The creative team has gone to considerable lengths to portray Takashi Hayase in as sympathetic a manner as possible; Chronicle attempts to retcon him as a single widower parent who raised Misa all alone after her mother’s death (DeAgostini Japan 2013), even though White Reminiscences contradicts this. Incidentally, Macross Perfect Memory’s write-up on Misa says her parents had divorced and that she was subsequently raised by her father (Minori Shobo 1983), but this would’ve been an unusual outcome in Japan, as it would most likely require her mother to agree to cede custody.

The divorce narrative is contradicted by White Reminiscences, which explicitly shows Misa’s parents staying married until December 2005, when Sakiko, her mother, dies. Misa herself is four months away from her sixteenth birthday at the time, and she’s in the Far East Officers’ Academy, while her father is away due to his military duty. Unless White Reminiscences, whose narration on the time and circumstances of Sakiko’s death is quite thorough, is deemed to be no longer canon, there’s no reason to adopt either Chronicle’s retcon or Perfect Memory’s unsupported narrative.

Beyond that, Takashi’s public persona is carefully cultivated and curated: it’s that of a “modern” career officer with an egalitarian demeanor, straddling the line between a “warm old school senior” and a “modern professional”. He displays this attitude in his party, where he welcomes young Riber Fruhling as an equal interlocutor in a discussion of complex matters pertaining to pursuing diplomacy with extraterrestrials. Afterwards, Riber, exhibiting a mindset at least partly informed by gendered stereotypes, tells Misa that the military uniform isn’t suitable for girls, but he immediately backpedals: jokingly, he says that he shouldn’t be saying things like this in the presence of an “equal-rights advocate” like him, causing all present – Takashi, Riber, Sakiko, and Misa – to laugh at this family in-joke. But is Takashi’s self-image a true reflection of his personality or is it a mere façade?

As I explained earlier, Takashi’s entire conversation universe, if not his universe outright, is the military, and he’s the only adult professional model Misa sees every day. Worse still, the only future he expresses in White Reminiscences for his daughter is marriage. Not university studies. Not a career in any field, from waitress to singer, from painter to banker. Just marriage. To a man like him. When she tells her parents that she wishes to join the military, their reactions reveal a lot about the dynamics inside the Hayase family: her mother, married to a high-ranking career officer who goes to war, weeps. Takashi says nothing. Only later does he return to the subject, telling her that he doesn’t think she should become a soldier and that her future husband – who, based on previous parts of the novel, he likely assumes will be Riber – will be “a splendid military man.” Most tellingly, he adds that she “should be content with that.” Thus, his stated position on his daughter’s wish to enlist is that she should marry into the military, not enter it. This is very difficult to reconcile with his “equal-rights advocate” public self.

Second, even after he concedes to Misa’s wish to enter military service, he doesn’t read it as the romantic teenage dream it is. In the extensive Misa-Riber correspondence Ōnogi provides, we see no mention of him – or her mother – attempting to understand this wish, navigate, and manage it. Misa doesn’t tell Riber, to whom she says just about everything, that her parents insist she at least finish her secondary education before pursuing this career, because no such discussion occurs. On the contrary, what Takashi does is fast-track her enlistment through “extraordinary” (i.e. illegal and, normally, career-ending) means, through abuse of his status and influence, at the age of – as inferred from the text – fourteen, before she even finishes junior high school. The reason is that it pleases him “enormously to think that [his] only child’s desire [is] to carry on the family legacy.”

So, Takashi doesn’t guide Misa to leverage the civilian education system in order to acquire the academic toolkit she’ll need as a future officer; he doesn’t mentor her to prepare for a career as an officer – Misa herself tells Riber he still treats her as a child and not as an adolescent on her path to adulthood. Even the military role he envisions for Misa isn’t that of an active soldier, but – I’ll have to be blunt here – that of a rear echelon paper-pusher, à la Captain Kevin Darling from Blackadder Goes Forth. As he writes to Riber, she “will be an officer, and will not be participating in any battles on the ground.”

In a nutshell, the only “possible selves” he can think of for Misa are (a) a wife, (b) a soldier’s wife, and (c) a soldier’s wife who is also nominally a soldier, but has no active combat role and, instead, only serves as an extension of a patrilinear military legacy that goes back at least one hundred years (as Misa explains to Hikaru Ichijyo in SDFM episode 12). Even worse, through his machinations to have her illegally (there’s no way this can be overstated) enrolled into the Far East Officers’ Academy, he denies his daughter her agency and sense of achievement and accomplishment, and the novel’s framing of this as a “gift” to her is especially troubling.

This pattern has been well documented in the literature on parental gender-role socialization: fathers, particularly in traditional households, tend to express gender expectations more rigidly than mothers. They often do this through the activities they reward, the futures they encourage, and the assumptions they leave undisturbed (Kimmel 2000; Lytton & Romney 1991). It’s also well attested that parents may simultaneously endorse egalitarian principles in the abstract and, at the same time, remain traditional in specific domains, especially w.r.t. family roles (Halpern & Perry-Jenkins 2016). Misa’s father emerges as a textbook case of this: he’s nominally egalitarian in the abstract (Riber’s “equal-rights advocate” remark) and in public, but he’s traditional in the specific case of his own daughter, who should be “content” with being the wife of a “splendid military man.”

There are further elements that I find particularly jarring about Takashi’s true stance on gender roles. I’ll start by saying I’m not entirely sure the lipstick birthday gift in White Reminiscences’ “Prologue” is appropriate for a father to give to his daughter. In my opinion, which could well be wrong, the only appropriate givers for something like this are a close friend with whom she goes shopping for cosmetics, a mother, or a lover. Still, in its own uncomfortable way, it serves a symbolic summary and reminder – or, since it’s given at the novel’s very beginning – of the entire pattern: first of all, he tries to make the daughter he has look more like the daughter he wishes he had. Second, we see his marriage-related gender-based expectation of Misa both in White Reminiscences’ “Prologue” (“[t]he sooner you find someone, the sooner I can rest easy”) and in SDFM episode 24, where he asks her if there’s someone in her life. Her negative, non-verbal, response disappoints him. Third, neither in the “Prologue” nor in his limited presence in SDFM is Takashi seen asking her about her experiences, the hardships she’s endured, or anything pertaining to her career or her well-being.

Therefore, Takashi’s conduct, both in White Reminiscences and in SDFM runs contrary to the author’s framing and doesn’t allow me to view him as a man of consistently egalitarian views. On the contrary, it appears that egalitarian positions Riber may have in mind run contrary to the views he expresses within the context of his family and to his own actions w.r.t. his daughter’s identity, education, and career. His conduct actually – and despite Ōnogi’s coercive writing – indicates a desire to make his daughter fit a certain set of gender-based expectations.

Bibliography

1. DeAgostini Japan (2013). ‘Hayase Takashi’ [早瀬隆司], in Weekly Macross Chronicle [週刊マクロス・クロニクル] / New Edition, Character Sheet M-Sheet 09A: ‘People of the United Nations Military’ [地球統合軍の人々]. Tokyo: DeAgostini Japan (In Japanese.)
2. Halpern, H.P. and Perry-Jenkins, M. (2016). Parents’ gender ideology and gendered behavior as predictors of children’s gender-role attitudes: a longitudinal exploration. Sex Roles, 74(11–12), pp. 527–542.
3. Kimmel, M. (2000). The Gendered Society. New York: Oxford University Press.
4. Lytton, H. and Romney, D.M. (1991). Parents’ differential socialization of boys and girls: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 109(2), pp. 267–296.
5. Minori Shobo (1984). Macross Perfect Memory. Tokyo: Minori Shobo, pp. 109. (In Japanese.)
6. Ōnogi, H. (1984). Hayase Misa: Shiroi Tsuioku [早瀬未沙 白い追憶; Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences]. Animage Bunko. Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten. (In Japanese.)