The Wings of Honnêamise: Tora-san in Space
The first film from the Gainax studio features a nobody as the hero—a nobody who makes you look through the sky, past the weather, and into what is possible . . .
American fans of anime and manga these days tend to be young. They weren’t around in the dizzying decade for manned space flight that began in 1961 when the Soviet Union put cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit and ended in 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. For some, the space race was an extension of the terrestrial Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.—those who were rocketed into space were seen as “single-combat warriors” playing out a greater geopolitical game as well as daring to take one of humankind’s riskiest voyages.1 The Wings of Honnêamise, the first fruit of Studio Gainax, has a very different premise. What if a nation planned for space travel before the technology was ready? What if the best kind of rocketry they could manage was a half-baked contraption that wasn’t much better than a Wright brothers prototype? And what if the space explorers of that country were treated not as national heroes but as a national joke—a bunch of misfits, losers, and slackers unfit for “real” flying?
The roots of Studio Gainax actually go back about a decade before The Wings of Honnêamise. In August 1981 science-fiction fans in the Osaka area got together at a convention known as Daicon 3.2 The convention opened with a five-minute piece of animation produced by some college art students, most of whom had never worked in the medium before (at least, according to the Gainax website; it’s also said that the nucleus of Gainax met while working on the Macross series).3 By the following autumn, however, they had produced three works under the name General Products (which was also the name of a sci-fi store they had started). For Daicon 4, they again produced a five-minute animation clip that surprised its audience with its technical brilliance. By the next month, these amateur animators were making ambitious plans to expand their work into a full-scale production called Royal Space Force. But large-scale animation required money, which required incorporation; Gainax was founded in December 1984 specifically to make Royal Space Force, which was later renamed The Wings of Honnêamise.
The 1987 film was written and directed by Hiroyuki Yamaga, who has since gone on to become president of Gainax.4 The score was by one of the biggest names in Japanese rock music, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Also big was the budget: a record-setting eight billion yen, supplied by the Bandai toy company.
This film follows the Royal Space Force career of an Everyman, Shirotsugu “Shiro” Lhadatt. However, for all practical purposes, we can call him Tora-san.
The Traveling Salesman
The Tora-san live-action movies can be found in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest series of motion pictures centered around a single character: “a tubby, middle-aged man dressed like a pre-war market salesman: a loud, chequered suit, a woolen waistband, an undershirt, wooden sandals and a shabby hat.”5 That character is Torajiro Kuruma, known affectionately as Tora-san, a traveling salesman with a dubious track record. He never seems to succeed, from the first film Otoko wa Tsurai yo (It’s Tough Being a Man) to the last, at anything—at least, as society counts success. He’s sentimental, but he’s also got the cunning of a thief. He has a quick temper, but he also has a love for life and almost infinite compassion. His only “home base” is with his parents and his married sister’s family. Even though his brief encounters may help other people, he never seems to benefit, and just keeps moving on, like a Japanese version of another cinema icon, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp.
The plots for all of the Tora-san films are a formula, summed up by John Paul Catton: “Tora-san arrives in some remote Japanese town, fixing to charm the locals out of their cash. Tora-san meets a local maiden and falls in love. Tora-san finds himself on the brink of marriage and gets cold feet. Tora-san abandons his scheme and heads back to his sister’s house in Shibamata, Tokyo, and ponders the errors of his ways while getting pickled in sake.”6 Tora-san was first brought to life on the screen in 1969 by Kiyoshi Atsumi, whose death in August 1996 at age sixty-eight finally broke the string of films at forty-eight. With a track record like that, it’s safe to say that Tora-san touched something essential and immediate in the Japanese movie-going public. Donald Richie wrote in his obituary for Atsumi:
Coming from the working-class area of Shibamata in downtown Tokyo, Tora-san was a common man who always tried hard and fell flat. It was the fall that was funny, but what kept people coming back was his naive goodness. . . . To Japanese who grew up with Tora-san, the loss was personal. It was also a sign that tradition was dying. Though the real Shibamata had for years not resembled the cozy film version, the vision of a perfect hometown persisted because it was needed in a country in flux. Now that Tora-san is dead, a part of Japan seems gone as well.7
That hidden (but not altogether missing) part is certainly not the drive for excellence, the quest to compete in the global economic arena with the major Western powers. It’s a more peaceful drive, linked to the human comedy. It is senryu rather than haiku, with both types of verse following the same seventeen-syllable count, but with the former commenting on the human condition while the latter looks at the natural world. Tora-san is all about falling, then rising up and persisting nonetheless. He’s all about the reassurance that life, despite large or small calamities, will go on.
It’s Tough Being an Astronaut
And now we are ready to meet Shiro Lhadatt, his fellow pilots, and his “family.” In the opening narration, Shiro tells the audience that he is just an average guy. His grades in school and his scores on military tests put him squarely in the middle of the pack. For once, we have an anime hero with no superpowers, no magical talismans, and not even much determination or ganbaru spirit. Shiro’s only childhood dream was flying, but that was denied him when he didn’t qualify for the Navy, where the jets were. Instead, he ends up in Honneamise’s Royal Space Force.
That force is, to put it simply, a joke—a pet project for the royal family, without the technology to actually get a man into space, and secure in the knowledge that it won’t happen anytime soon. They still test the technology, though, using human subjects—and those subjects often die. The members of the Royal Space Force do little except attend funerals for their own.
Our first view of Shiro Lhadatt is at one of those funerals. He arrives late and out of uniform, apparently still recovering from a night on the town and general dissatisfaction with the life he leads. These opening minutes with the Force establish what life on Honneamise is like. It’s an elaborate example of “world-building,” one that many have commented on. But to focus on this depiction of a planet and its civilization is to miss the point. The artifacts and technology of a new locale aren’t important in themselves; they’re just tourism. What matters to an audience are the people who live in this place: who are they, are their problems like ours, what can we learn from watching them? Popular culture, after all, has never been merely an exercise in world-building, whatever the culture. Bilbo Baggins isn’t memorable because he’s a hobbit, but because of the trials he faces in his travels.
In the Royal Space Force, Shiro doesn’t have a life with much to offer: abusive training by day and haunting the pleasure quarter by night. One night, though, he sees something absolutely out of place in the quarter: a woman standing on a corner, preaching to the passers-by about the love of God. Shiro wouldn’t have listened to her any more than the others, but she thrusts a leaflet into his hand.
He finds the leaflet the next morning when he wakes up back at the barracks—having stumbled into the bed of the dead soldier. It’s a very bad omen to sleep in a dead man’s bed, but it’s also a symbolic rebirth, prompting Shiro to ride the trolley to the end of the line, where the leaflet said a religious meeting would be held. Shiro finds that he’s the only one at the “meeting,” at the home of the woman preacher, Riqinni. She lives with Mana, a child who could safely be called repellent. This surly and uncommunicative girl-child, adopted by Riqinni, is the opposite of the kawaii (“cute”) children usually seen in anime.
Shiro has dinner with Riqinni and Mana. In talking about the Royal Space Force to someone outside the military, for the first time Shiro sees in someone else’s face the excitement such exploration can raise. It excites him as well, and he goes from being just another slacker to volunteering for the first manned launch into space. This makes him not only a media figure to promote the Royal Space Force, but also a target for those opposed to the space program. To complicate matters, the head of the force announces that their space -vehicle will be a “warship,” which has the effect of accelerating the push to develop space-ready technology.
While Shiro trains, forces are at work around him that threaten to sabotage the launch. The project has become so expensive that only the royal family, in a sweetheart deal with an auto manufacturer, can come up with the money to continue. Money is diverted from other projects, to the point that anti-monarchy radicals are gaining more and more support. Meanwhile, the Army has decided that the launch serves no useful military purpose, so it creates a purpose: the launch site is moved to the very border of a hostile neighboring state. The Army wants the launch to serve as a provocation, tempting the other country to invade.
Things are also shaky on a personal level for Shiro. The house where Riqinni and Mana live used to belong to Riqinni’s aunt. So much money is owed that the electric company bulldozes the house, while all Riqinni can think to do is pray. Her absolute faith hasn’t taught her much about dealing with the real world.
One rainy day, Shiro goes to visit Riqinni, who now lives with Mana in a small warehouse and does farmwork by day. As she changes out of her wet clothes, Shiro’s old habits reassert themselves and he tries to rape Riqinni. She knocks him unconscious. The next day, she apologizes to him, taking the blame for his attack on her. This adherence to her religion shakes Shiro to the point that he starts going back to the pleasure quarter to hand out leaflets with her.
Launch day coincides with an invasion of Honneamise by the neighboring republic. After all that’s happened, it’s almost anticlimactic that the rocket successfully puts Shiro into orbit. Although the Defense Ministry had written him a speech he was trying to memorize as the first words from space, he abandons that speech for a passage from Riqinni’s holy book, and a message that mankind (on that planet, at least) has no reason for war, because there are no borders.
What follows is a montage that is in part a tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The audience sees a series of impressionistic images, suggesting that Shiro’s life is passing before his eyes (we see him as a child reflected in a window). This is followed by yet another montage: the growth of a planet’s civilization, from primitive cavemen through to industrialization and flight. The last image we see, before the credits, is of Shiro’s capsule orbiting the planet.
What happens to him after that? Marc Marshall’s review of the film says that Shiro successfully returns to the planet, and that this is confirmed both by writer/director Yamaga and by the production-sketch montage under the closing credits.8 Except that the sketches are very rough, and don’t clearly show any such thing. If anything, there’s a scene in the movie that confirms Shiro’s true fate. After the launch, we cut to the pleasure quarter, where Riqinni is again trying to hand out leaflets, being ignored as usual. A single snowflake falls and melts on her outstretched leaflet. She looks up at the other falling snowflakes. Perhaps she alone is looking past them, knowing that Shiro is up there.
Like Tora-san, Shiro’s hopes for a family life amounted to nothing. Professionally, he succeeded beyond his childhood dreams—whether or not it cost him his life.
1. See The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979).
2. As with so much else in Japanese, this is a pun, and a particularly delightful one. Daicon can be short for “big convention,” but a daikon is a white radish.
3. Helen McCarthy, The Anime Movie Guide (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1996), p. 58.
4. The Gainax website declares that this film “destroyed the entire concept of animation as just for kids.” It thereby conveniently overlooked such sophisticated classics as Galaxy Express 999 (directed by Taro Rin, based on a manga by Reiji Matsumoto), Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki), Windaria (see the previous chapter), Project A-ko, Barefoot Gen, Night Train to the Stars, and Dr. Osamu Tezuka’s Hi no Tori 2772. If The Wings of Honnêamise destroyed anime as a kids-only medium, the target was already pretty weak.
5. Ian Buruma, Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (New York: Meridian, 1984), 209.
6. From Tokyo Classified (http://www.tokyoclassified.com/biginjapanarchive249/241/biginja-paninc.htm).
7. Donald Richie, “It’s Tough Being a Beloved Man: Kiyoshi Atsumi, 1928–1996,” Time International 148 (8), August 19, 1996. Available at http://www.time.com/time/internation-al/1996/960819/appreciation.html.