Mr. Miyagi’s America

The aesthetic appeal of Japanese culture in the West has, I think, had at least as many points of continuity as points of rupture over the decades. Consistently Western observers of Japan have noted that it has an exceptionally beautiful visual and material culture, in ways that are difficult to define without lapsing into Orientalist cliché, regardless of what the observer thinks of the social and ideological aspects of Japanese life. Yet the way people in the West respond to this aesthetic appeal has obviously shifted over time; a Victorian artist’s model lounging in a kimono gives one a feeling of change-in-continuity vis-à-vis a cosplayer wearing a similar kimono at a late-2000s anime convention.

            The points of continuity and points of rupture become a little easier to identify if one allows oneself to consider some of the cliches, which, after all, are cliches precisely because they are widespread conventional wisdom. As I write this there is in my own apartment a whole stack of books on Japanese subjects from the mid-to-late twentieth century, after World War II and the Occupation but before the anime-focused Cool Japan boom of the 1990s and 2000s. We have The Inland Sea, Donald Ritchie’s travelogue about the waterways and coastal towns between Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu that presents Japan as a land of precariously-surviving tradition semiconsciously negotiating with globalized modernity; The Tale of the Shining Princess, an adaptation of Taketori monogatari whose title seems intended to imply a connection to Genji monogatari; The Makioka Sisters, the English translation of Tanizaki’s Sasameyuki, whose English paratext and reception history emphasize the same things as The Inland Sea despite the novel also containing a great deal of political content and Tanizakian cultural hobbyhorses; and The Golden Naginata, a pulp fantasy novel about Tomoe Gozen that I have not read yet, which is by an author named Jessica Amanda Salmonson and is dedicated to, among other people, Kaji Meiko.

            I have a lot of these kinds of books because I do like this visual and storytelling approach, even though I’m aware of the many things that are the matter with it. I always have liked it; as a child it sparked a lot of my earliest interest in Japanese society, before anything anime-related did. That being the case, it is surprising even to me that until recently I had not seen The Karate Kid.

            I’m going to be discussing the first three movies here, made in the 1980s and starring Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita. There’s a fourth movie with Hilary Swank, a remake from around 2010, and the recent TV series Cobra Kai, but these were made in somewhat later periods in terms of US-Japan cultural exchange. The first movie, which came out in 1984, is down-to-earth and in fact semi-autobiographical. Macchio’s character, Daniel LaRusso, moves from New Jersey to a Southern California community full of affluent beachy assholes; he gets bullied; then an aging Japanese handyman, the iconic Mr. Miyagi, teaches him to use karate to stand up to his bullies. At the end of the movie Daniel wins a local karate tournament and earns the respect of his main bully, whose harassment of Daniel is established to be downstream from his own karate teacher’s abusive treatment of him. Nothing in the movie is that implausible, and it’s an interesting and surprisingly intimate portrait of a certain sector of mid-80s West Coast life, even though the events on which it’s based took place decades earlier.

            Nothing about the movie necessitates sequels, but it did well enough to get them anyway—and more, as we’re seeing with the fact that Cobra Kai is still on the air almost forty years later. The sequels, as is often the way, go a bit off the rails. The stakes are higher, the characters less plausible, the conflicts continually mediated through a karate tournament for Californian teenagers. The third movie has an evil billionaire waste disposal executive who is just as invested in youth karate as everyone else is, to the point of personally backing the first movie’s evil dojo. (A lot of eighties movies have evil property management and utilities executives, a needed counterweight to the view held widely elsewhere in American society at the time that a property management or utilities executive was a type of culture hero.) The second movie, which is set mostly in Okinawa, is a bit more grounded than the third, but there are still serious problems with it that that original Karate Kid lacks, most of which boil down to the old “is this a sequel that needed to happen?” question. The Karate Kid Part II is a so-so movie; The Karate Kid Part III, a bad one (in, do not get me wrong, a very fun way, and one that continues to have a sound emotional and thematic heart slathered in ropey balderdash).

            Even watching a mediocre movie from 1986 like The Karate Kid Part II is, however, an inspiring and convicting experience after fifteen-odd years of box offices being dominated by half-billion-dollar exercises in copyright trolling that seek to resemble movies. Watching it I kept noting things that filled me with blindsided joy: what considered acting and directing! What a human touch even in the corny, implausible villains! What a shrewd decision to make the August Karate Room of Old so obviously important to Mr. Miyagi, so that even if the audience only ever spends one scene in it, they’ll care about its destruction because they care about him! This is competent moviemaking in late-twentieth-century Hollywood. Not even always that, as with the villains, although I wonder if perhaps viewers in Okinawa find it more plausible that someone who teaches martial arts to American military police could use Evil Karate to dispossess and kill people with impunity than do audiences and critics in the United States.

            With this USFJ base issue, as with other of the more geopolitical and (thus?) more moral aspects of Japan’s relationship with the United States, the Karate Kid movies take a stance that is subtle, at least for this series, but present and difficult to stop noticing once one starts. Mr. Miyagi is a World War II veteran; he served in the US Army and won the Medal of Honor, even though given the facts of his biography we are to understand that at the time of Pearl Harbor he had been in the country for very little time and possibly only slightly legally. This decorated veteran of the 442nd, a bona fide World War II hero if there ever was one, is humble or even dismissive about his war record; indeed, Daniel learns about it while Mr. Miyagi is drunk, trying to sleep, and in great emotional pain. The emotional pain is more than understandable considering that, while Mr. Miyagi fought for the United States against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, his young wife died in childbirth at Manzanar! John Kreese, the evil sensei from the first and third movies, is, conversely, an arrogant white Vietnam veteran about twenty years Mr. Miyagi’s junior. Ostentatiously self-confident, he insists on the style “sensei” despite not seeming to speak Japanese and insists on teaching a highly aggressive, deliberately unmerciful style of karate to his mostly high-status white students. World War II and Vietnam are tacitly depicted not only as different but as poles apart, opposite ends of the movies’ moral universe.

            Yet America’s role in postwar Japan isn’t presented as straightforwardly good in the second movie, as we see with the villains, who are intimately tied up with the American military presence, and with the constant presence of American military aircraft in the backgrounds of otherwise idyllic scenes. There’s a great scene early on where Daniel, reading a book about Okinawa on the plane to Japan with Mr. Miyagi, turns to him and excitedly, guilelessly says “did you know that Okinawa has the largest US air base in the Pacific?” Mr. Miyagi barely responds; of course he knows that, even though the movie makes it clear that this is his first time going home in forty-five years. It’s practically impossible to follow Okinawan affairs and broader Ryukyuan issues at all without knowing that. It’s a decisive issue in most prefectural elections, and as of this writing there has been a decade-long dispute between the prefectural government and the all-Japan government in Tokyo over moving the US base, because the prefectural government and the vast majority of the prefecture’s population want it gone entirely. So Mr. Miyagi—and Daniel, who adopts his perspective on Okinawan issues after spending time there with him—are men alone, at least within the movie’s framework; they’re American patriots who don’t always side with America, aficionados of things Japanese and Okinawan who believe that Japan and Okinawa were at one time badly in the wrong.

            Mr. Miyagi’s relatives, and most other older people in his village—not necessarily younger people or residents of the relatively large city of Naha—are presented mostly as cowed, intimidated normies. They stand up to the villains but only to an extent, in part because these are economically powerful people on whom their community is dependent. Even when Sato, the relatively-reasonable uncle, starts demolishing the entire village until Mr. Miyagi agrees to fight him in a duel, there’s only so much they feel inclined to do about it. Yet one somehow doesn’t get the sense that this is a commentary on the qualities of Okinawan people; the aesthetic of Japanese “submissiveness” is almost completely absent. Even in a scene in which Daniel and a young woman named Kumiko share a kiss over a sort of tea ceremony, we do not really get that sense. This scene could very easily have descended into a Miss Saigon-esque creepy fantasia of Oriental femininity (especially since in real life this sort of thing tends to happen with sake, not with tea; but this is the Reagan 80s, when moral panic about underage drinking among American audiences is at its height). The fact that it does not is mostly a testament to the acting, which is good in general and excellent for this type of movie.

            The demoralization that most of the supporting characters in the second movie feel may not be a commentary on the so-called Japanese character, but it certainly works as a broader commentary. Indeed most people in political situations like that on Okinawa are cowed, intimidated normies, just like most civilians in violent dictatorships, most civilians in non-violent non-dictatorships, and even people who are “caught in the middle” in our own society here in America. We could name not-particularly-pro-Israel Jewish students on college campuses throughout this great land as an especially pertinent example, one that would currently be very high-profile if the media had any interest in understanding them or knowing what they have to say. There is moral significance to this experience of things just as there is to fighting forthrightly for some side or cause or another.

            Mr. Miyagi does not need to be or for that matter want to be some kind of historical protagonist in order for his relationship with Daniel and his relationships with other Okinawan people to have a moral weight to them. He does not need to be in order for his Medal of Honor to have a real significance to it, either, even though the significance is not to him—it is to Daniel, who would have grown up on straightforward stories of World War II heroics and who clearly does not see any reason to doubt the benevolence of Reagan’s America until well into the second movie. The villains in the third movie at first use Mr. Miyagi’s war record to ingratiate themselves to him, then, later, mock it to his face. It should be noted that John Kreese is back in this movie, and that his backer Terry Silver, the above-mentioned evil businessman, was with him in Vietnam. They actively bring up World War II in conversation, to manipulate and belittle someone who fought in it. Daniel brings it up less, and Mr. Miyagi deliberately downplays it; their relationship the subject, conversely, is presented as straightforward, grateful, and, bluntly, morally sane.

            Albert Camus’s novel The Plague has a lot to say about the concept of heroism. Camus is suspicious of it, and for that matter he is as suspicious of saints as he is of heroes. I don’t share the suspicion of sanctity, which, as an abstract concept and as an ideal reality to be lived out (or lived into) I do believe exists, but with the Karate Kid movies’ treatment of war and politics I think that there is an admirably Camusian refusal to advocate going around as a self-ordained moral superman, even if you’re one of the few people in your world who’s taking a consistent moral stance on things. Mr. Miyagi’s nonfatal karate leaves people, crucially, free to make up their own minds and, when possible, see the error of their ways, even if it can sometimes seem implausible when some characters, like Sato in the second movie, actually do so.

            I am Catholic and the belief in a transcendent, abstract, absolute moral law is therefore not optional for me. But when morality becomes concretized between human persons—and little can possibly be more concrete than a martial arts movie, where moral significance is applied literally and directly to specific postures and movements of the human body—a sort of reverse alchemy happens to the moral principles that are commended to us from somewhere on high. It becomes possible for a moral decision to show greater or lesser fidelity, not only to the abstract moral law, but to the concrete human person as such. Anything that gets treated as an edge case in Kantian ethics is likely to be something of this kind. So too is the set of ways in which something like America’s military and political history during World War II can be so admirable and worthy an object of national myth-making on some levels and yet so squalid and unedifying on others. It’s perhaps appropriate, then, that the fascinating food for thought in these movies comes alongside a great deal of phoned-in, Orientalist, or just plain schlocky material. The storyline and tone of The Karate Kid and its immediate sequels support the thematics even in the trilogy’s moments of full-tilt campy hokum, not just when it is grounded and its verisimilitude is assured.

Divine Right of the Girlboss Downline

When I was growing up in the late 2000s as what people call a “transfeminine” person, an identity that I would later start, and then stop, publicly claiming for reasons that I do not care to discuss, I watched an awful lot of bad anime. I watched plenty of good anime too, and as I wrote in my essay “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” I think a strong argument can be made that the medium, and especially its fandom, were better and healthier fifteen years ago than they are now. Even so, plenty of crap was being put out in the 2000s, some of which was uninteresting, stagey, quasipornographic schlock. There was plenty of stagey, quasipornographic schlock that was interesting, too—I still wholeheartedly enjoy Black Lagoon, and I’m told even Elfen Lied holds up if you watch it in the right frame of mind—but that is not what I want to discuss right now. What I want to discuss is a deliberately sedate, very conservative series, one that is shockingly long for how little happens in it and was shockingly popular for how niche one would expect its appeal to be. I speak of Maria-sama ga miteru, usually translated Maria Watches over Us, a hypnotically slow-paced and minute series about not-quite-lesbian not-quite-Catholic students at a posh girls’ high school. It aired in four seasons between 2004 and 2009, it adapted the first two-thirds or so of a serialized novel series with the same title that came out between 1998 and 2012, and I find little to say in its favor except that it commits to its offputting premise wholeheartedly and understands the characters and relationships that result exceptionally well.

            Maria-sama tells the story of Fukuzawa Yumi, a scholarship student at Lillian Girls’ Academy, a Catholic high school in a leafy suburb of Tokyo. Lillian has what is called the “sœur system,” an institutionalized mentorship organized into linear chains that take on romantic overtones sort of like the chain marriages in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. An older girl will offer a rosary necklace to an underclasswoman, and if the underclasswoman accepts she will become the older girl’s petite sœur (French for little sister). The maximum number of active members in a sœur lineage at any time is three, the number of years in the Japanese high school curriculum, but many alumnae maintain close friendships, and in a few cases more, with their former sœurs for their entire lives. The system has been going on for about a century—the school was founded in 1905 and the series appears to take place around or a hair before Y2K—and has implications for how Lillian is run since three sœur lines monopolize the Yamayurikai, a student government that appears to regulate most aspects of extracurricular life. In the first season of the show—the first few novels in the series—Yumi becomes the petite sœur of the beautiful, aloof, aristocratic, short-tempered Ogasawara Sachiko, who inducts her into the Yamayurikai. The series then develops Sachiko’s grande sœur (the phlegmatic Mizuno Yōko) and the members and associates of the other two Yamayurikai lineages. The overall structure is a bildungsroman in which Yumi learns to confidently wield social power within this system despite her relative humble class status and initially poor self-image.

            I generally take it on faith that other people find some or most elements of this premise offputting. I don’t, because it is a pitch-perfect throwback to a body of pop literature and ephemera that I have studied extensively and about which I am enthusiastic academically and professionally. This is the Japanese women’s and teen girls’ magazine and serialized novel literature of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, from roughly 1900 to 1960. Key figures in this milieu would include the artists Takehisa Yumeji and Nakahara Jun’ichi, the translator Muraoka Hanako (famous for her efforts to translate Anne of Green Gables into Japanese despite the wartime government’s denomination of it as “enemy literature”), and above all the writer Yoshiya Nobuko. Yoshiya, a more-or-less-out lesbian herself but one who attained wealth and fame by not shocking the establishment overmuch, specialized in writing about what in the West was called romantic friendship; much of her fiction about the subject is almost identical to Maria-sama in narrative focus, theme, and tone. (Stylistically Yoshiya was a bit bolder; she wrote in an excited way full of exclamation marks, Western loanwords, and nonstandard use of onomatopoeia and phonetic glossing, a style that most literary critics in Japan despised then and despise now. I have translated Yoshiya’s prose and she does not make it easy.)

            Anyone who has read George Orwell’s excellent essay “Boys’ Weeklies” should be able to imagine what this body of literature was like in a roughly accurate way. It had memorable but not particularly complex characters, an aesthetic and semiotic repertoire stressing stability and comfort, a preference for very sedate and low-stakes storytelling, and a tendency to provoke moral panic among the parents and grandparents of its readership whenever its messages seemed insufficiently oriented to social control. Part of what the Maria-sama series is interested in paying homage to is, thus, a defunct understanding of the world in which, as the Orwell essay puts it, “Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.” A quick overview of the main characters, and what their storylines seem to be intended to tell the audience, makes this clear.

            Each of the three Yamayurikai families gets a somewhat different set of plot emphases, although all of them ultimately support and comment on Yumi’s journey to maturity in one way or another. Yumi and Sachiko’s lineage, the Rosa chinensis lineage, gets plotlines dealing mostly with emotional self-regulation and, to an extent, class distinctions. The Rosa gigantea lineage, consisting of Satō Sei, Tōdō Shimako, and later in the series Nijō Noriko, is generally angstier and gets most of the storylines that deal with religion per se; the only point in the series at which Lillian’s Catholic identity is stressed over against other religions present in Japan is an episode that has Shimako and Noriko get outed as sharing an interest in Buddhism. (Shimako is from a Buddhist priestly family; Noriko has an autistic-seeming special interest in Buddhist statuary, an art form with which suburban and small-town Japan is positively teeming.) The Rosa foetida lineage, consisting of Torii Eriko, Hasekura Rei, and Shimazu Yoshino, live in a psychic universe somewhat closer to what most people probably think of as normal high school experience; they are concerned with sports, health problems, and learning how to delineate their sœur system commitments from other types of relationships. That the series treats all this as ultimately secondary compared to Yumi and Sachiko’s generally more refined and genteel worries is traditional for the genre and part of its generally conservative worldview.

            This brings us to one facet of Maria-sama ga miteru of which I took special note when I rewatched it with my roommate over the past year, which is the show’s peculiar political stance. It is—I am not going to mince words here—thoroughly extreme-right, but it represents the extreme right in a hypothetical world in which the center is the radical feminist commune from “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” This is reflected in its infamous (in some circles) paucity of actual lesbian relationships, although as I will discuss further on in this essay there are multiple major characters who do actually seem to be lesbians in the normal sense as well as in the sense of partaking in Lillian’s institutionalized situational sexuality. The fact that the situational sexuality is institutionalized is the main way in which the series touches on politics. It is not interested in usual Japanese rightist gripes like World War II apologia and support for the sexual double standard—quite the contrary; the narrative implicitly but quite strongly disfavors men, once they start actually showing up in the Maria-sama universe, which takes some time—but it is intensely interested in questions of political legitimacy. Its stance on those questions is close to unreconstructed divine-right royalism; the linear passage of membership in the Yamayurikai through the sœur system, which in this context operates much like the early Roman Emperors’ practice of adopting their intended successors, is presented as right, stable, morally and culturally appropriate, and more important than the wishes of the individual characters. Two plotlines have characters outside the three ruling sœur lines run for the Yamayurikai and get crushed; both characters are sympathetic but they are presented as having personal dysfunctions that impel them to run against the Leviathan’s chosen avatars. Shimako, the “insider” candidate in the first of these two plotlines, does not even want the position, but it is not up to her; she heads the body politic whether she likes it or not, and if she does not like it, she should not have accepted Sei’s rosary in the first place. All of which is to say that, in the show’s moral imagination, Lillian Girls’ Academy succeeds where the ancien régime failed, because it is small enough to enforce the succession through interpersonal relationships and because France had the misfortune of being ruled by people with cooties.

II.

One way in which Maria-sama “liberalizes” relative to its early-twentieth-century foremothers is in its diminished degree of interest in shunting its characters into adult heterosexual relationships. This is, to many tastes, damning with faint praise; I have close lesbian friends who find the series infuriating since it is indisputably beyond coy about the relationships between girls that it depicts. Even so, whereas quite a few of the stories in, for instance, the early Yoshiya anthology Hana monogatari end with girls getting up and “graduating” to heterosexuality (Yoshiya did not, of course, do this herself), or even focus to begin with on married adult women reminiscing on their girlhood loves, Maria-sama depicts those loves while they are happening and ends with most of them intact. To a somewhat lesser extent this is true even of the books, which cover more time and thus transition more of the characters into adult life but still show little interest in rushing to pair them up at the end. Yoshiya might have felt the need—or, to be fairer to her, might have been made to feel the need—to have Yumi meet a nice man and settle down at the end of the series, or in some kind of epilogue. Konno Oyuki, the woman who wrote the Maria-sama novels, does not do this.

            In fact, in one episode of the show’s fourth and final season, “The Sigh of the Red Rose,” Yumi has a remarkable conversation with Sachiko’s arranged fiancé Suguru, a gay man who does not love her. (The novels establish that Suguru is bisexual and simply happens not to love Sachiko in particular, but in the show he does seem to be gay.) The conversation is elliptical, and words like “gay” or “lesbian” are never used for Yumi herself, but Suguru makes it clear that he sees a commonality between Yumi and himself, a disposition towards love that they share and that many of the other characters seem on the surface to share but in fact do not. When she asks him what, ultimately, he is to her, he says that he is her dōshi, a word that means “comrade” in senses like brother in arms, kindred spirit, or extended family member. It does not take a quick spin through Psychopathia Sexualis to figure out what is happening here—although, conversely, the fact that the conversation is still allusive and euphemistic raises ultimately unanswered questions about how comfortable the series is with its own subject matter.

            The other example of overt homosexuality in this otherwise classically pseudo-gay series is better-known, comes earlier in the show, and raises that question even more dramatically and in a way that leaves even more unresolved because it is further removed from the core Yumi-Sachiko relationship. Sei, a major character in the first season who spends most of her time preparing for college and aggressively flirting with Yumi before becoming more peripheral once she graduates in the second season, gets called to the principal’s office for allegedly having written a pulpy novel called The Forest of Thorns. The Forest of Thorns is about a doomed lesbian affair at an all-girls’ Catholic high school that is obviously based on Lillian and writes in fervent, sometimes angry terms of the effect that one partner’s over-the-top piety had on the other when the former broke off the relationship. The teachers and principal suspect that Sei wrote this because the plot is very similar to an open-secret relationship that she had with a student named Shiori before meeting her eventual petite sœur Shimako. (Shiori is a common name for this type of character, for some reason; Revolutionary Girl Utena also has someone with that name who is dealing with internalized homophobia in a flaky, selfish, and destructive way.)

            It turns out that the actual author of The Forest of Thorns is someone else—an adult (indeed aging), very successful novelist who went to Lillian forty or fifty years prior and is still working through an experience there that was almost beat-for-the-beat the same as Sei’s experience with Shiori. This, again, raises questions about the sœur system and whether it masks significantly more dysfunctional homophobia-inflected dynamics between the girls at Lillian. The series, again, does not answer these questions. Instead the main effect of this storyline is to establish that Sei isn’t just a comedic slacker or a flippant sex pest but someone with actual reasons for her closeness to the much more sedate and thoughtful Shimako. They share an outsider status, Sei because she is gay in a more substantive sense than her schoolmates and Shimako because her father is a Buddhist priest and she knows little about Catholicism despite being interested in the religion. Sympathetic viewers might note that this is an affirming framing both of homosexuality and of interreligious contact, because Sei and Shimako are framed more approvingly than are the people who are suppressing or hassling them. Unsympathetic viewers, conversely, might note that representing Sei as a tragic eternal outsider is a treatment to which Shimako is not subjected; she is integrated into the Lillian community on mutually agreeable terms after a storyline in the second season dealing with her and Noriko’s shared Buddhist connections.

            What to make, then, of Maria-sama ga miteru’s enthusiastic reception at the time among audiences interested in lesbian anime, both in Japan and in the West? The simplest answer, at least as far as the West is concerned, is that lesbian anime of the 1990s and 2000s did not appeal to the same sorts of audiences as most other lesbian media; the anime fandom writ large already selected for weird, reticent, mildly asocial people who were often unlucky in love (I touch on this in “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” but it is not a primary concern of that essay), and people in that fandom who were interested in series with gay themes were no exception. As far as Japan is concerned, I think the throwback element goes some way towards explaining the appeal. An American TV series that deliberately aped the lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s would probably find a loyal audience pretty quickly as well.

III.

The Rosa foetida line—Eriko, Rei, and Yoshino—have storylines with perhaps a bit more distance from Maria-sama ga miteru’s political or sociosexual motifs. This is not because they are uninteresting characters, and indeed there is one exception to this: Eriko is the show’s only expressly heterosexual main character, who has a crush on an older man that is revealed early in the second season. (He handles it in a commendably age-appropriate way, especially for Japan, a country that has still not had a full-fledged #MeToo moment regarding adult-adolescent relationships.) She sees the sœur system in what is probably a significantly more “normal” way than the other Yamayurikai oligarchs do; to her it is a stylized and spiritualized mentorship system that is a fun part of her school’s culture but probably not one that will have much influence on her decisions as an adult. Other than this, the Rosa foetida mindset mostly revolves around less ideologized and less “sexy” but still very important subjects: Rei and Yoshino, who are cousins as well as sœurs, must learn to navigate and define different types of relationships, and Yoshino has health problems that for much of her life have given her peers an inaccurate understanding of her personality because they limit her physical activity level.

            The episodes early on that establish Yoshino and her issues are some of the funniest in the show. A strong argument can be made that, uniquely for Maria-sama episodes, they would be among the funnier episodes in plenty of higher-energy anime as well. Yoshino, apparently a shrinking violet who relies on the strong and sturdy kendo player Rei to protect her from the mean old world, is actually a violent or violent-adjacent spitfire who loves historical novels and gung-ho motivational proverbs. The only reason she does not publicly behave in ways that comport with this is that she has a heart condition, which turns out to be easily fixed via surgery. (I have a close family member who has been to the hospital in Japan; although it does not have health care that is comprehensively free at the point of use the way Britain does, it still isn’t expensive or difficult to navigate, and even if it were, almost all of these characters except for Yumi are filthy rich.) The other characters find out about this because the school newspaper, the Lillian Ledger, runs a series of personality quizzes and everyone assumes that Rei’s and Yoshino’s answers got flipped by mistake. The Lillian Ledger in Japanese is the Lillian Kawaraban, a name that implies that it is a rag but an old-school rag, since kawaraban is a term normally reserved for the fly-by-night block-printed broadsheets of the Edo period. Comedy gold on all counts. I know people who hate the series in general but still chuckle at these episodes.

            There’s some good intentional humor with Eriko too, in the episode that establishes that she is interested in men and has a crush on an older science teacher (at another school, not Lillian). She is an animal lover who often goes to the zoo to look at charismatic megafauna such as elephants, which is where she meets the man on whom she develops the crush. They fall to talking about the charismatic megafauna par excellence of Earth’s prehistory—dinosaurs, of course—and he compares her to Hypsilophodon, a comparison to which she responds with the immortal line “I have never been compared to a dinosaur before! I am very pleased!” This isn’t for the obvious reasons, such as Hypsilophodon being known for ferociousness or being “badass.” To the contrary, although older interpretations about the taxon have it as armored in much the same way as the Ankyolsaurus, Stegosaurus, or Triceratops, by the time that the Maria-sama books were being written newer studies had shown it to be a small, beaked, grazing, relatively docile biped. Someone like Yoshino would be flattered for the usual reasons by being compared to an Ankylosaur or a Stegosaur. Eriko is simply happy to see her interests shared and validated. It is cute and would be downright adorable were not the line itself, even in context, so silly-sounding.

            The Rosa foetida line, despite having plenty happening that is worth discussing, nevertheless interests me a little bit less than the other two Yamayurikai lineages. In part this is because the abbreviated third season, which consists of five direct-to-video episodes that are themselves longer than the other seasons’ thirteen half-hour television episodes apiece, is the show at its most narratively dynamic (relatively speaking) and has less focus on them than usual. Then again, the third season is itself less distinctive and less characteristic of this particular series, for the same reason. Things like a hectic school sports festival or a class trip to Italy (on which Shimako reconnects with the girl who ran against her in the first of the two political-legitimacy storylines, who is studying to be an opera singer) happen in plenty of other school-life anime. So I am, I will admit, giving the Rosa foetida girls short shrift because they happen to be out of focus when the series is at its most conventional. This is not their fault and I would want to have more to say about them if not for the circumstances in which I am writing this essay—right before Christmas, and with a great deal of other writing to get done.

            This essay is going to end up a good bit shorter than “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” was. This is both for the reasons that I just gave and because that essay attempted a series of personal reflections, and even some amount of materialist historical analysis, of an entire medium and its fan culture, whereas this one is about a particular, very atypical, and now relatively obscure series within that medium. I don’t think I would recommend Maria-sama to most people. I rewatched it with my housemate, someone who is uniquely predisposed towards it demographically (as a Catholic lesbian) and temperamentally (as a civil servant with that profession’s attendant tolerance for “boring” experiences), and even she and I could only take so much of it at a time and took about a year to get through the whole thing. Yet being able to “recommend” it is not, I think, really the point. Orwell would probably not have “recommended” most of the material he discusses in “Boys’ Weeklies” either (he quotes some of it within the essay itself and it is truly terrible, far worse stylistically than anything in Maria-sama or for that matter in the girls’ magazine culture contemporary to Orwell), but he still presents it as worth cultural and genre discussion. Maria-sama isn’t necessarily bad, just written in a deliberately dated-to-hyperconservative way; as Orwell might put it, it is the Magnet to schlockier late-2000s anime’s Wizard. Nothing in Maria-sama suggests sadism, direct appeal to viewers’ prurient tastes, or reactionary political concerns in the nationalistic way that is unfortunately so common in other anime. Lillian Girls’ Academy is the Chalet School of anime, minus the shilling for upper-middle-class heterosexual domesticity, and I for one think that one could do a lot worse than rule by the sœur system downline. Nec pluribus impar!

Takasawa Keiichi’s “Kimono”: An Artistic-Cultural Treatise from Occupied Japan

Cultural relations between the United States and Japan in the twentieth century are today best remembered for two periods of hostility. In the 1940s the countries were enemies in World War II, and in the 1980s the strong postwar cross-Pacific alliance was strained due to manufacturing and trade policies that in some ways prefigured today’s rivalry between the US and China. Although President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro were both personally and ideologically close, many Americans thought of Japanese people in insecure, envious, and hostile terms.

However, between these two periods, there was a flowering of American Japanophilia influenced partly by American servicemen’s experiences in Japan during the prolonged Allied occupation of the country. The 1950s saw the Japanese printmaker Wada Sanzō (whose “Greenhouse Workers” from his Occupations of Shōwa Japan series hangs in my parents’ living room) win an Academy Award for costume design and the actress and singer Umeki Miyoshi win one for Best Supporting Actress. Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder admired (what they knew of) Japanese Buddhism, and D.T. Suzuki became a more famous and respected figure stateside than in his home country. It was in the earliest days of this midcentury Japanophilia that Takasawa Keiichi wrote and illustrated Kimono: A Pictorial Story of the Kimono.

Kimono is a 40-page book printed on Japanese paper, featuring Takasawa’s drawings and photographs of women in traditional Japanese dress supplemented by his own commentary (or an English translation thereof). The publisher has the unsurprising name Japan Travel Bureau, and the book was printed in Occupied Japan in 1948. It retailed for ¥250, and, I would guess, has been out of print since the early 1950s or so.

  I ran across Kimono while searching for a Takasawa work to buy that lacked some of the questionable artistic qualities of much of his oeuvre. As a visual artist he is best known for a massive body of portraiture most of which focuses on the same rail-thin, wry-faced model, who is generally thought to have been his wife. Many of his paintings and drawings of this woman are sexually charged or even pornographic; a common Takasawa subject is his wife having sex with other women. The illustrations in Kimono, on the other hand, are generally of a sort that one would feel comfortable showing one’s grandmother: the women are fully dressed and attractively but not sexually posed. They also show a broader range of ages and attitudes than the model of Takasawa’s other work; one drawing is captioned “Miss Teen-Ager learns the intricate steps of the classical dance,” and the women’s facial expressions range from contented to annoyed (“I wonder if my obi is on straight!”). The drawings are well-executed and done in an appealing palette, a sort of subdued four-color of charcoal grey, indigo, deep red, and pale gold. The photographs in the book, on the other hand, often suffer from the over-luridness of midcentury color photography, in a way that reminds me a little of the contemporaneous Chiquita Banana commercials with Carmen Miranda.

  The book was intended to capture the kimono as a “symbol of Japanese women” for a Western audience, and contains very lucid and easy-to-follow descriptions of what different types of traditional Japanese womenswear are, what events or times of year one wears them for, and how they are made and sold. The only section that tripped me up was one discussing how properly to put on an obi (sash), an aspect of kimono-wearing that has stymied me in life as well as in art. If anyone can ever explain to me what exactly is meant by “Make a little fold at the end of the long end of the obi, tuck the other end of the obi into the bow, and fasten all these tightly together with the obi-dome which is also taken around in front of the obi and tied there,” that person will have my heart for life.

  Takasawa’s politics, which do make it into the book, are “reconciliatory” and focused on a revivification of Japanese society, including traditional arts and customs, after the traumatic war years. The implication is that he, like many other small-c conservative Japanese artists and writers, was unhappy with the war primarily because of the way it destroyed Japan’s Meiji- and Taishō-era civilian culture. This is a position shared with, among others, the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, whose family saga The Makioka Sisters was censored during the war for its focus on “the soft, effeminate, and grossly individualistic lives of women.” Something very similar, or at least similarly sexist, could well have been said about Kimono had Takasawa written it five years earlier.

Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles introduces to Japanese literature the somewhat self-conscious distinction between feminists and “woman-worshipers,” who idealize women but have no particular respect for their opinions or their values. Kimono outs Takasawa as a woman-worshiper of the old school, as if his later paintings of his wife weren’t enough. The copy accompanying his drawings idealizes women and states several very strong preferences about female dress and behavior as if those preferences are facts. One passage makes an absolute statement about the female love for changing one’s clothes that a butch lesbian or even a vowed religious sister of the period could and probably should have disabused him of immediately had he asked.

However, I don’t mean to suggest that Kimono is a uniquely misogynistic work; I don’t think it is. The premise itself, and Takasawa’s breadth of knowledge about women’s clothing, show an interest in women’s lives completely absent from truly woman-hating Japanese art of the period, such as Confessions of a Mask (a novel of whose misogynistic homoeroticism, or homoerotic misogyny, I was strongly reminded when I finally sat down and read American Psycho). It’s easy to imagine a version of Takasawa alive today as a sort of male Karolina Żebrowska or Safiya Nygaard, taking to YouTube and Instagram to share his interest in traditional womenswear with the world.

Kimono can be found used on Biblio and similar websites for roughly between $30 and $100. My copy was on the expensive end because several of its pages are signed by Takasawa (in an idiosyncratic format with “Keiichi” in kanji and “Takasawa” in roman letters). I would recommend the book to those interested in Japan’s presentation of itself to the West at this point in the country’s long history, provided they can put up with some of the author’s less-than-feminist sentiments and views.

Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa

It is never pleasant to have our old shrines desecrated, even when we have outgrown them.

—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

I.

The year is 2022, and anime is in decline.

I don’t think I know anybody my age who seriously denies this. Friends of mine who are in my age cohort—the ages of, let’s say, twenty-five to thirty-three, people who were in their late childhood or adolescence during the international anime and manga glut of the early to mid-2000s and who populated college anime clubs around the same years I did during the first three-quarters of the Obama administration—seem to be unanimous in the opinion that the medium and its fandom aren’t what they once were. Current high school and college students still entertain and enthrall themselves with My Hero Academia or whichever generation of Precure we’re currently on, and I don’t think the medium is dead or is no longer producing anything of value; each of the past three or four years has produced at least one series that I’ve enjoyed. Even so, there have been subtle but noticeable changes in both the content and the reception of anime over the second half of the 2010s and now into the 2020s, and many of those changes are making it difficult for people who’ve long been in media fandom to maintain interest in what’s currently coming out of Japan. In this essay I will seek to diagnose some of those changes.

First let me share my general impressions of what the medium and its fandom were like around 2007, when I was first becoming a fan. 1999-2007 are commonly accepted among fandom historians as the dates of the Western anime boom, in which brick-and-mortar bookstores had manga sections several aisles deep and the Western anime market was (according to Matt Clement’s Anime: A History) actually driving or partially driving Japanese production. “Animesque” Western cartoons came into vogue partway through this period, some (such as Avatar: The Last Airbender) becoming classics themselves, others (such as Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, which I had to be reminded existed) fading very quickly into obscurity. Spirited Away won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at one point, and basic cable stations like Cartoon Network had entire programming blocks of competently dubbed anime for teen and young-adult audiences. I came up at the tail end of this period; the first anime that I followed as it was airing was Code Geass R2, and I was probably part of the last wave of American teenagers to start using LiveJournal for fandom purposes before that website’s death spiral in 2009-2011.

At this time there was an accepted cursus honorum for inducting oneself into the anime canon before venturing forth into the badlands of cult classics and genre specialization. It differed a little for boys and girls, but I watched shows from both sets, probably because I was being introduced to anime by two girls with whom I was friends in high school. The first anime movies I watched were Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and one of the InuYasha movies (I had a hard time focusing on that one; I don’t remember why). The first full series I watched were Azumanga Daioh and Neon Genesis Evangelion. This was in the era of DVD box sets; for Azumanga Daioh I borrowed a friend’s DVDs and for Neon Genesis Evangelion I spent a couple weeks’ allowance. Once you saw some of these works that were in some sense representative of the medium, or at least representative of what other American teenagers were into, then you could venture forth into discovering new shows and favored genres and subgenres on your own. By late 2008 and early 2009 I was watching a lot of the “girls with guns” subgenre of action anime—Noir and its spiritual successors, Black Lagoon, and so forth—that had come out earlier in the 2000s. I also started watching a lot of anime with gay themes, especially shows with lesbian connotations that were less overtly sexual than a lot of what was being produced about gay men. And it was great for a while.

The problems with this fandom environment—and such problems did exist—mostly revolved around two core issues, gatekeeping and amorality. 4chan, a website that is now mostly known as a hotbed of far-right politics but in the late 2000s was an anime fandom standby, was in some ways the locus classicus for both of these issues with its culture of eviscerating “newfags” and “moralfags.” I experienced this more in Western science fiction and fantasy fandoms than in anime and manga fandom—for some reason I just had a thicker skin about, say, Fullmetal Alchemist than about Doctor Who—but I still noticed it. These problems became extremely relevant later as a highly pop-moralistic backlash against them began permeating fandom spaces around 2015.

The unsustainability of the Japanese foreign and trade policies that had led to the early-to-mid-2000s boom in the first place probably also contributed to the unsustainability of the fan culture that built up around Japanese products. As is well-known, the fundamentals of the Japanese economy were not sound, and a semi-deliberate national policy around pop culture exports did not have enough failsafe measures to survive the decline in faddish Western interest. The list of localization companies and fandom media organs that went defunct or had to merge with one another to stay afloat between 2008 and 2013—the peak years of my anime fandom participation—includes ADV Films; Newtype USA magazine; Shojo Beat magazine; the North American version of Shonen Jump magazine; Central Park Media; Bandai Visual USA (dissolved back into its Japanese parent company); and the original incarnation of Toonami. Perhaps oddly, I didn’t really notice this at the time; since I was just getting into the fandom, it didn’t really occur to me that its glory days were, in some wise, already behind it. I had the same experience with LiveJournal, which I had no idea was already a dying platform when I joined it.

This in some ways commonplace story is one that I tell by means of explaining what I think a vibrant and interesting anime fan community does look like. I’ve deliberately avoided passing comment on the actual content of the shows that were popular at that point, because I want to discuss content in the context of where—in my opinion—it all went wrong.

When I told a friend about the concept for this essay, he said it had “Boomer energy.” Despite my self-consciousness about this, I am not going to take any special efforts to make the essay seem value-neutral or judgment-free, because it is not; it would be insincere to avoid the impression of someone worried about premature middle age complaining about the tastes and interests of teenagers, because that is, in part, exactly what this essay is. What follows is an attempt to explain those fogeyish opinions and complaints and to and advocate for them based on historical and cultural facts.

II.

Having come of age in anime and manga fandom during what we might call a transitional period—the late 2000s and early 2010s, when the fandom wasn’t at its peak in the West anymore but was not yet in obvious enough decline for me to notice it at the time—I can’t approach this question exactly as somebody with clear memories of the fandom of the 1999-2007 period might approach it. The decline that was underway during my period of heaviest fandom involvement had material economic roots that I mentioned above, and it was secular in the sense of being a sustained long-term process that would have been difficult to reverse. The collapse, or transmogrification, of a medium and a fandom that I recognized and with which I felt comfortable into a medium and a fandom that I did not, felt more abrupt, and I would argue that it was more cultural and in some ways even ideological. The cultural and ideological shift of the mid-2010s may have had its historical genesis in the economic and material shift of the late 2000s; however, I do not have enough experience or knowledge of the latter event to feel confident saying for sure.

I count three major factors that, taken together, determine what kind of characteristics a medium fandom will have: What kind of content is being produced, how that content is being disseminated to its fans, and what the fandom’s culture and ideology (i.e. its “superstructure,” Marxistly) are like when the fans receive the content.

I’ll begin with the intermediate stage, how content is disseminated to its fans. Until the mid-2010s, the prevailing model for anime and manga localization was what we might call “fansub (or scanlation) first, license later (if at all).” That is, a title that was making waves in Japan would be informally translated—a process that was legal under Japanese law but of dubious legality under most Western copyright regimes—by a group of fansubbers (if it was an anime) or scanlators (a portmanteau of scanner and translator, if it was a print manga). This informal localization would then be made available online, through several avenues that were themselves of dubious legality; when I first entered the fandom, you still often saw anime episodes uploaded to YouTube in five- to ten-minute-long chunks that you had to watch in order. (Amazingly, one can still at the time of writing find certain old episodes of the extremely well-known Western cartoon The Simpsons on YouTube this way!) YouTube ceased to be usable for these purposes around 2010 as its user base and the culture surrounding it were formalized and professionalized, so the fandom moved to an archipelago of other sites with names like KissAnime, Mangafox, and so forth. Many of these sites still exist in diminished form. They had—still have—domain names out of places like Tonga and Christmas Island, and were only usable if one had both an ad blocker and a good antivirus program; fortunately, most fans did.

An official, indisputably legal localization would appear later if enough interest built up in the West—or sometimes if a Japanese studio or distributor wanted to shill something in the West to make it turn a profit, as happened with the infamously iconoclastic localization of the flop horror anime Ghost Stories in 2005. The push-pull of Japanese production with a Western audience in mind had its genesis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and by the 2000s it had created a system somewhat similar to the “usual channels” of parliamentary democracies. That is, Japanese creators, Western localizers, and prominent fandom figures had some degree of professional and even social familiarity with one another, and negotiated amongst themselves to bring most official localizations into existence. For example, a gay-themed anime called Simoun that was a personal favorite of mine for a long time—it’s now mostly forgotten—got an official American DVD release almost solely because a well-known fan personality saw the fansubs and brought it to the professional localizers’ attention.

The underlying economic process that made this social and cultural system possible was the buying and selling of DVDs. The system relied on the practice of accumulating physical home video sets of one’s favorite shows, because “fansub first, license later” was only economically viable for localization companies if the fandom had a collector mentality and an ethic of “rewatch value.” Western anime fandom as such had been intimately tied to the technology of home video from its inception; many fan communities had originated as AV clubs in the eighties and nineties. The almost totemic quality of DVD sets in “old” anime fandom—something analogous to the totemic quality of hardcover books among self-professed bookworms—can hardly be overstated. I still have complete DVD sets of at least half a dozen shows I’ve only ever watched once, despite the fact that my computer no longer has a drive to play them in, because you never know.

With the advent of online streaming services and their supplanting of physical audiovisual media culture starting around 2012, the economic incentives for professional localizers changed enormously. There was no longer any real reason to tolerate illegal or semi-legal fan treatment of Japanese material as a means of building up word of mouth about a property. So producers, distributors, and localizers began to build a “license first, fansub never” model, which relied on simulcasting via streaming services such as Crunchyroll and, eventually, Netflix. (I know I said I felt self-conscious about this essay’s boomery premise, but I have to say this: I feel a pang of genuine heartache whenever I see the words “A Netflix Original Anime” at the beginning of an episode of Carole & Tuesday, a show I otherwise love.) This had the effect of making the economics of anime fandom much more similar to the economics of first-run Western TV fandom—only first-run Western TV fandom was itself being transmogrified into something much more top-down and supply-side.

Moreover, because of other technological and social shifts that are part of the same zeitgeist as the rise of streaming services, such as various “pivots to video” and the increasing stranglehold of algorithmically-arranged social media platforms on our culture, attention spans in general seem a lot shorter these days. I once ran across someone who watched Haibane-Renmei, created a fan Instagram account for the show (of all platforms!), then abruptly decided barely a year later that they were no longer interested in the show or in anime in general. Someone doing that ten or fifteen years ago would have been called a filthy casual and told to get the hell out of Otakon, the way a cowboy might be told to get the hell out of Dodge.

III.

The first of the three factors I mentioned above is one I’m addressing second because it requires somewhat more extrapolation and interpretation as opposed to hard facts. The actual nature of anime being produced, and whether and why it’s changed, is difficult to assess from a vantage point stateside, and it’s been the better part of a decade since I actually spent time in Japan (although I’m in both internet and postal contact with people in Japan semi-regularly). Summer 2013, most of which I spent in Japan, could be taken as a transitional period in terms of many of the changes I am discussing, but even that requires some degree of eisegesis—what makes 2013 “more transitional” than 2014, or 2012?

What I do know is this. Although Western demand driving Japanese production was a phenomenon that created its fair share of cross-cultural problems and resentments, the relatively mukokuseki (“stateless”) characteristics of the shows being made in the 1990s and 2000s did mean that most of those shows avoided the worst excesses of Japanese political and artistic discourse. A show that was consciously being produced for an international audience would have to include internationally appropriate themes not only in the sense of “statelessness” around character designs and pop-cultural references, but also in the sense of avoiding preachy overconcern with domestic Japanese issues and, in particular, Japanese nationalism. This was how you could end up with a property like Code Geass that was obviously sympathetic to Japanese nationalism and anti-Americanism but that was still watchable as something other than a rightist screed because its themes were couched in abstracted terms about imperialism and self-determination.

Moreover, Western fantasies of Japan as some sort of “animeland” utopia (which Japanese politician Yuriko Koike has, hilariously, tried to make into a winning message in Japanese domestic politics) were always missing something essential about Japan itself. Japan, like every other country on the planet, has a “normie” supermajority in its population, and because it is also a conformist and collectivist society, people who are “weird” have diminished social capital relative to weird people in most Western countries. Continued passionate love for anime and manga into adulthood is seen as unusual in Japan—the arbitrary yet curiously widespread “age ghetto” for animation and comics is probably, if anything, weaker in Continental Europe than it is in Asia. Being an “otaku,” a word whose Japanese usage is clearly pejorative and comes from a formal and slightly archaic term for one’s own house, has for a long time actually been more broadly acceptable in North America and Western Europe than it is on anime’s home turf.

For both of these reasons, diminished demand for anime in the West could be argued to have actually sapped the medium’s vitality even in Japan itself. This is not because Westerners can judge Japanese art more sagely than Japanese people can—far from it!—but because the assortment of Japanese action-movie and romcom tropes one commonly sees replicated in your “typical” anime benefited from having to be used more judiciously to attract a worldwide audience. Somebody inclined to laissez-faire thinking might even see it as a competitiveness issue, in which 1990s and 2000s anime had to make a name for itself on a grander scale and over against a massive variety of rival cultural products.

In Japan in 2013, I noticed that a lot of the anime and manga being produced for what we might call domestic consumption was being microtargeted to maladjusted subcultural interests. The most benign such case, and possibly also the most familiar to Western audiences, was the inexorable advance of the toxic cult of “deconstruction,” in which an anime that treated its genre, its medium, and even its own fans with cynicism and contempt could actually attract a devoted audience due to the false perception that it was saying something profound. Good “deconstructive” anime have been produced—nineties masterpieces Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena being two such—but invariably the deconstruction in such shows is commenting on something external to the shows themselves: mental illness and antisocial behavior in Evangelion’s case, misogyny and homophobia in Utena’s. In 2011 a bombastic attack-from-within on the magical girl genre called Puella Magi Madoka Magica emerged, dominating fandom conversation in both Japan and the West despite its mere twelve-episode length. The delayed airing of its final two episodes due to that year’s earthquake and tsunami cemented the show’s instantly legendary status. Madoka itself did have interesting things to say, but for some reason that I cannot quite pinpoint, the series solidified a perception of edgy, grimdark subject matter and themes as both artistically superior and more profitable than sincerity and optimism. Very little has been produced in the magical girl genre since 2011 that isn’t somehow preoccupied with either replicating or refuting Madoka’s extraordinarily gloomy take on the genre’s key conceits, and much of what is being produced is therefore very difficult to watch.

If the Madoka phenomenon was a peptic ulcer, making “old” anime culture significantly more painful and annoying but not actually killing it, the Attack on Titan phenomenon was the bubonic plague, or possibly some sort of bioengineered supervirus thawed out from some IJA ice prison to maraud through modern Japan. I actually loved Attack on Titan initially, as did, I dare say, the vast majority of rank-and-file anime fans. Its 2013 first season, which was actually airing while I was in Japan that summer, is the most recent anime for which I’ve bothered to buy fandom merch. I still in spite of myself have genuinely wonderful memories of fiercely debating its twists and turns with my friends, and of becoming invested in its, at the time, wonderful female characters. It wasn’t until at least a year into its initial burst of cross-Pacific popularity that it began to be widely suspected not only that its creator was aligned with the political far right but that the series itself was actually meant to communicate and advocate far-right views. The series recently ended, and won back some of its old fans by ending in an unexpectedly pensive, ambivalent, and self-reflective way, but by that point it was too late to save its general reputation as “a fascist anime.”

Japan as a whole has lurched to the political right over the past decade. This is true of many countries, but in Japan the effect has been particularly pronounced, producing repeated electoral landslides for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which despite the name is conservative and nationalist. A center-left government that briefly dethroned the long-dominant LDP in 2009 proved inept and rudderless and was itself turfed out in 2012, after which right-wing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe managed to entrench himself as the longest-serving premier in Japanese history.

The pluses (they do exist) and minuses of Abe’s time in power could be an entire essay of their own, but the policy area most relevant to anime and its fandom is his avowed nationalism, historical revisionism, and desire to rehabilitate the legacy of the Japanese Empire that was defeated in World War II. This is a winning issue for younger Japanese people, and in particular younger Japanese men, because young adults in Japan right now do not have much else to believe in; it hasn’t been a good economy into which to come of age for nearly thirty years, and the economic incentives of Japanese life make timely family formation for young adults all but impossible. Thus, the Abe years saw a boom in overtly right-wing anime.

Attack on Titan is an infamous example of a right-wing 2010s anime, as is a mecha show called Darling in the Franxx, which aired in 2018 and included an extended paean to heterosexual family formation, including via teenage sex. (Personally, I think the moral panic about teen pregnancy that characterized left-leaning Western fans’ reaction to Darling in the Franxx was also ridiculous, but it is still probably not something a mecha anime should be outright glorifying.) My personal favorite example of this cottage industry, though, is something called Gate: Thus the Japanese Self-Defense Force Fought There. This was a 2015 isekai anime based on a light novel series about the JSDF, Japan’s postwar “military,” launching an incursion through a wormhole into a high fantasy world. Gate actually had to have some of the web novels on which it was based edited for conventional publication to tone down some of the nationalism.

Another subcultural-pandering genre that’s become more and more popular lately is difficult to describe except by saying that it tends to be based on light novels and those light novels tend to have titles that go on for half a paragraph. Examples include No Matter How I Look At It, It’s You People’s Fault I’m Not Popular (I actually liked this one to an extent); Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?; Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie?; I Don’t Like You at All, Big Brother!; My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy; Lately, My Little Sister’s Been Acting a Bit Strange, But…; and Though Young People Recoil from Entering the Black Magic Industry, I Found Its Treatment of Employees Quite Good When I Entered It, and the President and Familiar are Cute Too so Everything is Awesome! Some inkling of the common themes and plot conceits of this type of series should be evident from the titles themselves.

I don’t mean to say that no overly cynical, politically questionable, or sex-fetishistic anime were being produced before 2011 or so. Obviously that would be an absurd claim. When I was coming up in anime fandom it was common to sarcastically recommend that people watch a show called Boku no Pico that was honest-to-goodness child pornography. (Since it’s animated, no actual children were harmed, and I don’t think anybody actually watched it—the suggestion that one do so was basically a form of hazing—but even so!) However, it does seem like shows that appeal to baser instincts—sexual, political, philosophical—have cornered the market in a way that wasn’t always the case, and I would attribute this to the perceived need to sell things to the harder core of Japan’s domestic otaku subculture. It’s not just me who says this; quotes floating around imputing hard forms of this claim to all-time great Hayao Miyazaki are usually falsely attributed, but he has made the claim in softer forms. In a television interview in 2014 Miyazaki said that most anime then in production was being made by creators who “don’t spend time watching real people” and “can’t stand looking at other humans.” I can think of no better way to describe a creative industry that would make a fantastic actress like Eri Kitamura voice a protagonist who’s motivated by proving that she’s not really related to her brother so that it’ll be legal for her to marry him.

IV. 

This brings us to the issue of reception and the cultural—and, yes, moral—strategies that anime fans have for watching anime and deciding what it means to them. Obviously the sort of material that I described in the above section does appeal to real audience desires; as early as 2000 Tamaki Saito could claim in his book Beautiful Fighting Girl that many anime fans were interested in the medium due to a psychosexual fascination with the types of female protagonists common at that time. (Think of Evangelion’s Rei and Asuka or Sailor Moon’s Inner and Outer Senshi.) However, there is also an intensely moralizing style of anime engagement, one that interacts with the fetishizing style in unexpected and sometimes counterintuitive ways.

A lot of this interaction has to do with a time-honored fan tradition called “shipping.” Most readers of this essay will be familiar with this concept, but some may not, so I’ll define it briefly. Shipping, short for relationshipping but these days invariably used on its own, is the practice or habit of favoring, rooting for, or creating fan content (such as fanfiction, fanart, etc.) for a romantic relationship between two characters in a work of fiction. A real-life equivalent of shipping is familiar to anyone who’s ever attempted to set up two acquaintances on a date; the fandom version will be, on some level, known to anyone who came away from Little Women wishing Jo had said yes to Laurie’s proposal, or who wanted Jerry and Elaine to stop sleeping around and get back together in Seinfeld. The pairing being shipped can have any level of textual support ranging from “completely nonexistent” to “they’ve been blissfully married since before the plot started,” and oftentimes a particular fan will have a preference for shipping straight, gay male, or lesbian pairings. (I mostly ship straight and lesbian pairings, but there are gay male pairings I like as well.)

For most of modern media fandom’s existence, it was understood that a fan’s shipping preferences had very little connection to what that fan actually wanted in a real romantic or sexual relationship. For example, there was never any question of whether a fan who favored ships between characters who were on hostile terms in the source text also favored relationships between people who hated one another in real life. An anime fan might enjoy Beatrice and Battler from Umineko: When They Cry, a pairing that has a sadomasochistic subtext, without desiring a sadomasochistic relationship for themselves; a fan might think that a three-way would solve some of the entanglements in Toradora! without condoning infidelity or even open relationships between real people.

For a few different reasons, fandom discussion in the first half of the 2010s gradually called these understandings into question. First of all, an important feature of traditional shipping culture was that it was mostly disconnected from questions of sexual morality. This made shipping spaces relatively convivial for people whose beliefs about real relationships might sharply differ—“your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay”—but it also meant that in many cases fans found themselves exposed to content to which they might have strong ethical or even religious objections. The overall ethical framework, such as it was, derived mostly from the “sex-positive” Western feminist consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, making it very difficult to get any moral criticism of consensual sexual behaviors (and sometimes even certain kinds of nonconsensual ones) taken seriously in fandom. This made life in fandom very difficult not only for people with strong religious beliefs about sexuality but also for partisans of the by-then-unfashionable “radical feminist” project of constructing a specifically feminist normative sexual morality. For whatever reason, in the early 2010s there was a convergence in interests between these two groups. A close friend of mine who’s narrated much of this history to me suspects that what happened was that a group of young people raised in conservative Protestant religious environments developed radical feminist opinions upon reaching adulthood, then set about putting those opinions in active opposition to prevailing fandom mores.

I don’t mean to over-idealize pre-2010s shipping mores, especially since they actually weren’t totally amoral but rather reflective of generically social-liberal views, which are not as value-neutral as they claim to be. Had I been asked at the time, I would have said that I was all for attempting to impose some moral parameters on the way media fandom, including anime fandom, approached shipping and fictive portrayals of sexuality. However, given what happened next, I would evidently not have been careful enough what I had wished for.

In 2014 or 2015, a subset of users of the microblogging website Tumblr.com whose own fannish interests mostly lay in newer lesbian-themed anime undertook an organized push to change the way their preferred series were discussed online. I noticed this at the time because it involved an, in my opinion, bizarrely disproportionate degree of hostility to the 2006 anime Simoun, mentioned above, which at the time was already fading into obscurity but was still a personal favorite of mine. According to the friend of mine mentioned a paragraph and a half ago, a lot of these people had specifically come from Madoka Magica fandom and were understandably upset about a then-recent sequel movie’s even darker and more cynical take on the show’s already-edgy subject matter. The culture of Tumblr—to which much of Western media fandom had migrated after the LiveJournal death spiral a few years before—encouraged, and in some corners of the site still encourages, taking an overtly political and thus in some sense overtly moral angle on almost any imaginable aesthetic question. The purpose of fiction is, as Marx might put it, not so much to describe the world as to change it; the purpose of changing the world through fiction is to vindicate the values and priorities of the post-materialist Millennial and Generation Z political left. Therefore the measuring rod for works of fiction became how hard they tried to represent, and how well they succeeded at representing, oppressed social groups in a positive way. It was into this overall structure of thought and set of standards for assessing media that the phenomenon of “anti-shipping” was finally introduced—first in lesbian anime fandom, then in anime fandom in general, finally in media fandom writ large.

“Anti-shipping” does not mean that one actually opposes all shipping; this would be next to impossible in media fandom as currently constituted, in which it is almost a dogmatized fact that the best reason to become invested in a book or series or movie is for its characters. It means, in effect, that one opposes the culture whose basics I describe several paragraphs above. To an extent this entails reasonable and normal moral positions (it’s true enough that well-adjusted people don’t usually want to read extensively about, say, incest). I don’t want to completely elide or discredit that point; in the days of “old fandom” much of the tone of fannish discussion of relationships and sex made me uncomfortable, and some corrective, at some point, was probably necessary. Those who knew me back in the early 2010s remember somebody who was in fact very rigidly moralistic in many ways. I was once challenged to write a piece of Doctor Who fanfiction using a common sex-related plot conceit that I strongly dislike and the only way I was able to make it convincing was to play it up for cosmic horror.

However, the anti-shipping mindset also entails a moral stridency that, much like similar moralizing styles elsewhere, often apophatically carries a prurient subtext. In other words, if someone looks at (to use an example I have in fact seen very recently) a relationship between two orphans who were raised in the same institutional setting and sees a case of sibling incest, that “someone” probably already had incest on the brain to begin with. So too with seeing a relationship between a twenty-three-year-old and a seventeen-year-old as not only legally dicey and probably exploitative but actually pedophilic in the same sense as if the twenty-three-year-old were molesting an elementary school student.

Some—admittedly mostly in the fandoms for Western cartoons rather than anime as such—apply this quality of moral analysis to previously uncontroversial forms of fanwork such as fanfiction about child characters as adults or ships between high school-aged characters played by adult actors. As well, many “antis” tend to see anybody who disagrees with them about these things as themselves suspect of an actual desire for pedophilic or incestuous sex in real life.

What happens when this lens is turned on anime, a medium with a long history of otaku-baiting raunchiness that comes from a culture with little in the way of a deeply ingrained theory of sexual morality? The answer is that many younger anime fans who have come up in an “anti”-dominated environment in the past five years don’t actually like anime as a medium at all. The idea of anime as an art form in conversation with itself seems to have evaporated. In its place we have, as I said above, a fandom culture more akin to that of Western first-run TV fandom, in which someone can happen to be a fan of a few shows-that-are-anime without knowing or caring much at all about the medium as a whole. Sometimes this even extends to whether or not one is actually a fan of the show in question. “I don’t watch My Hero Academia,” I saw one person with a My Hero Academia-themed Tumblr say recently. “I’m just here for Bakugou.” (Bakugou evidently is a specific character in My Hero Academia.) Evidently this person didn’t get the memo that being a Bakugou fan makes you an emotional abuse apologist.

V.

I don’t mean to moralize overmuch about the current state of the fandom or imply that my way of doing it in the 2008-2013 period is the way everybody has to keep doing it forever. I also don’t mean to suggest that there is no good material coming out of Japan anymore; in fact there is still plenty, despite the trends I have described. Carole & Tuesday, which I mentioned above, is a delightful show that fuses a mellow singer-songwriter sensibility with the two-fisted sci-fi setting of 90s classic Cowboy Bebop. Anime movies like Your Name and A Silent Voice still speak to audiences worldwide in much the same way that The Girl Who Leapt through Time and Summer Wars did in the late 2000s; Netflix distributed a movie of this type too, A Whisker Away, after its Japanese theatrical release got cancelled due to COVID-19. I’ve even liked the episodes of My Hero Academia that I’ve seen, although I evidently haven’t seen enough since I still barely know who Bakugou is. A friend of mine keeps trying to get me to watch Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! and I’m confident that I’ll love it once I get around to it.

What I think has been lost is the sheer amount of high-quality content that was coming out of Japan in the 2000s; the “innocence” of anime fandom as it didn’t use to need to ask questions like whether a show was shilling right-wing nationalism (since even if the show was, it could usually be ignored); and the wild-west fandom culture that made anime fandom such a hot spot for heady cultural and aesthetic remixing. These features are in decline even among people who are nominally committed to preserving or honoring the way the fandom used to be. 4chan anons who were once apolitical and latterly became Ron Paul or Occupy Wall Street types have converged on the identitarian right along with the genres they follow. Nobody these days is as blasé about ungovernably amoral fan content as they used to be (and that, if nothing else, is almost certainly a good thing). People with discerning tastes have less to discern from, have become pickier and picker for all sorts of reasons, and often end up repudiating shows they once loved. Of course, some of this may be, simply, the fact that anime fans who were not grown up ten years ago are grown up now, and growing up is the first step on the inevitable road to bereavement.

A year or two ago I heard an interview with an academic of some sort, I think it might have been Jonathan Haidt, who said that after 2014 or so he had noticed a change among university undergraduates. New classes, he said, suddenly began to have next to no brute-facts, pre-ideological understanding of, interest in, or tolerance for the past beyond what they had personally experienced. This has not universally been my experience with younger people, but it is something I have noticed about some. It is something I have noticed in fandom not least of all spaces. Fortunately, “some” is not “all,” and there has not been a complete loss of memory. Plenty of people are still talking about—or, more often, being lectured to by people like me about—the fandom of the 2000s and early 2010s. Even though it is not where the fandom is right now, even though it is difficult to see how it could ever be where the fandom is again, it has not become a place that is never visited or never remembered.