witches in modern eastern culture

How witches change their roles in modern eastern society comparing to what we learned in class that the roles in western culture in early modern period when books talked about.

In modern Asian society, especially in Japan, witches have become the category of people that have supernatural power and help normal human or their partners to defeat evils in the world. Therefore, lots of stories, comics, and animations about how good witches help people came out and influenced my generation when we grew up.

In Palmer’s book, witches were described as the symbol of fear, darkness and bad things as “the generic witch was a mythological construction composed of vague attributes and a culture symbol of fear”. Also in our class discussion, we found that witch is the expression of fear of darkness and other creepy things that they were not acknowledged in people’s mind at that time, and then became a cultural symbol.

         But during the period I grew up, a comic book (then became animation), Cardcaptor Sakura, came up. In that story, the main character Sakura Kinomoto is a witch but also a beautiful, lovely, friendly, and outgoing primary school girl. Her job is collecting the “magic cards” and uses the power of cards to protect the world. Therefore, I believe that the culture of witches has changed in modern Eastern world because they transferred their roles from bringing fear to people and punishing human to the protector of human being. Also the images of them are always adorable, cute and lovely girls instead of some bad looking, disgusting old ladies.