The world of anime topics vastly cover everything from a marching band in high school to a group of pirates sailing all over the world. This brings me to one of my favorite topics, which are animes and manga that involve bureaucracy. They are not the most action packed animes, but they make you think. Two works that have a strong focus on bureaucracy are the anime, Plastic Memories and the manga, Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit.
Ikigami’s story focuses on a bureaucratic worker named Kengo Fujimoto. Kengo works as a messenger delivering Ikigami messages to people. These messages tell certain people they have 24 hours to live. When these people were in first grade, they were injected with a Nano capsule that will cause them to die between the ages of 18 to 24. This was done to ensure that life was precious for people in Japan and that people did not take their lives for granted. Every few manga chapters focus on a different story when Fujimoto delivers the Ikigami message and how people react to them.
The anime Plastic Memories’ story is of the main character, Tsukasa Mizugaki. Tsukasa has gotten a job with a company known as SIA Corp. SIA Corp specializes in dealing with androids that are at the end of their nine-year life span. Tsukasa is assigned one of these androids and he, along with his android, must convince other people to return their androids as they well malfunction if kept longer. Each case is different and features different characters, but has the same character of Tsukasa throughout the entire season.
Both the animation of Plastic Memories and the manga Ikigami, the Ultimate Limit, share many similar themes. One of these themes is bureaucracy. Both stories have main characters that are performing crucial jobs for the Japanese government. In Ikigami, Kengo is delivering messages to people letting them know that they are going to die as per a government regulation. Plastic Memories is very similar, as Tsukasa is also performing a job for the government as he is recalling androids at the end of their life span. Both of their jobs are unpleasant as they are dealing with a form of death. In Kengo’s case a “real person” is dying as they only have 24 hours left to live. Conversely, in Tsukasa’s situation an android that has been part of people’s lives which has developed memories is dying. Both men have to do their jobs and sacrifice their emotional well being to deal with death of both people and ideas.
Since both works share a form of death, one dealing with people dying and the other with androids dying, they are both thought provoking in a similar fashion. One of the many thoughts that these works stimulate is living life to the fullest. Ikigami captures this idea of living life to the fullest with each story arc as the character has 24 hours to live and is trying to make the most out of the last hours. Conversely, in Plastic Memories, Tsukasa’s job is to convince people to part ways with the android they have loved for 9 years and 4 months as their operating system will soon fail. In this case Tsukasa tries to establish and preach to these people good memories and how they have lived a full life. Both Kengo and Tsukasa, throughout the process of their jobs, question if what they are doing is right and if there is another way for people and androids to fulfill their maximum potential. When watching and reading the manga of both works, these questions are passed onto the viewer and reader. The internal debate begins and questions are formed as to what is the full potential of life and how do we determine what life is. Both works only begin to formulate and explore these questions and are only a starting point to determining an answer. Both of the anime and manga works should be explored as they are thought provoking and make one think about their life and life in general.
