Teruaki Nakamura is a high school boy whose family just moved down from the Japanese mainland to the sunny southern island of Okinawa, and even in that short time, he’s fallen in love with a bubbly classmate named Hina Kyan. There’s just one catch: he can’t talk to her—literally. Hina defaults to the old Okinawan Japanese dialect of Uchinaguchi and has a *very* thick accent to boot. She’s effectively unintelligible to a mainlander who grew up on textbook Japanese. But luckily, Hina’s BFF Kana Higa is usually on hand to translate. Of course, there’s a wrinkle in play given that Kana is crushing on Teruaki, so we’ve got some love triangulation here. Doki-doki and hijinks both ensue as Teruaki manages to get hit with every case of Okinawan culture shock in the book, from activating the “Higa” Trap Card to accidentally shouting “I love you” in Uchinaguchi, to getting buried under a small mountain of sata andagi donuts. The episode ends with a hint the next episode will include… Honestly, we don’t know what, because Hina explains in Uchinaguchi, which the subtitlers have transliterated but not translated as part of the joke…

It’s been a few years since we’ve seen an anime set in The Best Prefecture (fight me) and I’ve been looking forward to this one. Full disclosure, I work as an English teacher in Okinawa, and have been there long enough to have an Okinawan driver’s license, so I’m “rooting for the home team” on this one and can’t claim to be entirely unbiased. But I can say with confidence that this looks to be a fun series to watch. Plot-wise, so far we’ve seen a series of pretty standard rom-com scenarios, just with an Okinawan cultural twist—once you’ve seen the scene where Teru learns that Okinawans often use their given names instead of their family names for practical reasons, any experienced anime fan can guess what is coming next (answer: he has to call a girl by her given name, normally a sign of affection and emotional intimacy in mainland Japanese culture). The animation is up to standard, but the real star of the art is the backgrounds. Granted, Okinawa is just that beautiful, but still, studio Millepensee does a good job. What will become of these kids living out the springtime of their youth on the island of endless summer? Well, it’s too early to know for certain, but I’m certainly going to be along for the ride.

Okitsura: Fell in Love with an Okinawan Girl, but I Just Wish I Know What She’s Saying is streaming on Crunchyroll.