Pope Wears Japanese Coat With Anime Picture Of His Face To Visit Tokyo Cathedral

It’s 2019, and somebody once said that anything is possible.

Anything? Like anything? Even anime going mainstream? 

When people talk about anime being mainstream now, I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean that most people just treat anime as just another genre nowadays.

And not whatever you’re about to see:

さすがにびっくりしちゃった pic.twitter.com/VYCeLTHMUI

— 渋谷すさの🍚日曜南3ナ40b (@rgm79e) November 25, 2019

That’s right. That isn’t photoshopped. That isn’t anime.

It’s the god durn pope wearing a coat with an anime picture of himself.

And you know what that means.

Pope Francis now has the power of God and anime on his side.

“Happi”, A Traditional Japanese Coat

The coats have a varied history, but now they signify symbolic cultural references.

On the Happi that Pope Francis wore, you can see words in different languages (including Japanese and Spanish), that reads “gratitude”, “let’s pray together”, “may there be peace”, “what can be done to give disaster victims hope”. and “we are glad that you’re the pope”.

4 Day Visit To Japan To Denounce Nuclear Weapons

So anyway, Pope Francis didn’t exactly go to Japan just to get this robe.

(Or maybe that was his true purpose, and the rest of the 4 days were just convenient excuses. We may never know.)

He went there—other than to use the power of anime for uniting people—to ask major powers to disarm nuclear weapons.

A Pope going to a country to essentially say “nuclear war bad, people die, don’t do this” sounds like a very Pope-ish thing to do, but this is actually the first time in 38 years a Pope visited Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

And although he is visiting a country with only about 500k Catholics, I think that’s a stance that most non-insane people would hold. He stressed that true peace can only be an “unarmed peace” and urged political leaders to “ponder the catastrophic impact of their deployment.”

But what power does an 82-year-old Argentine wearing an anime robe (he actually took off the robe pretty quickly, but still) hold?

For what it’s worth, Pope Francis reportedly personally sent letters in 2014 to then-U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro to mediate relationships between the two countries.

U.S.-Cuba diplomatic relationships were restored in 2015.

As for the nuclear arms race itself, it’s still something to be debated.

Though I certainly hope it won’t be like climate change where it’s scientists going “hey dude, 99.99% of our data says if we continue doing this we’re f*cked”, and old politicians from every country going “yeah, about that, something something GDP, and we’re only 15%, not even majority, so I guess it’s something to be considered in the future when I’m already dead”.

But with the power of God and anime by his side, I’m guessing odds are in his favour.

And because you might want to watch the whole meeting at the Cathedral of Holy Mary (it’s time-stamped at the moment you want):