Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime

292 Pages·2007·3.45 MB·English

by  Christopher Bolton

AND
ROBOT GHOSTS
WIRED DREAMS
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AND
ROBOT GHOSTS
WIRED DREAMS
t O f F S J
o A rig rom ict cie ap
n in io n a
im s n c n
e e
e s
e
CHRISTOPHER BOLTON, ISTVAN CSICSERY-RONAY JR.,
AND TAKAYUKI TATSUMI, EDITORS
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
See page 261 for information on previously published material in this book.
Copyright 2007 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
aretrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
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permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robot ghosts and wired dreams : Japanese science fiction from origins to anime /
Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, editors.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4973-0 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4973-1 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4974-7 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4974-X (pb : alk. paper)
1. Science fiction, Japanese—History and criticism. I. Bolton, Christopher.
II. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. III. Tatsumi, Takayuki, 1955–
PL747.57.S3R63 2007
895.6'30876209—dc22 2007027032
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Introduction. ROBOT GHOSTS AND WIRED DREAMS
Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime
Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi
vii
Part I. Prose Science Fiction
1. HORROR AND MACHINES IN PREWAR JAPAN
The Mechanical Uncanny in Yumeno Kyu¯saku’s Dogura magura
Miri Nakamura
3
2. HAS THE EMPIRE SUNK YET?
The Pacific in Japanese Science Fiction
Thomas Schnellbächer
27
3. ALIEN SPACES AND ALIEN BODIES IN JAPANESE WOMEN’S
SCIENCE FICTION
Kotani Mari
47
4. SF AS HAMLET
Science Fiction and Philosophy
Azuma Hiroki
75
5. TSUTSUI YASUTAKA AND THE
MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE OF AUTHORSHIP
William O. Gardner
83
Part II. Science Fiction Animation
6. WHEN THE MACHINES STOP
Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in
Neon Genesis Evangelionand Serial Experiments: Lain
Susan J. Napier
101
7. THE MECHA’S BLIND SPOT
Patlabor 2and the Phenomenology of Anime
Christopher Bolton
123
8. WORDS OF ALIENATION, WORDS OF FLIGHT
Loanwords in Science Fiction Anime
Naoki Chiba and Hiroko Chiba
148
9. SEX AND THE SINGLE CYBORG
Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity
Sharalyn Orbaugh
172
10. INVASION OF THE WOMAN SNATCHERS
The Problem of A-Life and the Uncanny in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Livia Monnet
193
11. OTAKU SEXUALITY
Sait¯oTamaki
222
Afterword. A VERY SOFT TIME MACHINE
From Translation to Transfiguration
Takayuki Tatsumi
250
PUBLICATION HISTORY 261
CONTRIBUTORS 263
INDEX 265
Introduction. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams
Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime
Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi
vii
Since the end of World War II, Japanese science fiction has been as
much a world cultural presence as U.S. science fiction was after
World War I, and for many of the same reasons. But Japanese science
fiction did not arrive on the world scene by way of prose literature. The
translation of Japanese prose science fiction into English was extremely lim-
ited through the end of the twentieth century; the situation was somewhat
better for languages like French and Russian, but by and large Japanese
science fiction entered global culture through new media. Like the pulp
magazines that made science fiction a shaping genre of twentieth-century
popular culture, Japanese science fiction has been distributed throughout
the world in the most popular new communications technologies—tele-
vision, videocassettes, arcade games, personal computers, and game con-
soles. These new media, moreover, have usually been introduced as ve-
hicles for science fiction–themed spectacles that reinforce their futuristic
aura. The marriage of medium and techno-scientific mythmaking has al-
lowed Japanese science fiction filmmakers, game designers, animators,
and manga artists to operate under the radar of cultural control exerted
by American and European entertainment monopolies, and to develop
themes, stories, and effects that synthesize the attitudes of their primary
constituency: global youth culture.
The producers of Japanese science fiction have always been familiar
with their Western counterparts, and in new media they have often had
an eye on Western markets. As a result, Japanese science fiction texts have
frequently been double coded, evoking Japanese national concerns and
popular myths while resonating strongly with foreign audiences. This has
been true for many parts of North America and Europe, but we can con-
sider the specific history of the United States as a representative (if not
universal) case.
The breakthrough works of global Japanese science fiction were the
kaiju¯ eiga—the big monster movies produced by Japanese studios, begin-
ning with Gojirain 1954. These were reinvented by American producers,
renamed (Gojira became Godzilla, King of the Monsters!), and remixed to
satisfy American tastes. In the United States, the Japanese monster film
became the archetype for cheap, cheesy disaster movies because of the
sort of cultural and technological interference patterns that still characterize
the reception of Japanese science fiction in North America today. In many
cases, the original films’ anamorphic wide-screen photography, which lent
images greater scale and depth when properly projected, was reduced for
American showings to a smaller format; the original stereophonic sound-
tracks (among the most technically innovative and musically interesting
in the medium at the time) were rerecorded and rearranged; and additional
scenes with American actors, shot on different screen ratios, were added,
along with woeful dubbing. The American versions inevitably stripped out
the stories’ popular mythological resonances, their evocation of Japanese
In theater, and the imaginary management of postwar collective emotions.1
tro Even so, Japanese monster films gained immense popularity in the
d
u
c 1960s and 1970s, through a medium they had not been made for: television.
tion The films came cheap; U.S. stations bought them for programs targeting
children and teenagers. For this audience, the films’ relative innocence
viii and intimacy provided a pleasure different from the techno-moralistic para-
noia of cold war American science fiction. The monsters had names and
legendary provenance, in contrast with the absolutely othered menaces
of The Thing(1951), Them!(1954), and It!(1966). They were not reducible
to simplistic moral dualisms.2
The kaiju¯ eiga’s affection for monsters was paralleled by a love of robots,
particularly in Japanese comics, or manga, and animation, or anime. Tezuka
Osamu’s Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) appeared on Japanese and Ameri-
can televisions in 1963 and was the first of many friendly Japanese robots
that contrasted with the phobic images of dehumanization dominating
Western science fiction.3Cute anime automatons vitalized the robotic toys
that Japan exported in large quantities in the postwar years, which has
led one scholar to claim that “the American consumption of toy robots
may have more to do with the Japanese presence in science fiction than
does their success in industrial robotics.”4Affectionate ambivalence has
extended to each new step in the process of imagining virtual creatures,
from boy robots to the superrobots of the 1970s, the “real robots” of the
1980s, the cyborgs of the 1990s, and the virtual pocket creatures that cur-
rently dominate children’s television programming in both Japan and the
United States.
The rise of Japanese economic power in the 1970s and relative eco-
nomic decline in the United States led to an ambivalent fascination with
Japanese attitudes toward development—the synthesis of robotic indus-
trialization, neofeudal corporate culture, and the enthusiastic acceptance
of new communication and simulation technologies in daily life. As Japa-
nese investment and market share leaped worldwide, the future appeared
to be saturated with Japanese elements, a Western perception distilled in
Blade Runner’s enormously influential image of a futuristic Los Angeles
that resembled Tokyo. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film was the forerunner of japo-
naiserie in cyberpunk novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer(1984) and
Idoru(1996), which took an adrenalized dreamscape Japan as their model
for the future. Although he had little firsthand knowledge of the Japanese ix
context, Gibson understood the science-fictional ramifications of the rest-
less mixing of fashions and personal technologies conveyed in the image Intro
of the shinjinrui—the “new human” Japanese youth culture of the time. d
u
c
These interests ranged from techno-mystical cults to the adulation of “vir- tio
n
tualidols” like Date Kyo¯ko, a computer-generated simulacrum of a singer
treated by her fans as a living rock star.5
Cyberpunk, which was often derided by Western science fiction crit-
ics for being cartoonish, immediately appealed to a Japanese sensibility
that had been nurtured on science fiction manga and Japanese animation.
The results were texts that synthesized the main themes of both Japanese
and Western postmodernist science fiction—the breakdown of ontologi-
cal boundaries, pervasive virtualization, the political control of reality—
as well as their artistic media. O¯tomo Katsuhiro’s Akira(which had begun
its 2,200-page manga serialization in 1982) was released as an anime film
in 1988 and subsequently shown to great acclaim in art-house theaters
worldwide. Together with Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell(1995), Akira
represented a fusion of contemporary art—anime, manga, cinema, digital
graphics, and cyberpunk narrative—with contemporary themes, addressed
to a global audience. The effects of this new “global” Japanese science
fiction continue to propagate, in products from The Matrix(whose creators
avow their debt to anime and manga), to multicultural media-remixes
like Sakaguchi Hironobu’s digital cinema based on the Final Fantasy
video games.6