The Female Gaze - Through a Different Lens - New Book Release

The Female Gaze: Through a Different Lens

What is the female gaze and why is it important?

Arts, entertainment, and culture have been defined through the male gaze for centuries. But things are rapidly changing. The question is not whether society is ready, but whether women themselves are ready to fully express what they see through their gaze - their unique perspective as women.

The Female Gaze discusses how the female gaze differs from the male gaze in books and movies such as Star Wars, Fifty Shades of Grey, Nomadland, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Emily the Criminal, and The Woman King, and also examines slash, Japanese yaoi, and m/m romance as alternatives to traditional heteronormative romance stories.

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Anime Hidden Gems – Three That You Probably Missed

Japan produces a lot of anime each year, and only a fraction of it gets licensed for streaming in the U.S.

It’s easy to miss some good ones despite the fact that the number of series released in America per season is fairly manageable. Throw in one’s own preferences for certain types of stories and genres and a kind of tunnel vision sets in. We don’t even notice the series that are outside our comfort zone.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of not enough time. The descriptions of this or that anime don’t appeal, so you don’t give them a chance.

It’s understandable. Also, the anime seasons come and go so quickly, don’t they? It’s summer now but soon enough it will be fall, which will morph into winter, and then it’s spring again.

So here are three anime series that you probably missed when they were first released. None of them are flashy action stories or made a huge splash when they debuted, though I think all received good reviews, especially the one I’ve placed at No. 1.

In any event, I can wholeheartedly recommend all of them. At the very least, they’re something to watch while we wait for the return of My Hero Academia and the concluding arc of Bleach to air this fall. ;-)

3. Blast of Tempest (Zetsuen no Tempest)

Put a shonen story together with a looming apocalypse, supernatural powers, and a fantastic murder mystery - and you have Blast of Tempest.

Hazake Kusaribe, a powerful female mage, gets stranded on a desert island by her traitorous lieutenant Samon. She puts a wooden doll - a magical communication device - in a bottle and sends it over the waves. The bottle reaches Mahiro Fuwa. Mahiro is a rich kid whose parents and adopted sister Aika were murdered the year before. He agrees to help Hazake escape the island in exchange for the mage’s help in solving the mystery of who killed his family.

Mahiro teams up with his best friend Yoshino Takigawa to aid Hazake in her fight against the members of the Kusaribe clan who betrayed her. Compared with Mahiro and his rough attitude, Yoshino is the good kid and nice guy of the pair. He does, however, keep one secret from Mahiro - the fact that he and Aika were dating behind Mahiro’s back.

Huge eyes appear in the sky above Japan and start turning people into metal. This event is connected to the Tree of Exodus, which Samon is working to resurrect. Hazake says that they must stop this from happening in order to save civilization.

Hakaze’s Kusaribe clan - Samon’s original clan - is supported by the Tree of Genesis, which opposes the Tree of Exodus’s awakening. As Mahiro and Yoshino get swept up in the conflict, they must decide which side is the right side for the fate of the world.

Some elements of the story hark back to Shakespeare’s Tempest, hence the name. Blast of Tempest is a quality production with beautiful, fluid animation and a memorable music score.

But what really makes Blast of Tempest stand out for me is the mystery surrounding Aika. Aika (in flashbacks) and everyone’s memories of her haunt the story from the very beginning, creating an underlying tension that increases with each episode. The question of what happened to her informs Mahiro and Yoshino’s every action, all the way to the final episode when the answer is revealed. The mystery gives Blast of Tempest that extra edge that makes it truly memorable.

And now... I need to say a few things before I talk about the next anime.

There’s a missing genre when it comes to anime released in the U.S. Think about it. We have shonen, shojo, action, fantasy, historical, isekai, and quite a few other genres.

So what’s missing? It’s a genre called josei.

Josei is stories for adult women, usually with a woman as the main character. It’s often romance, though not always. It’s not shojo for girls, or magical girl stories such as Sailor Moon or Madoka Magica. I would define it as stories for women with a woman main character who has agency and the ability to determine her own destiny.

There are so few josei anime that make it to the U.S. that it’s hard to think of one off the top of one’s head. There’s Nana, and possibly Fruits Basket would fit in this category. There’s also an older josei anime called Diamond Daydreams that I can recommend.

I’m going to guess that there’s a lot of josei manga in Japan, but that most of it never gets translated into English or made into anime. It’s basic sexism... the belief that stories about women just aren’t as exciting as stories featuring men (a belief hardly unique to Japan - Hollywood has it too).

And - too often - even josei focuses on romance stories. Nothing wrong with romance, but as the automatic default genre for ‘a woman’s story’ it gets a little tiresome.

My point is this. I would love to see more josei stories from Japan. We’re in the 21st century now and past the point where we should be required to justify why stories about women are worthwhile.

2. Hanasakeru Seishonen

Oil magnate Harry Burnsworth proposes an odd challenge for his teenage daughter Kajika. She is to choose her future husband from among three candidates. The catch is - he won't tell her who they are. Her job is to find that out for herself.

I know... romance again. But Hanasakeru Seishonen only uses this marriage game as a starting point. The story actually turns into a political thriller, at the heart of which is Kajika and the choices that she makes.

The three men Harry referred to are: Eugene, an heir to one of Burnsworth Oil's subsidiaries; Prince Rumaty, the grandson of King Machaty of the fictional oil kingdom Raginei; and Carl Rosenthal, the son of the oil magnate whom Harry Burnsworth beat out for control of Raginei's oil export market.

As Kajika becomes involved in the three men’s lives, she begins to discover secret information that links her family to the Raginei kingdom.

Kajika is a strong female lead. She makes her own decisions and doesn’t look to others to rescue her. She’s also genuinely likable and someone you can root for.

Despite its reverse harem look, Hanasakeru Seishonen has more to offer than just that. All of the important characters are interesting and given character arcs of their own, and the international political intrigue angle really spices up the story. It’s also a nicely multicultural mix of East Asian/Southeast Asian/white characters, all of whom are equals playing on the same level in a non-forced way.

I really recommend Hanasakeru Seishonen, especially if you’ve never seen a josei anime before. Maybe - like me - you’ll wonder why we don’t see more anime like this in the U.S.

1. The Eccentric Family (Uchoten Kazoku)

The Eccentric Family is a charming story about humans, tanuki, and tengu in contemporary Kyoto.

The main character is Yasaburo Shimogamo, who appears to be a teenage boy, but who is actually a tanuki.

Actually, his entire family are tanukis. Tanukis are raccoons, technically raccoon dogs, and in Japanese folklore they are considered to be tricksters and shapeshifters.

The Shimogamo family is the eccentric family of the series’ title. The mother of the family dresses in prince drag, while the eldest son Yachiro bosses Yasaburo (the third son) and little Yashiro (the fourth son) around. The second son Yajiro currently lives as a frog at the bottom of a dry well. (In other words, he’s a tanuki pretending to be human who is now pretending to be a frog.)

Yasaburo looks after Professor Akadama, a gruff elderly tengu who - like the Shimogamos - masquerades in human form. (Tengus, in Japanese legends, are supernatural birds of prey, like flying yokai.)

Benten, a beautiful human woman, is an ambiguous figure who may be a friend or a foe. Prof. Akadama taught her how to fly like a tengu when she was young. Yasaburo is wary around her as she is rumored to have had something to do with his family’s great tragedy.

The tragedy is that the father of the family was cooked in a hotpot years ago by the Friday Fellows, a social group that celebrates the year-end by eating tanuki hotpot.

The Eccentric Family is a slice-of-life fantasy show told with wry humor, and it has some genuine laugh-out-loud moments that catch you unawares. The writing has that quality I really appreciate where all the characters take responsibility for themselves and their actions and the unique makeup of each person - their personal history, character, and conscience - is given its due.

The first season is full of quirky and gentle humor, but underneath the fun you can feel that the father’s death has cast a long shadow over things.

Particularly as to Yajiro, the brother who lives in the well. We get the feeling that he’s running from something; that he feels guilt. Though he’s pleased when his brothers visit and bring him fried chicken, there must be a reason why he stays in frog form and isolates from the family.

(Yajiro is clearly stretching the limits of shapeshifting here, as he is a tanuki pretending to be human pretending to be a frog who is eating a piece of chicken.)

The mystery of who was really responsible for the father’s death is revealed at the end of the second season of The Eccentric Family, bringing closure for the family at last.

The Eccentric Family is just a delight on so many levels. It’s a comedy, a paranormal fantasy, and a tribute to accepting the weirdness in people. The Shimogamo family is strong together because of their tolerance of everybody’s quirks and strangeness. The inescapable conclusion is that eccentric families make the best families. If you watch The Eccentric Family, you may find yourself agreeing with this conclusion as well. :-)

The Girl of Prophecy

In recent Naruto Shippuuden episodes, the fact that Naruto is Konoha's "Child of Prophecy" has been a topic of discussion again.

Obviously, Naruto is the main character of Naruto Shippuuden and it makes sense that if anyone is going to be the "Child of Prophecy" in the series, it's him. Add to that the fact that this is a shonen series, and it really couldn't be anyone but Naruto who would be the chosen one. So I don't begrudge our favorite orange-jumpsuited ninja for this: but it did start a train of thought in my head.

A few years ago, I bought one of those calendars where you rip off a page each day. This one happened to be a Star Wars calendar. One of the daily pages caught my imagination, and I ended up taping it to my refrigerator (excuse the poor-quality scan):




That's Padme in the foreground and center, with Anakin behind her on the right, and Mace and Obi-Wan behind her on the left. It's just one of those publicity-shot type photographs of the lead characters in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, one in which someone probably said, hey, let's mix it up a little, put Padme in the front. It's only a picture: but the image, if you really look at it for a moment, brings to mind a startling question.

What if Padme had been the main character of Star Wars? Or her daughter Leia, for that matter?

Why is the "child of prophecy" always male?

And oddly, this is where a strange dichotomy arises between American and Japanese entertainment. Because many American genre and science fiction stories like Star Wars and Iron Man and the like actually do female characters a greater disservice than Japanese anime - where you will get a few kunoichi, some tough tsundere mecha pilots, or other strong female characters with super powers in most of the shonen stories. Just where you think American entertainment would come through with strong female characters, it often... doesn't.

I say that Star Wars did female characters a disservice, and perhaps that's a bit harsh. I'm old enough to have seen Star Wars in the theaters when it first came out, and I'll never forget the audience's reaction when Leia blew open the wall in the holding cells with a laser gun while Luke and Han just stared at her. She was a female character with spunk, and that was new. But Star Wars - I mean the whole thing, the two film trilogies - could have done more with its female characters. (Interestingly, the strongest female character in the entire Star Wars universe was created for the novel series, which still continues - Mara Jade, the Jedi Knight who becomes Luke Skywalker's wife.)

And I mention Iron Man because it hired an Academy Award-winning A-list actress like Gwyneth Paltrow... just to use her as arm candy for Robert Downey, Jr. Again, women as lust or beauty objects, or as support for the male characters in the telling of their stories.

In terms of being an anime fan: is it my own fault for loving shonen and action stories? I like watching stories where things actually happen. Slice-of-life stories put me to sleep. To encourage more female characters being featured in anime, am I supposed to watch series where there are 13 episodes of four high school girls doing... not very much? I think I'd rather see Ichigo throwing a Hollow into a distant mountainside - in fact - I know I would.

The Japanese have a terrible saying: "Men do, women watch." In four words, you have the reason for why the main characters and the interesting characters in anime (to me, anyway) usually turn out to be boys and men. They're the ones doing things; the girls and women usually just watch them do things. I don't prefer it this way - I want to see strong female characters doing things, too. But there don't seem to be many manga and anime series that offer this.

On Yumeka's recommendation, I've recently started watching Noir:




Though I've only just started watching this series, this is already what I see about Noir:

A. The two main characters are female.
B. They are both professional assassins, who make no apologies for their line of work.
C. The story is clearly focused on the two women; the male characters are secondary.

This much alone already places Noir in highly exclusive company. Most anime series I watch place female characters in the usual roles: love/sex interest, girlfriend, friend, mother, or other supporting roles. Noir starts from the premise that women are interesting and substantial enough to be the main characters; that their lives matter enough to be center stage. I can't wait to see where it goes from here.

The Last Airbender - Being Invisible

I’ve apparently been living under a rock, having not noticed until now that there’s a controversy going on involving The Last Airbender, a feature film directed by M. Night Shyamalan. (This film has just wrapped production and is due to be released in theaters next year.) It’s basically an Asian story about Asian characters. It has been cast with Caucasian actors. The following, from Derek Kirk Kim’s blog, is a great post on the topic:

http://derekkirkkim.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-day-in-politics-same-old-racist.html

I particularly love this quote:

>>I was speaking with Gene Yang (author of “American Born Chinese” and National Book Award nominee) about the casting and he said it best: “It’s like a white Asian fetishist’s wet dream. All the Asian culture they want, without any of the Asian people.”<<

Derek Kirk Kim also mentions that when he was in high school, he dreamed of becoming an actor. I am sure I am much older than Mr. Kim, but this struck a chord with me, since I had that desire when I was young as well. The thing with the casting choices made for The Last Airbender is that it’s a story which obviously could have featured Asian actors, but the choice was made to cast white actors instead. What this kind of choice, made over and over again in Hollywood, winds up doing is that it leaves Asians and other minorities invisible, and in just the properties in which their visibility would make perfect sense. (And it’s not the only recent example either – the movie 21 was based on a real-life story about an Asian-American geek student-turned-gambler. In the movie, the protagonist was played by a Caucasian actor.)

And what these casting choices lead to ultimately is people like Mr. Kim and myself, Asian-Americans of different generations, coming to the conclusion at an early age that even thinking of becoming an actor is a non-starter, having not seen anyone who looked like us in movies and TV.

There are exceptions, of course, and bless John Cho (Harold and Kumar, Star Trek), who must have noted the odds when he was young, and decided to pursue an acting career regardless. And I believe if you’re really meant to do something in life, you will end up making that choice anyway.

But this endless default casting of white actors is retro-thinking – and not the cool or good kind of retro either. In a nation that just elected a black President, this seeming fear in Hollywood that no one will come to see a movie unless the actors are white makes it apparent that it’s Hollywood that is behind in its thinking - and not the audience.

Anime Expo 2009

Anime Expo 2009 was held this past weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

AX is the largest anime and manga-related convention in North America (the number of unique attendees for AX 2009 was estimated at 44,000 following the event), and the place to take the pulse of the anime and manga industry. In various keynote addresses and industry roundtables, the consensus appeared to be that the recession was definitely affecting the industry, particularly the smaller and more niche companies; and further, that digital distribution of anime was beginning to fulfill its promise as the new standard for delivery of anime at virtually the same time as it is aired in Japan.

The experience of being around 44,000 anime fans in one place is a bit overwhelming. All of that youthful energy, many of them wearing cosplay outfits (designed to make them look like their favorite anime characters) and in high spirits (read: shrieking and running down hallways), can be a bit startling.

Another startling thing may be, if you’re not already familiar with it, the demographics of the fans you’re seeing. A casual eye-estimate shows you that minorities are in the majority here: Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Latino-Americans make up perhaps 65 - 70 percent of the fan base that come to conventions.

Does this mean anything? I think it does, in the sense that mainstream American entertainment is still dominated culture-wise and image-wise by Caucasian-Americans and by what is perceived as being middle American cultural norms and values. The fans who are ethnic minorities have discovered, in anime and manga, a different view of life, made by non-whites and from a different culture with which they feel more comfortable identifying, at least some of the time.

Stories in Japanese anime and manga, while often utilizing fantastical elements, are basically like stories written in any culture: they’re about life and people, about childhood, and about making one’s way in the world. What they’re not about is sanitizing or sugarcoating the experience of being human; and particularly of being a child. Anime and manga stories often feature abusive parents or other authority figures, merciless enemies, and other obstacles that the young protagonist must face. And yet, by the end of the story, the hero often discovers his empowerment through his desire to protect others, as opposed to living only for himself; and even more amazing, the villain is usually revealed to be just as worthy of being considered fully human as the protagonist is.

This multi-layered, in-depth characterization of even the bad guy in a story is only one of the attractions of anime and manga. And I think minority fans in America, looking for entertainment that is different from a mainstream culture that largely either ignores or stereotypes them, have found a universe that speaks to them and within which they can feel included.

All 44,000 fans who showed up for Anime Expo are on to something. (And of course, they represent just the tip of the iceberg – as not every fan wants to attend or can afford to attend conventions.) They’re saying yes to a different kind of storytelling, one that allows for the full spectrum of life experience. And if Hollywood wants their dollars, it might consider paying some attention.