Shoji Kawamori

The Holy Hayase Family – Part 2: Daddy’s Little Girl

/ Konstantinos Tzoannopoulos / 9 Comments
Anime drawing of a girl with long, brown hair and green eyes, wearing a green, romantically-styled long-sleeved dress, waits behind a tree branch.
Misa Hayase in her early teens. Drawing by Haruhiko Mikimoto. © Studio Nue / Big West.

Among the many alarming scenes I spotted while reading White Reminiscences, I flagged one as particularly puzzling, as it’s completely at odds with the hyper-competent, determined, workaholic officer we see in the TV series; in a conversation she has with Riber, he asks her what she wants to be when she grows up – a rather simple question for most children, who generally respond readily and, in most cases, enthusiastically and proudly. Any child growing up in a normal household has some sort of dream for their future: some want to become doctors, others want to become pilots, teachers, nurses, and so on.

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The Holy Hayase Family – Part 1: Ten Red Flags

/ Konstantinos Tzoannopoulos / 2 Comments
Anime screen shot showing a brown-haired, middle-aged military officer looks to his right; he is wearing a white peaked cap; his uniform's jacket is black and has a high collar, while the shirt is white with a turtle neck and a zipper hidden under a teal accented stripe.
Admiral Takashi Hayase in Super Dimension Fortress Macross. © Studio Nue / Big West.

Takashi Hayase is Misa’s father. His wife and Misa’s mother is Sakiko Hayase. He’s a career officer of the United Nations Navy, who later becomes a member of the UN Forces’ High Command. In the TV series, he appears in five episodes (15 and 24–27). He also has an extensive presence in Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences and The Plundering Fleet. The only works in which he’s shown to interact with his daughter are the TV series and White Reminiscences. For decades, he’s been viewed by fandom as a very minor character, and this becomes apparent by the lack of discussions on what he does as an officer and a parent. This has led to his role in the formation of Misa’s personality being severely understated.

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The Holy Hayase Family – Introduction

/ Konstantinos Tzoannopoulos / 2 Comments
Manga drawing of a black-haired Japanese woman in a colorful kimono with a young, brown-haired girl sitting happily on her lap; on the right, the husband, a dark-haired man in anime-style naval uniform leans towards them, with his right hand on the woman's right shoulder.
The Hayase Family: Sakiko (the mother), Misa, and Takashi (the father). Drawing by Haruhiko Mikimoto. © Studio Nue / Big West.

Continuing from my review of the light novel Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences, I’m turning my attention to the Hayase family – Misa’s father, Takashi, and her mother, Sakiko. The starting point for this multi-part analysis is Matteo Watzky’s 2020 article “Gender roles in Gundam and Macross” (also archived here) on his blog Animétudes. In his article, Watzky argues that Macross tries to somehow “teach” its heroine, Misa Hayase, how to conform to a certain standard of femininity – soft, romantic, loving, mated to a man – in order to be validated as a person. My reading of Misa and her arc differs greatly from Watzky’s for a number of reasons, methodological and interpretive. The most important of these reasons is that no character, especially one as carefully constructed and as fundamental to the series as Misa, exists in a vacuum. Therefore, to understand her emotional restraint, her attachment issues, her adherence to her military duty, and her narrative arc, we must examine the family she grew up in.

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