There’s a similar scene, with an unexpectedly dark undercurrent, in the generally light and fluffy TV series Ojamajo Doremi. The series revolves around a group of grade school girls in training to be witches. After the main character, a girl named Doremi, has a particularly rough day, her mother takes off her clothes and joins Doremi in the tub. There she encourages her daughter not to give up, just as Doremi encouraged her mother even before she was born. In this case, the mother admits that, when she broke one of her fingers, she assumed that her dream of being a concert pianist was over and she wanted to commit suicide. The only thing that stopped her was getting pregnant with Doremi, which reminded her of how dependant this new life would be on her. She didn’t present this as a feeling of obligation, but as the mutual support of the family bond. However, it’s unlikely that the mother would have mentioned her suicidal thoughts at all without the literal and emotional nakedness of the communal bath.
In fact, it’s part of a broader phenomenon for which the Japanese have coined the sort-of- English word “skinship”: physical contact with a loved one, ranging from a mother carrying a baby on her back and students holding hands on a date to breastfeeding and family bathing.7 Even cleaning the wax out of one’s ears has evolved into a platonic form of skinship—if your steady boyfriend/girlfriend does it while you rest your head on his/her lap. It’s a blatant look back to childhood and the source of all such skinship: mother.8 Family bathing raises a few awkward possibilities, but even these can be a source of humor. The heroine of Yuu Watase’s comic romance manga Absolute Boyfriend, Riika (a high school girl who gets to “test-drive” a robot boyfriend), is shown in a flashback of a bathing scene of when she was three years old. Predictably, noticing the difference between herself and her father, she grabbed hold of the “difference” and asked, “What’s this?” In a later episode, her parents are discussing her growing up. Her father, remembering the scene and feeling emotional and sentimental, utters the outrageous (in the West, anyway) line: “Only yesterday Riika was grabbing my chinchin.” Riika’s mother, having been there herself, takes things in stride: “Now she’s old enough to grab someone else’s chinchin.” The attitude, as shown at least in manga and anime, is that children exposed to the facts of life as early as age three stop making a fuss about it by age four and suffer no ill effects.
Even characters born and raised outside Japan are shown as benefitting from the Japanese approach to nudity. The title character of Ken Akamatsu’s popular manga Negima! Magister Negi Magi! (and its equally popular anime) is Negi Springfield, a ten-year-old British boy who happens to be a wizard (shades of Harry Potter). He’s sent to Japan to teach English at an all-girls’ junior high school that has its own magical students, while using this as a cover to track the whereabouts of his father. One of his students, a vampire-witch, causes Negi to run away from the campus to take refuge in the countryside.
While away from the school he bumps into another student: Kaede Nagase, a tall and easygoing teen who’s also hiding; in this case, she’s hiding her quest to become a ninja. Spending the day with Kaede honing her ninja skills in the forest, helps Negi take his mind off his troubles. He gets nervous again when Kaede invites him to bathe with her in very close quarters—a fifty-five-gallon oil drum heated by a campfire. If family bathing can be dubious, student/teacher bathing can have a lot of problems, even if the teacher is prepubescent. In this case, though, there are no problems. Kaede sits in the drum behind Negi, with both of them gazing into the starry evening sky. (In the anime, Kaede wears a bikini, which isn’t in the original manga.)
Satoshi Kon’s movie Tokyo Godfathers tells of three members of Tokyo’s homeless getting from Christmas to New Year’s Day with an abandoned baby in tow. The presence of the baby leads to breastfeeding, even though the breasts do not belong to the child’s mother. One of the “godfathers,” a runaway teenage girl named Miyuki, is holding the baby when they’re taken hostage by a South American criminal, who has been stalking a Yakuza gangster. We see the criminal’s wife, who speaks only Spanish and no Japanese at all, nursing both the hostage baby and her own. Later, we see the baby refusing to nurse from her mother’s non-lactating breast. There’s a good reason: the woman’s own baby was stillborn, and in her distracted grief she stole the baby from the hospital.
Gotta Strip ’em All
Perhaps the most (literally) outlandish excuse for nudity (for the time being, anyway) was the 1996 TV series Erufu wo karu mono-tachi (Those Who Hunt Elves).9 The set-up is similar to a host of other anime series in which people from one culture (usually present-day Japan) find themselves stranded in a strange land (usually not of this earth). In this case, the fairy realm is invaded by three humans: muscular lunkhead Junpei Ryuzoji, high-school student and weapons fanatic Ritsuko Inoue, and Oscar-winning actress Airi Komiyama. The elf-priestess Celcia begins the ceremony to send them back, which involves painting the spell onto her own body. Junpei’s asides about Celcia’s looks, however, make her lose her temper in mid-ceremony, and the spell fragments, flying onto the bodies of five other elves. Not knowing exactly which five, the Earth-trio decide they’re going to have to strip any elf they find.
The offensiveness of walking up to someone and demanding that they disrobe is neutralized by sheer absurdity, as in Ranma 1/2. The three earthlings are accompanied in their quest for the fragments by Celcia, whose impatience causes yet another calamity early in the series: she is turned into a dog. They also acquire Mike (pronounced mee-kay), a tank that behaves like an oversized cat.
There is also some drama and even pathos in the mix. In one installment, a young elf-woman actually begs the invaders to strip her naked. It seems that, to protect her village from a rampaging monster, she put on a suit of magical armor. The magic was that she could not remove the armor. She tells the humans that she hasn’t had a bath in three years (and the animators oblige by “showing” the wave of three-year-old funk caused by her bathless state). After several failed attempts to remove the armor, the elf not only manages to remove it, but (after discreetly bathing in a waterfall) puts the armor back on. It seems that she can’t just walk away from something she’s been so literally close to for three years.
Add to all of the above a range of other gags, from occasional asides to the audience to parodies of other anime, and you have another series like Ranma, in which nudity is a necessity, but is not necessarily titillating—by Japanese standards, at least.
Yet these entertaining, relatively innocent uses of nudity reveal some of the problems anime creators face in bringing their art to the West. Showing nudity in prepubescent children,10 or sexual activity among young teenagers, may keep an episode of a TV series off the air, or stop a movie from being translated for sale in the West. Some distributors have also cut whole scenes to try to avoid any hassles, even if the scenes in question have no overtly sexual content.
The flip side of this cultural divide on the uses of nudity is based on the fact that many anime started out in print, as manga, which literally has its own rules. The legal definition of pornography in Japanese pop culture is governed for the most part by Article 175 of the Japanese Criminal Code. This article bans depictions of genitals, unless they are caricatures or absurd, cartoonish versions.11 To avoid lawsuits and legal harassment, depictions of genitals are often abstract, or less than detailed. There may be, even in the most blatantly sex-oriented manga or anime, a blank space or a stylized blur in a character’s groin. Phalluses may be replaced by tentacles or creeping vines; shellfish have substituted for women’s genitals, as they have for centuries in Japanese fertility festivals. As in Hollywood, a close-up on the face can speak volumes. Sometimes, a piece of paper is pasted over the potentially offending artwork—even if it’s more like a strip of confetti that hides almost nothing. A common device in the digital age is to mask the offending body part with a “mosaic,” a very-low-definition grid of giant squares that still manages to suggest without revealing.
Regardless, sometimes
a scene or an entire story that is not pornographic can be put at risk because of Western perceptions that it is pornographic. Yasunori Umezu’s 1998 anime Kite, a story of teenage assassins, had to be trimmed of a half-dozen sequences to keep it from being barred from America as pornography. (These cuts, including some edited stills, are detailed on the website http://www.animeprime.com/reports/kite_lesscut_ss.shtml). The extreme violence, however, was left in.
1. Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, A Daughter of the Samurai (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, and Company, 1934), 154.
2. The title, like most Takahashi titles, is multitextured. Ostensibly a simple address—the rooming-house (named with the stylishly French maison, like many other pieces of downmarket real estate in Japan) at #1 Koku Street—the word ikkoku can also mean an instant in time or, as an adjective, stubborn or hot-tempered.
3. These denizens are Mrs. Ichinose (housewife) and her son Kentaro, Akemi Roppongi (bar hostess), Yusaku Godai (would-be college student). and the mysterious Mr. Yotsuya (God only knows).
4. Classically, a ronin is a samurai without a master. In the modern sense of the word, a ronin is a student of college age who hasn’t yet been accepted by a university (usually because he has failed the entrance exams at least once).
5. Kittredge Cherry, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987), 90. Mixed bathing would seem to be an erotically charged atmosphere, but in Japan, where the practice is long established, eroticism simply isn’t a factor—unless, of course, participants choose to make it so, in, for example, a “soapland,” Japan’s answer to the massage parlor. Similarly, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s memoir of her early schooldays recounts how the school’s headmaster allowed “clothing optional” swimming among the first-graders because “he thought it wasn’t right for boys and girls to be morbidly curious about the differences in their bodies, and he thought it was unnatural for people to take such pains to hide their bodies from each other” (Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, translated by Dorothy Britton [Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1982], 68).
6. Shinji Imaizumi, “Speed Zero,” Kamisama wa Southpaw 6 (Tokyo: Shueisha, 1990), 94–95.
7. Cherry, Womansword, 89–90.
8. In a Tetsuwan Atomu story from 1957 titled “Black Looks,” Atomu hunts down the title character, who has been assassinating prominent robots as revenge against the robot he believes killed his mother. When Black Looks is at last reunited with the robot who raised from a foundling (she hadn’t died, she was just broken), he puts his head on her lap, in a deliberate mirror of Atomu and his robot-mother at the beginning of the story. The narrator’s line from the beginning is repeated at the end, citing perhaps the prime example of skinship: “If there is one resting place in the world it is surely on your mother’s lap” (Osamu Tezuka, Tetsuwan Atomu 4 [Tokyo: Kodansha, 1980], 151).
9. Some of the following information is from “Those Who Hunt Elves” by Aaron K. Dawe in Animerica 8, no. 8 (September 2000): 16.
10. Especially common here are the nude transformation scenes for the “magical girls” such as Pretty Sammy of Tenchi Muyo! and the Bishojo Senshi (Pretty Young Girl Warriors) of Sailor Moon.
11. Frederik L. Schodt, Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983), 133.
Rated H: Hardcore Anime
Sex is a part of life and, in Japan, a part of pop culture. But manga and anime know how to add variety and keep things fresh: by lacing sex with humor, with horror, and with old-fashioned sentimentality.
I’m thinking of two artworks, neither of which I could show here for fear of running afoul of “community standards.” The first is a 1990 Japanese manga by Mitsuhiko Yoshida, an eight-page story titled Hajimete no Homonsha (The First-time Visitor).1 We see a girl going to the door of her home; the doorbell has rung, and she assumes that it’s her father. Instead, it’s a rhinoceros, and he begins chasing her through a surreal landscape to a garden at the top of a giant screw. We next see the girl apologize to the rhino for running away. She sheds her clothes and begins, let’s say, sexually servicing herself with the rhino’s horn. This scene is, of course, a dream, and at this point we cut away to the girl’s parents. They look at the girl’s drawing of a rhino, and quickly pick up on the phallic message hidden within. The father asks if the girl has had her first menstrual period yet, and, sure enough, the last panel shows a dark spot on the sleeping girl’s underpants.
Shocking? Bear in mind that Japan is a country where everyone for centuries has been literally (and unavoidably) in everyone else’s business, and that when a girl started menstruating, the tradition once was for family and friends to celebrate with a dinner featuring red beans and rice.2 Not exactly subtle, but a perfectly logical legacy of an agricultural people who needed to track both human and natural fertility.3 Classic works from Japan’s graphic arts heritage can be equally graphic. The second work of art I am thinking of is by the nineteenth-century master printmaker Hokusai, whose most famous work is the cycle of prints called Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Yet he too has a sexy side.
Hokusai, who popularized the term manga, created one print in 1814 of a mature woman pearl diver,4 although she’s taken time out from her work to be sexually serviced by two octopuses. And every available bit of blank space on the page is filled with either the drawing or line after line of writing, much of it the woman’s orgasmic “AAAAAAA.”
Is this some kind of joke, or some sick aberration? Actually it’s neither. Erotic art has a lengthy history in Japan, and was known classically as shunga (literally, “spring pictures”). In modern Japanese pop culture, erotica is known as hentai (literally, abnormal or perverted), by the letter H, or an attempt to pronounce the letter, etchi. Some of these works were part of “pillow books” (manuals illustrating a variety of sexual positions). Some were social satires, in which a third party—sometimes a miniature person—commented on the amorous follies that they were witnessing. Others were illustrations (probably glamorized) of life in the brothels that were legal at the time. Occasionally such a picture would show a threesome, and pictures of men seducing young boys, while less common, did exist.
This is not to say that Japanese culture is wide open and uncensored; at least, not here at the turn of the millennium. It’s just that given the legacy of shunga, legends of human sexual dalliances with demons and others not of this earth (from the Kojiki on up to the infamous anime series Urotsukidoji), and a body of erotic literature going back a thousand years to The Tale of Genji, Japanese culture has certainly made room for the sexual side of life. It’s embraced that side more openly at some times than at others, but the Japanese know it would be foolish to deny sexuality altogether.
The basic attitude toward sex was—and to an extent still is—that the act itself is not as important as the consequences. Two folktales illustrate this. Both center on Buddhist monks having sex—something forbidden by the Buddha, who enjoined his followers not to live an unchaste life. In these stories, the monks break that particular vow, but are not directly punished for breaking it. After all, according to the Buddhist doctrine of karma, each event has its own causes and its consequences, none of which can be avoided. Also, both stories are part of a larger body of tales in which monks have sex with women (when available), but usually with the only available outlet: boy acolytes.
The first story is from the Konjaku Monogatari (Tales of Times Now Past), a collection dating to about 1100. It’s the story of a monk who was a wise man and a brilliant scholar. However, he had no family and no noble patron, and lived a very poor life in a temple in northern Kyoto. Every month he traveled to the mountain sanctuary at Kurama to pray for help in making ends meet. He went to Kurama month after month for years.
Once, during the ninth month of the year,5 he had left Kurama and was at the outskirts of Kyoto when a good-looking boy of about sixteen started walking with him. The monk asked the boy what he was doing. “My master and I quarreled
ten days ago and I left him,” the boy replied. “My parents are dead. Please take me with you.”
The monk agreed, saying, “Don’t blame me for whatever happens. I live a rather dull life.”
All that day and the next, the monk found himself increasingly attracted to the youth, who refused to speak any further about himself or his family. He was so pretty, however, that, on their second evening together, the monk began to fondle the youth, as he had done to other temple acolytes. However, he quickly realized that this youth was not like the other young boys, and was in fact a girl.
“So what if I am a girl?” the youth asked. “Will you send me away?”
“I can’t keep you here if you’re a girl. What would people say? What would the Buddha say?”
“Just treat me the same as you would a boy. I promise that nobody will ever see me as anything but a boy.”
The monk’s desire for the beautiful youth had been growing and growing. At the same time, he knew that keeping a girl in the temple was a bad idea. Still, in spite of his misgivings and precautions, he could not help being human, and eventually he and the girl became lovers. The monk had never been happier in his life.
Several months later, however, the youth stopped eating. She told the monk that she was pregnant. This distressed the monk; he knew the neighbors were bound to find out. But the youth simply smiled and said, “Don’t say anything to anyone. Act as if nothing has happened. And when the time comes, keep quiet.”
Finally came the day when the youth complained of pain “down there.” It was time for the baby to be born. The youth told the monk to spread a mat in a shed. The youth cried in pain, and the monk cried in sympathy, but finally the youth gave birth. Her cloak covered every part of her, so the monk could not see a thing. After the birth, the youth lay down to nurse the baby, pulling the cloak over herself. As she did so, the size of the bundle under the cloak shrank. The monk pulled back the cloak. There was no youth, and there was no baby. What there was, however, was a large rock made of solid gold. In this way had the monk’s prayers at Kurama been answered. And, although he missed his lover with all of his heart, he chipped pieces of gold off of the rock a little at a time and sold them, and thus was he able to live in comfort for the rest of his days.6 This story presents a pattern that recurs in anime and manga, as well as in Japanese legends: having sex with a supernatural being is very different from having sex with a human. The monk, who “could not help being a man” (Royall Tyler’s phrase), had sex with boys and thought nothing of it; apparently, neither did other monks, who presumably were also having sex with their acolytes. Having sex with a girl was more problematic, and the monk knew it, since it violated one of the Five Precepts of his faith.7 However, once again, he could not help himself, which was exactly what the “youth” counted on. The monk’s devotion was repaid, first by physical and emotional gifts, then by gold.
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