Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  Anno spoke of Evangelion taking place at a time of absolutely no hope. He may have been referring to the year 2015, he may have been describing a period of depression in his own life as he faced topping himself and his past successes, or he may have been describing Japan itself in the anno horribilis of 1995, when it seemed to be hit with torments of Biblical proportions.

  None of the above? All of the above? Some of the above? Just another ambiguity? Watch the series and see what you can see. Some anime offer food for thought. Evangelion is a ten-course banquet.

  1. The original Tokyo was submerged in the Second Impact when the polar caps melted; this incarnation of Tokyo is about fifty miles to the southwest, on the Izu peninsula. At present, it’s a national park, featuring Lake Ashinoko, numerous hot springs, and the Owakudani Valley (which becomes the site of a momentous Angel battle in the series). Tokyo-2, by the way, was built by the United Nations about 100 miles to the north of Tokyo-3 in Nagano Prefecture and served primarily as a backup laboratory for NERV.

  2. Actually, an English translation of the letter is included in the first volume of the manga version of Evangelion, as translated into English, and also appears several places on the Web. The letter in its entirety can be seen at: http://www.anime-manga -world.de/Evangelion/Tvseries.html.

  3. Many have supposed that theirs was a gay relationship; I think this is yet another pseudo-gay relationship. Even though we’re never really clear as to what (if anything) happened between them in the bathhouse, the fact is that this isn’t a case of two pubescent boys falling in love, as in Song of Wind and Trees. Kaoru is, after all, the Last Angel in human disguise, which means that the entire question of sexuality is qualified, if not moot. Except as a tactic. In my (admittedly minority) opinion, Kaoru approached the loveless and forlorn Shinji knowing that he was the only viable Eva pilot left. Love was Shinji’s weak spot; Kaoru counted on Shinji abandoning, or at least neglecting, his duty when he declared his love for Shinji, so that Kaoru could succeed where the other Angels had failed and make contact with the being called Adam. It’s giri/ninjo again. Why else would the Last Angel disguise himself as a human?

  Please Save My Earth

  Quite literally, a story of now and then: seven scientists from a distant planet thousands of years ago. They work together, they love, they conspire, they die. The end? Hardly.

  The world of shojo manga is the natural habitat for love stories of all possibilities and combinations—domestic and international, past and present, gay and straight, even mortal and divine. Boku no Chikyu o Mamotte (Please Save My Earth) by Saki Hiwatari is one of the more interesting permutations of the genre, involving love in the fourth dimension. Its production in 1993 as a series of six half-hour OAVs also illustrates the pitfalls involved in animating certain kinds of stories.

  Once Upon Two Times

  A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away there was born a young girl named Mokuren. From her birth she carried a mark on her forehead—four dots in the shape of a diamond—that set her apart as a Kiches, a chosen devotee of the goddess Sarjalin, with heightened psychic powers. No big surprise, really, given that her parents were also Kiches. In fact, their combined powers became vested in Mokuren. This circumstance was one of the reasons the Sarjalin church preached celibacy for its high-end practitioners: Kiches lose their psychic abilities if they lose their virginity, and such powers were not to be an inheritance from one’s parents, but a gift from the Goddess. Of course, that’s exactly the kind of restriction that brings about the clash of giri and ninjo. (And apparently, no two Kiches had ever tried to marry each other before.)

  Mokuren exhibits her special gifts at an early age, notably the ability to commune with nature—to “hear” plants and animals. If there are dark spots in her life, they come from the two universal opposites of love and death.

  Mokuren’s mother dies when she is a child, and Mokuren is kidnapped to live in a school for Kiches run by the Sarjalin sisterhood. A few years later, death comes again, but this time to the father of a friend of hers, a boy named Sebool. Sebool came from a family of circus performers; his father was killed when a trapeze gave way. Mokuren is doubly frustrated. First, she has run up against the limits of her powers—even the chosen of Sarjalin cannot undo death. Second, it is Sebool that makes the Sarjalin vow of chastity start to seem like a bad idea to her. Not that Sebool is making improper advances; it’s just that he never lets Mokuren’s Kiches status in the sisterhood of Sarjalin color his feelings toward her. She finds it refreshing to be treated as a woman and not kept on a pedestal.

  At least, Sebool didn’t dwell on her status as a Kiches until his father dies. Then, he begs and pleads with Mokuren to bring his father miraculously back to life, which no Kiches could have done. She shouldn’t feel guilty about failing, but she does, in no small part because she is attracted to Sebool.

  She finally takes her concerns to the head of the order, and is told that her destiny is to be part of a scientific team at station KK-101, an observational outpost on the barren moon of the third planet of an obscure sun. . . .

  Jump ahead to the present day. Alice Sakaguchi’s family has just moved to Tokyo from Hokkaido, relocated by Mr. Sakaguchi’s employer. She’s a typical teenager, but some very atypical things begin happening. For one thing, her baby-sitting of Rin Kobayashi, the bratty boy next door, has been complicated by the seven-year-old’s proposal of marriage. For another, she has an uncanny rapport with animals, and even with plants. Lately, however, her dreams have been telling her that she was once a scientist named Mokuren and a devotee of the goddess Sarjalin. . . .

  In the West our mythology travels in a single unbroken line: we’re born, we live, we die. We have one shot at getting it right and have to rely on divine mercy if we don’t—and we usually don’t. Furthermore, the doctrine of Original Sin dissuades some of us from trying to get it right on our own in the first place.

  Well, what if there was a second chance? And a third?

  Tokyo Tower

  It’s always a bit confusing at first, looking at the skyline of Tokyo and seeing something that at a glance looks like the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The resemblance is deliberate: Tokyo Tower was built in 1957–1958 and designed to look like its French model as a way of telling the West that postwar Japan should be taken seriously as a global presence.

  In fact, the Tokyo Tower is the second look-alike in Japan of the Eiffel Tower. The first, the Tsutenkaku (“tower reaching to Heaven”), was built in Osaka in 1912. The Japanese government had it torn down in 1943, to recycle the metal for the war effort and because it might have made an attractive target for American bombers. It was rebuilt in October 1956.

  In a sense, Tokyo Tower was born in 1953 when Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK, Japanese public broadcasting)1 went on the air. In order for NHK’s signal to cover the eastern part of Japan, a broadcast radius of almost 100 miles, it needed a much taller tower than anything that had survived the war. Designer Tachu Naito came up with a design inspired by the Parisian tower, weighing about half as much and designed to withstand earthquakes on the scale of the 1923 Kanto quake. About one-third of the tower’s steel frame was made from American tanks that had been in service in the Korean War.

  Since its opening around Christmas 1958, Tokyo Tower has served three purposes: broadcasting, tourism, and advertising. The former is being eclipsed by the growth of digital broadcasting and the need for an even taller tower—the Tokyo Sky Tree, which opened in early 2010. As for tourism, Tokyo Tower rivals most malls, with stops including restaurants, clubs, a wax museum, an amusement park, and a Shinto shrine. The lights of Tokyo Tower have also been customized for holidays and product advertisements (the lights, for one example, duplicate the packaging of a new version of Coca Cola).

  There’s a fourth function served by Tokyo Tower: a disaster target. Pop culture in Japan has used Tokyo Tower as a bull’s-eye for years. The Tower hadn’t even been up for five years when Mothra had a gigantic caterpillar spin a coco
on on the tower as if it were just another tree branch. The anime feature Tenchi the Movie: Tenchi Muyo in Love has the tower targeted for destruction by an intergalactic master criminal. Similarly, the manga Please Save My Earth and its anime version have a reincarnated rapist with psychic powers and a deep grudge target the tower—this time, though, it’s to use the tower as a shrine to his beloved. The three schoolgirls of Magic Knight Rayearth are launched from Earth to Cephiro from the observation deck at Tokyo Tower. In another CLAMP group of works including CLAMP Campus Detectives and X, Tokyo Tower is part of the pentagram-with-in-a-circle geographic symbol that protects Tokyo in general. The deck of a replica of Tokyo Tower in the capital city of Mars is the site of the final battle in the feature film Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. On a more benign note, the first scene in the first episode of CLAMP Campus Detectives has the grade school trio surveying the tower as the site for an upcoming party; seeing an older woman on the observation deck, wearing a kimono and in tears, leads to their forming the amateur detective agency of the series. The tower even puts in an appearance in Tokyo Mater, a Pixar short film based on characters from the film Cars that parodies The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

  1. It may have the same acronym, but the manga and anime Welcome to the N.H.K. has nothing to do with Japanese public broadcasting.

  A basic tenet of Buddhism is that we’re constantly being reborn onto this Earth, but that’s not what we should want. The ideal is to detach, to let your desires for earthly things drop off one by one until the round of rebirth comes to an end. The trouble is, contradictory earthly desires pile up from so many directions that it’s sometimes impossible to reconcile them all. Something has to give, and usually the ideal of detachment is the first to go. It seems that all seven scientists at the base, including Mokuren, get attached to something or someone.

  When Mokuren gets to KK-101, among the crew are Gyokuran and his friend and rival since childhood, Shion. Shion, as will be discussed below, is aloof and antisocial, but the anime doesn’t show the full extent of his sociopathology: at one point in the manga, knowing about the Sarjalin vow of chastity, Shion forces himself on Mokuren. Gyokuran walks in on them and has Shion put under house arrest, but Mokuren intercedes, claiming that in fact they were “married” and that she came to him of her own choice. It was a lie, but there may have been something to it: Mokuren, even though no longer a virgin, impossibly still has the mark of a Kiches after the rape.

  The scientists end up stranded on the moonbase when an interplanetary war wipes out their entire home solar system. When a plague breaks out on the base, Gyokuran conspires with the medical officer, Shukaido, to see to it that Shion gets the only sample of the antidote. This way, he reasons, he and Mokuren can die together and thus be reborn into the same place and time without Shion getting in the way.

  He is half-right: not only does Shion show up nine years too young, but his nine years of solitude on the moon drove him mad. And the only thing worse than a crazy man is a crazy seven-year-old boy with heightened telekinetic powers. Like Mokuren, Shion has psychic talents. Unlike Mokuren the Kiches, who was able to commune with nature, Shion is a Sarches—a type also known in manga as an “esper,” meaning someone with ESP and, in Shion’s case, telekinetic abilities.

  Like Mokuren, Shion discovered his powers at an early age. Born on the moon that orbited Mokuren’s world, Shion was orphaned as a child by a war that devastated the society on that planet. At one point, Shion found himself under fire. His telekinesis kicked in, turning the soldiers’ bullets back on themselves. This saved his life but sent him into a guilty antisocial rage, since in his own mind he was now no better than the soldiers. The sisterhood of Sarjalin tried to heal Shion’s psyche by finding him a foster home with a man named Lazlo and his companion, a six-foot tall cat named Kyaa.1 They made contact with Shion’s heart and he seemed to be coming around in an environment of love and trust when Lazlo and Kyaa were killed in a car crash. This sudden deprivation left Shion sullen and aloof for years. He denied that Sarjalin even existed; he considered Mokuren’s presence on the moon base a challenge to his own bitterly cynical view of life. When he raped Mokuren, he was trying to rape the Goddess.

  The Rest of the Story

  When this story was animated, it was as a series of six OAVs of about thirty minutes each. The result is visually attractive, but decidedly unsatisfying in another way. Like the reader, the viewer has to decode much of this non-linear story on the fly and in scrambled chronological order. Unlike the reader, however, the viewer (in America, at least) doesn’t have the twenty-one volume manga story to fill in the gaps. And some of the gaps are egregious: the six episodes tell nothing of Mokuren’s childhood. We’re told almost nothing about the events at KK-101 except as they directly affect the rebirth of the characters, and there’s not a word about the rape. We do get lengthy, seemingly irrelevant looks at a Mr. Tamura, who befriends the reincarnation of Shukaido.

  Interestingly, the best resolution of the problematic adaptation was the separate release of a half-hour of music videos.2 Incorporating old and new animation (mostly new), these videos teach us about Mokuren’s childhood, as well as the nature of the infernal machine Shion/Rin wants to build in Tokyo Tower. Even though this information is alluded to more than directly explained, it goes a long way toward answering the questions of those who have no access to the original manga.

  But the answers to some of the questions are themselves, to put it mildly, problematic. Two of Alice’s classmates, Jinpachi and Issei, turn out to be the reincarnations of Gyokuran and Enju, who had their own brief love affair on the moon base. This story gives us as the villain—not the sociopathic Shion or the abusive Rin—but the hypocritical and manipulative Gyokuran. His punishment is twofold in the next life: he has to watch as Mokuren and Shion reconnect, even as Alice and Rin, and he can never be with his real beloved, since Enju is now in a man’s body.

  In fact, this latter circumstance isn’t a quirk of fate; Enju wanted to avoid Gyokuran in the next life, even though she loved him. It didn’t take her too many days on the moon base to realize that Gyokuran would never return her feelings toward him. He was simply too fixated on Mokuren to acknowledge Enju. Issei doesn’t realize the depth of Enju’s frustration until another member of the team points it out to him. Enju wanted to be reborn as a male for a reason: to let go of her love for Gyokuran (to which Gyokuran will never respond anyway) and find a new love.

  Gyokuran and Jinpachi have something in common: a love of propriety, of always saying and doing the right thing, of never being thought “out of line.” There is, however, a price to pay. If Gyokuran/Jinpachi wants true love to come his way again, he’ll just have to sit this life out. In the meantime, Gyokuran’s obsession with Mokuren and his attempt to create a happy ending led to unhappiness for himself and three other people.

  It’s a convoluted yet explicit statement of the view that trying to force fate into a particular pattern will have unforeseen consequences, none of them good. It doesn’t work on a planetary scale for Dornkirk in Escaflowne, and it doesn’t work for Gyokuran on the smaller scale of the romantic triangle. The message is clear: don’t force it. Whatever’s going to happen should be allowed to happen. This may seem fatalistic from our point of view, but it is actually an affirmation that, in love and war and everything in between, things will work out the way they’re supposed to.

  So what if it takes more than one lifetime?

  1. Here’s a pun that gets lost in translation. Lazlo explains that the cat (actually a being from another planet) is called Kyaa “because that’s what everyone says when they see him.” And “kyaa” is Japanese for “EEEK.”

  2. The music used in these videos is a particular kind of song: image music. These songs, although not used in the original production, are released to “flesh out” characters or amplify plot points, and often contain a composer’s best work.

  The Big Pokémon Scare

  When
they were a video game, or a card game, you really could put these “pocket monsters” in your pocket. But, as you know, they’re much bigger than that now.

  December 16, 1997 was an animator’s worst nightmare: the day a cartoon turned toxic. Worse, it wasn’t some ultraviolent shocker like Fist of the North Star, nor was it a writhing mass of raping tentacles like Urotsukidoji. Pokémon was one of those cute, cuddly, inoffensive anime aimed at grade-schoolers and based on a popular fad. Worst of all, the episode made international headlines, giving non-Japanese (especially conservative American media critics), already wary of too much sex and violence in television, yet another reason to be suspicious of an entire genre.

  The First Pokémon Master

  In a sense, the digital Pokémon game had its origins hundreds of years ago.1 Boys in rural Japan would play with whatever was handy, and that included insects. They would gather up large beetles and set them to fight each other. The game was inexpensive, since these beetles lived in the wild and were free for the taking—even the poorest child on the most isolated farm could find bugs for battle.

  Satoshi Tajiri wasn’t poor, nor did he live in the countryside when he was growing up in the 1960s, but his suburb of Tokyo was far enough from the central city that there were still pockets of nature—ponds, forests, fields—and insects that lived in them. When Tajiri graduated from high school, he declared that, rather than go to college, he would invent the greatest video game of all time. The new industry was still shaping itself when he developed a prototype of the game that would become a worldwide phenomenon.