Character · Nichijou
Hakase
The professor is eight years old, wears a lab coat over pyjamas, and built a robot mainly for the company.
In Otakana the clue reads: Eight-year-old professor who built a robot girl
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Nichijou
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Hakase, whose family name is Shinonome, is a genius by any measure that counts and a small child by every other one. She built Nano, a robot girl who now handles the cooking and most of the worrying, then bolted an enormous wind-up key to Nano's back because she thought it looked funny. Nano hates it. Hakase refuses to take it off.
Nichijou runs on that gap between capability and age. Hakase can build a talking cat, and does, and then cries because the salmon has run out. Kyoto Animation adapted Keiichi Arawi's manga, which began in 2006, into a television series in 2011, and the studio spent serious money on sight gags that last two seconds each.
The show was not a hit when it aired and has since settled into something close to a cult standard, largely because of animation that treats a dropped sausage with the timing of an action sequence. Hakase is why the domestic scenes work at all: an eight year old with a fully equipped laboratory is a reliable engine for chaos.
Spelling HAKASE
HAKASE is six letters and the final E is pronounced, ha-ka-se, which is exactly the trap: English speakers see an E on the end of a word and go silent on it. In Japanese 博士 means professor or doctor, so the character is being addressed by a title rather than a name. Consonant and vowel alternate the whole way across.