Good Evening,
I would like to start this off by thanking everyone who is stuck around with me for this week of posts! I was very hesitant to start this project, but it means a lot to much as someone who cares about health and medicine as well as animated media! I wanted to use this inaugural week of posts to let you all know what to expect with this project and I hope you all are as excited as I am for the new posts coming in the near future! Speaking of the future, I want to let everyone know that starting after tomorrow I will be keeping my posts to Thursdays and Sundays around the same time, of course. I have had a few people message me about different characters or related projects to cover and I am 100% open to suggestions if you have any! I do have current roster of characters that I hope to present, but this list is as malleable as my schedule allows it so if you let me know early enough I can try to get the dirty work done soon and see if I can get your request in within 2/3 posts!
Anyway, on to today’s professional: Ryou Shinnai. So, Ryou is the main character of the series Comical Psychosomatic Medicine also known as Anime de wakaru shinryounaika (アニメで分かる心療内科). The English translation of this Japanese title is a bit more along the lines of “Understanding Psychosomatic Medicine through Anime.” Personally, I really love this because it covers a variety of psychological and medical topics in short 5-minute bites. These topics range from discussions on depression, social anxiety, and panic disorder to analyses of erectile dysfunction and sleep disorders. The show tries to employ both a comical but informative approach towards understanding different types of conditions and illness in the realm of psychology. I would hope that any nerds interested in otaku culture and hoping to pursue a career in psychology or psychiatry check out this little show and see what you think! I would also love to hear your opinions on the show 😊
So, with regards to our boy Ryo Shinnai there is not much information on him. He is a psychologist who works at Yuu’s Mental Clinic. That is essentially all we really know about him. You might be wondering though, especially as you watch the show, “Who is Yuu?” Well, that is an interesting question!
Yuu is not only the creator of Comical Psychosomatic Medicine but he is also an actual Psychiatrist. He has written a series of comics related to psychology and mental health. One of his other series besides Comical Psychosomatic Medicine, the manga, and the anime, he has also developed a manga about body remodeling called Manga de Wakaru Nikutai Kaizou.
So, with regarding to Ryou himself, I could not find much information so most of this back story comes from the Japanese Wikipedia on the anime. This is what I could gather about Ryou. First off, is that he is farsighted rather and near-sighted and was raised in Africa. This is the second series where we have seen or met a character that has some connection to Africa! Ryou’s without his glances, looks relatedly like Nobita Nobi from the Doraemon series. As a child, Ryou suffered from Irritable Bowl Syndrome and his experiences with that disease encouraged him to pursue a career in clinical psychology/psychiatry. I think something else that might have influenced Ryou is the fact that nearly all his family members were psychologists or studied psychology somehow. It was so ingrained in his family that he spent dinners being silence because everyone was trying to psychoanalyze eachother throughout dinner time. The Japanese Wikipedia also references how Ryou’s character contributes to the comedy in the series, being the straight man character (aka tsukkomi). Tsukkomi characters are typically the reactionary characters that try to make sense of none sense that going around them. I could try to explain more, but it would help if you checked out an episode or two!
I only have 1 fun fact about Ryou Shinnai today given the lack of information.
If you write his name in Japanese (both text and style) as心内療 (or Shinnai Ryou), it literally reads heart, internal, cure roughly to the idea of healing psychosomatic illnesses (very roughly though). It makes sense since he is a psychologist developed by a psychiatrist!
Welp, that is all I got for you guys today! I hope you have a great evening and I will see you for our last post for this first week of AniMedica‼‼‼
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