Episode Stats:

Japanese Episode 32:  "Sekichiku Ninja Taiketsu!" 

("Sekichiku Ninja Battle!")

American Episode 32:  "The Ninja Poke-Showdown!"
Pokemon Dare Da?  Konpan
Japanese Air Date:  November 4th, 1997
American Air Date:  October 20th, 1998
Important Characters:  Kyou (Koga), Aya (Aya)
Important Places:  Sekichiku Gym (Fuchsia Gym)

As Satoshi-tachi search for the Sekichiku Gym in the middle of a huge forest, they come across a large Japanese mansion.  Inside, Satoshi finds a Konpan, so he tries to follow the bug pokemon to find out where the master of the house is.  As he pursues the pokemon, Satoshi realizes that the mansion is filled with booby traps!  Invisible walls, doors leading to the side of a cliff, and flying shuriken all trouble Satoshi-tachi as they make their way through the mansion.  They finally come across a room with a ninja dressed all in pink, Aya.  The Konpan that had been wandering the mansion was hers, and with it she challenges Satoshi to a pokemon battle.  Satoshi's Fushigidane quickly beats Aya's Konpan, so her elder brother Kyou steps in to battle.  Kyou ends up being the Sekichiku City Gym Leader, and he starts his battle with a Konpan.  Konpan quicly evolves into Morphon, and it battles it out with Fushigidane until the Rocket-Dan interrupt.  After immobilizing all of Satoshi's pokemon with a web-like gunk, the Rocket-Dan round up all of the gym's Biriridama to take to the boss.  Kasumi tries to lend a hand with her starfish pokemon, but Koduck is the only pokemon to come out.  After a few pathetic attacks, Koduck begins to use some amazing psychic abilities!  It seems that after Koduck's headache becomes severe enough, its psychic powers are awakened.  The Rocket-Dan are ejected from the gym, and Satoshi and Kyou can resume their battle.  Kyou's Golbat fights with Satoshi's Hitokage, whose flame attacks quickly beat the bat pokemon.  Satoshi earns himself the Pink Badge and happily leaves for his next gym.

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Thoughts
Satoshi's sixth gym battle occurs in this episode, and I thought it was pretty interesting.  Watching Satoshi-tachi stumble around the ninja mansion was great, and the battle was actually pretty entertaining.  I do wish they had stretched this out to a two-parter so that we could see more of both the mansion and the gym leader's personality (Kyou really didn't have a lot of dialogue, did he?), but what's done is done. 

Paint Edit
Right as Aya calls back Konpan, there's a kanji in the background that's erased.  It looks like a combination of ryoku (power, strength) and shin (spirit).  It's also erased in the very next shot featuring Aya, the one where she looks a bit angry.  The thing is, the kanji was kept for the other few times it showed up earlier in the episode (like in the pan shot of the room before Takeshi and Kasumi find Satoshi shuriken'ed to the wall), but it's erased for that one scene.  Ah well.

Side Note
Since there wasn't a lot changed in this episode, it is worthwhile to give you a little background information to Musashi and Kojirou's kabuki appearance. The first paragraph here will give a brief history of kabuki (I promise not to make it boring!) and the next will relate kabuki directly to Musashi and Kojirou's scene.

Kabuki started around the late 16th-century.  The plays were began with merchants who had acquired great wealth but could not advance socially because they were stuck in their "commoner" class.  So they produced these kabuki plays to make themselves more prominent in the commoner class (if you can't go up, become the best at where you are).  The plays are usually taken from a variety of sources:  jidai-mono (historical dramas, which tell of the adventures of noble warriors and such), sewa-mono (domestic dramas which tell of commoners), plays adapted from noh and kyogen dramas (the little comic relief plays between noh plays), and plays adapted (sometimes verbatim) from the puppet theater (which had a person on the left narrate and say the dialogue while the puppets mimed out the performance--in kabuki, the actors themselves spoke the dialogue).  Then there are plays made soley for kabuki plays, but they are few compared to the other kinds.  Music is very important as it sets the mood, and the actors usually say their dialogue to a song-like rhythm.  Emphasis is placed on gestures, as almost every gesture is accompanied by a sound effect and has signifigance in the play--a wrong gesture could ruin the meaning of the entire play.  Kabuki actors are usually prepped from the time they start school, and many families pass down the job from generation to generation (as many as fifteen or sixteen generations).
 

• So what about Musashi and Kojirou's appearance?  This time the curtains are the right colors (see Episode 31) and are drawn from the side (See?  Didn't I tell you?).

• The music effects in the background (underneath the usual Rocket Dan theme) is a combination of wooden clappers and shamisen (a three-stringed instrument used in most kabuki plays).

• Musashi and Kojirou's outfits are traditional kabuki outfits, but technically Musashi should not be included in the scene.  You see in the early days of kabuki, women usually played the parts.  But when they called attention from young men in the audience, it was decided kabuki plays would be taken more seriously if women were excluded.  So in 162,9 a ban was put on women in kabuki theatre.  For the female parts in the plays, men would do the parts of the females and would be known as onnagata.  The ban was finally lifted about 250 years later, but by that time the onnagata had become so important and such an intregal part in kabuki theatre that there were no parts for women.  Musashi could have been in a real kabuki play, but she most likely would have been played by an onnagata instead.

• When Musashi and Kojirou cross their eyes during their motto, they're doing a technique of kabuki known as mie.  During a climatic part of the play, kabuki actors will pause momentarily, assume a picturesque pose, stare out into the audience, and cross their eyes.

That pretty much covers it.  That's a lot of notes for just thirty seconds of an episode, but I think it's interesting that 4Kids would keep a scene packing THIS much Japanese culture intact but would erase a kanji symbol earlier in the same episode.

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