Pants Pankuro

is the name of a series of animated shorts (each just over a minute in length) that aired on Japanese public television from April 2004 until March 2008. The series is geared to toddlers and young children, and most episodes focus on the issues involved with toilet training. It features a number of anthropomorphic characters, including talking toilets and washing machines, who instruct children about how to use the restroom and what to do in case of an accident.

Characters

* Pants Pankuro, the protagonist, is about three years old. He has just started to wear underpants and use the toilet.
* Komingo is Pankuro's little sister. She is not yet toilet trained.
* Koricchi is a boy the same age as Pankuro; the two are intensely competitive. Koricchi speaks in a Japanese dialect known as Kansai ben, spoken by residents of Osaka.
* Koin is a girl about the same age as Pankuro, who likes to spin and dance.
* Toire-sama is Pankuro's friendly household toilet. Pankuro usually treats Toire-sama with great respect, as though he were an older relative.
* Kamiko-san is Pankuro's toilet roll holder. ("kami" means "paper".)
* Watoire-sama is Koricchi's family's old-fashioned squat toilet.
* Makihime-san is Koricchi's toilet roll holder. ("maki" means to "roll up" and "hime" means "princess".)
* Toire-sensei is Koin's toilet. She speaks in Japanese and English.
* Sottoire Three outdoor toilets that Pankuro and his friends use when they're playing outside. They speak Japanese and French. (The name is a combination of "soto," meaning "outside" and "toire," meaning "toilet.")
* Sentako Hacchan is Pankuro's eight-legged washing machine, who is very eager to do the laundry. ("Sentako" is a combination of "sentaku," which means laundry, and "tako," which means octopus. "Hacchan" is a combination of "hachi," which mean "eight," and "chan," which is a diminutive suffix used for names, similar to adding a 'y' to the end of a name, as in Bill -> Billy.)
* Ko-hachi Sentako Hacchan's son. He washes one pair of Pankuro's pants at a time. "Ko" means "child."
* Mago-hachi Sentako Hacchan's grandson. "Mago" means "grandchild."
* Suberi-ika A slide that Pankuro and his friends play on outside. "Suberi" means "sliding."

External links

* [http://www.nhk-ep.com/chara/pankurou/index.html Official "Pants Pankuro" site at NHK]
* [http://www.youtube.com/user/koricchi "Pants Pankuro" shorts on YouTube]