Black silhouettes of leafy branches seen from below, with a small spiral of leaves at the center against a white sky.
Illustration by Otaku Ren

Guide

Ajin Is a Time Capsule of 2010s Japan

By Otaku Ren

Spoiler note: no ending spoilers. I mention a few scenes from Volumes 3 to 6, but only to point at what is on the screens and tables.

The 2010s already feel like a long time ago.

I’m in my thirties, so 2010 still feels recent to me. But it was more than sixteen years ago, and I half refuse to believe it.

So what was Japan like back then? YouTube was already there. Smartphones were gradually taking over from flip phones. TV was still on in the living room, the way it had always been.

There is a manga that lets me feel that time directly: Ajin (known in English as Ajin: Demi-Human). It is a very good action story. It also ran for about nine years, so the phones and screens in it change as Japan’s did. That makes it a kind of time capsule.

What is Ajin?

Ajin is about people who cannot die. When an Ajin dies, the body comes back to life, and nobody knows they are one until it happens for the first time. The state hunts them and studies them.

Kei Nagai is a student who wants to be a doctor. Then he finds out he is an Ajin, and his life turns into a chase. Sato is an Ajin too, and he decides to fight the country itself.

Neither of them is alone. Here are some of the others you meet:

  • Kaito is Kei’s close friend, and he helps Kei when Kei is on the run.
  • Eriko is Kei’s younger sister, who is in poor health.
  • Kou Nakano is an Ajin who ends up as Kei’s partner.
  • Yu Tosaki is an official who heads Ajin research at the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. He is human.
  • Izumi Shimomura is an Ajin who works for the government and acts as Tosaki’s bodyguard.
  • Koji Tanaka is an Ajin who joins Sato.
  • Takahashi is another Ajin on Sato’s side.

Of all of them, two kept me reading, then and now.

Kei Nagai is the hero, but to me he reads as almost a psychopath: cold and calculating. A hero like that was what I found cool at the time.

Sato is the other character who hooked me. I loved the way he fights: he dies and keeps going. He is also a terrorist, and the story never lets you forget it.

The 2010s you can see in Ajin

The Japanese Volume 3 is dated November 2013, Volume 5 is dated November 2014, and Volume 6 is dated June 2015. The last one, Volume 17, is dated May 2021. Here is what I noticed in the props.

Feature phones and early smartphones. In Volume 1, a character flips open a phone to ask a friend for help. In Volume 5, I noticed a feature phone again, next to a smartphone I recognized as a DIGNO, a model line from Kyocera. In Japan, feature phones are nicknamed garakē, short for “Galápagos phones,” because they evolved in their own way, apart from the rest of the world.

The numbers match. At the end of March 2014, smartphones were still only 47.0% of mobile subscriptions in Japan. More than half were other kinds of phones.

I remember owning a Regza Phone, a Toshiba smartphone line. One of its models, the T-01C, went on sale at docomo in December 2010. Smartphones were still new enough that I remember them as a gadget.

Video on a phone. YouTube had been available in Japanese since June 2007. Still, watching video on a phone felt new to me. In Volume 3, a video plays on a feature phone. Later, the story shows a fight streamed online, with viewers’ comments below it. That feels very mid-2010s to me.

A handheld console. Sato plays a PlayStation Vita. Sony launched the Vita in Japan in December 2011, so it was a recent gadget in these volumes. It fits him: in at least one scene he compares his plan to a video game.

Paper. In Volume 6, the plan to ambush Sato comes with a floor plan covered in handwriting and papers handed around the room. Most of what I write these days never leaves a screen. Watching people plan an operation with a pen makes me want to pick one up.

TV, still everywhere. In Volume 5, wanted photos appear on the TV news and in magazine headlines. That matches the time. A government survey from late 2013 found that people in Japan watched about 168 minutes of live TV on a weekday and spent about 78 minutes online. Among people in their twenties, online time had already passed TV time. And on September 22, 2013, the finale of the drama Hanzawa Naoki averaged 42.2% in the Kanto region. (The survey covered 1,500 people aged 13 to 69, so treat it as a snapshot.)

What was exciting then, and still is

Sato’s way of fighting. He is brutal, and he is cool. Because he knows he will come back, he dies, revives and goes back into the fight, again and again. It is a ruthless way to fight, and I still think it is cool. It does not make him a good person.

The police. The police and the special units are written as professionals who really are trying to catch the Ajin. In Volume 5, the special assault team (SAT) mounts an operation with snipers, tranquilizer rounds and radio. You can feel an organization at work. I like that in action manga, and it still works for me.

What I envy about those days

To me, the world of Ajin feels like one where human ability was tested more, because technology had not advanced as far. People plan on paper, and the phone is one tool among others.

That may be partly nostalgia. But my phone eats too much of my time these days, and I often think about going back to lower-tech devices.

Should you read it?

If you want cool action and a look at Japan as it was in the 2010s, yes. Next time you open it, watch the phones.

This is the first post in a series about reading modern Japan through manga. From here on, I’ll keep looking at those times through manga.

Sources

Most of these are in Japanese.