Why I am Here

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Hello reader,

Why are you here?

Why are you here tonight? That was the question for us, in our night class in essay-writing. To answer, we had to write “free fall” and then read aloud. Here’s my answer:

 Of course I love my couch, and television, and popular culture: at home I have stacks of VHS, DVDs, Japanese figurines, cool posters—as well as some grown up original oil paintings. My point is, there are lots I could do at home—oh, and I have Internet too. So I could entertain myself for hours. But I’d rather feel productive. To me writing essays is productive because there is suspense: I never know if it will be any good.

For example, I own a certain Japanese cartoon “anime” series, full of violence, and I ended up doing an essay about that show. (Only 13 episodes beginning-to-end) But did I do it right? A young Safeway cashier saw my Japanese baseball cap, learned about my blog, and now I have to wonder: Is my essay too hard for her? Too grownup? Too serious and intellectual? Certainly it’s nothing a young anime fan would write or normally read.

But then again, my essay is about the truth of child abuse. In the show a man and a woman, newly adult, take in child runaways, one of whom has never seen a warm Japanese bath, and one of whom has denial to the point of memory loss. And these things do happen. So maybe a young reader would like to know about the wide world. And that is why I’m here tonight. To learn to write more stuff, more personal stuff, and I think it will be all right.

There will be other evenings for me to be at home enjoying nice non-violent anime, and sci-fi shows.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

Fall 2016

Footnotes:

(Again, I would remind people I am desperately seeking the Japanese figurine of Kuniko holding her boomerang overhead.)

~My grim essay is The Anime, Elfen Lied, archived June 2011.

~The opening song credits for Elfen Lied on Youtube are not hard for you to find. Instead, I offer here (link) some young fans performing in Latin the opening song, Ilium, in E minor using violins and a piano: The singer has a trained voice and good enunciation.

Although I was very moved by Elfen Lied, and although when I saw a young woman at a convention dressed all in bandages like Lucy in the show I burst out, “That is the best costume I’ve seen all weekend!” … still, I just can’t recommend Elfen Lied to anyone my age whom I don’t know. Too violent.

~So let me instead recommend a housewife-friendly 13-episode series that has been called “very gentle,” Some Day’s Dreamers, about a sixteen-year-old country girl alone in Tokyo, trying to learn to be a mage (wizard). The Japanese title translates roughly as, “What mages need to know.” Here’s the link to the sympathetic opening song, a song I like very much.  

~Today many high schools and colleges have an “anime club,” and many cities have an annual Japanese anime/media convention, one-day, (Camrose in October; Lethbridge until 2017) or all-weekend. (Edmonton and Calgary in the summer)

Goodby, Anime Sculptures

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I am so pleased that this old post is suddenly timely for reprinting....

Some day I will really appreciate abstract sculpture. I will feel the swirling lines, the effect of polished surfaces next to parts left rough, and the tension of blocky parts digging down that want to spring up and away. For now though, in the spirit of crawling before I walk, the only sculptures I buy are anime (Japanese animation) figurines. Are they art? Yes, you may be surprised to find they come with the sculptor's name prominently on the box. 

Sometimes you may choose to buy these figurines pre-ordered from the factory, or else wait and hope to buy from the factory’s extra run. Often, though, with a prototype shown on the internet, “pre-order” is all there is. If, perchance, you had no cash flow this summer because first you finished your mortgage early, then paid a year's worth of property tax and then paid off all your visa and then paid for your powerful yet incredibly light Macbook Air computer then … like me, you will feel sad at the pre-order figurines that you never bought, gone now, gone forever except in memory.

There were three pieces that I appreciated. I had wanted to set them for display on points of a triangle. Let me recall them now to say farewell.

There have been many interpretations of the teenage girl Asuka Langely. In the series Neon Genisis Evangelion she often wears her uniform, her plug suit, to fight mystic ghostly aliens. (Not living humans) This year an artist pictured her away from battle, dancing for joy. She is wearing a monotone blue dress rather than, say, a schoolgirl’s sailor shirt over a dark skirt. This means my eye’s path down is not delayed. But my eye does not rush out along her leg: the leg is not extended with a straight foot like a proper ballerina’s. Instead, her knee is tossed out, her schoolgirl satchel is gaily swinging, dress swirling. Such a jumble of energy surrounds her. And her face! It makes me so happy just to see her. 

Asuka’s girlfriend Rei has often been interpreted wearing her plug suit or a girlish blue dress or even as a gothic waitress. This year the artist must have imagined a prim cylinder within which to sculpt Rei as wearing a woman’s traditional Kimono. Energy is constrained. In contrast to her dancing friend of American heritage, Rei’s narrow kimono allows only short soft steps. It has gorgeous fabric, as part of how traditionally women were meant to be adored and put on a pedestal. The effect is matched by Rei’s usual not-smiling expression.

As any art becomes less abstract and more “real,” as with realistic figurines, the art becomes increasingly viewed in the light of the history of the viewer and what he or she brings to the art. For me, knowing the eventual fates of the girls, I am moved to see them as still unmarred and having a life.

The third figurine for my triangle, balancing the other two poles of joyful and serene, new and traditional, child and woman, is a newly adult woman named Kuniko from the series Shangri-La. I remember her sitting in a short pleated skirt, wearing not high heels but high action boots. She still wears her old schoolgirl sailor shirt, and, with her arms up overhead, she holds a steel futuristic boomerang. Cool! I immediately sense she is not “just another teen in the crowd.” Best of all is her expression, rare in figurines: a huge U-shaped smile. I can relate. I instantly want to know what adventures she has. So I did a google search for boomerang and found out Kuniko is a community leader, fresh out of jail. 

I won’t reveal what the dear girl tries to do: Anime differs from mundane U.S. television. For U.S. TV, which typically has ongoing shows such as police mysteries, you could accidentally expose the plot of only one episode at a time. Fantastic anime is different: The plot lasts for a full season, as the show is intended to terminate after a certain number of weeks. The stories for my two favorite shows, Elfin Lied and Serial Experiments Lain, are told in just thirteen episodes. At the end of the series the hero has won or lost, lived or died: For her it’s all over. These terminal ending make figurines especially dear.

Had I bought my three sculptures I could have brought them to my favorite art gallery, the Stephen Lowe gallery. I would have brought them up to the counter, set them in a triangle, and then my friends the art experts, they who so deeply appreciate “real” art, would have ooh-ed and ah-ed been happy for me. 

My lesson? Don’t be intimidated at the thought of “real” art lovers; buy what you like, and if you really love it… snap it up before it’s only a memory.

Sean Crawford,

Calgary,

October 2010 ... Every year at Otafest I look, without hope, but do not find.
Update:
 In summer of 2016, as a pre-order for September of 2016, comes a "re-issue" of the Asuka figurine. Hurray! The makers know what fans want, and what true fans will pay, for this time they are charging what the market (in Japan) will bear—quite a lot. Too much for us sensible North Americans. Yes, but I really want to have it.

So I've ordered Asuka, and I get free tracking of my parcel too, all the way from leaving Gunma prefecture, to Tokyo post office, to cross the ocean, to the port of Vancouver post office, to the transCanada highway, to my town. (Yes, by government post; I can't afford Federal Express) I've ordered through J-List.

Somehow I found the Rei sculpture, a few years back. Hurray! Did you know her name means spirit? (Oooh)

Only one sculpture left: Any Kuniko figurines out there? I will road trip to your house to buy it! She was created by artist Range Murota, who did the covers for Robot magazine.

Footnote: I use J-Box, the Japanese import site.
There must have been a number of people who missed out this summer, because this fall the term **pre-order** is being bracketed with two stars, and a big box has been added to each pre-order figurine page, spelling out what a pre-order is.

Anime for A Brainwashed Mother

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Every year I am among among thousands of young people—and one of the few people over age thirty—(what we used to call the “older generation”) at the Otafest convention. It’s a gathering for fans of Japanese culture and entertainment. I’ve written about Otafest before; today I will suggest a few Japanese animation, or “anime,” shows for an over-thirty mother to view. Why?

Because: At a reader-writer-publisher convention, When Words Collide, a housewife, call her Jane, asked me about anime. Jane asked not about animated movies but about weekly television cartoons from Japan, asking me to assist her to smash her brainwashing. Jane realized she was culturally trained to think that TV animation had to always be at the level of the Saturday morning cartoons of her childhood: always for laughter, always for children. For Jane, an animated version of The Little Mermaid would “have to” follow the cartoon Disney version of a happy ending, not like the tragic live movie version or the written story of Hans Christian Anderson. Now, because her teenage daughter was watching anime, Jane really wanted to give anime a try.

To help a mother escape brainwashing:

Think of anime as being from a foreign culture, and don’t be a cultural chauvinist.

Americans, God bless them, can’t do stillness. This I documented in a recent essay, Freefall into Anime archived May 2016. (With two suggested anime opening credits to click on) Nor can they still their tongues. I was struck by the difference in the English language dubbing of a feature length Japanese animated movie, based on the book series The Borrowers, called The Secret World of Arriety. Having watched the U.S. version in theatres, I was astounded to watch the beginning of the UK version of the film on Youtube,. I learned the Americans had added dialogue where Arriety is rushing around. Better to have the girl talking to the insects, thought the Americans, than to have silence. The British and I would beg to differ.

The British, as I saw on the CBC, were making television shows intended to be shown in order long before the Americans did. Hollywood did not dare make a weekly “five-year novel” until Babylon-5. (See my essay Death of Buffy, archived January 2012) Rather, American shows, both live action and animated, were always a franchise, to be shown in any order, a franchise created without any resolution in mind, a franchise to be cranked out in endless, mindless monotony right up until the ratings began to fail. Sometimes, desperate to keep the audience interested, they’d throw in a shark for someone to jump over. But not in Japan. There the creators of anime are not bored by their own shows. And there, like Buffy, the cartoon hero can die—even before the final episode.

An anime series begins with a set number of episodes in mind, to be shown in order, leading to an intended resolution.

In Japan a full year, or season, of TV runs over two half-seasons. Some shows are intended to wrap up in just a half-year: 13 weeks. I will restrict my list of recommended shows, “for a mother to try out,” to ones that are resolved after only 13 episodes.

I suggest Haibane Renmei. Imagine a small brick town and fields where wind power turbines are not exotic, but as old and familiar to the children as telephone poles. Where older children take care of the younger ones. Where in fact the so-called “children” have halos and wings for they are angels, earning their keep in a town of humans. Here are no wicked witches or monsters or machine guns, just a very troubled angel. The pretty (shown here without credits) opening music shows the protagonist plunging to earth to be reborn with wings.

Another show that, while not showing normal anime artwork, would surely help to disrupt brainwashing would be Kino’s Journey. The first episode shows three criminal scum on the road who would never be shown on the American Teletoon channel—but after that, I can assure Jane, none of the other folk Kino encounters are as sinful. Kino travels from country to country (city-state) alone.  

The countries are not in Japan, but in a European-flavored imaginary land. As for Japanese culture, I should note they have a concept of excellence, associated with the “way” or “do.” They may invest a lifetime learning “the way of the tea ceremony,” or learning Karate-do, “way of the empty hand.” When Kino insists on practicing with a pistol every morning it is not to be a cowboy gunfighter, but to pursue excellence as taught by “one who has gone before” which is the literal translation of “sensei,” or teacher.

Here’s the opening (without credits) song, one that might be too dull for an American child. And—wow! —Here’s an intriguing trailer, without spoilers about the cultures of any country, that explains and entices better than I ever could.

I’m not trying to be a feminist, but—if you didn’t know there was a gun, could you guess Kino’s gender? In ancient Japanese etchings, in the erotic ones where the couple is fully clothed, you can only discriminate the man from the woman by the samurai swords. Also, in less ancient times, there were theatre companies of all-men and all-women, with the cast playing all genders. Today, for anime that takes place in, say, a boarding school, often a wholesome good-natured student will turn out to be posing as the opposite gender. (In one series the viewpoint hero is a girl in disguise at an all-boys school—hence the sprinkling of light blue school blazers at Otafest) But I don’t suppose a housewife with a daughter would want me to elaborate on how the Japanese don’t have Puritan ancestors.

As for high school anime, a good 13-episode show is Angel Beats. Don’t be fooled by a boy’s poleaxe or the guns—nobody permanently dies in heaven, which is where they are. I am reminded of an old live action series, Harsh Realm: Imagine a high school like in our world, only bigger, where most of the inhabitants, unknown to themselves, are virtual characters, put there not by an “intelligently designed” computer programmer, but by God. The school is an afterlife, but not a final heaven—only a way station.

The real students are few—all had tragic lives and died young. They form their own school club, with a female president, having a crest and the motto, “Rebels Against the God.” But the student council president, also female, wants to herd them on to new pastures. Of course the kids are determined to resist her, hence the guns. Such a tragedy. And yet it’s laugh-out-loud funny. And yet the ending makes people cry.

Yes, cry. Here in west, from the time of ancient Greece, our stage plays have had one of only two masks: tragedy or comedy. But from the Orient we get “dramedy.” In fact, in one of my favorite long series, (Ruroni Kenshin) you could almost set your watch by the joke that always comes a couple minutes into each episode. It may surprise western mothers like Jane how Angel Beats has a greater proportion of humor in the earlier episodes. No surprise to anime fans. In fact, in a long series about a guy with three guns, Trigun, the hero is first seen bounding around like Daffy Duck—I’m not kidding: He’s dodging bullets the way Daffy does. Luckily the comic store manager who rented it to me warned me not to be misled by the queer beginning, for it soon steadies down into a good drama.

Here is the Angel Beats opening song. The unsmiling girl at the piano, without any friends, is the student president—the blowing white feathers suggest her angel wings.

Before I close, for someone willing to try a long series, I might suggest Last Exile. A married couple was so enthralled with Last Exile, that they talked to each other about naming their first boy and girl after the main characters, a brother and sister. Here is a link to the opening, sans credits.

Besides Last Exile, I see that I have linked three short-series opening songs. And a trailer. That’s enough. It’s quite fitting for my two-dimensional black lettered essay to have such links because anime is colorful, visual and aural. The links fit today’s topic, because U.S. children’s cartoons will have opening credits that are frantic and shallow but these ones are not: How very Japanese.

Sean Crawford

May

Calgary

2016

Footnotes:

~As far as I can tell, it was a man with an adopted Asian first name, Joss Whedon, (Joss means luck) who made Hollywood’s first live action TV shows with dramedy, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. He must have viewed Asian entertainment.

—Hey, I just realized: Whedon was the first producer in Hollywood who, without any foreshadowing, would kill off main characters right on stage! In fact, his actors would make jokes that they daren’t complain about their wages. Yes, Joss must have viewed anime.

~Hair color can be a code, according to a blogger in Japan I’ve been following for years, Peter Payne of J-List, who notes: “…white or grey hair are usually an indicator of a secret, including hidden powers. Red haired characters like Asuka from Evangelion are fiery demons who are quick to anger… ” In Angel Beats! the colors apply to an angel who needs no gun, and a fiesty leader of rebels.

~As for the couple who liked Last Exile, here is a lengthy blog post by one of my favourite web essayists, Stevey, about him and Linh discovering anime, and then trying to learn which anime suits them.

A Philosophical Traveler

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When I posted my piece advising you to Say Hello to Strangers I said I was having an off day, and not saying hello to anyone. This time, visiting the city of Lethbridge, I had my chance to do it right.

Wearing my citizen-tourist hat, I drove south to the city after my writing class on Friday. You know, to a European, a town is “city” if it has a cathedral; to me on the prairies, a “city” is any town with a public bus service. I drove to an Econo-Lodge. An older couple from Montana was checking in—the lady’s first time in Canada—on their way up to see the open pit coal mine in Hinton. And Banff, too. I enthused about the big Japanese garden just down the road in Henderson Park. No flowers, just Buddhist landscaping. “After you leave, the real world looks ugly.” We talked a little about wartime civil internment camps; today, of course, we have only friendship for Japan. We shook hands, and retired to our rooms.

Next morning I awoke to possibilities: Maybe in the evening I could take in a discotheque; in the afternoon, perhaps, a golf course; for lunch, maybe, a gourmet meal at a museum—all the standard tourist things. But what about my humble morning? And my humble wallet? It could be cheaper and more rewarding to just go around saying “hello” to the natives.

I bustled about my room while enjoying the novelty of having a TV. At my usual “cowboy hotel” in Edmonton, the old Strathcona, there aren’t any television sets in the rooms. That’s OK by me: It suits my budget, and besides, I don’t do TV back at home: no cable, no rabbit ears, no peasant TV…It’s cheaper that way, leaving more time for writing. And so my idiot box is now a glorified DVD player… for watching my Japanese anime. (animation)

Just when I was ready to leave my room, I found the ending of an old Spencer Tracer war movie—maybe you’ve seen it—where he is a dead pilot, back as a ghost. Cool. I sat on the bed to watch. Next came another black-and-white war movie, Hell to Eternity. “Of course,” I thought, “in the US this is Memorial Day.” I remained sitting.

I just had to smile: Down in the U.S. the armed forces, and the police, enjoy the affection of the people, having a friendly distinct competence possible only in a democracy when the people and their civil servants are competent rather than corrupt. “Every nation gets the armed forces it deserves.” An immigrant from a country with poor citizenship said he knew Canada was a good country from his first arrival at the airport, because two passing RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) smiled and said, “Good morning.”

I had never heard of Hell to Eternity. I kept watching because the film starts out in that nostalgic time when my parents were young, the pre-war years. In the opening scene Hollywood-handsome delinquents use 1940’s slang. And then, how nice to see schoolboys with Japanese parents using slang so well, so melted in as “real” Americans. The hero, a feisty orphan, gets adopted into a Japanese family where the parents are learning English—of course he learns fluent Japanese. I just had to smile: America is where, with the exception of the American Indians, everybody can come and assimilate into any family, and meanwhile get assimilated into the national family, just fine. No one has to stand in front of a mirror and brainwash himself: it just comes natural. Like how the hero, after enlisting, naturally adopts the body language, attitudes and reactions of a US Marine. One year you naturally believe in arranged marriages; another year you easily believe in marrying for love, and, if you attend a local mosque, that Islam means peace.

In LA, before air conditioning, the hero is with a Japanese-looking girl in an open convertible when the fellows in the next convertible have their radio on: It is “a day that will live forever in infamy.” War. To paraphrase what the Bible says about the Lord, “Thou shalt hate the enemy with all thy heart and all thy soul.” Obviously, during strenuous war-time hatred, it is just not done for Asian-Americans to serve in the Pacific Theatre of War, so the hero’s brothers go off to fight in Italy; the hero fights the Japanese on Saipan; their parents are interned far inland.

It’s a queer coincidence how the hero is of Italian background, for my high school was half Italian, half Asian. When I left home as a teenager to attend school alone, I naturally found parental-figure Asians, and I naturally gravitated to finding a home in the armed forces.  So I related to the movie… I kept watching a little longer, and then a little longer; eventually I dialed “O” and got the front desk. “I’m watching a Turner Classic Movie. Can I stay another hour?” And I did, for another $15.00. Hey, it’s the same price as a movie and extra popcorn downtown. Besides, we tourists like to see movies.

Eventually, out in the bright sunshine, I found myself on a path in Henderson Park. A fixed wing aircraft was droning over the park, banking to vertical, again and again. A mature man with a stroller was watching. I asked, “Friend of yours?” Small world: The stranger turned out to be a pilot, guessing at the make of the aircraft. He said, “He sure looks like he’s having fun.” His partner came up and took the stroller, and a lady using an electric scooter came up and we three talked about the weather and she knew Calgary politics. I said, “I can’t believe you have full leaves on the trees! And blossoms too! Up in Calgary the trees are only still budding!” I told the strangers I was in town to go to a Japanese kitchen/gift store downtown—they knew the one—to find out how to cook my brown rice better. And sure enough—small world—the nice man gave me a blow-by-blow explanation of how to cook brown rice, and told me where in Safeway to find the fluffiest brown rice of all. (Called something like buzzmat) Good thing I talk to strangers.

Best of all, when I told the man I was in a good mood from seeing Hell to Eternity, he knew the movie and said it was well known. That was nice to hear. For most of my childhood we had no TV, so maybe I had missed seeing it on seeing the Late Show.

Soon I was striding down a long arrow straight path to the Japanese garden wall: The approach is part of the experience. At the gateway I met two Japanese young men. One was just finished high school in Japan, only a little older than I had been, when I was in a strange and urban land. The older man, cheerful and expressive, with dyed brown hair, was here for the local university. I’m glad I conversed, because, after I photographed them, the quiet younger guy offered to take my picture posing with his friend: how thoughtful, how wonderful, as I never take pictures of myself. In Japan, I know, they always take group pictures twice so the person with the camera is included too.

The garden meditation path includes passing through a Japanese house constructed of beautifully fitted wood. No nails. Two Lethbridge young ladies in Kimonos talked to me. Along the walls were a few dolls behind glass, of porcelain faces and exquisite fabric. Know what? When I was the age of those girls, I told them, I had bought one of the dolls being displayed, as a teenager, in the tourist area, “gas town” in Vancouver. It had belonged to one of the sales staff. I remember I couldn’t buy the velvet display stand, only the doll. Who knew it would be worth so much? (Later it cracked, later I lost it during one of my moves)

Later, back down the straight long path, back at the gift shop, I conversed with a young lady from Japan. She exclaimed and pointed to my Totoro ball cap! We conversed about anime, and she darted to a book with lots of color pictures and flipped the pages, to find good anime to show me. The book is Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential subtitled How Teenage Girls Made a Nation Cool. Yes, I bought the book, feeling very avuncular.

Regrets? Two: Next time I’ll have memorized the titles of anime I like, as I really blanked out when I was asked. And I regret I didn’t ask the university student whether he was between semesters or yet to start, so I could warn him: Universities here are hard compared to Japan. (Where high school is very hard) As a graduate myself, I could share a few tricks.

You probably don’t want to hear whether I golfed or had a gourmet meal. (No and no) The important thing, in my eyes, is that I got back to practicing what I preach: talking to strangers.

Now to put on my citizen-philosopher hat, considering Hell to Eternity: I thought, for 1950’s Hollywood, there was good acknowledgement of sexuality, with ladies dancing burlesque in their apartment; splendid scene cutting; and more American bodies (except for maybe the opposed beach landing) than in Saving Private Ryan—why? Are citizens of today unable to face war? In the horribly restful silence after battle, the hero walks in a field among American and Japanese bodies… The sergeant is played by David Janzen, who went on to make a lot of people happy playing The Fugitive in the TV series. (Later a movie starring Harrison Ford) I am relieved to realize U.S. civilians, at least as late as 1960, are aware that Japanese women and children would leap to their deaths rather than be captured. Someone tells the hero to lower his rifle, advising you can’t stop suicide with violence. But you can talk.

I am relieved because I was feeling a little guilty, some essays back, when I revealed the Saipan suicides, and, in the Japanese comic Barefoot Gen, an Okinawa class of students and their teacher killing themselves with a hand grenade. I don’t feel I can judge what my generation is able to face. This spring most people initially couldn’t bear to guess that “masked troops without insignia” would, if unopposed, invade, occupy and annex the Crimea; others couldn’t believe that some American Muslims, “deniers,” would never talk to overseas Muslims, to convert them away from believing Islam means violence.

As a happy humble traveler I enjoy our friendly continent, good for citizens and tourists. I hope you, with or without much money, can manage to travel too.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

May

(Hurray, now the trees have full leaves, as spring becomes summer!)

2014

Footnotes

~When the teen hero of Robert Heinlein’s young adult novel finds himself a displaced person, Between Planets, (Book title) then, as the narrator knows, but as the young man himself is unconscious of, he seeks out a father figure from another race: …a talking dragon.

~For being newly amongst urban Asians, back when I thought in terms of “belonging,” not “assimilation,” see my essay Young Bombers Longing to Belong, archived November 2013.

~When my parents were young the saying was, “Scratch a Russian, find a Tartar.” (under the scratch) Perhaps the 21^st century version will be, “Scratch a Russian, find a communist.”

~A slogan I “quoted” above is actually a paraphrase of a wartime observation. Yes the fascists bombed both London and Pearl Harbor before we bombed Berlin and Tokyo; still, bombing them back was not easy. It could help to say, “Every country gets the government it deserves.” (is fit for)

~Speaking of not having a TV, I thought I would paste in a quote you read last week, from Stevey’s blog:

I can't promise you any satisfaction from the upward curve. You'll get better at a lot of things, and you'll have plenty of interesting insights. You may even get a better job, or build some software that makes you famous, or just have more fun at what you do. But you won't have much time for television. Something will have to give. We all have to choose how to play our time, and it's a zero-sum game.(Stevey Yegge, see footnote)