Why I Love Banana Fish as A (White) American
(Light spoilers for Banana Fish)
I love a lot of things about the manga Banana Fish, and one of them is the fact that it's set in the USA. I particularly enjoy that the character of Ash, like me, is white American. The reason is basically this: a character like Ash helps me spring free of imaginative false dichotomy between American Exceptionalist master narratives and their Jungian mirror: that we (especially white) Americans suck. Americanness in Banana Fish represents neither of these things.
The United States is a country founded on denial. Its existence is based on slavery, racism, dispossession, genocide, and ecocide, yet to this day, it has not apologized for most of this or even acknowledged much of it. It desperately needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission but is nowhere near having the internal cultural pressure to get one. Instead, the mainstream culture continues to trumpet the idea that the US is a beacon of democracy and opportunity and the greatest country in the world. Though the US, in my view, does deserve some credit for being a trailblazer of modern democracy, at least today, none of those things is true.
Like anyone in denial, the US collective conscious overcompensates. In popular action narrative, this typically means that the white American hero is set up as the hero savior of the world. Though there are many exceptions to this, it's persistent enough to be powerful trope. Historically, figures like Superman and Captain America come to mind-and, yes, I know both these characters have been widely reinvented and nuanced, but the originary images still hold iconic power. Captains Kirk and Pike are in this mold. (I like them both, but they fit that mold.) Buck Rogers. Pick your John Wayne character. (Light spoilers follow for Farscape and heavier spoilers for Babylon 5, only in the next paragraph.)
And here I'm going to pick on a couple of characters who are by no means the worst offenders, but as a fan of their shows, I know them well: John Crichton (Farscape) and John Sheridan (Babylon 5). They are both good characters, but outsized Americanness plagues them. It pops up in John and Aeryn's intercultural romance, which largely consists of Aeryn learning to agree with John's American values. It pops up in scenes with Crichton blustering on, sometimes overtly about being an "Amurican," while the characters who would logically just blow his head off stand stupefied by his out-of-the-box thinking, I guess? It pops up (for me) in the romance between John and Delenn, where she is awesome on a messianic level and he is… not carrying the messiah identity off (for me). In both cases, these shortcomings are causally linked to the heroes being white American men: in that era, they almost had to be in order to for the show to get funding. By the same token, there was a requirement that they not be too different from the average white American guy, as he's the audience they're written to appeal to. And so you end up with fairly typical (if professionally impressive) white American guys puffed up to be grand leaders and saviors.
The flip side of this narrative doesn't show up much in TV and movies, but it's strongly present in many of our minds: the idea that we (especially white) Americans suck. Under the bluster, we're a bunch of stupid, racist, uneducated, egocentric, incompetent, whiny, entitled brats, demanding the world serve us and accept our greatness like Joffrey from Game of Thrones. I myself feel a powerful impulse toward of self-hate (i.e. hate for one's own group) in an attempt to launch some sort of internal corrective to this American hero-worship.
As a shoujo manga, Banana Fish is outside this cultural framework. It's not written to appeal to American men but to Japanese girls. Thus, all this need to stroke the American exceptionalist ego goes away. What it's replaced with is a sense of American exoticism. In BF, America is strange foreign country the Everyman, Eiji, marvels at.
And Ash is pretty marvelous. He's super to the point of almost being a superhero himself, with his marksmanship that defies the laws of physics and IQ over 200 and so on. Yes, he is in some ways a Mary Sue, and yes, he is, in some ways, not psychologically realistic. Though I'd argue, as many others have, that there's a strong strain of psychological realism in him too-and that's why he's sympathetic.
Be that as it may, super though he is, structurally he's not an American exceptionalist hero. He's not the center of the narrative: Ash and Eiji together are. He's not the hero who saves the day: he's instrumental in saving the day, but it's a team effort from start to finish. He doesn't get the girl. There's no girl to get, and this matters, largely because having Eiji in the main "partner" role circumvents a lot of potential for gendered BS that makes the love interest a prop for the hero. (Would Delenn really fall madly in love with John? Really?) Ash is not lionized for any great victory. His reward is pretty much not being immediately prosecuted for his many, many crimes. But nor does he treat this with a sense of broody anti-heroness, like the outcast riding into the sunset. Ash is basically content with this; he doesn't have to be a hero, anti- or otherwise. It's also notable that his masculinity is questioned in a way unusual in the typical American hero. In addition to his not being heteronormative, he is a rape survivor. (I have to give Farscape full credit, too, for going there with John Crichton; it's a brave move.)
What really makes Ash refreshing, however, is that the whole narrative doesn't bend to serve him. (See teamwork above.) This is also why he doesn't really read as Mary Sue to me, in spite of all his awesomeness. Ash, for example, doesn't really have sidekicks. He has subordinates as a gang leader, but he really has to negotiate the people he interacts with. And, yes, this is true in many American hero narratives too. Nonetheless, too many opt to warp the story to keep the hero central.
Finally, Ash doesn't represent America in the way that Superman or Captain America traditionally does. Or, indeed, the way Kirk and Pike do as exemplars of the Federation, which is mostly modeled on a utopian version of the United States. Ash, blessedly, just is an American. He happened to be born in the United States. And that certainly shapes him: it means his native language is English, his general demeanor is informal, and he has very easy access to guns. But it's the culture that he's from, not an exaltedness he embodies. In Banana Fish, the United States gets to be just a country, a county with good people and bad people, political problems, crime, impressive buildings and vistas, poverty, prisons, surprisingly nice police, and surprisingly little racism. Okay, it's a fantasy of America, but it's not American Exceptionalist fantasy; it's a Japanese fantasy. And that, in itself, decenters Americanness and simply lets it exist.
As a white American reading Banana Fish, I don't have to be ashamed of being a white American. I'm not being accused of all the basest stupidity of the worst stereotypes of America, nor do I have to be ashamed of the hubris that warps so much of our cultural mythos. I can simply see my own ethnic identity depicted as a just an ethnicity some people have, with all its up and downs and things to explore. And I find that rare and comforting.
I love a lot of things about the manga Banana Fish, and one of them is the fact that it's set in the USA. I particularly enjoy that the character of Ash, like me, is white American. The reason is basically this: a character like Ash helps me spring free of imaginative false dichotomy between American Exceptionalist master narratives and their Jungian mirror: that we (especially white) Americans suck. Americanness in Banana Fish represents neither of these things.
The United States is a country founded on denial. Its existence is based on slavery, racism, dispossession, genocide, and ecocide, yet to this day, it has not apologized for most of this or even acknowledged much of it. It desperately needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission but is nowhere near having the internal cultural pressure to get one. Instead, the mainstream culture continues to trumpet the idea that the US is a beacon of democracy and opportunity and the greatest country in the world. Though the US, in my view, does deserve some credit for being a trailblazer of modern democracy, at least today, none of those things is true.
Like anyone in denial, the US collective conscious overcompensates. In popular action narrative, this typically means that the white American hero is set up as the hero savior of the world. Though there are many exceptions to this, it's persistent enough to be powerful trope. Historically, figures like Superman and Captain America come to mind-and, yes, I know both these characters have been widely reinvented and nuanced, but the originary images still hold iconic power. Captains Kirk and Pike are in this mold. (I like them both, but they fit that mold.) Buck Rogers. Pick your John Wayne character. (Light spoilers follow for Farscape and heavier spoilers for Babylon 5, only in the next paragraph.)
And here I'm going to pick on a couple of characters who are by no means the worst offenders, but as a fan of their shows, I know them well: John Crichton (Farscape) and John Sheridan (Babylon 5). They are both good characters, but outsized Americanness plagues them. It pops up in John and Aeryn's intercultural romance, which largely consists of Aeryn learning to agree with John's American values. It pops up in scenes with Crichton blustering on, sometimes overtly about being an "Amurican," while the characters who would logically just blow his head off stand stupefied by his out-of-the-box thinking, I guess? It pops up (for me) in the romance between John and Delenn, where she is awesome on a messianic level and he is… not carrying the messiah identity off (for me). In both cases, these shortcomings are causally linked to the heroes being white American men: in that era, they almost had to be in order to for the show to get funding. By the same token, there was a requirement that they not be too different from the average white American guy, as he's the audience they're written to appeal to. And so you end up with fairly typical (if professionally impressive) white American guys puffed up to be grand leaders and saviors.
The flip side of this narrative doesn't show up much in TV and movies, but it's strongly present in many of our minds: the idea that we (especially white) Americans suck. Under the bluster, we're a bunch of stupid, racist, uneducated, egocentric, incompetent, whiny, entitled brats, demanding the world serve us and accept our greatness like Joffrey from Game of Thrones. I myself feel a powerful impulse toward of self-hate (i.e. hate for one's own group) in an attempt to launch some sort of internal corrective to this American hero-worship.
As a shoujo manga, Banana Fish is outside this cultural framework. It's not written to appeal to American men but to Japanese girls. Thus, all this need to stroke the American exceptionalist ego goes away. What it's replaced with is a sense of American exoticism. In BF, America is strange foreign country the Everyman, Eiji, marvels at.
And Ash is pretty marvelous. He's super to the point of almost being a superhero himself, with his marksmanship that defies the laws of physics and IQ over 200 and so on. Yes, he is in some ways a Mary Sue, and yes, he is, in some ways, not psychologically realistic. Though I'd argue, as many others have, that there's a strong strain of psychological realism in him too-and that's why he's sympathetic.
Be that as it may, super though he is, structurally he's not an American exceptionalist hero. He's not the center of the narrative: Ash and Eiji together are. He's not the hero who saves the day: he's instrumental in saving the day, but it's a team effort from start to finish. He doesn't get the girl. There's no girl to get, and this matters, largely because having Eiji in the main "partner" role circumvents a lot of potential for gendered BS that makes the love interest a prop for the hero. (Would Delenn really fall madly in love with John? Really?) Ash is not lionized for any great victory. His reward is pretty much not being immediately prosecuted for his many, many crimes. But nor does he treat this with a sense of broody anti-heroness, like the outcast riding into the sunset. Ash is basically content with this; he doesn't have to be a hero, anti- or otherwise. It's also notable that his masculinity is questioned in a way unusual in the typical American hero. In addition to his not being heteronormative, he is a rape survivor. (I have to give Farscape full credit, too, for going there with John Crichton; it's a brave move.)
What really makes Ash refreshing, however, is that the whole narrative doesn't bend to serve him. (See teamwork above.) This is also why he doesn't really read as Mary Sue to me, in spite of all his awesomeness. Ash, for example, doesn't really have sidekicks. He has subordinates as a gang leader, but he really has to negotiate the people he interacts with. And, yes, this is true in many American hero narratives too. Nonetheless, too many opt to warp the story to keep the hero central.
Finally, Ash doesn't represent America in the way that Superman or Captain America traditionally does. Or, indeed, the way Kirk and Pike do as exemplars of the Federation, which is mostly modeled on a utopian version of the United States. Ash, blessedly, just is an American. He happened to be born in the United States. And that certainly shapes him: it means his native language is English, his general demeanor is informal, and he has very easy access to guns. But it's the culture that he's from, not an exaltedness he embodies. In Banana Fish, the United States gets to be just a country, a county with good people and bad people, political problems, crime, impressive buildings and vistas, poverty, prisons, surprisingly nice police, and surprisingly little racism. Okay, it's a fantasy of America, but it's not American Exceptionalist fantasy; it's a Japanese fantasy. And that, in itself, decenters Americanness and simply lets it exist.
As a white American reading Banana Fish, I don't have to be ashamed of being a white American. I'm not being accused of all the basest stupidity of the worst stereotypes of America, nor do I have to be ashamed of the hubris that warps so much of our cultural mythos. I can simply see my own ethnic identity depicted as a just an ethnicity some people have, with all its up and downs and things to explore. And I find that rare and comforting.