Who Ya Gonna Call?: The Spirit World in Anime
Japanese ghosts are a thousand years old, or as young as last week’s urban legend. Naïve or nasty, playful or punitive, they’re a link to the supernatural even in these hi-tech times.
The supernatural plays a very large part in Japanese pop culture. Ancient legends feature more spirits, from multi-tailed foxes to tortoise-shelled kappa, than can be listed here.1 The prominence of the old ghosts and demons continues to this day, when some of them even turn out to be the good guys.2 At times, the battles of good versus evil are in clear-cut, even apocalyptic, terms, without the moral ambiguity that keeps anime and manga fresh to Western eyes. But even in the most basic supernatural battles there are recognizably Japanese patterns. In Buichi Terasawa’s manga Kabuto, the title character is supposed to be a karasutengu or crow spirit. Karasutengu have a lengthy history in Japan; Dr. Tezuka used them in several manga set in Japan’s old days, notably as comic relief in Hato yo! Ama Made (Dove! Fly Up to Heaven). They also appear in Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura as a race of crowlike aliens.
Kabuto is a human embodiment of a karasutengu, but more important is the fact that he fights alongside four other human embodiments of spirit-gods, as they try to defeat Doki, the kuroyasha (black demon—who looks suspiciously like Thor in the old Marvel comics). As you might have guessed by now, Kabuto’s fellow deities are a woman, a child, a big beefy guy, and a lone wolf—it’s the Gatchaman science team in yet another disguise.
That’s The Spirit
Spirituality in Japan has evolved into a union of Shinto and Buddhism. They share a belief in a porous afterlife, where spirits can move between the real world and their own realm. They can cross over because of a particular time of year or special date, or because of a particular event or emotion, or after being invoked by one of the many kinds of spiritual mediums or priests. These can be ghosts of the once-living or the spirits of aborted fetuses, of household pets, of jealous lovers, of upset suicides. . . . In a very real sense there is no beginning and no ending to reality, whose nature is far greater than humanity’s concept of time, birth, and death. Some ghosts are even tied to the elements.
Snow White
The yuki-onna (snow-woman) is one of several vampiric female spirits in Japanese legend. She is a woman in white robes who flies through the sky during blizzards; because her skin is also as white as snow, all anyone can see of her is her eyes (and, in some versions of the legend, her pubic hair). She also appears to men as a woman in furs, holding a bundle and asking them to hold her baby for a moment; those who do so are found frozen to death. Her story makes up one part of Masaki Kobayashi’s live-action supernatural masterpiece Kwaidan. She puts in a more benign appearance as Yukime in Jigoku Sensei Nube (Hell Teacher Nube).
A variation on the yuki-onna also appears in Gate Keepers (2000), a series based on a video game. There are ample clues to this character’s identity, beginning with her name: Yukino Hojo (yuki meaning “snow”). Then there’s her origin: she was found wandering on Daisetsuzan (the Great Snow Mountain) on the northern island of Hokkaido. She never seems to age, she wears traditional kimono rather than modern clothes (the anime is set in the 1960s), she seldom speaks, except in a very soft voice, and then only in verse. One character identifies her speech as tanka poetry, a verse form that dates back some 1,300 years. Finally, there’s her “gate,” the portal to another dimension that she controls. All the members of the AEGIS group (all of them students, of course) psychically control such gates, but Yukino’s is the Gate of Ice and Snow, which she uses to create blizzards as weapons against invading aliens.
In the Well
The case of Okiku Ido (Miss Chrysanthemum-in-the-Well) is less sinister, except for what it says about courtly life. In one version, Aoyama is a servant of a noble family who conspires to take over the family fortune by assassinating the head of the household. Okiku, another servant, finds out about Aoyama’s plan and prevents the assassination. In revenge, Aoyama frames Okiku and convinces the master to have her thrown down a well. The specific well, at the Hakurajo castle in Himeji near Osaka, is now a tourist attraction by day, but in the dead of night one supposedly can hear Okiku’s voice in the well. (Her master heard her night after night, after discovering that Okiku was innocent; remorse and sorrow ultimately drove him to madness.)
This is another old legend brought to life (sort of) in Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku. During the Obon festival, the residents of the boarding-house take part in a haunted walk (an outdoor haunted house). Kyoko volunteers to be Okiku; the plan is for her to hide in the bottom of a shallow well and speak in a ghostly voice to passers-by. Of course, nothing goes as planned, and the episode ends with six people jammed into a rather small well. (The cover illustration for this manga episode shows Kyoko as Okiku, with a stack of nine dishes on the edge of the well. This is a reference to the lie that Aoyama told to cause Okiku to be thrown into the well: she was accused of breaking one of a set of ten plates, priceless heirlooms for which she was responsible.)
The Exorcists
With all the spirits roaming pop culture Japan, in recent years exorcism has become a viable (and largely comic) profession for a number of anime characters, including Shinto and Buddhist clerics as well as Christian ones, not to mention purely mercenary freelancers. The lives of most people, including the clergy, can be, let’s face it, rather dull—hardly prime material for dramatic treatment. But when the outrageously supernatural moves in, it’s a different matter . . . .
Reiko Mikami and Company
Takashi Shiina’s manga Ghost Sweeper Mikami has proven popular enough to spawn a TV series and an OAV special (1993) as well as over a hundred print episodes. Mikami is a knockout, which is one of the reasons she can get away with paying so little to her assistant, a lecherous young man named Yokoshima. He has no magical ability whatsoever (unlike Mikami, who uses paper talismans, demon-killing spears, and other devices to dispatch the undead), and is content to hope for a chance to peek in on the boss in the bathtub. Other members of her staff include:
Okinu-chan, yasashii but a bit befuddled by modern life. She comes by it honestly, since she was sacrificed to a volcano god three centuries ago and first encounters Mikami as a ghost. Having forgotten how to let go of the world and become one with the cosmos, she agrees to work with Mikami and is restored to life five years into the series. As a ghost and later as a ghost-hunter, she wears the white blouse and red hakama of a Shinto shrine maiden or miko.
Meiko Rokudo, a middle-school girl from a wealthy family whose body happens to be host to a dozen different shikigami spirits. However, when she gets nervous (as seems to happen frequently) she loses all control over them.
Father Karras. Yes, he’s named after the central priest in William Blatty’s The Exorcist, a piece of Western pop culture that had a serious impact in the East. This Father K is a sincere exorcist (unlike Mikami, who charges her clients ten million yen per exorcism).
Shiho Sakakibara
She only puts in a brief appearance in the manga Oh My Goddess! (1988) by Kosuke Fujishima, but it’s memorable. A cute classmate at Nekomi Tech of Keiichi (the hapless student who dialed Heaven’s help-desk and now has the goddess Belldandy as a girlfriend), she’s been dabbling in exorcism for a couple of years and is convinced she knows it all. Unfortunately, she doesn’t, and actually ends up summoning spirits rather than dispelling them. She also has an indirect effect on the plot by stirring up jealousy in Belldandy. At the end of the episode, Belldandy has confronted her jealousy and learned from it, while Shiho continues on, blissfully unaware of her abilities—or lack thereof.
Meisuke Nueno
In Jigoku Sensei Nube (Hell Teacher Nube, 1996), this poor soul is a fifth-grade schoolteacher who constantly wears a black glove over his left hand. It’s not a fashion statement—the glove covers up the demon claw that he has in lieu of a hand. Meisuke, also known as Nube, is an exorcist who found himself outmatched in one of his exorcisms, and won out only by taking the demon into himself. So, while he performs exorcisms, among other magical feats, the title character of Sho Masakura and Takeshi Okano’s horror/romance school comedy does so from an insider’s perspective.3 He teaches at a school with other supernatural practitioners among the faculty and students.
Ayaka Kisaragi and Company
Yugen Kaisha (Phantom Quest Corp., 1994)4 could almost be called “Ghost Sweeper Lite.” There are a lot of similarities between the OAV series Yugen Kaisha and Ghost Sweeper Mikami: a for-profit exorcism agency run by a hard-drinking, fiery, voluptuous redhead who subcontracts to a variety of others with occult talents, resulting in adventures that mix the humorous and the horrific.
However, the Yugen Kaisha of the title is not as successful an operation as the Ghost Sweepers. The company operates out of Ayaka’s home, which is at least convenient, since she prefers, after a night of carousing, to sleep until almost noon. In an apparent bid to save on expenses, her office manager is Mamoru Shimesu, a ten-year-old boy who seems quite accustomed to waking up a boss who sleeps in the nude (but then, his family has a history of being servants to the recently strapped Kisaragi family). Other experts are hired per job, and usually have a day-job already. These include Nanami Rokugo, a pubescent girl who’s a “fire-starter”; Rokkon, a traditional male (for a change) monk/magician; and Madame Suimei, a stereotypical Western gypsy fortuneteller. Ayaka’s main contact is Kozo Karino, at the psychic desk of the Tokyo Police Department, where he would have almost nothing to do if not for the Yugen Kaisha.
A Magic Number
Yoko Mano being the 108th Devil Hunter was not a random number choice. At the stroke of the New Year, Japanese Buddhist temples sound the bell 108 times for the 108 temptations of this world that must be overcome. We see this happen in an episode of Hotel, a manga series by Shotaro Ishinomori, in which an apprentice chef, tempted away from his job by lowlife friends, returns to a life of duty and honor on New Year’s Eve, as the 108 chimes sound.
Note also the Chinese version of the myth of Pandora’s box, retold in the prologue of Shih Nai-An’s thirteenth-century epic Water Margin (Shui-hu Chuan, or Suikoden in Japanese). In this version, an envoy from the emperor frees 108 imprisoned supernatural fiends, letting them loose upon the world. “It is impossible to talk about Japanese irezumi [tattooing] without mentioning Utagawa Kuniyo-shi’s [prints based on the Chinese legend] Tsuzoku Suikoden Goketsu Hyakuhachinin (108 Heroes of the Suikoden),” writes the author of an article on irezumi for alterasian.com. “These designs form a large part of all full-body tattoos and are often copied, or else the artist will draw his own illustration of another part of the story.” (An anime titled Suikoden is more post-apocalyptic than reflective of Utagawa. There’s also a video game called Suikoden, but based on “ancient Eastern lore” and not the Chinese story.)
A pirate band in the Outlaw Star series is called the 108 Suns. On the H side, there’s Mitsuko, a sexual vampire and grandmother to Kenji, hero of the Elven Bride series. In the second OAV, Mitsuko seduces one of Kenji’s National Guard colleagues, and they end up doing it 108 times; no wonder the guardsman is only a withered husk of his former self when it’s over. In one of the cases investigated by Shibuya Psychic Research in Ghost Hunt by Shiho Inada and Fuyumi Ono, a haunted mansion is found to have 106 rooms, which seems to come up short of the magic number. However, this is before they discover two hidden rooms, fulfilling the number. And in Crying Freeman, a manga and anime by Kazuo Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami, a yakuza gang calls itself the 108 Dragons. But the number isn’t always bad news—in the first installment of the Magical Girl Pretty Sammy OAV series, Tsunami is chosen to lead the planet of Juraihelm by a group of 108 priests.
Clearly, in Japan 108 is a number to conjure with.
Himiko Se
This exorcist is deadly serious. As the heroine (it seems) of the four–part OAV Vampire Princess Miyu, her path crosses that of the title vampire, a perpetual fourteen-year-old. Himiko also learns of an order of being that’s part demon, part human, called a Shinma, who must be returned to the Underworld by Miyu and her companion Larva. With or without Miyu’s help, Himiko has to deal with a vampire, a possessed suit of armor, and an enchantress who turns people into marionettes. In the final installment, she confronts Miyu directly and learns her story. This is one time I will not be a spoiler and give away the ending. This OAV series is one of the most atmospheric in all of anime; a definite must-see.
The Holy Student Council
Adolescence is an anxious time, and in modern Japan some of that anxiety gets projected onto the high school itself, and the thought of what might be lurking there at midnight. A common urban legend is that one school or another was an “execution ground” during World War II, and ghosts reputedly re-enact the killing of prisoners night after night. Students who killed themselves (and they have done so in Japan for a variety of reasons, from imitating someone else’s suicide to escaping particularly abusive bullies) have been thought to return to their school. At Saito High, though, the whole thing is played for laughs. What else can you expect, when the school is run by a ghost?
Saito High is the setting of the 1997 “after hours” TV series Haunted Junction, and, like another after-hours series, Those Who Hunt Elves (1996), the series isn’t as risqué as its time-slot suggests. It doesn’t take much of anything seriously, including the three students who make up the Holy Student Council. One from each faith (Buddhist, Shinto, and Christian), the three council members are charged with corralling the rowdier of the ghosts. This would be hard to do at the best of times, but these three students bring their own quirks to the table.
Ryudo Kazumi, son of a Buddhist monk, is himself well versed in esoteric Buddhism. One suspects he had to learn exorcism as a survival skill, since he tends to get possessed by whatever spirit’s around—usually animals. His particular favorite among the ghosts at Saito High is Toilet Hanako-san. There is a substantial body of stories about Japanese toilet ghosts, ranging from the evil (because, let’s face it, few positions leave a person more vulnerable to attack) to the benevolent and protective (handing out toilet paper if one gets caught short). Toilet Hanako-san, though, satisfies a slightly different urge in this series: as an erotic inspiration for those boys who retreat to the toilet to, as it were, let off some sexual steam.
Speaking of sexual matters, Mutsuki Asahina, daughter of a Shinto priest and a miko in her own right, frequently gets sidetracked from her own attempts at exorcism. Like so many Japanese schools, Saito High has a statue of educator Sontoku Ninomiya on its grounds.5 This one, though, comes alive and runs around at night. Mutsuki catches him and turns him into a servant as well as a focus for her own lusts. In case you were wondering if there was an analog to the “Lolita complex” or rorikon, in which grown men fixate on prepubescent girls, there is. It’s called the Shota complex, and Mutsuki’s got a serious case of it.6 Haruto Hojo is the central character in this school story: blond, handsome, Christian and fed up with the Holy Student Council. Having to exorcise all these ghosts is keeping him from what he sees as a normal life, although by the end of the series he learns that “normal” has its own problems, primarily the lack of the very randomness that makes life interesting.
Among the ghosts that live (as it were) at Saito High is a little girl in a mirror, a giant, a science-class skeleton and a Visible Boy—the life-sized torso with removable organs that has apparently creeped-out generations on both sides of the Pacific. Also appearing in the series is a boy who turns out to be a tanuki (see the Studio Ghibli chapter for a report on Pompoko and a description of this creature’s attributes).
Yoko Mano
Star of the 1992 Devil Hunter Yohko OAV series, this sixteen-year-old girl is a reluctant warrior who finds out from her grandmother about her family’s legacy as fighters against supernatural evil. Yoko learns she is the 108th in line of succession and that granny could not pass the heritage to Yoko’s mother because at age sixteen mom wasn’t a virgin. Yoko’s combat against evil things (mamono) involves the martial arts and a “soulsword.” This being the twentieth century, she also quickly picks up a business manager, as well as Azusa, a kawaii apprentice. She’s also trying to fall in love and have sex (not necessarily in that order), but something always gets in the way.
Yoko’s first adventure was only half-serious, and played off the sexual side of her life. From there, things got more serious (although never completely so), with the second OAV containing an ecological message against destroying “sacred” forests; the third sent her back in time to free a bishonen prince from a spell; part five brought her up against a demon so big and bad that she had to summon her 107 predecessors back from the dead to help her defeat him; and part six pits her against her evil twin. (You may be wondering about part four. Technically, there isn’t one; the installment known as Part 4-Ever is actually a collection of music videos.)
Shibuya Psychic Research
Shibuya is one of Tokyo’s trendiest, most modern neighborhoods. It also is (perhaps) the last name of the teenager who is the head of Shibuya Psychic Research in the Ghost Hunt anime and manga series.
Ghost Hunt started as Akuryou (Evil Spirits), a series of young adult supernatural novels by Fuyumi Ono. These were turned into a manga in 1998, with Ono adapting her books and artwork by Shiho Inada. The manga appeared for a time in Nakayoshi magazine; when Nakayoshi dropped it, the manga continued in paperback. When the series was animated and broadcast in 2006, it immediately jumped into Japan’s top twenty anime. Handsomely animated by Avex Entertainment, and directed by Rei Mano (whose credits include Cardcaptor Sakura and Gun-slinger Girl), this series is one of the finest, using Japan’s considerable ghost literature.
The core of the story is someone who (at first) isn’t one of the psychically gifted staff. Mai Taniyama is a high school student who accidentally gets introduced to the group (literally) by injuring one of the members; because she broke an expensive camera, she works for the group to pay for it. She starts out as an Office Lady of sorts, but gets to be more important (and reveals hidden psychic abilities) as she stays with the group. The rest of the group is a mixed spiritual bag: Masako Hara, a very pretty teenaged exorcist who’s something of a TV celebrity;7 Ayako Matsuzaki, a miko who isn’t part of a shrine (we’ll meet her below); Hosho Takigawa, a Buddhist monk who has taken a break from his duties at the Mount Koya monastery;8 and John Brown, a teen-aged Catholic exorcist-in-training. The group is led by Kazuya Shibuya, who is assisted by Hong Kong native Rin Ko-jo; they do not reveal their own abilities until late in the series. Shibuya is generally cold and aloof, and has picked up (not just from Mai) the nickname “Naru”—short for “narcissist.” Yet he treats Mai nicely—in her dreams.
Girl Power: The Miko
One special subdivision of these warriors against evil is quintessentially Japanese. Pop culture still invests a great deal of power (mystical or otherwise) in the miko. These female shamans of Shinto have been influential in the life of Japan as far back as the third century, when warring tribes were brought together under the rule of the shaman/queen known as Himiko. According to legend, she was a shaman who focused on magic, leaving day-to-day political rule to her brother.9 In modern Japan, miko are the young female attendants and officiants at Shinto shrines, and are usually not thought to possess shamanic or magic powers at all.
The role of miko in manga and anime is of course far more colorful than their real-life counterparts. They usually play host to mystical powers, far beyond anything ascribed to a miko in contemporary Shinto, thereby reaffirming Japanese tradition and the power of the traditional belief system. Of course in anime, being a powerful priestess doesn’t eliminate romance. This feeds a different Japanese tradition: the belief (held by most males and not a few females in corporate Japan) that a “career woman” is a contradiction in terms, and that the destiny of a woman, even a miko, is still to be a wife and mother. It is interesting, however, to note that for miko in anime, romance is usually a juggling act at best, and at worst can set dire wheels of fate in motion. Still, the psychic powers ascribed to miko are often hereditary and cumulative, so there is a practical incentive for them to seek love and marriage. If they didn’t have a daughter to take up the torch, a miko’s power could well die with her.
Hino Rei
While viewers of Sailor Moon often see Rei in the middie blouse that is her school uniform, or the variation on it she wears as Sailor Mars, they also see her wearing the white blouse and baggy red hakama of a miko. (We should also note that the color scheme of her Sailor Mars outfit parallels her miko wardrobe.) Her role at the Shinto shrine is tied into Japanese tradition far more closely than anyone else in the cast of Sailor Moon. We occasionally see her as a Shinto diviner, but her exorcism abilities are also incorporated into her Sailor Mars arsenal; it’s not unusual for Sailor Mars to slap an ofuda onto an enemy, with the incantation “Akuryo taisan!” (Evil spirits of the dead, depart!). And yet, in the first episode of the third season of Sailor Moon, when Rei talks about what she wants to do with her life, her answer is rather down-to-earth: after being an idol singer and a seiyu (cartoon voice actress), she wants to get married.
The Women of the Mima Clan
In Key the Metal Idol (1994), we see not only Tokiko Mima (known as Key), but also her mother and grandmother as the inheritors of considerable psychic powers. These hereditary miko of a shrine in a small rural valley first have their lives disrupted when a young scientist witnesses the power of Key’s grandmother to make a doll move without strings. The scientist (Key’s grandfather) then marries the miko and subjects her to a battery of tests. Their daughter is subjected to the same scrutiny as she grows older; she escapes the testing only in death, although first giving birth to Key, in whom the destiny of all the Mima miko reaches its climax.
Ayako Matsuzaki
Among the members of Shibuya Psychic Research, a group of ghostbuster teens and young adults ranging from a Buddhist monk to a Catholic exorcist from Australia, is a self-identified temple maiden named Ayako Matsuzaki. At age twenty-three she technically can’t be called a maiden, and she’s not affiliated with a Shinto family temple. She is, in fact, a medical doctor like her parents. So why does she call herself a miko?
She mentions in volume 9 of the manga (animated as episode 25) that her family home included on its property a large camphor tree. Native to Japan and China, the camphor tree is not sacred per se, but is often venerated because of its height, longevity, and healing properties. Those designated by Shinto as especially sacred are marked by a rope made of rice plants (shibenawa). We see such a rope on the tree the young Ayako is talking to. As she explains, the sign of a true miko is that the tree talks back: “it used to tell me many things. Since it told me when our patients were going to die, it also got me into trouble.” While some anime miko have powers that can only be called fantastic, Ayako’s most successful ritual, invoking tree spirits to lay other malevolent ghosts to rest, has an impressive quality that seems highly plausible.
Kaho Mizuki
When we first see her, we don’t know that she’s a miko at the Tsukimine Shrine. In fact, even after she wears the white blouse and red hakama of a miko, Western viewers may not know it. In turning the anime series Cardcaptor Sakura (1998; based on a manga by the CLAMP collective) into Cardcaptors for the West, Canadian animation studio Nelvana seemed bent on moving the dubbed version as far from Japan as possible. To that end, Sakura’s beautiful but mysterious teacher isn’t just transformed from Kaho Mizuki into Layla Mackenzie; when seen in her miko garb, she refers to the temple grounds as simply “a park.” Still, Nelvana had a couple of land mines ahead in adapting the rest of this series. There is the distinct impression that Kaho/Layla and Sakura’s brother Toya were once “an item,” despite the age difference. (The reason why isn’t surprising, when you realize that Kaho is more than a miko; she’s also one of the moon-related demigods watching over Sakura’s recovery of the Clow Cards.) By the second season, Kaho is living with a ten-year-old boy named Eriol. This apparent love affair is also “rescued” by virtue of Eriol being the reincarnation of Clow Reed, creator of the Clow Cards. As it turned out, Nelvana opted for straight translation of the latter part of the series, without trying to explain away the unusual relationships.
Nami Yamigumo
Kia Asamiya created a miko for the not-too-distant future in his highly successful manga series Silent Möbius and its 1991 anime spi-noff. Supernatural evil is plaguing Tokyo, causing the formation of the all-woman (and awkwardly named) Attacked Mystification Police. Nami is one of three generations of the Yamigumo family in this story: her father and grandfather are priests at a Shinto shrine. Nami is recruited into the AMP by her sister Nana, who’s friends with Mana Isozaki, one of AMP’s higher-ranking officers. However, Nami seldom wears the AMP uniform, preferring a modified version of her miko garb (an all-white kimono with red piping). As such, she’s one of the most powerful members of the group, and her use of ofuda against evil adversaries (known as Lucifer Hawk) shows that Shinto is not to be dismissed even in the high-tech future of A.D. 2027.
Cherry and Sakura
This uncle/niece act (he’s a Buddhist priest, she’s a Shinto miko) is the oldest of this group, going back to the 1970s and Rumiko Takahashi’s first runaway success Urusei Yatsura. They’re actually a trio, since Sakura is engaged to Tsubame Ozuno, a practitioner of Western black magic. None of the three, however, can ever get their magic spells to come out quite right.
Kikyo
This takes us to Takahashi’s most recent success. Kikyo was a miko long ago, charged with guarding the Shikon no Tama jewel. In defending it from the dog-demon who is the title character of InuYasha (2000), she shoots him with an arrow, freezing him for half a century. Meanwhile, Kikyo dies and is reborn as the schoolgirl Kagome, the heroine of the story. In the meantime, the Shikon no Tama has fragmented and InuYasha and Kagome must round up all the shards. Kagome, like Kikyo, is also an archer (archery is also the weapon of another magical girl/miko, Sailor Mars).
As for Kagome herself, at the end of the anime series she is able to return to her own time. She’s there for three years—just long enough to attend and graduate from high school—before returning to the warring states period to be with InuYasha and the other friends she made in the fifteenth century. This fulfills her modern duty: to graduate from high school. In the final scenes, we see Kagome without the sailor fuku or high school uniform; instead, she’s wearing the white blouse and baggy red pants of a miko, reminding us of a far older duty: that her calling is often a matter of family.
All of these spirit-based stories have a parallel set of anime/manga reflecting the popularity in Japan of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories. Western magic has actually been around for years; one of the first anime for Japanese television was Sally the Witch, and Kiki’s Delivery Service was a book long before it was a movie. The Potter saga accelerated the acceptance of stories like Magic User’s Club and Ojamajo Doremi (both dealing with witch education), Witch Hunter Robin, Fullmetal Alchemist, and especially Negima! Magister Negi Magi, the story of a ten-year-old wizard teaching English in a Japanese private girls school.
1. It’s no accident that multi-tailed foxes still appear in video games such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokémon, that the multi-tailed fox Renamon plays a pivotal role in the third season of the Digimon TV series, that the ninja trainee Naruto Uzumaki from the manga/anime Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto was possessed at birth by a fox spirit, that a fox and tanuki (see the Ghibli chapter entry on Pom Poko) provide low comic relief in the Shaman King series, and that one of the magical characters in Rumiko Takahashi’s InuYasha is Shippo, a shape-shifting fox-spirit who looks like a little boy with a fox’s ears and tail.
2. 2 See an early episode of Jigoku Sensei Nube (Hell Teacher Nube), in which a young student is terrorized on the school playground by a kappa, a tortoise-like goblin that lives in rivers. In this case, the kappa lives in an underground spring beneath the school and was trying to point out that the school had built its playground over an unexploded World War II bomb.
3. Nube is also the son of an exorcist, but had a falling out with his father when his mother took sick and his father would not (or could not) heal her. He turned as a child to a teacher named Minako for comfort; he took her spirit into himself when he also absorbed the demon who was attacking her. Rounding out the trilogy of women in his life is Yukime, a mountain snow-goddess who was supposed to kidnap Nube and ended up married to him. They’re happy enough together, except that she tends to melt if the temperature gets too high.
4. The title is (no surprise) a pun, using different kanji to spell out “Phantom Quest Corp.” instead of “Limited Corporation,” which would be pronounced the same way.
5. At one time every elementary school in Japan displayed a statue of Ninomiya Sontoku (born Kinjiro, 1787–1856) as a young boy walking along, reading a book while carrying a load of wood on his back. Ninomiya was held in high regard for founding “trust associations” that helped improve the quality of life in rural Japan. He and his disciples established the Hotoku (“repaying virtue”) movement to promote morality, industry, and economy. The statues were based on the legend of the young Ninomiya learning to read even while performing manual labor—Japan’s equivalent to the stories of young Abe Lincoln, living on the frontier and writing his alphabet in charcoal on the back of a shovel. The government tried to revive the Hotoku movement in the 1920s and 1930s as a state-sponsored alternative to radical farmers’ unions. Ninomiya statues thus began appearing in schools in the years before WWII: first small ones, then life-sized figures in bronze or cement. They were meant to inspire the students to follow Ninomiya’s example. Some of the statues didn’t survive the war or were destroyed during the American Occupation. But many remain to exhort new generations of Japanese youth—though one Ninomiya statue, modified by an anonymous student, was photographed showing the young Ninomiya reading a manga magazine.
6. The Lolita complex is, of course, named after the title character of Vladimir Nabokov’s best-known novel. The Shota complex, on the other hand, is named after the child protagonist in Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s manga Tetsujin 28-go (Iron Man No. 28), better known as Gigantor. The pairing of Nabokov’s novel with giant Japanese robots has to be one of the more surreal examples of Postmodernism.
7. There are many kinds of psychics in Japan. Masako is a yobisute, which literally means “lending a mouth”; spirits of the dead speak through a yobisute. One of the best-known examples is in Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon, when a murder victim testifies through a yobisute at the trial of his accused killer.
8. The name carries more significance in Japan, where the Mount Koya monastery is known as a center of Shingon Buddhism, which advocates the training of body, mind, and speech to reach enlightenment.
9. Mikiso Hane, Japan: A Historical Survey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 18.