*sigh* So, I think everyone and their mother has criticized Rainbow at some point for acting a bit lax in the storytelling department.  It looks like today is my turn to jump on the bandwagon.  Episode 4 explores Sakuragi, his past, and his current motivation to protect the boys in his cell.  Unfortunately, the way they present it, it falls flat on its face.

Uh... thanks for the visual aide, guys.

We get a flashback in the second half of the episode.  Sakuragi’s father goes off to war.  When the war ends, he doesn’t return.  Eight years later, he finally shows up at the house, and it turns out the Russians had held him for the past eight years in a Siberian internment camp.  The experience changed him completely.  He’s become a drunkard, abusive, and lost his motivation for living.  Sakuragi decides to stay out of the house more often to avoid him, but runs across his father in the pouring rain one night.  They quarrel, and son essentially tells father to go to hell.  The father actually complies, and the experience leaves Sakuragi emotionally scarred.

So, what’s the problem?  Well, it generates no sympathy for Sakuragi’s father.  His son correctly surmises he suffers from survivor’s guilt, but this is something we’re told matter-of-factly, rather than shown.  Think about how much more impact this flashback could have had if we had even a glimpse into the father’s life.

Imagine the life of a middle-aged soldier having to fight in the Second World War while missing the family he holds dear.  Imagine his reaction as his superiors hand him report after report of his children dying on the battlefield, likely without him ever having the chance to say goodbye.  Imagine the despair he feels as the Russians corner him.  Imagine the trip to Siberia, in an overloaded train car, as he realizes he may never see the wife and child he loves dearly ever again.  Imagine him slowly breaking under the strain of the harsh and unforgiving environment in his “new home.”  Imagine the disillusionment he feels when they finally release him eight years later.

All the events, culminating in this one emotional outburst.

Yet, we get none of this.  Survivor’s guilt and its ilk can make for powerful storytelling, but you actually have to work with it correctly.  You never feel immediate sympathy for a character who shows up on the doorstep in a psychologically defeated state.  We need an emotional attachment to the character involved.  This means we also have to experience the events that lead to the gradual breakdown.  I know everything that happened, I just told you all of it, but Rainbow didn’t show it to me itself.  All we see is the result: a man who has broken in several ways and then takes his own life.  It presents us with fact instead of emotion.  I feel no sympathy.

When Sakuragi says his motivation is to prevent such a tragedy from ever occurring again, I feel nothing as well.  Yes, it is fact, and the conclusion derives from the premise, but that’s all it does.  I don’t think it helps any when the whole fire scene is needlessly overwritten and dramatized.  The amount of time they spend in the blaze, the Inspector beating up Uncovered, debris pinning Bro down, it’s all meant to pull at the heart-strings.  They simply do too much with it though, thus it feels overdone.  Perhaps I’m harsh in my assessment.  However, presenting a dark drama doesn’t give you a free card from criticism.  You also must have the writing to back it up.  I’ve read a few comments on MAL that say the manga picks up at this point.  I certainly hope it does.

With creepy doctor on the watch, it at least looks interesting.

Trust is something many of us give with great reluctance.  We have to know a person for some time before we feel like we can open up to them.  However, trust is a double-edged sword.  When we reveal these aspects of our lives, we open ourselves to attack.  It’s so easy to betray someone.  It is fitting that this episode, entitled Distrust, revolves around a person who cannot trust anyone.  His name?  Baremoto.

I don't need you! I don't need anybody!

After the events of the last episode, Joe wants to become a singer.  I think this is a career choice right up his alley.  You can tell he is more prone to emotional outbursts than the rest of his companions in the cell, but it isn’t necessarily bad.  You must put emotion into your singing to make it real.  A person who sings about something he doesn’t believe in himself comes off as fake.  In addition, Joe wants his fame to catch his sister’s attention.  However, I think he can do more.  A popular singer can become a strong voice for social change.  He already has a wealth of experience to draw from in his song writing from both positive and negative experiences.  He can use music to convey the problems facing the young, the abandoned, and the impoverished.  Perhaps this is a bit big and idealistic, but sometimes all it takes is one person in the right place to start a change.

Well, I believe in your dream, Joe!

Baremoto trusts no one and believes only in himself.  This stems from his childhood, where he saw vile men taking advantage of his mother.  In one way, he is correct in his appraisal.  Truly terrible people exist in this world who are capable of equally terrible actions.  You wouldn’t want to be mixed up with someone of that nature.  At the same time, Baremoto misses the point of his mother’s sacrifice.  She derives no pride from living a life of prostitution.  However, you have a strange sense of admiration for his mother, who literally did everything she could to ensure her son’s safety and survival.  If she believed only in herself as Baremoto does, he would have died long ago.  In addition, you can draw a striking parallel between his mother and himself.  He knows the cigarettes are his and he knows he started the fire.  Baremoto essentially sells himself to Ishihara to escape punishment in a form of mental prostitution.

He's seeing exactly what you think, and it'd scar you too.

I think you can define Inspector Ishihara as a control freak with a superiority complex.  He craves power and he gets it by holding control over the kids in the detention facility.  You can see where a guy like Bro would pose a problem.  When Ishihara beats him, Bro simply looks at him with defiance in his eyes.  It is a silent look saying, “You can batter me, but you can never break my spirit.”  It drives him straight into a rage.  His terrible traits make us hate him as a character, perhaps even think of him as a monster.  Yet, just like the boys, I wonder how he got this way.  No one is simply born this way, so what happened in his youth to make him flip out when he loses control?  It runs counter-intuitive to a series about character who have to deal with someone like him, but I hope they resolve it just the same.

You dare challenge the all-powerful Inspector Ishihara!?

Finally, we have Bro.  He acts like a big brother now, but if Ishihara’s words are true, he killed his parents.  It surprised me to see them put this plot into motion so early.  Whatever the circumstances of the crime, we can see Bro wants to become a better person.  He’s acted as a pillar of strength to the boys, to the extent that Mario still believes in him despite the claims.  When Bro runs into the fire, it really drives home his character.  Generally, a person running into a fire embarks on a suicide mission.  So many things can go wrong.  You can receive heavy burns, suffocate, or even the building itself might crush you with its quickly diminishing structural integrity.  He knows it and volunteers to sacrifice himself anyway, even if his inmates hate him and even if they already died.  I really don’t care what he did in the past right now, I look at him as a hero.  Next week, we’ll see if his heroics bear any fruit.

He ran into the fire...

I’ve been putting off this episode, partly because I’ve had something to write about every day so far, and partly because I hoped FroZen could save me from ridiculously huge files.  Well, I ran out of episodes.  I cleared some space on my hard disk and sat back with a nice refreshment while I waited for it to finish.  Okay, enough silliness.  After all, prison is serious business.

OH GOD! Can we go back to just silliness? Please?

The boys arrived at the detention center in January, and some time has passed.  Today, Joe has a visitor, the woman who runs the orphanage where he was raised.  He arrived with a girl he treated like a sister, named Megu, and someone has adopted her.  This prompts flashbacks to his childhood, where the two were all each other had.  Unfortunately, the director sexually abused him.  You can understand his concern for his sister given the orphanage’s record.  When supplies arrive, an opportunity to escape presents itself, and his fellow inmates help him.  He runs straight for the orphanage.  This is actually a very bad move.  A little forethought would tell you the officers would have the grounds under surveillance.  Joe simply cannot think clearly under the conditions.  Despite his normal mild manner, he’s filled with rage and sadness and wants nothing more than to protect his little sister.  I imagine most of us would make the same crucial error.  The officers capture him easily and he receives a severe beating for his escape.

Poor guy had already failed before he started.

On the other end of this equation, we have Megu.  The orphanage director has just sold her off to a… rather unsavory fellow.  You can tell she doesn’t like the arrangement just from looking at her body language.  Yet, she still tells Joe off rather tersely.  Why would she do such a thing to her brother?  It’s quite simple.  We do not like seeing our loved ones in pain, and we hate it even more when we cause the pain ourselves.  Joe has put himself in danger by escaping the prison to search for her.  Guards have roughly subdued him, and he’s even sustained a head injury.  She can probably guess he will try to escape again at the next opportunity, and he might suffer even more.  When Megu tells him to leave her alone and to think about himself, it crushes Joe.  It crushes her as well, and she bursts into tears in the temporary safety of her room as she quietly thanks her brother for his concern.  However, at least he will stay in the detention center and not suffer for her sake.  I hope they will meet again someday, so she can tell him why she did this.

It hurts terribly, but at least he can be safe.

Finally, we have a very brief look at Spoon.  He lost his family in the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  He didn’t have any lost love for his abusive, alcoholic father, but he lost his sister.  He still blames himself for leaving his sister behind when he went for a walk that day.  I’m not going to cover anything about the nuclear attack for now, and I instead defer to the book Hiroshima by John Hersey.  I know it’s required reading in some schools, and if you haven’t read it, you should.  However, people seem to hold a misconception that anyone even near the blast zone died in short order.  Shouldn’t Spoon have died already?  Hersey’s book relates the stories of six people, five of whom were within a mile of ground zero.  He followed up on them forty years later.  Four of the six survived.  The bomb caused a great deal of psychological and physical trauma to people, but it did not guarantee death.  On that note, radiation exposure has probably shaped Spoon’s physical appearance.  Next week, we should to learn a little about Baremoto.

Even in despair, never forget the good times you shared.

Rainbow is the story of seven teenagers who are thrown into a juvenile detention center in 1950s Japan.  The series is decidedly dark and gritty.  If you are looking for an anime with rainbows and butterflies, find another series, like K-ON.  If you cannot handle explicit images, turn back now.  For everyone remaining, welcome to Hell.

Even the opening splash warns you what to expect.

In the aftermath of the bombings, World War II, and the reparations demanded of them, Japan has become a crapsack country.  In such conditions, those with power thrive, and those who lack power constantly draw the short straw.  On the one side of this equation, we have Inspector Ishihara, who presides over his center with an iron fist.  He prefers to issue punishment personally through beatings, viewing the teenagers as less than human.  You can see he enjoys the work with the twisted smile on his face as he inflicts blow after blow.  He also hates having his authority challenged in any way.  If the Doctor hadn’t come to the cell to stop him during one of his tirades, we would probably be out one main character in the first episode.

You can tell this guy has issues.

Speaking of Bro, he embodies the other usage of power.  Ishihara’s power has corrupted him and he rules through fear.  By comparison, Bro leads by example and commands respect from the new additions to his cell.  He has an air of maturity and a great deal of control over his actions.  When the teens attack him to assert their superiority, he defends himself, but not to an extreme extent.  He dodges and counters each one with simple blows meant to show them who leads, and not to inflict great injury.  While he berates them when they question him, he also reaches out to them in friendship by passing the cigarette around the cell.  Where all the other characters get brief introductions by the narrator, Bro doesn’t introduce himself until the end and he still doesn’t tell us why he’s here.  It’ll be interesting to learn the source of his maturity, as well as the crime he committed.

Can the fearless leader tie this motley crew together?

Then we have the other six delinquents who have freshly joined the detention center.  The narrator introduces each with the crime they committed.  Some of the descriptions are straightforward, while I assume others will have a bit of fleshing out as the series progresses.  Turtle and Uncovered are both con artists and thieves, while Cabbage’s imprisonment is due to alcohol consumption and assault.  These three illustrate the squalor plaguing the country as the poor and unfortunate resort to crime to support themselves, or fall into the wrong crowd.  On the other hand, Mario, Soldier, and Joe all have sentences relating to assault, where they defended themselves or another.  Their crimes represent the failings of the penal system to mete out true justice.

Left to Right: Cabbage, Joe, Soldier, Uncovered, Turtle, Mario

The people running this institution drive home that the teens have no power.  The first thing they have to deal with is riding on a bus filled with people while they stand in chains with their faces covered.  Then when they arrive at the facility, the doctor subjects them to a cavity search using a long glass shaft.  They use both of these experiences to degrade them.  Deprived of any power, they try their luck at harvesting some level of superiority by taking on Bro, but to no avail.  When offered the opportunity to strike him by the Inspector, they refuse.  They know they have no right to strike him when a downed man when they couldn’t even touch him while he stood.  It illustrates both a capacity for humility and morality I am interested to see develop.  In the next episode, Joe tries his hand at escaping to see his sister.  I don’t imagine his plan going too well.

Can they find any hope within despair? We'll see.