Dogeza: I Tried Asking While Kowtowing.
土下座で頼んでみた (Dogeza de Tanondemita)
- Comedy
- Ecchi
- Episodes
- 12
- Duration
- 3 min per ep
- Aired
- Oct 14, 2020 to Dec 30, 2020
- Status
- Finished Airing
Synopsis
Suwaru Doge lives by a single principle: bow low enough, and you can get what you’re asking for. Convinced that a perfectly executed dogeza—kneeling and pleading with his forehead to the ground—can open doors that shouldn’t open, he sets his sights on the one “reward” he’s obsessed with: catching a glimpse of a woman’s nude body.
With that belief guiding him, Doge puts his groveling tactic to use on the girls at his school, making increasingly shameless requests and accepting whatever damage it does to his reputation along the way. Comedy and ecchi antics follow as he presses forward, one apology-filled kneel at a time.
Otaku Consensus
Dogeza succeeds only when judged as a precision-tooled short-form ecchi gag: Adonero’s three-minute pacing keeps each sketch from outstaying its welcome, and Tomokazu Sugita’s shameless vocal commitment gives the central joke more energy than the production footprint suggests. Reception is sharply split, with 8/10 defenders praising its “stupid” but effective comedy while broader metrics such as a 5.53 MAL score and 2.8 streaming average reflect the main criticism: it is thin, repetitive, and contentious by design rather than a fully developed comedy.
Why You Should Watch
Watch Dogeza if you want ecchi comedy stripped down to the speed and tact of a cursed punchline: 12 shorts, about three minutes each, no dramatic padding, no pretend wholesomeness. It scratches the same shameless impulse as Interspecies Reviewers or the dirtiest corners of Seitokai Yakuindomo, but without their ensemble sprawl or worldbuilding; this is a snack-sized test of how far a single escalating joke can go. The appeal is strongest for viewers who enjoy uncomfortable reaction comedy, recognizable voice talent, and the novelty of a TV anime that knows exactly how disposable it is. If you need romance, character arcs, or plausible social behavior, skip it; if you want a one-sitting ecchi curiosity with a polarized reputation, it delivers exactly that.
Key Characters
- SSuwaru Doge(VA: Tomokazu Sugita)
Suwaru Doge functions less like a conventional protagonist and more like a human bad-idea generator, with Sugita’s performance carrying much of the show’s comic timing in episodes that have almost no room for setup.
- MMinori Gakesaka(VA: Yui Ogura)
Minori Gakesaka represents the series’ reaction-comedy structure, where embarrassment and disbelief are treated as the real payoff rather than long-form characterization.
- KKanan Misenai(VA: Miyu Tomita)
Kanan Misenai is part of the main-girl rotation that turns each short into a compact vocal-and-visual gag built around surprise, confusion, and social pressure.
- UUrara Toyofusa(VA: Juri Nagatsuma)
Urara Toyofusa adds another variation to the show’s fixed sketch format, giving the anime a cast-based rhythm despite its extremely limited runtime.
What Makes It Stand Out
- 1
Adonero produced the series as 12 short episodes of roughly three minutes each, making the entire season closer in length to two standard TV episodes than a normal cour.
- 2
The show aired from October 14 to December 30, 2020, a compact fall-season run that matched its sketch-anime format rather than stretching the material into full-length episodes.
- 3
Its official genre identity is unusually narrow: Comedy and Ecchi, with no listed theme tag, which accurately reflects how little the series tries to disguise its one-joke construction.
- 4
Its reception profile is more interesting than its premise: 31,437 MAL votes place it at a 5.53 score and rank #13235, while its popularity rank of #2749 shows it was sampled far more widely than it was acclaimed.
- 5
The Japanese cast is disproportionately recognizable for a micro-format ecchi short, led by Tomokazu Sugita alongside Yui Ogura, Miyu Tomita, and Juri Nagatsuma.
Fun Facts & Trivia
- Fun fact 1
- The Japanese title, Dogeza de Tanondemita, is rendered in English as Dogeza: I Tried Asking While Kowtowing, preserving the cultural specificity of the word “dogeza” instead of replacing it with a looser phrase like “begging.”
- Fun fact 2
- One positive user review rated it 8/10 and openly called the premise “stupid,” which captures the show’s defender logic: enjoyment depends on finding the stupidity intentional rather than accidental.
- Fun fact 3
- A streaming listing summarized it under subtitled seinen and showed an average rating of 2.8 from 2.2k users, reinforcing how divisive the anime became outside database scores.
- Fun fact 4
- Despite its low MAL rank, the series’ popularity rank of #2749 indicates that controversy and short runtime helped it attract viewers who might not commit to a conventional full-length ecchi series.
- Fun fact 5
- The 12-episode count can be misleading for new viewers: because episodes run around three minutes, Dogeza is structurally closer to a single extended comedy compilation than a normal TV season.
Studios
- Adonero
