Japanese anime draws on religious traditions
I have spent years studying and teaching Japanese anime, exploring how its narratives intertwine with cultural, philosophical and religious traditions. One of the most compelling aspects of Japanese anime is its ability to merge thrilling action with deep spiritual and ethical questions.
'Demon Slayer: Mugen Train,' which shattered Japanese box-office records for earnings and ended up as 2020's highest-grossing film in the world, is a prime example of how anime engages with these profound themes. With 'Demon Slayer' continuing its global success, it is an opportune time to examine how it intertwines Buddhist, Shinto and samurai traditions into a narrative of heroism, impermanence and moral struggle.
Anime often explores spiritual and philosophical questions by drawing on Japan's religious traditions to examine themes of fate, self-sacrifice and the struggle between desire and duty.
Hayao Miyazaki's 'Princess Mononoke,' for example, follows Prince Ashitaka, who is cursed by a demon and must journey to find a cure. His quest leads him into a conflict between the industrialized Irontown, which seeks to expand by clearing forests, and the spirits of the natural world, including the Deer God, a divine being that governs life and death.
The film reflects Shinto principles by portraying nature as sacred and inhabited by 'kami,' or spiritual beings. It emphasizes harmony between humans and the environment and the consequences of disrupting this balance.
Scholar Melissa Croteau, in her book 'Transcendence and Spirituality in Japanese Cinema,' notes how Miyazaki's films use nature spirits to critique modernity's detachment from the sacredness of the environment. A still from 'Spirited Away' in which 10-year-old Chihiro must learn to navigate an unseen world. Image: GoodFon.com, CC BY-NC
Similarly, his 2001 animated film 'Spirited Away' reflects animist ideas in Japanese culture, where spirits are believed to inhabit natural elements and even everyday objects. Set in a mysterious Japanese bathhouse filled with 'kami,' 10-year-old Chihiro, once shy and afraid of change, learns to navigate this hidden world and transforms along the way.
A key moment in the film is the arrival of a polluted river spirit, which appears as a filthy, sludge-covered creature but is revealed to be a once-pristine river god, burdened by human waste. This scene embodies the animist belief that natural entities have their own spirit and must be respected. It also reinforces an environmental message: When nature is polluted or mistreated, it loses its vitality, but with care and reverence it can be restored.
'Neon Genesis Evangelion,' a landmark Japanese anime television series that aired from 1995 to 1996, engages with deep philosophical ideas, particularly existentialist questions of identity and purpose. Set in a postapocalyptic world, the series follows 14-year-old Shinji Ikari, who is recruited to pilot a giant biomechanical weapon called an evangelion to defend humanity against mysterious beings known as Angels.
As Shinji and his fellow pilots struggle with their roles, the series explores themes of isolation, self-worth and the challenges of forming close, meaningful relationships. It draws from both Buddhist and Gnostic thought, which emphasize a focus on inner spiritual knowledge and the belief that clinging too tightly to the material world causes suffering. Evangelion portrays suffering as arising from attachment and the inability to form meaningful relationships.
What sets 'Mugen Train' apart is its focus on the internal conflicts of its characters, symbolized by their battles with demons. These demons represent human suffering and attachment, themes deeply influenced by Buddhist thought. At the heart of the film is Kyojuro Rengoku, a demon slayer who embodies unwavering selflessness and honor. https://www.youtube.com/embed/wurz7urUGtM?wmode=transparent&start=0 Rengoku's flame-breathing forms.
Rengoku's fire-based fighting style is deeply symbolic. In Japanese culture, fire represents both destruction and renewal. The Kurama Fire Festival, held annually on Oct. 22 in Kyoto, is a Shinto ritual where large torches are carried through the streets to ward off evil and purify the land.
Similarly, Buddhist goma fire ceremonies involve priests burning wooden sticks in sacred flames to symbolize the eradication of ignorance and desire. Rengoku's own techniques reflect this duality: His flames cleanse the world of evil while signifying his unwavering spirit. https://www.youtube.com/embed/itz80UqyV54?wmode=transparent&start=0 Goma fire ritual.
Bushido, the samurai code of honor, underpins Rengoku's character. Rooted in Confucian ethics, Zen Buddhism and Shinto beliefs, this code emphasizes loyalty, self-sacrifice and duty to protect others. His mother's teaching – 'The strong must protect the weak' – guides his every action, reflecting the Confucian value of filial piety and the moral obligation to serve society.
Bushido's connection to Zen Buddhism, with its focus on discipline and acceptance of impermanence, further shapes Rengoku's unwavering resolve, while its Shinto influences reinforce his role as a guardian upholding a sacred duty.
Even approaching death, Rengoku remains steadfast, accepting impermanence, or 'mujō,' a fundamental Buddhist principle that sees beauty in life's transience. His sacrifice teaches that true strength lies in selflessness and moral integrity.
Opposing Rengoku is Akaza, a demon who embodies the destructive consequences of clinging to power and immortality. Once human, Akaza became a demon in his obsession with strength, unable to accept the impermanence of life.
His refusal to acknowledge death aligns with Buddhist teachings that suffering arises from attachment and desire. Scholars such as Jacqueline Stone have explored how Buddhist texts portray clinging to existence as a fundamental source of suffering, a theme vividly reflected in Akaza's character.
Visual elements reinforce Akaza's symbolism. His body is covered in tattoos reminiscent of 'irezumi,' traditional Japanese body art historically associated with crime and hardship. In Edo-period Japan, tattoos were often used to mark criminals, branding them as outcasts from society.
Even today, irezumi remains stigmatized in many parts of Japan, with some public bathhouses, gyms and swimming pools barring individuals with visible tattoos due to their historical association with the yakuza. In contemporary anime, tattooed characters frequently symbolize a troubled past or inner turmoil, reinforcing Akaza's role as a figure trapped by his own suffering and destructive path.
Akaza's irezumi visually conveys his entrapment in cycles of suffering, reinforcing his contrast with Rengoku's liberating flames.
The battle between Rengoku and Akaza is more than a fight between good and evil; it is a clash between two worldviews – selflessness versus egoism, acceptance versus attachment. 'Mugen Train' taps into universal human struggles, making its themes resonate far beyond Japan.
The film's exploration of impermanence, moral duty and the pursuit of meaning contributes to anime's broader legacy as a medium that entertains while provoking deep philosophical reflection.
As 'Demon Slayer' continues to captivate audiences worldwide, evidenced by social media buzz around its new projects and the ongoing enthusiasm of fans, its success underscores anime's ability to blend action with profound themes.
Whether through Rengoku's selfless courage or Akaza's tragic downfall, 'Mugen Train' offers a timeless meditation on what it means to live with purpose and integrity.
Ronald S. Green is a professor in and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Coastal Carolina University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Asia Times
16-05-2025
- Asia Times
Lafcadio Hearn: the foreign correspondent as double agent
This is a story of how, a century and a quarter ago in Japan, a remarkable Anglo-Irish-Greek foreign correspondent called Lafcadio Hearn pulled off an unusual feat: He became admired not only by the readers he was writing for in America and Europe, who knew little about Japan, but also by the Japanese themselves, who knew rather a lot. He is no longer well known in Europe or America, except among specialists, but in Japan he remains an object of study, of admiration and even, for some, of veneration. How many foreign correspondents have museums dedicated to them in the countries about which they were writing? This is even more surprising than it may sound. The best foreign correspondents often end up annoying or at least irritating their hosts. After all, their job is to report what is going on, warts and all, and few governments or elites like the warts to be pointed out. 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The exoticiser who went native The Japan to which Lafcadio Hearn arrived by ship in 1890 from the United States, where he had been working as a journalist and author in Cincinnati and New Orleans, was of course a place very different from the country we know today. After two centuries of self-imposed isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan had in 1853 reluctantly opened up to European and American trade, technology and diplomacy and then suffered two turbulent, violent decades of civil war and disorder. With the restoration of the Japanese emperor at the helm of government in 1868 in a coup d'etat and the establishment in 1889 of a new constitution with the country's first ever parliament, albeit elected by a limited franchise, the country that greeted Hearn was also embarked on an urgent, determined strategy of modernization and Westernization, so as to heal domestic divisions and to stave off foreign threats. But to Westerners it was also wonderfully exotic, with an influx of Japan's art and design to Europe bringing about the late 19th century fad of Japonisme. You need only to watch Gilbert & Sullivan's 1885 comic opera, 'The Mikado,' to see how Japanese images could even then be translated and distorted in popular culture back home. Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born in Greece in 1850 as the son of a Greek mother and Anglo-Irish father, whose marriage was later annulled – and then both parents in effect deserted him, leaving Lafcadio to be raised by relatives in Ireland and schooled in England. All that made him, arguably, a classic product of the British empire, albeit at the poor end of the range: somewhat stateless, with a mixed, perhaps confused, identity, but also able to make his way in the great country of stateless migrants of the era, the United States. 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In a strict, modern sense, he also wasn't what we now think of as a foreign correspondent as he fell out with his editors at Harper's quite soon after arriving in Japan, had to find work teaching English, and managed to make money from his writing chiefly through getting books published rather than from newspapers or magazines. But in an era when such news reports as existed were sent by seaborne mail and when readers had little knowledge of the countries being written about, books frequently satisfied the need for information, understanding and entertainment that media of all kinds satisfy today. In his most well-known books, alongside the Odd and the Exotic he also sought to describe ordinary life in Japan. Quite a few books had by the 1890s already been written about Japan by Britons, Americans and other foreigners who had arrived before him, whether as diplomats, teachers, engineers or government advisers, but most were in effect travelers' tales rather than in-depth studies. 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Contemporary western readers of Hearn, like audiences of Gilbert & Sullivan, will have thought of Japan as a mysterious place: partly wonderful, partly weird, partly entertaining. What Hearn also told them was that the Japanese were a people one could admire, one could be interested in – but whom one could never really understand properly. From Marco Polo to Sofia Coppola He lived in Japan for the last 14 years of his short life (he died in 1904 at 54 years old), took a Japanese name and built a Japanese family of four children with Setsuko, but never mastered the Japanese language. Arguably, he idealized Japan while always feeling it was impenetrably different from the Europe and America that he knew. Hearn was far from the first to view Japan as both different and exotic. Indeed 600 years earlier another sort of foreign correspondent, the Italian Marco Polo, had reported the existence of a country he called 'Zipangu,' or the land of gold, which he had never visited but had been told about during his visit to Beijing. 'The King's Palace,' said Travels of Marco Polo, 'is roofed with pure gold and his floors are paved in gold two fingers thick.' Perhaps we should blame Polo's ghostwriter, Rustichello da Pisa, for bigging up the rumor his employer had brought home with him. In modern times Polo's 'Zipangu' also came in handy when used as a term of abuse, by a group of Japanese who became angered by what they saw as stereotyped, misleading coverage in the New York Times in the mid-1990s by that newspaper's Tokyo correspondent, Nicholas Kristof. The group, who were themselves based in New York, used a blog and then a book, Japan Made in the USA, to attack Kristoff as a new peddler of what they saw as Zipangu myths. This was, admittedly, a period in which Japan's economy and hence self-confidence had taken quite a dive. A previously all-conquering stock market had crashed, banks wobbled and then new pain emerged in 1995 from a home-grown terrorist group, Aum Shinrikyo, which used Sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo underground to kill 13 people, and from a devastating earthquake that same year in Kobe in western Japan. Nerves were raw and perceived criticisms evidently unwelcome. Yet even at a less unsettled time, early in the new millennium, there came further evidence that a view of Japan as an exotic, even amusingly strange place could be unwelcome. I will illustrate this with an anecdote connecting Peter, now Lord, Mandelson and the filmmaker Sofia Coppola. In 2003, just after Coppola's film, 'Lost in Translation,' about characters played by Bill Murray and Scarlet Johanssen finding themselves adrift and befuddled in their lives and in Tokyo, came out I found myself attending a meeting of British and Japanese officials, scholars and businesspeople taking place in Britain and chaired by Peter Mandelson. When we gathered for the opening session, Mandelson tried to break the ice by mentioning 'Lost in Translation.' 'Wasn't it wonderful', I recall him saying. Some of the Brits nodded and chipped in. The Japanese looked stony-faced. Now, for some of the Japanese attendees the blank reaction might have been embarrassment or just caused by jetlag. But I realized later that there was another reason: Coppola's film had gone down like a lead balloon in Japan. Although her main topic was the not-quite love affair between the characters played by Murray and Johanssen, that story was set against a backdrop of Japanese exotica, or perhaps plain weirdness, ranging from a kooky whisky advert that Murray's character was filming to funny mispronunciations to a bizarre night-club. Japanese audiences and critics for the most part did not appreciate this. Some even found it racist. Why Hearn's stereotyping and racism were welcome On the face of it, Hearn's depictions of Japan in the late 19th century might also have gone down like a lead balloon. Indeed, they may have done so at first with Japanese diplomats who were trying to persuade westerners and the Japanese public alike that their country did not deserve to suffer under 'unequal treaties.' This was a country seeking to modernize itself, after all, and to make itself strong and sufficiently unified to fight wars against China (1895) and Russia (1904-05). Hearn did express some patriotic support for such Japanese nationalism, but at the same time his books idealized the Japan that was being left behind by a modernization of which he disapproved. Moreover, his view of Japan emphasised what he saw as inherent racial differences compared with Westerners rather than differences of circumstance or stages of development. He and the British mentor who had helped him find his first teaching job, a language scholar called Basil Hall Chamberlain, fell out in part over whether it was nature or nurture that explained Japan's cultural particularities. Lafcadio Hearn was stubbornly racist but also romantic. Crucially, he did not use his racial stereotyping to criticize or denigrate Japan but rather to praise it. We can speculate that he may have preferred racial explanations of cultural difference because he thought them likelier to be resilient against modernization. He showed what might be said to be a vital characteristic of the foreign correspondent as double agent: a strong sympathy for those about whom he was writing. His timing was also fortuitous. The era was one during which Japan was experiencing momentous and rapid change, but in which the Japanese government was also seeking to use tradition as a stabilizing force. Much the way the British historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger portrayed The Invention of Tradition in Victorian Britain, the leaders of late 19th century Japan were reaching back to imperial rule and to the Shinto religion to shore up – some would say create – a Japanese national identity. A foreign writer such as Hearn, one with a strong sympathy for what he saw as traditional Japan, was therefore a useful validator. Not only did he help spread a positive view of his adopted country to his European and American readers, but he also helped reinforce the message the government was seeking to send to Japan itself. This may explain why, without apparent qualifications, Hearn landed a job teaching English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, which is still today (shorn since 1945 of the word 'imperial') the country's leading educational institution. Helping Hearn to stay in Japan and in a more prominent position than in his previous provincial teaching posts may have felt like a good idea. But even if there was no conspiracy to exploit Hearn, he was nonetheless extremely useful at a moment when Japan was going through something of an identity crisis. Something similar happened again, half a century later. During World War Two the US Office of War Information commissioned an American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, to do a study of Japanese society and culture, initially as a 'know your enemy' project but which then in 1946 was published in book form as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Benedict's book remains on the reading lists of many foreigners moving to live in Japan. More remarkable is the fact that this book, by an American author who had never visited Japan, had by the late 1990s sold more than 2.3 million copies in Japanese translation, more than six times as many as it had sold in English. Defeat had brought a period of questioning of Japan's identity similar to that in the last decades of the nineteenth century. So, like Hearn's books, Benedict's study provided a sort of validation as well as offering an outsider's view to an uncertain people. Nonetheless, what is also surprising about that sense of validation is that Benedict's book, somewhat like some of Hearn's, can be considered guilty of summing up a large and complex nation with a series of sweeping generalizations – the most famous of which is of Japan being a 'shame culture' while the West is a 'guilt culture.' Plenty of academics have criticized Benedict's generalizations, just as Basil Hall Chamberlain criticized Hearn's. However, both Benedict and Hearn have nonetheless been embraced, notably by the strain of nationalist thought known as Nihonjinron: the study of Japaneseness, which began in 19th century Japan but which flourished especially after 1945. Generalize as much as you like, the Nihonjinron devotees seem to say – as long as you show how different, and special, the Japanese are compared with westerners. Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, the Anglo-Irish-Greek foreign correspondent, became a successful late 19th century double agent because he showed sympathy for Japanese society rather than lecturing or criticizing, because he helped shore up Japan's sense of identity during a period of turbulence and because his work supported the notion of Nihonjinron. The fact that he left a Japanese family behind him also helped greatly, for his descendants remain vital preservers of his legacy, notably the museum dedicated to him in Matsue, the provincial town in which he made his first family home. In recent years, his memory and legacy have also been celebrated and marked by exhibitions and events in Ireland, Greece, Cincinnati and New Orleans. The vividness of his writing has undoubtedly also helped. In the end, whether you agree or disagree with him, he marked out the subjects of his writing as being exceptional and different, which is what he was, too. Formerly editor-in-chief of The Economist, Bill Emmott is currently chairman of the Japan Society of the UK, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the International Trade Institute. This essay, originally published by Engelsberg Ideas, is based on a lecture he gave in Dublin on April 12 as part of a series linked to an exhibition of new prints based on the Kwaidan ghost stories. Asia Times is republishing with kind permission.
South China Morning Post
13-05-2025
- South China Morning Post
Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon movie review – sci-fi anime compilation not up to par
2/5 stars Anime compilation films are far from a new phenomenon. Since the 1970s, feature-length re-edits of animated television series have been a mainstay in Japanese cinemas. Offering diehard fans the opportunity of a big-screen refresher, while giving franchise newcomers a crash course that is all killer no filler, every self-respecting series from Space Battleship Yamato to Mobile Suit Gundam has swung for a splashy theatrical cash grab. Recently, Demon Slayer and Attack on Titan both scored notable box office hits with compilation films made up of almost entirely of previously-seen footage. Play Now comes Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon, 80 minutes of distilled footage from the first season of the science-fiction coming-of-age series adapted from Naoya Matsumoto's digital manga of 2020. In addition to seeing the best moments cherry-picked from its 12 episodes, audiences are rewarded with the bonus episode 'Hoshina's Day Off', a frivolous digression of little substance.
