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Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 23:1 (2013), 3–18. doi 10.1075/japc.23.1.02lev issn 0957–6851 / e-issn 1569–9838 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Animation papers

The sweet smell of Japan Anime, manga, and Japan in North America

Antonia Levi

“The fact that it’s Japanese has nothing to do with it. I’m not that interested in Japan,” insisted one North American anime fan who agreed to be interviewed by me at Kumori-con, an anime convention held in Portland, OR in 2005. That state- ment was seemingly at odds with her costume which was that of a miko (a Shinto priestess), and her own listing of her three favorite anime series (Inuyasha, Rurouni Kenshin, and Samurai Champloo), all of which are, however loosely, grounded in Japanese history and culture.

This young fan’s reaction is not atypical however, and remains a source of dis- appointment to Japanese scholars like me who had hoped that the popularity of translated anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese comics and graphic novels) might raise interest in Japan and even pack our classrooms with students eager to learn the language and/or trace the historical and cultural roots of their favored entertainment. That has not happened. Unlike early North American fans of anime and manga who were often serious Japanophiles, those who discovered the medium in the last decade or so, often in dubbed form on television, have no particular interest in its country of origin, or even in the many references to Japanese customs and history which pervade anime and manga.

One way to understand the seeming contradiction of this development is view it through the trope of Iwabuchi Koichi’s (2002) concept of “cultural odorless- ness,” the efforts made to promote Japanese products abroad by reducing or eras- ing cultural identity. In the case of anime and manga, Iwabuchi points to the lack of specific racial characteristics in the way characters are drawn and to the fact that so many anime and manga (at least those distributed in North America) utilize a fantasy context of some sort. (Iwabuchi, 2002: 28–32)

This is certainly true, but only to a degree. Although anime characters are highly stylized and sometimes deliberately modeled on Caucasians with an eye to the Western market, names, clothing, and other cues more often clearly mark

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them as Japanese. Iwabuchi (2002), for example, cites Oshii Mamoru’s characters as being “modeled on Caucasian types,” and certainly one of Oshii’s best known characters, Kusanagi Motoko of Ghost in the Shell, fits that model. She is a power- fully-built woman (actually a cyborg) with no explicitly Japanese racial character- istics beyond, perhaps, her dark hair.1 However, her name is not only distinctively Japanese, but it also references the fabled kusanagi sword of Japanese mythology. Moreover, the context in which her story plays out is explicitly Japanese, albeit futuristic; it is a corrupt, multinational world in which she serves “the corporate conglomerate state called ‘Japan’ ” (Masamune, 1995).

The responses of anime fans in North America are equally complex and seem- ingly self-contradictory. Many, like the fan quoted above, deny that the Japanese elements of anime and manga have any particular appeal for them, yet when asked what it is that attracts them, they most often list the ways in which anime and manga are different from (and superior to) North American cartoons and com- ics. They note the unique drawing styles (often derived from traditional Japanese styles, especially woodblock printing), the comedic elements in tragic scenarios and vice versa (also a feature of traditional Japanese theater and literature), the willingness to engage with moral ambiguity, loss, and death, and the wide variety of martial arts. Most fans also mention the costumes, particularly those who en- gage in “cosplay,” dressing up as their favorite characters. Not all of these costumes are specifically Japanese, but those that are (kimono and Japanese school uniforms in particular) regularly form the majority of costumes found roaming the halls of anime conventions.

Anime and manga as a fusion form

One reason anime and manga fans may hold such seemingly contradictory views is that they are unsure of what is and is not Japanese. Few recognize the Japanese artistic, literary, and theatrical traditions that anime and manga draw upon. Even those who do, however, may legitimately have trouble identifying the Japanese ele- ments, because they are already fused with Western traditions. Anime and manga are already a multicultural creation.

When the West arrived full force in the middle of the 19th Century, it found a vibrant and unique popular culture forged in over two centuries of seclusion. That popular culture included woodblock print picture-novels called kibyoushi, and a long tradition of story-tellers who used pictures and sound effects to accompany their tales. Those popular culture traditions were then influenced by a plethora of Western traditions, including British political cartoons and American comic strips. In the 1930s and war years, early Chinese animation added new elements;

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manga pioneer Tezuka Osamu, for example, was profoundly influenced by Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan’s Princess Iron Fan. Japanese propaganda also included a plethora of political cartoons that drew on traditional folklore and mythology, and a creative use of animation to promote Japan’s war effort.

It was not until after World War II, however, that the greatest influence on modern anime and manga arrived with the U.S. Occupation forces. Cartoons ar- rived officially, as part of the cultural effort to “defeudalize” Japan by exposing Japanese to Western ideals of individualism and freedom. This effort included movie shows that followed the American format of the day: a newsreel, a cartoon, and a main feature. Comic books arrived more informally, in the kit bags and rear pockets of the G.I.s themselves. Either way, they quickly made their way into the popular culture of Japan.

The man credited with combining all these influences into the genre known as manga is Tezuka Osamu, a medical doctor who quickly discovered that he pre- ferred creative work. Although Tezuka was certainly not the only person involved in the creation of manga, he was intensely creative and prolific, and there is no doubt that his influence was major. In particular, his graphic novel series aimed at adults set a new standard for what could be done with the comic book format. Three series in particular, Buddha (a fictionalization of the life of the Buddha), Phoenix (a cosmic tale of karma and the quest for eternal life), and Adolf (a story of World War II and its aftermath), remain classics in Japan, and have been translated into many languages, including English.

Tezuka was not shy about acknowledging the influence of American cartoons and comics, and of Walt Disney in particular when speaking of his work. Later manga-ka (cartoonists) and fans, however, have not always been so kind, seeing the American products as technically advanced but creatively limited. The situa- tion was exacerbated by the events surrounding the release of The Lion King by Disney Studios. Japanese immediately noticed the similarity between The Lion King and Tezuka’s animated series Junguru Taitei (literally, Jungle Emperor) which had aired in the U.S. as Kimba the White Lion decades before. There were certainly differences, but the main characters and premises, the lion cub whose birthright is stolen by an evil uncle, the villainous hyenas, the wise old baboon, and the smart- talking bird were all there in Tezuka’s work. In response, 120 manga-ka crafted and signed a letter noting the similarities and asking that when the work was re- leased on DVD, it should include an acknowledgment of Tezuka’s influence. It was a reasonable and courteous request, and made no charges of plagiarism, merely artistic influence. Unfortunately, Disney lawyers did not see it that way, and the entire affair ended with no acknowledgement and a great deal of ill will. (Schodt, 1996: 268–273)

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“Odorless” anime and manga in North America: The early years

Kimba the White Lion was not the only Tezuka animation to air in North America. Many of his children’s series did quite well, particularly Astro Boy (Tetsuan Atomu, literally, The Mighty Atom) about a child robot, and Goku, an homage to Princess Iron Fan, which aired in the US as Alakazam the Great.2 Tezuka’s series were not the only ones to do well. Gigantor, Speed Racer, and Battle of the Planets also enjoyed reasonable success and acceptance. All these series, however, appeared only in dubbed forms and names were changed to disguise or at least reduce the Japanese “odor.” All were also aimed at children.

That changed in 1979 when Star Blazers went on the air in the U.S. That fact was perhaps not realized by the networks which relegated it to the early morn- ing kiddie hours, but teen fans quickly discovered it on their own. One early Star Blazers fan recalled that his mother loved the show, because it finally got him up in the morning early enough to have breakfast and get to school on time. He had to, he pointed out. In the days before VCRs, getting up on time was the only way to avoid the shame of being the only kid to have missed the latest episode. Like most anime series, Star Blazers featured a seasonal story arc, so continuity was important.

Many Star Blazers fans also checked out the credits and understood that the series came from Japan, but it was not until later that most them understood how their favorite show had been changed to remove its Japanese “odor.” Perhaps the biggest change was in the names of the characters and the spaceship itself. The first season of Star Blazers found Earth devastated by attacks from an alien force called the Gamilons. When an offer of help was received from another alien, a team of earthlings headed by Captain Avatar refit a sunken battleship called the Argo with a nuclear engine, and set forth to reach the friendly alien and save the Earth. At least, that was the story the American audience saw. In fact, the ship was called the Yamato. It was the World War II battleship that was sunk and went down with all its officers aboard during the battle of Okinawa. When it rose again from the dried up oceans of Earth, amid military music and rising sun imagery (much of which was cut in the American version) to do battle with the evil (and blond) Leader Dessler, it was a powerful rewriting of history. At least, it was for Japanese audiences; Americans saw a somewhat different version. The characters were also renamed to sound “science fictiony” rather than Japanese: Captain Okita became Captain Avatar, Kodai Susumu became Derek Wildstar, and Yuki became Nova.

Some of the smaller changes were quite funny. In one flashback, for example, Derek Wildstar (Kodai) recalls how, as a child, he visited his brother, Alex, at the space academy. He brought his brother a bento specially prepared by their moth- er. Alex opens the box and takes out what is clearly a rice ball wrapped in black

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seaweed (nori), but to avoid any Japanese references, the dubbed script has him say “Oh good, chocolate cake!”

Such efforts often backfired. The results were so odd that they triggered suspi- cions among fans who eventually figured out about what changes had been made. It became a point of fannish honor to know these things. That was also true of the next big anime science fiction hit, Robotech, which aired in 1985. Robotech was actually three separate series that featured similar giant robots; distributor Carl Macek combined them into a “multi-generational arc” in order to produce some- thing long enough to be salable to American networks. The first season shocked and/or delighted American audiences with its portrayal of an interracial couple: Roy was white and his girlfriend, Claudia, was black. Most of Roy and Claudia’s story, including his shocking death, was allowed to remain as it was. The same, however, was not true of a freedom fighter named Lancer who appeared in the second season. Lancer was a transvestite or possibly a transsexual who, when not heroically freedom-fighting, enjoyed a career as a female pop idol named Yellow Dancer. The Americanized version cut as much of this as was possible and dubbed in dialogue to explain that this was all a disguise to promote his cause and not a matter of personal preference.

A similar problem plagued the first season of Sailor Moon, the first example of girls’ anime to reach North America, which aired in both the U.S. and Canada in 1995. It featured a group of schoolgirls who, with the aid of magic pens and a talk- ing cat, transformed into demon-fighting superheroes wearing costumes loosely based on the nautical look of many Japanese schoolgirl uniforms. In its North American debut, Sailor Moon featured the usual changes in names: the heroine, Tsukino Usagi became Serena, her boyfriend, Chiba Mamoru, became Darien, and so forth. Some effort was made to preserve names where possible: sailor scouts Ami, Rei, and Minako became Amy, Raye, and Mina, respectively.

There was, however, another aspect of Sailor Moon that was not so easily de- odorized. The first season featured a gay couple, Zoicite and Malachite. These two were actually villains whose love for each other was perhaps their only redeeming trait. When Zoicite died, Malachite became a major threat to Sailor Moon and her friends. It was a major plot point and could not be edited out as Lancer had been in Robotech. In the end, DIC resolved the problem by dubbing in a female voice for Zoicite, the smaller and more feminine of the two, and changing pronouns all around. Zoicite became a woman, although her physical form remained flat- chested, an unusual look for romantic female roles in anime and manga.

The change was easy to make because Malachite and Zoicite were typical of the sort of gender-bending that occurs routinely in girls’ manga, and the char- acters are drawn as bishounen, beautiful boys whose look is androgynous, if not actually feminine. Indeed, there is a whole genre called BL (or boys’ love) devoted

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to male, same sex romances and/or erotica written by and for women. Although BL certainly looks gay to North Americans and has, in fact, gathered a surprising number of gay male fans, it was not initially created as a gay medium.

Distribution of anime and manga: Legal and otherwise

By the time Sailor Moon aired in North America in 1995, VCRs and videocassettes had become a regular part of North American entertainment options, and along with that technology came the fansubs. Fansubs are anime that are subtitled and distributed by fans without any copyright permission. Today, fansubbing occurs almost entirely online and is almost always free through file-sharing. In the past, however, it was a more complex business. Considerable labor was involved. First, the fansubber had to obtain the Japanese original. Then a transcript was made, translated, and turned into a usable script. Finally, the subtitles had to be trans- ferred to the copy, taking care to time them for maximum intelligibility. The tech- nology involved was fairly expensive. One well-known fansubber estimated that he lost an average of $10,000 to $15,000 a year producing fansubs. It was a labor of love, he argued, and since he made no profit, he did not feel he was doing anything morally wrong in violating copyright law.3

Most fansubbers subscribed to an unspoken code that they should not make money out of violating the copyrights of artists they admired. Videocassettes, however, cost money, so most distributors asked to be reimbursed for the cost of the tape (or the purchaser could provide the tape) and for shipping. Most, how- ever, refused to charge for the labor and technology that went into producing the fansub. Most early fansubs began with an inserted disclaimer: “Subtitled by fans for fans. Not to be distributed for profit.”

Obtaining such early fansubs also required more effort than simply going on- line and downloading. Fans had to know which fansubbers produced which series and also which could be trusted. Face to face transactions, often at science fiction or comic book conventions, were often a starting point, and it was not uncommon in the 1990s to see whole fansubbed series offered for sale on the dealers floor right beside legally produced videocassettes and, later, DVDs. Today, that is unknown. Legal capitalism has triumphed, at least in public. Online, however, fansubbing continues and the sheer range of genres available has increased enormously.4

Manga arrived more slowly in North America than anime. Translating and reproducing a manga is a far more difficult business than subtitling or even dub- bing an anime. One issue that persists is that of page order. Manga are read left to right in their original Japanese form. To western eyes, they are read back to front. Changing that order is not easy. If they are simply “flopped,” the result is a mirror

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image: actions occur in reverse and all the characters suddenly become left-hand- ed. In many cases, that was not a major cause for concern. In samurai series where depictions of swordplay were an important element, however, it could cause prob- lems. When Dark Horse released Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal in 1994, for example, they not only reversed the page order, but cut and pasted the panels so that the manga could be read left to right in western style without the characters being mirror imaged. The results were not always consistent, but they did elimi- nate the left-handed problem. They also eliminated another problem. Manji, the lead character in Blade of the Immortal, wears a Buddhist swastika (a manji, sym- bolizing the dharma) on his back. A mirror image of that becomes a Nazi reversed swastika, hardly the image the artist intended.

Today, many manga publishers take a different approach. They simply leave the pages in the original Japanese order, trusting that a new generation of manga readers knows how to read them this way. Some still add arrows to indicate more clearly which panel follows which, but even that is dying out. Japanese page order has become an accepted alternative among younger manga fans. Most of them know that this derives from its Japanese source, but that is not a major concern for them. Some do not even know. For them, the page order is a feature of manga rather than of Japan. The product has become deodorized not by disguising its Japanese origins, but by making them an integral part of western fandom.

Like anime, manga also exist online, usually in forms that do not respect copyright laws. Scanned pages of manga, called “scanlations,” are becoming in- creasingly common. Some are fully translated with the English text replacing the Japanese in speech balloons. Others leave the Japanese pages intact, adding the English script separately. And still others do not provide a translation at all, but these are for the truly hardcore fans who still follow the old practice of actually learning Japanese.

The appeal of anime and manga

Whether as fansubs or professionally produced anime and manga, however, the North American distribution of anime and manga has been primarily an im- port business, not an export. At first, these were small companies like Animeigo (founded in 1988), fans who lovingly and legally promoted subtitled versions of the anime they themselves enjoyed (Secret History of AnimeiGo). Later, larger companies offering a wider variety of products became involved, but until the mid-1990s, they remained primarily American companies, importing a product for personal reasons and/or because they believed these products would appeal to a large enough audience to make their business profitable. Japanese companies

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exporting their products through joint ventures like Bandai Entertainment came later.

There is a good reason for this. Anime studios in Japan tend to be small op- erations like Yumeta Co. which produced a popular TV series called Beyond the Stream of Time. Yumeta Co. is quartered in an unmarked building in a Tokyo suburb and employs only 30 or so artists. Anime studios are also often headed up by manga-ka who rose through the ranks to found their own businesses; most of these are better at producing good quality entertainment than they are at manag- ing the business side of things. They are unlikely to pursue massive export efforts. Most of the urging comes from the other side of the Pacific, some of it from quite high up such as from Richard Cook, chairman of Disney Studios or Todd Miller, managing director for Asia at Sony Pictures Television. (Rowley, Tashiro, Dawson, and Moon, 2005)

That small scale production and the continuing use of hand drawn frames (much of this is outsourced to Korea) may be limitation in terms of export and business, but it probably contributes to the success of anime in North America, because it results in a much wider variety of products, and in what Kazumi Kawashiro of Bandai Entertainment calls anime’s “Japanese quirkiness.” (Rowley, Tashiro, Dawson, and Moon, 2005) Another word for that quirkiness might be creativity and artistry, two factors that have played a major role in motivating North Americans to import the product in the first place.

Another factor that explains why North Americans find anime and manga so appealing lies in the themes that dominate many of the offerings: sadness, envi- ronmentalism, and technoterror. Environmentalism and technoterror are univer- sal concerns, but the appeal of sadness is something that requires an explanation. Sadness is not, or at least has not been, a major part of North American popular culture. Hollywood is notorious for its happy endings even when those are im- probable, and fans of television series know that regular characters are unlikely to die or suffer any irretrievable loss during the course of the run. That this was not true in anime became clear early on in the 1980s when Robotech character Roy Fokker died suddenly and tragically mid-season. Anime often delights in killing off its most popular characters. The Gundam series became so notorious for killing off anyone who had captured the audience’s heart that it became a verb: to gundam a character.

Death and grief in popular culture were a novelty to North Americans, but the continuing attraction went beyond novelty. One very popular series was Neon Genesis Evangelion, a robot series in which fourteen year olds must fight and die to save the earth in the biologically engineered robots only they can control. It is easy to dismiss Neon Genesis Evangelion’s appeal as simple adolescent angst, and certainly that is a factor; the inherent tragedy in the young pilots’ situation

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is augmented by romantic and parental issues. The sense of hopelessness and grief that pervades the apocalyptic world of Neon Genesis Evangelion goes beyond that, however. It is virtually a celebration of sadness and loss. In fact, the creator, Anno Hideaki, suffered from clinical depression at the time he wrote Neon Genesis Evangelion, and in one of the several endings to the series, the whole story is re- vealed to be a fantasy concocted by the seriously depressed teen hero, Ikari Shinji.

Interestingly enough, fans in both Japan and North America rejected that end- ing, partly because it was dramatically a bit of a cheat, but also because it undercut the aesthetic of sadness and beauty that had formed the attraction of the series in the first place. The problems associated with revealing that beauty to be pathologi- cal, in fact, underlines a change in how Japan views sadness. Ethan Waters (2010) discusses the recent changes in Japanese attitudes toward depression in his book, Crazy Like Us. He theorizes that pathologizing sadness as “clinical depression” is new to Japan, and a result of a cynical marketing campaign by GlaxoSmithKline to sell Paxil. Prior to that, Waters argues, Japanese saw sadness as a state rather than a disease, and not necessarily a negative state. Sadness and even suicide might be interpreted as the sign of a personality “too pure of heart to live with the conflicts, compromises and demands of modern life.” (Waters, 2010: 205) It also had reli- gious implications.

Waters does not discuss the aesthetics of that view of sadness, but he should have. The Japanese call this aesthetic mono no aware, a term sometimes trans- lated as “a sensitivity to things.” This aesthetic pervades Japanese literature and art, and has done so throughout its recorded history. It includes not just a sensitivity to beauty, but also a sense of transience as an integral part of beauty. Things are beautiful precisely because they cannot last. Cherry blossoms, for example, are particularly beautiful because they bloom for only a short time, and are therefore a symbol of death as well as beauty. A warrior who dies in the prime of his or her youth and beauty is particularly lovely and poignant because of the immanence of death. Despite Anno Hideaki’s modern conviction that his own sadness and that of his protagonist were pathological conditions, the older view of sadness and mono no aware pervades Neon Genesis Evangelion, and may explain why fans felt so betrayed by the original ending which undercut that aesthetic. That view and that aesthetic have proven to be very attractive to North Americans, not just for the sake of novelty, but because it adds something new to their understanding of themselves and art.

By contrast, the focus on environmentalism evident in many anime has prov- en popular precisely because it is familiar. That is not always immediately appar- ent. Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, for example, contains very specific and very Japanese historical and cultural references that are almost guaranteed to be unfamiliar to North Americans. It plays in the past, in Japan’s violent Muromachi

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era (1336–1573), although the exact time frame is left deliberately vague. The guns (muskets) which might have dated it more accurately to being after the arrival of the Portuguese in 1543 do not do so since the script informs us that they are in- stead of Chinese manufacture.

The central plot focuses on one of Miyazaki’s few strong male characters,5 a young man named Ashitaka. Ashitaka comes from a frontier society in northern Japan that appears to be as much Ainu (Japan’s largest indigenous minority) as it is Japanese. When Ashitaka is mortally wounded by a boar god who was defiled and driven mad by a musket wound received at the hands of the more technologi- cally advanced Japanese, the village shaman tells Ashitaka he must go to the land of the now dead boar god and see with clear eyes if he is to survive. Ashitaka heads south and soon finds himself caught in the crossfire between the animal gods of a primeval forest and a village that is strip-mining the forest to provide steel for the Muromachi period’s endless wars. The situation is further complicated when he falls in love with San, a human girl raised by wolves who rejects her own humanity to fight for the forest and her wolf family. The story is loosely based on or perhaps just inspired by Japan’s mythic culture hero, Yamato Takeru. Miyazaki does not retell Yamato Takeru’s story, but he does use the imagery from that story: the deer gods, the healing pool, and the white dogs or wolves in particular. The result is a dizzying display of natural imagery, fantastic beings, and a complex and morally ambiguous story.

However, both the history and the references to an ancient mythology that give Princess Mononoke so much of its power are understandably lost on most North Americans. The film did quite well in North America although certainly not as well as it did in Japan where, in 1997, it quickly became the highest gross- ing Japanese film (animated or live action) of all time. (Napier, 2001: 176) It never did that well outside Japan, but given its historical and cultural specificity, it is amazing how well it did do. To some degree, Princess Mononoke’s success in North America can be attributed to the unusually wide theatrical release it received cour- tesy of Walt Disney Studios, which handled its distribution. Distribution, however, is not the whole story. In retrospect, the way in which North Americans responded to Princess Mononoke’s evocation of an exotic environment and a battle between industrial polluters and anthropomorphized nature is closely akin to the way in which they later responded to the same themes in Avatar.

Avatar, of course, has had a vastly more successful run than Princess Mononoke. That is partly due to marketing and the public’s fascination with the new technol- ogy used, but it is also the result of cultural differences both in the mythos used and in audience expectations. The mythos of Princess Mononoke is unabashedly Shinto, featuring gods (kami) that are either enormous, sentient animals or eerily supernatural beings like the Shishigami, the spirit of the forest which, at night,

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changes into a much more fearful phantom called the Detarabochi. Except for the wolf girl San, who finds it difficult to communicate with humans, the forest has no human or even humanoid face. Nature remains nature in Princess Mononoke, and many of its attributes are incomprehensible and disturbing.

That alone is a sharp contrast with Avatar where nature is not necessarily sen- timentalized, but it is explained by a race of beings, the Na’vi, who are physically linked with their natural world and capable of explaining it to humans. Through the Na’vi, nature has a humanoid face and also a humanoid culture that includes hunt- ing and shamanic practices that seem to be drawn from Native American sources, and which are therefore more likely to feel familiar for North American audiences. Documentary filmmaker Richard Meech has also suggested that Cameron may have had Amazonian mythology and its “vine of the soul” (ayahuasca) in mind when he created the Na’vi “Tree of Souls.” He notes that this particular mythology and its supposed healing properties has enjoyed great popularity among North Americans recently. Either way, the practices of the humanoid Na’vi are apt to have greater resonance with North American audiences than the more abstract animal deities drawn from Shinto that appear in Princess Mononoke.

Avatar also plays to more familiar themes in terms of audience expectations. In Avatar, the battle between industrialization and nature is a fairly simple one. The industrialists are represented by a greedy and heavily armed corporation, while the indigenous people, the Na’vi, are essentially noble savages who initially greeted the newcomers with friendship, turning to violence only when their lands were attacked. The hero, Jake Sully, is a well-known western mythical figure of the type that David Brooks of The New York Times calls a “great white messiah.” Initially one of the invading industrialists (albeit a minor one), he falls in love with a local girl and little by little with her culture. He becomes one of them (quite literally through the avatar technology), and ultimately their savior and new leader. He can do this not merely because he understands the technology and mindset of the in- vaders better than the Na’vi do, but also because he comes to understand their own culture better than they do, using it to play to an old legend, rally the tribes, and drive out the evil corporation, thus producing a classic Hollywood happy ending.

Jake Sully is also a classic patriarchal hero. Certainly Avatar challenges no ma- jor gender assumptions. The women of the Na’vi are athletic warriors and hunters, and also the spiritual leaders (shamans), but they do not appear to hold the main political power. Things are even more gendered on the other side. The corporate power structure is entirely male except for one female scientist who theoretically holds a high position in the structure, but who is consistently overruled and finally killed off. The one genuinely powerful female character is a minor character, a low level fighter pilot who takes the side of the Na’vi for reasons of her own that are

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never quite made clear; she dies alone in the battle and is apparently forgotten by the end of the film.

Princess Mononoke presents a far more complex story about nature and indus- trialization. The industrialists who threaten the forest deities are no greedy villains. They are a desperate band of runaway serfs and women escaping sexual slavery, who are attempting to build a new, independent life for themselves through strip- mining and metal smelting. The forest gods and their one human member, San, are sympathetic simply because of their situation, but they often behave stupidly and even unjustly. There is also a third side, that of the warlords and the imperial court; these are the true villains, but they are tangential to the central conflict be- tween the metal smelters and the forest deities.

Ashitaka, the hero who comes from outside, and falls in love with the girl, does not enter the conflict as a “great Japanese messiah.” He is not even an Ainu or Emishi messiah. He is no kind of messiah. He is lucky to escape with his life. Although he possesses a variety of warrior and hunting skills, he is not essentially a warrior and he does not save the day, at least, not by himself. In fact, no one saves the day. The war between the metal smelters and the forest gods ends when Lady Eboshi, the leader of the metal smelters, succeeds in decapitating the spirit of the forest. Nature, now literally mindless, runs amok and everyone, human and god, samurai and peasant, is in equal trouble. Eventually, San and Ashitaka together manage to restore the severed head and the forest deity subsides back into the wa- ter, clearly injured, if not actually dead. Things quiet down and there is cause for hope in the sprouts emerging from the destroyed forest, but it is clear that noth- ing will be quite the same again. Lady Eboshi vows to live more in harmony with nature, but given the enormity of human needs in the war torn Muromachi era and her own humanitarian impulses, it seems unlikely that she will be able to keep her word. San ceases her active hostility toward humans, but refuses to live among them or even fully recognize them as her own species. And Ashitaka is left to build a liminal existence for himself between the woman he loves and his own humanity.

Princess Mononoke also challenges gender assumptions both in the ways fe- male characters are portrayed and in the roles they play. The most obvious ex- ample is Lady Eboshi, the charismatic and idealistic leader of the metal smelters. The forest deities are led by Moro, the huge female wolf who raised San; when Moro dies, her teeth still embedded in Lady Eboshi’s arm, her daughter succeeds her, despite the fact that she has two biological wolf children, both male. The only patriarchal structures in the film are the warlord armies and the representatives of the Emperor who are the true villains and who are ultimately sent packing, although probably not permanently.

Princess Mononoke appealed to North American audiences because it power- fully evoked a familiar theme, even though it did it in ways that were completely

The sweet smell of Japan 15

unfamiliar. When Satoshi Kon dealt with the equally familiar theme of technology and the human mind in his 2006 film Paprika, he used a more familiar format: sci- ence fiction. Paprika was given a very limited theatrical release in North America by Sony Pictures Classics (USA) which, despite the Sony label, does not focus pri- marily on anime or even Japanese films. Despite the limited theatrical release and marketing in general, Paprika has done well at international film festivals and its DVD sales are solid. This is due partly to Satoshi Kon’s own reputation with anime fans, but it is also because of the film itself. In both its visual artistry and its story line, Paprika reveals quite clearly what comprises that “Japanese quirkiness” cited by Kazumi Kawashiro of Bandai Entertainment. (Rowley, Tashiro, Dawson, and Moon, 2005)

Paprika brings together many of the features that have made Satoshi Kon’s reputation: his historical sensibilities, questioning of the dividing line between re- ality and fantasy, and ability to depict these visually. In Paprika, he also addresses the merging of technology and the human mind in truly horrifying ways. Paprika plays in the near future where a somewhat neurotic psychiatrist named Chiba uses a device called the “DC mini” to access the dreams of her patients. When using the DC mini, Chiba herself becomes a dream persona, a far more cheerful, sexy minx named Paprika. That duality is graphically demonstrated in a powerful but dis- turbing scene in which the villain strips away Paprika’s flesh to reveal Chiba with- in. Other characters also reveal their personalities not only through their dream personas, but in the way those personas are depicted. Tokita, the morbidly obese, childlike genius who created the DC mini, for example, emerges in the dream se- quences as a blocky, 1950s looking toy robot who literally attempts to devour both Chiba and Paprika. Eventually, the dream world leaks into the material world and threatens to destroy both.

At the heart of that destruction is an image that most often confuses North Americans: the parade, a visual pastiche of Japanese history and culture gone mad. At the forefront of the parade are appliances: a refrigerator, a television, and a washing machine, the “three treasures” coveted by Japanese families in the 1960s (Vogel, 1963: 72). These are followed by cars, air conditioners, and color TVs, the “three treasures”7 of the 1970s and, in case anyone missed where this was coming from, the Statue of Liberty also makes an appearance in the destructive, but oddly mesmerizing, parade of technology and materialism. They are also accompanied by a marching band of frogs playing western instruments, but otherwise eerily reminiscent of the anthropomorphic frogs found on a well-known 12th Century picture scroll.

These, however, are merely the prelude. At the heart of the parade are dolls. Some of them are western, possibly a reference to the American blue-eyed friend- ship dolls sent to Japan in the 1920s in an effort to counter increasing tensions

16 Antonia Levi

with expressions of peace and goodwill. But the majority of the dolls at the center of the parade are traditional Japanese dolls, many of them quite ancient, some of them articulated and robotic in appearance. Satoshi Kon does not take the easy way out in this visualization. He does not target the west or technology exclu- sively. He suggests that the destruction of Tokyo in this case has Japanese roots. He merges predominantly Japanese imagery with imported images to depict the heart of modern Japan.

Most North American audiences do not follow all, or perhaps any, of these references, yet because the medium is visual and emotional, they do follow the general menace of technology and materialism run amok. Nor do they miss the fact that they are drawn to the menace at the same time that they recognize its destructive power. That mix of technoterror and technophilia has relevance for almost anyone living in the developed world.

Cultural odorlessness or cultural fusion?

Part of the reason the very specifically Japanese references in Princess Mononoke and Paprika are not more confusing to North American audiences is because they fall into the genre of science fiction/fantasy. This is not an accident. Not all an- ime and manga produced and distributed in Japan deal with the fantastic by any means. It is, however, the form of anime and manga that dominates in the North American markets. This is because science fiction and fantasy do, to some degree, render the cultural odor less evident. The worlds they create are based primarily on imagination. There are points of reality in both films: historical reality in the case of Princess Mononoke, contemporary Tokyo in the case of Paprika. For North Americans, however, the Japanese references, if odd enough, are often interpreted as part of the purely fantastic. There is no need to render anime and manga cul- turally odorless. The audience does that itself by selecting the types of anime and manga to import, and then by interpreting anything unusual as fantastic.

That is becoming ever easier since we are by now dealing with a generation that grew up with anime and manga as a normal part of their North American world. They grew up with kiddie anime like Pokemon or Card Captor Sakura. They graduated to Naruto and eventually to some of the even more adult offerings on the Cartoon Network’s late night “Adult Swim.” They read translated manga and sometimes even manga drawn and written by North Americans in a manga style. They are mostly aware that anime and manga originated in Japan, but this is in- creasingly an ignored detail. Anime and manga are becoming culturally odorless not by reducing their Japanese characteristics, but by integrating those character- istics into North America’s popular culture universe.

The sweet smell of Japan 17

Notes

1. Oshii’s anime version of Ghost in the Shell is loosely based on a manga of the same name by Shirow Masamune. Shirow’s character design is very different; his Kusanagi is much sexier with large breasts and long legs, but arguably, she is still modeled on Caucasian ideas (idealizations?) of physicality. In the colored pages of the manga, her hair is purple.

2. Tezuka’s Princess Knight (actually Ribon no kishi or Knight in Ribbons) aired in Hawaii and a few places on the west coast, but only with subtitles on Japanese language channels. It is often considered to be the original girls’ manga (shoujo manga). Its distribution in North America was very limited, however.

3. This information derives from an interview conducted with a well-known fansubber at Baka- con (later renamed Sakura-con), which was held near Seattle, Washington in 1997. He spoke with me only on condition of absolute anonymity. While this is probably no longer a concern, I am respecting his wishes.

4. Speed has increased as well. According to fan lore, the record was achieved by a series called “Wolf ’s Rain” which was uploaded by fans in Japan as soon as it aired on January 3, 2004. It was then downloaded by a fansubbing group in Toronto, translated, subtitled and put back online in its new fansubbed form within 22 hours.

5. Almost all Miyazaki’s other heroes (and many of his villains) are female. He is known for his strong female characters.

6. Kami is usually translated as “god,” although “spirit” might be a better translation.

7. Listing three treasures to define specific eras is a long-standing Japanese joke. The reference is to the Shinto “Imperial Three Treasures” of mirror, sword, and jewel, unseen and probably no longer extant artifacts thought to represent the spiritual, military, and economic power of the nation.

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