Another new series I started watching recently is Enen no Shoboutai, titled Fire Force in English, an innovative seinen series by Kodansha that basically takes the sentai model of a team of heroes fighting monsters and turns them into firefighters. But not just any firefighters: they live in a world where humanity has started to spontaneously combust and turn into firey demons called Infernals, requiring society to meet this new threat with supernatural fire-users of their own. It’s quite a good show with a high budget and outstanding visual imagery, plus some rather sexy fanservice.
You might think that building an anime around firefighters is kind of a pedestrian idea, but to the Japanese, fire is an extremely serious topic. When I went to Japan in 1991, I expected Japanese houses to be delicate things made of wood and paper, and…I was exactly right. The practice of building houses out of flammable materials, coupled with the common use of carbon monoxide-spewing portable kerosene heaters can make Japan quite susceptible to dangerous fires. No less than five times, I’ve looked out a window at home or J-List and witnessed fires in nearby buildings, close enough that I could see actual flames. Making firefighters into cultural heroes goes back to the Edo Period. There’s a famous story about a girl named Oshichi who set fire to Edo back in the 15th century so she could be with her lover, who has become a kind of Guy Fawkes folk hero for Japan.
Back when I was studying Japanese at university, I read lots of manga in Japanese to pick up vocabulary and it fit into spoken sentences. But I had a strict teacher who told me not to read manga because it would give me bad examples of Japanese I shouldn’t emulate. While I didn’t follow her advice, she was 100% correct: manga is filled with informal and stylized Japanese that can potentially cause offense or embarrassment if studied too closely, just like learning English from Yoda’s dialogue in Empire Strikes Back wouldn’t be a good idea. So while reading manga to learn Japanese is fine, just understand its limitations.
A good example can be found in the character Arthur Boyle, a blonde-haired boy from an unnamed Western country who joins the 8th Fire Brigade in Fire Force. He’s so strong, he refuses to use polite Japanese to his commander, which is permitted because he’s foreigner, and thus is outside the normal social rules that apply to Japanese. (The same social dynamic explains why foreigners’ names are never put in family-name-first order, as Japanese names are.) This is part of the attraction of anime, which can tell stories about characters who are free from society’s rules in ways the Japanese target audience can never be. It’s another kind of escapism that anime offers, just like isekai and harem shows.
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