I’m slightly behind on Hanamaru Kindergarten, but the last episode I saw was quite good.  The yakuza child Hinagiku is a welcome addition to the cast; she’s clearly mature and refined beyond her years, but she still essentially acts like a little girl playing tea party.  It’s great fun.

But then, why IS she so refined?  Her family’s rich, certainly, but growing up in a house of gangsters and coming out like Hinagiku seems terribly unlikely.  And yet, here we are, watching a five year-old girl in kimono breaking her sandal strap and introducing herself to a kabuki soundtrack.  Of course, we’ve seen this type so often before.

Gokusen

Black Lagoon

Seto no Hanayome

(Incidentally, two of them also have enka theme songs. Coincidence?)

The yakuza princess is popular enough to share space on a TV Tropes entry (not that that says terribly much, mind).  Sometimes she’ll have a bit of a rough, dangerous edge when backed into a corner, but the essential quality of the yakuza princess is her beauty, grace, and all those signs of an ancient fine Japanese pedigree, which are at odds with the family business.  Or are they?

Here’s what I think: From the early 1800s to the present, hardly any aspect of Japanese culture has been left untouched by western modernity.  Hiroki Azuma says that Japan has been fundamentally disrupted not just once, but twice in less than a century: First with the black ships and the Meiji Restoration, and secondly with defeat in World War II.  Even the yamato nadeshiko, the “traditional” ideal Japanese woman, has been set up today as a reply to modern, western femininity.

And yet– claim Japanese television and movies– there is one institution that has survived the march of the ages.  Its true origins are shrouded in mystery, but the popular imagination dictates that it goes back as far as the Tokugawa period, to the venerable days of the samurai.  Today, it is extremely powerful, entrenched in all parts of society, and its members alone maintain the old ways.  I’m talking, of course, about the yakuza.

It isn’t actually true.  In real life, yakuza are really just organized thugs.  But the belief that they follow ancient traditions and codes of honor—that’s no small thing.  I’m saying that effectively, anime uses the criminal underground as its special space to reconstruct the lost ultra-traditional female.

(EDIT – Thanks, ghostlightning!)

First, remember this entry of mine?
No Longer Human and Misogyny

The yamato nadeshiko was originally part of that Meiji-era push to define what made Japanese culture so special and great. But it morphed into something particularly desperate during the Showa era: Women who proved their loyalty, their Japanese-ness, against the barbarian west. I would go further and say that since the end of World War II, the concept hasn’t moved away from that strict binary. A yamato nadeshiko is prized precisely because she’s such a rarity (such a direct opposite) among modern Japanese women.

When we’re dealing with otaku, it gets more complicated. If you don’t mind me dragging out Hiroki Azuma again, he says that a large part of the otaku superiority complex (sentiments along the lines of “we are the future of this country”) comes from an imagined connection to pre-modern traditions. Our old culture hasn’t been disrupted and lost, say the otaku; it has been preserved IN the otaku.

And yet! And yet, otaku culture proper is only about fifty years old. The people we know as Gainax (the guys who, incidentally, make Hanamaru Kindergarten) burst onto the scene only about twenty years after this whole thing began. Their earliest point of reference, contemporaneous with the rest of Japan, is the 1960s– in other words, the heyday of yakuza films, samurai movies and enka.

And then there’s some point to be made about how it all comes together through the otaku obsession with moe traits, and the general Japanese obsession with types. And Yamamoto-sensei, the main eye-candy, the big-breasted teacher who appears to be the perfect woman in every way without having to be a kimono-wearing Japanese girl, also complicates matters.

It’s a deep, rich subject.  But at the same time, I just love how these kids can ride on grown-ups’ shoulders like parrots.