It's Our History And We'll Do Whatever We Want With It

Each nation owns its own history, or at least writes its own history books.

There are two very different interpretations of Japanese history this summer anime season. Nobunaga Concerto didn't look promising at first, but it has surprised me.

Saburou, a contemporary schoolboy, falls off a bridge and literally lands in the Warring States era. The first person he comes across is Nobunaga Oda, himself still a teenager.

The two boys note their uncanny resemblance. As Oda is sickly, he tells Saburou to take his place at home while he finds a place to rest and regain his health.

The first episode was not serious, but events take a darker turn starting in episode 2. This is the Warring States era after all, and a lot of people died both in the battles and in the various intrigues during the long lead-up to the actual war.

Nobunaga's father-in-law, Dousan Saito, is a feared warlord himself.

However, as Saburou finds out, he and Saito have something in common: they're both from the future. Thirty years before, Dousan, a modern-day police officer, found himself transported to the Warring States era and decided to make the most of it by becoming a warlord.

Saburou decides early on that he wants to play his role as Nobunaga Oda for real, that is, he wants to win Oda's battles and go on to lead Japan. It's a character shift we can believe in, because from the beginning Saburou shows both a cocky attitude and a penchant for serious reflection when appropriate. As usual, I didn't recognize Mamoru Miyano playing him; I only saw it was Miyano when I looked it up today. I can never recognize his voice for some reason.

Nobunaga Concerto has been criticized for being completely CGI, but it works well. It doesn't look as fluid as regular animation, but it's not a distraction, and the art is beautiful, particularly the backgrounds.

If you're looking for an unexpectedly serious recounting of Japanese history with a time-travel twist, you might consider giving Nobunaga Concerto a try.

On the complete other side of historical interpretation...

Bakumatsu Rock is a jaw-dropper in a lot of ways. As with Nobunaga Concerto, it helps if you know a little Japanese history. I know the Bakumatsu period better than the Warring States era, but I'm not sure any of it helps when the set-up is this insane. =D

Ryoma Sakamoto, a "crazy kid from Tosa," plays guitar and sings in Kyoto. He has a part-time job at a pizza parlor working for a flamboyant okama owner and later joins up with Takatsugi and Katsura, two other talented rock musicians. (The real-life Sakamoto, Takatsugi and Katsura were famous rebels of the Bakumatsu period.)

Ryoma wants to become famous for his music, but alas, the Shinsengumi are the biggest rock stars (literally) in Kyoto. Performing for thousands of screaming fan girls waving glow sticks night after night, flaming gay heartthrobs Hijikata and Okita, under the direction of former band leader Kondo, are the idols who sing "Heaven's Song."

"Heaven's Song," though, is a brainwashing song that pacifies the masses. Ryoma and his band decide they're going to defeat the Shinsengumi and sing for freedom and justice and... all that good stuff.

Bakumatsu Rock is as nutty as it sounds. The outlandishness of it makes me cringe while watching it, and I'm not even Japanese. Imagine some old man sitting in Kyoto watching this anime; it would make his dentures fall out.

Kishou Taniyama, one of the best seiyuu-singers out there, is Ryoma, and the rest of the cast is full of other seiyuu who sing well, and yes, they sing in every episode. I confess that I watch Bakumatsu Rock simply because I can't believe what I'm watching and want to see how far they'll go with this. I'm not proud of it, but there it is. ;-)

The 66-Year-Long Summer Day

The most famous Japanese woodblock print inspired French artists in the 19th century, and left a lingering impression of Japan as a place of mystery and natural beauty.

Japan has fascinated people ever since its opening to the west in 1853. Like its European island-nation counterpart, Britain, it has had a disproportionate influence on the world considering its relatively small size.

Part of this influence is due to Japanese culture and aesthetics, and anime and manga are a part of this. When I'm watching anime or reading manga, the things that intrigue me and that strike me as odd or funny or downright strange all come from the nuances of Japanese life that I, as a non-Japanese, don't understand.

Japanese society is still largely closed to outsiders. Much has been said about Japanese "monoculture" and group-think and lack of individualism. These are generalizations, of course, but there is some truth to them. And it's not entirely bad, as evidenced by the orderly behavior of Japanese citizens following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Working to preserve group harmony in normal times leads to civil order being preserved in times of emergency. The best of what Japanese people are was on display in the days and weeks following March 11 this year.

The disaster at Fukushima has dropped out of the headlines in recent months, but a sense of unease remains. People in Japan are doubting the word of TEPCO, the operators of the Fukushima nuclear plant, that the situation is under control. Some have taken to using geiger counters to measure radiation in their neighborhoods. And some in Tokyo - 170 miles away - have been finding it.



Naturally, the Japanese government would be loath to cause a panic, and evacuating 13 million Tokyo residents - many millions more if you include the suburbs - is a nearly unimaginable scenario. I know someone who flew to Tokyo a week after the earthquake, and while changing planes at Haneda Airport saw nothing but babies and their mothers waiting to board planes that were heading south.

I don't have the scientific evidence to back this up, but I have an uneasy feeling about Fukushima as well. Many have noted the cruel irony of Japan suffering a nuclear disaster, after being the only country to have been hit with two nuclear bombs in 1945.

After 1945, Japan had to remake itself. With hard work and a desire to put WWII behind them and look forward, they did so, becoming the richest nation in Asia.

That prosperity led to a flowering of Japanese pop culture, the existence of which we take for granted now as if it had always been there; but in fact, it needed the sense of possibility that came into being in the 1960s and after to truly flourish.

Japan faced a clouded and uncertain future before March 2011, with an economy that had been moribund for 20 years; an aging population and severely declining birth rate; as well as the usual issues of limited food self-sufficiency and literally no energy self-sufficiency. Now, should Fukushima turn out to be the slow-moving catastrophe that some fear it is, all that will pale next to this.

Since 1945, for the first time in its history, Japan has shared its art and culture with the world - and the world fell in love with it. Sixty-six years ago, this nation that tends to self-isolation opened its door to the world and basked in the sunshine. Now, with all that they're facing, I fear the Japanese may retreat into their hole and, like in a cartoon, pull the hole in after them. I fear that they may have had their summer and that it is now autumn in Japan - irretrievably.

I hope that I am totally and laughably wrong about Fukushima, but - I don't know. I know that all of this came to me when I was looking at the Edo period woodblock print at the top of this post and suddenly realized why I found it disturbing.

It's a tsunami.

The Monster Under the Bed

The still-unfolding situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant has raised the specter of something that has lurked in the Japanese subconscious since 1945.

How many times have you, as an anime fan, been watching an anime when mushroom cloud imagery suddenly appears out of nowhere? I can think of at least a few examples off the top of my head, and I know I've forgotten many others.




The truth is - the Japanese people can absorb something as horrible as a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami, even with the loss of numerous lives, and recover as a people and as a nation. But the threat of nuclear radiation is different. This opens a psychic wound, one that is always present in the back of the Japanese mind whether it's talked about or not. This lurking monster haunts everyone in the modern era, but it haunts Japan the most.



Regardless of how the Fukushima nuclear plant situation resolves, the psychological effects may be long term. I don't think the Japanese can be judged for their fears. The monster under the bed came out twice in their country already and left an emotional gouge in their souls that is not easy for others to understand. If you pray at all, please pray for them now.

Paintings credit: http://japanfocus.org/-David-McNeill/1836

The Romance of the Shinsengumi

I am currently finishing the writing of a novel called Kaminishi. It's a time-travel yaoi romance about a samurai warlord and a modern-day American graduate student. It's mostly set in Japan in 1851.

Now, 1851 is a tricky year to try to recreate. That was two years before Commodore Perry arrived with his black ships - so the Japanese characters, particularly the samurai, need to be described as looking authentically late-Edo period in their clothing. While doing research for this novel, however, I discovered that there are a lot of movies that are set either in the very late-Edo period - the Shinsengumi period, when the shogunate was about to lose power and bite the dust as an institution - or in the Warring States period, around 1600, with Kenshin Uesugi, Nobunaga Oda and all those guys. But there aren't a lot of movies set in-between those two times, or more specifically, in the period just before Perry landed; in other words, the period I need to recreate visually for the reader in terms of what people wore, what the cities of Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo) looked like then, what foods they ate, etc.

The Shinsengumi period (1860s) still had samurai, and it is late-Edo - the end of the Edo period, in fact - so it's been tempting for me to try to use movies and anime set in that time period for research. The problem is: not only Western ideas, but Western fashions had already begun to infiltrate Japanese society, even the samurai, by then.

Some samurai began wearing Western-style soldier dress. But thankfully - not the Shinsengumi. ;)

The Shinsengumi fascinate me and it's easy to romanticize them, as it is to romanticize the last of any breed, culture or group. They were the samurai holdouts, the representatives of a dying era and cult of ideals.

As part of my research, I recently watched Peace Maker Kurogane, a rather uneven anime series about the Shinsengumi. The protagonist is an annoying brat named Tetsunosuke Ichimura:




Tetsu joins the Shinsengumi, for whom his older brother Tatsunosuke already works as a bookkeeper:




Both Tetsu and his brother Tatsu actually existed and are documented Shinsengumi members. I kind of doubt the real-life Tetsu looked like that, however. ;)

Peace Maker Kurogane begins as a rather comical and lighthearted series, but in the last four or five episodes it turns gut-wrenchingly, hideously violent. It's as if a 24-episode TV series started off as Pokemon and then turned into Silence of the Lambs around episode 19 or 20 or so. (One could write a post just on bizarre tone shifts in anime. And Peace Maker Kurogane should top the list.)

If you watch any movies or anime about the Shinsengumi, the major players become familiar quite quickly. For us fangirls, Soji Okita is a favorite.




Historically, Soji Okita was supposed to be tall and dark. He was an excellent swordsman, and he died of tuberculosis. If you're watching a Shinsengumi story and a samurai suddenly starts coughing up blood, that's Soji.

In Peace Maker Kurogane, Soji is so beautiful that he looks female. Soji Okita, for some reason, has been personified as a bishonen in Shinsengumi recreations, including the movie Gohatto where he's played by Shinji Takeda; and the TV series Shinsengumi! where he's played by Tatsuya Fujiwara (Light Yagami in the Death Note movies).

The two leaders of the Shinsengumi were Isami Kondo and Toshizo Hijikata. Here's Kondo in Peace Maker Kurogane:



... and Hijikata:




What I'm about to show you next may shock you a little.

This is Isami Kondo.



And this is Toshizo Hijikata.




One thing about the Shinsengumi that differentiates them from other samurai is: we have photographs of some of them.

Most historical figures are a little misty around the edges. We read about their childhoods and adult lives, their exploits, triumphs, failures... and they seem more like characters in a book than people who actually lived.

But starting in the mid-19th century, even in isolated Japan, some of those figures were forever immortalized by the new technology: photography.

When I look at the photos of Kondo and Hijikata, it jolts me. Suddenly all the romantic imagery of the end of the samurai and Japan's pre-industrial era come smack up against hard reality. The Shinsengumi were samurai in an era when the samurai actually had to fight again. After hundreds of years of an indolent peace in which they largely engaged in cultural pursuits, the Shinsengumi were the last samurai to take up arms; and they went out in a fierce, bloody blaze of glory. Kondo was captured and beheaded in 1868 at the age of 33. Hijikata was killed a year later on the battlefield at Hakodate. He was 34 years old.

A new Shinsengumi anime series, Hakuouki, just started this spring. The legend of the Shinsengumi continues to evoke the dream-like beauty of that historical era in Japan and the long twilight - and violent end - of the samurai culture in our imaginations. The drawing to a close of that era is a theme in Kaminishi. When the novel comes out, in the tradition of kigo, or change-of-seasons imagery, look for a lot of falling autumn leaves. ;)

Hikikomori Nation

In one of Hidekaz Himaruya's Hetalia: Axis Powers comic strips, entitled "Black Ships Have Come," Japan is portrayed as a hikikomori, a person who chooses to shut himself inside his home and not deal with the outside world.

The strip, of course, refers to what is called the "opening of Japan" in 1853, when American naval commander Commodore Perry arrived with his black ships, demanding that Japan start trading with other nations.

In the world of Hetalia, this is shown as Kiku Honda - the personification of the country of Japan - reacting to Alfred F. Jones' (America's) arrival in his country thusly:



Later, still terrified, Japan can only think of ruses to get America to go home:



When nothing works, Japan - with great resignation - finally opens up and begins to trade with other nations.

But I sometimes wonder how much Japan has really opened that door. Since becoming an anime and manga fan, one of the things that has struck me about Japanese society and culture is how insular it is. On the surface, the Japanese have absorbed all kinds of outside influences: American movies and pop music style, English (or Engrish) words everywhere, curry and spaghetti and kaki for dessert. But Japan still seems like 127 million people who are all part of a single (and possibly - dyfunctional) family. They understand each other - but to outsiders, they are a closed book.

This is a nation that believed that avoiding contact with the outside world for 200 years was a good idea - until one day, near Tokyo Bay, black ships arrived with big, enormous guns. (I can just see it now - the Japanese generals standing at the harbor, looking at those big guns and saying: "Oh.")

They had no answer for such weaponry. Their response was to start modernizing their weapons and methods of manufacture. And they went off to war with China, Russia, then China again; until WWII began - and we all know what happened then.

Since the end of WWII - and the effective end of Japanese militarism - it's Japan's economy that has been the focus. From the 1960s through the early 1980s their economy was the envy of the industrialized world; but it has been stagnant for years since then. One reason might be the rigid corporate structure, with its salaryman workaholism and hidebound gender roles (i.e., women employees as "tea ladies," seen as only working until they can get married and have children). In today's globalizing world, their corporations appear to be too bound by traditions that don't carry over effectively to a changing international business environment.

One could argue that individual countries have the right to be monocultures and to maintain myopic, insular business models. Japan is still the second largest economy in the world and has achieved much to be justifiably proud of. But Japan only has 40 percent food self-sufficiency and 100 percent dependency on outside sources for energy (i.e., oil). Such facts dictate that flexibility, openness to outside ideas and willingness to do whatever pragmatically works to reinvigorate one's economy should take precedence over clinging stubbornly to "the way we've always done it."

I see China and India sending their young to be educated and work overseas, and returning home with experience in different business models - and I worry about Japan. Their 'postwar miracle' days are long behind them, and their birth rate is falling at an alarming pace. Not only their prosperity, but their people are literally disappearing. I fear that as Japan continues to restrict immigration, maintain old dinosaur ways of doing business, and operate as a severely gender-stratified society that China and the other Asian nations are eating Japan's lunch. That island-nation mentality still remains; and the image of Japan as hikikomori, playing video games and surfing the net with his door firmly shut while the outside world undergoes enormous social and business changes, is troubling.

There may be hope yet for a change of outlook. As a cheery America shares with Japan:



The world is more interconnected now and no country - particularly not energy-dependent Japan - could in reality isolate itself from the world these days. But the image of little Kiku slamming that door still resonates.

Translated panels from http://aph.starry-sky.com.