This is my page for articles on Sailor Moon, anime, mangas and Japanese pop culture.
BY SIMONA CHIOSE
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, June 14, 1997
THIS much is known. Her name is Kyoko Date and she is 17 years old. Her favourite colours are black and white. When she was a child, she wanted to be a private detective (like in old American TV shows, she tells her fans). She collects sneakers as a hobby and she is a Scorpio.
What is not known is what will become of Kyoko, the latest of Japanese idol singers. Carbon-copy pop stars, idol singers are manufactured by the country's entertainment industry, their songs and lyrics, most often based on melted-sugar melodies, written and sung by someone else, their value being only their willingness to allow their personalities to be designed, marketed and then disposed of.
Kyoko, however, may prove to be the most pliant idol yet. She, like the heroine of William Gibson's 1996 novel, Idoru, is the first ever virtual pop star. Everything from her height -162 centimetres and still growing - to her family history - her parents run a sushi bar in Tokyo and her father loves Harley-Davidson motorcycles - has been dreamt up by the Horipro Entertainment Co., a Tokyo-based communications giant. The company is lagging behind on only one element of her image: music. So far, she has only two songs to her credit and has not made it onto the eountry's pop-music charts.
There are precedents for her. In 1994, for example, Mirabella magazine featured a model designed by a computer on their September cover. "Wherever there's mass media, there's the potential to manufacture mass-appeal pop stars. Kyoko Date is only a modest update of this," says Mark Jenkins, a Washington-based writer on pop culture who has written about Asian pop. An experiment like Kyoko, Jenkins says, is more likely to have begun in Japan, because of the country's "enthusiasm for cuteness and electronics."
Much like Tamagotchis, the tiny virtual "pets" that are now being banned in schoolrooms across North America, Kyoko is indeed both cute and electronic. More realistic-looking than the big-eyed cartoon characters of Sailor Moon, her looks still fall in the same esthetic.
Developed over a period of 18 months and released last fall, Kyoko is code-named DK-96, for digital kids as well for the star's initials. She was endowed with qualities which the company says make an artist "sought after in his or her professional field."
Still, Kyoko is no competition for Deep Blue, or even for the musicians she names as her favourites: Mariah Carey, TLC and Enya. She has appeared in short clips dancing and singing on Japanese television and on the World Wide Web. In a few years, however, the company predicts the same technology that allowed such human movement to be captured and manipulated will result in Kyoko appearing on television and radio interview shows and in feature-length movies. She will then become so real that maybe, as in Gibson's plot, a human will fall in love with her.
Already, Kyoko has a substantial fan base. Gibson himself is setting up an interview with the virtual star for the men's magazine, Details. And as befits a virtual star, her presence is most notable on the World Wide Web, where dozens of pages are devoted to her history. What these tributes worship, though, is not the star herself, but her artificiality. With no pesky real personality hiding behind the public appearances, Kyoko erases the distance between the anonymous fan and the star.
"When you think about real bands ... they're not real anyway," says Gregory Vinyard, who has built a Kyoko page. "They're real people underneath the image but real only to people they know, not to the millions like me. DK-96 is just as close to me as anyone."
Despite her Japanese birth, Kyoko has some very American precursors. "The Archies [the TV cartoon and comic book series that was made into a band by Monkees' creator Don Kirshner] had four top 40 hits be tween 1968-1970," Vinyard says. And there is also North Americans' infatuation with Max Headroom, the eighties media tycoon who was no more than a sophisticated piece of animation with the voice of Canadian Matt Frewer.
But unlike North American audiences who are always grasping for a piece of the real person behind the celebrity, Japanese audiences appear to be content to just play at star worskhip. What matters is not the celebrity but the entertainment value of following the celebrity, suggests Harumichi Yamada, a eommunications professor at tbe Tokyo Kenzai University. In the early 1990s, Yamada says, Japanese radio unwittingly created a direct ancestor to Kyoko Date, an idol singer called Haga Yui.
"Haga is a common family name and Yui is a common girl's name. As one word, though, Hagayui means softly irritating" Yamada said. "The radio host referred to this combination as a possible idol name as a joke. The next week, the show received several fan letters from the audience addressed to Haga Yui. These letters contained more detailed descriptions of the idol, completely produced by the writers' imaginations.
"Haga Yui appeared on the show as a guest. . . She appeared on TV with her face hidden. She even had an akushu-kai, an event where fans have a chance to shake hands with their idol. She was hidden in a box with hands stuck out of the box. So Kyoko is not uniquely created, she is a product of several currents which contribute to this idca of the virtual idol. "
Haga Yui eventually wore out her novelty welcome. And much like all idol singers, Kyoko is also designed to be upgraded. No fans will mourn her passing, though. "I don't know anyone for whom DK-96 is their favourite singer," Vinyard says. "She will most likely spawn a second generation of virtual idols that are more fully realized."
Kyoko would probably like nothing better.
For coverage of Japanese pop culture and the country's idol singers, the e-zine jpop is indispensable - and in English: www.j-pop.com/index.html.
BY STEVE WEATHERBE
Special to The Globe and Mail
Victoria, B.C.
IT'S still possible - although barely - to ignore the growing influence of Japan's entertainment media on the culture of North America. But not for long. Sailor Moon; the Japanese comic book and animation superheroine, was last Halloween's top costume model for girls, but like so many characters from Japanese comics - or manga, as they are known in Japan - her features are Caucasian.
Sales of Sailor Moon books, videos and accessories gross hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide; they are available in dozens of countries. Other manga are selling well in comic-book stores and in Victoria at least, videotapes of the latest Japanese TV dramas are rented as soon as they reach the city's rental outlets.
One of the most avid borrowers is Timothy Craig, a University of Victoria business professor whose own visits to Japan have made him a fan not only of the dramas but of the many other artifacts of the country's highly variegated entertainment industry. When Craig was picked last year as director of Japan programming of the university's 10-year-old Centre for Asia Pacific Initiatives, he knew that part of the job would be to mount a conference - presumably something on Japanese management techniques. Instead, he chose to organize what he believes is the first conference on Japanese popular culture. Held last week, it drew to Victoria nearly 100 academics from around the world, a fair number of them serious comic-book buffs.
"I'm just a great fan," admits Craig. "The Number One reason is that it's high-quality stuff. And the content of the TV dramas is very close to ordinary people's lives."
The same cannot be said of the manga phenomenon. What began as a frank imitation of North American comic books in the years following the Second World War has grown into a uniquely Japanese idiom so pervasive it accounts for 37 per cent of all printed material there, delivering to an eager public everything from how-to manuals and government white papers to evangelical tracts from the cult responsible for recent nerve-gas attacks.
But the main thrust of manga is entertainment. Science fiction, fantasy, alternative histories and alternative universes figure largely in the manga universe, as does enough violence and sexual deviance to worry parents in Japan and North America.
Craig and his conference organizers decided to open their event by having the American author and Japanese culture interpreter Frederik Schodt give a public lecture on manga. It drew an unsettling mix of academics, prepubescent fans and worried mothers to the campus's conference centre.
Schodt, tall, lean and sporting a greying ponytail, clearly didn't want to talk much about Rapeman, or other extreme examples in manga of male-female sexual assault, and of the reverse. Instead, he led off his talk by displaying a graph that showed rape and murder rates to be 10 times higher in the United States than in Japan, and expressed the hope that this would put to rest that perennial staple of cultural debate everywhere, does life imitate art?
It didn't: One mother kept interrupting Schodt with questions about the darker side of manga. Resorting to the classic avoidance technique of the proselytizer, Schodt responded with, "That's an interesting point. Let's get back to that," then, of course, did not.
Schodt strove mightily to demonstrate that Japan is a more visual culture than our own, with a long history of explicit, and action-packed, illustration. Manga are about fantasies, he argued, not actions. "No matter how erotic and violent manga are, they are not directly reflective of Japanese society."
In a larger treatment on manga in his new book, Dreamland Japan, Schodt produces more statistics to show Japan's violent-crime rate decreasing during the same era that manga were expanding in popularity, becoming not only a major force in inspiring spinoff consumer goods but also hardcover, text-only books, movies, animated cartoons (called anime), even operas: There are manga, Schodt says, "for every dream," every fantasy. Some of these are bright, featuring large-eyed, Caucasian-featured waifs in fairyland or sci-fi worlds. Some, such as the Rapeman manga, are dark, appealing to the male Japanese penchant for sexualizing prepubescent schoolgirls. On the other hand, there are manga graphically depicting women raping men, and one genre depicting male homosexual romances - read entirely by women. Planet of the Jap, meanwhile, presents an alternative history in which Japan wins the Second World War, American cities are on the receiving end of the atomic bomb, and General Douglas MacArthur is publicly beheaded.
When asked what the popularity of manga says about Japanese culture, a bristling Schodt snapped back: "You should ask why comic books are so unpopular in the United States, " and then answered that question by blaming U.S. censorship in the 1950s. "Comic-book sales have never recovered from the self-censorship by the industry in response to complaints from parent-teacher associations and educators."
In his book, Schodt notes that "the gap between fantasy and reality in Japan is enormous," but stops short of arguing that a permissive fantasy life permits the Japanese to be repressed in real life. In fact, he contends the reverse: The innate stability of Japanese life "may give people more leeway in their fantasy life."
After Schodt's opening foray, the conference hunkered down for some serious literary, theological and anthropological analyses of Japanese shopping habits, television commercials, pop music, TV dramas and gender role representations.
UNLIKE the manga, Japanese dramas, or doramas, are serious, down-to-earth, and never recycled. As with Seinfeld and Canada's The Newsroom, Japanese TV series fuel not only mundane coffee-break chatter but also spirited public debate.
Seven copies of each episode of the current hit Twins reach Victoria two weeks after each airs in Japan, and all are quickly rented, noted Tim Craig in his introduction to a series of lectures on doramas. Before he could finish his preface, a member of the audience interrupted to ask if he could borrow the Twins episode Craig had before it was returned to the video store.
How such shows reflect and impact on social change was a favourite topic among presenters. Hilaria Goessmann came all the way from University Trier in Germany to assert that, whereas doramas once reinforced the role of the stay-at-home wife, they're now supportive of the working and even, in one exceptional case, of the stay-at-home hubby.
At a beach barbecue cum karaoke dinner, discussion turned to differing notions of child care. Ron and Wendy Stuart, a husband-and-wife anthropologist team from Columbia College, Vancouver, related the role of the rusuba, or "the person who stays home."
In less settled times, someone always stayed in the Japanese house-hold as protection from burglars. Now that it is just a custom, the rusuba may be a three-year-old - which would be deemed a form of child abuse in this country. On the other hand, the North American practice of isolating an infant in a dark room approaches child abuse in the eyes of the Japanese, who socialize their children early.
Child care and family life was also considered by University of British Columbia Professor Millie Creighton, who described how Japanese department stores had niftily found a way to reconcile the still-paramount duty of the Japanese woman to reproduce and maintain the homefront with her new role as the "designated consumer" in Japanese families.
The stores, Creighton noted, provide not only play areas but on-site pediatricians, breast-feeding booths and even concerts for the unborn (to encourage musical interests). Such perks - along with discounts - come with membership in shopping clubs for each age group. Children are enrolled before birth.
Most commentators at the conference agreed that an intensifying generational division is occurring in Japanese culture. "In my day," noted Maka Takahashi of the University of ` Kentucky, "we treasured our sailor- suit school uniforms. These girls today, some of them, sell them to specialty shops along with their panties which then sell them to. . . men."
Talk about these sorts of shops and the "Lolita complex" that characterizes much of the Japanese male's sexuality peppered much of the conference conversation, leading one to conclude that perhaps there was plenty more material from the "dark side" that needed exposure. But that would be for another conference.
The Globe and Mail April 19, 1997
"Sailor Moon" is all the rage, but a butt-kicking Amazon named Xena is a better role model for your daughter
As someone with the upper- body strength of an eleven-year-old boy, it's not often I find myself feeling like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But just before Christmas I ventured into the toy section of a major department store and entered a crush of people who, like The Muscled One's character in the bad-idea holiday movie Jingle All the Way, had no higher purpose on earth than securing this year's toy of choice.
The object of our desire? A "Sailor Moon" action figure, spin-off merchandise from the hugely popular animated children's series that targets girls between six and eleven. If you don't know any children of that description, you may never have heard of the show. If you do, you probably find yourself even now humming its inane but catchy theme song - "Fighting evil by moonlight, winning love by daylight, never shrinking from a real fight, she's the one called Sailor Moon." Yes, she is, and the action figure comes in three sizes ranging in price from ten to thirty dollars.
Based on a hit comic book, "Sailor Moon" is a Japanese cartoon fantasy that has quickly become the most popular children's show in the world. Carried in Canada on the CanWest Global Netwvork, YTV and several private stations, it has a growing, passionately loyal audience, about sixty per cent female. (On some cable services you can see it as many as four times a day, including, rather incongruously, late at night.) The show centres on a group of five schoolgirls, all of them Caucasian and well endowed with enormous eyes, slim legs, and manes of flowing hair, who live in a city that sports Japanese signs and cars but no visible adult residents. The five are led by the blonde Serena, othenwise known as Sailor Moon, who spearheads their daily battles against the evil Queen Beryl and the wicked alien twins, Alan and Ann. Serena's pals Raye, Amy, Mina, and Lita round out the Sailor Scouts, living their double lives as, respectivey; Sailors Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter.
According to its supporters, "Sailor Moon" is doing something unprecedented in children's television: providing a strong role model for pre-teen girls: "The issue of a girl being empowered is a wonderful theme you just don't see in American animation," says Andy Heyward, president of DIC Entertainment, the California-based company that adapted the show for North America. "There's very little, if anything, out there starring a girl."
And girls, it seems, are now ready to trade in Betty and Veronica, not to mention chose alternatively frumpy or perky girls on "Scooby Doo," for genuine comic-book heroes. This isn't just Nancy Drew: it's Nancy Drew with supernatural powers, deadly rays and freeze guns, and exploding balls- the whole array of superhero armament. As the DIC press release concludes, wich true comic-book hyperbole: "The combination of her cry `MOON POWER' and the Hi-Tech powers from her secret locket will make SAILOR MOON the female force of the 90s!" So that's an action figure, not a doll you can buy at Eaton's - and with lots more to come. Sales of "Sailor Moon" merchandise in Japan reached $ 1.5-billion (U.S.) between 1993 and 1995, ouutripping both Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. For Irwin Toys, Canada's biggest toy company, it was the top-selling line this past Christmas.
The show itself is long on energy but short on coherence, with no explanation provided for its basic premise, no clues as to how Serena and her friends acquired their various superhero powers-or their super-model bodies. In battle each of the girls transforms from a school-uniformed fourteen-year-old into a bizarre male fantasy of adolescent beauty. The knee-length pleated skirts of their sailor suits shrink to micromini size, their Buster Browns mutate into sexy boots or high heels. Their virginal Victorian-style blouses become form-fitting sleeveless tunics that emphasize pubescent breasts and collarbones, even as the Scouts arch their backs, preen, and knock their knees together in poses borrowed directly from the Victorias Secret catalogue. I am not making any of this up.
Which explains the appeal of "Sailor Moon" for a certain kind of man, I suppose, possibly including the original producers. It also explains some of the controversy the show has generated. In December my local CBC affiliate ran a news segment in which a professor of mass media at York University called it sexist and inappropriate, citing in particular all the primping the Sailor Scouts engage in before battle. George Irwin, president of Irwin Toys, defended the show by saying, rather unfortunately, that it is "reflective of the type of girls and what they do these days."
Obviously, parents aren't concerned. Some of them undoubtedly are happy that the show includes, at the end of each episode, a preachy "Sailor Says" segment in which Sailor Moon articulates an uplifting moral: "If you get angry with younger kids, talk to your parents or another adult about it," she chirps after one adventure involving a difficult baby. "Be patient with your little brothers and sisters - one day they might grow up to be a lot bigger than you!"
But girls find "Sailor Moon" compelling for other reasons: the idea of a secret life, for instance, or the prospect of fighting evil in close-knit groups, talking in tough-guy cliches. ("You're sushi!" Sailor Moon snarls to an enemy in one episode. I wonder if that was in the Japanese script.) They are also drawn co the small differences between the five Scouts, identifying one or another as a favourite. Tbe doll boxes even offer little personality profiles to encourage this-
Serena's listed hobby is shopping, for example, and Lita's cooking, but Raye is "into meditation" and "actively dislikes television." Evil Queen Beryl, by the way, who has narrow eye slits in place of the girls' insectoid globes, is listed as being "twenty-something," which I suppose is morbidly old if you're ten.
And while it's true that these gestures of individuation, as well as the larger theme of female empowerment, sit uneasily with the soft-porn visuals of the series, more disturbing is the basic arc of the narratives, which repeatedly show the Scouts stumbling into alien battles they really can't handle. At the decisive moment, just as they are about to be scorched by Beryl or Alan, a male figure called Moonlight Knight appears, throws down what looks like a carnation, and delivers a little sermon that bucks the girls up and turns the tide of battle. For some reason I have yet to fathom, Moonlight Knight is dressed in flowing desert robes and Lawrence of Arabia headgear. The Scouts look at him with abject teenage love in their eyes; you can tell because their massive pupils are suddenly replaced by throbbing red hearts.
"Well done, Sailor Scouts," he tells the five after one narrowly averted disaster. "Keep a melody in your heart and a lilt in your voice. So long." The girls heave a collective sigh. "What a hunk-meister," Sailor Moon whispers, blushing madly.
There's a better answer out there to the lack of TV role models for girls, though it might seem an unlikely one at first. "Xena: Warrior Princess," shown on most of the same stations as "Sailor Moon," is a live-action fantasy show centring on a strong female character whose belief in justice is matched only by her ability to swing a sword, perform dexterous back flips, and land brutal roundhouse kicks.
A reformed mercenary, the beautiful Xena (Lucy Lawless) nowv uses her warrior abilities for good rather than evil, slapping miscreants into shape and treating cruel rulers to her gleeful brand of Amazonian butt-kicking. The series is like a Marvel comic book brought to life, complete with wisecracking hero, adolescent cleverness, and background of garbled lore. In one episode, the mythological figure Sisyphus appears as an evil magician trying to get Xena to take over his eternal rock-rolling fate - an incident missing from my edition of Bulfinch.
On the other hand, who cares? "Xena" is good fun, and its cartoonish wit is drawing a fast-growing, enthusiastic teenage and young-adult audience, male and female, as well as the main target group of pre-teen girls. Its more loyal fans, who call themselves "Xenites," watch the show in groups while consuming Xena's favoured snack of nut bread. Inevitably, the show has spawned a number of sites on the World Wide Web, including one called Whoosh! after the cheesy sound effect used in the series for everything from sword thrusts to Xena's back flips. The site boasts a complete episode guide, an "Encyclopedia Xenaica," and apparently serious articles on such subjects as "Visual Metaphor in Xena: Warrior Princess," and "Xena: Warrior Princess: A Native American Perspective." I'm not making this up either.
So maybe some grown-ups have way too much time on their hands. But for younger fans, "Xena,"along with the equally silly "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys," from which it was spun off, is obviously striking some deep mythopoeic chord.
It also, in contrast to "Sailor Moon," makes the traditionally male superhero genre cool for girls without hollowing out the strong message. Yes, the blue-eyed, raven-haired Xena does cavort in revealing leather jerkins and thigh-high boots: an outfit that got her anatomically correct action figure included on an annual list of "warped Christmas playthings."And her moral pronunciamentos aren't much more sophisticated than Sailor Moon's -"It takes a lot more strength to resist violence than to surrender to it," she opines in one episode. But they are at least based on hard-won experience. And Xena never has to be rescued by a man; on the contrary she does the rescuing herself.
You might think "Xena" is just comic-book cheesecake, the way Lynda Carter's Playboy-style "Wonder Woman" series was in the seventies. But don't underestimate Xena's ability to inspire self reliance in young female fans, even a kind of new-style power feminism. In this age of explicit tele-visual disclosure of bodily attributes, when "Baywatch" is the worldwide standard of what's watchable, the warrior princess compellingly combines action with appearance. In an episode that found her transported into the equally luscious body of her arch-enemy, Callisto, Xena shut down one man's amorous approach by saying, "It's not my body that makes me who I am - it's my deeds." Then she punched him.
If only Sailor Moon would do that to Moonlight Knight once in a while.
Saturday Night February 1997
I also wonder why he doesn't know where their powers come from. Every episode the girls hold up their transformation pen or locket and say the magic words. As for their purpose he must have missed all the episodes where Luna is telling the girls they have to look for and protect the princess of the moon.