High Position (Hi-Posi, ハイポジ), 2017-2018, Kira, Takashi, Manga Action

STORY: 4

Meet Mitsuhiko, a 46-year-old dull salaryman on his way to divorce, when suddenly.. he hits his head and wakes up in the past!
Bam! He is back 30 years before and gets to relive his teenage days. If you feel you have already read that story, it’s normal because there’s one thousand titles with exactly that same story line about reviving the ‘spring of youth’ (adolescence). So, does High Position have an approach that sets it apart from all the similar stories? No. There’s just a triangle love story in the Orange Road style, and the worst is that the reactions of the character being 16 again are too unrealistic to be interesting. Meh.

ART: 6

Lines are confident, very old-school and sometimes reminiscent of Orange Road.

POLITICAL POTENTIAL: 4

If you were 46 and sent back to the past, what would you do with your unique knowledge of the future? Change the course of history ? Save lives? Get rich? Take care of your family? Fight corruption?
Duh, our hero is focused on going to school, eating the meals that his mum cooks, and getting an underage girlfriend. With so many manga doing that, it makes one think how pathetic the life of grownups must be in Japan to have so much interest in being 16 again.

FEMINISM: 3

Mitsuhiko is sent back to class among kids the age of his daughter, do you think he reacts with compassion and tenderness for them like a dad? Of course not: his main goal is to be romantically involved with one of the kids. If the story was about someone who was 19 and was given the opportunity to be 16 again, why not, but here the manga is just a disgusting illustration of how widespread that figure of the teenage girl as an object of desire for adult men is in Japan.

Our hero has sex with a girl in her 20s and it’s shown as awesome. Later, he also has sex with someone his age (in her 40s), so they should be most likely to connect and have an interesting relationship but no, he’s not interested. And why is that? Because there’s a kid on his mind.

Besides, we have the classic ‘zero shit given about sex workers’ that you can bang without second thought, but oh god “that’d be horrible if my daughter did that kind of job”. Manga are really showing their sexism with that kind of discourse, by saying that men find normal to exert power on one group (sex workers) but they would not accept that kind of power relation being applied on themselves or the people they care about. And this, here, is one of the definition of an oppression.

CONCLUSION: 4

A cliche story made weak by the fact that the dad does not keep the character of a dad and the school kids don’t act like school kids. More realism could have made a better read, but the sexism would still make you skip this manga.