Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle (PDF)

WO)OaADJ6IDdOMMM AN I M E Akira to from Howl's Moving Castle Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation Susan J. Napier palgrave macmillan ANIME FROM AKIRA TO HOWL"; MOVING CASTLE Copyright © Susan]. Napier, 2001, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2001 as ANIME FROM AKIRA TO PRINCESS MONONOKE by PALGRAVE MACMILLANTM This updated edition first publislied 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLANT" 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. lOOlO and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1-4039-7051-3 hardback ISBN 1-4039-7052-1 paperback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Napier, Susan Jolliffe. Anime from Akira to Howl's moving castle : experiencing contemporary Japanese animation I Susan]. Napier.-- Updated ed. p. cm. ISBN 1-4039-7051-3 -- ISBN 1-4039-7052-1 (pbk.) 1. Animated films--Japan. I. Title. NCl766.]3N36 2005 791. 43'340952--dc22 2005054743 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Planettheo.com. This edition: December 2005 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America For Julia Moon Prism Power! CONTENTS Acknowledgments.................................... vii Foreword to the Revised Edition.......................... ix PART ONE INTRODUCTION CH AP T E R O N E Why Anime?........................................3.. CH AP T E R T W O Anime and LocaVGlobal Identity.......................... 15 PART TWO BODY, METAMORPHOSIS, IDENTITY CH AP T E R THR E E Akira and Ranma 112: The Monstrous Adolescent............. 39 CH AP T E R f OUR Controlling Bodies: The Body in Pornographic Anime.........63 CH AP T E R F I V E Ghosts and Machines: The Technological Body..............85. CH AP T E R SIX Doll Parts: Technology and the Body in Ghost in the Shell.... 103 CH AP T E R S E V E N Stray: Gender Panics, Masculine Crises, and Fantasy in Japanese Animation.................................117.. PART THREE MAGICAL GIRLS AND FANTASY WORLDS CH AP T E R E I GHT The Enchantment of Estrangement: The Shojo in the World of Miyazaki Hayao................. 15 1 CH AP T E R N I N E Now You See Her, Now You Don't: The Disappearing Shojo... 169 CH AP T E R T E N Carnival and Conservatism in Romantic Comedy............ 19 5 PART FOUR REMAKING MASTER NARRATIVES: ANIME CONFRONTS HISTORY CH AP T E R E L E V E N No More Words: Barefoot Gen, Grave of the Fireflies, and "Victim's History"................................. 217 CH AP T E R T W E lVE Princess Mononoke: Fantasy, the Feminine, and the Myth of "Progress"........................................... 231 CH AP T E R T HI R T E E N Waiting for the End of the World: Apocalyptic Identity....... 249 CH AP T E R F O UR T E E N Elegies.............................................. 27 5 C O N CLUSI O N A Fragmented Mirror.................................. 29 1 Notes............................................... 29 5 Bibliography......................................... 333 Index...............................................343 A CKNOWLEDGMENTS One day in 1 9 89 a student lingered after my Japanese class to show m e o n e of t h e Japanese comic books (manga) he h a d frequently brou ght up in class discussion. Expecting some thing simple and upbeat along the lines of my childhood favorite, Superman, I was surprised , then transfixed. The comic he showed me, A h i ra, was a complex evocation of a twenty-first c entury dystopian Japan, dominated by beautifu lly rendered images of surpassing bleakness. Thanks to the manga , I was inspired the next year, while teaching in London, to go to the British premier o f Ahira and was again transfixed, gradually becoming aware tha t I was seeing some thing both wonderful and different. So my first acknowledgmen t must be to the s tudent who first showed me A h ira and to all the students and anime fans over the las t 1 1 years who have shared with me their favorite manga and anime and their though ts about them. I want particularly to thank J onathan N awrocki, Peter Siegenthaler, Kara Williams , Brian Ruh , and Alex Aguila , who have been espe cially helpful a t various stages in the research o f this book. Perhaps i t was no coincidence tha t the premier of A h i ra was followed shortly thereafter by what I believe was the first conference on Japanese Popular Culture ever organized in the West. I must thank most deeply its organizers , Beth Berry and J ohn Treat, who invited me to give a p aper there. The paper turned out to be on A h ira and the enthusiastic resp onse at the conference made me realize that this was a research topic worth pursuing at far grea ter length. Venturing to write a boo k-length discussion of anime was really journeying into undiscovered country. I could not possibly h ave done it withou t the generou s awards from three institu tions , the J ohn Simon Guggenheim M emorial Foundation, the Social Science Research VIII * ANIME FROM A K I R A TO H O WL'S M O V I N G C A S TL E Council , and the University of Texas, whose awards gave me the time to leave the teaching world temporarily behind. I cannot thank enough the friends/colleagu es/mentors who helped me ob tain these awards: Anne Allison , Helen Hardacre , Patrick Olivelle, Sharalyn Orbaugh , Miriam Silverberg, Arthur Sto ckwin, and Ezra Vogel. O thers who helped along the way are Sharon Kinsella, Livia Monnet, Jay Rubin, Robert Khan, Henry Smith , Ian Reader, Alex Smith , Kotani Mari, and Takayuki Tatsumi. As always , I would like to thank my two most imp ortant mentors, Howard Hibbett and Asai Kiyoshi, who have remained marvelously supportive , especially considering how far I seemed to have traveled from the study of "pure literature. " Along the way I also made some exciting new friends i n the anime community. I am gra teful and honored by Helen M cCarthy's enthusiasm for the book. I also want to thank Marc Hairston for his consistent support and interes t in the proj ect. The editing of this book was a whole other j ourney in itself. I would like to thank Robert Luskin for his help in the initial stages and with the sta tis tical surveys used in the Appendix. As for my editors a t Palgrave-Anthony (Toby) Wahl, Alan Bradshaw, a n d Annj e an ette Kern-they are in a class by themselves, the very best. I must especially extend my heartfelt gratitude to Toby, whose consistent support and enthusiasm for the project, combined with editorial brilliance and ( perhaps even more important) saintlike patience , made him the perfect editor. Las tly I want to thank the people closest to me whose lives were most touched by anime (whether they wanted it to be or not). I want to thank Bill Barlow for his consistent interest, not to mention his willingness to a ttend anime conventions. And I want to thank my daughter, J u lia, who lived through too many weekends of my writing and not playing with her, and to whom this book is dedicated. FOREWORD TO THE REVIS ED EDITION By the time this updated edition of Anime from Akira to How l's Moving Castle (formerly Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke) is published, it will have been five years since the publication of the original e dition. Much has happened in the world of anime in that time. To be honest, when I finished writing the first edition, I genuinely wondered if the anime boom might soon reach its peak and become a niche phenome no n, beloved o f ardent fans but never becoming mainstream. In fact, almost the opposite has occurred. Anime has increased in popularity to the point where U. S. fans number at least in the hundreds of thousands. I still remember my incredulity a couple of years ago when I was invited to speak at O takon , one of the largest of the East Coast anime conventions. Going in to register the first morning of the convention, my j aw dropped when I saw an enormous line of people snaking around the Baltimore Convention Center and down the street. Not only did they range in age from 6 to 60, but many of them were colorfully dressed as their favorite anime character. I learned later that 1 7 ,000 fans had converged on Baltimore that summer. (The figure rose to 2 0 ,000 at the following year's convention. ) And since then the fan base has continued to expand. Although there are still people who try to edge away when I tell them what I do my research on, these days more often than not the person I am speaking to is either a fan or knows someone close who is. One o f the more striking changes in anime fandom in America over the last few years has been the rise of female fans, not only of anime, bu t o f anime's rela ted medium of manga. As the New York Times documents, " Manga producers in the United States have tapped into a new audience for comics-the female consumer. " I Recent conven tions I have attended also attest to anime's growing popularity among women. At many cons-conventions-the participants seem to be evenly split between the genders , although it is clear that some types x * A N IM E FROM A K I R A TO H O WL ' S M O V I N G C A S TL E of anime may appeal more to one gender than the o ther, This is most notable in sessions on so-called yaoi (anime and manga with homo erotic themes ) , where female fans seem to outnumber male fans by a t least ten to o n e. At the same time, however, it should be emphasized tha t male and female fans e xist for virtually any type of anime , including hentai (pornography ) , which although initially aimed a t males , h a s a surprising number of female adheren ts. T h e same c a n b e said from the opposite point o f view about s hojo (young girl) anime and manga. Statistics bear further evidence of anime's growing popularity among different age groups and sexes. According to the J apan E xternal Trade Organization, 60 percent of all TV cartoons worldwide are anime. Children's anime programs, such as Yu-Gi-Oh and Pohemon, rank in the top ten of American children's programming ( third and sixth respec tively). Even home-grown American cartoons, such as The Power Puff Girls and Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi , show clear anime inspiration. As is clear from the works discussed in this book, how ever, anime is definitely no t only for children, According to the Was h i ngton Post, " [ Tlhe Cartoon Network's late -night 'Adult Swim' segment which heavily fea tures Japanese anime-is now the most watched cable block in i ts time slot for men between 1 8- 3 4 , beating out Jon Stewart's 'D aily Show,' 'The Tonight Show' and 'Late Show with David , Letterman. " 2 Anime's popularity continues to extend well beyond America and Japan. The Washi ngton Post notes that a South African company will soon launch a 2 4-hour anime channel and tha t Pohemon has become one of the most viewed cartoons in the world, now broadcas t in 68 countries. 3 Furthermore , interest in anime reaches well beyond the big cities. In the summer of 2002 I walked into a small newspaper shop in a little town in Burgundy to find five different journals devo ted to anime staring a t me from the magazine rack. Anime is also being taken seriously on an aesthetic level. In December 2004 I had the opportunity to see a Parisian e xhibition comparing Miyazaki's art to tha t of the popular and enigmatic French comic artist Moebius, Walking into the stunning neoclassical foyer of the Musee de la Monnaie where the e xhibi tion was held, I almost thought I had made a mistake. But sure enough , the second floor of the museum was thronged with young French people looking at scenes F O R EW O R D T O THE R EVI SE D E DIT I O N * XI from Miyazaki films beneath an ornate nineteenth-century c eiling. The exhibition even included a ca talog complete with quo tations from Moebius and Miyazaki on art and fantasy. One quote seemed to sum up Miyazaki's approach to art and life : "Of course I believe that o ther worlds exist. If they didn't life wou ldn't be interesting. I t's like lov e : y o u can't see it but it exists-simply because y o u believe it. I t's j ust a ,, matter of believing. 4 O thers besides the French have been impressed by M iyazaki's art. In 2002 his film Spi ri ted Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamihahushi) won the Academy Award for best animated fea ture , beating out four American films, including two from Disney. Miyazaki's latest film , How l s Moving Castle (Hauru no Ugohu Shiro), based on the English fantasy by Diana Wynne J ones , opened in 50 countries in 2005. But p erhaps we should re turn to the question that M iyazaki's sta tement implicitly raises: Why are more and more people arou nd the world "believing in" the other world that is anim e ? Al though this is an enormous subj ect, a few speculations might be appropriate at this point. One is that, in the last few years , fantasy in general has roared back into a prominen t place in popular culture. The immense success of books such as the Harry Potter series or films such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy attest to what might be called a global hunger for fantasy. The reasons behind this yearning are no doubt diffuse , but it seems safe to say that the last decade of the twentieth century u shered in an increasing disaffe ction with technology. Although technology still produces "cool" products , such as cell phones and DVDs, it seems less able to p rovide the sa tisfying fu ture tha t utopian science fic tion used to promise. Problems such as environmen tal degradation, economic downturns , and war appear increasingly intractabl e , with science seeming to suggest little in the way of overall solutions. In addition, in America at least, the events of September 11 have cast a long shadow over the national psyche. I t is little wonder that fantasy worlds offering alterna tives to the frightening new reality should become increasingly popular. At the same time it should be emphasized that one of anime's important elements is the uniqueness of the medium itself, which may make it particularly appropriate for today's culture in which many participants , especially the c o mpu ter litera t e , move seam lessly between the " real" and the unreal. Paul Wells has stated: "Animation XII * ANIME FROM A K I R A TO H O WL ' S M O V I N G C A S TL E is arguably the most important creative form of the twenty-firs t century. Anima tion as an art , an approach, an aesthetic and an application informs many aspects of visual culture, from feature length to prime-time sit-corns ; from television and web cartoons to display functions on a range of communica tions technologies. In short, animation is everywhere. " s An even more important aspect of animation is tha t, compared to other twentieth-century visual media, it is explicitly nonreferential. O ther cinema and pho tography are both based on an outside reality even if they use special effects to change that reality; animation s tresses to the viewer that it is separate from reality, or perhaps even an alternative reality. For some viewers, especially older ones who are used to looking down on animation as children's fare, watching animation can be an uneasy experience. In fact, we seem to be psychologically less "defended" when we watch animation. In o ther words , when viewers watch a live-action film , they have c ertain expectations as to the visual or narrative traj ectory of a particular action. In animation , there is no underlying expectation o f any kind of normality. Characters may expand, shrink, or transform. Pigs can fly and cats can talk. The universe can take on the form of a gigantic human being before one's very eyes. The notion of the permeability between reality and illusion fits in very well with my concep tion of the "fantasyscape" that I explore in the conclusion of this book. If anything, the appeal o f the fantasyscape has only grown in the last five years as people all over the world celebrate alternatives to reality, ranging from video games to the culture of cu teness emblemized by the unreal Hello Kitty, to the surge of open interest in pornography. Like it or not, we live in a culture increasingly full of worlds that are essentially mental (and often technological) cons tructions. How has anime itself responded to the changes over the last five years? This updated edition is an attempt to answer that ques tion. Once again , however, a few caveats are in order. As more and more anime gets produced, it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about specific overall trends, There will always be exceptions to whatever general s tatements I make , p erhaps many. In addition , I am mainly discussing anime available in America, which, of course , does not reflect the entirety of anime available in Japan (although a much wider fO R EW O R O T O T H E R EVI SE D E D I T I O N * XI I I variety of anime is available n o w i n the United States than even a few years ago, thanks to the magic of downloading). Overall, I would say that my three overarching modes-the apocalyptic, the elegiac , and the carnival-still hold true as a way of broadly categorizing anime. But sometimes they are not the whole story. Thus , a popular television series such as Rurouni Kenshin, which has definite elements of all three, does not belong to one overall category. For the updated edition of this book I have tried to look at as diverse a group of anime as possible but, as in the first edition, to concentrate on works that seem to be especially interesting and/or imp ortant. I have included a number of series and films that are extremely p opular both in the United States and j apan, not only because their popularity means that they will have had a s trong impact on con temporary anime cu lture but also because it is safer to make pronouncements abou t certain trends when one knows that the anime in question are watched by an enormous number of peop l e. It should be noted, however, tha t just because something is popular does not necessarily mean tha t it is shallow or formulaic. InuYas ha, the series based on Takahashi Rumiko's popular manga , for example, ran to 1 50 episodes bu t remained inven tive and imaginative un til the end. Cowboy Bebop (Kauboi i Kebopu), the noirish saga of bounty hunters in space, gained an intense following bo th in America and in j apan precisely because it to o k certain conventions of masculinity and explored them on a deep and emotionally sa tisfying level. And of course Spiri ted Away, which became the highest-grossing movie in j apanese history, can be enj oyed as brilliant entertainment on one level and as thought-provoking critique of contemporary j apan on another. As b efore , however, I have also included works that are less wildly popular (in fact some are rela tively unknown) , usually because the quality and originality of the story line and the issues they explore are so interes ting and important tha t they deserve both critical attention and a wider audience. Works such as Haibane Renmei, which deals with the aftermath of suicide in a manner that is delicate, memorable, and moving, is one such example. Wo lfs Rain ( the title is the same in japanese ) , an elegy to lost dreams , is another. In some cases , anime that were not terribly popular in j apan have gained an intense following in America. An example of this is Serial Experiments XIV * ANIME FROM A Ki R A TO H O WL ' S M O Vi N G C A S TL E Lain, a brilliant exploration of the nightmare side o f c ompu ter technology that has been widely praised by American scholars, critics, and fans, As is always the case , there were many o ther wonderful anime tha t I had to leave out for reasons of space. I apologize to devo tees of series such as Escaflowne, Gundam, Fushigi Yugi, and the rest, who may feel sligh ted. F ortunately, more and more critical attention is being devoted to anime these days , so it is likely that these works will be discussed in some venue at some point. In fac t , another change over the last five years has been the number of high-quality articles and books coming out about anime, a trend that I am sure will con tinu e. 6 Speaking of trends , I would like to make a few o ther general remarks on the subj ect within anime narratives themselves. Although, as I have said, one needs to be cau tious about overgeneralization because o f the range and diversity of anime , I would like to venture a few specu lations. P erhaps the most intriguing trend tha t I have no ticed is a general darkening of anime subject matter. This is, o f course , a relative distinction since one thing that attracted young Americans to anime from early on was the fact tha t it has consistently dealt with subj e cts that are more challenging and serious than those in most recent American cinematic products. That being said, I still would submit that even anime directed toward middle schoolers seems to have taken on a more serious tone in the last few years. An example of this would be InuYasha, whose crea tor, Takahashi Rumiko , is known for such lighthearted works as Ranma 1/2 and Urusei Yatsura. In contrast, InuYas ha, while still hugely entertaining, from its very beginning has dealt with issues of death, family dysfunction, and the burden of the past that seem out of place in the madcap realms of the previous series. A darker tone can also be seen in the depiction of the shojo, young girl characters who served as the icon of contemporary Japanese culture in the 1980s. Although still as important or perhaps even more so as then , the shojo in today's anime often deal with far tougher issues, including their own neuroses and dark pasts , than their e arlier sis ters did. Even a comedy such as Fruits Bas ket (Furutsu Basketto) is premised on the adventures of a homeless orphan. The director Kon Satoshi's most recent film , To kyo Godfathers, focuses on, among o ther things, a girl who stabs her policeman father when she thinks tha t he FOREWORD TO THE REVISED E DI TION * XV has lost her cat and hides away in the big city with a middle-age alcoholic and an aging transves tite. As the charac ter and environment of the shoj o have darkened, so have those of the male figures in anime. Although the l echerous teenage boy surrounded by girls remains a popular trope, even his situation has grown more complex, exemplified in such anime as Please Teacher ( Onegai Sensei) and Midori Days (Midori no Hibi ). I t is probably safe to say tha t Shinji of Evangelion still wins the champion ship for most psychologically complex (or j ust plain neurotic) male character ever invented; nevertheless, as w e will see in chap ter 1 3 , he has plenty of company among recent anime heroes. Anime even deals with problems such as the so-called hikikomo ri, young people who shu t themselves away rather than deal with society. Another intriguing trend has been the relative absence of maj or apocalyptic series or films (with the possible exception of Metropolis) and a turn away from science fiction to fantasy. Even the visually stunning Metropo lis might be called retro-apocalypse, no t only because of its 1 930s-style setting and its inspiration from an early Tezuka Osamu work, but also because the entire film can be seen as a pastiche of everything from Fritz Lang's original Metropolis to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, whose nihilistic-apocalyptic climax , disorientingly accom panied by an upbeat song, is directly echoed in the Japanese film. O f course , science fiction anime i s still being produced , but even in mecha-like works such as Gainax's idiosyncratic Furi Kuri, which includes a robot growing out of the protagonist's head , the effect is more surreal than sci-fi. Similarly, Oshii Mamoru's beau tifu l sequel Ghost i n the Shell 2: Innocence (Inosensu) , although set in the same near-fu ture techno-dystopia of the earlier film, is imbued with a sense of the uncanny rather than the cyberpunk sensibili ty that do minated the first film. 7 The Gundam series with its humans in power suits fighting interstellar battles still continu es, but it is a carry-over from the 1 9 70s. An interesting and considerably darker fantasy vision of the "power suit" may be found in the poignant series Fu l l Metal Alchemist (Hagane no Ren kin jutsushi), about two bro thers , the younger of who m , AI, loses his body in an alchemy accident. The older bro ther quickly finds a replacement body for AI, a suit of armor that gives him superhuman strength. But, as Al makes clear in a number of sorrowfu l declarations , h i s power suit takes away his capacity to feel , b o th XVI * ANIME FROM A K I R A TO H O WL ' S M O V I N G C A S TL E physically and emotionally, and he would far rather have his human body back even with all its imperfections, The fantasy world of Fu l l Metal Alchemist is one of many fu lly realized alternate realities tha t recent anime has offered us, O ther memorable ones include the dazzling bathhouse of the gods in Miyazaki's Spi ri ted Away, not to mention the fantastically designed moving cas tle that dominates his most recent release , How l Moving Castle, On a quieter note , we might think of the sepia- toned Old Home in the world beyond death of Haibane Renmei. Although I have already touched on the worldwide swing of interest toward fantasy, it is useful to speculate briefly on the question of why anime has turned toward that genre. Again, one answer must be a feeling of disillusion with the promises of technology. In his introduc tion to the book Japanese Cybercultures, David Gauntlett mentions how the latest communication technolo gy is contributing to the "transforma ,, tion and detraditionalization of Japanese society. 8 Although some people see this as a liberating development, it is clear that for o thers these changes are exacerbating a profound unease that has haunted Japanese society since its recession began in 1 989. Japan has recently begun to climb out of the worst of its economic doldru ms , but literature scholar Tomiko Yoda's description ofjapanese society at the millennium remains accurate: "Japan in the 1 990's has come to be widely perceived as the site o f an imploding national economic system, a disintegrating social order, and the virtual absence of ethical and competent leader ,, ship. 9 How this malaise is expressed in specific anime is covered in chapters 7 and 9, but for the moment it is worth suggesting that fantasy, particularly in its more conservative form, may be particularly appealing to a society that is at some level deeply uneasy with its past, present, and future. It is not surprising that two of the most popular series of the late 1 990s, Rurouni Kenshin and Inu Yasha, are set in the past, hinting at a strong desire to escape the complexities of the contemporary world. Miyazaki's decision to set Spirited Away in a mise-en-scene that contrasts an alluring traditional culture with a disappointing contemporary world is also related to this , although Spirited Away is more a call to arms for change than a simple fantasy of escape. Looking into the futu re , it will be interesting to see how animators respond to the new complexities before them. Even though FORE W 0 RO T 0 THE RE VISE D E 0 I TION * XVI I there are always laments that anime has become "stale" i n comparison to some mythic golden age , much exciting talent is still at work, not all of which I have been able to discuss in this book. Among others , I would mention C lamp , the all-female anime studio from Osaka whose work, such as Chobits and the satire Miyuki-chan i n Wonderland, have opened up n ew approaches for anime. Studio Gainax , the maker of Evange/ion, has shown its versatility with Kare Kano, an affec ting high school drama, and the extraordinary Furi Kuri series , which somehow balances on a tightrope between the carnivalesque and the nihilis tic. Perhaps the most important new director whom I was able to tou ch on only briefly is Kon Satoshi. Kon's films-Pe tject Blue (Pafekuto Buru) , M i l l ennium Actress (Senen joyu) and Tokyo Godfathers ( To kyo Godofazasu)-are all so memorable (and each so different from the other) tha t critics have given him the backhanded compliment of IO asking why he does not do live action. Kon's most recent e ffort, a foray into television called Paranoia Agent with its blend of dark, unpredictable fantasy and memorable characters , also should have an impact on o ther crea tive talents. O ther direc tors and artists whose work should b e watched include Abe Yoshitoshi , whose character designs for Seri a l Experiments Lain and concep t for Haibane Renmei show him to be highly imagina tive and intriguing. Watanabe Shinichiro , the director for Cowboy Bebop, often aided by the screenwriter N obumoto Keiko (who also wro te every episode of Wolf Rain), is already having ano ther success with his recent series Samurai Champloo, which, like Cowboy, also highlights idiosyncratic male characters. The small Studio Bones is responsible for two of the most crea tive recent series , Wo lf Rain and Ful l Metal A l chemist, whose success should prove an inspiration for other exciting works. F ortu nately, the old guard of anime are still alive and well and producing. Takahashi Rumiko seems to go from strength to strength with her richly imaginative manga that have consis tently inspired some of the longest-running anime series in Japan. Oshii Mamoru continues to produce anime tha t is both a visual and a cerebral delight. Miyazaki Hayao-who, as of this writing at least, has stopped talking about re tiring-is a national or perhaps a global treasure and is finally getting the recognition he deserves. Obviously, anime is changing as new technologies and new issues come up. But it is and will remain XVIII * A N IM E F R O M A K I R A TO H O WL' S M O V I N G C A S TL E o n e o f the most important cu ltural expressions of contemporary J apanes e society, I am sure we are all looking forward to s eeing what the future will bring. PART ONE * INTRODUCTION CH AP T E R O NE WHY ANIME? THERE ARE MANY ANSWERS to the qu estion that ti t les this chapter, as th e res t o f this introduction will d emonstrate, but for now it is worth explo ring the qu estion its elf. J apanes e animati o n , or "anime, " as it is now usua lly referred to in both J apan and the West, is a phen o m enon of popu lar c u lture. This m eans that much (some would argu e most) o f i ts products are short-lived , rising and falling du e to popular taste and th e d emands of the hungry mark et p lace. Can or ev en sho u ld anim e b e tak en as s eriously as the ex traordinary range o f high cultura l arti facts, from woodblock prints to haiku , that Japanes e culture i s famous for ? Can o r should anime b e s een a s a n "art , " or sh o u ld it o n ly b e analyzed as a socio logical phen o m en o n , a k ey to und erstanding some of the current conc erns abou nding in pres ent day Japanes e society ? Thes e are legitimate questions. As J ohn Treat, one o f the maj or sch o lars in this area , notes in his ground-breaking introduction to Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture: 4 * ANIME FROM A K I R A TO H O WL ' S M O V I N G C A S TL E T o worry about the relation o f the popular t o high o r official culture is to think about the perennial problem of value: perennial first because value is so exasperatingly mercurial,.. and second because its determination only deflects us from understanding how cultures high, low and in-between exist in discursive and material relations of exchange, negotiation and conflict with each other." 1 The "cu lture" to which anime b elongs is at presen t a "popu lar" or " mass" culture in j apan, and in America it exists as a "sub" cu lture. How ev er, as Treat's point about the m ercuria lity of valu e suggests, this situation may w ell change. Indeed , in j apan over the last d ecade, anime has been increaSingly s een as an intellec tua lly cha llenging art form , as the numb er of scholarly writings on the subj ect attest. Furthermore, anim e is a popular cultural form that clearly builds on previous high cultura l traditions. Not only does th e m edium show influenc es from such japanese traditional arts as Kabuki and the wo odblock print (origina lly popular culture phenomena themselves ) , b u t it also makes u s e o f worldwide artistic traditions o f twentieth century cinema and photography. Finally, the issu es it explores, o ften in surprisingly comp lex ways, are ones familiar to readers of contemporary "high culture" literature (both inside and outside j apan) and view ers o f contemporary art cinema. Anime texts entertain audiences around the world on the most basic level, but, equally importantly, they also move and provoke view ers on other levels as well, stimu lating audiences to work through certain contemporary issu es in ways that o lder art forms canno t. Moreover, precis ely because of their popu lar reach they a ffect a wider variety of audiences in more ways than some less accessible typ es o f high cultural exchange hav e been able to do. In other words , anim e c learly app ears to b e a cu ltural phenomenon worthy o f being taken s eriously, both socio logically and aesthetically. The fo llowing anecdote illustra t es th e o ften surprising ways anim e a ffects its audience. In 1 993 the japanes e critic U eno Toshiya made a visit to the city of Saraj evo in war- torn S erbia. Wand ering through the bombed-out ci ty, he encountered an unexp ec t ed Sigh t. In t h e middle o f the o ld city w a s a crumb ling w a ll w i t h three panels. On the first was drawn a picture o f Mao Z edong with Mickey M o u s e ears ; th e s econd had a s lo gan for th e Chiappas lib eration gro u p , t h e WHY A N I ME l * 5 Zapatista s , emblazoned on it. But when he cam e to th e third he was "at a loss for words. Incredibly, it was a larg e pan el of a s c en e fro m Otomo Katsuhiro 's A k i ra. Against the crumbling walls o f th e co llaps ing group of buildings, that 'mighty juvenile delinquen t ' Kaneda was saying 'So it's b egun! ",2 U en o 's story is a thou ght-provoking o n e. Unqu estionably a masterpiec e o f t echnical animation, A k i ra is also a complex and chall enging work of art that provoked , b ewildered , and occasionally inspired Wes t ern audi ences when it first app eared outside J apan in 1 99 0. However, it is not a work whos e image might hav e b een exp ec t ed to appear on a wall in Saraj evo three years l a t er as an icon o f political resis tanc e. At th e time o f A h i ra's first app earanc e in th e West, animation was g enerally regard ed as a minor art, som ething for children , or, p erhaps, the occasional abstract, art-ho u s e fil m. Anima tion from Japan was marginaliz ed even fu rther. If audi en c es took note o f it at a l l , it was to fondly rememb er watching Speed Racer a fter school on tel evision, o ften without realizing its Japanes e origin. T h e notion th at a s ophisticated Japanes e animated fi lm could cross interna tional borders to b ecome a po litical statem ent in a war wra c k ed Euro p ean coun try would have b een d eem ed bizarre at b est and most likely absurd. Things have changed. Wh ereas J apan has b een known for such " high cultural" products as haiku , Z en , and th e martial arts , the J apan o f th e 1 9 90s b egan to d evelop a new export, animated films and vid eos-anim e, a Japanes e abbreviation o f the English word "anima tion. " Anim e has now entered the American vocabu lary as w el l , to the extent tha t it has appeared in recent years in a New York Times crossword puzzle. Through anim e Japan has becom e an increasingly significant player in the global cultural economy. Ind eed , one scholar has gone so far as to label anime Japan's " chief cultural export. »3 As a 1 9 9 7 cover story in the Japanes e v ersion o f Newsweek makes clear, anim e's reach ex tends around the world. I ts products are popular in countries such as Korea and Taiwan , and also in Sou th east Asia, where the children 's animated s eri es Do raemon b ecam e a big hit in Thailand in the early 1 990s. Anim e has also p en etra ted Europe, from th e United Kingdom , wh ere A k i ra was a top-selling vid eo i n the year a fter its r el ease, to France, a country not known for its gen erosity to non-native cultural 6 * ANIME fROM A K I R A TO H O WL' S M O V I N G C A S TL E products , which in th e mid 1 990s carri ed over 30 hours a w eek of J apanes e cartoons, In America as w ell, anime's popu larity has grown enormously in th e last decade, While even a few years ago it was known only to sma ll subgroups among science fiction fans , ani m e is increasingly moving to at least a margina l niche in the mainstream. Wh ether it will ever b e totally integrated into Western pop c u lture is still d ebatable. Indeed, a strong part o f its app ea l, as will be s een , is its di fference from the Western mainstream. D espite (or thanks to) this differenc e, anime c lubs continu e to attract growing numb ers o f memb ers. Anime is shown on the Sci-Fi Channel, is avai lab le at such mainstream video v enu es as B lo ckbuster Vid eo , and has a whole section devoted to it at Virgin M egastore in London. Anime's influ enc e also extends b eyond Japanes e exports of actu a l tap es and videodiscs to include ev erything from the Pokemon toy giv e-away in 1999 at K entucky Fri ed Chicken (a product tie-in with the extremely popu lar chi ldren's animated television show) to American museums where anime-inspired artists such as Yanobe K enji have received favorable critical comm ent. P erhaps anim e's " greatest" moment of transcu ltural recognition so far was a cover story about Pokemon in Time (Novemb er 2 2 , 1999) that inc lu d ed a special s ection on anime in gen eral. Wha t exactly is anim e? To define anim e simp ly as "Japan es e cartoons" gives no s ense o f t h e dep th a n d vari ety that m a k e up t h e m edium. 4 M any d efinitions i n t h e West attempt t o explain a n i m e by comparison to American animation , speCifica lly Disney. Thus, the Time artic le attempts to answer the question by suggesting that in comparison to Disney "anime is a ll kinds of differents... Anim e is kids' cartoons: Pokemon yes , and Sai lor Moon... But it's also post doomsday fantasi es (A ki ra), schizo-psycho thri ll machines (Peifeet B lue), s ex and samurai sagas-the works. " s If anything, Time's fo cus on the more extrem e visions o f ani m e actua lly minimiz es the variety o f the form , sinc e anim e also inc ludes ev erything from animations o f children's c lassics such a s Heidi t o roman tic comedi es such as N o Need fo r TenehL Nor do the insistent comparisons with Disney p ermit the appreciation of the fact that anim e do es not d ea l only with what A m erican viewers wou ld regard as cartoon situations. Essentia lly, anim e works include ev erything that Western audi ences are accus tom ed to s eeing in live-action films-romance, com edy, tragedy, WHY A N I M E ' * 7 adventure, ev en psychological probing o f a kind s eldom attempted in recent mass -culture Western fi lm or television. It is not surprising, th erefore, that anim a t ed works are a maj or part o f the o u tp u t o f Japanes e studi o s. J apanes e television studios produ c e around 5 0 animated s eries a year and a comparab le num b er o f OVAs ( O rigina l Vid eo Animation). Animated fi lm s are a lso far more important in Japan than in the West, amounting to "about ha lf th e tic k ets s o ld for m ovies. ,,6 In fac t , in 1 9 9 7 Princess Mononohe bro k e al l box o ffi c e records to b ecom e, bri efly, the high est-grossing film of a ll tim e in Japan , and it remains to this day th e high est grossing Japanes e film ever. Unlik e cartoons in th e West, anim e in Japan is tru ly a main stream pop cu ltural pheno m enon. Whi le rabidly fanatical fans o f ani m e are ca lled by the pejorative term otahu and lo oked down upon by conserva tiv e Japanes e society, anime is simp ly accepted by virtua lly all the younger gen eration o f Japanes e as a cultura l stap le. Viewers range from little children watching Pohemon and other chi ld-oriented fantasi es , to college students or young adu lts enjoying the harder edged scien c e fiction o f films like A h i ra and its many d es c endants , such as th e b leak Evangelion s eries. Sometimes , as was th e case with Princess Mononohe and o th er films by its director, M iyazaki Hayao , ani m e cuts across gen erational lines to b e embra c ed by everyo n e from children to grandparents. Images from anime and its related m edium o f manga (graphic novels) are o mnipres en t throughout J apan. Japan is a country that is traditiona lly more picto c entric than th e cultures o f th e Wes t , as is ex emp li fi ed in its use o f characters or ideograms, and anime and manga fit easily into a contemporary c u lture of th e visu a l. They are used for education (one manga explains th e Japan es e economy) , adornm ent (numerous s hirts are emblazoned with popular manga and anime p ersonages) , and, of course, commercial enterpris e. Wh en th e hit television and manga s eri es Sailor Moon was at its most popular in th e mid 1 990s, pictures o f its heroine S erena ( Usagi in th e J apan es e v ersion) p eered down ubiquitously from billboards , while Sailor Moon related paraph ernalia-ev erything from "moon prism power - wands" to bath tow els-were snapp ed up by d evoted fans o f the s eries , largely young girls who w ere attracted b y th e characters' uniqu e combination o f cuten ess and fantastic powers. 8 * ANIME FROM A K I R A TO H O WL ' 5 M O V I N G C A S TL E On a more ominous no te, Japanese society has on occasion convu ls ed into what the socio logist Sharon Kins ella has d escribed as a " mora l panic" regarding the olanu cu lture, as it d etermin ed anime and manga to b e socia lly unhealthy, 7 The first tim e this o ccurred was in the 1 9 80s when a young man accused of murd ering four little girls was found to b e an avid watcher of vio lent pornographic anime. More rec ently, the J apanes e m edia, indu lging in an orgy o f b la m e-finding for the disastrou s sarin gas subway attack in 1 99 5 by the cult group Aum Shinrikyo , c laim ed that many o f Aum's "best and brightes t" followers w ere a lso avid fans of apocalyptic scienc e fiction anime. Reasons to study anim e within its Japanes e contex t should by now b e obvious. For those interested in Japanes e cu ltu re, it is a richly fascinating contemporary Japanes e art form with a distinctiv e narra tiv e and visu a l a esth etic that both harks back to traditional Japanes e culture and moves forward t o the cutting edg e o f art and m edia. Furthermore, anime, with its enormous breadth o f subj ec t m a t erial, is a lso a us efu l mirror on contemporary Japanes e soci ety, o ffering an array of insights into th e significant issu es , dreams , and nightmares o f th e d a y, But anime is worth investigating for o th er reasons as w ell, p erhaps the most important being th e fact tha t it is a lso a g enuinely global phenomenon, both as a comm ercial and a cu ltu ra l forc e. Commercia lly, it is b eginning to p lay a significant ro le in th e trans national entertainment economy, not only as an important part of the Japanes e export market, but a lso as a small bu t growing part of th e non-Japanes e commercia l world , in terms of the increasing numb er o f non-Japanes e enterpris es that deal with anime. Thes e range from small video rental operations in big cities throughout the world to mail order houses up to and inc luding such b ehemo ths as Amazon. c om (which has a sp ecial anim e s ection) and most famou sly the mammoth Walt Disney Enterprises , which , in 1996, made a d eal with Stu dio G hibli , J apan's most well-known animation studi o , to distribute its products in America and Canada. To be sure, its internationa l comm ercial impact is sti ll small compared to th e global returns on a succ essfu l Hollywood b lockbuster, but anime and its related produc ts are increas s ing ly drawing attention from marketers around the world. Inves tigating anime as a cu ltural forc e is even more fascinating than inquiring into its comm ercial asp ects , as it brings insight into the WHY A N I M E ' * 9 wid er issu e o f th e relationship between globa l and local cu ltures at th e beginning of the twenty-first century. In a world wher e American domination of mass cu lture is o ften taken for granted and local culture is frequ ently s een as either at odds with or about to be subsu m ed into h eg emonic globa lism , anim e stands out as a site o f implicit cultural resistan c e. I t is a uniqu e artistic product, a loca l form o f popu lar cu lture that shows c lear indications of its Japanes e roo ts 9 bu t at th e sam e tim e exerts an increasingly wide in flu enc e b eyond i ts nativ e shores. Wes terners raised on a cu lture o f chi ldren 's cartoons m a y find anim e's globa l populari ty surprising. N o t ed scho lar Arjun Appadurai has suggested tha t " the most valuable feature of the concept of c u lture ,, is th e conc ep t of differenc e, l 0 and certainly one sali ent aspec t o f anim e, a s Time's disquisition makes c lear, i s its insistent di fference from dominant American popu lar cu lture. As Susan Pointon astu tely comments, " [Wjhat is p erhaps most striking about anim e, compared to o th er imported m edia that have b een modifi ed for th e A m erican market , is th e lack of compromis e in making thes e narra tives palat ab le. " 11 This is not only tru e in regards to th e many specifically J apanes e referen c es within th e narra tives , but a lso in r egards to narra tive style, pacing, imagery, and humor, not to m ention emotions and psychology, which usually ru n a far wid er gamut and o ft en show greater d epth than do American animated texts. Anim e i s u ncompromising i n o th er ways a s w ell. I ts comp lex story lines cha llenge the viewer used to the predic tability o f Disney (or o f much of H o llywood fare overall, for that matter) while its o ften dark ton e and content may surpris e audiences who lik e to think o f " cartoons" a s "childish" or "innoc ent. " Ind eed, what app ears t o b e th e single most-asked qu estion about anim e in America, "why is anime so ful l of s ex and viol ence? , " 12 is an inquiry tha t, whi le b etraying an ign oranc e of the comp lexity and vari ety of the art form, is sti ll signi ficant in that it reveals the b ewilderment o f Western audiences in confronting so-ca lled adu lt th em es within the animated m edium. 1 3 Given its apparently uncompromising "othern ess , " why has anime succ eeded so remarkably as a cross -cultural export? The short answer to this, cu lled from many interviews with ani m e fans in America, Euro p e, and Canada, would have to do with th e fac t tha t th e m edium is b o th different in a way that is app ealing to a Wes t ern 10 * ANIME FROM A K I R A TO H O WL'S M O V I N G C A S TL E audience satiated on the predictabilities of American popular culture and also remarkably approachable in its universal themes and images. The distinc tive aspects of anime-ranging from narrative and charac terization to genre and visual styles-are the elements that initially capture Wes tern viewers' attention (and for some viewers these may be the main keys of a ttraction) , bu t for o thers it is the engrossing stories that keep them coming back for more. Up to this point, much of the academic discourse about anime has centered on its visual properties; understandably so , given that this is what most obviously differentiates animation from live-action cinema. I t is also impo rtant to emphasize how the visual s tyle of anime is significantly different from mass-audience American cartoons. As anime critics Trish Ledoux and Doug Ranney point out, even early 1 9 70s Japanese animated television series " absolutely overflow with tracking sho ts , long-view establis hing sho ts , fancy p ans , unusual point-of-view 'camera angles' and extreme close-ups... [iJn c ontrast [toJ most American-produced TV animation [whichJ tends to thrive in an action-obsessed middle-distance. " 1 4 However, J apanese anima tion merits serious consideration as a narra tive art form , and not simply for its arresting visual style. 1 5 Anime is a medium in which distinctive visual elements combine with an array of generic, thematic, and philosophical stru ctures to produce a unique aesthetic world, Often this world is more provo cative , more tragic , and more highly sexualized (even in lighthearted roman tic comedies) and contains far more complicated story lines than would be the case in equivalent American popular cultural offerings. Much of this book will be an investiga tion into the themes, imagery, and ideas of some of the more memorable anime created over the last two decades , the period o f the so-called anime boom , in an attempt to understand what makes anime the distinctive art form that it is. I t should be stressed that not all of the texts to be considered are masterpieces (as with any entertainment medium , much that is produced is simply commercial fodder) , but each work tha t I have chosen to discuss will ideally help to reveal some o f the more fascinating and distinctive features of the anime world and ultimately illuminate the reasons behind its increasingly global appeaL This is an appeal that is strongly related to the increased importance o f such contemporary issues as technological development, gender identity WHY A N I M E l * 11 and rela tions between the sexes , and the problematic role o f history in contemporary culture. I t may be that animation in general-and perhaps anime in particular-is the ideal artistic vehicle for expressing the hopes and nightmares of our uneasy contemporary world. Even more than live action cinem a , animation is a fu sion o f technology and art, b o th suggesting in its content and embodying in its form new interfaces between the two. I t is p erhaps no accident tha t two of anime's most popular genres , the cyberpunk and the so-called mecha genres , are within science fic tion. Cyberpunk, well known from such Wes tern science fiction classics as William Gibson's Neu ramancer (a maj or influ ence on Japanese science fiction in general) , is a genre focusing on dystopian fu tures in which hu mans struggle in an overpoweringly technological world where the differen ce between human and machine is increasingly amorphou s. Mecha ( a shortening o f the English word " mechanical" ) privileges a favorite form from J apanese popular culture , the robo t. Although in such classics as Tezuka Osamu's Astra B oy the robo t is drawn in a positive light, more recent mecha o ften feature humanoid machines in a more ominous mode. Both these genres are particularly appropria te ones for our increasingly high-tech world. As j. P Telotte says o f Western science fiction film: I n a near fixation o n the artificial, technologized body-the robot, cyborg, android-the [science fiction] genre has tried to examine our ambivalent feelings about technology, our growing anxieties about our own nature in an increasingly technological environ ment and a kind of evolutionary fear that these artificial selves may 16 presage our own disappearance or termination. It is not only anime's references to technology that make it such an appropriate art form for the turn of the millennium. In its fascination with gender roles and gender transgression-seen in lighthearted terms in romantic comedies or shojo (young girl) narra tives and more bleakly in occult pornography-anime encapsulates both the increasing fluidity o f gender identity in contemporary popular culture and the tensions between the s exes tha t characterize a world in which women's roles are drastically transforming. P erhaps 12 * ANIME FROM A K I R A TO H O WL ' S M O V I N G C A S TL E many of anime's most important characters are female b ecause i t is so often the female subject who most clearly emblema tizes the dizzying changes occurring in modern society Y Anime texts also explore (sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly) the meaning of history in contemporary society. These works usually involve a specifically J apanese context, such as the period of samurai warfare , bu t even the most specific texts, like Grave of t he Firefl i es, set in the waning days of World War I I , implicitly suggest larger issu es, includ ing the political nature of historical memory. Most recently, M iyaza ki's historical epic Princess Mononoke problematized the na ture of histori cal identity in relation to the modern world through its complex mixture o f fantasy and fact. Indeed, anime may be the p erfect medium to capture what is perhaps the overriding issue of our day, the shifting nature of identity in a constantly changing socie ty. With its rapid shifts of narrative pace and its constantly transforming imagery, the animated medium is superbly positioned to illustrate the atmosphere o f change permeating not only J ap anese society but also all industrialized or indu strializing societies. Moving at rapid-sometimes brea kneck-pace and predi cated upon the ins tability of form, animation is b o th a symptom and a metaphor for a society obsessed with change and spectacle. In particular, animation's emphasis on metamorphosis can be seen as the ideal artistic vehicle for expressing the postmodern obsession with fluctuating identity. Wha t animation scholar Paul Wells describes as " the primacy of the image and its ability to metamorphose into a ,, completely differen t image , 1 8 is a function of animation that has powerful resonances with contemporary socie ty and culture. Such a pro tean art form as anime is impossible to comple tely sum up in a single book and I shall not attemp t to do so. Ra ther, I intend to look at a variety of anime in terms of three major expressive modes tha t I have termed the apocalyptic, the festival , and the elegiac. The next chapter will discuss how these modes fit into J apanese cultural norms, but they also exist in more au tonomous terms. The apocalyptic is perhaps the most obvious mode, since a vision of worldwide destru ction seems to be a staple across all cultures. It is certainly a major part of American film culture, ranging from the alien invasion cinema of the 1 9 50s to the late 1 990s spate o f end-o f-the world films such a s A rmageddon o r End of Days. As will be seen, WHY AN I ME ' * 13 however, the apocalyptic can range beyond ma terial ca tastrophe (although this is well represented in an enormous number ofJ apanese anime) , to include more intimate forms of apo calypse, such as spiritual or even pathological ones. The flexible visuals available to animation make apocalypse a na tural subj ect for the mediu m , but it is in the interplay of character that anime offers its most distinc tive visions of apocalyps e. Perhaps e qually important i n anime i s the m o d e o f the festival. " Festival" here is used as a direct translation of the japanese term " matsuri " but the term "carnival" as theorized by Mikhail Bakh tin has very similar c onnotations. According to Bakh tin the " carnival sense of the world" is one predicated on " the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal. ,, 1 9 This privileging o f change is at the heart of animation , but animation's narra tive struc ture and themes can also be carnivalesqu e. I n Bakhtin's view carnival is a liminal period o f topsy turvy that expresses " the joyfu l relativity of all structure and order, of all authority and all (hierarchical) positio n. " For a brief moment norms are transgressed or ac tually inverted. The weak hold power, sexual and gender rules are broken or reversed, and a state of manic intensity replaces conventional restraint. 20 Comedies are usually the most obvious sites of the carnival/fes tival mode, and it may be suggested that sex-reversal comedies such as Some Like It Hot in America or Ranma 1 12 in japan are particularly carnivalesque in their implicitly transgressive antics. Again , the visual flexibility o f anima tion , with its intense palette of colors and abili ty to transform figures, shapes , and even space itself, also makes the medium peculiarly suited to the extreme and sometimes grotesque mode of the festival. The elegiac mode , with its implications of loss, grief, and absenc e , may at firs t seem a less obvious mode to Western viewers, who are used to emo tions being painted with broad brush in anima tion. Even in live-action films the elegiac may not be so wide a ca tegory in the Wes t, although movies like The Way We Were, with its mourning for a more innocent romantic time , or even B lade Runner, with its privileging of genuine emotional response in reac tion to growing dehumanization, might be considered candidates. In japan, the elegiac-in terms of a lyrical sense of mourning often c o nnec ted with an acute consciousness of a waning tradi tional culture -is an important element in both anime and live-action cinem a. Although it 14 * ANIME F R OM A K I R A TO H O WL ' S M O V I N G C A S TL E is imp ortant to acknowledge the immense range of anime-its fasci nating variety of genres, its mixture of traditional and modern elements , and its disparate assemblage of subjectivities-it is also rewarding to see how the modes of apocalypse, festival , and e legy continually appear, reworking and recombining themselves a cross the broad tapestry o f contemporary animation, To re turn once more to the question asked at the beginning of this chapter, "Why ani me? ," there now should be enough evidence to show the value in studying this complex and fascina ting mediu m. As a form of popular culture, anime is important for its growing global popularity but it is also a cultural form whose themes and modes reach across arbitrary aesthetic boundaries to strike significant artistic and psychological chords. Furthermore , the three modes used to examine anime are ones that go beyond any distinction between "high" and " low" culture or beyond any nation-specific site to illuminate in a timely fashion some of the maj or issues of global socie ty at the turn of the millenniu m. CH A P T E R T W O ANIME AND L O C A L/ G L O S A L I D E N T I TY T H E D E V E L OPM ENT OF ANI M E IN JAPAN TO WESTERNERS it may seem surprising that an artistic form tha t has been known to them largely as children's entertainment could encom pass so many varie ties. To understand the reasons behind this varie ty, we need to understand something of the history and role of anime in Japanese society. Firs t of all , it is importan t to appreciate j ust how significant a force anime is in contemp orary Japanese media. In 1 9 88 roughly 40 p ercent of J apanese studio releases were animated. By 1 9 9 9 , as the previously mentioned article in Time notes, at least half of all releases from J apanese studios were animate d. l Animation on television is a c ontinuous presence , beginning with children's shows in 16 * ANIME FROM A K I RA T O H O WL ' S M O V I N G C A S TL E the morning, continuing through family viewing hours in the evening, and taking on a significant presence in the late-night market (after 1 1 :00 P. M. ) , where edgy animated shows aimed at late teens and twen ty-some things are maj or offerings. From the early 1 980s anime also became an impo rtant player in the video market, where OVAs constitute a high proportion of video sales and rentals. 2 Of course, animation was not always such an important part of the Japanese popular cul ture industry. F o r a long time it was overshadowed by J apan's superb live-ac tion cinema and exis ted only as a fairly marginal and largely child-oriented alterna tive. To some extent, animation's rise in Japan is in an inverse relationship with the decline o f the Japanese film indus try, which, in the fifties and sixties, was one o f the greatest in the world. Unfortunately, the 1 9 50s decade of film masterpieces , exemplified in the wo rks of Kurosawa Akira , Ozu Yasuj iro , and Mizoguchi Kenj i , was also the decade i n which film attendan ce peaked in Japan. Japanese filmmakers have contin ued to create important and provocative works , but they are now increasingly in competition with both television and American imports. While Western animated films had appeared in J apan as early as 1 9 0 9 , and J apanese animators began to create their own work by 1 9 1 5 , animation a s a commercial art form really got started in the postwar period with popular, feature-length animated films produced by studios such as Toei, a company primarily famous for its live-a ction films. 3 P erhaps the most important date in Japanese animation history, however, is 1 96 3 , the year that Japan's first animated television series, Osamu Tezuka's legendary Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu ) , appeared. The story of a little-boy robo t, buil t by a brilliant s cientist as a replacement for his dead son, was an immediate success, as much for its exciting and often affecting story line ( the first in what would be a long line of animated features about humanoid robots) as for its spare but effective graphic design. Tezuka followed Astro B oy with the color series Kimba the White Lion U angu ru taitei , 1 9 64 ) , which also became a maj o r hit, and, by the late 1 9 60s, animated television series were securely established in Japan. 4 Tezuka himself was a strong admirer of Disney animati o n , as were many of J apan's pioneer animators. Even today Japanese animators are strongly aware of American animation. But, virtually A N I M E A N D L O CA L / G L O B A L I D E N T I T Y * 17 from the start, postwar J apanese animation has tended to g o i n a very different direction, not only in terms of i ts adult orien tation and more complex s tory lines but also in i ts overall s tru c ture. I t is important to emphasize the link between television and Japanese anim ation in terms of anime's narrative structure and overall styl e. 5 The weekly television format of most series gave rise to certain narra tive s tru ctures, most notably serial plots, which allowed for longer, more episodic story lines than a cinematic format would have done. This serial quality was also reinforced by anima tion's connec tion with the ubiqu itous manga , which emphasized long-ru nning episodic plots as well. The animation indus try'S connection with television was also crucial in relation to its ability to a ttract talented people. Riding the wave of television's increasing popularity in the mid-sixties , animation offered op enings to a large pool of gifted young animators at a time when live-action cinema seemed to offer fewer opportunities to ambitious artists. Buffeted by the increasing dominance of Hollywood on the one hand and the expansion of television viewing on the o ther, Japanese live cinema had b egun to play it safe. While brilliant dire ctors such as Imamura Sh6hei , Itami Juz6 , and, most recently Kitano "Beat" Takeshi , still appear, the typical Japanese film product o f recent decades tends to be highly formulaic action films or softcore pornog raphy. Donald Richie , the dean of Western commentators on J apanese film , sums it up when h e writes that from the 1 970s on " distrust of the new and the original became even more intens e. " 6 While this gloomy assessment has been contradicted by the rise of some exciting new filmmakers in the last decade (and the produc tion of some brilliant works from older direc tors such as Imamura) , for a long time it was clear tha t opportunities for the "new" and " original " were far more likely to be found in the fast-developing-and increas ingly commercially important-field of animation. Minamida M isao points to the "sense of new things in a medium full o f liberating possibilities , " that made the early days so exciting to young animators. He also points out that anime offered a way of going " beyond the ,, framework of [ conventional ] Japanese entertainment. 7 By the late seventies , anime in the cinema was also an important trend , although the films w ere usually tied in with l o ng running television series. One example is the classic Space Battles hip 18 * ANIME FROM A KIRA T O H O WL ' S M O V I N G C A S TL E Yamato (Uchii senkan Yamato , 1 9 7 3 ) , a film based on a television series of the same name , The series was so popular that it inspired long lines outside the thea ters the day before the film even opened , Since the early 1 980s the OVA market has not only boosted sales a t home but has a l s o helped to increase t h e overseas sales prodigiously. By the end o f the 1 990s it was clear that anime was an important element o f japan's contemporary cultu re , Als o , by the 1 990s intellectu ally sophisticated anime w ere increasingly appearing, The two most important of these were Anno Hideak i's televis ion series Neon Genes i s Evangel i o n ( S hinseiki Ebuangeri o n , 1 99 6 - 1 99 7 ) and M iyazaki Hayao's film Pri n c ess Mononoke (Mononokehime, 1 9 97) , I n each case the work's enor mous popu larity was equaled by intellec tually chall enging themes and ideas that stimulated a plethora o f schol arly articles , not only about the respec tive works bu t also about anime itself. It was clear that anime was finally being recognized, by j apanese commentators at least, as a cultural produ ct genuinely worthy o f intell ectual stu dy. One particu larly interesting example of such a study is Minamida's attempt to define the almost fo rty years since anime began in terms o f a series of transitions of narrative , perfo rma tive , and even intellectual styl e s. Working chronologically, he starts with what he calls the " dawn " of anim e , treating relatively simple works, such as A s t ra B oy, which privilege black and white characterizations and a dventure stories and which concern " l ove , courage , and friend ship , " H e ends in the 90s, discu ssing what h e c o nsiders to b e the almost overripe " maturity" that characterizes such complex philo sophical works as Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evange l i o ll, the profound e xistential concerns of which would be remarkable even in most live- action films 8 But what is perhaps most interesting abou t Minamida's analysis is his willingness to take ani me seriously as a cultu ral form that deserves intellectual explication, This is in significant contrast to American writing on Western animation , which still tends to look at either the terms o f its visuality or its sociological rol e , The reasons behind this difference are not hard to discover. Simply put, the West does not have the wealth of animated texts to draw on that japanese scholars do , A NIM E A N D L O CA L / G L O B A L I D E N T I T Y * 19 ANI ME AND JAPAN' S C U LT URAL HERITAGE Why should animation exercise such a powerful hold on Japanese popular culture? The reasons can be found both in J apan's distinctive cultural heritage and in certain key economic realities of art and commerce in the late twentieth century. The most salient economic reality in anime's development is probably the increasing domination of the global film marke t by Hollywood. While excellentJapanese films are still being produced, they are forced to compete for market share against a flood of American blockbusters. As film writer Stuart Galbraith noted in 1 9 94, "To day it is common to find seven of the top ten box office attractions in Japan to be American movies, and the number ofjapanese g made films has gone down to a tiny portion. " There are exceptions to this situation and some of the most important ones have been animated. For example , in 1 988 Akira beat out Return of the Jedi to become the number one film in Japan. More recently Miyazaki's epic Princess Mononoke became the number one film in Japanese box-office history (until it was bested by Titanic). Produced for infinitely less m oney than the Hollywood hits , the two Japanese works are marvels of creativity and imagination. It is clear that animation is perhaps the maj o r area of film inJapan that has strong commercial and artistic potential. It makes sense that filmmakers should put money and effort into an art form that does no t directly compete with the Hollywood behemoth but that still appeals to a broad audience. The cultural reasons behind anime's popularity are more com plex. Undoubtedly, one of the most obvious is the relation between anime and the twentieth-centu ry Japanese cul ture of manga. Althou gh the word "manga" is o ften translated into English as "comics , " manga are not only distinctively differen t from American comics bu t they also exercise considerably wider influence in Japanese society than their American equivalents do in theirs. The reasons behind this are two fold. First is their variety of subj ec t ma tter. Even more so than anime, manga cover a dazzling range of topics. These can include child-oriented fare, such as the sp orts club stories aimed a t b oys or the highly inventive , beau tifully drawn s hoj o manga produced for young girls , as well as a vast variety of manga for adults ranging from 20 * ANIME FROM A K I RA T O H O WL ' S M O V I N G C A S TL E etiquette j ou rnals to the so-called Ladies Comics (Reideezu homi h hu), which are actually explicitly erotic comics targeted a t women. The second reason behind manga's influential role in contempo rary society springs from the first. The wide range of manga ensures that virtu ally everyone reads them, from children to middle-aged salaried workers. Indeed , some estimates go so far as to suggest that 40 percent of material published in J apan is in manga form. As Fre derik Schodt, the dean of writers on manga in the West, puts it, "Japan is the first nation on earth where comics have become a full fledged medium of e xpression. " 1 0 It is important to understand the connec tions between anime and the rich and fascinating world of manga. The most obvious one is tha t of visual style. Although it might be an oversimp lification to say ,, that " anime could be considered... a kind of animated comic s trip , l l i t is certainly true that there are many pictorial similarities between the two media. Furthermore, as animation scholar Luca Raffaelli suggests, the distinctive cuts , which rely on the viewer's imagination to move the animated story along, undoubtedly come from the unique manga form of visual narration that is very different from the more dialogue intensive Western comics and graphic novels. The other crucial link between the two media is the fac t that many, if not most, anime are based on stories that appeared firs t in manga. 1 2 These anime versions are often quite different from the original, not only because of the different media involved bu t also because they are frequently directed by people not related to the original manga , sometimes to the indignation of the manga fans. (Oshii Mamoru , for example, tells the story of how his film Beautifu l Dreamer; based on the immense ly popular comic and television series Urusei Yatsura by Takahashi Rumiko , earned him the anger of fans to such an extent that some included razor blades in their letters to him. B) However, even when an anime is directed by a manga's own writer, the format, time limits, and design strictures of film inevitably lead to significant changes between the texts , as is obvious if we look at such works as Otomo Katsu hiro's Ahira or M iyazaki Hayao's Nausicaa of the Val l ey of the Winds , The print versions of each work allowed space for numerous other characters and for a far more complex story line , while both films used pacing, music, and extraor dinary visuals to p ermit the viewer a truly visceral experience. A N I M E A N D L O CA L/G L O B A L I D E N T I T Y * 21 The above examples suggest some o f the major differen ces between anime and manga, but it is important to note tha t both m edia share a common heritage in a cul ture tha t most scholars agree privileges the visual far more than does that o f the West. Most commentators on manga sugges t that the origins o f the form go back at least to the Edo period 0 600- 1 868) , and some see its origins even earlier, in the Zen cartoons of the medieval p eriod and the comic animal scrolls of the tenth century. Certainly Edo p eriod works have images that appear to have dire ct links to both manga and anime, particularly wi th the hibyoshi, illustrated books with an often humor ous ancIJor ero tic content, and the woodblock prints known as u h iyo e, which featured not only actors and courtesans o f the demimonde bu t, as time went on, increasin gly gro tesque and imaginative subj ects such as demons, ghosts , and extremely creative pornograp hy. 14 Although it would be impossible to say for certain how much today's animators are consciou sly influ enced by the visual trove of their traditional culture, it seems safe to say that their cultu re's tradition of pictocentrism is definitely an in flu ence behind the ubiqui tousness o f anime and manga. Certainly some images from earlier periods would not seem out of place in contemporary anime or manga. Anyone who has seen Hokusai's as tonishing 1 824 print, The Dream of the Fisherman s Wife, which depicts a naked woman lying back with two octopuses sucking her genital area and her mouth while their tendrils coil around her body, canno t help but make a connection between that and th e no torious "tentacle sex" scenes occurring in some of anime's more sadistic pornography Grotesque images of this sort were particularly common in works from the so-called Bakumatsu (end of the shogunate) and Meij i periods 0 868- 1 9 1 2 ) transitional epo chs when Japan was opened to a tidal , wave of Western influence at the same time as the culture struggled to preserve its traditions. l s As art historian Melinda Takeuchi documents , [t l he depiction o f supernatural themes reached a n apogee during the nineteenth century, an age when artists vied with each other to satisfy the public's quickened appetite for images of the bizarre and the macabre. In response to the challenge, illustrators turned back into their cultural past, outwards towards the art of other lands, 16 and inwards to the realm of the imagination. 22 * A N I ME F R O M A KI RA T 0 H O WL 'S M a v I N G CA S TL E In many ways this description might well be an ap t one for today's animators and manga artists who , even if they do not necessarily work in the modes of the bizarre and the macabre , certainly use an enormous range of cultural references as they explore the realms of their own crea tive imaginations. ANI ME AND G L OBAL C U LT URAL I DENT IT Y Perhaps the final reason behind anime's hold on Japanese culture has to do with its participation in global culture. By the late 1990s it was clear tha t anime bo th influenced and was influ enced by a plethora of Wes tern cu ltural products. As film scholar Susan Pointon writes of J apanese anime videos: I t is impossible t o ignore the constant cross-pollination and popular cultural borrowing that complicate and enrich anime texts. The creators for the most part are young J apanese artists in their twenties and thirties who have been exposed since birth to Western influences. Despite their Japanese overlay, many of these videos pay generous and excessively scrupulous homage to sources as diverse as American television cop shows of the seventies, European GlamRock fashions of the eighties and French N ew Wave cinema from the sixties, 1 7 Poin ton's statement concerning the "constant cross-pollination" occurring between anime and Western popular cultural texts is an important one. For most Japanese consumers of anime, their culture is no longer a purely Japanese one (and indeed, it probably hasn't been for over a century and a halO. At least in terms o f entertainment, they are as equally interested in and influenced by Western cultural influ ences as they are by specifically Japanese ones. A similar process is happening in the West as many youths open up to a more international entertainment culture. This relates to a further point Pointon makes, concerning the need to approach contemporary media cultures as " 'zones' and 'intersec tions' where the elements o f different ,, cultures collide and mutate. 18 Despite its indispu tably J apanese origins , anime increasingly exists at a nexus p oint in global culture ; A N I M E AN D LOCAL/G L O BA L I D ENTITY * 23 this p osition allows it to inhabit an amorphous new media territory tha t crosses and even in termingles national boundaries. 1 9 And this is clearly one of its attractions. Film scholar Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto has commented tha t: [ 0 J n e of the highly contested issues among those who study the formation of global image culture concerns the connection between global circulation of images and regional boundaries... The relevant question is where the image is to be situated in this new global dynamic. Are globally circulated images simply sub sumed under the bifurcating tendency of simultaneous globaliza tion and against globalism and localism, or do they reinforce instead the identities of nation-states as a counterforce against 2o globalism and localism? The answer to this question in terms of anime is a complex but thought-provoking one. First, the appropriate answer to the qu estion of whether anime is being "subsumed" into global cultu re seems to be "not yet , " even though anime's influence is increasing in American popular culture. For example, many anime fans have seen what they believe to b e heavy "borrowing" in Disney's 1 994 Lion King from the 21 Tezuka Osamu classic Kimba the Whi te Lion More recently, John Lasseter, the director of the immensely popular Toy Story animated films , has acknowledged the influence and inspiration of the great anime director Miyazaki Hayao. 22 As has already been discussed, however, part of anime's appeal is its "differentness , " and this seems likely to remain the case for a long time to come, given how Japanese society remains in certain respects quite dissimilar from tha t o f the Wes t. The answer to the second part of Yoshimoto's question, concern ing whether "globally circulated images" actually reinforce national identi ty, is an even more complex one. In some ways the content of anime-its particular themes, issues, and ic ons-is inevitably cultur ally specific. For example, many ani me come dies are set a t school , since education is one of the maj or pivots around which Japanese society revolves. (Many of these comedies are quite subversively inclined toward the educational system , although in a lighthearted way. As with any art form , anime does not simply reflect society, it 24 * ANIME FROM A KIRA T O H O W L ' S M O V I N G CA S TL E problematizes aspects o f the dominant social culture. ) Furthermore, many anime use j apanese historical set tings as ma teria l for a variety of dramas , comedies , and even fantasies. But one o f anime's most popular genres, science fic tion , is the one tha t is far less likely to be cu lturally specific. Although many science fic tion anime contain Significant elements related to contem porary japanese issu es, they are usually played out across "sta teless" fantasyscapes of fu ture cities or far-away galaxies. For example the 1 9 70s Space Battleship Yamato series simultaneou sly celebrated such j apanese cultural norms as the notion of collective sacrifice a t the same time as it emphasized more transna tional values such as universal peace and love. M oreover, as almost every non-japanese viewer soon notes, the characters in anime often do not look particu larly j apanes e , ins tead they participate i n wha t might be called a nonculturally specific anime style. Rather than necessarily reinforcing j apanese cultural identity, it might be at least as appropria te to say that anime narra tives, even when they include strong cul turally specific situa tions , problematize the nature of japanese identity. In fac t , a number o f j apanese commentators have chosen to describe anime with the word "mukokuseki, " meaning "stateless " or essentially withou t a national identity. Anime is indeed " ex o tic " to the Wes t in tha t it is made in j apan, bu t the world of anime i tself o c cupies its own space that is not necessarily coincident with that o f j apan. Unlike the inheren tly more representational space o f conventional live-action film , which generally has to convey already-exis ting obj ects within a preexisting context , animated space has the po tential to be context free , drawn wholly out of the animator's or artist's mind. I t is thus a particularly apt candidate for participation in a transnational , sta teless culture. In a revealing discussion between the critic U eno Toshiya and the animators Oshii Mamoru and I to Kazunori , the muko kuseki asp ect of anime comes up frequently as an expression o f what they perceive as j apan's very problematic cultural identity at the start of the twenty first century. U eno's position explains anime as a product of what he deems to be Techno -Orientalism, an O thering of japan by the West that sees it only as a technological dystopia or occasionally as a u topia. Thu s , anime may be seen as a dark mirror tha t reflec ts j apan to the Wes t and to some extent vice-versa, in that anime also gives j apanese AN I ME AND L O C A L / G L O B A L I DE N T I T Y * 25 viewers a distinctive vision of non-Japanese worlds. T h e three com menta tors are fascinated both by the mediu m's appeal at home and by its increasing popularity abroad. 23 Groping for an explanation of this popularity, they all seem to agree with a s tatement made by Oshii that anim e is " another world. ,, 2 4 This " o ther world , " according to Oshii is , created by animators who themselves are " stateless. " He supports this point by suggesting that animators do not p ossess a real "fu rusato" or hometown. The use of the emo tionally and ideologically charged word furusato, with its lyric evocation of a quintessentially Japanese origi nary village and landscape , stands in s trong contrast to the neutral and abstract muko kuseki, sugges ting how far anime diverges from tradi tional Japanese cultural products. For years the furusato has been a vital building block in Japan's cultural construction of itself. By rej ecting the notion of a furusato for the creators of anime O shii seems , to be implicitly rej ecting ano ther precious cultural construct the , no tion of Japan's uniqueness. Another aspect of anime's mukokuseki quality in m any eyes is the extremely "non-Japanese" depiction o f human charac ters in virtu ally all anime texts. This is an issue among American audiences new to anime as well, who conSistently want to know why the characters look "Western. " In fac t , while m any anime texts do include figures with blond hair, i t is p erhaps more correc t to say that rather than a "Wes tern" style of figuration , the characters are drawn in what might be called " anim e " styl e. This s tyle ranges fro m the broadly gro tesqu e drawings of characters with shrunken torsos and oversize heads of some anime comedy to the elongated figures with huge eyes and endless flowing hair that populate m any romance and adventure s tories. And while many of them are blond or light brun ette m any have more bizarre hair colorings such as pink , green , , or blue. To Oshii and Ueno this deliberate de-J apanizing of the characters is in keeping with their view of anime as offering an al ternative world to its J apanese audience. In fact Oshii suggests that this is part of a deliberate effort by modern Japanese to "evade the fact that they are Japanese , ,, 25 quoting a provocative statement by the director Miyazaki Hayao to the effect that " the Japanese hate their own faces. ,, 26 Oshii sees the Japanese anima tors and their audiences looking "on the o ther side of the mirror " particularly at America, and drawing from that world to , 26 * ANIME FROM A KI RA T O H O WL ' S M O V I N G CA S TL E create, "separate from the reality of present day Japan, some other world" C isekaO Y Oshii's statements are not altogether universal, as he himself acknowledges when he admits that Matsumoto Leiji's Space Battleship Yamato series has very "Japanese-esque" aspects to it. In fact, virtually all anime contain some Japanese references , from psychology to aesthetics to his tory. This referenCing may be superfiCial but many works , particularly from Miyazaki's Stu dio Ghibli, such as My Neigh bor To toro, Ponpoko, and Grave of the FireJ1ies, are deeply embedded in J apanese his tory and culture , Indeed, Oshii's Ghos t in the Shel l, while referencing a dystopian global fu tu re and containing many allusions to the Bible, also strongly evokes both Shinto and Buddhist archetypes in its climactic scene , Oshii's central point, that anime is a world unto i tself, however, is essentially correc t. The animated space, with its potential for free form creation, is in many ways a realm that exists in counterpoint to the world of modern Japan , Indeed, perhaps the most fundamen tal reason for animation's popularity in Japan is not j ust econo mic constraints and aesthe tic traditions but the very flexibility, crea tivity, and freedom in the medium itself, a site of resistance to the conformity of Japanese society. If this hypo thesis is tru e , it might also explain anime's increasing popularity outside ofjapan, for it seems reasonable to argu e that this is an appeal that goes beyond the constraints of any specific cu lture , The very quality of "statelessness" has increasing attrac tion in our global culture , I t is not just Japanese audiences who search for more varied forms of electronic entertainment, who long for an " anywhere , " or who are tired of their own faces, In fact, the popularity of anime, both in J apan and abroad , a ttests to a new kind of hybridity on the part of a global younger generation tha t is increaSingly elec tronically conversant with the vas t variety of worldwide popular culture, Contrary to Homi Bhabha's vision of "hybridity" in terms o f a colonial (or postcolonial) exercise of power and discrimina tion , this vision of hybridity is an equalizing one, Safe within the stateless fantasy space that anime provides, both J apanese and non-Japanese can participate in trying on a varie ty of wha t might be called "poste thnic" identities , Although it is true that this fantasy space is the product of the Japanese entertainment industry and may therefore have economic or even politically problema tic aspects to it, 28 A N I M E AN D LOCAl/G LOBAL I D ENTITY * 27 the anime medium-precisely because i t s o often highlights charac ters and settings that are neither clearly Western nor clearly Japanese offers a space for identity exploration in which the audience can revel in a safe form of O therness unmatched by any o ther c ontemp orary mediu m. But a t t h e s a m e time a s many viewers l o n g for some Other world, many also fear its homogenization into a fantasy space of cookie-cutter themes and theme parks. P erhaps for this reason a basic human fascination with "difference" seems , if anything, to have increased with the entrance into a new and even more complex millennium. 29 ANI ME AND JAPANE SE C U LT URAL I DENT IT Y In order to understand this new hybridized space more fully, it is firs t necessary to understand anime in relation to the context of J apanese cultural identity. For, while anime has been enormously influenced by global cultu re , it remains an original product o f the concatenation of circumstances that have created the cul ture of modern Japan. This is a society that even today remains unique , not only for its distinc tive culture but for the fact that it is still the only non-Western society to have successfully industrialized virtually every aspect of its economy. Despite the many successes of its Asian neighbors, Japan s tands alone as a country that can accurately be des cribed as modern-or indeed postmodern-from a Western point of view. It is also a society tha t, in ways both positive and negative, is almost larger than life. The positive is deeply impressive. N ot only was Japan the firs t non-Western nation to moderniz e su ccessfully, but also it succeeded so well that, during the 1 9 60s and 70s , it became a model for o ther developing nations. Today it is the world's second-largest economy. Despite some lacks in the social and environmental infra stru cture, the standard o f living is high , the citizenry is exceptionally well educated, and 90 percent of Japanese consider themselves "mid dle clas s. " I ts arts, from the traditional to the contemporary, are renowned around the world. It is the only Asian country to have two N obel Prize winners in literature. During the 1 9 80s it seemed that Japanese society, with its superb bureaucracy, efficiently func tioning government, and high technological expertise existed as a utopian 28 * ANIME FROM A KI RA T O H O W L ' S M O V I N G C A S TL E alternative to what many perceived as the corrupt and decadent societies o f the West. 3 D The negative is nightmarish, however. The past 1 1 years have seen the longest collapse of any stock market in the world since the Great Depression. j apan is still the only country on earth to have suffered a tomic bombing, an experience that continues to affect the society today and that has created for many a collective sense of victimhood. M any of its citizens maintain an ambivalent a ttitude toward America, whose occupying troops in 1 945 were the first in j apan's entire history to breach the country's defenses, an event that cast a long shadow over japan's efforts at construc ting its own postwar identity. A t the same time j apan's relations with its neighboring Asian countries remain tense because of an unwillingness on the part o f the j apanese government to acknowledge past war crimes during its war of aggression in Asia in the 1 930s and '40s. In 1 99 5 many j apanese eyes were suddenly opened to the dangers of the modern age when the heart of japan's capital endured a nerve gas attack by an apocalyp tic cult, Aum Shinriky6 , a cult that still attracts adherents today. The Aum attack is seen by both j apanese and Western observers as a watershed in postwar japanese history, encapsulating the dark and complex currents that were roiling beneath what many j apanese wanted to believe was still a utopian socie ty. In addressing the reasons behind the attractiveness of Aum and o ther cults for contemporary j apanese, Ian Reader gives a useful list of the difficult issues confront ing j apanese society : The stresses and pressures o f the education system, which. '. trains people to do little other than pass examinations, the increasingly competitive nature of a society which appears only to emphasize material values and appears spiritually sterile, the erosion, in the cities, of a sense of community and of widely shared values, the alienation and isolation of individuals within the city environment, the political weakness and lack of leadership within society and the perceived weakness of the older religions which have failed to 1 provide moral guidance are all contributory factors, 3 This complex cultural background , sometimes heady, sometimes traumati c , is bri lliantly expressed in anime's range o f modes themes, , A N I M E AN D L O CAL/G L O BAL I D E N T I T Y * 29 and imagery. Given the dark even ts tha t have permeated j apan's twen tieth century, it is hardly surprising that many of anime's most important texts , from Miyazaki Hayao's 1 98 5 Naus icaa to Anno Hideaki's 1 9 9 7 Evangelion, are not simply dystopian but deeply ap ocalyptic, suggesting a society with profound anxieties abou t the fu ture. The end of the world is an important element in postwar j apanese visual and print culture. Postwar writers such as O e Kenzaburo, Abe Kobo, Murakami Ryu , and Murakami Haruki, have presented li terary visions of apo calypse, from nuclear war to a purely psychological endtime. The apocalyptic is also a frequent feature in live-action film, from obvious sci-fi fantasies such as the long running Godzi l la series to the more complex explorations in the films of Kurosawa Akira, such as the relatively realistic Record of a Living Being (Ihimono no h i ro hu, 1 95 5 ) and his sumptuous late fantasy Dreams ( Yume, 1 99 0 ). Anime's visual effects, however, seem to lend them themselves particularly well to the apocalyptic, since all kinds of destruction can be easily represented in animation without reliance on costly special effects. While some of these apocalyptic anim e , such as the films of Miyazaki, contain visions o f hope and rebirth , most o f anime's apocalyptic fare is much darker, centering on the destruction of society and the planet itself. Clearly, the most obvious reason behind the high incidence of apocalyptic scenarios is the atomic bomb and i ts horrific aftereffects. There are o ther factors , however, either cul turally specific or simply specific to the twentie th century, that contribute to the pervasive darkness of many anime. These include the increasingly aliena ting aspe cts o f an urbanized industrialized socie ty, the gap between generations , and the growing tensions between the genders, as men lose dominance and women play a wider role outside o f the family. M o re specific to Japan, however, is the decade of econo mic problems that began with the co llapse of the stock market in 1 989. The perceived failure (or at least inadequacy) of japan's postwar econo mic success has led to an increasing disenchantment with the values and goals that much o f postwar j apan has been built on. Although this disenchantment is very obvious in youth culture, which c elebrates the ephemeral fashion of the shojo (young girl) and the cu lture o f hawaii (cu teness) , disillusionment has permeated throu ghou t society, leading to record-breaking suicide rates across the generations. The many 30 * ANIME FROM A KI RA T O H O WL ' S M O V I N G CA S TL E apocalyptic anime seem to be expressions o f a pervasive social pessimism, Thus, more recent apocalyptic anime, such as Evangel ion, link violent apocalyp tic tropes with intense psychoanalytical probing into dysfunctional psyches to produce a memorable vision of what might be called "pathological apocalypse. " But there is ano ther aspect ofJapanese society, both traditional and modem, that anime captures: what I have called the notion of "festival" or its Japanese equivalent, "matsuri. " The matsuri is an integral element of J apanese religious and social life, a celebration of " the realm of play ,, and ritual. 32 Similar to carnival in the West, the liminal space of the festival allows for a kind of controlled chaos, in which " pe ople behave in extraordinary ways , once freed from ordinary time and everyday ,, order, 33 or, as anthropologistJohn N elson says of the shukusai, or night ,, festival, there are "aspect

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