Akio Furukawa Quotes
3 quotes from Clannad, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
The bread-throwing comic father who turns out to hold the show's thesis about what parents give up. Loud on purpose, so that nobody in his house ever has to be embarrassed.
“Hmph! What a puny name! Go with something like Galactic Okazaki.”
This is the first thing Nagisa's father says to the boy who will marry her, and the first lesson in how the Furukawa household works: nobody is allowed to be embarrassed, because Akio will always be more embarrassing first. Tomoya has just made Sanae cry by calling her bread a failure, and Akio's response is to run a naming contest rather than take offense, which is a kind of hospitality the show never underlines. It is worth setting the scene against Tomoya's own house, silent except for a drunk father, to see what the joke is doing. The bakery is the first place Tomoya is teased, and being teased is how this family says a person is welcome. Galactic Okazaki is a stupid joke and a formal adoption, delivered in the same breath, and Clannad's comedy is nearly always doing both.
“Little coward! Alright, then...I'll just have to tell her myself...By landmine...What I'm talking about. IS. SANAE'S BREAD!!!!!”
The running gag has a fixed shape: Akio insults Sanae's bread, she overhears, she runs off crying, and he runs after her cramming the bread into his mouth and shouting that he loves it. The version in the summer-holiday episode is the fullest performance of it, and it is worth thinking about what the routine actually is. It is a marriage. Sanae's bread is inedible, both of them know it, and the joke is that Akio's tactlessness and his devotion are the same reflex; he cannot stop saying the true thing and he cannot bear having said it. Clannad gives the healthiest relationship in the series to its two clowns and never draws attention to that. After Story will make Tomoya learn the same trick, the truth and the chasing-after, with a daughter instead of a wife.
Nagisa has walked out of her own play after learning, an hour before curtain, that her parents gave up acting and baseball to run a bakery when she nearly died as a small child, and this is what Akio shouts at her in the school corridor to get her back on stage. Akio has spent twenty-one episodes as the bread-throwing comic father, and the show cashes that in here: the man who names customers Galactic Okazaki is the one who says the series' thesis out loud, and nobody else could have. Two things keep it from being sentimental in the bad sense. The dream he gave up was a real one, an actor's career, and the story has been honest that the bakery is a small life. And After Story will test the line directly, asking whether Tomoya can do for Ushio what Akio did for Nagisa, and letting him fail at it for five years before he can. The sentence is a standard the second season holds its hero to.