Based on the manga created by Toshinao Aoki and Studio Bones, the animation in Dragon Pilot brings to mind the comic strip art of Bill Watterson. The premise of Dragon Pilot as well is the crazy kind of gross but hilarious and yet clever idea that Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes would come up with.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the world (and most Japanese), a select few of Japan's military aircraft, including an F-15J and an F-2 (Mitsubishi's made-in-Japan version of the F-16), are dragons disguised to look like fighter jets.

Hisone Amakasu is a rookie airman at the Japan Air Self-Defense Force Gifu Air Base. One day out of the blue she learns she has passed a "qualification" (she wasn't aware of) and is summarily transferred to a huge hanger way off in the corner of the base that no one seems to know about—except for an odd old woman who pushes a food cart around the base.

When Hisone finally finds the hanger, she walks in and is confronted by a huge dragon (she later names "Masotan") that promptly eats her.

The ground crew is delighted. It's been a while since a pilot passed muster with this particular OTF (an "Organic Transformed Flyer," as the military labels them). You see, the pilot doesn't ride atop the dragon like a horse. The dragon swallows the pilot, who "flies" the dragon from its guts. And when the flight is over, regurgitates her back out.

And, yes, the pilots have to wear special flight suits to keep from getting digested.

Needless to say, the dragon has a lot of discretion about who gets swallowed, and some, like Masotan, can get picky. The dragons are perceptive about the personalities of their pilots. They can even pick up mechanical issues with the real F-15Js they fly with (via the heads-up display in the helmets the pilots wear). But they don't talk.

It's eat or don't eat. Once they've formed an attachment, the one thing that really gives a dragon an upset stomach is his pilot forming a romantic relationship with another human being (which reminds me a similar plot device in My Zhime). No surprise, then, that the girls who make the best "D-Pilots" are not very socially adept.

For all its inherent silliness, Dragon Pilot raises fascinating questions about choice and free will. Hisone got something she didn't know she wanted. Nao wants something she can't get. Elle got what she didn't want instead of what she did. Moriyama gave up what she wanted and walked away to happily make another life for herself.

As Hisone tells Okonogi, a member of her ground crew and also, by family lineage (not something he had a lot of choice about either), a Shinto priest, "It's always best when the things you like and the things decided for you are in agreement."

That religious angle is no small matter. One of the old gods of Japan is a whale-sized monster, literally the size of a small island. It briefly comes out of hibernation every seventy-four years. The job of the dragon pilots is to escort it to a new resting place before it goes all Godzilla on Japan, and put it to bed with an ancient Shinto ritual.

The old school ritual required one of the miko attendants to stay behind in the "belly of the whale," so to speak. As far as Hisone is concerned, that is very much not okay. As it turns out, the food cart lady is the last living member of her squadron from the last time, when her reaction was the same as Hisone's.

In Calvin and Hobbes style, Hisone figures out an unlikely solution. It's a credit to the writing that the series manages to take these serious turns—and turn back again—without spoiling the comedic mood created earlier or making light of the dramatic decisions that Hisone faces (but be sure to stick through the final closing credits).

Masotan ultimately gets a character arc too, which suggests that perhaps the dragons will figure out how to compromise on the whole personal boundaries thing, and not force their pilots into the kind of all-or-nothing choice that Moriyama was left with. We have every reason to hope that the dragons will mature alongside their pilots.

Dragon Pilot is streaming on Netflix.

Labels: anime reviews, japanese culture, netflix, religion, shinto

In the realm of contemporary fantasy, I see dead people is always a useful addition to the resume of the main character.

Donna Howard investigates the provenance of relics and antiques with the help of people from the past who are only visible to her.

For Natsume, his second sight (inherited from his grandmother) often results in the supernatural Shinto world intruding on his otherwise ordinary day-to-day life.

Mieruko can see dead people too. Her name is a pun on the verb meaning "I can see." That makes her privy to an extensive and weirdly thriving ecosystem of the living dead invisible to all but a select few.

Unfortunately for Mieruko, she has a hard time telling the good dead people from the bad dead people.

Even the guardian deities (inari) at the Shinto shrine are fierce and intimidating. Most of the dead people and creepy crawlies look like mutating corpses. Which is bad enough, except when they realize she can see them. Mieruko has gotten good at maintaining a look of deadpan indifference.

The rules governing Mieruko's abilities mirror those in Natsume's Book of Friends (which just debuted a new season). Creatures from the spirit world can only physically interact with you if they catch you looking at them first. Maintaining an attitude of stoic indifference can be the best recourse.

Which brings me to a new word I learned reading the manga: suruu sukiru (スルースキル), a transliteration of "through skill." Weblio defines it as the "ability to ignore bad things happening to you." In other words, the skill to work through a problem by tuning out and not getting upset about it.

But like Natsume, a girl's got her limits. There are times when Mieruko has no choice but to lend the ghouls an ear. Occasionally she discovers their intentions are benign. At other times, not so much. It's easier when the monsters behave like monsters, but even there she can jump to the wrong conclusions.

The occasional Sixth Sense twist will also fool the reader. And there's a touch of Dexter in the cat killer arc as well (which is featured in the anime).

Her best friend Hana is a ghost magnet ("Like moths to a flame," an old soothsayer ally observes), though not having second sight herself, she's clueless about their presence. One of their classmates also has second sight, though not being as powerful as Mieruko, she misjudges their respective abilities.

These moral dilemmas lend Mieruko-chan depth without being depressing or nihilistic. Some of the stories are genuinely heartwarming. If you're a fan of Edward Gorey or Charles Addams, Mieruko-chan is right in your wheelhouse.

Written and illustrated by Tomoki Izumi. Published in Japan by Kodansha and by Yen Press in the United States. The anime is based on the first three volumes of the manga. A live-action film adaptation is scheduled for release in 2025.

Related links

BookWalker (English emanga)
BookWalker (Japanese emanga)
Amazon (Kindle and paperback)
Crunchyroll (anime)

Labels: anime, bookwalker, crunchyroll, ebooks, japanese culture, kindle, manga, manga reviews, movies, religion, shinto

Jun Maeda turned the visual novel game studio Key VisualArts into a synonym for true-to-life melodramas infused with a large dollop of magical realism. In Angel Beats, his latest anime series, he skips right past the realism and goes straight for the magical. Or rather, straight for the eschatological.

In the first scene, Yuzuru Otonashi wakes up in the afterlife and promptly gets killed again. He doesn't die because he's already dead. Which is a good thing, because he's fallen in with a gang of like-minded teenagers who have decided they do not want to "go gentle into that good night," and have armed themselves accordingly.

That means fighting Angel, who's gotten very good at killing them in turn (getting killed here is like a painful time-out in the penalty box). Angel's ungentle job it is to see that they do go gentle into that good night. And that means being good students instead of a bunch of delinquents.

You see, Angel is the student council president. Purgatory is a Japanese high school. And Angel has appointed herself Charon, the ferryman.

Refreshingly, these rebels really are a bunch of delinquents, and despite all the scheming by Yuri, their bad girl leader, they're not good at being bad. Otonashi admits he would have joined whatever group approached him first. All they know is the current status quo, so that is what they defend—to their repeated deaths.

Though following Jun Maeda's reliable formula, this is executed with a good deal of dark humor that at times is quite funny.

Helped along by the fact that Angel isn't a mindless antagonist, and this hapless gang—who admit they don't really know what they're rebelling against (to quote Marlon Brando: "Whaddya got?")—aren't necessarily the protagonists. Because the only true enemy is the self.

Yeah, I know, that's about as trite as truisms get, but stick with it. It pays off.

There's an element of The Matrix here. The red pill students know they're dead but alive in an unreal world, while the blue pill students remain completely oblivious. Except here Maeda fills in the gaps that The Matrix misses, by giving all parties compelling, even moral, reasons for their opposing choices.


Though in substance and message, Angel Beats! reminds me more of Haibane Renmei, Yoshitoshi ABe's subtle and sublime meditation on grace and redemption. ABe's protagonist is Rakka, who is reborn into an afterlife that resembles a semi-rural village in mid-20th century Eastern Europe.

In the pastoral world of Haibane Renmei, there is no god to rail against, no highway to heaven, no sign posts pointing the way. Their only job is to live out their afterlives in the community while "working out their salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12).

While Haibane Renmei is quiet and meditative, Angel Beats! is loud and obvious. It's the garage band version, with the volume turned up to eleven. Literally, as one of the gang's tools of subversion is a student rock band that stages illegal concerts to distract Angel's minions during their ammo resupply raids.


Angel Beats! also has a distinctly Buddhist slant. ABe created a purposely Catholic version of purgatory for Haibane Renmei. In Angel Beats! Christian salvation isn't in the cards. Whether you move onto the next world is purely a product of self-realization or satori, and only you can hold yourself back.

On this score, Joseph Smith would agree.

For our words will condemn us, yea, all our works will condemn us; we shall not be found spotless; and our thoughts will also condemn us; and in this awful state we shall not dare to look up to our God; and we would fain be glad if we could command the rocks and the mountains to fall upon us to hide us from his presence (Alma 12:14).

Everybody in this purgatory is terrified of resurrecting the memories of who they were before they died, and instead are obsessed with what could have been versus what actually was. As Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." So the dead stay dead until they face that examination directly.

Still, it wouldn't hurt if someone could figure out these eschatalogical truths first and then point the way to everybody else. Eventually joining forces, that is what Angel and Otonashi end up striving to do, until the only job left to them is to save themselves.

Related posts

The catechism of Angel Beats!
Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry
Set Apart
Angel Beats! (Crunchyroll)

Labels: anime, anime reviews, buddhism, fantasy, haibane, jun maeda, lds, religion, shinto, your name

Following up on my previous post about ghostbusting Japan, here is an abbreviated list of some more recent anime releases that epitomize the genre. I'm limiting myself to titles that fit primarily into a Buddhist or Shinto framework.

There is considerable overlap in the magical girl genre. The "Divine Tree" in Yuki Yuna is a Hero has a Shinto vibe to it, though as with Madoka Magica and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, the causes behind the effects are "scientific" (alien science up to no good) rather than theological.


An eclectic crossover is Ghost Hunt, written by Twelve Kingdoms author Fuyumi Ono. The ghostbusting team includes a Buddhist monk, a shrine maiden, a Catholic priest, a spirit medium, a paranormal researcher, and, of course, a couple of high school students. They've got all the bases covered.

Noragami does an excellent job with all of the core elements: the purification of fallen souls, a teenager with second sight, the (Shinto) God of Calamity, getting into a literal shootout (firearms are involved) with Bishamon, the (Buddhist) God of War, and the divine working for a living.


Noragami was one of last year's big hits, a nicely balanced mix of action, comedy, theology, and some pretty intense dramatic scenes stressing the wages of sin and the trials of atonement (as I pointed out before, by no means does monotheism have a monopoly on hellfire and damnation).

Kamichu! takes a purely Shinto approach. One day, Yurie, an ordinary schoolgirl, becomes a Shinto god and gets put in charge of the gods and youkai in her neck of the woods. The aesthetics of the Shinto cosmology in Kamichu! is similar to that in Spirited Away.

Makoto in Gingitsune is a shrine maiden (not a kami) but she can communicate with the shrine's kami. The final episodes nicely depict a community purification ceremony. There is a whole shrine maiden genre, perhaps the most popular series being Rumiko Takahashi's Inuyasha.

Beyond the Boundary, Myriad Colors Phantom World, and Kekkaishi stick to the teen supernatural superhero formula and hue closely to Shinto eschatology.

Beyond the Boundary features freelancers that cooperate—and sometimes compete—with the powerful clan that runs the local cartel on youma hunting.

Your mileage may vary, but the comic relief works for me (the entirety of episode six is a standalone comedy), and as a teen romance it is certainly unique. Mirai Kuriyama kills Akihito Kanbara the first time they meet, and then a dozen times after that. Otherwise, they get along fine.

But Akihito is an immortal half-youma so getting killed isn't a big inconvenience (at first). Despite the occasionally goofy material, it is an intense and compelling drama with several great character arcs (be sure to watch the credits in the very last episode all the way to the end).

Ghostbusting is a school club activity in the parallel universe of Myriad Colors Phantom World. It's an episodic series with a conventional harem setup. Thankfully isn't a harem show. The artwork is nice and it succeeds at being fun and informative.

Episodes are introduced with little tutorials about theology and applied psychology that take the subjects seriously as they relates to the ghostbusting business. Episode four, for example, revolves around omagatoki, which also figures into Serpent of Time.

Kekkaishi is the lower-budget version of Myriad Colors. The -shi in Kekkaishi and Mushi-shi means "master of." A "Kekkaishi" is a master of a spiritual barrier, a common tool in the genre. They're also used in Beyond the Boundary.

Being a Kekkaishi is the "family business," and two families in town compete with each other, generally to comedic ends. There are some shared similaries with Noragami about how youma go bad.

The live-action film of Mushi-shi was released in the U.S. as Bugmaster, which makes it sound like a 1950s B-movie. Mushi-shi is infinitely more subtle than that. It's about a roving demon-fighter who deals with problems caused by insect youkai.


Think Twilight Zone or a solo Supernatural with a period setting.

These last three titles are closer to the conventional horror category, with creepier characters (both antagonists and protagonists) and plenty of blood & guts action and gore.

Ghost Talker's Daydream is basically Ghost Whisperer, except that the heroine works in an BDSM club (because ghosts don't hang out in BDSM clubs) and dead people mightily annoy her. She really doesn't care what happens to the dearly departed as long as they leave.

In Corpse Princess, Makina is the shinigami ("god of death") of a murdered girl. She now works for a Buddhist order as a ruthless assassin of malevolent shinigami who've gone bad.

Tokyo Majin leans more more toward the wuxia genre. The teen demon fighters are martial artists and possess Buddhist superpowers. One of the MacGuffins is something called the "Bodhisattva Eye." But they spent most of their time battling fairly conventional zombies.

Related links

Ghostbusting in Japan (1)
Japanese genre horror

Beyond the Boundary
Corpse Princess
Ghost Talker's Daydream (Amazon). Only a few anime episodes were made and I recommend avoiding them. The manga is better (explicit material).
Gingitsune. Gingitsune and Kamichu! can also be classified as "family-friendly" slice-of-life series.
Kamichu!
Kekkaishi
Myriad Colors Phantom World
Mushi-shi
Noragami

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, buddhism, japan, japanese culture, personal favs, pop culture, religion, shinto, superhero

According to Buddhism, suffering arises from attachments to transient emotional states and the impermanent material nature of this corruptible, world. In other words, believing you can take it with you. Undisciplined, our insatiable desires doom us to samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth.

Enlightenment can only be achieved by breaking the chains of these cravings.

The Japanese being enthusiastic syncretists, home-grown Shinto evolved similar doctrines with a difference. The Buddhist concept of the "hungry ghost"—corrupt souls possessed by earthly failings such as greed, anger and ignorance—merged with the Shinto concept of impurities accumulated through sin or pollution.

Japan's outcast social class (burakumin) is said to have arisen from Buddhism strictures attached to death-related occupations such as executioners, undertakers, butchers and tanners. Such trades have long since been religiously accommodated, though the hereditary burakumin class persists.

Similarly, people who die harboring unresolved grudges and possessive attachments can turn into evil kami and ghosts and haunt the world they departed from until they are exorcised.

The epitome of this downward spiral is perhaps best illustrated in Madoka Magica, in which the very process of fighting evil inevitably corrupts the good magical girls. It's gone on for so long that now all the magical girls do is battle other magical girls who've gone bad.

In Noragami and Kekkaishi, participating in the brutal battles of the medieval Warring States period tainted even the souls of the gods. And at times turned ordinary animals into evil kami.

Kami loosely translates as "god," though more in the Greco-Roman sense than the Judaeo-Christian. "Kami" can span the behavioral spectrum, from the benign and even playful youkai (which includes the the various species of shikigami) to expressly evil youma and  shinigami ("god of death").

In Shinto, every imaginable aspect of the natural world has a parallel spiritual dimension, with new kami evolving all the time. Toss in all the Buddhist crossovers and this raises the ghostly population an order of magnitude. Justin Sevakis details a small slice of Japan's transcendental taxonomy:

Onryo are vengeful ghosts, ubume are the spirits of mothers who died either in childbirth or with young children who return to look after their kids. Goryo are vengeful aristocratic ghosts, funayurei are ghosts who died at sea, zashiki-warashi are playful child ghosts, and ibakurei are ghosts that haunt a certain location.

Out of this theological amalgam developed a popular fantasy genre about the spirit world warriors charged with combating the evil fruit of both human and divine depravity.

The first pop-culture spirit world warrior was the real-life Heian court diviner Abe no Seimei. He literally became a legend in his own lifetime (played here in the 2001 film Onmyoji by Mansai Nomura).

Spirit world warriors can be recruited from the Shinto pantheon, which includes deities imported from Buddhism and Taoism.

More commonly they are human (or teamed up with humans), maybe with some supernatural powers (but not super-duper). Their job is to corral out-of-control youma and youkai and put them through the purification rites. Or send them onto the next world. Or blast them to kingdom come.

The job will always be there. Anybody can go bad: gods, people, and things go bad all the time, without moral dualism necessarily being at play.

Because "badness" can be disassociated from "evil," the same way polluted water can be filtered and distilled, there's no way to separate the sides by simply counting the black and white hats.

Almost nobody and almost nothing is condemned to a particular place in heaven or hell for eternity. But don't count on deathbed repentance scooting you to the head of the line in a post-mortal Disney World. The severity of the Buddhist hell would give Dante pause.

Considering the stakes, Pascal's Wager is one worth making. Despite most Japanese not being devout or theists in the common Christian sense, most Japanese make it.


So when visiting a Shinto shrine, if there is one, be sure to step through the purification ring. The one at Omi Jingu is depicted in Chihayafuru; the ritual is explained at length in Ginkitsune. And while there, perform the temizu hand-washing ritual.

Harae (cleansing) ceremonies springing from Shinto that have been a practical part of everyday hygienic practices in Japan for centuries.


Sumo wrestlers cast salt before a bout. They don't flick a pinch over their shoulders, but throw it high into the air; if you've got a ringside seat, it'll be raining salt.

Courtesy Princeton Wong.

In police procedurals, cops do the Buddhist equivalent of crossing themselves when they encounter a dead body. Omamori charms can be bought at any Shinto shrine. And somebody dying in an apartment is considered a curse that will drive down the rent.


Even if your house isn't cursed, a priest will stop by on Setsubun and drive out the bad spirits, just to be sure. What with all this supply and demand going on between the material and spiritual realms, there are plenty of business opportunities.

In Beyond the Boundary, exorcized youma can be turned in for bounties. In Noragami, the god Yato hires himself out as handyman to save up for his own shrine. And in In Ghost Talker's Daydream, Saiki is a professional exorcist who cleans up apartments where suicides and gristly crimes took place.

In a slightly different genre, the devil in The Devil is a Part-Timer has to get a job at McDonald's to make ends meet.

Thus in keeping with the original Ghostbusters, ghostbusting in Japan is often a business, or at least an avocation, both in real life and in fiction. Well, that's the modern world for you. Even the gods have to work for a living. Eastern spiritualism meets Adam Smith.

Related posts

Ghostbusting in Japan (2)
Pop culture Buddhism
Pop culture Shinto
Pop culture Catholicism
Angel Beats!
The Passion of the Magical Girl

Labels: anime, buddhism, chihayafuru, history, japan, japanese culture, religion, shinto

Shinto grew organically in Japan, inventing itself and its mythologies along the way. The first references appeared in the eighth century. In the official histories, the Imperial Court traced its ancestry back to Emperor Jimmu, a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu.

Jimmu is said to have ascended to the throne in 660 BC. Emperor Sujin, who purportedly reigned from 97 BC to 30 BC, is the first Japanese emperor believed to not be complete fabrication. But the genealogies aren't considered trustworthy until the fifth century.

The "mists of time" can be awfully useful when it comes to the "evidence of things not seen." Sure, you can't prove any of it happened. But you can't prove it didn't! What the heck, it doesn't hurt to play along. As Wikipedia explains,

Shinto does not actually require professing faith to be a believer or a practitioner thus a person who practices any manner of Shinto rituals may be so counted, and as such it is difficult to query for exact figures based on self-identification of belief within Japan.

When the queries are done, the number of believers always add up to significantly greater than the total population. Japanese don't see religious affiliation or belief or even "atheism" as a zero-sum game. Why believe in just one? Cover your bases! Accept Pascal's Wager for all the gods!

Shinto in genre fiction typically has about the same relationship to its theological roots as a Marvel Thor flick has to Norse mythology. It's more about the ballpark verisimilitude, and as source material for compelling superheroes and cool characters.

This makes Shinto a deep well that manga and anime can draw from time and again, with little fear of offending anybody no matter how wild a tangent the story takes from the religion's theological roots.

The live-action Onmyoji, for example, casts the real Heian period court diviner Abe no Seimei (921-1005) as a superhero exorcist. Similar historical settings and tropes show up in anime like Otogi Zoshi.

Outside Japan, the Studio Ghibli classics Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and the lesser-known Pom Poko are the best-known explorations of Shinto metaphysics. While opaque to western viewers, most of the religious references would be familiar to Japanese audiences.

Shinto is more commonly known for the miko (shrine maiden) and the ever-popular inari (fox god). Shrine of the Morning Mist casts the miko as superheroes. In the more subdued Gingitsune, the daughter of a Shinto priest has inherited her mother's "spirit sight."


The inari and its kin are recurring characters in Japanese fairy tales, often transforming into human form. Thus a little supernatural matchmaking will get you a romantic comedy. The best-known rom-com pairing is Rumiko Takahashi's Inuyasha. Inuyasha is a half-demon inugami (dog god).

Unlike the semi-divine inari, the ranks of the inugami and shikigami are populated by the ghosts and goblins of Japanese mythology. They, in turn, are ruled over by the kami, which loosely translates as "the gods," whose job it is to keep the divine rabble in line.

Those gods can turn up in the most unlikely places.

Kamichu! begins with a junior high school student in a small fishing village in Hiroshima. Yurie wakes up one morning to discover she's turned into a minor Shinto deity. Rather than causing great alarm, she's treated more like "hometown girl makes good."

The focus instead is how Yurie comes to terms with her "godhood" with the help of her friends and family, and, in turn, keeps the local shikigami in line.

This brings to mind comparisons with Bruce Almighty, except that Bruce Almighty is monotheistic while Kamichu! is unapologetically polytheistic. The gods of Shinto aren't omnipresent or omnipotent or monotheistic or even worth worshiping sometimes.

In Noragami, Yato is a Shinto god (with a dark past) in need of a shrine, which means amassing followers by doing "good deeds." In other words, this god's charitable acts are entirely self-serving. Well, a bad boy with a good heart is a character arc that practically writes itself.


Shinto-based genre fiction tends to be more devil-may-care than the more "serious" Buddhism. Shinto does have a sober side, name in the connection to State Shinto.

State Shinto was abolished in 1945. It effects still persist in the politically sensitive symbol of Yasukuni Shrine and the Shinto temples and accession rites tied to the Imperial Household (much the same way the Church of England is to the throne in the United Kingdom).

A "bamboo curtain" of church/state separation is usually tactfully drawn between the political and sectarian function, but now and then it slips in curious ways, such as when a politician makes an "official" to a shrine. Prime Minster Abe has avoided Yasukuni but has visited Ise.

Princess Noriko (the emperor's grandniece) married the eldest son of the head priest of the Izumo Taisha grand shrine. This sort of thing is treated with a degree of deference unimaginable by Japan's tabloid press on any other subject.

In these specific church/state contexts, Shinto becomes a subject actually more off-limits than Buddhism. Royalty in Japan are a low key bunch to start with, and the very imperious Imperial Household Agency makes Buckingham Palace look like the cast of Monty Python.

As the Christian Science Monitor put it a while back:

The most secretive agency in Japan is not its intelligence organization. It is the Imperial Household Agency . . . . The agency tightly controls the flow of information about Japan's monarchy, not only to the public but to the rest of the government.

The Imperial Household Agency has gone so far as to close down archaeological digs that might possible put past historical events in the "wrong" light (such as revealing that early emperors were the descendants of Korean princes fleeing civil wars on the peninsula).

The fanatical right (still fighting WWII in spirit) doesn't give a fig about theology as long as you leave the modern-day emperors (and their origins) out of it. Steer clear of that minefield and the sky's the limit. Shinto can be as weird and goofy as you want it to be.

Related posts

Pop culture Catholicism
Pop culture Buddhism
Anime genre horror
Ghostbusting in Japan

Labels: anime, anime lists, buddhism, japan, japanese culture, religion, shinto, superhero

Buddhism arrived in Japan as early as the third century. Then and for the next thousand years, China would be the mirror in which Japan saw its own reflection (thereafter replaced by Europe and the especially the United States). Like Constantine and Christianity, Buddhism found friends in high places who assured its rapid adoption.

Via this conduit, the accompanying organization structures and the written language were absorbed both into the body politic and the society at large. So even if you managed to extract the theology, the cultural framework of Buddhism is bolted into the bedrock of Japan.

Imagine that popular pagan practices—such as the spring solstice and winter equinox—hadn't be "Christianized," but had lived and let live. That's essentially what happened with Buddhism and the native-born Shinto sects in Japan. Two completely different but (mostly) non-antagonistic, non-exclusive religions progressing on parallel tracks.

This balance was upset during the Edo period (1603-1868). Buddhist temples were anointed the primary keepers of the census, to which even Shinto priests were subordinated. As a result, not unusual is the situation in episode 7 of Gingitsune, where a large Buddhist temple sits on the grounds of a small Shinto shrine.

The religious roles were reversed with the restoration of Imperial rule in 1868. But Buddhism quickly rose to become the defining ideology of the military class.

This association lives on in the martial arts and the (much more complex than Christian) end-of-life rituals. Just as importantly, Buddhist and closely-associated Confucian concepts underpin the equivalents of "Judeo-Christian values" and the "Protestant work ethic."

Because Zen and the martial arts are so tightly linked, Buddhism is the go-to source for cranky old warrior priests with paranormal powers and kung fu fighters (with the exception of home-grown sumo wrestling, which is closely aligned with Shinto).

The Soka Gakkai sect created the Komeito or "Clean Government" party in 1964. "New Komeito" incorporated as an independent party in 1998 (cutting official ties to the sect) but adheres to a socially conservative platform and consistently partners with the center-right LDP, helping it form ruling majorities for most of the past fifty years.

The Komeito is a "serious" political party and Buddhism is the "serious" religion, so your "Father Brown" types are going to be Buddhist.

After all, death, judgement (karma) and reincarnation are their jurisdiction. The equivalent expression of "He's gone to meet his maker" is "He became a Buddha." A dead body is often colloquially referred to as a hotoke, meaning a Buddha (?).

This is most evident in the police procedural. Upon encountering a dead body for the first time, a police officer will pause, bow his head, and press his hands together (gasshou). It's the rough equivalent of crossing yourself, but is a far more ubiquitous gesture on Japanese cop and coroner shows than in their U.S. counterparts.


Because of those end-of-life connections, in the horror genres, Buddhism can be counted on to provides hell and hungry ghosts. Shinto spirits tend to be of the more mischievous kind (as in the aforementioned episode of Gingitsune), though their anarchic natures can wreak no end of trouble along with plenty of inexplicable weirdness.


But Buddhism cultural references are not all Sturm und Drang.

The Chinese classic Journey to the West, based on a Tang Dynasty Buddhist monk's travels to India, has inspired dozens of anime, such as Saiyuki and the mega-franchise Dragon Ball. The title of the low-brow harem anime Ah My Buddha is a play on the somewhat higher brow Ah My Goddess, whose characters also reside in a Buddhist temple.

Saint Young Men (already a classic) is a clever sit-com about Jesus and Buddha hanging out together in Tokyo. As both religions accept them as mortal human beings somewhere along the line, I see nothing undoctrinaire about depicting them as such.

Related posts

Pop culture Catholicism
Pop culture Shinto
Anime genre horror
Ghostbusting in Japan

Labels: anime, anime lists, buddhism, history, japan, japanese culture, religion, shinto

Japan's wars over religion have never been all that religious. To be sure, rabble-rousers like Nichiren sowed doctrinal strife no less than did Martin Luther. But the Thirty Years' War didn't follow, in large part because the church in Japan has only rarely not been subservient to the state.

Then there was that whole Aum Shinri Kyo business, but I'll leave the fringe element out of the discussion and focus on the Napoleons. Though there's not much in the way of open theological debate to be found, wars involving religion could get pretty nasty.

In 1571, Oda Nobunaga razed the Buddhist temples on Mt. Hiei, killing upwards of 20,000. At issue was the power of Tendai Buddhist "warrior monks" at Enryaku-ji monastery. They'd aligned themselves with rival warlords and exerted undue influence (Nobunaga believed) over Kyoto politics.

Though home to Tendai Buddhism since 788, no building on Mt. Hiei dates to before 1571.

The Portuguese first arrived in Japan in 1543, bringing with them guns and Jesuits. Although he openly declared himself an atheist, Nobunaga was fascinated by western culture, quickly learned how to use the musket in large-scale offensives, and gave the Jesuits wide latitude to proselytize.

That latitude ended with his assassination in 1582. His successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was already suspicious of Christian influence in the fractious western half of the country. The Jesuit Gaspar Coelho made things worse by promising Hideyoshi arms and warships that would never be forthcoming.

When the Hideyoshi realized he was being conned, Coelho threatened a coup. But Hideyoshi at the time commanded one of the largest armies in the world. Although Coelho's petitions for military support were summarily rejected by his superiors, Hideyoshi was convinced he had traitors in his midst.

The Tokugawa shogunate doubled down on Hideyoshi's policies to expunge Catholic influence from the country. As far as the shogunate was concerned, if the Catholics weren't all in with them, they were against them, so against them they were deemed.

In 1637, the Shimabara Rebellion culminated in the siege of Hara Castle. When the castle fell in early 1638, some 37,000 Christian peasants and masterless samurai died or were executed.

After Shimabara, only a small contingent of Protestant Dutch traders was allowed to occupy a tiny island near Nagasaki. Again, though as merciless as the Inquisition in forcing adherents to abandon their beliefs, at issue was the consolidation of power and an isolationist foreign policy, not theology.

These fears of foreign influence were not unfounded. Two centuries later, the Satsuma domain (just south of Nagasaki) armed itself with British weapons and warships and led the revolt that overthrew the shogunate.

Shimabara was also largely a problem of local governance. The governor of Shimabara was subsequently executed for cruelty and incompetence. The message: if the peasants revolt, they'll be executed; if you gave the peasants good reasons to revolt, you'll be executed too.

In the mid-19th century, a final religious conflict arose when the Meiji government switched the state religion from Buddhism to Shinto. For 250 years, the Buddhist temples had grown fat and corrupt under the patronage of the shoguns, who used the temples as tools of control via the census.

Over a period of four years, popular uprisings following the Meiji Restoration in 1868 destroyed tens of thousands of Buddhist temples and works of art (though resulted in few deaths). The haibutsu kishaku was basically a super-condensed, hyper-kinetic version of the English Reformation.

Like Catholicism in 16th-century England, Buddhism was down but not out. During the 1930s and 1940s, Zen Buddhism saw a resurgence (side-by-side with the state-sponsored Shinto-based emperor cult) as the "spiritual backbone of the military army and navies during the war."

But in the late 19th century and ever since 1945, deprived of its power to tax and compel affiliation, Buddhist temples have had to attract parishioners the old-fashioned way: with goods and services. Buddhism now dominates the lucrative funerary business in Japan.

As if by a cosmic gentleman's agreement, Shinto gets the first half of life, including coming-of-age ceremonies, weddings, and the blessing of inanimate objects like dolls, needles, and buildings; Buddhism get the second half. Though both Shinto and Buddhist temples hold doll funerals.

After which they'll be cremated (the dolls, that is).

And, of course, a Christian wedding is fine too (if the Shinto rite doesn't suit your tastes or wallet: renting wedding kimonos for the bride and groom alone can cost several thousand dollars).

Labels: buddhism, history, japan, religion, shinto

Every spring, states in the U.S. engage in competitive advertising campaigns to lure tourists to their respective locales. Here in Utah, Wyoming (right next door) probably makes the biggest push. You'll see pitches as well from Texas and California.

Prefectures in Japan are motivated no less, especially those in the hinterlands experiencing profound population declines.

A TV program with a local setting can do wonders for the featured locale. The docudrama Ryomaden was a boon to Kochi, Sakamoto Ryoma's home town. The Tohoku region in Northern Japan is still cashing in on the popularity of the 2013 Amachan series.

As far as that goes, Matsuyama City in Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku deserves a medal for merchandizing genius. They're already an established attraction as home to eight of the 88 temples in the Shikoku Pilgrimage (the O-Henro).

But there's no resting on one's municipal laurels with a young demographic out there willing to spend, spend, spend on the (digital) comforts of life. So Matsuyama set out to build a pop-culture media empire based the Shikoku Pilgrimage.

It's called "Oh! My Ring" (there's an English version too), obviously playing off another popular goddess manga and anime series, Oh My Goddess. They'd like to virtually escort you on "An adorable journey around Shikoku's 88-temple pilgrimage."

That will hopefully encourage you to spend your next vacation in Shikoku and experience the real thing.

Each of the 88 temples gets its own cute goddess. Collect them all!

The "ring" refers literally to the loop of the Shikoku Pilgrimage, though it also hints at the Ring horror series, which it turn brings to mind authors like Masako Bando, who made Shikoku the equivalent of Steven King's Maine with books like Inugami.

(Which has much more of a Shinto vibe, but business is business; let's not get all sectarian about the religious affiliations of the various tourist traps.)

The "Oh! My Ring" website is already peddling smartphone apps, online manga, cosplay characters, and badges, T-shirts, posters, and a cafe. Plus actual information about the actual temples. I'm sure the kitchen sink isn't anywhere close to being full.

Labels: anime, geography, japan, japanese culture, manga, religion, shinto

Hourai (蓬莱) is one of three legendary mountains in Chinese folklore. It is also an ancient name for Taiwan, though here it refers to Japan. On Mt. Hourai,

There is no pain and no winter; there are rice bowls and wine glasses that never become empty no matter how much people eat or drink from them; and there are magical fruits growing in [Hourai] that can heal any disease, grant eternal youth, and even raise the dead.

In Shinto mythology, Tokoyo (常世) is "a utopian place far beyond the sea."

Of the devastation Kyoto experienced during the Onin War (1467-1477), Wikipedia notes that it took a full century for the city to recover:

[Kyoto] has not seen such widespread destruction since, being spared the strategic bombing of Japanese cities during World War II. In Kyoto, pre-war refers to the Onin War rather than World War II.

Mt. Kinugasa is a prominent hill in the center of present-day Kyoto Prefecture.

Labels: 12 kingdoms, poseidon, shinto, ww2

Minamoto no Yoshitsune is one of the great tragic heroes of Japanese history and literature. He was one of Japan's most accomplished generals, responsible for demolishing the Taira clan in the late 12th century, ending the Heian Era and ushering in the reign of the shoguns.

But his older brother Yoritomo instead became the first shogun in the Kamakura Bakufu. Presaging the central political conflict in Serpent of Time, after the Genpei War, Yoshitsune backed Emperor Go-Shirakawa, essentially choosing to preserve the old political system.

Emperor Go-Shirakawa later abandoned Yoshitsune as a lost cause (three such fatal betrayals cursed the final years of his life) and appointed Yoritomo the first shogun.

Gendô refers to this historical antecedent to make it clear that sanctuary on Mt. Kôya was no guarantee of safety against a determined head of state.

Throughout Japan's medieval period, the state always held the upper hand over the church. Conflicts between competing Buddhist sects were minor scrapes compared to efforts by warlords and governments to keep the church from interfering with the prerogatives of the state.

The most powerful religion during this time was the Tendai Buddhist sect, founded by Dengyô Daishi (767–822). The proximity of its Enryaku-ji headquarters to Kyôto gave it increasing influence over the secular affairs, to the point of creating a private army of warrior monks (僧兵).

In 1571, after Enryaku-ji sided with his foes, the warlord Oda Nobunaga sent an entire army against Mt. Hiei and burned the temple complex to the ground, killing at least 20,000 men, women and children. None of the structures on Mt. Hiei date further back than the late 16th century.

The second major religious war--that also had little to do with religion--was the Shimabara Rebellion (1637–1638). It began as a tax revolt concentrated among Catholic adherents in Nagasaki, and became a crusade against the brutal anti-Christian persecution of the Tokugawa shogunate.

This persecution arose out of the regime's isolationist and xenophobic policies. It had little to do with theology. Between 20,000 and 30,000 rebels held out for a year against far superior forces, but were pushed back to Hara Castle, where they were eventually overrun and slaughtered to a man.

An actual religious war occurred during the early years of the Meiji Restoration, when the government abruptly adopted Shinto as the state religion. This was done to bolster the nativist ideology that rationalized overthrowing the shogun and restoring the emperor to supreme authority.

After chafing under the thumb of their Buddhist overseers for 250 years, Shinto adherents erupted in a spasm of vandalism known as the Haibutsu Kishaku (廃仏毀釈), which resulted in the destruction of an enormous amount of Buddhist art and architecture, though little loss of life.

Nowadays, it's all bygones. Buddhism and Shinto and Christianity happily exist side by side. Visit Shinto shrines on the holidays, marry in a Catholic church, get buried as a Buddhist, and nobody bats an eye.

Labels: buddhism, history, japan, politics, religion, serpent notes, serpent of time, shinto

I got the name of the Danjiri Inn from the Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri. It is the most famous of the danjiri ("cart-pulling") festivals, which feature portable shrines (o-mikoshi) the size of small trucks being pulled pell-mell through the narrow streets of the city.

If you think this sounds rather risky, you're right. We're talking about some serious Shinto shrine roller derby. Here's a compilation of near misses, collisions, and a few wrecks from past danjiri festivals.

Labels: japanese culture, serpent notes, serpent of time, shinto

This is only a representative sampling of movies I've actually seen, and all the shorter because the horror genre is for me more the exception than the rule, to be avoided unless I have a good reason not to.

To start with, the genre seems dominated by extremes of "bad." At one end, by splatter flicks, these days stripped even of eye-pleasing gratuitous sex and nudity (e.g., Freeze Me). At the other, by coldly mathematical morality tales. And in the middle, elaborate practical jokes: "You though X. Ha! It's really Y!" M. Night Shyamalan's entire oeuvre.

Most modern horror isn't scary or frightening. It's some banal combination of the depressingly nihilistic and the startling, like a balloon popped behind your ear. Not the same thing at all. I don't like roller coasters either.

The scariest thing I saw as a kid, maybe ever, was--no kidding--Disney's Miltonesque Black Hole, and Anthony Perkins getting rototilled to death by a killer robot, totally sans blood and gore, not even a nosebleed.

But a few films do the same-old, same-old with sufficient wit and bravado--that don't confuse iconoclasm and heresy with the juvenile giving of offense--and actually manage to create something new. Or did that new thing first to start with.

Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953) deserves to be on Time magazine's all-time 100 best list. It's a morality tale based on well-known ghost stories, told in the context of Japan's medieval warring states period, albeit with obvious contemporary allusions, considering it was made immediately following the end of the American Occupation.

Aragami (2002) is a recent addition to the same story line, in which a wandering peasant or soldier takes shelter in an old temple that turns out to be home to a surly demon. Aragami does nothing new and sports a groan-inducing Shyamalan-style ending. The world doesn't need any more ninety minute Twilight Zone episodes.

Makai Tensho ("Samurai Resurrection") is a perennial classic, remade now at least three times. The story comes from the 1637-1637 Shimabara Rebellion, in the wake of which almost 40,000 Christians were killed and Christianity was outlawed (upon pain of death) for the next two centuries. But, hey, bygones!

Christianity nowadays (the trappings thereof) is cool. In the early 17th century, it was very bad for your health. The leader of the Shimabara Rebellion, the "Christian Samurai" Shiro Amakusa, rises from the dead to wreak vengeance and it's up to Yagyu Jubei (another historic character and samurai flick favorite) to save the Shogunate.

The 2003 version has the best production values and is the least gratuitous, though it lacks the cheesy, exploitation flick exuberance of the 1981 version (often titled "Samurai Reincarnation"), starring Sonny Chiba as Jubei, a quasi-historical role he played often.

"J-horror" was big in the U.S. for a while, but I got bored with it about as soon as it began, movies about ghosts with big hangups and a misdirected sense of revenge. The "vengeful ghost" is big in Buddhism. Like Ghost or The Sixth Sense, except these dead people need tons more therapy.

The following "big three" are generally acknowledge to have launched the "J-Horror wave": The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water. Of those three, I've only see the English version of the first. Like I said, not my cup of tea. Two hours of mood for a few minutes of "Gotcha!" I'll wait for the ten-minute Simpsons parody.

I can only put up with so much moody angst before I want to know what happened next. When stuff does happen in J-horror, it's usually according to a strict moral algebra where everybody who does X and Y predictably gets Z, except in the maddening passive voice. Give me a protagonist who will just punch the creepy ghost's lights out.

Which is why I greatly prefer shamelessly pandering action/horror flicks like Constantine and End of Days.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (not related to Akira) made the postmodern psychological thriller his thing (for a while, with Koji Yakusho in the lead role). I just can't get excited over his stories of Nietzschean excess, about weird things happening to people I don't care about. But they're a far sight better than the recent spat of inexplicably popular "will-to-power" amorality tales.

We're not talking about vigilantes ridding the world of far worse guys, but the kind of sociopathic twerps Jimmy Stewart upbraids in Rope, that we're supposed to root for because they're so, so clever and filled with so, so much Freudian angst.

The execrable Death Note franchise perhaps represents the nadir of this particular sub-genre. It really is just Rope turned upside down and given a spiffy polish. Rope was made in 1948. Talk about recycling old material and pretending it's hip and new.

Code Geass is a hundred times smarter, and the Hamlet-ish conflict Lelouch starts out with is a hundred times more interesting. But by the end of the first season it's clear you're stuck rooting for Hitler or Stalin, and I'd rather they both dropped dead.

Seriously, parents and preachers and politicians, you should wish your kids were watching porn and not soul-killing crap like this. On the other hand, it once again demonstrates that there is zero correlation between what tickles the teenage mind and what actually motivates a teenager to get off his butt and do anything.

I've long concluded that there is a depressingly large population of (especially "indie") filmmakers who believe that there's absolutely nothing worse in this world than growing up middle class. Back in high school, they concluded that life sucks and never grew up. Teenagers do love being told how put-upon and long-suffering they are.

Anyway, I did like Koji Yakusho in Shinji Aoyama's Eureka, a psychological thriller/serial-killer crime drama with a strangely hopeful conclusion. A little authentic hope goes a long way. Otherwise, horror is like hitting your thumb with a hammer for the pleasure of stopping. Better not to hit your thumb in the first place.

Shikoku and Inugami are based on novels by Masako Bando, the "Stephen King" of Japan (his Maine is her Shikoku). The former is low-budget and ends like an Indiana Jones sequel. The latter is a crazy mix of Oedipus Rex, Shinto mysticism and a Hatfield/McCoy feud. It's a gorgeously-shot film, with heaps of gorgeously-shot sex and nudity.

Inugami is a good example of an "art film" where the director mistakenly thought that setting a mood was the same as delivering a message. All I remember about it now are the lush establishing shots, the stuff about traditional paper making (the most interesting parts), and attractive women without any clothes on.

Well, sometimes that's enough!

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Labels: buddhism, japan, japanese movie reviews, moral outrage, movie reviews, pop culture, religion, robots, shinto

NHK's daily (six days a week) 15-minute long, family-friendly morning melodrama (Asadora) is doing something a bit different this time around: a non-fiction series. The story is based on the autobiography of Nunoe Mura, wife of famed horror mangaka Shigeru Mizuki.

During WWII, Shigeru Mizuki was an infantryman in Papua, New Guinea, and lost his left arm in a bombing raid. Originally left-handed, he had to teach himself to draw with his right. When the war ended, he considered staying behind in Rabaul, but returned to Japan.

His affection for New Guinea has since been reciprocated, with a street in Rabaul being named after him. (The Taiwanese also remain relatively well-disposed toward the Japanese, probably because the Imperial Army treated them better than the Chinese Nationalists.)

Mizuki's most famous work is Ge-Ge-Ge no Kitarou ("Kitarou of the Ge-Ge-Ge"), so the Asadora series is titled Ge-Ge-Ge no Nyoubou, or "Ge-Ge-Ge's Wife." The "Ge-Ge-Ge" are a tribe of youkai, or spirits and demons. Mizuki is largely responsible for popularizing Japan's rich youkai mythology.

Ghibli's Pom Poko belongs to the youkai world, while the creatures in Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke are more Shinto in orientation. They live alongside the gods of Japan's creation myths and various Chinese and European imports. The Venn diagrams overlap quite a bit.

By comparison, think of the difficulty in classifying all the gods and demons in the Western tradition (Greco-Roman, Christian, Norse, just to name a few), along with the pagan religions, fairy and folk tales (original and revised versions), plus recent inventions like Dracula and Frankenstein.

The propensity for human being to create transcendental realities seems bred in the bone (if not the genes). Not satisfied to just create them, we then arrange them into insanely complex taxonomies. This, incidentally, is why evangelical atheism is ultimately doomed to plow the ocean.

Labels: asadora, japan, japanese tv, manga, pop culture, religion, shinto, studio ghibli

Released in 1978 after being rushed through production in a mere six months, Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato followed on the heels of Space Battleship Yamato, which outperformed Star Wars at the box office. Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato doubled that.

With its cute robots, planet-killing "Death Star" antagonist, and "Battle of Britain" fighter scenes, it's clearly derivative of Star Wars. The ship's bridge as the principal set, the protagonist's Kirkian disregard for military protocols, and his propensity—on a ship with hundreds of crew—to rush off to confront his enemies personally are clear nods to Star Trek.

The overdressed, operatically overacting evil aliens with blue or green skin as their only non-human characteristics come straight out of 1950's B-serials.

The crudely-drawn animation is reminiscent of 1960s Saturday morning Johnny Quest cartoons (60,000 cells in a 150 minute movie averages out to 6 fps). However, even given such rough material to work with, the direction by Toshio Masuda and Leiji Matsumoto borders on the brilliant at times, creating visual perspectives cinematically ahead of their time.

About a bajillion people get killed in Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato, just as they do in Star Wars. Though without any blood and guts, Masuda and Matsumoto somehow manage to make the experience a lot more harrowing than in Star Wars.

Despite all the back-to-the-future echoes in the plot—fans of the original Star Trek series will recognize how the Yamato is turned into a big antimatter weapon, the "grand theft starship" business from Star Trek III (1984), and destroying a Death Star by flying inside it from Return of the Jedi (1983)—the Yamato itself is all Japanese and all Leiji Matsumoto.

Anachronistic space opera is Matsumoto's unique oeuvre, including pirate galleons in space (Captain Harlock), WWII battleships in space (Space Battleship Yamato), and steam engines in space (Galaxy Express 999). That last one is his most inspired and most inspiring. The 1979 film version is a remarkably exploration of moral philosophy through science fiction.

To be sure, despite its financial success, die-hard fans did not react well to practically the entire crew getting killed and the ship itself being destroyed. The events of Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato have since been relegated to an "alternate timeline," and the series—both television and theatrical releases—was resurrected anew.

However, I believe that Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato is actually the most true to its namesake and to the enormous weight of history that the story of the Yamato carries with her. Yamato is the ancient name of Japan, and the original battleship Yamato carried the Emperor's Imperial Seal prominently displayed on its bow.

Commissioned a week after Pearl Harbor, the Yamato and her sister ship Musashi were the biggest battleships ever built, and their eighteen-inch main guns the largest ever mounted on a ship. The Yamato's first deployment was as Admiral Yamamoto's flagship during the Battle of Midway, though it never directly engaged U.S. forces.

But as Eliot wrote, "In my beginning is my end." The Battle of Midway made the battleship an anachronism. The Yamato was too valuable a symbol to risk as a "tin can" destroyer and was too fuel-hungry to use in middling support tasks. Aside from occasional run-ins with U.S. submarines, the Yamato saw minimal combat duty until October 1944.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf ended its career. In one of the most remarkable naval engagements in history, the tiny "Taffy 3" escort group fought an entire task force led by the Yamato to a draw. The mighty Yamato proved no match for the puny but radar-directed five-inch guns of the U.S. destroyers and the antiquated Wildcat and Avenger fighters from the escort carriers.

The Yamato spent most of its last year docked at its home base in Kure on the Inland Sea. Finally, in the name of blustering patriotism and "morale," it was sent on a suicide mission—with only enough fuel for a one-way trip—to engage the U.S. Navy off the shores of Okinawa.

The Yamato was attacked by carrier-based torpedo and dive bombers as soon as it emerged into the East China Sea. It was sunk two hours later. Only a handful of sailors escaped when its ammunition magazines exploded. The ship sank with 2,498 hands on board, the largest loss of life attributed to a single ship in peacetime or war (the Titanic lost 1,517).

Otoko-tachi no Yamato ("Our Yamato") is the latest attempt (2005) to document the life and death of the Yamato with a gory, melodramatic, Ridley Scott-style Hollywood approach. Except that lots of stuff spectacularly blowing up can't mask the criminally stupid waste of men and material that marked the Yamato's final voyage.

At least the Light Brigade featured in Tennyson's famous poem overran the Russian positions they were aiming at, but were forced to retreat when the less suicidal Heavy Brigade didn't advance down the "Valley of Death" after them. Pickett's Charge briefly breached the Union line on Cemetery Ridge before being pushed back with crippling losses.

All the Yamato managed to do was temporarily distract U.S. fighters from their more important job of shooting down kamikaze. The Yamato got nowhere near Okinawa. It didn't accomplish a single military objective. Twenty-five hundred men died for absolutely nothing.

At its heart, I can't help but read the Space Battleship Yamato series as an attempt to vest meaning in that meaningless loss.

In nods to The Philadelphia Experiment and Raise the Titanic! a starship is constructed inside the wreck of the Yamato, and then raised from the bottom of the ocean to battle aliens out to destroy the Earth. Spinoffs also have the ship being purposely sunk to prevent top-secret technology from falling into enemy hands, which is then salvaged by later generations.

Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato then becomes a restaging of the battleship's final, tragic mission (April 6-7, 1945). With the captain dead at the helm and the first mate alone alive at the wheel, the ultimate sacrifice made this time around is truly noble. The Yamato dies for something, saving the Earth from destruction and saving the lives of billions.

Even so, the historical perspective makes it all the more painful to watch. The most appropriate treatment of the Yamato story is perhaps the "Crossing the River of Time" episode of Kamichu! (DVD 3 episode 9). Kamichu! is about a junior high school student living in a fishing village near Kure, who wakes up one morning to discover she's turned into a minor Shinto deity.

In "Crossing the River of Time," Yurie escorts the "soul" of the Yamato (Shinto theology stipulates that all things—animate and inanimate—have unique souls or gods) back to her home base in Kure. It is a moving story that recognizes the bravery of the men who served on the Yamato, and the magnitude of their loss, without rationalizing or wallowing in it.

Labels: anime reviews, history, japan, matsumoto, shinto, star trek, star wars, ww2

The interminably hospitalized or ailing characters in Air, Clannad and Kanon (both of which have two) remind me of the dying heroines in operas like La Boheme, who manage to expire while everybody's singing up a storm. "Mimi! Mimi!"

The "dying kid" theme shows up a lot in Japanese melodrama. A large part of it is dramatic convenience, but there's actually a medical reason behind it. Despite having the world's longest lifespans and some of the most modern medical technology in the world, Japan does very few cadaverous organ transplants.

Most transplants are live-donor organs such as kidneys, and weighted for population, Japan does less than a tenth as many as the U.S. Only eleven heart transplants were performed in 2008. This has led to "organ transplant tourism," such as the three yakuza lieutenants and a yakuza oyabun who received liver transplants at UCLA.

EU countries have long complained about this, and only U.S. hospitals still place Japanese nationals on heart transplant lists. Cadaverous organ transplantation was formally legalized in 1997. A bill passed the Lower House in June 2009 intended to bring Japan's medical ethics laws into line with World Health Organization guidelines.

This doesn't really "solve" the problem, as the definitions of "brain death" and the legal concept of "consent" remain far from settled in the public mind. As the Mainichi Shimbun opined about the bill:

It doesn't appear that thorough deliberation of the various proposals has taken place, nor does it seem that Diet members and the public have reached a real understanding of the issues.

What makes this all the more interesting is that abortion is legal in Japan and is little debated. Japan is one of the few developed countries besides the U.S. that has a death penalty and regularly uses it. It is also little debated.

When it comes to surveys showing how "atheistic" Japanese are, it should be remembered that a belief in a Judeo-Christian deity says little about people's beliefs when it comes to life-and-death matters such as transplantation and cancer. Japanese doctors still regularly (as high as 70 percent) hide diagnoses of cancer from patients.

They do so even in the face of studies showing that the decision to conceal the "true diagnosis was not related to the presence of psychiatric disorders in Japanese cancer patients" (informed patients had a lower rate). Doctors are acting upon religious and cultural beliefs, not science.

I believe that at the heart of the matter is the firm hold Buddhism still maintains over all aspects of funerary culture in Japan, including Obon, the second most important holiday after New Year's. (On the other hand, faux Christian marriage ceremonies have become more popular than the traditional Shinto rites.)

In fact, after I wrote the above paragraph, the aforementioned bill passed the Upper House (13 July 2009). This is a "sea change," explains Mari Yamaguchi of the AP, "because of Buddhist beliefs [that] consider the body sacred and reject its desecration."

So the languishing patient remains a very believable possibility in Japanese melodrama. Another good example is My Hime, in which Mai's little brother languishes away for the entire series before going to the U.S. for a heart transplant in the happy ending.

Labels: anime, buddhism, health care, japan, jun maeda, politics, religion, shinto, yakuza

Plastic Little has long suffered an undeserved reputation that its U.S. distributor has only encouraged. ADV's liner notes delightfully boast of its "graphic violence [and] gratuitous nudity." Okay, we'll stipulate that the nudity is indeed gratuitous (and at times just silly), but it's also innocuous. The violence is PG-13 at the worst. Not that Plastic Little is without its problems in other departments. But they're not enough to sink this ship.

Essentially, you've got two hours of plot distilled down to fifty minutes, as if they ran out of film stock halfway through the project. The result is a storyline (except for the aforementioned scenes of gratuitous nudity) stripped down to the bare bones: a microscopic setup, a few dabs of character development, and the action sequences. Another hour's worth of compelling questions are left unanswered: what Guizel is actually up to, besides being generally nasty; where all those ships came from in the big showdown; how a pet shop hunter came to be so heavily armored; whether or not Tita is a lesbian . . . .

Such trifling matters notwithstanding, Plastic Little exemplifies anime's unique ability to make the most of its female characters' sexuality, and at the same time present them as compelling and believable protagonists who can hold her own in any rough-and-tumble situation. As Antonia Levi observes, "[Women in anime] may be heroes or villains, saints or sinners, but they rarely blend into the background. And they rarely wear much in the way of clothing . . . . Men will watch because of the sex and women will watch because of the strength, or so the popular wisdom goes."

The popular wisdom is only half-right. Anime bucks the tried and true truism that girls will watch a movie about boys but boys won't watch a movie about girls--but for reasons more substantial than what in otaku-speak is euphemistically known as "fan service." When Captain Tita swings into action, it's no stretch of the imagination that her male crew willingly follows her into battle. And it's no stretch when she dukes it out with the bad guys and prevails. She is completely believable as a literal "leader of men," willing to act before it becomes necessary to react.

(Recall the rooftop standoff between Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich in In the Line of Fire and you can't help but cheer Tita's far more satisfying solution to the same dilemma.)

The paradoxical fact remains that in anime, particularly in action roles, female protagonists, far more so than their comparable Hollywood counterparts, do not rely "on the kindness of strangers" for their well-being. It's remarkably oxymoronic. Women in Japan pursuing a professional careers still have a hard row to hoe. Business is definitely a "man's world," the glass ceiling almost bulletproof. And the majority of married Japanese women with children drop out of the workforce to become housewives.

It sounds like a model neo-Victorian world. Well, not quite. Perhaps because Japan parted with its feudal past only a century and a half ago it has not fallen prey to the sloppy, wishful thinking that confuses equality with sameness, and sameness with the neuter gender, and thus expressions of femininity with powerlessness. To quote Levi:

Traditional Japanese women control the family budget, keep their husbands on strict allowances, determine most major purchases, and have the majority voice in how their children are reared and educated. Under some circumstances they not only keep their own [sur]name, but also bestow it on their husbands and children.

Levi points out that, in the standard Hollywood fantasy setup, the standard device is to get rid of the father. But in Japan, you get rid of the mother. Because the presence of a strong, responsible woman "would kill all the fun." Levi also observes that (to the extent that you lend credence to such things) Japanese girls score much higher on "self-esteem" scales than American girls, and muses that perhaps it is because "Japanese women derive considerable prestige from performing their traditional roles in a satisfactory way."

But what constitutes a "traditional role" points to more important differences between the superficially similar Victorian and Tokugawa-era social structures. A search through the historical antecedents reveals a rich repository of female role models that anime can draw upon. To begin at the beginning, Japan's creation deity, Amaterasu, is female. The miko, Shinto priestesses, are often cast as your all-purpose spiritual guides and ghostbusters (Inuyasha, Shrine of the Morning Mist, Kamichu!).

The historical record also reveals numerous examples of the female warrior, women such as Hangaku, Tomoe Gozen, and Masako Hojo, who were as fierce and competent on the battlefield as any man. Throughout the Tokugawa era, women of samurai lineage were trained in the martial arts, particularly in the use of the naginata, or halberd. Judo, archery, and kendo remain staples of the Japanese high school physical education curriculum for both sexes.

The only comparable European counterpart is Joan of Arc, an exception that proves the rule by its exceptionality. This may explain the trepidation with which Hollywood casts female action leads, in stark contrast to even low-budget Hong Kong action films. The last film actor to fill such a role convincingly was Linda Hamilton in Terminator II. Television has done better with Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. "Before Buffy," Hillary Frey argues, "the only women who kicked ass on [American] television did so metaphorically, in the courtrooms or in the ER."

And in an analysis of the two series, Salon writer Stephanie Zacharek, borrowing from Camille Paglia, points to "the identity of sex and power [and] the permeation of eroticism by aggression" in a dramatic arena in which "the masculine hurls itself at the feminine in an eternal circle of pursuit and flight." Zacharek concludes, "In this dynamic there's no such thing as the weaker sex."

Yet the physicality demanded by this "dynamic" continues to prove problematic. I'm a die-hard Buffy fan, but it still takes a lot of clever camera work to make Sarah Michelle Gellar look good when she's whupping the bad guys. It's hard to come up with a single Hollywood actress who could hold a candle to Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh, or Ziyi Zhang in that department.

Obviously, no anime character is checked by the limitations of an actor's physical training. But this is only half an excuse. Physical strength is a single facet of aggression. Gerard Jones sums up the anime melodrama heroine as follows: "[She] can be flirtatious, cute, embarrassed, silly, self-indulgent, and knowingly sexy. And if [she flies] into a savage rage against a villain [or boyfriend], it [is] likely to be a much more personal and more human reaction." Ryoko in Tenchi Muyo and Akane from Ranma 1/2 come to mind. Even the demure Yukino in His and Her Circumstances—you do not want to get this woman really pissed off.

More recently, Moribito and the Japanese version of Witchblade offer up adult women (rather than overgrown teenagers) as action heroes. In the former case, Balsa's compassion is not presented as a feminine impediment to her ability to fight, the Achilles heel that every villain predictably seizes upon. In the latter, even though Masane is sexualized in often eye-rolling ways, her switching in an eyeblink between "mom" and "superhero" does not strain belief in the slightest.

Denying to women the efficacy of affective as well as physical power are remnants of Victorianism, which, perversely combined with the more self-destructive trends in gender feminism, concluded that for women to achieve "equality" they must shed those feminine attributes that so easily give them power over men. Hollywood up to the early 1950s somehow escaped these influences, promoting actresses such as Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not), Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday), and Grace Kelly (Rear Window) who could be beautiful, sensual and tough as nails. Not to mention that Hollywood's first megastar, Mary Pickford, ran her own production company and was a founding partner of United Artists.

But over half a century on it can be argued that American popular entertainment has only recently again embraced the concept that beauty is not inimical to emotional or physical strength. Of course, a healthy libido has always been considered an asset for any man, real or fictional. The little girls who flocked to Britney Spears concerts and to Charlie's Angels movies, figured this out. And all the better that it shocks! shocks! their parents and moral guardians.

This dichotomy is obvious in the persona of Captain Janeway (Star Trek Voyager), repressed and dispassionate to the point of being sexless, ruling with all the rousing disposition of a 19th century schoolmarm. Her Captain Bligh demeanor should have gotten her shoved out an airlock shortly into the first season. Why, asks Stephanie Zacharek, in a similar vein,

is playing a depressive writer or an anti-death-penalty nun automatically considered superior to (or more difficult than) playing a kook (like Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby), a prostitute (like Jane Fonda in Klute), or a femme fatale (like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity)?

Compare Janeway to Major Kusanagi, the purposely dispassionate protagonist of Ghost in the Shell, whose smatterings of feelings you actually do care about. And when she tells her (male) subordinates to jump, you understand why they ask "How high?" on the way up, and don't take their eyes off her on the way down. In the Ghost in the Shell television series (Stand Along Complex), Kusanagi's abilities as a commander are even more pronounced, easily making her the most competent law enforcement officer of either sex on either side of the Pacific.

The wretched original English dub of Ghost in the Shell drives the point home: the only way most American producers know how to depict a "tough woman" is to turn her into a tough (foul-mouthed) guy. With a push-up bra. Minnie Driver's pitch-perfect voice-over of Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke is proof that it can be done right. Calm, cool, and scarily in control. U.S. distributors should watch, listen, and learn.

Ironically, Rick Berman went a long way to correcting his own mistake on Star Trek Voyager with Seven of Nine, who all but took over the series from the moment she was introduced. Not surprisingly, Seven and her celluloid sisters-in-spirit—Xena and Buffy—would be quite at home in anime.

Perhaps even more illustrative is Kumiko Yamaguchi in Gokusen (voiced by Risa Hayamizu). Yamaguchi is a freshly-minted and idealistic high school math teacher at an inner-city boy's high school, a stock character in television drama and comedy. The catch is that Yamaguchi is the scion of an established yakuza family. And, no, she's not the good girl running away from her past. She's going to run the "family business" and (often literally) pound an education into the heads of her juvenile deliquents. There's never any doubt, whether in the classroom or holding a tight rein on her own gang members, who's in charge. And her femininity is never in question. She can knock 'em dead in a kimono, not just with her fists.

American television does seem to be growing up faster than film. Chris Carter and Gillian Anderson created a breakthrough character (half of one of the great television duos of all time) in FBI agent Dana Scully. Joss Whedon and Sam Raimi paved the way with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena. Andrea Parker's underappreciated "Miss Parker" in Pretender redefined the bad-guy-worth-rooting-for in ways that have not been matched since. Andromeda delivered a two-for with Rommie (Lexa Doig) and Valentine (Lisa Ryder). Joss Whedon answered the call again with (the shamefully short-lived) Firefly, featuring American television's toughest girl-with-a-gun, Gina Torres as Zoe.

Over and over, action series provide the best role models. Amanda Tapping as Samantha Carter on Stargate. Jill Hennessy as medical examiner Jordan Cavanaugh and Jennifer Garner as superspy Sydney Bristow. Jolene Blalock (Enterprise), who stands out in her supporting role, is Seven redux, down to the body suit and the attitude. I was initially most encouraged by Hennessy, who at least initially was not compelled to apologize for the fact that, yes, she is an excessively gorgeous woman. Garner, in contrast, came across as excessively stoical (she's neither a Vulcan nor an android).

The contrast between Garner and Hennessy is illustrative. The argument can be made that Garner's Sydney Bristow started out working for a bunch of murderous conspirators, so it's no wonder that she should be a tad distant and humorless. But, then, being around someone who hates her job week after week isn't a whole lot of fun for the viewer, either. Here we get back to the either/or problem that so often plagues the female action lead: you can be one or the other, but not both. Yet the whole point of Captain Kirk's life (and Captain Picard's and Captain Archer's) was that he loved being a starship captain. There was never ever any conflict on that point.

Men have long been permitted to wallow in their eccentricities (or sexual peculiarities) without becoming any less acceptable in their roles, as CSI's quirky Gil Grissom (William L. Petersen) demonstrates, or Mel Gibson's borderline psychotic protrayal of Riggs in Lethal Weapon, or Tony Shalhoub playing a neurotic genius in Monk. For several seasons, Joss Whedon populated Buffy with the most interesting female characters ever on television, but the pickings are sparse. The unconventional, competent and relatively angst-free woman Hollywood still has a problem dealing with.

Stephanie Zacharek got it right when she wished Hollywood's veteran actresses "the chance to get ahold of something more valuable than your typical ho-hum actorly prestige: I wish them more opportunities to wear bad-girl lace, without having anyone hold it against them." Or as Rowan Pelling puts it, "Why can't we admire and applaud strong women who are calling the steps of the dance? The qualities of the femme fatale are no longer prized by Hollywood or the wider world."

With the the exception of Buffy and the Scoobies, lead female action roles remain mostly consigned to sidekicks (Emily Deschanel in Bones) or (even rarer) lone wolves. Perhaps leaders of other women (Charmed), but not leaders of men. Leading is a supporting role, as illustrated by Epatha Merkerson's supporting role in Law & Order, Tamara Taylor's supporting role in Bones, Lauren Holly's supporting role in NCIS.

There is no better illustration of this propensity than a 2003 episode of Enterprise ("Twilight"), in which not only does T'Pol give up command of the Enterprise to care for an ailing Captain Archer, but it is also strongly intimated that she was not really cut out to command a starship. Not like those manly Earth men. Talk about a woman's place being literally in the home. Back to the future, indeed.

So there's plenty of room for give and take on both sides. While Hollywood goes about rediscovering what it knew about women sixty years ago and subsequently has fogotten, Japanese society would greatly benefit from applying to daily life what its manga writers and anime directors have long been bringing to its silver screen dreams.

Labels: anime, buffy, deep thoughts, ghost in the shell, manga, sex, shinto, shirow, social studies, superhero, yakuza