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

Part 4: When Is a Blond Not a Blond?

by Margaret O'Connell

As discussed in previous installments of this article, determining a manga or anime character's "real" hair color is often problematical at best. Many characters' hair conspicuously changes shades or even colors from one tankoubon (trade paperback) cover or color illustration to the next, with even characters whose hair is fully inked-in in the black-and-white interior pages of the manga not infrequently turning out to have hair that is red (Kurama and Kuwabara in Yu-Yu Hakusho, the female Ranma in Ranma 1/2); green, blue, or rose (Lum in Urusei Yatsura, in various different portrayals); or even pink (Shuichi Shindou in Gravitation), rather than the black or dark brown the non-technicolor version suggests, at least to Westerners. Especially in series set in what appears to be some version of real-life Japan, I have generally excluded from my discussion of specific shades characters with hair color sufficiently changeable that it appears to be less of a consistent physical trait than a purely decorative design element which could well have inspired Dorothy's question to the Munchkin makeover artists "Can you dye my eyes to match my gown?" in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz.

The question of whether or not a given character's hair is actually the color that it most often appears to be becomes especially troublesome when the character is supposed to be Japanese and the hair color is one as genetically improbable for someone of apparently undiluted Japanese ancestry as blond (or at least the various shades of yellow that Westerners mean when they use the term "blond"). As in the analogously arbitrary case of the green- and purple-haired characters in the Marmalade Boy anime discussed in "Otherworldly Shades", Part 2 of this series of articles, quite a few characters in shoujo (girls') series whose primary target audience is junior high school age or younger appear to be blonde even when this would seem to defy all rational logic or explanation.

One might argue that, say, Usagi/Serena/Sailor Moon and Minako/Mina/Sailor Venus in Sailor Moon are blonde as a side effect of their hidden reincarnated-alien/magical-girl nature, much as I proposed in the previous installment of this article that several members of the zodiac-cursed, shapeshifting Sohma family in Fruits Basket (TOKYOPOP) are blond or white- or orange-haired as a side effect of their susceptibility to the were-animal family curse. Some variation of this explanation might also conceivably apply to characters like Lili Hoshizawa, the equally blonde-appearing heroine of Natsumi Ando's Zodiac P.I. (TOKYOPOP), who doesn't have full-blown magical powers herself, but can summon various zodiac-related familiar spirits to help her solve crimes by delving into the victim's horoscope. However, this "blondeness caused by an inherently magical nature" theory appears somewhat debatable when applied to certain other blonde (at least in the anime) characters such as Fuu Hououji of CLAMP's Magic Knights Rayearth, who apparently displayed no more genuine affinity or aptitude for magic than any other fan of sword-and-sorcery roleplaying games until she and two other girls, a redhead and a brunette, were magically whisked away from a field trip to Tokyo Tower into the otherdimensional fantasy realm of Cephiro.

As far as I can tell, the blondeness of these characters tends to remain a purely visual element which is never alluded to verbally or commented on by other characters. This is in vivid contrast to the corresponding situation in Fruits Basket, where both Kisa Sohma's blondeness and her older cousin Kyo's orange hair — as well as the bottle-blondeness of tough-girl supporting character Arisa Uotani, a/k/a Uo-chan — become topics of animated discussion on more than one occasion. In fact, Uo quickly falls into the habit of addressing Kyo by a "carrot-top"-type nickname which the Viz edition translates as "Orangey", responding to his demand that she dye her hair black if he is triumphant in a rematch of an earlier card game by declaring, "Fine. If you lose, bleach your hair some more so it turns white." "This is my natural color!" Kyo howls indignantly in reply, prompting a skeptical, "Oh, is it...?" from Uo-chan.

No such exchanges, polite or otherwise, appear to occur in the somewhat younger-skewing magical-girl or junior high school astrologer/detective series described above, despite the obvious incongruity of their apparently naturally blonde Japanese characters. This circumstance leaves it an open question whether the other characters see their blond cohorts the same way the audience does, or whether the characters in question are "really" supposed to be blond at all (assuming that what a manga or anime character "really" looks like is actually meaningful or possible to determine).

Nobody ever says anything about the apparently blond hair of Rei Kashino, the rebellious but good-hearted bad-boy hero of the teen romance Mars (TOKYOPOP), either. However, in this case that could be because so many of the other characters in the series also have what appears to be fair hair that the few dark-haired characters — almost all of whom turn out to be malicious or obstructive in some way (as do a few of the light-haired characters) — are far more conspicuous by comparison. Whether Fuyumi Soryo, the writer/artist of Mars, uses this overwhelmingly un-colored-in palette of mostly blond-looking characters out of some conscious attempt at visual symbolism or (as some other manga-ka, such as Shizuro Seino in Girl Got Game, also do with most major characters) simply out of a desire to avoid spending a lot of time inking in characters' hair remains unclear. However, the fact that, in a rare display of manga color-scheme consistency, on the covers and in color illustrations Rei's hair is invariably depicted as blond (in contrast to that of his girlfriend Kira, whose hair alternates between blonde and reddish), seems to suggest that, as far as the mangaka is concerned, Rei's blondness does carry some sort of symbolic weight and is not merely an arbitrary, easily-altered-to-fit-the-occasion design element. Since the most striking quality Rei has in common with the wide array of other blond and blond-looking characters discussed in the previous installment of this article, ranging from the light-haired Sohmas to Naruto and Trigun's Vash the Stampede, is a conspicuous tendency to attract trouble, either deliberately or in spite of himself, it seems logical to conclude that whether or not Rei's hair is actually supposed to somehow be literally yellow, on some level he is at least symbolically blond.

There is also at least one major manga character who, whether for symbolic or more purely glamor-related reasons, is consistently portrayed as blond on covers and in the anime, even though it is explicitly stated more than once in the manga that his hair is actually brown, albeit what is evidently a noticeably light brown. This is the sarcastic romance novelist Eiri Yuki, the initially scornful object of eighteen-year-old aspiring rock star Shuichi Shindou's affections in Maki Murakami's shounen-ai series Gravitation (TOKYOPOP). Eiri Yuki's personality and behavior certainly fit the paradigm of the trouble-making blond set forth by Antonia Levi in Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation, since he starts out as a cold-hearted snake who ridicules Shuichi's song-writing efforts and threatens to run the boy over with his Mercedes if he keeps getting in his way. By volume two, Yuki's gratuitous nastiness and fondness for messing with people's heads have begun to be slightly mitigated by the softening influence of his suitor's sincerity and goodheartedness. However, he's still more than capable of tormenting Shuichi by feigning a sudden interest in his previously-ignored arranged-marriage fiancee when the lovestruck girl runs away to Tokyo and fortuitously enlists Shuichi's aid in an attempt to see her intended future husband. Even the pseudonym-using novelist's younger brother Tatsuha, who is almost as much of a bisexual playboy as Yuki himself, warns the naive Shuichi, "My brother's got you on a yo-yo, yet somehow you just played yourself ... Eiri likes winding you up."

The only problem with this in terms of Levi's pattern is that, despite the way he is depicted on the covers, according to the actual text of the manga, Eiri Yuki isn't really blond, even by virtue of hair dye — at least, not by the Western definition of blondness. Yuki's coloring is so atypically light for a Japanese that when Shuichi first accidentally encounters him while walking home from work through the park late at night, he initially assumes that the in timidating-looking stranger is a foreigner, and is astonished when he addresses him in flawless Japanese. Later, stung by his unknown detractor's derisive comments about the song lyrics Shuichi had dropped when their paths crossed in the park, the would-be musician vainly attempts to track down his self-appointed critic by asking people in the area for information about a tall man with what he assumes is dyed brown hair. However, in a subsequent volume, the elusive novelist is described by his brother-in-law Tohma Seguchi as having "naturally brown hair." According to Yuki himself, the latter version is the truth. As he tells Shuichi in volume two, "My skin is pale, and my eyes and hair are light. I look like an American, don't I? I got picked on a lot as a kid, and even my parents looked at me funny. My brother's the only one who never treated me differently." In a pictured flashback, two neighbor women are giving the child Yuki unwanted attention of a different sort, exclaiming, "Hey, look, it's the Uesugi boy, Eiri. Doesn't he look mixed? Isn't that cute?" This revelation prompts the listening Shuichi to confess, "Oh ... I thought you were mixed, too."

Proof that Yuki wasn't imagining his parents' negative reaction to his looks comes in volume four, when the novelist briefly returns to the temple his family runs near Kyoto and has a try at fulfilling his cantankerous father's wish that he take up his hereditary duties as a monk. The senior Uesugi praises his elder son's skills at conducting funerals, then immediately moves on to pestering him to shave his head according to monkish custom, or, failing that, "At least dye your hair a respectable black!" "I know ... you always hated this hair and these eyes," Yuki retorts nonchalantly, running his hands through the offending hair. "You said they made me look 'un-Japanese.' ... I think you're getting ahead of yourself, Pops. I didn't come home to take over the temple for you ... You're the one who made me hate Japan in the first place." Further complicating the issue of what color Eiri Yuki's hair is supposed to be is the fact that the Japanese perception of and vocabulary for color does not precisely match up with the standard Western view of the chromatic spectrum. According to Kenji Kitao and S. Kathleen Kitao's Communicating Across the Pacific,

"Usually, Americans are more specific with colors and use more color terms than Japanese. For example, kuro [black] [can be] used for black, brown or dark. Therefore, kuroikao [black face] can be used to describe a very dirty face, the face of a black person, or a suntanned face. In English, a suntanned face is described as brown, never black ... "Compared to Japanese, English has more color terms. English also has more words for shades of colors. In Japanese, expressions like 'the color of water' (light blue) or 'the color of a mouse' (gray) are used as color terms."

Honshu resident Rebecca McGregor, who teaches English at a Japanese junior high school, remarks that there appear to be only five Japanese nouns which refer purely to specific colors and have no other meanings. There are also two nouns of the same uniquely-referential type referring to white ("shi iro") and black ("kuro"), which the Japanese consider shades or tones, rather than true colors. The aforementioned "gosai", or "five colors", are "aka" (red), "ao" (blue), "midori" (green), "ki iro" (yellow), and "murasaki" (purple). In other words, the "five colors" consist of what in English are called the primary colors (i.e., red, blue, and yellow) — a concept for which there appears to be no equivalent Japanese term — plus green and purple, the colors produced by mixing blue with either of the other two primary colors. (However, since the Japanese tend to regard blue and green as more or less interchangeable in many situations, as discussed at greater length below, they might well dispute this interpretation's implication that green is merely a derivative of blue and yellow, rather than a cornerstone color in its own right.)

The names of certain other colors, such as brown ("cha iro" — literally, "tea color") and "momo iro" (a term for pink which literally means "peach color"), are more metaphorical in nature and are formed by allusion to other proper nouns. Since "ki iro" (yellow), one of the basic "five color" nouns is, like the metaphorical "something-color" terms just mentioned, written with two separate kanji (kanji being the complicated non-syllabic characters originally borrowed from Chinese), Rebecca McGregor and Koko Kurosawa, a longtime Japanese teacher of English she consulted, suspected that this term, too, originated as some kind of metaphorical combination of two independent nouns. However, although "ki" bears a deceptive resemblance to "hi," the Japanese word for "fire," it has no currently valid meaning that Ms. Kurosawa was able to uncover, leading Ms. McGregor to conclude, "It is possible [the meaning] is lost in antiquity, and the kanji remains only to describe a color."

Still other color terms have been picked up from English, including "pinku" (pink) and "orenji" (orange), both of which are evidently used more frequently nowadays than their more traditional Japanese equivalents, "momo iro" (peach color/pink) and "daidai iro" or the more archaic "niiro," both of which mean (the color) orange. (Before beginning to investigate this topic, Rebecca McGregor remarked, "There is a [native] Japanese word for orange, but I never hear it used.") Although I was unable to confirm this, it seems entirely possible that when Uo-chan mockingly calls the carroty-haired Kyo in Fruits Basket by a nickname which TOKYOPOP translates as "Orangey", she may well have been literally using the term "orenji" (orange), much as redheads in English are sometimes addressed as "Red". This idea horrified Ms. Kurosawa, the Japanese teacher of English, who told Rebecca McGregor that Japanese people "would never tease someone in this manner, because it is not polite." Of course, Uo-chan has done far more impolite things than this, such as mouthing off to teachers and bringing a bloodstained iron pipe to school with her, so such behavior would not necessarily be out of the question for her.

Ms. McGregor continues, "To indicate 'light' as in 'light blue', the Japanese add the word 'usui' to the front. To indicate 'dark', they add 'koi' [or 'an' or 'kurai', depending on the individual word], which means 'deep'. However, I just got a hold of the color sampler we use for ordering paper, and cornered a [different] Japanese teacher of English. Questioning her on 'What do you call this shade of red? This shade of green?' I found that they almost always just slap a noun on, so there is 'water color' and 'peach color'." When queried about this point, Koko Kurasawa, the more experienced Japanese teacher of English, stated that Japanese speakers don't make the distinction between, say, "red" and "light" or "dark red" very often — they just say "red."

According to Kitao and Kitao, among other sources, the Japanese terms for "blue" and "green" are often used interchangeably, with ao (blue) frequently being used to refer to what Westerners would regard as indisputably green items such as green traffic lights and green plants or vegetables. Rebecca McGregor confirms that she has seen advertisements for "aoiyasai" (literally "blue vegetables"), although Koko Kurasawa stated that "the word for 'green vegetables' used most often literally translates as 'green yellow color vegetables' (ryoku ou shoku yasai: ryoku=green, ou=yellow, shoku=color, yasai=vegetables)", with "ryoku" being an alternate pronunciation of the same kanji used for "midori", the more common term for "green".

As for the blue/green traffic lights, according to Rebecca McGregor, "Ms. Kurosawa says she sees the traffic light color and it is green, but when she talks about it, she says it is blue ... She cannot say 'green light', or no one will understand. Though the color is green to [the Japanese], they say it is blue. Very confusing, and she was confused herself. I have to wonder how much her extensive experiences with the Western world bias her thoughts, however." The closest parallel to this I could come up with in Western culture was English expressions such as "green card" (i.e., the I.D. card certifying the permanent resident status of an immigrant in the United States) or "green room" (the behind-the-scenes room where performers can relax before or after theatrical or TV appearances). So-called green cards no longer come in green, and most modern green rooms aren't painted green, either, but if you referred to them by their real colors, no one would know what you were talking about. Still, as Rebecca McGregor pointed out when I suggested this comparison, it seems unlikely that there was ever a time when Japanese traffic lights or vegetables literally appeared to be what we would call blue.

Kitao and Kitao also state that to the Japanese, a number of things which Westerners tend to regard as yellow are instead perceived as red, most notably the sun (at any time of day, not just sunset, which even Westerners sometimes describe in terms such as "blazing red"). This is why the disc representing the rising sun on both the more abstract-looking current Japanese national flag, or Hinomaru, and the traditional flag of the Japanese naval and armed forces is red. Rebecca McGregor reports, "Ms. Kurosawa tells me she sees the color [of the sun] as yellow, but they are taught that the sun is red as children. She thinks perhaps the color red does not so much represent the visual color as the idea of the heat of fire. Fire is red in Japan, and so the sun is red as well." Kitao and Kitao add that to the Japanese, the moon is yellow, not white, as is the usual American perception.

Commenting on the Kitao article and its potential implications for distinguishing different hair colors, Rebecca McGregor says, "As the article implied, the Japanese recognize far fewer distinctions between shades of colors, so to be called 'brown' by the Japanese, it has to be pretty solidly brown, which in American thinking would be medium to dark brown. Having fewer colors that they use, a larger range of colors fall into smaller categories. My daughter's hair is a light brown by our standards, but she is called blonde, or 'burondo', by the Japanese because that particular color, for them, falls into the 'yellow' category."

Based on this information, I began to wonder about the literal Japanese meaning of the two Gravitation references discussed above to what the TOKYOPOP editions translate as Yuki's "brown" hair. If, to the Japanese, the distinction that Westerners see between pale brown and yellow hair effectively does not exist, then it is literally possible for a manga character to have what we would call brown hair, but still qualify as a blond by Japanese standards. As Rebecca McGregor remarked, "I tried convincing Ms. Kurosawa that [my daughter] Kallisti's hair was light brown, but she says in Japan that color is blonde or yellow."

Under the circumstances, it seems entirely possible that Eiri Yuki's hair is supposed to be a shade of pale brown similar to that of Kallisti McGregor, and, as in Kallisti's case, the Japanese word used to refer to this in the manga may literally mean "blond". If so, the TOKYOPOP translator and adapter might have chosen to translate the original Japanese term as "brown" instead in both instances because they knew that in Japan "blond" hair isn't necessarily yellow and wanted to avoid confusing English-speaking readers by stating that Yuki's hair was "naturally blond", since according to the Western definition of blondness this would logically be genetically impossible for someone who apparently has no known non-Japanese ancestry. When I queried TOKYOPOP about this hypothesis, current Gravitation editor Paul Morrissey was quite friendly and willing to help. However, since Morrissey did not become the book's editor until volume four, he was unable to shed much light on editorial decisions made in the course of translating earlier volumes.

In any event, as with the more minor, but somewhat analogous, example of Naozumi Kamura, the blue-eyed, symbolically lavender-haired foundling turned child actor in Miho Obana's Kodocha (TOKYOPOP), Gravitation writer/artist Maki Murakami does acknowledge, if not really explain, in the text of the manga the exotically atypical for Japan appearance of the blond (and sometimes blue-eyed) on the covers, light-enough-to-look-"mixed"-or-American-according-to-the-dialogue, co-star of her story. No such verbal clues are provided in Mars, where we are told only that Rei Kashino is six foot three and good-looking enough to be repeatedly approached on the street by representatives of modeling agencies. Perhaps we are intended to assume that Rei, like the similarly blond-on-the-covers Eiri Yuki, actually has pale brown hair, or perhaps the artist just drew whatever struck her fancy at the moment without really thinking about it in relation to real life, as so often seems to be the case in the literally chameleonic world of anime and manga. However, in both of these cases, whatever color the characters' hair may "really" be (assuming that concept is at all applicable in this context), it appears that what looks like a blond when pictured in color more often than not does tend to thematically function like a blond in terms of causing and/or attracting trouble.

Levi's theory about the troublesome associations of manga blondness also sheds some light on possible reasons why in another well-known shounen-ai series, the romance/police drama FAKE (TOKYOPOP), one of the heroes has un-colored-in hair which to Westerners looks blond in the black and white interior of the manga, but, according to the painted covers, isn't. Conversely, several other characters in the series have partially inked-in hair which I initially assumed was intended to be brown, but was eventually revealed to be blond. Judging by online fan commentary, most English-speaking readers tend to assume that the lighter-haired of FAKE's two protagonists, New York City police detective Ryo Maclean, is blond, based on the fact that there is no hint of color or shading in his hair within the pen-and-ink pages of the story itself. However, this impression is contradicted by the covers, in which his hair is portrayed as being either reddish, golden brown, or light to medium brown, and by a line of dialogue in volume three in which he is specifically described as having what the TOKYOPOP edition translates as chestnut brown hair. (To experience this cognitive dissonance-inducing effect first hand, compare Ryo's un-filled-in hair in the black and white illustration included in my article "Why Do Manga and Anime Characters Look the Way They Do?" with the volume five cover reproduced here, which is about as close to blond as Ryo gets in any of his full-color appearances I've seen.)

I queried TOKYOPOP about this reference, too, and received the following reply from FAKE editor Rob Tokar: "The written translation I have says, 'chestnut-brown hair' and, to double-check, I asked TOKYOPOP Production Manager Mutsumi Miyazaki (native of Japan) to read me the [original Japanese-language] balloon. She specifically said the words, 'chestnut brown hair' without any coaching." In view of the information above about the Japanese tendency to describe certain shades and colors by metaphorical allusions to items which are visually emblematic of those colors, this presumably means that Ryo's hair was literally described as "the color of a chestnut." In fact, this is essentially the same meaning conveyed by the equivalent English use of "chestnut" as an adjective, although in current American usage this particular term is more often applied to horses than shades of human hair.

In contrast to the officially brown-haired Ryo, there are no fewer than three other characters in FAKE whose hair is partially filled in with ink lines in the black and white sections, but colored blond on the covers and, in two cases, described as blond within the text. These are Bikky, the orphaned half-African-American juvenile delinquent whom Ryo and his partner/love interest Dee Laytner meet in the course of the first story arc and whom Ryo ends up more or less adopting; Berkeley Rose, a rather unscrupulous senior officer who spends much of his time sexually harassing Ryo; and Diana Spacey, an FBI agent with a reckless, mischievous personality who is an old childhood friend of Berkeley and initially assists him in his efforts to drive a wedge between Ryo and Dee. Since all three of these characters, even the flawed but basically sympathetic Bikky and Diana, fall far short of the incredibly nice, good-natured Ryo in terms of overall admirability, their respective hair colors actually make a certain amount of sense according to Levi's "beware of blonds" theory.

As for the partially inked-in effect on these officially blond characters' hair which initially led me to assume that it was intended to be brown, evidently this is one of those cases where Western-trained visual habits and manga artistic conventions are at cross-purposes. As Rob Tokar explained in the course of discussing the "chestnut-brown hair" scene, "Mutsumi [Miyazaki] went on to say that, on the following page (FAKE vol. 3, page 11, panel 3), FBI agent Diana Spacey is supposed to be blonde. I thought she was supposed to be a brunette, but, according to Mutsumi, all those lines in her hair are there to indicate a blonde shine."

As far as I can tell, relatively few other manga that have been translated into English feature anything comparable to the extensive network of inked-in lines within Diana's hair, or Berkeley's, or Bikky's, on characters who are specifically identified as blond. However, once I knew what to look for, I was able to find a number of other, somewhat more unobtrusive examples of this technique for indicating blondess in black and white, mostly in other shoujo (girls') titles.

The only other manga-ka I have come across who uses these clusters of fine, thin lines to indicate gleaming blondness to anywhere near the extent of FAKE's Sanami Matoh is Natsuki Takaya in Fruits Basket. Since I had already seen the Fruits Basket anime, in which all the blond characters' hair is simply colored in solidly yellow the same way it would be in Western animation, I didn't really notice while reading volume one of the black and white manga that Uo-chan's bleached-blonde hair had a lot of sketched-in lines in it. However, when I read volume two after learning of Mutsumi Miyazaki's explanation of the partially inked-in effect in Diana Spacey's hair, I realized that the manga version of Uo had almost as many long, thin lines scattered throughout the length of her hair as Diana did. The most noticeable difference between Sanami Matoh's and Natsuki Takaya's respective renditions of this technique is that, unlike Diana's, Uo-chan's hair is left blank white at the crown of her head. This has the effect of making it easier for a Western reader to assume that the clusters of lines visible throughout the rest of her hair are intended to represent individual strands or hairs, rather than the medium-brunette pigmentation initially suggested to both me and TOKYOPOP editor Rob Tokar by the denser network of lines in Diana's hair.

The Diana situation is further complicated by the fact that on the three pages at the beginning of FAKE Act 8, in volume three, which in the TOKYOPOP edition are reproduced in black and white but were obviously originally in color, Diana's hair is painted some color which appears to be much darker than yellow, and, in fact, looks only a few shades lighter than the supposedly chestnut-brown hair of Ryo on the (originally) color page that follows. Although it is impossible to verify this without seeing the original color artwork from the Japanese edition, this suggests to me that Diana Spacey, like Kallisti McGregor and (probably) Eiri Yuki, may well be another example of someone who is blond according to the Japanese definition of the word, but actually has light brown, rather than yellow, hair. Between this and the abundance and density of the little clumps of fine lines in Diana's hair which are evidently intended to indicate individual shining blond highlights, even the FAKE production staff appears to have become slightly confused at this point. In the second panel of the first entirely pen-and-ink page of the story, Diana's hair is not only shot through with the usual highlight-indicating clusters of lines, but also entirely shaded in with the same sort of screen tone routinely used to indicate the somewhat darker hair of another character, police sharpshooter and comic-relief pest J.J. Adams — an apparent coloring error which, as far as I am aware, does not recur in any other panel of the series in which she appears.

Ironically, the blank whiteness at the crown of Uo-chan's head in Fruits Basket may conceivably be intended to suggest that her bleached-blonde hair has darker roots, since the other (naturally) blond character who appears in volume two of the manga, the half-German Momiji Sohma, has highlight-indicating clusters of lines threaded throughout virtually all of his hair. Only in certain panels is a relatively small blank white area visible around the roots of his hair at the very top of his head. For me, at least, this comparatively dense, all-encompassing use of the "blond highlights through clumps of fine lines" technique once again made it somewhat difficult to bear in mind even after having seen the anime that Momiji is supposed to be blond, not brunette.

Tomoko Taniguchi makes somewhat more moderate use of this technique of portraying blondness in "Love and Peace in a Cornfield", the main story in her manga Popcorn Romance (CPM Manga). "Love and Peace in a Cornfield" is about two brothers whose budding careers as heavy metal musicians are apparently cut short when Zenta, the younger of the two, collapses onstage and is discovered to be suffering from a debilitating illness which will soon prove fatal if he and his brother don't retreat to the healthier, less stressful atmosphere of their grandfather's farm in Hokkaido. In accordance with the hair band-esque "visual band" culture of his particular genre of Japanese pop music, Zen irritates his crotchety, down-to-earth grandfather by wearing fancy, impractical costumes and dyeing his long, flowing hair blond, even on the remote mountain farm where he's supposed to be spending his days digging potatoes and planting corn.

The way Taniguchi represents Zenta's bleached blondness in black and white tends to vary from panel to panel. However, it basically falls somewhere in between the heavily-lined and sketched-in hair of the blond characters from FAKE and Fruits Basket and the way Sanami Matoh depicts the officially chestnut-haired Ryo, which strikes most Western readers as being more suggestive of blondness. That is, Ryo's hair is left predominantly blank white, but with individual locks and strands delineated in ink.

In "Love and Peace in a Cornfield", varying amounts of the bleached-blond Zen's hair are left blank white from panel to panel, with various locks and strands within his frequently elaborate hairstyles separately delineated in ink. In many panels, his bangs and the tips of his hair especially are also subtly stippled with clumps of finer lines of the type used to indicate blond highlights, although in this case they frequently blend in with the rest of the coiffure in such a way that this effect is virtually indistinguishable from Western comics artists' method of depicting individual hairs. The overall effect in most panels is much less densely sketched-in than that of the blond characters in FAKE and Fruits Basket, making it relatively easy to keep in mind what color it's supposed to be. (Of course, the fact that the character appears on the front cover with his hair painted bright blond and is described in his introductory character profile as "skinny and blonde" does a lot to head off any mistaken impression of brunetteness that Western readers might get from the occasional panel in which Zen's hair is more densely filled in with lines.)

Upon re-examining some of the other shoujo series already discussed featuring characters who are specifically identified as blond, I realized that certain characters whose hair is basically left blank and un-filled-in, except for pen lines indicating individual strands of hair, also often display the characteristic clusters of thin, fine lines denoting blond highlights. However, in contrast to the technique used in FAKE and Fruits Basket, where so many of these highlight clusters occur virtually side by side or at such regular intervals that in some panels they almost seem to run together, in Yoko Kamio's portrayal of the half-German, half-Japanese blond Thomas in Hana Yori Dango/Boys Over Flowers (Viz), the highlight lines occur only in more distinct, isolated clumps scattered unobtrusively throughout the character's hair.

A similar effect occurs in Gravitation with both K, the maniacal gun-wielding American band manager, who is specifically described as blond on at least three occasions not long after his first appearance in volume five, and Eiri Yuki, whose hair looks yellow on the covers, is described as "naturally brown" in the TOKYOPOP translation discussed above, and is probably supposed to be blond according to the more elastic Japanese definition of that trait. Both of these characters are fairly often shown with their hair portrayed as predominantly blank white with individually-delineated strands, in a mostly un-filled-in effect closer to the impression created by Ryo than Diana or Uo-chan. Both K and Yuki are also often shown with scattered clumps of blond highlight lines inked in so emphatically that in some panels it looks almost as if their hair is spattered with short black streaks — which, bizarre as it sounds, actually does give the impression of gleamingly shiny hair.

I also found some relatively understated usage of this technique in the portrayal of Ash, the protagonist of Akimi Yoshida's Banana Fish (Viz), although here what I believe to be the highlight clusters blend in so seamlessly with the rest of the character's hair that I'm not absolutely certain that they really are highlight clusters and not just scattered sketched-in individual hairs.

Although this technique of indicating blondness in black and white does seem to be used primarily in shoujo manga (and to greatly varying degrees even within that genre), I also spotted some stylized highlight clusters on the blond portions of the title character's very stylized zigzag hair in the Yu-Gi-Oh! strip currently being serialized in the English-language edition of Shonen Jump. In general, however, the blond characters in shonen (boys') manga I examined, such as Trigun, Naruto, and Hikaru No Go (whose title character, like Yugi in Yu-Gi-Oh!, is blond at the front of his head, with darker hair toward the back), tend to conform to the general shonen pattern of drawing hair less elaborately than in their shoujo counterparts. In fact, in some strips, such as Naruto and One Piece, many characters' hair appears to be merely drawn as an outline and then either solidly inked in or left blank, with no attempt at creating the highlights or individually-delineated strands of hair so typical of the work of shoujo artists.

Whatever techniques the artists use to draw their hair, blond characters in anime and manga vary widely in motivation, moral alignment, and personality type, ranging from innocent victims of others' derisive reactions to their unusual and/or "un-Japanese" appearance to chaos-bringing troublemakers in their own right, with a healthy sprinkling of more ambiguous characters in between. In Eiri Yuki's case, at least, there seems to be some indication that his generally go-to-hell attitude and penchant for cruelly needling other people are at least partially the result of his having spent his formative years being treated like a freak and/or some sort of exotic aesthetic object because of his symbolically — if not quite literally — blond appearance by virtually everyone around him, including his own parents.

One trait that all of these characters seem to share is their inability to escape the spotlight or the problems that so often come with it. Whether because of disturbing historical experiences with Westerners, light hair's traditional association with the Asian realm of the supernatural, or the sheer technical ease of making them stand out on the page in black and white, manga and anime characters with blond or pseudo-blondly fair hair are often the center of attention and almost always lightning rods for trouble.

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