“Lelangiric”, or so they say…

A particularly ubiquitous figure refers to this short string of notes (a figure being, in music theory jargon, the smallest group of notes whose sonority acts in a group-like fashion):

Simple, easy to insert anywhere over any chord, can act as a pickup, and so forth: a plethora of pragmatic qualities that are applied to this one figure. While that can be a good thing, in anime, it’s abused more than *insert joke about tentacle-rape-hentai here*. Ascending the aeolian is just a fancy way of saying “going up the aeolian mode” - aeolian being the natural minor scale.

Here’s some clipped examples Dennou Coil OP, Suzumiya Haruhi OP, Air OP (or was it the ED?), Some random Bokura ga Ita song, another random BGI song, This Ugly Yet Beautiful World OP, and so forth. The last two were slight variations but the general motion is exactly the same.

Here are some more variations on this figure.

FMP OP (I forget which series), and so you can get the jist of this hopefully. This figure’s “ubiquity” was hyperbolic since I literally don’t hear it everywhere, although you could “hear” it everywhere if you tried (that’s my biased interpretation of everything).

There are tons more songs that have a similar figure, except it’s four notes ascending (maybe you’ve heard them). These two figures are used in very similar contexts (not that that’s very surprising…) as a pick up to a chorus or verse. I don’t think there’s any kind of special meaning to this, it’s just that stepwise intervals are very easy to listen to, hence pop = easy listening. Not that “easy listening” is any kind of objective term, nor is it exclusive to pop. I’ll shut up now.

YM = YM = No connection…

Concerning the increase of profanities, I apologize. They come up mostly when I talk about music, the posts about Beck in general, since you cannot have rock without all the “fucking” (pun intended, of course).

When Koyuki starts to look for a new guitar, Ryuusuke takes him to this place. I like how we get to see Koyuki’s evolution via the guitars he plays, getting a new one each time he reaches a new level. Eddie Lee may or may not be a reference to Paul Gilbert, yet this is no doubt a parody of Yngwie Malmsteen. Perhaps this stemmed from Mr. Malmsteen’s legendary water-debacle on a flight to Tokyo wherein the fockin fury was unleashed. If you have no idea who this guy is, just listen to this sound clip and you’ll get a fine idea.

Malmsteen is not being very fat photogenic here

Is Beck making fun of Malmsteen? He is surely the butt of long-running fatass jokes across the internet, and Tanako, the shop owner, doesn’t help this image. However, we need to think about the connection between rock, Japan, and the West. What is the connection between the airborne mishap and Japan’s perception of Malmsteen? Of rock? of the West? How is Beck another example of the autoethnographic text? What does the title suggest, in reference to Jeff Beck and Saitou-san’s obsession with British rock? Is Koyuki a reference to Eugene (or otherwise a similar recontextualization of a “good guy” archetype), our protagonist from the film Crossroads? That title too hints at Koyuki’s uncertain position, always evolving, always turning corners. Is his overall “Japanese” behavior clashing with the iconoclasm of “Western” rock; another rearticulation of David vs. Goliath? (You won’t regret clicking on that last link.)

[If you’ve seen this film, you can pick up on the resonation between the two; binaries of classical vs. blues; academics vs. music, as well as the universal good vs. bad (Eugene/Vai, Koyuki/everyone, as we’re always presented with an antithesis that will redeem himself.)]

Koyuki, stop checking yourself out, narcissist

You’ve probably read this series of posts on cultural literacy by the blog far away from no where. Basically it utilizes the idea that our literacy – our reading and interpretation of texts (anime) – is subjective because different cultures have different conceptual systems, which is heavily supported through structuralism. However, reading texts is not so simple, especially in animes like Beck or Afro Samurai (yes I am whoring that article just to get some comments) when the content is globally influenced, or when the production itself was manufactured through a conglomeration of cultures. Beck is “Japanese” inasmuch as it is “Western”; thus we cannot simply use problematic lenses of analysis to put one or another behind the curtain. Afro Samurai uses iconic symbols and behaviors of both the East and West in the fusion of something radically retarded “different” to the effect that a cultural literacy requires us to dig deeper not only into the text itself, but into our cultural representations of them on which these texts are based on.

In summary, again, the autoethnographic text is a self-parody based on representations produced by cultures that hold power over weaker ones. The autoethnographic text attempts to force, upon these oppressive cultures, the realization that their representations are not true and are in fact particularly demeaning. It would be like “Africa” making a movie about how it actually contains different countries. And so Beck demonstrates this by portraying its Japanese characters as obsessed with a Western (sub?)culture nevertheless being raised in the East. On this note it would really funny to see an anime about fansubbers and anime-viewing in the West produced in Japan.

I think that Beck is showing, directly or indirectly, purposefully or unintended, how something as “white” as rock is not limited or limiting in any sense of the word. The medium itself attests to a cultural globalization, while the content of the show is obliged to agree with the seemingly panoptic expanse of the West. While I may have been tempted to stick to my asshole/comfort-zone position of Japanocentrism, I can see very little traces of such in Beck. Westerners are portrayed as both nice guys and douches, and the same goes for Japanese. In eliminating this context, we can focus on how Beck is a more egalitarian representation of cultures – more so than Afro Samurai at least.

Here, I’m trying to set up the premise for our cultural literacy. Since autoethnographic texts are based upon one culture’s own cultural literacy, we must henceforth become culturally literate as such in order to practice a second-order literacy. This may sound impossible – you can’t develop a first-order literacy since (1) there’s no difference between these two orders because (2) they are viewed through the same, biased consciousness. But no – that cannot be right! Well, that actually is a very sound argument. I don’t know if a “second-order” cultural literacy is possible since you’re always looking through the same eyes – there’s no escaping your own identity/positioning/perspective.

While I had leeway to write the Afro Samurai piece because it was produced, simultaneously, between and of two cultures, Beck is different because it’s one culture’s perception (and thus representation) of another. The process here involves some amount of time – it is not instantaneous. Then how are we supposed to engage with an anime like this? I’m putting this one up for grabs – the blogosphere is a pedagogical space as well as a giant soap box.

Joe Satriani + facial hair?

…Or so said Dying Breed’s vocalist, Matt. I’ve been wondering now, having seen 12 episodes, how rock in Beck reflects the politics of music in Japan and anime. This is only speculative, since I don’t really know anything about Japan nor its rock subculture (to an extent - I’m a jazz freak evolved out of Dream Theater-esque stuff). And there has definitely got to be a difference in Japanese and American rock. The interesting thing is that Dying Breed is an American (or was it British…?) band, and so I definitely think that these two guys, Matt and Eddie could be parodies of Joe Satriani (Satch occasionally sings on albums but his guitar playing is surely better; thus Matt’s attempted singing as a parody) and Paul Gilbert, and Paul Gilbert actually speaks Japanese and frequently tours and plays there. He actually did some kind of trivia/guitar show with Marty Friedman (Megadeath?/Cacophony/Speed Metal Symphony)

Coincidence or paying homage?

Firstly, I wanted to point out the guitars used throughout the series. Of course Eddie uses the iconic Les Paul, while Eiji uses a similarly iconic Strat. Koyuki seems to be the only one using something not so ingrained into the visual monument of rock, a Gretsch White Falcon. However, I think I’ve seen some of these at guitar center (so I don’t really know how mainstream they are), and the only “obscure” guitar I’ve seen is that nameless archtop that was smashed, twice.

The interesting thing is that in the actual scene I’m referring to - when Matt tells Eiji to fuck off since “his music won’t save anybody” - Matt proceeds to burn his guitar (Hendrix style or otherwise) and toss it to the floor. Matt is probably referring to how Eiji sells himself out just to get big, and in the process, his music becomes more akin to, dare I say, the j-pop we’re all so accustomed to during OPs and EDs. You can get a sense of Eiji’s female appeasement since when we get to hear his band, they actually sing in Japanese, instead of Koyuki’s painfully correct English (I really want to hear him sing in his native tongue).

Compare this to Beck’s music, which we can all hear is heavily, heavily influenced, if not a direct rip off of some of Rage’s tunes, especially their anthem Guerilla Radio. Sakurai points this out to Koyuki, saying how widespread Ryuusuke’s influences were. And, us always considering the politics of everything, Rage’s political messages are sometimes evident within Koyuki’s actions, most noticeably the commandeering of the PA system to play a DyBre song. There’s even a specific scene where Koyuki throws his fist in the air - that classic sign of dissent (but I have no clue which episode it’s in).

So we get all these cultural allusions thrown in our face, warning us, via dissent in the form of Rage and Hendrix, not to conform and submit to the culture trust. Is this a message directed towards anime? Compare Kurenai’s OP to Allison & Lillia’s – that statement should speak for itself.

The references to living guitarists (insofar as they actually are references) I think is, again, a parody of the state of J-pop. Gilbert and Satriani (Eddie and Matt, respectively) are elevated to demi-god status within Dying Breed (the name itself suggests the endangerment of “good music” [to quote Ellington]) while Eiji is bastardized as the bad guy. The ironic thing is that that DyBre’s music is absolutely nothing like Gilbert or Satch’s. The “contemporary” rock in which Satch and Gilbert are situated is some extremely complex and technical stuff, while the Beck ED (DyBre’s featured song), while itself being eerily reminiscent to Dream Theater (the vocals even sound like Labrie), is very simplistic. To add a further touch of irony, the ED itself is sung by Mark Gardener who is signed under DefSTAR records (a subsidiary of Sony, uh-oh), DefSTAR also signing j-pop band Chemistry. And we all know how pervasive the mainstream is.

Small world eh?

After having read this post, and after observing a certain prevailing trend amongst entries and comments around my familiar regions of the blogosphere, I’m going to have to elaborate and modify my earlier argument in which I stated that it is not the reader that creates meaning but the author. This whole post is probably more rooted in a philosophical sphere in which I am nearly illiterate, although I will use David Bohm’s notion of “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” to facilitate this particular articulation, so any direction towards critical authors would be nice.

In elaboration of Part 1, I’m going to add that, while it is not necessarily the viewer that creates meaning out of meaningless or not-so-meaningful things (I will later address the very notion of “creation”), the meaning that authors insert into anime is not all-encompassing of the entirety of the anime itself. As the title suggests, there is a serendipitous, if not incomplete component of the author’s construction of their universe; there is an implausibility of empiric semiosis (if this title didn’t already turn you off). In other words, more meaning exists beyond the first and fundamental semiosis, without disregarding that this primary semiosis is complete unto itself. This puts forth the controversial notion that a completed anime will have more meaning than what was originally created by the authors. And so what exactly does this nebulous jargon entail? Let me explain Bohm first.

Bohm thinks of the universe as a continuous flux wherein existing “sub-totalities” (i.e. these elementary particles and any kind of existing body like galaxies, stars, and so forth) are autonomous, but our perception of reality cannot be empirically reduced to such sub-total autonomies. In an interview with Bohm published by Omni, it was remarked that:

“Believing that the nature of things is not reducible to fragments or particles, he argues for a holistic view of the universe. He demands that we learn to regard matter and life as a whole, coherent domain, which he calls the implicate order.”

In essence, sub-totalities are autonomous entities within the larger whole, yet this whole presupposes the existence of things that are part of it. Bohm also called this the “Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement,” that is to say that “this view implies that flow is, in some sense, prior to that of the ‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow.”

In receding now to the partialities and holistics of semiosis, the first thing I am addressing is the notion of “depth” in anime. The second is the processes by which we engage in this depth, that is, our alleged “creation of meaning”. The third is semiosis and hermeneutics as complete functions in and of themselves. The fourth is the constructed universes of anime as represented partialities or sub-totalities within the wholeness of reality. The fifth is the (re/de)construction of the roles of “author” and “viewer” within wholeness.

Section 1: Depth

After reading these pieces on depth in anime, there is a recurring motif dealing with depth which bifurcates meaning as simply existing or not existing. Batezi’s piece is the only one that dives into the subjectivity of interpretation, some talk about the difference between intellectual fan service vs. actual depth, and some talk about art vs. entertainment. However, none of these deal with depth as an already-existing thing besides one brief phrase about how “viewers search for meanings in some shows that aren’t there in the first place;” yet this quote is about searching, which presumes the existence of meaning but strives to prove such an existence.

However, my analysis is attempting not to epistemologically solve the issue of the ontological binary of meaning since that in itself presents us with the paradox of our methodology. I am trying to peer into the ontology – the form – of depth; not the epistemology – the content.

What I’m trying to say is that there is this prevailing trend to dismiss meaning as either there or not there in a single location – that there is no holistic process of semiosis and hermeneutics, and that there is no meta-analysis of the context of meaning in which anime is situated. There is an endless depth because anime is just a sub-totality within the wholeness of reality, and in such a relation, anime assumes all the meaning present in reality because essentially, they are one in the same. I’m arguing that depth is always there – not in a superficial Evangelion or Ergo Proxy fashion – but in the reality that is connoted, not the reality that is denoted as its own microcosm: anime metonymically connotes the entirety of reality, but denotes only a small focal portion of it.

You may discover a caveat to this interpretation: universes that do not depict our reality, as in, Gundam and whatnot; but do not be fooled, for the denotation is futuristic, the human relations are not. The very fact that any anime is inherently human in its relationships and mentalities, within an envisioned future or otherwise, will only buttress my argument that it is not the content of the meaning but the form, and that there is one and only one form of knowledge – human knowledge.

Section 2: The “Creation” of Meaning

Now we come upon a common debate: that there is no meaning and that viewers create the meaning, or whatever articulation you fancy. Since I stated in Section 1 that meaning is always there, this will refute (1) that meaning is created since this presumes that (2) there was no meaning to begin with. We are not ever really creating meaning, but rather, we are simply viewing the predominant meaning or extracting a more subtle one. In essence, we are viewing anime through different lenses. This is a good description since it’s widely used around the blogosphere. Another analogy I saw the use of the stencil in this post. Both the “lens” and “stencil” imply that only a portion of meaning is taken out – and this assumes that there is something more, something prior, which is wholeness. In order to use a stencil, you must first have a large wall. In order to have a lens, you must first have a complex body through which you interpret, not in fragments, but in “dimensions” or “flavors”.

This post also brings up how you can analyze anime through lenses (without actually referring to the process), in this case genres. The problem with lenses, stencils, genres and any kind of classificatory system, as I’ve been pointing out this whole time, is that they inherently disregard one thing or another. Comedy or slice of life? Slice of life or comedy? There was a spectrum included that demonstrated how an anime’s genre is not white and black, that there is a gradient. However, the problem with this is that such a gradient is composed of homogenous fragments (genres) and is still planted within the discourse of anime whose fragmentatious nature always divides, cuts up, divides, chops up, until now we have what is seemingly heterogeneity – but it is not, since that very gradient is still paradigmatically homogenous, that is to say, each section going from SoL to comedy is homogenous unto itself. This is what Bohm has argued. In trying to strictly define anime, we make our systems of classification smaller and smaller until we have these fundamental units of analysis that constitute anime. We cannot be fooled by the syntagm of heterogeneity.

Hence, the serendipity of our hermeneutics. We may look for one thing, but end up finding another, both of which (all of which) exist within the same wholeness.

Section 3: The Completeness of Semiosis and Hermeneutics

Semiosis and hermeneutics are processes by which meaning is, in Bohm’s terms, enfolded and unfolded, or through the conduit metaphor, packaged and unpackaged. When meaning is packaged, there is no extra meaning whatsoever. This is the author’s intent. What the author intends, he or she intends, and that’s it. However, what they intend and the final products they create are different. They create those universes that connote infinity. However, their denotation – their intent – is strictly limited. I’m expanding (and obfuscating) these terms in that the author’s intent is both denoted (what is visible) and connoted (what is invisible), while the original connotation is not inserted into the medium, since that is impossible. Culture and wholeness connote denotation. If this is bizarrely confusing read this post about Barthes’ “Photographic Paradox”. This post is called Part 2 for a reason. I also made a fancy diagram.

Second level signification (or second-order in Barthesian terms) is simply when the denotative acquires a connotation due to culture. That is, when a sign elicits an understanding that is cultural, for instance, the intellectual fanservice in Evangelion. Third level signification refers not even to the meaning which the sign itself produces, but the ideology around it and how it is used. This is the metaphysics of the sign: for instance, lolicon being a staple of otakudom.

Basically, this section being the complement of the first, I’m saying that while there is an infinite amount of depth in the external reality that is imaginatively internalized within anime, the semiosis of meaning does not insert that specific depth into the final product because the author’s denotation – his intent and semiosis – cannot also contain a connotation. We cannot possibly uncover an inserted connotation within the physical denotation – that is why we always guess at what the author really meant, and in those rare times when they tell us, they are giving us their own connotation. But we cannot forget that there is a connotation within the denotative anime – that is wholeness. That is the realm in which we analyze, interpret, misinterpret, create meaning, and so forth. This realm of wholeness is not created by the author, yet this does not make it by any means “incorrect”.

Section 4: Sub-totalities of Wholeness

I said that the realm of wholeness is not created by the author. The author only inserts his or her production into the preexisting framework of wholeness. There lies that realm of depth from which we can extract infinite meaning. Anime is autonomous, but always functioning within the boundaries of the wholeness of human thought.

Section 5: The (De/Re)construction of Roles

What is to say that we are limited to merely viewer and author in the movement of information? One has the economic means to produce anime, and we have the desire to consume it. While this can be strictly defined as a political matter, within this wholeness, we are always, in our analyzing, creating. We are authors of our meaning, regardless of the intent originally associated with anime. To say that one meaning or another is “wrong” does not look at the meaningful context in which anime is positioned. It cannot be anything but meaningful.

References

Bohm, David, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order,” Routledge & Kegan Paul: New York, 1980.

Blogs Referenced, vaguely or otherwise

http://blog.mistakesofyouth.com/2008/02/09/on-pretentious-fags/#comment-36730

http://animanachronism.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/not-elevens-allusions/

http://omaemo.dasaku.net/2008/05/09/the-lucky-star-ova-slice-of-life-comedy-for-dummies-or-how-to-not-suck-at-anime-appraisal-this-summer/

http://animanachronism.wordpress.com/2008/01/04/death-of-the-animator/

The look of a real man being seduced

First off I want to point out a huge fallacy I overlooked in part 1: Japan is rather ethnically homogenous, or I am under the impression of such a fact. So then perhaps the lack of blacks in school life anime is justified not because producers envisage an utopian Japan, but rather, they are correctly portraying the ethnically monolithic high school demographics. However, this does not refute the convenience of representation, nor does it explain why I’ve never seen a black transfer student – a pretty good example of this, I’d say, is Patricia Martin, and although she may just be there to contribute to the Lucky Star otakudom, we still cannot disregard the curtain of Japanocentrism.

Since the last post I’ve seen maybe a couple of pieces pertaining to Afro Samurai, and while whenever I mention the anime I always say “(don’t laugh at me)” as a kind of elitist rhetorical shield, I am rather surprised at the amount of stuff you can pull of out Afro Samurai. This goes somewhat into my post about the “abundance of meaning”, so in short, you can dissect anything – hence the abundance of meaning. I mentioned previously that Afro Samurai was such an excellent piece to dissect not in its denotation, or what it presents, and not even in its connotation, what it represents, but in its metatation. I know that’s not a word – but we must dissect how and why Afro is represented the way he is in understanding the convenience of representation.

In setting up the last bit of logistics, I’m just going to take a look at episode two, particularly his relationship with Otsuru, the sex scene, the imaginary friend, his childhood, and the uncanny resemblance of the “monks” to the KKK, complete with southern accent, in no particular order, and all as pivotal points in Afro’s representation.

Now the beginning of the sex scene, when this extremely well-endowed women suddenly starts to kiss Afro’s arm, I find utterly hilarious. I mean, just, wow. But anyway, the surprising thing is how Afro does not reject her, as you would find any kind of conservative anime character do in a fit of embarrassed stupor. Just in this one bit we can discern several things:

(1) Afro is promiscuous, and undeniably sexual while simultaneously upholding his stoic samurai visage – in essence, he can be Japanese, but he cannot enter the domain of Japanocentrism in that he cannot be white. You can clearly contrast this to Kenshin (at least in the TV series, Trust & Betrayal is a much different story). You can also see glimpses of colonialism here, African or otherwise – aborigines can rise and attain power in a colonial government system, yet they can never be considered “one of them”. Afro has been paradoxically territorialized as Japanese and black while conveniently retaining the “best” of both.

(2) Because of the necessity of the holistic binary, in that the one must define the Other, Otsuru completes and amplifies Afro’s blackness. She is absolutely and utterly white in her childhood – the teddy bear (symbolic in the story’s context but nevertheless an artifact of Western culture, Minami-ke please?), the innocence and unadulteration – while becoming the analogon of the Cult of Domesticity in her cooking and caring for Afro which is the Western dream that Japan inserts into all its anime, what with MILFs galore who also enjoy housework. Thus Otsuru is the conduit for which Japanocentrism inscribes its whiteness (both maternal and sexual) and thus mirrors the blackness of Afro.

(3) While it may be argued that the sex scene humanizes Afro in a similar way to that of the sexual relationships present in Samurai Champloo, this is clearly dehumanizing because of the lack of emotion. Afro never sounds so much as a grunt during this R&B laden hentai/Chingy music video. All the attention is centered around Otsuru and her humongous boobs – another defining feature of her whiteness, this time in a clearly erotic manner. By silencing Afro we see how he’s turned into an apathetic body, void of any human emotions, yet capable of a basic human instinct – however, sex has situational implications, and therefore, here, sex does not become an act of love but rather an act of corruption in that Afro’s lack of humanity – his blackness – renders him the antithesis of Japanocentrism, and Otsuru the embodiment of Japanocentrism, as he figuratively (and, partially, literally) rapes the white women. He becomes not a person, but a thing that mindlessly screws the unsullied in perhaps not even a sexual or human relation, but a parasitic one, sucking the life out of whiteness and converting it into what we assume is a monstrous form of pleasure within the alienated mind of Afro.

Afro’s childhood was particularly depressing in many, many ways. Firstly, he’s obsessed with the #2. Secondly, we can again see how the white children are there to magnify Afro’s blackness against their “normalcy”. However, Afro’s childhood does not function primarily as a microcosm unto itself, but rather, as an attempted justification of adult Afro’s apparent lack of humanity. And ironically, if I were in any wrong in analyzing Afro as less than human, I’m sure that the added history – that long sought after continuity of the self and identity-as-praxis – attests to his hollow mannequin portrayal. Child Afro becomes – and it is becomes here because in our minds, as the pieces of history are slowly glued together, adult Afro becomes more complete, contradicting the praxis of identity in favor of a safer, more definite identity-as-product – victimized in the wake of the gang when his friends have to assist him. And we must make the distinction between this gang of thugs and samurai; they clearly are not, not in any kind of objective definition, nor in a subjective manner in that they are not elegant, in speech, behavior, and sword technique, nor do they carry actual katanas, perhaps the definitive artifact of the samurai.

The imaginary friend I think is the most blatantly terrible thing about this anime. It’s a cheap way of saying “this is part of my subconscious – this is the way I really am” as well as a cheap way of saying things about blacks in general. I’m not a psychologist, although I wish I knew a few things as they would really come in handy here, but I can talk about the politics of it. The presentation of the imaginary friend gives two things to work with: (1) another antithesis to the samurai positioning of Afro – while I had said that Afro is the antithesis to Japanocentrism, that is through his position as a black, not as a samurai, which is the convenience of both representation and positioning. The imaginary friend is loud, crude, severely annoying, and stereotypically “main stream” black, or perhaps even “gangsta” would suffice here, lending nothing whatsoever to the credibility of Afro’s shoddily constructed identity. What’s more is that the imaginary friend is conveniently “resolved” in the end, when Afro apparently comes to terms with himself. Nevertheless, all of his positioning remains, as if chunks of his identity were to come loose and fly away if his imaginary “real self” - and here schizophrenic (although Thomas Szasz would disagree) will be a legitimate term, in a sarcastic way - were to simply disappear. Here is the inherent contradiction of Afro in that his imaginary friend is acting as his own antithesis within himself.

(2) While the imaginary friend can be interpreted as an antithesis, his existence is not entirely relational, that is, we can examine his own connotations. And here is when we must look closely at that attempted insertion of a “mainstream” black culture. The Commmutation Test proves invaluable here: basically switch something around and see if the overall meaning changes. If we remove the imaginary friend from the picture altogether, Afro’s encapsulating image surely changes – we then lose that antithesis and thus Afro can take a slight step forward to the hub of Japanocentrism. He is there to control Afro, not in any kind of non-meta sense, but to put a check on cultures – this is a game of checks and balances, since Japanocentrism has positioned Afro within that of the samurai, yet in that colonial sense, he cannot ever actually reach the ideology that has created him. The imaginary friend is there to say “don’t forget that you’re actually black.”

Lastly we come across the monk. Now, how much of this is coincidence? Pointy head – reminiscent of the pointy mask, the nose – obviously stylistic of that old white man, the southern accent – I don’t need to say anything about that, the fact that they’re out to literally lynch him – again silence will suffice, the cult-like nature of the entire “bad guy group” and the monks own “grand wizard”-like image – all these traits can only lead me to believe that they are definitely representative of the KKK. This is Japanocentrism’s greatest achievement. It is the usurpation of the grand historically American narrative of white vs. black. While this dichotomy is not inclusive to just America, the KKK is, if my history serves me right. Thus Japanocentrism can reach the core of the West by positioning Afro as simultaneously black and Japanese, while denying him any real agency within their own culture, and pitting this historical foe against him to amplify the white/black dichotomy and distract us from Japanocentrism itself. In essence, the KKK acts as another curtain of Japanocentrism, putting not Japan under the radar, but its ethnocentric ideology and thus justifying and concealing, through the lens of Japanocentrism, nearly everything about this anime: (1) Afro’s blackness, (2) the samurai elements of Japan present, paradoxically, through Afro (he is the only archetypal stoic/elegant/refined samurai in the show), (3) Japanocentrism itself, (4) and the pinnacle of whiteness shown through Otsuru.

I think that this analysis will serve to show how Afro is conveniently represented as a number of things. He is the embodiment of Japanocentrism, yet he is always within their spectacle. He is a walking contradiction, but the average viewer won’t care if there’s tons of blood and gore. He is dehumanized and alienated yet always glorified within his own microcosm. He is that snowman within the snow globe, always being shaken for the amusement of the puppet master.

So I was reading Anime | Otaku’s entry pertaining to Afro Samurai and also how it related to a short bit on the difference between denotation and connotation, as The Animanachronism was talking about in his recent entry on foreign languages in anime. Anyway, and this is sort of a rant, it seems like just because an anime may be “mindless” or without any “depth”, that imbues upon the anime a sense of a certain lack of meaning, that is, it cannot be analyzed either entirely or in a smooth fashion. I’m pretty sure that is definitely not the case – it just shows that reaching into its depths is not as easy. Of course it may be harder to analyze G Gundam or Bleach than it is Evangelion or FLCL because it’s the difference in what they present – what they denote. And so here I’d like to reference Roland Barthes and a thing he called the “photographic paradox”.

In describing the photographic paradox, I’ll go back to the difference between denotation and connotation as the Animanachronism was articulating. Basically, denotation is presenting, in that what is shown is what it is fully - the perfect analogon - the perfect description of reality. This is the first level of the photograph. A photograph, being a perfect description of reality, denotes what is displayed in the picture in complete co-extension with itself; that is, its meaning is completely saturated in the image itself. However, there is a second level of signification present in the photograph – that is the image’s connotation – its cultural decoding, the semiosis and hermeneutics of its meaning. Therefore, there is a paradox of meaning: on one hand, the denotation expresses that there is no meaning, while the connotation remarks that there is an abundance of meaning, both forms present in a single image. While I say “no meaning” - this is somewhat figurative in that I’m using it to illustrate how we can find meaning in what is visible and not visible. When we analyze the denotative features of anime, we look into why they are there. When peering into the connotation, we seek to understand both why and how.

When we say “oh, there’s nothing to be analyzed,” it only illustrates our unwillingness to just scratch past the surface. Unfortunately I cannot say that society 2008 is not lethargic at all, but must anime spoon-feed us meaning? There is a difference, again quoting the Animanachronism, between intellectual fanservice and an actual depth. Just because we see an anime denote religious symbols does not mean we must focus our attention wholly on the visible. In all my of my internet career I haven’t ever really seen analysis into the relation between Misato/Ritsuko/Kaji/Gendo except in Hige vs. Otaku’s concentration on the significance of Misato.

While the denotation of anime may present eye-candy to be analyzed, it does connote and to an extent mirror the society and social relations that is based off of. We are forced to only look at what Afro Samurai presents to us, and disregard not only when he represents unto his microcosm, but what he signifies outside of that reality and in ours. This is what I find so great about meta-analysis. It provides us with insight into our own lives, which at first you may think is “irrelevant” but we cannot simply think of anime as an uninfluenced and unbiased conduit of meaning. It is clearly an extravagant model of reality, skewed and distorted it may be, but it is nonetheless very human in what it can signify.

Perhaps this comes from a more philosophic ideal whose explications deal with the ubiquity of meaning. Is meaning everywhere? Perhaps this is kind of like that “anthropic principle” I saw Koizumi talking about in The Melancholy – that notion of the unobserved being nonexistent. Of course we can observe anime and of course we assign meaning to it – that meaning varies between people and cultures but nevertheless it is still there, always in different flavors between lenses. In essence, I’m saying that everything merits an objective thought. From Dead Leaves – in an Orwellian sense, the sex part mirrors an unconquerable human sex instinct amidst the regimentalized physical repression of the soul – to Afro Samurai, there is an abundance of meaning.

References

Barthes, R. (1977). “The Photographic Message.” From “Image, Music, Text” (Heath, S.(Ed. and Trans.). New York: Hill, pp. 15-31.

If there are two things I absolutely hate, which can ruin an entire damn song that would have otherwise been fabulous, they are horrid guitar solos and unnecessary amounts of boring Dr. Beat percussion.

I’m going to compare two songs, one shitty, one good, one with a shitty guitar solo and bland/unnecessary percussion and one that knows what’s up and keeps things low profile as to not distract the poor listener.

1. Shitty song #1: Anata ga Ita Mori - Jyukai (Fate/Stay Night ED) and on a lighter side note, this video is weird. Wasn’t The Ring a Japanese movie? Is this like The Ring: Harvest Moon Edition? Don’t they know this..well, I don’t know if they’re parodying it or not, but still - I don’t know why it looks like she’s the singer - and I don’t know why I’m hearing an electric guitar when the one shown is using an acoustic - and of course you can edit it but that only makes it even more stupid.

The song starts out pretty good actually, except for the stupid suspended cymbal crescendo. Why the hell give that to us when you just go straight back into another piano intro? We only need one introduction, asshole. The piano intro is ok - it sounds like ii-V-iii-iv in E major the first time, then just a deceptive cadence leading into the next section.

Now this part I like. Nice vocals, not too much crazed vibrato, very mellow which is coupled with an equally unclustered piano that stays out the way but also adds some satisfying fills in where the vocalist breaths - nice dynamics too. But, uh oh, starting to give us those god damn clustered quarter note block chords and then another fucking suspended cymbal roll into the ubiquitous hi-hat on 2 & 4 with strings. And then, wait, ANOTHER suspended cymbal roll and some kind of quasi-glissando in the string section to go into the chorus complete with distorted guitar, MOAR strings, an annoying triplet pattern on the ride and the inklings of a strummed acoustic guitar - we can’t even fucking hear it (and it’s not there for feeling like Freddie Green)- so don’t use it. But prompts to the vocalist again, good job.

When returning to the verse they obviously have to keep the annoying percussion that I could play with my dick. Some stuff happens, then there’s a drum fill on some toms into a really bland and uneventful guitar solo which needs louder and more invasive drums/strings to compensate for it. You know what I’d like to hear? An a capella guitar solo, yeah, or you know what, you don’t even need the obligatory distorted guitar, give us anything else, besides a drum solo. Actually, Jyukai is a two person band? Does that even count? One is the “vocalist and songwriter”, the other does the “programming, composing and arranging”. I never knew what the hell the difference between songwriting and composing where. As if one sounds more legitimate than the other, and what the hell is programming? Creating shitty MIDI file drum beats? Since, apparently, none of them are guitarists, I can see why this solo sucks so much; don’t just randomly insert a guitar just because, douche bags. When the guitar solo ends you

Then you just get that repetitive progression, the one they used in the piano introduction, but with crappy polyphony in the string section that doesn’t go well with each other - it’s like you’re trying to jack off while wearing a needle-covered condom: it just doesn’t work. AND THEN ANOTHER SUSPENDED CYMBAL ROLL and the piano introduction takes it out. I think, overall, the form went something like this: intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-guitar solo-verse-interlude-outro.

Good things: the first verse, the vocalist overall, I liked the melody too.

Mediocre/almost-bad things: the piano - it was ok, it didn’t screw up the entire song, but it was thoroughly bland in its harmony and texture.

Bad parts: the guitar solo and drums obviously. The form nor progression were anything special, especially the verse and its chromatic descending bassline. It sounded good in My Funny Valentine. It sounds mediocre here; I would say “pirated” but that’s definitely my own personal bias, which in itself is probably incomplete - I don’t know when the hell that specific progression was first used.

Overall: Would have been a lot better if not for the things I mentioned - luckily we are never obliged to watch endings

Great song #1: Wasurenaide - Suara (Kimikiss Pure Rouge ED)

Now this is a great fucking song. The two greatest things: no guitar solo, and no percussion. Don’t get me wrong of course I like guitar solos and percussion, but they can be very intrusive and damaging like I’ve been yelling about for the past 700 words.

Starts out with a much better introduction - even though it is more repetitive (the piano plays exactly the same thing except for the left hand chords) - the nice layering of the strings compensates for this. Also, the progression is I-vi-IV-V in Ab major: the canonical pop progression that you hear basically everywhere and that is regurgitated and rearticulated everywhere in mass-produced songs, which is funny considering how much better it is than Fate/Stayandtakeadump’s ED.

We also get a break (a short unaccompanied [solo] measure or two) into the first section which is nice. Now this first section is just pure win because it doesn’t need anything but a duet to give us such an emotive momentum. The harmony is much lusher and while the rhythm may be repetitive, that’s exactly where the momentum comes in. They also do something else that’s great: instead of having the piano dominant the poor vocalist, she just gradually crescendos while the piano’s volume stays fairly static and the strings come in. So here we get the best of both a gradual crescendo leading into the chorus, and none of the crappy problematic decrescendo that the piano might have done if not for the vocalist.

Into the chorus, and the first thing you may notice is the counterpoint in the strings. Very nice - not intrusive at all. The piano sets up the time more than anything, since we have plenty of harmony in the strings and melody itself (which establishes where the harmony goes).

Going into the string solo - is this a viola? - the piano reenters nicely to make up for the vocalist’s temporary exit and sets up an ostinato arpeggiated pattern. The only thing is that I wish the same chord weren’t arpeggiated - but then it may have distracted from the string solo.

The strings give a nice counter melody, and then into the outro which is great (and again, nice counterpoint in the strings). The piano’s very blatant yet subtle change in dynamics is especially nice- you really get the hint that it’s coming to a close, instead of relying on the god damn suspended cymbal roll.

Great things: (1) the smooth transfers between sections, (2) counterpoint and counter melodies in the string section, (3) overall sonority of the ensemble, (4) ability to build momentum without sacrificing anything or being intrusive.

Mediocre things: overly standard progressions/harmony/form, as usual, and the viola(?) solo.

Bad things: the rare bluesy note by the vocalist? Way out of place lady. I would have commented on how well the show actually used the ED, by starting the music before the credits rolled, but I was kind of going for objectivity here…too late.

Overall: this is a really nice song that I’ve listened to way too many times.

Ok, so in a change of pace, I’m just going to indulge in fanboyism and list out some of all time favorite scenes of anime I’ve watched. These two aren’t necessarily my top two, but the first two that came to mind, and I’ll write about more later.

Fruits Basket ep. 8, 14:55

So I’m a guy, and I watched Fruits Basket, and I liked it, and I’m not a trap. But this was the sexiest scene, well jesus not because you have two guys, oh wait one’s a girl…but due to the awesomeness of Wakaba Murasaki’s voice acting. I’m pretty big on seiyuu, not that knowledgeable but I do enjoy good voice acting, and this scene took the cake (is that the correct expression?) with the deliciously sadistic whispering after he just smashed a freaking pot over Hatori’s face.

In thinking about the music, it’s kind of interesting how the BGM is a karaoke version of the OP (and I really do love the OP song) - in fact it makes the scene all the much better. What would this scene signify if you had some deliberately malignant music? You’d definitely get much more an “Akito you douche…” impression, but with the lethargic electric piano and melancholy strings it seems almost happy in a tragic way. Yeah, this scene is very, very tragic if you felt any compassion of Hatori. I think that the key of the song fits perfectly, pretty sure it starts out in G major then when (in the vocal version) the melody comes round to the E, tonicizing the relative minor, you get that E7 (V7/ii) going back to the ii-V-I and so forth, leading back to authentic cadence in the “let’s stay together, itsumo.” The whole point of the key is that the electric piano is in the perfect range. Any higher and it would sound too much like a screech, and any lower and you’d get a horribly wobbly sound.

Besides the actual music which probably bores the hell out of anyone reading this, the music is coupled with the momentum of the scene. You get these contrasting themes of Akito/death-be-upon-us, and Hatori & Kana/oh-my-god-so-tragic. The music works for both themes, signifying the former as disturbingly silent and the latter as over-the-top-tragic-memory-loss. So in this case, quite possibly, you have both the music signifying the visual, and then the visual and its changing context signifying the music.

So Goldilocks had her porridge just right, and I my Fruits Basket.

Samurai Champloo ep. 11, 19:18

In my favorite scene of Samurai Champloo, we actually get a look into the archetypal silent-samurai, thus giving Jin some human-like qualities. There were three main things about this scene that made it stand out: (1) Jin fights with no sword, which was tight as hell, (2) woman powah! The former wife/concubine literally throws coins in her patriarch’s unevenly-toothed face, something I don’t know if I’ve ever seen in anime, and (3) the music, again! Looks like this will be a recurring theme…

The music is an arrangement of Affirmation, a tune composed by Jose feliciano, but perhaps propagated to pop/jazz/funk famedom by George Benson, both being guitarists/singers/composers, and so forth and so on. I was posting comments about this as well as the nature of the representation of jazz in Claiming Ground’s blog. And so, in concurrence with the music, you get several kinds of larger connotations: (1) the larger permeation of a cultural signification which adds meaning to the overall situation, those main situations being (2) the separation of the lovers and (3) feminism. In the same way music functioned in the fruits basket scene, that is, how it acted within different contexts and signified each accordingly, we see a lot of different short situations acted out. The scene starts with Shino escaping and the music playing, and you immediately get this sense of desperate and romantic flight (well obviously but the music really helps) coupled with them running - I especially like the short part where you see them from behind wooden bars - from the very recent past of Shino; and in that short time you get a sense of loss, of moving on from one large segment of history and on to another unknown one. Then we get to the fight scene, and this is great, it’s got all the mamoru-ism without any of the actual “I’m going to protect her” rhetoric nonsense. In fact Jin never even says anything during that time except for a hasty “isoidei” if that’s the correct romanization for “hurry” - you don’t get any of that horrible masculinity since, well, Jin isn’t a Niagra Falls of testosterone, as the elegant/refined samurai should. Mugen is a different story.

Lastly we come upon the beach scene, and Shino does all the work in warding off the husband while Jin stands back and watches - displays the agency of women that need not always rely on the samurai/protector/whatever to dice the bad guy. It was even kind of funny how when the husband first came, Shino and Jin just kind of looked over like “oh, him?” That poor man was really dehumanized and infantalized, but it was great anyway. Jin pushing the boat away, and Shino’s desperate “JIn!” give you that interesting separated-lovers situation, where Jin knows she can’t come with him, well, perhaps they both knew it all along but did it for its own sake - and that resolved and whispery “arigatou” at the end is just like icing on the cake. I like cake metaphors.

I’m going to divide this essay up into five different parts; an introduction which outlines the theoretical tools used to address the case studies which will be parts two – Afro Samurai, parts three – Dutchy (Black Lagoon), parts four – the Vodarek (Eureka 7), and parts five – the spectacle of multiculturalism and “the token black”.

There is one problematic feature of this analysis in that it does not cover a broad historical spectrum (due to the relatively short number of series I’ve watched and of which portray “Blacks” at all), that is, Eureka 7 and Black Lagoon aired in 2006 and Afro Samurai in 2007. We cannot possibly grasp the cultural and political significance of a Japanese perception of “Black” unless we take a look at anime created in the 20^th century, so this examination will only seek to produce some kind of barely-historical result pertaining to the state of a Japanese “Black” representation in the latter half of the first decade of the 21^st century.

This essay is also problematic in that I write from the position of an “American” in a lenient sense of the word. I’m writing about Japan, and about “Black” through my Western lens. You could have the same argument with an Easterner writing about the West through his or her own lens.

Japan, “Black” and “White” are the three main categories of this essay, yet their terms may be somewhat interchangeable and/or problematic because of a contradictory blurring of the East and West in anime. In order to step outside a broader discourse on orientalism in which the Far East is incorporated, Japan, an economic superpower yet militaristically non-existent state, must join the West in their own reconstitution as simultaneously Oriental and modern, Western, or Occidental. There is this anachronistic retainment of traditions in a lot of futuristic anime or ones that feature alternate universes – the Abh using chopsticks in Crest of the Stars, Onsens in TTGL and Grenadier, the Seiza position being visible in just about any anime, and so forth and so on. But perhaps the greatest Westernization in anime is seen in the character art: allegedly Japanese-descended characters with blonde hair and blue eyes, and just about anything besides brown eyes and black hair – not to say that there aren’t characters whose signifier is “stereotypically Japanese” (lest we not confuse signifieds and signifiers, and I for a racist), but the creation and propagation of what we assume are born and raised Japanese does not reflect their real-life counterparts. One example I will use later on is the case of Ray and Charles Beams (we all know it’s a reference to the Ray Charles whose own connotations are probably significant in their own right, and who is clearly from the West) from Eureka 7 who speak Japanese - but do they look Japanese? Again, I don’t think the Japanese have naturally blue eyes, and apart from that, the futuristic universe that Eureka 7 presents us with holds a different concept of race and nationality that we are familiar with – on this I’ll go into more detail in the fourth and final part.[1]

While the universes that are presented in anime may be purely for the sake of art, there is an underlying political and marketability aspect – why doesn’t subbed anime get aired in the USA (well I don’t really know if it does but it doesn’t to the extent of my knowledge)? Why does only dubbed anime (dubbed via US corporations/companies – Funimation is subsidiary of Navarre Corporation) get screen time in the US? Would an animation produced in the US (and the word “anime” conflicts with a non-Japanese genesis point and its connotations) get screen time in Japan? What about a Japanese animation that only gets American dubs – you can see where I’m leading this into.

In “Time to make that shit!” – an Afro Samurai production blog entry by this guy named Eric who claims to be “just another snot-nosed hustler trying to make it in Hollywood by pimping animation.” He also remarks that “Afro went crazy. We got a dream team of Samuel L. Jackson, SpikeTV, FUNimation, and others to join us. Now what? Time to actually make it!” Ok now I’ll post the parts that you can laugh at.

“On this blog, I’ll talk mostly about the story. First of all, Okazaki (as usual!) had a ton of really unique and genius ideas. Even though he’s never published a story in comics or written a screenplay for TV or film, he’s incredibly intuitive and deeply spiritual. I think in all of his work, there are lots of heavy Buddhist theories, Japanese traditional culture references, and martial arts theories. But, at the same time, he’s got an incredibly up-to-date understanding of world pop culture, brand identities, and American TV and sci-fi movie culture!” [my emphasis]

“When it gets down to it, story writing is always a deeply personally exposing, complicated, and morally challenging endeavor. If anyone tells you it’s easy - then remember one thing - they probably suck at writing! A single idea can bring down a house of cards. A great ending can fix a horrible movie. A flaw in pace can be the difference between an Oscar and a never-watched opus.

Here’s some rules we gave ourselves when writing Afro that we hopefully achieved in the end:

1) We wanted to keep true to Okazaki’s vision of a dark revenge story.
2) We decided to tell a Samurai story.
3) We wanted to have lots of action in every episode (since mainstream US fans don’t really tolerate slow pace in animation).
4) We wanted to be new, but wanted to respect a classic sensibility.
5) We wanted Samuel L. Jackson to be happy.”

Now please do not obfuscate the point of this essay – I’m not praising anything about Afro Samurai besides the fact that it is an intriguing display of a transnational political alliance – Gramsci’s historical bloc – against an oppressive consumer capitalist machine embodied, in one aspect, through Hollywood.[2] However, in Okazaki’s attempt to be creative and counter hegemonic, insofar as it was his actual intent to create something that resonated with his personal experiences, and not the American obscuration that Funimation brought upon him, he has then submitted to the reinsertion of Afro Samurai into a cultural hegemony – in other words, he commodified his dissent, sold out, and kissed the ass of consumer capitalism.

The reason I posted the whole damn Afro Samurai manifesto was to show how an anime originally thought of in Japan by a Japanese was then brought directly into an American culture. This is, Afro Samurai, that is, a contact zone - a space unto itself where cultures and representations clash. It is a dialogue between America and Japan, yet in its intercultural process of formation, it is a dialogue in and of itself. This is why Afro Samurai is such a great piece to dissect in a macro-analysis or in a greater global context, instead of focusing on its internal components (or lack thereof).

If you read any of the that last link you may get a feel of one of the main topics of this essay. In “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Mary Louise Pratt brings up a tool that is central to my analysis of the cultural constitution, representation and decoding of race – the autoethnographic text. She defines this as “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them. …autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts” (Pratt, 1999). This is also applicable to a mountain of other anime, particularly Code Geass and its portrayal of a new, subservient Japan in relation to the imperialist empire of Britannia, and we can see, thereto, that “Japan has begun to use Britain as a mirror, as a way of saying things about Japan that they fear, or that they dread, or that they’re not sure of, by holding them up in Britain” (taken from The Animanachronism’s blog).

Rather than using McCarthy’s analogy of Britain as a mirror, I’d like to refer to the autoethnographic text as a mirror in such that it is a product constructed by one culture and its global representations which intend to “intervene metropolitan modes of understanding” and which “often constitute a marginalized groups point of entry into the dominant circuits of print culture” (Ibid.). Insofar as we can consider the sphere of anime and manga (or whatever kind of otaku classification you want) a growing international subculture, we can thus think of anime in particular as a global autoethnographic text which engages with representations of Japan and America, a prime culprit of a global, cultural hegemony.

Now I want to go back for a second to Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the paradoxical positioning of anime, and I’ll summarize this in a few points. (1) Japan is in a contradictory state – both East (geographically and historically) and West (economically, perhaps politically). (2) Due to this oxymoronic position, anime as a form of knowledge and art becomes an autoethnographic text that addresses representations made about it through depictions of the producers of those representations. (3) We can observe the anachronism and preservation of cultural continuity in anime through various Japanese traditions.

Firstly, I’m arguing that through anime characters, Japan can glorify and Westernize itself – basically, they can consider themselves Western. You can get the hint of this kind of Japanocentrism through depictions of Westerners through a sort of reversed and hypocritical lens of Occidentalism. Kidd from Yakitate - must I say anything more than DABURU KURASUMEITO? Code Geass’ Oppressive Britannian nobles? Blue Gender’s cold-blooded Marlene Angel (although she changes, but the significance is that the Westerner has to start out in that subjected position)?

Now I can finally talk about how “Black” comes into all of this. Japan’s global position has then permitted them to make statements about other cultures and peoples, and we can obviously see this through the screen shots at the beginning of this essay – but the striking thing, I think, about these three pictures is that there is a clear juxtaposition of “White” and “Black” – the one and the Other – insofar as we can now classify glorified Japanese characters as “White” within the discourse of anime. And now I am talking about political categories and not so much about racial categories while not completely neglecting one or the other. That is the intrusive behavior of positions and identities – the stereotyping and association of one miniscule trait to a huge classification: if one black guy is characteristic A, then all black men must then be characteristic A. In usurping a black and white (and now there’s no use for the politically safe and correct capitalization and quotation marks) dichotomy, the harbingers of Japanocentrism insert blacks into their microcosmic hegemony of alternate universes – you won’t see blacks in worlds that present an imagined, fictitious, utopian, white Japan: blacks in Fruits Basket? Blacks in 5 Centimeters per Second? Blacks in Maria-sama ga Miteru? Lucky Star? The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi? Minami-ke? The list goes on and on. Essentially, and in other words, preconceived notions of blacks are conveniently presented (or hidden behind the curtain of an imagined, perfect-Japan) as whatever kind of fantasized roles Japanocentrism wishes, from samurai to arms dealer to marginalized religious nation. This is not to say that creators and producers of Japanese anime are racist, I absolutely do not think they are, and this is not to say that the theories presented in this essay are always applicable to anime (and are correct in their presumptions) as there are always exceptions – this is not even an investigation into the social effects of racism during an era of cultural globalization (simultaneously, without ignoring and disregarding racism that exists today), it is simply an inquiry into the paradoxical state of Japanocentrism in the cultural representation of black people.

So, with that said, part II on Afro Samurai will be coming sometime in the near future.

Sean Nixon wrote an article on new types of masculinity called “Exhibiting Masculinity” where, upon investigating the cultural representation of half naked men, he also brings up one important concept which I think is important and readily applicable to, well, a shitload of stuff. Nixon remarks that “[i]n particular, the concept of patriarchy is weak at explaining the relations of power between different masculinities,” and that there are “relations of domination and subordination operating between different formations of masculinity” (Nixon, 1997, pp. 300). Harima Kenji, our School Rumble protagonist, undergoes a series of developments, yet his previous states of identity are never really lost; Harima develops in such that we can get a good look at the different kinds of roles he plays that are situational, that is, the type of masculinity he displays depends on the situation, most importantly, in relation to Karasuma.

I think it’s safe to say that our first impression of Harima is a one that reeks of manliness. Beard, bike, beaten-up bastards – all of that is quite masculine. But wait, Harima is also capable of being quite the wimp when it comes to Tenma (although this changes). So we all know that we act differently around certain people. You wouldn’t want to act like you do in a boxing ring around your grandmother. But of course these situations demand different types of masculinity – the fighter, and the domesticated boy, respectively, all of which are latent and displayed at the correct time.

Karasuma is, on the other hand, monolithic and inextricably stoic. Antisocial? Autistic? No, not really, he was in that band…and anime characters have a particular lenience (fetish perhaps, no, definitely) for the silent type – so he is exactly that – the silent man, like that was hard to figure out. Of course this role has been recycled with your minimalist Jin, minimalist Afro Samurai (don’t laugh at me), Morinozuka, and so forth. So Karasuma is almost like a parody of the tall and silent, especially when he has to play the jester (mime?) in those fantastical, awkward situations throughout that love triangle. But even if Karasuma is in himself a satire, he does retain the masculine qualities that constitute, specifically, the silent/refined/elegant/minimalist man. And as we’ve seen, one iteration of the pop-culture samurai fits this description pretty well.

Insofar as Karasuma is situationally homogeneous, he acts as a control to which we can compare Harima. The two instances I clearly remember off the top of my head of Harima/Karasuma interaction are (1) the scene where Karasuma is drinking water and Harima eventually says he likes him and will buy him curry in the future, and (2) when Karasuma and Tenma are at the animal fortune teller.

In the first, and this is before Harima stumbles upon Karasuma and Tenma eating onigiri outside, Harima approaches Karasuma but is seemingly talking to himself while Karasuma drinks. Harima already had a vague inclination that Karasuma was the guy Tenma liked, so of course he is going to play out his alpha-male status by assuming the role of the best-buddy-bro. Harima attempts to establish his hegemony over an unsuspecting (allegedly retarded [exaggeration] in Harima’s delusional mind) Karasuma by subscribing him just as some pal, thereby elevating himself to the likes of the jock (we also don’t know yet that Karasuma is a pro football player?!) that has tons of friends, Karasuma being just one of the unrecognizable many. Harima even says he’ll pay for the curry, as though Karasuma were some poor bastard who couldn’t afford lunch, haha (that’s ironic, you know). Harima’s hypocrisy is fun to laugh at, since it’s just a presentation of the high school social struggle, but who did have power? Karasuma. Here we have the silent masculinity versus the imperialist-asshole masculinity whose words cannot by any means penetrate that steel wall of a poker face. And so Harima only ends up looking like a dumbass while Karasuma walks away unflinchingly in the presence of an alleged badass.

In the second situation, Harima assumes the righteous hero masculinity where he chases after Tenma after Karasuma makes her cry. Again, Harima attempts to display his power by questioning Karasuma’s motives, but, and again, Karasuma basically nullifies any kind of authority by, seemingly, submitting himself to Harima’s will. I think Karasuma said something like, uh, “go.” Then he went to a curry restaurant. But anyway, and this is funny too, Harima is the one who submits to Karasuma’s hegemony now simply by going along with him. In fact it’s almost like Karasuma becomes arrogant when he completely disregards anything besides his love for curry with his matrix style pimpflip onto a pole. In essence, an abridged dialogue would go like this: “You bastard, you made her cry!” “I must eat curry, go to her.” “Yes master!”

In Harima’s case, a patriarchal system is almost never really applicable because he’s always in a subordinate position. Yakumo being the exception, arguably in that she was subservient, yet he was not dominant, otherwise, well…having a completely pathetic male lead would be interesting but I have a feeling that there is a marketability factor behind this. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, the whole Yakumo misunderstanding is pretty funny, overall, but that kind of humor could be converted and amplified in more Tenma/Harima if a questionable Yakumo/Harima relationship were out the question (and in the same way, the Eri/Harima relationship is hilarious in its own right). And while the whole point of this anime is to convey the complexity (sort of…not really) of gender relations, as we get the male dominated Asou/Suou & Ichijou/Imadori (in a very odd fashion…) relation, as well as the female dominated Eri/everyone besides Harima & Yakumo/Hanai relations, we do get a good look at relations of force in masculinity, especially with Harry McKenzie, Harima, and Hanai, and that other guy – and in this particular combination we bring out the badass in all of them, and there’s that one back alley scene I’m talking about.

In exploring more of the masculine-masculine relations, there are a treasure chest full of scenes that you can bring up, one being the sports fest in season I, especially the relay race, but I think I’ve covered the main theme of Harima/Karasuma. In ruminating upon these variations of an overarching masculinity, this “suggests that we need to think about a range of new codings which share a loose family resemblance;” (Ibid., pp. 304) it grants us allowance into traversing the spectrum of masculinity that is Harima Kenji – not some god awfully boring two-dimensional character, but one that is rather flumsy and hard to define.

Works Cited:

Nixon, Sean, “Exhibiting Masculinity,” from “Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices,” (Ed. Stuart Hall) London: Sage Publications, 1997.