One’s true character, ideas, and values are revealed through not only their actions and words, but also by what they choose to condone and where they choose to remain silent and inactive – especially when they have the option and power to speak and act. The party scene in “White Sketch” is especially revealing here. It is during this party that Misa first meets Riber, as a matter of fact. While playing tag with other children, she bumps into Riber, causing him to spill his drink on his shirt. She’s immediately scolded by her father for her carelessness, but Riber then receives a barrage of abuse from his own father, Herbert (von) Fruhling, an old friend of Takashi Hayase’s. Herbert’s behavior and Takashi’s handling of it reveal a fair bit about their characters, despite Ōnogi’s best efforts to reframe their actions and words into something more benign.

Herbert starts by berating his son for this mishap, unfairly placing the blame on him. Then, he proceeds to publicly humiliate him by calling him “unworthy of the family name” and striking him with a shoulder-slap strong enough to make him lose his footing. Interestingly, Ōnogi chooses to euphemistically describe it as a “pat”. Since the party is described as “small”, it’s unlikely others don’t witness this abusive conduct. Yet, nobody pushes back – not even the host, Commodore Takashi Hayase.

When Takashi introduces Herbert to Misa with his full name, including the “von” title, Herbert responds that he can dispense with the title, because “[o]ur Brave New World has thrown out all those titles of the aristocracy.” It’s plausible for the reader to interpret these words as a snarky comment about a more egalitarian world, where there’s little room or deference for the inherited privilege of the nobility. Although the novel gives little for the reader to work with, I wouldn’t be surprised if Herbert resented a sociopolitical landscape where the Austrian and German aristocracies had become irrelevant, and the “unworthy of the family name” quip does point to such a stance.

Additionally, Herbert is described as “bluff and hearty.” In reality, he’s more like the kind of proper manly man aptly parodied by the English punk rap duo Bob Vylan; besides his eagerness to resort to emotional and physical abuse, he displays the PG-13 component of the toxic masculinity Roy Focker exhibits in the in-universe propaganda film DYRL? and the Distantly Fading Memories audio drama – with none of Focker’s nurturing, guiding, and caring moments in SDFM. Even worse, as Riber informs Misa in a conversation they have later, he enrolled his son in military academy against his will.

The way Takashi handles these events is worth noting. He doesn’t verbally object to Herbert’s treatment of Riber. Even afterwards, in private with his wife, the novel doesn’t show him discussing the incident. However, he treats Riber in a markedly different manner during the party. For starters, when he sees Riber’s embarrassment at the way his father introduced him, he tries to make him feel at ease, telling him there’s no need to “get formal.” He subsequently proceeds to offer him champagne, overriding Herbert and having Riber, whom he declares, at seventeen, to be a “strapping adult,” speak directly to him and, after toasting, join their conversation as an equal participant.

Takashi’s offer of champagne to Riber can rightly be construed as an adult abusing his higher military rank and his status as host to extract consent to alcohol consumption from a minor, overriding the latter’s overbearing and abusive father. However, we’re talking about a 1980s novel that sets these events in 2002 and normalizes Herbert’s and Takashi’s behavior with no authorial objection – instead, Ōnogi’s writing almost romanticizes this conduct. In fairness to Takashi, his treatment of Riber is also legible as an old-fashioned man’s way of defusing a tense situation and being cordial to a mistreated boy. Still, offering alcohol to Riber would be illegal under Japanese law, regardless of period – 1984 or 2002: the 1922 Act on Prohibition of Drinking by Minors (未成年者飲酒禁止法) sets the minimum drinking age at twenty and makes no exemption for parental assent or private settings.

What’s worse, it seems that this is not the only time Takashi facilitates underage drinking. In the “Prologue”, which describes a dinner he offers Misa in his Alaska Base quarters for her twentieth birthday (curiously, this dinner is held in February, though Misa’s birthday is March 3 – one of the chronological oddities in this part of the novel), he and Misa are both shown drinking their wine in a single gulp. Additionally, in the post-Unification Wars scenes, Misa – near her seventeenth birthday and, thus, still well below the minimum legal drinking age – is shown as being perfectly accustomed to alcohol consumption, as she and her comrades “showered each other with wine” and, post-demobilization, she’s shown perusing the Hayase residence’s well-stocked wine cellar.

Getting back to Takashi’s treatment of Riber, the novel shows him behaving in a manner that doesn’t align with his cordiality at the party. When Riber dies in September 2005, Takashi’s failure to make even the smallest amount of time to comfort Misa makes it easy for the reader to question how much he truly valued him as a “splendid military man” and respected what he meant to Misa.

Bibliography

1. 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.)
2. Tomita, S. (prose) and Akane, A. (lyrics) (1983). Chōjikū Yōsai Makurosu Vol. IV: Harukanaru Omoi [超時空要塞マクロス Vol. IV 遥かなる想い; The Super Dimension Fortress Macross Vol. IV: Distantly Fading Memories] (audio drama). Tokyo: Victor Musical Industries. (In Japanese.)