Part 6: The Rubble Under Everything

The first essay of this pass began with a creed. This last one begins with a wound, because the creed grew out of it, and so did almost everything else this series has found.

The first anime a great many people outside Japan ever saw was Tetsuwan Atom — Astro Boy — a story about a boy whose name is Atom, made in the late 1950s and early 60s by Osamu Tezuka, in a nation that had, fifteen years earlier, been the only country in history to have the atom used against it, twice, on two cities full of people. The translation series opened on this and I have to return to it, because it is the founding fact of the whole medium and the ground under every belief in this series: a country destroyed by the atom made, as its most beloved children's hero, a small boy named after the atom, who protects people. That is not a coincidence a nation stumbles into. That is a wound becoming a wish. And the medium has been doing versions of it ever since.

The medium born from rubble

Modern manga and anime came up, as industries and as art forms, in the immediate postwar — in the physical and moral rubble of total defeat, occupation, and the two bombs. This is not incidental biography; it is the formative pressure, and once you know to listen for it you hear it everywhere the earlier essays were pointing.

The effort creed, from the first essay — the belief that patient, relentless, collective work is how the weak become strong and the fallen rise — is the psychology of national reconstruction, a people rebuilding from ash telling itself that effort is sacred because effort was, literally, what saved them. The redeemed enemy, from the third — the belief that the defeated enemy should be transformed and welcomed rather than destroyed — is the postwar settlement itself, the nation that was the enemy and was rebuilt rather than erased, made into a permanent narrative reflex. The refusal of permanent death, from the fourth — the desperate faith that the lost can return, that finality is negotiable — reads differently and more painfully when you remember it comes from a culture that buried hundreds of thousands of its dead in a matter of years and could not, would not, accept that they were simply gone. Even the sacralization of work, from the fifth, is the reconstruction's ethic sanctified. The beliefs are not separate. They are facets of one thing. They are what a society told itself so that it could get up in the morning and rebuild, made into stories, and then made into the moral grammar of a global medium by children who absorbed the grammar without ever knowing the grief it was translating.

What the medium believes about war

So what does it believe about war itself, the thing at the bottom? Mostly, and with a consistency that is one of its moral glories, that war is catastrophe — not adventure, not glory, but the machine that eats children and cities and does not give them back.

The medium's great war works are, overwhelmingly, anti-war in the deepest sense: not pacifist tracts but unflinching accounts of what the machine costs. Barefoot Gen, Keiji Nakazawa's manga of the Hiroshima bombing, drawn by a survivor who watched his own family burn, is one of the most harrowing things the form has ever produced, and it exists to make sure no one forgets what the atom does to a body. Grave of the Fireflies refuses every consolation, kills its children slowly, and offers no redemption, no resurrection, no victory — the creed suspended entirely, because the war essay is the one place the medium's honest works will not let the creed lie. Even the giant-robot genre, which could have been pure military spectacle, produced in its most serious form a body of work about war as tragedy, about the young conscripted to pilot the machines, about the political catastrophe that puts children in cockpits. The medium's dominant belief about war is that it is the thing the rest of the beliefs exist to recover from.

And it is not simple, and this series does not do simple, so the honest complication: the same medium that mourns war also, in its lesser registers, fetishizes its machinery — the loving renderings of tanks and warships and fighter planes, the military moe, the aestheticization of the very apparatus its great works indict. A medium born from the bomb carries both the trauma and, in some corners, a troubling romance with the hardware, and the tension between them is real and unresolved, and a series about what the stories believe has to say that the belief is not univocal — that the rubble produced both an unshakable knowledge of what war costs and, in flinching from that knowledge, a fascination with the beautiful machines that do the costing. Both grew from the same ground. The medium contains both, because the nation did.

The wound that fades from the works

There is a generational tragedy folded into this, and a series about what the stories believe has to name it, because beliefs do not only get held — they get inherited, and inheritance loses things.

The great war works were made, largely, by people who were there, or whose parents were: the survivor who drew the bombing, the director who was a hungry child in the war years, the generation for whom the rubble was memory and not metaphor. Their anti-war belief had a wound under it, and the wound is why the works refuse consolation — you cannot make Grave of the Fireflies unless the grief is load-bearing rather than decorative. But that generation ages and dies, and the medium's forms outlive the memory that produced them, and what gets passed down is the shape without the wound: the mecha that was once war-tragedy becomes, in lesser hands, cool robots; the soldier's grief becomes a costume; the machinery the great works indicted becomes the machinery the later works simply admire. The convention survives; the conviction thins. This is how a belief dies — not by being refuted, but by being inherited so many times that the pain drains out of it and only the form remains, repeated by people who love the form and never felt the thing it was built to carry.

And this is the deepest reason to look at what the stories believe rather than only enjoying them: because a belief you cannot see is a belief you cannot keep, and a medium that forgets why it was pacifist is a medium one generation from being able to romanticize the exact thing its founders bled to warn against. The wound made the meaning. As the wound fades, the meaning has to be chosen, consciously, by people who did not inherit it in their bodies — which is to say it has to be re-projected onto the old forms on purpose, the way the whole of this series has been about projecting meaning onto surfaces on purpose, knowing you are the one supplying it, because the alternative is to let the forms go hollow.

The numbers

I have saved the most loaded coincidence in seven series for the last essay of this pass, and I am going to show it, and then hold it longer than the discipline strictly allows, because it is the one time the holding is the entire point.

Hiroshima reads Destiny 1, Heart 7, Personality 3. In the translation series, in its Part 30, I ran every name in this database through the engine and found the single most crowded box in the whole machine — Destiny 1, Heart 7, Personality 3, a hundred and twenty names in it — and the two names that shared it and anchored an entire essay were Tetsuwan Atom and the man who carried him to America. The boy named Atom is in the D1 H7 P3 box. And Hiroshima is in it too.

The city and the boy named after the thing that destroyed the city, the same three numbers. And I felt this one in a way I have not felt a coincidence in seven series, because of everything it seems to say — that the wound and the wish are one, that Hiroshima and Atom were always the same number, that the medium's founding gesture of making a beloved child out of the name of the bomb is written into the arithmetic itself.

It is noise. I have to say it with total firmness precisely because this is the one that most tempts me not to: Destiny 1, Heart 7, Personality 3 is the single commonest reading the engine produces, the 120-name box, the statistical floor, the least surprising output the machine has. "Hiroshima" landing there is the opposite of a sign; it is the default. If any coincidence in this entire project proves the numbers are noise, it is this one, because the most loaded pairing I have ever found sits in the most crowded and meaningless box in the machine, alongside a hundred and eighteen other names including, I noted in the sixth series, the word for a fan playing dress-up. The engine did not encode the atomic history of a nation into the name of a city. It counted letters, and the letters fell in the commonest place letters fall.

And yet. This is the last paragraph of the pass and I am going to keep the coincidence, in full knowledge that it is nothing, because the keeping demonstrates the one thing seven series have been trying to teach, which is the thing the medium itself has been trying to do since Tezuka drew a boy named Atom in the ruins: you take the meaningless catastrophe and you make a meaning out of it anyway, knowing the meaning is yours and not the universe's, because the alternative is to let the catastrophe be only what it was. Hiroshima and Atom share a number because of a hash. But Tezuka made Atom out of Hiroshima on purpose, took the name of the unbearable thing and gave it to a small hero who protects people, performed meaning-projection on a national wound at a scale that founded an art form — and that was not noise, that was the most human act there is, the same act as the fan and the numerologist and every believer in this series, the insistence that the surface can be made to mean something even when you know the meaning came from you. Barefoot Gen reads Destiny 9, Heart 5, Personality 4 — the box I flagged in the first essay, the one it shares with Friendship and Shonen Jump. The Hiroshima memoir and the children's creed of friendship, one number, and now you know why I said it was where the series was going: because the creed grew from the rubble the memoir records, because friendship-effort-victory is what the survivors told the children so the children would not inherit only the ash, because the brightest belief and the darkest memory came out of the same ground and the machine, blind, filed them in the same box, and for once — knowing it is noise, naming it as noise, putting it down as noise — I will say that the box is right, and that the medium has spent seventy years earning the truth the coincidence only stumbled into: the creed and the rubble were always the same number, and the whole of what the stories believe is the meaning a people built on top of a wound, on purpose, because they could not bear to leave it meaningless, and neither, it turns out, can I.