Thursday 10 June 2004

Pic of the day: To the right, Sawamura Seiji, orphan and raised by his wild older sister. And it shows. To the left, Ayase Takako, whose parents are very much alive but she bought them travel tickets to get them out of the house before inviting her classmate, so we still don't get to see them. (Screenshot from anime Midori no Hibi again.)

Anime without parents

No, I am not concerned about kids watching anime without adult supervision. Sure, there are times when this is not a good idea, depending on the age of the kids and the nature of the anime. But contrary to popular belief, anime is not usually about tentacles and schoolgirls. No, what I am talking about is the striking absence of parents in many anime aimed at young people.

A fairly large segment of anime is aimed at high school students and is about high school students. The anime can be about love, magic, superpowers or sports. But whatever the genre, parents are either explicitly absent or just not shown. The typical hero is often as not an orphan, or his parents are abroad for years at a time. Even when there is one parent, the other is often dead. And the existing parent is shown rarely and then only as movable furniture, less noticeable and with less personality than a robot servant.

***

In many cases, the absence of the parents is integral to the plot. The "living with girl(s)" plot would be hard to pull off with a parent. In several anime, a boy lives with a sister (who is usually a stepsister or adopted sister) or a cousin. Without parents around, they are free to do what they want ... and responsible for their own actions. This is a fairly common subtype of high school anime, and the moral is generally that family is important and should be respected. But along the way there is a lot of fun on the expense of the main characters.

But even when there is no reason to not have parents around, you don't see them much. For instance in Hikaru no Go, which is about a normal boy who meets the ghost of the world's best Go player (Go is a board game of strategy, easier to learn than chess but harder to master). There is no dubious content in this, it is all about being young and playing Go and friendships and rivalries. The girls are nothing more than friends, at best. Yet we learn very little about Hikaru's family life. He has a mother who will occasionally talk to him, but she is little more than a robot maid who serves tea and picks up the phone. We meet Hikaru's grandfather for the simple reason that he is a pretty good Go player in his own right, but I have watched 75 episodes of the anime and still can't say whether his mother is married or a widow or a single mother. I totally draw a blank.

In Pita Ten the main character lost his mother as a child, she was run over by a lorry. In the anime it is implied she sacrificed herself to save him, while in the manga he only feels guilty because he could not save her, and traumatized by the memories of her broken bleeding body in front of him. It should indeed be enough to make anyone hesitate about ever loving anyone again. More to the point, however, his father is only seen very briefly; he is usually at work and sometimes not coming home even for the night. The neighboring girls are seen going in and out more often than the father is.

Narue no Sekai is a rather girl-friendly anime; even though it starts out from the viewpoint of a boy, the main character is the half- alien girl Narue. (She doesn't look or feel alien, it's more a plot device to make weird things happen.) Again, her mother died young, but she is living with her father, and he is actually home a lot, and it is clear that they care about one another. Also her sister arrives during the series, and they are often together as a family. This anime really stands out, although most of the action still takes place elsewhere. And the male lead lives with his mother and sister (I can't remember if we see his father), but they only make guest appearances, such as to say thoughtless and embarrassing things when he first time is visited by a girl. (They have just met, and the mother is like "oh our son has grown up" and the sister comes to gawk.) Then again, this anime seems to be instructional for young girls to learn about relationships, and this is all too realistic.

In Azumanga Daioh we meet a bunch of high school girls who have a lot of fun which rarely involves boys in any way. We see them at school and we see them do stuff together after school, but their parents are either absent or only shown very briefly, as when one of them is being woken up by her mother just as she dreams the coolest dream. It is as if parents are utterly unimportant to a high school kid. Is that really so?

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The reason I came to think of this was my own attempt at writing fiction again. As I've mentioned recently, I wanted to write something a bit anime-inspired, just not set in Japan. But the cultural differences can be most subtle. I thought family was considered more important in Japan than here. And it probably is. Removing the parents from the picture may simply be a way to avoid conflict. A conflict with one's parents may be deemed more unseemly there. Here, it is mostly considered unavoidable. Teens are shouting at their parents without considering who may be listening; they show no shame.

It doesn't make my writing easier that I did not have that time in my own life. I left home when I started high school. I never hated my parents (except when they tried to make me work, and such, when I was little). I never thought my parents were stupid or overly restrictive. Then again, they never were. But I've seen so many normal humans and normal families, I think I can pull this off. But whether I can make it sound anime-ish ... that remains to be seen. (Or not seen, if I fail spectacularly. But I've reserved a web space just in case.)