Birth and Death and Rebirth: Reincarnation in Anime

In what is probably the most unusual form of conflict resolution in pop culture, some anime bad guys are not destroyed but reborn—literally or metaphorically. Immortality is viewed as a curse rather than a blessing.

The moral universe of anime has its share of internal contradictions (as does Western civilization and its pop culture). On the one hand, the universe is often presented in anime as cold and disinterested in human notions like love and justice. “The Japanese view,” writes Antonia Levi, “is that the universe is amoral and the sooner we all accept it, the better.”¹ On the other hand, a mechanism exists to restore the balance and undo evil, even though it may take years or even centuries: the Buddhist concept of reincarnation.

Western viewers, who pay lip service to the notion “justice delayed is justice denied,” insist on a judicial system that functions solely in the here-and-now. The notion of a speedy trial is written into the Bill of Rights (even if the backlog in the courts means a civil action can take years to come to trial—surely an odd definition of “speedy”). The notion of trying and punishing a surrogate is anathema; the notion that, left to itself, the cosmos will work everything out for the best is even more repugnant. Yet these ideas are intrinsic to the mind-set of the Japanese pop-culture consumer, and are reflected in anime and manga.²

Suicide is Painless

Japanese Buddhism and Shinto share one belief that pops up in popular culture time and time again. Unlike Christianity, which assumes a beginning point (which may vary from denomination to denomination) and the end point of death, Japanese tradition holds that the soul constantly moves back and forth between two worlds: the human realm and the spirit realm. The child, from birth to age seven, is assumed to be on the cusp between the two worlds. Unlike animals, which are born knowing who they are and what to do, children need to be taught to function in this world; their playful impulses are seen as reflecting their borderline status. Similarly, the elderly (age seventy and beyond) are believed to be souls in transition away from this world toward the spirit realm. In their case, senility and dementia have been seen as signs of the other-worldliness of their souls preparing to leave the realm of the living.

Suicide—attempted or successful—is a much more common element in anime and manga than in the West, where it carries a strong moral condemnation and isn’t even discussed except as a pathology. Anime even for young children, by comparison, discuss suicide quite openly. One surprising example occurs in the anime Ojamajo Doremi, a comic and colorful story about grade school girls in training to be witches. Even this series strikes some darker notes, including a scene in the second episode of the so-called “Sharp” season³ that is jarring to someone who isn’t ready for it. The witches had spent the better part of a day trying to care for a baby for the first time, and as fifth graders they were worn out very quickly; they had to call for help from the mother of the main witch-child Doremi. When the exhausted Doremi comes home, she skips dinner and goes to soak in a hot bath. While she’s in there, her mother comes into the bathroom and gets into the tub with her daughter.⁴ When Doremi asks her mother if she was such a handful as a baby, her mother tells her that she had dreams of being a concert pianist, and that, when she injured her hand in an accident, she was so depressed at abandoning her dream that she wanted to commit suicide. The only thing that saved her, she said, was getting pregnant with Doremi. No matter how much Doremi cried, her mother said, she heard those cries and even regarded Doremi’s kicks in utero as an encouragement: “Mother, do your best; I’ll always be beside you.”

The view of the soul embraced by popular Buddhism in Japan comes into play here.⁵ With the notion of rebirth into another body comes the assumption that there is a reason why, and an explanation for the specific nature of that rebirth. To answer the question why, Buddhism developed the doctrine of karma.⁶ Western culture marginalizes belief in rebirth, but Asian cultures have found the concept not only workable but useful, and for centuries it has been a central fact in their lives, even in our own science- and technology-governed times.

Japan, for example, copes with the moral dilemma of abortion with images of Jizo, the bodhisattva regarded as a protector of children. These small stone statues are erected in cemeteries to apologize to a fetus for being aborted, and as a focus for prayers that the soul of the fetus will be reborn into better circumstances. Thus there is a belief (which the West simply does not share) that nothing irretrievable has been lost by an abortion, and that there may be a greater good in the long run.⁷ This approach to abortion reflects a broader belief that informs other aspects of Japanese life as well, including pop culture.

A Daimyo’s Best Friend

None of this is recent; remember that Japanese culture goes back well over a thousand years and has lots of experience with tales that traffic in a non-Judeo-Christian definition of the soul. Take The Hakkenden, an elaborate eighteenth-century epic by Kyokutei Bakin that became the basis for a 1990 OAV anime series. In this tale, the daimyo Satomi, besieged by enemy troops, rashly promises his daughter, Princess Fuse, in marriage to whoever brings him the head of the enemy general. The next day, Satomi is stunned when Yatsubusa, his wolfhound, shows up with the head of the enemy commander. Fuse, reminding her outraged father that a samurai’s word is his bond, takes the dog to a mountain cave. She spends her time reading religious texts and praying for a human soul to enter her “husband” Yatsubusa.

Her father, however, is so enraged at this state of affairs that one of his servants (himself in love with Fuse) takes it upon himself to shoot the dog. The bullet, however, passes through the dog, killing Princess Fuse as well. At the moment of her death, eight shining stars rise out of Fuse’s body, the embodiments of eight Confucian virtues (wisdom, loyalty, sincerity, devotion to one’s parents, and so on). These spirits fly off in different directions, and are reborn as eight boys with identical flower-shaped birthmarks. They grow up widely separated, but are brought together by destiny to fight for the daimyo Satomi.⁸

Born Again

Consider, in the light of The Hakkenden legend, one of several anime starting in 1991 based on Locke the Superman, a manga by Yuki Hijiri.⁹ Locke is not a Western-style superhero; he is an esper (someone with heightened powers of extra-sensory perception) called in for special jobs. This particular job involves a futuristic zaibatsu (multinational corporate conglomerate) that seeks to rule the universe under the leadership of the Great Zog. The corporation’s activities are being attacked, however, by another powerful esper, a space pirate named Leon. Of course the story builds to a confrontation between the espers—in space, no less—and if that were as far as it went, the story would be a cliché. The story is saved, ironically enough, by the introduction of another cliché: Leon’s sister, the nearly blind Flora, with whom Locke is in love.

Before the final battle, the viewer/reader is given additional information to muddy the ethical waters. Like his sister, Leon is disabled—he has a prosthetic arm, since the Great Zog destroyed his arm as a child, as well as his sister’s vision. Therefore, both sides of the conflict are painted as both sinned against and sinning, victim and victimizer. How does one resolve such a moral dilemma?¹⁰ This anime takes the novel approach (novel in the West, at least) of reclaiming Leon’s soul, although not his body. During their final battle, Leon finally puts all of the pieces of the puzzle together, realizing the harm he has caused in trying to avenge his own wrong. He immediately concedes the match by hurling himself into the sun. This does not, strictly speaking, kill him, since the epilogue of the story shows us Locke and Flora happily married, with a son who is the reincarnation of Leon (the hair is the giveaway). Leon is thus reborn as his own nephew, and becomes the good person he was meant to be through a new upbringing by the justice-minded Locke and the yasashii Flora.

Trying to redeem someone like Leon might have seemed futile to Westerners, but in the Japanese belief system based on reincarnation it was the most practical thing to do. The reason why is summed up in the 1999 anime series Monster Rancher.¹¹ A young boy named Genki gets transported to a fantastic world, where he has to fight a Godzilla-like monster named Mu. But he realizes that defeating the physical body of Mu is not enough: “What if he’s reborn again and again and again?” Evil, like matter, can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be changed.

Another rebirth takes place in the third-season story-arc of Sailor Moon. The whole thing starts with a geneticist named Professor Tomoe. An explosion in his laboratory almost kills him and his ten-year-old daughter Hotaru. He is offered recovery, for a price, by an alien messenger of a dark interstellar entity with the unlikely name of Pharaoh 90. Under the alien’s orders the professor sets out on a search for three pure hearts, within which dwell three talismans: when united, these talismans form a source of power, the Holy Grail. Even without the talismans, the Professor needs pure hearts as medicine for his daughter, who is sickly and subject to strange fits. Consequently, she spends almost all her time at home and is very lonely.

In fighting to keep people’s pure hearts from being stolen, the Sailor Senshi find themselves at cross-purposes with two new Senshi: Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, who know only of the impending end of the world should the Messiah of Silence awaken, and are trying to find the talismans to save the world, whatever the cost. Midway through the story-arc Chibiusa returns from the thirtieth century to complete her training as Sailor Chibi Moon by making an important friend back in the twentieth century. After some false starts (including a young boy who is a precocious master of the Japanese tea ceremony)¹² Chibiusa meets Hotaru. Her compassion for Hotaru’s loneliness binds them together. Chibiusa is followed to this century by her guardian, Sailor Pluto, who intercedes between the Sailor Senshi and Sailors Uranus and Neptune.

The three Outer Senshi (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) are found to possess the talismans that form the Holy Grail. However, Professor Tomoe manages to steal both the Grail for Pharaoh 90 and Chibiusa’s pure heart to revive Hotaru, at which point Hotaru reveals herself to be another servant of Pharoah 90, a slinky grownup named Mistress 9. Yet all is not lost; Hotaru also is the rebirth form of Sailor Saturn, the only Sailor Senshi with the power to destroy the world. With the help of Sailor Moon (who prevents Sailors Uranus and Neptune from killing Hotaru, since they’re afraid either Mistress 9 or Sailor Saturn could bring about the end of the world), Sailor Saturn destroys Pharaoh 90 at the cost of her own life.

We next see Sailor Moon carrying a baby. We can tell from the eyes and the hair that this is Hotaru reborn. She’s given to her father, who is likewise reborn (in a sense, amnesia having driven away his memories of working for Pharaoh 90), and once Chibiusa has a chance to see Hotaru’s rebirth and Uranus and Neptune make peace with Sailor Moon, the story-arc ends happily.

Another literal rebirth comes at the end of The Daughter of Darkness (1997), the second theatrical feature based on the Tenchi Muyo! story line. This story manages to overlay three different holidays from two different planets: Christmas from the West; Obon, the Japanese midsummer festival celebrating the annual visit of the ancestral spirits from the land of the dead; and the midsummer Startica festival on the planet of Jurai. Tenchi Masaki, a high-school student whose house is suddenly overrun by aliens (all of them female) is baffled by the sudden appearance of a girl his own age who calls him “papa.” This girl, Mayuka, is in fact a clone, created by a demonic spirit attempting to avenge herself against the Jurai royal family. (Tenchi’s grandfather was a prince of Jurai before he abandoned the throne and fled to Earth.) In the end, Mayuka is reduced to a gemlike essence, but is reborn in human form, with the consent of the Masaki household.

Redemption

This same theme is played out symbolically in the second feature film based on Osamu Tezuka’s character Unico. Unico in the Island of Magic has the little unicorn do battle with Kuruku, a mistreated marionette who has learned magic in order to turn the world into toys that he can abuse in turn. Unico becomes involved only by being adopted (temporarily) as a pet by Cheri, whose big brother Toby has apprenticed himself to Kuruku. Unico fights not only to protect Cheri but to reclaim Toby, but he does not win by defeating Kuruku, any more than Locke defeated Leon. Through a compassionate understanding of the wrongs done to Kuruku, Unico offers his friendship to the puppet. Kuruku, who lived only by his hatred of living things, is undone by Unico’s love; in the end, he becomes a simple marionette again. Cheri finds him and, because we know her to be yasashii, we know she will not mistreat him, and that history will not repeat itself.

Another symbolic playing-out of the idea of rebirth to a better life, far less benign than Dr. Tezuka’s tale, happens at the end of Grave of the Fireflies, the melancholy masterpiece from Studio Ghibli. Isao Takahata directed and wrote the screenplay based on a memoir by Akiyuki Nosaka. We learn at the very beginning of the movie that two Japanese children, Seita and his little sister Setsuko, have starved to death just after Japan’s surrender in World War II; we then spend the rest of the movie watching in horror as it happens in flashback. At the end of a movie in which fireflies have represented everything from stars in the sky to lights on a distant train, two fireflies representing the souls of the children rise into the night.¹³

A Westerner in the audience, brought up on happy endings, may fail to see how this is anything but a bleak ending. It’s definitely sad, but it’s not bleak. There is hope in the Japanese cultural perspective that the cosmos will give these two orphans of the storm a second chance, in a place and time better for them than Japan at the end of World War II.

Similar symbols appear at the end of Mermaid Forest, a 1991 Gothic horror tale by Rumiko Takahashi. This is part of a series of stories by Takahashi in which eating a mermaid’s flesh can bestow eternal life—if it doesn’t kill you first. In this story, twin sisters competing for the same man set off a decades-long string of tragic events. When at the end one of the sisters dies, the other throws herself into a burning house—followed by the man they fought over. Later, the camera looks up at the sky, showing one shooting star, followed by two others. The symbolism is obvious: the souls of the unhappy trio have been returned to the cosmos.

Such an ending is also alluded to in the first episode of the first Tenchi Muyo! television series. Tenchi and galactic pirate Ryoko are trapped on the edge of a cliff with the police closing in. Ryoko declares that they may be doomed, but “we’ll be stars in the sky forever.” This also refers back to the Tanabata legend and the lovers who were turned into stars that meet in the sky only one day a year.

By far the most elaborate statement of the themes of destiny and reincarnation in purely human terms is Saki Hiwatari’s anime/manga Please Save My Earth. The story begins on another planet, centuries ago, and deals with a romantic triangle that soon takes on a more complex geometry. At base, though, there is still an essential three-sided competition: two men, Shion and Gyokuran, are both in love with Mokuren, who favors Shion. A plague breaks out and, in order to stack the deck in his favor for the next life, if not this one, Gyokuran arranges for only Shion to be inoculated. Sure enough, Shion is the last one left alive. He spends nine desperate years alone, going deeper into madness, before he too dies of the plague.

They are all reborn into modern-day Japan, and sure enough, Shion’s rebirth was delayed nine years, so that he’s still a child when his “colleagues” are teenagers. But Gyokuran’s plan was only partly successful; it causes a great deal of trouble and sorrow for all concerned, but in the end it does not prevent Shion and Mokuren from being together. In fact, because Gyokuran tried to isolate Shion from Mokuren, the second time around it is Gyokuran who is isolated, by having his beloved Enju reborn as a man rather than a woman.¹⁴

The Blessing That’s a Curse

In contrast to the view of reincarnation, the few depictions of immortality in Japanese pop culture usually show that eternal life has a very steep price. In two stories by Rumiko Takahashi, The Mermaid Forest and Mermaid’s Scar, we meet characters who have lived for hundreds of years. They have tasted the flesh of a mermaid, and most of those who did have lived unhappily ever after. They share the negative, cynical world-view of the Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew, and Count Dracula, to name three Western mythic images of immortality.

Speaking of Dracula, there is an entire subgenre of stories in anime and manga drawing on the Transylvanian terror in one form or another. As different as these portrayals are, they share the notion that vampires are discontented because eternal life turns out to be not all that desirable.

Yet people still desire it, because they don’t have it. One scientist allows the quest for eternal life to warp his humanity. The third installment in the 1990 OAV series Cyber City Oedo 808 features a crazed old industrialist, Shionji, searching for immortality. He can find it only by becoming a vampire. In searching for the means to prolong his life, he used people like lab animals and abandoned his own humanity, according to Remi, an assistant-turned-victim.

A literal joining of the West’s two most famous vampires appears in the Ghost Hunt series. It starts when young people begin disappearing in a deserted old mansion built by an eccentric industrialist in the nineteenth century. The reason behind this is uncovered by Shibuya Psychic Research, and it’s grim. Kaneyuki Miyama was reclusive and sickly, and used his silk works to recruit a staff of young servants. “Inspired” by Vlad the Impaler, the historical Romanian prince who inspired the character of Dracula, and by another real-life vampire, Elizabeth Bathory, Miyama tried to regain his health and change his sickly nature by killing young people and bathing in their blood. (In life Miyama even took the name “Vurado,” which is as close as the Japanese alphabet gets to “Vlad.”) It worked, in a sense; Miyama’s ghost and those of his attendants kept kidnapping and killing the living. In this case, exorcism was out of the question: there had been so many murders, over so many years, that the only way to free the spirits of both the monstrous Miyama and his victims was to burn the mansion to the ground.

The 1988 OAV series Vampire Princess Miyu is a chilling set of variations on the theme that immortality corrupts, that it warps both those who have it and those who seek it.¹⁵

Case in point: Kei Yuzuki, from the second OAV. This student would seem to have it all: wealthy family, good looks, a future all mapped out for him. The problem is, he knows he’s a bishonen, and doesn’t ever want to lose his good looks by growing older. At first, he seeks out a girl he knows is different, even if he can’t say how he knows. In reality she’s a Shinma, a half-demon named Ranka. She’s been draining the life out of students at the school, leaving life-sized dolls behind. However, something different happens this time. Kei realizes that he loves the girl, she loves him in turn, and Ranka turns Kei into a doll. After Miyu banishes Ranka and the curtain comes down (literally; we see the traditional Kabuki striped curtain), marionettes Kei and Ranka dance amid a fall of cherry blossoms.

If not actual immortality, the illusion of immortality—trading in one’s skin and bones for a durable metallic body—has long been a science-fiction staple. It is also the keynote of Reiji Matsumoto’s classic manga Ginga Tetsudo 999 (Galaxy Express 999). The 1978 anime version as directed by Rintaro (Shigeyuki Hayashi) is focused on the same message—that immortality corrupts—as we follow Tetsuro across the universe in a cosmic steam locomotive. Tetsuro starts out (again in a future dystopia reminiscent of Metropolis, with machine bodies at the top and humans living in the slums below) wishing for a robot body to replace his own, because he would then (he thinks) be able to hunt down the robot who killed his mother. He ultimately rejects immortality, with guidance from the mysterious Maetel, who bears a strong resemblance to his mother.

Of all the stops by the Express, the stop on Pluto is certainly one of the most visually stunning images in all anime. On Pluto, Tetsuro finds out what happens to the humans who trade in their bodies for machines: the bodies are laid out, row on row, beneath the permanently icy surface of Pluto. The entire planet has been turned into a necropolis, and the keeper of these bodies is herself still conflicted over whether she should have traded in her beautiful face and body for a faceless machine.

Reborn from the Ashes

The ultimate expression in Japanese pop culture on the question of death, rebirth, and immortality was created by Dr. Osamu Tezuka. Between 1967 and 1988, he created eleven volumes of stories (and also wrote and directed an anime feature film) in which the central characters, in one way or another, encounter the hi no tori—literally, the firebird or phoenix. Like the legendary animal, this phoenix is shown bursting into flame, dying in the fire, and being reborn out of its own ashes. The stories, however, focus on another magical power of the phoenix: whoever drinks its blood can never die. Dr. Tezuka’s phoenix appears in a variety of times and places, even to some non-human characters. Its mission is to remind them of the true nature of the cosmos (true to the Japanese perspective, at any rate). Like the cosmos, the phoenix transcends petty little things like time, space, and human desires, and serves as the embodiment of Dr. Tezuka’s humanist philosophy.

More important than eternal life, in the Japanese view of the cosmos, is the intrinsic value of our very limited life: compassion for the essence of a thing. This is a rough translation of the phrase mono no aware, and it carries the idea that something may be special precisely because it is impermanent and fated to disappear.¹⁶ This is the meaning of the cherry-blossom–viewing parties held in Japan every spring (and shown in too many manga and anime to count). The blossoms (which some have likened to human flesh) appear for a brief time, then fall to the ground. They are the ultimate reminder that human life is very impermanent, but that, for the short time it’s here, can also be very beautiful.

And here, at last, we can see why Japan would make Titanic one of the highest-grossing movies in the country’s history. Whatever the film’s visual or musical attractions may be, the film also fits neatly into a popular culture that finds romantic beauty in a love that lives briefly and dies suddenly. The Japanese have been watching this movie for hundreds of years, on the stages of Kabuki and the Takarazuka Opera, on television, and every spring when the cherry blossoms fall.

1. Antonia Levi, Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 99.

2. It should also be noted that Japan is one of the least litigious of the developed countries, while Americans seem to run to court at the drop of a hat.

3. Doremi is a Japanese name as well as the syllables for the first three musical notes in a scale. Using musical terms to name the seasons of the TV series isn’t the only musical reference; one of the witches, a girl named Onpu, is also a young and popular singing idol (see part 1. chapter 13), and the word “onpu” refers to the use of musical notes and symbols in text messages to signal a sing-song speech pattern or a happy state of mind.

4. The subsequent revelations make sense in the context of the bath. This openness in a place where literally all barriers are down is a common occurrence in Japan, and not only in its popular culture. The Japanese describe this feeling with a made-up English-sounding word: “skinship” (see part 1, chapter 5).

5. There are, to simplify it a bit, two schools of Buddhism: Theravada, the “old school,” is closely tied to the original teachings of the Buddha. Mahayana Buddhism allows for more input from the local culture. Japanese Buddhism, which arrived by way of China, is very Mahayana.

6. The Japanese use the word en, but the Sanskrit karma is still the most common usage in the West.

7. William LaFleur, Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 148–49.

8. From our perspective, Satomi, who indirectly had his daughter killed, scarcely deserves the loyalty and bravery of the eight dog-soldiers (hakken) of the title. But our perspective is not the point. They were, in a manner of speaking, the children of Satomi’s devoted daughter Fuse and his faithful dog, Yatsubusa; the dog-soldiers’ devotion to their daimyo/grandfather is the whole point of the story.

9. This OAV is titled Locke and Leon in Japan, but in the West it is part of a series of tapes collectively titled Space Warriors.

10. Dr. Tezuka called such a dilemma “the egoism of the State” when it defines national policy and employed it in many of his manga, most interestingly in A Message to Adolf. Set at first in the 1930s, the story juxtaposes two boys named Adolf, one a Jew and the other a member of the Hitler Youth. But the story does not stop there; in the Middle East of the 1960s the Jewish Adolf has become an Israeli terrorist, surrendering (as far as Dr. Tezuka was concerned) whatever moral authority he gained in the first part of the story.

11. Based on the video game Monster Farm.

12. Quite a few of the holders of “pure hearts” in this story-arc practice traditional Japanese arts (the teamaster, a taiko drummer, a karate instructor), but there are also a couple of idol singers, a concert pianist, a little girl who adopts stray cats, a race-car mechanic, the Sailor Senshi themselves (in fact, Hino Rei, who’s also a miko, is the first to get zapped), and a genetic scientist named Dr. Sergei Asimov.

13. The title refers to one other appearance of the insect in this story. The children capture fireflies in a glass jar, using their light for a lamp. In the morning, the bugs are dead and the children bury their husks in a small hole.

14. “Hold on!” you may be saying. “You said Gyokuran was in love with Mokuren.” He was, but he was also attracted to Enju, who actually was in love with Gyokuran. I warned you about the geometry.

15. Since the OAVs, there has been a manga series and a spinoff TV series. As often happens (with Tenchi Muyo! and El-Hazard, for example), the characters and the groundrules are rewritten for each new incarnation.

16. Compare this with the scene in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s children’s classic Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), in which the title character meets, and thoroughly dislikes, a mapmaker who won’t put roses on his maps. Flowers, after all, are ephemeral and of no importance to mapmakers. A Japanese audience would side with the rose-loving Prince, and it should be no surprise that an anime television series was based on Le Petit Prince.