Japan is a remarkable and peculiar place. Place here is meant to mean more than a country, a culture, or a people, I mean a place like the "Place in the heart" that is invoked to describe things that affect us in a deep and lasting way.
Anyone who has made an effort to understand, to conceptualise something that is particularly "Japanese" in character has found himself in the odd situation of somehow not being confronted with the task of investigating something foreign as much as investigating something foreign in himself. And this is because "Japan" as a holistic concept is something more than it's parts, something more than the product of the Japanese people. This is not to be taken as dismissive of the Japanese people. On the contrary, it is meant to suggest that the Japanese have a special gift for transcendental acts that cannot be explained as the result of temporal causality... the Japanese are prone to making leaps that land them in wonderland, and they are not afraid to dwell there once they land.
The Japanese animated series Tenchi Muyo is generally recognised for having a special relationship with it's characters, a sentimental humanity that is often strived for by, for example, Disney, but that is realised in Tenchi (and it's subsidiary developments, one of which we are gradually sneaking up on here) to such a degree of perfection that one comes away from Tenchi with a genuine love for each of it's characters, and with an uncanny sense that the characters have actually been released from somewhere inside the viewer. Character development is surprisingly subtle and effective, with all of the recurring characters showing regular growth and varying involvement with the episode plots.
The character Sasami Kawai (alternately Sasami Jurai Masaki) is subjected to a bewildering set of situational distortions in which she is variously presented as an innocent and very ordinary schoolgirl (age 10), as a princess from a magical kingdom (age 8 to ??), and as a character in wild transition between all three. Sasami is obligated to transform into "Mahou Shoujo Pretty Sammy" to protect herself and those around her from a series of wonderfully absurd catastrophes. Sasami is consistently cute, competent and optimistic in spite of being continually thrown into a series of mortal combats with the character Pixy Misa, who is created from Sasami's best friend, the introverted Misao Yamano, against her will and without her knowing it, by a hypnotic spell cast by Rumiya. Pixy Misa is genuinely evil, she becomes especially elated at the times that she most nearly causes Sammy's demise.
My first exposure to Sasami was in the Magical Project S Japanese dubbed TV series. In this incarnation Sasami is a "normal 10 year old girl" who wants to grow up, marry a nice man like her daddy, and be a housewife. When Princess Tsunami suddenly appears and insists that she become a "Mahou Shoujo", she demurs, pointing out that magical girls look weird and are different from other girls, and that she just wants to be an ordinary girl and to fit in (this in spite of the fact that her family milieu is anything but ordinary! More about this later). Princess Tsunami is not one to take "no" fo an answer, and she pretty much just smiles and dithers her way out of the interview with Sasami, leaving a creature name Ryo-ohki to keep Sasami on-track as she becomes a "Magical Girl" (Mahou Shoujo).
At the same time, Tsunami's rival, Ramia, is plotting to screw up Tsunami's plans, and decides to turn Sasami's best friend into an evil counterpart to Pretty Sammy, entirely against her will. Sasami's best friend Misao Amano (and I can't help but think that this is an oblique bow to Miyu Yamano, The Vampire Princess) is a rather depressed (and repressed) little girl whose father is a composer, and has been travelling on business for YEARS, and whose mother is a workaholic, and rarely ever is home while Misao is awake. Misao is entirely dependent on Sasami, and could probably not get along without her in the state she is in at the beginning of the story.
Under Rumiya's influence, she becomes the super-competent, super-confident, utterly over-the-top Evil Magical Girl Pixy Misa. Pixy Misa seems to be about 5 years older than Misao, I am not certain what significance there is to this, perhaps Misa is a projection into Misao's future, but it is difficult to reconcile her with Misao even with a generous amount of speculation.
Aficionados of the mahou shoujo genre will notice immediately that Pretty Sammy has a great deal in common with Sailor Moon. Among other things, Sammy's transformation is a hilarious sendup of the already pretty funny Sailor Moon transformation sequence... instead of the glamorous fashion show music that plays during a Sailor Moon tranformation, Sammy gets a bizarrely goofy Jay Ward sort of fanfare. Sasami has somewhat less in common with Serena. Their similarity ends at the roots of their hair. Sasami gets much better grades in school!
Also notable is the fact that, whereas Serena/Sailor Moon detests carrots, Sasami, and the entire Kawai family, have a downright unnatural and very apparent infatuation with carrots. The carrot seems to be the Kawai family crest!
All the members of the Kawai family wear these matching pajamas.
This is Sammy's most powerful incantation in the Pretty Sammy OVA's. It is a fluff of a well known character name in a kind of Japanese shaggy dog story:
Sasami Kawai can be (loosely) translated as Cute Beach Bunny!
Aren't you glad you asked?
![[Home]](/jpeg/slugwiki.jpg)