"No One Knows Your Loneliness"

I first learned of エリア88 Area 88 from the November 1984 issue of ジ・アニメ The Anime magazine. It didn’t appeal to me. I’ve never been interested in realistic war stories.1

And 新谷かおる Shintani Kaoru’s character designs lack masculinity.

Later I learned why - Shintani started as a girls’ manga artist.

Shintani didn’t change his style much when he drew for boys. Although he added lots of hardware -

- carefully rendered by his assistants2 - the people remained the same.

But the test of a ‘good’ story for me is one that transcends my biases. I eventually rented all three volumes of the Area 88 anime by 1987 and even got the first issue of the English translation of Area 88.3

The anime has only grown on me over time, and now I consider the Area 88 trilogy to be among my all-time favorite movies. Why?

Because I am always drawn to stories that I can relate to. Stories that might not have the best craft. Miyazaki movies have apex-level craft, yet they leave me completely cold. I don’t see myself in them.

I do see myself in 風間真4 Kazama Shin, the protagonist of Area 88.

His plight was abstract to me when I first rented his movies. As a teen I was impressed by the aerial action which was completely hand-drawn. No CGI! Loved the soundtrack too. Here’s the opening of Act III: Blazing Mirage which went straight to video in Japan forty years ago today.

No one knows your loneliness5

Hard to believe that came from a studio that had previously specialized in … cute girls!? Studio Pierrot’s biggest hit was their adaptation of Takahashi Rumiko’s Urusei Yatsura which TURNS ME OFF.

There is nothing of me in that image above.

Granted, Shin doesn’t look like me, though his voice actor is my all-time favorite, 塩沢兼人 Shiozawa Kaneto. I wish I could speak Japanese like he does.

However, the real attraction of Shin isn’t the way he looks - I never wanted to draw like Shintani - or sounds.

Shin was a mercenary flying fighters for the foreign legion stationed at Area 88 in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Aslan, named after the Turkish word for ‘lion’. He was tricked into signing up and was stuck in a foreign land where there were only four ways to leave:

• survive three years of combat

• pay a penalty of $1.5 million dollars

• desert (and risk the death penalty)

• die

As an adult, I found myself in my own Aslans, in places far from Hawaii - on the North American continent and in Europe and Asia. Like Shin, I wanted to go home. And like him, I had to make money.

Act I set up that premise.

At the end of Act II, Shin crashed during a mission and managed to walk away alive. To freedom? No … he had accidentally wandered back to Area 88!

By the end of Act III, Shin was finally out of Aslan. His final mission was to escort the king of Aslan to France, where he was a free man.

What would do you once you stepped out that door?

In Paris, Shin telephoned his girlfriend 涼子 Ryōko, whom he hadn’t spoken to, much less seen, in years. She wasn’t around to pick up the phone the first two times. When she did pick up the phone the third time …

… he could only say a few words to her before hanging up.

The man she had loved was no more. Only his body remained - a body that no longer belonged in Japan.

Meanwhile, back in Aslan, the civil war was about to end. The rebels had foreign backing and seemingly innumerable planes.

Aslan’s government, having lost its king, was about to fall - and Area 88 would unconditionally surrender. Its commander set Shin’s fellow pilots free.

In theory. In reality, they flew toward certain death with him - “a one-way trip to hell”, as the dub put it.

And Shin took off from France to join them …

We don’t see all of them die. We don’t have to.

One couldn’t eject in time before missiles struck his plane.

Another who had shot an ejected pilot in mid-air suffered that very fate.

That death scene was the most played part of this YouTube video.

As the video’s title indicates, it gives away the ending, so you might want to watch it after reading my take on the ending first.

The Aslan foreign legion was reduced to just six planes. There’s a scene with all six, but they’re hard to see, so here’s a clearer scene with just four.

One pilot had only three or four seconds’ worth of ammo left. There was no reason to believe any of the others had much more.

This is a Japanese production. There is no American happy ending. The trajectory was straight down.

Shin knew that, yet when we see his face for the last time, he’s smiling.

He finally came to terms with what little life he has left.6

Unlike Shin, I did come home. But there was no Ryōko waiting for me.

Will I ever come to terms with this one-party state?