Let’s have a talk about cancel culture. I refuse to endorse any images that will promote racism of any kind. We punch up, not down, here. It’s for that reason I have to confront legitimately racist works, like the comics and anime behind Open Sesame’s! Chocolate Panic, with some modicum of introspection. Although the music itself is wonderfully dark and unlike anything you’ll hear, something which I whole-heartedly endorse, it is in the end soundtracking a piece of art that fails miserably to show as much care in its supposed subject matter.
Released in 1985 to accompany the OVA version of Kamui Fujiwara’s popular Choco Panic manga, this soundtrack tries to do the seemingly unenviable task of taking its subject matter and present to it a modicum of depth its audience might be missing in the caricature from its original creator. Somehow, that manga, depicting the hijinks of Kunta, Quinte, and Sambo (I wish I wasn’t typing that recent reality…) a trio of bushmen struggling to understand “civilization” — in the vein of The God’s Must Be Crazy — confuses satire with exploitation negating all the interesting ideas it had by dehumanizing the appearance of its lead characters. In the end, there is nothing noble about depicting a “noble savage”.
For Choco Panic to find an audience that stretched its appeal through a trajectory of four volumes and one film points to a worrying not-so-blindspot in Japanese hegemonic society. But before I start throwing stones in glass houses, as a person of color, I must lodge that rod from my own eye first and point to a troubling trend I’m noticing.
It’s a story as old as time: no amount of window dressing or fancy critique can explain away that this is fine — we should be beyond the era where depicting a sambo, pickaninny character, is acceptable. No amount of [insert your own infuriating stereotype] done up, in a thoughtful way, can divorce it from its history. Exceptions will always exist with those using put-upon stereotypes as acts of subversion. However, being another person of color doesn’t divorce you from having to find that awareness: you don’t have this ownership. It goes back to who has a rightful claim to wield those things that once caused pain.
In this day and age, when we’re bombarded (both quietly or overtly) with imagery that threatens to undermine whatever good intentions we have to unite with cultures we feel an affinity to, I think, one must be even more aware not to use symbolism (or promote images, language, and media) which has the chance to cross the line from parody into something else. Consumers of Japanese media are not immune to this. Ask yourself: Am I infantilizing that other? How deep am I really going to understand that culture? When am I crossing the line into appropriation? If you find it in your social media and persona — it’s time to let it go.
Need a great example of how this is done: take a listen to the music of this OVA, done by a forgotten group of stellar Japanese session musicians. Actually taking great care to go beyond homage, to actually be inspired by the mercurial urban soul music floating around in that era, we find them take the Talking Heads route and use creative ideas gleaned from groups like Parliament, Afrika Bambaata, and Sly & Robbie to new eras/areas that draw on their own experience/ideas. This is best heard on the vast majority of mutant funk found here on songs like “Scarab”, “Bonsai Banzai”, and “Hustle Bustle” which could easily find their home in places far from their creation.
In a perfect world one would find them backing scenes that poke holes at western culture hegemony. However, in our imperfect one, we hear the music providing a message at odds with the confusing narrative (if there’s one to begin with). What do we do then here? My suggestion: Cancel out that which doesn’t serve anyone (or worse yet: a select few). Absorb what can serve others.
Thankfully, I think, there’s still a bit of that whole lot of that other (more meaningful/hopeful) something here.
Editor’s Note: Album is sourced from original vinyl rip by Nitroxity: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNsTAXlj2CuHQweTNTAUk5w/videos