Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan

Closure

155 b C L O S U R E Manga and anime reflect the protean—and often conflicting—interests of the people who produce and consume them. Although they are often simply sources of profit for producers and diversion for audiences, they sometimes feature moving pictures and stories that may animate audiences, prompting the creation or perpetuation of religious frames of mind. The religious aspects of manga and anime culture are visible in the ways in which people visualize religious worlds, entertain religious ideas, and appropriate religious sites and concepts for novel purposes. Creators of popular illustrated fiction re-create religion by depicting apparently religious themes—characters, settings, plots—in a variety of modes that reflect attitudes ranging from piety to playfulness. Some of these portrayals closely resemble traditional religious stories and iconography. Some stretch the limits of plausibility in their irreverent depictions of formal religious doctrines, rituals, and ideals. Yet the adulteration of traditional religious vocabulary, imagery, and concepts does not necessarily imply religious degeneration or decline, nor does the deployment of religious imagery or vocabulary indicate formal commitment to any particular religion. Audiences re-create religion in the interpretation and exegesis that accompany narrative and visual reception. In some cases, the verisimilitude of fictive worlds—regardless of their fidelity to formal religious cosmologies—is so entirely convincing that figments become facts and chimera incarnate. In their religious frames of mind, audiences imaginatively animate the characters that populate fictional universes, granting them vitality beyond the frames on the page and outside the layered cels that make up a scene. Jesus and the Buddha become the boys who live next door, tree spirits lurk in the forests on the island of Yakushima. Furthermore, through this imaginative compositing of fictive and empirical realities, audiences can be animated by stories in turn, prompted to ethical and ritual action. Fictional figures like Nausicaä become role models deserving emulation, and visiting Yasukuni Shrine becomes a moral imperative. 156 Closure The field is rich and its subject matter fecund, leaving considerable latitude for future study. I encourage others to use manga and anime that I have not discussed—particularly products marketed primarily to girls and women—to examine other aspects of religious production and consumption that I may have overlooked or merely noted in passing. I also expect that future studies will necessarily include more emphasis on the material aspects of religious manga and anime culture, including the technical apparatuses used in the production of these products, the anime- and manga-derived paraphernalia such as ema and amulets (omamori) that are currently proliferating at formally religious institutions, and the toys that help fans get in touch with their favorite characters. There are also other embodied aspects of manga and anime culture that I have not addressed. These include the physical discipline of producing thousands of meticulously drawn images, the technical skill of punctiliously arranging the cels that comprise a single scene in an anime, the multisensory experience of attending fan conventions , the vicarious, votary, and dramatic qualities of cosplay masquerade, and the virtual and actual embodied experience of playing video games related to manga and anime. Finally, studies of religion and religiosity do not necessitate the study of formal religions and their doctrines. Building on recent research into emergent religions, everyday religion, religious visual culture, and the authenticity of ostensibly ersatz religious practices, this book sketches a somewhat novel approach to these subfields within the study of religion but at the peripheries of studies of specific religious traditions. The methodological combination of history, ethnography, and formal analysis of narrative and image has served the purpose of taking a synchronic snapshot of contemporary Japanese religion (as seen through the viewfinder of manga and anime) while also providing a diachronic narrative of the development of illustrated vernacular religious media over time. Taking a page from its subject matter, this study has situated a static image—the state of contemporary Japanese vernacular religious media—within a larger narrative flow that gives an impression of movement, from its premodern precursors to—through the imaginative process of closure—its possible future iterations or manifestations. ...