REEM: 3-2-1. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to LOL Adulthood. And today we are talking about some fun stuff. To sum it up in two little words, it's going to be anime and Armageddon. And today I have with me a fabulous host.

ARI: Hi, I'm Ari, and I'm a weeb.

REEM: She's a weeb. She's going to go into all of this and explain what that is.

ARI: So anime, anime in English stands for Japanese animation. And really, it was first created. The first ever thing we got from anime or when I basically started was in 1917. And it started as just like this one little Japanese animation called Astro Boy. And that was one of the first things we got. And it was first introduced on the Western side of Japan.

REEM: Really?

ARI: Yeah.

REEM: Astro Boy was the first anime?

ARI: I think so. I know. 1917.

REEM: Wow. Right after the Titanic.

ARI: I think so.

REEM: Titanic was 1914. That is a great gift to give us after that tragedy.

ARI: Exactly. Yeah. It just started building. And you can see the difference in the styles from back then and now, because now it is a lot more realistic and back then it was a lot more cartoonish.

REEM: And that's true. Yeah. I loved Astro Boy growing up.

ARI: It evolved a lot.

REEM: It has.

ARI: And even stuff has come off of anime, like cosplay and all these food things based off of it 

REEM: Food things? What do you mean?

ARI: There's, like, food things that you can get at stores based off of, like, anime characters, because people love them so much. Yeah, they use it as, like, advertising or something.

REEM: Give me an example. Like what?

ARI: I don't know, like little snacks, I guess, based off of, like, Demon Slayer characters, which is a pretty popular anime right now.

REEM: Okay. Okay. Continue Ari, tell me more. What is your favorite anime right now?

ARI: My favorite one right now is death note.

REEM: Death note. Why?

ARI: Because it's a pretty dark subject that it's going around, but it's really good.

REEM: Okay.

ARI: So it's based off of about this kid. And he finds this death note that this God of death has accidentally dropped in the human world and -

REEM: Accidentally? Okay.

ARI: He goes and takes it and he's curious about it, but he takes it and he reads and there's rules on the inside of it. And, like, if you write someone's, name the notebook, then they die, like, 40 seconds after by a heart attack.

REEM: Oh, Wow. So that's pretty big to just by accident, drop.

ARI: Yeah, it was an accident. And anyway, it's just about him. And he's killing all these criminals, thinking that he's doing Justice for the world. He wants to create this ideal world where everyone's safe, and he wants to be this, like, God. Yeah. That's pretty much what it's about.

REEM: That's all that does sound interesting. So something I found out is that anime is actually heavily influenced by Shintoism. Have you ever heard of that?

ARI: I have not.

REEM: Oh, my gosh. You're going to love this. So Shintoism is a belief system, but it's more focused on your actions and how you are performing them rather than like a religion. So it's like Buddhism, but it's not. So in Japan, a lot of people, they don't say that they are Shinto, but they follow the actions of that. And that is pretty much being in balance and coexisting with the energies around you. So example, they believe in Kami. Have you heard of Kami?

ARI: I have not heard of that either.

REEM: So Kami is very loosely related to the word God or deity or spirit. So they believe that everything in the world has Kami. Example, a mountain is a Kami, that is a spirit God. It but mostly, I guess the closest thing I would describe to is an energy. So there's like, a mountain energy. There is a River energy, there is grass energy. There's people who can also be Kami, just everything has its energy. And they look to these energies of something you should respect and be in balance with.

ARI: Interesting.

REEM: So one thing they have in Japan is called Jinja, and that's spelled J-I-N-J-A . Jinja is an entrance way that goes into a Shinto shrine. And that's where you are paying respect to a Kami and just, you know, respecting the energy and, you know, being in harmony with it. And one thing that's really cool with that is the actual Japanese first Emperor, Jimmu. He is believed to be a Kami, and he is believed to be the descendant, of the Sun goddess.

ARI: Okay.

REEM: So they believe that the first Emperor, Jimmu, was a descendant of Amaterasu, the sun goddess. Right. So what they do is that before each Emperor gets reined in, they do this whole ritual and he goes into a room and he's alone with the Sun goddess.

ARI: Interesting.

REEM: And they spend an evening or night together.

ARI: That's cool.

REEM: And they do that with every new Emperor. And they believe that all the emperors are straight descendants from this Kami God. And another thing that was really cool that I saw is when Jimmu became the Emperor, Amaterasu - again. I'm sorry if I'm saying this wrong. She gave him three gifts. She gave him a magic mirror that helps him look into what everyone is doing by every minute around the Island, which is crazy to think about, back then. And then she gave him a jewel and she gave him a sword.

REEM: And nobody's ever seen these things. Only the emperors get see these and they're very sacred. And if you think about it, a lot of people have been saying that these things that she gave him are actually extraterrestrial. And I think they're magical and stuff like the mirror where they're saying, how can a mirror help him see every minute of what's going around Japan? That's, like, pretty big. Yeah, that's a big thing. They're like, maybe it was like a tablet or a laptop, because if you look at a laptop now, it's pretty much a thin mirror that shows you things.

ARI: Like a more futuristic thing.

REEM: So some people believe in that. And I just I thought that was really interesting. And actually anime is heavily influenced by that belief system, like, Spirited Away. If you'd seen that, all of those things that you see in there, all these elements of these ghosts and these spirits, the way they're going about their day to day traditions and lives. It's all based on Shintoism, which is really interesting.

ARI: I could see it now, though.

REEM: Yeah.

ARI: It makes so much sense.

REEM: That really cool. Yeah.

ARI: That's pretty spectacular.

REEM: I know it's such a cool religion. It's not even a religion. It's like a belief system. And it's cool because nobody really talks about it. It definitely needs more light shed on it.

ARI: That needs more attention. Because I think that would play an even bigger role for the anime community. More people want to learn about that.

REEM: Yeah. And it's more focused on what you do than what you believe. So it's all about actions and paying respect. So one thing I saw it was saying that people who are in Shintoism, like in Japan, they say that about 3% say they are Shinto, but 70% aren't.  But 70% of them do practice it because it's all about respect and being in harmony with your environment, which is really cool. They say that along with Shintoism, it's you're following the Kami right. The energies, the gods, whatever. And they said that there's about eight million Kami, like, there's an endless amount of them.

REEM: So that's cool to think, too, that everything has an energy. And they think that it's not just birds and animals and plants and objects, but it's also people. So that's cool. And it goes with death note because he's, like, kind of in a God situation.

ARI: Yeah. That makes so much sense.

REEM: I know it's like when I was reading about this, I was like I want to go to Japan even more.