The Byakue Kannon isn’t even the largest Kannon in Japan. The “Big Kannon” in Kamaishi, holding a fish and intended to bless sailors and fishermen, stands thirteen stories tall and has a circular staircase within. Two other Kannon, a 200-foot statue in Kurume and a 185-foot statue in Aizu, are Jibo Kannon, and are specifically for worshippers to pray to for fertility and protection of newborns; they are shown holding babies. During the Tokugawa Shogunate, when Christianity was officially outlawed, some believers kept Jibo Kannon statues in their homes as an acceptable secret substitute for the Madonna and Child.
The goddess doesn’t appear in the Studio Ghibli film Ponyo, but two sailors think she does. Granmamare, the goddess of the sea and mother of the goldfish title character, is seen swimming to a meeting with her human husband. Because she appears to the sailors as a luminous, beautiful woman, larger than the ship they sail on, one of them immediately starts praying to Kannon while the other claps his hands twice: the traditional Shinto way of summoning the attention of the gods.
The recognition of a Buddhist deity in a Shinto manner is as clear a proof as can be that Japanese religion isn’t about determining the “One True Church”; rather, it is about a life that unifies disparate religions as a way of explaining the bigger picture of life in Japan and Japan’s place in the universe.
Where does all that leave Christianity? Pretty much marginalized in Japan, a nation that got along for two millennia without it. As far back as Oda Nobunaga, Christianity was seen by Japan’s rulers as more destabilizing than beneficial; Christian missionaries were tolerated by Nobunaga more as a political counterweight to the militant Ikko Buddhists than out of an attraction to Christian doctrine. Christians in Japan, both foreign-born missionaries and native converts, were persecuted in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but a lot of this persecution was brought on the Christians by themselves.
Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in the mid-1500s to spread the Jesuit perspective on Catholicism, which was autocratic and hierarchical and not unlike the Japanese warlords’ top-down view of political power. But then came the Franciscans, who sought to convert the poor and lowly rather than the wealthy and powerful. To make matters worse, the Jesuits were predominantly Portuguese, while the Franciscans were predominantly Spanish, and there was just as much bad blood between the two nations as between the two Catholic orders. With the Jesuits and the Franciscans constantly sniping at each other (a situation made even worse when Protestant missionaries started arriving in Japan in the late 1500s and badmouthed all Catholics), Japan’s rulers felt that Christianity might do the nation more harm than good.
Of course, there was also the matter of these rulers’ self-preservation. Life in Japan had long revolved around the clan, the region, and the emperor (or the warlord who propped up the emperor): the emphasis was on some powerful group or other. The Christian focus on personal salvation taught its followers to think of themselves as individuals rather than members of a group—unless, of course, the particular Christian sect was the group. The religion was perceived as a threat not just to Japan’s native beliefs, but also to the nation’s social and political stability. So beginning in 1587 with an (unenforced) demand by Toyotomi Hideyoshi that all foreign missionaries leave the country, a crackdown on Christianity began that culminated in a complete ban on the religion by the Tokugawa shogunate in the first decades of the seventeenth century and the closing of Japan to all contact with the West except for a tiny Dutch trade outpost in Nagasaki.
After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, as Japan rushed to westernize, Christian missionaries returned to Japan after an absence of almost three centuries. They established universities that still stand today; they pioneered education for Japanese girls and charity for the disabled. Today, the bottom line is that, in Japan, Christianity is a vital and important faith to its few adherents (about one percent of the population). For the rest, all they know of it is pretty much what they see in pop culture, whether it comes from Hollywood or Tokyo.
Following the Doctor
In the late 1950s, when Hollywood was turning out one Biblical epic after another, Dr. Osamu Tezuka developed his own iconography for crucifixes, which pretty much set the standard in Japanese pop culture for all that would follow. The cross served two distinct purposes in Dr. Tezuka’s work. On the one hand, it was a death symbol, denoting or even forecasting the death of a character. In addition, it could be used to signal the just conclusion of a story or sequence, which might involve the death of the villain, or avenging the death of a sympathetic character by the arrest of the responsible party. There is a somewhat different usage in a later episode of Futago no Kishi (Twin Knights), the manga sequel to Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight). In the episode “Okami no Yama” (Wolf Mountain), a mother wolf dies protecting her pups, and is buried beneath a cross. The wolf is not anthropomorphized at all; the reader is intended to view her as a wolf. Topping her grave with a Christian symbol was partly a sign of respect, honoring a mother who died protecting her children, thus conforming to traditional human gender expectations. The wolf, in other words, may not have been human, but she was a mother, according to the culture of the comic’s reader, and not just that of the narrative’s fantasized European culture.
There is also a religious sense in which the wolf, and the respect accorded to her, could be seen as traditional, even if the symbol used to express the respect is alien to Japanese culture. Buddhism stresses the oneness of all living things, a theme that recurs throughout Dr. Tezuka’s works as well as that of other manga artists. There is a connection, after all, between the Black Jack episode8 in which, stranded at sea with two criminals, Black Jack must perform surgery on a dolphin so it can help them find land, and the kuyo ceremony described by William R. LaFleur:
Annually in Japan there is an autumnal rite of kuyo for eels. Through the medium of national television, each year presents select restaurateurs and their customers, people who love to eat eels, gathered by an altar while Buddhist priests intone the words of sutras to express thanks to the eels for having been so nourishing and for having such a delicious taste. Of course, in this—especially when the whole rite is projected to the nation via the nightly news—the Japanese tell themselves once again that their ties with antiquity are intact and that they as a people are not ingrates or irreligious, however much they consume eels with great relish most of the time.9
A group of Astro Boy stories also employs the cross to signal a just conclusion of the story, while also serving as a death-marker. “Kirisuto no Me” (The Eye of Christ) is the most overtly religious of the group, beginning in a church on a stormy night. A gang of masked criminals invades the church. The priest tells them that Jesus (in this case, the altar crucifix) sees everything. The criminal ringleader, whose mask is blown off by a gust of wind, tells the priest to blindfold the plaster statue of Jesus. As he does so, the priest scratches an ideogram into the statue’s eye that identifies the ringleader. The priest is killed, but the mystery is solved when Hige Oyaji, the old teacher who assists Atom in his adventures, makes the connection. The final panel juxtaposes the radiant image of the altar cross with the criminals being marched off to jail.
In the story “Ivan no Baka” (Ivan the Fool), Atom and a group of earthlings are in a spaceship that gets hit by a meteor. The party makes an emergency landing on the moon. While exploring, Atom finds the ruins of an old rocket crashed in a valley. A tape recording reveals that the rocket was launched by the Soviet Union in 1960.10 The sole survivors of the crash were cosmonaut Minya Mikhailovna and her robot companion Ivan. Since, in Dr. Tezuka’s lunar landscape, plants flourish in a breathable atmosphere and water is available, Minya scratches out a basic but lonely existence. On her deathbed, she tells Ivan to bury her on a hill where she has planted a cross.
When one of the passengers (established at the beginning of the story as a thief) learns that Minya, while she lived on the moon, had unearthed massive diamonds, he threatens to kill the others unl
ess Atom shows him where Minya’s grave is. Lunar night begins to fall; Atom takes the others to a rescue ship, while the thief pulls the cross from the ground and uses it as a digging-tool to get to the diamonds, thus compounding desecration with sacrilege. No sooner does he find the diamonds than Ivan appears, mistaking the thief for Minya, as he similarly mistook Atom for Minya earlier. Ivan carries the thief back to the ship to care for him, heedless of his cries for help. The final panel shows the spaceship in the background, the discarded diamonds and the cross in the foreground. Once again the cross is used as the signal of a just conclusion, while it also serves as a symbol of death. Here it represents the doom of the thief as well as the death of Minya.
This same dual usage is seen in “Chitei Sensha” (The Underground Tank). The villain of this piece, General Saborsky, invented the title vehicle as a means to world domination. One of his workers, however, has stolen the tank and used it to rescue Hige Oyaji, stranded in a desert after his plane was destroyed by the general’s jet. When the pilot of the tank is killed in a landslide, Hige Oyaji buries him in a grave with a cross as a marker. (It is worth noting here that the dead tank driver is black, for no apparent plot reason. However, it does reinforce the cultural notion that Christianity is essentially a creed for non-Japanese).
Hige Oyaji then digs his own grave and erects a cross for himself; however, when he prays, the words come out “Nanmai Dabu,” a scrambled version of the “Namu Amida Butsu” prayer to Amida Buddha.11 Atom hears these prayers and rescues Hige Oyaji.
The story ends with Atom attacking General Saborsky’s private jet, knocking off the wing-tips and tail and causing it to crash into the ground nose-first. General Saborsky attempts to escape by driving his damaged tank into a live volcano—a move that means certain death, which he considers preferable to surrender. Again, in the final panel, the wrecked fuselage in the foreground bears a deliberate resemblance to a crucifix grave-marker and also signals the just end of General Saborsky.
A Higher Power
The image of Christianity in Japanese pop culture can be, in a word, fanciful. Some priests in manga and anime are vampire-killers, their roles modeled on the Dracula movies produced by England’s Hammer Studios in the 1960s and starring Christopher Lee. In the Vampire Hunter D anime (1985), based on a series of novels by Hideyuki Kikuchi, the vampire is named Count Magnus Lee, and Christopher Lee’s name is invoked as a vampire gag in Hyaku Monogatari (One Hundred Stories), one of several manga treatments by Dr. Tezuka of the legend of Faust.
Vampires tend to be romanticized in the West, but Japan looks at attempts to prolong life at the expense of others as monstrous. The mentality of finding human life despicable because it is so short is given a surprising showcase in “Interlude Party,” a one-shot episode from the second series of Fullmetal Alchemist. In an episode that is partly a dream sequence and partly a collection of clips from earlier episodes, the alchemist Hohenheim, father of the Elric brothers, finds himself watching villagers dance around a bonfire. At first he argues with a much younger version of Pinako, the grandmother of Winry Rockbell, a local girl whose love of machinery makes her a mechanic to the Elric Brothers. Because Hohenheim used the Philosopher’s Stone to live for centuries, he had abandoned his attachments to humanity, despising them as fallible, ignorant beings who just keep making the same mistakes. He adopted the view of the Homunculi: that humans are merely a resource, whose only purpose is to be sacrificed to make more Homunculi. Finally one other character appears in the dream: Tricia Elric, the woman Hohenheim fell in love with, married, fathered two boys with, then left to avoid revealing his own longevity. Tricia tells him that humanity’s mistakes, its fallibility, even its mortality cause humanity to grow. The dream ends with a flight of cranes.
Why cranes? Because this is anime, a reflection of Japanese culture. Cranes are found on almost every continent, but China and Japan venerate the crane as the most long-lived of birds; its life span in reality is thirty to forty years, but in folklore the crane was said to live a thousand years. They came by their longevity by associating with the sages of old, reclusive wise men who lived in the mountains.12 These cranes, however, are still mortal; longevity is not immortality, and their hearts aren’t as corrupted as the humans who seek to cheat death.
The Exorcist also resonated in Japan. The Ghost Sweeper Mikami manga and anime (1993) include an exorcist actually named Father Karras, after the character in the movie. Manga “bad boy” Go Nagai produced a bawdy parody of The Exorcist in his series Occult Gang. As in the movie, a young girl is possessed by a demon and wreaks havoc. The Occult Gang is called in to exorcise the demon. One of the gang, however, inadvertently drinks the holy water that was to be used in the exorcism. This doesn’t faze the gang; with the leader reasoning that holy water stays holy even if it isn’t in the bottle, the exorcism proceeds by pissing on the possessed girl.
Another exorcist, and another outsider, appears in the Ghost Hunt stories by Fuyumi Ono, with artwork by Shiho Inada. The staff of Shibuya Psychic Research includes an Australian Catholic exorcist-in-training named John Brown. While he’s capable when reading scripture and sprinkling holy water, he doesn’t always fit in. For one thing, he speaks Japanese in the western Kansai dialect. Beyond this, he sometimes makes mistakes, like saying that SPR has a patron but using the word that refers to the financial supporter of a prostitute.
One of the most memorable scenes in the apocalyptic Hollywood horror film The Omen showed a Catholic priest being skewered by a falling lightning rod. Dr. Tezuka’s series Don Dracula inverts this scene for comic effect, by having lightning strike a tree branch, which then falls onto Dracula’s back in a deliberate imitation of the scene from the movie. (But then, the entire series was a parody of a parody, inspired by the American vampire parody movie Love at First Bite, which ran in Japan as Dracula Miyako e Iku (Dracula Goes to Town).
Answering Prayers
Not all Christian priestly appearances are tied to the supernatural. A kindly but ineffectual old priest figures in Dr. Tezuka’s shojo manga titled Angel Hill. A monastery is home for the boy Dan Hayasaka13 as he develops into a naïve faith-driven boxer in Shinji Imaizumi’s God Is a Southpaw. Rumiko Takahashi inverted this situation for comic effect in her manga about a young boxer and a Catholic novitiate, Ippondo no Fukuin (One-Pound Gospel).
By far, however, Christianity’s main resonance in modern Japan is theatrical: as the backdrop for a church wedding. The old pattern of getting married in a Shinto ceremony and receiving a Buddhist funeral has been amended in recent decades. The current saying is: “Born Shinto, marry Christian, die Buddhist.” A Christian church wedding has be-come the chic thing to do, to the dismay of priests who at least want to talk about Christianity a little bit. As an indication of how the Japanese perceive the whole issue, the current demand is not just for a church backdrop but for a blond, good-looking priest to perform the ceremony.14 Marriage has become tied in Japan to an unusual Christian holiday: Christmas. In Japan, St. Valentine’s Day is a very specific celebration: girls give food to the boys they like. This usually consists of chocolate, and there are kits available to make chocolate from scratch. But this is the only time a female is encouraged to take the romantic initiative. It usually falls to the male to pop the question, and Christmas has increasingly become the favored day to do that. So much so that some women get tired of waiting; the 1991 album Lucky by pop singer Misato Watanabe includes the song “Kurisumasu Made Matenai”—“Don’t Wait Until Christmas.”
One Picture is Worth
The world of Japanese religion also allows for communication between the dead and the living. It may be a bit one-sided, but there are many examples—requiring photographs. These aren’t spirit photographs, even though they’re part of the goings-on in films like The Ring and The Grudge. They’re ordinary photos of departed family members, with whom the family needs to keep in touch.
T. R. Reid describes the years he and his family lived in Tokyo while he was Asian
Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, in his book Confucius Lives Next Door. The title refers not just to the sage of China who lived 500 years before Christ, but also to the Reids’ next-door neighbors, who embodied so many Confucian virtues. They were an elderly couple, the Matsudas, and one day Mrs. Matsuda passed away at age seventy-eight. As Reid placed flowers on the makeshift altar that had been erected in the Matsuda living room, Mr. Matsuda turned to a photograph of his wife and told it matter-of-factly, “Cho-Cho, it’s Reid-san.”15
It’s tempting for a Western reader in the twenty-first century to dismiss this scene as the sentimental gesture of an elderly widower. Doing this, however, misses the point. Mr. Matsuda wasn’t being sentimental, or senile, or ironic. He spoke to the picture of his wife in order to communicate with the spirit of his late wife; nothing more, nothing less.
He isn’t alone. In Osamu Tezuka’s manga Song of the White Peacock, the heroine, Yuri Kogawa, speaks to her father, missing in action since the Second World War, through his picture. We can see Ryo Kawasaki speaking to the photo of her dead father in Princess Nine. We can see Haruhi Fujioka keeping a photo of her deceased mother, and hear her senpai Tamaki talk to it, in Ouran High School Host Club. Similarly, in the romantic comedy manga Ai Yori Aoshi by Ko Fumizuki and its anime version, the main character, Kaoru, has decided to take the girl he loves, Aoi-chan, to meet his mother. He picks up flowers, incense, and food, and takes them to a cemetery. He places everything in front of his mother’s tombstone and matter-of-factly introduces Aoi-chan to his mother as the girl who has come to mean everything in his life. Aoi-chan follows up on this, telling Kaoru’s mother about her feelings for her son.
Anime Explosion! Page 19