Was the version of Nightmare Campus you watched a movie or the video series? According to my Anime Encyclopedia, it was a five-part series that appeared only on video (the encyc. authors refuse to call such series OAV--"Original Anime Video"--denouncing that as a "spin doctor term"). I rented, I think, 2 out of the 5 tapes in the series. According to that page you linked to, the series was edited into a movie-length product. Probably doesn't matter, I was just curious which you saw.

As far as A-bombs, the answer is yes, "a giant white flash, a dome of light/force that explodes into cataclysm" appears in one anime title after another. It's almost like a cumshot in porn--a battle between giant robots or demons isn't truly complete without one. I've always assumed it was, on some level, a way of working out a collective, national trauma over having been bombed in such a spectacular, lethal fashion. In the 50s "radioactive monsters destroying Tokyo" stood in for the Bomb but by the '80s mushroom fireballs became much more frequent and overt.

Having said all that, I kind of hate such generalizations about the Japanese, even when they come from Japanese themselves. One of many reasons I dislike Western art curator darling Takashi Murakami is that I think he's telling the curators exactly what they want to hear: that Japanese art is all about flatness and that anime is playing out national impotence on a global scale. Fuck that noise. Anime is exciting and beautifully drawn and a tremendous cultural success story. Beside just enjoying it, I've been motivated to do all sorts of research to understand what I'm seeing in films, in terms of dress, food, buildings, customs. I know way more about Japan now than, say China or Korea, as do anime-loving fourteen year olds all over North America.

- tom moody 2-21-2004 7:52 pm

my nuclear bomb dreams and fears are all about repression and treading carefully lest the bad thing happen. The nameless, unthinkable dread. Maybe part of the reason I like anime is the release (well obviously in this case there's the porn angle, but that's not what I mean). Interesting on a personal level, but culturally its a disturbing kind of acquisitiveness -- buying products of catharsis from the culture that we inflicted with the suffering that we feared.
- sally mckay 2-22-2004 6:20 pm

I agree that's disturbing, and it has bothered me, too. Here are some other ways to look at it:

First, the 20-something artist who draws anime and the 14-year old North American who consumes it "don't know from A-bombs," as they say here in NY. It's just another cultural trope that says "big goddamned explosion."

Second, anime is increasingly meant to be a "world product," that is, enjoyed, understood, and consumed by people everywhere. The big eyes and different hair colors and endless middle-school hijinks are part of this. We tend to focus on the Japanese-ness of anime but equally interesting is its huge appeal outside Japan. Thus, a-bombs are something that could happen to anyone, anywhere. They've gone from being a culture-specific fear to a widespread one.

And last, getting a sick kick out of another country's trauma isn't entirely a one-way thing anymore. A month or two after 9/11/01, a friend in Germany sent me a cell phone cover, manufactured over there, with a photo of the twin towers intact on one side and exploding in flames on the other.

Off topic, Bush/Cheney coercing the Japanese to remilitarize and send troops to help out with our latest colonial venture (thereby increasing terrorism fears in their own country) strikes me as tragically wrongheaded just plain shitty.

- tom moody 2-22-2004 9:12 pm

This is completely off topic, and I don't know why it appeared in my local news paper 3+ years after the fact, but I thought you might be interested ... Wave-particle duality seen in carbon-60 molecules
- mark 2-23-2004 10:49 am

thanks mark - maybe this decoherence is the reason its in the news. Interesting project: to identify the boundary between micro(quantum) and macro(classic).
- sally mckay 2-23-2004 12:28 pm

I've been watching more A-bomb stuff. Saw the Legend of the Overfiend which seems to have been the inspiration for Nightmare Campus since they were pretty much identical, right down to the five-pointed star on the outside of the campus building. Overfiend had less sex (though apparently I was watching a shortened, dumbed-down, and dubbed version) but more gross and cathartic violence: lots of dismemberment and bodies turning inside out, spitting apart, dissolving to mush. The A-bomb stuff at the end was really intense and I found it pretty disturbing. Especially since this one did not have the comic relief element of the ridiculously giant penis that stole the show in Nightmare Campus. Does anyone (heh, I guess by 'anyone' I mean Tom) have a recommendation for reading on anime? I'd love a non-obessive, general history, but if manic, fan-based, over-attention-to-detailed history is all there is on offer, I'd happily read that too.

- sally mckay 3-06-2004 8:54 am

My Big Three references (these are USA Amazon; it was easier to link to for the summaries):

Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation --Good overview by University of Texas prof Susan Napier

The Anime Encyclopedia--Insanely detailed show by show run-down. Very dry British-style humor in the writing (not sure if the authors are British--I think they are).

The Anime Companion: What's Japanese in Japanese Animation --more of a cultural encyclopedia, but tied to things you see in specific shows. Hugely informative and fun. (But organized alphabetically according the Japanese names for things--you end up skipping around in the book a lot.)

- tom moody 3-06-2004 9:35 am

Those look like excellent references! thanks so much.
- sally mckay 3-06-2004 9:54 am