As you wish

Meiji, it’s more than just chocolate! –or- Everyone go watch Ruroni Kenshin.

Something has always bothered me about “The Princess Bride.” It starts with farm-boy Wesley going off somewhere via sailing ship and then the news that his ship was captured by the “Dread Pirate Roberts,” who is such a bastard that he kills everyone on every ship he ever does pirate things to. After a few years Wesley returns as the Dread Pirate Roberts to rescue his princess. Initially the princess hates him for killing her one true love, but then once she finds out he IS her one true love, she’s so elated to see him. She apparently has no problem that since he’s been gone, her beloved farm-boy Wesley was such a bastard that he killed everyone on every ship he ever did pirate things to (everyone; passengers, crew the captain’s wife and 12 year old daughter, nuns, a doctor on the way to help some beleaguered colony somewhere… everyone). This princess biatch and the audience are supposed to think nothing of the fact that this guy has racked up executions of mostly innocent people in the triple digits. I’m sorry but no matter how heroic he comes off there has got to be a huge take-a-number machine full of people who wanna kill his ass to avenge some family member he probably cut the throat of and let them bleed to death over the deck of his pirate ship and then kicked their lifeless corpse into the ocean.

To an equal extent, the same sort of forgiving eye is often turned to the world of pre-Meiji Japan. The samurai class, shinsengumi, and their various entourages have been romanticized to such an extent, that it often paints a picture of an era that looks cool to live in. But let’s face it, much like medieval Europe, Ancient Rome, or the American “Wild West” pre-Meiji Japan meant a life full of total suck for about 98% of the people there. Aside from being a time without electricity, a safe water supply, penicillin, or toilet paper Japan had laws regulating dress code, travel restrictions which rivaled modern North Korea, an inescapable cast system, a massive gender inequity gap, and demanded absolute obedience to a ruling class. All of these laws were enforced with such brutal force, that the Taliban could have taken pointers.

Modern literature and entertainment from “Blade of the Immortal” to “The Last Samurai” glosses over much of this kind of thing for the sake of making a good story, and that’s ok if you you can keep in mind that these are works of fiction. This kind of romanticism in historical settings is more or less required for works such as “Ninja Scroll” or “Zatoichi” to be entertaining. To be entertaining you more or less have to be fun, and it’s hard to do that if you pack all that human misery of real life into it. The problem is when this gets taken too far, and we end up with tripe like “The Last Samurai” or things that make the Shinsengumi look like cool heroes rather than the more true to life Gestapo with swords. The same kind of view is also applied to world history with Hetalia, but that’s not exactly the same in the way it treats things. But since they are coming from a set of different set of historical literacy, iIt’s important to take context into account when dealing with historical anime titles. Think about it, how many people actually knew what the “House of Toyotomi” was when it was mentioned in "Ninja Scroll"...really?

The Meiji restoration is increasingly being seen and reflected in pop-art as something that was somewhere fundamentally was "done wrong". There’s a notion that there was a serious degree of “Japanese-ness” that was left behind in the Meiji that could have otherwise been brought into the modern time we have today if things were different. Of course anyone who knows the political climate of the Meiji and the history of Japan up to 1945, knows that this notion is total bullshit. One of the series that treats the Meiji restoration realistically (though it takes liberties in a lot of areas, not just historical), is actually Ruroni Kenshin. A side note: I remember talking to Black Belt TV when they mentioned they were licensing Ruroni Kenshin for broadcast, and I thought that it might be a tough property for them since they were looking for programming for 21+something men who like UFC and hot chicks. Apparently they based their decision to license the entire series from watching 10 min of the first episode... They looked at the opening sequence, and judged a 50+ episode series based entirely on that. And people wonder why TV is all fucked up.

It's a soap opera, not "Akira with swords"
Even in the Kenshin OVA, Kenshin’s decision to choose a side is very relevant to the era’s political climate, which if you’re a guy like him you just can’t escape (though this is lost on American audiences who only want blood and guts). Ruroni Kenshin is worth a another watch if you try looking at it from a historical perspective. One thing I disliked about Ruroni Kenshin though, is that it had all the late 1990’s weaboos trying to use terms like “dono” and “gozaru” in Japanese, which sound stupid, since in Japanese this way of speaking died out a century ago (it would be like a modern English speaker using terminology from the Victorian era).

Apart from older history, anyone familiar with the political and cultural climate of Japan during the 1980’s, should find Akira a very special level of fascinating.

Also, I know I keep mentioning this, but the animepodcast.net interview with TM Revolution is coming soon.

Life in the Bubble: Axis of Ignorance

No time slot. Not yours.

While by no means the first manga creation to anthropomorphize political states as cute characters that do cute things, Axis Powers: Hetalia (the graphic says "powers" but some people are calling "powered"?) was popular enough to get someone to pay for an animated series. It should come as no surprise that this is not going to get aired on TV. When Japan’s neighbors throw a (deservedly justifiable) fit over a state visit to the Yasakuni Shrine, I doubt a cartoon series that makes the Rape of Nanking and Kamikaze attacks look like schoolyard shenanigans is going to go over well in the international community. Therein lies the focal point of this conundrum. In the great collective memory of Japanese history, these things didn’t happen. Studying there I found the academic history to be so whitewashed that even among college students, “Kamikaze” only congers up images of an invading Mongol army being swept out to sea off of Kyushu in the thirteenth century.

This unintentional ignorance of historical matters goes a long way to explain why a writer of a modern manga might be oblivious to certain international sensitivities when it comes to portraying 20th century events. It is not for this reason that the show shouldn’t be made, but only that we shouldn’t be surprised if places like Korea and China (where most anime is actually made) have negative reactions to an anime which, by no stretch at all, serves to reinforce an “accidental revisionism.”

This Japanese “culture bubble” is why Japanese pizzerias think canned corn is a widely used pizza topping in the U.S., why whale-burgers are still on the lunch menu, and why no one thought a TV show called Axis Poweres would create any kind of backlash (or maybe they did since the time slot was going to be late night). This not a program created by some right-wing group with some sort of revisionist agenda out to glorify one state or another. If anything, one could argue that the personification of Japan as the quiet weird one who probably tortures animals at home and one day will shoot up the school if Russia doesn’t give Saklin back, is at the deep end of offensive. But that self deprecation is not enough to get a pass in the commercial arena, and I don’t think it should be. Now, I want to see this show, and I would not want it canceled or production halted, but this is one of those occasions where the “culture bubble” has affected the end product to a point where it might be incompatible with an international notion of an acceptable way to treat 20th century history. Also, why does Lichtenstein have a character… seriously?

Japan’s exports are historically good at avoiding the taint that the culture bubble can give things (all exports have to otherwise no one is going to buy enough of them). Cars, electronics, earth-moving equipment, kitchen knives, have all been made in such a way so that their universality overshadows the unique aspects of their origins. This is also true for most internationally successful anime and manga. They have a universal quality to them which exists in things like character design, story type, and unspoken communication of emotion. Character designs are often made, or at least perceived, in such a way as to deemphasize depictions of ethnicity so that the relation to the characters by the audience is almost immediate (ie they don’t have to look a certain way to make the story believable).

It would seem that Hetalia: Axis Poweres has tipped ever so slightly over the side of that line so as to lessen the universal quality by being perceived a bit too sympathetic to the one true Axis of Evil if ever there was one. Case in point, people in the U.S. would expect France to be the one with all the white surrender flags and not necessarily Italy, but from the perspective of the Axis powers, it would make perfect sense thanks to wacky Victor Emmanuel III (look it up if you don’t know, I’m not history channel). If the intentions behind this series were strongly and intentionally political, then it might almost be easier to accept the series as just some product of right wing thinking and therefore marginalized.

Is this an instance of oversensitivity of fragile sensibilities stifling a truly creative work on the grounds of PC-ness and an example of collective bullying against free expression? Probably, but free expression with this material rarely translates to good business and as mini-mouse once said, “animation’s expensive.”

Props to Erin of the Ninja Consultants for the idea that Israel and Palestine should be conjoined twins forced to share the same desk.

The growing shrinking gap,

Like other generations before them, young Americans are at the peak of a cultural fascination with Japan. Listen kids, don’t think you’re the first ones to open Japan up. Perhaps some out there will remember the craze of the 80’s when ninjas were just as common as they are today, and Voltron ruled over the imaginations of children while “Gung-Ho” made it seem as if you wanted a Job that was worth anything in the future you’d better learn Japanese. Neither that generation nor this current one was the first in recent memory to enjoy such an era of Japanophilism (s’that a word?). Films like “Sayonara” (1957), and the 007 foray into things Japonica which was “You Only Live Twice” (1967) show us that the then recent blood enemy had been transformed into a source of “new toy syndrome” to the fascination of Americans which went beyond anime.

Going back to the days of Commodore Perry Japan and America have been bound together in various ways not only in our own eyes but in the eyes of the rest of the world as well, as both countries were seen as relative newcomers on the world scene (America being less than a century old and Japan having just been forced to turn off its “cloaking device”), and one look at “Madame Butterfly” makes it clear that there was a sphere that both countries were put in when it came to the perceptions of the rest of the world powers. By the way if you have the chance to see Madame Butterfly I think you should definitely go see it.

There is an indelible link that has seen a progressive cycle of hills and valleys on this side of the Pacific. But now for the first time ever, we’re approaching what may just very well be a sustainable plateau. From food, clothing, to music, manga, anime, and even furniture and lifestyle, there is a level of acceptance and general recognition which stretches over demographic clusters that have no other similar connections with each other. How is this possible now and not before, you may be asking. Well like any complicated question the answer is one that covers a number of different causalities. At this particular moment, the perfect storm of media licensing, technology, unrestricted travel, and an ongoing history have combined with socio-economic congruences such as both Japan and America reaching the end of their life cycles as bases of manufacturing and having an emergent service and I.T. economy, and with U.S. suburbs experiencing a brain-drain of youth to our large cities, out lifestyles are growing ever closer in similarity. This perfect storm has been able to keep Japanese culture infused into American life, long enough to infuse itself over generational lines, meaning at the same time the early otaku have graduated from Japanese studies in college and are a good 8-9 years into their carears, there are a bunch of high school freshmen kids with anime DA accounts thinking that they’re going to grow up to be super manga-ka or work in the anime business. Why is this important? Because the top and bottom of this group are doing what they’re doing for the same reason; anime in the U.S.

At the same time, Japan has never been so connected to the United States, although you’d never guess it if you looked at the current political situation (also one thing Japan was able to do was correct it’s housing bubble early on in the 1990’s, while here we just kept it going spurred by the massive demand for housing initially created by the divorce rate… you know, kids competing with their parents for the same kind of housing en mass for the first time). In any case, in my opinion it is apparent that the two countries will continue this cultural and economic symbiosis unabated for years to come. The home media market in the U.S. is in a state of implosion and is taking anime with it, but only as a home media product, just like kung fu, documentaries, TV on DVD, indie film, horror, and every other genre that saw unsustainable growth in the DVD bubble. Anime stands to pull off a quick recovery by finding an integrated media delivery system here, because Japanese properties already have other strong legs to stand on such as manga, merchandise, and now an open window to broadcast, with the ever illusive co-production on the very immediate horizon. This connection and support for anime and Japanese influence will no longer take a back seat to a resurgence or pre-packaged formula-driven tripe like we’ve seen before. Our own domestic entertainment producers have been changed forever by the new otaku, the new audience demands a story arch, they demand character depth, they demand programs that are designed to fit these new times.

I was involved in a great example of this. There’s an American company out there that’s had its glory days back in the 1980’s and 1990’s, but is still around and still can get things done. They were big in the toy field and then big in the cartoon business for a little bit. Now this company wanted to make an animated series out of their property “Micronauts” (that’s “Micro-Men” in Japan) and wanted to team up with Geneon. No the American company didn’t do this because they really wanted to do anything but get a show done as cost effectively as possible. Geneon was on board since after all, that property was hot in their own domestic market and this was a good way to pick up those rights for nothing. Que the stumbling block: Side A wanted to make each episode self-contained episodic and follow a formula, while Side B wanted to have connected episodes in an ongoing story. I’ll give you 3 guesses. So falls another possible co-pro. Now, don’t get me wrong, self contained episodes work or have worked for lots of properties; Star Trek, Scrubs, Kimpossible, Teen Titans, and even a huge chunk of Sailor Moon when you think about it. But this was going to be a new show. A new show for what is a new audience, they like anime for a reason. That reason is not because they’re a captive audience and will simply watch whatever is on TV at a certain time, it is because they are sick to death of what is being force-fed to the captive audience and want something better, smarter, and more in keeping with the times.

Would the series have worked either way? Probably, but we’ll never know since the American company refused to give their domestic audience enough credit and simply refused to allow for an interconnected story line in what was sure to be a promising series, and the first true co-pro to hit both markets. Instead it falls on top of the pile of other project carcasses (Shiden, people?) that might have been. Yet another thing to be angry about.

This Japanese interconnection and lasting influence will effect a change in how media companies view their productions and what they will look like in the future. Avatar is just the beginning, as the “Sopranos”/“Sex and the City” production roadmap is applied to animated entertainment for all ages. It took a Japanese invasion, but once the writers remember that working for a living is what most people have to do, a new creature will be born to international anime, the co-pro.

Oh, あけましておめでとう and all that.