Ask John: What is the Significance of Arcadia?

Question:
What does the word Arcadia mean and what is it’s significance in anime?

Answer:
Arcadia, as it’s used in anime and particularly in reference to the classic Captain Harlock origin movie Arcadia of my Youth, is an adoption of a very old American/European myth. As long ago as the early 1500s, French colonialists used the word “Acadia” as a name for fertile regions of Eastern North America ranging from what is now known as North Carolina up into northern Canada. The word is most commonly cited as derived from the name of the ancient Greek region called “Arcadia,” considered a rural realm of happiness and natural tranquility.

In the mid 1750s, the area of Canada now known as New Brunswick, then known as Acadia and inhabited by French settlers, was taken over by British rule, and the French population was forced to migrate south, finally ending up in the Louisiana area of America. IN 1847, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow composed the epic poem “Evangeline,” a verse about a woman who sets off on a journey across North America in search of her lost lover. One early line in the poem states, “List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest; List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.”

So beginning over 150 years ago, the name “Arcadia” became a sort of American myth for a peaceful, pastoral, ancestral home long since exiled from. Especially in Captain Harlock, Arcadia represents the sense of a peaceful, perfect earth long gone.