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Ellen Baker, Japan’s anime-style English textbook teacher, gets turned into a huggy pillow

Casey Baseel May 30, 2016
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With or without permission from her creators, someone is ready to provide in-bed companionship for everyone who’s hot for teacher, as long as that teacher is Ellen-sensei.

As the Japanese school year began last month, budding linguists and passionate anime fans fell in love with Ellen Baker, a fictional yet charming English teacher from the U.S. who appears in illustrated form in widely used textbook series New Horizon. The phenomenal popularity of Ellen-sensei, as fans have taken to calling her, was great publicity for the educational materials she’s part of, but at the same time publisher Tokyo Shoseki was concerned about the possibility of the lustier side of otaku fandom rearing its head.

In order to protect the wholesome, educational image of the New Horizon texts, and thus ensure their continued use in schools, both the books’ illustrator and publisher have asked the character’s fans to show restraint in their unofficial, derivative depictions of Ellen-sensei. It seems that not everyone was swayed by their words, though.

Character merchandise retailer Pepera Shoten is currently selling Ellen-sensei huggy pillow covers through Yahoo! Japan shopping. While the character is wearing her relatively modest teaching attire on one side of the double-sided case, the other shows her in a half-dressed state much more appropriate for the bedroom than the classroom.

Pepera Shoten’s site makes no mention of an official license from the character’s rights holder, but does make sure there’s absolutely no confusion about who the blond educator is supposed to be, as the names “Ellen” and “Ellen Baker” appear multiple times, in both English and Japanese, in the product description.

The company also boasts that the pillow cover is made of a material that’s “velvety soft and smooth to the touch.” Sticklers for quality will also be glad to know that it’s equipped with a zipper, so as to keep everything in place during the intense jostling that comes with the manner in which such pillowcase are usually used.

However, we can’t entirely rule out the possibility that Pepera Shoten has only the most chaste of intentions in appropriating Ellen-sensei’s likeness. After all, now that modern technology has made talking huggy pillows a reality, maybe the company expects purchasers to load in voice clips from New Horizon’s audio lessons, thus bringing the illustrated Ellen-sensei into the 3-D world in order for her to better command pupils’ attentions and more effectively instruct them.

Of course, that still wouldn’t explain the black garter panties.

Can’t sleep because your huggy pillow case is in the wash? Why not see what Casey is up to on Twitter?

Source: Hachima Kiko
Images: Yahooo! Japan Shopping/Pepera Shoten