While Japan was getting back on its feet economically after the disastrous war, idol singers were seen as a harmless way for the younger generation to blow off steam. The main difference between Japanese and American idols is that displays of fan affection in the United States have usually been those of female fans screaming after male idols, from Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley to Menudo and ’N Sync, while Japanese idols are usually girls who have both boys and girls as a fan base. The Japanese variant on the idol started when Japanese promoters substituted squeaky-clean Japanese singers for Western idols. The problem is that idol singers, like sushi, go stale very quickly. Most Japanese pop singers have a fairly short shelf-life, and try to do as much as they can before they become obsolete.1
Parallel Universes
Let’s say you’re a fan of the Tenchi Muyo OAV series. You then discover the Magical Girl Pretty Sammy OAVs, featuring many of the same characters, but in different relationships. Jurai Princess Sasami, who once looked up to Tenchi as a big brother, is now unabashedly in love with him, as are Ryoko and Aeka, now students at a high school where one teacher is the former mad scientist Washu. Sa-sami’s mother leaves the running of the family CD store to Mihoshi and Kiyone, two college students. Then you check out Magical Project S, a weekly TV series based on the Pretty Sammy OAVs. Only, not quite. While Sasami’s father was missing in action in the OAV series, he’s now happily married to a totally different mother. Mihoshi and Kiyone are now teachers at Sasami’s elementary school.
What’s going on here? Manga titles can keep a story line going for years without the cast morphing into different identities. Creators can develop characters and plant hints for future story development. In anime, however, production of a weekly series won’t begin without development of (at least) thirteen episodes. This locks the staff into certain character relationships. Changing these from the ground up is a way of bringing back popular characters in fresh contexts.
Tenchi Muyo is not the only anime franchise in which the viewer is handed a cast of characters, only to see them switch identities and relationships in a different project. It happened to the cast of the El-Hazard OAV series when it became The Wanderers, a weekly television series. It happened to the cast of the Vampire Princess Miyu OAV series when it too went weekly. Naoko Takeuchi’s magical girl Aino Minako, star of Code Name Sailor V, kept little besides her name and her cat Artemis when she joined the cast of Sailor Moon.
If you think I’m going to tie this in to Dr. Osamu Tezuka—you’re right. A number of minor characters reappear in Tezuka manga and anime from one end of his career to the other, forming what I call the Tezuka Repertory Company. If, for instance, Dr. Tezuka needed a sleazy impresario for Song of the White Peacock, all he had to do was recycle a sleazy impresario from Tetsuwan Atomu. The character in Atomu known as Hige Oyaji appeared throughout the doctor’s career, even starring in the movie version of Metropolis a decade after Dr. Tezuka’s death. Thus did the God of Comics solve the pop culture problem of having to be both fresh and familiar.
Song of the Cute Peacock
The whole system was depicted in microcosm by Dr. Osamu Tezuka (no surprise there) in Shiro Kujaku no Uta (Song of the White Peacock), a manga he created in 1959 for the girls’ magazine Nakayoshi (Good Friends) that describes the rise and fall of an idol in terms that haven’t changed much over forty years. A girl, Yuri Kogawa, and her mother receive word from the government that the remains of the girl’s father, who was missing in action in World War II, have been discovered on an island near New Guinea, along with something else: a white peacock that refuses to be driven from the remains. The girl takes it both as a pet (which she names Piko) and a last living link to her father, even though the mother predicts that the bird will be a problem.
In fact, it starts out being more beneficial than bothersome. The girl is a pianist (presumably passable enough in talent) who finds that the peacock dances to her music. This is the only break she needs: soon she and the bird are cute media darlings. However, after awhile Piko is locked up in a zoo by Yuri’s sleazy manager, Yuri’s popularity wanes, and the manager who created her career drops her like a hot rock to handle the next fresh face that comes along. Even though the sleazy manager shoots the peacock and it dies (but not before one last dance for Yuri), the story does not end on this tragic note. Thanks to an army buddy of her father, Yuri goes on to study at a conservatory and becomes a concert pianist, still drawing inspiration from memories of the white peacock.
There’s as much fantasy to this story as any other manga, except for one thing. The girl and her bird got work mainly because they were cute. Never underestimate the appeal of cute, especially in Japan. Although Japan has its share of big-haired heavy-metal bands, grunge rockers. and techno performers, the crucial quality for an idol singer in the land of Hello Kitty is still to be cute.
Storm Warning
Yet mention should be made of a sea change that hit anime and its music in 1987. When the first installment of an OAV series titled Bubblegum Crisis was released, its opening notes signaled something new. Fans heard Kinuko Omori, a rock singer rather than an idol-wannabe, belt out a dark and driving version of “Konya wa Hurricane” (“Tonight is the Hurricane”), a song solidly in ’80s rock idiom. This wasn’t just a marketing decision: it was also an integral part of the story. The Bubble-gum Crisis world is essentially reworked from Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner: rogue robots commit mayhem in the streets of a futuristic Tokyo, and the police are powerless to stop them. Enter the Knight Sabers, a vigilante group of four women (one of whom is the daughter of the scientist who invented the robots in the first place) with high-tech body armor beyond anything in the police arsenal. One of the Knight Sabers is a rock singer, Priss Asagiri, thus putting “Konya wa Hurricane” in context.
As surely as Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” became the herald of rock’n’roll when it was used in the 1955 film The Blackboard Jungle, “Konya wa Hurricane” pointed the way for music that broke the anime mold of cuteness. More than a decade later, the musical palette has grown exponentially, encompassing sounds that range from big-band jazz (the themes to the Cowboy Bebop and Ghost Sweeper Mikami TV series) to Slavic-sounding choral music (the films Macross Plus and Ghost in the Shell). The prize for eclecticism probably goes to the Escaflowne TV series, whose music ranges from Indian raga to Gregorian chant to classical music evocative of British composer Frederick Delius. Still, the majority of the singers heard in anime are idol singers, and the predominant note is still cute.
This works out well because anime voices need cute as well. A number of pop singers are also seiyu or voice actors. That way, if their latest record isn’t on the charts, their voices are still before the public. If they’re lucky, they’ll land a role in a TV series running twenty-six weeks or more, keeping them busy and forestalling the dreaded day that their careers are declared over. Conversely, a dramatic voice role can sometimes be parlayed into a singing career. Seiyu also become radio announcers and can even be heard lending their voices to computer games.2
Tops of the Pops
Not all singers cross over to anime voice work (or vice versa), but of those who have, the reigning queen is probably Megumi Hayashibara. Not only is she a talented singer, she’s able to handle voices for a variety of diverse characters. She sings the title songs for the OAVs of All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku and supplies Nuku Nuku’s voice; she’s the voice of the title character in Video Girl Ai; in Evangelion she’s the soft-spoken Rei Ayanami and (in flashbacks and dream sequences) Shinji’s dead mother Yui.3 She plays the three different personalities of Pai in 3x3 Eyes; she’s Lina Inverse, the hot-headed teenage sorceress in the sword-and-sorcery parody Slayers; she’s the rogue gambler Faye Valentine in Cowboy Bebop; she’s the voice of the android Lime (whose catch-phrase “I may be stupid but I’m the star!” pretty much sums her up) in the Saber Marionette stories; and she provides the voice for the female aspect of Ranma Saotome (known to fans as Ran-
chan) in Ranma 1/2. She has resisted being cast as a single type and has demonstrated a considerable range of talents.
As noted in the sidebar “’Pre-Mothers’: The Office Lady” (see part 1, chapter 10), the social expectation of Japanese women is that they will eventually become wives and mothers. So it was for Megumi Hayashibara: in 1998 she married and announced in 2004 that she would be a mother. The following year, 2005, was one of the few years in which she didn’t record any songs. She was busy that year, however, voicing two roles in Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (see part 2, chapter 13). Many other singers have tried to climb Idol Mountain, but even after two decades it’s still largely Megumi’s mountain.
The same holds true for Aya Hisakawa. In 1999 she released a best-of CD called Decade, reflecting her ten years as a popular singer. In an industry in which the careers of some stars have the life span of a moth, this is an achievement in itself. But she’s also a sought-after voice actress. Her roles include Skuld, the youngest of the three Fates in Oh My Goddess! (the themes for this series of OAVs are sung by the Goddess Family Club, made up of Hisakawa, Kikuko Inoue, and Toma Yumi, the three seiyu who voice the goddess sisters); the title character of Iria, about a futuristic teenaged bounty-hunter-in-training; devil-hunter Yoko Mano; Cerberus, the winged keeper of the Clow Card deck (renamed Kero-chan) in Cardcaptor Sakura (known on American TV as Cardcaptors); Miki, the pianist cum mathematician whose obsession with his sister Kozue leads to trouble in Utena;4 Arisa, the Rambo-like “office lady” for Mishima Heavy Industries in All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku; and she’s especially known for playing the bookish student Mizuno Ami who helps save the universe as Sailor Mercury in Sailor Moon.
The Composers
We might mention at this point the other end of the creative process: the composer. Songwriting for an idol is pretty thankless, and is shown fairly accurately in an episode of Key the Metal Idol. In this particular sequence, idol singer Miho Utsuse’s producer and the boss of Ajo Heavy Industries are faced with a pile of cassettes. These are demos from songwriters, only a few of which will be chosen for the next Miho album.
Similarly, after she recorded her first album, Megumi Hayashibara decided to try her hand at writing songs for her second album (as documented in her autobiographical manga). She found it to be a lot harder than it seemed, and even her best efforts were torn apart, with a few promising-sounding phrases rescued for submission to professional songwriters. Japan is not unaware of the singer/songwriter; it’s just that idols are chosen for stage presence and vocal delivery, not for creative ability.
In recent years, two composers for anime have especially stood out. Joe Hisaishi has worked on almost all of Hayao Miyazaki’s feature films since Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), in a relationship similar to the one composer Bernard Herrmann had with Alfred Hitchcock. Hisaishi’s scores are memorable and fully cinematic. He knows full well how to bring out a mood in a given scene, whether it means the use of sound-alikes of familiar Japanese melodies—“Sampo” (Stroll), the opening theme for My Neighbor Totoro, sounds like a reworking of the popular postwar song “Konnichi wa Akachan” (“Good Morning Little Baby”)5 and establishes the happily nostalgic mood from the opening frame—or quasi-European music (for Kiki’s Delivery Service). He also knows when to pull back and let the movie speak in silence. In fact, a number of Miyazaki fans complained that the English dub of Kiki’s Delivery Service produced by the Disney studios added musical cues where none were originally intended.
The post-modernist prize for anime music composition surely belongs to Yoko Kanno. Perhaps the most creative composer on the scene, this self-trained prodigy started composing songs at age three. Her scores are marked by the widest musical palette in the business. Her music for Please Save My Earth (1993) is lush, romantic, and nostalgic, in keeping with the story of love and reincarnation, while her “Madame’s Memories” (also known as “Magnetic Rose”), the first of the three segments of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories (1995), is a brilliant pastiche of Puccini operas, driving up the tension as space salvagemen are bedeviled by the ghost of an ancient diva (as well as their own past lives). For Macross Plus (1994) she wrote songs for virtual idol Sharon Apple in several different languages and idioms, ranging from the raunchy to the angelic. For the TV series Cowboy Bebop (1998) she worked almost entirely in big-band jazz, Delta blues, and other American music idioms. Her real gift is her ability to write pop songs that would sound at home in a far-distant time or place. And she still has a long career ahead of her.6 As does Maaya Sakamoto. She was all of sixteen years old in 1996 when she sang Kanno’s theme for the Escaflowne series and provided the voice of the series’ heroine, high school track star and Tarot-card reader Hitomi Kanzaki. Since then, Sakamoto has voiced other anime series, and is one-half of the pop duo Whoops!!, along with Chieko Higuchi; both girls were seiyu in the 1996 shojo anime TV series Mizuiro Jidai (Aqua Age). Mainly, though, Sakamoto has been a specialist in the songs of Yoko Kanno, and has recorded several albums of Kanno’s compositions (some of which were set to Sakamoto’s lyrics). While some of these are the kind of sugary pop confections favored by idol singers, Kanno’s work is more often complex and innovative, stretching the boundaries of pop culture music, and Sakamoto’s clear, pure voice is a perfect showcase for it. The Kanno/Sakamoto collaboration may yet give rise to a new kind of idol singer in the twenty-first century.
One other writer of incidental music has a style unique enough to stand out above the run-of-the-mill. Yoko Ueno has relatively few scores and songs to her name so far, but those few are unique enough to earn her notice.
As a musician she’s part of the duo Oranges & Lemons, among others. Ueno is best known for the music for the comic series Azumanga Daioh. Her style copies that of Broadway musical giant Stephen Sondheim. Ueno, like Sondheim, does not create long, soaring Kanno-style melodic lines. Instead, Sondheim and Ueno build their melodies out of short phrases of six to twelve notes (or fewer) that are then varied, altered, and repeated.7 Ueno’s “Raspberry Heaven,” the ending theme for Azumanga Daioh, can be seen as groups of six- to eight-note clusters. The same applies to her music for the anime series Scrapped Princess. In her case, the writing fits the comic nature of the visuals. Among her other music is the 2003 album “Simply Sing Songs,” which are her new melodies to old Anglo-American folk songs, including “The Parting Glass” and “Black is the Color (of my True Love’s Hair).” These are musicians that should get more interesting as the twenty-first century goes on.
Musical Monsters and Messiahs
But enough of real life. Let’s look at some idol singers as portrayed in anime. The rigors of the starmaker machinery in the real world look like child’s play compared with what some anime idols have had to endure.8
Lynn Minmay and Company
In a sense, Minmay’s the mother of all anime idol singers, having come to life in Super Dimensional Fortress Macross. This series (and its Americanized version Robotech) proposed one of the most outrageous plots in anime: an idol singer bringing peace to two warring galaxies.
The 1982 TV series turned out to be just the beginning of the Macross franchise. In 1993 a six-part OAV series took the story to a higher level. Macross II doesn’t focus on the original characters, but preserves the idea of the idol singer as part of global defense. In this series, ten years after the first Macross, Lieutenant Sylvie Jeena is both a pop singer and a fighter pilot (at age seventeen, no less). She not only inspires her own forces against the invading Marduk aliens; she also causes a change of heart in the Marduk’s own singer/priestess Ishtar. Normally Ishtar’s songs rally the alien troops for battle, but after seeing Earth people’s happiness brought on by Sylvie’s love songs, Ishtar decides to sing for peace rather than war. We are also reminded early on of the limited life of an idol singer when huge projections of a Minmay concert fail to stop the invading Marduk.
This series was followed in 1994 by another series of OAVs (like Macross II, this was later stitched
together into a feature-length film) titled Macross Plus. This time, the idol singer is Sharon Apple, a computer simulation programmed by Myung Fan Lone, a former singer herself who has developed a love/hate relationship with music and is (usually) content to let Sharon be her voice.9 Being romantically pursued by two test pilots isn’t much solace to Myung; in fact, the internal contradictions of such a relationship (and painful repressed memories rising out of the triangle) have an effect on Sharon Apple that puts the entire world in peril. This was Yoko Kanno’s first solo animated score (her earlier work was co-credited to her mentor, Hajime Mizoguchi), and the music made viewers sit up and take notice. The songs in the previous year’s Macross II sounded like the typical idol songs of the day. Kanno created music that seemed to be written in a far future or a distant galaxy, but kept its listener appeal.
And then there’s Macross 7, yet another variation on the theme. Here a rock band, Fire Bomber, whose members double as soldiers in the battle against space aliens, replaces the idol singer altogether. Lead singer and flying ace Basara Nekki prefers songs to weaponry. He also finds out in the course of this long-running series that he’s the illegitimate son of the band’s guitarist, who has the unlikely name Ray Loverock. The band also includes Mylene, a female vocalist, and a drummer named Bihida from the Zentraedi race. Quite a soap opera.
Anime Explosion! Page 22