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Jigoku Sensei Nube
The title Jigoku Sensei Nube (literally, Nube, the Teacher from Hell) certainly has more of a flourish than “Meisuke Nueno, Fifth-Grade Teacher at Domori Elementary School.” This particular anime, consisting of 48 episodes broadcast from 1996 to 1997, plus three movies and three OAV episodes, was based on a manga with artwork by Takeshi Okano and story by Sho Makura that ran in Shonen Jump from 1993 to 1999. Unfortunately, this classic comedy/supernatural series never traveled outside of Japan.
Meisuke wears a glove on one hand, to cover his oni no te (demon hand). As an exorcist, Meisuke had gotten into a battle with a demon, and the only way to defeat it was to take the demon into himself. The hand serves as a weapon against paranormal threats (although Meisuke often botches some of the lesser spells he tries in the school—such as the opening pages of the manga, in which he tries to exorcise a demon from a picture of Beethoven. I suspect that he sometimes loses these contests in part to inspire his fifth graders to keep trying).
He’s also married to a yukionna, named Yukime, who he rescued from a snowy mountain encounter with a hunter. She left the mountain, moved to the village of Domori, and found a job as an ice skating coach. This is a good example of the tenor of Jigoku Sensei Nube: some of the ghosts and demons are truly menacing and threatening, and others are cute or silly. Maybe it’s this dual attitude that kept the series from successfully traveling to the west. American ghost stories tend to be either menacing or silly; not both at once.
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Shoujo Kakumei Utena: The Black Rose story-arc
The television series Shojo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena), whose creators are collectively known as Be Papas, can be divided into three story-arcs. In the first 13 of the 39 episodes, the viewer learns the basics of Ootori Academy, its odd custom of dueling to “revolutionize the world,” and the various characters who make up the cast. For this chapter, we look at episodes 14 through 23, which form its own sub-plot, which happens to be a kind-of ghost story.
62. One Hundred for One
The major incident is shown at the beginning of the arc: a fire which claimed the lives of one hundred students. We never see them as spirits; we do, however, see their silhouettes, like crime scene chalk outlines, in the dueling arena, along with one hundred empty desks. As to why they died…
A student named Shouji Mikage introduces Utena (and us) to Nemuro Memorial Hall, where the fire occurred years ago. Mikage has an agenda: searching for “the power of Dios,” which he believes to be the key to immortality. At the moment, the power rests in Anthy Himemiya, the Rose Bride, who is “engaged” to Utena. Mikage is convinced that, to get to the power of Dios, Anthy must be destroyed, which means that Anthy’s protector Utena must be defeated in a duel. Toward that end, Mikage plays on the fears and doubts of various students, offering to resolve their fears by having them duel Utena. They all lose, of course, and ultimately Mikage has to take up the sword himself and go after Utena.
Before he can do so, we see in flashback what the fire was about. A research professor, named Nemuro, was hired from outside the Academy. He headed up a research team of one hundred students who seem to be searching for the key to immortality. Nemuro didn’t really care; cold and detached, he described himself as a robot. This changed, however, when he became fixated on Tokiko Chida, sent by the Board of Governors to inspect the research, and on her sickly younger brother Mamiya. Tempted into believing that time can be stopped, Nemuro’s optimism is jolted when he witnesses Tokiko being seduced by Akio, Anthy’s brother.[81] The next thing we see is the building going up in flames; during the flashback we are led to believe that Mamiya set the fire at Nemuro’s request. Later, we realize that Nemuro set it himself out of his sense of betrayal.
Although this isn’t a traditional Japanese ghost story, there are similarities, notably in the quintessentially Japanese theme that eternal life is a curse, and that ghosts remain miserable after life because they cannot change or grow without assistance.[82] At one point, Mamiya, noting that his sister Tokiko dries flowers to preserve them, wonders “if the flowers themselves are happy, being forced to live so long.” Akio also warns the viewer that, as long as anyone stays at Ootori Academy, “a person will never become an adult.”
This is taken to another level, becoming more than a metaphor, when we realize that the student Souji Mikage, who has been trying to remove Anthy as the Rose Bride, was actually Professor Nemuro. Having achieved immortality in the shape of a high school student, he can only hang onto it by living a life of illusions, one of which is that Mamiya started the fire and not he, and sending others to fight the duels he only fought as a last resort. Once he is defeated, both he and Nemuro Memorial Hall itself are history.
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Negima: Sayo Aizaka
The tragic nature of a ghost—static and unchanging, bound by the circumstances of its past—even comes into play, although in a surprisingly pleasant form, in Negima!, a popular anime based on an equally popular manga by Ken Akamatsu. Mingling aspects of Akamatsu’s successful “harem romance” manga Love Hina with bits of the Harry Potter story, Negima! tells of a ten year old British wizard, Negi Springfield, who must complete his training by going to Mahora Academy, an all-girl school in Japan, to teach junior-high English. In addition to the overabundance of “fan service,”[83] most of Negi’s students are also magical, and range from a robot to a ninja, a sorceress disguised as a vampire, and a ghost: Sayo Aizaka.
63. A Ghost in the Garden
There’s never been an adequate explanation at Mahora Academy of why Sayo Aizaka should be on the rolls for second year of middle school, but never shows up for class. Some say she was a transfer student who never left her old school. Others call her “Typo Girl” believing that a printing error keeps her name on the roster year after year.
The first hint of Sayo’s true condition is when we first “see” her in the manga: in the roster of Negi’s homeroom students, complete with photos. While all the other girls were photographed wearing the modern girls’ school uniform of white shirt, tie, and blazer, Sayo is the only one wearing an old-fashioned middie blouse. Under her picture is the cryptic statement: “1940—Don’t change her seating.” Things are different in the anime: from the first episode we see Sayo in crowd scenes, but she speaks to nobody and nobody speaks to her. It’s all a tease (and a tip of the hat to M. Night Shyamalan) that doesn’t get explained until much later.
We find out that 1940 was when she died, at age 15. According to her back story in the nineteenth episode of the anime (which isn’t shown in the manga), Sayo’s younger sister had planted a flower garden at Mahora Academy; she believed that their mother would come back to them if she planted a bed of yellow tsuwabuki flowers. However, as the “rising sun” flags and planes flying overhead remind the viewer, this flashback took place during World War 2. It wasn’t likely that either of their parents would come back from the war. Sayo, however, tried to protect the flowers during a violent thunderstorm and died.
Since then she’s been a jibakurei—a ghost who is attached to a particular place because of sudden or violent death. Still, she doesn’t exactly haunt the school; most students and faculty don’t even know she’s there, because she doesn’t possess the power to manifest. When we see her, six decades have taken their toll, and she’s completely forgotten why she became a jibakurei. Still, she seems quite happy just to watch the life of the schoolgirls around her.
At first only three students can see Sayo, and one of them does so as part of figuring out the mystery of her identity. Kazumi Asakura writes for the Mahora school newspaper and traces Sayo’s picture back to the years when she was alive. In the anime, the mention of a bed of tsuwabuki flowers triggers a memory, and Asakura dashes across campus to the ruins of an old chapel. There, instead of a bed of flowers, she and Sayo find that the tsuwabuki flowers have grown all over the courtyard. But Sayo finds something else. Her little sister had left a message in
the flowerbed asking that their mother return to them. For the first time, Sayo reads that the message was amended to ask that “big sister” also be returned. Faced with this reminder of her death, she loses her composure and breaks down sobbing among the flowers. In doing so, she becomes visible to Asakura, who’s tempted to photograph the ghost. However, she stops herself, saying “it wouldn’t be right.” Evangeline McDowell, a sorceress posing as a vampire who, on top of everything else, has a long-standing grudge against Negi’s father for imprisoning her in a child’s body, makes Sayo visible to the rest of the class. Rather than be frightened, the entire class rushes to befriend her. She was even able to lose her attachment to the school grounds and accompany the class in the anime on their field-trip to Kyoto—very unusual behavior for a jibakurei.
The third person who sees Sayo is Mana Tatsumiya, a miko (Shinto temple maiden) who almost exorcises Sayo. Thus each of these three have their own reasons that would allow them to perceive Sayo before she became generally visible.
The anime also establishes that Mahora Academy’s elderly Headmaster (and grandfather of one of Negi’s students), Konoe Konoemon, not only knew Sayo when she was alive but in his youth had a crush on her. We know this because he keeps tsuwabuki flowers in a vase on his desk.
Sayo’s manga persona at first is that of a lonely ghost, unseen by virtually everyone. She appears to Negi during a project on haunted houses, and is almost exorcised, except for the timely intervention of Negi and Kazumi. After that, when she is not only rescued but befriended, she in turn becomes much more friendly.
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Shaman King—Helpful School Ghosts
The hero of Hiroyuki Takei’s successful Shonen Jump manga series (and its animated version), Yoh Asakura, is a student in his first year of middle school (the American seventh grade). Actually, he’s not much of a student, and gives the appearance of being a total slacker. However, because he has the family talent of communing with ghosts, he has cultivated a stable of school spirits to do the work for him.
The first ghost is Suzuki, who claims that the only skill he had was in taking tests. Described as the smartest kid in class, Suzuki nevertheless committed suicide five years earlier to escape ijime.
The word is translated as “bullying” and sometimes as “hazing,” but takes on a very different meaning in Japan. A western bully would typically be an overbearing kid with one or two hangers-on, threatening physically weaker kids for money or favors. Harry Potter’s nemesis cousin Dudley Dursley fits this pattern, especially in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which gives him a mini-gang.
In Japanese schools, the size of the bullying group is larger, sometimes pitting one student against the rest of the class; the schools (trying to save face) usually choose not to notice even when the bullying gets to be too extreme; and (in a perverse endorsement of the images of heroes in manga and anime) those who are bullied are expected to grow out of it or fight back as a part of growing up.[84]
Some students cannot and do not fight back, and a few ijime-related suicides hit the newspapers every year.[85] T. R. Reid, whose family lived in Tokyo for years while he was the Asian Bureau chief for the Washington Post, noted a ripple effect connected with these suicides:
There have been about a dozen such suicides annually. Many of the victims leave behind farewell letters or diaries; they are painful, indeed shattering, to read, filled with details about the fear, shame, and despair the child felt after being branded the outsider. To make things worse… a case of teen suicide is frequently followed, a day or two later, by another suicide by another victim of ijime, often way off in a different corner of the country. It’s as if these poor children, feeling hopeless because they are outside the group, suddenly find a group they can be admitted to—the group of suicide victims.[86]
Yoh is at least respectful toward Suzuki’s ghost, even if he does seem to exploit him.
For physical education, Yoh lets himself be possessed by the ghost of Kobayashi, the former captain of the track team. Unfortunately, Kobayashi was hit by a motorcycle during a race.
Neither brains nor athletics would help in the arts, and two ghosts aid Yoh in this area. Ashida was a member of the Visual Arts Club and an aspiring manga artist; unfortunately, he was so into manga that he stayed up for two weeks with no sleep working on one of his creations, and died of exhaustion. Finally there’s the pianist known only as Noriko (unlike her ghostly male counterparts, she doesn’t even rate a last name in a society that places the family name first; thus is male chauvinism taught at an early age in Japan). She grew ill and died just before she was supposed to give a concert.
All four are thus the kind of ghosts that legend would expect to haunt a school. Suzuki fits the image of the suicide escaping this world for the next, while still full of regrets and unfulfilled plans. The others were actually cut down in the middle of what they loved doing, and are classic cases of ghosts with unfinished business. Once they do what they wanted to do (run in a track meet, complete a manga, play a recital), they ought to have found peace and Become One with the Cosmos. However, it doesn’t always work that way, as the next example shows.
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Here is Greenwood, episode 4: “Mitsuru and the Ghost: The Phantom of Greenwood”
This 1992 entry, the fourth in a series of six OAVs, may be ghostly, but also continues in the comedic vein of the series, based on a manga by Yukie Nasu serialized in the shojo manga magazine Hana to Yume. It’s the tale of Kazuya Hasukawa, a hapless teen who has a deep crush on a young woman; when that woman gets married to Kazuya’s older brother, he decides that he can’t live in the same house with his brother’s new bride, and heads off to Ryoukuto High School, his brother’s prestigious alma mater, where the older brother is employed, and which has a dormitory known as Greenwood. Here he meets the requisite group of wacky characters, including a student so in love with his motorcycle that he carries it up and down the stairs to his room rather than leave it outside, a baleful Christian evangelist, Kazuya’s roommate Shun who wears his hair long and acts like a girl, Student Council President Shinobu Tezuka, and Shinobu’s roommate and Greenwood dorm leader Mitsuru Ikeda.[87] Although the manga and its anime focus on Kazuya, in one episode Mitsuru ends up being haunted.
64. One Last Thing to Do
During a thunderstorm, the Greenwood dorm momentarily loses electricity. When the lights come on, the residents of Greenwood see the classic glowing demonic yuurei ghost-woman. But that’s not the real Misako, who turns out to be a pleasant little blonde female “wandering ghost” in a high school uniform, age 16 at the time of her death. Unlike the vengeful woman spirits like Oiwa (which she disguised herself as because she thought that’s what was expected), she claims she has no idea why she’s still on earth: “I cannot rest until my soul is cleared of all hatred and regrets. I’m not sure when that’s gonna be…”. Still, she announces her intention to haunt Mitsuru.
Everyone else in the dorm think it’s cool that they get a young and pretty girl ghost; Mitsuru and Shinobu, of course, think otherwise.[88] The older woman who supervises the dorm seems to take it in stride: “I’ve seen lots of ghosts here but I’ve yet to see one this lively.” This is our first real indication of psychic activity at Greenwood Dorm; other examples come quickly. Misako gets upset and cries when Mitsuru yells at her (which he does a lot) and the results are akin to an earthquake.
Rumors fly about Misako: she was a suicide, she had an affair in middle school with Mitsuru, she carried his unborn child, she was his sister… Misako finally tells the truth to the matron: she’d been in girls’ schools all her life, she fantasized about having a boyfriend, and then she got hit by a truck. She wanted to act out her romantic fantasy, and picked Mitsuru at random because of his good looks. That’s all. Playing house (or “dorm”) with Mitsuru isn’t enough to satisfy her; she wants to kiss him, but has to possess someone else’s body to do it. Of course, none of the boys in the dorm want to lend themselves out so that
she can kiss Mitsuru. Misako ends up possessing a stray cat, kissing Mitsuru, and leaving.
Usually, that would be the end of the story: the ghost has satisfied her earthly curiosity, achieved what she wanted to do, and departed to Become One with the Cosmos. Not Misako: she returns declaring that “Once I kissed Ikeda-san, I became even more reluctant to leave this world.” She even brings other wandering teenaged girl ghosts to Greenwood, all of whom want to experience boys, and end up choosing them at random.
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The episode starts with a girl in a high school uniform hovering yards in the air above Greenwood. This convention in anime and manga usually means one of three things: that the person is (a) an alien, (b) an esper (someone possessing psychic powers), or (c) a spirit. The title tells the viewer up-front which one she is.
This is one of the rare cases of Japanese ghosts that take place in the winter but does not involve a yukionna. (Many Japanese ghost stories, as we’ve seen, look to a different part of the calendar: summer.) We realize it’s winter when we see Kazuya and Shun reading under a kotatsu: the short, padded table with a heating element underneath that is unlike any kind of western furniture, simultaneously providing a heat source (while conserving resources) and fostering camaraderie. As time passes, the branches of the trees near the dorm grow bare. In the end we actually see it snow.
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65. School Spirit
There are two reasons why “The Never-Ending Story,” one installment of the anime OAV Sentimental Journey, is unique among other ghostly anime: it has a non-human narrator, and it’s based not on a novel or a manga, but on a dating simulation computer game.
The dating sim, titled Sentimental Graffiti, appeared in 1998, inspired by the success of another such computer game, Tokimeki Memorial.[89] That same year, the Sunrise anime studio brought out a twelve-episode series of romantic short stories: each one unrelated to the others, telling of, as the title says, “twelve girls in twelve cities.” They range in type from a guitarist in a rock band who refuses to write love songs, to the daughter of a kimono-maker who’s expected to inherit the family business. The tenth installment, “The Never-Ending Journey,” features Emiru Nagakura, who lives in Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture, north of Tokyo.
A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga Page 18
