For my second post for 12days(of)Anime (etc), I should take a moment and go on a bit about the “why?” of this strange blog, for those of you who are dropping by for the first few times. Yup, I do the usual anime and manga reviews of stories that catch my eye and I have even been known to do “season line-up” coverage but that isn’t my main interest.
Kind of hard to explain…
Herr Doctor Professor Saitō Tamaki summed it up in his brilliant post-lacanian examination of otaku desire; Beautiful Fighting Girl. Libidinised desire, even displaced and sublimated through fantasy narratives can re-cathect and/or re-enchant an otherwise dead reality. Think of it as an updating of what Freud swiped from Mary Shelly.
Go back 8-10 years. I was reading scanlated manga and watching a few fansubbed anime and was beside myself. I blame Kōji Kumeta and his insanely long-running and arch manga Sayonara, Zetsubo-Sensei [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayonara,_Zetsubou-Sensei] The anime versions, staying quite close to the source material but cranking the problematic aspects to 11 only made matters worse.
I was soooooo embarrassed that I was reading and watching that sick shit.
Did I worry too much? Would you, even today post a series of opening (or closing) credit sequences from a Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei anime on your normie Faceebook page? No, really... Aside: search Vimeo and Dailymotion, the OP’s and EPs routinely get scrubbed from Youtube.
Even the mild Rolly- composed and sung Teacher’s Pet ED slips in a whackload of cringy and strange bits. It wasnt good enough to dismiss the entire mess as edgy satire. (BTW: that’s his sister who is wiggling her ass at sensei) Sure; makes fun of… Ha Ha Ha, It’s a Japanese thing, they just do that kind of in-your-face pornish, death-obsessed, pedo-bear, lolicon weirdness. Then add the Showa bits to lampoon the “exoticization” of a past Japan; a trick Mamori Oshii cranked to 11 in his forgotten 2006 Tachiguishi-Retsuden [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachiguishi-Retsuden] (1)
Kumeta is making fun of all it, including all the Showa-era graphic conceits, nasty shout-outs, the insane labyrinth of footnote-able pop sociology (the manga scanlating crew was heroic, with end-pages full of references and decoded snark) and the ironic-but-still-get-to-gawk fanservice overload…
Yeah, that’s it.
Time to re-watch Full Metal Panic. Pacifist Japan dreams of warring secret societies with robots and futuristic weapons built with super tech from girls who dream of the future, playing global games of apocalyptic geopolitics. Complete with a chaste love story. You have to get through ALL the light novels before they even get to kiss. Jeesh! What’s left of the Arbalest’s AI wants a Camaro.
Suicide, bondage, stalking, madness, murderous jealousy. A high school class full of under-age nubile girls chasing a drama queen rich-boy teacher. A Japanese take on Harold and Maude, without the sex granny?
Why does this THING exist?
Uh, lookie: a few blogs I follow have gone ecstatic about the revival of some old manga. Is Genshiken even a Japanese word?
Pause and rewind. Dr Tamaki wrote Psychology of the Armored Cutie in the year 2000. He didn’t care to delve into the women’s flip side of the effect; he even dismissed the possibility that there were any significant number of Japanese manga fans who might not be quite “straight”. Write what you know. Tamaki, a Japanese Lacan-influenced psychologist [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamaki_Sait%C5%8D] dabbled in otakology only as a sideline to his work with social isolates. He had no interest in developing a unified otaku schmex-und-desire field theory. Besides, bricolage-ing Lacanian and Freudian pop cultural analysis at a very Japanese phenom was a wry joke in itself. Had not Lacan declared that the Japanese were fundamentally un-anylyze-able?
Want to know what was weirder? His simple monograph on otaku stirred up a half decade debate-feud among Japanese guy otaku “experts”. Watch a whole bunch of Japanese pop-cult theory guys manspalain that while –urrrr some otaku might, urrrrr, hmmmm, dojinshi, kleenex boxes, figurines, whatever– that was all beside the point, or the result of wimmins shoujo-ish poison infecting heroic manly sci-fi anime and manga, or just more of the same militaristic nationalism mind control, or something about databases…
They should have asked the women, since Japanese women had been quietly playing with this stuff since the 1970’s. Or, the boys had to go the long way around because the girls were being very very secret secret society about it all. I did mention the “second generation’ of the Genshiken, right?
So: stare into the pit too long and the pit does not stare back. Once in a while however, it glances provocatively over it’s shoulder and winks.
If you get geeked on this kind of theory-behind-the-genres thing, you can go all Da Vinci Code fast. Or you end up with the beginnings of a post-graduate research project. If young, with a passing grasp of Japanese, you may want to seek an advanced degree in some cultural studies-ish field related to Japan. Fair warning: most of the Japanese faculty positions open to outlander experts to reflect Japanese cultural ephemera back to Japanese undergraduates are already filled on a long-term, renewable every five years contract basis.
Yet theory holds its own form of moe. I remain a sucker for it. And because I try not to essentialise too much, I fixate on those odd bits of Contemporary Japanese Visual Culture that travel well into outlander (that’s you and moi) regions. Grey channel patterns of distribution help a lot. If a whole bunch of folks go through the trouble to translate, etc., etc., etc… there must be something there. Oh! Moar pr0n…
Now that Genshiken Nidaime has concluded I have less concentrated raw material to play with. I have to wander further afield, even if Kio-sensei continues to have fun with the old gang in the quarterly Spotted Flower. If you have not yet, you really should. That means the full manga run, not just the anime(s). As for Spotted Flower; the story takes place on a probability line where the original crew have all grown up as bored and horny 30-somethings. Either this is the Kio’s Gate result from playing with obscure IBM computers or the author is taking every single lewd doujinshi pairing and mulling over whether he could do better. Kio Shimoku is proprietary about his creations; competitive too.
Which invariably leads to, ahem, minority sexuality and gender expression in Japanese stuff. Set aside the made-by-and-for properties. They face sterner scrutiny than I, an outsider could ever offer. What gets fascinating is when “queer” characters get dropped into stories for nominally straight audiences. On one hand, real-life folks in somewhat similar circumstances gush to see representation that looks even a tiny bit like their realities. For the rest of us, reactions vary from hard-reactionary “get that xyz stuff out of my zyx” to -hmmmmmmm- and even “yes please, can I have another?”
It’s that old “the other” thing again, with a fresh coat of paint. Different classes, ethnicities, nationalities, cultures and (dare I use an imprecise term) “races” have all suffered this kind of interest before. Why not throw some queer into the pot as well? And am I not redoubling the offence by projecting my interests on the Japanese expression of this effect? Yes and no; Japan and co. are all grown up high modernists too; they are doing it back to us, we see them doing it at us as we are doing it at them and both of our gazes lock in mutual fascination. Could this be love? (2)
Search this blog for Adrian Piper
Meanwhile, queer characters are no longer used (as much) as scary villain sauce or even tragic object lessons (you can have your “pure, not-approved by society” love but the fates will be cruel in the end). What the sociology types call “established models of gender roles, desire, romance, family formation and child-rearing” are under heavy structural and economic pressure. They are falling apart all over the world and a few teens (or others) who really really don’t fit some highly idealised models are not the ones causing the collapse. Repeat: Gay marriage does not “threaten” marriage. Gay folks holding hands and sneaking a smooch in public does not destroy hand-holding, smooching or the public. No money, no steady jobs and /or benefits/ health care and crazed authoritarian politics are probably closer to what has gone sour, causing the Japanese high-end beach-front Pizza restaurant to close its tacky wedding chapel and reno it into a bus tour friendly mega-dining hall.
We all knew that reactionary religio-politico types; Japanese or North American or other were all just spewing bullshit to line their pockets by leading group-hate cheers. Shame on those who go along with it.
Curiously, after decades, even centuries of being nasty toward the gay, what do we now suddenly want from it? We imagine “they” must be experts at getting around all that rigid asshat proscriptive stuff and figuring the important stuff out for themselves, right?. So they must have secret insights! Also, they do the “to yourself be true” thing, which I sometimes call “the doctrine of authenticity” (and which gets all of us one way or another) and that is heroic in a way that removes no skin from my nose and is heartwarming to cheer on. Gawd, this is transactional and selfish as all get-out, just as it always has been. We are like that, even if we’re working on it. And if “they” are less than interested in sharing tips, we’ll just go and invent crude shadows of “the gay” to try out our nifty ideas in a story or two..
“The last violence we impose upon the queer of our straight imaginations
is the burden of our hopes.”
Sorry, but long, long ago too many of us (guys) were scared spit-less by Alice Sheldon’s (writing as James Tiptree Jr) “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston,_Houston,_Do_You_Read%3F] This, incidentally also explains gamer-gait and similar spasms. So, harm reduction…
Whether it is teen (and on) young women reading about two young good-looking guys trying to figure out their first make-out session, because guy characters can do things that might be too smutty or objectified for the readership if one (or both) of them were girls, or otokonoko otaku guys reading about stand-in straight boy getting hot and bothered over the crossdresser or trans continuum character (who incidentally does “girl” better that the run-of the mill cis version, in numerous subtle but important ways – (jeesh dude, what happens if you fall IRL for a cis girl who doesn’t look/present like a BFG in bikini armor, OL/ hawt teacher or moe blob?) whatever “model breaking” ends up relentlessly circling back to our majority cis heteronormative concerns – if only because they are so many of us. That, bucks and printing presses.
Whot De…??? They made the boy figure skater a full precure ??? This is a show for Japanese girl children! It was inevitable after they made the android girl from the future one earlier. Check out the heavy-duty sakuga in the battle scenes with the guest precures…
All this means something.
Scribble, scribble…
(1) 10 years ago I got half-way through puzzling out English subs from machine translated Chinese subtitles for Tachiguishi Retsuden (Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters) before I gave up. Only the folks at Sumimassen Scans could even hope to do this one justice. Brain Hurts! And yet I am convinced it was a big influence on Kumeta’s decision to Showa-out Zetsubo Sensei. Someone, please…
(2) “Since the 1950s area studies programs throughout the United States have produced knowledge in multiple disciplines about strategically identified geographical “areas.” But this knowledge tends to remain ghettoized in area studies departments and only rarely feeds back into the mainline disciplines. This is a result not only of continuing Eurocentrism in academia, but also of the isolating effects of the organization of area studies departments according to nation state, as well as, in the case of Japan studies, an insistence on Japanese cultural uniqueness that is underwritten not only by many Japanese scholars themselves but also by the funding priorities of Japanese government entities that are charged with propagating Japanese culture abroad. The vast amount of knowledge produced outside Japan about Japan thus remains suspended in a curious limbo, jealously guarded by its producers, like a fetish that compensates for their lack of access to the “larger” scholarly community. As Harry Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi put it, employing a striking metaphor that Freud would have had a field day with, “More than fifty years after the war’s end American scholars are still organizing knowledge as if confronted by an implacable enemy and thus driven by the desire either to destroy it or marry it.”
— Intro, Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture. Edited by Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.
(Don’t get too excited; the book is all about turn-of-the-century Japanese literature, except for the last entry on the rise of the pantsu fetish in 70’s Japanese “pinku” soft-core porn films. The research therein must also be taken with a grain of salt as it started out as a conference joke research paper, originally titled “Die Zizek Die!” )
“What’s done to the children is done to society.”
— Buddhist proverb
Spoiler warning: much to do with Franxx will be spoiled. As well there will be TLDR; on Japanese politics and revising the Japanese constitution, or not…
After watching the final episode of Darling in the Franxx, I like many viewers (and bloggers) leaned back and shook my head as if to wake and throw off a troubling dream. Sure there were parts, large slabs of it in fact that warranted examination but once you get past the action scene animation or the curious fighting robot/ mecha designs (Tittie bots! Giant fighting robots with girlish tittie bumps – ok, guy-ish robots have done worse but… ) and the cringe-inducing notion of doggie-sex positioned girl-boy pilot pairs…
Oh SNAP. Dealing with Franxx is like dealing with a crazy president. The weird shit just keeps getting thrown at you. You really don’t have a chance to deal with one bit of weird before another bounces off the wall and flies past your left ear. The overall “shape” of the whole remains somewhat consistent: some form of updating/ tribute to epic sci-fi anime franchises of decades gone by, but the bits appear to have been slapped together while the vehicle was already in motion using whatever was in the back seat or could be snagged off the side of the road with poles when they slow down to take a curve.
Ecological dystopia, domed cities, cynical ruling cabal, mad scientist, child soldiers raised in Brave New World creches, ever escalating levels of incomprehensible monsters, giant girly looking robots/ doggie-sex position piloting and
One Demon girl.
your Franxx was strong but you wanted proof…
Code/ name 0-2; Zero-Ni. O-ni; subtle-not. At least she doesn’t wear a tiger stripe bikini to go with her fixation on her “Darling”. Zero-Ni is the heroine of the story, lad notwithstanding. Of course the lad be captivated but this essay is NOT going to do Zero-Ni as Übermensch, so just stipulate and keep moving. Zero-Ni is so strong that she can even power up one of those giant robots (tittie version or boring on-spec version) herself – which as well could lead to strained metaphors which will not be indulged. Zero-Ni has a snarky “pro-from-Dover” attitude, follows orders whenever or not and seems to have enough privilege to get away with minor misbehavior because she is very good at killing the incredibly loud monsters (rendered in English as Klaxosaurs). Driven to kill in fact. Kill obsessed.
Beside her, all the other kids, pistils, stamens, post-gendered squad 9, adult-ish minders and the mad scientist Dr. Franxx pale. Also they get used a lot as plot road-kill. Boyo’s original partner Naomi is soon hustled off stage. As she departs, she gives our hero her belongings to distribute to her ex-comrades as if to say; “I ain’t coming back from this one, they are going to euthanize and dissect me or something, so fuck it.”
Moore wisely sticks to her thesis and doesn’t TLDR; out and wander all over the map (hold my beer) but notably links a lot of the attitude as to the proper roles of characters in Franxx to current real-world-Japan trends in politics and society. Specifically:
“A few weeks ago, Japanese lawmaker Mio Sugita stirred up international controversy when, on-camera, she chuckled about queer Japanese youth attempting suicide. She said that, since same-sex couples don’t reproduce, they are “unproductive” and not worth taxpayer money.
Her remarks sparked outrage, and thousands came to protest on the doorstep of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s headquarters. Although the LDP has disavowed her comments, other members have said similar things before.
[…]
In June 2018, the LDP’s secretary general, Toshihiro Nakai, said childless couples were “selfish.” Only a month before that, another LDP politician said that newlyweds should focus on having “three or more” children, and that single women are “letting the country down.” Another stated that women, rather than men, should be in charge of caring for children. Meanwhile, women who take maternity leave, especially politicians, face maternity harassment.”
— Moore
It had been hard to miss the recent glaring example of misbehavior by some of the ruling LDP party’s right-wing howling dogs. Imagine my surprise, when I was looking through chapter synopses of a new, open source academic anthology of essays on Japanese feminism and I run into the snippet intro-ing K. Hemman’s ch10 essay:
“In July of 2003, former Japanese prime minister Mori Yoshirō stated that women without children should not receive welfare benefits. “It is truly strange that we have to use tax money to take care of women who don’t even give birth once, who grow old living their lives selfishly and singing the praises of freedom,” Mori explained in a speech addressing Japan’s falling birthrate, which had reached an all-time low of 1.29 children per woman…”
— Dangerous Women and Dangerous Stories: Gendered Narration in Kirino Natsuo’s Grotesque and Real World by Kathryn Hemmann; Chapter 10 of Rethinking Japanese Feminisms, Editor(s): Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, James Welker, University of Hawai’i Press. (2018) https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv3zp07j.17
Clearly this “unproductive” manzai routine has a long history within the right-wing ranks of the LDP. Re-stating it and recycling it is alternatively a phatic gesture; a dog-whistle and a shout-out tribute to a senior faction player (now heading the 2020 Olympic Cttee — expect disaster) as well as being a calculated and cynically deployed lie. However Mio Sugita is more telling as symptom rather than as cause.
“It must be said that Sugita is not qualified to serve as a member of the Diet — a person who yields power to make laws as a representative of the people and make decisions on how to spend taxpayers’ money.
Sugita has made absurd arguments in the past. For example, she criticized moves seeking more day care centers, use of different surnames among married couples and support for LGBT individuals as acts “driven by the Comintern (an international organization of communist parties) to destroy Japanese families.”
LDP legislators are constantly making socially unacceptable remarks under the almost unchallenged long-term reign of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. They include unruly statements such as, “Moms are indeed the best people to raise children,” and, “Cancer patients don’t have to work.”
Sugita was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2012 on the ticket of the Japan Innovation Party. She lost her seat in the 2014 election, but was re-elected as an LDP candidate on the proportional representation list for the Chugoku region in western Japan in the 2017 general election. She now belongs to the Hosoda faction of the ruling party, from which Prime Minister Abe hails. The LDP bears a serious responsibility for leaving Sugita’s words and deeds unchecked.””
Why such a recent uptick in LDP wingnuts spouting-off?
Shinzo Abe has just sewn up his internal party election, secured his third term as leader of the LDP and therefore will remain Prime Minister of Japan. Mio-san, like the other rightists undoubtably voted for their patron. His opponent Ishiba Shigeru received 254 votes to Abe’s 553. Shigeru’s platform alluded to past and recent Abe-linked corruption scandals. Right-wingers picked their best friend, a champion of a puffed-up nationalism that serves as a blanket to hide if not legitimise decades of crony profiteering. Perhaps they sensed that Abe-san’s need for their votes gave them an opportunity to slip the leash and do some loud barking?
Mio-san later issued a grudging apology and Abe has remarked that she has is still young and holds promise.
Franxx‘s ruling APE conspiracy is resonant to Japanese viewers if only for its cynicism and ruthless instrumentalism. That its ultimate agenda involves the complete destruction of the earth and the psychic assimilation of the souls of all humanity is a suitably overdone restatement of the gulf between the public pronouncements of Japan’s political elites and their “apres moi le deluge” impulses.
The Anifem essay calls out the gender essentialism of Franxx as mirrored in contemporary Japanese politics and social discourse but slips past the greater, even genocidal instrumentalism that always hides behind extreme manifestations of statist authoritarianism. The Japanese 1945 Constitution is hated by the nationalists – according to the cover story, because it was ‘imposed” by the American occupation. Plenty of scholarship exists that argues that indigenous Japanese progressives; even an American-Japanese proto-feminist had significant roles and input in its drafting:
“We, the Japanese people, acting through our duly elected representatives in the National Diet, determined that we shall secure for ourselves and our posterity the fruits of peaceful cooperation with all nations and the blessings of liberty throughout this land, and resolved that never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government, do proclaim that sovereign power resides with the people and do firmly establish this Constitution. Government is a sacred trust of the people, the authority for which is derived from the people, the powers of which are exercised by the representatives of the people, and the benefits of which are enjoyed by the people. This is a universal principle of mankind upon which this Constitution is founded. We reject and revoke all constitutions, laws, ordinances, and rescripts in conflict herewith.”
Lookie how the preamble echoes the contemporaneous United Nations declaration and then cuts immediately to a categorical rejection and proscription of the kind of authoritarian absolutism that had marked power and rule in Japan since its earliest recorded histories. To put it in Twitter terms, the 1945 Constitution was written by Social Justice Warriors.
Meanwhile, the LDP had a committee of right-wingers beavering away at a replacement, properly Japanese constitution. The good news: it did not restore female debt-bond sexual slavery. The bad news: pretty well everything else. As always, any organised tendencies that spit at SJWs are at very least after some dodgy fast money and at worst are wannabe slavers and genocides. Final good news; they went so overboard on it that it was dead in the water the second it was released. Abe & co. now say they will attempt amendments via a stealthy incremental approach.
“As many scholars have pointed out, the 2012 draft rejects all three core principles of the current constitution: people’s sovereignty, human rights and the rejection of war (including denunciation of wars by the Japanese Imperial army). Reflecting historical revisionism, this completely revises the current preamble, which is based precisely on those principles. The newly proposed draft preamble reads:
Japan is a nation with a long history and unique culture, having the Emperor as the symbol of the unity of the people…
The Japanese people, defend our country and homeland with pride and strong spirit,… value harmony, and form a nation where families and the whole society assist one another […]
The Japanese people, in order to pass on our good traditions and our nation-state to our descendants in perpetuity, hereby establish this Constitution.
The 2012 draft thus emphasizes Japanese tradition as represented by the Emperor, the duty to defend the country, and family values. People’s sovereignty is undermined by the fact that the Emperor is designated the head of the state in the preamble and in Article One. Respect for fundamental human rights is constrained by the demands of public order detailed in Articles 12 and 13, and importantly, Japanese citizens are no longer respected as “individuals” but only as “persons”. Needless to say, the principle of renunciation of war in Article 9 is dismissed in favor of establishing a national defense army.
Higuchi Yōichi has criticized the 2012 draft as being worse than the “Five Articles of the Charter Oath” [Gokajō no goseimon], the foundational document of the Meiji regime, published in 1868. The LDP draft, he writes, is “not a return to the Meiji Constitution but rather like one of the proclamations of the Keian era (1648-1652) – the edicts imposed on Japanese peasants and others by the Tokugawa Shogunate].”20 In a conversation with Higuchi, another scholar of constitutional law, Kobayashi Setsu recalls that he once tried to explain to members of the LDP that “the constitution does not exist to constrain the people, but should serve as the supreme law that limits the power of the state,”21 and was taken aback at the politicians lack of understanding of this fundamental point. The 2012 draft is not simply a revision, but the destruction or total negation of principles of the current constitution. In fact, Abe firmly believes that the view of constitutionalism shared by most social science scholars was biased or old fashioned. “”
— Prime Minster Abe’s Constitutional Campaign and the Assault on Individual Rights by Okano Yayo, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (March 2018) https://apjjf.org/2018/5/Okano.html
CRAP! Who would do such a nasty thing?
“At its launch, the Nippon Kaigi Diet Members League had 189 members from both chambers. The number continued to increase, and as of November 2015, there were 281 members (mostly LDP), and the members of the Nippon Kaigi Diet Members League were the largest force in both houses with around 40 percent of the 717 Diet members. This rightwing league was behind the launching of the three Abe cabinets. Abe was the League’s key person as party president and prime minister. In the 3rd Abe Cabinet, 16 out of the 20 (80 percent) of the ministers are members of the Nippon Kaigi Diet Members League.
The Nippon Kaigi, with its close ties to the Diet Members League, is now running Japanese politics. One example can be seen in the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), which from 2002 has distributed, to all elementary and middle-school children, supplemental educational pamphlets called Kokoro no Nōto [Notes for the Heart] (four levels: 1st and 2nd graders, 3rd and 4th graders, 5th and 6th graders, and middle-school use). The materials promote official moral values, starting with love of country, and are aimed at controlling the minds of children.”
— What is the Aim of Nippon Kaigi, the Ultra-Right Organization that Supports Japan’s Abe Administration? by Tawara Yoshifumi, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (Nov 2017) https://apjjf.org/2017/21/Tawara.html
And:
“The Abe administration’s “education rebuilding” policy was realized with the passage of the revised Fundamental Law of Education in 2006. The policy aims to create “human resources” (jinzai) to carry out the goals of the new law. Abe’s “education rebuilding” policy aims at 1) the cultivation of human resources sought by large corporations seeking to win in global competition; and 2) education that will produce a “national army” and supporters of the same. In both aims for human resources education, there must be inculcated in the schools a sense of “patriotism” and “morality,” and in order to realize these aims, the system of education and type of textbook are essential. The Abe administration stresses that “education rebuilding is the foundation for realizing a society in which there is “dynamic engagement of all 100 million citizens” [ichioku sōkatsuyaku].
Setting up a council to carry out education rebuilding, the Abe administration moved forward at a fast pace with various “educational reforms” to nurture such human resources. The main reforms included: 1) strengthening control over the contents of education; 2) nurturing effective human resources for the sake of the large corporations; and 3) controlling school administrators and teachers.
To accomplish that, the system of screening textbooks was revised. What had been treated as a “special course” of “moral education” [dōtoku] was elevated to the status of official subject entailing evaluation, (on a par with courses such as mathematics). The education guidelines were greatly revised to make this possible.
The next version of the education guidelines comprehensively control the education system with the state setting not only the contents of what is being taught but also the instructional method used by teachers, the way schools should be run, and even the relationship between schools and the home and local community. The system has changed from one in which the dignity of children is respected and the aim is character development to one shifted 180 degree toward creating “human resources” that will serve the state, national interests, and the interests of corporate giants. ”
— ibid Yoshifumi (1)
Also:
“Article 97 of Japan’s Constitution delivers a stirring declaration of the heritage of these rights: “The fundamental human rights by this Constitution guaranteed to the people of Japan are fruits of the age-old struggle of man to be free; they have survived the many exacting tests for durability and are conferred upon this and future generations in trust, to be held for all time inviolate.”
The LDP proposes to simply delete these words. The Party provides no explanation for this in its Q&A pamphlet, so we can’t be entirely sure about its motivation. I assume that Party leaders are most offended by the notion of an “age-old struggle of man to be free.”
Japan’s Democracy at Risk – The LDP’s Ten Most Dangerous Proposals for Constitutional Change 危機に瀕する日本の民主主義 自民党憲法改正案、最も危険な10項目 by Lawrence Repeta (Japanese translation courtesy of Takahiro Katsumi0, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, (July 14, 2013) https://apjjf.org/2013/11/28/Lawrence-Rpeta/3969/article.html
Dissecting the Wave of Books on Nippon Kaigi, the Rightwing Mass Movement that Threatens Japan’s Future by Saito Masami, Nogawa Motokazu and Hayakawa Tadanori. Introduction by Sven Saaler. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (October 4, 2018) https://apjjf.org/2018/19/Saito.html
Did you think that Franxx‘s evil wurld gummint cabal, complete with stylised monkey masks and “Papa” authority over the child soldiers was overdone?
Parasites?
To push at the edges of heavy-handed allegory in Franxx you have to stay relentlessly within a heteronormative male viewer frame of reference but if you do, you can see a standard sci-fi allegory as critique of instrumental authority — of the kind that the Franxx‘s Japanese audience’s demographic would instantly recognise. The kids in the “birdcage” are a lab experiment to see what happens when you allow a small resurgence of individuality and gender expression. They even have individualised girlish robots and… Lo and behold, one of their number is able to survive more than three piloting sessions with star quarterback demon-girl. They fight like kittens until leveled up but that’s immaterial as long as being with them motivates demon-girl to vainly seek to become more human and less demon by killing ever more of her own kind.
Before this essay bogs down in lefty contemporary Japanese politics articles, we can try to go at Franxx sidewise and note what it doesn’t do. Take for instance that even though we have invading aliens, we do not get the usual ‘Black Ships’ plot – a fave for lazy Japanese pop-cult allegories. Those robots: while they are clearly Eva lineage, rather than the usual blocky mecha lineage, it isn’t the boy who gets to spaz out to super-power one up. It is Zero-two demon girl who goes on solo rampages. Once again, a Beautiful Fighting Girl is trotted out for boy viewers. This raises the relentless guy-Ota-King gaze of Franxx. While not inconceivable that women might tune in to watch Franxx, they risk laughing themselves into stitches. Doggie-sex piloting positions? What nitwits came up with that one? Was not Infinite Stratos bad enough to prevent recurrences of this kind of foolishness? Perhaps there are some bishies worth some fun “transformative” interpretation?
Euuhyechhh. The writers did a clumsy “salting” of same-sex desire and gender politics in the story. Very clumsy. The rotten tribes are infinitely inventive when they get the urge to ship but if you leave a ham-fisted set-up out as bait it annoys them.
As well, Franxx has villains but no Adversaries, save for the late-on-the-scene Klaxasaur Queen who descends from the wires.
There isn’t a whole lot to work with here.
The Childbirth and Politics beat is closer to the nut but elides the only weighty (relentlessly heteronormative) antimony of the story. Sure all the girl child soldiers except the woman-loving one must heroically fulfill their biological essentialisms, just as Prime Minister Abe and the entire right-wing-militarist-shinto-nationalist power structure of Japan has been harping at them for decades…
However…
The world of the evil treat-the-kiddies-as-disposable-child-soldiers-while-the-adults-are-sterile and ruled by a nefarious government science conspiracy HAS TO BE TOTALLY OBLITERATED, a la 1909 E.M.Forester The Machine Stops catastrophe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops]…
…Before the kids can pappa-mamma.
The lad with misplaced feelings of admiration settles for a girlfriend; the sole lesbian becomes a doctor, the gender-hating squad 9 go off into space to meet their destiny as kamikaze warriors serving as honor guard to Zero-ni, now queen of all Klaxosaurs and merged with a honking giant aryan babe centaur mecha that also needs to vore buddy boy so that it can obliterate the ever-waiting eon-spanning threat of the animation studio logo beings.
Survivors back on earth get to do the Whole Earth Catalog.
“Farming by hand is backbreaking work.” — Slavoj Zizek
At least all of the pregnant and child-raising gender essentialised ex-pilot young women command the full resources and support of the surviving human enclave. The Japanese right may call on the women folk of the nation to be “productive”, may push gender essentialism as part of a nationalist “Heimat” fantasy of family structure but they remain resolutely unwilling to spend any more money on programs or do anything else to reduce the very social and economic pressures that work against family formation.
Ladies, get pregnant yesterday and sign up for a second shift at the 7-11.
Over 50% of Japanese single parent mothers live UNDER the poverty line. Child support is arranged by private contract if at all. Social costs continue to be shifted onto prefectural and local governments, who in turn shift it onto users in the form of fees. Full-time employment with benefits is out of reach for more than %40 of the workforce. You get fired if you want to take maternity leave. %40-60 of men and women of marriageable age have given up on the dream of ever getting married and it aint because they want to marry their game consoles…
Mio-san and the cabal she performs for can spout off about unproductive gays or unproductive single women but most Japanese people under the age of 60 will shake their heads because they know perfectly well that this tired line is a crock of shit. How original; shift all the blame and responsibility onto individuals-as-subjects with a time-worn cheap-ass notion of state authority. Never heard that one before… this afternoon.
Another damming trend:
“Suicide leading cause of death among pregnant women, new mothers: survey
TOKYO — The leading cause of death among pregnant women and new mothers from 2015 through 2016 in Japan was suicide, making up about 30 percent of the total, according to a survey by the National Center for Child Health and Development and other research institutes.
[…]
Of the 92 women who took their own lives, those aged 35 or older totaled 45, and people who had their first delivery numbered 60 or 65 percent. The suicide rate was higher in jobless families.”
— Suicide is the leading cause of death for all persons in the 15～39 age bracket.Mainichi Japan, (September 6, 2018) http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180906/p2a/00m/0na/031000c
Then again, suicide is the leading cause of death for all persons in the 15～39 age bracket.
More:
“Indeed, members of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) keep demonstrating their world view is still deeply rooted in pre-war thought, before Japan had a constitution guaranteeing gender equality, popular sovereignty, and basic human rights. On May 10, another LDP politician, Kanji Kato. stated that single women were a burden to the nation and also added that “I always tell every newly wedded couple that they need to have three children or more,” recalling the pre-war slogan of Umeyo, Fuyaseyo (breed more, make more soldiers for the nation).
…
One in six children in Japan now lives in poverty. Half of all single mother households do as well. The number of people who have regular employment with all the benefits it carries has been declining for years. Death by overwork (karoshi) is a chronic problem that won’t go away and Abe’s latest “labor reforms” are certainly going to make life harder for anyone who isn’t a CEO. In fact, they legalize 100 hours of overtime a month, 20 hours more than what the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare deems dangerous. Some jobs will have overtime pay removed entirely. Technically, you can’t work to death if no one keeps track of your hours, or has responsibility for them, so perhaps that’s one way to eliminate the problem.””
“The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education showed attitude to interview the Mainichi Shimbun on interviews by the Mainichi Shimbun regarding sex education classes in which one junior high school in Adachi – ku, Tokyo explained sexual intercourse, contraception, abortion to third graders. The school will continue classes in the future. In this issue, LDP lawmakers criticize the class at the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, and the urban board of education departs from the scope of the instructional guidelines.
…
Liberal Democratic Party member Toshiaki Koga, who criticized the class at the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly. In the past gathering, “purity education to refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage is necessary” “values after war to self-decide to marry, do not self-decide in the first place are problems, marriage, childbirth, child rearing contribute to society” etc.”
Or, per Twitter user @neko_guruma01
Tokyo Metropolitan assemblyman Koga (LDP): We should teach kids that
– having sex before they get married is bad
– deciding for themselves whether they marry or not is wrong
– marrying and having kids is to make an important contribution to society
Despite all, the ultra-nationalist manzai routine remains very very popular among some factions of the LDP.
Young singles of Japan. If you wish to be able to marry and reproduce without starving or being worked to death, the LDP, the Keidanren [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Business_Federation] and the Nippon Kagi must be stuffed into a barrel and dropped into the sea, preferably from a great height. Vote Communist, subscribe to Akahata today!
Or….
Redefine the idea of family and live in communal poverty while working at shit jobs and shoplifting dinner:
From the less-polite longer version in the Daily Beast:
“Kore-eda, in the course of doing research for the movie, also spoke with non-profit organizations and visited a care home for abused children. It was this visit that stuck in his mind. “While we were there, kids started to come back from school and I asked one little girl what she was studying at school. She pulled out her Japanese class textbook from her backpack and suddenly started reading Leo Lionni’s Swimmy out loud to us. The facility staff scolded her, ‘Everyone’s busy, you shouldn’t bother them,’ but she refused to listen and read to us the story from beginning to end. When she finished and we all clapped for her, she beamed at us with such joy. It was in that moment I thought, maybe what she really wants is to read that out loud to her parents who she doesn’t get to live with. After that, the face of this little girl reading to us haunted me and I wrote the scene in which the boy reads his textbook out loud right away.”
“Ironically, on the day of the Kore-eda press conference, Tokyo police arrested a married couple on suspicion of neglect resulting in the death of the mother’s 5-year-old daughter. The little girl left behind a notebook pleading with her parents to stop abusing her, promising to work harder. The child had been previously taken into protective custody and the police in another prefecture had twice recommended her stepfather be prosecuted for abuse. The authorities kept returning her to her “real parents” until they finally killed her. That’s how the Japanese government protects children.”
— Ibid Adelstein, THE TALE OF MISOGYNY
If you don’t have a proper Class War (or alien invasion), nobody will be able to marry and all the kids will end up in military orphanages, raised to fight to the death for “Papa”. Or die of abuse. Or survive by living in squalid petty theft communes. At least they won’t be raised by queer parents!
LDP representative Mio Sugito is curiously nuanced in her homophobia. She claims to have nothing against gay people and recognises the historical existence of homosexuality in Japan. It is only when gay, trans and other queer folk pick up strange outlander notions, get uppity and start agitating in the Asahi Shinbum – Japan’s premiere (mildly) liberal newspaper (whom Sugita associates with an International Communist Conspiracy) – do they become a danger to the nation. The next thing you know, brothers and sisters are wanting to get married, people are marrying their game consoles and the libb-rull apocalypse is at hand. Did she not herself once experience a girl-crush in high school? She got over it and went on to a successful career as a reactionary flak. Ladies, pull up your socks and get with the program!
Biology-is-destiny complaints aside, there are plenty of folks in Japan, as in other countries, that would love to have and/or raise children if only it wasn’t economically or legally impossible. LGBTQ folks are as prone to social conformity and competency at family formation and child-rearing as straight folks. If western experience is any example they might well be slightly more disposed to weather the social and economic forces that discourage child-rearing in contemporary Japan. Two moms? that works. Two dads? That might involve adoption but surprise; few people adopt other people’s children in Japan. Japanese practice terms adoption of children as “special adoption” because it is so rare. (2) I wonder if two dads could remedy this problem. Trans* parents should also have the option to run the baby route, so why not quietly ditch the nazi-eugenics inspired sterilization and full surgery requirements for official gender re-assignment?
If Abe and the LDP want more child-raising family units (and wish to further cheap out on orphanage costs) a simple equivalent-to-marriage civil union addition to Japan’s laws could be passed into law tomorrow. No need to save gay marriage for a soften-up-the-voters trial run constitutional amendment. This is all well-known. Japanese activists know all the grotty details of how their country’s Family Law is messed up, from child support, to the nightmare of the family registry, to nearly non-existent adoption rates, maternity leave, child abuse, discrimination against “illegitimate” children, bullying… The list is exhausting.
Rightists and the Nippon Kagi‘s solution to any of these ills is to exhort Japanese women to somehow “take care of it” for free.
Everyone in Japan knows this. Everyone knows that the right are full of shit. When they spout off, it is the same as with western reactionaries; pump up the thuggish “base” and make a show of power to everyone else. Then cash in on your “patriotism” with some crony rewards.
“You calling me a liar?”
Against this frightening spectre of a modern Japan lurching towards authoritarianism under the influence of a secretive cabal, there stands the powerful and reassuring weight of social conformity and institutional inertia. And the LDP. Surprisingly enough – there are social progressives in the LDP. “Not all LDP” are war-crazed feudal lord wannabes. Japan’s LDP is a multi-party political system in and of itself. As it takes 3 blue moons in a row plus a Prime Minister and cabinet screwing sheep on the front steps of the Diet for the LDP to lose power for a year an a half, all the action in Japanese politics happens within the LDP.
There are factions that are somewhat disposed to grabbing, watering down and rolling out token progressive social policy initiatives, if only to maintain power. Outside observers have even ventured that the LDP makes a home for wingnuts within their ranks and throws token bones to them (as well as letting them run off-leash every so often) lest the rightists go all secret-secret-death-culty if expelled and start doing political terrorism.
Japanese rightists were historically noted for their taste for political assassination, seppukku after bizarre manifesto readings and whipping up lynch mobs against Japanese Koreans after earthquakes. They just do that kind of stuff. Better to have them inside the tent pissing out. Give them a warm blanket, a place by the fire and let them get fat and lazy. Overstaffed Japanese police forces might spend too much time running surveillance and harassment on the few members of the official Communist party but there is no need to re-deploy them against the sound truck nuts. The sound truck nuts are (mostly) well-behaved co-opted allies of the ruling party.
This highlights a further curious happenstance of Japanese political approaches to social policy issues: right-wingers can wave around the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers, Sailors and Schoolchildren because few other factions within the LDP or opposition parties give a flying squirrel about social policy issues. Within the LDP, daycare centers don’t kick back campaign contributions; best to leave that kind of stuff to local governments (3) and/or the Soka Gakkai backed Komeito.
With the power of the local women’s chapters within the Soka Gakkai and Komeito, plus their nominal do-gooder Buddhism image one would think that they would be a continuous force of agitation for social policy innovation. Instead they appear to be curiously reactive. Their ineffective resistance to the recent Casino legislation is typical. The Komeito‘s only political absolute is to ally itself to power and prevent any persecution or interference with the Soka Gakkai. The Komeito‘s sole social policy constant is probably that people should join the Soka Gakkai. One more quasi-religious power bloc scurrying about in the wings.
The CDP is a new party, born out of the disintegration of a previous catch-all party, whose rightists all bugged off to join a new, even more rightist party led by the charismatic governor of Tokyo. She promptly ran away from the mess during their first federal election and left a lot of hacks floundering. Meanwhile the liberal-leaning refugees banded together to form a new, radical party dedicated to keeping the Japanese constitution exactly as it is, with no damn amendments whatsoever. This is radical in Japan. They have also proven to be media and social-networking savvy, so they may yet become a force for social policy innovation. What the right’s cynical use of hot-button “social” and “family” issues proves is that in Japan, as in the west, progressive forces need to develop and articulate a broad consensus vision of the individual and the family, within society. One that features employment, enforced workplace regulations and has social safety net would be a start. Otherwise opportunists and scammers step into the policy vacuum and turn human lives into fodder for jingoism.
Is this beyond Japan’s (and our) abilities? Are such dreams only possible in China?
Where does this leave us with Franxx? Aside from the unsurprising tendency to fill in the bits between the giant robots vs incomprehensible geometric monster fights with resonant sociopolitical filler, not much. One might as well try to glean insights into trends in Japanese education policy in the early 21st century through a close reading/ watching of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. That Franxx padded out its story by letting the kids grow up and make babies the old-fashioned way, once the ruling evil old men (and sneaky aliens and sterile, net-addicted adults) were wiped out was a simple and obvious pitch towards the sympathies of Japanese viewers of a certain demographic.
Dammit, we wanted Ota-princes and we got Netto-uyoku
Franxx is a spaghetti-at-the-wall sci-fi epic. It could have had the good doctor live and announce his nifty procedure for M-preg, or that along with the cavern full of washed out pistil & stamen kids in suspended animation waiting to be revived, there were also 90 miles of caverns full of viable, almost to term test-tube babies in suspended animation. Therefore everybody, boys and girls alike got to greet the new era by helping out in the nursery, for decades. Deduct four points for lack of imagination by the writers. Unfortunately, baby-making essentialism comes with the hippie commune Whole Earth Catalog ending; the WEC itself being an artifact of less enlightened times.
Does Franxx plant its butt on the ash-heap of history by suggesting that all or almost all of the surviving young ex-soldier women naturally -must- become “good wives and wise mothers”? Would it have won a grudging pass if more of them were shown to put off the maternity route if favor of exploration, administration, governance and farm machinery maintenance? Does the controversy boil down to ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you have to”? Boys squad to the nursery STAT!
Anything else? Oh yeah: star-crossed love affairs with super-powered outlander girls will NOT yield a happy family life but must end in heroic double love suicides.
At some point it could be instructive to track representations of family in anime and manga over the last 30 years. I suspect it would run from majority “ideal supportive Japanese extended” through “nuclear” to absent father/ single mother and finally parent(s) dead/ vanished/ work overseas, siblings supporting each other households – with outlying horrorshow instances – but that is just initial speculation. Family/home substitutes could use a survey as well. I predict share-houses as the next big thing; an update on ever-popular eccentric rooming-house tropes.
One could even quantify the heck out of this kind of study so that it would smell science-y.
Another interesting exercise would be to close-read-watch the few remaining young-girl-gaze anime properties and note how they build and use character and story (while still managing to sell sparkly plastic toys.) to foster dreams of independent, mature adult femininity with agency and an elaborate (though NOT skeevy skin flashing) wardrobe. And long, thin legs. The fashion model legs seem important.
Have a seat and get comfy, that one could take a while.
ENDNOTES:
(1) More details on the push for “moral education”, including nonsense that required erasing bakeries (yes, bread) from schoolbooks!
English subs added to a Japanese documentary on right-wing efforts to control school textbooks and curriculum. Details and transcript: “Education and Patriotism” (Kyōiku to aikoku). A Documentary
Translated by Collin Rusneac with an Introduction by Sven Saaler. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, (September 15, 2018) https://apjjf.org/2018/16/Rusneac.htm
You may or may not have already heard the term ‘the male gaze‘. It originally came from a film criticism essay. We now find it used to examine all kinds of visual culture artifacts. I was thinking about it recently as I was going over my anime watch list for the January-February-March 2018 season. Most of what I had settled on watching was “girly stuff” or rather exclusive girl character stories, except for one slapstick comedy and one fanservice train-wreck. Thankfully, there seemed to be a sliding continuum of moe/ CGDCT / fan-service, so I am not damned for all eternity.(Slow, slow run the horses of the night…) I’m not exactly sure who these stories’ gazes are made for or rather, whether the strict gendering of gaze has not been blurred by dint of market pressure. (1)
Sora Yori mo Tooi Basho/ A Place Further than the Universe is a girl’s adventure story with lead characters who are all responsible and have their own reasons for wanting to go on an expedition to Antarctica. Of note as well are the two expedition organisers we see the most of, who are both serious 20-something women and who have done this before. One of them is conflicted about the first girl’s determined reason for going on the trip. Men pop up in the background but this is overwhelmingly a women’s story of women’s efforts.
In another all women show, Takunomi, 20-something working women drink during their free time. Short 12-minute episodes about career women who live in a share-house and drink to relax while eating side dishes. Even less detailed than the manga Nomi Joshi. (1) Each episode features a different booze and each is a product placement deal. A manga has been whomped up to go along with the campaign.
One couldn’t say that the show is a fan service fest. It looks like it is aimed at office ladies looking for tips on how they should be drinking during their precious few moments of time off. The talk is mercifully free of ‘I’m getting old and need to find a guy” crap. Again, guys show up in the background but this is a women’s homosocial – another one of those academic-ish terms, originally invented to describe all-guy stories by literary criticism types who wanted to read gay subtext into every single 19th century manly-man‘s novel with no women doing anything of note in them. Kind of like slash and/or BL, only with tenure. Lest I be accused again of being ‘smarmy’, E.K.Sedgwick was probably dead right about most of the manly-man stories she set her sights on but from then on it gets complicated. The term remains useful.
Drinking with friends is important for working women. Here is a panel from the just-ended, long-running twitter web comic by @black9arrows about the tribulations of the Lone Office Lady:
Next up is the wonderful Yuru Camp/ Laid-back Camping. It starts off with one solitary camping girl who doesn’t like company and the Genki Airhead Girl who pesters her to be her friend. Airhead Girl bugs her older sister to drive her to campgrounds around the Hakone area. Then it picks up two more high school girls in a camping club that has yet to go camping. They discuss camping gear. They go camping. They go to a campground onsen. They cook camp meals. Mount Fuji comes into view. Again there’s nothing much in the way of fanservice or appeals to weird guy-otaku interests.
There are some great moments; as when the young camping club members who have never gone camping before discuss the ultimate winter camping tent and end up re-inventing the kotatsu.
At the bottom of my list of Cute or not Girls or Women doing things that may or may not be Cute in the winter 2018 anime season is Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san/ Koizumi-san loves Ramen.
It definitely is a male-gaze property and seems to exist so that we can get close-ups of Koizumi-san (who looks like she escaped from Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei’s classroom) slurping ramen and blushing. Also Koizumi-san’s legs as she walks away wearing a too-short school uniform skirt from the POV of the girl who wants to be her friend and has a clumsy yuri crush on her.
You get to learn a lot about varieties of ramen so it’s not a total write off. Guys watching get to dream about meeting a beautiful high-school girl who won’t mind going on endless cheap dates to ramen restaurants and would not complain that an exclusive diet of ramen might make them overweight.
I also tried watching something called Marchen Madchen. Nope…
Finally my last two choices: Franxx and Psi(2). Saiki Kusuo No PSI Nan (2) sticks very close to the manga, which is stupid and yet howlingly funny in unexpected ways. It has a high school ensemble cast of self-absorbed guys and girls who drag our hero into ever deeper layers of trouble – I’ll be back to it later, as it inadvertently suggests an approach to understanding part of the problem I’m digging at.
Darling in the Franxx or rather Infinite Stratos meets Logans Run is a return-to-Gainax fanservice train-wreck. Disposable orphan boy and girl child soldiers have to pilot giant Evangelion-ish robots by getting into doggie-sex positions because the mad scientist who invented them is a pervy creep. Also, monsters attack the post-apocalyptic city walls. Also, the part-monster girl babe who wants to be “on top”. The characterisation for all besides Monster Girl are boringly thin, The other pairs can’t “get it up” sufficiently to fight the monsters and only crazed Monster Girl and whatever hapless guy she snares, can. The kids are all named with numbers, their “names” are nicknames. Monster/ Demon Girl is without a nickname and known only as 02. Zero-Ni. “O-Ni”. Wow; subtle…
So; January, February, March 2018. If I exclusively needed guy stuff, aside from Franxx, I would be in despair. I am probably missing some other anime that failed to pop up on my radar and may be full of conventional gendered roles and bro heroics, along with endless level-up battles, try-your-best lessons and buddy-banter. They must be out there somewhere.
Meanwhile I seem to have snuck in a generic “this is what I’m watching this season” anime roundup into this blog, along with a few grumbles about thin pickings. You could go to any number of other blogs or Twitter and get better recommendations.
I need a reason for doing this.
I’ll try grinding on the male gaze or gendered gaze thing. First set out extremes. For the women’s gaze, something like Maria-sama ga Miteru/ Maria-sama Watches Over Us. I made it 7 episodes in before I ran away, creeped out. It wasn’t the soulful friendships between young women that threw me. The Cath stuff snuck up on me. Somewhere in the world there are Catholic high schools that do wonderful work with students who love the experience and cherish the education and the friendships that they made there throughout their lives. I didn’t go to one of those. I’m sure they were plenty worse educational experiences but those didn’t happen to me. My 4 years in a Catholic High School felt like being trapped in the Hitler Youth while secretly being not quite Aryan (and loathing nazi shyte). I managed to get out of there more or less intact but it took a lot of work and emotional turmoil. I’m sure imaginary Japanese’s Catholic girls schools do a much better job of things.
But I digress. Aside from me getting weirded out, Marimite works as a series of slow, intricately built character studies and emotional interactions between young women. Not so much yuri or romantic subtext as much as a fully imagined society. A senior blogger’s recent paean [http://okazu.yuricon.com/2018/01/28/maria-sama-ga-miteru-20-years-of-watching-mary-watching-us/] to the entire opus praises it for among other things; showcasing the development of leadership skills among young women.
Consider Marimite a “women’s gaze” story exemplar.
On the other end of the scale, maybe draft Gintama, Gasaraki and/ or Evangelion. Made for guys. Women characters are there to support the guy main chara and for guys to look at. Perhaps the “which is the most manly-man anime ever made?” debate has already been done to death. I have probably picked the wrong animes but I never got around to Fist of the North Star, so I burn/ (am already…).
Once we get beyond simple surface appearances, we are into the moe thickets and the loli-bait. Looks like a young girl’s magical girl series but is for “older friends”. Then you get Idol schools and finally the current crop of CGDCT nothing-much-happens shows that build on K-on and Joshiraku. Surprisingly, these are easy to understand on a meta-level, especially when one considers extreme variant phenomenon like BL and fanservice yuri.
Meanwhile, a bit more about the original male gaze concept. The observation was that movies were shot from a POV and for the “view” of the default viewer, which usually meant the guy viewer. Other writers and even the original theorist went back and added caveats which can be summarised in the observation that a filmic narrative is uniquely suited to imposing a gaze, including a gendered one, upon the viewer. After all, the viewers are along for the ride, neh? It just seems to be a western conceit that a lot of movies/ videos tell their stories from the POV of a guy, usually a straight middle-class, even pale-skinned guy.
From this observation we can better understand the various “gates” involving games and the noisy butthurt that occurs when say, Ghostbusters is re-done with women charas. The folks pushing back implicitly acknowledge that the default gaze is not set in stone. If they don’t scream to the heavens, they will be “cast on the ash-heap of history” or some other portentous sounding nonsense. At very least, some resources that once went to exclusively pandering to them might be diverted to other audiences and the absolute number of way kewl things made for them could diminish.
Or something…
Note the assumptions in this kind of thought. Creativity is a zero-sum game, narratives can be somehow “contaminated” or “usurped” and most importantly, that there are proper ways to do a guy-view story as well as ways that are not as good, descending on a scale to “recruit you for ISIS” to “make you gay” or… I have no idea. Maybe turn us guys into Drag Queen school busses or robot toaster cats enslaved to feminazis. Also no more Mom cooking for us and doing our laundry.
Or something…
Meanwhile, am I second guessing myself because I find myself bingeing on girl main chara anime? Why am I doing this? Am I secretly lusting for high school girls? I used to be pretty sure this was not my thing; I don’t even jokingly entertain the idea of “waifu“. Overdone fanservice annoys me. I better get back to Japan fast and spend quality time with She-who… The best I can figure is that the stock types of girl main and secondary characters do not annoy me anywhere as much as the limited range of stock shonen guy characters.
It is all about avoiding over-used annoying things.
My sweetie will often remark how she can’t watch an anime because the voices of the girl characters are annoying. Or they use Keigo inappropriately – why the over-polite mode towards everyone including your cat in Flying Witch? Why so squeaky and high voiced in a number of other anime? Other viewers might condemn an entire anime because no high school girl could be so hopelessly inept and helpless as to forget how to ride a granny bike on the first day of school and therefore all the young women in the show as well as the viewers, writers and producers are class enemies!
As a guy, especially a guy who can barely understand 40 Japanese words, I don’t pay much notice to such things. Unless the fanservice hits in a tsunami of pantsu shots and asymmetrical boobie jiggles, I just read the girl charas as “young human, no annoying chara tropes, pray continue.” The girl charas have, by process of elimination (of annoying things) become the “default” characters.
What then has happened to my gaze?
It is as if the condition noted decades ago by Yukari Fujimoto in her “Where Do I Belong? The Shape Of the Heart As Reflected in Shoujo Manga” [fan translation at: http://owlectomy.dreamwidth.org/114796.html ]
regarding the gendering of the female character/ subject in the view of the male has been tumbled butt over teakettle.
I want to see the cartoon young women of “A place Further” make it to Antarctica, have an exciting time of it and get back safely. I hope the first of them doesn’t have to experience unbearable trauma over the memories of her mother who vanished in an Antarctic blizzard. I really, really hope they don’t find the frozen body! I will cry foul if Mom is still alive, working as a cook at a nearby base and she played dead because bill collectors were after her (a trick used in The Otaku’s Daughter). Otherwise, watch them go on an expedition. Girl #2’s best friend was all clingy, secretly tried to sabotage the mission and tearfully repents. Ok, I’ll buy that. No BL subtext fistfights required. Frenemy should pull up her socks and get on the next expedition. I’ll keep watching this. I wonder how involved it will get?
With Takunomi, I take refuge in prior academic/ sociological studies (3) for context. I also remember the similarly themed Office Ladies Go Drinking manga. So far they have held forth on Ebisu Beer, some shochu, a cat-labeled light Belgian-style beer and some Chu-hai. That’s cool. Hope they get into speciality shochus. I had a buckwheat shochu from Nagano that was really tasty. I wonder if they will do unfiltered sake or farm sake. Otherwise, more background on the Japanese propensity of guys and girls to socialize among themselves in gender-segregated groups plus tips on side-dishes. That “homosocial” thing again. Mixed nights out turn into “mixers’ and those feels like work. Speaking of work, “night out” events are not workplace drinking events; the latter are fraught with hierarchy, difference, seku-hara to be avoided and office politics. More work.
With Yuru Camp I was struck with an irrational worry during the first episode that the Genki Airhead Girl would be denounced in outlander blogs as a class enemy for acting like a helpless idiot. Genki Girl soon redeems herself by proving that eating alone is far less fun than sharing a spicy hot-pot. Using the ubiquitous portable hot-pot gas heater as camping equipment was a good twist as well; everyone in Japan has one of those, although for hardcore campers, such a rig is probably considered too bulky. Solitary camping girl is still ranging farther than the outdoor club trio but we can expect that they will camp together sooner or later. So far no fanservice (that onsen sequence did not count), some light humour and the potential for location tourism in the Hakone area.
This is a a rather restrained example if it is CGDCT. Do young Japanese women watch it? I have no idea if they would zero in on some fatal flaw in the story and/or a character depiction that would leave them cold. As an outlander guy viewer however, it is again mercifully free of annoying things and populated with neutral, sympathetic characters doing interesting things.
What if Psi Nan tried something like this? All the characters, male and female, young and old except Saiki are idiots and extreme character trope types. Imagine them all camping. Or all of them except Psychic Saiki go camping. Chuni guy goes on about “Dark Wing”. Big Oaf guy acts stupid. Rich guy acts spoiled. Ex-yankee guy attempts to not get angry. Perfect girl mooches for attention; go through the checklist. Add some conflict to overcome with friendship and a few try-again-harder gambattes. Psychic Saiki can swoop in and fix things behind the scenes. Rinse, repeat.
Urasai!
I do not want to watch another nondescript guy who has become a NEET transported to a fantasy world and/or trapped in a vidja game with one amazing power and a bevy of comely young women to harem out with. Nondescript grumpy highschool loner guy who suddenly has the hot girl exchange student get interested in him, triggering new interest by the childhood friend girl and then add more girls every episode (if manga every 3-5 chapters) will be a stretch. It might slip by if the writer(s) add(s) something quirky, although we are running out of exploitable quirkies. Zombie Apocalypses and/ or everybody must fight to the death cruel survival game thingies can just fuck right off.
Guess that leaves nothing but Lupin III.
It appears that there is a cost to being written as the default main character with the entire story built to rotate around your… axis. Character development atrophies.
The two guys in “Just Because” were a teeny bit better than the normal cyphers guys usually trotted out but it looks from here like the real neat characters have of late been mostly women. Miss Kobayashi and Tooru. Violet Evergarden. The entire student cast in Little Witch Academia. The young women and girls of Flying Witch, The girls of A Place Further. Even photographer girl in Just Because was hands down the most interesting of the bunch. I could go on by going back through past seasons.
It is not like manga is devoid of interesting takes on guy characters or that all light novel and game guy characters are paper-thin unoriginal Cardboard Everyslackers or Earnest Burning Youth. But something seems to happen to stories and guy characters when they get turned into anime that is happening a teeny bit less to girl characters. (Or I don’t notice the grinding same-same of the women characters because I am a lazy guy?) Or It could be simple economics. Create an interesting new take on a guy character and guys –might– tune in but you may well lose some of them because new dude does not fit the expected comfortable same-old same-old male MC mold. Hmmmm… Must be there as fujoshi-bait. And truthfully, you wont get much in the way of women viewers for shonen unless you throw in some token fujoshi-bait. Whereas if you center a story around interesting, capable young women characters, you can pitch towards women viewers and you are sure to pick up a good number of guys peeking in; for service, CGDCT or even just mildly competent and likeable characters doing something with purpose.
The young woman character has somehow ended up as the new default pov choice for anime.
I blame the Beautiful Fighting Girl, if only because I go on and on and on about Dr. Saito Tamaki. Once she was no longer a supporting romantic interest to the guy hero, the inexorable march towards character domination took off. Now we are at such an advanced stage of the assimilation that a fan-service-y girl cast might attract even less viewers than serious, sympathetic non-fan-service-y girl/ young women/ women charas. Don’t piss off half of your audience. Exceptions to be made for magical fighting game-based grinders that go on and on and on. The novelty of turning male historical figures into armored fighting girls continues to pay off, even if the occasional crossdressing bishonen hawtie sneaks in. As I have mentioned, I am holding out for William Tecumseh Sherman to be reincarnated as a foul-mouthed loli girl with a serious cigar and whiskey habit.
Meanwhile, try to do something like this so that it makes sense with run-of-the-mill guy charas:
It would still be difficult to trick a bunch of otaku guys into watching the entire run of Marimite, based on the promise of an exciting adventure story and a lot of yuri subtext but such hot-house settings no longer seem necessary. You can get a more up-to-date version of a similar effect from a high school band without the creepy Cath drag.
Fleshing out a character is hard work and chews up precious screen time. The Fate trick is even scarier; we need to find guy charas that don’t end up more interesting if they are turned into young women – fanservice sexy or otherwise. I could watch an anime about a bunch of characters methodically building a garden shed but I fear the conventions of anime scriptwriting — what is agreed upon to be expected — would shonen-out the characters if they were guys. If they were girls, I probably wouldn’t notice the chara clichés as much, so long as it didn’t turn into a fanservice train-wreck or have too many instances of squeaky voiced ineptitude for too long.
In contrast, look what Shinkai had to do to Your Name‘s Taki Tachibana to make him interesting.
Perhaps the angry guys screaming about Ghostbusters are “on” to something, even if their reactionary and inarticulate fear-driven rage is hindering a precise examination and diagnosis of the condition. There is also the deeper problem offered by the paper-thin young guy hero: along with his limited characteristics, he suffers not only from a limited range of behaviour but a limited path to the future. Salaryman or sleeping under a bridge. Ending up magicked away to a fantasy world video game otherworld where he gets to be king is not something to draw life lessons from. Why defuk can’t guy charas get off their asses and go to Antarctica? Or go camping? Even getting out of Japan has been fading as a dream, unless it it by way of magical isekai effect.
An aging manga/ anime/ games consumer demographic may also have something to do with the problem. Who wants to be reminded of what an idealised guy adolescence could have been when you yourself are a 30-something slipping towards 40 guy and the future appears ever narrower ahead of you. In this case, not being able to identify with the young women characters on the screen or page is a very good thing. If we want charas that we can identify with, we will wait for more Bruce Willis, Tommy Lee Jones and “Beat”Takeshi Kitano movies. Undoubtedly 30-plus-something women readers/ viewers might similarly find the girls of the Antarctic expedition and the Camping Club annoying. This continues until the readership all gets beyond middle age and then we can all be as virtually bemused uncles and aunties and finally catch up on the anime and manga we missed.
Designing guy characters for today’s demographic is a challenge but is not impossible, even if an anime is a huge capital investment with hundreds of people working on it. While the pressure to stick to formula is intense and the penalties for failure are severe, innovation is possible. Check out the guys in these sneaky cup noodle commercials. The teen Tombo updated from KikI’s Delivery Service holds his own with teen Kiki.
He hints at substance, at least as much as teen Kiki does, as does his nameless counterpart in this Armageddon Confession that sneakily turns into …. Another damn Cup Noodle commercial.(4)
Goddammit! Lookie at both of them. In the space of a few seconds we have two interesting people painted in a few deft strokes. Sure confession scenes are a big cliché but both parties appear, in their brief instances of screen time, as having their own stories. These hint that creating better, nuanced characters is not a zero-sum game. A better developed male chara shouldn’t suck the oxygen out of the story for the well-developed woman character. (even with a cameo by an anime Bruce Willis) Crap; these Nissin Noodle commercial are dense texts in their own right. Here someone does a complete analysis, including shout-outs, cameos, character notes (!) and easter eggs: https://youtu.be/-VKFWLn7FlM
If guy charas (or now girl charas) are sucking the oxygen out of the scene, something is off with the conventions of the way they are written. Or is Japan so sex-segregated that the vast majority of its stories must be as well? Suddenly the location (and temporal) separation breached by the body swapping in Shinkai’s Your Name takes on an extra significance. Girl in village. Boy in Tokyo. Each bound to “act” in their territory.
It is great that women and young women characters are being better written and written into lead roles in more stories. These upgraded girls show us that the guys could use an upgrade as well.
Maybe they can build a shed or something for next fall’s season.
“Work remaining on map” Taisei Corporation CM
(1) They could ALL be male-gaze and I am hopelessly trapped within my own strictly gendered and class-derived perspective, forever unable to recognise my predicament and escape.
We are 3 episodes into Violet Evergarden and so far it is a loving mix of beautifully rendered scenery, slow character development and jarring holes in the world-building, back-story and characterization. I must tread lightly so as not to sound like I am picking at it, rather than trying to squeeze past the discontinuities while still enjoying the story.
As a whole, Violet Evergarden remains charming and a must-watch for the season; the turn-of-century quasi-European city setting is almost as attractive as the terraformed Neo Venezia of the Aria opus. No one would pick Aria apart, that tale is too satisfying. At the same time, Aria‘s world building and characterization is a lot tighter. There are far few holes to pole a canal boat through. Even Cait Sith can’t break the spell.
With Violet Evergarden, we have troublesome bugaboos, even if they are the kind of thing that one presumes the Japanese anime viewer and/or light novel reader wouldn’t waste a second on – any more than they would fixate on the consistent use of flight technology in Studio Ghibli’s Castle In the Sky. If Violet is to join a profession that will have her and her women co-workers referred to as “Auto Memory Dolls”, beyond any presumed clunky translation effects and problems of reconciling the anime to the light novels, such fanciful conceits are completely within the rights of the author. It could have been stated that in this fantastic turn-of-century quasi-Europe, the profession of typist & public stenographer is called “Giant Robot Cake Chef” and thereafter have no giant robots, kitchens or cakes anywhere within the storyline. Fantasy turn-of-century quasi-Europeans just do that kind of wacky thing (see also: pants, below).
But of course there is more to this. I suspect that Violet’s profession was given its odd name specifically for Violet’s benefit, for the atmospherics surrounding her story – though of course, not –within– the story. In the light novels, there apparently was something about an inventor who created a machine to help his wife when she was stricken with an illness. Episode 2 briefly alludes to this; mentioning the inventor, his author wife who went blind and a machine he invented, all while holding on a still image of a typewriter with a doll behind it.
“Auto Memories Doll: Quite some time has passed since this name created a commotion. Professor Orland created a machine to record human speech. Originally made just for his beloved wife, the machine quickly became popular worldwide and an organisation offering rentals was also established.
“If a customer so desires it, I will hurry to wherever they are. I am Violet Evergarden of the Auto Memories Doll Service.” Says a blonde-haired blue-eyed woman, looking as though she’s stepped out of a story, in a voice sweetly ringing with robotic beauty.”
— per show synopsis: https://honeysanime.com/violet-evergarden/
Some confusion between the light novels and the anime adaption has crept in. Why bother about it any more than bothering about the other jarring incidence of “just-so”; Violet’s prosthetic arms and hands? Before she gets down to some serious speed-typing, Violet rolls up a sleeve and changes a setting or adjusts the tension on her mechanical elbow. Violet’s mechanical arms and hands are far in advance of any of the other technologies shown in the story. Was the original doll some similar manner of steampunk techno-magical text-recognition automaton that was not made available in the production model? Once again, the question is moot to the story. Such discontinuities are even characteristic of Contemporary Japanese pop narratives; almost as if the fuzzy parts are dropped in as a hook and/or for reader enjoyment. What is important is the atmospherics; the feeling that the profession’s name casts upon the lead character who is seeking her personal redemption within it. What better way to ease an asocial over-trained girl-child soldier back into civilian life, mechanical limbs and all, than as a pretty, emotionless and partially mechanical “doll”?
We must postulate that the eventual “good ending” of Violet’s story is that she finds her “humanity”; an empathetic, socially aware sense of self that will incidentally be appropriately gendered to the larger society she moves within. Of course, she will still be lethal in a close fight but she will be able to understand love, be again loved and be able to return such feelings as a full human being. To highlight how far she has to go, the story has done a simple trick during episodes two and three:
It has turned her into Full Metal Panic‘s Sagara Sousuke.
This is a wonderful economy of storytelling because we not only get a taste of Violet ‘The Weapon‘ in a civilian setting but we see her accommodation to her war injuries contrasted to those of Luculia’s brother; a wounded warrior who has become a traumatized, survivor guilt-ridden drunk. Again; Violet is immune to PTSD because her barebones instrumental war-child “self” is in itself a far greater trauma.
Kaaaaa-shim!
And yet, the flash of empathy towards a fellow wounded soldier and her characteristic economy of words come together to write the letter that Luculia needed to give to her brother and that her brother needed to read so as to begin working towards recovery. This breakthrough as well redeems Violet’s efforts at the Doll Academy, awarding her the delayed graduation along with her first successful commission. Perhaps she also wins an awareness of the condition of an “other” grounded in, or at least resonant to her own condition. This is “the writing of self through the writing for (and of) others” that I mentioned previously as the over-arching theme of the story and what makes Violet Evergarden stand out from mundane “What is this thing called Love?” Beautiful Fighting Girl grinders.
Episode 3 advanced with a mechanical precision and economy reminiscent of Violet’s hands and demeanor. An Auto Memory Doll is not a Lacanian psychoanalyst who practices the “short session” while they type letters. A letter can by necessity only provide momentary comfort to those who request and those who receive them. The second episode took the time to introduce the characters and position Violet as completely at a loss to understand civilian social interaction – and still deeply fixated on the memory of her commanding officer, Gilbert Bougainvillea. The third begins in earnest the pattern for the next few episodes. It does so well, playing to Violet’s experience as a soldier as her first point of empathy with a client, allowing her to write the letter that was needed and that few, perhaps none of her coworkers would have been able to write. The moment before she hands Luculia’s brother the letter, deflecting his crutch blow with her metal arm was a masterstroke of understated symbolism.
Meanwhile, the plotting hole or narrative space of the “Doll” term looms, whether or not there were advanced steampunkish magic-technological robot maid secretary typists that were supplanted by cheaper flesh and blood women behind a machine that presses type to paper. Her declaration; “If a customer so desires it, I will hurry to wherever they are. I am Violet Evergarden of the Auto Memories Doll Service.” carries with it uncomfortable undertones of gendered selflessness/ “un-selfing” within a gendered profession which further complicates Violet’s project of creating/ writing her own self. Then again, sex role expectations are already being messed with in the nation of Leidenschaft; her male patron’s first name is Claudia and the guy stripper pants and high heels on the delivery rider Benedict are almost as much of a hoot as the dangerous putt-putt moped he drives.
For me, the wonky moped cinched the show. I had one something like it in my youth. Restored to somewhat ride-able condition from “basket case” condition while out west then crated up and brought home, I even found an old-stock OEM over-size piston and bored out the engine with the help of a friend who was heavily into classic English cars. I then drove it around town enough for it to try to kill me a couple of times before it was stolen out of my garage one night.
The episode 2 scene with Benedict’s putt-putt moped threw me into a fit of nostalgia and occasioned hours of net-searching until I was able to find pictures and then a video of a 1952 Villiers New Hudson. Note the handle-bar arrangement: they are prone to vibration-induced metal fatigue and can snap off at speed. Meanwhile the lever throttle control remains wide open. Lunge forward, grab the front fender, hit the fuel cut-off with your knee and hang on for your life until the evil thing coasts to a stop 3 blocks later.
It didn’t corner for shit either. Skidded over nicely though…
I don’t miss it at all. I am alive today because it vanished into a long-past night. Still, I am a sucker for any anime with something similar in it.
For me, the wonky moped cinched the show. I had one something like it in my youth. Restored to somewhat ride-able condition from “basket case” condition while out west then crated up and brought home, I even found an old-stock OEM over-size piston and bored out the engine with the help of a friend who was heavily into classic English cars. I then drove it around town enough for it to try to kill me a couple of times before it was stolen out of my garage one night.
HEARTS OF FURIOUS FANCIES 