When I tell people I meet that my children are 14 and 16, the standard reaction is at least one of the following: a rueful smile, some eye-rolling, head-shaking and “Oh boy” or “Yikes” or just a stunned sympathetic silence. And sometimes all of the above.
 
But in fact, it has been my great good luck that the cliché of adolescence -- willful, selfish, snarling, reckless, impossible; basically, how I behaved as a teenager – has not been my daughters’ MOs. They don’t even shut my wife and me out of their lives.
 
To the contrary, both of them are eager to share new stuff they’ve seen or heard or read –- to open our eyes to corners of the culture we’d otherwise never go.
 
Like, for instance, my eldest daughter’s absolute passion for manga and anime, Japanese comic books and animated films. You probably know kiddie anime, Pokemon, or for older kids, Spirited Away, which won the Oscar a couple years ago. But those are the tinniest tip of the iceberg. So my daughter plunged into this world when she was 10 or 11 and became a connoisseur, spending her allowance ever since to assemble a collection that I swear a museum or university will someday beg her to donate.
 
So thanks entirely to her, in this zone of cutting-edge culture – and pretty much this zone only -- my wife and I were ahead of the curve.
 
We saw it coming years before it hit the American mainstream. Before music videos absorbed anime and before Kill Bill came out with its whole central anime sequence, before manga-esque advertising started popping up and way before the artist Takashi Murakami became the hottest Japanese artist ever internationally, turning anime and manga characters into his fiberglass sculptures that now sell for $600,000 at auction.
 
And it isn’t all stylish funny poppy stuff and futuristic fantasy my daughter has introduced me to. I think the only time besides Bambi that a cartoon made me choke up was watching an anime with her a few years ago called Grave of the Fireflies. It’s about the American fire-bombing of Japan at the end of World War II, and the long, grim, postwar aftermath. It is an achingly beautiful film unsparing and absolutely devastating.
 
And so, now coming full circle, there’s a brand new manga that I discovered and couldn’t wait to show her, a manga created as part of the latest new annual report of the Japanese military.
 
Since we won World War II, Japan’s constitution theoretically doesn’t allow it to maintain armed forces or wage war but they do have a military, they’re just called Self-Defense Forces. And they’re now part of the American alliance occupying Iraq. So the Japanese government manga has three cute little characters who debate global terrorism and the response. And the pacifist character capitulates in the end.
 
I asked my daughter what she thought of it.
 
“Well, it is weird, using little-kid cartoon characters to justify war. Not that I’m saying I disapprove…..” She wrinkled her nose and waved her hand at the drawings. “It’s just not very good. I mean, it’s ‘manga’ the way those buckle-your-seatbelt illustrations on airplanes are ‘cartoons.’”
 
So in other words, her objections were aesthetic.
 
That’s Kate Andersen.
 
And this is Kurt Andersen.

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