Let's go back in time to the Taisho era. Around this period, the most common connection shared between the Japanese and Western cultures at the time is their hatred of witches of any kind. No exceptions. Unfortunately for them, a young witch arrives in Japan, who happens to be hated and feared by both sides, ventures out to bring the two cultures together by using her western magic in Tokyo. Which follows next is the tale of a girl ensuring a strange but earnest attempt to bring people together, even if things won't be easy for her.
Taisho Kitan Majo (大正忌憚魔女 The Feared Witch of Taisho) is a supernatural Fantasy manga created by Miki Usami as their second series, following Flower Girl in Dystopia (Taihai no Hanauri) from 2017. The manga is serialized through Comic Cune, first debuting in July 2022. The manga is notably recommended by Tsukumizu, the creator behind Girls' Last Tour and Shimeji Simulation, the latter of which also ran in Comic Cune alongside it monthly.
In February 2023, to celebrate the first volume's release, an official voiced narration for the manga, focusing on the third chapter in specific, was released with Yuki Kuwahara and Hiromi Igarashi. It can be watched here: LINK
Compare and contrast the author's other work Flower Girl in Dystopia, which also deals with themes of Fantastic Racism. The main difference comes with how they are portrayed here: Taisho is a Period Piece that centres on both Western and Japanese cultures who discriminate witches, while Flower is an inversion of this, as it takes place After the End where non-humans discriminate humans and often blame them for the cause of it despite the absurdity of such claims.
Taisho Kitan Majo contains examples of:
- All of the Other Reindeer: The main character in question is hated and feared by both the cultures of the Western and Japanese, due to her being a witch. Her goal is to ultimately prove that both cultures can coexist with witches like her.
- An Aesop: Do not judge someone by their outward appearances.
- Birds of a Feather: Gahou easily befriends the witch girl, who easily knows her plight of being discriminated by others due to her being a witch. For the record, Gahou also knows the fact that not all witches are mischievous tricksters.
- Contrasting Sequel Main Character: The witch girl is this to the flower girl in the author's previous work Flower Girl in Dystopia. Both are wide-eyed optimists who are hated due to their differences and suffer from Fantastic Racism all the time, though their characterisation is wildly different. First of all, they live in very different periods of time; the flower girl lives in future Earth situated After the End where Humans Are Not the Dominant Species and non-humans dominate the ruined planet. The witch girl is the reverse, who lives in past Earth during early 20th Century, where humans are the dominant species and she's the only witch amongst humans. The flower girl is simply an average human with no powers, while the witch girl is a witch who has magical powers. Lastly, while the flower girl is a mainstay local in the 7th District with her mechanical brother, the witch girl is a foreigner who arrived to Tokyo by herself.
- Fantastic Racism: Primarily Deconstructed. Humans on both cultures treat witches disparagingly that their first reaction of seeing one is nothing short of disgust and contempt. The actual reasons, on the other hand, is complicated. As it turns out, most of them are wildly Improperly Paranoid as it was revealed by Gahou that their fear towards them come from story books (a completely opposite depiction of a witch where they are treated as obligatory villains), depicting them making wishes for people's misery, hence their fear towards the protagonist. In short, their "fear" towards witches is because of being believed through stories about witches that only show the more villainous ones and not the ones who are actually harmless and beneficial to society.
- Improperly Paranoid: Everyone in this world are scared of witches and have known to shown obvious prejudices towards them including the girl, which they are paranoid of seeing one. The problem is that they are completely paranoid for the very wrong reasons about them, when it turns out from Gahou that they only see it myopically through sets of books about witches wishing misery for people, of which it is revealed that is not how most witches operate. Said books themselves completely skewed their view towards harmless witches.
- Irony: The Western world is often known for witches in many of its fantasy set pieces. Here, the Western and the Japanese aren't exactly kind to the protagonist either, who is a witch.
- Malicious Slander: The very first page of Chapter 2 shows a bogus news article about the witch girl who summoned a mirage of a fox, which did not go unnoticed from the public eye.
- Our Witches Are Different: An inverse of this. Since both of the main sides in this story hate witches, the main character is pretty different from the rest of the world at the time of the story's setting.
- Period Piece: The series takes place during the Taisho era, putting the time frame around 1912-1926.
- Spiritual Antithesis: Has a similarity to the author's previous manga Flower Girl in Dystopia, with the main character facing Fantastic Racism from the dominant race as the story's Central Theme. Otherwise, everything about this manga is completely the opposite to its predecessor.
- Flower Girl in Dystopia is a Cyberpunk story that takes place in the future After the End where Humans Are Not the Dominant Species. It focuses on the adventures of a young girl, the only human in the 7th District with her mechanical brother, whose goal is to plant flowers around the barren wasteland by working as a florist. But due to her being the only human, she deals with racism left and right against other non-humans, particularly due to their irrational fear against humanity (understandably) as they caused the mass extinction of their own race and the end of the world as they know it.
- On the other hand, Taisho Kitan Majo is the complete opposite, which is a Period Piece story that takes place in the past during Japan's Taisho period (1912-1926), as the title suggests. Humans are the dominant species and non-humans like witches are discriminated especially to the cultures of the Western and Japanese. It centres on the witch girl who arrived in Tokyo to practice magic, but both cultures hate witches, making her the target of their discrimination, and so she plans to co-mingle both cultures altogether through her magic. But while Fantastic Racism is also the Central Theme like its predecessor, it is much more Deconstructed than played straight in Taisho, as it turns out that most of humanity's racism and fear against witches are heavily skewed due to them being mistakenly construed as ones from story books that only depicted them as Villain by Default. Unlike the flower girl who is simply a human living locally in the 7th District, the witch girl is a witch who is a foreigner from another country arriving to Tokyo, Japan. Likewise, Taisho's setting is much more vibrant and diverse than Flower Girl's own, with the latter simply surrounded by abandoned buildings and ruins of war with natural environment being a thing in the past.
- Villain by Default: In-Universe. At the very least how the witches in a multitude of story books are portrayed. But humanity's hate to them becomes extremely nebulous when the witch girl, who is careless with magic but is actually harmless, shows up in Tokyo, where people of the Western and Japanese see her as a witch and disparage her. The bulk of the story's conflict centres around the witch girl trying to end said prejudices against witches.
