A look at popular anime which feature vampires, and speculation about how fans in the West and East have different views of the vampire.
Vampire stories are big in anime. Actually, they’ve never gone. You can find vampires in Old School anime and manga such as Osamu Tezuka’s “Don Dracula,” a satire which was itself inspired by the Hollywood Dracula parody “Love at First Bite.” “Don Dracula” gives us the Count transplanted to Japan, where his daughter Chocula(!) attends night school, has a crush on a boy, but can’t figure out how to be with him in the daylight without turning to ashes.
A vampire appears in the first installment of “Phantom Quest Corps” and the final installment of “O-Edo 808”. The movie “Vampire Wars” gives the audience vampires as extraterrestrials. The anime “Vampire Hunter D,” “Vampire Princess Miyu,” “Trinity Blood”, “Blood: The Last Vampire” and its TV series sequel “Blood+” are well-known. Then there’s manga such as “Vampire Knight,” in which humans battle vampires in an elite school, and “Millennium Snow,” a romantic comedy in which a human girl offers her blood to a vampire who finds blood distasteful.
Yes, vampires have earned a place in Japan’s pop culture, but why? I believe that religion plays a part in both the East and West, but for very different reasons. Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” has always had about it the air of decadence, a corruption of sacred ritual in the hands of the undead count. He compels his female victims to drink his blood so that they may become his “brides.” This is a mirror image of the consecration of a nun to a life in the Catholic Church. Dracula becomes a kind of sick parody of Christ, not merely inspiring but demanding crucifixion by his blasphemous offer of immortality.
Japan being a country with only a handful of Christians, the appeal is completely different. Japanese religious traditions, whether Buddhism or home-grown Shinto, recognize that death is inevitable. Rather, death as the end of awareness is inevitable, but, in keeping with the laws of physics, matter is neither created nor destroyed, and the body returns to nature. (This is all explained quite well, and in purely Buddhist terms, in the “One is All, All is One” episode of “Fullmetal Alchemist.")
The vampire’s desire for immortality, then, isn’t a parody of Jesus’ offer of eternal life to the believer, as the west sees it. The desire to cheat death is viewed as literally unnatural, and the vampire can only be a sympathetic character up to a point. Ultimately, death has to come for the vampire—not because he’s sacrilegious, but because he’s unnatural—although, in a nature-based religion like Shinto, there’s little difference.
