Plot Shield

Fukushima vs. the Romance of the Telescope

2012-01-10T04:32:00.000-08:00

Last summer I was taking a train across Europe with my wife. It was a minor dream of mine that I’d found myself suddenly able to realise: To take a trans-Europe express whilst listening to the album Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk. It was a silly dream, and taking a thirteen-hour train ride from Berlin to Paris, followed by several more hours on trains before we arrived in Bath, instead of just flying made it an extraordinarily inefficient use of time, but what use are dreams, even dumb ones, if you don’t seize the chance to make them real?

As we moved out of the Berlin suburbs into the countryside, one of the most striking things was the way the farmland was spotted with wind turbines. Wherever you looked, you saw these vast, white electricity-generating windmills scattered across the fields, in between the occasional cluster of old farm buildings and cottages.

Now I know there are lots of issues about wind power – the unpredictability of generating capacity from day to day, the hidden carbon cost of building them and then the gas power required to back them up during periods with low wind, the supposed noise pollution problems, the visual impact on the environment, and the cost in government subsidies that presumably explains why German farmers were so eager to have them on their land in the first place. Nevertheless, there was something powerful about the image that I couldn’t put into words. Something I don’t feel when seeing electricity pylons, something to do with the clean, smooth simplicity of the design, standing proudly artificial in nature’s midst (we’re pretending that farmland counts as natural here, and I hope you’ll forgive me) while at the same time working together with nature’s most elementary forces to create energy. The economics and hidden problems aside, the image itself just felt right. I turned to my wife, motioned to her to look, and she said in two words what I had been unable to say:

“ちょうサイバー” (“Very cyber!”)

Which brings me onto what I really wanted to talk about here, which is the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the anti-nuclear protest movement.

One of the problems I’ve had in processing the impact of Fukushima and the subsequent protest movement, I’ve come to realise, is that it cuts through two powerful prejudices that I have. These are things I strongly believe and can back up with cold, hard reasoning, but I call them prejudices nonetheless because they are principles that I feel emotionally, in my gut before I even think about bringing reason to the table. The first is my instinctive support for any protest movement that goes up against a conservative establishment. I’m a lefty and I feel an instinctive sense of solidarity with any left-wing or left-aligned political or social movements. When I see policemen in Shinjuku battering protestors, or yakuza-backed fascist groups staging counter-demonstrations designed to intimidate and warn off ordinary people from joining in, I get a deep red mist. When I learn about politicians, media and big business collaborating behind the scenes, cutting corners on safety, collaborating to conceal information and spread lies, when I see the establishment’s ranks closing to protect its own interests at the expense of ordinary people, and when I see public figures who try to do something about it demonised and driven from their positions, I feel automatic support for whoever it is that could get such contemptible people so scared and angry.

People sometimes ask, “Where is Japan’s ‘Occupy’ movement?” Certainly when people here tried to stage sympathetic protests last summer, they passed largely unattended. However, in many ways Japan’s anti-nuclear movement is already their Occupy Wall Street. Like “Occupy”, it is a protest that cuts to the heart of the incestuous, undemocratic and destructive relationship between business, media and government, and like “Occupy”, it is an outpouring of public anger that could only come from people who have finally felt a real-life, tangible impact on their own lives as a clear result of this dysfunctional collusion within the establishment. With this, I can’t help but feel sympathy. It’s something I believe strongly on an intellectual level, but it is something that first and foremost I feel emotionally. It is a prejudice – a correct one, I believe, but a prejudice nonetheless.

However, on the issue of nuclear power, my left-wing sensibilities come up against another prejudice of mine. I am an unashamed lover of science fiction – no expert, admittedly, but I definitely lean geekwards – and my feelings towards nuclear power itself are emotionally influenced by my sense of wonder at the science itself. It angers me when people on Twitter and other places insist on referring to nuclear energy as “nukes” – a slang term associated primarily with nuclear weapons (like referring to a kitchen knife as a “shiv”, it strikes me as disingenuous – both can cause harm, but only one is designed for the purpose and it seems unfair to conflate them).

On an intellectual level I might ask myself about the wisdom of building nuclear power plants in an area with as much seismic activity as Japan. Nuclear power has with it a lot of the same financial, local and visual impact issues as wind power, coupled with massively more serious pollution, waste disposal, health and safety issues. I’m not going to argue those points. Still though, like wind power, the wonder of it – the romantic image of mankind harnessing the awesome power of the atom – takes my breath away.

Now given the very real suffering of people just a couple of hundred kilometres from where I live in Tokyo and the (I’m going to stick my neck out and guess probably less real, although the government/media/TEPCO axis do little to reassure on that) fears of many in the Tokyo/Yokohama area, such airy, wistful ideas will seem frivolous, facetious, even irresponsible. I accept that my reasons as outlined above are not good ones. As I say, this is a prejudice and my purpose in examining it is to find the emotional source of my instinctive reaction.

But once again, I believe, after thinking and taking into account what I know to be my instinctive biases, that I do still support nuclear power, although whether I support its continued long-term use in earthquake-prone Japan, I am far less sure. The devastation to the Fukushima region is horrifying, but nothing compared to the devastation to the whole world being wrought by our continued reliance on fossil fuels. Many of the problems at the plant and most of the possible dangers to Tokyo seem to come primarily from human failures (and I use this term deliberately – TEPCO etc. should not be allowed to pass off their oversights and systemic corruption as mere “errors”. They, the government and all who colluded with them and continue to do so failed as human beings on this), not failures of the science of nuclear energy itself. At least the fears that sent ultra-wealthy Japanese scampering for Hawaii and Hong Kong, and caused such bitterness and division within Tokyo's foreign community seem not to have been as serious as many worried they were at the time. To hate the corruption but love the science – yes, I am such a naïve romantic.

But whenever I think about nuclear power, or indeed wind, solar, any exciting new technology, I always find it is the sci-fi romanticist in me that leads my thoughts, that chooses their path, with the rational part of my mind following behind saying, “And that could also have useful social implications,” and things like that. When I see protests calling for an end to nuclear energy, I cheer on their attacks on government and industrial corruption, but my stomach knots with fear. What will happen if these protests result in funding cuts for research into fusion power? In my mind I see spaceships with massive fusion reactors bound for Mars and a little bit of me thinks, “This! This is what you’re protesting against, you fools! Can’t you see how beautiful it is?”

In truth, since very few of us, including the journalists we rely on to explain these things, really understand enough about nuclear physics, nearly all of our reactions to the Fukushima crisis are driven by such instinctive and emotional factors. The fear of deadly, poisonous radiation that can be neither seen, heard nor smelt is a powerful factor, the distrust of government, media and big business may lead some to feel that the science itself is corrupted by association, or perhaps that humans are too intrinsically corrupt to be trusted with such power. In these emotional responses, we can see folkloric themes play themselves out. The Biblical themes of Original Sin, or the Tower of Babel are powerful stories that evoke our fears of human weakness or hubris, the tales of Prometheus or of Faust can inspire hope or fear in the search for knowledge, fairytales are infested with shadowy evil that slips unseen and unheard through your window at night. Science-fiction embodies all these themes, as well as spinning its own myths about the power of technology to shape the future of mankind. Even when we are presented with the facts, but especially when our knowledge lacks, these age-old and not-so-old themes still carry emotional resonance.

In this way, just as it is irrational to let fear of the unknown or poorly understood dictate our response to Fukushima, so it is also irrational to think that merely by supporting "science" one is being scientific. We pick through the snippets of information in the media, desperately try to recall our school science education, skim Wikipedia articles, and we may think we understand, but unless we are prepared to wade through thousands of pages of data and read dozens of scientific papers, unless we're prepared to deal with the information at our disposal scientifically, all we're really doing is sifting through mountains of stuff that we don't really understand, looking for things that "feel right" (i.e. that confirm our pre-existing, emotionally driven prejudices). Someone like me may well want to argue that by taking the part of science, one is arguing a more positive and utopian ideal, but that is all I am doing.

In a sense, this is simply a long way of saying that it's probably for the best that I'm not the person in charge of determining energy policy for Japan over the next fifty years. On the other hand, I don't think that upon recognising our biases over this issue we should disavow responsibility either. It is such a lovely feeling to be able to say, "If only an expert could handle this stuff, then all these stupid politicians who we elected wouldn't be able to mess things up," but our prejudices often lead us to be selective about which "experts" we choose to believe. I do believe that we don't give enough respect to scientific data, and believe that peer-reviewed science should carry more weight in public life than the populist ranting of news media, the moralistic fantasies of religion or the cynical lies of industry lobbyists. Still, these feelings that I have been characterising as prejudices are also rooted in stories that contain genuine insights into human character and the consequences of human actions. Without being dogmatic about them, they are useful tools in enabling us as people to make judgments about the kind of world we are in and the kind of world we want to make.

The events at Fukushima are a tragedy, and the nuclear industry should clearly be (and I hope it is) asking serious questions of itself rather than simply circling the wagons in anticipation of resuming corrupt business as usual. But my fervent hope is that in its aftermath, we aren't left with a world where we look at technology with only cynicism and fear. For this sci-fi geek at least, technology should be a source of hope for the betterment of mankind, we should be able to separate the corruption of the government-media-industrial triad from the promise offered by science, and I hope we are able to deal with the problems, the risks, and the harsh practicalities of technology without losing sight of the dreams of science, of the romance of the telescope.

Objective music reviews:

2011-12-08T19:03:00.000-08:00

For those people on Twitter and in The Japan Times' email inbox who were upset with the mean things I said about Perfume's mediocre new album and concerned about its lack of something called "objectivity", I thought I'd offer up a cut-and-paste objective music review that they can use for all their favourite J-pop albums:

[CD title] is the new album by [J-pop group]. It features the singles [uptempo summer pop tune], [mid-paced autumn track] and [string-laden winter ballad], and fans of these singles are sure to like some of the other songs on the album too. These include [TV drama theme], [TV ad campaign song 1] and [TV ad campaign song 2], which will already be familiar to listeners who watch a lot of television, spend any amount of time in shops that have music piped by USEN, or have walked past a big TV screen outside a station. The vocals are cute and the lyrics deal with the themes of love and friendship. All the songs are between four and five minutes long. Fans of this kind of music will probably like this music.

No need to thank me. You can have this one for free.

(12:32pm edit: Additional objective measures of quality suggested by Dan Grunebaum)

AKB48, "Koko ni Ita Koto"

2011-08-12T09:57:00.000-07:00

(I reviewed this album ages ago for The Japan Times, but this was a longer, more detailed analysis I did together with a friend and colleague of mine that was originally published in Japanese at Goblin.mu and cross-posted in English from Clear And Refreshing)

With the staggering popularity of AKB48 and their ever-expanding legions of sister groups, there can be no denying that Yasushi Akimoto is in possession of a particular kind of genius. To have taken what at first seems like a niche product, best suited to performing at anime conventions and amusement parks, and made it into the most successful group in the country demands attention. The release of "Koko ni ita Koto" provides as good a platform as any to subject the AKB phenomenon to some measure of analysis, not least to answer the question of whether Akimoto's genius extends beyond the group's marketing and into their music.

THE MARKETING

To achieve the level of commercial success that AKB48 have, they would never have been able to do it without attracting a sizeable female following. Nevertheless, look at the queues outside AKB48's theatre in Akihabara and you see precious few female faces. And while many of their casual casual audience are female, everything the group does is predicated on the assumption of a male audience. In this way, it seems that the group's success is built on an obsessive core of male fans, to whom they faithfully pander, and female fans are simply invited to follow: "This is what kind of female image is considered attractive,” “this is how to be cute,” etc.

AKB48's image treads a thin line in lyrical content, participating in the obvious “moe” sexualisation of childlike imagery but avoiding the kind of direct appeals to lechery that were the stock in trade of 80s predecessors Onyanko Club. Or, indeed, the earlier AKB48 of "Seifuku ga Jama wo Suru"-- in many ways, "Koko ni Ita Koto" shows these earlier works to be naive. The sex is merely a hook to draw audiences towards something longer-lasting: the pursuit of true love, and when we say "true love", what we mean is "the relentless march of consumer capitalism."

The main manifestation of this is in the way that beneath the superficial atmosphere of friendship and mutual support, the members of AKB48 are made to constantly jostle for the affection of fans via the "senbatsu elections" and special edition CDs. Despite the claim that "Dare mo minna Team B oshi desu yo ne?" the song "Team B Oshi" basically amounts to the members of Team B engaging in the equivalent of an intra-team rap battle over who should be the listener's favourite.

There is more to this paradigm of competition than meets the eye. Consider that dozens of girls are singing songs together about the importance and uniqueness of "one true love" to a single imagined male listener. It's reminiscent in some ways of that creepy moment when, listening to a boy band, you realise that there are five guys singing about wanting to get with the same girl -- and yet it's different. With a group like 'N Sync or Blue, the band are the subject and the girl the object: they are seducers and she their quarry. In AKB48's case, the hypothetical man they are singing to is still the subject, with the power to choose from the array of girls before him, while the girls objectify themselves in competing for his attention. This relationship is most obviously apparent on "Ponytail to Shushu", where the girls take on the voice of the male listener and narrate his pursuit of his object of affection from the male perspective. The song also romanticises the obvious point that the man's love can never be physically requited:

Your long hair is bundled in a polkadot scrunchie
I cannot catch that tail of love
If I touch it, this illusion will disappear

In the 2D world that AKB48 and their fans inhabit, "true love" has been systematised like that. The girls make a play for the man's attention in the brief snatches of time the format of the group allows them, through their enactment of the various pre-determined "moe" behavioural elements that act as shorthand for more complex human character traits. At the same time, the man sits in judgement, indicating his affection through voting power that is conferred on him directly in accordance to how much money he spends. It is love as perceived through the mind of a piece of accounting software.

That is not to say that AKB48 fans are stupid. The notion of the single true love that they perpetuate through their lyrics is a lie in which both sides are complicit. The whole time the group and the fans are acting out this curious late-capitalist pastiche of love, what we might call the "Akimoto System" is encouraging the fans to take time to sample the different flavours. "Come to the theatre more than once to see all the girls perform, buy all the different versions of the single, complete the set. You will fall in love with one, but you don't know she's the best until you've shopped around, right?"

In this way, the relationship between AKB48 and their fans is rather like a video game dating simulator played out in real time and on a mass scale. Like with AKB48, "gyaruge" and visual novels operate in a paradoxical world where the player and game enter into a shared fantasy of true love and intertwined destiny, while at the same time, the player is encouraged to replay multiple times to complete the paths of each girl on offer.

"Heavy Rotation" pushes the notion of one true love hard, although it also (probably unintentionally) hints at this "replay factor":

I wonder how many times can people fall in love in the span of a lifetime?
If I could have just one unforgettable love story, I'd be satisfied

The beauty of this system, of course, is that whatever the fan does, whether he completes his collection, or whether he focuses wholeheartedly on the one girl he truly loves, Akimoto is always there to collect the money. The house always wins.

THE MUSIC

Musically, the image of the group as an offshoot of otaku culture is not really accurate. Genuine otaku culture, for all its quirks, is constantly evolving, and most of the fans AKB48 had among hardcore otaku have already left them for the likes of Momoiro Clover or the all-virtual world of vocaloid software. AKB48 have always been a simulation, an otaku-themed Disneyland ride.

In contrast, the music on "Koko ni Ita Koto" remains in a musical furrow that has existed relatively unchanged for years. These are the same watered-down, eurobeat-influenced rhythm and major chord progressions that you hear from pachinko parlours and game centres all over Japan. In each case, the sound is linked not to the specific content of what goes on inside, but to the image of cute, cartoonish, colourful, synthetic good cheer. It’s a world where human interactions and life experiences can be simplified to commodities and financial transactions, a world where the only law is "Follow your dreams," and for convenience's sake, the choice of dreams available to you is laid out on a laminated menu.

While this sound is evocative of the 90s, it's not really retro. To be retro, you must first consciously draw a distinction between the music of today and the period that you want to imitate. In contrast, with a few exceptions, this music simply doesn't recognise the existence of any musical advances made since the mid-to-late 1990s.

It's a shame that it has to be like this, since a group like AKB48, at the very pinnacle of the Japanese pop music scene, are in a position with audiences where they could define a new direction that would influence J-Pop for a generation. But that isn’t what’s happened. Whether through fear of alienating fans, or the need to provide reliable content for the advertisers that bankroll an increasingly significant proportion of the music industry, or through sheer lack of imagination and curiosity, the music relies to an extraordinary degree on a sound that has been in stasis for at least fifteen years.

That's not to say, however, that the album never diverges from this template. If you can get over the karaoke backing track production, the firm beat and more aggressive arrangement of the 2010 single "Beginner" sounds like it might be an attempt at a response to the rising popularity of Korean girl groups like Girls' Generation, although the lyrics disregard these superficial trappings of sexual maturity in favour of a familiar brand of faux-inspirational sentiment:

We should be as brand new as a child...
Let's tear off the chains that controlled us

To be completely fair, both "Kaze no Yukue" and the title track are competent enough ballads. "Ningyo no Vacance" is also notable for actually sounding like it might have been written by a human being, and is perhaps the closest thing on the album to legitimate pop songwriting. None of this is enough to redeem the album, but it bears mention.

THE FINAL WORD

While it seems like the music of AKB48 is a relatively minor aspect of the total media-mix, the problem remains that the popularity of AKB48 and their sister projects as entertainment icons grants an undeserved aura of legitimacy to this regressive, infantile, musically unadventurous approach to pop. Recent Japanese-language singles "Jet Coaster Love" and "Go Go Summer!" saw Korean girl group Kara aping the thin-sounding, cheap production values and lolita-esque demeanour of AKB48 even though their more mature and sexy image had made them stars in their own right. More upsettingly, Japan's most forward-looking pop group Perfume slipped into a worryingly familiar sort of sentimental 90s balladry on their recent B-side "Kasuka na Kaori". It would be a terrible shame if the enormous popularity of AKB48 were to drag an already creatively moribund Japanese pop scene any further into the abyss. Connor Shepherd & Ian Martin 3.August.2011

A Conversation...

2011-07-19T07:02:00.000-07:00

ME: Seems like there are different British and American dubs for the English version of Arrietty.

MY WIFE: Why's that?

ME: I don't know. Maybe the UK distributor thought that because it's based on a popular British novel, lots of British people would feel weird hearing these characters speaking with American actors.

WIFE: No, I mean why bother with an American version?

ME: ...

Tohoku, Fukushima, and the social contract

2011-05-10T02:26:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of comment around the world on the Japanese people’s response to the March 11th triple-disaster, mostly positive, with observers from The United States to the traditionally Japanophobic China praising the order and resilience of Japanese people in the face of the almost unimaginable catastrophe that hit large parts of the country.

Trying to unravel what lies behind this orderly response is more problematic. Some web comments in China bemoaned how far their own country was behind their eastern neighbours, making declarations along the lines of “this is what it really means to be a developed country”. Some people in the West shook their heads and muttered, “automatons” or “zombies”. Many people in Japan noted the discrepancy between the way Japanese media downplayed the crisis, relying on government statements and officially established facts, while many parts of the Western media sensationalised the crisis (yes, I’m looking at you, The Sun).

However, I think what it mostly comes down to is the idea of the social contract. Responses to a disaster are calm and orderly when people feel that there is a social contract between them and the establishment that is being respected. In New York after the September 11th terrorist attacks and London after the tube bombings, people mostly responded in a similar way to the way Tokyoites responded to March 11th. These are large, wealthy cities, with strong infrastructure and government institutions that may not always be liked, but which are on the whole trusted to deal with a crisis. In all three of these cases, the people trusted their city as a whole to deal with the problems in a calm, orderly manner, and as a result, they themselves responded in a calm, orderly manner.

Now take New Orleans, a city rife with economic and racial inequality, where right from the moment the crisis started to emerge, the signs were there that the social contract was not being respected. The wealthy, largely white part of town occupied the safest ground, the levees had been neglected, and the evacuation still left many of the poorer residents behind. When the city was flooded, the Bush government initially refused to intervene, politicians squabbled over responsibility, and the news media demonized the starving, neglected evacuees who resorted to looting. Where the establishment doesn’t honour the social contract, the people have no security to cling to.

The people in Tohoku, and Japan generally, still have that sense of a social contract, and despite the much publicised failures of government response after the Kobe quake of 1995 (of which current Prime Minister Naoto Kan was vocally critical), and despite many lingering administrative problems, there is still a sense that society, both at the top and the bottom, is united by shared social bonds.

What is interesting, is the response of people in Japan to the Fukushima situation. Here, it is increasingly becoming clear that the government and TEPCO have consistently lied and concealed information from the people. That the dishonesty and corruption between business and government is deeply rooted and has been to the detriment of the people with whom they had this unwritten contract. When LDP lawmakers can gather to form a nuclear industry lobbying group with the crisis on their doorsteps still ongoing, when figures are starting to emerge on the extent to which former politicians have been gifted lucrative positions in energy firms in return for passing helpful laws, and when the Japanese media refuses to report on the biggest protests of any kind seen in the country since the 1960s, people start to feel that their social contract is not being honoured. Instead of “us” in this situation together, it becomes “us”, the victims, and “them”, the establishment.

If the Japanese government wants to retain the trust of its people, it needs to be very careful how it deals with TEPCO and Fukushima, because something quite fragile is at stake.

2:46 Now on sale -- all proceeds to the Japan Red Cross

2011-04-11T22:50:00.000-07:00

Written in two days, edited and put together in one week, and released in just over three weeks, 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake is the result of the #quakebook project, put together via Twitter in the aftermath of the March 11th earthquake in Tohoku.

The book went on sale in ebook form today via Amazon. I wrote the piece Radioactivity, which I also posted on this blog, specifically for 2:46, and it appears there in an edited form. The book also features contributions from Jake Adelstein, William Gibson and Yoko Ono, but the real reasons to buy it are firstly, the way that it pieces together the real-time experiences of ordinary people as they reacted to the quake, and secondly, because Amazon have agreed to donate all the money to the Japan Red Cross.

You can buy 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake from Amazon here.

Radio Activity

2011-03-18T01:56:00.000-07:00

I'm in a small club in the Tokyo suburb of Koenji, drinking beer with a group of twenty or so young Japanese people. A man in a hard hat and face mask is conducting a mini orchestra of vintage 1980s synthesisers in a goofy cover version of the Korean pop group Girls Generation's recent hit "Gee". The audience rewards their set with a cascade of applause and whoops.

Beneath the cheer and good humour, however, these are people only too aware of the unsettling new situation that Japan finds itself in. The man’s getup is just one of the eerie reminders around the room of the tragedy that had struck northeastern Japan less than a week previously. His father was from Fukushima, close to the nuclear power plant that was dominating news headlines that day, and the band’s drummer also hails from the same area. There are smiles and laughs around the room when Kraftwerk’s 1975 song “Radioactivity” comes on in the background, but it’s a dark, ironic sort of humour on display – one that you would never normally expect from the kind of cheerful slapstick that dominates Japanese TV comedy.

A small TV in the corner remains tuned to NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster and most reliable source of news, and all eyes turn to the screen. An aftershock has been recorded near Tokyo. Here in our Koenji basement, no one felt a thing, but as numbers recording the strength of the tremor start appear on the onscreen map, a cheer goes up among some of the people present; the Koenji area scored 4, putting it in the level of most extreme shaking. There’s a sense of victory: we took the worst of that tremor and didn’t even feel it. The party goes on.

At the end of the evening, the audience and band members drift out, leaving money for the relief fund in a small tin in front of the DJ booth. People talk of music as an agent of healing, but for people in Tokyo, it’s also a weapon of defiance.

Worried you might have accidentally made a cool anime?

2011-03-09T10:48:00.000-08:00

Already set yourself up with a dull as ditchwater, platitude-spouting, male lead who drearily moralises about how robbing sunken u-boats is disrespectful to dead Nazis, and still the show manages to be hard-edged, intelligent and by and mature?

No worries, just add a fucking kid.

No one has ever found a child annoying. Their pure-hearted sincerity, innocent courage and untainted belief in simple matters of right and wrong are a beacon of inspiration to us all.

More than anything, children anchor the moral compass of a show while providing lovable light relief from all the violence and moral ambiguity. Just think how much better Ghost in the Shell would have been if Section 9 had had a cute kid tagging along with them in all their missions. Miles better, right?

After all, young children are so terribly under-represented in animation, so it's really nice to see them being catered for. To fail to insert a shrieking, wailing, selfish, self-righteous fucking kid into every anime, including retroactively adding them to any that have already slipped through the net, would be like the worst crimes of the Nazis by a multiple of a million, and should be enforced by law. Obviously.

Fractale: (lots of) thoughts after episode 1

2011-01-19T08:19:00.000-08:00

Azuma Hiroki wrote possibly the best book ever written about anime and manga culture (certainly the best available in the English language), in Dobutsuka-suru Postmodern (Otaku: Japan's Database Animals), which explored, nailed down, and examined otaku culture in a way that was both fascinating, detailed and accessible. He was, as one might imagine, hated by some sections of otakudom (no one likes being analysed against their will), yet they bought his book in droves, and by the end of the early 2000s, Like his ideological contemporary, artist Murakami Takashi, it was becoming clear that many people working in the industry had read his book and absorbed what it had to say.

This is not the time to go Azuma-hunting in the world of 2000s anime, but the appearance of Fractale, based on a story and concept by Azuma (although only the novel, which follows a different story, was directly written by him, it is probably fair to say that the universe Fractale inhabits was developed under Azuma's strong influence), is very interesting, seeing the critic's position rotate through 180 degrees, to the other side of the screen.

The director tasked with bringing Azuma's idea to life is Yamamoto Yutaka, whose previous includes work on shows like Kannagi and Shakugan no Shana, as well as working for moé titans Kyoto Animation on Air, Kanon and Haruhi. As a result, Fractale is a work that turns on the influence of two creators with important connections to otaku and moé culture. One its arch analyst, dissector of its habits and behaviours, the other one of its most experienced practitioners, with a hand in some of the most iconic moé works of the decade.

The story begins in somewhere that might be a future Ireland or might be some kind of Celtic Neverland, with a boy called Clain encountering a mysterious, faintly alien seeming girl called Phryne, who is being pursued by a gang of assorted ne'er-do-wells. So far, so familiar. The environment and the animation are largely realistically drawn, with few of the usual visual signifiers one would expect of a moé anime. However, some of the characters' behaviour and certain cliches they act out, indicate that Azuma or Yamamoto (or both) nevertheless intends to run with some of moé's key tropes.

Flushed, sweating, eyes wide with fear: is he being sacrificed to the Great Cthulu? No, he just saw a girl's tits.

Within seconds of first encountering Phryne, Clain as been put in a situation where he must (in order to help the poor girl, natch) gingerly lift part of her dress covering her leg. He frets and faffs over this tedious piece of voyeurism that the production staff have contrived for him, which is par for the course among anime heroes of course, because it allows the audience to experience the thrill of precariously concealed underage female flesh, with hero-avatar's reaction providing the reassurance and validation that their intentions are actually the opposite. They are being forced to look up the unconscious teenage girl's skirt: they don't want to, but they have to in order to help her, and they feel really bad about it because, you know, they're not usually that kind of guy (yes, these are sarcastic italics).

Later when she appears topless in his room asking for help with the minor wounds she sustained, we're treated to the same paroxysms of crippling social inertia from Clain, but this time she is conscious and openly displaying herself to him, although the magic moé sex-away wand is at work here too. In order for the show to provide its audience with the titilation they require without ever making the girl seem like, you know, a scrubber, she behaves in a way that shows her to be entirely innocent of Clain's sexual discomfort. Thus the production team preserve her purity and innocence while at the same time preserving her role in appeasing the audience's sexual demands.

Naked, but not in a dirty way, thus the audience may be titillated also not in a dirty way.

Yes, I'm making a big deal out of something that is hardly the main point of the story. Nevertheless, compare and contrast with almost the exact same scenario in Miyazaki's Laputa. Pazu lives a self-sufficient life alone, working for the shaft engineer at the mine. When the girl Sheeta falls from the sky into his arms at the beginning of the film, there is also obvious interest in the beautiful, angelic young female presence that has appeared in his life, but there are important differences in the way he responds to her. His attitude is more brash, he wants to show off to her, be it his athletic abilities, the view of his home town, or his collection of flight memorabilia. In an instant, we know what is important to him, what kind of person he wants to be, and what his dreams are. We also find out that he can be clumsy in his pursuit of those goals, as when he falls through the roof of the house into a pile of rubble. But then we learn that he can bounce back from these setbacks through the sheer power of his enthusiasm and never-say-die attitude.

With Fractale's setting based on Ireland rather than Laputa's imaginary Welsh valley (although one picturesque Celtic location is surely as good as another, right?) Clain's interest in Phryne is displayed through sweat-drenched, cripplingly self-conscious voyeurism. Apart from a desultory interest in music, and the requisite otaku tendencies, his goals are vague; he demonstrates little interest in the world he inhabits, meanwhile his parents are distant, interacting with him only through a pair of inhuman looking automatons.

Elsewhere, the villains chasing Phryne are clearly modelled on the Grandis Gang from Anno Hideaki's Nadia, although with a shrieking underage girl in a nurse's uniform replacing the sexy and mature Grandis Granva as their presumed leader. One imagines (hopes?) that someone as clever as Azuma would have clever ideas for subverting these standard tropes in later episodes, although if he is really all that clever, then there is also the chance he'll know where his bread's buttered and just pander away for all he's worth.

"Shh, my dear: don't cheapen the moment."

This episode, however, does give hope that the former case may be true, for while Azuma may have immersed himself to a stupendous degree in otaku culture, he's not really an otaku: Azuma is a philosopher and to a limited degree a sociologist, and he has a more old-fashioned way of thinking. He may wish to dress up his work in some of the trappings of hyper-post-modern, "superflat" otaku culture, and he plays those cards well -- well enough in fact that some of the early interactions between Clain and Phryne (combined with Clain's infuriating habit of dropping his voice to a whisper for the final syllable of every fucking sentence that vomits forth from his face -- it just pushes my hate button, OK? Just wait till I start writing about Banner of the Stars) had me in spasms of spitting rage and hate -- but at the heart of Fractale, there is the sense that for Azuma, everything must mean something.

Clain's sense of dislocation and alienation, his vaguely geekish tendencies: these things are not the "boo-hoo, no one understands us" mutually masturbatory victimhood yowls of self-obsessed otaku. They are cultural observations from a person both intimately involved in and a keen observer of society. Like Miyazaki, and like any socially-concerned science fiction writer, Azuma is looking at the world, observing the interaction of technology and society, and projecting what this does to us.

When Clain explains that the reason he keeps the old videos of himself and his now (physically at least) absent parents is because they're in a rare, outdated video format, the moment is freighted with meaning because it forms part of an interlocking sequence of small events and incidents that have set up the theme. We don't really believe that Clain doesn't care for his parents, what this scene shows rather poignantly is the way that Clain is so disconnected from his feelings that his sentiment for outdated machinery is the only outlet he is emotionally capable of using to express the loss he feels at his parents' absence.

Phryne sheds tears in place of Clain, who sits uncomprehending, surrounded by screens, speakers and the silent eye of the webcam.

There must be some debate as to what aspects of it are down to Azuma and which down to Yamamoto, and indeed to what extent the two are singing from the same hymn sheet, but yes, at least from this first episode, it is clear that Fractale has absorbed, and is casually regurgitating, many of the themes and cliches that underlie modern moé-influenced anime; and yet, it also seems intent on putting them in a wider social context. Yes, it is littered with transparent references to older anime works, but the characters thus far have remained innocent of them, free from self-referential comic asides.

Where it's obvious that someone like Hayao Miyazaki passionately wishes that the modern otaku had never been born and, thanks to his more mainstream popularity in Japan and overseas, is able to continue living his life in blissful denial of their existence, Azuma and Yamamoto have been getting their fingers dirty, peeling through the onion skins of moé culture for the past ten years and more, and are among the best placed people out there to engage with this most divisive aspect of Japanese pop culture in an interesting and valuable way (before presumably ruining it with a feeble final episode, like we all secretly know they will).

The Exciting and Predictable Adventures of Kira Kiken

2010-12-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

Teaching can sometimes be a boring job, especially essay-writing classes, where students are as a matter of necessity sitting silently and writing for large parts of the class. Fortunately, the dedicated geek can always find constructive things with which to occupy his time. The result of one such explosion of ennui-induced/inducing creativity was The Exciting and Predictable Adventures of Kira Kiken (shading and text obviously added on the computer afterwards).

Page 1:

Page 2:

The idea was initially to do a quick comic that crammed as many moé clichés into as small a space as possible -- yeah, I know, satire -- but to be honest, there are dedicated otaku out there doing that kind of thing day in, day out, and they know and care way more than I ever will about manga and anime, so it ended up just being a pretty straight, idiotic gag strip. Enjoy!

Me: in Japanese Media

2010-10-07T20:21:00.001-07:00

Quick bit of self-promotion here:

I was interviewed by journalists from the Japanese magazine ASCII a couple of weeks ago, and the article is online here. A lot of what I'm talking about is music (my lazy, critical comments about crap Japanese music magazines Snoozer and Rockin' On were apparently controversial), but I also spend a lot of time talking about the similarities in the behaviour of fans between punk and indie "DiY culture" and otaku "doujin culture".

Oh, and it's all in Japanese.

Thanks.

Tytania: Documenting the Slow Death of Anime (Part 478)

2010-10-07T20:04:00.000-07:00

Status:
Abandoned midway through episode 18.

Reason:
The makers didn't seem to care, so why should I?

Seriously, there seemed to be this weary attitude of, "Oh, this'll do," permeating every creative aspect. The battles were dreary and one-dimensional, the animation cheap and crudely rendered, the voice acting cliched and grating, and the script... oh, the script...

Pyuu! Pyuu! Blip! Zap!: a typical battle in Tytania

Fan Hyulick is a Reluctant Hero, which puts him at the end of a noble tradition that includes Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard from Blade Runner, Harrison Ford's Han Solo from Star Wars, and, erm, Shinji from Evangelion. However, Fan is reluctant to the point of being practically catatonic, lacking any of the coiled intensity that is needed to provide tension with his happy-go-lucky exterior. The audience really needs to see this tension in a Reluctant Hero in order to emotionally engage with his reluctance. In Deckard's case, there is a brooding intensity about him that suggests a capacity for ruthlessness and violence that the character himself despises; Solo is in some ways the reverse, his reluctance to fight masking a romantic instinct that he is embarrassed about showing; Shinji is wracked with Oedipal traumas and insecurities that he tries to suppress. In all these cases, there is something sympathetic about the character revealed in his reluctance, be it Deckard's unwillingness to return to his violent past, Solo's roguish charm, or Shinji's sheer smallness in the face of what he is being asked to do. However, what the audience is really looking for is the moment when the hero casts away his reluctance and his repressed inner self is revealed in a blaze of cathartic glory: the violence of Deckard's conflict with the replicants, the excitement of Solo's rebirth as a hero of the Rebel Alliance, or the increasingly raw, primal emotions released by the the gradual exposure of Shinji's subconscious.

Fan Hyulick gives us none of these things. It is as if the writers were afraid that compromising his easygoing exterior in any way would make him less cool to whatever idiotic audience they were trying to appeal to, when in fact it just makes him seem two dimensional and immature. He forms an attachment to the girl Lira, although she's drawn in such a scattershot way that it's hard to see why; the only reasons we are given are that she's pretty and she can make good omelettes. Perhaps if your only meaningful contact with a female other is with your own mother, then perhaps cooking might be the first thing you reach for in your assessment of female characters, but for most of us not still living in the 1950s, this is not only extremely poor writing, but actually actively insulting.

In anime, women develop new personality traits entirely for the convenience of men.

In any case, it's soon clear that Lira only exists so she can be killed to give Fan his needed motivation. Not only that, but just in case you were moving into any sort of engagement with or immersion in the plot, there is another, equally irritating character on hand in rebel strategist Dr. Lee, to explain precisely this to us. Literally, Dr. Lee actually comes out and says something along the lines of, "Fan doesn't have the motivation to fight now. He needs something dreadful to happen to someone he cares about so that he'll be angry enough," just before Lira dies (in predictably contrived and clumsily handled circumstances) and then, hey presto, motivation (and, two for the price of one, woman character and hero's sole emotional connection removed from story).

As with Fan, the writers constantly seem afraid of immersing Dr. Lee's character emotionally in the story, with him constantly referring to the rebellion he is organising as his "research project", in a way that comes over more like teenage fanfiction than the sort of thing you'd expect from a professional writer.

As for the antagonists, the Tytania clan, they are certainly the more interesting side of the story, but not by much. Red headed Duke Jouslain is clearly the writers' favourite character, which perhaps explains why Fan Hyulick's side of the story seems to have been dashed off with such obvious disinterest. He is a likeable enough combination of sympathetic, intelligent and ruthless, and plays off well enough against his cousins, the Prim & Proper One, the Angry & Aggressive One, and the Sinister & Scheming One. Also of note is Prim & Proper, who is the only character in the whole first 75% of the series who displays any character progression at all, going from arrogant in episode one, to hurt and ashamed in episode 3, to wiser and somewhat improved in all subsequent episodes. To this, I offer the writers a hearty "well done," and append a humble, "more, please."

Evil and homosexual? What a shit!

Rather worse is Angry & Aggressive's gay younger brother, with whom the writers manage to play every sickeningly homophobic card they have to hand, portraying him as a vain, effeminate, cowardly, sadistic, sexually predatorial paedophile. This opens up a curious question about the moral universe Tytania's writers inhabit. On the one hand, they seem the think the idea of "freedom" and the culturally familiar environment of liberal democracy alone are enough to make us sympathise with the rebels, but on the other hand, their portrayal of women and homosexuals, not to mention the constant forelock tugging of the servant classes towards their social betters, remains trapped in the pre-war years. If this were simply a case of them showing how the social order of the Tytania universe is aligned, that would be admirable (a good science-fantasy should portray a world with different culture and values to our own), but there has clearly been so little thought, care and attention put into its construction that this view is hard to credit. More likely, they felt that making Angry & Aggressive's younger brother a homosexual was a handy way of "punching up" the script, making him seem more sinister; more likely they simply felt that making Lira good at cooking was the most natural way of showing that she's at heart a good woman despite her spunky exterior; most likely it seemed obvious to them that when a planet's old set of feudal overlords is overthrown by a new set of feudal overlords, the servants should remain loyal to their rightful rulers -- anything else would be sneaky and treacherous.

Unfortunately, generally speaking, there's not really enough to dislike in the Tytania clan to make Fan's rebellion anything you can really root for, and the whole story is far too simplistic and half-arsed to work in any other way. Tytania creator Tanaka Yoshiki's better known Legend of the Galactic Heroes exceeds Tytania by presenting a world where two likeable and sympathetic heroes, Reinhard von Müsel and Yang Wen-li, are driven into deadly conflict with each other, manipulated by forces outside of their control. Tytania, with considerably fewer episodes in which to tell its tale, simply has none of this sense of grand, overarching events influencing the story.

The way Tytania unfolds is equally uninspiring. Fan is presented to us as a tactical genius, but all his schemes seem to involve simply creating a diversion and then somehow breaking into/out of whatever armed compound he's currently stuck in/trying to rescue someone from, and simply trusting in his plot shield to help him carry it off. Ocean's Eleven this ain't. The space battles play out like video games, and 1970s video games at that, with the spaceships just lining up to zap each other with death rays a la Space Invaders. Das Boot this also ain't. The plotting and intrigue among the Tytania royal family is marginally more diverting, but only in the sense that being less diverting would mean multiplying a base interest level of zero. Every Tytania plot runs like this: A plots against B -> A moves against B -> B is revealed to have already known about A's plot -> A dies/is killed. Defence of the Realm, this most assuredly ain't.

Three men with crap haircuts: plotting (also scheming).

Most of all, however, Tytania just isn't Legend of the Galactic Heroes. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't so transparently trying to be, but it is, and it fails pitifully. In every single respect it is its illustrious forbear's pale imitation, the writers, artists and directors failing to imbue it with even a glimmer of what made Legend of the Galactic Heroes the flawed but nonetheless impressive and well crafted work it remains to this day.

Railway Etiquette and the Lighter Side of Virtual Dating

2010-06-25T05:15:00.000-07:00

An article I wrote was published today in Tokyo-based English magazine Metropolis on the subject of the DS dating simulation game phenomenon that is Loveplus, or more accurately Loveplus+, in view of the latter's release tomorrow.

Read that?

OK, now first up, Metropolis' "Pop Life" column isn't the kind of place that encourages long, rambling discourses on sociological and postmodernist topics, but some of the stuff that came up in this article touched on one of my pet issues, and I think intersects interestingly with some aspects of modern Japanese life.

In his 1997 book The Plague of Fantasies, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek says:

The need for the phantasmic support of the public symbolic order (materialized in the so-called unwritten rules) thus bears witness to the system's vulnerability: the system is compelled to allow for possibilities of choices which must never actually take place, since their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system. In the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s -- to take the most extreme example -- it was not only forbidden to criticize Stalin, it was perhaps even more forbidden to announce this very prohibition: to state publically that it was forbidden to criticize Stalin. The system needed to maintain the appearance that one was allowed to criticize Stalin, the appearance that the absence of criticism [...] simply demonstrated that Stalin was effectively the best and (almost) always right.

In other words, it is the peeling back of the facade, by revealing the true process that underlies the lie, even though we all know it to be a lie, that is the crime.

What has a piece of Nintendo dating simulation software got to do with Josef Stalin, one might well ask? Let's think about these "unwritten rules" here.

Every culture has its unwritten rules; they are the foundation stones of what makes our society function. An example most of us have experienced at some point is the dilemma of what to do when offered a free meal. If someone offers to pay your half of the bill, you must make a quick calculation as to whether this is an occasion where you are to insist on paying your share, or one where you must merely make a show of insisting before relenting; the option to accept right off the bat, applies only to certain people in certain relationships, and you must be aware of these rules (these unwritten rules) in order to function smoothly in this situation.

In Japan, many of these unwritten rules are breaking.

The Tokyo Metro has been running a series of advertisements in its stations to educate passengers on the finer points of train etiquette. To an outsider, these "Please Do it at Home" posters probably seem like a mixture of common sense and outright weirdness, but there are some key signifiers that tell us what they are about.

Firstly there is the recurring character of the gentle, unfairly harassed old man who is the victim of all this bad behaviour. Secondly, the perpetrators of most (although not all) of these crimes are young people. Generally speaking, I think it's fair to say that there is a generation gap on display here. Young people either do not know, or simply disregard the unwritten rules.

Yet by producing these posters, hasn't Eidan Line themselves done damage to the system? By writing down the rules, the rules are no longer unwritten. By displaying the rules, they actually reveal more clearly the breakdown of the system, and by showing up the generation gap, they accentuate the differences.

One clear early memory of my early time in Japan is of an older middle-aged student that I was teaching telling me, "The good thing about a homogeneous society like Japan is that you can sit on a train and look at the person opposite you, knowing that they're thinking the same way as you." There was a great deal of comfort to be found in knowing that society shares the same values and rules. Now, how does he feel stepping into the Metro and seeing those posters? Perhaps he is comforted, but not in the same way as before. The poster comforts him by saying, "While the people opposite you may no longer think the same way as you, be assured that the system is on your side of the cultural division."

A more recent discussion I have had, this time with a group of middle-aged women, centred around the phenomenon of young women doing their makeup on the train, and this is where it gets really interesting for me.

Now as a man, and a foreign one at that, this is something I had never previously cared about, and the way the Eidan Line posters complained about it baffled me. How does a women doing her makeup harm anyone? Who cares? Sometimes I worried that a sudden jolt might send a line of mascara skew whiff, but that seemed to me a matter for the girl to deal with. Nevertheless, these three women were horrified by the trend towards girls doing this in public. To them, the act of showing oneself doing one's makeup on the train was equivalent to getting dressed in public. Viewing the process of transformation was what disgusted them. You may wear makeup -- and Japan is a culture that practically demands that its women spend a fortune on the stuff -- but you may not show yourself applying the makeup.

Perhaps significantly, or perhaps by happy coincidence, the Japanese term for "making up" literally means "changing" or "transforming" oneself, which brings us back to Stalin: by revealing the process, you shatter the illusion, and even though everyone knows it is an illusion, it is necessary for society to maintain the pretence of not knowing; to peel back the facade is forbidden.

This is where the real division between generations lies, and the crux of the matter comes in Japan's transformation into a postmodern society. The truth of these girls on the train is that they don't care about the illusion. The makeup is accepted on its own terms, not as a way of tricking people into thinking they are more beautiful; similarly, the elaborate art girls plaster onto their nails has no purpose in creating the illusion of beautiful nails: it is the art itself that they wish to display as beautiful.

Now, finally, let's return to Loveplus. A well worn theme when dealing with otaku culture is the division between reality and make-believe, and a well-worn criticism of otaku themselves is that they become unable to distinguish between the two. Reporting on Loveplus often focussed on the blurring of reality and fantasy, but what I would contend is happening here is very similar to the girls on the trains. The issue of whether the girls in Loveplus are fake or real is irrelevant; the chap I interviewed for the Metropolis piece, Endo-san, is an intelligent person and it's very clear from talking to him that his interest in 2D girls is made with full awareness of what distinguishes them from real women, simply that he accepts the distinctions on their own terms, and actually prefers 2D ones. Perhaps the real controversy with games like Loveplus is not that they blur distinctions between reality and fantasy (this has been the purpose of art since for ever), but that they reveal how easy it is for fantasy to substitute for reality, and that they ask questions of reality that it cannot answer except by reflexively replying "but I am real!" The game's reply to that is simply, "I know I'm not real love, but I argue that I am an improvement on reality. I am not love, I am Love Plus."

Murakami Haruki: Godfather of Moé

2010-05-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

Yes, I've touched on this before, but lately I've been thinking it deserves expanding upon. Nevertheless, before I begin, some caveats. Firstly, I am a fan of Murakami Haruki, although (as will no doubt become clear) I think his writing has several limitations. Secondly, I am not a fan of moé, although (as readers of this blog will perhaps already have figured out) I remain open to being impressed by shows touched with its fell mark. Now onto the meat of the piece...

One of the key recurring themes of Murakami's female characters is the way that all of them are presented as a mixture of quirky and vulnerable, in just the right balance that lets the (male) reader admire their unique and independent mind, but also fills the (male) reader with the desire to protect and care for her. This is a fundamental quality of moé, and Murakami codified a lot of these characteristics while anime was still struggling, lobe-finned, out of the prehistoric swamps of 1970s/80s kids' cartoondom.

Murakami's women appear in various shades of male fantasy, but the main types have traditionally fallen into three basic categories:

First, there is the whore with a heart of gold. She is usually a college student who sells herself willingly, which is a neat way of circumventing a lot of the less pleasant aspects of the trade, and she uses sex in a therapeutic way, healing the metaphysical wounds of her clients. She is probably the most well-balanced of the Murakami femmes, and her vulnerability stems from the fact that for all her independence, she is nevertheless being exploited (by bad, or at least morally ambiguous people, not by good people like the guy actually fucking her). The girl with the ears (Kiki) from A Wild Sheep Chase, Creta Kano from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, any one of a number of characters from Dance Dance Dance, and the girl Colonel Sanders provides for Hoshino in Kafka on the Shore are all variations on this.

The second type is the ethereal beauty, disconnected from our reality, but who hints at vision beyond our realm. She is often vulnerable through an innate fragility and an inability to relate in a normal day-to-day manner with our world. Naoko from Norwegian Wood is the archetype for this character, although variants on her could include Shimamoto from South of the Border, West of the Sun, Sumire from Sputnik Sweetheart, and the "End of the World" librarian from Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Thirdly, we have the spunky, boyish, inquisitive, female take on Holden Caulfield. Her brash, self-confident exterior usually masks a sensitive, easily damaged soul. She will invariably mock and feign scorn for the main character, but gradually come to care deeply for him. In some of Murakami's books this character is presented as a child, explicitly out of the hero's sexual strike zone, and on others she will be of equal age and a valid romantic partner. Midori from Norwegian Wood, May Kasahara from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Yuki from Dance Dance Dance, and the "Hard Boiled Wonderland" librarian from Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World all fit the bill here.

Finding a foreshadowing of moé in this is not a chore. One could loosely summarise these three character types as (1) Misato Katsuragi, (2) Rei Ayanami, and (3) Asuka Langley Soryu, although Misato is a rather more well-rounded character than Murakami ever managed, and no Murakami heroine ever scaled the heights of melodrama that Asuka attained. Looking more deeply into moé as developed through the 2000s via the media of visual novels and light novels, you nevertheless find Murakami's character formulae cropping up again and again.

The Naoko type is frequently re-conceived as the terminally ill girl that forms the mainstay of visual novel trauma-porn, and the May Kasahara type is a simple variation on your boilerplate tsundere. The Kiki/Creta Kano type is a rarer proposition thanks to moé culture's inability to deal with the idea of sex in any post-pubescent manner, but she is nonetheless present in some form, often in the "big sister" role.

A recent, explicit example of Murakami-as-moé is the incorporation of the 12 year-old Yuki from Dance Dance Dance into the dating simulator/girlfriend tamagotchi phenomenon Loveplus as the character Rinko. Yuki was introverted, Rinko likes books; Yuki was a fan of Talking Heads and, erm, The Police (and, most tragically, Genesis), Rinko likes punk; Yuki doesn't mention anything about fighting games, but, hey, you gotta keep up with the market. What it says about the Loveplus creators that they chose Murakami's most utterly un-sexual character as a template for one of their date-models I humbly leave up to the reader's imagination (clue: either (A) they think their customers are paedophiles, or (B) they think their customers can't deal with a character with any sexual motivation of her own).

Another example of Murakami's world intruding directly into the land of moé is in Abe Yoshitoshi's Haibane Renmei, which recreates "End of the World"'s mysterious walled town (sadly sans library) and puts its heroine down a well for a couple of days a la Wind-up Bird Chronicle (there might be some debate about its moé credentials, but the fact that my wife hates it with a passion puts it very powerfully in the moé category). Here none of the characters particularly fits any of the Murakami archetypes, but the format of the show fits each girl up with her own hidden weakness or vulnerability, from something as simple as Nemu's sleepiness through Kuu's loneliness, to Reki's more complex issues. This is essential to the progression of the plot, and the viewer's task is to dig up and reveal the source of each girl's vulnerability throughout the series.

The existence of the specific character types Murakami created is in many ways irrelevant. What matters is the combination of quirkiness and vulnerability, and the protective response that they evoke in the reader. What Murakami makes clear, and what moé culture shies away from (or rather pretends to shy away from), is the explicit sexual appeal of these characters. Even where the narrator of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle distances himself from any sexual feelings for May Kasahara, May herself is undeniably a sexual being, and by in this way making her existence independent of the male protagonist's gaze, this is partly why she is Murakami's best female character.

Nakagawa Shoko Sings the Greatest Hits of Anime... Again and Again

2010-04-05T02:47:00.000-07:00

In my secret double life as a music journalist, I occasionally come across things that cross over with the ever-vibrant world of anime, so anyone going crazy with excitement over the news that otaku idol Nakagawa Shoko has released yet another collection of anime cover versions might want to check my review of said album over on The Japan Times' web site. Given The Japan Times' word limits, there's a lot more I could have said about it, but suffice to say most of the songs are from mainstream anime of the 1990s, with a few from the 80s or more recently (all of which sound like 90s anime songs anyway). This is a good thing, in that 90s anime music pre-dates the sickness of moé that swept the nation after the world ended in 2000 and we all started living in an endlessly looped Ouroboros vision of ourselves, but if the fact that it's re-digesting a slightly different period of recent history is the best that can be said about it, then I hardly think one can call that a ringing endorsement.

Obviously Nakagawa Shoko has no particular duty to be in any way different to how she currently presents herself, and the choice of songs is actually pretty reassuring in the way it shies away from really obvious courting of the moé demographic and generally just fixes on songs that Nakagawa herself would have probably watched as a kid. But then, this is probably because Nakagawa's audience isn't really otaku anyway. She's a proper pop star, so the audience she needs to sell her product to is the wider ranging, casually nostalgic anime fans, who would probably vomit into their own scorn at the idea of being held in the same category as real otaku.

Self-promotion Corner

2010-02-22T11:51:00.000-08:00

I generally try to keep my music geek activities separate from my non-music geek stuff, but I'm going to break that rule for now since this here CD includes some of my own real music what I actually played on.

This album is a CD/R of cover versions of the legendary Japanese idol pop trio the Candies featuring 14 Japan-based underground artists. Track 6 is a cover of "Heart no Ace ga Detekonai" on which I played some very simple synth and which I flatter myself to suggest I "produced". The band goes by the name Trinitron, and it's possible to hear the song, along with Yamaco's far better cover of "Sono Ki ni Sasenaide" (if you ever wondered about the basis of the idol trio from Perfect Blue, just check out the linked video) on my label's Myspace.

As I said, it's only a private CD/R release, so if anyone's crazy enough to want it, your best bet's either directly from me or via Koenji's premier purveyor of weird, self-released avant-garde unusualness, Enban.

Valentine's Candies (CAR-91)
01. その気にさせないで / Yamaco
02. 春一番 / TE☆SY (From Cand☆es)
03. ハートのエースが出てこない / Umbrella-X
04. 春一番 / 春風堂
05. 年下の男の子 / cottonioo
06. ハートのエースが出てこない / Trinitron (N'toko+Ian Martin+friends)
07. あなたに夢中 / Puffy Shoes
08. 危い土曜日 / 地盤沈下
09. 二人だけの夜明け / うるせぇよ
10. 春９０００（「春一番」のカバー） / やまのいゆずる
11. A muk aihsa say (plaque translation therapy) （「やさしい悪魔」のカバー） - snip n` zener
12. 年下の男の子 / Jahiliyyah
13. 暑中お見舞い申し上げます / ruruxu/sinn
14. 微笑がえし / Killer Condors

OK, that's that done, and now back to the more comfortable business of writing about why everybody else is wrong.

Summer Wars: Not as Good as They Say

2010-02-19T08:03:00.000-08:00

I don't think I've ever seen any kind of anime receive the kind of universal acclaim afforded to last year's summer smash hit Summer Wars, Hosoda Mamoru's follow-up to the genuinely very good Toki wo Kakeru Shojo. Review after review and analysis after analysis hailed Hosoda as the successor to Miyazaki Hayao, the Japan Media Arts Festival picked it out for the Grand Prize (the absolutely masterful Kemono no Souja Erin, surely!), and fans queued up round the block for weeks to watch it.

I know what you're thinking: so what's wrong with it that makes it so popular?

Summer Wars certainly has its moments. There's some snappy dialogue, some larger than life characters, and some nicely-played dramatic interaction early on, but it also can't help diving too far into abstraction in the latter part, and that's primarily where it falls down.

Nationalism and patriotism (and whatever you say, there really is no practical difference) in film or television tread a fine line. Within a film -- diagetic patriotism, if you will -- it can be an effective way to represent a particular character's personality, and it's fine or even admirable. Where the film itself is pushing the patriotic buttons (non-diagetic patriotism) then it's more troublesome. Old war films like In Which We Serve sometimes get away with it by being brilliant, and The Green Berets gets away with it nowadays because the gift of hindsight (and preferably a handy pair of irony-shaded glasses) makes it seem endearing and naive. Others, such as Takahashi Tsutomu's hilarious women's baseball manga Tetsuwan Girl, get away with it simply by being so unbelievably absurd (intentionally or otherwise) that there is no other option than uproarious laughter at least twice a page. Still others, like Itami Juzo's Tampopo, tread a more complex path between sending themselves up and retaining a perverse pride in their own eccentricities.

Summer Wars attempts this latter path, perhaps largely succussfully. Again and again it plays up to an imaginary past of traditional Japanese values, uncorrupted by American culture, with every family member representing some patriotic (yet never humourlessly so) ideal of Japaneseness, from the stern yet kind-hearted, nagitana-wielding matriarch to the family history buff/karate teacher/fisherman uncle, to the teenage video game champion, to the baseball-fixated fat woman whose position in the family I couldn't determine. Only black sheep illegitimate child Wabisuke has a troubled side, and you know he's bad news because he's been in America. Still, even he lets us know early on that he can be saved when he mentions that for all its inferiority to the US, Japan still does better beer.

The scenes with the family are, as you can imagine with such two-dimensional characters, desperately cliched, but they are nevertheless the most effective and enjoyable parts of the film, working as an affectionate sending up of Japanese life (or at least Japan's image of itself, which in these postmodern times can often seem more like reality than the dreary truth does,) as well as pushing a lot of the right dramatic buttons. For the first forty minutes or so, Summer Wars is, while by no means reaching Itami's level of quirky social satire, nevertheless a top notch film.

The second half/two thirds of the film, after the grandmother dies (old people in Japanese films exist primarily to die so that their troublesome family members can weep a bit and reflect on their lives) shifts the focus from the family drama more fully towards the problem in the online world of OZ, and this is where Summer Wars goes completely off the rails.

The presentation of OZ is fascinating, with designs clearly influenced by Japanese artist/fashion whore Murakami Takashi (who also provided the visual impetus for Hosoda's short film/Louis Vuitton commercial Monogram). This is also interesting in the way it shows how Murakami's work has gradually come to be accepted and incorporated into anime culture, despite initial resistance from otakudom at the way he (many at the time felt) exploited otaku culture through his work. Not just through Hosoda's work, but also in many of the designs in last year's Kūchū Buranko anime, it seems that the anime world is increasingly coming to accept Murakami as one of their own.

The problem with it is that while OZ is an interesting visual concept, it's difficult to sustain emotional engagement in such an abstract world. By showing us the real characters behind the avatars during the first part of the film, and by regularly cutting back to events in the house, Hosoda presumably hopes to give us a "real world" starting point to latch onto, but he fails. The final hour of Summer Wars basically amounts to watching people sitting around a computer screen, and it's boring.

The fact that the villain that they're fighting against is an entirely impersonal, motiveless computer programme called "Love Machine" makes it even more difficult to care, and by the denoument, when Natsuki enters OZ for the final confrontation with Love Machine, all possible interest I had in any of the characters or events had been stripped away.

Azuma Hiroki spends a whole chapter of his book Dobutsuka-suru Postmodern (Otaku: Japan's Database Animals) discussing the ways otaku culture fetishises a self-congratulatory and imaginary image of Japanese history, particularly the Edo Period, and then warps and twists them to incorporate their own, more recently developed fetish objects. With the image of Natsuki's avatar during the final confrontation, Hosoda appears to have lifted (or paid tribute to) as many of the traits that Azuma identifies as he possibly can, fixing her up with a miko's outfit, fluffy animal ears, and later a pair of angel wings (to show she's levelled up, natch). This is interesting, but self-referentiality isn't what the film needs at this point. The whole final portion of the film becomes completely tied up in rules: the rules of the games, the rules of the computer world and the network, and the rules of otaku culture. Humanity, irrationality, emotion, and character lose their power to influence the plot, and are relegated to a reactive role, the characters' faces telling us when we should be caring about a particular lump of pixels moving around on a computer screen.

People claiming that with Summer Wars Hosoda has unseated Miyazaki as the king of anime filmmaking are deluding themselves. 2008's Gaki no Ue no Ponyo demonstrates that Miyazaki is still miles ahead in terms of originality, clarity of vision, character writing, pacing and emotional engagement. In fact even the Hosoda who made 2006's Toki wo Kakeru Shojo is miles ahead in those respects too. Summer Wars is an interesting premise that starts off by no means unpleasantly, but quickly gets eaten up by its own concept.

Holden Caulfield, What's it All About?

2010-02-17T07:03:00.000-08:00

Obviously every time a famous writer or other artist dies, there's the usual round of sentimental tributes as people fall over themselves to say just how much Dick Francis or whoever means to them, although for most people, their death is more likely simply an opportunity to remember the work of a writer you might recall being forced to read at school, or perhaps whose book you read and kind of liked a long time ago. Deaths, to most of us, serve as happy reminders that, yeah, that book that I hadn't thought about once for the last twenty or thirty years wasn't bad.

For me, J.D. Salinger was one of those writers, and more than anything I might have cared about his life or the minute body of work he could be bothered to publish, his death made me think, "Male lead characters in anime are rubbish, and Holden Caulfield gives us some hints as to why."

Without going into too much detail (Catcher in the Rye is a short novel and probably one you've pretended to have read on numerous occasions, so why not track it down and read it for real?) part of what I find appealing about Caulfield as a character is a combination of his knowing, often penetrating ability to size other people up, and his lack of knowledge and lack of understanding of himself (this is a trait you also see in the play/film Alfie, and a key factor in allowing the audience to feel pathos for a title character who really does some horrible things.)

Catcher in the Rye's most recent Japanese translator, and one of Salinger's most famous Japanese fans, the novelist Murakami Haruki, has drawn on these aspects of Caulfield's personality in the past, most frequently applying them to young, proto-moé female characters like Yuki from Dance, Dance, Dance, Midori from Norwegian Wood, and most strikingly May from popular metaphysical harem drama The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

It's significant that in Murakami's mind the character of Holden Caulfield maps most closely onto a female character, whereas his male characters more often drift through his stories in a state of weary passivity. Sure, part of this is derived from the insouciant cool of Raymond Chandler's classic detective Philip Marlowe, but where Marlowe was quick off the hip with a wisecrack or a punch to the guts, Murakami's heroes are a bit more, you know, bland. They are, he seems to be trying to tell us, ordinary guys, trapped in this dizzy maelstrom of crazy women.

Many anime heroes, like Holden Caulfield, have a protective relationship with their little sister, but, like Murakami's male heroes, they are also overwhelmingly bland. Caulfield is brash, frequently out of control, and self-destructive, and Salinger isn't afraid to show Caulfield's flaws leading him into dispiriting, humiliating situations; however, in his flaws he's also charming and vulnerable, as well as pro-active and driven. Caulfield operates at a higher level of reality to us, he is his readers' strengths and flaws magnified, he is extraordinary. Now look through a few character summaries of most popular boys' anime and count how many times the lead character is introduced with the hateful phrase "XXXX is an ordinary high school boy". The only weaknesses a typical anime hero is allowed to have are shyness around girls, a lecherous streak, and weakness of nasal blood vessels. All he can do is react to external stimuli, either in the form of more active (often female) characters around him, or the anime scriptwriter's favourite deus ex machina, destiny.

Time was that every disaffected teenage boy/celebrity assassin in the world carried a copy of Catcher in the Rye in his pocket, so closely did Holden Caulfield's travails resonate with the trauma of youth. Nowadays, anime (and in Japan the light novel) has eaten up huge chunks of the offbeat, faintly alternative youth culture party cake, but the level of its male character writing has still to see its voice change, grow its first pubic hair, and take the first step out of its perpetual pre-adolescence.

Death and Motivation

2010-01-28T14:35:00.000-08:00

J.D. Salinger just died. I don't do sentimental tribute posts, but expect a post on quality character writing soon, with a relevant amount of time devoted to why current anime screenwriters are such phonies. Natch. Sometimes it takes the death of a hero to make me get off my arse and write something that I'm not getting paid for.

A Tale of Two Paprikas

2009-09-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

Kon Satoshi gained something of a reputation with his 1997 film Perfect Blue as a director who likes to take a, let's say, "liberal" approach to his source material when working on an adaptation. As a result, a read through Tsutsui Yasutaka's original 1993 novel Paprika also throws up numerous interesting differences with Kon's 2006 adaptation. These differences can be summarised under the categories of "structural" and "thematic".

Kon's film is structured more as a mystery and a thriller, with key information withheld or expressed only obliquely until more dramatically opportune moments. The missing DC Minis are introduced right from the get go, Osanai acts as a friend and an ally initially, and Inui seems to be a cranky and troublesome boss, but isn't revealed as the villain until later on. Parallel to this, the characters of Noda and Konakawa are combined into the single character of Konakawa, and his rank in the police force is reduced to that of a simple detective. As a result, the film presents a neat parallel between Paprika's investigation into Konakawa's dream and the evolving mystery of the theft of the DC Minis.

On the other hand, Tsutsui's novel makes it clear from very early on that Osanai and Inui are up to no good. The novel is still a thriller, but it is psychological rather than a mystery. Atsuko/Paprika's enemies are established from the start, and we follow her path through the developing series of plots and machinations at a far less frenetic pace.

Similarly, the connection between Atsuko and Paprika is established explicitly, even to the point of detailing how Atsuko changes her appearance, adding freckles and moving her voice to a more girlish register to complete the disguise, whereas in Kon's film the connection between them is a little more blurred. Kon hints that they are the same person, and eventually states it clearly, but he never explains exactly how two such physically different people could be the same. Is it a physical disguise, or is it a blurring of reality and dreams through the use of the DC Mini? By the end, the two have separated completely, appear alongside each other, and even argue over which one is more real.

How the two versions of the story deal with the boundaries of reality and dreams crosses over into the area of thematic differences. Kon, in the film version's stunning opening sequence, makes it clear that he views the boundaries as fluid right from the start, whereas Tsutsui breaks them down at a much slower, more measured pace. For Kon, with that opening rush through clips of The Greatest Show on Earth, Tarzan, Roman Holiday, and a spy thriller that might be From Russia with Love or possibly North by Northwest, the breaking of those boundaries mirrors the way the audience of a film set aside one reality and step into another, as well as the way the director of a film takes a world from his own imagination and recreates it as an entirely new reality on the screen.

In Tsutsui's novel, cinema is certainly a minor theme, particularly in Noda's dream, but he seems much more interested in the details of mental illness and psychotherapy (which Kon largely glosses over), and in particular issues of sex and sexuality. There are some sharp observations about the way Japanese society frowns on attractive women also displaying obvious intelligence in public, but mostly sex is portrayed as the battleground where the novel's competing philosophies slug it out.

The homosexual relationship between Inui and Osanai plays out as faintly abusive one, based on power, and throughout the story, Osanai shows himself unable to view sex outside of expressions of power. Atsuko, portrayed here as much more sexually assured than her equivalent in the film, has a much more empathetic attitude to sex. As Paprika, she often forms close attachments with the patients of her dream analysis, and on one occasion actually has sex with Konakawa in a dream as part of his therapy (compare with the slap across the face she directs at him after he kisses her in the film). Towards the end of the film, as the dream world and real world merge, she is happily engaged in concurrent sexual relationships with three different men, often all at once.

The collision between Atsuko's empathetic approach to sex and Osanai's power-based approach comes in a scene where Inui directs Osanai to rape Atsuko. Osanai, confident in his good looks and desirability, is convinced that all he needs to do is force himself on her and she will become subservient to him. That all he needs to do is "break" her. Unable physically to resist, Atsuko resigns herself and in fact decides to use it as a chance to work off some of the physical need for sex that she hasn't had time to act on because of her work. However, once she shows herself willing to act as a proactive partner, Osanai finds himself unable to sustain an erection and is forced to beat a humiliating retreat. Even then, Atsuko chides herself for mocking his sexual inadequecy and not empathising with him more.

Finally, with Inui, the main villain, there are key differences. Kon portrays him as an old, crippled man who wants to use Osanai's young, attractive body to renew himself. In the novel, there is an entire subplot that is absent from the film, dealing with Atsuko and Tokita's nomination for the Nobel Prize and Inui's jealousy after he lost out to a British scientist many years ago. The battle lines with Inui, however, remain the same as with his protege Osanai. Power and domination versus empathy and understanding, brainwashing versus therapy, and interestingly Christianity versus Buddhism. Inui's dreams are deeply infused with European, particularly Christian, imagery. As Tokyo descends into chaos, mythological creatures from ancient bestiaries do battle with Buddhist deities in the city streets. Inui takes the form of the demon Amon, quotes lines from the Jesuit training manual, summons griffins, and creates vast cathedrals from nothing, while the two barmen, Jinnai and Kuga, battle them as Acala and Vairocana.

Singling out which is the better of the two is a pretty much meaningless exercise and the two are different enough that you could enjoy both without one ruining the other for you. The fact that Tsutsui himself appeared in the film as the voice of Kuga (acting alongside Kon himself as Jinnai) suggests that he had no problem with the hatchet that Kon took to his story, and it's obvious reading the novel why the director of such films as Perfect Blue, Millenium Actress and the TV series Paranoia Agent would be interested in it.

There are definite issues (possibly on the translator's side) with the quality of writing in the novel, particularly the way it hammers away through the third person narration at points that could be better expressed more subtly through the characters' actions; but perhaps the most unusual point from the point of view of Kon's back catalogue and Tsutsui's novel, is the way the film version shies away from the most controversial aspects of the novel. Tsutsui followed the release of Paprika with a three year self-imposed strike in protest at the Japanese literary establishment's squeamishness around taboo issues like mental illness. However, despite Kon's track record of touching on controversial social issues such as suicide, homelessness, prostitution and Japan's militaristic past, the film version of Paprika is mostly shorn of the novel's most pointed aspects. As it stands, Kon's film is a superb fireworks display of postmodern cinematic trickery, in some ways influenced more by Godard and Truffaut than it is by Tsutsui's novel, but lacking a lot of the meat of its printed forbear. In a sense it can be said that Paprika (1993) is a triumph of the "what", while Paprika (2006) is a victory for the "how".

Suzumiya Haruhi: The Case for the Defence

2009-06-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

A harsh and well-aimed salvo from the ever-enjoyable Colony Drop at the moment which puts me in the hateful position of being by default on the same side of the argument as hordes of people for whom I feel nothing but disdain and a smidgen of pity.

Summary of Colony Drop's position: Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu is shit.

Transcription of first comment beneath the original article: your a faget

Summary my feelings about typical Haruhi fans: Sigh.

My defence of Haruhi rests largely on four main pillars. Firstly, it is a postmodernist's paradise, not just for the wealth of references to other anime (Lucky Star has more and is a worse show), but also the way it uses genre cliches not as lazy "look at this, this often happens, now laugh" crimes of self-referentiality, but as metaphors that draw analogues between oft-repeated one-dimensional pop cultural tropes and the lives of the real people that were born out of the same culture.

Secondly and relatedly, as I have talked about at length before, it is a show with big themes that takes a sharp look at genuine contemporary sociological issues in Japan and other post-industrial societies. Yes, the members of the SOS-dan are stereotypes taken straight from Azuma Hiroki's database, but Haruhi is a distorted caricature that contains something real at her core. Similarly Kyon is an audience surrogate but he succeeds as an audience surrogate by actually being a character that not only articulates the superficial characteristics of his target audience, but also embodies their deeper concerns. Modern Japanese and other citizens of other post-industrial transnationalopolises emerge from childhood and face an adult world filled with employment practices that are either hangovers from previous generations (Japan's postwar work-all-the-hours-God-gives-and-never-change-careers lifetime formula) or dehumanised neo-liberal dystopias (free contracts with no benefits and you're fired at the first hint of economic bad times). There is a massive segment of society that is overeducated and immediately disenfranchised, and it clings to its memories of childhood as a response to its missing place in adult society, whilst at the same time being too clever and aware to be able to accept those memories on their own terms anymore. The tension between these two conflicting characteristics is represented by Kyon and Haruhi, and is what makes them real as characters, as well as what gives the show it's zeitgeist punch. Haruhi and Kyon are the only characters in the show that matter, because they alone embody the show's central dilemmas -- the intertwining strands that link childhood and adulthood, the known and unknown, the expected and the desired. One can find them irritating as characters and I can't help that, but in the context of the series, their motivations come across to me as as sincere and so I can be carried along by them.

The third pillar is Haruhi's mastery of structure, particularly in how it plays the plant and the payoff. The initial out of sequence broadcast was very carefully designed to drop hints in earlier episodes of things that wouldn't be explained until later ones -- the appearance of a pile of unused laptops in one episode, with the story of how they were acquired only appearing later, for example. The new series adds to this by each new episode coming in at a particular point within the chronology of the original series and illuminating details that had previously been left hanging such as the reason why Haruhi seemed to recognise Kyon on their first meeting. In addition, the show's non-sequential broadcast emphasises its own postmodern aspects. By cutting up the plot it shrugs its shoulders dismissively at the aspects of the show that are most open to criticism and by focussing on the key points in the relationship between Haruhi and Kyon, it nods its head towards the emotional meta-narrative that is the true heart of the drama.

The fourth pillar of my support for Haruhi is a little more (subtle pun alert) vaguely defined. In some ways it is just one of a number of cartoons that have appeared over the last dozen years or so that demonstrates the emergence in the world of anime of something resembling the Nouvelle Vague/New Wave movement in French cinema of the 1960s.

Like Haruhi, the classic French New Wave film takes delight in intellectualising trashy pop culture. In fact the origin of the Nouvelle Vague was the critics' journal Cahiers du Cinema, which was precisely that: a magazine where geeks over-analysed trashy Hollywood movies and took huge amounts of delight in aspects of the filmmaker's craft that the creators of those films themselves had likely never even considered. As a result, even when the Cahiers writers were directing films that played on traditional Hollywood themes, they were never simply repeating or pandering to Hollywood tastes, because firstly they were creating from the perspective of fans, which puts a layer between them and their source to begin with, and secondly they were creating from the perspective of critics, which meant that their own work could never take its source at face value.

The end result is a lot of clever-cleverness, which is undoubtedly a question of tolerance. A lot of people find Godard and early Truffaut unbearable because of the insufferable self-referentiality of their films, but they nevertheless represent something important in French cinema of the 1960s. Their fans would argue that rather than being a cold, introverted gang giggle, the self-referentiality is part of an exhuberant expression of their own generation, where the process of filmmaking and the romance of cinema's inherent deception is celebrated. The hero of French New Wave was often a faintly detached, bohemian, 1960s everyman who was dragged, half-interested, through a cinematic looking glass and then dumped at the end of it with a nonchalant Gallic shrug. Like Kyon, he was an audience surrogate (or at least a surrogate for what the audience wanted to be), but like Kyon he was also something seperate from the genre heroes he sometimes emulated. He could exist within the action whilst simultaneously being aware of the screen that framed him. In order to relate to him then, the audience too has to accept a world that is both within the frame, but also able to view the frame from a third person perspective. In essence, the audience becomes a participant in the events of the film rather than simply a passive viewer.

The most New Wave moment in Haruhi is the episode (Episode 0) that shows the film Haruhi directed for the school festival (Nooooooo! Heavy meta overload!) What it shares with its French cousins is a love bordering on obsession with the minor mechanics of filmmaking. It simultaneously indulges practically every cliche of bad anime and tokusatsu shows, whilst at the same time dissecting, critiquing and satirising them in a way that the Colony Drop writer would perhaps find deeply annoying; however, that argument only works if you take the position that firstly the indulgence trumps the critique, and secondly that these two aspects are the only things going on. The key aspect that makes this episode such a good piece of filmmaking and writing is really the attention to detail in the way it explores the whole filmmaking process through Haruhi's inept production. We don't see her physically on screen but we get to see Haruhi herself as a character by viewing the world through her own camera lens. She is made more human by the way she gets small things wrong like the many continuity errors and the appearance of boom mics in frame, and also by her unthinking adherence to meaningless directorial cliches such as the vertical panning shot at the end of a scene. At the same time she is recognisably herself by the manic and usually unexplained plot shifts that she forces on the viewers. There's something quite Spinal Tap about the way portraying something done badly can illuminate the process by which the good stuff is also created, and there's also a sense of postmodern romance and elation at seeing a character who is so into the process of creation that they don't care or even notice how bad it is. It was the first episode I ever saw of Haruhi and it provided the lens through which I viewed the entire series.

Of course I'm not saying that any fan of French New Wave would necessarily go for Haruhi because their frames of reference are entirely different, but structurally they are doing something similar. Part of what makes Haruhi so easy to hate is that it is wilfully of its own generation, in the process driving a wedge between itself and fans of the previous generation of anime fans (or fans of the previous generation of anime). Nevertheless, shows like the execreble Kannagi also do this, without any of the intelligence and attention to the minor details of plotting and filmmaking that Haruhi does.

Summary of this blog post: Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu is good.

We Are Puppets

2009-05-21T01:08:00.000-07:00

First up, here's the opening credits sequence of the anime Sugar Sugar Rune, based on Anno Moyoco's popular girls' manga. If you haven't seen it before, watch it now.

Now for some of you, the tune may have set off all kinds of bells ringing, and the more eagle-eared (does that work?) will have twigged it as a thinly disguised pastiche of France Gall's 1965 Eurovision-winning Poupee de Cire Poupee de Son.

Now this similarity should come as no surprise. Chocolat a la Folie was written and produced by Konishi Yasuharu of the Shibuya-kei group Pizzicato Five, and French ye-ye music was pretty much required listening for anyone involved in the Shibuya-kei scene.

What's interesting about Poupee de Cire, Poupee de Son, apart from that it's an uncommonly catchy pop tune, is what it tells us when we open it up. It was written by one of Konishi's idols, Serge Gainsbourg, and like a lot of Gainsbourg's songs, the lyrics are multi-layered and subversive (later songs he wrote for France Gall had her singing entirely innocently about oral sex and LSD). In this case, the title, which Wikipedia translates as "Doll of Wax, Doll of Sawdust", contains two puns in French. Firstly "cire" meaning "wax" can refer simply to a wax doll, but also to wax in the context of a record; similarly, "son" meaning fibre or sawdust could also mean "sound", making the song a meta-analysis of Gall's role as a doll or puppet controlled by Gainsbourg.

Elsewhere the line "Voir la vie en rose bonbon" combines the phrase "voir la vie en rose" meaning "to see life through rose-tinted glasses" with "rose bonbon" meaning something that is "pink like candy", foreshadowing the "chocolat" references in Konishi's song and emphasising the singer's youth (France Gall was seventeen at the time) as well as the song's central irony, namely the idea that people listen to songs about love sung by people too young to have experienced it properly.

Interestingly, two years later British singer Sandie Shaw won Eurovision with the song Puppet on a String, albeit with a slightly different metaphor.

Returning now to Konishi Yasuharu, Chocolat a la Folie (the lyrics were by Anno rather than Konishi) projects a rather more self-confident and aggressive image than Poupee de Son, in keeping with the personality of the story's main character. The lyrics also don't indulge in any such meta-analysis, but scanning around some of Konishi's work with J-Pop idols, such as the defiantly 60s styled Route 246 by Fukada Kyoko, a lot of the work he seems to associate himself with is channelling elements of Gainsbourg.

The song Ne~e by Matsuura Aya (lyrics by Tsunku, produced by Konishi) centres round the question of whether she should be sexy or cute, and posits the question, "which do you prefer?" perhaps more at the audience than the unknown boyfriend who is the ostensible object of Matsuura's quandary. On top of this, the video portrays Matsuura as a wind-up doll in a box, perhaps playing on her robotic, doll-like persona. It still lacks the subtlety and multiple layers of Gainsbourg's music, but it certainly nods to the postmodern, meta-analytical theme that underlies much of his work with France Gall.

Gundam, Nazis and Dramatic Potential

2009-05-03T12:50:00.001-07:00

A good post by Sean at Colony Drop deals with the oft-noted similarity in Gundam between Zeon and Nazi Germany, and concludes that Gundam was,

"not establishing Zeon as the bad guys by using the World War II-era German aesthetic, but establishing them as the cool guys, devoid of the more proper historical associations that we might assume"

That some anime creators are enamoured with the German aesthetic should be pretty clear to anyone with a passing familiarity with Legend of the Galactic Heroes, suckling as it does so firmly on the teat of 19th Century Prussia. The first few Gundam series were less obviously Wagnerian in their imagery, but the similarities were nonetheless readily apparent; and, as Sean points out in his article, the parallels with the Nazis grew as the franchise developed. Now I'm inclined to agree here, and say that the use of Nazi imagery in Gundam (as with the aristocratic Prussian imagery in Legend of the Galactic Heroes) was done primarily to look cool. Japan tends to view the Second World War in terms of the naval war in the Pacific and the bombing of its own cities by America, with visual reminders of the horrors of the European war entirely non-existent. As a result, there's less of a defined social consensus on what constitutes a valid portrayal of the Nazis in Japanese media.

Brits enjoy mocking Americans who date the war 1941-1945, relegating the invasion of Poland, the fall of France and the Battle of Britain to mere footnotes in the war's history, but in dating the war from 1939, we do the same to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The point is that each country has its own embedded narrative of the Second World War. The British narrative is tied up with Dunkirk and The Battle of Britain, both of which position us as plucky underdogs, holding on desperately, alone in the face of seemingly unstoppable adversity, but to an outsider, would it necessarily seem like that?

The RAF's defence of Britain against German bombers is certainly a stirring tale, but when you think of the great fighter aces of the war, you have to scroll down a very long list of German pilots before you get to James Edgar "Johnnie" Johnson, whose 34 kills were impressive but no Erich Hartmann. Bottom line: Germany did fighter aces better than anyone, and fighter aces are romantic. The fact that Germany was on the losing side and that these pilots were fighting for a flawed cause just makes them tragic as well as romantic heroes.

The two battles at El Alamein are often feted in the UK as important turning points in the war, and rightly so, but a quick look at the figures reveals just how hopelessly outnumbered the German Afrika Korps under Rommel were in both battles. The British strategy was sensible -- wait until the odds are insurmountably in your favour and then grind the German army into dust -- but it wasn't daring or romantic. Rommel was underequipped and overachieved through his ingenuity. Montgomery was numerically superior and ruthless. Bottom line: Rommel is a more romantic figure. His execution by Hitler for his involvement in the July 20th Plot just makes him a tragic as well as a romantic hero.

The Atlantic naval battles between the Royal Navy and the Kriegsmarine were similarly one-sided. The Graf Spee was outnumbered three to one at the Battle of River Plate; The Scharnhorst was sunk by a fleet of fourteen Royal Navy ships; the Bismarck was sunk by fleet comprised of two aircraft carriers, three battleships, four cruisers and seven destroyers; the Tirpitz was just bombed to oblivion without ever getting to see action. The Royal Navy was ruthless in hunting down and destroying German ships, and even went as far as attacking the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir to prevent them falling into German hands. Compared to the clenched iron fist that the Royal Navy swung down on any challenge to its supremacy in the Atlantic, the German ships and U-Boats cut lonely figures. Bottom line: German warships operated in a more romantic milieu. The fact that they were outnumbered, outgunned and doomed makes them tragic as well as romantic.

Now imagine: you're a writer and you're planning to tell an epic war story. You have a love of tragedy, and the idea of depicting the lives of soldiers fighting for causes they don't even necessarily believe in, under leaders who don't necessarily have the noblest of motives appeals to you. You want there to be drama, and you want there to be pathos. You look to past wars for ideas, seeking not the most honourable and righteous causes but the situations with the most dramatic potential. It turns out that the protagonists of many of the most dramatic situations of the war also had the nicest uniforms. A big grin spreads over your face and you say, "Eureka!"

So to paraphrase Sean's article, I would posit that Gundam is not establishing Zeon as the bad guys by using the World War II-era German aesthetic, but establishing them as the tragic, romantic and dramatic guys, devoid of the more proper historical associations that we might assume.

Separate but not equal: Kemono no Souja Erin

2009-03-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

The town of Ake, where much of the action in fantasy anime Kemono no Souja Erin takes place, is established early on as being isolated. It is described as being far from the battlefront where the touda lizards they raise are used to defend the kingdom; the marriage of one of the town's daughters to a man from another town requires that she leave home, with the prospect of future contact with her family unlikely; the appearance of a soldier from another clan with an injured touda meets with reluctant acceptance only once the Grand Duke's seal is shown; finally, the "mist people" of whom Erin's mother Soyon is one, are shown to be distrusted by the townspeople.

Soyon, having married the son of the town's chief and continued to work diligently as a doctor looking after the touda after her husband's death, is treated in a friendly way by most people, although in her first appearance in episode 1 she is pegged as being different by a passer-by in a short snippet of hastily-shushed backchat. This proves to be a theme underlying her relationship with the town. She and her daughter are liked but not accepted.

The primary antagonist in the early stages of the story is Wadan, another doctor in the town, although one of considerably less talent and considerably more self-regard, and it is he that provides the main voice for the prejudice and discrimination against Soyon and Erin. That despite Wadan's obvious asshattery and Soyon's clearly professional and gentle manner, her status in the village is constantly seen to be under threat while Wadan's appears unassailable, speaks of the high regard in which the townspeople hold the concepts of continuity, community cohesion and equilibrium.

No good deed goes unpunished

Soyon's attitude to her position as an outsider is to take a supplicatory stance at all times. In episode 5, when Erin protests at the townspeople stealing the touda eggs from their mother, Soyon goes down onto her knees to begs Wadan for forgiveness for her daughter's transgression. In the same scene, she shows no hint of pride or anger when Wadan lays the blame for Erin's behaviour on her mother's foreign blood. In the end, Soyon suffers for Erin's outburst and Erin suffers through guilt at having caused trouble for her mother. Within the context of the narrative it is Erin who is the villain for upsetting the equilibrium and Soyon who is the heroine for reasserting it. Even though the equilibrium itself is one that allows the bigoted Wadan to mistreat the two outsiders, the implication is that the greater good outweighs individual justice. Wadan must be pacified; the outsiders must take their knocks and feel thankful that they are allowed to stay at all.

In episode 6, when the senior townspeople gather to decide who should take responsibility for the deaths, by an unknown cause, of some of the town's toudas, Wadan uses this as an excuse to further press his vendetta against Soyon, and again Soyon's attitude is submissive. The audience is invited to hate Wadan for his arrogance, pettiness and vindictiveness, and on the flipside, we are asked to respect Soyon for the humble way she accepts her fate.

The sound that makes no sound

One of Kemono no Souja Erin's most striking features is the way each episode takes specific images and intercuts them with the main story in the form of visual punctuation, with each image providing a metaphor or a reflection on the main events of that episode. Central to this is the idea of the mute whistle. The mute whistle is inaudible to humans but has the ability to exert control over the touda, and it's tempting to suggest that this is a conscious metaphor for Kemono no Souja Erin's approach to storytelling, where what is unspoken is often of the greatest significance.

As Soyon is talking to Erin after throwing her mute whistle into the furnace, the camera cuts to the bath house, full of the town's citizens. The symbolism here is twofold. The whistle is the symbol of Soyon's position as the town doctor, and as it burns, it heats the water that enables the town's citizens to bathe communally together in peace. Soyon's sacrifice of her position therefore serves the greater good of the town's equilibrium. This image also serves to underline the isolation of Soyon and Erin, first sitting alone outside the bath house, and then bathing alone together afterwards. No one says any unkind words to them as they enter; the understanding that as outsiders they were never truly part of the community is merely accepted.

The way the evening is presented is ripe with hints and messages that are unspoken yet increasingly clear. Soyon's punishment is not described and yet everyone except Erin seems to understand what it is. After the meeting with the senior townspeople, Soyon is left free to continue her day as usual, and yet hints of what is to come abound. Soyon gives Erin a bracelet that she received from her own mother, which Erin instinctively understands as having been a parting gift for when Soyon left her home (although perhaps not seeing its significance in relation to herself now). While cooking the evening dinner, Soyon gently explains, step by step, how the dish is prepared. Finally, at night Soyon and Erin are shown sleeping together in the same futon; however, in a payoff to earlier scenes in the series where Erin is shown crawling under Soyon's covers, here Soyon is under Erin's cover. They symbolism here is the most significant moment of the whole episode: Soyon is positioning herself as the outsider in her own home, and passing ownership and responsibility for that home onto her daughter.

Armed men take Soyon away at dawn. Erin (for now) remains in the town, treated with the same kindness by the citizens that she always has. Equilibrium has been restored.

Xam'd: Notes on the Ending

2009-02-09T02:59:00.000-08:00

Endings are difficult to write. Just ask Konaka Chiaki, who wrote Shinreigari (Ghost Hound), maintaining a brilliant script that unravelled catastrophically in its superlatively awful final episode. Seriously, ask him: why was that ending so bad, and what are you going to do to avoid similar travesties in the future?

The ending to Bounen no Zamudou (Xam'd: Lost Memories) isn't a travesty, but neither is it a triumph. This post should by no means be taken as an evisceration of what remains an extremely interesting and refreshing piece of work, but there are definite structural problems with its conclusion that are worth analysis.

First, there are niggling problems with the final episode specifically. Kudos to the team for having the balls to kill off Raigyo in an earlier episode, but in a number of other cases, they trivialise death with how easily reversible they allow it to be. Ishuu seemed quite clearly to have died in episode 23, and yet she appears in the final episode with just a sling and a haircut to show for her ordeal. Kakisu was shot in the face at close range and yet in the final episode he is revealed to be merely in some sort of coma. Akiyuki turns into stone after Nakiami descends into the Quickening Chamber, and yet he is able to reappear and reunite with Haru at the end in a dramatically and thematically satisfying, yet logically dubious fashion.

Rather than systematically developing all the various story threads and then tying them back together into a satisfying, unifying conclusion, Xam'd's plot, from about half way through the series, disintegrates into a series of scattershot story ideas and visual concepts that rain down, disconnected, like pieces of torn paper dropped from an open window.

It becomes pretty clear that this is what's happening from a long way before the end so it's difficult to say that the ending itself is disappointing. Flawed it most certainly is, but the sources of the flaws lie further back in the series.

Perhaps the problem with Xam'd is that the creators didn't know what the story was about. At first it is implied that the story is about Akiyuki's attempt to understand the Xam'd that has been implanted in him and help it recover its titular "lost memories", but that quest is never clearly developed and Akiyuki merely drifts from one set of circumstances to another in what are often interesting diversions, but never quite held together with the sense of forward momentum and sense of purpose that a story needs if it is to conclude satisfactorily. The other characters' subplots are similarly vague. Kakisu's role on Sentan Island and the role of Haru's sister, Midori, builds up interestingly, but it flatters to decieve. In the end it is nothing more than incidental to the rest of the story. The crew of the postal ship Zanbani write themselves out of the story half way through and, with the exception of Ishuu and Raigyo, do precious little else. Haru herself merely runs after Akiyuki -- she admits this to herself at one point, and it feels more like a desperate cry from a writer unsure of what to do with this character whose motivation has not been set deep enough; a tacit admission of the staff's own failings rather than the words of the character herself.

An interesting comparison is with Simoun, which is similar to Xam'd in the way the war is used primarily as a setting against which the character drama plays out. In both cases the cause of the war isn't deeply explored, and in both cases, the series ends realistically with the threat of war an ongoing issue. Both shows also feature plots that drift, with the characters pulled hither and thither by forces out of their control.

The key difference is the ending. Simoun has a very powerful ending, where each character reaches a conclusion that may not be what the audience wanted, but which has clear roots in the way their personalities, motivations and character development have been set up earlier in the series.

Both shows have elements of their endings that are enigmatic, but Simoun ensures that each of these elements is charged with a strong, clear emotional resonance which again has its roots in how the characters have been set up. In a sense, it is the simpler, more archetypal set of characters in Simoun that gives it this resonance. Passion, loneliness, religious fervour and love are the guiding emotions of most of Simoun's cast, whereas Xam'd's characters are more complex, more uncertain, and less melodramatic. It is to Xam'd's credit that it takes this more measured and mature approach to its characters, but in doing so they also deny themselves the dramatic options that Simoun so successfully exploited.

This brings another problem -- in fact perhaps the main problem of Xam'd. What made the early episodes so refreshing and believable was the way the characters' personalities were shown up through their interaction with the circumstances in which they found themselves, and as long as those circumstances were tangible things that the audience could relate to, there was a satisfying sense of solidity to them. As the end approached and more abstract issues such as the Hiruken Emperor and the Quickening Chamber became more central to the story, that solidity started to dissolve and the story became caught up in what I call "the spiral of hippy". Everything became winged beings of light, raining down balls of goo on the earth, ancient mechanisms that are powered by esoteric metaphysical principles, and glowing orbs that embody trans-human spiritual entities. Once a series starts trying to explain its mysteries by going along this road, it becomes contagious and starts infecting other elements of the story with the same disease. Characters are forced into either passive, observational roles, or heroic, superhuman roles, both of which distance the audience emotionally from what is going on. Nakiami will sleep for a thousand years in the Quickening Chamber, you say? Is that good? Is that bad? What does that even mean? Our bewilderment overcomes our emotional response.

By way of contrast, in Simoun Neviril and Aer's final departure to the "other world" is more emotionally powerful for its simplicity. We aren't urged to understand the mechanics of it; all we see is them fading in and out of reality, forever young, as the other characters age around us. They didn't save anyone by making this journey and its purpose isn't explored so their situation can only be seen on its own emotional terms. The key emotions of loneliness and love in its purest sense are what remain, and set against the increasingly complicated daily lives of the other characters as they grow older and become embroiled in more wars, these emotions become a reminder of what one loses as one grows older. Any kind of mechanism or psuedoscience would have complicated and detracted from the emotional power of that ending, and by retaining its grounding in the recognisable physical reality of those characters left behind it never steps off the precipice into the spiral of hippy.

In a lot of ways, Xam'd is simply a victim of what appears to be a congenital disorder within Studio Bones. Every anime I've seen from this studio is in some way hobbled by an ending that, while not rubbish, feels somehow patched together (bear in mind that I've only seen Eureka Seven and Scrapped Princess all the way through -- Rahxephon and Wolf's Rain pissed me off too much before I got to the end). Xam'd also contains the more adult worldview and mature characterisation that makes aspects of other Bones shows so interesting, and is by far the best thing I've seen out of the studio.

In October of 2008 I met the director Miyaji Masayuki and interviewed him about the show, then still in its relatively early stages. He was an extremely enthusiastic, intelligent guy, bubbling with ideas that would shoot off in all directions, and it's tempting to see the series' flaws in that context. One imagines that if he can learn to focus his ideas more clearly, his next directorial work will be, rather than wonderful-yet-flawed, merely wonderful.

Oh, those Russians...

2009-01-20T07:58:00.000-08:00

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this frankly bizarre article by Gregory Clark in that ever-reliable quality newspaper The Japan Times recently.

By all means read the whole article and get the full context, but I'll only be quoting parts of it as I go along here.

Antiforeigner discrimination is a right for Japanese people

Yikes! What a headline! Well, to be fair here, my humble journalistic efforts occasionally grace the hallowed pages of the JT and I know that writers are rarely responsible for their headlines. Also, given that the paper has a reputation among some for being a bit of a moaning shop for foreigners, there's surely no harm in bringing a bit of thoughtful, well-written balance. Hats off to the editorial team then. So let's get started:

"Japan girai" — dislike of Japan — is an allergy that seems to afflict many Westerners here.

OK so far. No one likes a Moaning Michael, for sure.

Normally these people do little harm. In their gaijin ghettoes they complain about everything from landlords reluctant to rent to foreigners (ignoring justified landlord fear of the damage foreigners can cause) to use of the word "gaijin" (forgetting the way some English speakers use the shorter and sometimes discriminatory word "foreigner" rather than "foreign national.").

Surely getting turned down for an apartment on account of being foreign can be quite a serious problem though. In what way are these "justified landlord fears" and in what way do these fears balance out a human being's right to a roof over their head? As for the use of gaijin versus gaikokujin, well, the issue is surely more the intention behind the decision to use one word rather than another. Where the intent is to insult or belittle, it is natural to take offence. Where there is clearly no such intent, in the words of Wil Wheaton, don't be a dick.

A favorite complaint is that Japanese universities discriminate against foreigners. How many Western universities would employ, even as simple language teachers, foreigners who could not speak, write and read the national language?

There's a clear difference between universities "discriminating against foreigners" and "foreigners who could not speak, write and read the national language". Is Mr. Clark saying that Japanese-speaking foreigners aren't discriminated against by Japanese universities? It would help to know. But then perhaps what he is getting at is something a bit different. The complaint about universities is a pet project of everyone's favourite serial litigant-cum-freedom fighter Debito Arudou. Could it be that "many Westerners" and "these people" really refers to just one person?

Recently they have revived the story of how they bravely abolished antiforeigner discrimination from bathhouses in the port town of Otaru in Hokkaido.

Ahh, the Otaru onsen lawsuit, and a familiar face reappears. The plot thinnens. There's not much I could add to this sad case of an innocent onsen owner hounded out of his business by drunken Russian sailors and his terrible revenge on foreignerkind other than that it seems like something that could have been resolved with much less trouble if everyone involved had been a bit more civilised, although I did like this quote:

as proof I harbor no anti-Russian feeling let me add that I speak Russian and enjoyed talking to these earthy, rough-hewn people in their own language

I'm sure Mr. Clark has nary a Russophobic bone in his body, and he's written some fine articles about Russia, but this line still carries that dubious whiff of "Yeah, but, you know, some of my best friends are gay" about it. Perhaps he just thought we should know that he can speak a lot of languages.

The antidiscrimination activists say bathhouse managers can solve all problems by barring drunken sailors.

Sounds reasonable...

But how do you apply a drunk test? And how do you throw out a drunk who has his foot in the door? Besides, drunken behavior is not the only bathhouse problem with these Otaru sailors. I can understand well why regular Japanese customers seeking the quiet Japanese-style camaraderie of the traditional Japanese bathhouse would want to flee an invasion of noisy, bathhouse-ignorant foreigners. And since it is not possible to bar only Russians, barring all foreigners is the only answer.

Perhaps some kind of sign is in order, maybe reading something like, "Quiet, please". Mr. Clark could assist with the Russian if they asked. He certainly sounds like he wants to help. Mind you, those "earthy, rough-hewn" Russian sailors that he so enjoyed talking to really do sound frightfully scary.

The antidiscrimination people point to Japan's acceptance of a U.N. edict banning discrimination on the basis of race. But that edict is broken every time any U.S. organization obeys the affirmative action law demanding preference for blacks and other minorities.

This is quite simply an appalling argument. Drawing parallels between legislation designed to combat discrimination and behaviour that actively discriminates against people because of their skin colour is the rhetoric of the extreme right and an educated, seemingly liberal, man like Gregory Clark should be better than that.

Without it, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama would probably not be where he is today.

Ouch!

Malaysia has also ignored it, with its Bumiputra policy of favoring Malays over Chinese and other minorities. There are dozens more examples of societies deciding to favor one group of people over others in order to preserve solidarity or prevent injustices. A large chain of barbershops in Japan has signs saying service is denied to those who do not speak Japanese.

This paragraph is evasion, bordering on a particularly petty form of whataboutery. Malaysia's policy sounds pretty racist from what Mr. Clark writes here, but then I don't know anything else about it and I thought we were talking about an onsen. Or were we talking about moaning foreigners? Again, with the barbershop point Mr. Clark confuses discriminating due to a language barrier that clearly hinders the ability of the establishment to do its job and discriminating due to nationality or skin colour.

Non-Japanese speakers probably cause much less harm to a business than delinquent Russians. But we do not see our activists in action there

That is because they aren't the same thing.

The activists say there should be action to educate Russian sailors in bathhouse behavior. But do we see any of the activists in the friendship societies where worthy Japanese citizens try to ease problems for foreigners living here? Not as far as I know.

Greater cultural understanding for those lovely Russian sailors sounds like a great idea. Who knows, beneath the chrysalids of those earthy, rough-hewn exteriors there may be dozens of Lafcadio Hearns or even, in rare, lucky cases, Gregory Clarks just waiting to unfold their wings into the sunlight. Those friendship societies sound great too. Why are these two ideas presented in opposition here?

Presumably close contact with these citizens would also upset their Japan-girai feelings.

That's quite a big presumption to make, Mr. Freud.

Japan has long had a real problem of clever Chinese and Korean criminals taking advantage of Japan' s lack of theft awareness to pick the locks and pockets of unsuspecting citizens. But when the authorities try to raise this problem, they too are accused of antiforeigner discrimination. Even companies advertising pick-proof locks are labeled as discriminators if they mention the Chinese lock-picking problem.

In this case, though, why is it necessary to make a point out of these clever criminals being Chinese and Korean? Surely just warning people to look after their stuff is enough and doesn't have the side-effect of making the ninety-nine-point-whatever percent of non-criminal Chinese and Korean immigrants (many of whom are second and third generation) feel that they are all being treated as potential criminals.

Let me add that I also have no anti-China feeling; I speak Chinese too.

Tee hee. And George Wallace had lots of black friends, and simply loved jazz. It's strange why people still use this argument, but then it's not so strange that people become defensive when they're attacking others.

It is time we admitted that at times the Japanese have the right to discriminate against some foreigners.

By "some foreigners", it's tempting to suggest that Mr. Clark means rough-hewn Russian sailors and clever Chinese and Korean criminals, rather than Oxford-educated vice-presidents of Akita International University, but no, let us not carelessly throw around accusations of hypocrisy; he states that while he dislikes being fingerprinted at the airport, he accepts that it's needed so presumably he is willing to accept other forms of discrimination on behalf of those other, bad foreigners (some of whom can't even speak Japanese, dontchaknow).

If they do not, and Japan ends up like our padlocked, mutually suspicious Western societies, we will all be the losers.

Firstly, where did that come from, all at once in the final sentence? Secondly, how did he get from the problems of foreigners complaining about being called "gaijin" at the start of this article to Japan's metamorphosis into this hellish dystopia at the end? Thirdly, wasn't he advocating locks of some kind to protect innocent Japanese from clever Chinese and Korean criminals just a couple of paragraphs ago? This single point, tossed off at the end of the article is an interesting and serious issue that Japan is likely to face as its cities become increasingly multicultural, and if one tracks back to early last month, there is a rather better article by Paul De Vries that deals less hysterically with both this idea and the extremely important issue of the Russian onsen controversy, but Clark doesn't explore it.

As Marc Jones writes in the comments section of his blog here, "I think maybe Mr. Clark is out of touch with how those foreigners with lower-status jobs than heads of universities are discriminated against, including Chinese and Koreans but also immigrant residents and workers from other Asian countries."

Gregory Clark isn't an idiot. Judging from some of his other articles he has a wide range of experience on all manner of issues and doesn't habitually write from a perspective of transferred nationalism. Neither does he seem like the sort of person who writes simply to shock. Somewhere amid all this nonsense and flawed rhetoric, I feel Mr. Clark has a point to make, but I'm also pretty sure that point is just "Debito Arudou is a wanker". It's just a shame that he had to catch a glancing blow off of pretty much every other foreigner in Japan with his wild swipe.

"Your racism's worse than my sexism!"

2008-12-19T12:34:00.000-08:00

Some of the discussion about 2channel's moefication of Mirror's Edge has been instructive.

To summarise, the video game Mirror's Edge features a female central character who appears to have some kind of East Asian background. The game's producer, Tom Farrer, claims that his team:

"...really wanted to get away from the typical portrayal of women in games, that they’re all just kind of tits and ass in a steel bikini. We wanted her to look athletic and fit and strong [enough] that she could do the things that she’s doing."

The blogger Artefact over at Sankaku Complex counters that:

"Possibly, he should have considered looking at what passes for beauty in the East Asian markets prior to actually designing his orientalist vision of what a gritty Asian women should look like, but never mind."

Neatly playing the "How very dare you!" card by implying racism on the part of the Swedish development team, and in the process, bizarrely, linking to a parade of pouting submissives in order to illustrate the point.

The battle lines are then drawn. On the one hand we have those cultural imperialist Swedes with their arrogant refusal to understand Asian cultures, and on the other we have a bunch of otaku and Japan-fetishists whose idea of a girl is something you can keep as a pet rather than something that can climb walls and leap the tops of high buildings.

Down in the comments, these two straw men continue to battle it out furiously:

"Everyone who’s ever seen an Asian of any ethnicity on the street knows that no one looks like that."

Well, I live in Tokyo and you don't see many people here looking like either of the different versions of Faith. The question that hangs over a lot of these arguments is whether creating a strong-looking female character justifies twisting Asian features to fit your ideal, and similarly whether authentically representing Asian (for which we can read "Japanese" in this context) ideals of beauty justifies inflicting degrading sexism on the character.

For what it's worth, my answer to the first part is "yes" and to the second part is "no" since the first part is done in service of the character, in order to make her more convincing in her interaction with the world of the game, whereas the second does violence to the gameworld and setting. The "moe" Faith puts strain on the fourth wall and damages our suspension of disbelief. Through the disconnection between what the character does for a living and how she is portrayed we can see an audience being pandered to and we are forced to see her as a two-dimensional cypher overlaid on top of the world, which itself then loses depth and seems unrealistic through its interaction with an implausible main character.

Did someone just say "superflat"? Damn you, otaku culture!

Anatomy of a Villain

2008-11-24T11:34:00.001-08:00

A true villain...
...humiliates his victims...

...always gets what he wants...

...and then kills them anyway...

...finds no pleasure greater than the fear of others...

...especially small children...

...does not tolerate failure in his subordinates...

...is practically unkillable...

...laughs in the face of death...

...revels joyfully and loquaciously in his own wickedness...

...

Twilight of the Heroes

2008-11-24T10:12:00.000-08:00

In my writing about anime I often find it difficult to hold back on criticism of otaku culture, especially the third generation (post-Evangelion, Densha Otoko akiba-cool types) and its influence on recent anime and manga. The emphasis on "fan service" is a lazy, self-indulgent substitute for detailed, careful plotting, characterisation and world building; the frequent self-referential jokes that rely on knowledge of other anime shows often break the fourth wall and damage the audience's suspension of disbelief without bringing any real insight or comedic value of their own to the table; finally, the portrayal of female characters in a lot of otaku-orientated anime is something I think I'll always have problems with.

What I always try to do, however, is step back every once in a while. Even as many aspects of current otaku culture annoy me, it is often fascinating trying to understand them, even where I'm unable or simply disinclined to defend them. Secondly, it's important to remember that 95% of any genre or art form is unmitigated crap and that it should be judged primarily on the best of what it has to offer rather than the stagnant sludge that clogs up its wider, shallower channels. With this in mind, one area that the G3 otaku can claim to have made real progress in is the breaking down of archetypes among male characters.

Evangelion, Gundam and the treatment of angst:

The roots of this, of course, run far deeper than 1995 megahit Evangelion (such is the postmodern nature of Gainax's masterpiece that there probably isn't anything truly original about it really) but, as with so many things about modern anime culture, it is nevertheless a key starting point.

One of the most frequently commented-on, imitated and mocked points about the male lead Shinji is his angst: his paralysing fear in the Eva's cockpit, his tortured cries of "Father!", the recurring visual motif of his clasping and unclasping hand. This alone is nothing particularly new; the melodramatic nature of much anime lends itself to angst, with Gundam (1979) and numerous other 70s and 80s shows having plenty to go round, and many of Evangelion's immediate imitators clearly thought this alone was enough, hence the profusion of whiny, self-centred anime heroes in its immediate aftermath. The really radical thing that Evangelion did was in its psychological deconstruction of the Giant Robot genre boy hero archetype. Shinji experiences angst in the form described by existentialist philosophers and director Anno Hideaki uses it as a wrench to prise open both Shinji's mind and the genre's own conventions rather than simply as an end in itself.

Kierkegaard defined philosophical angst as being fear of failure in one's responsibilities to God; conversely, Sartre describes it as being (although not limited to) an emotional response to the non-existence of God. What both views have in common is that they hold angst as a function of the conflict between freedom of choice and our fear of the consequences. In the case of a character like Amuro from Gundam, he experiences a relatively simple form of angst, where he must balance his own emotional fears and desires against those of his comrades on White Base and the people he must protect. His path to maturity lies in putting aside those emotions or desires characterised as "selfish" in order to "be a man" and fight to defend those weaker than himself (women and lower level or non-newtype males).

Shinji from Evangelion experiments with this ideal but is unable to reconcile it with his own internal motivations. In episode 4 (Hedgehog's Dilemma -- the title itself another manifestation of angst) he wearily tells Misato he will fight because he's the only one who can do it, a motivation that Misato violently rejects. She won't accept Shinji fighting merely because he feels he has to in order to protect others: she wants him to find a reason that means something to him. The comment that Shinji reacts most strongly to is when Misato angrily tells him that they don't need him to protect them.

Kierkegaard talks about fear of failing God, but in a largely irreligeous society like Japan, a person's main external responsibility is to the people around them. In Christian societies the idea of "God" replaces the social group as the arbiter of morality and good behaviour, which is all very useful as a way of controlling the Roman Empire, but the more localised Japanese society's emphasis on responsibility to "the group" offers the same function in most practical senses. In Gundam, Amuro's angst takes the form of the conflict between his own selfish desires and his need to protect "the group" and, while Gundam is more complex than most preceding Giant Robot anime, he is driven by a sense of destiny that fits in neatly with the meta-narrative of sacrifice, hard work and responsibility to others that Japanese society constructed for itself to deal with the rebuilding and recovery process in the wake of the Second World War.

By the mid-1990s, as I've said before, the reality of life for young people in Japan was quite different. In Evangelion, Misato denies Shinji the sense of responsibility and direction offered by "the group", and as with Sartre's non-existence of God, the removal of this external motivator leaves Shinji confronted with the dilemma of his own freedom. The look of horror in Shinji's eyes isn't just his shock at Misato's angry outburst: it's his existential dread at the cutting away of the whole meta-narrative of responsibility and destiny that older shows offered. Misato forces him to analyse and deal with his own feelings and in the process denies him the option of "being a man" in the traditional sense.

Ironic treatment of "the cult of masculinity":

Jennifer Kesler discusses what she calls "the cult of masculinity" over at The Hathor Legacy. The "man" as constructed by the media...

...is something that does not occur in nature. It is a supernatural creature of extraordinary emotional, physical and mental resilience. It can withstand enemy torture for years on end without ever giving out the codes; it can somehow magically love its family, God and country without actually being distracted by normal human feelings; it has no moods and is always perfectly even-tempered, except when roused to fight for good. It can get over abuses and wrongs done against it, even in its most vulnerable formative years, without sorting or processing its feelings and experiences.

The traditional anime bildungsroman, which experiences its highest male form in the Giant Robot story, requires that boys become a variant of this "supernatural creature", although an important difference is that the Japanese anime hero is far more emotional, with fire, passion and impulsiveness valued as key character attributes. Nevertheless, a shared ideal of masculinity is that the hero should make clear his intentions by acting decisively; "sorting or processing its feelings and experiences" is not encouraged.

These types of passionate, masculine leads didn't disappear by any means, but as a result of the self-consciousness and genre-awareness of the G3 otaku (by this time important as both a target market and as creators working within the industry), the narrative had changed. In Kido Senkan Nadesico (Martian Successor Nadesico), the Shinji-like main character Akito is put opposite a fiery anime hero type called Daigoji Gai but the show subverts Gai's character on many levels. His real name is revealed as the more mundane Yamada Jiro, he is ridiculed by his comrades and, inevitably, he is an anime otaku. He is also killed in episode 3, prompting Akito to embark on a personal quest to live up to the anime-inspired ideals that Gai espoused.

In Gainax's own return to the genre, Gurren Lagann, Kamina and Simon's relationship is similar to that of Gai and Akito, with main female character Yoko left as a pragmatic voice from the same set of realities that the audience occupies. The over-the-top macho antics of Kamina and his and Simon's phallic obsession with drills are the subjects of wry humour. Despite the irony the characters and situations are sympathetic and frequently moving, but again the emphasis has changed. Kamino is sympathetic as a kind of Walter Mitty character, living in a fantasy within his own mind, cut off from the reality represented by Yoko. Simon's character development is given pathos as, while we identify with his desire to live out a boyhood dream of heroism, we can clearly see the path taking him further from common sense and indeed sanity. The irony here is clear and surely intentional: the path towards "being a man" is a road into a childish dream, and it is Simon's more mature, feminine side that occasionally holds him back.

In both Nadesico and Gurren Lagann the appeal of those heroic ideals now lies in their value as nostalgia rather than as something relevant to modern society; the modern audience can hold them close for warmth against the chill of the existential void, but there is a shared agreement between fan and creator that they are something to be affectionately mocked rather than wholeheartedly embraced.

Masculinity under the microscope:

The arrival of more complex, believable male characters in anime, whose existences recognise the dilemmas (the angst, if you will) of modern life, and whose growth through their story's narrative is characterised by some degree of self-awareness and reflection, is one of the great achievements of the 3G otaku generation and one that goes far beyond the Giant Robot genre.

One example is in the treatment of issues such as bullying. In the past, bullying was treated as a fairly black and white issue. Bullying was character-building and bullies were either weaklings-at-heart to be stood up to and defeated or they were hard-but-fair teachers, who were only doing it for your own good. In either case, the victim's response was tied up inescapably with their masculinity. Over the past decade or so there have been several cases of anime shows that have delved into the more complex nature of bullying in Japanese schools, dealing with the relationship between victimiser and victim and even questioning the whole nature of the society in which these incidents occur. Shigofumi, as I mentioned before, includes one particularly good example of this, and Kon Satoshi's excellent Paranoia Agent also touches on the subject powerfully. No longer a simple matter of standing up and "being a man", there is often no easy solution and the audience is left with an uncomfortable sense of moral ambiguity.

Another phenomenon that has been gradually developing over time has been the way previously female genres have been co-opted into the male otaku world. The appeal of magical girl shows featuring leggy teenage girls in idealised versions of the traditional Japanese schoolgirl uniform to shy men on the fringes of acceptable society is I think obvious, as is the yuri romance, begun as a subgenre of shojo manga in the 1970s but co-opted into the male otaku world. While often simply played for cheap titilation, male-targetted yuri sometimes has interesting things to say about male gender.

The comedy drama series Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl deals with a very feminine young boy called Hazumu who is accidentally turned into a girl by visiting aliens and how this switch of gender affects his relationship with Tomari and Yasuna, the two girls in his life (clue: it doesn't much). So far, so Ranma, but Kashimashi has a bit more to say than simple comedy. The story takes the form of a traditional male-orientated love story or dating simulator game, with Hazumu being a fairly blank central character. What is interesting is firstly how easily he adapts to being a girl, and secondly the fact that such a character is presented as the point of identification for the male audience. Sure, plenty of men have fantasised about what it would be like to have breasts and dress up in girls' clothes (not that I ever, err... did), but through the process of presenting the audience with a male character as an avatar and then switching their gender at the end of episode 1 the show also takes the audience through the process of transformation and expects them to continue to relate to the character.

By allowing the character's gender to switch so easily, Kashimashi denies the relevance of gender labels in the pursuit of a character's emotional needs. It's not just that Hazumu can adapt so easily to being a girl, it is that the audience itself is able to adapt with him. A similar idea, although less central to the plot, exists in .hack//Sign, where central character Tsukasa appears in the online world (and to the audience for most of the series) with a male avatar and falls in love with female character Subaru. It is later discovered that Tsukasa is a girl in real life, but in the end that is no barrier to her relationship with Subaru. Again, the obvious caveats about male fans' predeliction for girl-on-girl romantic action apply, but as with many aspects of otaku culture, lower motivations on one level don't necessarily preclude higher considerations in the execution.

Looking Inward / Looking Outward: Part 2

2008-11-06T10:40:00.002-08:00

In part one, way back in August, I wrote about a trend within anime that derives from the inward-looking nature of a lot of modern, third generation otaku culture. By third generation, what I'm really talking about here is the generation that grew up in a world rehabilitated by the media, free from the shadow of "otaku murderer" Miyazaki Tsutomu, and spoiled by the rush of more intelligent and mature anime that Evangelion kicked off in the late 1990s.

Where the first generation of otaku were viewed by mainstream Japan with confusion and disdain, if they were noticed at all, and the second generation were treated with outright revulsion, the third generation are accepted and even celebrated. A clear example of this is the 2005 TV series Densha Otoko, which took a setting centred around otaku culture (Akihabara, anime fandom, Internet message-board 2channel) and crafted a schmalzy love story around it*, starring make-up commercial/mobile phone campaign girl Ito Misaki and targetted squarely at mass consumption. If that's not enough for you, the new prime minister of Japan, Aso Taro, is a self proclaimed nerd, who talks of anime and manga exports being used to boost Japan's economy and increase its soft power abroad.

Marxy over at his old Neomarxisme blog posited the theory that otaku were being rehabilitated because of the economic role they play as consumers and that they were being held up as an example to remind Japanese people what a good consumer looks like.

So the media shifts all attention to Akihabara, because they still purchase items, go the extra mile to find rare artefacts, and show an envious loyalty towards their heros and icons. It's not that anime or manga are "cool" all of a sudden but they are the only ones to show up on the field.

Certainly the rise of the third generation of otaku has gone hand in hand with the idea of the "media mix", where the anime, comic, light novel series, computer/video game series and drama CD are produced and marketed hand in hand. With this overwhelming influx of product, is it any surprise that, as I said in part 1, the modern otaku's frame of reference turns further and further inward? Compare Densha Otoko's opening sequence with the 1983 original (by the team who later formed Gainax). The original pulls in references to a wide range of both Japanese and Western pop culture -- the song is ELO, for fuck's sake! -- whereas the focus of Densha Otoko's parody is entirely inward.

But let's get back to Aso's comments for a moment. Regardless of how seriously you take the idea of anime reviving the Japanese economy (a 2006 estimate puts the total world value of the anime market, complete with all associated goods, at around $23 billion; in contrast, electronics giant Sony posted revenue of over $88 billion all by itself in 2008), there is only so much saturation that the Japanese market can take and so as otaku turn inwards, the industry itself increasingly has to turn outwards.

As a result, we are seeing increasing amounts of anime being made with overseas audiences in mind and the results are interesting. Generally speaking, it seems that most attempts have followed one of two strategies, looking either to the influence of Hollywood, or to the overseas success of directors like Oshii Mamoru and Miyazaki Hayao (or some combination of the two approaches).

Films like Vexille and Appleseed take the Hollywood approach, bringing in supposedly hip electronic artists to do the sountrack, chucking in sexy-looking action scenes, and writing shitty scripts. Vexelle makes an interesting inversion of the "anime nationalist" meme with its portrayal of the Japanese government as corrupt isolationists and the focus on an American heroine. One wonders if this decision was made particularly with the motive of selling the film to Americans. Is this the assumption that Americans will simply not watch a film where they aren't the deliverers of justice to poor, backwards foreign countries? If so, it is perhaps tempting to suggest that those in the West, and Hollywood in particular, might want to reflect on the image that they present to the rest of the world.

Foreign sales are also probably something that Studio Gonzo had at least half an eye on with their sumptuously animated steampunk/fantasy adventure Last Exile. Again the script is rubbish, but this is probably less down to the studio's low expectations of a foreign audience than it is their own more mundane deficiencies. Never let it be said that Gonzo don't spread their mediocrity around evenly. Like Vexille, Last Exile reaches out to the overseas audience with extremely high production values (far higher than any TV series could normally command) to give it a more Hollywood-like cinematic sweep, but also references Miyazaki's Laputa with its flying ships and cheerfully stupid child leads.

Ergo Proxy carries distant echoes of The Matrix (which in itself borrows heavily from anime going back through Ghost in the Shell and Akira to Megazone 23) and couples that with a script by Sato Dai, who gained a lot of kudos in the West for his work on Cowboy Bebop and various other well received shows. To polish things off, the closing theme is Paranoid Android by Radiohead, although the inclusion of opening theme Kiri by Monoral (at the time unknown outside Japan although both members are mixed race Japanese/other) suggests that the producers might have been cultivating an image of "foreignness" as much for the benefit of the Japanese audience as for an overseas one.

The list could go on, but the last show I'm going to mention here is the currently running Bonen no Xam'd (Xam'd: Lost Memories) by Bones. I interviewed the director, Miyaji Masayuki, for The Japan Times last month, and while there's no way that my editor was ever going to allow me to indulge in the sort of interminable navel-gazing I get up to on this blog, but it's worth reading over in relation to what I'm writing about here.

Xam'd is radical largely in how normal it is. It is remarkable for just how old fashioned and classical the story is, recalling shows like the older Gundam series' and movies like Gainax's Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneamise. It panders to foreign audiences with its blatant Miyazaki references, and the inclusion of Boom Boom Satellites' song over the opening credits is probably partly an attempt to latch onto some idea of "cool Japan". I shan't talk about the series in detail here because the article says enough itself, but there are some points that are worth expanding on a bit.

First is the decision to release the series through Sony's Playstation Network rather than broadcast it on normal TV. By selling it episode by episode, they can target their audience more directly and are less beholden to advertisers' wishes or TV companies' own broadcasting restrictions on violence/language/sexual content etc. (presuming of course that Sony's own restrictions would be more liberal in that regard). Second is the decision to sell it in America first. The staff from Sony and Bones were hesitant to talk about the reasons for this but I think they must have been at least partially considering the greater numbers of Playstation Online users in America and the saturation of the Japanese anime market, perhaps hoping to make a splash in America and then sell it back to Japan on the back of overseas success. Also, I think Miyaji's point,

"I want to be able to reach out to a different kind of audience — video game, movie or film audience rather than just anime fans"

is interesting. By breaking away, at least partially, from the commercial restrictions of the Japanese anime world, releasing the show to an overseas audience through a games machine, Xam'd is representative of the dying days of the third generation of otaku.

Already the Internet has made Akihabara relevant more as a tourist spot like Harajuku than a place of crucial importance to otaku culture, and the creative peak of the third generation's "database type culture" has probably already passed (Haruhi, Lucky Star, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei). The Playstation Network style (although perhaps not PSN itself) of release structure, like iTunes is doing for music, will probably have the effect of fragmenting the anime world. Diversity of genres and styles aside, otaku culture nevertheless relies on a series of reference points and conventions that are universally understood amongst those within that particular society but not necessarily by those outside. The colour-coding of female characters' hair or Sentai series characters suits, the meanings of bizarre visual signifiers such as the ahoge, the increasingly deformed and disconected-from-reality characterisations that form the nebulous creation that is moe, the list goes on. Western anime fans won't automatically understand all the semiotics at play here, and as they become a more and more important market for anime, clever studios will learn to adapt their work to appeal to increasingly diverse range of subgroups. Japanese otaku culture as it is now will command influence over a narrower and narrower range of work being produced, and under the influence of this more targetted, less homogeneous release and marketing structure, increasingly fragment as well.

What we are seeing now is partly just one of the natural periods of directionless meandering in the industry that comes after a boom has started to subside. Shows like Strike Witches push moe culture to more and more absurd extremes whereas shows like Xam'd step back and focus on more classical cinematic views of storytelling, characterisation and structure; other shows stick to tried and tested formulae and try not to rock the boat. Nevertheless, the shifts in the industry that we are seeing now, as it moves in a more globalised direction and immerses itself more and more in digital distribution make me think that this fragmentation is something more than just a lull and one of its early repercussions will be the death of the 3G otaku.

*Yes, I know it's supposed to be a true story, but surely no one actually believes that, right?

Shigofumi ~ Letters from the Departed ~

2008-10-17T23:47:00.000-07:00

Shigofumi ~ Letters from the Departed ~ is an anime and light novel series created by Amamiya Ryo about a typically emotionless, silver-haired moe archetype called Fumika, whose job it is to deliver letters from the dead (the titular shigofumi). She has an annoying talking staff called Kanaka and a faintly fetishistic retro postal worker's outfit that, intentionally or otherwise, makes her look a bit like Boogiepop.

In terms of content, most episodes are hamstrung by the kind of cliched character archetypes and cookie-cutter sentimentality that plagues a significant proportion of anime and light novels, as with the fourth episode, where some heavily yurified schoolgirls go on a training camp with their tennis club while one girl, Ran, deals with her feelings about the death of the mother who abandoned her as a child. As pulp genre fiction it works fine, but given how seriously the series takes itself, as viewers we should expect and demand more realistic characterisation. Why did the mother never contact Ran after leaving even though she'd been secretly going to all her daughter's tennis matches to support her? Why, when discovering this via the mother's (very long) shigofumi, does Ran react in the way she does? Unfortunately, without letting Ran's feelings for her mother step beyond broad strokes melodrama, the script is unable to breathe life into the premise.

The series' main plot thread involving Fumika is similarly rubbish. Her father, a supposedly genius writer called Mikawa Kirameki (it translates as something absurd like "beautiful glittering river") is a ridiculous character and impossible to take seriously. Once more, if Shigofumi was going for overblown camp, he could have been brilliant -- a mad writer who drafts his novels by inking them with a glass calligraphy brush onto his young daughter's naked body (further abuse, either sexual, physical or both, is hinted at but not directly shown) would have been camp melodrama gold (melodrama can be brilliant if done well) in the hands of someone like Ikuhara Kunihiko* -- but the po-faced seriousness with which it approaches all situations means any potential enjoyment on such terms is strangled at birth.

The purpose of Kirameki and Fumika's equally self-absorbed mother Kirei (meaning "beautiful" -- subtlety not welcome here) is unclear. Is it a satire on the way artists obsess over creating physically attractive characters that they use and abuse, objectifying them as items of beauty, treating as a blank slate on which to paint their stories, and denying them the free will to look after their own destiny? If that's the case, it could be seen as a criticism of the moe phenomenon as a whole, in which characters are blank, puppet-like constructs created from a database of superficial fetishistic elements and lacking in any of the driving emotions and motivations that genuinely good writing requires. The trouble with that is that Shigofumi is guilty of precisely these crimes, with its awareness of the world beyond genre cliches only accentuating its inability to abandon those selfsame cliches.

On other occasions, Shigofumi's limitations are imposed by its audience's own lives, as in the stupid and self-obsessed episode about the thirty-something otaku who learns he has terminal cancer, gets beaten up by thugs, mistakenly arrested for child abduction (by comically abusive police) and suffers the disapproval of his family, before finally bravely sacrificing himself to save a small girl from a truck -- the absurdity of which is accentuated by the script's utter, straight-laced faith in its own gravity.

The episodes that show the series at its best are conversely the ones that attracted the most controversy. Episode 3, which deals with the suicide of a seemingly happy schoolboy, hangs on the casual thought (or sometimes temptation) that crosses everyone in Japan's mind once in a while when standing on a railway platform: "It would be so easy to just jump." That it interweaves this simple and easy to relate to thought with a devastatingly accurate parody of the kind of hand-wringing nonsense spouted by rent-a-quote TV "experts" whenever these kinds of situations occur imbues the episode with a layer of biting realism that seems, in part, to have led to the episode being partially censored for its initial broadcast.

Episode 6 is even more hard-hitting with its harsh portrayal of bullying in school and the unpleasantness that results. The episode concludes that humans are social animals, and that when we remove one of our own from society (i.e. by singling out and bullying someone), we also remove an important part of what makes that person human. One boy can't take it and commits suicide. His successor as the target of the bullies responds with violence. The role that web forums like 2ch can play in these situations is also captured with striking accuracy (giving the episode a blackly comic Densha Otoko vibe) and again the episode got into trouble, being banned by at least one TV station.

There's also some good stuff going on with the music, which is atmospheric in a way that recalls the darker end of Kanno Yoko's instrumental work on the Macross Plus soundtrack. Despite the fact that there are only two out and out good episodes (detailed above), the deeply flawed remainder offers up a lot of interesting ideas and directorial flourishes as well, albeit fewer and fewer as the series progressively loses itself in futile attempts to make worthwhile drama out of largely worthless characters. In these moments, Shigofumi reveals its best side where it satirises how the media trivialises and cashes in on people's suffering, as well as the way that we as consumers are complicit in this.

It's also interesting in the way it represents the recurring theme of how people deal with abuse and in the process makes plain a lot about the way Japanese society discourages victims from speaking out. The girl whose father forces her into pornography, the boys being bullied at school, the man with cancer all feel they must suffer in silence. At the end, when the physical Fumika (rather than the spiritual mail carrier Fumika) awakes from her coma and announces that she wants to press charges against her abusive father, it comes as a shock to the audience and to the other characters. One character even rebukes her for being disrespectful to her father.

Ultimately, however, it fails because the creators are tragically unable to reconcile the maturity of their real-world social and philosophical awareness with the unrealistic caricatures that comprise the standard pick-and-mix anime characterisation to which they cleave so closely and with such misguided loyalty.

*Interestingly, Shigofumi scriptwriter Okouchi Ichiro was responsible for two novelisations of Ikuhara's camp, gender-annihilating masterpiece Shoujo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena).

Allison & Lillia

2008-09-30T12:51:00.000-07:00

Watching Allison & Lillia, Madhouse's anime adaptation of Sigasawa Keiichi's Allison light novels, I was drawn in absolutely by the idyllic and beautiful, yet also strangely bleak, depiction of the not-quite-1930s-Europe fantasy world in which the story is set. Coming from the pen of the author who wrote Kino no Tabi (Kino's Journey), that the world is whimsical and faintly unreal is no surprise, but it's nevertheless pleasing.

The other intriguing aspect of it is the detailed recreations of real aircraft of the era, from Allison's beautiful yellow DeHavilland Tiger Moth to the Sikorsky S-42 flying boat and Focke-Wulf 190 fighter that appear later in the series -- also credit to the show's makers for showing a visible and believable development in aeronautical technology from the biplanes of the Allison segments to the WW2-era planes of the Lillia episodes that occur 15 years later.

What throws this care over the show's atmosphere and attention to the show's detail into sharp contrast is the lack of care and attention over the characterisation.

That the plot is also utterly ridiculous could also be a source of consternation, but taken in the context of the way the world of Kino no Tabi defiantly clung to its own internal logic throughout, I think there is a sort of consistency in Allison & Lillia too. Almost no one is ever killed, pilots shoot out the engines of opponents and destroyed planes are always accompanied by gently billowing parachutes. Villains are almost never considered beyond redemption, and deeply rooted feuds between families or even nations are easily solved by what seem like the most absurdly simple reasons. This is Sigasawa's world, and he decided with Allison to create the kind of charming, dreamlike world where these situations are everyday reality.

Now in a simplistic world, the characters should also be simplistic, and few could be more simplistic than feisty blonde air force pilot Allison herself. Allison is one of the loveliest and most likeable characters you will ever find in anime and woman-loving (but not womanising) enemy pilot Carr Benedict is as dashing a fighter ace as you could ever wish to meet -- of particular note was a wonderful scene after the time-skip where a palace retainer accidentally catches Benedict and his wife Fiona (by now Queen of the mini-Russia Ikstova) in a passionate embrace. They simply continue kissing until they have finished, and then turn to the retainer and continue their business completely unabashed. In an anime world where the slightest hint of outward affection or an honest display of one's feelings usually results in furious blushing, laughter and frantic rubbing of the back of one's head, their lack of shame is truly refreshing.

The problems with characters begin with Allison's childhood friend Wil. He is in many ways a typical Japanese male character in that he is utterly, ignorantly oblivious to Allison's feelings for him, to the point where she eventually has to wrestle him to the floor and demand he kiss her to make her feelings clear. However, this is mitigated for the most part by the fact that in other ways he's obviously pretty intelligent and many of his actions reveal an obvious affection for Allison, and partly simply because Allison likes him and her being such a likeable character herself, it naturally rubs off on him. He makes one particularly selfish decision just before the time jump, but again mitigates it just enough that you can keep liking him.

Wil and Allison's daughter Lillia and her pathetic boyfriend Treize are the shitstorm that ruins the series though. Replacing the lovable Allison and the flawed yet just about forgiveable Wil as the main characters after the time jump, they turn the story from a whimsical and faintly surreal meander through a 1930s fairy tale into a predictable run-through of anime romantic comedy's worst cliches.

Where Allison was fiesty, direct and forthright in her desires, Lillia is like every ditzy anime schoolgirl -- selfish and cruel in her treatment of Treize, and prone to acts of unbelievable stupidity. Treize is no better, constantly dithering about the "right moment" to tell Lillia the truth about himself (he's the secret "backup" prince of Ikstova, dontchaknow, and darned if he doesn't want Lillia to be his princess!) but instead breaking into fits of nervous laughter, blathering inanely, and, yes, furiously rubbing the back of his head. Needless to say this brash, loudmouthed pandering to cliche is kryptonite to the fine balance of the show's charm.

There seems to be a subtext in the presentation of male lead characters that being emotionally retarded and suffering from a crippling inability to express yourself is somehow a desirable character trait and evidence of one's inherent integrity. If the love you feel for a girl is deep and true enough, goes the thought process, you should be unable to express it without the most unbearable trauma. If it's the kind of thing you can say easily, then you can't mean it enough. Since we're in the business of making drama here, this argument carries some weight, but only if the characters are otherwise believable and well-written. If the characters have no obvious depth in any other aspects of their characters, how can the audience be expected to suspend its disbelief and accept that there is depth in this one?

It's telling that the two most refreshing characters of the series, Allison and Benedict, are the two who are most emotionally self-assured. Allison's strength also serves to make her moments of uncertainty, where she lets flickers of the 15 year-old girl beneath the impetuous air force pilot show through, all the more touching and believable, and it's largely the lack of any of the traditional character conflicts that is what makes Allison's half of the series so much the superior of Lillia's.

Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto (Someday's Dreamers) is Crap

2008-08-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

Just watched the first episode of 2003 anime Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto (Someday's Dreamers) and within 10 minutes the main character, Yume, has fallen over twice while trying to cross a road and tried to run away in fear from the sight of a man with no shirt on (he didn't even have his bits out). She later gets given a free pizza and only eats one piece before going to bed because she's so just so gosh darned dainty.

How, for either a female or a male audience, can this kind of feebleness be considered a desirable character trait in a female lead? I'm trying to think back over old anime and wondering if things were always thus or whether I should be blaming moe for this phenomenon. The girl-falling-over-when-running thing has been there since time immemorial, but the girl-falling-over-when walking-somewhat-briskly thing seems like a new extreme.

I know raging against this kind of insipid characterisation is pissing in the wind but this is just plain insulting to both men and women. It's even more insulting, of course, to the presumed target audience (male, no girlfriend) because the message it sends to them is, "You can't deal with real women. You are such sad losers that you can only cope with even the idea of women if they are presented as grotesque parodies of the most sexist ideals of femininity."

The setting of Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto is around Tokyo's hip and rather pretentious Shimo-Kitazawa district, which sets the scene for some gently amusing character conflict between the cringeworthily awful Yume and the laid back bohemian types she's likely to encounter there, with some semblance of character development presumably involving Yume being brought out of her shell somewhat (oh, but not too much, understand -- let's not get crazy here). This is the escape clause. The fig leaf of self awareness that the show flashes in front of its misogyny, that says, "Hey, I know she seems pathetic, but look how we acknowledge that fact thus proving that we aren't the sort of people who get a boner over emotionally retarded male fantasy chicks."

The representation of Tokyo is interesting, with actual real, recognisable shop fronts and billboard advertisements in the backgrounds, and it's always nice to see subculture districts other than Akihabara portrayed, but whatever good this show might have to offer, it's already lost me.

Looking Inward / Looking Outward: Part 1

2008-08-29T08:03:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before about the inward-looking nature of the modern otaku mindset. Original "OtaKing" Okada Toshio recently criticised this tendency in his book Otaku wa Sude ni Shindeiru, enraging hordes of angry nerds in the process, and in that point at least I think he's right. Okada's criticism dovetails with Azuma Hiroki's idea of the "database culture" where designs are "based on the large accumulation of anonymous types and elements". At one extreme it's ironic self parody, as with this scene from Lucky Star, where Konata breaks the fourth wall by remarking on the unwitting fan service that Miyuki has provided. The gag itself (Miyuki wins the race on a photo finish because her breasts were bigger) is cliched and unfunny, and it is Konata's acknowledgment of the trope that is the real joke in the scene. This kind of postmodern humour has itself become a cliche in much media now, but it is nevertheless popular with otaku because it parallels the kinds of discussions and analyses of tropes that they have themselves. Lucky Star's success was in large part because of the way it reflected the otaku's own lifestyle back at him, as in the scene when Konata finishes watching an episode of Haruhi Suzumiya no Yuutsu (produced by the same team as Lucky Star), makes her own snide judgement of it and immediately turns to the ensuing online flame fest.

This scene from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei takes what Lucky Star is doing a step further. Here the trope being parodied is the cliche of the onsen resort episode which always involves one tedious example of someone going into the wrong bath and getting embarrassed. Here the situation is turned on its head as only the male teacher is embarrassed whereas his female students are uniformly unbothered. It ends with him feeling that his masculinity has been debased by the unflinching response of his students (foreshadowed cleverly by the distinctly feminine way he is shown getting into the bath to begin with). They top it off with Kafuka actually parodying Lucky Star itself and by parodying something that is in itself a parody, Studio Shaft stake their claim to being teh no.1 133t p05tm0d3rn15tz, until someone can parody them.

Of course, the critical rejoinder to this is that regardless of the irony and self-parody, knowing that your gag is cheap and lazy doesn't make it any less cheap and lazy. The creators also can't stop fans from consuming their work unironically if they choose to. A friend of mine who I usually trust to give me the heads up on any new trends or memes in otaku culture alerted me recently to what he called "the most dangerous anime ever" (NSFW) and suggested that he felt that the show in question, Strike Witches, represents the birth pains of a fourth generation of otaku. Whether this is true or not is hard to say, but at least it represents the extreme development of much of what third generation moe culture represents. The characters themselves are designs constructed directly from the moe database complete with cat ears and tails. None of them wear trousers or skirts ever, for reasons spuriously rationalised as having something to do with the mechanical propellors that they attach to their legs in order to turn them into anthropomorphised representations of World War 2 fighter aircraft.

In Gainax's Otaku no Video from 1991, based in part on Gainax co-founder Okada's own life, an early scene showing the main character, Ken, undergoing his otaku training specifies Star Trek, Doctor Who and John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids as required knowledge. On the other hand, in Strike Witches every aspect of the show is designed to reflect some recycled aspect of Japanese anime culture. The story is entirely subservient to the database and the database is something that has been compiled purely by refining fetish elements from previous anime. Inevitably, as fans turn inwards, the creators of the shows follow them and in all creative aspects Strike Witches shows precisely the kind of inward looking tendency that Okada seems to be criticising in his book.

The otaku's rejoinder to that would be that Okada is criticising them for failing to do something that they never intended in the first place and that he is merely confirming that he is out of touch with what is really happening in fan culture. Putting aside the disturbingly extravagant panty fetishism for a moment, the whole girls=aircraft aspect is a radical and interesting reassembly of two standard base elements. Otaku aren't confusing these girls with real live females and would think you were weird if you implied otherwise. These girls aren't even meant to represent human females: they are a nominally female creation from an entirely different evolutionary model -- children of the database, if you will. In the modern otaku's view, Okada is like Tem Ray, the scientist who created the Gundam Mobile Suit and witnessed its birth, but who ends up a madman, crawling around a junkyard and making useless suggestions to improve a machine he no longer understands.

Part 2 is now up.

Children and The Unknown

2008-08-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

I've been watching an anime from a few years back called Mujin Wakusei Survive (Uninhabited Planet Survive) recently and finding a lot to like about it. Partly due to the way it generally avoids letting itself get defined entirely by moe cliches (is that tautology?) and the refreshing accompanying lack of fan service, but mostly because of the sense that it actually feels like the kind of thing that would have had a big effect on me had I watched it as a child.

A lot of recent anime (basically post-Evangelion) has been created by otaku from the first and second generation, who grew up watching classic shows of the 70s and 80s and there is a nostalgic tendency towards revisiting these shows or trying to recreate some of the atmosphere of these shows. Now I have nothing against this, and few pastiches and parodies in the history of irony and postmodernism have been as spot on as Gekiganger 3, but on the other hand I never grew up with this kind of stuff when I was a child, and this kind of melodramatic, cliched action, where heroes of good do battle against evil never really affected me. The works that have stuck fast in my memory since childhood have been those that dealt with a journey into the unknown.

A lot of the appeal of fantasy literature clearly comes from the way it describes unknown worlds, and the purpose of a quest is in many ways simple a pretext for taking the reader on a package tour of a world that the writer has created. Miyazaki Hayao's work resonates because of the strength of his world building whereas something like Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals fails to resonate because the world building is ill thought out, even compared to the game (FFV) it was based on. Obviously it's made worse by the fact that the main character is both a Pure-hearted Hero of the most obnoxious type and a classic Mary Sue, but these are both symptoms of the same dearth of imagination on the part of the hacks responsible for its creation.

Esteban from Mysterious Cities of Gold was a Pure-hearted Hero and re-watching the series he's undoubtedly annoying at times, but it remains easier to empathise with him because the world itself draws you in. The designs of the architecture, the mecha, the costumes and the soundtrack work together to create a consistent atmosphere, evocative of the place, the time and the emotion (is there any child alive in the 80s who didn't want to ride the golden condor?) And finally, the structure of his quest, stepping constantly further and further into the unexplored unknown, can't help but drag you along with him.

Likewise, another fragment of my childhood that couldn't help but have a powerful effect on me was Stewart Cowley's Terran Trade Authority book series. In particular the second half of the book Great Space Battles, which dealt with short stories based mostly around the colonisation of new planets. What made these tales (and others in the follow-up SpaceWreck) so powerful was again down to the world building. The fascinating, detailed, evocative artwork, even though the pictures were compiled from numerous unrelated sources, was eerie and wonderfully alien, and the writing maintained a single viewpoint throughout, never allowing us to know the whole picture, always holding the truth just out of our grasp. After each story we are left with a real sense of the unknowable vastness of space and of the unimaginable dangers and wonders it contains.

Coming back to Mujin Wakusei Survive, its this sense of the unknown that makes it so involving. The story is a sort of Lord of the Flies meets The Breakfast Club kind of thing with a bunch of mismatched classmates crashing on a small island on an unknown planet during a school trip (it makes more sense in the context of the show, OK?) and struggling to survive its perils. There's no attempt to be deep, philosophical or "edgy" and it's perfectly likeable as a solid, unpatronising children's cartoon. Some of the characters are problematic -- does Howard really need to be such a twat? Why does the sickeningly pathetic Sharla sound like she's about to burst into tears with everything she says? Could Bell please open his eyes? Oh, and Kaoru, your angst is annoying and self-indulgent so just stop it, OK? On the other hand, in Luna and Menori there are two strong, independent female characters who both consistently take on leadership roles and handle them believably. Menori in particular is flawed and aware of her flaws, but also strong enough to overcome them and is by far the most well-written character.

Throughout, however, it is those memories of Cowley's tales of the colonisation of space that I'm constantly reminded of. Whereas Mysterious Cities of Gold portrayed the adult characters as either outright evil or at least somewhat unreliable, thus forcing the child leads to be self-sufficient, Mujin Wakusei Survive takes the Narnia route of removing adults from the picture early on -- in fact from the start adults are rarely seen, with Luna living alone and Menori taking on many of the adults' roles during the school scenes. The early episodes where the children are mapping out the island, searching for food and fresh water, and trying to build a home are particularly good. The island is presented as a real place that rarely tests the audience's suspension of disbelief too close to its limit (at least for a children's show it doesn't) and if I were a child watching this, I think this is something that would have carved a firm place in my memories.

Blade of the Immortal anime - first impressions

2008-08-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

Hiroaki Samura's Mugen no Junin (Blade of the Immortal) has hit TV screens. Difficult to see whether it's going to be any good or not, but Studio Bee Train and Koichi Mashimo at the helm suggests that it will be flawed with moments of inspired brilliance.

A few quick observations:

No Yuki Kajiura this time. This is a bad thing.

Unlike previous Bee Train shows like Noir, they don't have a problem showing blood in this one (it's on TV Tokyo's cable subsidiary rather than the main channel so presumably not subject to the same censorship). This is clearly a good thing.

The "death murals" of Samura's artwork are obviously impossible to recreate fully in animated form, but Manji's death strokes are sometimes stylised in an interesting way. This may turn out to be a good thing.

While it focuses mostly on Manji's background and motivation, the story manages to interweave the beginnings of Rin's and Anotsu's story threads and hints at the Mugai-Ryu arc as well. This is probably a good thing.

Despite her small role, the way Machi's madness is presented is handled pretty well. Key moment is the way she awakes from nightmare recollections of her husband's death with the screams of the dream segueing into her hysterical laughter upon waking. This is undoubtedly a good thing.

The Villain Of The Week deploys the Crazy Voice as a substitute for believable characterisation. This is a bad thing.

Manji's character design has become a bit less of the lean, wiry Sid Vicious-in-a-kimono nihilist punk samurai that he was in the manga and taken on a slightly more conventional square-jawed beefcake look. This is not a good thing.

Has Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei started a new wave of kinbaku-themed opening credit sequences?

Has Shinreigari started a new wave of Shiina Ringo-styled opening songs?

Anime Cliches #01: Pure-hearted Hero

2008-07-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

His voice has a volume range that starts with a shout and increases depending on the amount of emotion he needs to express. Often for additional emphasis he will shout the same thing over and over again. He is particularly fond of shouting the name of Ethereal Girl. During the rare moments of confusion and uncertainty, for example when speaking to a girl, he will entirely lose the remains of his primitive ability to construct full sentences and resort to meaningless, directionless interjections like, "But I..." and "It's not like that. It's...", and "...[girl's name]...". This is not a problem though. It is a well-established fact that inability to express complex emotions is regarded as a sign of sincerity and is considered an extremely desirable character trait by women.

Fortunately, as the main character he is protected by the most powerful kind of plot shield -- one that not only protects him from physical harm but also shields his brain, a tiny object as small and hard as a walnut, from any consideration of the consequences of his behaviour or any doubt as to the righteousness of his every action. He reacts to moral ambiguity with confusion and shouting but don't be fooled; as we already know, shouting=emotion and it is a well known fact that reason is obliterated when the emotion index reaches approximately 85dB. If your words don't fit in with his worldview, he will stick his fingers in his ears and shout "lalala" until the narrative is able to contort itself around his narrow moral absolutism and teach you a lesson.

As a rule, the more serious the story and the more real the dilemmas faced, the more infuriating he is.

Stats:

Romantically compatibile with:
- Ethereal Girl

Natural Allies:
- Wise Old Woman
- Annoying Mascot Creature
- Impressionable Child

Natural enemies:
- Relativist
- Utilitarian
- Misanthropic Villain

Plot Shield:
- 10/10

1950s Graphics

2008-06-28T11:19:00.000-07:00

I ended up this afternoon at the print museum in Iidabashi enjoying an exhibition of what were mostly pretty fantastic 1950s Japanese advertisements. Obviously, one has to recognise that the exhibition was compiled from a modern point of view, but nevertheless one of the most striking features about it was damn cool Japanese poster art was back then.

There's a debate over at the excellent Neojaponisme blog at the moment about what constitutes "Cool Japan", where one major divide seems to be from those who feels that anime had a large role to play in the development of Japan as something hip and those who prefer to see it as something that appeared in the 90s and 2000s as a result of pop and fashion culture with anime as a quite separate issue. Part of the division seems to be between the American and British commenters -- as a Brit, I seem to remember that cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk anime like Akira and Ghost In The Shell were extremely cool in the 1990s and the whole image of dystopian Shibuya neon tracking right back to Blade Runner and William Gibson made Japan seem like very much the place to be.

Part of the context of the Neojaponisme discussion seems to be the antipathy between America and Japan in the late 80s and early 90s and the way that dissolved as Japan's economic situation declined and America's strengthened during the Clinton era. Some comments suggest there was less of that in the UK and Europe since Japan wasn't an economic competitor the way it was with America at that time (us poor Brits in the midst of the darkest days of the Thatcher era were more worried about recession and the poll tax than east/west willy-waving). Nevertheless, I'd be surprised if the alignment between the aggressive modernism of 80s~ Japan and the dystopian futurism of Gibson et al didn't have a major impact on Japan's cachet in the 90s.

I'm not au fait enough with the ins and outs of current trends to begin to explain the undoubtedly extremely detailed and complex background behind why Japan now has major cultural cachet whereas in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s it didn't. However, what the 1950s Japanese Graphics exhibition shows is that regardless of the caprice of Western fashion and the often selective attention it pays to Japanese arts over time, there was still some extremely modern, extremely hip, extremely fashionable work going on in the Japanese commercial mainstream more than 50 years ago. It's easy to look at elements of the design and style and point to the influence of French or American artists, but there is also obviously something distinctly Japanese going on that enhances rather than diminishes the clean, stylish, essentially modernist lines of the designs.

What it also might show is the way the post-90s, post-"Cool Japan" filtering process can dig out articles of Japanese retro design that support and consolidate current trends in visual style. Bearing in mind that most modern Japanese visuals would generally be categorised under the loose bracket of "post-modernism", what does this say about the 1950s visuals shown at this exhibition? Are we being treated to a simple localisation of America/European modernist themes, or is this actually a precursor to the post-modern absorption and reconstitution that we have all come to know and love and that has come to define so much current "cool" Japanese art and design?

Anime Cliches #012: Unhinged Villain

2008-06-24T06:26:00.000-07:00

Rarely a primary antagonist, Unhinged Villain (example here -- there's a lot going on but watch the guy with they funny eye) usually takes the form of a Villain Of The Week or a sidekick, with his role often overlapping with that of Snivelling Henchman.

His demented, sociopathic behaviour, hammy overacting and tendency to lash out, often with fatal consequences, at innocent bystanders and expendable underlings alike may occasionally make the casual observer wonder how he ever rose to a position of power and influence in his evil organisation in the first place without getting done in, Joe Pesci-in-Goodfellas-style, by his colleagues.

While he will sometimes behave in a deceptively calm and composed manner, he is generally easy to distinguish from colleagues such as Misanthropic Villain and Philosophical Villain by his deployment of the Crazy Voice. This, coupled with his advanced case of Battle Loquacity, makes him one of the more annoying antagonists. If you ever come across a fight between Unhinged Villain and Pure-Hearted Hero, the volume control is an invaluable tool for the dedicated sailor of this most infuriating of anime seas. Failing that, a heavy boot to the TV screen usually suffices.

Anime Cliches #007: The Darth Vader Gambit

2008-06-24T05:52:00.000-07:00

A technique deployed by villains in order to disable the hero, the Darth Vader Gambit involves imparting a piece of traumatic exposition at a crucial moment in battle, immediately precipitating an emotional crisis that will cause the hero's weapon to clatter to the floor and the hero themself to fall to their knees, clutching their face. Often this is accompanied by violent trembling and repeated utterances of the phrase, "No... it's not true... it CAN'T BE true..!" At this point the villain may choose to respond with, "Look deep within yourself... you know it to be true." at which point the hero will reply, "NOOOOOOOOOO!"or some other variant on the template.

Watch out for phrases such as, "Have your friends not told you what they are truly planning?", "Do you know who really killed your brother/sister/parents/teacher/wife?", and the evergreen "You and I are alike..."

The only known countermeasure to the Darth Vader Gambit is the Tuco Defence. As far as I know, however, no anime hero has ever tried this.

Note that it is even more infuriating for dedicated Tuco acolytes when the Darth Vader Gambit is used in a video game, since the computer will wrestle control of your character from you and force you to sit, helpless, spitting obscenities at the screen, as your character flops about on the ground like a recently caught salmon.

Anime Cliches: An Introduction

2008-06-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

Much of this ongoing series of featurettes is self-explanatory and in any case, I'm sure a quick search of the web will reveal numerous other sites expressing similar ideas. Anyone with an interest in anime will know how cliche-ridden it can be and indeed there is an element of otaku culture that revels in the cliches. Some believe that the way the interchangeability of constituent elements is increasingly coming to be the primary creative driving force of anime and manga is in fact a revolution in media and fan culture.

I'm not trying to do anything so dramatic here. As I watch shows, I often come across elements or character types that I have seen numerous times before. Sometimes it annoys me, sometimes I just find it funny, sometimes I feel it points to social or political attitudes that could do with exposing, and sometimes I feel it's just bad writing. If I occasionally come over all Gramsci on you, that's just the way I am and I make no apologies.

Although I'm labelling it "Anime Cliches", most of these elements are equally applicable to Japanese video games, particularly RPGs, and many of them you will find across the whole spectrum of fantasy and SF.

On bad fantasy lit. and losing my innocence

2008-06-16T08:26:00.001-07:00

I was lurking around a secondhand English bookshop in Tokyo last week with the firm intention of getting myself some big, chunky fantasy literature. It wasn't an idea I'd thought about much; it was just one of those whims that sweep across you like a powerful, raging storm and seize you with their enthusiasm. Going into the store, I had this image in my head of picking up a great thick doorstop of a book and losing myself in it for days as its beautiful and richly imagined world swept over me, immersing me in its details and nuances.

Of course, when I got to the fantasy section reality hit me. It's not that it wasn't well-stocked (it was), it's just that faced with the reality of what fantasy literature is actually like, I felt my enthusiasm drain from me, to be replaced within seconds by a kind of frustrated, tetchy bloody-mindedness. I would find something to inspire and lift my imagination. Nothing would stand in my way. It was my quest. My destiny.

But honestly:

In the aftermath of the brutal murder of his father, a mysterious woman, Kahlan Amnell, appears in Richard Cypher's forest sanctuary seeking help... and more. His world, his very beliefs, are shattered when ancient debts come due with thundering violence.

In their darkest hour, hunted relentlessly, tormented by treachery and loss, Kahlan calls upon Richard to reach beyond his sword -- to invoke within himself something more noble. Neither knows that the rules of battle have just changed... or that their time has run out.

Who can read crap like this without retching? Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair here by picking out Terry Goodkind as an example, since from what I can gather he's a particularly odious example of the sort of hack bollocks that seems to comprise most of the pantheon of fantasy literature, but honestly, almost every single book I perused slapped me in the face with some similarly flaccid blurb, similarly self-assured and pompous in its own blatant mediocrity.

My hunt continued...

There was a complete set of Tad Williams' Otherland series, and I seem to remember finding his Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series satisfying, with likeable enough characters and just enough playful nudging of the genre stereotypes to occasionally tip them over into unexpected flourishes of near-originality. The premise of Otherland does not fill me with dread and I had good times with the similarly-themed .Hack//Sign anime. Still, Tad Williams is the place where another of the harsh realities of fantasy literature must be confronted. His work suffers from a terminal case of stuffy over-writing.

I stumbled through the first four lines of the first page of one of the books [Edited Jun 25th 07: initially I thought it was the first book but I checked again and the first book actually opens pretty well] and nothing interesting happened. If Williams has already started padding it out at the first line, I thought to myself, what hope for the rest of the four gargantuan telephone directories that await? I foresaw interminable descriptive passages of tangential relevance to the plot, I foresaw frustratingly drawn-out setups to long-foreshadowed events left dangling ad nauseam as the word count piled up behind them, I held the book open before me in the one-handed reading pose and weighed the pressure on my little finger. I backed down from the challenge. I was not ready. Not yet.

Part four of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series was dismissed out of hand. I thought book one was excellent when a friend forced me to read it, but I refuse to touch the series further until all seven volumes are complete. Plus, what's with all that "R. R." stuff? Plain old George Martin not good enough for you? Or did your publishers think the old "R. R." in the middle gave you a bit of Tolkienesque cred that lifted you above the pack?

By this point, I was becoming more and more crotchety and cynical with the whole trashy business of fantasy fiction. I remembered that anything that reminds me of Tolkien makes me want to puke. Nothing turns me off a book better than those endless pull quotes from lazy reviewers who call every new piece of cookie cutter genre trash the "best fantasy novel since Tolkien". I remain impressed with the obsessive detail he put into the mythological and linguistic background of his world, but the casual sexism and racism, the unquestioning adherence to a system of feudal patriarchy turns me off, particularly when I see the same kind of bilious goo vomiting forth from contemporary writers who should know better. I felt my blood running a little redder and my inner Trot began to awaken.

According to China Mieville, who I admire but don't necessarily agree with as both a writer and as a revolutionary socialist, Ursula LeGuin is a full-on anarchist so her books might be politically acceptible for me. There weren't any in the book shop though so my search continued. I'd read all the Iain M. Banks that they had and the same went for the Philip Pullman.

I could go on, but Alec Austin has already outlined most of the pitfalls in his excellent Strange Horizons essay Quality in Epic Fantasy.

Nevertheless, there is a little nugget of self-discovery that came out of this whole, honestly rather small and insignificant episode of my life that I have so zealously overdramatised above. Something in the conflict between the feeling that I used to get from fantasy writing and cartoons as a child and my increasing difficulty accepting such things at face value as an adult. When people say to me, "It's just a story" and I tear my hair out and scream vile obscenities at them, this is the internal conflict that lies at the heart of the external drama. The frustration from applying grown-up critical standards to work that prefers not to recognise those standards.

So in the end, the call of the familiar drew me away from the fantasy section and into the comforting embrace of Graham Greene. Within half a page of Our Man in Havana, I was overwhelmed with a sense of joy that cancelled out the bitter sting of defeat. Why do writers of fantasy literature so rarely employ such clean lines in their sentences, such elegance and order in their structure, such beautiful, almost mechanical simplicity? Why can't such simple tools be applied to the construction of extraordinary worlds and situations?

In fact, I'm pretty sure that they can be. SF writers don't seem to feel quite so bound by the need for archaic linguistic tropes or figures of speech, and are far less prone to overwriting. Arthur C. Clarke is an endlessly readable author and there are plenty of others. As LeGuin (herself admirably economical in her prose) points out in her essay From Elfland to Poughkeepsie, fantasy works with a more old-fashioned setting, which naturally requires that the writer adopt a voice appropriately distanced from his present time and location, but there is no reason why that can't be done within a stylistic and structural framework like Greene's.

As Austin points out in his essay above, a lot of the problems with fantasy literature stem from the nature of the market, which requires sequel after leaden sequel. Such an environment inevitably benefits talentless hacks like David Eddings, and I would imagine the likes of Goodkind, Brooks and Jordan (R.I.P.) all fall into the same category. SF tends to be friendlier to the standalone novel and the science aspect of the genre naturally draws the focus towards neat concepts and ideas to the benefit of the genre, whereas fantasy, based on the creation of worlds, is more abstract, its focus less clearly defined. Perhaps this aspect, with its less obvious conclusion and greater scope for reader to become lost in the world and writer to become lost in his or her own ego, makes it more vulnerable to the dictates of a greedy market.

The greatest fantasy writer of all time, Jorge Luis Borges, never wrote a story over twenty pages and one flicker of a great imagination can say more than a thousand shelf-bending sagas.

Kamichu! Part 2 - Japanese National Identity

2008-06-16T02:15:00.000-07:00

In my last post I talked about the way stories about confused, alienated teenage girls gifted with godlike powers could reflect certain changes in Japanese society and within the world of anime creators and fans. I focussed in part on the TV series Kamichu! and I'm going to stick with that show with this post as I focus on some observations about national identity.

One of the awkward things when discussing these kind of issues is where the relatively neutral term "national identity" becomes a little too neutral to be useful and where you have to start playing around with more politically charged terms like "nationalism" and dealing with the can of worms that then gets opened up. I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that anime can be very nationalistic, but I'm going to add some caveats here.

Firstly, I'm not talking about the kind of jackboots and swastikas, goose-stepping racist type of 1930s European nationalism here (although anyone who spends much time hanging around Ochanomizu Station in central Tokyo has probably seen exactly these kind of black-shirted fascist scum harassing students from the supposedly lefty-biased Meiji University). What I'm talking about in the context of anime is generally a kind of loose cultural nationalism. An attempt, not necessarily confined to what we would traditionally label as right or left wing, to define and untangle a kind of distinctive Japanese culture from the tangled threads of foreign influences that form much of modern Japanese life.

For all its emphasis on the mundane details of daily life, Kamichu! expresses a remarkably consistent socio-political worldview, on some occasions more explicitly than on others.

In episode four, a female alien visits to return a broken NASA space probe and is imprisoned by the Japanese government with the intention of handing her over to the Americans for experiments. The main character of Kamichu!, Yurie Hitotsubashi, is called in to act as an interpreter for the alien and then tries to rescue her when she discovers the prime minister's plan. There are two things going on here.

Firstly there is an implied criticism of what many regard as the Japanese government's craven acquiescence to American demands. This is an ongoing point of debate in Japan as President George Bush puts pressure on Japan to amend Article 9 of its pacifist constitution to allow the Japanese Self-Defence Force to engage in overseas military action. The issue is a conundrum for the traditional nationalist right in Japan since they are by their nature militaristic, yet they are also opposed to foreign influence in Japanese affairs. As a rule, the right tends to focus its criticisms on Russia and China while quietly supporting the United States. This relationship dates right back to the early postwar years, when the U.S. occupation government and CIA cut deals with extreme right wing POWs, mafiosi and war criminals in order to gain access to their information networks in the fight against communism. The most unified objection to the influence of the United States in Japanese politics seems to come from the left, who share with left-liberals the world over a suspicion of American foreign policy and who, like a majority of Japanese, are extremely proud of Article 9. Kamichu! makes its own position clear when Yurie deals with a platoon of gun-toting soldiers by reminding them that they aren't allowed to use their guns except to defend against a foreign invader and since the alien isn't invading, they are constitutionally obliged to leave them alone.

Despite being set in 1983, which sets Kamichu! during the tenure of Yasuhiro Nakasone, the political issues discussed above were current (and controversial) in 2005 under Junichiro Koizumi. Such direct referencing of current headlines, albeit hiding behind the fig leaf of the historical setting, is a relatively new feature in mainstream anime, perhaps showing recognition that an older audience is watching.

There is a second, more subtle, theme being explored in Kamichu! though, and it is one that recurs throughout the series, namely the idea of the loneliness of the person far away from home. The alien has a sweetheart on Mars who she wants to see again, and Yurie's comment that "Martians should be on Mars" while on one level responding to the simple fact that her alien friend is homesick, also reveals something about the series' attitude. Kamichu! is at heart very inward-looking and in the world it creates, foreigners are welcome guests and amusing diversions, but not permanent fixtures. The bottom line is, that everyone has their place and in the end it is expected that they will return.

In episode nine the same situation occurs in reverse when Yurie has to bring back the spirit of the battleship Yamato, which was sunk by American aircraft near Okinawa in 1945. Within the worldview of Kamichu!, the reunion of the ship and its home port is both natural and necessary. From a pacifist perspective, there could be the implied message that it should never have left. From the nationalist perspective, the return of the most powerful battleship ever created represents a revival of Japanese pride and the way Yurie must first study in detail every aspect of the ship before she is able to contain its spirit is a lesson for Japanese youth to learn about their history and culture. A curious, throwaway comment made by Yurie's local god Yashima-sama, that in addition to learning everything about the ship's physical dimensions she should also learn about "why it was built" seems to hint at a deeper examination of Japan's role in the war, (clue: it was built to kill people) but that thread ends up going nowhere as Yurie is far more interested in the fact that there was a room on the ship where they made lemonade. Presumably too deep an exploration of the war would have been deemed inappropriate for a children's show, although the end result, with its faintly unpleasant whiff of jingoism hardly seems an improvement.

Far more effective is episode twelve, where Yurie moves to Izumo for a month to attend a gods' convention. In that episode, she herself is forced to confront the loneliness and alienation she feels in a new environment, where she is treated differently by those around her. She is eventually able to make a connection with her temporary classmates, but in the end, as with when Yashima-sama runs away to become a rock star, when the cat Tama runs away to escape Yurie's mothering, and when Miko runs away to escape heartbreak, Yurie has to return home in order for balance in the universe to be restored. In all these cases, the ties that bind the characters to their homes are painful when stretched and the relief when equilibrium is restored is palpable.

One of the defining features of post-nineties anime is the way that the first, and now second, generations of otaku have moved from being consumers to being active participants in the creation of anime, either through effecting their own entry into the industry or through the influence they wield through the Internet (check the case of Takami Akai and the infamous "2channel incident" if you don't believe me). The postmodern critic and philosopher Hiroki Azuma wrote in his essay Superflat Japanese Postmodernity that "otaku culture is a sort of the collective expression of post-war Japanese nationalism" and with that in mind, it is perhaps natural that an increase in the number of otaku working in the industry has gone hand in hand with more explicit expressions of national identity and nationalism.

Within the otaku world many believe that a direct link can be drawn between modern (or postmodern) otaku culture and pre-modern Japanese Edo period culture, pointing at similarities in consumption patterns as evidence. Azuma dismisses this as a "cliche" and a "pretension", pointing to the postwar influence of America as the primary background of otaku culture. The result of this, according to Azuma, is a kind of twisted view of "Japaneseness" that tends towards self-caracature.

The clinging onto iconic nationalist images like the Yamato is one reflection of this but there are many more going further back into Japanese history. In the SF series Gasaraki, the mobile armour that forms the centrepiece of the series is a parody of Japanese Noh theatre and one of the main characters, somewhat ambiguous at first, but who occupies an increasingly sympathetic role as the series progresses, is a hard-right nationalist figure whose ideology is based on a very strict interpretation of Bushido.

In a more domestic setting, romantic and slice of life dramas like Kamichu! invariably place great prominence on the changing of the seasons. This is a fundamental feature of traditional Japanese art and literature, with precedents in Murasaki's Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji) as well as the requirement for references to the seasons in haiku. From a postmodern viewpoint, however, this is merely appropriating imagery and motifs from traditional Japanese culture purely for superficial purposes or to support its own postmodern agenda. Modern Japan has been shaped by so many factors over the past 150 years since Western influences were first allowed in that the Edo period is like another country, thus the modern otaku claiming descent from this lineage in fact has more in common with French "Japonisme" of the late 19th Century than he does with the culture that he is claiming as his own.

The fact that it is blatantly unrealistic to expect Japan to turn back the clock to the 18th Century is of course obvious to most, and to return to Kamichu! for a moment, there is a neat recognition of this in the episode dealing with Matsuri' self-declared "War on Christmas", where she gets jealous of the popularity of this foreign festival when her own Shinto shrine lies empty for a day, and annoys a lot of gift shop owners in the process. The two festivals decide to coexist and Matsuri's rival "Japanese" winter festival is considered a success when she manages to bring in ten percent of the people she invited.

Another factor in Japanese society that is beginning to have an impact on the themes and issues dealt with in anime is globalisation. Despite still being a largely homogeneous society, foreigners in Japan are becoming an increasingly visible part of the tapestry of daily life, particularly in Tokyo but also in other parts of the country. Part of this is down to the decrease in value of the yen from the early nineties making foreign tourism easier, partly this is the increasing wealth of Japan's Chinese and South Korean neighbours, and partly this is the slowly but steadily increasing numbers of foreign workers, particularly Chinese, who are settling in Japan.

Politically conscious "hard SF" anime like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and the aforementioned Gasaraki pinpoint increased ethnic communities as possible hotspots for civil unrest, although regardless of whether or not they are "wanted" in the end, both shows try to paint the minorities in a sympathetic light. The 2000 comedy series Niea_7 portrays a run down bath house in a near future rural Japan where aliens have crashed on earth and have reached a point where their initially incredible presence has become mundane. It deals with the issues of integration faced by the stranded aliens who themselves are by now second generation with no connections to or even conceptions of their home planet, and contrasts their own internal squabbles and prejudices with the personal sense of alienation felt by the human main character Mayuko Chigasaki who is herself seperated from people around her by the remote location of her home, her extreme poverty and her lack of parents. As the series develops, the similarities between her predicament and that of her annoying alien roommate lead to an increasing empathy between them. It's a far more nuanced view of the polyethnic future that Japan might find itself in than most other shows and all the more powerful for the way it avoids making any of its main points directly.

Kamichu! avoids dealing with this issue by fixing the setting in a time and place where foreigners were unlikely to appear, which serves well the show's focus on maintaining the image of a utopian small-town Japan. Certainly it's the prerogative of any show to set the parameters of what issues it chooses to address, although it's hard not to come to the conclusion that by the values that the show expresses, the lack of any non-Japanese presence is because in a world with everything in its right place, foreigners would stay at home in the first place. In this sense, the kind of nationalism that Kamichu! expresses is a defensive response against the foreign influence on Japanese society and the feeling that modern Japanese people have lost touch with traditional values. Unfortunately, as Azuma points out, "traditional" Japanese values are difficult thing to define, with the definition having gone through a number of changes over many years in response to various changes in the world. Kamichu!'s reaction in the face of this is a curious mixture of resigned acceptance, as with the "war on Christmas", and the desire to turn away and to turn inwards.

There is an episode near the end of the series which most powerfully and persuasively expresses a much wider context into which the show's attitude to national identity fits. After her exertions over New Year, Yurie takes a "duvet day" underneath the cover of the heated kotatsu table in her house's living room. The lengths she goes to and the contortions she puts herself through in order to remain in the warm, comforting embrace of the kotatsu, safe from the January chill around her, perfectly captures the "five more minutes" feeling universal to anyone who has experienced winter in a Japanese house and underpins that with a deeper sense of ennui and reluctance to leave home and face the world. She knows, as we know, that she will have to get up, take a shower and get dressed sooner or later, but for now the world be damned and just let me sleep.

Ian Martin - June 16th 2008

Kamichu! Part 1 - Lonely Gods

2008-05-28T08:02:00.000-07:00

Kamichu!, an anime series about a teenage girl called Yurie Hitotsubashi who wakes up one morning to discover she is a god, is not particularly striking for its originality. Obvious reference points are the films of Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki Hayao, particularly Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) and Majo no Takkyubin (Kiki's Delivery Service): the former in the supporting cast of comically-presented Shinto deities that populate much of the world in which Kamichu! takes place; the latter in the narrative's focus on a young girl and her attempts to lead a normal life as a teenager whilst coming to terms with magical powers. Further references abound throughout the series, from the Kiki-style red bow that the Martian bestows upon Yurie in episode four to the opening theme song that subtly evokes Majo no Takkyubin's closing theme song Yasashisa ni Tsutsumareta Nara. Fans of Ghibli's Mimi wo Sumaseba (Whisper of the Heart) will probably find the way the camera lingers lovingly on mundane yet painstakingly detailed features of Yurie's suburban hometown familiar, and the way the finales of many episodes pound you with lethal, effortlessly effective doses of manipulative yet irresistable, tear-jerking sentimentality seals the deal.

The similarities with Ghibli are unmistakable and appear to be utterly intentional, but Kamichu! is different nonetheless. As we've seen with Majo no Takkyubin and with innumerable TV anime shows about schoolchildren suddenly gifted special powers, the premise is not without precedent. The idea of a teenage girl being a god, however, is a bit more abstract.

Unlike Miyazaki's films, which sometimes appear to be issued forth from a culture bunker where the rest of contemporary Japanese popular culture only exists as something to occasionally react against, Kamichu! taps into a seam of faintly literary magic realism that seems to have grown up over the past ten or fifteen years. The influence of Ghibli is perhaps there for all to see, but the increased mining of light novels rather than manga as an alternative source for anime adaptations could also be part of it. Co-creator Hideyuki Kurata has a background as a writer of light novels in addition to his work as a scriptwriter and he has also displayed a literary flourish in his script for Now and Then, Here and There. Also, unlike most magical girl anime, Kamichu! has no obvious antagonist and Yurie's quest is never clearly defined beyond a vague sense that she likes nice-but-dim calligraphy club member Kenji. Yurie's central dilemma, however, is more personal. She wants to know what kind of god she is, what her powers actually are, and what she is going to use them for.

This more introspective approach to teenage superpowers has parallels, as so much anime these days does, with 1995 megahit and cultural/marketing tsunami Neon Genesis Evangelion. Its focus is on the central character's search for meaning in their new powers and the way those powers are sometimes manipulated by those around them, as with Yurie's friend Matsuri and her frequent schemes to use Yurie to boost revenue at her family's Shinto shrine. Nevertheless, I'm going to take the Triangle Staff's 1998 sleeper hit Serial Experiments Lain as my starting point.

Like Yuria, Lain is a shy junior high school girl and like Yuria, Lain is a god of sorts. Both characters face a similar dilemma in how they come to terms with their powers and how they use them. Although there are clear contrasts in the way the gentle fantasy comedy of Kamichu! treats its protagonist compared to the relentlessly grim cyber-horror of Lain, there are also similarities in the sense of uncertainty, directionlessness and alienation that the characters in both stories feel. Yurie's friends Matsuri and Mitsue are both uncertain about their future and even local god Yashima-sama doesn't know what to do with his life, actually resorting to running away from home at one stage. Serial Experiments Lain opens with the suicide of one of Lain's schoolmates by jumping off a rooftop in a seedy backstreet of Tokyo; Lain's sister passes her time with diet fads and empty sex in love hotels with her semi-detached boyfriend. As protagonists, Yurie and Lain have no vapid notions of "destiny" to guide them in their path: both have the full crushing weight of responsibility for choosing their own path and all that entails. Yurie's challenge is to decide whether or not to confess to Kenji. Lain's dilemma is more existential -- literally, "To be or not to be" rather than Yurie's plain, "What to be?"

A different sort of lonely god appeared a year or so after Kamichu!, in a burst of song, dance and otaku mania.

Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya) was centred on the slightly older (high school age) Suzumiya Haruhi, another teenage girl with godlike powers. Unlike Yurie and Lain, Haruhi doesn't know about her own powers and the plot revolves the attempts of the circle of weirdos that she gathers round herself to keep her entertained, thus ensuring that she doesn't destroy the world and reshape it into one more to her liking, as she already appears to have unwittingly done at least once in the past.

It's partly a madcap comedy, with less of the gentle realism that defines much of Kamichu!, although the first and 9th episodes of the TV series to be shown (actually the 11th and last episodes since the series was broadcast according to a sequence that rejects such mundane concepts as chronology) display precisely the slow tempo and languid attention to details of the scenery (as with Kamichu! and Lain, based on real locations) that also characterise Kamichu! at its best.

Again lacking a single main antagonist (although enemies occasionally appear), the central conflict is between childhood and adulthood. The characters, as high school students, are all on the cusp, with the show's narrator Kyon representing the voice of the adult world that will soon call everyone at North High School irreversibly into its grasp. With her intense dedication to all things extraordinary and mysterious, Haruhi stands in direct opposition to the onslaught of adulthood.

The conflict partly manifests itself within Kyon, as Haruhi's enthusiasm secretly appeals to aspects of his own character that he has suppressed in the face of inevitable disappointment. No matter how weird the occurrences around him, he maintains a weary, cynical, "nothing ever happens" attitude that resembles similar remarks often made (also against all available evidence) by Yurie's friend Mitsue in Kamichu!, as well as by Naota in Gainax's FLCL. This refusal to accept the strangeness around them and constant insistence that everything is normal and boring is often portrayed as a barrier to a character's true acceptance of themself, whilst at the same time acting as an implicit criticism of an adult world that disdains childish dreams and ambitions. Since this is a world that often requires that its residents give up anime along with these dreams, it isn't perhaps surprising that so many anime creators would encourage people to hold onto them.

A second conflict occurs within Haruhi herself. Despite her aggressive optimism, she harbours real doubts about the existence of the aliens, time travellers and psychics that she is so intent on finding. The audience's reaction to Haruhi differs from other shows mentioned here in the way that we are given far more information about her and about her world than she herself is allowed. Out of fear for what consequences she might wreak if she knew the truth, Yuki (alien robot), Mikuru (time traveller) and Itsuki (psychic) keep their identities secret from Haruhi, just as they keep Haruhi's identity secret from herself. Instead, they prefer to maintain a balance. She must be entertained at all costs, but she must never be allowed to truly know that the world is anything other than a normal, mundane place -- the worlds of childhood and adulthood must maintain equilibrium, lest all things may fall apart.

It's tempting to draw all sorts of inferences from this, but for now let us compare with the way Lain's guardians -- her fake parents and the Men in Black -- withold information from her while at the same time never intervening directly to prevent her discovering by herself. In the end, her "father" confesses the truth of his role in the conspiracy and urges her to follow her own path, which she duly does, remaking the world not to make herself happy at that moment (a la Haruhi) but for the wellbeing of others, and then promptly erasing herself from her creation. Haruhi is never given that choice by her guardians and it is left to the powerless Kyon to muse that, "They should just tell everything to Haruhi directly. Whatever happens to the world after that will be her responsibility."

So why gods, and whither the uncertainty and alienation? Wish-fulfillment probably forms part of this, and Japan's social and economic climate since the start of the 1990s probably forms part of the background. With the collapse of the late 80s "bubble economy" and the end of Japan's programme of post-war reconstruction, the Japan of the 1990s started to look more and more like the "mature economies" of Europe and America, where the goal had shifted from constant, aggressive progress for the good of the nation to the more mundane and problematic business of maintaining standards of living for the population, and particularly securing a healthy retirement and pension for the baby-boomers who had brought it there.

At first, there was the recession that followed the collapse of the bubble, and the introduction of alarming new words like "ristora" (restructuring), which started to sow the seeds of uncertainty among young people who had previously had their lives and careers mapped out for them. Secondly, there was a gradual recognition of the increasing irrelevancy of the traditional anime stereotypes that had provided the propaganda backdrop for Japan's reconstruction. The simple, pure-hearted boys and girls who fought to protect their home planet from alien invaders suddenly found themselves on the other side of victory and with nothing to fight for anymore. Thirdly, as 2006 approached, the economy moved to protect the retirements of the baby-boomers and young people found their employment prospects becoming more and more "flexible" (read: more temp work, less job security, fewer benefits).

Finally, there is perhaps a case to be made for a change in the status of women, or maybe a change in the way women think about themselves and their futures, being an influential factor in these stories of young girls dealing with dilemmas and responsibilities that previous generations would perhaps not have considered an issue. When your only option in life is to get married, produce children and cook meals, the only dilemma is to get it done before you reach the age of thirty. Subtly, yet tellingly, when Mitsue from Kamichu! tells Matsuri and Yurie that she thinks she might like to become a housewife, she is making a career choice out of personal preference rather than in order to fulfill a societal expectation. Nevertheless, for all this, it is perhaps telling that all the three stories analysed here were created by men. Is the use of female lead characters down to women's increasing status and respect in society? Probably somewhat. Is it cheesecake? Certainly to some extent.

In any case, the 1990s left Japan with one of the most highly-educated workforces in the world and yet uncertainty and directionlessness were everywhere. To be a god takes the wish-fulfillment of young people who feel powerless and combines it with a recognition of one of the dilemmas of freedom. Superheroes fight crime, giant robots fight alien invaders, but gods? What do gods do?

It was inevitable that those feelings would evenutally find themselves voiced back through popular culture. Demographic shifts in the anime viewing audience showed that older and older people were taking anime seriously, which made TV channels a little less nervous about allowing more mature or socially-conscious themes. Also, a generation of children who had grown up with the more mature themes of 70s and 80s anime like Gundam, Space Runway Ideon and the films of Miyazaki Hayao were now making anime of their own and they had a much higher opinion of the sophistication and intelligence of their audience than many of those who had gone before. As a result, an important substream of creative, genre-defying anime brought social consciousness to the fore and began to explore the changes that Japanese society was, and still is, undergoing.

Anyway, congratulations if you made it this far. This is not all by a long stretch though. In the next article, I'll be using Kamichu! again, for the sake of continuity, as a sort of anime clothes hanger on which to drape some observations about politics and national identity, although I'll be bringing in various other shows for comparison.

Ian Martin - May 28th 2008

Introducing my new blog...

2008-05-27T10:43:00.001-07:00

I keep a couple of other blogs around the place, but they all have quite a specific focus (mostly music) so this new one is meant to be an outlet for some of my sophomoric pontifications on other topics. Expect tiresomely detailed analysis of anime and old video games, the odd pop music item that I didn't feel was appropriate for my other blogs, as well as miscellaneous comments on the subject of things I see around me and want to pretend other people are interested in too.

This is all.