Although there’s never an overt plea for conservation, the various TV series and movies in the Tenchi Muyo! universe have a very definite pro-tree message. Trees turn out to be the guardians of the royal house of Jurai. On that distant planet, certain trees are sentient beings who provide psychic energy to specific partners, retain memory, and are capable of communication. They’re actually capable of even greater feats: when Princess Sasami was accidentally killed, energy from Jurai’s most important tree, Tsunami, brought her back to life.1 In the second Tenchi movie, Manatsu no Eve (Mid-summers’ Eve), a single twig from a Juraian tree is enough of a weapon to vanquish the demon Yuzuha.2 Speaking of the demonic, the second OAV in the Devil Hunter Yohko series begins with a construction crew breaking the seal on a forest shrine. This looses some demons for Yoko and Azusa to fight, and before the story is over they realize that some parts of nature need to be left untouched.
A similar story is the setup for the anime series Gakko no Kaidan (Ghost Stories), which is based on a mix of Japanese ghost tales and “urban legends” told by modern-day children. The story that ties everything together is of the Miyanoshita family, mainly the daughter Satsuki. Mr. Miyanoshita and his two children return to the town that was the home of Kayako Kamiyama, the late Mrs. Miyanoshita. Back in the day, when Kayako was a schoolgirl (the same age Satsuki is now), Kayako used her considerable magic to seal up a large number of evil spirits plaguing the town. However, no sooner does the Miyanoshita family arrive than a construction crew breaks the seal, freeing the spirits. Fortunately they find Kayako’s notebook with details on how to imprison most of the spirits—again.
There is a subtle “city versus country” dichotomy at work throughout Key the Metal Idol, as Key’s early life in her secluded rural valley is contrasted with the bustle of modern Tokyo. Sometimes this dichotomy is also expressed in the series’ “human versus machine” question: what exactly is Key? It’s all brought to a head in the concert in which Key sings her song. The song turns out to be one of the oldest archetypes in music, perhaps the first type of song ever sung: a lullaby. Beyond that, the song consists almost entirely of nature images.3 Even hentai films have shown some greening in recent years. The first film in the Angel of Darkness series of OAVs has a science professor at a prestigious girls’ academy break the eldritch seal on a tree; possessed by an evil spirit trapped behind the seal, he begins to turn into a monster. The only way to combat this force is when the spirits of forest elves enter into and empower a lesbian student at the academy.
In a few anime nature takes its revenge. Agent Aika, Brain Powerd, Blue Submarine No. 6, Yokohama Shopping Journal, and Evangelion are just some of the stories that look to the future and find that the polar caps have melted (for one reason or another), killing billions of people and submerging almost all of Japan. The various stories have slightly different takes on these events: Aika tries to profit by salvaging stuff lost in the food; Alpha, an android, runs a coffee shop on the road to Yokohama (now just a lonely country backroad) to serve those who still make the trip; and Evangelion’s Misato Katsuragi, whose father was killed in the big meltdown, still sings the praises of air conditioning (in what has become year-round summer in Japan) as “the triumph of man over his environment.” All three share the view that life (of sorts, in Alpha’s case) still goes on.
The first movie based on Kia Asamiya’s manga Silent Möbius takes place in the mid-twenty-first century and sets up the battle between the Attacked Mystification Police and the Lucifer Hawk, a monstrous race from the planet Nemesis. As the story puts it, their “purpose and nature are yet to be revealed.” In particular, it tells of the series’s central figure, Katsumi Liqueur, joining the AMF, an organization her parents had kept her hidden from.
In the year 1999, Gigelf Liqueur, Katsumi’s wizard father, aided by the Magician’s Guild, set into motion a plan to open a gate between Earth and Nemesis. The plan was to exchange Earth’s polluted air and water with clean air and water from Nemesis, with the switch powered by a huge cyclotron under Tokyo. Unfortunately for all involved, Ganossa Maximilian—Gigelf’s old apprentice—sabotaged the plan, opening the gate early for his own purposes. This left Earth to cope with both self-inflicted pollution and an alien invasion. The moral for those of us in the present: there are no shortcuts to curing the environment.
Other cautionary tales take place in the past rather than in the future. Please Save My Earth has its septet of scientific observers arrive at a moon base thousands of years ago to track the evolution of life on Earth. Unfortunately, they neglect to monitor their immediate surroundings, and a plague cuts their observations short—until they are reincarnated in Japan. Similarly, in E.Y.E.S. of Mars, the people of that planet, having screwed up their environment and their hopes for survival for a second time, launch their souls from Mars onto the planet that will be called Earth.
Green Earth, Blue Cat
One of the biggest names in Japanese pop culture, Doraemon, isn’t too well known in the West. The title character of the manga series by the team of Fujio Fujiko4 is a blue robot cat with a magical kangaroo-like pouch. He befriends a schoolboy named Nobita and they share hundreds of fantastic adventures. The comic started publication in 1970 and was first animated for television in 1979. An annual feature-length Doraemon film is a staple of spring in Japan, and Doraemon merchandise still floods the country,
Although written and animated for a grade-school audience, Doraemon has served up stories that can be called environmental.5 Eri Izawa describes the 1974 manga episode “Wolf Family”:
Nobita and Doraemon seek to help hunters who want to find (and kill) the fabled (and recently extinct) Japanese wolf, based on a report that the wolves had been seen nearby. Doraemon transforms Nobita into a wolf to help in the search. The wolves find Nobita and accept him as family, and Nobita learns of their difficult life, of how they lived peacefully before the humans came and began exterminating them. Upon returning to human form, Nobita changes his mind; he no longer wants to hunt the wolves, and would rather protect them.
This is superficially similar to any of a number of Western cartoons, especially Disney’s, which anthropomorphize animals or inanimate objects: The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast are prime examples. However, the Japanese—and other Asians with a Buddhism-influenced culture—have a very different, non-Western approach to humanizing the non-human.
Buddhism’s keynote is a sense of compassion for all sentient beings. In the rite known as kuyo, the Japanese even extend this compassion to inanimate objects. The scholar Hiroshi Wagatsuma has described a “memorial service” held for sewing needles that were broken or blunted and no longer useful: they were placed in a block of tofu, thanked for their service and told that they could now rest in peace.6 This may seem the height of silliness to an outsider, but it is simply a display of respect and gratitude for services rendered—a very large part of the Japanese culture. To a great extent, environmentalism itself is nothing more than that: a respectful recognition that humanity is dependent upon nature, rather than divorced from it. Unfortunately, rituals such as kuyo often fail to solve the real problem, serving only as a formality, a way of placating one’s conscience before going back to business as usual.
Another Doraemon episode mentioned by Izawa is rooted in the nostalgia that informs much of even the most radical Japanese pop culture. Nobita’s parents are shown lamenting that they used to be able to sit at night and listen to the songs of dozens of different insects. They are now part of the suburbs, though, and Nobita wonders what he’s missed. In the end Nobita and Doraemon realize that most of the insects have moved on or disappeared—except for cockroaches. The punch line is at once funny and sad.
The Doctor
Dr. Osamu Tezuka used his comics and animation to preach against pollution, among other social problems. We see it clearly in Jungle Emperor and Leo the Lion, stories set in a natural world in which almost any appearance of a human is potential pollution. We see it indirectly in Ku
rubeki Sekai,7 a 1951 science-fiction story in which a “dark gas” from space threatens the Earth (as the story was written during the Korean War, the gas could also be seen as metaphorical “war clouds”). The message was especially explicit in the “Black Rain and White Feather” episode of the manga Unico, as the heroine’s health was threatened by pollution from a totally automated factory.
Tezuka’s voice of conscience continued to speak even after his death in 1989. In 1996 master animator Osamu Dezaki (who started out as a student animator with Tezuka’s Mushi Productions in 1963) directed and co-wrote a feature film based on one of Dr. Tezuka’s most popular creations, Black Jack. In this feature, a spore that grows in a small corner of an isolated desert bestows both wonderful and horrifying side effects. These can be controlled by the extract of a certain plant. By the end of the film, however, a scientist announces that the plant can no longer combat the effects of one strain of the virus carried by the spore. He blames pollution, the fouling of the planet’s air and water, and tells both his audience and the viewer to do something: “The Doomsday Clock is ticking!”
After sitting through this movie, you realize that the scientist isn’t crying wolf. Unfortunately, such anime treatments of environmental themes are about as far as Japan (or the United States) seems to be willing to go. In a world where industrial development equals progress and progress means being taken seriously as a nation by other industrial powers, there are simply too many built-in incentives not to clean up humanity’s messes. Platitudes about green space may make one feel good, but at some point someone will have to actually try to preserve the Earth. The planet cannot live on pop culture alone. But at least anime can be part of the road map reminding us of where we want to go.
1. An audience watching the Japanese-language version would find a stronger connection between Sasami and Tsunami. They’re both voiced by the same seiyu, Chisa Yokoyama.
2. For more on the trees of Jurai, go to http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Dojo/3958/trees.html.
3. A sample of the lyrics, by writer/director Hiroaki Sato: “Starling, turtledove, gold beetle, and a giant purple butterfly, all in a dream.”
4. The name, which sounds like the pen name of a single cartoonist, represented the team of Hiroshi Fujimoto and Motoo Abiko.
5. Information about these Doraemon stories is from Eri Izawa’s essay “Environmentalism in Manga and Anime,” which can be found at http://www.mit.edu/people/rei/manga-environ-mental.html.
6. Cited in William R. LaFleur, Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 143–45.
7. The title literally means “the world to come” and has been translated “Next World,” but Dr. Tezuka was directly inspired by the 1936 British film Things to Come, directed by William Cameron Menzies with a screenplay by H. G. Wells.
War Is Stupid: War and Anti-War Themes in Anime
Countless battles have been fought in Japan’s long history, even though World War II—terminated by the atomic bomb—sets the tone of most anime. Japan’s view of pacifism thus carries considerable weight.
Violence never solved anything. Trust me; I’m a military man; I know these things.
—from the anime Final Fantasy (1994)
In its long history Japan has seen periods of nearly incessant warfare, but also hundreds of years in which the country was at peace, both at home and with its neighbors. This history contributes to Japan’s current popular culture view of war: a view that is complex, if not conflicted. Wars are still fought in anime, and warriors are praised for their fighting spirit, yet a pacifist belief in the ultimate futility of war tempers these mixed messages.
Anime depictions of war can be divided into: (a) real wars Japan was involved in, (b) fictional battles involving Japan (past, present, or future), and (c) battles with little or no connection to Earth, except that at least one of the combatant species is humanoid. The more distant the action is from any real military, the easier it is to root for one side or another without feeling like a combatant.
Japan at War
Perhaps the most controversial genre of anime in some circles, even more controversial than pornography, is anything to do with Japan during World War II. Intended as they are for domestic consumption, Japanese pop culture depictions of the war come from a perspective that non-Japanese often find problematic. Specifically, outsiders have difficulty seeing Japan as a victim, the stance that is presented in most Japanese retrospectives on the war. Disturbed by the fact that these comics and movies do not depict Japan’s responsibility for the war or show Japanese soldiers committing atrocities, foreign critics tend to dismiss stories of Japanese deaths on the battlefield and privations on the home front. When Japanese pop culture describes the suffering of the Japanese people, the almost inevitable critique in some circles is, “What about the Bataan death march?”1 What this attitude overlooks is that many Japanese experienced the war years as civilians. For them, the war was a time of terror and privation due to events that seemed largely, if not entirely, beyond their control. We’ll explore later in this chapter why this attitude is not only actually consistent, but has an American counterpart.
Isao Takahata, the director of the anime version of Akiyuki Nosaka’s novel Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies, 1988), set out to tell a very specific story about two children who starved to death near the end of the war. Keiji Nakazawa, in his semi-autobiographical Barefoot Gen, set out to tell a very specific story about living through the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath. Nakazawa, in hindsight, attacked Japanese militarism; Hotaru no Haka, in contrast, for the most part leaves politics alone as irrelevant to the lives of two orphaned children. In either case, it is difficult to see how issues such as Japanese war guilt or atrocities in Asia or the Pacific could be introduced as anything other than an artificial and ideologically driven digression from the stories these films are trying to tell.
For director Hayao Miyazaki, just the mention of the subject matter of his latest film—and his last as director—was enough to open the old wounds. Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises) is a fanciful biography of airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi. His was a very eventful life, from living through the 1923 Kanto earthquake to watching his beloved wife Naoko dying of tuberculosis. However, the sore spot of the whole movie was his designing the A6M fighter plane, known as the Zero. This plane wasa staple of Japan’s military in World War II, which some are still unwilling to forgive, even though Horikoshi was no militant and, like Miyazaki, loved flying machines for their own sake.
Contemporary stories involving Japan in fictional wars can be just as controversial as looking at the very real war in the recent past. These stories also test the author’s creativity, since the postwar Japanese constitution limits the country’s military to a self-defense role. The manga The Silent Service by Kaiji Kawaguchi (animated in 1985 by director Ryo-suke Takashi) gets around these limitations with a Tom Clancy–style story set in the near future. In it, the United States and Japan have been jointly working on a secret weapon, in clear violation of the Japanese constitution: a new class of nuclear-powered submarine. The prototype, a vessel dubbed the Seabat, is so secret that another Japanese sub is “sunk” and its crew listed as presumed dead in order to provide the personnel to man it.
The sub’s commander, Captain Kaeda, has no use for the political machinations on both sides of the Pacific, and hits on an extreme form of protest: rechristening the sub the Yamato (the ancient name of Japan, and also the name of the most powerful battleship in Japan’s World War II fleet), he declares it to be a sovereign nation (complete with twelve-mile boundary) and (maybe) nuclear weapons. He simply wants to demonstrate that, even though the Cold War is over, some mentalities haven’t changed, notably those of the United States. In spite of public statements that Japan is an equal partner, the United States has persisted in treating Japan as if it were a client state, and in this story the White House has even drawn up contingency plans to re-occu
py Japan should the need arise. The subject of The Silent Service, which upset superpatriot Americans, was not “Jap treachery” but American treachery.
The United States also comes in for some lumps in “Stink Bomb,” the second part of Memories, a 1995 release based on a trilogy of manga by Katsuhiro Otomo. A nerdy lab assistant, looking for a prototype cold remedy, accidentally swallows a prototype bio-weapon instead. He develops a literally killer case of body odor in a story that is by turns humorous and harrowing. As he nears Tokyo, the government decides that they have to kill him, but this is vetoed by an imposing black officer in a military uniform with “U.S.” displayed prominently on the lapels. It seems that funding for this weapon came covertly from America, and the Americans want to keep the plague carrier alive for study. As anyone could predict after seeing any of the Alien movies, trying to hold a deadly weapon for observation usually backfires.
An anime based on Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack takes the same approach in its story of a Latin American revolutionary leader who was shot and arrested by troops with an American-looking flag, and whose “President Kelly” is similar to Ronald Reagan. Black Jack is hired to tend to the commander while his daughter breaks him out of jail so that he can die in his homeland. Perhaps intentionally, the name of the country representing American military might is the Federal Unites, which means their equipment and flag carry the initials FU. Not too subtle.
Japan at War—Sort of
The third segment of Memories deals with war in a different way: it looks at a society where war is taken for granted. “Big Cannon City” is nothing more than a day in the life of a family in a town where every waking moment is dedicated to a strange and undefined war. Nobody ever sees the enemy, because they live in “moving cities.” Colossal cannon are fired at wherever these cities are supposed to be, except that this is Victorian-era hi-tech of the genre that has come to be called “steampunk,” and the cannon can only be fired up to four times each day. Even the language reflects the society’s obsession with the war: instead of father and son saying ittekimasu (a standard Japanese goodbye, literally meaning “I’m going but I’ll be back”) when they leave the house in the morning, they say “shoottekimasu.” Apart from a few union organizers trying to alert cannon workers to toxic conditions, nobody seems to see anything wrong with their dreary and pointless way of life.
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