or, “An Analysis Of The Shark Stickers On The Shinonome Fridge”

I finished rewatching Nichijou last week, and found out some interesting stuff about the timeline I thought I’d share. The anime doesn’t give away a whole lot of timeline info compared to series like Ace Attorney and Yotsuba&!, but even so it’s generally pretty coherent, and the date of Nano’s birthday is especially interesting. (No, really)

The anime timeline very rarely reveals any concrete dates; there are just a few indications like Hallowe’en and Christmas which give a rough idea of the current month or week. Episode 26, however, has a closeup of the calendar on the Shinonome fridge:

That shows Nano’s birthday is on the 7th day of the month, and it’s a Monday.

It doesn’t show which month though. (The English Nichijou wiki says it’s August, but I don’t know where that came from.) Two of the stickers are even obscuring the last few days, so it’s impossible to tell how long the month is.

Fortunately though, the anime provides enough information to narrow it down. Episode 22 contains the Christmas segments:

So Nano’s birthday must be after Christmas. And since everyone’s still in 1-Q in episode 26, it must take place before the start of the next school year (which is April in Japan). So Nano’s birthday is in either January, February, or March.

Can it be narrowed down any further? Let’s look at the case when Nano’s birthday is on January 7th:

The 1st and 14th days are public holidays in Japan, circled in red. Not only are they not shown as holidays on the Shinonome calendar, it also seems very unlikely that episodes 23–25 take place in the few days between Christmas and the 7th. I think it’s fair to rule out January as a possibility.

So we’re down to either February or March.

What are the dates of the public holidays in February and March?

If you check those against the Shinonome calendar you’ll see that both the 11th and 21st days are covered by the stickers, so it’s impossible to tell which one is the public holiday…

So not only do the shark stickers prevent us from knowing the length of the month, they also obscure the only relevant public holidays. The stickers were deliberately arranged to make Nano’s birthday ambiguous between February and March.

Honestly I believe that’s what was originally intended. For some reason Arawi didn’t want to give away the exact date, at least not back when the anime was made. However…

In volume 9 of the manga there’s a timeskip into the future, when Hakase is in high school. No dates are visible in the chapter itself, but in the 2015 Nichijou calendar there was a bonus page featuring the timeskip:

The important thing here is the year:

Apparently the timeskip is set in 2021! April 20th of that year is a Tuesday, which fits with what it says on the top left of the bonus calendar page (火 is short for Tuesday). The date is also consistent with the calendar in Mio’s timeskip chapter in volume 10:

This chapter is set just before Mio and Mai tell Nano that Yuuko is returning to Japan, so it makes sense that the date on Mio’s calendar is shortly before the 20th. It’s pretty clear that Arawi had concrete dates in mind for the timeskips. But what does that mean for Nano’s birthday?

The fact that the timeskips are set in 2021 doesn’t immediately give us the year of the main story, since we don’t know the exact offset of the timeskip. But combined with the fact that Nano’s birthday is on a Monday, it helps to narrow down the possibilities.

The first possibility is that Nano’s birthday is in 2011. It could be February 7th or March 7th – they’re both Mondays, since February has 28 days. But there’s a problem: in episode 3, Hakase says she’s eight years old. If episode 26 is set in 2011, then episode 3 is set in 2010, which would make Future Hakase 18 or 19 (depending on when her birthday is). That just seems too unlikely; she’s supposed to still be in high school, and she also just looks a lot younger than that anyway:

The only other year consistent with the fact that Nano’s birthday is on a Monday is 2016. Then Hakase would have been eight years old in 2015, making Future Hakase either 13 or 14. That’s too young for high school … but then again, this is Hakase we’re talking about. If anything, it’s a little surprising that she didn’t skip high school altogether.

So: Assuming the anime is consistent with the easter egg in the Nichijou calendar, the conclusion seems to be that Nano’s birthday is in 2016. It does require that Hakase enters high school a year or two early, but I think that’s a pretty reasonable assumption to be honest. She’s certainly intelligent enough, and let’s not forget she already somehow managed to persuade the Principal to admit an extra student in unusual circumstances once before…

Who knows if we’ll ever know for sure, but if Nano’s birthday really is in 2016, then we can actually deduce the exact date. 2016 is a leap year, which means February 7th and March 7th are on different days of the week, so there’s no ambiguity between them. So if it’s in 2016, then Nano’s second birthday – and the final episode of the anime – is actually today: March 7th!