Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  Midori Days

  This thirteen-week anime series started as a fantasy boys’ manga by Kazuro Inoue. It tells how a school brawler named Seiji finds love by way of a bawdy joke. Seiji isn’t known for much of anything except his knockout right fist, although he sometimes fights on behalf of those who can’t fight for themselves. Still, this reputation has caused him to be rejected on the twenty occasions he’s asked a girl for a date. At one point in the first episode, he wails, “I don’t want to end up engaged to my right hand!” (One meaning is that he’s known exclusively for punching guys with his right fist; the other meaning is the obvious one.)

  The next morning, reality changes for Seiji: he wakes to find at the end of his right arm, not a hand but a miniature girl. She announces that her name is Midori6 and has loved Seiji from afar. From then on, the series is about Seiji hiding Midori, pretending she’s a puppet, and all the time growing to love her. The real Midori, meanwhile, lies in a coma. . . .

  This series has more than its share of fun with otaku, fanboys and obsessed nerds involved, in this case, in puppets and cosplay. So pop culture can mock itself, as long as there’s a greater good. It was also an “after hours” series, its late broadcast time required by the few fairly mild examples of frontal nudity in what is essentially a sweet romantic comedy. That does not make it trivial, however. The clue is when the dream sequences start.

  In one dream episode, the roles are reversed, and Seiji ends up being the puppet on Midori’s right hand. Another begins when a boy named Koda dreams of meeting another child in the woods, a very young Midori, reading a picture book about Snow White. Suddenly she vanishes, and an older Midori appears, as if in an enchanted sleep. . . . He wakes up just as he dreams of Seiji, dressed as Prince Charming, riding up on a horse.

  This introduces the center of the plot, that the painfully shy Midori has had a crush on Seiji for a long time, but hasn’t worked up the courage to say a single word to him. The intensity of her feelings causes her to fall into a coma, and, for her spirit to have an out-of-body experience,7 to take over for Seiji’s right hand. Just as Seiji learns to live without brawling, Midori learns to speak up for herself. Her conversion is unstable at first, so we actually see her return to her body from time to time, and we know she’ll be ready to deal with Seiji when the time is right. Likewise, Seiji learns there’s more to life than brawls and porno. Each was being, in their own way, too self-absorbed to do what the culture needed from them to stay alive. Each was brought, by circumstances, back into conformity, and each thinks it was their own idea to do so.

  Train Man

  This isn’t about school and only slightly about brawling, but is another, very circuitous route to love. Bear in mind that the following is reportedly based on a true story:

  One day, as so often happens in large cities, a drunken man started bothering some of the women on the subway car he was riding. One otherwise shy guy tried to get the drunk to stop, they tussled for a while, and the passengers took the opportunity to get a conductor to remove the drunk. The women made a point of thanking the shy guy, with one asking for his address. Normally this might be the end of the story, but, this being 2004, the shy guy goes home and tells the story on an Internet message board.

  After a while, “shy guy,” now known online as Densha Otoko (Train Man), receives a very fancy, very pricey thank-you gift. He again took to the Internet, stating that he wanted to meet the woman, but had never been on a date in his life. There followed a flurry of postings with the others on the board offering advice and encouragement. They dated briefly, then, when some of the messages took a bawdy turn, the thread stopped abruptly.

  The Internet messages were collected into a book, with the writer assuming the pen name “Nakano Hitori” (a pun on the Japanese phrase “naka no hitori”—one among a group). It spawned a small media industry: no less than four manga adaptations, a television series, a stage play, and one of Japan’s top grossing movies of 2005.

  One thing that these three love stories have in common: the happy couple aren’t the only people involved. Students are encouraged in pop culture to include classmates; businesspeople include coworkers; if family can’t be there, friends take the place of family.

  The Sandlot Samurai

  Rurouni Kenshin points to an interesting paradox in Japanese pop culture, one that leads directly to the modern male role models of anime and manga. On the one hand, heroic deeds are supposed to be commonplace to special people like Kenshin. On the other hand, ordinary people like those who read about Kenshin are supposed to be able to perform ordinary deeds heroically. The ordinary deeds are as diverse as life itself, and as plentiful as the fans of anime and manga. Pop culture heroes range from chefs to surgeons, from investment bankers to hotel managers, from policemen to bicycle messengers. The common thread in all these roles is to strive for perfection, to do one’s best, to—as the Japanese say—ganbaru. And the present-day arena most like medieval Japan is the world of sports.

  Science fiction anime and its manga source material are well represented in the West, but sports anime are hardly ever seen here. However, sports is one of the biggest genres, encompassing both traditional Japanese activities such as archery, kendo, karate, and other martial arts, and Western imports, including golf, soccer, tennis, and the ever-present baseball. Sports even crosses gender lines, in a segregated way, with boxing and basketball for the boys and volleyball and tennis for the girls.8 The genre even goes over the top into the flaky fantasy realm of pro wrestling.

  Western sports entered Japan during the Meiji period, and later governments encouraged sports for developing patriotic spirit. During the Occupation, all sports were suspended for a time, for fear they were echoing the bushido spirit that led to World War II. The suspension was lifted in 1950, and Japan eagerly got back on the sports track, the high point being the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Japanese schools started having Sports Day (Taiiku no Hi) in October 1966, consciously evoking the Olympic Games of 1964.9 One thing about manga sports: they—seem—to—take—a—very—long—time. Every pitch, every lob, every golf stroke is played for the maximum dramatic value. Consequently, a boxing match in a weekly magazine like Shonen Jump can take weeks, and a round of golf can be drawn out for months. In anime, on the other hand, time and not space is the medium, and the story may only feature the highlights of a match.

  Often, however, the story will feature a bit of business that is virtually a ritual: the training regimen. It usually starts when the athlete in question is just a child. At some point he (and sometimes she) becomes consumed with a desire to become the best (fill in the blank) in the world. Often, he does this to emulate his father, or to fulfill a dream his father was unable to accomplish. Next, he develops his own homemade, crude, but effective training schedule, and pushes himself into it with single-minded determination. Stories as different as the boxing title God Is a Southpaw and the girls’ wrestling manga Super Angels use this device. The girls-competing-against-boys baseball story Princess Nine has one of its players develop a powerful batting style in a very singular manner: the batter, a fisherman’s daughter on the island of Shikoku, hits incoming waves with a fishing rod.

  Even the supernatural take part in training regimens, as shown in an episode of the “after-hours” anime Haunted Junction (1997). Red Mantle, a drop-dead gorgeous masked ghost who haunts toilets and hands out tissue to those who are caught short, is approached by his sister (also a ghost), who wants to take up toilet-haunting. They prepare her by having her stand under waterfalls (a traditional Japanese spiritual purification technique), hike through mountain blizzards (since public toilets are never heated in the winter) and spend time in garbage dumps (to get used to bad smells). But the girl has a problem: she’s too shy to speak to strangers. So the training regimen is expanded to include handing out samples on street corners, dancing in discos, and wearing funny costumes in public. None of this is meant to mock the idea of a training regimen—it just extends the training into
humorous territory.

  The regimen is rough, but exhaustion, bruises, and bloody knuckles are just minor annoyances. After all, the point of the training regimen is not merely training, but about the will to win and the commitment to do whatever it takes to be the best. Almost every sports story in the Japanese pop culture has this underlying idea as the lesson to be learned. Victories are not accepted if they come too easily.

  Baseball in Japan

  At the turn of the millennium, one of the biggest names in American baseball is Ichiro Suzuki. This heavy hitter may not have all of the baggage Jackie Robinson brought in desegregating the game, but he certainly opened a few eyes and raised a few questions.

  Baseball has long been known as America’s “national pastime,” which had a lot to do with why Horace Wilson brought the game to Japan in 1873. He had come to teach English and American history, but the pastime caught on in a big way. In 1891, a Japanese team challenged the Americans in Yokohama to a game. The American Athletic Club initially did not take the challenge seriously. Convinced of their own superiority as the masters of an American game and sure of a win over the smaller Japanese, it took five years before they finally agreed to a game. The game took place at the AAC, where Japanese had previously not been allowed to enter, and the Japanese team showed no reaction to the boos and catcalls of the gaijin (foreigner) crowd. What happened next shocked the complacent Americans. The Japanese won 29–4.

  The game went professional in 1935. World War II interrupted things, but the game came back after the Occupation. Now there are two pro leagues in Japan, with a total of twelve teams. The teams have rather unusual names, though; sometimes the name will be American style, with the city and the team (Hiroshima Carp, for example), and sometimes the name will include the team’s corporate sponsor (the Nippon Ham Fighters).

  Another unusual aspect: sometimes a Japanese game, which is even slower and more deliberate than the American variety, will end play abruptly—because the commuter trains are about to stop running. It’s not often that baseball is played for the convenience of the fan. Then again, we don’t see baseball as developing “loyalty, self-control, moral discipline, and selflessness.”1 At least, not in America, and not these days.

  1. Quote from “Take Me Out to the Beseboru Game” by David Parker, reprinted at http://isaac.exploratorium.edu/dbarker/beseboru.html

  This also reflects Japan’s self-image in the world as a cluster of islands with neither the size nor the mineral riches to compete with the superpowers. Victory comes from perseverance—or, as in jujitsu, by strategically exploiting the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses.

  Perseverance is an important lesson for other facets of life as well as sports. Schoolwork requires it, certainly, but so does the job or a hobby. This makes “Ganbatte!” one of the most common exhortations in Japanese pop culture. As a command carrying the meanings “Go for it!,” “Do your best!,” and “Hang in there!” it’s a word Japanese boys and girls start hearing at an early age.

  This is due in part to the influence of Confucius. The teachings of the ancient Chinese educator have had a deep influence on Japanese life in general and the educational system in particular. One teaching is that (all other things being equal) just about anyone can learn to do just about anything, to some degree, if they persevere. Accordingly, the Japanese school system is designed to offer a wide range of choices and opportunities for its students. This is reflected in anime in the penchant for school clubs. Virtually every school story shows some of these activities. Maho Tsukai Tai is named after one such group, the five-member “Magic User’s Club,” which has to compete for meeting space with the much larger Manga Club. One episode of Here Is Greenwood has the entire dormitory out trying to make its own sword-and-sorcery movie for a school festival, complete with animated clay demons. The 1995 series El-Hazard: The Wanderers opens during another such school festival, and hints at the wide variety of available clubs, from cooking to broadcasting; a similar fair takes place during episodes of Sailor Moon and in the 1993 made-for-TV Studio Ghibli film Umi ga Kikoeru (I Can Hear the Ocean). The trend even continues into college: in Maison Ikkoku, Godai joins a university puppetry club, which serves him later in the series, as he finds a career in child care.

  According to the hero of xxxholic, the major manga series by CLAMP that spawned two seasons of anime, clublessness can itself be a club. Nobuhiro Watanuki notes that his rival, Domeki, is a member of the school Archery Club. Watanuki bitterly refers to himself as a “member” of the “Go Home Right After School Club.”10 In other words, there’s no reason to stick around since nobody else at school sees spirits and monsters. However, by stretching the point, he could say he’s a member of the “Working for Yuko the Witch Club”—even if the only other members are the strange little girls Moro and Maru.

  If this concern with striving for superiority makes Japanese men and boys seem like joyless workaholics, that’s because they are—part of the time. Whether in its agrarian past or its industrialized present, the need to succeed and the recognition that success won’t come easily have long been a part of life in Japan. Hence the cram schools and the late nights at the office. Among the compensations is the belief that in their own way they are carrying on the heroic tradition of the past. Bravery on an exam and loyalty to the company aren’t exactly the life of a samurai, but they are as close as this century will get to the glorious past. Meanwhile, on the schoolbus or commuter train, men and boys can open up a manga magazine and sense the connection between their seemingly unheroic lives and the lives of the heroes of old.

  As for being a girl in Japan; that’s a different story. . . .

  1. I know I said back at the beginning of the book that Japanese names would be given Western-style, with the family name last. However, when dealing with historical figures, long-standing tradition puts the family name first.

  2. For the biographical information here, I thank the online martial arts magazine Furyu at http://www.furyu.com/archives/issue9/jubei.html.

  3. Mikiso Hane, Japan: A Historical Survey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 226–27.

  4. Frederik L. Schodt, Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983), 68--–69.

  5. Schodt, Manga! Manga!, 70–71.

  6. Anime characters have oddly colored hair, but in this case it’s part of the pun. Midori is Japanese for “green,” and you can imagine what color Midori’s hair is. . . .

  7. This echoes all the way back to the oldest novel still in existence: Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), written about the year 1000 by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, a member of the Heian court. In one chapter of this book, a woman likewise goes out-of-body, but jealousy is the motivation, and the results are deadlier.

  8. Examples of clubs and sports for girls will come up in this chapter ostensibly about male role models simply because Japanese society is still reinventing itself regarding the role of women, especially in coeducational schools. In any event, girls copy the lead determined by boys, rather than vice versa.

  9. http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/HFeid/home_2e.htm

  10. CLAMP, xxxholic, trans. Bill Flanagan (New York: Del Rey Manga, 2004), 2:114.

  Shojodo: The Way of the Teenage Girl

  If “it’s a man’s world,” then why do so many teenage girls in Japanese pop culture acquire magical powers? Because they’re nice. With a kind spirit, sometimes it’s even okay to slay a dragon.

  A sword is meant to kill. Fighting techniques are ultimately used to kill. This will never change.

  But dreamers like Kaoru-dono use fighting techniques for something besides killing. And I prefer what Kaoru-dono believes to the way things are. Maybe someday everyone will see why her way is better.

  —From the first episode of the anime version of Nobuhiro Watsuki’s

  Rurouni Kenshin

  In Douglas Adams’s science-fiction spoof The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the problems of the world are solv
ed by a teenage girl, sitting alone in a coffeeshop. At least, the problems of the world would have been solved: just as she realized how workable her solution was, but before she could tell anyone, the Earth was bulldozed by extraterrestrials building an expressway.

  In Japanese pop culture, solutions to incredibly complex plots are usually pretty simple, and often come down to a single word. Ian Buruma writes that “(t)he key word here is yasashii (gentle, meek, kindly), that term so often used by Japanese to describe their mothers, as well as themselves as a nation.” Yasashii people are “warm, without a hint of evil and malice, pure in their hearts, and blessed with those unique Japanese antennae, always sensitive to each other’s feelings which never need to be spoken.”1 This character trait is supposed to apply to both men and women in Japan up to a point, but—let’s face it—there are other qualities a hero needs to be heroic. Traditionally, if a heroine is yasashii, then that’s enough.

  Can it really be that simple, even in anime? Is the answer to the world’s problems simply a matter of living as if love was better than hate, life was better than death? Of being kind and having faith? The final episode of Evangelion has a line from Misato’s lover Kaji that puts the whole paradox of human expectation into perspective: “The truth within oneself is such a simple thing that people are always seeking after Profound Truths.” There has to be a Big Cosmic Mystery somewhere out there, since nothing less, and certainly nothing as simple or as compassionate or as naïve as the mind of a teenage girl, can account for the answer. It can’t be that easy, can it?