Holy Anime! by Drazen Patrick

Author:Drazen, Patrick [Drazen, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Hamilton Books (R&L)
Published: 2012-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Ghost of Christmas Past

There are some manga which have Christmas-themed seasonal episodes, but always on Japanese terms. The word “Christmas”, for example, is often followed by the word “cake”. It is as ubiquitous a symbol in the holiday stories as the decorated tree is in the west. Both symbols appear in one of the most unlikely Christmas stories in the pop culture. The Ghost Hunt series of novels by Ono Fuyumi were turned into manga with artwork by Inada Shiho and later animated by JC Staff. The series focuses on a group of teenagers and young adults who are psychic researchers and “ghostbusters”. Included in the group is John Brown, an Australian Catholic priest in training to be an exorcist. The group, Shibuya Psychic Research, is hired by a church that operates a day-care and orphanage—institutions associated with Christianity in Japan since the Meiji period.

The day-care and orphanage is mainly for foreign workers in Japan. This circumstance ties into the connection between Christianity and its practice of social welfare in modern-day Japan, as well as a reminder to the reader that Christianity is a non-Japanese faith. The story “Silent Christmas” (v.4, pp. 106-171) begins thirty years earlier, when a child named Nagano Kenji was brought to the church’s old location. Father Toujo, a Catholic priest who runs the day-care and the church, tells the SPR that “when I first met him he already couldn’t speak. I heard it was due to a psychological trauma he’d experienced . . . but I never heard the exact cause of it.” (v.4, pp. 113-114) In the manga and the anime, the implication is that Kenji was autistic to some degree, but this is never spelled out. His father left him at the center to go to a job in the Kansai region of Japan; he never returned or was heard from, although he said he would be back.

Kenji disappeared while playing an adapted version of hide and seek. The Japanese version of the game requires the hiders to tell whoever is “it” if they’re hidden or not; since Kenji did not speak, a code was worked out so that he could communicate by hitting objects with a stick. While playing near the present church, which was still under construction thirty years earlier, the scaffolding collapsed and a winter storm which hampered the search for Kenji moved in. He—or his remains—would not be found until SPR investigated, and realized that Kenji had climbed the scaffolding and hidden behind a statue of an angel above the door of the new church. Nobody thought to scale the front of the church and look behind the statues; by that time, all that could be seen from the ground was a skull, which was taken to be a part of the statue.[2]

John Brown tries to exorcise the ghost from a child, but it immediately possesses the main character in the series: the group’s Office Lady, a high school student named Taniyama Mai. This is just one more failed exorcism conducted by John in the series.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.