Anime Literally Brought Me to Japan
When childhood hobbies turn into future aspirations
And, no, I don’t mean a week-long holiday in order to shop at the biggest gachapon on the top floor of Ikebukuro’s Sunshine City complex, nor traversing the entirety of Tokyo to sweep the shelves of every Animate store’s minimum of seven floors of nerdy paraphernalia.
Anyway, if you live there, you can do both — and with less of a time crunch on your hands.
Pins, keychains, figurines, the CDs of my favorite anime/live-action crossover musical artists, and seemingly plain canvas bags perfect for going for job interviews but reveal me as a Naruto, One Piece, or Bungo Stray Dogs fan at heart if you can decipher the cute tiny illustrations that point to some of the major characters from the series — all done in a day’s haul as a reward for keeping up our grades (excuses, excuses) and surviving yet another semester at the Tokyo university where me and my nerdy co-conspirators will be studying Japanese culture, media, and literature for a total of four years.
And, of course, I have anime to thank for instilling in me an interest in all things Japanese at such a young age: starting from daily afterschool watches of Naruto, One Piece — two of the “Big Three” shonen anime greats — and Kekkaishi (an underrated gem that kickstarted my foray into Japanese mythology) on local TV, to the pretend plays with my friends at primary school where transforming into Pretty Cure warriors to defeat invisible bad guys filled our imaginations during class and spilled out in grandiose, arm-spinning physical enactments in between.
But there was one anime specifically that pointed me in this particular direction of (Japanese) literary studies, and that— if you haven’t guessed from my earlier name-dropping — is Bungo Stray Dogs whose characters are based on real-life classic authors from Japan, U.S., and Russia (and a smattering of others) with special abilities derived from one or more of that specific author’s most defining works.
Heart pounding shonen action sequences mixed with references to classical literature, the relationships between the real-life authors, and the emotional and psychological turmoil seemingly plaguing both the characters on-the-page and the hearts and minds who wrote them…
It’s as if someone took my interests and mixed them all into an actual, well-crafted story before I even knew what they were.
I discovered the series in 2017, with both season one and two of the anime having aired back-to-back in 2016. I fell in love halfway through the first episode — intrigued by the premise of literature and history interweaving to make a modern action story, then staying for the humor, the aesthetics, the vague yet unique power system, and, most of all, the characterization.
Books are my next love after anime. It took me a little longer to develop — specifically, it was only until after I learned to read properly with the help of my friends and our lovely library teacher during the first grade of primary school, and as if to make up for the years lost of being unable to understand the beauty of the written word (the abyssal depths of meaning and emotion behind every stroke of ink on paper and screen), I remember spending any chance I got poring through the books in the school library, and then the ones I begged my mom to buy me even as every cabinet, every shelf in our shared room became bogged down with the weight of still unread words.
The order of discovery goes something like this: anime, books, then (naturally) manga, movies, games. Now I would jump from one media to another, not having so much of a phase where I would steep myself in only one for months on end as much as constantly pushed by unbridled curiosity — and also the Gen Z brand of instant boredom — across the multiple IPs that are springing up at one end then the other at seemingly the same exact moment.
There is always so much to read, so much to watch … and there will always be so much to read and so much to watch, and I — like most other people, I imagine — couldn’t be forced to give up one of my interests for the sake of another because they equally make up my day as much as they helped shape the way I look at the world.
Fairies, dragons, a tyrannical government looking to suppress rebellion and disorder through forced intercommunity manslaughter — these big, often fantastical, often larger-than-life conflicts always hide something smaller, something relatable no matter which world you find yourselves in because humans are humans and where there is external conflict, there is always the personal.
Shy, clumsy underdogs in a big, big world that suddenly demands so much from them, having to grow up quickly and weave through the myriad relationships they’re inadvertently going to form as they journey through a world in desperate need of saving even though it hadn’t done much for them in the first place…
It’s a familiar protagonist trope, but one that persists because of how many people can see themselves in such characters.
Fiction is a reflection of you, but it is also a teacher and a friend — especially to introverts who can’t seem to reveal their feelings and troubles to just about anyone and who find comfort and solace in the fantastical where the jumbled threads of familiar troubles somehow get tied up in a pretty knot at the end, if not a little bit unraveled.
And if not relatable, then it makes you think, to empathize with point-of-views you otherwise wouldn’t even consider shouldn’t you come to care for the two-dimensional characters whose every tear makes you ache, whose every laugh makes you smile in return.
Anime and manga characters are the epitome of this phenomenon, with their complex, seemingly dramatic inner turmoil and desires compared to other forms of fiction that somehow makes them that much more real and palpable.
In any case, their characterization, as expected — and, again, my longstanding love for literature — was what prompted me to read some of the works of the real-life authors portrayed in Bungo Stray Dogs. Some I read before I entered university, others during. I wanted to know where these personalities, these emotions came from — is it an original interpretation by the mangaka, or something hidden to varying degrees within the pages of each poem, each short story, each novel?
In this whirlwind of curiosity and exhilaration, an unprecedented opportunity came about: a chance to study not just literature that now my favorite anime ever had first introduced me to, but games, movies, manga, and anime — all the things I love and all in English (at that point, I wasn’t studying Japanese at all) — in a country that I’ve visited several times and only fell in love with more as time went by, but that I never thought in my wildest imaginations I would be able to live in.
In a way, it was as much a bad choice as a good one. Having studied in international school with a Cambridge curriculum, I grew up thinking I would go to university in the U.K. and, given my aspiration to become a writer in English, that was certainly the most natural choice.
And, yet there was something tugging at me every time I answered “U.K.,” “England,” “London” — what about manga, anime, yokai, Final Fantasy, Japan?
In the end, that was enough. The seed of doubt blossomed into the beautiful cherry blossoms that lined my way to school in the April of 2023, six months after I finally stepped foot in Japan well towards the end of the pandemic and as I rushed to make up for the two years lost by studying online.
I’m now a fourth-year student set to graduate this September of 2024, and while expectedly plagued with yet more doubts about my future and whether I would be able to stay in Japan whilst pursuing my persisting goal of becoming an English-language writer, I somehow feel content about the way my life has turned out.
No, I do not regret spending my university years playing games, reading books and manga, and watching anime and movies. I do not regret analyzing, writing about them, learning from them, and producing works that are inspired by both the culture around me and the culture I grew up in.
I know I have many dreams — big ones fueled by my equally deep, wide-ranging interests, but I trust that it’ll all turn out just as I hoped. That’s why I’m writing this blog post now, writing in English about how Japanese culture and the media I loved since childhood have shaped my then future and will continue shaping my future until I say so otherwise.
Anime literally brought me to Japan, and it’ll help me stay and reach all of my goals. This blog post is one of many first steps towards granting childhood dreams.
