Danica Davidson
May 25, 2021 
Plenty of people have bad memories of sex education class, whether the class didn’t tell them what they needed to know or spent its time terrifying them about STDs. Sex Ed 120% follows a teacher determined to give the students at her all-girls school accurate and useful information.
So of course it gets her into trouble.
But Tsuji-sensei doesn’t give up, even when she’s called out for passing out condoms and dental dams in class. Or when eyebrows are raised for her talking to her students about masturbation. She’s called the queen of sex talk for a reason.
The manga concentrates on Tsuji-sensei and a few specific students. One student is obsessed with BL, another is a lesbian but uncertain about telling people. The students are all trying to understand how things work.
Sex Ed 120% is a comedy, but it also includes quite a bit of factual information in it, some of which could be helpful to real students. It’s also written from a female perspective, and points out how sex ed tends to ignore many female issues. Because of the topic, the book is rated mature and shrink-wrapped as if it’s hentai, except it’s anything but that. There are a few suggestive panels, but mostly it doesn’t show much, and usually when it does “show” something, it’s actually showing something indicative of the real thing and not the real thing itself.
(You may learn more about sugar gliders than you wanted to know, though.)
The book obviously takes place in Japan, and it repeatedly and specifically condemns the Japanese sex ed system as not being good enough for its students. However, many of the criticisms seem pretty generic to sex ed classes elsewhere, so you don’t have to be Japanese to understand the references or enjoy the story. As a way to educate, the manga even ends with suggested websites where people can get more information, but these websites are all in Japanese and so not of much help to the average American reader. There’s also a quiz with answers toward the end, so you’ll have to see how you do.
Story: Kikiki Tataki
Art: Hotomura
Publisher: Yen Press
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