By Jeanne Johnson
So let's talk about angels. Angels are getting popular lately inboth east and west. My first reaction to the wave of angel books both Englishand Japanese was to wonder why it wasn't the saints who'd won the popularitysweepstakes. After all, there are a lot more individual saints than individualangels, and their stories are a lot more interesting, and most of themhave been translated into English if they started out in another language,like Latin. Angels otoh are obscure.
One or two show up in the bible and a handful- Gabriel, Michael,Raphael- are respectable saints of the Catholic Church in their own right.But in general angels are a product of arcane rabbinical and mystic traditionsin Judaism and Islam, and to read about them requires a familiarity withmedieval Hebrew and Arabic just for a start.
But maybe because they're mystical and obscure- and more importantly,not human- angels seem possibly more powerful and interesting than anyold dead holy man or woman. Here in the west we're losing our confidencein human ascendency. Saints are just human beings, after all- and generallynot very nice human beings at that- and I think that in a pinch we'd ratherrely on a superhuman power to help us out in these millennial latter days.Thus the spate of 'Your Personal Angel' books, and 'Angels for All Occasions','Guardian Angels and Others' etc etc. The popularity of angels in Japan,though, looks to me like a purely aesthetic thing: angels in Catholic traditionare good looking young men with wings. You see what that means to a Japanese?Winged bishounen! What mangaka (or djka, for that matter) could
resist?
I don't know what, if anything, the Protestant sects make of angels.They always seemed, like saints, a very Catholic institution to me. Assuch, their story and character is pretty clear. Angels are the servantsof God, pure spirits without a body except when it's necessary to talkto mortals like Tobias and the Virgin Mary. Long long ago, for reasonswe don't know, a band of angels rebelled against God and refused to servehim any more. (One tradition, flattering to us, is that God proposed to
make the angels servants of the human race and Lucifer thought itbeneath him to be subserviant to a mortal worm.) Lucifer led a rebellionagainst God and was defeated by the heavenly host led by the archangelMichael. He was cast down into Hell and became Satan, the Evil One, theembodiment of all wickedness. (None of this story, btw, is found in theBible. 'Later traditions', the books all say: meaning Jewish traditionsfinding their way into Catholic orthodoxy.) 
But Christianity is quite clear on this point: God and his angelsare good personified. Satan and his demons are evil personified. Blackand white and no fooling around, which is how westerners in general likethings.
Angels get to Japan and weird things happen to them. They turn intohuman beings. Human beings with supernatural powers, but with bodies- whichangels just don't have, sorry- and the whole range of human emotions- love,anger, sorrow, envy, lust, melancholy, ambition... Yuki Kaori's angelsin Angel Sanctuary are more reminiscent of Colonels and grunts in the USArmy than of any heavenly host- Pentagon plots and My Lai massacres areordinary stuff to them. It's the demons who are the sympathetic guys- loyal,brave, honest, clean in thought word and deed- kind of like Boy Scouts.Or take Higuri Yuu's demons in Lost Angel. They're evil, yes- until they'rereleased from their self-created hells and purified by 'The Sword of God'which sends their souls back to heaven even as it destroys their bodies.You can't do that in 
Christianity. Damnation is fforever. Once in Hell you sta there,whether you're a fallen angel or a sinful human. But in Japan, salvationis evidently an option even for demons. How come?
OK. Sweeping cultural generalization alert. Japanese cultureis based on a very physical here-and-now approach. It doesn't much likeabstract notions. No Japanese would argue, as Plato did, that the 'idea'of an object is more real than the physical
object itself. The Japanese keep coming back to pragmatism- how doesthis affect what is. One of the consequences of this reality-basedapproach is the famous situational ethics of the Japanese. Things are notnecessarily right and wrong or good or bad. It all depends. What's goodtoday may be bad tomorrow. What's wrong in this context is just fine inthat. This flexible approach is the opposite of western religious absolutes.God and Satan; heaven and hell; right and wrong; black and white; us andthem. 'Those who are not with me are against me.' True, the Japanese canbe absolutist just as we can be situational. (Ask anyone who knows aboutNichiren Buddhism. Nichiren's attitude was as 'Those who are not with meare against me' as Christ's.) But it's not the basic tendency of our cultures.We keep coming back to absolute principles in our thinking- 
'People should do this' or 'That is wrong.' The Japanese keep comingback to 'case by case.'
So it would be natural for a Japanese writer to think that demonsmight very well be good people on occasion, just as angels might well havetheir failings. 'All power tends to corrupt. Absolute power tend to corruptabsolutely.' Who has absolute power? God. Well then, surely God and hisminions have a tendency to be corrupted absolutely- don't they?
Well no- not by the Christian definition of godhood, which includes'unchanging', but very possibly by the definitions of Shinto. Shinto doesn'thave *a* god, it has a huge number. These numerous divinities are calledkami. Kami are everywhere. Kami reside in trees and rocks and places andpeople. Kami are a lot like angels in their way- they're all over the placeand they have power and they're not human. And in the oldest texts thattell the stories of the great kami, the kami behave exactly like people-angry and stupidly destructive and given to sulks
and vanity and dirty stories. (OK- it was a dirty dance. Same difference.It made the 
kami laugh.) What's the use of a divinity that doesn't act like you?Even Christians insist that their all- good all-powerful unchanging godat one point became a complete human being.
So for any number of reasons it's not surprising that the Japanesemangaka would ignore the hard-and-fast givens of Christianity and givetheir angels and demons emotions and bodies and options for change. AndI still think artistry plays a part. Absolute good and absolute evil makefor boring characters and boring stories.
Nothing happens. Nothing can happen. But give that beautiful bishounenwith the wings an unrequited love for some other bishounen with wings andhey presto- instant plot. Which is what manga is about, after all.
(The cuts were taken from Angel Santuary; AngelWars; Earthian)