lumenquill | That Time I Had My Own Yukito (Reply)

In recent times, by which I mean several months ago at this point, I ended up re-watching Cardcaptor Sakura with my friends over Discord. It was a great experience, introducing my majority AMAB friend group to shojo anime and seeing my childhood favourite series in a new light, watching a dub closer to the original Japanese than the one I was used to.

I gotta say, while there are some… issues with it that are no doubt known to those familiar with creator CLAMP’s works, it was on a whole a good time and entertaining to everyone involved.

To those unfamiliar, Cardcaptor Sakura follows to the adventures of normal enough elementary school girl Sakura Kinomoto, or Sakura Avalon in the dub I grew up with, to recapture the mischievous spirits of the Clow Cards, magical cards created by the wizard Clow Reed and left in a magical book for her to find one day. She is accompanied by many magical and non-magical friends in keeping her endeavours a secret and capturing the cards, from the laid back guardian of the cards, Kero, to her best friend and biggest supporter, Tomoyo, but one particular character struck my friends as a little strange. That was Yukito.

Yukito is the best friend of Sakura’s older brother Toya, and the object of Sakura’s schoolgirl crush. He’s older than her, being in high school, and she has zero chance with him romantically speaking as he is implied to be romantic partners with her brother, but he is nonetheless kind to Sakura. He frequently greets her, gives her candy, walks to school with her, and spends time with her outside her brother’s influence. While I always read his kindness to her as normal and reasonable, my friends were slightly bothered by this, finding it odd a high school boy would spend so much time with the neighbourhood elementary school girl.

The reality is this never struck me as strange or creepy as a child, because my neighbourhood had its own Yukito. Let me back up a bit. I spent most of my childhood in a small low income co-op housing area, in which all the kids knew each other and were on some degree of reasonable terms. There was a playground in the center of the housing circle, and all of us would gather and hang out there.

Being low income oriented, people and families came and went relatively quickly and with little warning, but two doors down from us was a family that stuck around the majority of the time they lived there. I don’t know exactly how much older the families son was than me, but I remember him being in his mid-late teens when I was a tween so I assume there was a several year gap between us.

Our fathers were on good terms and frequently talked to each other, so I have to assume his dad must have told him something like “be nice to their daughter!” Or something, but the boy came to approach that goal with an earnestness you don’t often see in young boys being asked to be kind to little girls.

Every time I called to greet him, he would stop what he was doing, be it street hockey with his friends or walking to run an errand, he would come and say hi to me, ask how I was doing, and listen for a few minutes as I rambled at him about whatever it was I was excited about that day. His family was Muslim, but despite celebrating completely different winter holidays than us, he insisted on getting me a teddy bear around Christmas time for several years.

When my family moved to another house a few blocks away, his family eventually by sheer coincidence joined us as next door neighbours in our new housing complex and he continued to greet me every so often. I distinctly remember him having a part time job at the local Gamestop (back when it was known as EB Games) and loaning me his copy of Pokemon Diamond before I managed to rack up enough allowance for Pokemon Pearl for myself. I also remember him having an outdoor cat who skittishly avoided me, and him trying to get the cat to come over for me to pet it.

I don’t think i ever had a crush on him like Sakura did Yukito, and I have no idea how much adult intervention was involved in his kindness, but his presence is a cherished memory of mine nonetheless. I explained this to my friends, which caused them to warm up to Yukito for our watch through of Cardcaptor Sakura.

I guess it really goes to show how far a little kindness can go, considering I still remember all of this years later. I don’t know what happened to him, or where he is and what he’s doing now, but I hope I’m a bright spot in his memories of youth too.