Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  In the first movie, told mostly in flashback, Katsumi learns about the dispute going on between Earth and Nemesis, and her parents’ role in it.

  The Miyazaki Mother

  Mothers tend to come off best in the movies of Hayao Miyazaki. The mother of the girls in Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro, 1988), for example, is the focus of the entire plot, even though she’s onscreen for maybe five minutes. Her husband and children move to a country house in order to be close to the sanatorium where she is recovering from tuberculosis. Her health is still touch-and-go, though, and a telegram comes to say that a scheduled visit home has to be canceled. This prompts Mei, the younger daughter, to try to take her an ear of corn, believing that it will improve her mother’s health. Mei’s impromptu trip brings on the final crisis of the film.

  Neither Pazu nor Sheeta, the young leads in Miyazaki’s Laputa (1986), have a living mother, but that means that they can be adopted by a surrogate. In this case, they’re embraced by Ma Dola, leader of a gang of flying pirates. She’s a bit of a crone, and more a grandmother than a mother, but she sides with the children and against the forces trying to kidnap Sheeta to discover the secrets of the floating city Laputa.

  One of the most realistically portrayed mother-daughter relationships in a film by Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli is in Mimi o Sumaseba (If You Listen Carefully, also known in English as Whisper of the Heart, 1995). The central character, Shizuku Tsukushima, has reached the rebellious age of thirteen, although her rebellions are pretty minor by most standards (such as drinking iced tea out of the pitcher rather than a glass when nobody else is around). And even though Shizuku forgets a number of things during the film, she dismisses her mother as a “ditz” when mother, going back to school for an advanced degree and running late, forgets where she put her purse.

  The wolf-spirit Moro in Princess Mononoke (1997) would seem to be an exception to the run of “nice” Miyazaki mothers, yet this beast is more of a mother to San than her biological parent proved to be. As Moro explains to Prince Ashitaka, she met San’s parents in the woods. Fearful of being eaten, they threw their baby at Moro’s feet and ran. Moro raised San as, in her very motherly words, “my dear ugly furless child” who is “unable to become either fully human or wolf.”

  Kokiri is an herbalist/witch and the mother of Kiki in Majo no Takkyubin (1989). She doesn’t play much of an onstage role in either the book by Eiko Kadono or its animated version, known as Kiki’s Delivery Service. Offstage, however, she’s taught Kiki how to fly on a broom (she tried to teach herbalism as well, but Kiki just didn’t have the temperament). Still, there’s a wonderful moment in the book, just at Kiki’s leavetaking to spend a year making her own way in the world by magic:

  Later, after countless times saying the word “Goodbye,” Kiki, with the radio hanging from the front of her broom, set Jiji [her black cat] behind her and lifted off. The broom hovered in place a little, Kiki turned back and said her farewell to Kokiri.

  “Mother! Take care of yourself, okay?”

  Since they hadn’t been separated even for a little while, both she and Kokiri thought that they’d end up crying.

  “Hey! Hey! No looking around now!” Kokiri’s usual voice followed right behind her. With those words, everyone burst out laughing all together.

  Kiki breathed a sigh of relief. Even at such an extraordinary time, it seems that mothers will always be mothers, and Kiki thought that that was just fine.5

  Lisa in Ponyo is one of the most attractive of the Ghibli mothers. By “attractive,” I don’t mean pretty, although she is by Ghibli standards. She seems like a resourceful, modern young woman, the kind that an audience member—child or adult—would want to know. Married to a sailor (captain of a freighter), she’s had to spend a lot of time on her own, which shows in the way she runs her house. She and five-year-old son Sosuke have made a game of whether the water will come out of the tap from their private tank; the same applies to their backup generator. She loves her son dearly, and the same applies to her husband, although they’re never together in the movie. Because he has to work overtime, their anticipated family dinner is minus her husband. She gets angry, telling Sosuke that they’ll eat out tonight; when the boy says he prefers home cooking, she grabs a can of beer.6 When her husband’s ship sends an apology by signal light, her angry reply is to grab her own signal light and call him, again and again, “BAKA” (idiot). Finally, when Sosuke intercedes on his father’s behalf (and we get the feeling he’s done it before), she cheers up, even singing a few bars of the opening of My Neighbor Totoro. When a “micro-typhoon” hits their coastal town and threatens the senior citizens’ center where she works, she takes it on herself to load up the car with supplies and make sure the seniors are all right. When Sosuke finds the car abandoned, still loaded with food and supplies, he worries about what happened to her, and so does the audience.

  Still, no matter how nice Kokiri and other mothers may seem, they have to go a long way to dethrone the reigning mother of Japanese pop culture. She’s been on the scene since 1946, has outlived her creator, and by virtue of her ordinariness has become the mother of all Japanese mothers, without magic, without mecha, without gimmicks.

  Sazae-san

  Machiko Hasegawa’s Sazae-san started out as a four-panel comic strip, appearing in a local newspaper in 1946 before going national in 1949. Life wasn’t easy during the Occupation—Dr. Tezuka, a medical student at the time, once said that he found that Japan’s most pressing medical problem was malnutrition. So it was common for Japanese comic strip characters in those days to bear the names of food.

  Sazae-san’s entire family fits into this category, since every one is named after one form of seafood or another.7 The family consists of herself, her husband, their son, her two younger siblings, and her parents, an arrangement one website calls “traditionally multi-generational.”

  Tradition—or at any rate nostalgia—seems to be one of the major appeals of Sazae-san, which ended its comic strip run in 1974 after twenty-five years but has kept its popularity as an animated television series that has run continuously since 1969. This is definitely a kinder, gentler Japan, not concerned with global trade deficits or the Pacific Rim. This is just a story of a family that makes simple mistakes—the kind that everyone laughs about later, over dinner and drinks. It’s about getting lost in the new shopping mall; it’s about Grandpa mistaking the soup stock for wash water; it’s about father getting stuck on the roof when his wife accidentally takes away the ladder. Yes, there were some episodes in the ’40s that dealt with those odd Americans during the Occupation, and that later tried to make sense of the college radicals of the ’60s. Yes, current fads came in for some gentle teasing. But for the most part, Sazae-san was far more universal than topical. It was—and is—all about daily life.

  In its animated incarnation, Sazae-san has over 1,600 episodes to its credit, thus surpassing even the Dragon Ball franchise. Oddly enough, Sazae-san has so many episodes precisely because it borrows its form from American television cartoons.

  Remember that, when television was new, the cartoons shown in the U.S. were usually recycled theatrical short subjects, each about seven minutes long. Three of those could fit easily into a half-hour and still leave room for commercials. This is the same format used by Sazae-san: three short unrelated vignettes per week.

  The popularity of the comic and the anime meant that the family wasn’t to be limited to those media alone. Sazae-san became the subject of movies, of live television drama, and its own art museum in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, and it even gave rise to two research institutes. In 1981 the Sazae-san Academy was started, and in 1992 it published an analysis of the long-running manga. The analysis didn’t sit well with some observers, though, who started their own academy, the Setagaya Sazae-san Research Association, which published its own findings.

  As Charlie Brown would say, “Good grief.” And, even though Sazae-san is most often compared to Chic Young’s Blondie comic be
cause of its domestic humor, Sazae-san herself is actually sort of a gender-bender Charlie Brown. She is described as wishy-washy, but that’s only because she’s engaged in an incredible balancing act. She must be a wife, a mother, and a daughter at the same time. Still, she’s lived with that kind of balancing act all her life, as have most Japanese. They also live, for example, the balancing act of believing two or more religions at the same time.

  1. Kittredge Cherry, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987), 78–79. In the more traditional extended family, when the parents of either the husband or wife also live under the same roof, these grandparents pick up some of the child-rearing slack if the mother takes a part-time job or goes back to school for an advanced degree. (Joy Hendry, Understanding Japanese Society [London: Routledge, 1989], 95.)

  2. Cherry, Womansword, 134.

  3. In the first Silent Möbius movie, we see Fuyuka in her hospital room, reading Tarot cards.

  4. As for what they were negotiating, called Project Gaia, see part 1, chapter 12.

  5. Eiko Kadono, Majo no Takkyubin (Witch’s Delivery Service) (Tokyo: Fukuinkan Shoten, 1985), 35. My translation.

  6. We can tell from the gold star on the can that it’s one of the most familiar Japanese brands, Sapporo beer. The brewery, located on the northernmost island of Hokkaido (where Sapporo is the largest city), was started in 1876 as a government-sponsored development project. It was privatized after ten years.

  7. Frederik L. Schodt, Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983), 95. These days hardly any anime or manga still use the flood-name formula, though Bakuretsu Hunters (Sorcerer Hunters) includes characters with names like Carrots Glacé and Apricot Ice, while the various Saber Marionettes series feature androids named Lime, Cherry, and Bloodberry.

  Faith-Based: Christianity, Shinto, and Other Religions in Anime

  Japan (and its pop culture) see nothing incongruous about following two or more religions at once. Native Shinto, Buddhism from India, the teachings of the Chinese sage Confucius—all apply at the right time and place.

  You can’t live a life without pain

  —Isamu Dyson, quoting the Buddha in Macross Plus

  When DIC Studios started dubbing Sailor Moon into English, Western viewers probably didn’t realize that some scenes were destined for the cutting-room floor. It wasn’t because of sex or violence, but because some images Western viewers automatically invest with a great deal of power are taken by Japanese viewers with little more than a mental shrug.

  Example: in the R series of Sailor Moon episodes, the four Sailor Senshi who assist Sailor Moon are taken aboard the flying saucer of Rubeus.1 That’s the last most Westerners see of them until Sailor Moon vanquishes Rubeus in combat, and she and the others have to escape before the ship blows up. Were the other Sailors in prison? Not exactly. Japanese viewers (and some Western fans) know that the other four spent the time suspended on crystal crosses.

  It’s ironic that a symbol as potent as crucifixion should be edited out precisely because of that potency. After all, the way it’s generally used in anime—when it’s used at all—is in a manner Westerners can understand. It becomes a form of torture for someone who doesn’t deserve it.

  The Sailor Senshi certainly fit into this category. They were just being used as bait by Rubeus to draw Sailor Moon onto his ship. Another innocent victim is the video girl Amano Ai,2 the title character of Den‘ei Shojo (Video Girl Ai). In this 1992 anime, based on the manga by Masakazu Katsura, Ai is a “comfort video” girl, who’s only supposed to speak consolingly to whoever rents her cassette. However, she not only crosses out of the television and into the real world, but is later electronically crucified by her inventor/programmer, Rolex. Her crime was falling in love with one of the customers, the hapless student Yota Moteuchi.3 In Vengeance of the Space Pirate, an edited and dubbed version of Reiji Matsumoto’s Arcadia of My Youth, pirate queen Emeraldas and Maya, the underground broadcaster who tries to rally Earth against an alien invasion, are hung up on crosses before their execution by firing squad. The fourth installment of Earthian features a synthetic human named Messiah whose inventor wishes to erase and reprogram Messiah’s memory. He does this by crucifying Messiah on an oddly shaped device set up on the altar of a church. In the film version of Macross Plus, virtual singing idol Sharon Apple declares her independence of her programmer, Myung Fan Lone, by suspending her in midair, crucified with a dozen coaxial cables. And in the Tenchi Muyo! OAV known as “The Mihoshi Special,” Galaxy Police officers Mihoshi and Kiyone and Jurai princess Aeka are suspended on crosses while Dr. Washu tries to destroy the universe and space pirate Ryoko tries to compromise Tenchi’s virginity. Even crucifixion can be played for laughs.

  Knowledge of crucifixion in Japan seems to date from the sixteenth-century introduction of Christianity itself to the islands. There were several notorious examples of crucifixion in Japan, especially the martyrdom of twenty-six foreign missionaries and their Japanese followers in 1597. Another was carried out by the infamous warlord Oda Nobunaga. A ruthless fighter, Nobunaga abused friend and foe equally, but the blow that sealed his fate involved the mother of Akechi Mitsuhide, a warlord who had allied himself to Nobunaga. During one battle, Mitsuhide had sent his mother to the enemy camp to serve as a hostage to convince the enemy to negotiate. When the enemy arrived at the parley, Nobunaga, ignoring his own terms, had the enemy envoy crucified; the enemy killed Mitsuhide’s mother in retaliation.

  In June 1582, Mitsuhide was ordered by Nobunaga to lead his forces in an attack on the Mori clan; instead, his men turned on Nobunaga. Trapped in a temple in Kyoto, Nobunaga committed suicide. At the time, he controlled about half of Japan.4 What did Japan borrow from Christianity aside from crucifixion? Not a great deal. Attitudes have changed since the Tokugawa ban on Christianity, and in modern times the country has had a small minority of devout and practicing Christians, but in general the Japanese have only been interested in the tangential trappings and trimmings of Christianity. They have simply never needed it to provide a world view or a theology.

  The Big Three

  We need to remember the context. Japan has existed for centuries with a mix of no less than three governing belief systems, one of which doesn’t strictly qualify as a religion even though it serves some of the purposes that religion serves in the West. Yet Japanese were and are able to function under all three simultaneously.

  Confucianism, which is actually a social and ethical code rather than a form of worship, was based on the writings of the great Chinese scholar named K’ung Ch’iu, better known as K’ung Fu-tzu, or Master Kung. In Renaissance times, Western writers romanized his name to the quasi-Latin Confucius).5 Master K’ung was a teacher of the elite; in modern terms, it might be more accurate to call him a consultant. He advised nobles in China on state policy and techniques of governance. His advice wasn’t always followed, but its common sense survived the centuries and influenced, to one degree or another, most of the societies of Asia.

  What Confucius taught was a way of ordering society that em-phasized education over heredity. Brains mattered more than birth to Confucius, and his teachings were the foundation for the Chinese imperial system in which government posts were earned by passing rigorous civil service tests. Beyond that, Confucius also saw that the family was the key to society, and that society functioned best when family members behaved according to a well-understood hierarchy. If you are an older brother, the teacher said, behave like one, and all will be well.

  Buddhism came to Japan from India, by way of China. Although Confucius provided a blueprint for an ethical society and a description of what makes a true gentleman in that society, history has shown that power tends to corrupt. Societies based too rigidly on such social hierarchies can often degenerate into despotism as brutal as the old aristocracies. Buddhism turned out to be a perfect counterweight to this tendency, because of its doctrine that the capacity for enl
ightenment—“Buddha-nature”—is within everyone, regardless of education or social standing. Thus the conscientious Buddhist is supposed to show compassion to all people, regardless of rank. (It actually goes farther than that, calling for compassion for all living things, from animals to insects.)

  So, if Confucius gave Japan its ethical ground rules, and Buddhism taught Japan how to leaven those rules with compassion, what does Japan’s native religion, Shinto, offer? Nothing less than the identity of Japan itself as a nation, and of the Japanese as a people. Shinto provided the creation mythology for Japan. It provided Amaterasu the Sun Goddess6 as putative mother of the entire Imperial line and of the Japanese people, and the animistic belief that kami (divine beings) are many and everywhere.

  The word “belief” is the key here. In Shinto, doctrine takes second place behind the worship itself. Joseph Campbell tells the story of asking a Shinto priest about Shinto’s belief system. The answer: “We have no ideology. We have no theology. We dance.”7 He meant the ecstatic trance states entered into by seers, although this isn’t limited to Shinto; the so-called “whirling Dervishes” of Sufi Islam are a case in point.

  One other religious figure puts in an appearance from time to time: Kannon, the Goddess of Compassion. This is Japan’s version of Kwanyin, a Chinese version of Indian bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. Also a figure in Korean, Tibetan, and Vietnamese Buddhism, Kannon’s Chinese name means “Heeding the Cries of the World.”

  Kannon’s stature as a goddess is shown by being oversize. The manga Shaman King by Hiroyuki Takei takes place in a Tokyo neighborhood called Funbari Hill, where the major claim to fame is a large statue of Kannon. This could be, in keeping with Shaman King’s tendency to show real places with slightly altered names, Takei’s version of the Byakue Kannon (White Robed Kannon), a statue over ninety-six feet high, carved between 1934 and 1961 (with a break during World War II), and located in Oofuna. However, unlike Funbari, which is almost deserted in the manga, Oofuna is near the bustling city of Kamakura, which flows almost seamlessly into Yokohama and Tokyo.