The Moé Manifesto Read online

  Patrick W. Galbraith

  The Moé

  Manifesto

  T UT T L E Publishing

  Tokyo Rutland, Vermont Singapore

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  Contents

  4 Introduction

  24 ITO KIMIO

  From Social Movements to

  Shojo Manga

  30 KOTANI MARI

  Memories of Youth

  38 OTSUKA EIJI

  From Shojo Manga to Bishojo Magazines NDA LLY

  46 SATO TOSHIHIKO

  On Magical Girls and Male Fans (Part One)

  /FRIENDOC

  ZE©

  YA

  54 NUNOKAWA YUJI

  5 On Magical Girls and Male Fans

  THWA

  (Part Two)

  HN

  JOH©

  64 POP

  6 Talking about Moé at the Heart

  of Akihabara

  72 MOMOI HALKO

  7 The Voice of Moé Asks

  for Understanding

  80 TOROMI

  8 Notes from Underground

  90 SHIMADA HUMIKANE

  9 Bridging the Gap between

  Mecha and Moé

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  98 MAEDA JUN

  The Crying Game

  108 ITO NOIZI

  Girl Drawing Girl

  116 HONDA TORU

  The Love Revolution Is Here

  126 MORINAGA TAKURO

  For Love or Money

  136 HIGASHIMURA HIKARU

  The Moé Studies Research Circle

  144 SODA MITSURU

  The Philomoé Association

  152 MORIKAWA KA’ICHIRO

  Learning from Akihabara

  162 ITO GO

  The Pleasure of Lines

  T

  170 AZUMA HIROKI

  Applying Pressure to

  INMEN

  TA

  the Moé Points

  ERT

  ENL

  ITA

  IG

  N

  D

  WO

  MI

  L

  178 SAITO TAMAKI

  Otaku Sexuality

  A

  G

  N

  C

  O K

  MN

  ©

  OM

  186 Glossary

  RAY B

  PH

  188 Index

  RAGOTO

  PH

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  4

  Falling in Love with

  Japanese Characters

  “Are you familiar with Japanese moé relationships, where socially dysfunctional men develop deep

  emotional attachments to body pillows with

  women painted on them?” asks James Franco, guest starring on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock in January 2010. Later in the episode, the actor is shown holding a pillow with an anime girl crudely drawn on it. Franco calls her Kimiko. Viewers cannot suppress their laughter.

  The laughter comes from a growing worldwide awareness of Japanese popular culture, including the antics of some of the more extreme fans of manga, anime, and games. Just as anime and manga are understood to be distinct from cartoons and comics, fans of anime and manga are in a category of their own: otaku. While talking about moé, Franco offers a concise description of otaku: “socially dysfunctional men”

  who are entirely too attached to fi ctional girl characters.

  From where did the writers of 30 Rock get this idea? Perhaps a July 2009 article in the New York Times that describes “moé relationships” with body pillows as a social phenomenon in Japan. Given the prevalence of such articles in the popular press, many watching 30 Rock shook their heads, smiled, and thought, “Yes, James Franco, we know moé!”

  But what does moé even mean? The 30 Rock viewer sees a man with a body pillow, which he seems to love. Is that moé?

  THE MOE

  ´ MANIFESTO

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  Used as part of an inside joke, it seems that

  that

  everyone implicitly understands moé—it

  t

  needs no explanation. James Franco holds

  ds

  aloft exhibit A. He says it’s a Japanese

  thing. We know they’re weird, right? Case

  se

  closed.

  In order to formulate an independent

  opinion about moé, we need some defi nitions tions

  and context. Linguistically speaking, moé (

  é 萌え

  (

  )

  萌え)

  is the noun form of the verb moeru, meaning to ning to

  burst into bud or to sprout. There is a youth-

  uth-

  ful vitality to the word, refl ected in its use in

  se in

  Japanese poetry from as early as the eighth

  hth

  century. Moé can also be a given name,

  which in manga, anime, and games is typ-

  p-

  ically reserved for young girls. The word

  is pronounced moé (i.e., with the fi nal “e”

  ”

  sound stressed separately as “eh”).

  In the 1990s, otaku gathering online

  to talk about manga and anime char-

  acters began to use the word moé as slang

  ng

  for burning passion. The story goes that

  they were trying to write the verb moeru (燃

  (

  える), “to burn,” but computers would often

  ten

  mistakenly convert this as the homonymous

  mous

  Y

  verb moeru (萌える), “to burst into bud.”

  E

  In this contemporary usage, moé means an af-ns an af-

  T’S / K

  fectionate response to fi ctional characters.

  r

  s. There

  Ther

  AL ARUIS

  are three things to note about this defi nition.

  iti

  on. First,

  Fi

  rst,

  moé is a response, a verb, something that is done t i

  .

  s done

  .

  © 2004 V

  Second, as a response, moé is situated in those those

  Moé: an affectionate response

  to fi ctional characters

  INTRODUCTION

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  responding to a char-

  NWOL

  acter, not the character

  GC

  M

  itself. Third, the response

  NOM

  is triggered by fi ctional

  RAY B

  characters.

  PHS

  RA

  The characters that

  GOTO

  trigger a moé response,

  PH

  sometimes called moé

  characters ( moé kyara), are

  most often from manga,

  anime, and games. Materi-

  al representations of char-

  acters—fi gurines, body

  pillows with the charac-

  ter image on them—can

  trigger moé. Sounds and

  voices are described as

  Figurines can trigger a

  moé response

  THE MOE

  ´ MANIFESTO

&nb
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  moé when associated with characters. A human can trigger moé when dressed in character costume, just as an object can be anthropomorphized into a moé character. What is important here is that the response isn’t to the material object, sound, costume or person, but rather to the character.

  To return to our defi nition, moé is a response to fi ctional characters, and when we talk about moé we are necessarily also talking about how people interact with fi ctional characters.

  Available evidence suggests that interacting with a character in a manga, anime, or game, one can become signifi cantly attached to that character. Indeed, some otaku describe such attachment in terms of “marriage.” This can be as casual as calling a favorite character “my wife” ( ore no yome) or as serious as announcing a long-term, committed relationship.

  Author and cultural critic Honda Toru, for example, has said that he is married to Kawana Misaki, a blind high-school girl from the game One: kagayaku kisetsu e (1998). A shy man, Honda is also something of a radical who advocates moé relationships in books he has written, for example No’nai ren’ai no susume (Recommending imaginary love), published in 2007.

  Many have followed in Honda’s footsteps. On October 22, 2008, a man called Takashita Taichi set up an online petition asking the Japanese government to legally recognize marriage to fi ctional characters. Within a week, a thousand people had signed it. On November 22, 2009, a man calling himself Sal 9000 married a character from the game LovePlus (2009) in an offi cial-looking ceremony held in Tokyo. “I love this character,” the man told CNN. “I understand very well that I cannot marry her physically or legally.” Remember James Franco’s body pillow? Well, on March 11, 2010, a Ko-rean man announced his marriage to the character drawn on his body pillow.

  INTRODUCTION

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  On the one hand, these marriages are playful performances by otaku that we perhaps shouldn’t take too seriously.

  On the other hand, however, these marriages do signifi cant work. As anthropologist Ian Condry sees it, otaku are demonstrating their devotion to others in a political move to gain acceptance of attachment to fi ctional characters. These public declarations of love for fi ctional characters pose important challenges to accepted norms. Honda Toru calls the awakening to moé relationships a “love revolution” ( ren’ai kakumei), which entails the embrace of fi ctional characters and libera-tion from oppressive social and gender norms. For the record, Honda doesn’t care about legal recognition of his marriage, because he refuses the authority of institutions that he sees as corrupt to legitimize his love.

  To understand moé, we need to consider how it is possible to become attached to the characters of manga and anime in the fi rst place. Comparisons to comics and cartoons risk grossly misrepresenting the status of manga and anime, which are vibrant forms of mass media in Japan. Consider Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy (1963–1966), which in 1963 was adapted from a popular manga series into a weekly TV serial, had product tie-ins and sponsors, spin-off merchandise and toys. Media researcher Marc Steinberg argues that this became the basic model for character franchising in Japan, which is now ubiquitous. Encountered constantly in this pervasive way, characters are a very real and intimate part of everyday life in Japan.

  As psychiatrist Saito Tamaki sees it, fi ctional characters can become the object of romantic love for those growing up with them. One’s fi rst love can just as easily be a manga character as it can be an idol singer on TV or a girl in your class. When I fi rst met Saito, I was a little shocked by how easily those words rolled off his tongue. I pressed him on THE MOE

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  Astro Boy

  how normal it is to fall in love

  with fi ctional characters, and

  he turned the question around

  on me. “Why is it strange to

  love manga characters?” I re-

  call the scene vividly even now,

  because it revealed to me how

  differently characters are regarded

  in Japan, where there is such an all-

  pervading manga and anime culture

  compared to the United States.

  The roots of moé go deeper than

  S

  many suspect. Helen McCarthy,

  TION

  author of a number of reference

  RODUC

  books on manga and anime,

  P

  notes similarities between

  EZUKA T©

  the postwar manga of

  INTRODUCTION

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  Lost World (1948), Tezuka Osamu

  S

  TION

  RODUC P

  Tezuka Osamu and contemporary offerings. McCarthy zeros in on Tezuka’s Lost World (1948), in which a scientist in an EZUKA T©

  alien world has developed a method of genetically engineer-ing females from plant matter. The scientist intends to sell the plant women as slaves, and his prototypes are made attractive to tempt potential buyers. Another scientist on the planet befriends one of the plant women, Ayame. Later, the two are left stranded in the alien world and decide to live as

  “brother and sister.” As McCarthy writes on her blog, “This is essential moé —an innocent, literally budding girl, a geeky young man with the heart of a hero and protective instincts to do any father proud.”

  THE MOE

  ´ MANIFESTO

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  While largely agreeing with McCarthy’s analysis, Meiji University professor Morikawa Ka’ichiro points out the physical attractiveness of Ayame, which, he argues, was extremely stimulating for young male readers. Many early postwar manga artists in Japan list Lost World as a major infl uence.

  In this sense, says Morikawa, Tezuka could be considered to have sown the seeds of moé culture.

  Among the fi rst to respond to Tezuka’s work by making explicit the attractiveness of his characters was the manga artist Azuma Hideo. In the late 1970s, Azuma combined the rounded character bodies associated with Tezuka’s manga with the expressive character faces associated with shojo manga (manga for girls),

  which resulted in a hybrid

  form known as the bishojo,

  meaning cute girl.

  Fans of bishojo charac-

  ters were among those

  manga and anime enthu-

  siasts fi rst labeled otaku.

  The columnist Nakamori

  Akio, writing in the sub-

  OE

  ID

  cultural magazine Manga

  MA HU

  Burikko in 1983, used the

  © AZ

  word otaku to mean some-

  thing like geek or loser.

  Azuma Hideo is named

  explicitly in Nakamori’s

  articles about otaku, and

  those attracted and at-

  tached to bishojo are called

  all sorts of names in ad-

  dition to otaku—including Azuma Hideo’s “cute girl”

  INTRODUCTION

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  E

  LE

  EW

  DR N AYS

  TE R

  COU OT

  HO P

  THE MOE

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  leeches and slugs! The ferociousness of Nakamori’s reaction refl ects a more general discomfort with the ways men were interacting with bishojo characters. Cultural critic Takekuma Kentaro recalls being shocked and dismayed at the increasing popularity o
f bishojo manga, even as manga editor Sasakibara Go and sociologist Yoshimoto Taimatsu point to the late 1970s as a crucial time of “value changes” ( kachi tenkan) among Japanese fans.

  The years 1978 and 1979 are crucial. Famed creator Miyazaki Hayao gave his fans two female characters—Lana, from the TV anime Future Boy Conan (1978), and Clarisse, from the animated fi lm The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)—and they g

  y gained an incredible following. As journalist Takatsuki Yasushi writes in

  his book, Lolicon: Nihon no

  shojo shikoshatachi to sono

  sekai (Lolita complex: Ja-

  pan’s girl lovers and their

  world), published in 2010,

  fanzines about Clarisse

  IAIWAAWA were abundant enough to

  K KU KZUAZA have their own category:

  KOIRROK Clarisse magazines ( kura-

  D HDH

  AR

  risu magajin). Also in 1979,

  OWH

  SY HSY

  Azuma Hideo and friends

  ETRUUR published the fi rst volume

  O

  TO COC

  of the legendary fanzine

  OHPPH Cybele, which stressed a

  cute aesthetic over real-

  ism and opened the eyes of

  many fans to the charms of

  bishojo characters.

  Gundam

  Gun

  fanzines

  INTRODUCTION

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  Further, in 1979, the anime series Mobile Suit Gundam aired on Japanese TV. Often considered a “realistic robot” anime, and much loved by mecha fans outside Japan, the series was at fi rst heavily criticized by established sci-fi fans inside Japan, who were dismissive of the melodramatic emphasis on human relationships and scathing about the shallowness and excitability of fans of the series. Though it is not much remembered today, news reports from the time detail how Gundam fans would dress up as characters from the series and make a spectacle of themselves on the streets of Hara-juku, one of the epicenters of Tokyo’s youth culture. Fans of Mobile Suit Gundam have long peppered their fanzines, which are at least ostensibly about robots, with images of cute girls.