Anime Explosion! Page 16

  The Japanese seem to think so, if their pop culture is any indication. Whether the young girl in question is a princess or a witch, a student or an idol singer, she’s rarely along just for the ride. She’s usually the spokesperson for the yasashii point of view, which means she has at least some of the answers.

  Lovely Warriors

  As it turns out, the way of the sword and the way of the high school girl are not mutually exclusive. They meet in the bishojo senshi, the pretty young girl warriors who star in anime’s most popular export, Sailor Moon.2 They meet in other magical girls, most recently in Magical Girl Pretty Sammy, a spinoff of the Tenchi Muyo! series. They meet in yasashii girls, from Hitomi Kanzaki of Escaflowne to Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service to Kaoru the martial arts instructor in Rurouni Kenshin. As long as they honor (in their own way) the five precepts of a samurai (loyalty, bravery, politeness, simplicity, and truthfulness) and keep their yasashii credentials, these schoolgirls can be just as heroic as their sword-wielding male ancestors.

  We’ve already seen one of the first anime heroines to live by bushido (“the way of the warrior”) and be yasashii at the same time: Princess Sapphire of Princess Knight. Her descendants include the swashbuck-ling shojo Utena Tenju in Utena. Getting away from European swordplay and cross-dressers, traditional Japanese martial arts have produced the same combination, including Akane Tendo of Ranma 1/2 (even if Ranma doesn’t consider her yasashii, there’s ample evidence to the contrary) and Kaoru, who inherited her father’s dojo in Rurouni Kenshin.

  San, the title character of Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Princess Mononoke, is about as un-yasashii as it’s possible to be. Our first sight of her face is gruesome: her mouth is smeared with blood, which she was sucking from a wound in a gigantic wolf. She lives only to harass and kill humans, who pollute the forest and threaten the very gods of nature. Yet even this feral child is capable of “redemption,” once she gets to know a boy her own age. In the final scene of the movie, she proves her conversion to the ranks of the yasashii by saying the magic words to Prince Ashitaka: suki desu—I love you. But then, she wasn’t far from the ranks of the yasashii to begin with; for all the mayhem she causes, the movie never shows her actually kill anyone—though it’s not for lack of trying.

  Some teenage girls either are warriors or are connected to boys who are warriors. The five pilots in the Gundam Wing series each seem to have a shojo counterpart. The principal among these girls, Relena Peacecraft, has to confront a variety of villains who want her to abandon her dream of total pacifism. Among these is another teenage girl, Dorothy Catalonia, who is very much Relena’s opposite number. She relishes war as a glorious spectacle, with no regard for the loss of life and disruption of cultures caused by war. She’s virtually Lady Macbeth, and an example of what an un-yasashii girl can be like.

  Then there are those who are themselves in the military, or at least the para-military. This is where the juggling act gets especially tricky. How can a character be yasashii and be in the business of shooting at people? The problem is partly mitigated because these servicewomen are usually in some hi-tech far future where the actual damage is either minimal or impersonal. Mobile Suit Gundam 0080 (1989), for example, presents Christina Mackenzie, a Gundam test pilot and systems programmer. However, the audience also knows her to be the former babysitter of fifth-grader Alfred Izuruha, a central figure in the series. The women who crew the Nadesico in the 1996 TV series Martian Successor Nadesico spend the first half of the story shooting down unmanned spacecraft: not much risk of being un-yasashii there. Two of the pilots on the space battleship Soyokaze, in the 1992 series The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, are not there because of an eagerness for combat. They’re Eimie and Yumie, the cute twin daughters of retired Admiral Hanner, who sends the girls to keep an eye on the unorthodox Captain Tylor.

  The presence of yasashii girls in potential battle situations reaches its illogical conclusion in Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko (1995). Interplanetary wars in the future are regularly scheduled, and are fought by ships which, if destroyed, automatically teleport the pilot (a cute girl, of course) out of harm’s way. It may as well be a video game, which explains why Earth reaches back to a twentieth-century video-game-obsessed teenager (the title character) to be its new champion.

  Out of This World

  The juggling act is easier when the girl in question is not necessarily from planet Earth. Sahari is a salvage prospector in the science-fiction OAV series Sose Kishi Gaiarth (Genesis Survivor Gaiarth, 1992). Having to live by herself, she’s developed a hard edge and a tough bargaining ability. Her personality causes some problems at first when she meets up with Ital, the good-looking young rebel against the empire. The longer they stay together, though, the more her yasashii side is allowed to come out.

  There’s a thrilling conjunction of the two approaches to life at the end of the first Tenchi Muyo! feature film (1992). Long ago, Tenchi’s grandfather Yosho, of the alien noble house of Jurai, arrived on Earth, married into the Masaki family, and had a daughter, Tenchi’s mother. (Tenchi doesn’t find out any of this until he’s a teenager himself and female alien visitors start coming out of the woodwork.) Tenchi’s mother, Achika, was retroactively attacked as a high school student by Kain, a time-traveling intergalactic criminal, to take revenge on the house of Jurai for helping the police imprison him. Tenchi and friends have to travel back in time to rescue her—other-wise, Tenchi would never have been born.

  In the final confrontation in Tenchi the Movie: Tenchi Muyo in Love (1996), Achika assumes the full powers of a noble of the house of Jurai, wielding a weapon that had been for other Jurai nobles (including Tenchi) a light-sword (clearly borrowed from the Star Wars movies). In Achika’s hands, though, the weapon is a colossal glaive of energy (although—tradition strikes again—the design is classically Japanese, based on a woman’s weapon called a naginata). Since Kain had been tormenting Tenchi much as the Emperor tormented Luke Skywalker in front of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, Achika pays Kain back by splitting him up like kindling. There are anime with fancier swordfights, but few that touch such a primal need. The child in us watches and rejoices that, on some barren moon somewhere in the universe, a mother fought like a tiger to protect her child, even if the child would not be born for another ten years. (But more about mothers in the next chapter.)

  It’s Magic

  The story of Tenchi the Movie: Tenchi Muyo in Love may be pure science fiction, and the plot device may be called the Power of Jurai, but we should realize that Lady Achika is really another in a long line of “magical girls.” (In fact, the Tenchi Muyo! universe has its very own magical girl: Princess Sasami, who—perhaps only in her own fantasies—transforms into Pretty Sammy.) Most of these girls are pre-teen, but a few are either adolescent or (like Minky Momo; see the section in chapter 4 entitled “The Peach Boy”) become adolescent when they activate their magic.

  The magical girl genre goes back to 1966 and the TV series Mahotsukai Sally (Sally the Witch). The series ran for over a hundred episodes, two of which included principal animation by a young animator who was already a five-year veteran in the industry, Hayao Miyazaki. In 1989 Miyazaki would create a feature film based on Majo no Takkyubin (Witch’s Delivery Service), a novel by Eiko Kadono about a thirteen-year-old witch (a literally magical girl) trying to find a place in the world.

  It may seem horribly obvious, but membership in the Magical Girls is limited to those who are (a) girls and (b) magical, although the definition of “magic” can be a bit loose. Flying is usually considered magical, but this definition would mean that the central girls of Miyazaki masterpieces Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa: Castle in the Sky are magical. The problem with this definition is that they can’t work any other kind of magic. Also, magical girls tend to have secret identities, and generally do not flaunt their powers in public. Sailor Moon, Pretty Sammy, Cardcaptor Sakura, Saint Tail, Minky Momo and many others fall into this category, and so may Birdy, the in
tergalactic policewoman who hides in the body of a hapless Japanese (male) student in Birdy the Mighty. Tenchi Muyo!’s Space Pirate Ryoko, on the other hand, certainly has magic, is most definitely a girl, and flies constantly. However, she has no secret identity (except when trying to pass for a normal Earth-girl), so she’d be very out of place among anime’s traditional magical girls. (Not to mention the fact that she isn’t exactly yasashii—most of the time, anyway.)

  Tears

  Probably the most striking physical feature of both manga and anime characters is their eyes. Frederik L. Schodt’s book Manga! Manga! described girls’ comics as featuring characters with “eyes the size of window panes.” These days, however, the colossal orbs are no longer limited to shojo comics and animation. The boy hero of the TV series Cho Hatsumei Boy Kanipan (Super Inventor Boy Kanipan), to pick just one example, has eyes fully as huge as any of the girls in the cast.

  But eyes are only part of the equation. Sometimes it seems that the point of having eyes in Japanese pop culture is not to see, but to cry. Movies, plays, manga, and other forms of Japanese entertainment are often classified on a continuum between “dry” and “wet,” with tears providing much of the moisture.

  Characters shed tears of sorrow, tears of joy, tears of frustration, tears of anger—but this is a good thing. The audience equates the ability to cry with the ability to feel deep emotion, and thus to be human. The villain can be identified (among many other giveaway signs) by being unable or unwilling to shed a single tear. This denotes a lack of compassion, an inability to be yasashii.

  But of course this can change. Villains, after all, are considered capable of redemption, whether the villain is a magically malevolent marionette (Kuruku in Unico in the Island of Magic) or the sociopathic Shion in Please Save My Earth. And tears are often the herald of change.

  One episode of CLAMP Campus Detectives has one student, a hard-edge girl named Midoriko, issue a challenge to the leader of the detectives: she has hidden something on the campus, and he has three days to find it. She refuses to say what. During those three days, she shadows him as he hunts and sees what he puts himself through for her sake. Just before she throws in the towel, the tears start.

  But even tears can be played for laughs. One example takes place in Bisco Hatori’s romantic comedy manga Ouran High School Host Club. Some members of the Host Club (a way of getting romantic with some of the students under controlled conditions) use cosplay and fake tears caused by eyedrops. At the end of one episode, the only girl in the club, Haruhi Fujioka, is seen by other club members with a large circle in the corner of one eye. In manga/anime art, this is a simplified way of showing tears, but it’s a joke on the club and on the audience: one of Haruhi’s contact lenses had slipped.

  Another magical girl barely fits the definition, since she’s an elf. Deedlit is the closest thing to a teenage girl in Record of Lodoss War, the epic sword-and-sorcery anime. From the very beginning of the OAV series, she’s shown as possessing great power and capable of using it; on the other hand, her feminine side almost becomes a frivolous parody of itself, as she puts the entire party at risk by modeling jewelry at a very inappropriate moment.

  School Days

  Most often, however, Japanese pop culture offers very unmagical young girls in their natural, present-day Japanese habitat of home and school. Two recent anime series, both based on shojo manga, begin from very different circumstances and tell their stories with wildly different techniques, but it should not be surprising that they end up at the same place. After all, Japan is a nation where “the nail that sticks up gets pounded down,” although that old saying may be too negative a way to express something that happens in the United States as well. Popular culture, even at its most stylistically radical, still usually points in only one direction: tradition.

  Mizuiro Jidai

  The story behind Mizuiro Jidai (literally Water-colored Years, also sometimes called Aqua Age after a hair salon in the story; 1996) is simply the lives of some students moving from junior high to high school.3 The action revolves around Yuko Kawai, a good-natured, kind, and generally unexceptional girl. She’s literally grown up with the boy next door, Hiroshi Naganuma, and they’ve been friends for a long time. However, as their bodies begin to mature, the feelings begin to deepen. Those feelings don’t always get expressed in the right way, but that’s part of growing up.

  When Yuko’s menarche starts in the middle of class, she gets sympathy and support from a source where she least expected it: her rather bossy friend and rival for Hiroshi’s attentions, Takako Takahata. (Actually, there are two reasons why Takako’s helpfulness shouldn’t be surprising. Yuko and Takako shared a secret since fifth grade, caring for a kitten that was living on the school grounds. Also, the heart of the Confucian approach to life is to observe and live up to the names of society’s various roles, from the familial to the political. In spite of her smug know-it-all manner disguising a lot of self-doubts, Takako wouldn’t be much of a friend if she didn’t support Yuko in an area where Hiroshi would be absolutely no help at all.)

  Most of the events in the manga and anime aren’t very dramatic by most standards. Yuko, a good writer, is asked to write a skit for a talent show and promptly develops writer’s block. Yuko throws a Christmas party, which the other girls in class will attend on one condition: Takako can’t come. Yuko and Takako are supposed to take charge of the band club at their school, except that Takako is too overbearing and Yuko is too wishy-washy. Yuko’s grades start to slide; Hiroshi tries to help, but this causes its own set of problems. . . .

  Mizuiro Jidai is, in short, about nothing more than some yasashii kids growing up. The manga and anime are both about When Bad (or Good, or Weird) Things Happen to Good People. You know exactly who to cheer for, and exactly why.

  Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo

  But what do you get if the girl in question isn’t all that yasashii? If the guy turns out to be manipulative? If neither kid is really the way they seem in public? You get the 1996 manga Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo (His and Her Circumstances) known as Kare Kano, which looks at the opposite numbers of Yuko and Hiroshi. The choice of an animator for the television version (1998) of the comic was unusual: Hideaki Anno. This was his first animated project after creating Evangelion, the most controversial anime of the ’90s. Kare/Kano is, in terms of technique, just as unsparingly avant garde as Evangelion. Anno brings out all his technical tricks (text flashed on the screen almost too fast to see, long static stretches, collage, even frames from the manga), while adding “super-deformed” caricatures. For all its technical sophistication, though, its message is very similar to Aqua Age.

  The heroine of this story, Yukino Miyazawa, seems to be the perfect fifteen-year-old. She makes good grades, she excels in sports, she’s effortlessly pretty, and the rest of her junior high school class looks up to her as the class leader. Yet, unknown to her classmates, she works like mad to keep up this illusion. Around the house, she trades in her contact lenses for large wire-rim glasses, pulls her hair up under a scarf, and wears an old jogging outfit. She works at academics and athletics for one reason only: vanity. She wants to be admired by others, and so remakes herself into the perfect student.

  All goes well until she applies to get into Hokuei Senior High School in Kawasaki, an industrial suburb that’s part of the Tokyo–Yokohama urban industrial sprawl. She comes in second on the exams to a boy named Soichiro Arima. He seems to be just as perfect as Yukino: good looking, excellent student, all-around athlete, from a prominent medical family,4 admired by his peers. Yukino now has an added incentive to continue her public persona: her hatred of Arima for usurping her place as class leader. The problems start in at once: a girl can’t be jealous and spiteful and vain and still be yasashii.

  Actually, she doesn’t have much chance to be spiteful, since Arima surprises her in the very first episode by saying, “I love you.” This confuses Yukino to the point that she lets Arima put her on a host of student government commi
ttees. She yells at Arima, hits him, and runs away. He chases her to apologize, and his interest in her keeps growing.

  When he visits Yukino’s house, and he sees the kind of gleeful chaos caused by Yukino’s younger sisters, we learn Arima’s past. He lives with an aunt and uncle, because his parents are nowhere to be found. They lived by stealing and blackmail until they disappeared. The aunt and uncle never stop reminding Arima that their family has been prominent since Tokugawa times, and that somehow Arima is the cause of his parents’ bad behavior. He puts on a façade of perfection because he feels that he has to. Yukino, however, tells him that, since they love each other, each can accept the other’s real personality. They can dispense with their façades, at least with each other.

  It’s no wonder romantic love is part of just about every shojo story. Adolescence is, after all, just a stepping stone. Even Japanese girls intent on some kind of career after schooling always have a particular cultural belief in the back of their minds. They know—because they have been told, overtly and symbolically, for most of their lives—that their greatest destiny lies ahead: becoming not just a wife, but a wife and mother.

  1. Ian Buruma, Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (New York: Meridian, 1984), 211.

  2. In fact, seiyu (anime voice actress) Megumi Ogata, who played Sailor Uranus, has begun to advocate what she calls Female Chivalry, urging girls to model themselves on proper male behavior. See the website http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/4081/fle416.html#20.