(Spoilers ahead)

Loss is an emotion that permeates deeply within the human psyche, making an otherwise rational person lose control of themselves. This can be made all the worse in a time of tragedy and decay, especially for those unequipped to deal with such tragedy. For the nation of Japan, it is sometimes stated that they are accustomed to times of peace punctuated by examples of extreme and disorienting violence (Kenji). In the year of 1995, on the heels of the evaporation of the Japanese Economic Miracle came one such act.

Mawaru Penguindrum is a television series directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara that deals specifically with the 1995 Tokyo Sarin Gas Attacks, one of the deadliest attacks in post-WWII Japanese history. The attacks stand out in a society not accustomed to large lists of victims, and even today, only the 2011 Earthquake stands out as a more deadly disaster for the country. But on a different level, the attacks demonstrate the endurance, and growth, of an unwanted reality of Japanese society. Under the layers of politeness and courtesy lay a depression and lack of connection among an increasing amount of the populace. However, this is not an issue Japan faces alone. Indeed, all the world over, much of humanity struggles to feel as if they have any safety net or outlets to reach towards, which only leads to malevolent conclusions, such as suicide or terrorist attacks.
Ikuhara attempts to bridge the gaps of modern society and put forward a message of hope. In Mawaru Penguindrum, he utilizes the 1995 Tokyo Sarin Gas Attacks as a means towards exploring comfort in increasing times of uncertainty, an especially prescient message both domestically and abroad.

The 1980s in Japan were a time characterized by rampant excess and vapid materialism. With the Japanese economy having exploded within the decade, the country was seen as a burgeoning superpower. But in the 1990s, everything fell apart. The ensuing period of economic stagnation is popularly referred to as to the Lost Decade, but since the stagnation has continued until today, perhaps it is fairer to refer to the period as the Lost 20 Years, in my opinion.
Such a fall from economic grace, attached to already existing worries about demographic decline, would prove to shake the psyche of the nation, and pushed many thoughts to be at the forefront of society to its fringes. One such example of said fringes is the group Aum Shinrikyo.

Made up mostly of disillusioned “university students and graduates, often from elite families,” the group attempted to give purpose to a purposeless base, pushing “end of the world” type scenarios, which only the members of the cult would be able to survive, of course (Fletcher). In Mawaru Penguindrum’s analog of Aum Shinrikyo, their leader waxes apocalyptic, talking of the necessity of “[cleansing cities through their] holy fire” (Ep. 20 09:32) and persistently motioning to saving humanity through a “Survival Strategy”. Much like Mawaru Penguindrum’s nascent terrorist group, Aum Shinrikyo chose to “cleanse” humanity through an extreme and bloody manner.

The 1995 Tokyo Sarin Gas Attacks seemed to come out of nowhere. In a day, over 6000 were victims of noxious fumes that the cult had planted on several subway lines. But curiously, despite the many serious side effects that they suffered, many victims whom author Haruki Murakami interviewed seemed more apathetic than angry at their plight. One woman said that she “[couldn’t] say [she felt] much anger or hatred,” for she “[couldn’t] seem to find those emotions in [her]” (Murakami 18). Another victim says that he “[doesn’t] feel especially angry towards the individual culprits” (86). This apathy extends even to the perpetrators of the attack. Murakami writes extensively on one of the perpetrators of the attack, Hidetoshi Takahashi. What is striking about Takahashi is not only that he has bounced back from being a member of a cult, but also the utter lucidity with which he talks about what led him to join Aum Shinrikyo. Takahashi said this in his interview with Murakami:To free myself, to make a fresh start, I poked my nose into all sorts of things, hoping to find the energy I needed to live. Live is full of suffering, and the contradictions in the real world irked me. To escape these, I imagined my own sort of utopian society, which made it easier for me to be taken in by a religious group that espoused a similar vision… Certainly one of the attractions of Aum lay in people’s frustrations with reality and unrest in the family… I do think inside all Japanese there is an apocalyptic viewpoint: an invisible, unconscious sense of fear. When I say that all Japanese have this fear, I mean some people have already pulled aside the veil, while others have yet to do so. If this veil were suddenly drawn back everyone would feel a sense of terror about the near future, the direction our world’s headed in. (348)

The attacks proved to hit at a population that was beginning to grow detached from their reality and sense of purpose. And, in such a detached situation, it is hard to hold hope.
Mawaru Penguindrum starts with a monologue from one of the protagonists, Shouma. In it, he speaks frankly about the Attacks, and in doing so seems to capture the mantra of both the attackers and victims. He ends it by stating: “Ever since that day, none of us had a future. The only thing we knew was that we would never amount to anything” (Ep. 1, 00:44). Mawaru Penguindrum explores the inner psyches of the multiple broken generations who have felt unable to grieve, who felt that they were no longer living in the best times of Japan, and the Sarin Gas Attacks served as a bloody example of that.

Muen shakai literally translates to “no-relationship society”. It describes an emerging issue in modern Japan; those who throw off most human interactions beyond what is “required to work, shop, or attend to their needs,” or people that are barely able to hold human connections and therefore consciously choose instead to seal themselves away (Taylor). In a society where muen shakai exists, so too must there exist fewer extreme versions of societal separation. Mawaru Penguindrum, as it progresses, shows how no one in a culture of distress can escape with escape without any emotional baggage.

Ringo Oginome, the deuteragonist of the show, ostensibly lives a regular life as an average high school girl. However, underneath this thin veneer of normalcy lies an absurdist layer of self-hatred and a lack of identity. In the show, Ringo constantly seeks to emulate her beloved sister who died in the attacks by going after her sister’s former crush, Tabuki, who is significantly older than she is. Her efforts to woo Tabuki range from making a specialty curry to sleeping under his house to know when his fiancée is away. Ringo is forced to trying to have her life go both directions, to live a life of normalcy while fruitlessly chasing a perfection, which never existed.
Shouma, Kanba, and Himari, the children of the leaders of the show’s fictional cult, hide behind a constructed family—none of the three Takakuras are related by blood—and struggle to live a happy life. Kanba is a frequent womanizer who utilizes women as a distraction from what he feels is a fraudulent homelife. Shouma is afraid of having relationships, and crumbles when faced with the prospect of becoming better friends with Ringo. And Himari is a figure that can appear warm to an outside observer but shows cold indifference to her suffering—from an unknown disease that persists throughout the show—and the subsequent suffering that her pain brings others. The Takakura family is one that constantly pretends that they are happy and thriving, despite the torment of their parents’ actions, and fear that they cannot escape the legacy of their family.
It should be noted that even Tabuki, the teacher that Ringo so wants to woo, holds a profound amount of trauma within his heart. The same incident that destroyed the hearts of Ringo and the Takakura family so too gnaws at the core of Tabuki, who feels a deeply ingrained rage at the death of Ringo’s sister during the Tokyo Sarin Gas Attacks. But he hides it. He hides his anger in being an exemplary and friendly teacher, one who is in a healthy relationship with a budding actress. All of that, at least partially, is a lie. Tabuki, under his calm and collected exterior, wishes to bring destructive ruin to the Takakura family, who are both students of his and the relatives of those who partially ruined his life; the only time in which the façade falls is a violent time, where Tabuki attempts to kill the Takakura family in a bizarre scheme at a construction site.

Another important inspiration for Ikuhara when creating Mawaru Penguindrum was an unexpected one. On March 11th, 2010, Japan experienced one of the deadliest earthquakes within it is history. Indeed, the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake ravaged part of the country, with a subsequent tsunami and nuclear disaster only worsening conditions (Saito).

Ikuhara was in the process of directing Mawaru Penguindrum when the earthquake occurred and was quite candid in admitting that the natural disaster played a significant part in the message that he wanted to convey to audiences. He told Kana Ohtsuki in an interview that “the fact that the anime was released in 2011 greatly influenced it, where whilst the idea just started as a small thought, due to the situation of 3.11, this thought became more certain” and that “everyone felt that their lives were fragile and very much in danger” in the aftermath of the earthquakes (“Eulogy). Ikuhara had a mission, an important story to tell, and an important lesson to give that encompasses the two biggest recent tragedies that have gripped the island nation.

Within Japanese media, one of the most interesting and relevant forms of muen shakai comes in the form of a genre known as denpa, or electromagnetic waves. The name originated because of the prevalence within the genre of “oppressive radio towers and people’s consciousnesses being manipulated by electromagnetic signals” (Kenji). The genre mainly concerns with showing the many ways in which melancholy and apathy towards the rest of humanity can manifest itself, whether that be through the looping every day of Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer or the surreal mystery whereby all of humanity disappears except for a small group of teenagers, within the game CROSS†CHANNEL (Kenji). The most well-known display of denpa is also one of the most well-known anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, a show that looks at the hopelessness presented by muen shakai and seeks to bring forth clarity to a crisis bringing quandary. But while director Hideaki Anno finds that we can move past muen shakai through a widespread discovery of the self, Ikuhara chooses to go for an entirely separate theme.

While acknowledging the existence and prevalence of muen shakai, Ikuhara consciously attempts to move past it and make suggestions towards how to counter it, expressing it as an imperative in the current technological culture. He said this to Kana Ohtsuki:

I was originally wanting to do a story about family, and compared to the little thought of denial I felt towards it, my feelings towards affirming the family just grew stronger and stronger. Saying it out loud sounds a bit stupid but it’s perhaps loss and restoration. This has been a theme for me for a number of years. The experience of loss is something felt universally by yourself and those around. Something you can’t quite get back, then you have to restore it again, but you don’t know so you have to find out how to do this (“Eulogy).

In this quote, Ikuhara expresses a desire to bring the individual back towards the family. This is an especially prescient message given how the earthquake served to destroy so many lives in the Tohoku, literally ripping families apart over the death of loved ones and leaving only individuals who are “plagued by regret,” as “time [doesn’t] solve things” that no one wishes to solve (Saito). Indeed, in times of intense anger and personal upheaval, feelings of regret need to be pushed aside, as difficult as that may be.
However, when Ikuhara says family, he does not merely mean those who are connected to you by blood. When he discusses the importance of family, he is encompassing the relationships of those who are met on earth, whose relationships are greater than that of a blood relationship.

The Takakuras are not a family related by blood, and yet, until their love is brought into question, they are able to function as a tight unit. While all of them may pretend that they live in a situation of normalcy, it would also be lying to say that among all the lying, there was not at least some happiness.

Before rounding out this review, it should be noted that this is not a Japan only issue. While it may be significantly easier to throw aside legitimate criticism of one’s own society in favor of acting as if Japan is the only country that is extremely troubled within this current time and age, it is nonetheless wholly inappropriate.

Muen shakai is not a specifically Japanese issue. Rather, it is an issue that many countries are now being forced to reckon with as birthrates decline, job prospects increasingly are in doubt, and the climate presents an existential threat to humanity. We may act as if this is a problem that only Japan is expressing itself through, but we are lying by doing so. In current times, “we know much more of the rest of the world and how differently others live and think… we also know how much we don’t know about the world we live in, even things that bear directly on our lives” (Eckersley 1). We live in terrifying times, where in knowing so much more about everyone else, we feel that we know nothing.

In an age of constant change and constant misery, where every tragedy and every folly of humanity is broadcast for all to see, what hope do we have to survive? According to Ikuhara, the hope must rest in the solidarity of family, whether that be your natural family or your found family. After all, with the protective love of a family, anything, even death, can be weathered easily.

Works Cited

“Eulogy for the Fool – Ikuhara Kunihiko and Ohtsuki Kana Discussion.” Japanese Translation, japanesetranslationblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/06/ikuhara-kunihiko-and-ohtsuki-kana-discussion.

Eckersley, Richard. “Killer Cults and the Search for Meaning.” AQ: Australian Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 1, 2000, pp. 16–51. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20637876. Accessed 13 Apr. 2021.

Fletcher, Holly. “Aum Shinrikyo.” Council on Foreign Relations, 19 June 2012, www.cfr.org/backgrounder/aum-shinrikyo.

Kenji. “On Denpa: A Guest Article.” On the Ones, 29 June 2019, ontheones.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/on-denpa-a-guest-article-by-kenji-the-engi/.

Murakami, Haruki. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. Kodansha, 1997.

Saito, Mari. “10 Years on, Grief Never Subsides for Some Survivors of Japan Tsunami.” Reuters, 10 Mar. 2021, www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/japan-tsunami-survivors.

Taylor, Matthew. “Not with a Bang but a Whimper: Muen Shakai and Its Implications.” Anthropoetics, vol. XVIII, no. 1, 2012, anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1801/1801taylor.
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