Faith-Based: Christianity, Shinto, and Other Religions in Anime
Japan (and its pop culture) see nothing incongruous about following two or more religions at once. Native Shinto, Buddhism from India, the teachings of the Chinese sage Confucius—all apply at the right time and place.
You can’t live a life without pain
—Isamu Dyson, quoting the Buddha in Macross Plus
When DIC Studios started dubbing Sailor Moon into English, Western viewers probably didn’t realize that some scenes were destined for the cutting-room floor. It wasn’t because of sex or violence, but because some images Western viewers automatically invest with a great deal of power are taken by Japanese viewers with little more than a mental shrug.
Example: in the R series of Sailor Moon episodes, the four Sailor Senshi who assist Sailor Moon are taken aboard the flying saucer of Rubeus.1 That’s the last most Westerners see of them until Sailor Moon vanquishes Rubeus in combat, and she and the others have to escape before the ship blows up. Were the other Sailors in prison? Not exactly. Japanese viewers (and some Western fans) know that the other four spent the time suspended on crystal crosses.
It’s ironic that a symbol as potent as crucifixion should be edited out precisely because of that potency. After all, the way it’s generally used in anime—when it’s used at all—is in a manner Westerners can understand. It becomes a form of torture for someone who doesn’t deserve it.
The Sailor Senshi certainly fit into this category. They were just being used as bait by Rubeus to draw Sailor Moon onto his ship. Another innocent victim is the video girl Amano Ai,2 the title character of Den‘ei Shojo (Video Girl Ai). In this 1992 anime, based on the manga by Masakazu Katsura, Ai is a “comfort video” girl, who’s only supposed to speak consolingly to whoever rents her cassette. However, she not only crosses out of the television and into the real world, but is later electronically crucified by her inventor/programmer, Rolex. Her crime was falling in love with one of the customers, the hapless student Yota Moteuchi.3 In Vengeance of the Space Pirate, an edited and dubbed version of Reiji Matsumoto’s Arcadia of My Youth, pirate queen Emeraldas and Maya, the underground broadcaster who tries to rally Earth against an alien invasion, are hung up on crosses before their execution by firing squad. The fourth installment of Earthian features a synthetic human named Messiah whose inventor wishes to erase and reprogram Messiah’s memory. He does this by crucifying Messiah on an oddly shaped device set up on the altar of a church. In the film version of Macross Plus, virtual singing idol Sharon Apple declares her independence of her programmer, Myung Fan Lone, by suspending her in midair, crucified with a dozen coaxial cables. And in the Tenchi Muyo! OAV known as “The Mihoshi Special,” Galaxy Police officers Mihoshi and Kiyone and Jurai princess Aeka are suspended on crosses while Dr. Washu tries to destroy the universe and space pirate Ryoko tries to compromise Tenchi’s virginity. Even crucifixion can be played for laughs.
Knowledge of crucifixion in Japan seems to date from the sixteenth-century introduction of Christianity itself to the islands. There were several notorious examples of crucifixion in Japan, especially the martyrdom of twenty-six foreign missionaries and their Japanese followers in 1597. Another was carried out by the infamous warlord Oda Nobunaga. A ruthless fighter, Nobunaga abused friend and foe equally, but the blow that sealed his fate involved the mother of Akechi Mitsuhide, a warlord who had allied himself to Nobunaga. During one battle, Mitsuhide had sent his mother to the enemy camp to serve as a hostage to convince the enemy to negotiate. When the enemy arrived at the parley, Nobunaga, ignoring his own terms, had the enemy envoy crucified; the enemy killed Mitsuhide’s mother in retaliation.
In June 1582, Mitsuhide was ordered by Nobunaga to lead his forces in an attack on the Mori clan; instead, his men turned on Nobunaga. Trapped in a temple in Kyoto, Nobunaga committed suicide. At the time, he controlled about half of Japan.4 What did Japan borrow from Christianity aside from crucifixion? Not a great deal. Attitudes have changed since the Tokugawa ban on Christianity, and in modern times the country has had a small minority of devout and practicing Christians, but in general the Japanese have only been interested in the tangential trappings and trimmings of Christianity. They have simply never needed it to provide a world view or a theology.
The Big Three
We need to remember the context. Japan has existed for centuries with a mix of no less than three governing belief systems, one of which doesn’t strictly qualify as a religion even though it serves some of the purposes that religion serves in the West. Yet Japanese were and are able to function under all three simultaneously.
Confucianism, which is actually a social and ethical code rather than a form of worship, was based on the writings of the great Chinese scholar named K’ung Ch’iu, better known as K’ung Fu-tzu, or Master Kung. In Renaissance times, Western writers romanized his name to the quasi-Latin Confucius).5 Master K’ung was a teacher of the elite; in modern terms, it might be more accurate to call him a consultant. He advised nobles in China on state policy and techniques of governance. His advice wasn’t always followed, but its common sense survived the centuries and influenced, to one degree or another, most of the societies of Asia.
What Confucius taught was a way of ordering society that em-phasized education over heredity. Brains mattered more than birth to Confucius, and his teachings were the foundation for the Chinese imperial system in which government posts were earned by passing rigorous civil service tests. Beyond that, Confucius also saw that the family was the key to society, and that society functioned best when family members behaved according to a well-understood hierarchy. If you are an older brother, the teacher said, behave like one, and all will be well.
Buddhism came to Japan from India, by way of China. Although Confucius provided a blueprint for an ethical society and a description of what makes a true gentleman in that society, history has shown that power tends to corrupt. Societies based too rigidly on such social hierarchies can often degenerate into despotism as brutal as the old aristocracies. Buddhism turned out to be a perfect counterweight to this tendency, because of its doctrine that the capacity for enlightenment—“Buddha-nature”—is within everyone, regardless of education or social standing. Thus the conscientious Buddhist is supposed to show compassion to all people, regardless of rank. (It actually goes farther than that, calling for compassion for all living things, from animals to insects.)
So, if Confucius gave Japan its ethical ground rules, and Buddhism taught Japan how to leaven those rules with compassion, what does Japan’s native religion, Shinto, offer? Nothing less than the identity of Japan itself as a nation, and of the Japanese as a people. Shinto provided the creation mythology for Japan. It provided Amaterasu the Sun Goddess6 as putative mother of the entire Imperial line and of the Japanese people, and the animistic belief that kami (divine beings) are many and everywhere.
The word “belief” is the key here. In Shinto, doctrine takes second place behind the worship itself. Joseph Campbell tells the story of asking a Shinto priest about Shinto’s belief system. The answer: “We have no ideology. We have no theology. We dance.”7 He meant the ecstatic trance states entered into by seers, although this isn’t limited to Shinto; the so-called “whirling Dervishes” of Sufi Islam are a case in point.
One other religious figure puts in an appearance from time to time: Kannon, the Goddess of Compassion. This is Japan’s version of Kwanyin, a Chinese version of Indian bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. Also a figure in Korean, Tibetan, and Vietnamese Buddhism, Kannon’s Chinese name means “Heeding the Cries of the World.”
Kannon’s stature as a goddess is shown by being oversize. The manga Shaman King by Hiroyuki Takei takes place in a Tokyo neighborhood called Funbari Hill, where the major claim to fame is a large statue of Kannon. This could be, in keeping with Shaman King’s tendency to show real places with slightly altered names, Takei’s version of the Byakue Kannon (White Robed Kannon), a statue over ninety-six feet high, carved between 1934 and 1961 (with a break during World War II), and located in Oofuna. However, unlike Funbari, which is almost deserted in the manga, Oofuna is near the bustling city of Kamakura, which flows almost seamlessly into Yokohama and Tokyo.
The Byakue Kannon isn’t even the largest Kannon in Japan. The “Big Kannon” in Kamaishi, holding a fish and intended to bless sailors and fishermen, stands thirteen stories tall and has a circular staircase within. Two other Kannon, a 200-foot statue in Kurume and a 185-foot statue in Aizu, are Jibo Kannon, and are specifically for worshippers to pray to for fertility and protection of newborns; they are shown holding babies. During the Tokugawa Shogunate, when Christianity was officially outlawed, some believers kept Jibo Kannon statues in their homes as an acceptable secret substitute for the Madonna and Child.
The goddess doesn’t appear in the Studio Ghibli film Ponyo, but two sailors think she does. Granmamare, the goddess of the sea and mother of the goldfish title character, is seen swimming to a meeting with her human husband. Because she appears to the sailors as a luminous, beautiful woman, larger than the ship they sail on, one of them immediately starts praying to Kannon while the other claps his hands twice: the traditional Shinto way of summoning the attention of the gods.
The recognition of a Buddhist deity in a Shinto manner is as clear a proof as can be that Japanese religion isn’t about determining the “One True Church”; rather, it is about a life that unifies disparate religions as a way of explaining the bigger picture of life in Japan and Japan’s place in the universe.
Where does all that leave Christianity? Pretty much marginalized in Japan, a nation that got along for two millennia without it. As far back as Oda Nobunaga, Christianity was seen by Japan’s rulers as more destabilizing than beneficial; Christian missionaries were tolerated by Nobunaga more as a political counterweight to the militant Ikko Buddhists than out of an attraction to Christian doctrine. Christians in Japan, both foreign-born missionaries and native converts, were persecuted in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but a lot of this persecution was brought on the Christians by themselves.
Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in the mid-1500s to spread the Jesuit perspective on Catholicism, which was autocratic and hierarchical and not unlike the Japanese warlords’ top-down view of political power. But then came the Franciscans, who sought to convert the poor and lowly rather than the wealthy and powerful. To make matters worse, the Jesuits were predominantly Portuguese, while the Franciscans were predominantly Spanish, and there was just as much bad blood between the two nations as between the two Catholic orders. With the Jesuits and the Franciscans constantly sniping at each other (a situation made even worse when Protestant missionaries started arriving in Japan in the late 1500s and badmouthed all Catholics), Japan’s rulers felt that Christianity might do the nation more harm than good.
Of course, there was also the matter of these rulers’ self-preservation. Life in Japan had long revolved around the clan, the region, and the emperor (or the warlord who propped up the emperor): the emphasis was on some powerful group or other. The Christian focus on personal salvation taught its followers to think of themselves as individuals rather than members of a group—unless, of course, the particular Christian sect was the group. The religion was perceived as a threat not just to Japan’s native beliefs, but also to the nation’s social and political stability. So beginning in 1587 with an (unenforced) demand by Toyotomi Hideyoshi that all foreign missionaries leave the country, a crackdown on Christianity began that culminated in a complete ban on the religion by the Tokugawa shogunate in the first decades of the seventeenth century and the closing of Japan to all contact with the West except for a tiny Dutch trade outpost in Nagasaki.
After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, as Japan rushed to westernize, Christian missionaries returned to Japan after an absence of almost three centuries. They established universities that still stand today; they pioneered education for Japanese girls and charity for the disabled. Today, the bottom line is that, in Japan, Christianity is a vital and important faith to its few adherents (about one percent of the population). For the rest, all they know of it is pretty much what they see in pop culture, whether it comes from Hollywood or Tokyo.
Following the Doctor
In the late 1950s, when Hollywood was turning out one Biblical epic after another, Dr. Osamu Tezuka developed his own iconography for crucifixes, which pretty much set the standard in Japanese pop culture for all that would follow. The cross served two distinct purposes in Dr. Tezuka’s work. On the one hand, it was a death symbol, denoting or even forecasting the death of a character. In addition, it could be used to signal the just conclusion of a story or sequence, which might involve the death of the villain, or avenging the death of a sympathetic character by the arrest of the responsible party. There is a somewhat different usage in a later episode of Futago no Kishi (Twin Knights), the manga sequel to Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight). In the episode “Okami no Yama” (Wolf Mountain), a mother wolf dies protecting her pups, and is buried beneath a cross. The wolf is not anthropomorphized at all; the reader is intended to view her as a wolf. Topping her grave with a Christian symbol was partly a sign of respect, honoring a mother who died protecting her children, thus conforming to traditional human gender expectations. The wolf, in other words, may not have been human, but she was a mother, according to the culture of the comic’s reader, and not just that of the narrative’s fantasized European culture.
There is also a religious sense in which the wolf, and the respect accorded to her, could be seen as traditional, even if the symbol used to express the respect is alien to Japanese culture. Buddhism stresses the oneness of all living things, a theme that recurs throughout Dr. Tezuka’s works as well as that of other manga artists. There is a connection, after all, between the Black Jack episode8 in which, stranded at sea with two criminals, Black Jack must perform surgery on a dolphin so it can help them find land, and the kuyo ceremony described by William R. LaFleur:
Annually in Japan there is an autumnal rite of kuyo for eels. Through the medium of national television, each year presents select restaurateurs and their customers, people who love to eat eels, gathered by an altar while Buddhist priests intone the words of sutras to express thanks to the eels for having been so nourishing and for having such a delicious taste. Of course, in this—especially when the whole rite is projected to the nation via the nightly news—the Japanese tell themselves once again that their ties with antiquity are intact and that they as a people are not ingrates or irreligious, however much they consume eels with great relish most of the time.9
A group of Astro Boy stories also employs the cross to signal a just conclusion of the story, while also serving as a death-marker. “Kirisuto no Me” (The Eye of Christ) is the most overtly religious of the group, beginning in a church on a stormy night. A gang of masked criminals invades the church. The priest tells them that Jesus (in this case, the altar crucifix) sees everything. The criminal ringleader, whose mask is blown off by a gust of wind, tells the priest to blindfold the plaster statue of Jesus. As he does so, the priest scratches an ideogram into the statue’s eye that identifies the ringleader. The priest is killed, but the mystery is solved when Hige Oyaji, the old teacher who assists Atom in his adventures, makes the connection. The final panel juxtaposes the radiant image of the altar cross with the criminals being marched off to jail.
In the story “Ivan no Baka” (Ivan the Fool), Atom and a group of earthlings are in a spaceship that gets hit by a meteor. The party makes an emergency landing on the moon. While exploring, Atom finds the ruins of an old rocket crashed in a valley. A tape recording reveals that the rocket was launched by the Soviet Union in 1960.10 The sole survivors of the crash were cosmonaut Minya Mikhailovna and her robot companion Ivan. Since, in Dr. Tezuka’s lunar landscape, plants flourish in a breathable atmosphere and water is available, Minya scratches out a basic but lonely existence. On her deathbed, she tells Ivan to bury her on a hill where she has planted a cross.
When one of the passengers (established at the beginning of the story as a thief) learns that Minya, while she lived on the moon, had unearthed massive diamonds, he threatens to kill the others unless Atom shows him where Minya’s grave is. Lunar night begins to fall; Atom takes the others to a rescue ship, while the thief pulls the cross from the ground and uses it as a digging-tool to get to the diamonds, thus compounding desecration with sacrilege. No sooner does he find the diamonds than Ivan appears, mistaking the thief for Minya, as he similarly mistook Atom for Minya earlier. Ivan carries the thief back to the ship to care for him, heedless of his cries for help. The final panel shows the spaceship in the background, the discarded diamonds and the cross in the foreground. Once again the cross is used as the signal of a just conclusion, while it also serves as a symbol of death. Here it represents the doom of the thief as well as the death of Minya.
This same dual usage is seen in “Chitei Sensha” (The Underground Tank). The villain of this piece, General Saborsky, invented the title vehicle as a means to world domination. One of his workers, however, has stolen the tank and used it to rescue Hige Oyaji, stranded in a desert after his plane was destroyed by the general’s jet. When the pilot of the tank is killed in a landslide, Hige Oyaji buries him in a grave with a cross as a marker. (It is worth noting here that the dead tank driver is black, for no apparent plot reason. However, it does reinforce the cultural notion that Christianity is essentially a creed for non-Japanese).
Hige Oyaji then digs his own grave and erects a cross for himself; however, when he prays, the words come out “Nanmai Dabu,” a scrambled version of the “Namu Amida Butsu” prayer to Amida Buddha.11 Atom hears these prayers and rescues Hige Oyaji.
The story ends with Atom attacking General Saborsky’s private jet, knocking off the wing-tips and tail and causing it to crash into the ground nose-first. General Saborsky attempts to escape by driving his damaged tank into a live volcano—a move that means certain death, which he considers preferable to surrender. Again, in the final panel, the wrecked fuselage in the foreground bears a deliberate resemblance to a crucifix grave-marker and also signals the just end of General Saborsky.
A Higher Power
The image of Christianity in Japanese pop culture can be, in a word, fanciful. Some priests in manga and anime are vampire-killers, their roles modeled on the Dracula movies produced by England’s Hammer Studios in the 1960s and starring Christopher Lee. In the Vampire Hunter D anime (1985), based on a series of novels by Hideyuki Kikuchi, the vampire is named Count Magnus Lee, and Christopher Lee’s name is invoked as a vampire gag in Hyaku Monogatari (One Hundred Stories), one of several manga treatments by Dr. Tezuka of the legend of Faust.
Vampires tend to be romanticized in the West, but Japan looks at attempts to prolong life at the expense of others as monstrous. The mentality of finding human life despicable because it is so short is given a surprising showcase in “Interlude Party,” a one-shot episode from the second series of Fullmetal Alchemist. In an episode that is partly a dream sequence and partly a collection of clips from earlier episodes, the alchemist Hohenheim, father of the Elric brothers, finds himself watching villagers dance around a bonfire. At first he argues with a much younger version of Pinako, the grandmother of Winry Rockbell, a local girl whose love of machinery makes her a mechanic to the Elric Brothers. Because Hohenheim used the Philosopher’s Stone to live for centuries, he had abandoned his attachments to humanity, despising them as fallible, ignorant beings who just keep making the same mistakes. He adopted the view of the Homunculi: that humans are merely a resource, whose only purpose is to be sacrificed to make more Homunculi. Finally one other character appears in the dream: Tricia Elric, the woman Hohenheim fell in love with, married, fathered two boys with, then left to avoid revealing his own longevity. Tricia tells him that humanity’s mistakes, its fallibility, even its mortality cause humanity to grow. The dream ends with a flight of cranes.
Why cranes? Because this is anime, a reflection of Japanese culture. Cranes are found on almost every continent, but China and Japan venerate the crane as the most long-lived of birds; its life span in reality is thirty to forty years, but in folklore the crane was said to live a thousand years. They came by their longevity by associating with the sages of old, reclusive wise men who lived in the mountains.12 These cranes, however, are still mortal; longevity is not immortality, and their hearts aren’t as corrupted as the humans who seek to cheat death.
The Exorcist also resonated in Japan. The Ghost Sweeper Mikami manga and anime (1993) include an exorcist actually named Father Karras, after the character in the movie. Manga “bad boy” Go Nagai produced a bawdy parody of The Exorcist in his series Occult Gang. As in the movie, a young girl is possessed by a demon and wreaks havoc. The Occult Gang is called in to exorcise the demon. One of the gang, however, inadvertently drinks the holy water that was to be used in the exorcism. This doesn’t faze the gang; with the leader reasoning that holy water stays holy even if it isn’t in the bottle, the exorcism proceeds by pissing on the possessed girl.
Another exorcist, and another outsider, appears in the Ghost Hunt stories by Fuyumi Ono, with artwork by Shiho Inada. The staff of Shibuya Psychic Research includes an Australian Catholic exorcist-in-training named John Brown. While he’s capable when reading scripture and sprinkling holy water, he doesn’t always fit in. For one thing, he speaks Japanese in the western Kansai dialect. Beyond this, he sometimes makes mistakes, like saying that SPR has a patron but using the word that refers to the financial supporter of a prostitute.
One of the most memorable scenes in the apocalyptic Hollywood horror film The Omen showed a Catholic priest being skewered by a falling lightning rod. Dr. Tezuka’s series Don Dracula inverts this scene for comic effect, by having lightning strike a tree branch, which then falls onto Dracula’s back in a deliberate imitation of the scene from the movie. (But then, the entire series was a parody of a parody, inspired by the American vampire parody movie Love at First Bite, which ran in Japan as Dracula Miyako e Iku (Dracula Goes to Town).
Answering Prayers
Not all Christian priestly appearances are tied to the supernatural. A kindly but ineffectual old priest figures in Dr. Tezuka’s shojo manga titled Angel Hill. A monastery is home for the boy Dan Hayasaka13 as he develops into a naïve faith-driven boxer in Shinji Imaizumi’s God Is a Southpaw. Rumiko Takahashi inverted this situation for comic effect in her manga about a young boxer and a Catholic novitiate, Ippondo no Fukuin (One-Pound Gospel).
By far, however, Christianity’s main resonance in modern Japan is theatrical: as the backdrop for a church wedding. The old pattern of getting married in a Shinto ceremony and receiving a Buddhist funeral has been amended in recent decades. The current saying is: “Born Shinto, marry Christian, die Buddhist.” A Christian church wedding has be-come the chic thing to do, to the dismay of priests who at least want to talk about Christianity a little bit. As an indication of how the Japanese perceive the whole issue, the current demand is not just for a church backdrop but for a blond, good-looking priest to perform the ceremony.14 Marriage has become tied in Japan to an unusual Christian holiday: Christmas. In Japan, St. Valentine’s Day is a very specific celebration: girls give food to the boys they like. This usually consists of chocolate, and there are kits available to make chocolate from scratch. But this is the only time a female is encouraged to take the romantic initiative. It usually falls to the male to pop the question, and Christmas has increasingly become the favored day to do that. So much so that some women get tired of waiting; the 1991 album Lucky by pop singer Misato Watanabe includes the song “Kurisumasu Made Matenai”—“Don’t Wait Until Christmas.”
One Picture is Worth
The world of Japanese religion also allows for communication between the dead and the living. It may be a bit one-sided, but there are many examples—requiring photographs. These aren’t spirit photographs, even though they’re part of the goings-on in films like The Ring and The Grudge. They’re ordinary photos of departed family members, with whom the family needs to keep in touch.
T. R. Reid describes the years he and his family lived in Tokyo while he was Asian Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, in his book Confucius Lives Next Door. The title refers not just to the sage of China who lived 500 years before Christ, but also to the Reids’ next-door neighbors, who embodied so many Confucian virtues. They were an elderly couple, the Matsudas, and one day Mrs. Matsuda passed away at age seventy-eight. As Reid placed flowers on the makeshift altar that had been erected in the Matsuda living room, Mr. Matsuda turned to a photograph of his wife and told it matter-of-factly, “Cho-Cho, it’s Reid-san.”15
It’s tempting for a Western reader in the twenty-first century to dismiss this scene as the sentimental gesture of an elderly widower. Doing this, however, misses the point. Mr. Matsuda wasn’t being sentimental, or senile, or ironic. He spoke to the picture of his wife in order to communicate with the spirit of his late wife; nothing more, nothing less.
He isn’t alone. In Osamu Tezuka’s manga Song of the White Peacock, the heroine, Yuri Kogawa, speaks to her father, missing in action since the Second World War, through his picture. We can see Ryo Kawasaki speaking to the photo of her dead father in Princess Nine. We can see Haruhi Fujioka keeping a photo of her deceased mother, and hear her senpai Tamaki talk to it, in Ouran High School Host Club. Similarly, in the romantic comedy manga Ai Yori Aoshi by Ko Fumizuki and its anime version, the main character, Kaoru, has decided to take the girl he loves, Aoi-chan, to meet his mother. He picks up flowers, incense, and food, and takes them to a cemetery. He places everything in front of his mother’s tombstone and matter-of-factly introduces Aoi-chan to his mother as the girl who has come to mean everything in his life. Aoi-chan follows up on this, telling Kaoru’s mother about her feelings for her son.
Kaoru, by the way, is a college junior in pre-Law when we meet him; it’s hard to imagine anyone more prosaic and less given to communing with spirits. Yet Kaoru and Ryo and Yuri and Haruhi do not address their dead parents half-heartedly or ironically. They expect to be heard and understood in the next world.
1. The five seasons of Sailor Moon are roughly divided thus: Sailor Moon, Sailor Moon R, Sailor Moon S, Sailor Moon SuperS, Sailor Stars.
2. This is another loaded name. Literally, it can mean “the love of Heaven,” and the mysterious video store where Yota finds Ai’s tape is called Gokuraku (Paradise).
3. He has a loaded name too, and his classmates love to tease him about it. His family name, Mote-uchi, is made up of two kanji. Mote carries the connotation of “to be popular with the opposite sex.” However, the kanji pronounced uchi can also be pronounced nai, and nai is the suffix that turns a Japanese verb into a negative. So when his classmates call him motenai, they are saying “can’t get a girlfriend.”
4. Mikiso Hane, Japan: A Historical Survey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 130–34.
5. This happened to other great minds of the time as well. Polish astronomer Nikolai Kopernik is now known as Copernicus; Dutch legal scholar Huig de Groot became Hugo Grotius, and so on.
6. She’s still present, and not just in Shinto shrines. In an episode of Cardcaptor Sakura, based on a manga by the CLAMP collective, Sakura captures the Mirror Card, which until then had been masquerading as Sakura. When it is identified, it reveals itself in the traditional image of Amaterasu, carrying a mirror.
7. Quoted in Hane, Japan, 23. This line takes on a literal significance when one looks at Key the Metal Idol: Tokiko Mima’s mother, her mother before her, and all the women of the Mima line were temple dancers.
8. “Umi no Stranger” (Stranger from the Sea) in Black Jack 1 (Tokyo: Akita Shoten, 1974), 29–51.
9. William R. LaFleur, Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 145–46.
10. Recall that, in 1959, the Soviet Union led the United States in space exploration. No matter how implausible Dr. Tezuka’s lunar landscape might be, the odds (as seen from 1959 Japan) that Russia would beat America to the moon looked rather good.
11. With the pun potential inherent in Japanese, the prayer also sounds like a seemingly unrelated question: “How many pages are there?” It’s the kind of question a harried editor might ask a manga artist who is behind deadline, and thus the joke also becomes a self-referential pun on the fact that this is a comic book. Similarly, in the Don Dracula episode “Dracula versus Carmilla,” the female vampire tells Dracula’s daughter Chocula that she works for Shojo Princess magazine, which brings an angry complaint by the editor of Shonen Champion, where Don Dracula was running at the time. An obituary for Tezuka noted that such references were common: “Suddenly we’d read the words ‘Genkoryo yasusugite tamaran!’ [The payment for this manuscript is so cheap I can’t stand it!]” (Shigehisa Ogawa, “New Classic Music Rag #7,” Shukan Asahi [February 24, 1989], 111).
12. http://www.yamaha-motor.co.jp/global/entertainment/papercraft/animal-japan/tancho/guide/index.html
13. Dan is an interesting name. It’s written with a kanji that supports a number of readings, including the root of the verb hazumu (to rebound, also to be inspired) and the word for “bullet,” tama in Japanese. What better name for a boxer who, inspired by his faith, rebounds after being hit and attacks like a bullet?
14. A delightful manga story by Rumiko Takahashi, “Roman no Akindo” (The Romance Merchant), tells of a struggling marriage chapel. They perform Shinto, Buddhist, or Christian weddings, with the same “priest” officiating at all three—provided he’s sober.
15. T. R. Reid, Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East teaches us about living in the West (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1999), 90.