Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
Ultraman Leo is the last elegy of Shōwa-era Ultraman. And its last rally before death. Ultraman Taro is aimed squarely at very young children, and Taro, the “crown prince,” gets whatever he wants. Listen to the Ultraman Taro theme song: “Father of Ultra is here, Mother of Ultra is here, and then Taro is here too.” Taro is your classic “kid with connections”: whatever he wants, he gets. He has serious backing. And although the lyrics mention both Father of Ultra and Mother of Ultra, the atmosphere of Taro as a whole is maternal. Taro is the one being protected. From its architecture and costume design to the names of its monsters, Ultraman Taro has a distinctly playful postmodern style. Taro’s human host, too, is a headstrong, sunny young man. To him, the world is all too simple—nothing but a game.
Ultraman Leo, on the other hand, is Taro’s complete opposite. It starts by stripping Leo of his support: he is left without a homeland. In an instant, we have gone from Taro, the pampered “little emperor,” to Leo, who has neither dad nor mom. Beneath Leo’s feet there is no longer solid ground, only endless emptiness. Leo is utterly without a homeland, yet he fights the aliens more doggedly than any other Ultraman, pitting his own body against them. Why? Because he has nothing left except his body.
The Ultraman Leo theme song goes like this: Suddenly, a storm descends. Suddenly, flames rise. It is the moment when some prophecy is fulfilled, the moment when some ending is proclaimed. No one must forget courage; no one must forget yasashii (gentleness).
This theme song made me cry. Really. In Shōwa-era Ultraman theme songs, Ultraman generally appears right at the start—coming from a distant planet to defend Earth, that sort of thing. But in this song, Ultraman doesn’t appear until the end. What comes first is a scene of near despair. It sounds like a song a fighter would sing to children just before blowing himself up for an ideal.
Leo keeps getting stronger. Why does he have to grow stronger little by little? Because his circumstances are just too difficult. The feeling isn’t “I’m strong,” but “If I’m not strong, everyone will die.”
But everyone died anyway. Leo was strong, very strong. Leo tried. He tried with everything he had. Everyone died anyway.
Leo really has no homeland. He had finally managed to find so many companions on Earth, but most of the people he knew were cruelly killed, one after another.
Look again at the theme song’s lyrics: two occurrences of “suddenly,” right at the start. Everything happens far too suddenly. The very first episode of Ultraman Leo is “The Day Seven Dies in Battle, the Hour Tokyo Sinks.” Ultraseven is beaten so badly at the outset that he is left disabled. He needs Leo’s help, but he also acts as a father to Leo, “alone at the ends of the earth”—a damaged but steadfast father figure. If Taro identifies with the mother, Leo identifies with the father, though that father is in his twilight years, nearing death.
And even this incomplete father–son relationship cannot last. In the middle of the story, Dan Moroboshi, Seven’s human identity, is attacked by a Saucer Creature, and no one knows what has become of him.1
As we know, an Ultraman usually chooses a human being as his host, whereas Leo takes human form directly. This is just like Hegel’s and Kierkegaard’s different interpretations of Jesus. Hegel sees Jesus as God inhabiting a human body (an Ultraman choosing a human host), whereas Kierkegaard says Jesus is an other. You cannot say that Jesus is both human and God. You should see it this way instead: Jesus is neither God nor human. Jesus is an absolute other, outside the general–particular categories and directly connected to the singular–universal axis.2
Leo, too, is universal in this way: he differs from every other Ultraman, yet can directly represent them all. Someone without a homeland—that is, someone who regards the whole world as a foreign land—is a perfect person, Auerbach says.3
By the Saucer Creature arc, Ultraman Leo has a strongly apocalyptic atmosphere (the saucers themselves correspond to the UFO craze of the time). One might even call it the spirit of the age: in the latter part of the last century, Japan was permeated by end-of-the-century panic. Black Directive, who commands the Saucer Creatures, looks like the frightening stock image of Nostradamus, who predicted that the world would end in July 1999. Around the time Ultraman Leo aired, Japan saw the release of Prophecies of Nostradamus, a film full of despair and negativity. In 1974, it actually ranked second among Japanese films in box-office revenue. Still more unbelievable, this “dark film,” which devotes so much time to showing despairing young people committing mass suicide in all sorts of elaborate ways before the end of the world, actually received a recommendation from Japan’s Ministry of Education. Our Japanese Ministry of Education really is so, so, so, so impressive!
In short, even if tomorrow is the end of the world, don’t forget courage. Don’t forget yasashii. Ultraman Leo, thank you.