Ask John: Why Is Marriage So Prominent in Recent Anime?

Question:
What’s up with all the marriage talk in anime lately? It used to be just the harem series but shows like Godannar and Gun Sword have their action heroes battling baddies with their wives or fiancees beside them. Is there some sort of family values or “help Japan grow” public service message involved?

Answer:
I’m hesitant to give anime too much credit as a conscious force of social or political activism, but anime is a product of Japanese society, and may inevitably reflect the concerns and zeitgeist of its cultural origins. In other words, I don’t think that the anime industry is intentionally trying to encourage marriage or family building, but anime may be incorporating those concerns which are prevalent in contemporary Japanese society.

Japan’s birth rate has decreased every year since 2001. According to the CIA World Factbook, as of 2006, Japan’s national birth rate has fallen to an average of 9.37 births per thousand residents. For comparison, America’s current birth rate is 14.14. Japanese women give birth to an average of only 1.4 children each (compared to America’s 2.09 rate). According to a report from the Inter Press Service News Agency, at its current pace, if nothing is done to reverse the trend, Japan’s current population of 128 million citizens will drop to 100 million by 2050, posing a serious threat to Japan’s national economy. The number of Japan’s elderly citizens is increasing while its child population is decreasing. Japan’s government has implemented numerous plans over the past decade aimed at raising its alarmingly declining birth rate. New governmental offices including the Support for Child Rearing Department of the National Health Ministry have been formed to combat this new social threat.

The concept of marriage has been central in anime for a long time. Examples include Maison Ikkoku concluding with the marriage of its protagonists; the “groom collection” of the first Urusei Yatsura movie; the 1996 Marriage OAV series and Wedding Peach television series, and the aforementioned Godannar and GUNxSWORD. However, certain recent anime have specifically referred to or parodied Japan’s falling birth rate. The 2002 Rizelmine anime series depicted a governmental agency fostering a young marriage, and 2004’s Final Approach literally illustrated government agents attempting to raise Japan’s birth rate by forcing high school boys into arranged marriages. But rather than act as public service announcements, I think that recent anime is simply acknowledging this widely discussed social phenomenon. I’m not aware of any anime that specifically encourages marriage and family planning as a vital and necessary social responsibility. Godannar simply uses marriage as a means to distinguish an otherwise stereotypical anime. Titles like Rizelmine and Final Approach satirize the problem rather than seriously encourage a solution. I know that anime is capable of addressing, and has addressed, serious social concerns in a serious manner, but I don’t think marriage and Japan’s population growth are topics that the anime industry is consciously trying to battle. Rather, I think that Japan’s fertility rate is a national concern that has integrated into anime just because it’s an inescapable concern for contemporary Japanese society.