Christian images show a lot in anime in subtle and less subtle ways. It's natural then to ask why these images are so popular when only a small minority of Japanese people consider themselves Christians. It is probably not a surprise that these images generally have little to do with actual Christianity. First, I'll briefly give some examples of stylized Christian images and images of Europe in anime. This part is easy and you can really just go on and on forever, so I'll just outline a couple of general categories and examples and if you want you can think of examples from your own favorite shows or favorite manga. Typically the imagery is Catholic, it features priests, crosses and cathedrals. One thing that is interesting is that rarely do these figures perform any religious tasks. They tend to either seem to only have the appearance of a religious figure or perform the rights of some vague fictional religion. Angels and demons derive from Christian tradition and to an extent even the conflict between light and dark, common video game staple can be seen as influenced by the same tradition. More broadly, when you see organized religion at all in anime, usually it follows the guideline of Western faith, presumably because most Eastern religions don't have the same structure of centralization of power that makes them useful plot tools. That's really all I want to say about some examples. The main point of this video is to explain that the portrayals of Christianity in Japanese popular culture have a separate life from the actual Christianity as its practice now or at any point throughout history. The holiday of Christmas is a useful example for understanding this argument. Christmas is a Christian or Western image that almost forces itself into many slice of life anime. All around the world, Christmas is increasingly secularized and it's becoming detached from its original Christian meanings even though many of the symbols still persist. For example, the Christmas tree, with a history hundreds of years old, is credited as a Christian practice and it's usually topped with an angel or star that appears in the nativity stories of Jesus. I think many people in, likely many Christians even don't think of Jesus when they put a star on top of their tree, but they still practice their tradition because it's taken on new cultural meaning as completing the task of decorating the tree. This is similar to why we see images that obviously have Christian origins in anime, but that are made vague or lack any actual religious meaning. They're familiar, they resonate with the audience and they mean something even if that's something has been changed. Let's get into history. From here on I'll be making use of citations which will pop up in this corner. There's no facecam but if there was I would be pointing to the top right of the video. You can check these against the bibliography in the video description. First I'll say a little about the actual and surprisingly long history of Christianity in Japan. It's really cool. Not because it'll help you understand these images in anime but because it's actually entirely different and interesting in its own right. Christianity first arrived in Japan in 1549. Anti-Christian sentiments rose in the following decades and the Tokugawa Shogunet in 1600 forced Christians to worship in secret. Only in 1865 after Japan was forcefully open to the west, the missionaries rediscovered the Japanese Christians who could finally come out of hiding after over two centuries. During this time they wrote and passed down their own holy text called Tenchihaji Marino Koto. In the beginning of heaven and earth, based solely off of their memories of Christian teachings of missionaries, they created this incredible Christianity that combined with local religious beliefs. I think this is a really cool tradition but with very few exceptions it's very rarely touched on in Japanese popular culture. One reason is because of my argument that Christianity portrayals are not derived from the actual history of Japanese Christianity and also because this unique Christianity that evolved among these hidden followers is now essentially extinct. It's so fascinating to me too that the Church is usually portrayed in Japan as an oppressive force because for hundreds of years Christians were persecuted and pushed to the margins of Japanese society, with some of them literally crucified for their beliefs. I think this shows how Japanese creators are borrowing not just Christian images themselves but specifically recent Western conceptualizations and skepticism of organized religion and what its symbols represent. So what is actually the history of these images? This is a difficult question since it's a pretty narrow phenomenon and obviously individual people will have different answers to it. So I will try to stay close to the sources that I found. Those difficult for me to find any literature specifically talk about Christianity but there is a healthy body of work examining the pictures of Europe more generally in Japanese literature and anime. According to these sources Christianity is one part of a cultural diffusion from Europe and the United States to Japan into postwar era and especially in the 1980s onwards. This also explains why we don't see the native hidden Christianity tradition that I discussed above. One set of images that have become quite popular is that of the European Middle Ages. The papers I found don't really say this specifically but I think these images are very relevant to this discussion of Christianity. Clearly the popular Christian images in Japanese media of huge Gothic cathedrals, holy nights and powerful bishops is more similar to an imagination of the Middle Ages than how Christianity was actually practiced around the world in modern times. Again, I refer to this imagination of the Middle Ages. These ideas are not historically accurate and they're not intended to be. Translated Western fantasy novels and early fantasy games such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest produced the fantasy boom in the 1980s and 1990s that was partially responsible even for the creation of the light novel genre. Multiple genres of anime also incorporated European images including ones as famous as Miyazaki's Kiki's delivery service. This was also a period of great economic expansion and expansion of consumer culture in the appetite for entertainment. I think this wide-ranging popularity and influence across different types of media as well as the coincidental timing all have contributed to the durability of European and Christian images. Okay, that's all I have. It would be really nice to give some more information, some more historical background but I think this topic is one where it's really easy to just make up stuff that kind of sounds right so I wanted to stay along the lines of what researchers have published and this is more or less what I found. Even then I still feel like I made some extrapolations. But hopefully this gives you some interesting ideas for interpreting the sometimes confusing phenomenon of Christian images in Japanese popular culture. Thank you.