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Monday, August 07, 2006
Samurai Champloo: Anachronism, Revision, Hybridity, Eclecticism and All That
Samurai Champloo is a 26-episode anime series directed by Schinichiro Watanabe, who also did Cowboy Bebop. Like Bebop, it is episodic, following the adventures of Fuu, Mugen, and Jin, as they look for the samurai who smells like sunflowers (Fuu’s father). Both Mugen and Jin are skilled fighters; Mugen is an ex-pirate, Jin is a ronin, a samurai without a master. Fuu worked as a waitress.
Like Bebop’s, Champloo’s mise en scène is culturally eclectic. It is also anachronistic. But the mix is different. Bebop is set in the future and in space, mostly Mars, its moons, and asteroids. As the name suggests, the music nods toward jazz. “Cowboy” is slang for bounty hunter, which is the default profession of the four central characters (five if you count the dog). Champloo is set in Edo-era Japan - roughly the two and a half centuries before Perry arrived. The title theme is hip hop, and hip hop occurs in the soundtrack, imagery, and thematics.
This note is about two episodes that are relatively late in the series. Each involves an encounter between Japan and America, but only one is staged that way. One is about tagging & Andy Warhol and the sign (of the word), the other about baseball. Note that baseball was first played in Japan in 1872 and has been played more or less continuously since then.
Tagging Warhol
The English title for episode 18 is “War of the Words.” What interests me about this episode is simply its emphasis on the printed word (scroll down this page for a plot summary). Running through the episode we have rival gangs fighting, not through physical violence against one another, but through tagging. The episode is framed by voice over about fashion and the street, delivered by this guy:
The image itself may or may not proclaim “Andy Warhol” to you (do look at the hair), but the reference is obvious enough in context. I have no sense of how obvious the reference would be to an audience too young to have been aware of Warhol when he was alive (he died in 1987). I have no idea about Warhol’s acceptance in Japan, but pretty much assume he was well-known there simply because he was one of the best-known art-world figures of the time.
Here we have the Niwa brothers:
Notice the hair styles, the piercings, and the (mostly obscured) graffiti behind them. They’d inherited a dojo from their father, but were not trained martial artists. The brothers have been feuding, leading rival gangs in tagging the local public spaces. Jin - one of the Champloo’s core trio - suggests they settle the matter with a tagging contest. The gang that scores the most spectacular tag wins.
They both lose. They’re beaten by Mugen, another of the core trio. Mugen painted an infinity sign - his personal symbol - on the roof of Hiroshima castle:
This episode is not staged as an encounter between Japan and the West. I can all but imagine an argument denying that it is, in fact, an encounter between Japan and America. Among other things, this argument would have to bracket Warhol’s origins. That seems doable, but I leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Play Ball
In contrast, episode 23 is quite explicitly staged as Japan-American encounter (scroll down this page for a plot summary). After a prelude about the success of Japanese players in American baseball, and a set-up involving a feast the trio cannot pay for, we have a baseball game.
An American ship lands and demands trade. They play a baseball game with the Japanese and loose by forfeit at the end of the first inning. Consequently, they leave.
Here’s the two teams lined up before the game. The Japanese team looks, well, rather irregular. The American team looks well-fed, and all of them alike:
The Japanese are up first and score two runs. Here’s the bottom of their batting order:
The woman is Fuu, the third continuing character in the series. The dog and Fuu’s pet squirrel are on the team as well. The old man, the village elder, dies while walking to the plate.
Mugen adopts a two-bat style, no doubt derived from a martial arts discipline:
And then we have this iconic gesture from Manzou the Saw (a recurring character):
Naturally, the coach kept signing for him to bunt. He didn’t. Got a hit. And died when one of the American players landed on him, twice.
And so the Japanese are retired. Just what happens when the Americans get up to bat is a bit complicated. But the upshot is all are so badly injured that they cannot play. With one Japanese player left standing, Mugen, the Japanese team wins by forfeit.
This episode is quite obviously and pointedly staged as an encounter between Japan and America. The particular style of the encounter is worth a remark or two, as is the fact that the Japanese won the game. Given Japanese awareness of their special relationship with America, not to mention article 9 of the Japanese constitution, that is not a casual matter. One should also consider that this series was almost surely planned and executed knowing that it would be shown in America.
I leave consideration of these various matters as an exercise for the reader.
Comments
Department of D’oh: The baseball episode of Samurai Champloo is preceeded by one about 500-year-old zombies digging a deep hole in the ground for the lost treasure of the Heike. A meteor drops out of the sky and destroys all, sending a mushroom cloud into the sky:
That is not a casual image. And in this particular context it is certainly an allusion to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, this is the final image in the episode preceeding the Japanese victory against an invading Yankee baseball team.
Warhol is quite well known in Japan. You can find more on
http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmag/bk_issue/1996/sepoct/feat2.htm
Thanks, Tim. That’s an interesting little article.
I’ve been thinking about that article, Tim. I’m thinking that Warhol serves the Japanese as both synechdoche and metaphor (jargon, I know) for American pop culture. In that function it’s not so important to be familiar with Warhol’s specific works. It’s what he “stands for” that’s important.
And, he is at one and the same time Very American but not Officially American, not at all. So he’s a very convenient vehicle through which American pop culture can be “laundered.” Warhol, then, can stand in opposition to geo-political America.
In contrast, baseball is smack-dab center on geo-political America. Which is why the Japanese team wins, what with all its individualism and pan-speciesism. A very pointed denial of stereotypes about Japanese groupishness & lack of individuality. Along with a Buddhist and Shinto affirmation of non-human life.
Department of D’oh: The infinity sign up there is on the roof of Hiroshima Castle, also known as Carp Castle. It was destroyed by the atomic bomb. Here’s a picture of part of the castle as it was reconstructed in the late 50s:
<CENTER>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Castle TARGET=hcastle</CENTER>
This image (from the anime) suggests why it’s called Carp Castle:
<CENTER>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Castle TARGET=hcastle</CENTER>
Well, city destruction by explosion is present in many, many, many, many animes.
Yes, it certainly is. Apocalyptic explosion is a major theme in Japanese popular culture. It was a major theme in an important exhibit last year at New York’s Japan Society.
If I may return to Warhol, he is not merely unofficially American—meaning that he carries no particular geopolitical meanings aside from being American—but he is also an artist whose work was one root of postmodern graphics. It’d take *much* too much space to go into any kind of detail, but he is a transnational icon in much the way that Ridley Scott and William Gibson are iconic.
Tim
It seems to me, Tim, that you’re pointing the way to an important distinction between publically asserted geo-political identity and what we might think of as cultural locus—to coin an awdward phrase—as defined in terms of formative influences. There is an argument to be made that Warhol is American in the latter term; this argument would talk about consumerism, the mass media, and so forth. It’s not clear to me that this argument is correct, but it can certainly be made.
But those are not the terms of geo-political identity, which is delineated through contrasts between one group and another. Here the object is to differentiate America from all other nations in the world. Andy Warhol simply doesn’t register in this particular game.
Now consider Louis Armstrong. In terms of cultural locus he too is American. Geo-politically it’s more complex. During the 1930s jazz was declared geo-politically American in order to differentiate America from Nazi Germany. And so Armstrong became geo-politically American. After WWII he toured the world on behalf of the US State Department. Within a certain segment of African-America Louis Armstrong became an Uncle Tom; that is to say, he was not geo-politically Black. But that segment of African-America made peace with Armstrong’s image and so laid claim to him. Regardless of his geo-political status in the Identity Game, his cultural locus is what it has always been.
It would be a strange and marvelous America indeed that would aspire to lay claim to Andy Warhol as a token in the geo-politcal Identity Game. And so he is an international and non-national icon of the post-modern.
Note that an earlier epiosde of Samurai Champloo centered on a gay Dutchman who journeyed to Japan in search of sexual freedom. Alas, being Dutch was something of a problem.