Kaoru, by the way, is a college junior in pre-Law when we meet him; it’s hard to imagine anyone more prosaic and less given to communing with spirits. Yet Kaoru and Ryo and Yuri and Haruhi do not address their dead parents half-heartedly or ironically. They expect to be heard and understood in the next world.
1. The five seasons of Sailor Moon are roughly divided thus: Sailor Moon, Sailor Moon R, Sailor Moon S, Sailor Moon SuperS, Sailor Stars.
2. This is another loaded name. Literally, it can mean “the love of Heaven,” and the mysterious video store where Yota finds Ai’s tape is called Gokuraku (Paradise).
3. He has a loaded name too, and his classmates love to tease him about it. His family name, Mote-uchi, is made up of two kanji. Mote carries the connotation of “to be popular with the opposite sex.” However, the kanji pronounced uchi can also be pronounced nai, and nai is the suffix that turns a Japanese verb into a negative. So when his classmates call him motenai, they are saying “can’t get a girlfriend.”
4. Mikiso Hane, Japan: A Historical Survey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 130–34.
5. This happened to other great minds of the time as well. Polish astronomer Nikolai Kopernik is now known as Copernicus; Dutch legal scholar Huig de Groot became Hugo Grotius, and so on.
6. She’s still present, and not just in Shinto shrines. In an episode of Cardcaptor Sakura, based on a manga by the CLAMP collective, Sakura captures the Mirror Card, which until then had been masquerading as Sakura. When it is identified, it reveals itself in the traditional image of Amaterasu, carrying a mirror.
7. Quoted in Hane, Japan, 23. This line takes on a literal significance when one looks at Key the Metal Idol: Tokiko Mima’s mother, her mother before her, and all the women of the Mima line were temple dancers.
8. “Umi no Stranger” (Stranger from the Sea) in Black Jack 1 (Tokyo: Akita Shoten, 1974), 29–51.
9. William R. LaFleur, Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 145–46.
10. Recall that, in 1959, the Soviet Union led the United States in space exploration. No matter how implausible Dr. Tezuka’s lunar landscape might be, the odds (as seen from 1959 Japan) that Russia would beat America to the moon looked rather good.
11. With the pun potential inherent in Japanese, the prayer also sounds like a seemingly unrelated question: “How many pages are there?” It’s the kind of question a harried editor might ask a manga artist who is behind deadline, and thus the joke also becomes a self-referential pun on the fact that this is a comic book. Similarly, in the Don Dracula episode “Dracula versus Carmilla,” the female vampire tells Dracula’s daughter Chocula that she works for Shojo Princess magazine, which brings an angry complaint by the editor of Shonen Champion, where Don Dracula was running at the time. An obituary for Tezuka noted that such references were common: “Suddenly we’d read the words ‘Genkoryo yasusugite tamaran!’ [The payment for this manuscript is so cheap I can’t stand it!]” (Shigehisa Ogawa, “New Classic Music Rag #7,” Shukan Asahi [February 24, 1989], 111).
12. http://www.yamaha-motor.co.jp/global/entertainment/papercraft/animal-japan/tancho/guide/index.html
13. Dan is an interesting name. It’s written with a kanji that supports a number of readings, including the root of the verb hazumu (to rebound, also to be inspired) and the word for “bullet,” tama in Japanese. What better name for a boxer who, inspired by his faith, rebounds after being hit and attacks like a bullet?
14. A delightful manga story by Rumiko Takahashi, “Roman no Akindo” (The Romance Merchant), tells of a struggling marriage chapel. They perform Shinto, Buddhist, or Christian weddings, with the same “priest” officiating at all three—provided he’s sober.
15. T. R. Reid, Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East teaches us about living in the West (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1999), 90.
Who Ya Gonna Call?: The Spirit World in Anime
Japanese ghosts are a thousand years old, or as young as last week’s urban legend. Naïve or nasty, playful or punitive, they’re a link to the supernatural even in these hi-tech times.
The supernatural plays a very large part in Japanese pop culture. Ancient legends feature more spirits, from multi-tailed foxes to tortoise-shelled kappa, than can be listed here.1 The prominence of the old ghosts and demons continues to this day, when some of them even turn out to be the good guys.2 At times, the battles of good versus evil are in clear-cut, even apocalyptic, terms, without the moral ambiguity that keeps anime and manga fresh to Western eyes. But even in the most basic supernatural battles there are recognizably Japanese patterns. In Buichi Terasawa’s manga Kabuto, the title character is supposed to be a karasutengu or crow spirit. Karasutengu have a lengthy history in Japan; Dr. Tezuka used them in several manga set in Japan’s old days, notably as comic relief in Hato yo! Ama Made (Dove! Fly Up to Heaven). They also appear in Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura as a race of crowlike aliens.
Kabuto is a human embodiment of a karasutengu, but more important is the fact that he fights alongside four other human embodiments of spirit-gods, as they try to defeat Doki, the kuroyasha (black demon—who looks suspiciously like Thor in the old Marvel comics). As you might have guessed by now, Kabuto’s fellow deities are a woman, a child, a big beefy guy, and a lone wolf—it’s the Gatchaman science team in yet another disguise.
That’s The Spirit
Spirituality in Japan has evolved into a union of Shinto and Buddhism. They share a belief in a porous afterlife, where spirits can move between the real world and their own realm. They can cross over because of a particular time of year or special date, or because of a particular event or emotion, or after being invoked by one of the many kinds of spiritual mediums or priests. These can be ghosts of the once-living or the spirits of aborted fetuses, of household pets, of jealous lovers, of upset suicides. . . . In a very real sense there is no beginning and no ending to reality, whose nature is far greater than humanity’s concept of time, birth, and death. Some ghosts are even tied to the elements.
Snow White
The yuki-onna (snow-woman) is one of several vampiric female spirits in Japanese legend. She is a woman in white robes who flies through the sky during blizzards; because her skin is also as white as snow, all anyone can see of her is her eyes (and, in some versions of the legend, her pubic hair). She also appears to men as a woman in furs, holding a bundle and asking them to hold her baby for a moment; those who do so are found frozen to death. Her story makes up one part of Masaki Kobayashi’s live-action supernatural masterpiece Kwaidan. She puts in a more benign appearance as Yukime in Jigoku Sensei Nube (Hell Teacher Nube).
A variation on the yuki-onna also appears in Gate Keepers (2000), a series based on a video game. There are ample clues to this character’s identity, beginning with her name: Yukino Hojo (yuki meaning “snow”). Then there’s her origin: she was found wandering on Daisetsuzan (the Great Snow Mountain) on the northern island of Hokkaido. She never seems to age, she wears traditional kimono rather than modern clothes (the anime is set in the 1960s), she seldom speaks, except in a very soft voice, and then only in verse. One character identifies her speech as tanka poetry, a verse form that dates back some 1,300 years. Finally, there’s her “gate,” the portal to another dimension that she controls. All the members of the AEGIS group (all of them students, of course) psychically control such gates, but Yukino’s is the Gate of Ice and Snow, which she uses to create blizzards as weapons against invading aliens.
In the Well
The case of Okiku Ido (Miss Chrysanthemum-in-the-Well) is less sinister, except for what it says about courtly life. In one version, Aoyama is a servant of a noble family who conspires to take over the family fortune by assassinating the head of the household. Okiku, another servant, finds out about Aoyama’s plan and prevents the assassination. In revenge, Aoyama frames Okiku and convinces the master to have her thrown down a well. The specific well, at the Hakura
jo castle in Himeji near Osaka, is now a tourist attraction by day, but in the dead of night one supposedly can hear Okiku’s voice in the well. (Her master heard her night after night, after discovering that Okiku was innocent; remorse and sorrow ultimately drove him to madness.)
This is another old legend brought to life (sort of) in Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku. During the Obon festival, the residents of the boarding-house take part in a haunted walk (an outdoor haunted house). Kyoko volunteers to be Okiku; the plan is for her to hide in the bottom of a shallow well and speak in a ghostly voice to passers-by. Of course, nothing goes as planned, and the episode ends with six people jammed into a rather small well. (The cover illustration for this manga episode shows Kyoko as Okiku, with a stack of nine dishes on the edge of the well. This is a reference to the lie that Aoyama told to cause Okiku to be thrown into the well: she was accused of breaking one of a set of ten plates, priceless heirlooms for which she was responsible.)
The Exorcists
With all the spirits roaming pop culture Japan, in recent years exorcism has become a viable (and largely comic) profession for a number of anime characters, including Shinto and Buddhist clerics as well as Christian ones, not to mention purely mercenary freelancers. The lives of most people, including the clergy, can be, let’s face it, rather dull—hardly prime material for dramatic treatment. But when the outrageously supernatural moves in, it’s a different matter . . . .
Reiko Mikami and Company
Takashi Shiina’s manga Ghost Sweeper Mikami has proven popular enough to spawn a TV series and an OAV special (1993) as well as over a hundred print episodes. Mikami is a knockout, which is one of the reasons she can get away with paying so little to her assistant, a lecherous young man named Yokoshima. He has no magical ability whatsoever (unlike Mikami, who uses paper talismans, demon-killing spears, and other devices to dispatch the undead), and is content to hope for a chance to peek in on the boss in the bathtub. Other members of her staff include:
Okinu-chan, yasashii but a bit befuddled by modern life. She comes by it honestly, since she was sacrificed to a volcano god three centuries ago and first encounters Mikami as a ghost. Having forgotten how to let go of the world and become one with the cosmos, she agrees to work with Mikami and is restored to life five years into the series. As a ghost and later as a ghost-hunter, she wears the white blouse and red hakama of a Shinto shrine maiden or miko.
Meiko Rokudo, a middle-school girl from a wealthy family whose body happens to be host to a dozen different shikigami spirits. However, when she gets nervous (as seems to happen frequently) she loses all control over them.
Father Karras. Yes, he’s named after the central priest in William Blatty’s The Exorcist, a piece of Western pop culture that had a serious impact in the East. This Father K is a sincere exorcist (unlike Mikami, who charges her clients ten million yen per exorcism).
Shiho Sakakibara
She only puts in a brief appearance in the manga Oh My Goddess! (1988) by Kosuke Fujishima, but it’s memorable. A cute classmate at Nekomi Tech of Keiichi (the hapless student who dialed Heaven’s help-desk and now has the goddess Belldandy as a girlfriend), she’s been dabbling in exorcism for a couple of years and is convinced she knows it all. Unfortunately, she doesn’t, and actually ends up summoning spirits rather than dispelling them. She also has an indirect effect on the plot by stirring up jealousy in Belldandy. At the end of the episode, Belldandy has confronted her jealousy and learned from it, while Shiho continues on, blissfully unaware of her abilities—or lack thereof.
Meisuke Nueno
In Jigoku Sensei Nube (Hell Teacher Nube, 1996), this poor soul is a fifth-grade schoolteacher who constantly wears a black glove over his left hand. It’s not a fashion statement—the glove covers up the demon claw that he has in lieu of a hand. Meisuke, also known as Nube, is an exorcist who found himself outmatched in one of his exorcisms, and won out only by taking the demon into himself. So, while he performs exorcisms, among other magical feats, the title character of Sho Masakura and Takeshi Okano’s horror/romance school comedy does so from an insider’s perspective.3 He teaches at a school with other supernatural practitioners among the faculty and students.
Ayaka Kisaragi and Company
Yugen Kaisha (Phantom Quest Corp., 1994)4 could almost be called “Ghost Sweeper Lite.” There are a lot of similarities between the OAV series Yugen Kaisha and Ghost Sweeper Mikami: a for-profit exorcism agency run by a hard-drinking, fiery, voluptuous redhead who subcontracts to a variety of others with occult talents, resulting in adventures that mix the humorous and the horrific.
However, the Yugen Kaisha of the title is not as successful an operation as the Ghost Sweepers. The company operates out of Ayaka’s home, which is at least convenient, since she prefers, after a night of carousing, to sleep until almost noon. In an apparent bid to save on expenses, her office manager is Mamoru Shimesu, a ten-year-old boy who seems quite accustomed to waking up a boss who sleeps in the nude (but then, his family has a history of being servants to the recently strapped Kisaragi family). Other experts are hired per job, and usually have a day-job already. These include Nanami Rokugo, a pubescent girl who’s a “fire-starter”; Rokkon, a traditional male (for a change) monk/magician; and Madame Suimei, a stereotypical Western gypsy fortuneteller. Ayaka’s main contact is Kozo Karino, at the psychic desk of the Tokyo Police Department, where he would have almost nothing to do if not for the Yugen Kaisha.
A Magic Number
Yoko Mano being the 108th Devil Hunter was not a random number choice. At the stroke of the New Year, Japanese Buddhist temples sound the bell 108 times for the 108 temptations of this world that must be overcome. We see this happen in an episode of Hotel, a manga series by Shotaro Ishinomori, in which an apprentice chef, tempted away from his job by lowlife friends, returns to a life of duty and honor on New Year’s Eve, as the 108 chimes sound.
Note also the Chinese version of the myth of Pandora’s box, retold in the prologue of Shih Nai-An’s thirteenth-century epic Water Margin (Shui-hu Chuan, or Suikoden in Japanese). In this version, an envoy from the emperor frees 108 imprisoned supernatural fiends, letting them loose upon the world. “It is impossible to talk about Japanese irezumi [tattooing] without mentioning Utagawa Kuniyo-shi’s [prints based on the Chinese legend] Tsuzoku Suikoden Goketsu Hyakuhachinin (108 Heroes of the Suikoden),” writes the author of an article on irezumi for alterasian.com. “These designs form a large part of all full-body tattoos and are often copied, or else the artist will draw his own illustration of another part of the story.” (An anime titled Suikoden is more post-apocalyptic than reflective of Utagawa. There’s also a video game called Suikoden, but based on “ancient Eastern lore” and not the Chinese story.)
A pirate band in the Outlaw Star series is called the 108 Suns. On the H side, there’s Mitsuko, a sexual vampire and grandmother to Kenji, hero of the Elven Bride series. In the second OAV, Mitsuko seduces one of Kenji’s National Guard colleagues, and they end up doing it 108 times; no wonder the guardsman is only a withered husk of his former self when it’s over. In one of the cases investigated by Shibuya Psychic Research in Ghost Hunt by Shiho Inada and Fuyumi Ono, a haunted mansion is found to have 106 rooms, which seems to come up short of the magic number. However, this is before they discover two hidden rooms, fulfilling the number. And in Crying Freeman, a manga and anime by Kazuo Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami, a yakuza gang calls itself the 108 Dragons. But the number isn’t always bad news—in the first installment of the Magical Girl Pretty Sammy OAV series, Tsunami is chosen to lead the planet of Juraihelm by a group of 108 priests.
Clearly, in Japan 108 is a number to conjure with.
Himiko Se
This exorcist is deadly serious. As the heroine (it seems) of the four–part OAV Vampire Princess Miyu, her path crosses that of the title vampire, a perpetual fourteen-year-old. Himiko also learns of an order of being that’s part demon, part human, called a Shinma, who must be returned to the
Underworld by Miyu and her companion Larva. With or without Miyu’s help, Himiko has to deal with a vampire, a possessed suit of armor, and an enchantress who turns people into marionettes. In the final installment, she confronts Miyu directly and learns her story. This is one time I will not be a spoiler and give away the ending. This OAV series is one of the most atmospheric in all of anime; a definite must-see.
The Holy Student Council
Adolescence is an anxious time, and in modern Japan some of that anxiety gets projected onto the high school itself, and the thought of what might be lurking there at midnight. A common urban legend is that one school or another was an “execution ground” during World War II, and ghosts reputedly re-enact the killing of prisoners night after night. Students who killed themselves (and they have done so in Japan for a variety of reasons, from imitating someone else’s suicide to escaping particularly abusive bullies) have been thought to return to their school. At Saito High, though, the whole thing is played for laughs. What else can you expect, when the school is run by a ghost?
Saito High is the setting of the 1997 “after hours” TV series Haunted Junction, and, like another after-hours series, Those Who Hunt Elves (1996), the series isn’t as risqué as its time-slot suggests. It doesn’t take much of anything seriously, including the three students who make up the Holy Student Council. One from each faith (Buddhist, Shinto, and Christian), the three council members are charged with corralling the rowdier of the ghosts. This would be hard to do at the best of times, but these three students bring their own quirks to the table.
Ryudo Kazumi, son of a Buddhist monk, is himself well versed in esoteric Buddhism. One suspects he had to learn exorcism as a survival skill, since he tends to get possessed by whatever spirit’s around—usually animals. His particular favorite among the ghosts at Saito High is Toilet Hanako-san. There is a substantial body of stories about Japanese toilet ghosts, ranging from the evil (because, let’s face it, few positions leave a person more vulnerable to attack) to the benevolent and protective (handing out toilet paper if one gets caught short). Toilet Hanako-san, though, satisfies a slightly different urge in this series: as an erotic inspiration for those boys who retreat to the toilet to, as it were, let off some sexual steam.
Anime Explosion! Page 20
