The Secret Origins of Girls Running with a Slice of Toast in their Mouth

So in the recent episode of the Attack on Titan parody Titan Junior High School, we again saw a parody of a girl running with a piece of toast in her mouth (several actually). This is such a common trope now that it has its own tumblr. Some of us in the reddit thread were wondering about the origins of this now oft-lampooned joke.Calling upon the ancient art of google fu I delved into the internet to find…. No one really knows.It is discussed on TV Tropes in the article on the Late for School trope (warning, TV Tropes link). But aside from noting that it establishes the protagonist as cute but clumsy, and thus likeable, it cannot offer anything more than that it is an old and established trope. As someone wrote here:This is something that a lot of people have looked into, and no one can figure out exactly where it started. This answer accurately represents what is definitely known at the moment to the English-speaking community.– Logan MWell, that gave me an idea. This is all that’s known on the English web, but what about the Japanese web? I have horribly bad Japanese language skills, surely this should be no problem for me! So I looked into it, and this is what I found. (If anyone with actual Japanese fluency wants to check my work please do, I and the internet will be forever grateful.)The result I get from googling in Japanese (aside from some flash game about a girl playing soccer with a toast in her mouth… oh Japan) is that the first candidate for starting this trope is a manga called “Tsuraize! Boku-chan” a Shoujo Romance manga by Takahashi Ryouko that ran for six volumes around 1975. There is no further information on the English web, but this is my poor translation of the Japanese wiki page:Boku-chan is a manga about Tajima Nozomi, a high school girl in her second year. She is a member of the drama club and dreams of being an actress. She is a cheerful girl who doesn’t let any hardship get to her. She harbours a secret unrequited crush on Tsuji-Sensei. One day she is unexpectedly confessed to by Onodera Wataru, a member of the soccer club and her junior by one year. At first she brushes him off, but slowly she starts to take an interest in him…?[There’s not much more, I won’t translate it all, but there’s one interesting titbit: this manga also featured a production of Romeo and Juliet with a lot of fuss on who gets to play the leading roles. Could it be the source of that trope as well?]These two pages are supposedly the origin of the trope. Note she also crashes into a guy here. But, you might notice a snag, she is running and crashes into a guy, but no toast! This is discussed by a Japanese article I found here, my poor translation:“Tsuraize! Boku-chan” does not have a piece of toast in her mouth!It is said on the net that the origin of the trope of ‘girl is late for school and runs with a toast in her mouth before crashing into a guy’ is the manga “Tsuraize! Boku-chan”, but as you can see she actually does not have a piece of toast. The real truth is the following:[There is no mention of the city where the person went looking, but it might be the Manga Museum in Kyoto. Worth a visit if you want to see lots of manga, but keep in mind it’s more like a huge library of lots of new and old manga than a museum with lots of exhibits and stuff like the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo.]In the library, I did a rough search of the manga’s published between 1960 and 1970, but I found that just having bread for breakfast itself already almost never happened.The example I found of a girl running with a toast in her mouth was from Motomura Miyoko’s manga “Patty’s First Love” (included in the compilation volume Taiyou no Catherine published in 1968). [Tr. Note: keikaku means plan, “Patty’s First Love” is so unknown it isn’t on manga updates, and even lacks a Japanese wiki page. The only additional information I could gather is that it ran for nine or ten weekly chapters in Margaret Magazine from 1967 till 1968.] You can see the page here.But if you look closely, you’ll see she is not eating a piece of toast, but a bread roll. This running into someone while eating a bread roll is certainly something like what is done in American soap operas.Now, I went through thousands of manga volumes from the latter half of the 60’s and the 70’s but could not find a single instance of “running into someone while having a piece of toast in their mouth”. There is no doubt that it is not a Shoujo manga. I suspect it is more likely a 1950’s American soap opera. And that in that original soap opera, it is not a piece of toast but a bread roll.[There is another paragraph, but here the writer stops talking about girls and toast and changes the subject to the origin of tomboy girl characters. There’s some speculation that this and the Tsundere archetype have their origin in the same 60’s and 70’s shoujo manga. But that’s mostly just the author speculating.]There we have it, this is as far as I can tell the state of the art in “girl running with toast in mouth” related research on the Japanese internet. Some of the earliest examples are “Tsuraize! Boku-chan” from 1975 and “Patty’s First Love” from 1967, but there is no definite candidate for who first combined the whole package.We know that it was already being parodied in Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga, which was published in 1990-1991. You can see the page here. So already by the end of the 80’s the trope was established enough to be considered fodder for making fun of it as a cliché.If anyone wants to try and dig deeper and add some more info, be my guest. But hopefully with this I’ve increased our knowledge of the history and details of this great anime and manga mystery.EDIT: Thanks for the gold, whomever gave it! :D http://ift.tt/1j8rPEG