A doll survives because one girl refused to burn it. Another girl, her granddaughter, uses that same object to tell a bullied classmate she matters. The show holds two acts of protection across seventy years in your hands, each one small, each one everything.
Mitsuko is a schoolgirl who tries to shield Yu-Lian, a half-Chinese transfer student, from bullies. That night she finds Emily, an old American doll that came to a Japanese child through an exchange in 1921. During the anti-Western war years, when such dolls were burned, Emily was hidden away and saved by a courageous young girl who turned out to be Mitsuko's grandmother. At show-and-tell the following day, Mitsuko tells her class about Emily and offers Yu-Lian encouragement. The single-episode OVA from 1992 links a wartime rescue to a present-day act of kindness.
