Morality in manga and anime

This began as a comment in Brigid Alverson’s recent entry at mangablog, but it got so long and foot-stompy that I felt it was more appropriately posted in my own space.

I have many issues with the recent MSNBC article by Brian Alexander, Sexploration: Sexy anime goes mainstream, but the greatest of these is with a statement attributed to Patrick Macias (and I phrase it this way because I hesistate to assume that the article quotes him accurately or in-context*), “The appeal of Japanese pop culture [to Americans] is that it is a moral-free zone . . . The ideas of good/bad, right/wrong, that duality is not present.”

I will move quickly past the fact that I personally don’t know anyone for whom this is the appeal of Japanese pop culture, and straight on to my real problem, which is the concept of “morality” being discussed here, because this is something that really gets my ire up. Something that has long disgusted me about American culture, and something that I tend to attribute (fairly or not) to the intense influence of a particular brand of Christianity on our culture, is the idea that “morality” has to do entirely (or at least significantly) with who we sleep with and/or what we find sexually arousing, and this is certainly how the concept is being presented in this article.

Yes, it’s true, in my big xxxHolic post, one of the things I said I particularly enjoyed was a lack of focus on western concepts of good and evil, but though those ideas are not present, morality is a huge focus in that series. In fact, I can’t think of a single manga or anime series I love that doesn’t grapple with issues of morality at some point or another, and in most of them it is a strong focus. The difference is, it is what I like to think of as real morality; how our choices and actions affect ourselves and others, facing the consequences for our own actions, and understanding the complexity and diversity of all the beings that inhabit our world. xxxHolic, Mushishi, Fullmetal Alchemist–these are just a few of my favorite series that spring to mind immediately when I think about morality. I’m looking at my tag cloud right now, which gives me the names of every manga and anime I’ve posted about here, and I can’t find a single one that could be described as “moral-free.”

Even shonen sports-type manga focus on things like fair-minded sportsmanship and friendship, ideas I would consider essential to a “moral” society. Hikaru no Go opens with a story about a man who is unjustly banished from his society for cheating at Go, and who then spends much of the rest of the story struggling constantly between his own desire to play Go and achieve “The Hand of God” (a desire so strong, it has kept him tied to this world for a thousand years), and the ethics of forcing those desires on someone else, in this case, a boy who has the ability and desire to pursue The Hand of God on his own. How does any of this contribute to a “moral-free zone”? Patrick Macias, who I respect immensely, by the way, is obviously much more knowledgeable about Japanese pop culture than I am (I can’t even find a way to say so that isn’t a huge understatement), but I was really surprised to see him spell things out in these terms, if in fact he did. And though it’s true that the article did state that it was not talking about manga and anime created for children (like Hikaru no Go), it’s worth mentioning that two of the series I’ve mentioned here so far, xxxHolic and Mushishi, are written for adults.

It’s true that there are manga and anime that I find disturbing for sexualizing children, which brings up questions of morality that are about sex, and maybe that’s what someone might see as a lack of morals in Japanese pop culture (though I hardly think it is absent in American culture). It’s also true that I find most hentai, frankly, boring, so I’m not in the best position to discuss it, morally or otherwise. But pornography is not unique to Japan by any means, nor are scantily-clad heroes/heroines unique to Japanese comics. There is, perhaps, a unique flavor to the sexuality in manga and anime–an odd sense of innocence pervading what would be presented as plainly “dirty” in western culture, but to me that just follows naturally out of the sincerity-without-irony that is so particular to Japanese comics and animation. I’m sure there must be American otaku who are drawn to manga and anime specifically for the hentai, but unless my personal experience is extremely skewed, it can’t be anywhere close to a majority, which is what the MSNBC article appears to be suggesting. And while some manga and anime does present a refreshing amount of gender-bending and relationships between same-sex couples, there is also a huge amount of sexism, homophobia, and reinforcement of traditional gender roles, often from the very same sources, so suggesting that Japanese pop culture is some sort of liberating sexual free-for-all doesn’t work either. It’s a very mixed bag, and there are no easy conclusions to be drawn. Questions of sexuality in manga, are, in my view, every bit as complex as manga itself, and I’ve yet to spend time reading anything I could remotely describe as “moral-free,” even when it does concern sex. Free of myopic western ideas of “morality”? At times, perhaps. But I hesitate to say even that, when, for instance, so much manga reinforces passive, powerless roles for women (sexual and otherwise) that are still upheld as moral imperatives by much of the religious right in this country.

At the end of the article, Patrick Macias is quoted again, saying, “When you see a kid sitting in Borders reading a manga, he’s not just reading a comic book . . . There is something really powerful going on there.”

I agree. I just don’t think it’s necessarily all about sex.

*ETA: And I see now that Patrick Macias was misquoted, thank god, so this rant is directly aimed at the author of the article. *whew*

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