One thing about Dagashi Kashi is that – as some shows are – it’s weirdly adept at being innocent and raunchy at the same time.  I mean, the fact is that it’s not as if people don’t think dirty thoughts just because they aren’t expressing them, so acknowledging them openly isn’t less innocent – it’s just more honest.

In the first sketch this week, for example, we get Tou lifting Saya’s skirt using a Himo Q – some sort of weird Japanese gummy string dagashi that I’ve frankly never seen in the wild.  As fanservice goes it doesn’t get much more childishly harmless than that – especially considering that it happens so fast you’d have missed it if you blinked.  Hotaru is of course the picture of denseness, consumed with teaching the others the virtues of playing with your food by doing some kind of Himo-Q rhythmic gymnastics.

That segues directly into a bit starring Ohajiki, which is not a dagashi at all but rather a straight-up toy (something roughly akin to marbles in the West).  This serves as a reminder that Hotaru is utterly hopeless at games both of skill and chance (with which she keeps trying to entrap Coconuts into taking over the shop) and that Saya is just as utterly a natural.  The key takeaway here comes when Hotaru tries to recruit Saya to work at the shop because of her “talents”, an offer which makes Saya extremely uncomfortable for obvious reasons.

This interaction sets Saya off on a trip down memory lane, which develops into one of the most charming chapters in Dagashi Kashi so far.  The candy at the center of the story this time is Yoguretto, another dagashi I never knew of before this series.  This time it’s some sort of calcium-enriched lozenge-y thing in a blister case, which is supposed to be good for you – though I’m not sure whether it’s actually supposed to be play medicine for kids or 4th-grade Coconuts just has a vivid imagination (I suspect the latter).

The headline of this flashback is obvious enough, but it’s also worth nothing that as a 9 year-old Kokonotsu was quite open about being a dagashi otaku – which begs the question of when all that changed, and why.  But the main course here of course is what happens when Kokonotsu quite innocently suggests “playing doctor” and Saya’s reaction shows which of them is the less innocent at that age.  Watching her shamelessly try and get him to “examine her thoroughly” was pretty hilarious, especially as he just never catches on.  But interestingly enough, he obviously remembers that day just as well as she does – so it’s safe to say that sometime not long after the incident, he figured out what was really going on…