A U.S. Navy recruiting unit posted a video on Friday that opens with the opening sequence of Blend S, theme song and all, before cutting to footage of a warship. Whether anyone cleared the music is not clear.
The account belongs to Navy Talent Acquisition Group Great Lakes, a unit that recruits from the region around Lake Michigan. The video runs through the anime’s title sequence, vocals included, with “Bon Appétit ♡ S” playing and the line “Smile, Sweet, Sister, Sadistic, Surprise, Service” intact. It then cuts to an offscreen voice saying “San Antonio” over an image of a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock, and continues with clips of ships in that class and the sailors aboard them. The posts around it carry a written overview of the class.
The Blend S production committee has not commented. The Navy has not said whether it asked. Japanese blog Hachima Kikō spotted the video first, and it has been circulating since.
Why the silence matters
Anime studios and production committees are famously relaxed about fan activity and famously not relaxed about commercial use, and a recruitment advertisement sits well outside the fan-work grey area. A 12-episode TV series from 2017 does not usually generate licensing revenue, but it does have rights holders, and they are the ones who would need to say yes.
There is a second layer here, and it is the funnier one. Miyuki Nakayama’s manga is a comedy about a café where the staff are assigned personalities for customers. The lead, Kaho, has a permanently hostile resting face, so she is cast as the sadistic waitress. The title is a pun on do-S, Japanese slang for a serious sadist. Someone in Navy public affairs watched that show, heard the opening, and decided it was the right soundtrack for an amphibious transport dock.
The services have been courting this audience for years
The Marine Corps and the FBI both attended Anime NYC in an official capacity in November 2023, with recruiting tables and a booth presence. That is a deliberate strategy: conventions put thousands of people aged 18 to 24 in one building, and the services have missed recruiting targets in recent years.
Licensing is the part of that strategy nobody talks about. Platforms like AniBiz, the anime licensing marketplace that raised US$6 million from TBS, Toei Animation and TV Tokyo, exist because matching rights holders to buyers is still a slow, relationship-driven business. A branch of the armed forces using a 2017 opening sequence in a recruiting clip is what happens when that process gets skipped.
Does it even work as a recruitment ad
The people who recognise the song are, almost by definition, already anime fans, which makes it an odd fit for a pitch aimed at people who might not have considered the Navy. It reads more like a social media manager enjoying their job than a tested campaign.
Blend S is a slight thing to build a controversy on. Twelve episodes, one season, a premise that runs out of jokes by episode six, and a small but stubborn following that has kept the opening sequence in circulation for nine years. That longevity is the only reason the video works as a recruiting tool at all, and it is also the reason a rights holder might care.
What happens next depends on Aniplex of America, which streamed the show on Crunchyroll as it aired and released the Blu-ray in 2018. That makes it the obvious place for a complaint to land. A takedown request would end the story quietly. A licensing deal would be stranger and funnier, and someone would have to explain the paperwork behind a sadist café song.
Nothing has been announced either way, and the video is still up.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Key visual for the Blend S anime, via Anime News Network.
