2. In case you’re wondering, “Is this ‘Puffy’ group anything like ‘Puffy Ami Yumi’?” they’re the same band. They were originally called Puffy, but then American R&B singer Sean Combs decided to call himself Sean “Puffy” Combs. The Japanese duo changed their name to avoid confusion; unfortunately Combs only kept that nickname for about fifteen minutes. While he went from Puff Daddy to P. Diddy and ultimately settled on Sean Combs, Puffy Ami Yumi stayed in the idol business.
3. http://www.furia.com/twas/twas0339.html.
Neon Genesis Evangelion
The Hedgehog runs away. The director feels suicidal. The audience is perplexed. The Doll dies, but not really. The audience is stunned. The Angels attack. The audience is blown away.
It’s perfectly possible to reduce Neon Genesis Evangelion, the twenty-six-week 1995 series from Studio Gainax, to a TV Guide story-arc, but doing so only serves to highlight the uniqueness of this series among other anime—in fact, among all other television series.
A Date with an Angel
It’s the year 2015. With the new millennium came a catastrophic disaster: the so-called Second Impact, which tilted the planet on its axis, melted the polar ice caps, and drowned half of the people on Earth. Humankind (what’s left of it) dug itself out and was trying to rebuild its old glories when another disaster struck: the coming of the Angels. These Angels bear no resemblance to anything in the Sistine Chapel (or on American network television). These Angels, whose coming is supposedly foretold in the Dead Sea Scrolls, are gigantic biomechs, living machines as tall as skyscrapers, whose arsenals include a force field known as the AT (Absolute Terror) Field.
You should know the drill by now. With the Earth in dire peril, a teenager and his robot (a legacy of the teen’s scientist/father) saves the day, right? Well, sort of. There is actually a group of robots known as Evas. These too are colossal biomechs, piloted from within by kids who (for reasons never explained) had to be born after the Second Impact.
The First Child is the enigmatic Rei Ayanami. A quiet, socially awkward girl with pale blue hair and red eyes (no, that’s not reversed), Rei—whose name can mean “zero” in Japanese and who pilots the Eva prototype number 00—is a question mark to almost everyone who knows her, not least because all records of her history have been systematically destroyed.
The Second Child, on the other hand, has a name and a history as colorful as her flaming red-orange hair. Born Asuka Soryu Zeppelin, her father was a German scientist for NERV, the group building the Evas. Her mother, Keiko Soryu, had a hard time adjusting to life in the West, especially when her husband Herr Zeppelin ran off with another woman. The distraught Keiko tried to commit shinju—the traditional murder-suicide—by killing her daughter and herself, but was foiled by Asuka’s running away. In the end, Keiko hung herself, committing a symbolic shinju by also destroying a doll she had come to perceive as her daughter. Discovering her mother’s body sent the five-year-old Asuka into shock for some months, during which time her father married an American physician, named Langley, who adopted Asuka. Hence, Asuka’s contorted name in the series: sometimes Asuka Soryu Langley, sometimes Soryu Asuka Langley. She was sent to Tokyo-3 having recently completed college (at age fourteen).1 Where Rei is a quiet mystery, Asuka is all brass and brashness: Teutonic egotism carried to an extreme.
And then there’s the Third Child, with whom our story really begins. Shinji Ikari is the teenage son of Gendo Ikari, commander of the Eva project, so there is a family connection between father, son, and giant robot as there was in the Giant Robo series. Or there would be, if there weren’t also abandonment issues between Shinji and his father. Gendo met Shinji’s mother Yui when they were in college; she conceived of the Eva project as a graduate student. However, she was killed in a laboratory explosion when Shinji was just a toddler, and Gendo proceeded to hand him off to other relatives. Returning now only because his father needs him to be a pilot, Shinji would rather be anywhere on the planet than flying one of his father’s Evas.
This is the exact opposite of Giant Robo, wherein Daisaku treats the robot as a colossal keepsake and his membership in the Experts of Justice as a sacred duty. On top of this, Shinji’s self-esteem is pretty low; he agrees to pilot an Eva in part so that Rei, hospitalized after her last sortie, doesn’t end up killing herself, but mainly so that he can be of some use to somebody. His basic instinct has always been to run away from trouble, to passively agree with everything, to avoid confrontation, and to shut himself in his room with a mysterious cassette tape labeled “Program 25” and “Program 26.” Do they refer to the final two episodes of the series, in which creator Hideaki Anno abandons the narrative structure of the series altogether?
What’s in a Name?
Called Shinseiki Evangelion in Japanese, the series was rendered as Neon Genesis Evangelion in English. The word evangelion is Greek and means “gospel.” The word shinseiki literally means “new century,” but it can also mean “new era.” The scientists at NERV define their new era by the pursuit of a new life-form to “enhance” humankind and thus view their new era as a starting over of life on Earth: a new Genesis. A better translation of the title into English would have been Neo Genesis Evangelion, but “Neo-Tokyo” had already been used in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, another controversial post-apocalyptic vision, and it’s understandable that Studio Gainax and writer/director Anno wouldn’t want viewers thinking that this series was derivative.
But quibbling over one word distracts us from the meaning of the title: “Gospel of the New Genesis.” This is a science fiction epic about life starting over, but not because of the Second Impact. The New Genesis of the title speaks of what would (or could) happen if the Angels succeed: humankind would be wiped out, and a new order of being would inherit the Earth. But is NERV part of the defense against invasion, or is it really on the side of the Angels? Or is it both?
It’s as if this series borrowed equally from Giant Robo for its “teens and robots saving the world” science fiction, Three Days of the Condor for the subplot of political intrigue, Ordinary People for its theme of the reconstruction of Shinji’s psyche in a loveless family and dysfunctional social milieu, and Patrick McGoohan’s cult TV series The Prisoner for an idiosyncratic narrative structure that leaves the audience grasping for clues.
The series starts and ends with writer/director Hideaki Anno. One of the founders of Studio Gainax, he was a principal animator for The Wings of Honnêamise and was also in charge of Fushigi no Umi no Nadia (literally Nadia of the Mysterious Ocean, usually rendered in English as Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water). This 1991 TV series, which takes its plot and locations from the writings of Jules Verne, is very well drawn, very fast paced, and very conventional. This easy success after the equally successful The Wings of Honnêamise may have frustrated Anno. In any case, he accounted for the years between Nadia and Evangelion in a very strange letter, which reads in part:
It is said that “to live is to change.” I started this production with the desire that [the characters] and the world change by the time the story reaches its conclusion. That is my genuine sense of things. I am able to put all of myself into Shinseiki Evangelion—a self who for four years was a wreck, unable to do anything. I began this thinking just one thing: “I mustn’t run away”—after having done just that, run away, for four years—where all I was doing was simply not dying.
I thought of this production with the feeling that “I want to see if I can put these feelings on film.” I know that this is a senseless, arrogant, and difficult course of action—but it is my objective. I don’t know what the result will be . . . because the story has not yet ended in my mind. I don’t know what will become of Shinji or Misato, or where they will go. This is because I don’t know what the staff will be thinking as we go on.2
Shinseiki Evangelion pretty much forced Japanese anime producers, directors, and writers to change the rulebook. The series is a marvel: at once conventional and unconventional, incorporating both deta
iled animation and lengthy still shots, and even frames of text flashed almost too fast to read. Many of its plot points are not clearly resolved—some are not cleared up at all. Beyond a doubt it’s the most controversial anime of the ’90s. So much so that Anno may have been pressured into issuing several “sequel” specials, which in fact do absolutely nothing to explain the ambiguities of the series. If anything, the movies contribute more ambiguities of their own
This is as it should be. I happen to agree with Ethan Mordden in his book Opera in the Twentieth Century, which is probably the most unlikely title one would expect to find in a discussion of Japanese pop culture. Mordden maintains that composers of twentieth-century opera who have gone back to revise their work invariably lessen it: that the original artistic vision, however problematic, is a better piece of work than any attempt to clean it up after the fact.
Impassive Waifs
Evangelion exerted a very heavy influence in terms of character design on the anime that came after it. The enigmatic silent waif Rei Ayanami became immensely popular, especially as a fantasy object for some male fans. The early episodes gave her an inconsistent set of emotions: happy when talking to Commander Ikari, angry to hear Shinji lash out at his father, impassive most other times. This was only part of her mystique, but a lot of other animators seemed to decide that Rei’s looks had a lot to do with it.
The combination of red eyes and pale blue hair wasn’t a first in anime; Princess Sasami of the Tenchi Muyo stories has the same color combination, while other characters have looks that are even more unorthodox. After the successful run of the series, however, impassive waifs (blue-haired or not) seemed to pop up all over the anime landscape. Ruri Hoshino of Martian Successor Nadesico, the Special Ops assassins of Gunslinger Girl, the pilot known only as Miharu in Gasaraki, the robotic Yuki Nagano in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Riza Hawkeye in Fullmetal Alchemist, and the android R. Dorothy Wayneright in The Big O are just some of the anime characters who owe something of their looks and actions to the design of Rei Ayanami.
So it is with Shinseiki Evangelion. It’s a collection of exceptions and anomalies, unorthodox techniques and unexplained plot-threads. It appears to be about nothing but itself, or may also be about a great deal more. This is a series that requires the viewer to do some serious digging.
Shin(to)seiki Evangelion?
The mythology of Evangelion is one of its most controversial elements, shot through as the series is with Judeo-Christian imagery. The attacking Angels were supposedly foretold in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The opening credits ran each week over a graphic depiction of a sephiroth. This is an aspect of the Kabbalah, teachings from the most esoteric and mystical branch of Judaism. The sephiroth is an attempt to graphically depict the ten “letters” that symbolize the workings of the universe. The Kabbalah also gave rise to the myth of Lilith, which is invoked in the series. Lilith (an Angel in Evangelion) was created—according to the Kabbalah—in order to give Adam a wife and children before Eve was created. There are references to the Lance of Longinus, which in this story is a very large spear, capable of being wielded by an Eva against an Angel. The original, however, referred to the spear the Roman soldier thrust into the side of the crucified Jesus.
In the end, though, it could be argued that the mythic foundation of the series remains totally Japanese. In the beginning, according to Anno’s scheme of things, was the First Impact, millions of years ago. This involved the splitting of a divine entity into the White Moon and the Black Moon, respectively the source of the Angels and the source of human life on Earth. The White Moon was buried in Antarctica until the Second Impact liberated it. The Black Moon was buried under the Izu Peninsula, ultimately the location of Tokyo-3.
This certainly recalls the creation of the universe from the Japanese perspective, in which an undifferentiated cosmic soup separated into the light and the heavy, the former becoming the heavens and the latter becoming the sea, with the sky between the two. This also gives the viewer a cosmology in which all human life on Earth sprang from Japan, which means that the Judeo-Christian references may just be window-dressing. What the series really offers, at least in part, may be a hi-tech version of the Kojiki (see part 1, chapter 4).
In Evangelion much is made (though little is explained) about the Lance of Longinus. Perhaps it has less to do with the weapon of a Roman centurion than with the jeweled Spear of Heaven, given by the gods to Izanagi and Izanami, the male and female Shinto deities responsible for creating the Earth. They stirred the primordial soup upon the seas with the tip of the spear and pulled it from the water. The bits of matter that dripped from the spear formed the first of what would become the oyashima no kuni (the Country of the Eight Great Islands), later known as Japan. The other islands were born of the sexual union of these divine siblings.
On this basis, we can see Shinji, Rei, and Asuka as three of the offspring of Izanagi and Izanami: respectively, Susanoo, Amaterasu, and Uzume. Shinji, with his clumsy social manners and occasional adolescent erections, certainly behaves, like Susanoo, in a socially unacceptable manner (albeit involuntarily), while Asuka/Uzume has few qualms about flaunting her body. And at the end of the movie version of the story (as opposed to the television series), Rei is certainly transfigured into an Amaterasu-like goddess. Let the record also show that Rei, who is after all a clone, dies and is reborn several times during the series.
I don’t insist on this interpretation; neither, I daresay, would Anno or Gainax or many of the fans of the series. In the end, the series isn’t about the evolution of mankind so much as the growth and change of some adolescents (including Misato and her lover Kaji, who despite their age are arrested adolescents).
But why all the Judeo-Christian trappings—especially when they’re used so inexactly? I submit that trappings of Western religion are used here precisely because they can be used inexactly. When popular culture refers to a religion in a positive light, it usually refers to the belief system embraced by the majority culture. Even though it’s never explicitly stated, we in the West assume that the heavenly messengers in Touched by an Angel function in a Judeo-Christian context, even though other religions in the world employ the concept of angels. On the other hand, negative portrayals of religion seldom involve the belief system of the majority. Western mass media portrayals of Islam were criticized for inexactness at best, bias at worst, long before September 11, 2001, and things have only gotten worse since then.
Japan has a history of embracing the trappings and trimmings of Christianity, if not the religion itself, ever since the first missionaries arrived in the sixteenth century. Back then, it became fashionable for Japanese nobles to walk the street counting rosary beads or wearing a large, gaudy crucifix. If you asked any of these men about the tenets of the faith, you’d get a blank stare. That tendency continues today with the Japanese vogue for Christian wedding ceremonies in a country where one percent of the population calls itself Christian.
It isn’t about lack of information; ample material about Christian beliefs is available in Japan. But the makers of Evangelion didn’t want information. They wanted a belief system that they could turn into a plausible threat of global annihilation. Shinto and Buddhism don’t prophesy anything so dramatic. Judeo-Christianity, however, lends itself to apocalyptic visions. It thus serves the Japanese the way Islam or voodoo serves the pop culture of the West: as a fantasyland onto which we can project our fears and suspicious, claiming that this arcane and alien faith is capable of almost anything.
Anime (Psycho)Analysis
The Dead Sea Scrolls prophecy has it that the Evas must confront seventeen angels, and when that happens and only twenty-four episodes of the standard number of twenty-six have elapsed, what comes next? What comes next is the reconstitution of Shinji’s psyche. He’s been a reluctant Eva pilot, and directed the Eva after vowing to himself that he would not have to kill anyone. Of course, this is a hard enough promise to keep in the best of times, and several characters suff
er collateral damage. The damage to Shinji, however, comes when the Last Angel appears in the guise of another Eva pilot, a boy seemingly about his own age named Kaoru.
This is a dilemma similar to Hamlet’s. If he follows orders and kills Kaoru, Kaoru dies and Shinji’s responsible. If he refuses orders, everyone left on Earth dies. So he kills Kaoru and saves the world, but isn’t all that happy about it. Kaoru, after all, is the only person since his mother died who ever said to Shinji, in so many words, “I love you.”3 Shinji’s psyche needs some major reconstruction.
Anno provides it with a brilliant avant-garde remix of what has gone before, information that hasn’t been supplied up to that point, and even an alternate reality—a “sitcom” version of the story (complete with laugh track) in which Shinji lives in a TV-typical house with two TV-typical parents, has been friends with Asuka since childhood, and literally runs into Rei on the way to school. She’s trying not to be late her first day, and seeing Rei of all characters behaving like Tsukino Us-agi—even running down the street with a piece of toast hanging out of her mouth—is a much-needed shot of humor as well as part of the final two episodes’ principal lesson to Shinji: he does not have to settle for himself as he is, and that, just as a sitcom Shinji is possible, other Shinjis are possible.
And this raises the question: why?
If pop culture is a reflection of important issues in the broader society, what on earth was Japan going through in the ’90s that would require such a message?
Quite a lot. The beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century saw the Japanese economic bubble burst: real estate, which had been ridiculously overvalued, plummeted in price, and everything else went with it; the acquisitions of the affluent ’80s had to be sold off at a loss; and Japan lost its perceived spot as undisputed leader of the Pacific Rim. In the year 1995, when Evangelion premiered, Japan suffered perhaps its worst year since the surrender, capped by the Aum Shinrikyo cult gassing of the Tokyo subway in March and the Kobe earthquake in September.
Anime Explosion! Page 37