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

Popular culture has often been seen as a way to access the forms and formalities of religious life, even if it may not convey the particular truths of a religion. However, with Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan, Jolyon Baraka Thomas is not just attempting to chronicle how ritual and spiritual life is communicated through comics and animation in Japan (although that can certainly be found in the text) but he also aims to demonstrate ‘that some practices of rendition and reception can accurately be described as religious’ (p. 3). In other words, anime and manga not only serve as conduits for religious ideas to varying degrees, but the practices of creating and viewing or reading them can be described as religious.

Thomas is particularly interested in religion through a neologism he coined – shūkyō asobi. It combines the Japanese words shūkyō, meaning religion, and asobi, meaning play, and can be understood as both ‘religiously playful’ and ‘playfully religious’. In the anime and manga examples Thomas analyzes, shūkyō asobi emphasizes both the sincere nature of religious thought as well as a willingness to experiment and not necessarily be restricted by formal doctrines. Because Thomas situates creative practice and audience response at the heart of his work, he emphasizes the role of ‘ethnographic, sociological, or historical data’ (p. 21) in addition to the secondary techniques of ‘narrative analysis’ (p. 20) when approaching anime and manga.

Drawing on Tradition begins with an introduction in which Thomas outlines his overall approach to the subject matter and the importance of analyzing what people actually do, rather than what they say they believe, in regard to religion (p. 10). This is particularly necessary in the case of Japan, where many practices scholars would deem ‘religious’ are accepted as cultural custom and are not given specific religious import in discussions of belief. Thomas goes on to introduce the concept of shūkyō asobi and briefly discusses the many reasons one might have for creating anime or manga with religious content.

In the first chapter, ‘Visualizing Religion’, Thomas begins to construct a brief history or graphic religious representation in Japan going back more than a thousand years in order to demonstrate why anime and manga have been able to serve as conduits for religious content. He is careful not to suggest that such older forms are performing the same functions that anime and manga are doing today, though, and he stays away from asserting that a pedigree for modern media could be found in emaki picture scrolls. From here, Thomas proceeds to discuss how contemporary manga and anime are composed and constructed through a juxtaposition of text and images. For example, he briefly contrasts a hagiographic manga of Dōgen (founder of the Sōtō sect of Zen Buddhism) from the sect’s official website with Osamu Tezuka’s epic Buddha (1972–1983) manga in terms of intended audience, presentation, and construction. He also briefly examines how the anime films Tekkon Kinkreet (2006) and Paprika (2006) use cinematic techniques to evoke characters’ interiority and dreams.

The second chapter, ‘Recreating Religion’, builds on the first chapter in order to detail the many varied ways that religion has been presented in anime and manga. Thomas begins with a discussion of a survey he administered to attendees of two university lectures he gave and the results of the respondents’ attitudes toward the presence of religion in anime and manga. He goes on to categorize select titles (mostly manga) in terms of their approach and attitude toward their religious content. These range from those that are cosmetically religious, those that serve as role models to emulate, didactic textbooks, and those that serve as religious parables, to name just a few. The final part of the chapter discusses manga author Minoru Kuroda and the legally-recognized religious group he founded, Divine Corps of the World of the Lightwaves of Su.

The third chapter, ‘Entertaining Religious Ideas’, focuses on the anime films of Hayao Miyazaki and their reception among Japanese audiences. Thomas is initially critical of previous authors who have been quick to connect Miyazaki’s works with elements of Shintō belief and the effects such associations may have for viewers, arguing that these analyses are not supported by ethnographic work or any audience data. Thomas endeavors to support such connections by presenting the results of his own audience research by examining fan responses to four of Miyazaki’s films – Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Spirited Away (2001). In order to obtain such data, he examines online postings about the films on the Japanese social networking service MIXI. Additionally, he details how Miyazaki’s heroine Nausicaä influenced the lives of two informants he met in person.

Thomas concludes by discussing ‘Depicting Religions on the Margins’. This final chapter examines the relationship anime and manga have had with the religious group Aum Shinrikyō, which gained worldwide notoriety when it attacked the Tokyo subway system with sarin gas in 1995. Thomas postulates that comics and animation that dealt with what he calls an ‘aesthetics of extremity’ (p. 129), in which valiant protagonists must fight against overwhelming forces in extreme situations, had a particular influence on the group, including the anime and manga of Nausicaä and Akira (1988). Thomas then briefly discusses the anime and manga that Aum created as promotional tools, and concludes with an analysis of the manga Charisma (2004–2006) and 20th Century Boys (1999–2007), both of which deal with the themes of the role of religion in Japanese society in the shadow of Aum’s attacks.

The overall success of Drawing on Tradition depends on the degree to which the reader accepts the author’s stated aims as an appropriate yardstick. In his introduction, Thomas makes a point of emphasizing his use of ‘rendition and reception’, which is ‘designed to compensate for an excessive emphasis on narrative content that has not only characterized most studies of manga and anime to date, but has also characterized many foregoing studies on media and religion’ (p. 8). As mentioned previously, later in the introduction Thomas champions other forms of data over ‘narrative analysis’. However, large sections of the book are in fact given over to discussions and summaries of narrative, plot, and character, indicating that he is performing this kind of analysis far more often than he seems to realize.

Additionally, the supporting data that Thomas presents need to be stronger in order to convincingly support his arguments. For example, in the surveys he discusses in chapter two, his footnotes discuss the fact that his sample size was only 87 respondents. To Thomas’s credit, he goes on to acknowledge some of the flaws with how he constructed and administered the survey, although he indicates that his results were similar to a ‘more rigorous’ (p. 163) study that had been conducted by a Japanese researcher. Similarly problematic is the use of ethnography in the chapter on the responses to religious elements in Miyazaki films. Although Thomas again stresses the importance of data to support his claims, his methodology is not entirely clear. In discussing Nausicaä, he refers to the responses of two women he ‘met through acquaintances, essentially at random’ (p. 114) and for the other three films, he refers to posts on an online ‘Miyazaki-themed fan message board’ (p. 115). However, the reader gets no sense of how Thomas went about selecting the handful of responses he discusses, how the perspectives of someone posting on a Miyazaki-centric message board might differ from those of the viewing population at large, or even why he chose this particular board for his analysis. Additionally, interviews with present or former members of the Divine Corps of the World of the Lightwaves of Su or Aum Shinrikyō would have strengthened Thomas’s assertions about both groups and their use of anime and manga. For example, when discussing the former, Thomas writes that ‘most adherents presumably encounter the ideas of the group through the manga first and only secondarily through other literature’ (p. 100). Although I have no reason to doubt this assertion, by championing the use of data and ethnography, Thomas is setting himself up for further questioning when he says something is ‘presumably’ true about the behavior of a population without evidence. This is not to say that I would necessarily disagree with any of Thomas’s conclusions, but rather that some of his conclusions need stronger supporting data.

In the end, Drawing on Tradition is a strong introduction to the ways in which religious imagery and concepts are employed in anime and manga for ends that are at times both spiritual and secular. Someone approaching the text from a comics or animation studies perspective may find the sections on how the forms are constructed to be a little under-theorized, but this seems like it would be an excellent introductory text for an undergraduate audience. Although the book does not quite hit the lofty ethnographic heights that Thomas sets out in the introduction, it is still a useful contribution to the field of anime and manga studies. I hope that Thomas continues to work through the concepts he sets out in Drawing on Tradition and is able to showcase additional evidence in the future.