Iwa ni Hana

Quite in spite of its illustrious pedigree with Kenji “Ghost in the Shell” Kamiyama as director, the general impression the 11-episode anime series Eden of the East gave me is that it is like a game of bingo. The story and the marketing are all about hitting certain sets of keywords that you know you have heard somewhere else in various combinations before. Of these keywords, there are two I would like to focus on – one is 正しい道 [tadashii michi] which means “the correct path,” and the other is kuuki 空気 [kuuki] which means “air”.

In Eden of the East, the antagonist is billed as an old man who takes it upon himself to guide the country to “the correct path,” and goes about it by giving twelve randomly chosen individuals 10 billion yen each to spend as they believe would revive the country; meanwhile, the protagonist is billed as “a young man who fights against the air of this country” and is among the twelve individuals chosen. Now, “air” is a loaded word in Japanese politics. For more explanation I would suggest this article by Joichi Ito on The New York Times dated 2007. Joichi Ito is an insightful blogger whom I have been following for several years and the plot of Eden of the East happened to remind me of one of his most interesting blog entries back in 2004 about the cultural context of money in Japan:

One important Japanese businessman once told me. Power in Japan is not about having money yourself. It is about having the influence to move money.

“The correct path” is likewise loaded word. Just the other day, I was browsing through the newly released and best selling section at a Japanese bookstore, and noticed that the late Shitamura Osamu’s (下村治) controversial book dated 1987 with the title It is not Japan’s fault – It is America’s fault (日本は悪くない ― 悪いのはアメリカだ) has come back in a popular reprint edition. The book comes with a cover slip that says, In this book, the “correct path” that Japan should follow is shown (本書にこそ、日本が進むべき「正しい道」が示されている). “The correct path” pops up here and there in public discourse and this is just one instance that I can cite from memory. It is also unsurprisingly an obsession of the antagonist in Eden of the East.

Sermons of “the correct path” is a something of an thriving genre in the Japanese publishing industry – the writing, publishing and purchasing of these books keep a lot of people fed. I skim through some of them at bookstores from time to time, and am sometimes struck in awe by how hungry people must be for answers. It follows that when I first learned of the storyline of Eden of the East, my gut feeling was that commercially-speaking this whole anime project took aim at this mass hunger for answers. People do not just tune into this show for a story, they tune in for answers about the future of Japan and about life at large.

But connecting a string of words as you would in a game of bingo does not really make an answer. I for one have low hopes that the two theatrical films planned for release this year and next year would shred more light where the 11-episode TV series failed. Did anyone else feel the same (or differently)?