The Naked Truth

Japanese pop culture takes a much more casual and indulgent attitude toward nudity than pop culture in the West. It’s visible even on broadcast television. Even to the youngest viewers. And it’s no big deal.

In the beginning—as far as Western civilization is concerned—were Adam and Eve. According to Genesis, they were naked and not ashamed. They got ashamed really quick, though, when they ate forbidden fruit and, like God, learned the difference between good and evil. Let the record show that, though they may have invented farming, herding, and other human legacies, the first invention of Adam and Eve was clothing. They needed the clothing because they knew, after eating the fruit, that naked is bad.

Thousands of years and miles away, in the beginning—as far as Japan was concerned—were Izanagi and Izanami. These two sibling/parents in Japan’s creation legend (related in the Kojiki) eventually begat Amaterasu the Sun Goddess and her brother Susanoo. At one point, because of Susanoo’s rude behavior, Amaterasu shut herself and the sun into a cave, refusing to come out. This put humankind at risk, since the sun was needed for light and warmth. The goddess Uzume finally saved the day by staging a striptease outside the cave, with all the other gods hooting and hollering as she bared her breasts and flashed her pubic mound. Curious as to what was causing the noise, Amaterasu peeked out of the cave, which was just enough to let the sun back out to the world.

It’s hard to think of a more clear-cut pair of opposites. One culture starts civilization rolling by covering the genitalia; the other culture restores light and life to the Earth by displaying them.

Japan has had a long time in which to decide the uses and contexts of nudity. One Japanese traveler, Etsu Sugimoto, sailing to America in the late 1800s on a boat full of Western women, commented on their dress as more immodest than her kimono, giving some interesting reasons:

I found that most of the ladies’ dresses were neither high in the neck nor full in the skirt, and I saw many other things which mystified and shocked me. The thin waists made of lawn and dainty lace were to me most indelicate, more so, I think, unreasonable though it seemed, than even the bare neck. I have seen a Japanese servant in the midst of heavy work in a hot kitchen, with her kimono down, displaying one entire shoulder; and I have seen a woman nursing her baby in the street, or a naked woman in a hotel bath, but until that evening on the steamer I had never seen a woman publicly displaying bare skin just for the purpose of having it seen.¹

All cultures have their concept of propriety, and what it would take to violate that propriety. In some places, a woman publicly breastfeeding her infant would be scandalous, and in other places it would not raise an eyebrow.

The Kojiki creation myth is very familiar to the Japanese, explaining the origins of both the nation and the national religion, Shinto. Every Japanese reader therefore would also have noticed a similarity of the myth to the first installment of Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku.² The denizens of a funky little Tokyo boarding house open the episode with a considerable surprise: their old building manager has retired, and in his place is a beautiful young widow, Kyoko Otonashi.³ She’s only two years older than the hero, Yusaku Godai, and most of the rest of the series is about his wooing and winning the new manager. As the story begins, however, Godai is a ronin studying for the entrance exams.⁴ He can’t study, though, when the others hold a party in his room (the biggest in the house) to welcome the new manager. Frustrated, he moves into the closet to study. The others take this as a challenge: when Akemi Roppongi declares the closet to be “ama no iwato!” (the heavenly cave), the Kojiki-wise reader knows what to expect.

Akemi and Yotsuya start telling Kyoko to stop drinking so much, then to stop taking her clothes off; then they begin praising her body. Kyoko of course hasn’t dropped a stitch and is thoroughly embarrassed. Godai, however, can’t resist peeking out to look at Kyoko—and gets dragged back into the party.

Anything Goes

Takahashi’s next hit after Maison Ikkoku contains a great deal of actual nudity, but Ranma 1/2 is also innocent enough to show to Western grade-school children. The 1986 series focuses on a teenage student of the martial arts, Ranma Saotome, and his father/teacher Genma. Dad has promised Ranma as a fiancée to one of the daughters of his friend Soun Tendo, who runs the Tendo School of Anything-Goes Martial Arts. When Ranma shows up for the first time at the Tendo residence, however, there are a few problems to overcome. For one thing, Ranma has acquired at least two other fiancées (under circumstances too bizarre to go into here). The main problem: Ranma is a girl. Rather, sometimes he’s a girl, sometimes he’s a boy. During a training exercise on the Chinese mainland, Ranma fell into the Accursed Spring of the Drowned Maiden. The curse of this body of water is that, having fallen into the spring, Ranma now turns into a girl whenever he’s splashed with cold water. Hot water restores his masculine identity.

This kind of setup could easily be fodder for any number of erotic (or downright sleazy) variations. Takahashi, however, has chosen to play it strictly for laughs, thus blunting anything even remotely threatening. One way of taking the edge off of the situation is to reduce the whole curse aspect to absurdity, by having Ranma’s father fall into the Accursed Spring of the Drowned Panda. . . .

Ranma 1/2 is an example of caricatured nudity. There is no attempt at all to convince the viewers they’re watching real people. While watching live (or lifelike) nude high-school students may be offensive, if not illegal, Takahashi’s humorous manga-style artwork reminds the viewers that this is “just a cartoon.” In addition, when we see Ranma undressed, it’s usually in context, such as a bath.

Just Another Day in Paradise

One story-specific excuse for nudity—and an example of more realistic artwork—is in Saki Hiwatari’s 1993 anime Boku no Chikyu o Mamotte (Please Save My Earth). It’s only hinted at in the six-part OAV anime and in a series of music videos that supplemented the OAVs; but then, its audience was already expected to know why Mokuren, the devotee of the goddess Sarjalin, sometimes seemed to be wrapped in a blanket.

Mokuren was (as were both her parents) gifted from birth with the power to commune with plants and animals. As such, when Mokuren’s mother died (Mokuren was a very young child at the time), she was spirited away from her father to Paradise, a school run by the Sisterhood of Sarjalin, where she learned to develop her powers. One odd requirement at this sexually segregated school: no clothes. If anyone wanted to visit Paradise (or if Mokuren wanted to sneak off of the grounds to meet a boy, as she did in her early teen years), the students had to wrap themselves in ceremonial blankets.

This causes a problem when the adult Mokuren is first assigned to the lunar observation base. At first she walks around covered only in lush blonde hair that reaches almost to her feet. Once the rules are explained to her, she wears the same jumpsuit as everyone else. She is shown wearing only the blanket in one other circumstance: when she is with her beloved Shion. In Hiwatari’s universe, Mokuren’s nudity is more than just natural or naïve; it implies a state of grace, of Eden before the fall. Even more, it reminds those familiar with the Kojiki that the goddess Uzume used her nudity to preserve life on Earth, and parallels Uzume’s divinity with Mokuren’s goddess-derived powers to cause plants to grow and flowers to bloom, and her almost fanatical interest in Earth’s plant and animal life.

Skinny Dipping

Having a good rationale for displaying nudity can serve to neutralize what might be, in Western animation, a controversial scene. Among the non-erotic contexts for nudity in Japanese pop culture are breastfeeding, pearl diving (admittedly not as common now as it was a half-century ago), and, especially, bath scenes, whether in a private tub, a public hot springs, or even a shower.

Communal bathing is one of the traits that immediately defines a scene as being in or about Japan. Not all of these scenes, however, have been (or can be) shown on American television, no matter how innocuous. Some scenes involving children are played for laughs rather than titillation, but still get edited out or censored to be broadcast. In the Digimon series, one bath scene has towels redrawn on the prepubescent boys rather than have them flash bare butts. In a later season of Ojamajo Doremi (of which only the first season had been shown on American television), a boy who goes to school with the trainee witches gets hysterical when he goes to a public bath, then realizes he’s taking his clothes off in front of female classmates. It’s no big deal to the girls—one has a kid brother, after all—but the boy is at a transitional age where embarrassment is as natural as bathing.

One nice (in every sense of the word) example of non-erotic bath-related nudity is a scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro, 1988). A man (we find out later that he’s a college professor) and his two daughters, ages ten and four, are taking a bath together. They talk about the country house they’ve just moved into, whether or not it’s haunted, and how best to dispel any lingering ghosts. “Scrubbing and soaking together is a time-honored custom for all friends and family, especially children and their fathers. Many Japanese girls bathe with their dads until puberty, while boys and fathers may continue sharing the tub for a lifetime.”⁵ The scene is just as asexual as the rest of the movie.

There’s a similar scene in Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988), showing a ten-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister bathing. They seem more interested in trapping air bubbles in the washcloth than in each other’s anatomy. A story-arc in Shinji Imaizumi’s 1990 boxing manga God Is a Southpaw focuses on sports photographer Yukari Kudo, whose photojournalist father was killed in an avalanche when Yukari was about five years old. Her last memory of him was when they were bathing together.⁶ And in an episode of the anime television series based on Momoko Sakura’s Chibi Maruko-chan, the six-year-old title character takes a bath with her grandfather, and it’s really no big deal.

There’s a similar scene, with an unexpectedly dark undercurrent, in the generally light and fluffy TV series Ojamajo Doremi. The series revolves around a group of grade school girls in training to be witches. After the main character, a girl named Doremi, has a particularly rough day, her mother takes off her clothes and joins Doremi in the tub. There she encourages her daughter not to give up, just as Doremi encouraged her mother even before she was born. In this case, the mother admits that, when she broke one of her fingers, she assumed that her dream of being a concert pianist was over and she wanted to commit suicide. The only thing that stopped her was getting pregnant with Doremi, which reminded her of how dependant this new life would be on her. She didn’t present this as a feeling of obligation, but as the mutual support of the family bond. However, it’s unlikely that the mother would have mentioned her suicidal thoughts at all without the literal and emotional nakedness of the communal bath.

In fact, it’s part of a broader phenomenon for which the Japanese have coined the sort-of- English word “skinship”: physical contact with a loved one, ranging from a mother carrying a baby on her back and students holding hands on a date to breastfeeding and family bathing.⁷ Even cleaning the wax out of one’s ears has evolved into a platonic form of skinship—if your steady boyfriend/girlfriend does it while you rest your head on his/her lap. It’s a blatant look back to childhood and the source of all such skinship: mother.⁸ Family bathing raises a few awkward possibilities, but even these can be a source of humor. The heroine of Yuu Watase’s comic romance manga Absolute Boyfriend, Riika (a high school girl who gets to “test-drive” a robot boyfriend), is shown in a flashback of a bathing scene of when she was three years old. Predictably, noticing the difference between herself and her father, she grabbed hold of the “difference” and asked, “What’s this?” In a later episode, her parents are discussing her growing up. Her father, remembering the scene and feeling emotional and sentimental, utters the outrageous (in the West, anyway) line: “Only yesterday Riika was grabbing my chinchin.” Riika’s mother, having been there herself, takes things in stride: “Now she’s old enough to grab someone else’s chinchin.” The attitude, as shown at least in manga and anime, is that children exposed to the facts of life as early as age three stop making a fuss about it by age four and suffer no ill effects.

Even characters born and raised outside Japan are shown as benefitting from the Japanese approach to nudity. The title character of Ken Akamatsu’s popular manga Negima! Magister Negi Magi! (and its equally popular anime) is Negi Springfield, a ten-year-old British boy who happens to be a wizard (shades of Harry Potter). He’s sent to Japan to teach English at an all-girls’ junior high school that has its own magical students, while using this as a cover to track the whereabouts of his father. One of his students, a vampire-witch, causes Negi to run away from the campus to take refuge in the countryside.

While away from the school he bumps into another student: Kaede Nagase, a tall and easygoing teen who’s also hiding; in this case, she’s hiding her quest to become a ninja. Spending the day with Kaede honing her ninja skills in the forest, helps Negi take his mind off his troubles. He gets nervous again when Kaede invites him to bathe with her in very close quarters—a fifty-five-gallon oil drum heated by a campfire. If family bathing can be dubious, student/teacher bathing can have a lot of problems, even if the teacher is prepubescent. In this case, though, there are no problems. Kaede sits in the drum behind Negi, with both of them gazing into the starry evening sky. (In the anime, Kaede wears a bikini, which isn’t in the original manga.)

Satoshi Kon’s movie Tokyo Godfathers tells of three members of Tokyo’s homeless getting from Christmas to New Year’s Day with an abandoned baby in tow. The presence of the baby leads to breastfeeding, even though the breasts do not belong to the child’s mother. One of the “godfathers,” a runaway teenage girl named Miyuki, is holding the baby when they’re taken hostage by a South American criminal, who has been stalking a Yakuza gangster. We see the criminal’s wife, who speaks only Spanish and no Japanese at all, nursing both the hostage baby and her own. Later, we see the baby refusing to nurse from her mother’s non-lactating breast. There’s a good reason: the woman’s own baby was stillborn, and in her distracted grief she stole the baby from the hospital.

Gotta Strip ’em All

Perhaps the most (literally) outlandish excuse for nudity (for the time being, anyway) was the 1996 TV series Erufu wo karu mono-tachi (Those Who Hunt Elves).⁹ The set-up is similar to a host of other anime series in which people from one culture (usually present-day Japan) find themselves stranded in a strange land (usually not of this earth). In this case, the fairy realm is invaded by three humans: muscular lunkhead Junpei Ryuzoji, high-school student and weapons fanatic Ritsuko Inoue, and Oscar-winning actress Airi Komiyama. The elf-priestess Celcia begins the ceremony to send them back, which involves painting the spell onto her own body. Junpei’s asides about Celcia’s looks, however, make her lose her temper in mid-ceremony, and the spell fragments, flying onto the bodies of five other elves. Not knowing exactly which five, the Earth-trio decide they’re going to have to strip any elf they find.

The offensiveness of walking up to someone and demanding that they disrobe is neutralized by sheer absurdity, as in Ranma 1/2. The three earthlings are accompanied in their quest for the fragments by Celcia, whose impatience causes yet another calamity early in the series: she is turned into a dog. They also acquire Mike (pronounced mee-kay), a tank that behaves like an oversized cat.

There is also some drama and even pathos in the mix. In one installment, a young elf-woman actually begs the invaders to strip her naked. It seems that, to protect her village from a rampaging monster, she put on a suit of magical armor. The magic was that she could not remove the armor. She tells the humans that she hasn’t had a bath in three years (and the animators oblige by “showing” the wave of three-year-old funk caused by her bathless state). After several failed attempts to remove the armor, the elf not only manages to remove it, but (after discreetly bathing in a waterfall) puts the armor back on. It seems that she can’t just walk away from something she’s been so literally close to for three years.

Add to all of the above a range of other gags, from occasional asides to the audience to parodies of other anime, and you have another series like Ranma, in which nudity is a necessity, but is not necessarily titillating—by Japanese standards, at least.

Yet these entertaining, relatively innocent uses of nudity reveal some of the problems anime creators face in bringing their art to the West. Showing nudity in prepubescent children,¹⁰ or sexual activity among young teenagers, may keep an episode of a TV series off the air, or stop a movie from being translated for sale in the West. Some distributors have also cut whole scenes to try to avoid any hassles, even if the scenes in question have no overtly sexual content.

The flip side of this cultural divide on the uses of nudity is based on the fact that many anime started out in print, as manga, which literally has its own rules. The legal definition of pornography in Japanese pop culture is governed for the most part by Article 175 of the Japanese Criminal Code. This article bans depictions of genitals, unless they are caricatures or absurd, cartoonish versions.¹¹ To avoid lawsuits and legal harassment, depictions of genitals are often abstract, or less than detailed. There may be, even in the most blatantly sex-oriented manga or anime, a blank space or a stylized blur in a character’s groin. Phalluses may be replaced by tentacles or creeping vines; shellfish have substituted for women’s genitals, as they have for centuries in Japanese fertility festivals. As in Hollywood, a close-up on the face can speak volumes. Sometimes, a piece of paper is pasted over the potentially offending artwork—even if it’s more like a strip of confetti that hides almost nothing. A common device in the digital age is to mask the offending body part with a “mosaic,” a very-low-definition grid of giant squares that still manages to suggest without revealing.

Regardless, sometimes a scene or an entire story that is not pornographic can be put at risk because of Western perceptions that it is pornographic. Yasunori Umezu’s 1998 anime Kite, a story of teenage assassins, had to be trimmed of a half-dozen sequences to keep it from being barred from America as pornography. (These cuts, including some edited stills, are detailed on the website http://www.animeprime.com/reports/kite_lesscut_ss.shtml). The extreme violence, however, was left in.

1. Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, A Daughter of the Samurai (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, and Company, 1934), 154.

2. The title, like most Takahashi titles, is multitextured. Ostensibly a simple address—the rooming-house (named with the stylishly French maison, like many other pieces of downmarket real estate in Japan) at #1 Koku Street—the word ikkoku can also mean an instant in time or, as an adjective, stubborn or hot-tempered.

3. These denizens are Mrs. Ichinose (housewife) and her son Kentaro, Akemi Roppongi (bar hostess), Yusaku Godai (would-be college student). and the mysterious Mr. Yotsuya (God only knows).

4. Classically, a ronin is a samurai without a master. In the modern sense of the word, a ronin is a student of college age who hasn’t yet been accepted by a university (usually because he has failed the entrance exams at least once).

5. Kittredge Cherry, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987), 90. Mixed bathing would seem to be an erotically charged atmosphere, but in Japan, where the practice is long established, eroticism simply isn’t a factor—unless, of course, participants choose to make it so, in, for example, a “soapland,” Japan’s answer to the massage parlor. Similarly, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s memoir of her early schooldays recounts how the school’s headmaster allowed “clothing optional” swimming among the first-graders because “he thought it wasn’t right for boys and girls to be morbidly curious about the differences in their bodies, and he thought it was unnatural for people to take such pains to hide their bodies from each other” (Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, translated by Dorothy Britton [Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1982], 68).

6. Shinji Imaizumi, “Speed Zero,” Kamisama wa Southpaw 6 (Tokyo: Shueisha, 1990), 94–95.

7. Cherry, Womansword, 89–90.

8. In a Tetsuwan Atomu story from 1957 titled “Black Looks,” Atomu hunts down the title character, who has been assassinating prominent robots as revenge against the robot he believes killed his mother. When Black Looks is at last reunited with the robot who raised from a foundling (she hadn’t died, she was just broken), he puts his head on her lap, in a deliberate mirror of Atomu and his robot-mother at the beginning of the story. The narrator’s line from the beginning is repeated at the end, citing perhaps the prime example of skinship: “If there is one resting place in the world it is surely on your mother’s lap” (Osamu Tezuka, Tetsuwan Atomu 4 [Tokyo: Kodansha, 1980], 151).

9. Some of the following information is from “Those Who Hunt Elves” by Aaron K. Dawe in Animerica 8, no. 8 (September 2000): 16.

10. Especially common here are the nude transformation scenes for the “magical girls” such as Pretty Sammy of Tenchi Muyo! and the Bishojo Senshi (Pretty Young Girl Warriors) of Sailor Moon.

11. Frederik L. Schodt, Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983), 133.