Paper short abstract:

The Unako 'eel girl' commercial depicts moe characterization more broadly within the Japanese mediascape, beyond the world of otaku media mix fandom. Contextualizing moe aesthetics within a broader analytic perspective, I argue against Azuma's claim that Japan lacks a grand narrative.

Paper long abstract:

The use of characters, whether human, animated, or anthropomorphized, is entrenched in the Japanese media mix and widely used in marketing. A subset of these characters employ the typically feminized moe character aesthetic said to evoke positive affect in its fans who are stereotyped as otaku. This paper investigates problems that have emerged in the use of moe characters developed for promotions intended to attract a wider segment of the population. Specifically, the use of the character Unako 'eel girl' in the marketing of eel products of Shibushi in September 2016, resulted in such outcry within Japan (and, when it hit the global English media, abroad) that the video commercial was pulled from YouTube after one week. Though my interview with the producer reveals that the actions depicted in the video represented the raising of eel rather faithfully, this display of insider knowledge evoked widespread misunderstanding in the larger audience. Yet the makers themselves saw no such problem, and supportive voices were raised in their defense. Unako is not an isolated case: the global media asks, why does Japan persist in moe character representations?

Azuma has argued that Japan has lost its grand narrative, leading otaku to cobble together smaller stories from a database of moe-invoking character features. Against this claim, I consider moe in the context of Japan's political, social, and economic system in which, despite its Equal Opportunity Law, entrenched patriarchal heteronormativity provides a pre-existing framework for relationships of female dependency and male support. This entrenched cultural linguistic schema, often incorporating nature metaphors, has been echoing through the mediascape prior to the rise of moe characterization, for example in music lyrics and televised dramas. Women in the 'small stories' emerging from this schema are young, dependent on male approval, and in popular media can be idolized, as in AKB-type singing groups, fictionalized as in the moe database, or even turned into eels, remaining viable subjects of male affections of as long as they remain youthful and cute. Unako provides a link between fictionalized moe characterization and live performance that exemplifies this grand narrative.