More often than not, though, anime views of war are through the victim’s eyes—and if the victim is a child, so much the better. We in the audience may see through the eyes of the orphans doomed to die in Grave of the Fireflies, or the children in the Peter Pan–created paradise who need to be rescued by Minky Momo. We may see through the eyes of Shion, the orphan with telekinetic powers in Please Save My Earth, or of Chitose Kobayashi, whose story of having to flee formerly Japanese-occupied Korea after World War II is the subject of Rail of the Star (1993, directed by Toshio Hirata).
By viewing the world of war through the eyes of children (including adolescents), the Japanese pop culture is able to sustain its currently predominant vision of war. By focusing on people who cannot be considered combatants in any sense, and identifying with them, the Japanese audience can accept that World War II was less about a half-century of imperialist expansion than about its innocent victims. Whether the war was started by Japanese or gaijin becomes immaterial. The larger truth is maintained: war victimizes children.
The victim perspective is carried over from Japanese children to Japan itself. Elsewhere in this book Japan’s tendency to view itself as a David surrounded by global Goliaths has been discussed. When pop culture reminds the modern-day audience of the odds against Japan during the war, any film showing the absurdity of Japan getting into the war states a message that is pacifist without being disloyal. An audience that watches the submarine Yamato take on the rest of the world in The Silent Service, or sees the hulk of the battleship Yamato before it becomes the framework for an interstellar spaceship in Star Blazers, feels no irony in asking itself: “What were we thinking?”
Glass Rabbit: What They Were Thinking
2005 saw the production of an animated version (following a live film shot in 1979) of a children’s book that brings home issues of war and peace, illustrates how these issues are presented on film, and clarifies why a Japanese movie can “celebrate” defeating the United States military by bombing Pearl Harbor and yet consider themselves modern-day allies with the U.S. Garasu no Usagi (Glass Rabbit), directed by Setsuko Shibuichi, is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Toshiko Takagi. It focuses on twelve-year-old Toshiko. Her father, mother, and sisters were killed when the U.S. Air Force bombed Tokyo during World War II; she managed to salvage the title statue from the wreckage of her father’s glass works, even though the glass statue is slightly melted and disfigured by the firebombing. In the end, the movie celebrates one very unlikely hero: a clause in Japan’s postwar constitution.
Article 9 of the constitution states that Japan renounces war and will never maintain any sort of military except for a self-defense force. Even today, there has been little to no opposition to this idea except for a few right-wing Japanese militarists and, ironically, Americans who demanded the article in the first place because they wanted to demilitarize Japan completely, not thinking that someday America would ask Japan to be part of a “coalition of the willing” to depose Saddam Hussein. This article may seem like an odd event to celebrate, but Western viewers of the film often fail to realize the duality Japan has lived through in war and peace.
Glass Rabbit begins with Japanese civilians cheering the attack on Pearl Harbor. This is hardly a unique event; many films, from Gone with the Wind to Cold Mountain (just to look at Civil War films) begin with one army or the other cheering the beginning of a war that everyone believed would be over in six months. It’s no surprise that Japan felt the same way about Pearl Harbor, especially after the United States set up a naval embargo preventing Japan from importing oil earlier in 1941 (an incident alluded to in a line of dialogue in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather).8 The joy of the moment of victory soon fades as the realities of life in wartime take hold. The celebration of Pearl Harbor may seem harsh to a non-Japanese, but, once war was recognized as a false remedy to a nation’s problems, it was no less harsh to the Japanese themselves who recognized that a full-scale war left them worse off. The celebration of Article 9 is thus seen as genuine rather than hypocritical, and based on reality rather than political rabble-rousing.
What Goes Around
Children may be victimized by war, but children still grow up into the adults who wage the wars. Only a few anime focus on adult combatants; many of these, which paint a bitter and unglorious picture of war, are based on the work of Reiji Matsumoto. In addition to the Star Blazers series and the five feature films based on the space cruiser Yamato, and other science fiction battles involving Captain Harlock, Queen Emeraldas, and other major characters, there is the trilogy of World War II stories by Matsumoto collected as The Cockpit (1993). All of these point out the dirt and death of war, while romanticizing it at the same time.
On an adult level, the 1986 anime Windaria is one of the finest expressions of antiwar sentiment that isn’t couched in modern-day or futuristic terms. The film starts out as heirs to the thrones of neighboring kingdoms meet in the woods in secret to declare their love and their refusal to accept their countries’ war fever. However, when their parents die and they must lead their countries, giri (obligation) raises its ugly head. Rather, giri runs headlong into personal desire (ninjo). The only way that they can avoid fighting their parents’ war, and thus each other, is through death. In a surprising and moving scene, the princess kills her beloved, then herself.
Rather: it’s surprising to us in the West. The Japanese would have seen it all before. The ritualistic Kabuki theater has a number of staple plots, like anime, and one of these is for two lovers to face the conflict between giri and ninjo. Their response to the conflict is often shinju, a murder/suicide that acts as an extreme form of protest. In spite of its quasi-medieval Western trappings, Windaria shows the two lovers taking a very Japanese way out.
We also see it at the end of Shiriusu no Densetsu, the Sanrio-produced 1981 anime feature released in the West as Sea-Prince and the Fire Child. This fable also gives us a love affair between the heirs of two warring kingdoms, in this case the kingdoms of fire and of water. At the climax of the film, Syrius, blinded prince of the water kingdom, follows the voice of his beloved Malta of the fire kingdom, heedless of what the sun’s rays will do to him. They kill him, and Malta takes his body back into the sea, knowing that she will drown.
If any Western script—animated or live—tried to present an ending like that, the reaction might be, “What a waste!” You should realize, however, that in the culture that gave rise to anime nothing is wasted, and that even the soul is recycled.
1. The author saw this response in the guestbook of a website dedicated to the treatment of Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps. Some people just don’t know how to behave as guests.
2. Even as this chapter was being written and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade was being shown on a limited basis in the United States, the terrorist events of September 11, 2001 claimed (by some accounts) 3,000+ lives. It would hardly seem to be the time or place to talk about a movie in which a suicide bomber was the “good guy.” Yet, at the risk of offending some sensibilities, I have to point out that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. This is precisely the moral dilemma faced by the protagonist of Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade.
3. The title distinguishes this film from the live-action sci-fi film Zeiram, which told essentially the same story.
4. Antonia Levi talks about Roujin Z as if it were a sequel to Akira. Both are based on manga by Katsuhiro Otomo, but Levi missed the fact that Akira, a deadly serious dystopian fantasy, was the exception to Otomo’s work rather than the rule. Bottom line: Roujin Z is funny! See Antonia Levi, Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 118.
5. The name seems to be partly based on its model number (NK-1124), partly a babytalk variant on neko, the Japanese for “cat.” Actually, nuku nuku appears in the dictionary, and has the very catlike connotations of “warmly, snuggly, carefree,” etc.
6. The various suits of body armor used by OZ a
re named after signs of the Zodiac.
7. http://www.productionig.com/contents/works_sp/02_/s08_/index.html
8. In 1940, Japan invaded French Indochina (now Vietnam) in an effort to control supplies reaching Nationalist China and as a step to improve access to resources in Southeast Asia. This move prompted an American embargo on oil exports to Japan, which in turn caused the Japanese to accelerate their planned takeover of oil production in the Dutch East Indies. Furthermore, the movement of the U.S. Pacific Fleet from its previous base in San Diego to its new base in Pearl Harbor was seen by the Japanese military as a preparation for conflict.
Birth and Death and Rebirth: Reincarnation in Anime
In what is probably the most unusual form of conflict resolution in pop culture, some anime bad guys are not destroyed but reborn—literally or metaphorically. Immortality is viewed as a curse rather than a blessing.
The moral universe of anime has its share of internal contradictions (as does Western civilization and its pop culture). On the one hand, the universe is often presented in anime as cold and disinterested in human notions like love and justice. “The Japanese view,” writes Antonia Levi, “is that the universe is amoral and the sooner we all accept it, the better.”1 On the other hand, a mechanism exists to restore the balance and undo evil, even though it may take years or even centuries: the Buddhist concept of reincarnation.
Western viewers, who pay lip service to the notion “justice delayed is justice denied,” insist on a judicial system that functions solely in the here-and-now. The notion of a speedy trial is written into the Bill of Rights (even if the backlog in the courts means a civil action can take years to come to trial—surely an odd definition of “speedy”). The notion of trying and punishing a surrogate is anathema; the notion that, left to itself, the cosmos will work everything out for the best is even more repugnant. Yet these ideas are intrinsic to the mind-set of the Japanese pop-culture consumer, and are reflected in anime and manga.2
Suicide is Painless
Japanese Buddhism and Shinto share one belief that pops up in popular culture time and time again. Unlike Christianity, which assumes a beginning point (which may vary from denomination to denomination) and the end point of death, Japanese tradition holds that the soul constantly moves back and forth between two worlds: the human realm and the spirit realm. The child, from birth to age seven, is assumed to be on the cusp between the two worlds. Unlike animals, which are born knowing who they are and what to do, children need to be taught to function in this world; their playful impulses are seen as reflecting their borderline status. Similarly, the elderly (age seventy and beyond) are believed to be souls in transition away from this world toward the spirit realm. In their case, senility and dementia have been seen as signs of the other-worldliness of their souls preparing to leave the realm of the living.
Suicide—attempted or successful—is a much more common element in anime and manga than in the West, where it carries a strong moral condemnation and isn’t even discussed except as a pathology. Anime even for young children, by comparison, discuss suicide quite openly. One surprising example occurs in the anime Ojamajo Doremi, a comic and colorful story about grade school girls in training to be witches. Even this series strikes some darker notes, including a scene in the second episode of the so-called “Sharp” season3 that is jarring to someone who isn’t ready for it. The witches had spent the better part of a day trying to care for a baby for the first time, and as fifth graders they were worn out very quickly; they had to call for help from the mother of the main witch-child Doremi. When the exhausted Doremi comes home, she skips dinner and goes to soak in a hot bath. While she’s in there, her mother comes into the bathroom and gets into the tub with her daughter.4 When Doremi asks her mother if she was such a handful as a baby, her mother tells her that she had dreams of being a concert pianist, and that, when she injured her hand in an accident, she was so depressed at abandoning her dream that she wanted to commit suicide. The only thing that saved her, she said, was getting pregnant with Doremi. No matter how much Doremi cried, her mother said, she heard those cries and even regarded Doremi’s kicks in utero as an encouragement: “Mother, do your best; I’ll always be beside you.”
The view of the soul embraced by popular Buddhism in Japan comes into play here.5 With the notion of rebirth into another body comes the assumption that there is a reason why, and an explanation for the specific nature of that rebirth. To answer the question why, Buddhism developed the doctrine of karma.6 Western culture marginalizes belief in rebirth, but Asian cultures have found the concept not only workable but useful, and for centuries it has been a central fact in their lives, even in our own science- and technology-governed times.
Japan, for example, copes with the moral dilemma of abortion with images of Jizo, the bodhisattva regarded as a protector of children. These small stone statues are erected in cemeteries to apologize to a fetus for being aborted, and as a focus for prayers that the soul of the fetus will be reborn into better circumstances. Thus there is a belief (which the West simply does not share) that nothing irretrievable has been lost by an abortion, and that there may be a greater good in the long run.7 This approach to abortion reflects a broader belief that informs other aspects of Japanese life as well, including pop culture.
A Daimyo’s Best Friend
None of this is recent; remember that Japanese culture goes back well over a thousand years and has lots of experience with tales that traffic in a non-Judeo-Christian definition of the soul. Take The Hakkenden, an elaborate eighteenth-century epic by Kyokutei Bakin that became the basis for a 1990 OAV anime series. In this tale, the daimyo Satomi, besieged by enemy troops, rashly promises his daughter, Princess Fuse, in marriage to whoever brings him the head of the enemy general. The next day, Satomi is stunned when Yatsubusa, his wolfhound, shows up with the head of the enemy commander. Fuse, reminding her outraged father that a samurai’s word is his bond, takes the dog to a mountain cave. She spends her time reading religious texts and praying for a human soul to enter her “husband” Yatsubusa.
Her father, however, is so enraged at this state of affairs that one of his servants (himself in love with Fuse) takes it upon himself to shoot the dog. The bullet, however, passes through the dog, killing Princess Fuse as well. At the moment of her death, eight shining stars rise out of Fuse’s body, the embodiments of eight Confucian virtues (wisdom, loyalty, sincerity, devotion to one’s parents, and so on). These spirits fly off in different directions, and are reborn as eight boys with identical flower-shaped birthmarks. They grow up widely separated, but are brought together by destiny to fight for the daimyo Satomi.8
Born Again
Consider, in the light of The Hakkenden legend, one of several anime starting in 1991 based on Locke the Superman, a manga by Yuki Hijiri.9 Locke is not a Western-style superhero; he is an esper (someone with heightened powers of extra-sensory perception) called in for special jobs. This particular job involves a futuristic zaibatsu (multinational corporate conglomerate) that seeks to rule the universe under the leadership of the Great Zog. The corporation’s activities are being attacked, however, by another powerful esper, a space pirate named Leon. Of course the story builds to a confrontation between the espers—in space, no less—and if that were as far as it went, the story would be a cliché. The story is saved, ironically enough, by the introduction of another cliché: Leon’s sister, the nearly blind Flora, with whom Locke is in love.
Before the final battle, the viewer/reader is given additional information to muddy the ethical waters. Like his sister, Leon is disabled—he has a prosthetic arm, since the Great Zog destroyed his arm as a child, as well as his sister’s vision. Therefore, both sides of the conflict are painted as both sinned against and sinning, victim and victimizer. How does one resolve such a moral dilemma?10 This anime takes the novel approach (novel in the West, at least) of reclaiming Leon’s soul, although not his body. During their final battle, Leon finally puts all of the pieces
of the puzzle together, realizing the harm he has caused in trying to avenge his own wrong. He immediately concedes the match by hurling himself into the sun. This does not, strictly speaking, kill him, since the epilogue of the story shows us Locke and Flora happily married, with a son who is the reincarnation of Leon (the hair is the giveaway). Leon is thus reborn as his own nephew, and becomes the good person he was meant to be through a new upbringing by the justice-minded Locke and the yasashii Flora.
Trying to redeem someone like Leon might have seemed futile to Westerners, but in the Japanese belief system based on reincarnation it was the most practical thing to do. The reason why is summed up in the 1999 anime series Monster Rancher.11 A young boy named Genki gets transported to a fantastic world, where he has to fight a Godzilla-like monster named Mu. But he realizes that defeating the physical body of Mu is not enough: “What if he’s reborn again and again and again?” Evil, like matter, can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be changed.
Another rebirth takes place in the third-season story-arc of Sailor Moon. The whole thing starts with a geneticist named Professor Tomoe. An explosion in his laboratory almost kills him and his ten-year-old daughter Hotaru. He is offered recovery, for a price, by an alien messenger of a dark interstellar entity with the unlikely name of Pharaoh 90. Under the alien’s orders the professor sets out on a search for three pure hearts, within which dwell three talismans: when united, these talismans form a source of power, the Holy Grail. Even without the talismans, the Professor needs pure hearts as medicine for his daughter, who is sickly and subject to strange fits. Consequently, she spends almost all her time at home and is very lonely.
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