Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  4. In a Q&A session at the 1998 International Comics Convention in San Diego, Sailor Moon cartoonist Naoko Takeuchi insisted that the Three Lites were always female, which doesn’t explain their masculine attire when not fighting the bad guys. At the same conference, she confirmed that Sailors Uranus and Neptune were “a couple,” but joked that they only got together because “they had lots of time on their hands.” See http://www.black-kat.com/blackmoon/take2.html

  5. Utena dresses like a boy in order to be heroic; she knows that princes are heroic but princesses are not. As will be seen later, this belief costs her dearly.

  6. Relative age is so important in Japanese social relationships that twins are declared either older or younger than each other, if only by minutes.

  7. Haruhi’s father Ryoji (his professional name is Ranka) is generally comic but also has his poignant moments. He says that, although he was previously bisexual, the death of his wife convinced him that he could never love another woman again; hence his job in a drag bar. Paradoxically, he was so happy when he was straight that, when he became a widower, he turned gay. He’s rather impulsive and impractical, unlike his daughter, whom he wants to see return to her female identity. Ryoji, as a drag queen, is what Japanese slang calls an okama, literally a cooking pot; the word is vernacular for a womb.

  8. This is a case in which the manga and anime versions diverge. In the anime, the dorm’s senpai (upper-classmen) room together and sometimes act gay to play mind-games with the hapless hero of the series. In the manga by Yukie Nasu, however, two freshmen roommates actually begin a homosexual love affair; this isn’t mentioned in the anime.

  9. This is another title whose meaning is layered. It could be taken as either Magic User’s Club or the exclamation “We wanna do magic!”

  10. Catalogue of the Osamu Tezuka Exhibition (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun, 1990), 142.

  11. Atsushi Tanaka, trans. Keiko Katsuya, Catalogue of the Osamu Tezuka Exhibition.

  12. This name was hung on him by his girlfriend/stepsister Miki, who said that, like marmalade, he may seem sweet but there’s something bitter deep inside. Yu’s comeback was to call Miki “mustard girl,” suggesting that she was nothing but bitterness.

  13. Antonia Levi, Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 135.

  14. Ian Buruma, Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (New York: Meridian, 1984), 128–29..

  15. Sandra Buckley, “Penguin in Bondage: A Graphic Tale of Japanese Comic Books,” cited in Susan Napier, Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 266, note 28.

  16. The look of shonen ai characters can also be based on celebrities, including Western pop singers Boy George and Terence Trent D’Arby.

  17. Mikiso Hane, Japan: A Historical Survey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 73–76.

  18. Buruma, Behind the Mask, 132–35.

  19. Note that this figure was evoked in the television series Rurouni Kenshin in the character of Shogo Amakusa, also from the island of Kyushu and also a Christian.

  20. Hane, Japan, 148–49.

  21. For that matter, the romance expressed in shonen ai manga covers a wide range, from the platonic to the sexually explicit. This adds another layer of complexity to a genre that’s already difficult enough to study.

  22. Maki Murakami, Gravitation, trans. Ray Yoshimoto (Los Angeles: TOKYOPOP Manga, 2003), 2:70

  23. In a somewhat confusing convention, pornographic manga sometimes refer to semen as “milk.”

  24. Here again we have a title that’s a pun. The title is written with the kanji that could also be read The Wedge in the Gap. However, as both “gap” and “love” are pronounced ai the title could also mean “the Wedge of Love,” the symbolic meaning of which I’ll leave to the reader to imagine.

  25. As explained at the website http://www.yuricon.org/whatisyuri.htm, there’s no clear single source for this name. The first theory is that characters in early girl/girl romances were often named Yuri or Yuriko; the name became a cliché and then a label. Others say that Japanese lesbians were known in the ’70s as “the lily tribe” (the Japanese word for the lily is yuri). One theory even suggests that the name comes from one of the Dirty Pair, two comically destructive intergalactic policewomen. However, both Dirty Pair members Kei and Yuri are straight, and show an interest in each other only in H- manga.

  26. “Animerica Interview: Mamoru Oshii,” trans. Andy Nakatani, Animerica 9 (5): 13.

  27. Joy Hendry, Understanding Japanese Society (London: Routledge, 1989), 23; emphasis added.

  28. Stop and think: does modern American popular culture include anything at all for the romantic? Not on television, which has become the home post-9/11 of counterterrorism wars, action-heavy police dramas, angst-ridden medical soap operas, and glib crime stories. Hollywood movies will occasionally cast Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock or Hugh Grant in something resembling romance, but the examples are few and getting fewer. Anime, in contrast, offers romance, realistic and fantastic and just about every flavor in between, for most ages (although youths seem to be the main target, with older women preferring the written word) and all sexual combinations.

  29. Nicholas Bornoff, Pink Samurai: Love, Marriage, and Sex in Contemporary Japan (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), 299.

  Bushido: The Way of the Warrior

  Samurai stories are about medieval swordsmen—but they’re also about the ethical code the audience should live by. That’s why some modern samurai swing a baseball bat or line up a perfect putt.

  America has Wyatt Earp, Britain has Robin Hood, and Japan has Yagyu Jubei.1 Okay, maybe it’s not that simple, but it’s a place to start. When dealing with an icon as vital to Japanese culture and masculinity as the historic samurai, you should start by looking for whatever parallels your own culture has to offer.

  Jubei the Prototype

  The specific details of the life and times of Yagyu Jubei Mitsuyoshi (or, in some sources, Mitsutoshi) are a bit hazy, given that he lived in the early 1600s.2 His father, Yagyu Tajima no Kami Munenori, was no less than sword instructor to shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, and he landed that position the old-fashioned way: he earned it, at the battle of Sekigahara (September 15, 1600) that established the control of the Tokugawa shogunate over the entire country. Along the way, he was elevated to the rank of daimyo (a provincial feudal lord recognized by the shogun) with a fief centered on what is now called Yagyu no Sato, near the ancient capital of Nara. The elder Yagyu also developed his own school of swordfighting, although the main move in this school is more strategy than skill: find the enemy’s weak point and go for it as soon as possible.

  Jubei is heard from at court in 1616 as an attendant to Hidetada, the second Tokugawa shogun, but then vanishes from the record for a decade. He returns to history at age thirty-six, and dies at forty-four on a hunting expedition. In between, he loses an eye, gains two daughters, and writes an oblique book about his swordmanship called Tsukimi no Sho (The Book of Gazing at the Moon), giving future storytellers all the ammunition they needed for their imaginations to fill in the gaps.

  Just as the real Robin of Locksley soon vanished under the weighty legends of Robin Hood, stories of Jubei began adding to the original reality. His appearance in legend now pretty much determines the “look” of the samurai in Japanese pop culture. With a hat pulled down over his face to cover his features, including the simple leather strap he wrapped around his head as an eyepatch, the legendary Jubei roamed the country incognito, revealing his identity only when he drew his sword to punish evil.

  According to some, he roamed the land to sharpen his skills; other say he was actually spying for the Tokugawa shogun. Some say that he loitered about the Yoshiwara, the prostitution district of Edo, reasoning that he could get in some practice by slashing the throats of lower-level samurai who wasted their time with whores and would never be missed. Other stories relate t
hat Jubei did not adopt the diplomatic speech of the shogunal court, which might explain why he wasn’t heard from for a decade.

  He was, in legend, a blunt, no-nonsense type who let his sword do the talking, and it spoke volumes. In one story, Jubei reportedly fought seven men at once, slicing the limbs off of three of them and scaring off the others. In another tale, a gang of bandits tried to rob him in Kyoto; he killed twelve of them, frightening away the rest.

  Probably Jubei’s best-known legend is alluded to in Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Seven Samurai. In this case, a ronin challenges Jubei to a practice duel with wooden swords. The daimyo who referees the match calls it a draw, but Jubei declares himself the winner. The ronin demands a rematch to settle the point, this time with real swords. Jubei dispatches his opponent with a single blow.

  Jubei lives on in pop culture in a variety of forms. A lurid novel, Futaro Yamada’s Yagyu Ichi-zoku no Inbo (The Intrigues of the Yagyu Family), became the basis of first a film and then a television series starring Japanese action hero Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba. The name Jubei is invoked in anime as well, usually in stories unrelated to the real figure. The 1993 film known as Ninja Scroll in the West is actually titled Jubei the Wind Ninja, although there’s no historical evidence that Yagyu Jubei ever studied the combined magical/martial/assassin art called ninjutsu. A 1997 OAV series called Ninja Resurrection sets a samurai named Jubei down in the middle of the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637. Even if the timeline was historically possible, it’s highly unlikely that Jubei, whose family owed a great deal to the Tokugawa shogunate, would ever turn against the shogunal government, the Bakufu, and side with the Christian rebels. At the far edge of fantasy, there’s Jubei-chan the Ninja Girl (1999), a twenty-six-week anime series by Akitaro Daichi. This comedy gives us Jiyu Nanohana, a contemporary adolescent schoolgirl who “becomes” Jubei by putting on his eyepatch—improbably shaped in this series like a big red heart. We’ll consider how girls can become samurai in the next chapter.

  How to Be a Samurai

  The basic function of a samurai—a warrior retained in the service of a feudal lord—didn’t change much over the years, but attitudes toward samurai did. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Tokugawa shogunate had a firm hold on both the imperial court and the daimyo who held the key to local power in Japan. Consequently, there was less and less for samurai to do. Samurai was a social status, not just a job description, yet some samurai, with families to provide for but no battles to fight, had to abandon the warrior’s life and take up a trade. Others arranged for their daughters to marry into merchant families, while still others became bandits.3 And in the seventeenth-century equivalent of corporate downsizing, many were dismissed from service to become ronin, or masterless samurai.

  One such ronin, Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659– 1719), lived in the Saga domain on the southern island of Kyushu and served Saga’s lord, Nabeshima Mitsushige. When Mitsushige died in 1700, Tsunetomo tried to commit tsuifuku (suicide of a retainer after his master’s death), but by then this form of extreme loyalty had been outlawed. So Tsunetomo retired to a monastery where he held forth on what he thought was the ideal samurai philosophy. A young samurai took down many of his statements and reprinted them verbatim in Hagakure (In the Shadow of Leaves), the bible of bushido—the “martial way” or the “way of the warrior”—first published in 1716 and never out of print.

  Even a casual glance at Hagakure, though, reveals that the words of Tsunetomo could have benefited from an editor. His advice runs literally from the sublime (“The end is important in all things; if things end badly, all good that may have come before it will be erased”) to the ridiculous (“Walk with a real man one hundred yards and he’ll tell you at least seven lies”), but he does lay out the five core values a samurai is supposed to live by: loyalty, bravery, politeness, simplicity, and truthfulness.

  The main thing to note about Hagakure, though, is that it is all theory and no practice: Tsunetomo—like Jubei before him—never fought in a single recorded battle. His musings were motivated by nostalgia, for an ethos and a way of life he considered dead if not dying. His book is thus an idealization of the reality of the sword that was surely much grittier a century earlier. And this also means that any modern pop culture portrayal of the samurai, whether true to Hagakure or wildly deviating from it, is in a sense an ideal of an ideal. Modern samurai sagas tell us more about the time of their creator than the time their adventures supposedly took place.

  Postwar Swordsmen

  The manga revolution of Dr. Tezuka began during the Occupation of Japan, at a time when all facets of Japanese life were under the eye of America. Samurai stories were a staple of prewar Japan, when Japan’s military government approved of bushido’s emphasis on stoic self-sacrifice and obedience to one’s lord. When the militarists were discredited by defeat, their favored literature also declined for a few years.4 It wasn’t until 1954—with the Occupation over, the Korean War over, Astro Boy dominating the comics, and Godzilla the latest movie star—that a samurai story became a popular hit: Akado Suzunosuke (Suzunosuke with the Red Breastplate) by Tsunayoshi Takeuchi. Apart from the vibrant artwork, Takeuchi’s stories may have found popularity because the militarism of prewar manga was gone. After a decade spent rebuilding postwar destruction, the old attitudes would not have been welcomed, either by official monitors of pop culture or the mass audience, who simply wouldn’t have stood still for the same old propaganda. Instead, the emphasis is on skillful swordsmanship.

  This continued the pattern of reshaping samurai to conform, not to history, but to the needs of the moment. The militarists, after all, had encouraged pop culture that praised the military—now it was the opposition’s turn. And one thing defeated Japan needed to prove to itself and to the rest of the world was that it had not lost its talents and abilities. As the years went on, each generation recast the samurai according to its own attitudes and agenda.

  The ’60s, for example, a time of social experimentation and political ferment, gave rise to Sanpei Shirato’s Ninja Bugeicho (Chronicle of a Ninja’s Military Accomplishments). This samurai series could never have been done in another decade, since it examined the battles of Oda Nobunaga and the other sixteenth-century warlords from a leftist perspective, clearly siding with the oppressed masses and reform-minded ninja—whether they were historical or not.5 The year 1974 saw publication of a lengthy samurai manga of a different kind: Joji Akiyama’s Haguregumo. The word means “wandering cloud” and is the name of the ronin who is the leading figure in the story. No longer in service to a noble, he’s a husband, a father, and leader of a group of palanquin-bearers. The time is late in the Tokugawa period; European education, known as “Dutch studies” at the time, has been making a comeback, and Hagu-regumo’s son Shinnosuke has been picking up the new knowledge in school (including one phrase in English: “My father very nice”).

  All in all, Haguregumo breaks the mold of the classic samurai tale by showing a samurai who’s changing to accommodate the changing times. He’s more interested in chasing girls, drinking saké, and raising his son than in swinging a sword. It’s a lifestyle that would have found sympathy in 1970s Japan, which like the United States had just gone through a period of social unrest on college campuses and saw the questioning of many traditions and values. Still, this domesticated samurai finds a number of opportunities to draw blood in the name of justice. Akiyama’s idea of a swordsman was thus less consistent with the classical ideal, but well-suited to his audience at the time.

  A no less interesting ronin is the title character of Nobuhiro Watsuki’s Rurouni Kenshin (1996). The time of the story is the 1880s, during the Meiji Restoration. The emperor is back in power, westernization is taking hold in Japan, and the authorities have traded in their kimono for European uniforms. They’ve also waged a ruthless campaign against a group of renegade samurai who want to resist westernization and return to the old ways.

  Into the middle of this society in upheaval wanders a swordsman
who looks all of fourteen years old (his good looks and cute behavior when not battling evil have made this manga and its anime a crossover success with both boys and girls). A cross-shaped scar on his cheek is the only sign that he has had a rough life, but he has left a long and bloody trail of victims. Now, however, he has abandoned the road of blood. He has even reversed his sword (which is sharp only on one edge) and uses the blunt edge to fight people, if he has to fight them at all. The anime and manga both create situations in which bloodshed would seem to be unavoidable for Kenshin, and then we watch as he manages to avoid it after all. Add to this a succession of enemies of an almost science-fiction level of unreality, and the result is a samurai story that bears little resemblance to Hagakure. This is clearly samurai life as it was never lived, but as pacifists at the end of the twentieth century would have liked it to be lived.

  Brawling in Love

  Romance and marriage happen with so many variations, at so many stages of life, that just about all an observer can say about it is that it happens. Sometimes the route is very circuitous, but, since popular culture exists to point the way toward socially acceptable behavior, the trick is to get across the finish line, no matter how unconventional the route.

  Anime even holds out hope for school bullies and violent delinquents. Not all of them, of course; sometimes they’re just window dressing for the hero (or heroine!) to get past. But some who take the samurai code to extremes get reformed and find love along the way.

  Nanaka 6/17

  This is an unexpected teen romance, based on a manga by Ken Yagami. It has the expected brawling boy, Nenji Nakahara, but he’s not the villain, even in the beginning. There’s the title girl he’s liked since childhood, but Nanaka is cold, businesslike, and needs to broaden her horizons beyond academic success to include romance. But even she isn’t the villain. A blow to the head in classical sitcom fashion causes Nanaka to revert to her six-year-old self, when she obsessed over a Magical Girl TV anime series, Magical Domical. And, in a sense, this anime is the villain. Nanaka’s mother died when Nanaka was six years old; Nenji tried to cheer up Nanaka by invoking Magical Domical and asking her to turn them into grown-ups to help them cope. Nanaka has to grow up again, this time to a teenager who isn’t so cold and self-absorbed. Still, there’s one more crisis: the final episode of Magical Domical!