Da Terra Vermelha vêm os humanos: comunicação inter-religiosa na semiosfera xinto-budista-cristã de Neon Genesis Evangelion

Abstract

In common sense, anime, a term that refers to manga-style animation works produced in Japan, is generally attributed to children, given the amount of characters in their storylines designed to represent the age group of this audience. Several examples of this cultural industry, however, go beyond this notion and highlight complex content relations, with presentation of denser themes, such as the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion ( 新世紀エヴァ ンゲリオン, Shin Seiki Evangerion , Hideaki Anno, 1995). Its plot shows an interweaving of themes little discussed in the anime industry, such as the insertion of nihilism, existentialism and the agglutination of religious beliefs, especially the manifestation of Christianity linked to the narratives and practices of Shinto and Buddhism, religions that are basic to the Japanese society. Even though Christianity does not play a prominent role in the history of Japan such as Shinto and Buddhism (Hori, 1981), this religion establishes itself in the images of Neon Genesis Evangelion in order to communicate interreligiously, fostering new religious behavior. This research focuses on this communication from the space that Christianity occupies in the border areas of a semiosphere in which Shinto and Buddhism transit together and interculturally. Such dialogical relations allow us to suppose the creation of a new systemic structure shaped by exchanges of religious signs in constant movement from one border to another, enabling the maintenance of a new semiosphere whose central cultural text this research managed to embrace by the adoption of the term Shinto-Buddhism-Christian. This work studies the notions of semiotic border, semiosphere, cultural text, symbol, among others, under the framework of the Semiotics of Culture, whose main representative is the Russian researcher Iuri Lotman (1990, 2000). Throughout the text, some of the main points of the 26 episodes of the studied animation were analyzed in the light of discussions about religious configurations also based on authors such as Sasaki (2011), Kaneoya (2012), Usarski (2009) and Shoji (2017).