Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  3. Japanese grade school goes up through America’s sixth grade. Junior high corresponds to seventh through ninth grades, while high school only lasts three years. One other difference: the school year starts in April, not September.

  4. Arima’s family manages a hospital. In America, hospitals tend to be large institutions, either civically owned or privately run by corporations or churches or other charitable institutions. In Japan, many hospitals and clinics are smaller, family-run businesses. Also, it’s not unusual for the families of patients to volunteer to work at the hospital (doing the laundry, etc.) in order to lessen the bill.

  Enter the Mamagon: The Japanese Mother

  “Being with your mother is always the best thing,” says Haruhi Fujioka, the motherless, sometimes cross-dressing heroine of Ouran High School Host Club. . . . They help and they hinder; they stabilize and disrupt; they run the house and its occupants (most of them, anyway). Japanese mothers, in pop culture as in life, have to perfect a very special balancing act.

  Yasashisa is all well and good for a teenage girl contemplating love and marriage. But what happens after “happily ever after?” What happens usually is motherhood, an important part of Japanese life that is nonetheless conspicuously underrepresented in anime.

  Mothers in manga, though, are another story. They can be plentiful, if you look in the right places. Those places would be comic magazines, with titles such as Eve and Josei Jishin (Women Themselves) targeted at housewives. Within this genre, as in any other, the subject matter is wide enough to include comedy and tragedy, love and war, psychoanalysis and (definitely) sex. Quests for romance are mixed with stories of how housewives are often taken for granted.

  If marriage in Japan is a prison for women, it’s a prison where the inmates run the jail. If the proper place for the man is the workplace, that leaves management of the home to his wife, and her decisions are as absolute in her domain as the husband’s are in his (and maybe more so). Men in Japan typically turn their paychecks over to their wives, who give them back an allowance. She manages the household with the rest, which in this day and age can include making stock-market investment choices.

  Her main responsibility, though, is to her children. She is their only link to the world in the early years, instilling social norms at an early age. She also tracks their scholastic progress, and in this mothers can become overbearing and hypercritical, demanding as much of the educational authorities as of their children. This is the kind of mother referred to in the Japanese media for a time as mamagon, a maternal dragon.1

  The Dangers of Motherhood

  Anime mothers aren’t always so strong. A fair share of anime mothers get killed off early in whatever story is taking place, adding a degree of poignancy. The mother of Tenchi Masaki dies when her son is a toddler in the Tenchi Muyo! universe, thus opening the door for his Juraian family to claim him a decade later. In Grave of the Fireflies the death of the children’s mother in a World War II air raid, while their father is in the army, precipitates the crisis of the movie by forcing the children to live with distant relatives. In Key the Metal Idol, the mother of Tokiko Mima dies shortly after giving birth to her daughter, who is raised by her grandfather to think that she is a robot. Even a child-oriented film isn’t safe: the animated movie released in the West in 1984 as Enchanted Journey tells of two domesticated chipmunks, Glicko and Nono, trying to escape to the forest. At one point, Nono explains that she is making the trip because it was her mother’s last wish, and the audience sees a flashback to her mother’s death.

  Evangelion is downright lethal for its maternal figures. First, Shinji Ikari’s mother Yui was killed in a laboratory accident (with Shinji looking on) when he was a toddler. Free of marriage, Commander Gendo Ikari took up with Naoko Akagi, the scientist in charge of programming Magi, the supercomputer that runs everything in the relocated Tokyo-3 (moved fifty miles inland after melting polar caps left the old Tokyo underwater). This doesn’t end happily: Naoko hears Rei Ayanami, a five-year-old child at this point, say she overheard Gendo call Naoko a dried-up old hag. Naoko takes this rather roughly and commits suicide (after killing Rei). Gendo is once again on his own, and years later has an affair with Naoko’s daughter, Ritsuko.

  Meanwhile, half a world away in Germany, Keiko Soryu marries a German NERV scientist named Zeppelin and has a daughter, Asuka. When Asuka is about five years old, she comes home to find that her mother has hanged herself in grief after discovering her husband had abandoned her for another woman. With Asuka’s mother gone and Asuka in a nearly autistic state for two years, Herr Zeppelin marries the woman he ran off with, an American doctor named Langley. However, she is more interested in being a wife than in being a mother, and Asuka is left to fend for herself.

  Rounding off this antimaternal group is Misato Katsuragi. After meeting Shinji at the train station and seeing the way he and his father don’t get along, she offers to take Shinji into her apartment. Later she also brings Asuka to live with her. She becomes more like a big sister than a mother—although she means well, her cooking leaves a lot to be desired, and in any case she’d rather drink and/or have sex with her boyfriend Kaji. She’s already commander of the Eva pilots during business hours; she doesn’t always want them around after hours. It’s no big spoiler to say that she doesn’t get to the last episode alive.

  The mothers of Ranma 1/2 don’t fare too well, either. Soun Tendo, head of the Anything-Goes Martial Arts dojo, lost his wife before the story even begins. As for Ranma’s mother Nodoka Saotome, she’s still alive, and both Ranma and his father are trying to avoid being anywhere near her. When he took his son off to instruct him in martial arts, Genma promised Nodoka to make Ranma a “man among men.” Of course, since his fall into the accursed spring Ranma turns into a girl, so “man among men” isn’t in the cards right now. If they don’t find a way to reverse the effects of the spring, Ranma and Genma both assume that (as Gendo promised Nodoka should they fail) they will both have to commit seppuku, a classic samurai form of suicide, to satisfy Nodoka. Consequently, she is rarely if ever seen or even mentioned in either the manga or the anime. Of course, it never comes down to seppuku, even though, when she does appear late in the story, she’s fully prepared—she wears traditional kimono and carries a samurai sword. She almost uses it when she gets the notion that Ran-chan is really her son in drag. She finally relaxes when she catches her son peeking in on some girls. She’s even willing to accept his curse—as long as her son still acts macho. This is more than just a gag, though. This would be consistent with the Japanese mother’s sometimes-contradictory pulls: she wants her son to succeed, but also wants her son to fit into society.

  Fullmetal Mothers

  The popular anime Fullmetal Alchemist, from the manga by Hiromu Arakawa, focuses on the two Elric brothers in a world where alchemy is the height of science. It’s also a world where alchemy and mother love leads to the ultimate taboo.

  The brothers, Edward and Alphonse, want to study alchemy in imitation of their father, an alchemist named Hohenheim. Even when Hohenheim leaves his family one day and is never heard from again, the boys are encouraged in their interest by their mother Tricia Elric. She seems to be perfect or is at least idealized by her sons. The crisis comes when she develops a terminal illness, and Hohenheim is nowhere to be found. When Tricia dies, the boys decide to learn as much as they can as quickly as they can, then work forbidden alchemy to bring their mother back from the dead. Unfortunately what they summoned cost the boys dearly: Ed lost an arm and a leg, while Al’s entire body was consumed; his soul had to be anchored in a suit of armor.

  The boys latch onto their alchemy teacher as a sometime surrogate mother, but here too we meet a transgressor. The teacher, Mrs. Izumi Curtis, has more of a temper than Tricia Elric but clearly loves the two brothers as if they were her own. Which brings us to her transgression: when her infant child was stillborn, she too tried to use alchemy to bring the child back to life. She too had to pay a price, which in h
er case was the loss of half of her internal organs. Thus, even though Mrs. Curtis is an aggressive and skilled martial artist as well as alchemist, she’s subject to fits of bloody vomiting and often has to be cared for by her husband, who is ironically the town butcher.

  Other Mothers

  Some anime mothers are barely there, and serve merely as convenient plot-devices or comic relief. Usagi’s mother in Sailor Moon is basically clueless about her daughter’s secret identity, as Tsutomu’s mother in Birdy the Mighty is unaware of the fact that her son shares his body with a female alien cop. Magical princess Minky Momo has two mothers: the one in outer space keeps tabs on her from afar, while the child has convinced two Earth adults that she is their child. Both human parents remain clueless as to her magic, and in the end she renounces her magic powers to be their fully human daughter.

  Then there’s Yoko Mano, the teenage heroine of the Devil Hunter Yohko series of videos (1992)—she’s caught in the middle of a mother/daughter dispute. Yoko’s grandmother was 107th in a line of demon fighters. Yoko’s mother was supposed to be the 108th, but by age sixteen, when she was supposed to come into her own, she was ineligible because (to granny’s great shame) she was no longer a virgin. (This may seem like a thinly disguised argument for premarital chastity, but it isn’t. Once the sixteen-year-old Yoko officially becomes the next Devil Hunter, granny assures her that now she can go out and screw around as much as she wants. Somehow, though, something always seems to get in the way.)

  This brings up one more aspect of extended family life in Japan. In this series, the grandmother tries to dominate the household, while her daughter puts up resistance. In Japan the dispute is more often between a man’s wife and his mother. It’s a classic power struggle, when the mother who held the power over her son finds the power shifted to his new bride. “Almost half of the Japanese husbands who asked courts to mediate family disputes in 1983 cited conflicts between wife and mother as the cause.”2

  Mother Is a Mother

  Other mothers are deliberate obstacles to their children. Kyoko Otonashi seems never to have to deal with a mother-in-law in Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku. It’s just as well, since she has her hands full dealing with her own mother. Ichiko Chigusa spends almost all her time in the series trying to get daughter Kyoko to move back in with her, if not trying to fix her daughter up with the rich and handsome tennis coach Mitaka. Mother doesn’t think much of Godai’s prospects as a college student, and definitely hates the idea of her daughter making a living as manager of a boarding house. In this case, of course, mother isn’t right.

  Probably the wrongest mother in anime is the Millennial Queen, ruler of the mecha world in the 1978 anime Ginga Tetsudo 999 (Galaxy Express 999). The planet Rametal in the Andromeda system is the last stop on the intergalactic railroad serviced by 999, and is also where humans go to cast off their human bodies in exchange for machines. Of course, there’s a price to pay. The queen has caused the deaths of millions, and her daughter Maetel makes the trip to Rametal in part because she knows she has to stop her mother.

  Speaking of Galaxy Express 999, it’s the mother of the young hero Tetsuro Hoshino who, in a sense, starts the entire story in motion. When younger, Tetsuro witnessed the robot Count Mecha kill his mother. He later finds out the Count was trophy hunting: he had Tetsuro’s mother skinned and has that skin displayed in his castle as an example of the most beautiful of human women. (At some point doesn’t every child feel this about his/her mother?) Her renowned beauty is in fact the reason Princess Maetel bears such an uncanny resemblance to Tetsuro’s mother.

  One very present mother appears in the TV series based on the Pokémon game. In his quest for pokémon-master perfection, Satoshi (aka Ash) regularly calls home to mom to keep her up to date. He even stops home now and then for rest and recuperation between trials. So far, this is a diminutive parody of the way Japanese businessmen regard their wives—as there to provide maternal comforts rather than a marital partnership. But the mamagon can, and does, take things even farther. In the second feature film based on Pokémon (released in the West as Pokémon: The Movie 2000), a clash between colossal prehistoric pokémon threatens the world and its ecosystem. The mother of Satoshi/Ash promptly jumps into whatever vehicle will get her to his part of the world, just to make sure that her son is all right.

  Art imitated life in the case of Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen). In the manga and its 1983 anime, Gen Nakaoka is a schoolboy who survives the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He rushes home to find that his pregnant mother also survived, but that the rest of the family was killed in the fire caused by the bomb. Gen helps his mother deliver her baby in the midst of the hellish chaos caused by the bomb, but the infant doesn’t survive for long.

  Most of the above happened to artist Keiji Nakazawa (a neighbor helped deliver the baby), in addition to one final twist. According to Nakazawa’s autobiographical manga Ore ga Mita (I Saw It), Keiji’s mother survives to go back to work during the Occupation to support her son. (This is shown by her starting to wear Western clothes instead of kimono.) She lives long enough to see her son grow up and get married, but she dies shortly after the wedding. When she is cremated, all that is left is some fine ash. Ordinarily there would also be bone fragments, but their absence is blamed on a low level of radiation sickness that attacked her health throughout her life. Her outraged son decides to fight against the bomb that desecrated his mother’s very bones the only way he knows: through manga.

  “Pre-Mothers”: The Office Lady

  The Office Lady, or OL for short, is a still-evolving. part of Japan’s corporate culture. The term dates back to the postwar economic boom, which brought significant numbers of women into the white-collar labor force for the first time (with so many men having been killed in the war). These women office workers were first known in popular parlance as “BGs” (short for Business Girls), until they learned that American soldiers used the same phrase to refer to a different kind of “business.” The term Office Lady resulted from a contest sponsored by Josei Jishin magazine in 1963.1 As before, the cultural expectation is still for a woman to work a few years, then marry and leave the office. This is common enough that, at the close of the 1980s, a woman’s professional “life expectancy” from hiring to marriage was about 6.5 years. Some OLs are kept on staff only to serve tea, greet customers, run errands, and serve as decorations. Some end up marrying co-workers, which is an ideal situation for management: not only does it create a family within the “family” of employees, but the former OL is expected not to berate her husband about working long hours, since she was once in the trenches herself.2 The role of the Office Lady is featured—warts and all—in a number of anime and manga. One reasonably accurate portrayal is in the reworking of the Bubblegum Crisis OAVs into the series Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040. Lina Yamazaki is shown being lectured to, criticized, propositioned, and basically treated like an inferior; she’s even belittled by her robot supervisor. Miss Amamiya, the OL in Shotaro Ishinomori’s Manga Nihon Keizai Nyumon (Comic Book Introduction to Japanese Economics, translated as Japan, Inc.) escapes the more degrading aspects of the job, but is still clearly low on the totem pole, fetching tea and documents.

  At the other extreme are the two Office Ladies who serve the president of Mishima Heavy Industries in All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku. Arisa and Kyoko may work for a lady boss and thus evade sexual harassment, but they’re still expected to carry out surveillance, sabotage, and strafing runs as part of their boss’s war against her ex-husband.

  1. Kittredge Cherry, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987), 103.

  2. Cherry, 105–6.

  Other characters have lost parents on the way to fulfilling their destiny. Haruhi Fujioka of Ouran High School Host Club lost her mother, a lawyer, years before arriving at Ouran High School. Her father is alive but has kept a low profile, being a transvestite who works in a gay bar. Just about the only trait of her father’s
Haruhi has kept is his talent for cross-dressing; she generally takes after her levelheaded mother.

  Nobuhiro Watanuki, the central player in xxxholic by CLAMP, is an orphan, having lost both parents. Asuna Kagurazaka from Negima! Magister Negi Magi! (an anime based on a manga by Ken Akamatsu) is also an orphan. So is Mai Taniyama, the high school “Office Lady” for Shibuya Psychic Research in Ghost Hunt. And by the time the story of Ko Fumizuki’s Ai Yori Aoshi begins, the protagonist, Kaoru Hanabishi, had also been orphaned.

  I hadn’t searched for these characters specifically, but it’s fascinating to note the points of similarity between these orphans. Watanuki, Taniyama, and Asuna have latent magical powers, even though they tend to be over emotional but are otherwise levelheaded. They’ve had to work from an early age but say that they enjoy it. That description also applies to Kaoru Hanabishi (minus the magic).

  The Last Full Measure

  Mothers are expected to sacrifice their time, energy, finances, and just about anything else for the sake of her child. Sometimes a mother sacrifices her own life to preserve that of her child. Take the case of Katsumi Liqueur, who never knew that her mother was part of the Attacked Mystification Police, who use a combination of hi-tech and magic to preserve the future in Kia Asamiya’s manga (and the subsequent anime) Silent Möbius. Katsumi was shielded from all this by being raised away from her parents in Hawaii. Her parents were unconventional: her mother Fuyuka Hazuki was a broadcast journalist who didn’t realize her own magical abilities3 until she had met and married Gigelf Liqueur. He was a wizard who, with the help of the Magician’s Guild, started negotiations with the Lucifer Hawk race on the world called Nemesis.4 This partnership didn’t go well, and the rest of the series focuses on the AMF defending Mega-Tokyo against a variety of menaces, including Lucifer Hawk. The situation is really complicated for Katsumi when she learns that Gigelf was mixed, having human and Lucifer Hawk ancestors.