How Tokyo Ghoul Really Shows What It Means To be Human:
Tokyo Ghoul is a manga/anime published by the Japanese author Sui Ishida. It is a fairly new anime; being published in 2011–2013.
As I kept reading through Ken Kaneki’s adventures and his transformation into a fragile, sensitive bookworm and slowly into a stronger and more swift character while still keeping his incredible amount of compassion, I laid on my bed and kept thinking the same question over and over to myself:
“What does it really mean to be human?”
I started to think upon the immense tension and lack of communication between the humans and the ghouls. I still feel today as this as unnecessary.
For those who have never read nor seen the series, ghouls have to survive eating human flesh. They can hardly even chew human food let alone actually digest it. Eating human food can actually make them sick and they receive no nutrients from it. They only thing that they can have that we can is coffee.
But instead of exterminating the ghouls and shunning them, why don’t they use them to their advantage?
For example, Japan’s system of criminal punishment defies the death penalty as legal. Not only that, but instead of lethally injecting them such as many western countries practice, they hang them.
Even though being sentenced this punishment is only for murderers, and usually serial killers at that, we could kill them and feed them to the ghouls who need to eat just like humans do. Also people who die of natural causes, instead of burying them or cremating them, use them to distribute to the mouths of hungry ghouls?
Why don’t they study them closely and instead let them merge within the human society? They already do this, but discreetly and with many discomforts. Put the children who are ghouls in school and give their adults a hard-working job. Like us, ghouls can be very talented and have many good quality skills as well.
Many might think, “Well, what if they try to eat the humans?” Very true. Just like humans, they can commit crimes and do wrong. If this is the case, if a ghoul decided to eat an innocent humanthat was not approved of eating by the Japanese government, then they shall be executed because then they would be a ghoul version of a serial killer. Hang them and put it on the news so it can stir fear into other ghouls so they shall not do the same.
However, we humans still have our primitive instincts such as our ancestors from thousands of years ago. We fear of what we don’t understand and instead of thinking with our minds and not with our cowardly and impulsive hearts, we instead destroy them, even if it was not needed whatsoever.
Red Scare, the Salem Witch Trials, the Holocaust, and many more of these tragic events are just very few out of a million examples of this theory.
Even so, out of all the species that I could have been. I am more than honored to be a human being, especially being in the fatherland that I am today. I have the privilege to speak languages that our ancestors created long ago and what we have adapted. I got to truly see how and why humans are so far the dominant specie. I got to learn how thoroughly we have adapted after all this time from the Neanderthals from the Roman Empire and so on and so forth.
Nevertheless, if only we could spend more time improving and revising not the way our tongues speak or what kind of house we live in, but these small instincts that damage the world we live in immensely, imagine how much greater we could be. More than you can possibly imagine…
