Why Is Manga and Anime Characters' Hair All the Colors of the Rainbow?

Part 2: Otherworldly Shades

by Margaret O'Connell

As has already been mentioned in the first part of this article, certain hair colors in anime and manga tend to be associated with characters who are literally otherworldly. Westerners might well expect this category to include colors such as green, purple, light blue, and pink, which in real life are only achievable by means of hair dye, and in Western comics and science fiction would be likely indicators of mutation (a la the Hulk, She-Hulk, Beast Boy, Jade/Jennie-Lynn Hayden of DC's Outsiders, and the X-Men's Polaris/Lorna Dane) or extraterrestrial origin. There are in fact some manga and anime characters with hair of these unlikely shades who are either alien or metahuman, or both. These include the extraterrestrial princesses Lum (dark green hair) of Urusei Yatsura and Sasami (pale blue hair) in Tenchi Muyo!, along with the teenage-girl mecha pilot Rei Ayanami in Neon Genesis Evangelion, whose light grayish-blue hair and red eyes are outward signs of her origins as a genetically-engineered hybrid created from a combination of human and alien DNA. The mischievous space pirate Ryoko, also of Tenchi Muyo!, whose hair is variously depicted as pale green, pale silvery green, and silvery white in various different anime and manga illustrations, hits the not-exactly-human trifecta of being alien, metahuman (she has superstrength and can fly), and the product of a genetic engineering experiment performed by the wacky female mad scientist Washu.

However, the more strikingly improbable hair colors such as blue, green, and purple, which in nature are confined mostly to the plant rather than the animal kingdom, are not the primary shades assigned this sort of overtly non-human connotation in anime and manga. In fact, as alluded to earlier, the staff of the animation studio doing the TV adaptation of Wataru Yoshizumi's Marmalade Boy considered green and purple perfectly acceptable hair colors for the relatively mundane (in the sense of being non-science fictional or supernatural) characters in this fairly down to earth, non-fantasy high school romantic comedy series. Although writer/artist Yoshizumi herself found such shades odd and unrealistic (a feeling evidently shared by some of the manga fans whom she mentions wrote to her commenting on one character's unexpectedly green hair), hair in unlikely colors like these does show up on regular human characters in some other anime and manga.

Admittedly, series which feature multiple characters with hair in these biologically-impossible shades often tend to be so eccentric that even those members of their casts who are not supposed to be extraterrestrial or supernatural could hardly be described as regular in the conventional sense of the word. In fact, one such series, Revolutionary Girl Utena, is so strange and filled with fantastical and metaphysical overtones that some viewers remain uncertain of whether certain scenes actually occurred or are merely intended to be interpreted as fantasy sequences. Whichever is the truth, it seems undeniable that Utena has the highest concentration of strikingly improbable hair colors of any series not involving outer space, with a cast which includes at least two pink-haired people, one purple-haired damsel in distress, two siblings whose hair is different shades of blue, one green-haired student council member, and one student council president whose usually dark red hair is sometimes depicted in various shades of rose or rose mixed with red or black. The relatively tame, but still noticeably off the wall, Koko wa Greenwood/Here is Greenwood, on the other hand, contents itself with one conspicuously pink-haired underclassman and one perpetually-calm student council president with grayish lavender hair.

However, there are some anime and manga besides Marmalade Boy featuring characters with unlikely hair colors who are both non-otherworldly in nature and relatively ordinary in terms of personality. For example, in the anime of Kodomo no Omocha/Kodocha: Sana's Stage, Sana's fellow child star Naozumi Kamura, a blue-eyed foundling who grew up in a Tokyo orphanage and knows nothing more about his family background than that "I think one of my parents was Japanese, but I'm not sure," is portrayed with lavender hair, apparently to underscore the glamorously exotic appearance that in the manga leads one of his gushier female fans to refer to him as "my foreign prince." In Pokemon, which, although it is a fantasy series, tends to confine its fantastic elements to the bizarrely cute super-powered non-human flora and fauna of its basically Earth-like world, the policewoman Officer Jenny (Junsar-san) and Butch (Kosanburo), of the second-string Team Rocket team of teenage pokemon thieves Cassidy and Butch, both have light blue hair, while James (Kojiro) of the main Team Rocket team of Jessie and James has bluish lavender hair (although given James' general flamboyance and penchant for disguise, this could conceivably be the result of a dye job). Although it is difficult for science fiction-minded adult viewers to avoid the suspicion that Officer Jenny, who has an identically-named identical lookalike in every town the heroes of the anime visit, may very well be some kind of clone, this possibility does not appear to be overtly discussed in the series, and neither she nor the other two blue or lavender-haired Pokemon characters appear to have any kind of special abilities or otherworldly associations. As discussed in Part 1 of this article, there are also a number of characters, such as Akane in Ranma 1/2, whose hair is colored dark blue at least part of the time in accordance with the Japanese perception that when glossy black hair catches the light it appears blue or blue-black.

Pink hair, which the Marmalade Boy animators told Wataru Yoshizumi was "too weird" to be used for anyone in their show's cast, seems to be a special case. There are some instances, like that of the snippy, but relatively ordinary (as teenage girl apprentice ninjas go), Naruto supporting character Sakura, in which a character appears to have been given pink hair for no reason more profound than that her creator thought it would be fun to make her hair match the color of the cherry blossoms she is named for.

However, more often, pink hair seems to be used to connote gender or sexual ambiguity of some kind. For instance, take the case of Here is Greenwood's Shun Kisaragi, a boy whose waist-length pink hair, pretty face, and high-pitched voice inevitably cause him to be mistaken for a girl by anyone who's never met him before. (This includes his new roommate, who fails to realize until his fourth day in the dorm that the class officers who live down the hall were pulling his leg when they told him that Shun genuinely was a girl whose peculiar parents had for some reason enrolled her in an all-boys school.) Then there's the pink-haired title character of Revolutionary Girl Utena, a tomboyish girl who likes boys, but wants to be a prince when she grows up, insists on wearing a variant of the boys' version of the school uniform, and winds up accidentally "engaged" to a female classmate, Anthy Himemiya, the so-called "Rose Bride", after winning a duel with an upperclassman within days after arriving at Ohtori Academy, a boarding school so baroquely bizarre that it makes Greenwood look positively mundane by comparison. Touga Kiryuu, the president of the Ohtori Academy student council, is a pan-sexual playboy who attempts to seduce both girls and boys — a practice which may have something to do with the fact that although his long, flowing hair is most often colored dark red, it is also sometimes depicted as being a dark rose color, or as a mixture of dark red at the front and rose at the back or rose at the front and purplish-black at the back. Another important character who appears later in the series is Mikage Souji, the so-called Black Rose Duellist, who has pale pink hair and wants to subvert the school's established duelling practices by getting rid of Anthy, the literal trophy "wife" awarded to winners of crucial contests, and replace her as Rose Bride with his own boytoy, Mamiya Chida, who actually somewhat resembles the green-eyed, purple-haired Anthy. By comparison with characters like these, Gravitation's Shuichi Shindou, a bubbly, rather manic teenage boy who, when a sarcastic twenty-something romance novelist disses his song lyrics, reacts by falling in love at first sight and keeps showing up at the guy's house and pestering him until his feelings are at least somewhat reciprocated, seems almost run of the mill, despite his strawberry-colored hair. (In Shuichi's case it's possible that the unusual hair color is the result of a dye job anyway, since on the manga covers his hair tends to be portrayed as brown or red until after he has graduated from high school and started working full time at his dream of becoming a rock star.)

In contrast to the way many (to Westerners) more strikingly non-human shades such as green, blue, and purple are more often than not found at the end of the anime palette reserved for relatively ordinary people, hair colors such as red, white (on youthful-looking characters), and occasionally blond, which can actually be found in nature (although not very often in Japan), are frequently seen on anime characters with supernatural powers whose origins are at least partially derived from traditional Japanese mythology. Two of the most prominent examples of this are Rumiko Takahashi's belligerent, but basically good-hearted, half-dog demon hero Inuyasha and his more malevolent fratricidal older half-brother Sesshomaru, both of whom have long manes of white hair. According to Asian folklore collector James McGregor of the mythology site http://kitsune.org, this in itself clearly indicates their connection to the realm of the supernatural, since, in Japan, "as in Celtic Europe, white hair is seen as a sign of the otherworld." In fact, in the anime episodes "The Secret of the First Day — the Black-Haired Inuyasha" and "Kaijinbo's Evil Sword," when Inuyasha temporarily loses his demon powers and becomes entirely human, his long white hair turns black as a side effect of the accompanying physical transformation, which also reduces his superhuman strength to merely human levels and transforms his powerful demon claws to ordinary fingernails. Other white- or silver-haired anime characters based on supernatural beings from Japanese mythology include the more fox-like, silvery multiple-tailed form of Kurama, the reformed reincarnated fox spirit who becomes one of Yusuke Urameshi's allies in Yu-Yu Hakusho; Sakura, the fox-eared, eight-and-a-fifth-tailed humanoid kitsune bounty hunter in Hyper Police; Larva, the Western Shinma (demon) friend and servant of Vampire Princess Miyu in the anime of the same name; and Kanna, the phosphorescently pale evil child sorceress spawned by the demon Naraku in the "Kagura's Dance and Kanna's Mirror" episode of Inuyasha.

There are also a significant number of young-looking manga and anime villains with white or gray hair. The apparently prematurely, or perhaps even naturally, white hair of some of these, such as the psychic-vampire serial killer Muraki from Yami no Matsuei/Descendants of Darkness, the killer "blood alchemist" Scar from Full Metal Alchemist, and the misleadingly-named magic-using villain turned reluctant sort-of (anti)hero Dark Schneider of Bastard, might arguably be explained by the fact that their powers qualify them as supernatural beings of a sort, even though they are human evil magic-users like The Lord of the Rings wizards Sauron or Saruman instead of inherently otherworldly beings like Inuyasha and his brother. This explanation could also theoretically apply to the Yu-Gi-Oh! villains Pegasus, Merrick, and (when possessed by the evil spirit linked to his Millennium item), Bakura, since all three possess and/or are influenced by various magical Millennium artifacts. One of my fellow Tarts, LK Malnassy, actually suggested that "Millennium items and other magical things must bleach anime characters' hair — three characters on Yu-Gi-Oh! had white hair (all, if not exactly evil, on the wrong side of the story), and Yugi's hair is some sort of bizarre yellow and fuschia frappe."

The white-haired hero-turned-villain Griffith of the sword and sorcery series Berserk also has magical associations, having been given a magical red gem in childhood which supposedly identified him as the future king of the world. After his initial efforts to achieve this position fail, he eventually uses the gem to strike a bargain with the forces of darkness by trading the lives and well-being of his surviving friends and suppporters for the title of prince of demons.

Still other white-haired villains are otherworldly in a more science-fictional sense. These include the Negaverse general Malchite (Kunzite in the original Japanese version) and Prince Diamond in Sailor Moon, who are both agents of alien powers, as well as Tenchi Muyo!'s Kagato, a usurping claimant to the throne of the planet Jurai who makes a habit of kidnapping everyone from mad scientists to royal princesses and has dastardly designs on the master key of the Jurai royal family, which will supposedly grant him access to the secret of ultimate power. Another otherworldly antagonist who falls into this science-fictional category is the gray-haired boy alien/human hybrid Kaoru Nagisa in Neon Genesis Evangelion, who somewhat redeems himself in the end by subverting the alien Angels' plan after successfully carrying out nearly all of their original scheme to obliterate what remains of human civilization.

So far, I have been able to come up with comparatively few white- or gray-haired anime or manga villains who do not have this kind of supernatural or extradimensional edge. By far the nastiest of these more merely earthly villains is the sadistic assassin Shira from Hiroaki Samura's acclaimed samurai manga Blade of the Immortal, whose eyes light up at the prospect of being able to torture and even dismember the unkillable title character for as long as he likes without his would-be victim's ever bringing the game to an end by dying. As it turns out, Shira never gets the opportunity to try this, but his past is obviously littered with corpses, many of them dispatched with grotesque creativity. (At one point in volume twelve of the manga Shira brags to an opponent about having slashed the man's girlfriend to death as he was raping her, adding that she was the fifth woman he'd done this to.)

Despite his diabolical cruelty, Shira, unlike Manji, the series' supernaturally death-proofed protagonist, is, magically speaking, a normal human. This may or may not be reflected in the fact that Shira's white hair is a relatively recent development, the result of the trauma of having part of one arm cut off in a battle with Manji and then himself flensing the flesh off the last six or eight inches of the mutilated bones that remained so he could use them to stab opponents who wouldn't be expecting an attack from an apparently useless stump.

Another originally dark-haired villain whose hair turned suddenly and prematurely white from trauma is Enishi in Rurouni Kenshin. Enishi is actually the younger brother of Tomoe, Kenshin's late wife, whom Kenshin accidentally killed back during his Battousai period when she flung herself between him and a rival assassin who was attempting to murder him. Enishi witnessed this incident and, since he hated Kenshin to begin with and was obsessively attached to his sister, became convinced that Kenshin had killed her deliberately. Enishi swore revenge and set about trying to systematically destroy everything Kenshin had come to value about his new, more peaceful Meiji-era life, culminating with kidnapping and faking the murder of Kaoru, Kenshin's perpetually undeclared love interest. Although Enishi hears voices — specifically, the voice of his dead and supposedly vengeance-seeking sister — and was insane enough to kill the family that adopted him after Tomoe's death just because he felt that nobody deserved to be as happy as they were in a world where he had been bereaved of his own relatives, the mere fact that in the present day of the series he does not actually kill Kaoru (if only because she bears a slight resemblance to his beloved sister) and otherwise seems to specialize in arms smuggling, arson, and property damage, rather than murder, makes him seem relatively harmless compared to Shira, his fellow sufferer from sudden-onset traumatic hair-whitening.

Another thoroughly nasty member of the mortal and non-metahuman white-haired villains' brigade is the aptly-named Vicious, the bounty hunter Spike's former fellow organized-crime enforcer, in Cowboy Bebop. Vicious has shoulder-length gray hair, keeps a sinister-looking black peacock as a pet, and is perfectly willing to single-handedly instigate a gang war and assassinate literally anyone who gets in the way of his quest to take over the Red Dragon Crime Syndicate, including Spike and his fellow bounty hunters and Vicious' own employers, the syndicate's current bosses.

There is also a white-haired villain, Farfarello, among the heroes' main group of recurring opponents in Weiss Kreuz/Knight Hunters. However, although Farfarello, unlike his three fellow members of the villainous Schwarz group, does not have any psychic powers, his inhuman inability to feel pain, which enables him to continue fighting even after being severely wounded, could reasonably be said to qualify him, too, as somewhat metahuman, like many of the other white-haired villains discussed so far. Still, since, as with the phenomenon of hair literally turning white as a result of trauma, there are a few medically-documented cases of people who are physically incapable of feeling pain, whether one considers Farfarello merely a human villain with somewhat freakish abilities or counts him as one of those with otherworldly attributes of some kind is largely a matter of interpretation. In contrast, Farfarello's fellow Schwarz member Crawford, who is dark-haired in the original Weiss Kreuz anime series but redesigned to have white hair in the later Weiss series, Gluhen, has precognitive and premonitory powers which place him much more definitively in the semi-supernatural camp.

One of the few other apparently non-otherworldly white-haired villains I have been able to come up with is Lord Il Palazzo of Excel Saga. As befits the chief bad guy of such a dizzyingly silly spoof series, Il Palazzo seems to be more of a menace to his own clueless henchwomen than anyone else. He especially delights in finding excuses to dump Excel, his first (and, for quite a while, only) follower, through a trapdoor into a pit filled with cold water and an ever-changing assortment of unappealing crustaceans, alligators, and other annoyances. However, the cheerily delusional and apparently indestructible Excel inevitably manages to somehow clamber out of the steep pit and proceed on her merry way, casually wreaking far more destruction by accident while working at her various part-time jobs than the over-preoccupied-with-planning Il Palazzo appears to be able to orchestrate on purpose. Although, as my fellow Tart Layla Lawlor pointed out, Il Palazzo is "meant to typify the mysterious bishounen bad guy," the satire is underscored by the fact that by the end of the first volume of the manga, the worst thing he has actually done besides tormenting the Energizer Bunny-like Excel is to speak ill of Christmas and "the supreme confidence trickster in the history of man" whose birth the crassly over-commercialized holiday commemorates.

In addition to being associated with the supernatural in the sense of magic, in a number of Asian societies such as China and Japan, white is the color of mourning. In the words of James McGregor, "White is worn to funerals because it is a pure color, and purity of self at such transitional times as death is very important. Because of this, the color white has become associated with death, grief, and loss. For this reason, it is a very inauspicious color. By extension, white is the color favored by demons and other baddies, very similar to the way black is perceived in the West, and for many of the same reasons. However, there is more to the color white than that. White is seen as a divine color. Things that are white, especially things that are white which normally would not be (a white raven or a young Asian person with white hair, for example), are seen as having some sort of divine property. This is not just in Asia, but in most cultures around the world. Things that are divine are inherently set apart from the mundane world, in one way or another, and this, by definition, makes them otherworldly. So, especially in Japan, and China, and Celtic Europe, and India, things that are white tend to be associated with the supernatural. The use of the color white in Japanese pop culture, and indeed in the cultural memory itself, tends to identify its object as being not only dark and a bit evil (the death associations from funerary rites), but also as something having extraordinary abilities (the touched by the divine/supernatural bit)."

This complex web of negative and/or preternatural associations connoted by the color white does much to explain why there are so many anime and manga villains with white hair, as well as why some villains who do not have white hair, such as Crawford, Schuldig, and Nagi of the Schwarz group in early episodes of Weiss Kreuz and Legato Bluesummers in Trigun, dress predominantly in white. (Then there's Yami no Matsuei's Muraki, who not only has white hair and silver eyes, but dresses in spotless white from head to toe.) In fact, Legato not only wears a long white coat — the coat has a skull attached to one of its shoulders, underscoring the deathly element of the theme color he has chosen. (Although, in fact, Legato, too, has psychic powers — in his case, mind control, which he usually uses to compel his victims to kill themselves or each other.)

Another important shade of the supernatural color spectrum is red. In the context of traditional Japanese mythology, the bright red hair of Inuyasha's fox spirit sidekick Shippo is as much a sign of his preternatural kitsune nature as the fluffy golden foxtail he tends to retain when shapeshifting into other forms. Interestingly, although Shippo, like Yu-Yu Hakusho's Kurama, has red hair in his more human-looking form, according to traditional Japanese folklore, as kitsune grow older and more powerful their fur turns silver, white, or gold, and they grow additional tails, with one extra tail being added every hundred years, according to some myths. This is probably why Shippo's tail is golden like the fur of his more vulpine-looking father (who also appears briefly in the Inuyasha anime series) instead of red like the hair on his head. It may also explain why the other animal-spirit character who appears in many of the same episodes — i.e., Kilala, the non-speaking "familiar" of the girl demon slayer Sango, who can fly and shapeshift from a small, cute pokemon-like creature to a fierce, formidable-looking multiple-tailed being large enough for several humans to ride on, but apparently cannot morph into humanoid form — is a sort of yellowish cream color, instead of the red that viewers accustomed to Western foxes might expect. (According to an article entitled "The Manga Zoo: Fox and Tanuki", which appeared in Volume 1, issue 3 of the English-language edition of Shonen Jump, Chinese and Japanese myths about magical foxes associate them with Inari, the god of the rice fields, partially because of what the Japanese considered to be the animals' yellow fur, which was believed to be the color of fertile soil.)

Of course, this theory is based on the assumption that Kilala, too, is some variety of kitsune, despite her apparent lesser sentience. Since Kilala's species or supernatural classification is never referred to in any of the anime episodes I have seen, and I was unable to get hold of the manga volume in which she and Sango are introduced, I have so far been unable to draw any firm conclusions about whether she is a fox spirit or, as some viewers have suggested, some kind of magical cat creature more along the lines of a mute feudal equivalent of the similarly shape-shifting Keroberos in Card Captor Sakura. As James McGregor, who subscribes to this feline Kilala theory, points out, "Foxes are not the only animals in Japanese folklore to gain multiple tails as an outward sign of inner power. There are many other stories of common animals with multiple tails, and the most common one is the cat."

There is also one other well-known manga fox spirit of sorts whose coloring provides one of the few tip-offs to his true nature. This is Naruto, the Bart Simpson-as-aspiring-ninja boy hero of the manga of the same name, currently being serialized in Shonen Jump. Unbeknownst to himself, Naruto, like Kurama, is the reincarnation of a powerful multi-tailed fox spirit. In Naruto's case, a giant nine-tailed fox demon attacked the ninja village of Konohagakure, but wound up being slain by the village champion and its spirit bound to an orphan baby boy who grew up to be a yellow-haired troublemaker with faint fox-whisker-like markings on his face.

The mischievous, prank-playing Naruto is a prime example of the theory propounded by Antonia Levi, author of Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation, that blonds in anime "[are] usually a sign of trouble if not actual evil." As will be discussed in greater detail in next month's installment of this article, this "blonds are trouble" hypothesis accurately applies in at least some sense to an impressively wide array of yellow-haired manga and anime characters, from the well-meaning trouble magnet Vash the Stampede in Trigun to Momo, the title character of Peach Girl, whose light hair and unusually pronounced tendency to tan frequently cause everyone from quick-to-judge classmates to dirty old men in the street to assume that she is just a beach-bunny party girl undeserving of being treated with respect.