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[Hide] (457.3KB, 1170x1159) Reverse Your opinions were interesting. When I was little, Macross, Yamato, and Battle of the Planets were my favorite anime. I had no idea that they were foreign- made. I rediscovered anime when I went to high school and became completely addicted. My own life also changed completely: all my friends are Asian, and I major in Asian history in college. My parents are a little confused by how much I’ve changed. Sometimes it seems strange to me, too. Anime has even totally influenced my taste in girls.
All things Asian have an abnormal attraction for me. Among these, anime are particularly important. I am especially partial to Japan, Manchuria (?), and Korea. I major in East Asian history. All my friends are Asian and one of them is a girl from Niigata, Japan.
But it wasn’t always this way. I was raised in a white suburban home and had almost no opportunity to encounter anything Asian when I was a child. At most I might have said “I want to be a ninja,” or heard my grandfather talk about his time in Japan (he was there in the Navy). I saw the anime I mentioned earlier and kung fu movies (as growing boys tend to do, we watched a lot of martial arts movies and things like the Karate Kid and Bruce Lee stuff), but that’s about it. There were hardly any Asian students in my school, and the ones there were were Asian Americans.
In ninth grade (my third year of junior high school) I started learning tae kwon do, where I met a girl who was half-Korean, and we started dating. It’s a long story, so I’ll make it short, but the upshot of it is that we broke up.
Right after the breakup, a friend showed me some anime—Akira and Vampire Hunter D (Kyūketsuki Hantā D). I was really depressed, so I shut myself up at home and got so all I did was watch anime. The girl in the anime reminded me of the girl who broke up with me. I immersed myself in anime on the weekends, too. I was really miserable.
Even thinking about it now, I’m amazed that she was so much like the young girl in the anime. On top of being cute, she was so strong that she was dangerous (she was the state champion in tae kwon do and a cheerleader). Her appearance was like that of the girls in the anime, too—she was glamorous and had big eyes. Perhaps the fact that she was half-Asian made her seem like a special being, to the point of unreality.
Mamono Hunter Yōko took her place and became the girl I considered the cutest. If the young girls in anime had been the real thing, I probably would have loved them. A Japanese professor warned me, half- jokingly, that I should probably stop watching anime so much. If I didn’t, I might start expecting real girls to act like the ones in anime. That observation stayed with me, because I had never properly analyzed my own thinking.
But I think that I am definitely not a pervert. In the first place, I don’t like porn, whether anime or otherwise. I like Takahashi Rumiko’s works, like Ranma ½, and DNA2 (Doko ka de nakushita aitsu no aitsu). This semester I wrote a paper about gender roles and their representation in Ranma.
I gradually became fascinated with all aspects of Asian culture, not just anime. My area of interest shifted from European history to Asian history. Soon after I entered college, I became friends with a Korean student who likes anime as much as I do. Eventually it got so all my friends were Korean, Chinese, or Japanese. Even though I could barely speak Korean, I was always with them, the only white person. It was a little strange. But among the other Asian students, this group of Koreans had the reputation of being snobs. I lost interest in my white friends a long time ago. Even before I made Korean friends—there were various reasons for this. Do you know what fraternities are? Mine was anime-related and changed my life dramatically.
The symbolic connections between anime and the memory of my ex-girlfriend reinforced one another, and each fascinated me all the more. Until that time I had never liked an Asian girl or dated one (my Korean friends tell me that the half- Korean one doesn’t count). For me, Asian girls (that is, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese) are just as attractive as white girls and I think more of them are beautiful. Whether white or Asian, I think that the cutest girls are equally pretty. I’m not into the stereotypical submissive Asian girls. I just like the way they look. None of these things are normal for an American guy. I guarantee it. You’re a psychiatrist, so you can probably make judgments about the meanings of these kinds of things, but I can’t.
When I suddenly look around a room and see that everyone is Asian except me and whenever I realize that most of the time they can’t understand what I’m saying, I think about that. I wonder what I’m doing, and it seems strange that I ended up this way.
I think it would probably be wrong to blame all of this on anime. Because there are deeper, more complicated things involved.
My mother seems to think that I have been this way since a particular incident.
When I was two years old, my family took a trip to Seattle. There was a Japanese family with a little girl about my age there sightseeing. I don’t remember it, but according to my parents I was running around and I tackled the little girl and wouldn’t let her get back up. My parents felt terrible and apologized to the little girl’s family, who couldn’t understand English. There must be something about this episode deep in my unconscious, but I don’t really know. This is all I can write about it now. It’d be good if it is useful to you, but please don’t use my name. I’m going to Japan this December and January. To meet my friend from Niigata.
I like Japan; I even like the part of it that is militaristic and not very well thought of. I think the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is very interesting. I am also a big fan of ukiyo-e, Tanizaki’s novels, and Japanese music like Cibo Matto. I’m also interested in the war between the Heike and the Minamoto. I think that Japan is the most attractive, paradoxical, and contradictory society in the world. I will always admire it.