Spoiler note: This essay discusses character developments through Volume 4 of Tokoton Kuzu na Watarase Nanoni. It does not reveal an ending or speculate about unpublished events.
Short Answer
Junta Watarase is experienced at attracting women, but that does not mean he understands how to build a relationship around one person’s trust, daily life, and emotional safety. His development is not a revelation that he was “secretly kind all along.” It begins when easy charm stops being enough and he starts spending something more costly—his time, effort, attention, and emotional security.
If you are new to the series, begin with the Tokoton Kuzu na Watarase Nanoni manga guide for the premise, characters, and current publication information. This essay stays with Watarase’s psychology rather than repeating that introduction.
Dating Experience Is Not the Same as Understanding Love
Junta Watarase knows how to close a distance quickly. He can tell what kind of words will make someone happy, approach without hesitation, and choose the version of himself most likely to be desired. He is comfortable with the opening stage of attraction—the teasing, anticipation, and pleasure of knowing that another person is responding to him.
But none of that necessarily means he understands love.
Watarase appears most practiced at relationships that do not require him to reorganize his life around another person. He can enjoy attention while it remains light. He can create intimacy without showing the parts of himself that are uncertain, exhausted, or vulnerable. If the relationship begins to demand responsibility, he has usually occupied a position from which he can step away.
The number of people someone has dated tells us very little about whether they have learned to care for one person well. Knowing how to make someone’s heart race is different from knowing how to make them feel safe. Watarase is fluent in the first language. With Nonoka, he is only beginning to learn the second.
The Real Problem Is Not Simply His Number of Partners
Calling Watarase a “scumbag” only because he has been involved with many women would make the character less interesting and the criticism less precise.
The deeper problem is the kind of position he has repeatedly chosen: close enough to receive affection, but distant enough to avoid sharing responsibility for what that affection becomes.
This is why “he is actually kind” cannot erase his past behavior. A person can perform sincere acts of kindness and still have treated relationships carelessly. Those truths can exist at the same time.
The manga’s more compelling question is not whether his red flags were a misunderstanding. They were not. The question is what happens when the person carrying them encounters a relationship he can no longer manage through the patterns that once kept him comfortable.
As a Comedian, Watarase Does Not Run Away
Watarase’s private life can feel evasive and difficult to grasp. His work is different. When it comes to comedy, he is focused, disciplined, and willing to repeat the labor that performance requires.
A stage appearance depends on far more than popularity or good looks. A comedian has to write, rehearse with a partner, study an audience, adjust timing, and accept an immediate result. If the joke does not land, charm cannot fully disguise the silence.
This contrast matters. In romance, Watarase can often influence the outcome with a practiced look or a well-timed line. Comedy refuses to give him the same easy control. It asks for preparation and exposes the result in public.
Work gives Watarase a visible relationship between effort and response. Intimacy has no equivalent script, and no rehearsal can guarantee trust.
Nonoka Watches the Work, Not Just the Popular Man
One of Nonoka’s most important effects on Watarase is that she does not look at him only as an attractive celebrity.
He is accustomed to attention built around his appearance, popularity, and reputation as a desirable comedian. Nonoka, however, notices the material of his work: what he is trying to do onstage, the effort behind the performance, and the seriousness with which he approaches comedy.
His pleasure at being seen this way reveals something more vulnerable than vanity. Praise for his looks confirms an identity he already knows how to perform. Recognition of his work reaches the part of him that he has actually chosen and built.
Nonoka sees both his carelessness and his discipline. She does not have to erase one in order to acknowledge the other.
That gaze is difficult for him to answer with ordinary flirtation. She is not simply admiring the polished man in the spotlight. She is looking toward the person who wrote, practiced, failed, corrected, and tried again behind it.
Time and Effort Mean More Than Easy Words
Because Watarase is skilled with romantic language, his words are not always the best measure of change. Compliments and intimacy may come so naturally to him that they require little personal risk.
His actions become more revealing when they inconvenience him.
Within the first four volumes, his concern for Nonoka’s health leads him to travel from Osaka to see her. The emotional meaning lies not only in the dramatic distance. The trip requires time, physical energy, schedule adjustments, and a decision that her condition belongs inside his day rather than outside it.
One journey cannot settle everything between them, and it does not cancel his previous behavior. What changes is the place Nonoka occupies in his attention. She is becoming more than someone he can soothe with the right sentence. She becomes someone whose wellbeing can move his actual life.
Japanese romance manga often lets practical gestures speak before a character can name a feeling: arriving, noticing fatigue, bringing what is needed, or quietly changing plans. Such actions can be deeply tender. They also have a limit. Practical care should not become a permanent substitute for honesty or consent.
For Watarase, however, the movement from speech to effort is significant. Caring begins to demand something from him.
His Familiar Romantic Patterns Do Not Work on Nonoka
Watarase loses his composure around Nonoka not simply because she is inexperienced. He loses it because she understands enough about his world not to treat every kind gesture as a promise.
She knows there is a distance between an entertainer and an ordinary university student. She knows his history with women. Even while his closeness affects her, she tries not to assume that she alone is special.
The lines that normally give Watarase control therefore cannot provide certainty. More importantly, Nonoka sees beyond his attractive public face. She notices his dedication, but also his exhaustion, insecurity, and moments when work leaves him with little emotional room.
That attention is comforting because she sees what matters to him. It is also dangerous because she can see what he usually protects.
At first, Watarase seems to be the person unsettling Nonoka. Gradually, her choices begin to unsettle him. This is more than a romantic reversal. A man who once managed intimacy from a safe position is beginning to accept that another person can choose to leave, misunderstand him, or refuse the role he imagined for her.
Real attachment removes his guaranteed exit and his control over the emotional pace. That is why his usual ease begins to disappear.
Losing His Composure Does Not Give Him the Right to Possess Her
Watarase’s jealousy and emerging possessiveness create some of the manga’s strongest romantic tension. The usually confident man becomes reactive when Nonoka directs her attention elsewhere.
Yet jealousy is not the same as care.
Not wanting another person to take her away does not automatically mean he respects her choices, understands her needs, or knows how to create a secure relationship. Possessiveness centers his fear of losing her. Care must also make room for her life.
For Watarase to change, he cannot simply claim Nonoka more strongly. He has to listen to what she wants, make his intentions legible, and build trust through repeated behavior. His loss of composure matters because it places him on the vulnerable side of intimacy for perhaps the first time. It is an entrance to growth, not proof that growth is complete.
The next question is whether jealousy can become responsibility, and whether the desire to keep her close can become respect for the person she is.
Reading a Red-Flag Hero Without Romanticizing the Red Flags
Watarase has the ingredients of an immediately compelling red-flag hero: dangerous closeness, effortless charm, a careless romantic history, professional seriousness, and the spectacle of a confident man losing control around one woman.
His past does not vanish because he shows Nonoka tenderness. His flaws are what give his smaller changes weight.
What makes him worth following is not that the red flags are harmless. It is that the story may be asking whether he can recognize the habits that protected him from responsibility and choose differently.
Through Volume 4, that process remains unfinished. It is too early to say that he has become trustworthy simply because his feelings appear serious. The manga is still ongoing, and the value of his development will depend on repetition: whether effort becomes consistency, whether attraction becomes accountability, and whether he can care for Nonoka without reducing her to proof that he has changed.
Final Thoughts: The First Love He Has Had to Learn
Junta Watarase is not a man who knows nothing about romance. He knows how to attract, begin, and enjoy it. What he may not know is how to remain when another person’s feelings become part of his responsibility.
Nonoka makes his old skills insufficient. She sees his comedy rather than only his popularity. She does not accept every sweet gesture as evidence that she is uniquely chosen. She also comes close enough to see the weakness behind his composure.
So Watarase begins to offer something other than performance. He travels. He adjusts. He worries. He risks being the person who wants more than he can control.
None of these actions proves that he is already a good partner. They do show that his time, work, and emotional security are no longer untouched by the relationship.
He may be experienced in dating, but he is new to a love that requires him to care for one particular person. His appeal lies not in the idea that his immaturity is harmless, but in the possibility that he may finally have to stop escaping it.
