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  Sometimes the Japanese language can function on two levels. Only native speakers of Japanese (and some translators) would note one example in the Studio Ghibli film Ponyo. The title character, a goldfish acting out the story of The Little Mermaid, is in a boat with her boyfriend Sosuke (nothing much is going on romantically, since both are five years old), checking out the extent of the flooding of Sosuke’s coastal home in Hiroshima Prefecture. In another rowboat they find a young couple with a baby. Ponyo offers the baby a ham sandwich; the mother refuses, because the baby is still nursing. Without missing a beat, Ponyo offers the sandwich to the mother instead, saying it’s “for milk.” Ponyo uses the word “oppai” which can mean milk; however, its more common and vulgar usage is to describe the source of that milk; usually, “oppai” will mean “hooters.” No doubt Miyazaki was having a private joke based on his reputation for family-friendly entertainment. Once, before making Porco Rosso, he wished he could make a film that the PTA would object to.

  Out On the Edge

  Many examples of Japanese pop culture reflect the social web as it is woven and broken and rewoven in daily life. (These anime and manga titles seldom cross over to the West, since such “real life” dramas are considered too alien for Americans, as compared to the more accessible genres of slapstick and science fiction.)9 However, Japanese pop culturereinforces cultural beliefs by both positive and negative example. Comics and cartoons usually show ordinary Japanese in extraordinary situations, succeeding by doing the right thing. Other stories, however, show what happens to someone who has few or no social ties, romanticizing the benefits of the solitary life but also reminding the average Japanese how lucky they are that they’re not living out on the edge. Ian Buruma has speculated that “the tragic fate of the outsider confirms how lucky (the average Japanese) are to lead such restricted, respectable, and in most cases, perfectly harmless lives.”10 Yet the “lone wolf” often provides the ideal hook on which to hang a dramatic story. Examples range from the romance of the ronin (a samurai without a master) in works like Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s manga Lone Wolf and Cub and Nobuhiro Watsuki’s Rurouni Kenshin to Dr. Tezuka’s unlicensed surgeon Black Jack. The isolation can be comic, as in the shape-shifting of Ranma Saotome in Ranma 1/2, or pathetic, in the case of pilot Shiro Lhadatt in the The Wings of Honnêamise, or political, as in the robots’ struggle for civil rights in Tetsuwan Atomu. One can be isolated by one’s talent, as in Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), in which a thirteen-year-old witch must, as a rite of passage, travel to a witchless town, set herself up in business, and survive by her magic for one year. In any event, the Japanese myth of the lone wolf can be found, wearing one mask or another, in virtually all of the anime and manga this book will examine. It’s a story-telling device that marks the beginning of the journey whose end is either a return to the broader society or continued isolation, perhaps even death. But this is not a modern pop culture development. The lone wolf has haunted Japan’s legends for centuries, and many old characters have simply put on new costumes for their appearances in anime and manga.

  1. T. R. Reid, Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 74.

  2. Reid, p. 69.5.

  3. Rumiko Takahashi, “Kyoko to Soichiro,” Maison Ikkoku 3 (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1983), 63. As the title of this episode shows, this is actually a case of “turnabout is fair play.” Kyoko’s dog, after all, is named Soichiro, after her late husband.

  4. “P.S. Ikkoku-kan,” Rumiko Takahashi, Maison Ikkoku 15 (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1987), 191.

  5. Rei’s use of “Ikari-kun” is an example of a fairly recent move toward a kind of democracy. For many years, -kun was the suffix used by males of equivalent standing, like classmates or co-workers. Until recently, boys would address girls with the diminutive suffix -chan, while the girls were expected to use -san toward their male classmates. Boys and girls referring to each other as -kun is a step toward sexual parity, but still preserves the identity of the group.

  6. Reid, p. 69.5.

  7. “Chiho Saito and Kunihiko Ikuhara,” interviewed by Julie Davis and Bill Flanagan. Animerica 8, no. 12: 9. Italics added for emphasis.

  8. International Division of Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., ed., Business Japanese: A Guide to Improved Communication, 2nd ed. (Tokyo: Gloview Co., 1987), 276.

  9. Readers in the West may have gotten used to the “tweens-to-teens” Shonen Jump demographic that dominates translated manga, but there are many genres—from sports to soapoperas to erotica—that have never been published in America. These tend to be “seinen” manga, aimed for college students and young adults (usually male; women-oriented manga are called “josei”). Those that have been translated would include titles like Ai Yazawa’s Nana, the popular story of two young women on their own in Tokyo; With the Light, by the late Keiko Tobe, telling of parents raising autistic children; and Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku. The seinen category might include xxxholic by CLAMP, which is sufficiently sophisticated even though its major characters are still in high school when the story opens.

  10. Ian Buruma, Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (New York: Meridian, 1984), 218.

  Mukashi Mukashi: From Folktales to Anime

  Although some lament that Japan is losing touch with its history, its centuries-old folktales are an important source of subject matter for contemporary anime.

  In 1997 two movies broke box office records in Japan. One was an international blockbuster from Hollywood, James Cameron’s Titanic.1 This romanticized retelling of a historical tragedy swept everything in its path in Japan as well as in the United States. But then there was the other record-breaker, the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time: Mononoke-hime, an animated feature written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, (released overseas as Princess Mononoke).2 The two films are so radically different that a side-by-side comparison at first seems less than helpful. Both are set in the past, but Titanic takes place in the early twentieth century against the background of a historical event. There is no clear era that the fantastic events of Princess Mono-noke take place in, but it looks rather like the sixteenth century. The former movie gives us young adults of two different social classes—one a poor boy on a quest to make his fortune in America, the other a high-born young woman who has a fortune but is emotionally unsatisfied—who meet and fall in love just in time for one of them to drown when their ship sinks. The latter movie gives us two teenagers: one a prince on a quest to heal himself and the natural order, the other a feral child, literally raised by wolves. What brings them together is Tataraba, the fortress-city where iron is being forged into guns.

  There is no real villain in Titanic except possibly for Rose’s fiancée Cal, whose behavior throughout is less than honorable. The driving force is a force of nature: an iceberg. In the ancient Japan of Princess Mononoke, there are human villains, although one of them—Tataraba’s founder, Lady Eboshi—pays a terrible price to be redeemed at the end. The forces of nature, however, are many and varied, from small forest sprites to the supreme god of nature, and they cannot conveniently be called heroes or villains. Human meddling with these forces almost destroys San the feral child, Tataraba, various animal spirits, and the forest itself. And while the lovers in Titanic are separated when one of them dies, the young heroes in Princess Mononoke realize in the end that, even though they are in love, they come from such vastly different worlds that they can only see each other from time to time.

  Here are two movies about as different as any pair of films can be; yet both were vastly popular in Japan. This seems to bear out the observation of Hayao Kawai, a scholar of Japanese folklore, that, while some folktales and legends may resonate worldwide with the kind of shared experience Carl Jung called the “collective unconscious,” these tales also “manifest culture-bound characteristics”—variations on a theme that make that particular vers
ion uniquely satisfying to that par-ticular place on earth.3 Thus, the success of Titanic in Japan was part of a worldwide phenomenon, while showings of Princess Mononoke in the United States were successful only by art-house standards—it certainly didn’t set any records. This begs the question: why did the Japanese embrace this movie so avidly? Perhaps it would take a separate book to answer that question. As we probe for an answer, we will also look at other anime, big and small, to see what they can tell us about the culture that created them.

  One place to start is “Once upon a time,” a rough translation of the phrase Mukashi mukashi . . . that begins many Japanese folktales. The compilation of written collections of folktales in Japan was a courtly pastime going as far back as the early twelfth century, and most of the major anthologies still reprinted and read in Japan today date to between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.4 Other collections, including the myths and legends of the Kojiki, first written down in the eighth century, are much older.5 There is thus an ample record of the tales (including regional variants) that were the pop culture of their day, entertainments that reflected the dominant attitudes of the culture and in turn helped shape and perpetuate that culture.

  Any serious look at Japanese folk tales and their connection to the present would take more than a single chapter. As this book progresses, we will run into Japanese folktales in other chapters. For now, though, let’s focus on three examples that demonstrate different ways of working with traditional materials. One is a major reworking of a classic story; one features variations on a story and a character; and the last keeps only the slimmest connection to an old tale.

  Hagoromo, Past and Present

  The hagoromo legend is given a fascinating twist in Ayashi no Ceres (Ceres, Celestial Legend, 2000), Yu Watase’s shojo manga that became a twenty-four-episode TV series. Her treatment of the legend shows what is uniquely Japanese about it, while at the same time highlighting the universality of the original story.

  There are more than thirty variants in Japan on the story of the hagoromo, a feathered cloak worn by a supernatural being called a tennyo (heavenly maiden). In the basic myth, one or more tennyo have come to Earth to bathe in the ocean. A poor fisherman named Hakuryo finds a hagoromo left draped by one of them over a tree branch. Since he has never seen anything so wonderful, he decides to take it home. The tennyo appears in the form of a beautiful maiden, who begs him to return the hagoromo, since she is unable to return to Heaven without it. Moved by her tears, Hakuryo agrees to return it, but only if she dances for him.

  Watase based her story on a variant in which Hakuryo hid the hagoromo, using it as leverage to force the tennyo to marry him and bear his children. Years pass; and in an episode reminiscent of the European story of Rumplestiltskin, the tennyo overhears her child singing a song that reveals the hiding-place of the hagoromo. As soon as she hears this, she grabs the hagoromo (and in some variants her child as well) and ascends back to Heaven.6 In Watase’s manga version, Hakuryo is threatened by bandits. Clearly overwhelmed, he begs the tennyo for some of her divine power. No sooner does she grant his wish than the power goes to his head: he becomes abusive of his spouse and everyone else. Watase reasoned that the tennyo grew resentful at being so ill-used by a mortal. She thus made the other tennyo myth dovetail neatly with other vengeful female spirits in Japanese legend, recently on display in films like The Ring and The Grudge, derived from the nineteenth-century Kabuki drama Yotsuya Kaidan (Ghost Story from the Yotsuya District), which itself had centuries of ancestors. Watase, however, turns the tennyo into an Asian version of Medea, the priestess who helped Jason steal the Golden Fleece only to be cast aside when a better marriage prospect came along.

  Ayashi no Ceres presents us in modern times with the wealthy and successful Mikage family.7 Their wealth and success is based on their family having acquired a hagoromo centuries earlier from Ceres, the tennyo who bore the first Mikage’s children. But she resented her forced life on Earth and her husband’s abusive behavior, and has sought revenge even after death. She has been reborn into one Mikage female after another, fully manifesting herself when the girl turns sixteen. The Mikage males know about this, however, and have been quite careful to kill off any young women with godlike powers.

  In the manga, the central characters are Aya Mikage and her twin brother, Aki. She starts exhibiting signs of Ceres possession even before her sixteenth birthday, which means she’s doomed unless she flees her family. She finds refuge from hired assassins with a variety of people, including a couple of guys that turn into romantic interests. On that subject, Aya’s twin brother, Aki, also turns out to be possessed—by the spirit of the original Mikage who took the hagoromo in the first place. He seeks to capture Aya/Ceres, seeing her only as his “woman,” thus adding implications of incest to a plot already full of magic, suspense, and not a little humor.

  Yet there is another level to the whole story. Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Uses of Enchantment pointed out that traditional fairy and folk tales are often metaphors for life lessons that would be too intimidating if they were communicated directly. In Bettelheim, these lessons were presented in terms of classical Freudian psychology. Ceres is far less psychologically orthodox, but is still a life lesson couched in Japanese pop-culture terms. Andy Nakatani describes the story as “a girl put into a severely traumatic situation.” He’s right, but on a level he may not realize. Aya is confronted not only by assassination, but also by adolescence. Watase has given her audience an elaborate allegory about a teenaged girl’s entry into womanhood (symbolized by Aya’s possession by Ceres the tennyo) and the realization of the powers that accompany this new status. In order to do this, she must look outside of the family that has until now been her shelter and support, for their priorities are no longer her priorities. They may not like the changes she’s going through, but these changes were destined to happen from a time before memory. And, in order for all to end happily ever after, the goddess must confront her abusive spouse—not in battle, but in compassionate understanding.

  This last point would seem to be inconsistent with what has gone before. The supernatural Ceres has waged a grudge match against Mikage and his clan for generations, and the expectation (if this were a classic demon-wife story) would be that Ceres would not stop until she received satisfaction, which would probably mean the death of Aki. However, Japanese culture does not encourage vendettas for their own sake. There is always a context in stories such as that of the forty-seven ronin who waited literally years to avenge the death of their master, or in the case of The Hakkenden, the “eight dog soldiers” born in scattered parts of Japan who had to grow up and find each other before they could protect their clan. Vendettas are motivated by personal feelings rather than clan loyalty or even the karma of the universe, and thus tend to disrupt social harmony. And popular culture tends to uphold the social order rather than disrupt it. Harmony is the goal even between the real world and the spirit world: angry spirits, such as wronged women or aborted infants, have specific rites intended to placate them, and some itako (mediums) have the specific job of soothing the spiritual anger (see part 1, chapter 12).

  In the end, Mikage and Ceres are reconciled, even as Mikage is dying (and Ceres will soon follow him in death). Even heavenly beings, after all, have to learn to preserve harmony by being yasashii (the adjectival form of yasashisa).8

  The Peach Boy

  One of anime’s first magical girls, still fondly remembered and imitated today, was 1982’s Magical Princess Minky Momo.9 She is actually the child of extraterrestrial parents, who sent the girl to Earth to live with a childless couple (she hypnotized them into thinking that she was always their daughter). Her powers include a magic pen that allows her to transform into an adolescent version of herself—an older Minky Momo who can do anything perfectly, which is surely the wish of any child who has been told, “you’re too young.” After two seasons on television, Minky Momo decided that she wanted to remain an Earth girl.

 
; Her name, however, should have been a giveaway. She’s called Minky Momo not just because of her violently pink hair (in Japanese, momo means peach, and the word for pink is momo-iro, or “peach-colored”) but also because of her antecedents. “Minky Momo” is nothing less than an updated gender-bender version of the story of Momotaro the Peach Boy.10 A long time ago, an old childless couple lived in the woods. One day, while washing clothes at the riverbank, the old woman found a giant peach floating in the river. She took it home, and, when the couple cut the peach to eat it, a boy sprang out. They named him Momotaro, and, as time went by, Momotaro grew healthy, smart, brave, strong, and kind to other creatures.

  However, there were demons tormenting the village. Momotaro vowed to stop the demons and went to their island, taking only three millet cakes for food. On the way, Momotaro ran into a hungry dog. The dog asked for food in exchange for help, and Momotaro gave him some. The dog joined Momotaro and they continued on their way. A while later, Momotaro found a monkey, who also asked for food, was given it, and decided to join Momotaro. A pheasant joined Momotaro the same way.

  Days later, they arrived at the island. The bird flew over the island to check things out and report the location of the demons’ castle back to Momotaro. When they arrived at the castle, the gate was closed. The monkey jumped over the wall and opened the door from the inside. The demons saw Momotaro and the fight began. However, the millet-cakes had given Momotaro and his companions superhuman strength. Momotaro and his animal friends defeated the demons and returned to the village with a wagon full of treasure the demons had given him.

  Magical Princess Minky Momo repeats the story by giving Minky Momo as pets the three animals that aided Momotaro: a dog, a monkey, and a bird. It also shows her helping her parents out of more than one scrape (they’re not too bright). This also mirrors the story of Momotaro, who started out being raised by the old couple and returned with treasure from the demon island to care for them in turn. This pattern of reciprocal care-giving is still held to be an example of great virtue stemming from the teachings of Confucius.