I realized the other day how defensive I was feeling when I wrote the first post to this blog. I feel I spent more time than I ought to have addressing the issue of the "young earth"/"creationist" view point vs. the more "inclusive" world view of the Japanese manga What's Michael and Bleach. I think this happened because of my intent to review "comic books" from the perspective of adults trying to evaluate what sort of comics their kids are reading. I've been through this already with respect to buying comics and anime that the "rent-a-kid" used to watch and find myself doing these evaluations again for buying stuff for my niece and nephew, both in grade school.
The problem here is what part of what I've been calling "The Harry Potter Effect." Basically, there are fundamentalist Christians who have gone nutso because of the world view extent in the Harry Potter books, especially concerning the terms of "witch" and "wizard." It's that whole "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" bit in the bible (Exodus 22:18). If you subscribe to the most extreme version of this world view (see Deut 18:9-14), then all witches are bad and using magic is bad too. It is clear that the bible disapproves of magic and witches (and there is much more than just Exodus 22:18 - the disapproval is found multiple places in the Old Testament) then using this line of reasoning, it should also be clear that the Harry Potter books are bad because they present some witches, wizards and magic as being good.
To be honest, I personally think that this fundamentalist Christian take on Harry Potter is a bit absurd. Seriously, anyone with sense knows that fiction is not real life. To think that your kids will be corrupted if they read Harry Potter is ridiculous. Give your kids some credit for having brains enough to distinguish between the real world and make-believe. To think that all good Christian kids will go to hell because they read Harry Potter treats your kids as stupid and robs them of an opportunity to exercise critical thinking. The key here is what is known as "the suspension of disbelief." Good fiction requires the suspension of disbelief because all fiction is make-believe.
I think that the Harry Potter Effect became an issue because of the popularity of the Harry Potter books and movies. There are certainly other works of fiction and film that have sympathetic treatments of witches and magic; the Wizard of Oz is a very good example of this. These treatments usually distinguish between good (white) magic and bad (black) magic and between good witches like Glinda the Good and bad witches like the Wicked Witch of the West. It's all made up and everyone above the age of eight knows this. To let the single issue of magic use determine whether your kids read a story ignores the positive morality inherent in these stories. The Land of Oz and Harry Potter present clear depictions of right and wrong in self consistent make-believe settings. The authors of these works have never pretended that their stories were anything other than fiction. If we insist that the biblical prohibition against magic be applied to all fiction, then Narnia is just as bad as Harry Potter because many of the Narnia protagonists use magic to do good. Get a clue, folks: it's all make-believe. If you are a member of the ban-Harry-Potter club, my advice is to get over it. Instead, I think you would do your kids some good if you used works like Harry Potter to contrast and compare fictional settings with scripture.
Given that the Harry Potter Effect is an issue for some folks, this makes reviewing comic books and manga problematic. Manga plots in particular use settings that are often very different from the ethical monotheism of Western civilization. That difference is sometimes very subtle and many non-Japanese will miss it. What's Michael has a very good example of this. In What's Michael, Michael the cat is shown washing his ears in front of small Japanese sculptures as the narrator tells the reader that this motion denotes sadness in cats. Every native of Japan knows that these sculptures are not only ubiquitous in Buddhist temples, they are grave markers and memorials for the deceased. Most non-Japanese will not realize that Michael is washing his ears (expressing sorrow) in front of a grave marker in the middle of a cemetery. Another example of this phenomenon is found in the feature-legnth animation My Friend Totoro (Tonari no Totoro). The toddler Mei becomes lost and the second half of the movie is spent looking for her. At one point, she sits down in front of some stone buddha statues. When this happens, Japanese viewers will know immediately that all will turn out well for Mei - because those statues are gizo statues. Gizo are like Buddhist guardian angels for lost children. People make devotions to gizo to help them find lost children in a way that closely parallels the Roman Catholic intersession of the saints.
The modern Japanese world view in My Friend Totoro is strongly influenced by Japanese Buddhism and Shinto. Mei is protected by gizo. The old Japanese farmer woman prays with her Buddhist prayer beads. The father and his two daughters pay their prayerful respects to the spirit of the giant camphor tree. Let's face it: there is nothing even remotely Judeao-Christian in this animated movie. Should we protest against this movie because of that? If we subscribe to the attitude embodied by Harry Potter Effect and apply it rigorously, then anime movies like My Friend Totoro should also be placed on the list of things that should be banned for the sake of our American children. My Friend Totoro is a G movie and a wonderful portrayal of family values. It's such a good piece of entertainment that when I showed the movie to the high school-aged rent-a-kid, he liked it despite the lack of chase scenes, transformer-fu, and superhero action.
Frankly, if we are going to judge popular Japanese anime and manga to see if they conform to a wished-for Christianized American culture, then we might as well stop importing them; and while we're doing that, we should shove our heads back into the sand, fence all our borders, give up our status as a superpower and sink into isolationism. We'll have to start censoring content on the internet too since you can find a huge amount of readily available manga and anime online.
I am not going to stop reviewing the settings of graphic novels because I find the Harry Potter Effect deplorable. A lot of folks care about things like smoking, profanity, sexual content and violence when it relates to their own children. I know I care about those things too when it comes time to find more graphic novels to give the niece and nephew for Christmas. I've been down this road before, especially when it involved what the rent-a-kid read and watched when he was in grade school (no RoboTech without finishing his homework first!). I am not, however, going to obsess over these issues like I did on my first two posts. I think people just have to be aware that manga and anime will almost always reflect aspects of the modern Japanese culture where they are produced.
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