Why Is Manga and Anime Characters' Hair All the Colors of the Rainbow?

Part 1

by Margaret O'Connell

In the first article in this series, I discussed how various historical, sociocultural, and animation-history forces may have contributed to the prevalence of what strike many Western viewers as apparently un-Asian-looking characters in many manga and anime, even those which are specifically set in Japan. In the generally accepted visual vocabulary of Japanese comics, the oversized round eyes typical of so many anime and manga characters can provide important clues to their owners' personalities and even their moral alignments. Sensitive, sympathetic characters are generally drawn with larger eyes than their fellows, while evil or cold-hearted characters usually have narrow eyes. (Theoretically) innocent children's eyes, like those of the heroines of many shoujo (girls') manga, tend to be downright saucerlike compared to those of adults, and adult women, as members of the allegedly more caring and nurturing sex, usually have larger eyes than men. However, all of this varies from artist to artist and sometimes even from panel to panel, since characters' eyes often narrow, widen, bug out, or even appear to momentarily occupy a significantly greater or lesser percentage of their faces depending on the situation.

If manga characters' eyes and other facial features can change dramatically to suit the occasion, to many manga artists it seems quite logical that their hair should follow suit. Or, as the author of the tongue-in-cheek list of anime laws of nature hosted on the World of Urusei Yatsura's Lum website puts it in his explanation of the so-called Law of Follicular Chroma Variability, "Any color in the visible spectrum is considered a natural hair color. This color can change without warning or explanation." This may seem plausible enough in the case of alien characters like the extraterrestrial princess Lum herself, whose usually sea-green hair is occasionally colored rose or blue on videotape packaging and the covers of some of the old single-issue Urusei Yatsura Viz comic books. However, it also applies in one way or another to the hair colors of relatively normal Japanese human characters such as Yugi in Yu-Gi-Oh!, Revolutionary Girl Utena's pink- (or occasionally apricot-) haired title character, and even more prosaic examples like that of Sana, the eleven-year-old heroine of Kodocha: Sana's Stage, whose hair is brown on the covers of volumes two, three, eight, and nine of the manga, but dark red on volumes four, five, and six.

According to Gilles Poitras, author of The Anime Companion (Stone Bridge Press), "Japanese hair is naturally dark brown, black, or even rarely a very dark red." Rebecca McGregor, a longtime American resident of Japan and frequent poster on Sequential Tart's Tartsville discussion boards, adds further details: "I was born in Japan, and I have lived here off and on for 10 years. I teach in a rural Japanese junior high school in Akita prefecture (northernmost Honshu), where the students are not permitted to wear chapstick, much less dye their hair, and many of my students have noticeably brown hair. When I asked one of my Japanese fellow teachers about this topic, she responded, 'Japanese people can and do have brown hair, but black is more common.' I asked a few other teachers in the room, and they said similar things." Two other Western teachers of English whom Ms. McGregor consulted also mentioned students they had had whose coloring was somewhat unexpected for Japan. Anthony Barrett, from Scotland, said, "There is an ichi-nensei [first year] student in one of my JHS's who has Japanese features, but red hair. I thought for a long time that she defied school rules and dyed her hair, but apparently not." Alice Wright, from England, stated that in her English conversation class "I used to teach a Japanese guy with blue eyes who came from Hokkaido. He was kind of old so I don't know what colour his hair was when he was young, as it was white when I knew him."

The most likely explanation for such atypical coloring among residents of northern Japan would seem to be that they are at least partially descended from the Ainu, an ethnically distinct group native to Japan who, according to a 1989 New York Times article by John Noble Wilford (reprinted in Science Frontiers Online "have lighter skin, more body hair, and higher-bridged noses than most Japanese." An Encarta Online Encyclopedia entry on the comparative structure of different types of human hair describes the hair of both Europeans and Ainu as "wavy and intermediate between the straight and curly types; growing from a straight follicle, it nevertheless has a slight tendency to curl ... and exhibits a range of color from light blond to black." In a 1999 newspaper article, Chisato Dubreuil, the co-curator of a Smithsonian Museum exhibit called "Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People", who is herself of Ainu descent, remarked, "I have wavy hair and the majority of Japanese have very straight hair. So my school teacher thought I was perming my hair. When I told him this was natural he didn't believe me and I was punished." The same article goes on to explain that the Ainu "are believed to come from the Jomon culture, a Neolithic people who occupied much of the Japanese archipelago between 20,000 and 2,000 years ago — before ancestors of today's Japanese population migrated from mainland Asia and drove the Ainu north to Hokkaido and the remote Kurile and southern Sakhalin islands."

However, even the wider than expected range of natural hair colors resulting from the Ainu's addition to the larger Japanese gene pool does not account for the statistically high prevalence of different shades of hair — including some not found in nature — seen in many anime and manga set in Japan, including blond, red, green, purple, and pink. When it comes to the largely black-and-white interior pages of manga, at least, noted authority Frederik Schodt attributes the apparently fair hair of many characters to purely pragmatic design considerations: "Since [Japanese] comics are generally printed in only one color ... artists have discovered that they can help balance the page or differentiate between characters by not inking in their black hair. Often the same character's hair will be inked in in one frame, and then only outlined in the next, especially if set against a dark background. [Sequential Tart editor's note: A good example of this occasionally un-inked-in technique is Saki Hiwatari's depiction of Alice, the protagonist of Please Save My Earth, in volume one of that series.] To the unaccustomed eye a Japanese character may therefore appear to have white or blonde hair, but the fan [of shoujo, or girls', comics, in which this practice is particularly prevalent] is never confused. She knows it to be black in reality."

This "everyone knows all the characters' hair is really black" theory may well have been valid in the early days of manga, when readers rarely had the opportunity to see any of the characters (especially those from the then seldom-animated shoujo series) in any colors besides black and white except by exercising their own imaginations. However, it does not square very well with what Schodt himself acknowledges is the more recent widespread practice of depicting characters who are supposed to be Japanese with bright blonde hair and blue eyes on the covers and initial color pages of manga magazines, or with the wide variety of hair colors many characters are given when they make the transition from their black-and-white manga origins to full-color anime. In fact, even Schodt's assumption that it is possible to unequivocally know what certain character details such as hair color immutably are "in reality" seems more and more questionable the more examples one examines, at least in regard to some of the more recent manga and anime.

As mentioned above, there are characters whose hair (and sometimes, less conspicuously, eyes) change color for no readily apparent reason when they make the move from manga to anime, or even from one book or magazine cover to the next. There are characters whose fully inked-in hair appears to be black in the interior pages of the manga, but turns out to be some other shade on color covers or in the anime. For example, the female version of Rumiko Takahashi's magically gender-shifting character Ranma has hair which looks as black as her male counterpart's in the manga, but is revealed to be red when seen in color. The aforementioned Lum of Urusei Yatsura (also created by Takahashi) also has hair which looks black in the manga, but it is usually portrayed as green or rose in the anime and on color book and magazine covers.

There are characters whose creators casually refer to "characters with black hair" in the text sections of tankoubons (manga trade paperbacks) as if their hair is genuinely a different color from that of the characters whose hair is routinely left uncolored in. And there are characters whose creators appear to have given virtually no thought to what color their hair "really" is until it's actually time to sit down and pick out color schemes for the anime.

In a character profile included in volume one of Zodiac P.I., writer/artist Natsumi Ando urges readers to cheer on the character in question, somewhat know-it-all-ish male lead Hiromi Oikawa, because "I love drawing characters with black hair." (Zodiac P.I. is one of a number of series whose heroine — in this case, junior high school astrology expert/private detective Lili Hoshizawa — is depicted with blonde hair on the cover of the TOKYOPOP edition, although her eyes change color from brown to blue between the front and back covers of volume one.)

Of course, it's entirely possible that TOKYOPOP somehow misconstrued the translation, or that Ando was using the Japanese term for "characters with black hair" as shorthand for "characters whose hair is fully inked-in so that, in contrast to the other characters, the blackness of their hair is clearly visible." However, unless there has been a total mistranslation, this phraseology also suggests the possibility that, after several decades of black-and-white manga in which certain characters' hair routinely comes out looking blank white rather than black, even some of the manga artists themselves may be inclined to imagine their stories as taking place in the sort of fantasy Japan where two out of the five original Sailor Scouts were (apparently literally) blonde, including Sailor Moon herself. Or, perhaps, to decide that some of their characters dye their hair various brighter or more unusual shades, as many younger Japanese now do. As Rebecca McGregor, the American teacher of English in Honshu, remarks, "Forty years ago, I can't say what the motivation for drawing blond characters would have been (though I suspect it was a large number of things, including the Disney and Hanna-Barbera influence), but today, if I was a manga-ka creating a new title, I wouldn't think twice about making a Japanese character with red or blonde hair, simply because I see it on the street so much."

In a March, 2002, article in Nipponia, reporter Satoshi Matsuoka cites a 2001 survey in which Hoyu Hair Coloring, Japan's largest hair dye manufacturer, found that 68% of the women in the country had dyed their hair that year, whether to artificially restore gray hair to its original shade or to change the color of their hair entirely. Even more remarkably, this figure had more than doubled since 1996, a mere five years before, when only about 30% of the nation's women used hair dye. The Hoyu Hair Coloring survey also discovered that more than 20% of Japanese men had dyed their hair during 2001. Adding the figures for both genders together, almost half the Japanese population used hair dye that year — a percentage which experts expected to continue to increase.

Matsuoka suggests a number of contributing factors to this dramatic rise in the use of artificial hair coloring in a country where dyeing one's hair a shade conspicuously different from its natural color had traditionally been frowned upon and even prohibited by schools and corporations. As in the West, one element is the influence of entertainment celebrities and athletes who, in Matsuoka's words, "play up their own individuality and personal appearance" in order to stand out more distinctly in the pop culture landscape. For North American readers, the most familiar Japanese example of this would probably be former Seibu Lions player Kazuo Matsui, now the new shortstop for the New York Mets, who is well known for spiking his hair and dyeing it wild colors such as orange.

A concerted promotional campaign by the hair care industry — reacting to already emerging social changes possibly stemming from adjustments in the once-monolithic Japanese economy — also played a significant role in the abrupt upsurge in the use of hair dye. Hair-coloring consultant and beauticians' association researcher Kumiko Naito estimates that the current hair-dyeing fad really took off in 1994. Noticing the budding hair-coloring craze at the beginning of the decade, "the beauty industry decided to promote it more. Beauticians began suggesting new hair colors for their customers, and the industry launched a massive advertising campaign using different types of media." Manufacturers further enhanced the snowball effect by developing new colors and products that were less damaging to the hair, winning over potential customers who might previously have eschewed hair dye on the grounds that the results were insufficiently impressive to justify potential damage to the follicles.

All of these factors appear to have combined to make visibly dyeing one's hair both newly socially acceptable, and, in the eyes of some, a sign of being in tune with the rapidly changing zeitgeist. As Naito put it, "The 1990's dramatically changed lifestyles and revolutionized the Japanese sense of beauty. In Japan, the 1990's were called the decade of the individual. Coloring one's hair was a way to run with the times."

Back in the pen-and-ink world of manga, some artists seem to have found the transition from the black and white world of their original creations to the peacockishly technicolor universe of their anime adaptations almost as disconcerting as traditionalists must have considered the effects of the real-life hair dye craze. While Natsumi Ando's remarks about characters with black hair are ambiguously-phrased enough (at least in translation) to leave the reader uncertain about what color she considers the hair of the characters whose coiffures are not inked in to be, at least one other manga-ka, writer/artist Wataru Yoshizumi, appears to have given such matters no thought at all until it came time to produce full-color character designs for the anime version of her shoujo romantic comedy series Marmalade Boy. In the "Free Talk" behind-the-scenes commentary segments included in Marmalade Boy, volume six, Yoshizumi explains that even though she was not involved in the screenwriting or actual drawing of the animated TV series based on her manga, the producers consulted with her quite a bit and even asked her to create additional characters for the TV version. When the topic of the characters' individual color schemes arose, Yoshizumi, by her own account, seems to have had few, if any, preconceived notions about which characters' hair should be which color, although she did find the somewhat inconsistently rainbow-hued palette of shades available rather startling:

"The color of Arimi's [male lead Yuu's spirited, assertive ex-girlfriend] hair ... draws some attention from the animation viewers. According to the animation staff, green and purple can be used for hair and is considered acceptable, while pink is too weird. To me, all these colors appear unrealistic. They wanted to use green or brown for Arimi's hair. They chose green in the end because brown would make Arimi's image too cutesy. Green hair matches Arimi's cocky character ... At first, the color of Rokudanda's [the obnoxious, hypercompetitive cousin of one of the supporting characters] hair was the same brown as Nachan's [a likeable young teacher whom heroine Miki's best friend Meiko is in love with]. No anime cels had been made for Nachan at that point. It was me who suggested that Rokudanda's hair didn't deserve to be brown. Let Nachan have brown hair, and use purple for Rokudanda's. Sorry, Rokudanda!"

In contrast to the original manga-ka's relatively limited and belated interest in assigning various hair colors to specific characters, the animation staff of the Marmalade Boy TV series appears to have been so enamored of chromatic variety for its own sake that in a diagram I found on one Marmalade Boy website illustrating the romantic entanglements of ten of the more significant characters (excluding Miki's and Yuu's parents) there are two people with green hair, one (Yuu) who appears to be more or less blond, one (Miki) who in this case is pictured with reddish hair, and four people whose hair is some shade of brown. In defiance of real-life Japanese statistical probabilities, there is nobody whose hair appears truly black, and only two individuals whose hair could be described even as blue-black or anything approximating it. However, I did eventually find a picture on another website which revealed that Miki's parents Jin and Rumi both have black hair with blue highlights, while Yuu's parents' hair is light brown.

Antonia Levi, author of Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (Open Court), considers anime and manga characters' hair color to have a symbolic function, in addition to its obvious usefulness as a design element and means of differentiating between otherwise potentially similar-looking characters. In Levi's words,

"As might be expected in a country where most of the population has black hair, that color has positive connotations. Other shades are suspect until proven otherwise. Not all black-haired characters are perfect, but they are apt to be more sympathetic and more traditionally Japanese than those featuring other shades. In Ranma 1/2, a comedy series with a sex-changing hero, hair color is very important. As a boy, Ranma has thick black hair. When he changes into a girl [as a result of a curse which causes him to magically transform whenever he is splashed with cold water], he becomes smaller [and] curvier ... He also becomes a redhead. That change in hair color not only helps differentiate the two personas, it is also a tip-off as to which is the real, the proper Ranma. Akane (Ranma's own true love although neither of them ever admit it) also has thick, black hair, indicating that despite her tomboyish, kung fu-fighting approach to love, she is fundamentally sound and sincere."

The above examples appear to prove Levi's theory quite effectively, provided you use a rather flexible definition of the term "black". In fact, a closer examination of many of the stills from the anime reproduced on Ranma-related sites such as www.akanetendo.com, which describes itself as "the source of Akane Tendo pics", reveals that in many scenes Akane's hair is in fact depicted in varying shades of dark blue, even when the male version of Ranma appears in the same frame with his hair colored a more unambiguous plain black. This somewhat complicates, but does not necessarily invalidate, Levi's point about (boy) Ranma's and Akane's black hair. Even in American comics, Superman's hair, although officially black, was notoriously colored dark blue in most comic books well into the 1960's, at least. In Superman's case the character's so-called "blue-black" hair, which was actually more blue than black, is usually assumed to have been a byproduct of the limitations of the relatively primitive color printing processes available to comics companies in the days when all American comic books were printed on low-quality newsprint. In Akane's case, Rebecca McGregor suggests, the frequent blueness of her hair in the anime may be attributable to the fact that "the Japanese believe that black hair reflects light to look blue ... Akane's blue hair is [probably] meant to represent glossy black hair, and the bluish tinge may also be meant to exude femininity in contrast to Ranma's more solid black."

However, even assuming that to Japanese viewers hair which is colored blue or blue-black in fact counts as genuinely black, Levi's theory about the positive and "truly Japanese" connotations of black hair runs into trouble when she attempts to explain away the fact that, as in Ranma 1/2 creator Rumiko Takahashi's other popular series, Urusei Yatsura and Inuyasha, most of the other characters in the series also have black hair, regardless of their personality traits or deep-down soundness and sincerity. Levi goes on,

"Kodachi Kuno, the self-styled 'Black Rose' [a ruthless high school villainess with a maniacally evil laugh], also features long black hair, but hers is a bit too insistently black. In fact, her whole persona is a bit too insistently that of a very proper, traditional Japanese miss. She is a walking satire. It's harder to explain why Ryoga, the eternally befuddled young man who turns into a piglet [as a result of a variant of the same curse placed on Ranma], and Mousse, the Chinese martial artist who turns into a duck [also because of the curse], also have black hair. Both characters are undeniably strange and Mousse isn't even Japanese. The rules are not absolute, even in the work of a single artist."

Plausible as Levi's theory about the positive connotations of black hair sounds, in the case of the works of Rumiko Takahashi, at least, it seems to me more likely that Takahashi is simply one of the relatively few manga-ka (at least among those whose works have been published in the English-language market) for whom fully inked-in hair is the character-design norm. Possibly this has something to do with the fact that, although Takahashi herself is female, most or all of her work originally appeared in comics anthologies whose target audience was boys and young men — i.e., shonen, or boys', manga. Traditionally, characters with fully inked-in dark hair seem to have been much more standard in shonen manga than they are in their shoujo (girls') counterparts, at least up until recently. There may also be some significance to the fact that Takahashi began her career as a professional manga-ka in the late 1970's. This was well before the more recent trend in the manga and anime industry of blending stylistic elements from the shonen and shoujo genres together in the hope of attracting fans of both sexes. This trend seems to have more or less coincided with the popularity of a number of shonen boy protagonists who do not have fully inked-in dark hair, such as the title characters of Yu-Gi-Oh! (yellow and purple or scarlet hair), Naruto (blond hair), and Hikaru No Go (hair that's dark at the back but blond or orange at the front, in a contrasting pattern similar to that of the pink-banged, but otherwise dark-haired, Freefall of the original version of Image's Gen 13).

The fully inked-in hair so often seen in Takahashi's characters frequently does translate into black when her various manga series are turned into anime. However, in addition to Akane's more superficial alternation between literally black and "blue-black" hair, there are also occasional more consistent exceptions to this "black hair as default setting" rule in Takahashi's manga and anime. These include the (usually) green-haired alien princess Lum in Urusei Yatsura, Ranma's redheaded female persona in Ranma 1/2 (whose atypical fiery hair is probably, as Levi suggests, intended as an indicator that this is not Ranma's true self), and the white-haired half-human, half-dog demon Inuyasha in Inuyasha — not to mention Inuyasha's equally white-maned fully-demon evil half-brother Sesshomaru and his redhaired (and fox-tailed) kitsune (fox spirit) sidekick, Shippo. However, as the foregoing catalogue of exceptions demonstrates, all of these definitely non-black-haired characters are either aliens, (part) demons, or artificial personas created by the influence of a magical spell. As a result, it appears that, at least where Takahashi's work is concerned, Levi's assertion that hair of shades other than black is considered suspect (or at least in some way noticeably unusual or non-standard) until proven otherwise has more validity than her claim that black hair is itself symbolic of some kind of fundamental rightness or true Japaneseness about the characters who possess it.

Ironically, there is one series in which the full-color treatment of a particular character appears to demonstrate in the negative Levi's contention that black hair is symbolic of "soundness" and association with traditional Japanese values. This is Miho Obana's Kodomo no Omacha/Kodocha: Sana's Stage, in which eleven-year-old heroine Sana's mother, eccentric novelist Mariko Kurata, always dresses in traditional Japanese kimono and wears her dark hair piled on top of her head. However, since the determinedly wacky Ms. Kurata also wears a chipmunk (complete with miniature chipmunk "doghouse") in her hair and likes to drive around the house in an oversized toy car, it should come as no surprise when she reveals in volume three of the series that she took up her superficially traditional style of dress for decidedly unconventional reasons. In an excerpt from her latest best-selling novel/memoir, Mariko recalls:

"When I was 20 years old, I found out I might never be able to have a baby ... The doctors told me I had only a five percent chance of getting pregnant ... and I lost heart. Today, I'd be more positive and think a five percent chance is still hopeful, but I was very young ... At first, I felt like my life as a normal woman was over, and I became very depressed. But after some time, I decided that if I couldn't be normal, then I would just be weird! (I've always had the gift of being able to switch my point of view.) ... I started wearing my hair in bizarre styles and always wearing kimonos instead of modern clothes. I enjoyed people's stares and felt better."

In the light of these revelations, in addition to Mariko's established cheerfully programmatic nonconformity, it makes perfect sense that, despite the fact that her hair is always fully inked-in in the manga, when it comes to full-color portrayals, the more statistically probable and historically "normal" default setting of black hair is not for her. Because she deliberately wears traditional Japanese dress for the subversive motive of getting attention and making people stare, rather than because she's genuinely traditional herself, or even particularly fond of such "old-fashioned" styles, in the anime Ms. Kurata's hair is colored dark brown rather than black, and in the little head shot of her on the back cover of volume three of the manga, her chipmunk-adorned tresses are portrayed as dark red.

Other cases of characters whose fully inked-in hair more often than not translates into some shade other than black when they are shown in color include Miki, the heroine of the stepbrother-stepsister romantic comedy Marmalade Boy (whose hair is black on the covers of volumes one and two of the manga, but dark brown on the covers of volumes three through eight and reddish in the anime version) and Kurama, the rehabilitated fox demon in human form featured in Yu Yu Hakusho, whose hair is red in the anime and other full-color portrayals, but, like the girl Ranma's, appears black in the interior pages of the manga. A similar instance of pen-and-ink/technicolor divergence involves Kentaro, the wackier, Godzilla-obsessed half of the titular team of officially-designated high school superheroes in CLAMP's Clamp School Defenders Duklyon. Although within the black and white interior pages of the manga Kentaro's hair is inked in identically to that of his more conventional partner Takeshi (from whom he is visually distinguishable chiefly by virtue of Takeshi's longer, wavier bangs), his hair is dark brown on the covers, while Takeshi's is black with blue highlights or blue-black (on the covers of volumes one and two respectively). Another character whose usually fully inked-in hair does not translate into the expected black is Alice in Saki Hiwatari's Please Save My Earth, a shy girl who telepathically talks to plants and eventually discovers that she is one of a group of moon-dwelling alien scientists reincarnated as Japanese teenagers. In the anime Alice's hair is dark brown or brownish-black, while on the front cover of volume one of the manga, which pictures her kneeling in space, with her body symbolically cradling the Earth, her hair is colored a sort of rose-pink.

As the preceding capsule descriptions of these characters indicate, there is something at least a little bit unusual, if not downright alien or supernatural, about all of them. Even Miki from Marmalade Boy, who herself has a rather conventional personality and attitudes (at one point even reacting to the problems of a musical-prodigy friend with the thought balloon "I'm so happy I'm average!"), involuntarily departs from the expected social standard when her parents return from vacation and airily announce that they plan to get a divorce and switch partners with another couple they met on their trip. A further complication arises when both families move in together until the end of the waiting period required before the newly mixed-and-matched parents can marry their chosen spouses and Miki and her new stepbrother Yuu wind up falling in love.

The above sample crossection of characters probably provides insufficient data from which to draw any firm conclusions. However, it does seem to once again suggest that there is a certain validity to Levi's theory that there is some correlation between hair of shades other than black and characters who in one way or another do not conform to the conventional Japanese norm. Or at least that such characters, even when they start out with fully inked-in hair in the manga, tend to be assigned hair colors other than the more standard or "truly Japanese" black when they make the transition from pen and ink to color covers or anime. (Of course, in many of the more screwball comedy or fantastical-premised anime and manga, it's difficult to find any major characters, no matter what their hair color, who would qualify as "normal" by either Japanese or American standards.)

Next month: Otherworldly hair colors and other unusual shades.