MARI IIJIMA AND THE POLITICS OF MINMAY

Mari Iijima, a seasoned pop artist, lives in LA with a crop of successful CDs to her name. She's dabbled in numerous musical styles with her smooth voice, though an adult West Coast sensibility weaves through the whole. She acted Minmai in the anime classic Macross. It was almost 20 years ago; a door she went through to a good career, expecting to leave it behind.

Today she sits at an anime convention table, a decade and a half later, nearly 20 CDs in her portfolio, facing an unending stream of paraphernalia, from posters to LDs, not of herself, but of Minmai. Mari handles it with grace. She smiles, she talks. She's friendly and happy to see everyone. And she signs, and signs; engraving her signature next to one Macross symbol after another drawing of Minmai's face.

I feel sadness as I wait in line. Across 2 days, I'm one of the few to bring anything that represents her real career: a couple of her CDs and a review of her "Classics" disc I wrote for PA34. The convention atmosphere is strange. I had three of Mari's CDs before I knew about the Minmai connection. When I finally got a Macross CD, it wasn't because of Minmai, but to hear Mari sing. It seemed, however, that almost everyone else attending thought of Mari as Minmai. They did not see her as an accomplished musician who once did a voice acting job, but as the opposite: a voice actress of whom they had barely any idea what she had since done.

"Oh, this one," she exclaims, as pretty as ever, apparently ageless, tapping her index finger on the CD. She seems surprised to see herself, instead of her cartoon counterpart, gazing back from the cover.

"You must feel like history's repeating itself," I ask, thinking of the countless Macross appearances she faced in Japan during the early mid-Eighties.

"Yes, it felt strange at first," she admits, then, after pondering a moment," but I've already achieved my fame, so I can accept coming back to this."

"It's tolerable?"

She safely replies with a little smile and I move on, thinking how the exchange encapsulates Mari's current tension. In the big picture, Minmai is a small part of everything she's done, but to the majority of people, it's all they know. She's grateful for the opportunities Minmai opened, but at the same time you can see the hope in her eyes that all these people coming as Macross fans will leave as Mari Iijima fans; that people will move forward.

At this point, convention appearances are good for Mari. She's selling loads of her new CD and making people aware that there's more from where it came. The real test will come in about 3 years when we look at the line-ups again. Will it still be almost all Macross and Minmai material, or will there be a growing amount of her own music?

"Now that you've done a few of these conventions," I have the opportunity to inquire the next day," do you find it strange that Western people, who don't understand Japanese, want to hear you sing in Japanese?"

It's plain in her eyes that this could be a dangerous question. Mari's goal is to sing in English and be accepted on the Western market. She relates how an audience member had yelled for her to sing in Japanese in the middle of one of her first convention concerts. It shocked her. It hurt. She's put a lot of attention to her English skills and is proud of the musical work she's accomplished. Though she's to polite to say so, I know the fan's yell is a challenge to stay in the past, to keep living Minmai over and over. Instead, she says, "I realized later that because anime fans like Japanese things, they would like to hear me sing in Japanese. That is why I began singing some of my older material and a few Macross songs. I'm doing this specially for them."

Now that Mari has built this bridge to the anime fans, the remaining question is whether they'll have the equal courtesy to follow her back across the bridge into a future where there's been a delightfully creative life after Minmai. The other sad option is that we may ignore everything else she's done, as has happened to so many other convention regulars. If this occurs, and she continues the convention route, she may end up at a small signing table 15 years from now, as trapped by Minmai's voice as the Zentraedai were, so many years ago.

James Standen Taylor