Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  Speaking of sexual matters, Mutsuki Asahina, daughter of a Shinto priest and a miko in her own right, frequently gets sidetracked from her own attempts at exorcism. Like so many Japanese schools, Saito High has a statue of educator Sontoku Ninomiya on its grounds.5 This one, though, comes alive and runs around at night. Mutsuki catches him and turns him into a servant as well as a focus for her own lusts. In case you were wondering if there was an analog to the “Lolita complex” or rorikon, in which grown men fixate on prepubescent girls, there is. It’s called the Shota complex, and Mutsuki’s got a serious case of it.6 Haruto Hojo is the central character in this school story: blond, handsome, Christian and fed up with the Holy Student Council. Having to exorcise all these ghosts is keeping him from what he sees as a normal life, although by the end of the series he learns that “normal” has its own problems, primarily the lack of the very randomness that makes life interesting.

  Among the ghosts that live (as it were) at Saito High is a little girl in a mirror, a giant, a science-class skeleton and a Visible Boy—the life-sized torso with removable organs that has apparently creeped-out generations on both sides of the Pacific. Also appearing in the series is a boy who turns out to be a tanuki (see the Studio Ghibli chapter for a report on Pompoko and a description of this creature’s attributes).

  Yoko Mano

  Star of the 1992 Devil Hunter Yohko OAV series, this sixteen-year-old girl is a reluctant warrior who finds out from her grandmother about her family’s legacy as fighters against supernatural evil. Yoko learns she is the 108th in line of succession and that granny could not pass the heritage to Yoko’s mother because at age sixteen mom wasn’t a virgin. Yoko’s combat against evil things (mamono) involves the martial arts and a “soulsword.” This being the twentieth century, she also quickly picks up a business manager, as well as Azusa, a kawaii apprentice. She’s also trying to fall in love and have sex (not necessarily in that order), but something always gets in the way.

  Yoko’s first adventure was only half-serious, and played off the sexual side of her life. From there, things got more serious (although never completely so), with the second OAV containing an ecological message against destroying “sacred” forests; the third sent her back in time to free a bishonen prince from a spell; part five brought her up against a demon so big and bad that she had to summon her 107 predecessors back from the dead to help her defeat him; and part six pits her against her evil twin. (You may be wondering about part four. Technically, there isn’t one; the installment known as Part 4-Ever is actually a collection of music videos.)

  Shibuya Psychic Research

  Shibuya is one of Tokyo’s trendiest, most modern neighborhoods. It also is (perhaps) the last name of the teenager who is the head of Shibuya Psychic Research in the Ghost Hunt anime and manga series.

  Ghost Hunt started as Akuryou (Evil Spirits), a series of young adult supernatural novels by Fuyumi Ono. These were turned into a manga in 1998, with Ono adapting her books and artwork by Shiho Inada. The manga appeared for a time in Nakayoshi magazine; when Nakayoshi dropped it, the manga continued in paperback. When the series was animated and broadcast in 2006, it immediately jumped into Japan’s top twenty anime. Handsomely animated by Avex Entertainment, and directed by Rei Mano (whose credits include Cardcaptor Sakura and Gun-slinger Girl), this series is one of the finest, using Japan’s considerable ghost literature.

  The core of the story is someone who (at first) isn’t one of the psychically gifted staff. Mai Taniyama is a high school student who accidentally gets introduced to the group (literally) by injuring one of the members; because she broke an expensive camera, she works for the group to pay for it. She starts out as an Office Lady of sorts, but gets to be more important (and reveals hidden psychic abilities) as she stays with the group. The rest of the group is a mixed spiritual bag: Masako Hara, a very pretty teenaged exorcist who’s something of a TV celebrity;7 Ayako Matsuzaki, a miko who isn’t part of a shrine (we’ll meet her below); Hosho Takigawa, a Buddhist monk who has taken a break from his duties at the Mount Koya monastery;8 and John Brown, a teen-aged Catholic exorcist-in-training. The group is led by Kazuya Shibuya, who is assisted by Hong Kong native Rin Ko-jo; they do not reveal their own abilities until late in the series. Shibuya is generally cold and aloof, and has picked up (not just from Mai) the nickname “Naru”—short for “narcissist.” Yet he treats Mai nicely—in her dreams.

  Girl Power: The Miko

  One special subdivision of these warriors against evil is quintessentially Japanese. Pop culture still invests a great deal of power (mystical or otherwise) in the miko. These female shamans of Shinto have been influential in the life of Japan as far back as the third century, when warring tribes were brought together under the rule of the shaman/queen known as Himiko. According to legend, she was a shaman who focused on magic, leaving day-to-day political rule to her brother.9 In modern Japan, miko are the young female attendants and officiants at Shinto shrines, and are usually not thought to possess shamanic or magic powers at all.

  The role of miko in manga and anime is of course far more colorful than their real-life counterparts. They usually play host to mystical powers, far beyond anything ascribed to a miko in contemporary Shinto, thereby reaffirming Japanese tradition and the power of the traditional belief system. Of course in anime, being a powerful priestess doesn’t eliminate romance. This feeds a different Japanese tradition: the belief (held by most males and not a few females in corporate Japan) that a “career woman” is a contradiction in terms, and that the destiny of a woman, even a miko, is still to be a wife and mother. It is interesting, however, to note that for miko in anime, romance is usually a juggling act at best, and at worst can set dire wheels of fate in motion. Still, the psychic powers ascribed to miko are often hereditary and cumulative, so there is a practical incentive for them to seek love and marriage. If they didn’t have a daughter to take up the torch, a miko’s power could well die with her.

  Hino Rei

  While viewers of Sailor Moon often see Rei in the middie blouse that is her school uniform, or the variation on it she wears as Sailor Mars, they also see her wearing the white blouse and baggy red hakama of a miko. (We should also note that the color scheme of her Sailor Mars outfit parallels her miko wardrobe.) Her role at the Shinto shrine is tied into Japanese tradition far more closely than anyone else in the cast of Sailor Moon. We occasionally see her as a Shinto diviner, but her exorcism abilities are also incorporated into her Sailor Mars arsenal; it’s not unusual for Sailor Mars to slap an ofuda onto an enemy, with the incantation “Akuryo taisan!” (Evil spirits of the dead, depart!). And yet, in the first episode of the third season of Sailor Moon, when Rei talks about what she wants to do with her life, her answer is rather down-to-earth: after being an idol singer and a seiyu (cartoon voice actress), she wants to get married.

  The Women of the Mima Clan

  In Key the Metal Idol (1994), we see not only Tokiko Mima (known as Key), but also her mother and grandmother as the inheritors of considerable psychic powers. These hereditary miko of a shrine in a small rural valley first have their lives disrupted when a young scientist witnesses the power of Key’s grandmother to make a doll move without strings. The scientist (Key’s grandfather) then marries the miko and subjects her to a battery of tests. Their daughter is subjected to the same scrutiny as she grows older; she escapes the testing only in death, although first giving birth to Key, in whom the destiny of all the Mima miko reaches its climax.

  Ayako Matsuzaki

  Among the members of Shibuya Psychic Research, a group of ghostbuster teens and young adults ranging from a Buddhist monk to a Catholic exorcist from Australia, is a self-identified temple maiden named Ayako Matsuzaki. At age twenty-three she technically can’t be called a maiden, and she’s not affiliated with a Shinto family temple. She is, in fact, a medical doctor like her parents. So why does she call herself a miko?

  She mentions in volume 9 of the manga (animated as episode 25)
that her family home included on its property a large camphor tree. Native to Japan and China, the camphor tree is not sacred per se, but is often venerated because of its height, longevity, and healing properties. Those designated by Shinto as especially sacred are marked by a rope made of rice plants (shibenawa). We see such a rope on the tree the young Ayako is talking to. As she explains, the sign of a true miko is that the tree talks back: “it used to tell me many things. Since it told me when our patients were going to die, it also got me into trouble.” While some anime miko have powers that can only be called fantastic, Ayako’s most successful ritual, invoking tree spirits to lay other malevolent ghosts to rest, has an impressive quality that seems highly plausible.

  Kaho Mizuki

  When we first see her, we don’t know that she’s a miko at the Tsukimine Shrine. In fact, even after she wears the white blouse and red hakama of a miko, Western viewers may not know it. In turning the anime series Cardcaptor Sakura (1998; based on a manga by the CLAMP collective) into Cardcaptors for the West, Canadian animation studio Nelvana seemed bent on moving the dubbed version as far from Japan as possible. To that end, Sakura’s beautiful but mysterious teacher isn’t just transformed from Kaho Mizuki into Layla Mackenzie; when seen in her miko garb, she refers to the temple grounds as simply “a park.” Still, Nelvana had a couple of land mines ahead in adapting the rest of this series. There is the distinct impression that Kaho/Layla and Sakura’s brother Toya were once “an item,” despite the age difference. (The reason why isn’t surprising, when you realize that Kaho is more than a miko; she’s also one of the moon-related demigods watching over Sakura’s recovery of the Clow Cards.) By the second season, Kaho is living with a ten-year-old boy named Eriol. This apparent love affair is also “rescued” by virtue of Eriol being the reincarnation of Clow Reed, creator of the Clow Cards. As it turned out, Nelvana opted for straight translation of the latter part of the series, without trying to explain away the unusual relationships.

  Nami Yamigumo

  Kia Asamiya created a miko for the not-too-distant future in his highly successful manga series Silent Möbius and its 1991 anime spi-noff. Supernatural evil is plaguing Tokyo, causing the formation of the all-woman (and awkwardly named) Attacked Mystification Police. Nami is one of three generations of the Yamigumo family in this story: her father and grandfather are priests at a Shinto shrine. Nami is recruited into the AMP by her sister Nana, who’s friends with Mana Isozaki, one of AMP’s higher-ranking officers. However, Nami seldom wears the AMP uniform, preferring a modified version of her miko garb (an all-white kimono with red piping). As such, she’s one of the most powerful members of the group, and her use of ofuda against evil adversaries (known as Lucifer Hawk) shows that Shinto is not to be dismissed even in the high-tech future of A.D. 2027.

  Cherry and Sakura

  This uncle/niece act (he’s a Buddhist priest, she’s a Shinto miko) is the oldest of this group, going back to the 1970s and Rumiko Takahashi’s first runaway success Urusei Yatsura. They’re actually a trio, since Sakura is engaged to Tsubame Ozuno, a practitioner of Western black magic. None of the three, however, can ever get their magic spells to come out quite right.

  Kikyo

  This takes us to Takahashi’s most recent success. Kikyo was a miko long ago, charged with guarding the Shikon no Tama jewel. In defending it from the dog-demon who is the title character of InuYasha (2000), she shoots him with an arrow, freezing him for half a century. Meanwhile, Kikyo dies and is reborn as the schoolgirl Kagome, the heroine of the story. In the meantime, the Shikon no Tama has fragmented and InuYasha and Kagome must round up all the shards. Kagome, like Kikyo, is also an archer (archery is also the weapon of another magical girl/miko, Sailor Mars).

  As for Kagome herself, at the end of the anime series she is able to return to her own time. She’s there for three years—just long enough to attend and graduate from high school—before returning to the warring states period to be with InuYasha and the other friends she made in the fifteenth century. This fulfills her modern duty: to graduate from high school. In the final scenes, we see Kagome without the sailor fuku or high school uniform; instead, she’s wearing the white blouse and baggy red pants of a miko, reminding us of a far older duty: that her calling is often a matter of family.

  All of these spirit-based stories have a parallel set of anime/manga reflecting the popularity in Japan of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories. Western magic has actually been around for years; one of the first anime for Japanese television was Sally the Witch, and Kiki’s Delivery Service was a book long before it was a movie. The Potter saga accelerated the acceptance of stories like Magic User’s Club and Ojamajo Doremi (both dealing with witch education), Witch Hunter Robin, Fullmetal Alchemist, and especially Negima! Magister Negi Magi, the story of a ten-year-old wizard teaching English in a Japanese private girls school.

  1. It’s no accident that multi-tailed foxes still appear in video games such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokémon, that the multi-tailed fox Renamon plays a pivotal role in the third season of the Digimon TV series, that the ninja trainee Naruto Uzumaki from the manga/anime Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto was possessed at birth by a fox spirit, that a fox and tanuki (see the Ghibli chapter entry on Pom Poko) provide low comic relief in the Shaman King series, and that one of the magical characters in Rumiko Takahashi’s InuYasha is Shippo, a shape-shifting fox-spirit who looks like a little boy with a fox’s ears and tail.

  2. 2 See an early episode of Jigoku Sensei Nube (Hell Teacher Nube), in which a young student is terrorized on the school playground by a kappa, a tortoise-like goblin that lives in rivers. In this case, the kappa lives in an underground spring beneath the school and was trying to point out that the school had built its playground over an unexploded World War II bomb.

  3. Nube is also the son of an exorcist, but had a falling out with his father when his mother took sick and his father would not (or could not) heal her. He turned as a child to a teacher named Minako for comfort; he took her spirit into himself when he also absorbed the demon who was attacking her. Rounding out the trilogy of women in his life is Yukime, a mountain snow-goddess who was supposed to kidnap Nube and ended up married to him. They’re happy enough together, except that she tends to melt if the temperature gets too high.

  4. The title is (no surprise) a pun, using different kanji to spell out “Phantom Quest Corp.” instead of “Limited Corporation,” which would be pronounced the same way.

  5. At one time every elementary school in Japan displayed a statue of Ninomiya Sontoku (born Kinjiro, 1787–1856) as a young boy walking along, reading a book while carrying a load of wood on his back. Ninomiya was held in high regard for founding “trust associations” that helped improve the quality of life in rural Japan. He and his disciples established the Hotoku (“repaying virtue”) movement to promote morality, industry, and economy. The statues were based on the legend of the young Ninomiya learning to read even while performing manual labor—Japan’s equivalent to the stories of young Abe Lincoln, living on the frontier and writing his alphabet in charcoal on the back of a shovel. The government tried to revive the Hotoku movement in the 1920s and 1930s as a state-sponsored alternative to radical farmers’ unions. Ninomiya statues thus began appearing in schools in the years before WWII: first small ones, then life-sized figures in bronze or cement. They were meant to inspire the students to follow Ninomiya’s example. Some of the statues didn’t survive the war or were destroyed during the American Occupation. But many remain to exhort new generations of Japanese youth—though one Ninomiya statue, modified by an anonymous student, was photographed showing the young Ninomiya reading a manga magazine.

  6. The Lolita complex is, of course, named after the title character of Vladimir Nabokov’s best-known novel. The Shota complex, on the other hand, is named after the child protagonist in Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s manga Tetsujin 28-go (Iron Man No. 28), better known as Gigantor. The pairing of Nabokov’s novel with giant Japanese robots has
to be one of the more surreal examples of Postmodernism.

  7. There are many kinds of psychics in Japan. Masako is a yobisute, which literally means “lending a mouth”; spirits of the dead speak through a yobisute. One of the best-known examples is in Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon, when a murder victim testifies through a yobisute at the trial of his accused killer.

  8. The name carries more significance in Japan, where the Mount Koya monastery is known as a center of Shingon Buddhism, which advocates the training of body, mind, and speech to reach enlightenment.

  9. Mikiso Hane, Japan: A Historical Survey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 18.

  The Starmaker Machinery: Anime and Idol

  If you ever thought that Britney and Michael had taken pop music too far, think about Lynn Minmay and Sharon Apple, who can stop an intergalactic war—or start one. Anime’s pop singing idols are in a league of their own.

  Fact and fantasy, truth and illusion, meet to a greater extent than any other in the phenomenon of idolized pop singers, real or otherwise. This is where otherwise separate corners of Japanese pop culture mix and mingle.

  The United States is no stranger to the phenomenon known in Japan as the “idol singer,” since it was a U.S. export to Japan in the first place. In the 1950s, the Allied Occupation of Japan had officially ended, but the United States was still a large presence because of its use of Japan as a staging area for the Korean War. Japan was exposed to a great deal of American pop culture, including the whole range of activities lumped under the category of “pop singing idol.” There were the records, of course, but there were also the fan clubs, the screaming crowds, the touring, the theatrical stage shows, the magazines, the television appearances, the advertising endorsements—all these trappings and more that attached to Frankie Avalon, Pat Boone, Connie Francis, and in fact to just about every popular singer from Frank Sinatra up to and including the Beatles in the ’60s.