From the Makoto Shinkai film The Place Promised in our Early Days, on the stairs leading to (one of) our protagonists apartment in the later part of the movie. Kind of unclear a screencap, but trust me, that’s totally what those top two boxes say.

I actually spotted this back during a theatrical screening of the movie, shown as part of the Glasgow leg of last years Scotland Loves Anime festival in October, but procrastinated about posting about it because I couldn’t remember where the heck I’d put my DVD copy. It probably shouldn’t really have been much of a surprise, anyway – whilst Garden of Words proved to be more of a Ringo Box movie, and I’ve not been back to check Voices of a Distant Star, both 5cm/s and Children who Chase Long Titles sported orange-transportation devices.

I had been a little terrified about revisiting the movie, though. I’m not a particularly big fan of Shinkai’s work, I’m afraid – I enjoy most of his productions on first viewing, but upon rewatch I tend to be overwhelmed by the extremely tortured writing his work often sports. 5cm/s I found kind of unbearable upon a second viewing. With Place Promised actually being my favourite of Shinkai’s output, or at least the one I enjoyed the most at point of first encounter, I didn’t really want to ruin that – it was nice to be able to say I genuinely enjoyed at least something he’d made.

Saying that, whilst I can’t really remember any of the minutiae as to why given it was the best part of four months ago that I last saw it, I still enjoyed it well enough. All’s well that ends well, I guess!

(PS – Hi there Reddit, I guess? That sure it a lot more traffic than I’m used to… For what it’s worth, when I asked (RoD/Kamichu/Magi) director Koji Masunari about Mikan Boxes at a Welcome to the Space Show Q&A, he said it was mostly due to their commonality in Japan more than any specific memetic thing)