Hanami, or How to Pretend Anime has Easter Specials

Easter (Pascha in non Germanic nations) and Christmas are traditionally the two most important Holy Days of the Christian Ecclesiastical Calendar.  And so in the many cultures where Christianity has been the dominant Religion for centuries they are also two of the most important Holidays people observe to some extent regardless of their religion.

Japan is not a culture where Christianity has ever been the dominant religion.  But it has spent the last Century and a Half of it's history being to varying degrees influenced by those cultures.  And so during that time Secular Christmas has caught on and became a popular Holiday in modern Japan, allowing Anime to seemingly have just as many Christmas specials as Western Cartoons have.

Easter did not catch on in the same way however.  Maybe Easter is just harder to separate from what's inherently Christian about it regardless of how much Puritans complain about all the Bunnies and Eggs.  And so this makes it difficult for a Christian Anime website like Beneath The Tangles to have the same fun during Lent that they have during Advent.

Another thing Easter has in common with Christmas is being compared to observances Pagans engage in at about the same time of year.  Often with hostile intent, claiming the Christians were merely stealing from the Pagans, or reactionary Christians saying the Mainstream Church has been corrupted by these Pagan holidays.  But I have come to be with those who see these Cosmetic similarities as not inherently a bad thing.  

These kinds of Pagan holidays are about observing what happens in nature, and we Christians believe everything in nature is God's design.  There is a reason this time of year was chosen for Passover and for the Death and Resurrection of The Messiah.  So the Hebrew Roots types need to get over themselves and realize The Torah's own description of it's High Holy Days are just as superficially similar to what the Pagan Canaanites were doing, like for example Emar 373 and Emar 446.  Which God we Worship is the point.

And that is part of how I would argue that the themes and messages of Easter can still be found quite unintentionally in plenty of Anime, just like the Unknown God of Athens in Acts 17.

The Hanami is not quite a formal Shinto Festival, it doesn't seem like it's organized by the Shrines or anything.  But it is a part of Japanese culture during Late-March through May, the same basic time of year as Palm Sunday through Pentecost, but usually the big ones are in April.

The first example of Hanami observance in Anime that western fans were likely to have been exposed to is the 5th Episode of the Makai Tree (Doom Tree) Saga of Sailor Moon R (episode 51 of the series as a whole and 45 of the DiC order), the only episode of that arc directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara, but has the same writer who both began and ended it, Shigeru Yanigawa.  The Doom Tree saga shall continue to be a recurring subject on this blog, and indeed the entire Arc might well be good for viewing during the Easter season given the relevance it will have to the Eucatastrophe project I'm working on.

A website called Honeysanime.com made a Top 10 list of Hanami Anime.  Their number 1 was Clannad, Clannad and Clannad After Story does inevitably become a show about Death and Resurrection, and Clannad is considered the Spring of Key's Seasons Trilogy.  They also have a list of Cherry Blossom Scenes.  Here is a blogpost Itadakimasu did on the subject called This Day in Anime Hanami.

Not actually Anime but I've already said on this blog how the original Mothra and Mothra vs Godzilla movies from the 60s can work as Easter Movies.  I was gonna now recommend watching on YouTube the Devotional Criticism video on Mothra, but it seems those videos are now unavailable.

This is just the tip of the Iceburg, basically everything in Anime I've ever referred to as intentionally or not reflecting my view of The Gospel, since Easter Sunday is The Day of The Gospel.  But in order to feel like it's also amendable to Secular Easter it helps if it's set at or is about Spring Time, like parts of Majora's Mask.

And anything Jewish Anime fans find they like to watch during Passover is probably also good for Easter.

Update: A Year later and I find myself thinking of Pretear as an interesting Anime to add to this list, it's got Spring Imagery going on and definitely has some Gospel allegory potential.  I controversially consider it a much better show then Junichi Sato's other early 00s Magical Girl Anime.

Updating again in April 2022:  Going back to the Sailor Moon reference above, anytime Sailor Moon seems to be in Spring really works surprisingly well.  Usagi's name means Bunny that's why her Hair is like that, to look like Bunny ears.  

Also I've been looking into the Hebrew scholars who argue "Passover" isn't actually an accurate translation of Peshach and that the word really means Protection or Protector.  I looked into how you'd say either of those in Japanese simply because I've been constructing a sort of "Weeb Bible Translation" in my head and found something I should have remembered I already knew, that's what the name Mamoru means.  Mamoru is the name of Tuxedo Mask but Takeuchi had one point planned for it to be Sailor Jupiter's name.

There is arguably Spring imagery in the first Sailor Moon movie, Sailor Moon R:The Promise of The Rose, but it's also common in the first Cour of each year of the 90s Anime which tended to air in March-May, that includes the Doom Tree Saga (there are only two episodes I consider not good, episodes 3 and 7 of R, 49 and 53 total but 43 and 47 of the DiC order), and the first 6 episodes of Sailor Stars which you should watch instead of SuperS.

Pretear is arguably those themes of Sailor Moon brought to maturity for a somewhat older audience by a more experienced Junichi Sato, and it's fantastic.

Mothra Vs Godzilla makes a good Easter Movie

Which makes one wonder why I'm posting this during Halloween season?  Well it is a Monster movie, and while I've thought of this before it's now I felt compelled to blog on it.

First is the purely Superficial fact that it has a gigantic multicolored egg as a major plot point.

And the story has a Death and Rebirth theme to it.  One Mothra dies to live again through her offspring.

You're maybe thinking, doesn't all that apply to the original Mothra movie too?  Mostly they do, though the Death part is less literal.

But the key thing coming at it from a Christian perspective is that Godzilla as a villain of the movie could be seen a playing the role of The Serpent, and his Seed, thus a Genesis 3:15 tie in.

Mothra is very much the Messianic Archetype of the Toho Universe.

Majora's Mask speculation

I figure October is a good month to do a Majora's Mask post.

I watched Gaijin Goomba's 3 part video about Majora's Mask and Africa.  The first two parts were very good, like most of his videos.  But the third one about Majora himself felt like much more of a stretch, I'm afraid I don't really buy it.  I think a connection between Majora and Dionysus/Bacchus could make sense, Dionysus is frequently affiliated with such chaotic behavior, and via his connection to the stage with mask wearing as well.

I also enjoyed the Game Theory video about Link being Dead in Majora's Mask.  There is also a good counter video to that, which I lean towards.  But what interests me is while the Game Theory video was doing it in terms of Termina as a sort of Purgatory world, one could also argue it's all in Link's head during his dying moments.  Which is a genre I know a little bit about from what Brian Stableford discuses in his Afterward for The Vampire and The Devil's Son, published by BlackCoatPress.  His English Translation of Alexis Ponson du Terrail's La Baronne trépassée (1852).

I also can't help but be intrigued by the Stone Tower of Babel theory.

There are a lot of mythical themes in Majora's Mask.  The whole having 4 divine or semi divine beings at the four corners of the Earth is a common mythological motif.  One arguably included in The Bible in Revelation chapter 7 (which leads into Flat Earther arguments).

In Clock Town an annual festival is approaching.  I decided that since festivals are frequently based on the cycles of either the Sun or Moon, and Termina's Moon clearly isn't running on a normal cycle, to speculate on if this festival could be seen as linked to a Solstice or Equinox.

The three days over which the game takes place are days during which the daylight and nighttime hours are exactly even.  Now it's done that way for game play convenience, but still it does effectively make it very likely that these events are happening at an Equinox.

So next question is, is it Spring or Fall?  After you end the unnaturally prolonged winter on the Goron's Mountain there are clear references to it being spring there.  That doesn't necessarily prove anything about the seasons of the rest of the world, but thematically it does link the story of the game to Springtime.

The Roman Bacchanalia was in the Spring, as was the Athenian Urban Dionysia.

The speculation below is not at all stuff I think the designers had in mind, it's purely my own fun head canon.

As a Christian, Springtime festivals make me think of Passover, Purim and Easter.  A period of 3 days being relevant fits that even better.  And with there indeed being a theme of Death and rebirth involved, I figured why not have some fun with it.

After you beat the game is the Dawn of a New Day.  Which works very well in my mind to see as correlating to when Jesus Tomb was found empty early Sunday morning.

I believe that Sunday was April 9th, agreeing the traditional date of the early Eastern Church.  But the Western Church often believed that Sunday was March 25th, which is indeed about 3 days after the Spring Equinox.  Or some speculate originally that day was the Equinox but then somehow things got moved by a few days.

I support a Thursday Crucifixion model.  Which would place Jesus Death on The Cross at 3:00 in the Afternoon on the first day.  6:00 AM in the morning is when Pilate sentenced Jesus according to John 19:4.   However the theories of Wednesday proponents are perhaps most interesting here.  People who are Wednesday proponent while also believing days should start at Sunrise could easily see these three days as matching when Jesus was in the Tomb.

For traditional Catholics this makes the first day Holy Thursday, the second day Good Friday and the third day Holy Saturday.  But of course on Hebrew reckoning the days begin and end at Sunset not Sunrise.