“To Boldly “Not” Go Where No Woman Has Gone Before: Traditional Gender Roles in the Anime Series Planetes”
Planetes is a 26 episode anime series by Makoto Yukimura that has been highly praised for its realistic descriptions of both space technology and Japanese business culture. The 2003-4 anime is based on a five volume manga series that describes the lives of male and female space workers who collect low orbital debris. The manga won the Seiun Award 2002 and anime won the Seiun Award in 2005. This talk focuses on the roles given to the female characters in the anime series.
Tanabi Ai is one of the two lead characters. She and five other female characters have jobs that delineate the range of employment opportunities currently available for women in Japan. While the jobs are quite varied, all of the women are excluded from roles of direct power and authority and have limited opportunity for professional advancement. As the series unfolds, the women are presented as being successful only when they accept traditional female roles. Deviations from these roles are presented as highly problematic. The series concludes with Tanabi san returning to earth to bear children in her mother in law’s home while her husband goes off on a two-year flight to explore Jupiter. The lack of interest in the ethical issues raised by the highly circumscribed roles for women is in stark contrast to the series’ exploration of issues of racism and the misuse of power. The authors deliberately emphasize the future as a time of multiracial communities. Individuals from a wide range of nationalities are presented as successfully working together and the series explicitly criticizes discrimination on an ethnic or national basis. The series also criticizes the misuse of power by individuals and organizations. The authors, however, chose to treat traditional family and gender roles as if they were immutable physical laws that determined the fate of woman as completely as gravity determined the movements of the planets. This contrast suggests that the writers were able to develop a realistic description of a future Japanese business culture that was ethnically diverse but not one that could include women in roles of authority. Finally, it should be noted that later portions of the manga, completed after the anime series was written, differ greatly from the anime series on this issue. In the manga women play dynamic leadership roles and Tanabi san returns to work after marriage.
“To Boldly “Not” Go Where No Woman Has Gone Before: Traditional Gender Roles in the Anime Series Planetes” was given at the University of California at Riverside’s Eaton Science Fiction Conference in April 2013. The Eaton conference is a premier academic conference devoted to the study of all aspects of science fiction as a literary genre and social phenomenon. An earlier version of the paper was given at Mechademia in 2011.
Studying Anime 