By Trevor Young
Tamako Market (Yamada, 2013) is an often-neglected show within the catalog of animation studio, Kyoto Animation, and director, Naoko Yamada’s, oeuvre. Watching the show, it is easy to ascertain that it is about love, be that in a romantic setting, a familial one, or as a general attitude towards life, but overlooked is the source of this love. Where does it come from? And what is the impetus behind it? Through analyzing the history of Kyoto Animation’s projects prior to Tamako Market alongside the subcultural phenomenon that housed those projects during the 2000s known as moé, the intentions of Tamako Market as a loving thesis on moé as it pertains to an eclecticism of cultural bodies will become clear. In doing so, the TV series will receive the attention that it has been so woefully denied in Western academia in the hopes of sparking intrigue as to its subject matter and premise.
The term moé refers to an abstract feeling of pleasure or love one experiences when looking at a character image.[i] According to manga critic, Ito Go, the sensation is a physiological one akin to music in that it repeats patterns until “what you are looking at is no longer the boring repetition of image, but pleasurable characters.”[ii] Go describes this trend in manga with the phrase, “the pleasure of lines” (byosen ni yoru kairaku), as their sophisticated nature enables pleasurable viewing on the part of the spectator.[iii] Small movements of the body are then emphasized with a conservative number of lines to create an impression of three-dimensionality.[iv] Moé, as such, is based in abstractions, for the malleability of the character image considers the spectator’s imagination to accommodate for the projection of moé characteristics.
Moé is not simply a product of style, however. In many ways, moé was an inevitable cultural paradigm following World War II, as young men who did not fit into Japan’s masculine gender roles felt outcast by society.[v] These men would seek media as an escape from their predicament, and those more feminine of the bunch began to form fan clubs and doujinshi circles around anime and manga aimed at girls in the early 1980s.[vi] As such, these fan bases were often phallocentric, and “line fetishes” (byosen fechi) of a scopophilic nature developed into its own form of otaku subculture that would evolve gradually over time with the 2000s moé boom arguably representing the peak of its cultural relevance.[vii]
The animation studio, Kyoto Animation, rode the waves of moé’s popularity in the 2000s, adapting popular bishoujo (cute girl characters) works like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (Ishihara, 2006) and three separate Key visual novels into TV anime. The success of these series, particularly that of Haruhi’s, even acted as some of the moé boom’s greatest and most influential hits, the popularity of which helped launch the studio’s record of prestige that has carried on to this day.[viii] But in much the same way that Mulvey once described the male gaze as being for everyone, moé, too, was so open in meaning and content that it could appeal to anyone, including women.[ix] After all, its root stemmed from shoujo manga (comics aimed at girls) in the first place, so there were plenty of female creators who were both contributing to moé and reacting to it positively.[x] At what point a popular female centric moé anime would release was a matter of when rather than if.
All three of Kyoto Animation’s Key adaptations—Air (2004), Kanon (2006), and Clannad (2007) (along with its sequel, Clannad After Story (2008))—were directed by the late Tatsuya Ishihara, someone who would also act as mentor to a fledgling Naoko Yamada during her time as an episode director for Clannad After Story.[xi] In many ways, it is easy for one to trace the aesthetic heritage of her series directorial debut, K-ON! (2009), to Ishihara and the studio’s veteran staff. However, this point runs the risk of discrediting Yamada’s influence over Kyoto Animation’s future works, as she, along with her then friend and K-ON!’s lead character designer, Yukiko Horiguchi, transformed the series from a male oriented seinen gag manga into one of the most lucrative hits of the 2000s and 2010s respectively.
K-ON! is significant for a number of reasons. For one, Horiguchi’s malleable character designs allowed for a wide range of expressivity despite their fixation on realistic body types and proportions, a quality that quickly propelled her to stardom among animators and character designers.[xii] It was also with K-ON! that Yamada’s fondness for experimentation with camera lenses, angles, spatial proportions, and lighting effects would mature, properties that would eventually color the entire studio’s visual lexicon from then on out. But perhaps K-ON!’s most notable significance culturally was its shift in viewership, as it saw a far higher percentage of female and non-otaku viewers than other anime of its ilk at the time.[xiii] As such, the series helped pave the way for the diversity in content that Kyoto Animation would become known for, and while the studio has continued producing anime targeted at male otaku, their increased focus on series aimed at female otaku and general audiences would be hard to imagine had K-ON! not performed as well as it did, which finally brings us back to Tamako Market and how it acts as K-ON!’s successor.
When offered the chance to produce a third season of K-ON!, Naoko Yamada and company declined, opting instead to work on a wholly original TV anime, Tamako Market.[xiv] To make a long story short, the series did not garner nearly the critical or commercial response that its predecessor had enjoyed and is often criticized for its fixation on a plot involving foreign characters and its seeming lack of focus narratively. However, when examining the show’s admittedly scattershot approach to character and theme, these elements cease to be issues, instead becoming an integral part of its entertainment factor, and what better place to start than by examining the show’s least popular character: Dera.
Dera is a royal bird sent on a mission to find his prince a proper bride, and during his journey he happens upon Tamako and the Usagiyama (Bunny Mountain) Shopping District, whereupon he dubs her worthy of marrying his majesty. Dera’s abnormal presence immediately destabilizes the simple life that Tamako leads, disrupting her daily routines so much that it brings her to tears. His chivalrous personality directly opposes her humility to the point of being antithetical to the very nature of her being, a notion that is further emphasized by Dera’s last name, Mochimazzi, which quite literally translates to “bad tasting mochi.” Yet, despite Tamako and Dera’s apparent differences, similarities are constantly drawn between the two, such as their airheadedness, empathy, nearsightedness, and their love of Japanese rice cakes, or the mochi in Mochimazzi. As such, the bond they form becomes central to the show’s themes of eclecticism, as they both represent two sides of the same coin culturally.
As an agent of a foreign culture, Dera represents the exotic in its most abundant. He and his friends from the tropics are collectively associated with yellow, which their roles as foreigners mark as a symbol of exoticism. Tamako Market draws a parallel between the exotic yellow and the primary color palette of the Usagiyama Shopping District, most prominent of which also being its very own yellows. In doing so, the show makes the case that the locales thought to be familiar to a Japanese audience are no less brimming with diversity, from the assortment of specialized food stands to the flower shop run by a trans woman. Most notable is the music café where the store owner plays a different genre of music for Tamako nearly every episode. The ecosystem that these stores create thereby becomes the show’s signifier for eclecticism, something that is explored in greater detail with Tamako’s passion.
The name “Tamako” is a pun. “Tama” roughly translates to “ball” while the suffix “ko” connotes the idea of a “child” or “non-adult.” Put together, Tamako is literally a daughter of mochi, as her father runs a mochi shop. If thought about in a metaphorical light, one could assume this refers to Tamako’s role as a moé character, and her openness to the diversity of interests surrounding her is the show’s primary method of conveying the theme of eclecticism. In this sense, her unwavering dedication to the sweet, circular desert that is mochi is appropriate, as it, too, possesses the potential for moé. According to Higashimura Hikaru, moé is not simply a fan’s response to a cute character, but the object behind it.[xv] In reactions that trains receive from otaku, he states, “though this train is a nonhuman object, it has a hard-working character, which can trigger a moé response. People discover stories in objects and feel moé for them.”[xvi] If, by Tamako Market’s account, mochi is to be seen as moé, then Tamako, as its figurative offspring, acts as its ambassador to the world in much the same way that Dera does for the tropics.
Furthermore, examining the show’s title reveals that the market itself is a character. In the same way that K-ON! explored a school club as a collective unit paradoxically defined by the individualism of its members, Tamako Market sees each shop as a micro unit enabled by the macro structure of Usagiyama. These micro units, then, could be thought of as vessels for subcultures that both inform and branch out of the dominant culture. The result becomes what Morinaga Takuro calls “The Akihabara block economy,” or a market wherein the producers and consumers make up the same people and money circulates within a closed market so that nobody makes any real profit.[xvii]
Usagiyama fits Takuro’s model to a tee, as its patrons include its business owners, all of whom support one another by paying for each other’s services. In this camaraderie, the eclecticism that Usagiyama houses is related to love, and love is what lies at the center of Tamako’s story, so much so that the show’s movie sequel was named, Tamako Love Story (Yamada, 2014). After all, the show is not “Tamako’s Market,” but “Tamako Market,” implying that the two are one and the same in essence. Whenever the patrons of the market change their decor to fit a season or holiday, so too does Tamako’s attitude change. Its vibrancy is directly correlated to Tamako’s mood, and as such the market of Bunny Mountain, too, has a personality that can evoke moé through personification.
If Tamako Market can be said to have one central message, it is that love is the product of an eclectic and nurturing culture. In depicting a marketplace populated by adults, Tamako herself becomes the collective daughter of Usagiyama wherein her passion for mochi is spread to others in the form of love. This love is equated to the sensation of moé, as her family’s heritage evokes a lineage of styles that eventually lead to her becoming the vessel for joy that she is when Dera, and by extension, the audience, first meets her. Tamako is, thereby, an eclectic entity in and of herself whose presence indeterminably shapes the marketplace and those around her. In Naoko Yamada’s own words, “she’s someone you fall in love with at first sight.”[xviii] So, when watching the show, the only request it gives is to love Tamako, because otherwise the viewer will never truly experience the culture that she and Usagiyama offer. “Everyone loves Tamako and she loves everyone.”[xix]
Trevor Young is a film production major at The University of North Georgia. He specializes in studies on Japanese animation
[i] Patrick W. Galbraith. 2014. “The Moé Manifesto: An Insider’s Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming.”
[ii] Ibid, 164-165.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid, 26.
[vi] Ibid, 15-16.
[vii] Ibid, 17-19, 164,165.
[viii] Ibid, 20.
[ix] Laura Mulvey. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 60-61.
[x] Galbraith, 11-16.
[xi] kViN. “Naoko Yamada: Filmed With the Heart.” Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2016/11/28/naoko-yamada-filmed-with-the-heart/.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Galbraith, 140-142.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] Ibid, 127.
[xviii] kVin. “Tamako Memory’s Notes Interview – Naoko Yamada.” Sakuga Blog. https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2016/11/21/tamako-memorys-note-interview-naoko-yamada/.
[xix] Ultimatemegax. “Welcome to Tamako Market: Naoko Yamada x Reiko Yoshida Conversation.” Ultimatemegax’s blog. https://ultimatemegax.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/welcome-to-tamako-market-naoko-yamada-x-reiko-yoshida-conversation/.