter half.
- Stepford Smiler: Mari does her best to stay optimistic so that Mirai and Yuuki will not lose hope. Mirai unknowingly becomes one as well in wake of Yuuki's death.
- Survivor Guilt:
- Mirai is wracked with this, between seeing a classmate mourn her mother, listening to kindly old man Furuichi talk about his dead grandchildren, and Yuuki's death (for which she blames herself, and her mother blames herself). At the end of episode 11, she reaches the fifth stage.
- At the school, it turns out the elderly couple insisted to have their grandchildren come over to Tokyo to visit, but they could not have picked a worse time to do so, because they die. When asked about it, the old man says he wishes he had died instead so that they could live.
- Strong Family Resemblance: Yuuki resembles Mirai quite a lot. He is essentially a younger version of her with shorter hair. Mirai herself resembles a younger version of her mother.
- Take My Hand!: In episode 7.
- Tap on the Head: Subverted. It turns out taking a large bump to the head is actually really, really bad for you and can kill you.
- Time Skip: One month in the second half of episode 11.
- The Tokyo Fireball: Much of the city is on fire after the quake; episode two has a distant shot of the downtown skyline in flames.
- Tokyo Tower: Actually stays up during the earthquake, though askew. It falls during an aftershock in episode 4.
- Trauma Swing: In Episode 11, when she realizes Yuuki has passed away, Mirai perches herself on a swing and reflects on what happened.
- Unreliable Narrator: From leaving the hospital after Yuuki collapsed and onward a disbelieving Mirai continues to interact with the already dead Yuuki.
- Wham Episode: In episode 8, following an episode of lighter robot-oriented fare, Yuuki suddenly collapses, he dies at a nearby hospital, and Mirai goes into intense denial, making herself believe that he's survived and is still with them. This is followed up in episode 10 when Mirai (and likely also the viewer) finally realizes what happened in episode 8.
- Wham Shot: The flashback at the end of Episode 10, when Mirai remembers seeing the doctors give Yuuki a black Triage tag.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The credits at the end shows photos of all the survivors of the earthquake and its aftermath moving on with their lives. And one last picture of Yuuki to remember him by.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: When Yuuki is about to vomit, Mari grabs an empty plastic bag for him to throw up in.
