Part 9: The English That Japan Wrote: Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Title That Is Greek

The Japanese title is 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン — Shin Seiki Evangelion. Shin is new. Seiki is century. So: New Century Evangelion. In 1995 that is a title with a clock in it. The century was ending, everyone could feel it, and the show is set in a future dated from a catastrophe.

The official English title, chosen in Japan, printed on Japanese materials, is Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Which is not a translation of Shin Seiki. It is not even English.

Neon (νέον) is Greek for "new." Genesis (γένεσις) is Greek for "origin, coming-into-being." Evangelion (εὐαγγέλιον) is Greek for "good news" — the gospel, the word the New Testament is named after.

So the English title is Greek. All three words. Chosen by Japanese people, for a Japanese audience, rendered in the Latin alphabet — which most of that audience could sound out and few could parse — because it looked and sounded like the future.

An English speaker reading "Neon Genesis" gets a faint hum of neon signs and the first book of the Bible, which is roughly the intended atmosphere and roughly nothing to do with "new century." The title works on English speakers exactly as it works on Japanese speakers: as mood. Nobody was ever meant to translate it. It is not a sentence. It is a light fixture.

The Direction of the Crossing Reverses

Every essay in this series so far has had the same shape: a Japanese work is made, and then somebody outside Japan does something to it. A lawyer changes a letter. A distributor cuts twenty minutes. A dub director throws out the script. A machine renames Usagi. The crossing is done to the work, from outside, usually late, usually for money.

This is the other thing, and once you see it you cannot stop.

An enormous amount of manga and anime arrives pre-crossed. The English is already in the box — put there in Japan, by the people who made it, before any foreigner was involved. Death Note is called Death Note in Japanese: デスノート, the English words in Japanese script. One Piece. Bleach. Fullmetal Alchemist is printed in English on the covers of Hagane no Renkinjutsushi. Shonen Jump puts a giant Latin-alphabet JUMP on the front of a magazine sold entirely to people who read Japanese.

This is wasei-eigo in its broadest sense: English-derived material manufactured in Japan for domestic use. It is not a failed attempt to communicate with foreigners. Foreigners are not in the room. It is a design material — English as texture, as chrome, as a signal meaning modern, technical, cool, slightly clinical — in the same register an English-speaking designer reaches for a kanji they cannot read.

And here is the thing that should make an English-speaking fan sit down: the title you defend as authentic was made for you by nobody. "Neon Genesis Evangelion" is not the real title that localizers thankfully preserved. It is a Japanese fantasy of Greek, made in Tokyo, that survived contact with English because there was no reason to touch it. When fandom insists on the "original" title over some hypothetical New Century Evangelion, it is defending an artifact whose foreignness was manufactured domestically. The purity being protected is already a hybrid — and was one from the first draft.

What Is Actually Lost

Something did get lost, though, and it is not a joke. It is the clock.

Shin Seiki — new century — lands on a Japanese viewer in 1995 with a weight "Neon Genesis" does not carry for anyone. The nineties in Japan were the decade the bubble finished collapsing. 1995 itself brought the Kobe earthquake in January and the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack on the Tokyo subway in March, both within months of the show's October premiere. "New century," in that year, is not optimism. It is the sound of a clock running out on something that has already broken. Anno made a series about a boy who cannot be persuaded to get in the robot, released it into that, and called it New Century.

"Neon Genesis" says none of it. It cannot. It says science fiction, in a beautiful voice. It is the better-sounding title and the emptier one, and it is the one the whole world got, and it was Japan's own choice.

So this is a loss with no villain in it at all. Nobody did this to Evangelion. Evangelion did it to itself, for aesthetic reasons, and the aesthetic reasons were good, and the cost was the clock.

The Numbers, Making the Point for Once

Shin Seiki Evangelion: Destiny 9 — the Humanitarian and Sage, endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles, keyword reckoning.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Destiny 5 — the Freedom Seeker, freedom, disruption, restless movement — with a Heart's Desire of master 11, the Visionary, inspiration, tension, and heightened awareness.

Spelling. Two strings, two sums. The arithmetic does not know about 1995, or the subway, or the clock.

But I will take this one, with the caveat carried in both hands, because it is an elegant accident. The Japanese title — the one with the century running out in it — lands on the number of endings and reckoning. The Greek title, the beautiful empty one, lands on restless movement with a Visionary's heart, which is exactly what "Neon Genesis" does and exactly what it costs. It is gorgeous and it goes nowhere. It is a vision with no clock in it.

A coincidence. One I could not have engineered, which happens to describe the loss precisely, and which is still a coincidence — Shin Seiki Evangelion has the letters it has. Had Anno called it Shin Seiki Eva, the 9 would be a 4 and this paragraph would not exist.

Hideaki Anno comes out a Destiny 1 — beginnings and the will to act alone — and Shinji Ikari comes out a Destiny 9 with a Heart's Desire of 1: the boy of endings who wants, in his heart, to act alone. Which is either the most on-the-nose result in nine hundred essays or is what happens when you add up S-H-I-N-J-I. It is the second one. It has always been the second one. And I still went and thought about Shinji for ten minutes because of it, which is the only defence this method has ever had.

The Close

There is a habit in English-language fandom of treating the Japanese object as sacred and every English hand as a contaminant — the "ruined by localization" reflex this series has argued with since Part 1. The Evangelion title is the cleanest available refutation, because the contamination is load-bearing and it was applied at the factory.

The show English-speaking fans consider the least compromised, most authorial, least market-sanded work in the medium — the one with its director's breakdown legibly in the frame — is called, by its own author, in its own country, by a Greek phrase meaning "new origin gospel" that communicates nothing to anyone, chosen because it looked right.

It was never pure. It was a mongrel from the first cover. And it is one of the best things anyone has ever made, which suggests that purity was not the ingredient.