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[This essay on
Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/40it1x/essay_iyashikei_the_genre_of_catharsis/)
gives a pretty good definition for _iyashikei_ :

> Iyashikei means “healing-type” and the genre’s works reflect this meaning.
> Iyashikei aims to heal the viewer through delivering a sense of relaxation
> and catharsis. This is accomplished through a tranquil – though not
> necessarily happy – in-show experience which allows the viewer to calm their
> mind and relax by focusing more on the emotional experience than on the
> intellectual.

The essay gives several examples of _iyashikei_ shows, including Aria, K-On,
Mushishi, and Non Non Biyori.

In my meager explorations of Japanese literature, I've noticed a peaceful and
sometimes pensive feeling similar to the tone of many _iyashikei_ , especially
in the poetry. It seems that _iyashikei_ is a genre with pretty deep roots in
Japanese culture, so I'd expect it to take off early on in anime.

I'm curious what the earliest _iyashikei_ anime or manga was. The earliest I
knew of was [Yokohama Kaidashi
Kikou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Kaidashi_Kik%C5%8D), from 1994;
the Reddit essay mentions the Studio Ghibli film [Only
Yesterday](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Yesterday_\(1991_film\)), from
1991. Are there any earlier? Given my hypothesis that _iyashikei_ came from a
longstanding and uniquely Japanese cultural perspective, it seems like there
should have been.

Series this old wouldn't have been identified as iyashikei at the time (even
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou and Only Yesterday seem to predate the term), but if
modern fans would identify it as iyashikei or something similar, it's
potentially an answer.


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anime-history manga-history
What was the first iyashikei series?


(This was originally going to be a comment, but I'm going to go ahead and make
this an answer and explain why I'm not sure it is possible to effectively
answer this question. I could well be convinced otherwise, though!)

## Unlike obscenity, you _don't_ know (old) _iyashikei_ when you see it

So, here's the problem, as I see it. _iyashikei_ is one of those things that
is characterized less by the content of a work and more by the _effect_ of
that work upon its audience.

Today, content creators have a well-worn library of narrative approaches that
they can use to make their work _iyashikei_ (e.g. "cute girls doing cute
things"), and so we can look at a present-day work and see how it uses these
approaches to effectively "heal" the audience. Alternatively, we can look at
how a work comports itself relative to "canonically" _iyashikei_ works that it
discourses with, like _Aria_ and so forth.

But when we look at works that predate the _iyashikei_ "canon" and its
associated library of approaches, how do we effectively evaluate whether a
work is or is not _iyashikei_? Based on how it makes you feel, I guess.1 But
that doesn't help us come up with a good answer to "which was the first?".
That's the issue - it's simply rather difficult to say what is or is not
_iyashikei_ the further into the past you go.

## For example:

I strongly disagree with the reddit user's claim that _Only Yesterday_ is
_iyashikei_.

While it is, on the whole, a calm and relaxing movie, and happens to employ
some of the narrative trappings common to modern _iyashikei_ works
(wistfulness for rural Japan, in particular), it pairs these elements with
decidedly un-healing bits, like the various mishaps Taeko experiences during
her childhood, and the obstacles she faces in her budding relationship with
Toshio. It is a beautiful slice of Japanese life, but is it healing? No, at
least not to me.

If we lifted _Only Yesterday_ out of 1991 and released it for the first time
in 2016, would we call it _iyashikei_? I don't think so. It is not, in my
view, substantially in discourse with the modern " _iyashikei_ canon".

## Why is _iyashikei_ a Thing, anyway?

There's something of an argument that the crystallization of _iyashikei_ in
the late 90s as a Thing (throughout Japanese media; not just in the otaku
realm) is a direct response to the trouble Japan was experiencing at the time
- the bubble had just burst, and Japan was really reeling for the first time
since World War II. This explanation is pretty reductive, and it'd be silly to
claim that the economy is the only (or even primary) cause, but it seems
uncontroversial that Japan's national woes at the time did contribute to the
reification of _iyashikei_.

Taken out of its context as a response to the Japanese zeitgeist of the 90s,
does it even make sense to talk about _iyashikei_? I'm not sure that it does.

## A long, rambling footnote

1 This is not to say that it is _always_ impossible to identify a work as
having a quality that was only effectively delinated after the work's
creation.

Take, for example, the realm of gothic fiction. When Walpole wrote _The Castle
of Otranto_ , he wrote the first gothic novel, even though he could not have
known that, since the idea of gothic fiction as a distinct thing did not come
about until some years later. But we can nonetheless distinctly see that
_Otranto_ is a gothic novel (never mind the fact that the whole genre is named
for _Otranto_ to begin with), because there are specific narrative trappings
that characterize gothic fiction (spooky castles, fantastic romances, etc.),
and _Otranto_ exhibits them.

But _iyashikei_ works are not characterized by their narrative in this same
way. Where, on the one hand, you have the (admittedly large) cluster of "cute
girls doing cute things" anime, you also have "man has mystical encounters
with spiritual entities" ( _Natsume Yuujinchou_ , _Mushishi_ ) and "parenting
is great" ( _Usagi Drop_ , timeskip notwithstanding) and "shibe does shibe
things" ( _Itoshi no Muco_ ) and "whatever _Glasslip_ is" ( _Glasslip_ ), and
I don't know how to identify a coherent commonality among all these things
besides "they make me feel fuzzy inside".


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