Anime Explosion! Page 7

  The Peach Boy reappears in other anime as well. In the second feature based on Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma, known in English as Nihao My Concubine, the cast of Ranma is washed up on a tropical island. The island is owned by Toma, whose coat of arms includes a giant peach, and whose attendants are three men with definite dog-, monkey- and bird-like characteristics. However, this story isn’t about him fighting demons; Toma has kidnapped Akane and the other girls, looking for a bride. Because he is the kidnapper as well as owner of the island, Momotaro becomes a demon in this version of his story.

  The Peacock King

  Sometimes, all that has survived from an earlier folktale to a modern anime is a name. This is the case with Kujaku O (Peacock King). Actually, this name is attached to two sets of OAVs, from 1988 and 1994. The modern story is one of those mysticism-and-martial-arts free-for-alls celebrating rapid moves and ultraviolence. The title refers to one of the quartet of heroes, a young man named Kujaku (Peacock). He and his friends have to prevent a demon, buried in the old capital city of Nara, from being released.

  This is our connection to the real Peacock King, a mystical Buddhist deity. A story written down in the sixteenth century tells of a monk named En, so dedicated to the simple life that he wore clothes made of tree bark and ate pine needles. In a vision he was told to chant the Mantra of the Peacock King. When he did so, he developed supernatural powers, which included the ability to ride clouds through the sky.

  Much of the story, though, is of his struggles with the spirit Hitokotonushi, master of the Katsuragi Mountains. He was not, however, master of En, who tried to force Hitokotonushi to build a stone bridge to a mountain peak made entirely of gold. The spirit refused; En cast a spell on him and imprisoned the spirit at the bottom of a ravine, beneath a vine-covered boulder.11 The second set of OAVs takes the battle to two other dimensions in the opening minutes.12 First, instead of a duel between one monk and one spirit, the prologue speaks of a battle between forces of light and darkness. From here, we jump to San Francisco’s Chinatown. In a back-alley antique store, a priceless artifact is stolen by gun-toting Nazis, led by a short bespectacled man in a black trenchcoat.

  If this sounds like an imitation of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark with the opening of Joe Dante’s Gremlins (for the locale) thrown in, it isn’t either. It’s too confused to be a proper imitation of any one Hollywood blockbuster. The Nazis are referred to as “neo-Nazis,” suggesting that the war is long over. However, we also see the zeppelin Hindenburg floating over Chinatown.

  Quick-cut to a young man in monk’s robes on a Tokyo bus. His name is Kujaku, a descendant of the original En, and he’s passed his exorcist exams. Lucky for him that he did, because the other people on the bus suddenly turn into zombies. Kujaku dispatches a few, but gets a little unexpected help with the rest . . .

  You get the idea. There is a heavy Hollywood influence in anime, which makes sense since animation started in Hollywood. But what’s interesting about the Peacock King OAVs is not the Hollywood connection, but the ties to Japanese tales and legends. Anime doesn’t have to invoke old legends at all, and many don’t. However, a great many look back to the old stories for a character, a plot, or sometimes only a name or a place. They didn’t have to do this; stories could be made up out of whole cloth, with no reference at all to legend or history.

  But there are good reasons not to abandon the past. For one, it is a vast repository of plots, characters, and settings. The classics contain a wealth of material an animator or cartoonist could always use to advantage. A second reason is that this is a shared history. Animators who went to school ten or twenty years ago learned the same legends about the same gods and goddesses that are still taught to the young moviegoers of present-day Japan. A symbolic shorthand is already in place because of the common understanding of the legends. If your movie or television series invokes the name of the sea goddess Benten (as have the creators of Urusei Yatsura, Cyber City Oedo 808, Ghost Sweeper Mikami, and many others), the audience only needs to hear the name and it calls up an image.13 You don’t even have to believe in Benten to draw something from the name.

  The word “nostalgia” has been used to describe this particular aspect of the Japanese character,14 but I don’t think that’s an appropriate word. A better term might be “continuity.” After all, Japanese family structure extends the ie (house, family) to include ancestors long dead and those not yet born. The emperor, similarly, traces what is believed to be an unbroken lineage back thousands of years. The American Occupation specifically forbade both of these extended belief structures after the surrender, and yet Japan has not discarded them. This belief in extension, in continuity, is still useful in Japanese life.

  From our Western vantage point we look at anime like Peacock King and see elements of an old legend used to dress up a modern story. But what if we have it backward? What if we’re really watching modern window-dressing used to keep an old story alive into the present, and the future?

  1. An example of Titanic’s impact on Japan: in May 2001 a feature-length anime was released to Japanese theaters involving three of the biggest names in anime. The film is based on Dr. Osamu Tezuka’s early manga Metropolis and was adapted for the screen by Katsuhiro Otomo (creator/director of Akira) and directed by Rintaro (of Galaxy Express 999 and many others). Yet the film’s promotional website included a prominently displayed congratulatory note from Titanic director James Cameron.

  2. This title is a bit difficult. The suffix -hime means “princess,” but the title character, San, rules over nothing; she lives alone in the forest with the spirit-wolves who raised her. Mononoke means “evil spirits.” The film is half over before we see that mononoke-hime is a derogatory nickname given to San by the people of Tataraba—people she was constantly trying to harass and kill. “San” also means the number three, and the feral child was taken in as the third cub of the wolf-spirit Moro.

  3. Hayao Kawai, The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan, trans. Hayao Kawai and Sachiko Reece (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1988), 3

  4. Royall Tyler, Japanese Tales (New York: Pantheon, 1987), xix.

  5. Foreword by Richard M. Dorson in Keigo Seki, Folktales of Japan, trans. Robert J. Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), v.

  6. Seki., 63.

  7. No surprise that the title is a complex pun. The adjective ayashii means “unearthly,” “wondrous” but also carries the literal meaning of “incredible,” “not to be believed.” The word is written in the title with a variant Chinese character that also means “bewitching.” In addition, the central character’s name is Aya. Much of this information is from Andy Nakatani, “Ceres, Celestial Legend,” in Animerica 9:4 (April 2001), 6.

  8. Seki includes a much longer version that essentially continues the hagoromo legend by connecting it to the Tanabata legend. This story, also a popular tale in China, shows the fisherman climbing up to Heaven to be with his wife, who was still pining for him. But he is given a set of Herculean labors to perform by his father-in-law, as a result of which he and his wife become stars separated by the Milky Way; they come together only one day every year. That day, the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, is still celebrated as a Japanese holiday. Seki, 63.

  9. Perhaps better known overseas as Magical Princess Gigi.

  10. I owe this connection to the excellent Minky Momo website by Armando Romero at http://www.minkymomo.f2s.com.

  11. Tyler, Japanese Tales, 127.

  12. The first set is grounded in Japanese myth and history, including an attempt to resurrect the bloody sixteenth-century warlord Oda Nobunaga. The second set relies more on the trappings of Hollywood blockbusters.

  13. Benten, one of the Seven Good Luck Gods who sail the sky on New Year’s Eve in their Treasure Ship, is a musician and goddess of the arts, who can if need be change into a serpent.

  14. Joy Hendry, Understanding Japanese Society (London: Routledge, 1989), 156.13.
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br />   The Naked Truth

  Japanese pop culture takes a much more casual and indulgent attitude toward nudity than pop culture in the West. It’s visible even on broadcast television. Even to the youngest viewers. And it’s no big deal.

  In the beginning—as far as Western civilization is concerned—were Adam and Eve. According to Genesis, they were naked and not ashamed. They got ashamed really quick, though, when they ate forbidden fruit and, like God, learned the difference between good and evil. Let the record show that, though they may have invented farming, herding, and other human legacies, the first invention of Adam and Eve was clothing. They needed the clothing because they knew, after eating the fruit, that naked is bad.

  Thousands of years and miles away, in the beginning—as far as Japan was concerned—were Izanagi and Izanami. These two sibling/parents in Japan’s creation legend (related in the Kojiki) eventually begat Amaterasu the Sun Goddess and her brother Susanoo. At one point, because of Susanoo’s rude behavior, Amaterasu shut herself and the sun into a cave, refusing to come out. This put humankind at risk, since the sun was needed for light and warmth. The goddess Uzume finally saved the day by staging a striptease outside the cave, with all the other gods hooting and hollering as she bared her breasts and flashed her pubic mound. Curious as to what was causing the noise, Amaterasu peeked out of the cave, which was just enough to let the sun back out to the world.

  It’s hard to think of a more clear-cut pair of opposites. One culture starts civilization rolling by covering the genitalia; the other culture restores light and life to the Earth by displaying them.

  Japan has had a long time in which to decide the uses and contexts of nudity. One Japanese traveler, Etsu Sugimoto, sailing to America in the late 1800s on a boat full of Western women, commented on their dress as more immodest than her kimono, giving some interesting reasons:

  I found that most of the ladies’ dresses were neither high in the neck nor full in the skirt, and I saw many other things which mystified and shocked me. The thin waists made of lawn and dainty lace were to me most indelicate, more so, I think, unreasonable though it seemed, than even the bare neck. I have seen a Japanese servant in the midst of heavy work in a hot kitchen, with her kimono down, displaying one entire shoulder; and I have seen a woman nursing her baby in the street, or a naked woman in a hotel bath, but until that evening on the steamer I had never seen a woman publicly displaying bare skin just for the purpose of having it seen.1

  All cultures have their concept of propriety, and what it would take to violate that propriety. In some places, a woman publicly breastfeeding her infant would be scandalous, and in other places it would not raise an eyebrow.

  The Kojiki creation myth is very familiar to the Japanese, explaining the origins of both the nation and the national religion, Shinto. Every Japanese reader therefore would also have noticed a similarity of the myth to the first installment of Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku.2 The denizens of a funky little Tokyo boarding house open the episode with a considerable surprise: their old building manager has retired, and in his place is a beautiful young widow, Kyoko Otonashi.3 She’s only two years older than the hero, Yusaku Godai, and most of the rest of the series is about his wooing and winning the new manager. As the story begins, however, Godai is a ronin studying for the entrance exams.4 He can’t study, though, when the others hold a party in his room (the biggest in the house) to welcome the new manager. Frustrated, he moves into the closet to study. The others take this as a challenge: when Akemi Roppongi declares the closet to be “ama no iwato!” (the heavenly cave), the Kojiki-wise reader knows what to expect.

  Akemi and Yotsuya start telling Kyoko to stop drinking so much, then to stop taking her clothes off; then they begin praising her body. Kyoko of course hasn’t dropped a stitch and is thoroughly embarrassed. Godai, however, can’t resist peeking out to look at Kyoko—and gets dragged back into the party.

  Anything Goes

  Takahashi’s next hit after Maison Ikkoku contains a great deal of actual nudity, but Ranma 1/2 is also innocent enough to show to Western grade-school children. The 1986 series focuses on a teenage student of the martial arts, Ranma Saotome, and his father/teacher Genma. Dad has promised Ranma as a fiancée to one of the daughters of his friend Soun Tendo, who runs the Tendo School of Anything-Goes Martial Arts. When Ranma shows up for the first time at the Tendo residence, however, there are a few problems to overcome. For one thing, Ranma has acquired at least two other fiancées (under circumstances too bizarre to go into here). The main problem: Ranma is a girl. Rather, sometimes he’s a girl, sometimes he’s a boy. During a training exercise on the Chinese mainland, Ranma fell into the Accursed Spring of the Drowned Maiden. The curse of this body of water is that, having fallen into the spring, Ranma now turns into a girl whenever he’s splashed with cold water. Hot water restores his masculine identity.

  This kind of setup could easily be fodder for any number of erotic (or downright sleazy) variations. Takahashi, however, has chosen to play it strictly for laughs, thus blunting anything even remotely threatening. One way of taking the edge off of the situation is to reduce the whole curse aspect to absurdity, by having Ranma’s father fall into the Accursed Spring of the Drowned Panda. . . .

  Ranma 1/2 is an example of caricatured nudity. There is no attempt at all to convince the viewers they’re watching real people. While watching live (or lifelike) nude high-school students may be offensive, if not illegal, Takahashi’s humorous manga-style artwork reminds the viewers that this is “just a cartoon.” In addition, when we see Ranma undressed, it’s usually in context, such as a bath.

  Just Another Day in Paradise

  One story-specific excuse for nudity—and an example of more realistic artwork—is in Saki Hiwatari’s 1993 anime Boku no Chikyu o Mamotte (Please Save My Earth). It’s only hinted at in the six-part OAV anime and in a series of music videos that supplemented the OAVs; but then, its audience was already expected to know why Mokuren, the devotee of the goddess Sarjalin, sometimes seemed to be wrapped in a blanket.

  Mokuren was (as were both her parents) gifted from birth with the power to commune with plants and animals. As such, when Mokuren’s mother died (Mokuren was a very young child at the time), she was spirited away from her father to Paradise, a school run by the Sisterhood of Sarjalin, where she learned to develop her powers. One odd requirement at this sexually segregated school: no clothes. If anyone wanted to visit Paradise (or if Mokuren wanted to sneak off of the grounds to meet a boy, as she did in her early teen years), the students had to wrap themselves in ceremonial blankets.

  This causes a problem when the adult Mokuren is first assigned to the lunar observation base. At first she walks around covered only in lush blonde hair that reaches almost to her feet. Once the rules are explained to her, she wears the same jumpsuit as everyone else. She is shown wearing only the blanket in one other circumstance: when she is with her beloved Shion. In Hiwatari’s universe, Mokuren’s nudity is more than just natural or naïve; it implies a state of grace, of Eden before the fall. Even more, it reminds those familiar with the Kojiki that the goddess Uzume used her nudity to preserve life on Earth, and parallels Uzume’s divinity with Mokuren’s goddess-derived powers to cause plants to grow and flowers to bloom, and her almost fanatical interest in Earth’s plant and animal life.

  Skinny Dipping

  Having a good rationale for displaying nudity can serve to neutralize what might be, in Western animation, a controversial scene. Among the non-erotic contexts for nudity in Japanese pop culture are breastfeeding, pearl diving (admittedly not as common now as it was a half-century ago), and, especially, bath scenes, whether in a private tub, a public hot springs, or even a shower.

  Communal bathing is one of the traits that immediately defines a scene as being in or about Japan. Not all of these scenes, however, have been (or can be) shown on American television, no matter how innocuous. Some scenes involving children are played for laughs rather than titi
llation, but still get edited out or censored to be broadcast. In the Digimon series, one bath scene has towels redrawn on the prepubescent boys rather than have them flash bare butts. In a later season of Ojamajo Doremi (of which only the first season had been shown on American television), a boy who goes to school with the trainee witches gets hysterical when he goes to a public bath, then realizes he’s taking his clothes off in front of female classmates. It’s no big deal to the girls—one has a kid brother, after all—but the boy is at a transitional age where embarrassment is as natural as bathing.

  One nice (in every sense of the word) example of non-erotic bath-related nudity is a scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro, 1988). A man (we find out later that he’s a college professor) and his two daughters, ages ten and four, are taking a bath together. They talk about the country house they’ve just moved into, whether or not it’s haunted, and how best to dispel any lingering ghosts. “Scrubbing and soaking together is a time-honored custom for all friends and family, especially children and their fathers. Many Japanese girls bathe with their dads until puberty, while boys and fathers may continue sharing the tub for a lifetime.”5 The scene is just as asexual as the rest of the movie.

  There’s a similar scene in Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988), showing a ten-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister bathing. They seem more interested in trapping air bubbles in the washcloth than in each other’s anatomy. A story-arc in Shinji Imaizumi’s 1990 boxing manga God Is a Southpaw focuses on sports photographer Yukari Kudo, whose photojournalist father was killed in an avalanche when Yukari was about five years old. Her last memory of him was when they were bathing together.6 And in an episode of the anime television series based on Momoko Sakura’s Chibi Maruko-chan, the six-year-old title character takes a bath with her grandfather, and it’s really no big deal.