Preface
The book in your hands — Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime — will help you discover the connection between contemporary filmic images and certain subtexts of antiquity. Using select Japanese movies as case studies, this book brings to light mythological tropes and motifs embedded in recent popular cinematic productions. If you have wondered about the source of such mythological symbolism in Japanese film, this is the right book for you.
Japanese Mythology in Film is not about the mythic practices of Japanese religions, however. The word mythology as used in this book does not denote the theology or ritual practices of religions. Instead, it refers to the stories and allegories of deities and humans, the afterlife, and natural phenomena and supernatural forces as well as to other myths and legends of the mainstream and folk religions of Japan. It is not a genre-by-genre description of popular anime and movies of Japan, either. Rather, Japanese Mythology in Film guides you through the narratives and visuals represented semiotically in many “secular” box office hits such as Departures (2008), Spirited Away (2001), and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004). Why is it important to examine the cinematic adaptation of mythology? These myth-filled movies are retellings of ancient human drama and time-honored wisdom that have contemporary relevance. Why, then, apply semiotics to this particular task? Most importantly, semiotics is a form of film scholarship that guide us to in-depth textual analysis and reveals the encoded sociocultural views of the filmic narrative under study. The crux of my argument is that it is through the lens of semiotics that the interconnection of mythology and film can be better illustrated. I want to establish that semiotics can be used as a tool for uncovering signifiers of Japanese mythology hidden in this particular pop culture medium and that visual literacy or cultural literacy can be developed as an outcome. That is why semiotics serves as a methodology of analysis in this book.
The French semiotician Barthes (1972) argued that pop culture is an encompassing system that recycles socially encoded meanings of Western culture for commercial purposes. Certainly, he did not intend to assert that profit making is the only goal for which pop culture uses encoded messages. Nor did he mean to contend that embedding symbolic meaning in the mass media is a sui generis phenomenon of Western culture. In both the West and the East, filmmakers, novelists, and comic book writers frequently employ ancient myths and folktales to raise a contemporary social issue. Mythology is a great canvas for these contemporary storytellers to use to reacquaint audiences with cultural values and virtues or even to confront outdated attitudes and conventions. For this reason, the ancient tales of the Kojiki and the legend of the Lady Moon (Princess Kaguya) are adapted, whether intentionally or not, and transformed as “new” narratives via popular Japanese movies and anime.1 As Barthes (1972) stated, mythology is a metalanguage, a special mode of language designed to communicate culturally significant messages that have gained value through repeated social usage.
The book’s primary target audience is undergraduate students who are studying or are interested in Japanese language and culture. Any reader who is curious about Japanese film and its interconnectedness with Japanese mythology including religion and folklore is also welcome. For graduate students, the book may serve as an introductory guide to semiotic analysis of popular Japanese movies and anime.2 The book is also adaptable to other college-level courses designed to develop visual and cultural literacy. Unlike books with Japan as the specific area of study, this book is designed to be adaptable to college-level courses by instructors of other foreign languages who elect to apply film as a way of teaching culture or by professors of film studies who wish to include Japanese cinema in their coursework for a more diverse perspective on the afterlife, grieving, and other recurring motifs of mythology.
The book is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on semiotics as a tool of film analysis, guiding the reader through questions such as “What is semiotics, and how does it work as a tool of analysis,” “What does semiotics do that other methods of film analysis don’t,” and “What are the benefits of learning semiotics?” Part I draws on insights and strategies proposed by specialists in semiotics such as Arthur Asa Berger (Seeing is Believing, 2008, McGraw-Hill), Daniel Chandler (Semiotics: The Basics, 2002, Routledge), and Marcel Danesi (The Quest for Meaning: A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice, 2007, University of Toronto Press). While these authors apply semiotics to a vast array of media forms (including music and advertisement), this book focuses on its application to film only. Chapter 1 introduces the theory of semiotics while Chapter 2 provides the rationale for choosing semiotics as the theoretical lens for film analysis. The latter discusses the nature of interpretation by describing a branch of semiotics — film semiotics — and its key concepts such as tropes and intertextuality that are important in analyzing film. Chapter 3 defines what is meant by the key term mythology in this book and provides an overview of the Japanese myths and legends embedded in popular films.3 Chapter 4 examines the topics of narratology and transformation, which are also relevant to film semiotics. It discusses what to look for in the cinematic representation of mythology and how ancient tales and legends are transformed into the narrative of contemporary films. In Chapter 5, the topic of visual literacy and the relationship between semiotics and visual literacy are explored, and the ways in which visual literacy yields academic benefits and helps foreign language learners are discussed. With Part I’s focus on the teaching of semiotics, the book can be used as a main or supplemental textbook in media and culture studies classes as well as in foreign language courses.
Part II analyzes eight Japanese films that have proved popular not only with Japanese audiences but also with audiences for whom Japanese is not their native language. For each film, I begin with background information such as the film’s source text and the filmmaker’s comments made publicly in Japan, provide an in-depth discussion of Japanese mythological themes and symbols related to the plot, and suggest further reading at the end. I do not intend that these eight films be interpreted as entirely representative of mythology-infused Japanese cinema. They are presented solely as examples of the range of Japanese films with mythological content. The reader’s personal experience with the cinema of this particular genre can be incorporated into this part of the book. All the case studies of this book were tested with hundreds of students who took my course, Japanese Mythology through Film, and received favorable responses. The eight films I selected are mainstream Japanese anime or feature films (no documentaries) made within the last fifteen years. Each film is structured with a clear narrative containing relatively well-known mythological subtext. It is my hope that this book can help open your eyes to the worlds beyond your familiar cultural boundaries. If it helps you watch popular films from a semiotic perspective, analyze the Japanese films you have previously watched from a different angle, or successfully integrate films into your own language or culture courses, then I have accomplished my mission.
It might appear rather odd that we experience utter pleasure from consuming narratives of imaginary people and fictional events presented in media such as film. Public obsession with popular cultural characters is a cross-cultural phenomenon. In Japan, the finale of the manga Tomorrow’s Joe was “the talk of all Japan” (Koyama-Richard 2008). When one of the characters died, the fans of this manga staged a real funeral. They cried and mourned for that fictional man as if he were their close friend. As Taichi Takeshita, a Japanese anime fan, feelings for the characters can be so intense that some fans desire to join the “two-dimensional world.”5
No other sentient being invests so much energy and time in the imaginative world. It’s a human thing. My love of film, particularly those with mythological themes, lies in my own experience of finding in the narrative of the imaginative world the insights that are applicable and useful in my real-life situations. It’s a universal phenomenon. A steady production of new films with mythological themes reflects a continuing demand for such stories everywhere in the world.
There are a handful of books that analyze popular U.S. films with a particular focus on religious motifs drawn from Christianity. For example, Deacy and Ortiz’s (2008) Theology and Film, Deacy’s (2005) Faith in Film, McDannell’s (2008) Catholics in the Movies, and Miles’(1996) Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies analyze religious symbolism in popular Hollywood films as well as in other U.S. films. The Journal of Religion & Film and collections of papers such as Representing Religion in World Cinema (edited by Brent Plate 2003) and Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, Rituals (edited by John Lyden 2003) do include non-Christian, non-Western film analyses to a minor extent. However, the volume of that coverage is much smaller than that of Judeo-Christian symbolism in Hollywood films. There is also growing, international popularity of Japanese feature films and animated movies. Why does no one write about Japanese cinematic hits that encompass a variety of mythological motifs? Unlike Japanese audiences, international viewers unfamiliar with Japanese mythology are likely to miss the visual and linguistic signs rooted in its ancient myths and folktales. This book was written to fill that gap. Japanese Mythology in Film analyzes ancient metaphors and visual symbols of Japanese religious subtexts in films globally popularized in recent years.
This book evolved from my course of the same title, Japanese Mythology through Film, taught at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. However, on a personal note, the inspiration for this book was the passing of my close friend, Haunani Bernardino. When cancer quickly transformed her from a lively, high-spirited college professor to a lifeless victim of this debilitating illness, I “woke up” in a sense. I realized that life is short, too short to postpone following one’s dream.
My dream was to write a book based on my course about Japanese mythology, which I taught passionately for several years. But my time was consumed by raising a child and caring for an aging parent as well as by the regular semester’s teaching load and all the academic endeavors required for tenure and promotion. As soon as I received tenure, I launched upon the adventure of writing the book I had always dreamed of writing. Like the beginning of many adventures, I had no clue where and how to start. Slowly, however, the world appeared to conspire to provide what I needed, and doors started to open for me. Some chapters of this book were based on my published articles, “Semiotics of Japan’s Mountain Ascetics,” which appeared in The American Journal of Semiotics, Volume 23, Number 1/4, and “Shinto and Buddhist Metaphors in "Departures,” which appeared in The Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 17, Issue 1, April, 2013, Article 39. The book also draws on the fieldwork in Japan upon which I embarked in summer
2011, supported by a research grant from the Hawai’i Council for the Humanities. I was then invited to teach at Nanzan University’s Center for Japanese Studies in spring 2014 and was able to revise my lecture notes from the film course and research reports of the fieldwork during my fellowship in Japan. Even though there were some unexpected interruptions along the way, my passion for completing this book never waned at any point of this long journey. I am still spellbound by the topics of Japanese mythology and film. I hope you, who happen to hold this very book in your hands, find the magic is contagious.
The recent release of the anime The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) by Studio Ghibli is a case in point for this argument. As the Association of Asian Studies pointed out in their spring 2012 newsletter, there are a growing number of dissertations on popular culture (film, TV, music, cuisine etc.).
To sharpen my analytical eye in the identification of myths and legends in the selected films, I took part in three different types of religious training activities in Japan in 2011: a Tendai-sect Buddhist monastery program at Mount Hiei, a Shikoku ohenro (pilgrimage), and a yamabushi program of the austerities. The Hawai’i Council for the Humanities supported my fieldwork in preparation for the book. The story of Tomorrow’s Joe was written by Takamori Asao and its drawings were made by Chiba Tetsuya. Originally titled Ashita no Jō in Japanese, the series debuted in 1967; the story was about a runaway orphan and lone-wolf boxer named Yabuki Jō who possessed a samurai-like konjō (willpower) spirit. Its popularity peaked with left-wing student activist movements on university campuses during the 1970s. A Japanese man named Taichi Takashita petitioned online for the legalization of marriage with cartoon characters in 2008. More than 1,000 equally passionate anime fans in Japan signed his petition.
The book in your hands — Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime — will help you discover the connection between contemporary filmic images and certain subtexts of antiquity. Using select Japanese movies as case studies, this book brings to light mythological tropes and motifs embedded in recent popular cinematic productions. If you have wondered about the source of such mythological symbolism in Japanese film, this is the right book for you.
Japanese Mythology in Film is not about the mythic practices of Japanese religions, however. The word mythology as used in this book does not denote the theology or ritual practices of religions. Instead, it refers to the stories and allegories of deities and humans, the afterlife, and natural phenomena and supernatural forces as well as to other myths and legends of the mainstream and folk religions of Japan. It is not a genre-by-genre description of popular anime and movies of Japan, either. Rather, Japanese Mythology in Film guides you through the narratives and visuals represented semiotically in many “secular” box office hits such as Departures (2008), Spirited Away (2001), and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004). Why is it important to examine the cinematic adaptation of mythology? These myth-filled movies are retellings of ancient human drama and time-honored wisdom that have contemporary relevance. Why, then, apply semiotics to this particular task? Most importantly, semiotics is a form of film scholarship that guide us to in-depth textual analysis and reveals the encoded sociocultural views of the filmic narrative under study. The crux of my argument is that it is through the lens of semiotics that the interconnection of mythology and film can be better illustrated. I want to establish that semiotics can be used as a tool for uncovering signifiers of Japanese mythology hidden in this particular pop culture medium and that visual literacy or cultural literacy can be developed as an outcome. That is why semiotics serves as a methodology of analysis in this book.
The French semiotician Barthes (1972) argued that pop culture is an encompassing system that recycles socially encoded meanings of Western culture for commercial purposes. Certainly, he did not intend to assert that profit making is the only goal for which pop culture uses encoded messages. Nor did he mean to contend that embedding symbolic meaning in the mass media is a sui generis phenomenon of Western culture. In both the West and the East, filmmakers, novelists, and comic book writers frequently employ ancient myths and folktales to raise a contemporary social issue. Mythology is a great canvas for these contemporary storytellers to use to reacquaint audiences with cultural values and virtues or even to confront outdated attitudes and conventions. For this reason, the ancient tales of the Kojiki and the legend of the Lady Moon (Princess Kaguya) are adapted, whether intentionally or not, and transformed as “new” narratives via popular Japanese movies and anime.1 As Barthes (1972) stated, mythology is a metalanguage, a special mode of language designed to communicate culturally significant messages that have gained value through repeated social usage.
The book’s primary target audience is undergraduate students who are studying or are interested in Japanese language and culture. Any reader who is curious about Japanese film and its interconnectedness with Japanese mythology including religion and folklore is also welcome. For graduate students, the book may serve as an introductory guide to semiotic analysis of popular Japanese movies and anime.2 The book is also adaptable to other college-level courses designed to develop visual and cultural literacy. Unlike books with Japan as the specific area of study, this book is designed to be adaptable to college-level courses by instructors of other foreign languages who elect to apply film as a way of teaching culture or by professors of film studies who wish to include Japanese cinema in their coursework for a more diverse perspective on the afterlife, grieving, and other recurring motifs of mythology.
The book is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on semiotics as a tool of film analysis, guiding the reader through questions such as “What is semiotics, and how does it work as a tool of analysis,” “What does semiotics do that other methods of film analysis don’t,” and “What are the benefits of learning semiotics?” Part I draws on insights and strategies proposed by specialists in semiotics such as Arthur Asa Berger (Seeing is Believing, 2008, McGraw-Hill), Daniel Chandler (Semiotics: The Basics, 2002, Routledge), and Marcel Danesi (The Quest for Meaning: A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice, 2007, University of Toronto Press). While these authors apply semiotics to a vast array of media forms (including music and advertisement), this book focuses on its application to film only. Chapter 1 introduces the theory of semiotics while Chapter 2 provides the rationale for choosing semiotics as the theoretical lens for film analysis. The latter discusses the nature of interpretation by describing a branch of semiotics — film semiotics — and its key concepts such as tropes and intertextuality that are important in analyzing film. Chapter 3 defines what is meant by the key term mythology in this book and provides an overview of the Japanese myths and legends embedded in popular films.3 Chapter 4 examines the topics of narratology and transformation, which are also relevant to film semiotics. It discusses what to look for in the cinematic representation of mythology and how ancient tales and legends are transformed into the narrative of contemporary films. In Chapter 5, the topic of visual literacy and the relationship between semiotics and visual literacy are explored, and the ways in which visual literacy yields academic benefits and helps foreign language learners are discussed. With Part I’s focus on the teaching of semiotics, the book can be used as a main or supplemental textbook in media and culture studies classes as well as in foreign language courses.
Part II analyzes eight Japanese films that have proved popular not only with Japanese audiences but also with audiences for whom Japanese is not their native language. For each film, I begin with background information such as the film’s source text and the filmmaker’s comments made publicly in Japan, provide an in-depth discussion of Japanese mythological themes and symbols related to the plot, and suggest further reading at the end. I do not intend that these eight films be interpreted as entirely representative of mythology-infused Japanese cinema. They are presented solely as examples of the range of Japanese films with mythological content. The reader’s personal experience with the cinema of this particular genre can be incorporated into this part of the book. All the case studies of this book were tested with hundreds of students who took my course, Japanese Mythology through Film, and received favorable responses. The eight films I selected are mainstream Japanese anime or feature films (no documentaries) made within the last fifteen years. Each film is structured with a clear narrative containing relatively well-known mythological subtext. It is my hope that this book can help open your eyes to the worlds beyond your familiar cultural boundaries. If it helps you watch popular films from a semiotic perspective, analyze the Japanese films you have previously watched from a different angle, or successfully integrate films into your own language or culture courses, then I have accomplished my mission.
It might appear rather odd that we experience utter pleasure from consuming narratives of imaginary people and fictional events presented in media such as film. Public obsession with popular cultural characters is a cross-cultural phenomenon. In Japan, the finale of the manga Tomorrow’s Joe was “the talk of all Japan” (Koyama-Richard 2008). When one of the characters died, the fans of this manga staged a real funeral. They cried and mourned for that fictional man as if he were their close friend. As Taichi Takeshita, a Japanese anime fan, feelings for the characters can be so intense that some fans desire to join the “two-dimensional world.”5
No other sentient being invests so much energy and time in the imaginative world. It’s a human thing. My love of film, particularly those with mythological themes, lies in my own experience of finding in the narrative of the imaginative world the insights that are applicable and useful in my real-life situations. It’s a universal phenomenon. A steady production of new films with mythological themes reflects a continuing demand for such stories everywhere in the world.
There are a handful of books that analyze popular U.S. films with a particular focus on religious motifs drawn from Christianity. For example, Deacy and Ortiz’s (2008) Theology and Film, Deacy’s (2005) Faith in Film, McDannell’s (2008) Catholics in the Movies, and Miles’(1996) Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies analyze religious symbolism in popular Hollywood films as well as in other U.S. films. The Journal of Religion & Film and collections of papers such as Representing Religion in World Cinema (edited by Brent Plate 2003) and Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, Rituals (edited by John Lyden 2003) do include non-Christian, non-Western film analyses to a minor extent. However, the volume of that coverage is much smaller than that of Judeo-Christian symbolism in Hollywood films. There is also growing, international popularity of Japanese feature films and animated movies. Why does no one write about Japanese cinematic hits that encompass a variety of mythological motifs? Unlike Japanese audiences, international viewers unfamiliar with Japanese mythology are likely to miss the visual and linguistic signs rooted in its ancient myths and folktales. This book was written to fill that gap. Japanese Mythology in Film analyzes ancient metaphors and visual symbols of Japanese religious subtexts in films globally popularized in recent years.
This book evolved from my course of the same title, Japanese Mythology through Film, taught at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. However, on a personal note, the inspiration for this book was the passing of my close friend, Haunani Bernardino. When cancer quickly transformed her from a lively, high-spirited college professor to a lifeless victim of this debilitating illness, I “woke up” in a sense. I realized that life is short, too short to postpone following one’s dream.
My dream was to write a book based on my course about Japanese mythology, which I taught passionately for several years. But my time was consumed by raising a child and caring for an aging parent as well as by the regular semester’s teaching load and all the academic endeavors required for tenure and promotion. As soon as I received tenure, I launched upon the adventure of writing the book I had always dreamed of writing. Like the beginning of many adventures, I had no clue where and how to start. Slowly, however, the world appeared to conspire to provide what I needed, and doors started to open for me. Some chapters of this book were based on my published articles, “Semiotics of Japan’s Mountain Ascetics,” which appeared in The American Journal of Semiotics, Volume 23, Number 1/4, and “Shinto and Buddhist Metaphors in "Departures,” which appeared in The Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 17, Issue 1, April, 2013, Article 39. The book also draws on the fieldwork in Japan upon which I embarked in summer
2011, supported by a research grant from the Hawai’i Council for the Humanities. I was then invited to teach at Nanzan University’s Center for Japanese Studies in spring 2014 and was able to revise my lecture notes from the film course and research reports of the fieldwork during my fellowship in Japan. Even though there were some unexpected interruptions along the way, my passion for completing this book never waned at any point of this long journey. I am still spellbound by the topics of Japanese mythology and film. I hope you, who happen to hold this very book in your hands, find the magic is contagious.
The recent release of the anime The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) by Studio Ghibli is a case in point for this argument. As the Association of Asian Studies pointed out in their spring 2012 newsletter, there are a growing number of dissertations on popular culture (film, TV, music, cuisine etc.).
To sharpen my analytical eye in the identification of myths and legends in the selected films, I took part in three different types of religious training activities in Japan in 2011: a Tendai-sect Buddhist monastery program at Mount Hiei, a Shikoku ohenro (pilgrimage), and a yamabushi program of the austerities. The Hawai’i Council for the Humanities supported my fieldwork in preparation for the book. The story of Tomorrow’s Joe was written by Takamori Asao and its drawings were made by Chiba Tetsuya. Originally titled Ashita no Jō in Japanese, the series debuted in 1967; the story was about a runaway orphan and lone-wolf boxer named Yabuki Jō who possessed a samurai-like konjō (willpower) spirit. Its popularity peaked with left-wing student activist movements on university campuses during the 1970s. A Japanese man named Taichi Takashita petitioned online for the legalization of marriage with cartoon characters in 2008. More than 1,000 equally passionate anime fans in Japan signed his petition.
