Jolyon Baraka Thomas on Tradition MANGA, ANIME, AND RELIGION IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN Drawing on Tradition Drawing on Tradition Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan Jolyon Baraka Thomas University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu © 2012 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas, Jolyon Baraka. Drawing on tradition : manga, anime, and religion in contemporary Japan / Jolyon Baraka Thomas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3589-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8248-3654-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Comic books, strips, etc.—Japan—History and criticism. 2. Comic books, strips, etc.—Religious aspects. 3. Animated films—Japan—History and criticism. 4. Animated films—Religious aspects. 5. Japan—Religion—21st century. I. Title. PN6790.J3 2012 2012019821 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Publishers’ Design and Production Services, Inc. Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc. bCONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Conventions xiii INTRODUCTION Religious Frames of Mind 1 CHAPTER ONE Visualizing Religion 35 CHAPTER TWO Recreating Religion 57 CHAPTER THREE Entertaining Religious Ideas 103 CHAPTER FOUR Depicting Religions on the Margins 125 CLOSURE 155 Notes 157 Bibliography 175 Index 189 v bPREFACE One of the most frustrating experiences of my life was that of becoming suddenly illiterate when I stepped off the plane and into Narita Airport in January of 2002. I had moved to Japan on a whim and with little linguistic preparation, having landed a teaching job via the Internet about three or four weeks prior. I took with me a newly acquired teaching license, the enthusi- asm of a recent college graduate, and a pact I had made with myself that I would live in Japan for at least one year. There are many things that could be said about that first year in Tokyo, but one feeling that stays with me is that of being almost entirely unable to decipher the written messages all around me. In addition to its rampant noise pollution (everything talks), Tokyo is a cacophony of printed messages. Yet because I could not yet read in Japanese, for my first few weeks I wandered in a muted version of the city. On trains—and Tokyoites spend a lot of time on trains—I was impervious to the relentless bombardment of ad campaigns, unable to catch up on the latest gossip regarding celebrities and the imperial family printed in hanging tabloid ads, indifferent to (because ignorant of) the printed admonitions to report suspicious activity. My hiragana reading was slow and awkward, and katakana still largely eluded me. During my commutes, I began to combat my illiteracy by documenting correspondences I saw between Romanized spellings of train stations and their kanji and hiragana equivalents. My sight word vocabulary grew slowly and steadily, as did my collection of flashcards and pocket notebooks. With time, I was able to navigate Tokyo’s labyrinthine train system and muddle my way through a restaurant menu. To be truly literate, however, I had to pick up a book and just start read- ing. When I did, I turned to Japan’s illustrated serial novels called manga. In addition to supplementing text with pictures, manga often include phonetic glosses for characters that may be unfamiliar to some readers, making them ideal literacy aids for second language learners. I began with readily comprehensible fare like Doraemon (a classic series about the adventures of protagonist Nobita and his robotic cat from the fu- vii Preface ture), Crayon Shin-chan (shorts about an eternally young and irrepressible boy with a penchant for nudity and mischief, somewhat like Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes), Conan (a brilliant teen detective trapped in the body of a prepu- bescent schoolboy), and One Piece (a story about a ragtag ship of pirates who do more do-gooding than pillaging). Within a couple of months of starting to read manga, I was regularly borrowing volumes of One Piece and Conan from my students. I was hooked. My experience with manga changed, however, when I discovered Tezuka Osamu’s Phoenix (Hi no tori). I saw that Tezuka had woven bits of Japanese religious history into his narrative, and his already compelling story gained additional intellectual appeal for me since I had majored in religious studies as an undergraduate. At around the same time as that discovery, a friend introduced me to the anime (animated films) of Studio Ghibli directors Mi- yazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao, both of whom similarly incorporated reli- gious imagery and vocabulary into their works. I found Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no Tani no Naushika) and Takahata’s Pom Poko (Heisei tanuki gassen ponpoko) particularly intriguing. Although at the time I could not articulate the role that apparently religious content played in these various works (much less how Japanese people would interpret that content), given the evident popularity of such manga and anime, I wondered if there was something particularly compelling about the ways in which these master storytellers deployed religious imagery and vocabulary in their narratives. When I left Japan in 2004, I already had the germ of an idea for a research project related to these questions. I started to write this book to answer a question that seemed simple enough: why—in light of Japan’s evident and often fervent secularism—were manga and anime with apparently religious themes so numerous and so popular? I returned to Japan between 2005 and 2007 to pursue this question and draft most of the material on which this book is based. In the field, how- ever, the question turned out to be maddeningly complex; as my research proceeded, the nature of the question changed. I wanted to know whether and how these evidently religious themes—which run the gamut from cava- lier appropriations of formal religious imagery to pious renditions of saintly hagiographies and sententious explications of religious doctrines—came to influence people’s daily lives and worldviews. The following pages form the beginning of an answer to these inter- twined questions. I found that while much of the deployment and reception of apparently religious imagery and vocabulary in manga and anime is casual viii Preface and often irreverent, some audience members have responded to particular characters or to the oeuvre of a certain author or director with fervent de- votion. Some people have created new ritual traditions based on fictional worlds, and some have interpreted manga and anime in light of their lessons for daily life. Furthermore, some artists have adopted leadership roles for fan groups that have legally incorporated as religions. Manga and anime cul- ture thus reveals aspects of religion in contemporary Japan that exist at the boundaries of formal religious institutions and their doctrines. The produc- tion and reception of these influential media provide provocative examples of the ways in which fictional settings can influence, absorb, and create re- ligious worlds, and how fictional characters and fanciful ideas can inspire audiences and influence their worldviews. ix