Ask John: What’s the Significance of Jupiter in Anime?
Question:
What it up with anime and Jupiter? Gunbuster, GaoGaiGar and Heroic Age all featured important events that somehow revolved around that planet, two of the shows resulting in Jupiter’s destruction. Are there other anime where the Roman God of Thunder’s world gets a prominent role and, if so, why is that particular planet such a hot-spot in our solar system?
Answer:
Honestly, if Japanese culture imbues the planet Jupiter with any particular unique cultural attributes, I’m unaware. A number of planets in our solar system feature prominently in anime. The Aria TV series & Cowboy Bebop movie are set on Mars. SPT Layzner and Hoshi no Koe are partially set on Mars. The setting of Venus Wars is self-evident. Part of the Macross movie memorably occurs in Saturn’s rings. My best guess is that Jupiter is occasionally referenced in anime because it’s the largest planet in our solar system. The destruction of Jupiter would certainly signify a colossal galactic event.
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John, Jupiter is the Zeus, the all father of gods and goddesses in Greek myth, isn’t it? KOMATSU Sakyo, the godfather of Japanese sci-fi novel, is known for his _Bye-Bye Jupiter_, in which humanity decides to artificially explode the planet to save the solar system from a midium-sized black hole’s total destructon of the sun in the 22nd century. He said he wrote the story as the initiation of humanity doomed to kill his own father.
Thanks for the explanation. I’ll remember it.
Post script; _Bye-Bye Jupiter_ was written in Weekly Sankei between 1981 and 1980 and 1982, interestingly during the same period that Arthur Clarke wrote _2010: Odyssey Two_. Komatsu told in an interview that it was interesting that Clarke got shocked when he chatted about the plot of _Jupiter_ on one of his visits to Clarke’s cottage in Ceylon. Komatsu’s novels inspired many anime creators including Miyazaki. BTW, he used to dream of being a manga artist until he got shocked with a sci-fi manga _Kitarubeki-Sekai_(1950) by a young medical called Tezuka.