diary of infinity

I just had a dream about Hotaru (土萠ほたる), it was kind of strange as it must be a couple of years since I even glanced at a Sailor Moon episode. She was living next door to where I was staying, and although I got the impression she was considered a rather crabby person we seemed to hit it off very nicely, just chatting about trivial things. Sadly I woke up just as we held hands. >_<

(Picture by Naoko Takeuchi.)

Recently I saw for the first time (on Channel 4 over Xmas) the Ghibli film 猫の恩返し (Neko no Ongaeshi), usually referred to by the cryptic title "The Cat Returns" but more correctly called "A Cat Returns a Favour". In short, this is a very enjoyable film, but not overly deep. The heroine Haru reminds me somwhat of Makoto in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and it has a similar "slice of life with a weird twist" plot, only this time the twist is being spirited away by cats instead of acquiring the ability to leap through time.

A teenage girl, Haru, saves a cat from being run over, it turns out to be a prince of the Cat Kingdom, and as a thankyou the King showers gifts on Haru. Unfortunately the cats' idea of gifts is a garden full of catnip and dozens of boxes of mice. Haru later complains to the King's agent about her hard life and is offered the possibility of a life of ease in the Cat Kingdom, the only snag being she would have to marry the cat prince, a prospect she baulks at. However the over-enthusiastic cats spirit her away to the Cat Kingdom anyway, where to her dismay she swiftly starts to turn into a cat (she make a very sweet catgirl, first gettng the ears and paws, and later the whiskers!) In the end she escapes, with the help of two mysterious cats who are not from the Cat Kingdom but some other magical place hidden in the back alleys of her home town.

The story evokes traditional tales where people are spirited away to magical worlds, where to dally too long is to be trapped forever. But unlike many of them, there isn't a time dilation effect in the Cat Returns, except that there is no night in the kingdom. Haru must return to the normal world before dawn and doesn't realise night has already fallen in her own world. Meanwhile, the strange nighttime procession of the entourage of the Cat King who comes to visit Haru early in the film is reminiscent of stories where someone witnesses a procession of a fairy king or other unworldly creatures. Examples of such stories can be found amongst the Japanese folk tales collected by Lafcadio Hearn in his book "Kwaidan".

I've just realised I've never written here about the anime Air, described by some as the saddest anime series ever (but surely also one of the most beautiful). To date all of my Air talk has been in forums elsewhere. Some day I will rectify this omission, but sadly not today.

In science we are taught to test the validity of theories by looking for verifiable claims and then testing them. For absolutely no reason at all, I have decided to take the same approach with anime. Some anime takes huge liberties with scientific laws, whereas other anime, for instance Moyashimon, is packed with hard scientific fact which forms the basis of much of the story. Anyway here are two claims made in anime stories which might be tested scientifically, one more easily than the other.

1) Cherry blossom petals fall at 5cm/sec. (source: 5 Centimetres Per Second)

2) If you shorten your skirt by 2cm then you can fly further than yesterday (source: K-On)

Let's look at these claims a bit more closely. In 5 Centimetres Per Second, Akari states that cherry blossom petals always fall at 5cm/sec. Since she gives a constant speed, I think it is safe to assume she is talking about the terminal velocity of petals in still air. In principle this is easy to test, unfortunately cherry blossom season is now over until next year, so a proper experiment will have to wait. However there must be many videos which include the sight of falling cherry blossom so approximate measurements could certainly be made.

From the theoretical standpoint, one might produce a formula for calculating the forces on a cherry blossom petal, however this is not straightforward. In addition to the force of gravity acting on the mass of the petal, and the air resistance acting on the surface area of the petal, we must also consider that the petal flutters, spinning and see-sawing as it falls. This will use up a significant amount of the gravitational force, and the changing orientation of the petal will also alter the air resistance, e.g. when the petal is oriented vertically it will fall much faster. So the motion would be pretty hard to model! To understand the importance of the petals spinning, consider that physicist Richard Feynman once noted that a ball rolling down an inclined plane will only accelerate at 5/7 of the speed that the law of gravity would give you for the angle of slope, since the other 2/7 is used up making the ball rotate. So really unless you are a theoretician of Nobel Prize winning stature like Feynman (who once worked out the equations to explain the rate of wobble of a dinner plate spinning on the end of a stick!) you need to do the experiment first and worry about the theory afterwards (if at all!).

Anyway, next time I will report back on whether I have found any actual footage of cherry blossom falling, also on another question: does the cherry blossom in 5 Centimetres Per Second itself fall at the claimed rate or not? (Preliminary examination says: not!)

Turning now to Claim Number 2 which is made in the OP song of the anime K-On, I will have to defer detailed discussion of that to next time due to lack of time. However it looks to be somewhat tricky, since the obvious way of testing it is to get a girl wearing a skirt to take a flying leap and see if she goes further after trimming her skirt by two centimetres. Needless to say, the repeatability of such an experiment is somewhat problematic. Moreover, note that the specific claim is "further than yesterday" which implies one must compare results of flights that were 24 hours apart, which introduces further variability!

Don’t miss next weeks exciting installment of verifiable anime tales in which I will attempt to recruit a statistically significant number of girls in short skirts to test the K-On claim!

Well here we are at the winter solstice (happy solstice everyone! hmm, I think it's time to do my Xmas shopping!), and I'm determined to finish the piece I started to write about Kimikiss Pure Rouge before the year is out. (Please note that this post is located slap-bang in the middle of Spoiler City, read it at your own peril!)

So where was I? Oh yes. Previously on Kimikiss Pure Rouge, I started to watch what I took to be an affable and realistic slice of life drama (albeit one which used a set of cringingly stereotyped characters). (But nice watercolour styling as you can see in the pic of Mao and Kai here.)

The feel of the story is summed up by the OP and ED which seem to bracket the series as a whole: The OP, Aozora Loop (Blue Sky Loop), has a nice bouncy feel to it, it gets on a roll and then soars into the sky, something that was brought out literally when they reworked the OP sequence half way through the series and inserted a lot of sky shots and upward pans. It left you expecting a light and uplifting story, and of course that's how it began. That's always how it begins...

The second ED, which came in mid-series is Wasurenaide (I won't forget) a melancholy song which signals how the series will end. The singer, Suara, tells us (paraphrasing here) "I can't promise I'll always be with you, but I love you for now, and even if you end up alone you won't really be alone, because I'll never forget you."

The Eriko arc
So there I was, expecting a slice of life drama, and it turned into a sliced life drama instead, with life being dissected by the clinical Eriko Futami who at first I loathed but ultimately came to understand. Right from the start she seems to be playing with people's feelings, when she challenges Kazuki to kiss her "as an experiment", but ultimately it became clear that it was her own feelings she was playing with.

In one of two subplots that help illuminate the main theme, the capricious nature of love, Eriko claims to be trying to work out what causes people to fall in love, by going through the motions of a relationship with Kazuki in the manner of a scientific experiment to see if it engenders any feelings in her. She claims it doesn't, but in the end we realise that she is simply frightened of being hurt and this is her way of trying to remain detached so that when the inevitable end comes she won't be heart-broken. However Kazuki has seen through her (long before I did, I must say! I just took him for an idiot that she was toying with) and he is determined to get a response out of her, and in the end her experiment fails: she is forced to trust him as she confesses that she is in love, but was scared of the inevitable heartbreak when the day comes that they break up. (We get hints that her parents have divorced, and never really cared about her either, which has probably engendered her cynical view of the futility of loving someone).

Anyway, throughout the series, Eriko's continual questioning of why people fall in love, and why if they were in love their feelings would ever change, serves to highlight the way in which most of the characters are not in control of their own hearts, but fall haplessly in and out of love and end up hurting one another without being able to do anything about it.

In the Eriko/Kazuki part of the story we also have Asuka Sakino (the nice ponytailed girl on the left here, pictured with Kazuki and Eriko), the sporty spicegirl, who falls in love with Kazuki and yet is her own worst enemy when she helps him get back together with Eriko not once but twice! She is such a noble girl, and is the character everyone ends up feeling most sorry for over the fact that she ends up alone. A sweet twist at the end is that she can't help confessing her feelings to Kazuki even though she knows nothing can possibly come of it because she's left it all way too late, but she does manage to steal a kiss from him!

The Mao arc
The main part of the story though is the romantic quadrilateral of Mao, Kouichi, Yuumi and Kai. The lesson here is "Look before you leap to set a friend up with someone else!" as Mao discovers to her cost when she sets Kouichi up with Yuumi only to realise that she's in love with him herself. If Sakino shot herself in the foot over Kazuki, with Mao it was more like a head shot, indeed I couldn't help thinking she was lucky to come out of it alive because she seemed pretty suicidal to me at one point.

Basically Kouichi likes the shy girl Yuumi who's in his class, but they've never actually spoken and he's struggling even to open a conversation with her. Apart from her name he knows nothing about her (other than that he fancies her!). It was this bit that first persuaded me to give the series a chance since I felt the fumbling first steps towards friendship and ultimately love were handled very realistically. To cut a long story short, Mao kick-starts their relationship by almost literally throwing them together (in fact she just drags Kouichi over to Yuumi by the scruff of the neck...) only to start to have increasing misgivings and butterflies every time she sees them together, despite the fact that she already has a cool boyfriend of her own in the shape of Kai, a jazz saxaphone player.

To be honest when I think about it, this story arc (which unfolds in parallel with the Eriko one) is not very deep or thought provoking. But it is the emotional heart of the series, because Mao is a charismatic girl who we root for from the start, and when she starts to go to pieces, which she does in a big way about 2/3 of the way into the series, she drags us along too for the ride. On the animesuki forums there were even people becoming hysterical because they were afraid she wouldn't end up with Kouichi.

But I'm going to talk about Kai, the outsider (he's not part of their clique) who in the end makes it all happen. He's a man of few words, and against Kouichi he really does look and act manly compared to Kouichi's cute boyishness, despite only being one year older. Kai's words are few but they always count. When Mao breaks up with him, all he says is "why?", and then won't let her go until she has explained herself (that she can't get Kouichi out of her head despite having only originally thought of him as a "little brother" figure). Then when he later sees Kouichi and the latter asks why they broke up, he refrains from answering. Kouichi's plaintive little-boy-lost look shows he has no idea what is going on, and rather than saying something cutting like "because of you", or trite like "why don't you ask Mao", Kai leaves him to make that decision by himself. It was a difficult situation, many men would probably have hit the other guy at that point, but Kai knows it's not Kouichi's fault and decides to keep out of the whole thing.

And yet much later on, it is Kai who finally gives Kouichi the push he needs to break up with Yuumi and fulfil his predestined love with Mao. Kai doesn't want his own suffering, nor Mao's, to have been in vain due to an ever-indecisive Kouichi. Right at the end, he sees Kouichi is still in denial, talking about staying with Yuumi, so Kai comments that his expression is the same as the one Mao used to have when she tried not to hurt him by denying her feelings even to herself, but that in the end it was in vain and she hurt him anyway because she had to be true to her feelings. As Kai walks away, we can see the message has struck home, and Kouichi breaks up with Yuumi shortly afterwards and goes running to find Mao so the story can end with them having a tearful kiss as the end of festival fireworks go off.

The fireworks are clearly symbolic of the fulfilment of Love. Each character responds to them appropriately, giving a memorable wrap up to the entire story. Mao and Kouchi, Eriko and Kazuki, watch the fireworks with tearful joy, holding one another close. Kai is at work and pauses to look at the fireworks thoughtfully. Sakino is out for a run when she sees them, and looks emotionally drained but composed as she stands there panting. Yuumi is in the park when the fireworks go off behind her. She turns to look at them for a moment, her face expressionless. Then she turns her back on them and walks away. The ending is poignant and even sad, but it is the right ending. JC Staff avoided the temptation of a happy but trite ending where everyone finds love and instead stayed true to the realistic slice of life genre by letting everything play out naturally to the bittersweet end.

Wow! that was so long and I never talked about the other subplot, the film they made! Well you'll just have to see the series yourself for that bit! There's a batch torrent available for the BSS fansubs of the series.

But to answer the question I originally posed, is the heart soluble in tears? Well the series certainly melted mine, much to my surprise since I had long since tired of high school romances.
Thinking the series over, I want to pick out just one incident that for me was the most emotional moment. In the final episode, Mao (who still believes Kouichi will stick with Yuumi) bumps into Yuumi during the school festival. She tells her that she's noticed how mature Kouichi is now that he has a girlfriend, and that it's time for her to stop being his "big sister". She takes Yuumi's hand and squeezes it, saying "baton pass", and says to look after Kouichi. It's an incredibly sad moment because it shows she has finally given up all hope and is abandoning her life-long friendship with Kouichi because it's become too painful for her. Later the same day, when Kouichi breaks up with Yuumi, Yuumi is dry-eyed since she has long known this moment would come. But she looks at her hand thoughtfully, and says "let's just shake hands", and so silently passes the baton back to him. (Kouichi though, as ever, is oblivious to what just happened.)