The Salty Koharu Has a Soft Spot for Me sets a 6 October debut
The Shogakukan light-novel romcom has its second key visual, a main promotional video and an AT-X slot on 6 October - with no Western streaming home announced yet.
The anime adaptation of Kazami Saruwatari and illustrator Achiki's light novel The Salty Koharu Has a Soft Spot for Me (Shiotaiō no Satō-san ga Ore ni Dake Amai) will debut on 6 October, the show's official site has confirmed, with a second key visual and a main promotional video arriving alongside the date.
When it airs
AT-X goes first on 6 October at 20:30 Japan time, with repeat showings on Thursday mornings and Monday afternoons. Tokyo MX follows at 22:00 the same night, BS-TBS at 23:30 and WOWOW at 24:30, which in practice means the small hours of 7 October. CBC picks the series up on 9 October and MBS on 10 October, so it spreads across the week in Japan.
Streaming splits in two stages. d Anime Store and U-NEXT carry episodes from 22:30 Japan time on 6 October, and the wider field - ABEMA, DMM TV, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, FOD, NicoNico and around a dozen others - follows on 11 October. Nothing has been announced for UK or European services yet, so viewers outside Japan should expect to wait for a licensing announcement.
Who is making it
Tezuka Productions is animating, with Fumihiro Yoshimura directing, Takashi Aoshima on series scripts, Daisuke Okushima designing the characters and Shun Narita composing the score. The cast is led by Hiiro Ishibashi as Sōta Oshio and Miku Itō as Koharu Satō, with Miyu Tomita, Chiaki Kobayashi, Yoshino Aoyama, Hisako Kanemoto, Yasunori Matsumoto and Yūki Wakai filling out the supporting line-up.
What it is
The premise is about as uncomplicated as the title suggests. Sōta works at his father's café and takes the photographs for its social media; Koharu is the classmate everyone calls cold, and is in fact just awkward. Two people, one mutual crush, and nobody saying anything about it - a gentle high-school comedy rather than anything with fights in it.
The light novel has been running on Shogakukan's Gagaga Bunko imprint since 2019, with the 13th volume due on 16 October. Kaya Tetsuyama's manga adaptation began on the Manga ONE and Ura Sunday services in May 2020, and its 11th collected volume lands on 9 October. Shogakukan's NOVELOUS app publishes the series in English under the title The Salty Koharu Has a Soft Spot for Me, which means the source material is already readable outside Japan.
Our opinion
There is nothing novel about a shy-girl romcom, and that is exactly the pitch. Tezuka Productions has spent decades making this sort of show look effortless and rarely misjudges a warm, small-scale comedy, so the risk here is blandness rather than disaster. The genuinely useful detail is the English release: Shogakukan running the novels on its own app means Western readers can catch up before episode one, which is more than most seasonal anime can offer. The frustration is the streaming gap, because until a European or American service picks it up, this is another show most of us will meet through screenshots.