‘Haibane Renmei’ Almost Persuades Me That Its Ideas Are Christian
Haibane Renmei is an older anime series that’s not all that well known nowadays. I started watching it maybe a couple of years ago, but didn’t finish it. Recently decided to give it another shot, and I’m glad I did. It’s one that’s worth digging up from the dust of the forgotten.
What is ‘Haibane Renmei’?
In this series, the haibane are people, but also different from normal people. They are born into the world by hatching from giant cocoons. They wear halos and have small, seemingly useless wings growing from their backs. They live by certain strange rules that normal people do not have to live by. The story begins with the arrival of the newborn haibane, Rakka.
The story primarily focuses on Rakka and the older haibane Reki, as they both struggle with similar problems. Reki often takes on a motherly role with the younger haibane, but her own past and her uncertain future take the main stage as the story goes along, and it is Rakka who must help her friend.
Why Haibane Renmei is almost Christian …
So, main characters who have wings and wear halos. Yeah, right off the bat, there is a not-so-subtle hint of some strong Christian symbolism in the story, even if I think that these wings and halos have more to do with popular artistic renderings of angels then with anything biblical.
And these parallels and symbolisms don’t stop there. One episode mentions a lost account of how the world began, and what little is known about this account is a clear reference to Genesis 1.
Even the lives these haibane live and the rules they must live by can give the impression that they are somehow separate from the people of their town, even as they work and to some degree live among them. Or, to put it another way, they are in the town, but not of the town.
About midway through the series, a theme is introduced that becomes more important as the series nears its end: the idea of a haibane being sin-bound, a condition revealed by that haibane’s feathers turning black.
The Communicator, a strange figure who is something like an overseer of the haibane, offers Rakka an explanation of what he calls “the circle of sin.”
This figure says, “One who recognizes their own sin, has no sin.”
Rakka even takes it a step farther: “If I think I have no sin, then I do become a sinner.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed that some anime stories take the idea of sin seriously, but this may be the first one that I’ve seen where something that is at least close to repentance for those sins comes up.
But as good as even this may be, it still comes up short. If recognizing my sin means I no longer have sin, then how did that happen? Who has, in essence, washed my wings of the dark stains of my sins, and made them clean? Who made the laws that I broke, thus making me a sinner? All the Communicator can tell Rakka is that she has to find the answers for herself, which is almost like he’s saying that he’s just as lost as she is.
… But not quite
I guess this “not quite” began in the previous section, but that could also have been a false trail. It’s the end of the series that leads to the real “not quite.”
The twelfth episode could have ended the series on a good note, but there is a thirteenth. It’s one of those episodes that’s not an easy or simple one to watch, but that may make it all the better, and it’s failings all the worse.
In this story, Reki says:
“Ironic, isn’t it. If only I close my heart and pretend to be nice, everyone says I’m a good haibane. They just don’t know how dark and impure my heart is…Only when I was being useful to someone could I forget about my sin! And the only thing I was thinking was that maybe God would come and forgive me someday!”
You’d be hard pressed to find even a Christian story that so plainly, even bluntly, speaks of the way original sin has saturated mankind
Yet the way to salvation in Haibane Renmei is rather weak. Reki earned her salvation, earned forgiveness of her sins, freed herself from the curse of being sin-bound, by taking a difficult path and being kind to the weak, until this pretense became her true nature? But after showing so well her selfish motives, this seems like a cop-out.
Mankind seems to want to hold out some hope that we ourselves can win our own salvation, that we can make ourselves right with God on our own terms, and that God is ok with that. We rarely want to ask why any of that should be true, or how it could be true.
But if our hearts really are dark and impure, and if we live lies and pretenses, and if we do good for selfish reasons, then how can we earn any kind of forgiveness?
This is Haibane Renmei’s great weakness, where it fails: it shows us the vanity of putting hope in ourselves, then tells us to put hope in ourselves anyway. And if other people are just like us, then we would be unwise to put our hopes in them, too.
If we have sinned, then we have sinned by breaking God’s laws. If we have broken God’s laws, then we should be punished. How, then, can we be forgiven?
We can be forgiven and find salvation only if God is the one who is punished for us, and only if God is the one who gives us the forgiveness and salvation we cannot earn. These things have happened in Christ, who sacrificed himself for us and offers us forgiveness, salvation, and righteousness as gifts.
Still, you should see this series
Haibane Renmei has fallen into obscurity. This is understandable, yet also sad. It’s not a series with big action scenes and fights, and it’s not even a romance. Yet I think if someone will give it a chance, it’s likely they will not come away unhappy, even if they are like me and not completely happy with the show’s overall message.
It’s probably a more Buddhist idea of sin than Calvinist, but it’s a relatively different angle of approach that makes it interesting.
I feel like people could be disappointed by the small focus when it has a world full of mysterious weird stuff to explore, but I do like me some slice-of-life, too. Serial Experiments Lain is probably the more well-known version of this story, but Haibane is charming and I actually like it better because Lain couldn’t hold my attention.
It also has a lovely OP song:
Buddhism as far as I know has no concept of original sin. Some Buddhists, from what I read, say there is no such thing as sin at all, but from what I can tell that is not a common view. It seems the vast majority of Buddhists do accept there are transgressions against other human beings and think of them in a way that would translate well as “sin.” But “original sin” or having “a sin nature”? Not so much.
Buddhism has a different focus from Christianity. In fact, Christianity focuses on the biggest problem human beings have is the inabilty to overcome sin–and for this reason, Christ had to die for us, for God to do for us the things we could not do for ourselves (including taking our punishment, the reason for which this substitution was necessary proves to be at least a bit mysterious to us). Whereas the Buddhist concept of “salvation” is more an expunging of self to unite with the universe, not specifically focused on the problem of sin (though I’d say sin and self-focus are related). And although the way of Buddah is not really an easy one, it IS one you as a human being can follow if you choose to do so. You are capable of obtaining salvation in Buddhism yourself, if you apply yourself (though the salvation sought after has little in common with Christian salvation).
In Christianity–well, mostly anyway, there are cults who turn this dynamic off–you are not capable of obtaining your own salvation. At least part of it had to come from Jesus’s death and resurrection.
So if an anime series is doing things like having someone talk about badness as if there’s a certain irreducible amount of it, that’s actually not really a Buddhist thing to think. It’s really more Christian.
Is it more Christian because of Christian cultural influence? Or because Japanese people also notice that it really does seem impossible for people to stop being stinkers (a.k.a. sinners)–not entirely–no matter how well they are raised, educated, and no matter how hard they try.
So Audie noticing this anime doing what it does probably should not be brushed off “as a Buddhist concept of sin.” Actually, if Audie is correctly describing the anime, it would seem to be doing something rather unusual and unexpect. Something a Christian justifiably would see as a sign of God working behind the scenes in Japanese culture.
Yeah, Buddhists don’t have a concept of original sin, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an idea of the difficulty to rid yourself of their version of sin.
If the Haibane world is a version of the Japanese purgatory-hells (Hell in Japan/a lot of Asian countries is about punishment for wrongdoing, not necessarily eternal damnation), Reki DOES overcome her struggle enough to be reborn (and it implies that Rakka will eventually, too). There isn’t a Christ figure in Haibane, after all.
So it is definitely similar, but I think it’s a mistake to assume creeping Calvinism in Japan. I think it was a different process that produced this albeit similar result.
Unless he employed Death Of The Author, notleia :p Not saying he should, but believing strongly in Death Of The Author could make this conversation irrelevant, if authorial intent is irrelevant and a story is basically whatever the reader wants it to be.
Who is notleia? They sound like a fascinating person. 😛
Even if you go Death of the Author, itself still hard to divorce a work from the culture that produced it.
Since Haibane Renmei uses some of the stereotypical aesthetics of Christianity it probably was vaguely influenced by Christianity, but it was probably influenced by other things as well.
Several anime use Christian aesthetics and symbolism, or even things that feel like Christianity but are clearly not. Wolf’s Rain even had something called The Book Of The Moon, which seems a bit like the bible in the sense that it’s a religious text that prophesies the apocalypse in that world. But it’s clearly not the bible.
Death Note, Ao No Exorcist and Fate Zero have things and symbolism that are definitely borrowed from Christianity, but it just seems to be there for storytelling purposes more than anything. (In Ao No Exorcist, for example, demons are depicted similarly to yokai, and even though the main char was basically raised by a Catholic priest that does exorcisms, God isn’t treated as important, and the exorcisms are just another way to fight demons/yokai, equal to that of Buddhist methods and whatnot.) Rouroni Kenshin had an arc where it dealt with Christianity a lot more directly and actually grappled with it a bit, though not in an entirely favorable way. And that’s one of the few times I’ve actually seen an anime explore Christianity so directly, rather than it just sort of being there.
I haven’t seen Haibane Renmei, so I can’t say for sure. But although it seems to have some Christian influence and maybe some lessons that we as Christians can get from it, it’s worth being pretty skeptical about the idea of it trying to be Christian, or not using lots of other philosophies/religions in addition to Christianity. ‘One who recognizes their own sin has no sin’ sounds very different than the Christian notion of sin, after all. Recognizing one’s sin is the first step to asking for forgiveness, and perhaps for taking preventative measures to avoid sinning again, but it sounds like the show leads the concept of recognizing sin in a very different direction than Christianity does. So the story might be more about how an individual can understand themselves and keep from doing bad things, rather than actually caring about the religious part of it. Though of course that’s just a guess based on what I tend to see in anime.