EISHI
OKT
SO
KU Y B
TION A
TRSU
LL I,
OOKS BEGA
LL
VI ©
Wait, are trains moé too?
THE MOE
ŚTUDIES RESEARCH CIRCLE
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142
PG: Would you say that this response
is distinct from being impressed by a
building or factory?
HH: There is a feeling of veneration
for massive things, but this isn’t
necessarily moé. For example, one
might feel a sense of awe when
C
standing in front of a life-sized
N
model of a robot from the anime
OOKS, I
Mobile Suit Gundam, but one might
SAI B
also be moved by looking at a small
© SAN
fi gurine of a bishojo. But it is the
world or story of the object in front
of you that moves you, not the ob-
ject itself. So, to return to my earlier
example, moé does not mean being
moved by the physical presence of a
train, but rather being moved by the
imagined character of the train. Either
er
way the person is responding to a non-
n-
: moé?
Afghanistan
human object, but they are responding
to different things.
PG: Do you think that the more realistic a character, the less it elicits a moé response?
HH: I believe it’s possible to have moé feelings toward realistically drawn or depicted characters, but this goes unnoticed.
Characters like those from the anime series Lucky Star are for moé beginners because aspects of character design and behavior are obviously designed to be cute and elicit a response from viewers. In fact, if you look at the information provided by the designer in the liner notes of the DVD, you will see that so-called moé elements ( moé yoso) are clearly defi ned. It is teaching the viewer how to read aspects of cuteness in character design. On the other hand, literary novelists such as Dazai Osamu or serious fi lmmakers such as Oshii Mamoru hide the moé elements HIGASHIMURA HIKARU
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143
of characters deep down. It is not expressed on the surface. In these kinds of works, readers or viewers have to discover the moé elements by reading into the characters, story, and situation.
The process is intensive in terms of cognitive labor, thus not many people are willing to do it.
PG: Why did you decide to study moé?
HH: By studying moé I can comprehend the nature of my community and explain it to others, which might lead to greater understanding and tolerance. Because moé is not explained well, it remains unfamiliar and strange to people. As a general rule, people fear the unknown, which is why moé fans are often regarded as somehow perverse. It is necessary to defi ne and explain aspects of otaku culture such as moé. We need to explain to others that there is nothing to fear—we just do things a little differently.
PG: Some people think that moé is dangerous because it shows an inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Do you agree?
HH: No, I don’t agree at all with that stereotype. On the contrary, the deeper you pursue moé, the more you understand that it is about fi ction. The character is fi ctional—something that exists in the realm of ideas. I don’t think that there is any danger from otaku, however obsessive they may be, because they understand that it is the fi ction of the character they fi nd attractive.
PG: What do you think is the future of moé?
HH: The moé boom ended in about 2009, but the number of people who belong to the moé community remains the same. There are still plenty of manga, anime, and games out there, and fans have a built-in support system for their activities through university clubs and fan events. They can also come to Akihabara to immerse themselves in the moé world. I think that in the future we will see more and more people responding affectionately to fi ctional characters. But even in the best-case scenario, otaku will never become mainstream. Moé will always be a subculture.
THE MOE
ŚTUDIES RESEARCH CIRCLE
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144
Interview with
Soda Mitsuru
URUST
MI
DAO SS
OF
Soda Mitsuru, born in 1984, is
a fan of manga, anime, and
games who has spent much of
Y
his adult life studying moé. He has a
SY SET
PhD in library science and specializes
URO C
in planning and organizing museum
RUUSITI
events. He is the author of an upcom-
MMADA
ing book on moé, but publishes most
OSOF SO
of his work in the form of fanzines.
OH OPHAR
A quiet and unassuming man, Soda
OGTOOT
introduces himself as the head of the
PH
The Philomoé Association ( Hogaku
kyokai).* In this interview Soda makes
important connections between bish-
ojo media (media featuring cute girl
characters) and shojo manga (manga
for young girls).
* Visit
http://www.geocities.jp/mhpcsouda/
hougaku-index.htm
O
ZANO
IAN LR
Y AD
H B
APRG
TOOHP
The Comic Market
SODA MITSURU
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145
The
Philomoé Association
Discours de la moéthode
Patrick W. Galbraith (PG): When did
did
you start writing about moé?
Soda Mitsuru (SM): I wrote my un-
n-
dergraduate thesis on moé in 2006.
.
Around the middle of 2005, I read
every magazine article I could fi nd
d
with the word moé in it—about fi fty
ty
or sixty articles in total. Because
of the lack of a clear defi nition,
everybody was talking about dif-
ferent things, so I decided to get
some concrete data. I started
with the university clubs that
The S
were coming to Tokyo’s Comic
oul Taker
Market, Japan’s largest gathering for
for
producers of fanzines. I distributed about fi ve hundred TD
O., L
questionnaires and received three hundred responses. There were twenty questions, including things like, “What is moé to TION C
you?” “Where did you fi rst hear about moé?” “Can you feel moé for RODUC
O P
a real person?” I summarized these results in my thesis and in NOKU
my own fanzines, which I then distributed at the Comic Market.
STA
© T
PG: When did you fi rst notice the word moé becoming more widely used?
SM: I remember a commercial for the anime The Soul Taker (2001), where voice actress Momoi Halko, who plays one of the characters, says “moé moé.” [See Momoi Halko, page 72.] It was THE PHILOMOE
ÁSSOCIATION
MOE_16_144-151.indd 145
1
3/2/14 10:36 AM
146
probably after that time that the
term spread. Right around then,
TD.
the company Pony Canyon started
d
O., L
producing anime under the name
CLA
Master of Entertainment, or, for
ISU
I VA
short, “m.o.e.”
NDA B /
RISE
PG: Are you personally into moé
NU
media?
TD / S
SM: Yes. Like many of my gen-
O., L
U C
eration, I was into anime series
TSO
such as Martian Successor
© S
Nadesico (1996–1997) and Gun-
slinger Girl (2003–2004). Of par-
/YC
ticular importance to me was the
ENG A
anime Noir (2001). In high school,
G
ISINT
I had severe asthma and was frail
R
VED
and weak. I would wake up around
AOIK TD.
two o’clock every morning, feeling
OM Y CO., L
as if I was suffocating. I’d watch
/
D
TION
anime until I was calm enough to
A
ECOR
OR
R
P
sleep again. Noir was airing then,
NG
CORO
and I honestly feel like it saved my
Y
C. / KIN
OK T C I
life. During my most intense moé
V
E
T
B
©
XE
period I was
To
T p: Gundam S
G
d
Seed
d; b
bottom
tt
:
head over
Martian Successor Nadesico
C.N
heels in love
K, I
with the character Cagalli from the anime
WORTE
series Gundam Seed (2002–2003). I kept an
ION NS
online diary called “Cagalli and Me.” This
LEVI
is an embarrassing confession, but once,
JI TEU
while watching the show, I got so excited
C / FN
that I fell over and smacked my head
SAQL I
against the wall.
OUL
Gunslinger Girl: Henrietta
© MARVE
SODA MITSURU
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147
PG: But your fanzines have always been informational?
SM: Yes. I was always more interested in informational fanzines rather than those that dealt in fan fi ction or art. I fi rst found out about the world of fanzines from small events that were held in my hometown in Tochigi Prefecture, but most of the participants were girls and the events tended to be dominated by fanzines about boys’ love. My brother and I went to the Comic Market for the fi rst time in 1996. I was in middle school then, and was inspired by all the informational fanzines about the Gundam franchise. From there I gradually started producing my own fanzines. I wanted to go to university in Tokyo so that I could par-
.
ticipate in the Comic Market.
C
, INT
INMEN
PG: How did you decide to write fanzines about moé?
TA
ER
SM: Well, there were already so many informational fanzines on T
ENR
the Gundam franchise by that point that I didn’t see what I could OTIC V
add. Moé was a buzzword at the time
m ,
e
,
©
so I thought that I could write about
out
that instead. I had a friend who
went to the University of Tokyo, and
nd
when I was visiting him I found out
ut
about there was an otaku group that
hat
was researching maids, so I joined
d
them. We were all university stu-
dents learning philosophy and the-
e-
ory, and we decided to apply this
to moé as a kind of parody. For ex-
ample, we changed Descartes’ Dis--
cours de la méthode into Discours de la moéthode, making his discourse
on method into our discourse
on moé. We called ourselves the
Hogaku kyokai, or in English, The
Philomoé Association. The roots
of the word “philosophy” are the Noir : “It saved my life”
Noir
y
THE PHILOMOE
ÁSSOCIATION
MOE_16_144-151.indd 147
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148
Greek words philos, “to love,” and
nd
sophia, “wisdom,” so we switched
ed
sophia for moé, making us an
association for the love of moé.
NWOLGC
PG: Were you serious about
MNO
studying moé?
M
RA
SM: Yes, I was serious about it.
Y B
PH
People were saying that moé
RAG
was just about cute girl char-
TOO
PH
acters, which made me a little
mad. I wanted to explain what
anime meant to me, using the
seriousness of academia to
counter the trivialization of
Maids: subject of researc
moé by critics.
h
PG: What does the word moé mean to you?
SM: First, moé is the expression of feeling for fi ctional characters.
Second, moé can mean the production of such expression—the creation of those fi ctional characters by the production companies. Third, there is the more political use of moé when it’s used to describe the attention paid to anime outside of Japan. So you can talk about moé as a feeling, a market, or a political stance toward the spread of Japanese media in the world. All three of these ways of talking about moé were there in the articles I researched as a student in 2005. It is my position that we need to separate these three things and talk about each on its own terms if we are going to make any progress in the discussion about moé.
PG: Do you think there is a certain character type that is moé?
SM: The specifi c triggers of moé are all fads. In the 1990s, illustrations of bishojo became more and more detailed, vivid, and beautiful. This was especially pronounced in bishojo games, which SODA MITSURU
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149
use fewer images than animation and have to make each one detailed and appealing. But whatever we might say about the things that these images of bishojo share, none of them are essentially moé. They are just specifi c instances of things that triggered moé at one particular time.
What I think is important about bishojo games is that they emphasize characters, both in terms of illustrations and stories, and the players interact with these characters and develop feelings for them. If moé is a feeling for characters, then the more characters are emphasized the greater the chance of moé. So, I am less interested in the specifi cs of character design than in how we inter
act with characters. As I see it, the strategy of evoking emotional responses in readers was established in shojo manga. For example, in shojo manga, artists give the characters larger eyes, because this makes them cuter and more expressive. In shojo manga, readers spend more time getting to know characters in everyday situations, which increases empathy.
Finally, artists will sometimes write out the character’s thoughts, allowing the reader to access them.
.C
In all these ways, shojo manga
INA
heightens the emotional response
of the reader. This strategy was
SHUEISH©
transferred from shojo manga to
bishojo manga, anime, and games.
If you look at the eyes of bishojo
characters, for example, they are
huge. You don’t see this much in
shonen media (media for boys); the
large eyes are obviously inherited
from shojo manga. In bishojo games, players spend long hours interacting with characters, usually simu-
lating a romantic relationship, so
producers put great emphasis on
character design, and consumers
Shojo
Sh j manga: lar
l
ge eyes
THE PHILOMOE
ÁSSOCIATION
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150
YA
THWAHN
JOH©
feel great empathy with the char-
acter—so much so that they can
be moved to tears. [See Maeda Jun,
page 98.]
PG: So you would not agree that
specifi c elements of character
design are more or less moé? [For
more on this approach, see Azuma
Hiroki, page 170.]
SM: I don’t think that moé is a mat-
ter of character design, though it is
easy to get that impression because
of the prevalence of bishojo media.
In the late 1990s, bishojo manga,
anime, and games were on the rise.
In bishojo games, which feature
Pigtails and glasses: moé?
numerous cute girls that the player
can interact with, you will often
SODA MITSURU
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151
fi nd that visual elements are used to differentiate characters.
Certain designs—for example, blonde with pigtails or black hair with glasses—are popular and people will buy games featuring such characters. It is easy to get the impression that the character designs or even specifi c elements such as pigtails or glasses are moé in and of themselves, but that would be a mistake. If we return to the three ways to approach moé that I laid out before, you will see that character design focuses on production and market, not on inspiring moé as a feeling. There is no guarantee that a character in glasses will inspire moé in the player.
The Moé Manifesto Page 13
