Conversations with a Translator: High School 2

Kate: I’ve been reading more manga with high school settings, specifically the series Hana-Kimi by Hisaya Nakajo. And it seems that the more I delve into the genre, the more certain issues swim to the surface, including issues specific to Japanese teen fiction.

It seems like every manga series has at least one volume where the bratty girls drag the heroine up to the roof (geez, where are the hall monitors?) and bully her—I mean, bully her, like beat her up. The hero inevitably shows up to save the day although there’s one very funny series (High School Debut) where the hero shows up only to find that his girlfriend has thrashed the third-year girls.

The reasons for the bullying are, quite bluntly, that the heroine doesn’t know her place. Nobody pretends that the bullying is being done for personal reasons. It’s just “You shouldn’t be dating a senior” or “You get better grades than us.”

How mean are Japanese girls?

Eugene: Good Morning Call has almost the exact same scene. It long ago entered trope territory. But it reflects an ugly reality.

Bullying remains a big problem in Japan’s secondary schools, just as the realities of social class and hierarchy remain omnipresent. In an episode of Cool Japan on NHK, hosts went around asking teenagers and young adults about the traditional class markers in school and business (senpai/kohai: senior/junior, etc.). Hardly anybody was in favor of doing away with them and embracing American-style “egalitarianism.” It’s the water the Japanese still swim in.

Back to School at 35 is a live-action series in which Ayako Baba (Ryoko Yonekura) returns to her alma mater to complete her senior year. It covers all the relevant social issues, especially the problems that arise out of the homeroom class being the same class for all the students in that class for all their subjects. The series similarly concludes with the message that, well, yeah, the system sucks (a root cause in the bullying problem), but we prefer it that way.

One of the best movies in this regard is A Silent Voice (Netflix). It is basically an Afterschool Special, but was produced by Kyoto Animation, so it’s a really good Afterschool Special.

The big difference between boys and girls, of course, is that boys really do beat the crap out of each other.

Loud, sweet-natured, dyed-blond Natsuku from Osaka
Kate: Apparently, being from Osaka is the equivalent of being from the Jersey Shore and carries with it all the class-consciousness, or at least jokes, associated with the “guido” lifestyle (see Bones, “The Maggots in the Meathead”).

Characters in the series are constantly making comments about Osaka and at one point, the mother of an Osaka student shows up. She’s got big hair, a loud mouth, and dangling jewelry. The narrator keeps adding comments like, “Not all people from Osaka are like this,” the implication being that the mother represents common assumptions about Osaka. (This is Osaka, the area, not Osaka, the name, which, according to the helpful narrator’s notes, uses different characters.)

Eugene: During the Edo Period 1603–1868), the Tokugawa shoguns imposed an authoritarian form of federalism on the provinces. This was to keep discontented governors from banding together and overthrowing the regime, which was exactly what happened in 1868. But they kept it at bay for 250 years.

Traveling from one province to another required an internal passport and getting caught without one would get you tossed in jail (though the draw of the big city was enough that many risked it). As a result, the provinces developed distinct identities and dialects.

The traditional Osaka greeting is “How’s business?” A common dubbing mistake is giving characters from Osaka a Southern accent. You’re right; they should sound like they’re from Jersey. “It ain’t personal, it’s business.” After all, the Osaka (Kansai) region is also home to Japan’s biggest and oldest yakuza gangs.

Kate: Speaking of regions, Hokkaido is the “hicks” but in a cool way.

At one point, a manga character who lives in Hokkaido decides to go to Tokyo University. Everyone acts like he’s moving to the moon—America would be closer. I was so puzzled, I looked it up. It appears to be the same distance as Portland, Maine to Washington DC which, granted, is quite a ways (and in Japan, there’s a sea to cross) but not THAT far.

 I've since gotten the impression that it’s the Portland part of the equation that makes Hokkaido the “hicks”—that is, Hokkaido is “hicks” like Maine is “hicks” (as opposed to Arkansas “hicks”). It’s remote and mysterious and kind of otherworldly. Which is pretty much how people in Washington State reacted when I told them I was moving to Maine.

Eugene: Hokkaido is like Maine married to Minnesota only with volcanoes and earthquakes. There’s a ton of open land, but given the choice, hot and crowded Tokyo wins out every time. For example, Nana (HIDIVE) begins with two girls fleeing the sticks for the big city. Enough people are doing it that many rural towns in Hokkaido and elsewhere are drying up and blowing away.

Fifty years ago, the coal town of Yubari, made famous in the 1977 Yoji Yamada film, The Yellow Handkerchief, had a population of 120,000. Since the mines closed in the 1980s, the population has declined by over 90 percent.

A cute anime series that takes place in Hokkaido is Figure 17 (Tubi). An elementary school student moves to Hokkaido with her father (he’s apprenticing at a farm bakery) and runs into a bunch of aliens. It’s The X-Files meets Little House on the Prairie. The aliens aside, it puts the region in a romantic light (man-eating monsters aside), to the extent of making all that wilderness look downright exotic. 

Kate: Hey, I could go for The X-Files meets Little House on the Prairie. In fact, that may be Supernatural!

The deserted element definitely shows up in the manga I read! If a series has a ghost story, it takes place on Hokkaido. That is, Hokkaido is where spooky stuff happens—in the woods. Likewise, the two questions I was asked by folks in Washington State about my move to Maine were “Will you see a moose?” and “Will you see Stephen King?” (A third was, "Isn't Maine in Canada?") Bizarrely, I’ve seen the latter in-person but not the former.

Speaking of Americans, an assumption throughout many manga series is that Americans kiss more—all the time, constantly, and they kiss everyone and everything from pets to family members to significant others to people in the street. I think this perception may mostly be due to television.

Eugene: Actually, according to the people who measure such things, American do kiss more than Japanese (though not as much as Europeans). For what it’s worth, there’s more kissing in shojo manga than on Japanese TV. You can watch a bio pic series on NHK that covers the protagonist’s entire life, including marriage and children, and not see a single kiss.

You know what you see instead? Hugs. Like the nosebleed, it’s become symbolic shorthand for everything else.  

Kate: I’ve noticed the nosebleeds! In fact, the latest version of Emma hilariously uses it. At the climax, Mr. Knightly asks Emma to marry him and she is so stunned--because she once again misread the situation--she has a nosebleed. She crossly borrows his handkerchief and then declares that she is going to fix matters with her best friend who is in love with Mr. Knightly. I had to wonder if the director, Autumn de Wilde, was influenced by Japanese manga.

How symbolic is the nosebleed? Nineteenth-century women swooned. Not as much as literature depicts, but they did swoon (possibly due to corsets). Is the nosebleed a common occurrence, an uncommon occurrence that provides go-to emotional relief, or purely symbolic?  

Eugene: By this point, it’s entered the realm of the purely symbolic. For example, the aforementioned hugs. In Hanako and Anne (on NHK), there is a dramatic hug in the pouring rain between Hanako and Eiji, her future husband, but at the time married to somebody else. The plot developments and dialogue that follow only make sense if they slept (or almost slept) together, but that is left entirely to the imagination.

 As noted, the exception, and a fascinating example of cultural compartmentalization, is manga (and to a lesser extent, anime). Cheese! is an imprint of Flower Comics that targets a female audience starting in the late teens. It is often as explicit and gratuitous as Japanese law allows. A recent review of Yakuza Lover on ANN, published in Japan under the Cheese! imprint, reminded me of my Cheese! posts.

In one of those posts, I quote Tokyo-based writer Roland Kelts, who argues that

the strict codes of etiquette and behavior that govern daily life in Japan also allow for an extraordinary degree of creative and social permissiveness, the freedom to explore other identities, to test the limits of possibility.

It follows that, at least in terms of mainstream entertainment, the less abstract the artform (the live-action drama being not abstract at all), the more morally constrained it will necessarily become.

I wonder if there is something here that accounts for the huge success of manga and anime overseas, at the same time that Kdrama is orders of magnitude more popular than Jdrama. Unlike manga in the same genre, the characters in a Jdrama like Good Morning Call can at times feel they were transported out of a 1950s Golden Age sit-com.

To be continued as Kate discovers and inquires about more themes and tropes and motifs!

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