Why Are Anime Beach Episodes Alluring And Controversial?
Some think of them as a cheap way to garner popular attention, in the idea that sex sells. They may even harshly argue against the use of beach episodes, saying it objectifies female characters and, through this, contributes and trivializes the patriarchy, a state of slavery for women, or even pedophilia in some cases.
Some more nuanced critics might call it a plot device allowing slice of life as a genre to function, let alone provoke sexual tension between potential love interests, for instance through a ritual teaching-to-swim sequence which guarantees skinship and what ideas are close to that.
This article will explore every forementioned take and suggest a few more, such as the idea of a liminality of the beach, and then discuss more the associated geographic imaginary that anime beach episodes entail for Japanese sovereignty over natural, or developed, islands, alongside values that are shaped by a national cultural hegemony.
Anime beach episodes, if they’ve survived thus far in anime production, have proven to be a few things. A studio won’t be canceled for using such a plot device, audiences in the widest sense won’t cease to watch a show due to there being a beach episode scene, and the presence of some beach episodes or assimilated (think of hot springs) in sort of spin-off products means that it is sometimes the beach episode itself that is the end goal of the existence of the series! It means that it is a sustainable product in the economy of anime, which is to say something when we know some studios tend to have cashflow issues.
For a product to be sustainable, it has to be attracting in the abstract sense. But in the title is “alluring” used, meaning attractive in a sensual sense. This is because beach episodes are associated with a sensual imaginary, which has nothing natural, and is the proof of an import in Japan of Western ways to practice tourism. The allure can be associated with the extent of skin showed, with the type of censorship, with the plentifulness of a cast, but it is highly dependent on the non-monolithic audience of anime productions. For instance, muscular ikemen are probably a great thing for fujoshi, and some hetero male viewers won’t really feel a thing, but still be watching for something else but fan-service.
“Don’t talk like there aren’t any male characters that are also done the same way, because y’know there are zero male characters in anime who are overly handsome with perfect hair and chisel-cut abs with that oh so sweet perfect ass. It’s the same thing, the only reason you see more girls in this light than guys is because the people who create anime market towards males because that’s the prime demographic for it.”
“The Swimsuit Episode”, Adam Gaetan, Medium, January 5th, 2016. [1]
And there we have it: the natural slip from beach episode to fan-service. In many ways the material feminism criticisms that can be addressed to the beach episode are equally appliable to fan-service in other contexts, it’s just a trope that sometimes acts as an amplified, condensed, saturated manifestation of the sexualization of female characters in anime.
I said material feminism because I oppose it to liberal feminism, which I feel unfairly considers economics and rights to be the primary means of liberation politics. Instead material feminism looks at things like power differentials and social structures, in a continuation of what has been called continental philosophy. And because it focuses on cultural productions as ways of circulation of value systems and informing social roles reproduction, too, it makes sense that material feminism would be a treasure trove for the discussion of anime.
Conversely, I think the lesser heard point that liberal feminism could make about fan-service and beach episodes, is that it liberates the female’s body, giving agency to anime female characters, even though spectacular depictions will never allow for real agency like live-streaming permits. Yet again, it is always the youthful, beautiful that is encouraged to show some skin, never the aged, so ageism is a systemic oppression that is also reproduced through beach episodes.
One key factor that plays into describing allure, is the supposed identity of the person exercizing a spectatorship towards the work of art. We could use statistics to try to figure out a persona for the industry, but that in itself would just recompose a fictitious monolithic spectatorship for anime, when we know it to have so diverging audiences.
Speaking of particular audiences, are beach episodes perceived the same differing on age? We just addressed ageism in the depictions surrounding the beach episode topos. If it can be argued by some that beach episodes sometimes lead to the sexualization of underage characters, what can conversely be derived from that is the following.
That this depiction of underage characters in the sensual context of a beach episode can act as the confrontation to norms that are reified in reality. Therefore, underage characters can act as vicarious ways for projection, for transcendance of new social norms that different teenagers might have to navigate too, a complex issue for coming of age. In that way, it acts as education, or perhaps even putting words through an image on something felt as traumatic, even in the absence of a personal experience of child sexual exploitation. Puritanism in education might actually empower predators in the private sphere, by putting an omerta on the subject itself — therefore anime can provide a safe place to experiment one’s body, one’s experience of puberty. However, this only concerns younger characters and audiences alike.
How do beach episodes inform the viewer in the slice of life genre? Well, we are first exposed to the cultural representations that spawn in the mind of the character of the beach episode. Are they finding the sea trivial, part of the everyday, or is it in itself the imaginary threshold that motivates an entirely dedicated travel planned, and gone through, for instance through public or private transportation means? And then, can they swim, and if not are they scared of the sea? Is it associated to trauma? Thalassophobia perhaps?
You could argue I’m reading too much into it, but slice of life is precisely about the experience of characters in the world. Their Umwelt, as it were. Time, too. Is the time they’re spending at sea mandatory? Is it free time? Is it through travel as part of a touristic stay, and therefore limited in time? Is it plentiful? So many questions and the answers take time, aren’t necessarily crystal-clear, can be identified from elements, clues of the show that inform our emotions with regards to the fate of the characters…
Of course the character needs to survive for development to be made in a slice of life way. Usually beach episodes are considered to be leisurely like the actions they depict, to break a series’ flow after tough arcs that rose stakes and overall tension. But it is also a possibility to subvert expectations and kill one of the characters off. That’s what happened in Another, episode 8.
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The sea, itself, is not neutral. The beach is a particular type of littoral, or shore. There are cliffs, which invoke a very different type of relationship for the characters to the sea, then immediately seeming more dangerous, a threshold, but what is there beneath the sea, beyond the cliff and altitude…? Is it shallow, deep, is there a jellyfish going to zap me?
The sea has a liminality. The beach has a liminality. That is because everything physical is transitory, experienced through a planet that we know quite only one occurrence of in the entire observable universe. Science should inform philosophy. Liminality was born as a concept in Victor Turner’s anthropology to mean a rite of passage, but then derived into some sort of uncanny-valley aesthetic buzzword. But the liminality of the beach episode is manyfold.
The first transition is that of the episode itself, orchestrated as a function of time and characters in a setting. The second is that of the diegetic trip to the beach, or hot spring in some cases, but a lot of this analysis is worthy for hot spring episodes to be quite fair. The third is because the sea itself and the beach is under geologic and hydrologic dynamics. Experiencing the tide will itself reveal the transitory nature of it all. We could say the fourth liminality of the beach episode is the aesthetic resounding in the heart of the viewer: through character development we soon reach the end of the work, we leave characters we’ve grown fond of. We can see the aesthetic of wabi-sabi. The beach episode, whether reminisced at the end or repeated through multiple re-watches.
Beyond it all, I believe that something that might be put in the background with regards to anime beach episodes is the national identity of Japan and its cultural representations of the sea, the shore, the ocean… One has to understand that Japan is in an archipelago, something that enabled the Sakoku (or Kaikin) isolation.
But with the importation from the West of the practice of tourism, especially tied to the beach, I think that the beach episode also serves a functional role in reminding the Japanese audience of the true extent of the Nation-State’s sovereignty over different islands of the Pacific or Sea of Japan, not to mention contested islands with China and Russia alike.
As for the history of the beach episode in anime, the following video and excerpt are both interesting introductions as to this apparently four-decades old social construct:
Well, the earliest example I can find of what we would consider a modern-day beach episode is in Rumiko Takahashi’s romantic-comedy series, [Urusei Yatsura]. Airing on August 22, 1984, “[Ryunosuke Stunned! My Young Child Loves Rock Mother!!]” (episode 123) checks all the necessary boxes and — though this is pretty typical for the series — covers all of the fan-service angles as well.
The next time I was able to find a relevant episode was in — SURPRISE! — another romantic-comedy series by Rumiko Takahashi, [Maison Ikkoku]. A rather flimsy excuse is made to get the characters to the beach in the creatively-titled episode “[Love Panic on the Beach!]” (episode 10, aired May 28, 1986) and, once again, we find our cast in bathing suits and engaging in beach-y merriment.
“Beach Episodes: the history of an (in?)famous anime tradition”, Jason Muell, Medium, November 7th, 2017. [3]
To sum up: beach episodes stand at a crossroad of various stakes and perilous sandy mounds. First thing first, it is true that sex sells and it is proven by the fact that some whole spin-off series are specifically dedicated to the trope. And it is factual that some beach episode depictions objectify women or female characters, sometimes underage, thus contributing to a climate that may reify gendered norms, even inculcating them in the spirit of young girls.
But it can also be argued that such depictions liberate the female body in some sense, or act as vicarious ways to navigate gendered norms, especially considering the globalized distribution of anime productions in sometimes countries with conservative or even puritanist education systems. Though by focusing on the display of youth it is ageism as a systemic oppression that is reinforced, in some of the shows. One other way to put it might be that it is rare to find anime shows that adults can relate to directly by being represented, despite anime having adult themes! Instead it is more teenagers globally that are represented, which might also explain why some adults stop watching anime eventually, or at least some genres such as ecchi or harem.
But there is also the potential to develop slice of life characters through beach episodes, alongside romantic leitmotivs. Indeed, sea trips are often a liminal and transitory part of existence in such anime, a liminality that has several dimensions.
At last, the imaginary associated to islands can also serve a functional role in the establishment of a national identity centered around the sea in an archipelago, especially since the publication of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 by Alfred Thayer Mahan that greatly inspired Japanese navy military projections, culminating in WW2 imperialism over Manchuria, Taiwan, Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, Korea, Indonesia…, when Japan has established since the postwar era more of a soft power approach using cultural productions and economics for its diplomacy and internal affairs.
[1] Article. “The Swimsuit Episode”, Adam Gaetan, Medium, January 5th, 2016.
https://medium.com/@CSRadical/the-swimsuit-episode-6e94706b1f0e
[2] Screenshot. Taken c. 2016 [1]. Free! Iwatobi Swim Club (2013–2022), Kyoto Animation.
[3] Article. “Beach Episodes: the history of an (in?)famous anime tradition”, Jason Muell, Medium, November 7th, 2017. https://medium.com/@jasonmuell/beach-episodes-the-history-of-an-in-famous-anime-tradition-cd936eabb54a
[4] Video. “Why Every Anime Has a Beach Episode”, Hassy-sensei, YouTube, August 8th, 2023.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OQO8xoBRgY
[5] Screenshot. Taken c. 2016 [1], from Yuyushiki (2015) by Kinema Citrus [5].
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