Supernatural bedfellows continue to be seen in anime, and are quite a diverse lot. They include Lum, the alien girl of Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura (1981), who’s so full of electricity that her boyfriend Ataru has to wear an insulated rubber suit to go to bed with her. Another is Chihaya, the effeminate “angel” sent to Earth to observe human behavior in Earthian (1989). In the series Chihaya sleeps with his partner-angel, but also lusts after an angel turned human rock singer, and a cybernetic “angel” developed by a mad scientist. All three of the objects of his affection are male, but he is never censured for this. Miko Mido, the sexual ninja in the La Blue Girl (1992) series of H-anime, falls into this category as well, by virtue of her father having been a demon. And the anime Doomed Megalopolis (1991) has several non-human close encounters, including Yukari (raped by a demon) and Keiko (a miko, or Shinto priestess, who defeats the demon by becoming Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, and offering herself to the demon).
The Third Sex—Futanari
There’s a unique sub-genre of pornographic anime and manga featuring futanari—hermaphroditic characters with pronounced breasts, rounded feminine hips, long hair, and both male and female genitals. Unlike the “she-males” who tend to be feminized males, futanari are phallic females. These characters usually have feminine names and traits, and the stories tend to hit specific plot-points that suggest that it’s designed to meet the specific needs of a specific audience.
The stories are, more often than not, dojinshi created by amateurs. This doesn’t mean that they’re amateurish; much of the artwork is of professional quality. Again, the variety of stories is created by using humor (including parodies of mainstream manga), horror, or romantic sentimentality. However, almost all of the characters are principally female in appearance, with long hair, curvaceous figures, and huge erections. I think that this is for a reason, and it points to the audience that gave rise to futa stories.
One manga, titled Futagami by Balloon Club, focuses on a futanari named Megami (a very loaded name, since “gami” can be a variant of “kami” and is written with the same Chinese character as “spirit” or “god”). In this story, Megami and other futa live on a university campus in a secluded futa-only residence called “Angel Dorm”; later, it’s revealed to be a “safe house,” designed by another faculty futa who knew that the hermaphrodites were likely to get carried away by their own sexuality and designed the dorm to be a prison if necessary. This in fact happens when Megami declares herself the prophetess of a cult of pleasure and encourages everyone in the safe house to indulge themselves to the fullest with each other. The story ends with the exterior of the dorm, which seems ordinary but contains a sexual obsession that has crossed into an orgy of madness.
In another story, Kopipe1 by A-ta Kawaraya, body parts literally appear regardless of the subject’s original gender and age. Capricious changes of nature are a comedy of errors, even if they don’t seem funny to the people undergoing these changes.
A third story, written by Chunrouzan and titled “Sex Education,” offers the outrageous thesis that girls are being turned into futa by the Japanese government, in response to some unnamed crisis. One of the most elaborate variations on this sub-theme is the multi-volume dojinshi Dulce Report by Behind Moon. The transformation of male or female characters into futa takes place in a backstory that’s a mishmash of genetic mutation, crop circles, and something called Project Eden. This seems meant to evoke The X-Files television series but serves mainly as a backdrop for two Japanese adolescent futa, Momoe and Aoi, who both started the story as a male and a female respectively, and their declarations of love and orgasm. A typical aspect of the futa sub-genre: the more futa sex one has, the larger one’s erection gets. Three feet is not an uncommon length.
At one point, a character in Dulce Report converses with a disembodied, possibly alien, voice. On the page, she seems to be addressing her erection as “Master.” Believe it or not, this is a significant clue to understanding the entire sub-genre.
Despite living in a culture that provides a context in which family, friends, and strangers can see each other partially undressed if not naked, I imagine that adolescence is still a trying time for any Japanese youth going through it. Parts of one’s body, which have behaved predictably for a lifetime, suddenly seem to have a will of their own. Although the male suffers more than the female from this kind of physical capriciousness, there has to be some comfort for the boys in the belief that females suffer the same kinds of problems—if only in media. So young Japanese males (of whatever age, whether or not they’re old enough legally to read these manga), who find their penises suddenly acting as if with a mind of their own, can at least take comfort in the mediated suggestion that girls have the same or similar problems. In adolescence both genders can be hormonally pulled toward questionable (which is to say, incestuous and/or same-sex) behavior but are also told to avoid these behaviors if they want to fit into society. This, after all, is the purpose of socialization and the particular genius of pop culture media. Futanari pornography is a minor sub-genre in numbers only; its function is as orthodox as mainstream anime and manga.
This is an aspect of Japanese pop culture that needs further research and consideration. It’s also an area that cannot possibly be illustrated in a book for a general audience.
1. Pronounced “ko-pi-pe,” as in “copy/paste”—a Japanese slang term based on English Word processing commands. It’s a disparaging term for block-copied text.
Enough of the non-human (for now). Human sexual relations are complicated enough as they are, as shown in this story from the Uji Shui Monogatari (A Later Collection of Uji Tales), dating from the early thirteenth century.8 This is the story of a monk named Zoyo, who didn’t even try to live an ascetic life. There always seemed to be a party in his quarters. Salesmen of anything and everything sought him out, since he paid the asking price without question. Zoyo was very much involved with earthly pleasures.
This included pleasures of the flesh. One time he saw a young boy dancing at a festival, and quickly fell in love with him. He repeatedly asked the dancer to become a monk. At first the boy refused, saying “I’d rather stay as I am for awhile.” Ultimately, however, he agreed, becoming Zoyo’s acolyte and bed partner.
One day in the following spring, Zoyo asked the boy to try on his old dancing costume. The clothes still fit him perfectly, and Zoyo asked the boy to perform the hashirite dance. But the boy had forgotten all the steps to that dance. He tried a few steps of the katasawara dance instead. As he awkwardly did so, Zoyo let out a howl of anguish. He realized that, by hounding the boy into becoming an acolyte instead of a dancer, he had lost that which attracted him in the first place. “Why did I ever make a monk of you?” he lamented.
By now the boy was crying too. “I told you to wait!”9 The story of Zoyo is another case in which a monk has sex with a young boy, but that in itself isn’t the problem. Zoyo forced the boy to change from one kind of life to another, and in doing so lost the very love he was trying to save. He may even have kept the boy on as a sex partner after that realization, but surely any joy in the encounter was now tinged with sadness.
In the 1590s the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi granted an audience to a Portuguese Jesuit monk named Coelho, and asked several revealing questions about Christian behavior.10 Sex, or specifically monogamy, was a contentious issue; it was not unusual for upper-class Japanese men to turn to concubines, or even to young boys, as sex partners over and above their wives. The Jesuits could not condone these practices, while the Japanese elite found monogamy an alien concept. (The lower classes, as was the case elsewhere around the world, were seldom polygamous, simply because they couldn’t afford it.)
Of course, Buddhist monks traditionally practiced celibacy, and some still do, though in modern times most sects have interpreted the precept not to live an unchaste life to allow for monogamous marriage. Other monks were less scrupulous: the case of Ikkyu Sojun (1394–1481) comes to m
ind. Ikkyu was of the extreme position of some old Zen masters that, having experienced enlightenment, they became laws unto themselves. At least Ikkyu wasn’t entirely self-indulgent; he left behind some wonderfully autobiographical verse, especially poems celebrating his love affair (begun when he was in his seventies) with Mori, a blind prostitute more than fifty years his junior. In any event, celibacy has seldom been a realistic option in Japan, for the clergy or anyone else.
We could discuss the issue of sex in the pop cultures of Japan and the United States for days, and still never reach a conclusion, but one point I want to make is that the quantity of sexual content (or absence thereof) is not a reasonable yardstick for rating a culture. Some conservative American politicians think that there is a virtue in eliminating sex from pop culture altogether. They blame a host of social ills on too much frankness. Actually, if anything, we’re far less frank than Japan, in whose pop culture nudity and sex are much more common, yet whose crime rate is microscopic compared to that of the United States. Pop culture in the United States is coy about sex, alluding more often than showing, and some of this coyness crosses the line into sleazy suggestion. It could be argued that the smutty jokes of a Married . . . With Children or a radio drive-time shock-jock like Howard Stern would do our children more harm than the flat-out and funny frontal nudity of a Ranma 1/2.
Having said that, there is an entire sexual subgenre of anime in which you get the old in-out, but usually quite a bit more besides. Japanese pornographer Oniroku Dan, who specialized in sadomasochistic bondage stories, said that a storyteller can’t just keep repeating the same story over and over again: “Ordinary sex episodes would be too repetitive. Like (pornographic) photographers, manga artists must pander to the market by coming up with sensational subject matter.”11 The very fact that the public wants to see something a bit different the next time has pushed almost all Japanese pornographers, including producers of H-anime, to be more creative, keep up the interest level, and produce porno that isn’t just porno.
Variation One: Humor
How does an author or artist or animator provide variety? With humor, for one thing, as shunga prints have done for centuries. There are a couple of delightful hentai OAVs that are parodies of the 1990 sword-and-sorcery OAV series Record of Lodoss War.12 At the end of that series, we see the human knight Parn and the elf Deedlit ride off together, presumably to begin the ultimate mixed marriage. But what if it really happened? The 1995 Elven Bride series of OAVs tries to answer that question.
The first tape starts at the wedding; an odd wedding, since no guests have shown up. There are prejudicial feelings about this marriage from both the human and the non-human families. The newlyweds, however, believe that acceptance will come in time; they’re more focused on the honeymoon. But when it comes down to it, they can’t do it. Human and elfin physiology doesn’t quite match up, but is Kenji, the newlywed hubby, discouraged? No; he undertakes a heroic quest for the ultimate lubricant. His bride, Milfa, stays home and does housewifely things, even though the village children taunt her, she is charged triple price for food—when she’s allowed to buy food at all—and suffers other discriminatory indignities.
Kenji succeeds at his quest, even though he has to journey to Ygdrassil, the world-tree of Norse mythology, and has a brief romantic encounter with a harpy. However, he does it to obtain the sought-after lubricant, so in a sense he wasn’t being unfaithful.13 Meanwhile, Milfa has been enduring the taunts of the townspeople when one of them, whose cart is pulled by a two-headed hydra, loses control. The hydra rampages through town and is about to trample some children when Milfa magically saves them. At this moment, Kenji returns and subdues the hydra. That evening, with the hydra parked in the garage (!), the couple finds that the children have secretly but contritely left gifts of food on their doorstep. They recognized Milfa’s selfless spirit in protecting them at the risk of her own life. So, between acceptance into the community and the arrival of the lubricant (supplemented by a couple of alternate positions), this story definitely has a happy ending.
The second episode in the set shows that there are still some problems in the bedroom, and Milfa is recommended to a gynecologist. This doctor happens to be a bit of a pervert, but before he can work his will on Milfa, she’s rescued not only by Kenji and a helpful female member of his family, but also by the other patients in the doctor’s waiting room. And, given that the other women range from hobbits to werewolves and all are magical to some extent, this is one group of patients you don’t want to upset. Sisterhood is indeed powerful.
Milfa, however, apparently is not. Milfa is an elf, a magical being, but chooses not to act like one. Yes, Deedlit, her model, is victimized and almost sacrificed during the OAV series, but why wouldn’t Milfa magically strike back at the townspeople who discriminated against her or the doctor who tried to molest her? Two reasons come to mind. One is the desire to paint Milfa as the stereotypical submissive virginal Japanese female. But this works only up to a point; she does use her magic in order to rescue the children from the hydra. This points to the second reason: wa. Keiji and Milfa have settled down to live in this village, and the village serves as a second family. Preserving harmony is more important than magically zapping someone to punish a real or perceived slight. Milfa suffers in silence, believing that the villagers’ attitudes can—and ultimately will—change.
The 1994 anime Venus 5 is nothing less than a pornographic parody of Sailor Moon. Earth is falling prey to the Inma, a race of demonic beings led by a very impressive hermaphrodite. Once again, as in Sailor Moon (or a dozen other crime/alien-fighting science-team shows), five schoolgirls are needed to save the day. They’re superpowered, but don’t know it yet. The one who has to round them up and instruct them is a cat. Unlike Sailor Moon’s Luna, the cat in question here is a filthy (in every sense of that word) old tomcat. The girls are revealed by glowing astrological signs. Similar signs appeared in Sailor Moon on the foreheads of the Sailors in the “third eye” location, but in Venus 5 they appear on rather more intimate parts of the anatomy: a good excuse for a shower scene. In any event, just as having seen Record of Lodoss War made the Elven Bride tapes funnier, Venus 5 is funny to the extent that the viewer notes the Sailor Moon jokes.
The Third Eye
Here again we owe a tip of the hat to Dr. Osamu Tezuka, and in this case, his 1974 manga series Mitsume ga Toru (The Three-Eyed One), about a student from an alien race who has a third eye in his forehead, in the spot defined in esoteric yoga as the sixth chakra, the seat of enlightenment. If the third eye is covered, he’s a drooling idiot; when the eye is exposed, he’s an evil genius.
Since then, there have been countless manga and anime examples of third eyes, both literal (3x3 Eyes) and symbolic (such as the crescent on Luna’s forehead and the tiaras of the Sailor Senshi in Sailor Moon). Belldandy and her sisters from Kosuke Fujishima’s Oh My Goddess! have markings resembling third eyes, denoting their status as systems operators for the heavenly computer Ygdrassil. In the Tenchi Muyo universe, Jurai Princess Sasami has such a mark on her forehead, denoting her connection to the guiding spirit Tsunami, who revived Sasami after a fatal accident. And in Please Save My Earth, Mokuren has four dots on her forehead in the shape of a diamond; this symbolizes her powers as a Kiches of the goddess Sarjalin and her ability to commune with plants and animals. Mokuren is reborn as Alice Sakaguchi, but Alice is reluctant to face this until a school field trip to Kyoto. When she faints, the dots appear on her forehead, and all the plants in the park burst into unseasonable bloom.
The Frantic, Frustrated, and Female (1994) tapes don’t have to resort to parody for humor; just to absurdity. The stories all revolve around the plight of one girl who, regardless of sexual stimulation, is unable to reach orgasm. Another girl takes this as a personal challenge: she, the motorcycle-riding lesbian she loves, the lesbian’s two sidekicks, and even the original girl’s landlady launch into extended—but ultimately futile—sex sessions. The whole thing is b
uilt on twin foundations of sex and humor, since not only the story but the subtitles and the non-realistic character design are part of the humorous intent of the series.
The humor continues in the third F3 installment, when a wandering perverted ghost discovers the group. It possesses first the girls (causing them to grow penises), then their sex toys, before it is exorcised. But this installment brings us to the next variation.
Variation Two: Horror
Another popular context for hentai is horror. Series such as Angel of Darkness, La Blue Girl, and Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend invert the long-standing Western formula of using horror to express sexual anxiety. Gothic literature, notably Bram Stoker’s Dracula, often carries a sexual subtext to its horrors. Cinema as far back as the silent era (especially The Phantom of the Opera) has employed the sexual device of having the monster attack the heroine when she is either asleep or preparing for bed. In the modern era, Hollywood became more explicit, so that mad slasher films such as the Friday the Thirteenth series seem to require that the teenaged victims have sex before they can be graphically slaughtered.
Anime Explosion! Page 9
