Bella’s Bera-Bera
By: Isabella Tiberi
We’ve likely all seen pictures of Hugh Jackman sporting Wolverine’s signature sideburns and those dehydrated, unhealthy-yet-scrumptious abs from the first X-Men trilogy released in the 2000s. But I always manage to raise a few eyebrows when I tell people that Wolverine is fluent in Japanese and even has a wife and family in Japan. Since I’m currently reliving my childhood love of X-Men by watching X-Men ’97, replaying the Legends games, and reading through every comic in the series written by Chris Claremont, I thought it would be fun to talk about how Wolverine–and the series as a whole–has more ties to Japan than you may initially think. Let’s dive in, bub!
Wolverine first appeared in “The Incredible Hulk #180” all the way back in 1974, when the titular green giant was fighting a monster in the Canadian wilderness that Logan calls home. He only appeared as an X-Man in “Giant-Size X-Men #1” a year later as part of the next generation of mutant heroes: Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, Thunderbird, Banshee, and Wolverine himself.
One mutant who declines Xavier’s invitation to join the X-Men is Sunfire, also known as Shiro Yashida. He’s a mutant hero with the ability to generate superheated plasma, and unlike the other mutants, he decides not to join the X-Men and continue working for his homeland’s government. Sunfire was conceived by Marvel writer Roy Thomas, who explained in a 1996 interview that he “wanted to add a young Japanese or Japanese-American whose mother had been at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.” Thomas also wanted to include X-Men from various countries and ethnicities, expressing that “[he] thought the X-Men shouldn’t all be white Americans.” Considering how the entire new group of X-Men were heroes from around the world, Sunfire would have been a perfect addition to the team were it not for his loyalty to the Emperor–and his hotheaded, arrogant attitude.
Sunfire first appeared in the Marvel universe as an antagonist to the X-Men; his staunchly anti-American uncle Tomo convinces him to attack a United Nations ceremony being held in New York, and finding vengeance for his mother and the countless other civilians killed in the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After being confronted by his father Saburo, a Japanese ambassador in favor of peace, he decides to not go through with the attack. But–shock, gasp– Uncle Tomo winds up killing Shiro’s father in the ensuing argument. In a fit of rage and anguish, Shiro’s mutant powers go out of control, and he winds up killing his uncle. Marvel comics in this era were all about melodrama like this, so expect a lot more of it.
Sunfire’s design is pretty emblematic of comic artists in this era trying to portray different cultures from a very American lens. He’s a character with lots of fire imagery, his costume has the Imperial Rising Sun front and center, and artist Don Heck gave him a “kind of a weird dragony kind of mask” according to a recent interview in 2022. Whether this counts as Orientalism or racial caricature isn’t really for me to say, but I will acknowledge that this is just one of many aspects of Marvel comics that’s aged…interestingly.
Sunfire’s origins touch on an aspect of American superheroes that I’ve always found interesting when compared to Japanese heroes–namely, that so many Marvel characters get their powers from radiation. Sunfire’s mother died the night he was born after surviving the bombings, but he is far from the only Marvel character to gain powers from radiation exposure: Bruce Banner’s exposure to gamma rays turning him (and later his cousin Jennifer) into the Hulk, the Fantastic Four being exposed to cosmic radiation in space, the villain aptly named Radioactive Man, Abomination, The Absorbing Man, Rhino…It’s interesting that American writers were eager to take inspiration from the very American viewpoint of the Atomic Age and show radiation as something that could transform someone for better or worse, be used for good and evil. Conversely, Japanese fiction and perception of radiation has almost always been portrayed as evil and monstrous. The most famous example that comes to mind is Godzilla, a prehistoric monster awakened and empowered by radiation from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that goes on to wreak havoc and destruction. It’s understandable why Japan would be much less willing to portray radiation as something that can grant people special powers and improve their lives when the reality of their history is the exact opposite.
For now, we’ll let Sunfire fly home and get back to Wolverine. For many years in this new saga (often called “Second Genesis”), we learn bits and pieces about Wolverine’s history prior to stepping foot into the X-Mansion. The readers are just as surprised as the other X-Men to find out that Wolverine can understand Japanese while the group is on a mission in Tokyo. I prefer bracketed dialogue as a way to convey that a language other than English is being used, since your average Marvel writer isn’t going to know enough Japanese to write accurate dialogue. If you want to see panels of writers blatantly using Google Translate and other software to attempt to write a character who is supposed to speak fluent Japanese, don’t worry–lots of modern X-Men and Wolverine comics do this and it’s unintentionally hilarious.
This isn’t the only revelation that readers get about Wolverine’s character during this storyline. We also learn his real name after he reveals it to Mariko Yashida, Sunfire’s cousin who Logan immediately falls in love with.
This is one of the few times that readers were able to see a gentler side of Wolverine, and his romance with Mariko would continue in the comics for decades to come. As is typical of comic book romances, there are lots of twists, turns, arguments, heartbreak, and at one point Mariko even abandons poor Logan at the altar. In this continuity, their relationship sadly ends in tragedy; but remember, we’re talking about comic book continuity, so for every story where one of them dies or they break up, there are also ones where they end up having children together and have a happy ending!
The issue of Logan’s worthiness to marry Mariko is related to her family being related to a renowned yakuza clan, and Logan’s struggle to let Mariko handle things on her own. We can understand why Wolverine is so protective of his loved ones, but she wants him to understand that not everything has to end in violence. For a character like Wolverine whose origins and identity revolve around cracking skulls and slashing people with his claws, it’s a struggle for him to temper his anger and find another way to help support the people he loves. This internal struggle of his ties very well with how Logan is often portrayed studying and admiring the code that samurai followed (albeit a much more romanticized one from a Western writing team’s perspective). He’s a feral beast that has to temper his instincts and discipline himself, and his relationship with Mariko reads like a traditional Japanese tragedy between starcrossed lovers. It also helps that his character design works so well when he’s drawn in traditional Japanese clothing, which is something that plenty of Marvel artists and fans love to put him in. The man’s the best at what he does, and what he does is fight bad guys and look good doing it.
Good Morning Aomori 