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In episode 1 of Bakuon!!, around 20 minutes in, Onsa indicates that she is going to borrow from John F. Kennedy, and says what Crunchyroll translates as the following:

In exporting motorcycles throughout the world, our nation of Japan has brought liberty and justice to all. And yet, could you say to your heart, "Freedom, except for Suzuki riders," that we are all equal before the Lord except for Suzuki?

Which Kennedy oration is she taking that from? Also, here is a picture of anime JFK.

Kennedy-senpai

senshin
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  • +1 for the picture of anime JFK. That's the strangest thing I've seen since I finished Kill la Kill a few weeks ago. – Torisuda May 01 '16 at 07:14
  • This is a remarkably good season for Kennedys in anime! Benio quotes Robert Kennedy's "Day of Affirmation" speech in the preview for episode 4 of _Sousei no Onmyouji_: "only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly". – senshin May 12 '16 at 06:39

1 Answers1

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My best guess is that Onsa is rather loosely adapting the following paragraph of Kennedy's 1963 Civil Rights Address:

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home; but are we to say to the world, and, much more importantly, for each other, that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race, except with respect to Negroes?

The "except for..." language used by Onsa roughly matches that used in Kennedy's oration, but that's about as far as it goes. If you have a look at the Japanese version of the address (which, miraculously, exists), you'll find that the sentence structure is not even parallel to Kennedy's. There are also no references to religion in Kennedy's speech, so I'm not really sure what it's doing in Onsa's.

Googling for fragments of Onsa's speech that one would expect to be lifted unaltered from their source (e.g. 「自らの魂のもとに自由」) gets you nothing but Bakuon!! results.

In summary, I'd like to quote one of America's greatest presidents:

"Methinks some intern was crunched for time and ended up passing off random inspirational-sounding quotes as excerpts from Kennedy's speeches."
―Abraham Lincoln

senshin
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  • I actually think the match is close enough between the JFK quote and the Bakuon quote that someone who had at some point read JFK's speech could have written Onsa's speech from flawed pseudo memory of its general structure. And if I were going to make a half-assed reconstruction from memory of any speech by any American politician, I would definitely include the Lord somewhere in there, since politicians are always saying things like that. – Torisuda May 01 '16 at 07:21