by Josef Steiff
If we aren’t distracted by what is happening outside of the train window, we must then focus on what is inside the train with Chihiro and her friends. And the train is filled with ghosts, dressed from a time that clearly references the essentialist Shinto past again. They have no features or faces; they’re drawn as if they’ve already become a part of our collective memory. If we equate the train with that time in Shinto history when people were forced to abandon their spirituality, then we can more fully understand why the film is complete for Miyazaki here. This is when Chihiro has already learned everything about herself that she needs to know to grow into maturity. She already knows that nothing that happens is ever forgotten because she carries the spark of the kami within her as do all Japanese people. The nostalgia of riding the ghostly train, with the haunting music, evokes the memories of the Japanese culture for a tradition and way of returning home that can only be a connection between the existential aspects of Shinto and the essential aspects which recall the kami way.
Neither Spirited Away, the Disney version, nor Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, the original Japanese version, requires an audience to have an in-depth understanding of Shinto to appreciate the Ogino family’s situation. The parents have no memory of being pigs or how close they came to being turned into bacon. They remain blissfully unaware of the kami world or how their offspring has grown through her experience with the kami, having forgotten everything that occurred. And maybe it isn’t important that they have knowledge of their change or recognize the spiritual traditions that have preceded them. Children are after all, as Miyazaki says, only a mirror of their parents. But she provides hope for any audience that she will carry the traditions of Shinto, The Way of the Kami, into the future. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh recalls for us, “If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.” Chihiro carries the Shinto tradition in her palm; in her DNA, she holds an essence of the divine original spark of kami energy. As do we all.
8
Did Santa Die on the Cross?
ADAM BARKMAN
Legend has it that back in 1945, shortly after American troops occupied Japan during the Second World War, a famous Japanese department store—no doubt eager to capitalize on western traditions during the holiday season—set up a display of a life-size Santa Claus hanging from a cross. Whether this event actually happened or not we don’t know, but for those who have spent any time in the Land of the Rising Sun this legend certainly has a ring of truth about it. While all cultures practice to some degree what is known as “encoding” (putting their values into its cultural products), the modern Japanese are also especially famous for embracing anything and everything foreign—not excluding elements of foreign religion—and transforming them into something . . . well, unique, to say the least.
One of the most interesting platforms where the Japanese engage in this type of cultural value transformation and encoding is in anime and manga. Japan’s unique pluralism shapes how Japanese manga and anime artists portray Christianity—a portrayal that doesn’t generally give an accurate picture of Christian teaching.
Do Angels Practice Voodoo?
Although the Japanese celebrate Christmas, it’s not a day to mark Jesus’s birth, as it is in the West; rather, Christmas is a time for lovers—a time for first sexual encounters and engagement rings. Consequently, in Japanese anime, such as Always My Santa, Stellvia, The Big O, and Suzumiya Haruhi, the fact that Christmas is Jesus’s birthday is often shown to be interesting trivia, much as Buddha’s birthday, common knowledge in Asia, would be to western audiences.
Yet Christmas is not the only Christian tradition that the Japanese have appropriated: most couples celebrate Valentine’s Day and many also opt for so-called Christian weddings—weddings in Christian churches—when they get married; hence the expression that the Japanese “are born Shintō, marry Christian, and die Buddhist.”
And this leads to a question central to this discussion and the philosophy of religion as a whole: How should we understand religious diversity? There are three basic answers to this question.
The first answer comes from the pluralist, who, in the manner of Immanuel Kant and John Hick, thinks that there is a fundamental distinction between Ultimate Reality as it exists (the Noumena) and Ultimate Reality as it is humanly and culturally perceived (the Phenomena) (as in John Hick’s An Interpretation of Religion, p. 80). Because of this distinction, the pluralist typically maintains that we can’t univocally describe Ultimate Reality (where “univocity” means that the words applied to Ultimate Reality mean the same things that they do when applied to us). The best we can do is equivocally describe Ultimate Reality (where “equivocity” means that the words applied to Ultimate Reality mean something different than when applied to us). Thus, the important thing for the pluralist is not propositional truths or doctrines about Ultimate Reality; rather, the important thing is the way in which personal salvation or transformation is perceived. Accordingly, the pluralist typically regards as intolerant those who assert the truth of a particular religious doctrine.
The second answer comes from the exclusivist, who thinks a particular religion, such as Christianity, is propositionally truer than all other religions. In order for salvation even to be possible, one must accept both the ontological truth (the objective conditions for salvation or enlightenment must really be in place, such as Christ really dying and rising again) and the epistemological necessity (those seeking salvation or enlightenment must know about the conditions, for instance, they must hear about Christ’s death and resurrection) of that religion.
The third answer comes from the inclusivist, who agrees with the exclusivist, and disagrees with the pluralist, that one religion is propositionally truer than all other religions. However, while this one religion—again, take Christianity—is truer because it’s where the ontologically necessary salvific event occurred, it’s not, as the exclusivist claims, epistemologically necessary for all people to know of this salvific event (for instance, while Christ’s death is the only way for people to be saved, not all people have to hear of Christ’s death in order to be saved).
Although we’ll delve deeper into the religious history of Japan in the next section, for our purposes here we can say that modern Japanese are generally pluralistic in regard to religion. This pluralism is not merely the result of skepticism about attaining any knowledge of Ultimate Reality (the Daoist element in Japanese thought), but also involves the outright denial that there is an Ultimate Reality at all (the Shintō and Buddhist elements in Japanese thought).
Given this skepticism about, let alone outright denial of, Ultimate Reality, it shouldn’t surprise us that most Japanese anime artists feel no qualms about encoding their religious anime, particularly their anime pertaining to Christianity, in a generally pluralistic way. Thus, particular doctrines are seen as largely unimportant, whereas a general spiritual mood—a mood often created by blending many different religions together—is all-important. For instance, in Saint Tail, the Catholic heroine, Meimi Haneoka, goes to a fortune-teller for advice about her love-life, even though in the Bible, God condemns such people (Deuteronomy 18:10-11, Galatians 5:19); in Pita-Ten, Misha, an angel-in-training, washes a voodoo doll of the hero, Kotarou Higuchi, in order to “cleanse the soul” of the real Kotarou; in Maria-sama ga Miteru (The Virgin Mary Is Watching), Shimako Tōdō, the daughter of a Buddhist priest and a student at Lilian Catholic School, feels she has to hide her Buddhism from her classmates but later is shown to be fully accepted by all her Christian friends, who seem to think that doctrinal matters are peripheral to pluralistic tolerance; in Demon Lord Dante, Beelzebub, a demon mentioned in the Bible (Luke 11:15), is reincarnated (a doctrine that is Hindu-Platonic-Buddhist and incompatible with orthodox Christian teaching about the nature of the soul and bodily resurrection); and i
n Devil May Cry, Chrno Crusade, Trinity Blood, Hellsing and Devilman, good devils are the leading figures (a concept which directly contradicts the orthodox Christian teaching stating that a devil, by definition, is a fallen or evil angel).
Moreover, as is typical of pluralists, Japanese anime artists tend to view exclusivists and inclusivists—Christian or otherwise—as intolerant fanatics. Hence, the Shimabara Christians in Ninja Resurrection and the “Crusaders” in Chrno Crusade are drawn in a rather unflattering light, and in Big Wars, an alien race called “the gods” (who are linked to the Christian God via the destruction of Sodom) use brainwashing techniques to “subvert” humans into following them, apparently implying that those who follow a particular religion are irrational and dangerous.
However, according to orthodox Christianity (that which encompasses the core doctrines of the faith), exclusivism or inclusivism are the rational, tolerant choices and pluralism is the irrational, intolerant one. Why? Two things.
First, pluralism confuses epistemological and ethical considerations. It’s a mistake to affirm both that being judgmental about truth-claims necessitates maltreating people of different beliefs, and that being tolerant implies merely accepting diverse truth-claims (as they all equivocally describe Ultimate Reality) rather than rationally assessing them.
Second, although not identical to relativism, which denies Ultimate Reality altogether, pluralism ends in agnosticism, one of the results of which is that all talk about tolerance being grounded in the nature of Ultimate Reality is subsequently futile. The reason for this is simple. In order to “know” Ultimate Reality, we must be able to describe it univocally and metaphorically (wherein metaphors entail some basic univocal concepts, such as “life-sustaining” or “powerful” when we say “God is like the Sun”). But if we can’t speak about Ultimate Reality in this way (as the pluralist asserts), then we can’t know what Ultimate Reality is like. It follows that the pluralist’s criticism that exclusivism and inclusivism entail an unfair or unloving God is itself a groundless accusation since the pluralist seems (contradictorily) to think that he knows that God or Ultimate Reality is fair and loving.
As a result, while the pluralism found in most Japanese anime is aesthetically rich, it is, from an orthodox Christian perspective, rationally poor since it fails to appreciate proper, rational distinctions about God. Moreover, its apparent tolerance is itself intolerant of anything but a pluralistic view of religion.
Angel Invasion
Although the Japanese have been eager to accept and assimilate anything foreign over the past hundred and fifty years, this eagerness was not always characteristic of the Japanese. The first Japanese brought with them many of the same cultural and religious values shared by other Asian nations; indeed, Japan’s own version of shamanism, called Shintō, is remarkably similar to the shamanism found in nations as close as Korea and as far away as Mesopotamia and Peru. Nevertheless, as a nation of islanders, the Japanese found it easy to develop myths making themselves the center of the world, the ultimate result of which was a certain distrust of, and snobbery toward, anything foreign or alien.
When Buddhism was first introduced to Japan from Korea, the Japanese, being a nation of Shintoists, were initially hostile to this foreign religion (not so much because of doctrinal differences but because Buddhism was foreign). Although the conflict between Buddhism and Shintoism continued for hundreds of years, non-Japanese, in particular westerners, may find this surprising since the religious milieu of modern Japan is very much pluralistic and synchronistic in that it promotes the harmony and blending of Shintō, Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian beliefs—none of which, we must keep in mind, are particularly opposed to such a blending or, more importantly, to pluralism itself.
Now when Christianity was first introduced to the Japanese by Dutch Protestants and Portuguese Catholics in the sixteenth century, the new religion initially appeared as though it would go the way of Buddhism in Japan—at first feared and then, centuries later, accepted in one form or another. In fact, Christianity even looked more promising than Buddhism since the Catholics quickly succeeded in winning the friendship of Oda Nobunaga, who was the most powerful man in Japan at the time.
However, Christianity in Japan faced one problem that Buddhism never did: conflict, brought on by orthodox Christianity’s exclusivist claims, between religion and politics. That is, despite their desire for western guns and technology, the Japanese began to see that European expeditions into Asia were resulting in western colonization and so the Japanese came to believe that Christianity was the means by which European powers softened up countries that they intended to conquer. In their own case, the Japanese thought that when the European Christians discouraged people from acknowledging the divinity of the Japanese emperor (among other orthodox Christian prohibitions), the Europeans were promoting complete disobedience to the Japanese government: The Christian band have come to Japan, not only sending their merchant vessels to exchange commodities, but also longing to disseminate an evil law, to overthrow true doctrine [such as the Shintō doctrine that the emperor is the son of a god], so that they may change the government of the country and obtain possession of the land. This is the germ of great disaster, and must be crushed. (C.R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650, p. 318)
The ultimate result of this Japanese fear was that Christianity was declared illegal in 1606. Shortly after this, in 1637, Christians in the Shimabara region of Kyūshū revolted when they were asked by the intolerant Japanese pluralists to renounce their beliefs. This revolt resulted in the massacre of some 37,000 Christian peasants, and, a few years later, the Japanese government in Edo (Tokyo) established the Office of Inquisition for Christian Affairs, which gave Buddhist temples, among others, the power to sniff out any hint of Christianity and other “evil,” subversive religions.
Now it’s commonly known that anime generally avoids discussion of real-world religions (shūkyō), and this is certainly true of Christianity, particularly as it pertains to Japan’s first encounter with it. Nonetheless, there are a few exceptions. For instance, Nemuri Kyoshiro tells the tale of a blue-eyed swordsman whose Japanese mother was raped by a devil-worshipping Portuguese priest; Ninja Resurrection follows the story of a young Christian named Shiro, who is prophesied to become the messiah who will lead the Shimabara Christians to victory, but who instead becomes the incarnation of Satan; and Samurai Champloo is largely about a sword-for-hire living around the time of the Shimabara Rebellion, who, among other things, refuses to step on a fumie or a picture of Jesus or Mary, not because he is a closet Christian but rather because he “hates being told what to do.” What one can gather from these three series is the common theme that when Christianity was first introduced to Japan, it was largely seen as something alien and either ludicrous, as in Samurai Champloo, where the grandson of Francisco Xavier, the first missionary to Japan, is an unhinged megalomaniac, or dangerous, as in Ninja Resurrection, where the Christian revolt leads to massive blood-shed as a result of “Christian sorcery” (incidentally, the idea of prayer as magic or the manipulation of an impersonal force, and not a request to a divine being, is a common Japanese Daoist misunderstanding of Christian prayer).
While there are a number of series set in the present or future that encode certain aspects of Christianity in, if not an orthodox, at least a more positive light, such as Ode to Kirihito’s Scripture-quoting dog-nun, Sister Helen Friese, or Go Go Heaven’s resurrected Catholic schoolgirl, Shirayuki Kogyoku, some depict Christianity as a dangerous, alien religion. Bypassing Angel Sanctuary, Roots Search, and Chrno Crusade, all of which depict God as either apathetic or downright evil, and Sins of the Sisters, which makes the Pope the equivalent of a child-murderer, an anime series which deals with Christianity as a dangerous, alien philosophy is Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Neon Genesis Evangelion (or Eva for short) alludes to the Bible in its very name, which means something like “the gospel of a new beginning.” The series makes expl
icit use of orthodox Christianity (the book of Revelation), but also Jewish mysticism and Gnostic Christianity. Examples include the names of the angels who attack the Earth (for instance, Samchel, the angel who allegedly guarded the Garden of Eden), Lilith (Adam’s alleged first wife, who refused to submit to her husband—though in Eva is one of the angels), and the tree of the sefirot (the tree that is related to creation and engenderment and, in Eva, a picture of which decorates the ceiling of Gendō Ikari’s office).
In keeping with orthodox Christianity, Eva focuses on the angels who are sent to the Earth to smite it and who will eventually herald the way for the creation of the New Earth (Revelation 8-9, 16, 21). However, whereas Eva never mentions any divine hand behind the angels’ attack on the Earth, the Bible puts Jesus front and center. Or again, while Eva depicts the destruction and rebirth of the Earth in monistic terms (that is, where all things are mere appearances of a single reality), the Bible shows the judgment of the Old Earth to be a matter of justice and the creation of the New Earth to be a place where the just can find sanctuary. Consequently, it’s clear that Eva was not intended to be a serious engagement with orthodox Christian theology despite what some may think. Indeed, Kazuya Tsurumaki, the producer of Eva, said Christian themes were employed in Eva “because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan [and I] thought it would be mysterious” (Dani Cavallaro’s Anime Intersections: Tradition and Innovation in Theme and Technique, p. 59). As a result, one possible reading of Eva is to see the angels’ attack on Tokyo-3 as an allegory of Christianity’s impact, as an alien, hostile religion, on Japan. This reading is simplistic and ignores many factors; however, the general sense of dangerous and alien, which the Japanese were taught to associate with western powers and Christianity, can be found in Eva.
