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"She looks like she has an elementary school girl's head on a woman's body," my father, a child psychiatrist, commented on one of the first pieces of manga art he ever saw. That was 10 years ago, when I'd just started working at VIZ and very little manga was available in English, but if he'd said the same thing in 2009, I could have shown him the elementary school girl's body too.
The sexualization of underage (or underage-looking) characters in manga goes back to the late '70s, when underground and adult manga artists such as
Disappearance Diary creator Hideo Azuma began to work around censorship laws by drawing characters without pubic hair. This was the beginning of the
lolicon (Lolita Complex) trend; born in vending-machine porn magazines, it later influenced the new '80s market in direct-to-video anime pornography.
The works of Hayao Miyazaki, whose protagonists were frequently prepubescent girls, were particularly popular among
lolicon artists. As with any movement,
lolicon had many associated keywords—among them "alice" (implying an innocent young girl) and "lemon" (a more general sexual term), as in
Cream Lemon, one of the earliest adult anime. Today, while hardcore
lolicon (and its young-boy equivalent,
shota) still exists, the biggest descendant of
lolicon has a new name,
moe ("mo-eh").
First off, let me make the terms clear: I know that when Japanese people say
moe, it can mean any kind of loving fandom, from train
moe to sci-fi
moe to girls-with-glasses
moe. In that way,
moe is just another nerd-word like
otaku. The word
moe actually comes from a kanji meaning "to sprout." "My vegetable love should grow," to misuse a quote from Andrew Marvell—a slow budding affection, like a tender young plant.
Or like an underage girl, unfortunately. The
moe which makes me periodically ashamed to read manga in public, and which has caused a raging debate in the
Otaku USA letter column, is a particular kind of
moe which has its roots in the Japanese love of cuteness, domesticity and—one element among many—the lingering
lolicon trend. It's the
moe of stories like
Azumanga Daioh and
Strawberry Marshmallow and
Tori Koro and
Yotsuba&!, in which adorable girls do adorable things.
Going a step further, it's the
moe of stories like
Kanna and
Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase and
Hinadori Girl and
Blood Alone, in which adorable girls do adorable things while living in questionable situations with adult men. And if I went just another step further, it'd be the
moe of
Nymphet, in which adorable girls sexually tease adult men, but that manga crossed the line and got everybody offended and was never translated (Seven Seas Entertainment canceled it in 2007 after a chain of negative reactions to the announcement), even though, frankly, it's probably more honest about its intentions than some of the other titles I just mentioned.
Yes, the web of
moe is like a complex mesh stretching from almost totally innocent titles like
Azumanga Daioh, in which the reader gets to peep at the chaste world of girls, to
yuri (lesbian) stories aimed at men (
Strawberry Panic being one of the most pandering examples), to open
lolicon fantasies. Of course, in pure
moe, there's never sex, just as in
bishonen beautiful-boy manga (as opposed to true Boy's Love) the characters just bicker suggestively and never actually rip each other's clothes off and get down to it. In fact, it is often so sweet and gentle, like
Azumanga, that it can be enjoyed at face value as a children's manga—even though
Dengeki Daioh, the magazine in which
Azumanga ran, is aimed at teenage through twentysomething men. Blatant sexualiy would destroy the illusion of innocence that is part of the
moe appeal.
But still, in
Tsukuyomi Moon Phase for instance, it's just
assumed that there will be sexual tension between college-age Kouhei and Hazuki, who looks like a 10-year-old girl. "You better not touch her," his relatives warn. If my relatives felt they had to tell me this, I'd either (a) get new relatives or (b) take a long hard look at my life. Even in
Yotsuba&!, in which an adorable green-haired girl lives in the care of Koiwai, a cheerful twentysomething slacker, couldn't Koiwai have actually been Yotsuba's
real father? Does he have to be her mysterious, vague
adoptive father? Is the idea of Koiwai actually having sex with an adult woman and producing Yotsuba really that much of a wet blanket on the story?
"Is it a sign of pedophilia? Hell no, I say it's the longing for fatherhood," argued
Scott Von Schilling in a column a few years ago. Scott went on to point out that the majority of
moe readers are unmarried men in their 30s, who are seeing the "window of fatherhood" slowly closing in on them. With the graying of Japan, with Japan's low birthrate, is it a stretch to say that youth and childhood is becoming a more and more prized commodity? (This idea is itself the subject of many a manga, such as Masahiro Shibata's unpleasant science fiction/sex manga
Sarai.) "All these men really want is an innocent little girl of their own to take care of," he concludes.
Von Schilling has a point, but it's only half a point. The desire to nurture and the sex drive are all too easily combined, as anyone who's studied child abuse knows. Stu-Hiro's untranslated manga
Otaku no Musume-san ("Otaku's Daughter") confronts this dilemma a little more bluntly than other manga of its type. The protagonist, Kouta, is a 26-year-old nerd who is suddenly reunited with his 9-year-old daughter Kanau, the spawn of a single sexual encounter in high school. At first eager to meet her dad, Kanau is appalled to discover that her father is a doll-collecting pervert and porn manga author (actually one of his more positive traits -- at least he's working) whose apartment is full of body pillows and art of little girls in panties.
Kouta (who, we eventually learn, turned to the dark path of the otaku because he still pines for his lost high school love) at least has the good sense to be embarrassed, and tries to clean up his act, at least in front of her. ("Once you enter this world you start forgetting what things are like in the real world…since you're living here now I'll have to be more careful from now on. Sorry.") So Kanau ends up being raised in an environment full of borderline pedophilic imagery,
without the suggestion of actual abuse taking place. Everybody's happy!
By now, the "pedophilic otaku pervert" is a stock character in anime and manga, and the
moe element in stories like
Otaku no Musume-san and
I, Otaku: Struggles in Akihabara doesn't really feel like the authors' personal fetish; it feels more like an easy attempt at a laugh. This in itself is disturbing, but actually, the most disturbing element of
Otaku no Musume-san, perhaps, is that Kouta's nine-year-old daughter cooks dinner for him. Even with the explicitly sexual element removed,
moe is a fantasy of girlhood seen through chauvinistic male eyes. It's a fantasy of returning to the nursery—to the state of pampered childhood that so many real girls find stifling, but which to a young adult male with an emotionally stunted life and no job prospects, might seem like a retreat into paradise.
Even when
moe girls are "competent," like 10-year-old cook/laundrywoman/ dishwasher Sasami in
Tenchi Muyo!, these little girls represent house and home and the most stereotypical view of womanhood—little mothers who cook and clean and aren't as scary as real adult women. It's no surprise that one of the manga formats which has embraced
moe is four-panel manga, which, like traditional American comic strips, trades on a similar set of clichés: reassuring domestic situations, the warmth of family, and cute characters who never grow old.
Mixed motives are human nature. The innocent, vulnerable characters of
moe manga might activate the reader's nurturing instinct (
moe), the predatory instinct (
lolicon), or simply the desire to escape from the reader's own skin and into an idealized fantasy world of women, where no discordant male presences intrude (
yuri). Only one of these three things is necessarily "pedophilic," a loaded word that I have been blithely tossing around like sweating dynamite through this entire article. Anime and manga fans are understandably wary of having their entertainment matter labeled "pedophilic," particularly when the tragic outcome of the
Christopher Handley case shows just how serious a charge that is, even when applied to two-dimensional characters.
My review of
Azumanga Daioh in
Manga: The Complete Guide, in which I gave the series 3.5 stars but mentioned some readers might be turned off by the "vaguely pedophilic teacher,"
sparked a debate on the talk page for Azumanga Daioh's wikipedia article. It was a civil debate, but whenever people use the word "ephebophile," I have to think they're splitting hairs.
When I say "pedophile," I don't want to hang a lightning rod over the house of anime and manga, but I do feel that it is the only word to describe this aspect of
moe. To be brave enough to acknowledge and analyze this, as in the brutally honest comedy manga
Welcome to the NHK (in which the initially semi-normal protagonist rapidly degenerates down the
lolicon ladder), is the only way to acknowledge how some manga looks to people outside the circle of manga fandom. The forces that arrested Christopher Handley probably don't care about his motives, but it never hurts to understand your own.
Jason Thompson is one of the best-known manga critics in the US. He currently writes for Otaku USA and is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide. His website is www.mockman.com.
Manga Salad is © Jason Thompson, 2010
