Self, Android Other: Embodiment, Technology, and Subjectivity in Japanese

“In the near - corporate networks reach out to the stars. Electrons and light flow throughout the universe. The advance of computerisation, however, has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups.” – (Kōkaku Kidōtai, 1995, Oshii Mamoru, dir.)

Research Topic Overview Technology and Embodiment in SF The animated Ghost in the Shell opens with the above epigraph displayed on a black screen. The caveat that nationality and ethnicity continue to matter in an otherwise posthuman setting dominated by narrative tropes of disembodied AIs and cyborg replacements for the body signals that, for the creators1 of this text, the science-fictional promise of transcending the (ethnic, national) body rings hollow. Computer technologies, even as they claim to efface the body as a site of inscription for power hierarchies, are themselves human-made, and thus cannot escape the gendered, racial, and ethnic categories by which humans structure society. How does Japanese science fiction (SF)2 deal with the persistence of race in the contemporary world, which has for so long promised to erase such “superficial” bodily distinctions through technological advances and scientific-rational thinking? What does it extrapolate from our present, and what alternatives does it limn? The relationship between human society and the technologies it creates is a topic that has been examined by a wide variety of scholars. Posthumanist theorists such as Donna Haraway or N. Katherine Hayles have done much to destabilize the notion that technology exists in a realm of pure rationality, divorced from human bias and histories of oppression. Despite this progress, however, the specific role of embodiment in that relationship has been underexplored. I study this question through the lens of Japanese SF under the

1 The film is an adaptation of a written by Shirō Masamune (styled in English as Shirow), and thus it is difficult (and perhaps beside the point) to attribute any of the film’s themes specifically to Oshii or Shirow. The manga was serialized in Kodansha’s Young Magazine in three separate arcs that ran between 1989 and 1996. 2 Throughout this proposal, I use the terms science fiction, sci-fi, and SF interchangeably. Most authors writing about SF have done the same, and as a result, “SF” or “sf” are generally accepted terms within the SF studies field.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 1 premise that, as a concerned with the social effects of science and technology, SF is a focal point for questions concerning the future of technological society. Furthermore, as Japan is a society with a comparatively long history of SF production and has been conceived as a kind of “techno- utopia” in the popular imagination—both inside and outside Japan—throughout much of the 20th century, it provides a rich source of cultural productions taking up technology as a social force, productions that often pointedly position themselves as non-Western. Japanese science fiction since its inception has self-consciously engaged with its Western counterparts in a transnational conversation that affirms and disavows in turn the dynamics of racial and cultural difference in SF production. I propose to study embodiment as it is understood in Japanese SF in order to grasp the ways in which dynamics of racial, ethnic, and gendered marginalization are played out in the realm of techno-scientific material culture, and how critiques of that marginalization are articulated by those whom it would make silent and invisible. Though much has been made of Japan as a high-tech society in popular discourse, and though academic studies of Japan for the last 20 years have privileged analyses of its popular culture, SF as a genre has been generally neglected. Part of this is due to the overwhelming influence of media on Western popular and academic perceptions of Japan, with scholars grouping texts by their media form rather than looking at transmedia relationships of genre.3 However, SF’s importance to anime and manga, the two pillars of contemporary Japanese pop culture criticism in Western academia, can hardly be denied, making it all the more pressing to examine it on its own terms. Authors of science fiction such as Abe Kōbō and Tsutsui Yasutaka, as well as film directors such as Kon Satoshi and Fukasaku Kinji, present an array of literary and cinematic approaches to SF that are also woven into Japan’s more canonical media histories. Within , meanwhile, though the growing body of literature on takes up questions of race, these are questions specifically tied to black identity, either within the countries of Africa or as part of the various African diasporas. With a much different relationship to the West than Africa, I expect Asia (and Japan specifically) to produce science fiction that deals with racialized embodiment in very different terms than its Afrofuturist counterparts, yet there is very little scholarship that takes up Asian SF production. Having been both an imperial

3 A notable exception is Katherine Page-Lippsmeyer’s recent dissertation taking up the Japanese periodical SF Magazine. See Page-Lippsmeyer, “The Space of Japanese Science Fiction.” Her project nevertheless diverges from my own in her narrower focus on the emergence of the subculture of SF fandom in Japan, which she analyzes through a primarily art- historical lens, using SF Magazine as her main case study. My research seeks to widen the historical scope of inquiry beyond the 1960s and ‘70s, as well as looking at publications other than the industry-produced SF Magazine.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 2 power and also a state that endured occupation by the United States at different moments in history, for example, Japanese culture has a very complex relationship with histories of colonialism, a fact that has already been analyzed with regard to “the uncanny” in Japan’s mystery fiction (often named as SF’s progenitor). While the field of scholarship on Afrofuturism provides a helpful starting point for considering race and science fiction, scholars must nevertheless attend to the specificity of East Asia in considering these texts, and it is here that the Japanese case continues to hold valuable contributions for analyses of science fiction. The basic structure of the dissertation takes up these questions in three key moments of confluence between media-historical watersheds and ethnically- and racially-charged politics in Japan. In the 1920s-1930s, the domestic film industry was exploding at the same time as the meaning of the term “domestic” itself was in flux in the context of Japanese imperial expansion. With a colonial consciousness of both the colonies and of the Western powers with whom relations were becoming critically strained, this moment presents a fraught scene for considerations of embodiment and modernity just as SF’s “pre-history” was being written in detective fiction and horror novels. In the 1960s, I will read the tensions of the Cold War against the advent of television to examine notions of transnational cosmopolitanism. With the first “true” Japanese SF4 being created at the turn of the 1960s, and its first “Golden Age” occurring over the course of that decade, a wealth of material was produced in which Japan’s place in the Cold War world system was contested. Finally, in the 1990s and 2000s, Japan’s post-bubble economy was placing its hopes in popular cultural productions marketed with “Japanese cool” in the same moment that the internet was gaining ubiquity and becoming the target of a variety of social anxieties. Through an analysis these three historical moments, I will examine the ways in which SF media negotiated changes in both geopolitical landscape and material culture in its considerations of embodiment. SF does not limit its articulations of embodiment to the space of narrative, however, and multiple reading strategies will be required to bring these valences to light. Methodologies borrowed from media studies, film studies, and literary studies will all be necessary to grasp the texts’ views of embodiment not only within their own fictional worlds but also in their contemporary moments, as mediated by the media object of the text itself. I plan to position the visions of embodied subjectivity found within SF narratives against the broader discursive environments in which these

4 In this periodization (found in many histories of Japanese SF production), “true” is largely equated with the subgenre of “hard SF” in the mold of Stanislaw Lem or, in the Japanese case, Komatsu Sakyō. Many histories see the first example of domestically-produced SF in this mold in Abe Kōbō’s Inter Ice Age 4 (1958), with its attention to computer technologies and biological experimentation in the far future.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 3 narratives appeared. For example, in discussing SF novels and short stories that originally appeared in SF magazines, in addition to standard close readings of the narratives, I will look at the object of the magazines themselves, analyzing their cover designs, columns from the editors, advertising layout, and so forth. I will do this to reconstruct the discourses and debates surrounding the body in which these narratives were participating both implicitly and explicitly. While it may be impossible to fully reconstruct the moment of reception on the part of any given historical audience member of an SF narrative, my aim is to avoid treating these texts as self-contained wellsprings of meaning. Instead, in recognizing the posthumanist assertion that meaning—and indeed the subject itself—can only be understood relationally, I intend to analyze the contents of individual SF narratives relative to the other elements of their contemporary media environments. This is why it is critical to read the texts against the material media history of their moment; I adopt the media studies position that the specific media form in which a narrative is concretized is a crucial element of that narrative’s meaning, and cannot be considered separate from it in a kind of content/form hylomorphism. In other words, different media are accorded different cultural values in various moments in history, and those values affect the narratives that are articulated through each medium. Moreover, the specific dimensions of embodiment—such as gender or class—that are judged salient in a given socio-historical context must also be taken into account in order to avoid the pitfall of positing an ahistorical, abstract “body” as the sole object of contestation, identically valued in every context. Attending to the aspects of the body under discussion in each case will highlight the various power hierarchies at work, allowing me to avoid monolithic depictions of Japan and Japanese culture. Theoretical traditions of genre studies and feminist affect theory will give me the conceptual tools to think through the intersectional concerns of embodiment in SF by examining, for example, the ways in which writers of SF attempted to define it as a “high literary” genre and access the cultural capital thus afforded. Feminist affect theory, especially in the tradition of posthumanism, demonstrates the importance of asking what kinds of bodies are at stake in SF prognostications of new embodiments, and specifically how bodily difference is understood therein. These theoretical lenses will complement the reading strategies outlined above and help to illuminate the interests and issues in the texts I examine that are relevant to my overarching goal of studying embodiment as it is understood in Japanese SF.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 4 Tentative Chapter Outline As discussed above, I will structure the dissertation around three key moments in which paradigm shifts in the Japanese media landscape and “flash points” within the realm of ethnic, racial, and gender politics converge. The three main chapters will be framed by an introduction and conclusion. I outline the points of each of these sections below. All titles are working titles.

Introduction – The Body of SF and the SF Body In the first part of the dissertation, I will outline the terms of my project, review relevant scholarship in the field, and discuss the importance of an inquiry on the intersection of SF media and the body. I will do this with a focus on two seemingly simple questions: “What is SF?” and “What is the body?” This first question draws attention to the definitional contours of SF, which have been hazy and subject to continual renegotiation since the genre’s beginning. SF authors, scholars, and fans have devoted a great deal of energy to pinning down what exactly defines sci-fi, and what relationship (if any) SF has with the practice of science.5 Specific examples vary widely, but most tend to share an emphasis on a kind of methodological rigor—either in content or writing process— comparable to the scientific method and its ideals of quantifiable objectivity and experimental reproducibility. But where exactly the proper place for this rigor is, what exactly its proper role is, is a question that has myriad answers. While early on in its life, science fiction was seen as the vehicle by which the scientific literacy of the masses could be improved, later the focus would fall more on the testing of “hypotheses” through the writing process, with the narrative space of the text becoming a sort of laboratory. Rather than trying to identify or create a “true” definition, I instead draw on Edward Mack’s work on the institutional processes and discourses that drive the process of literary canonization, asking how SF (generally conceived as “genre fiction” rather than “high art”) co-opts that process to gain access to the cultural capital of the canon—or alternatively, how SF creators and fans seek to distance themselves from mainstream high literature. Doing so will help me draw out the ways in which SF itself is one of the objects of my analysis in this dissertation. This is the “body of SF” described in my chapter title. Highlighting the contested boundaries of the SF genre and the contested set of values associated with that genre demonstrates how those values shape and are

5 For an overview of some of these debates in Japanese, see Tatsumi, Nihon SF Ronsō-shi.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 5 shaped by each individual producer and consumer engaging with SF. The conceptual status of “SF” arises co-constitutively with “SF fans” and “SF producers” through their activities. Thus, no study of SF can treat it as a pre-given or static entity, but must rather approach it from the point of view of that relationship itself. This is the view of the mid-century French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, whose work on the individual and technical beings has undergirded a major stream of posthumanist thought. For Simondon, as for myself, it is the process of becoming that arises out of the interactions between an individual and its milieu that is the most critical object of study. I therefore approach the body of SF as a historically variable term whose mutations over time will cast light on the changing understanding of SF and the themes of embodiment contained therein. What, then, is the body? This second guiding question of the introduction delves more deeply into posthumanist affect theory to think about what the body means in contemporary society. So-called “cyborg theorists” such as Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles have thoroughly undermined the classical notion of a unitary, bounded subject through histories of science that have demonstrated the ways in which the knowing subject is always already intertwined with the object over which it claims knowledge and mastery. They show how the of a self-contained subject has licensed patriarchal white supremacy throughout the modern period by establishing rigid subject-object divides that allow the idea of conquering and controlling an Other that is entirely separate from the Self. The breakdown of this model has been anxiously visualized in a variety of cultural productions (Robocop or Tetsuo: The Iron Man being two vivid examples), in which the penetration of the boundaries of a putatively sealed subject is conflated with the destruction of subjectivity itself. Haraway and Hayles each argue that this anxiety is due to a fear of the Other that arises out of a misidentification of the Self as ever having been separable from the Other. Like the body of SF, the cyborg body they propose to replace classical models of embodiment is defined in part by boundaries that always dissolve and shift, and it is in identifying the instability of those boundaries—the body’s radical openness—that much of the value of SF narrative lies. More than this general assertion of the body’s openness, however, scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz and Laura Marks have noted the ongoing importance of gender, racial, and cultural difference in formulations of the cyborg subject. To summarize: the fundamentally hybrid figure of the cyborg may seem to invite the erasure of all boundaries, but insofar as it arises from contemporary cultural consciousness, which is structured through heuristics of difference, it nevertheless reinscribes those boundaries in displaced form; the fantasy of an erasure of all difference serves simply to hide ongoing discrimination. In terms of this dissertation, then, “the body” must always be interrogated

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 6 as a site of ongoing struggle, and I will carefully attend to moments in which an abstract, “universal” body is being substituted for particular bodies. As Grosz has convincingly demonstrated, this substitution more often than not is nothing more than the assumption of a white, male body for “the” body. With the two terms of “SF” and “the body” explicated, I move to the main chapters.

Chapter 1: The 1920s and ‘30s – SF’s Imperial Prehistory The first moment I examine in detail is the transition from the Taishō Period (1912-1926) to the Shōwa Period (1926-1989). SF was still in its formative stages in Japan, existing primarily either in translation (Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was a huge hit), or in the form of its “progenitor ” of horror and detective fiction. Meanwhile, the domestic film industry had exploded in the prior decade, and film was now a ubiquitous urban entertainment. At the same time, Japan’s colonial project had been underway for decades, with the annexation of Korea in 1910 and invasion of Manchuria in 1931 being two of the most prominent examples around the period I examine here. The definition of “Japan” was in flux as citizens in the “homeland” (naichi) reckoned with colonial policy that sought to make Japanese subjects out of those in the conquered colonial “frontiers” (gaichi). In the pages of film magazines and in discussions of some aesthetic philosophers such as Nakai Masakazu, the sensory impact of cinema was being discussed as heralding a newly modern form of subjectivity. One notable place where concerns of colonialism, media, and embodiment collided was SF. In this chapter, I will examine the ways in which the ethnic and racial politics of the Japanese empire intersected with the material construction of the modern subject in the pages of SF’s predecessors, detective fiction and . The Japanese empire was frequently characterized as an alternative to Western colonialism, one which drew on a presumed racial essence shared across East and Southeast Asia to position Japan as the more “rightful” colonial hegemons, under whom their Asian counterparts could be emancipated from Western colonialism. Yet the construction of difference within sameness that was necessary for the colonial government to claim brotherhood with their Asian neighbors but also hierarchical superiority as hegemon led to a convoluted view of race within the empire. This view was only further complicated by the recent influx of immigrants, especially Korean immigrants, who had arrived looking for work in Japan, destabilizing any idea of the Other existing “over there” in the colonies. In short, boundaries of inside and outside, self and other, were confused in a way that has strong resonance with the theories of cyborg subjectivity discussed in the introduction.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 7 Miri Nakamura has discussed the uncanny reflections of this racial conundrum in colonial- era mystery fiction, yet her reading relies largely on a psychoanalytic register that ultimately does not explore this promising connection with cyborg subjectivity. While it may be argued that psychoanalysis was the contemporary discourse that was most influential to detective fiction, rereading these texts through a cyborg lens will make the connections between detective fiction and later SF more explicit and thereby demonstrate the conceptual continuity between interwar detective fiction and postwar science fiction. My goal in this chapter is therefore to extend and modify Nakamura’s work, connecting the uncanny experience of colonialism with media and affect theories to think through the ways in which the breakdown of the separation between a putatively sealed Self and its Others were being expressed in what would come to be recognized as SF following the end of the war. In addition to these diachronic connections, the register of the uncanny will link detective fiction to other, synchronic examples of “proto-SF” such as Unno Jūza and Yumeno Kyūsaku, whose work has generally been examined in relation to scientific modernity as an industrial mode of production, rather than in its connections to colonialism. The reconsideration of classical notions of subjectivity (that is, Cartesian subjectivity predicated upon a strong distinction between mind and body) is not a discourse I am imposing from the vantage point of the 21st century, however. Contemporary thinkers were already seeing a site where subject and object intermixed with one-another in the visceral effects of film spectatorship. Furthermore, with the rapid industrialization and urbanization that had preceded this period came narratives of revolution by a slave-like class of workers in fiction, film, and theater. The embodied repercussions of urban modernity were also explored extensively in the fiction of Edogawa Ranpo, often dubbed the “father” of Japanese detective fiction. In Ranpo’s work, the urban environment creates new embodied ways of being, which are in turn linked to criminal psychology. The subject’s psyche was closely tied to its surroundings, and Ranpo found the surroundings of the urban environment to be inimical to older models of embodiment.6 In other words, contestations of the classical subject were already being enacted by those presaging the arrival of a hybrid, chimeric modern subject. I will use this chapter to talk about that hybridity in terms of Japan’s colonial project and the ethnic and racial politics it created.

6 It is important to note that Ranpo did not view urbanization in a wholly negative light. Insofar as it was linked to scientific-rational modes of thought, urbanism also enabled the logocentric means of deduction by which his detective characters were able to get to the bottom of urban crime. The city thus stands as both the problem and its own solution. For more on Ranpo, the city, and new modes of embodiment, see Kawana, Murder Most Modern.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 8 Chapter 2: The 1960s – Japanese SF’s Cold War Flowering My second chapter moves to the historical context of the Cold War, expanding on recent efforts in studies of Japanese history that seek to rethink the “postwar” era as the “Cold War” era. While much of SF criticism, both in Japanese and English, has been framed in terms of the prewar/postwar binary, I argue that there is much to be gained by a reading of 1960s Japanese SF media production that historicizes it as part of a specifically Cold War moment. In connection to this, the rapid spread of television ownership that occurred over the course of the 1960s provides another media paradigm shift through which issues of international cosmopolitanism come into clear focus. By many accounts, this is the period in which SF materializes as a recognizable genre in Japan, beginning with Abe Kōbō’s publication of Inter Ice Age 4 (Dai-yon kanpyōki), serialization of which began in 1958.7 Two magazines publishing science fiction had been founded by 1960, and both within their pages and elsewhere, a surge of people were writing SF and writing about SF. One of the major themes in these articles (visible, for example, in the activities and writing of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan [Nihon SF sakka kurabu]) was the way in which producing and consuming SF media linked one into a global community of SF fans. Indeed, the speed with which Russian and Euro-American science fiction was translated and disseminated to audiences in Japan meant that Japanese readers were consuming the latest SF almost simultaneously with their counterparts in Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, creating an image of SF as a truly global community. This cosmopolitanism is reflected in the frequently multinational casts of SF and books, such as Komatsu Sakyō’s Virus: The Day of Resurrection (Fukkatsu no hi, 1964), in which state borders seemingly cease to be salient boundaries separating the people of the world. In stark contrast with the politically divisive world system of the Cold War, the protagonists in Komatsu’s novel (about a virus that nearly wipes out the human race) are American, Russian, Japanese, French, and more, and all work together seamlessly for science and for the greater good of humanity. In this, Komatsu presents an attractive image of a world where humans are able to overcome racial difference and discrimination through the apparently apolitical practice of science and an awakened consciousness of the fundamental equality of all human beings. The notion of the “global community” in the work of Komatsu and others was reinforced in the 1960s by television, a medium whose central feature of “liveness” has been explored by media

7 By all accounts I have been able to find, Inter Ice Age 4 is the first domestically-produced Japanese SF novel, using the implicit gloss of SF as “hard SF” discussed above.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 9 scholars. The feeling of “really being there” that television afforded strengthened the sense that Japan had re-entered the world stage as its so-called economic miracle began to accelerate. Through the luxury item of television, Japanese viewers could feel themselves transported with up-to-the- minute immediacy to a variety of locations around the world. This combined, I argue, with the liberal humanist ideal of fundamental human equality that was a component of US Cold War rhetoric as it used Japan as part of its containment strategy for the USSR. The implicit promise of the US was that—in exchange for political, economic, and military alliance—Japan could expect to be treated as an equal, ignoring racial difference to stand side-by-side with the US in the global political scene. This surely must have been an enticing offer, with the US military still a very recent memory. Nevertheless, SF of this period registers a lingering unease with the idea that such equality could be possible across racial lines. For instance, the appearance of the US race riots of the 1960s in Komatsu’s novel mentioned above is a sign that the author was aware of America’s highly troubled history with issues of race in its own country, casting doubt on the likelihood of the US being able to ignore race in the context of international diplomacy. I will read the persistence of the body as a site of struggle within SF media against Jeffrey Sconce’s account of television. Unlike the “imagined communities” of television described above, Sconce identifies in American supernatural and a mythology surrounding television that sees it as a window onto a sovereign electronic space. In his account, the rhetoric of this discourse establishes the “worlds” of television as persistent spaces, existing even after one changes the channel or turns off the television set. These worlds become spaces of fantasy, alienated from the viewer in a very different relationship than that of non-fiction, “live” television. Like film in the Taishō period, television in the 1960s opened new vistas of sensory presence to Japanese audiences, but was the center of two competing discourses of connection and isolation, cosmopolitanism and insularity. I will examine the intersections between these discourses and SF media, including SF television shows, to analyze the interplay of the promise of global connection and the persistence of difference.

Chapter 3: The New Millennium – SF as a Soft Power Export My final body chapter revolves around the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. Following the collapse of the speculative bubble economy in Japan in the early 1990s,

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 10 Westerners began ravenously consuming Japanese popular cultural products, especially the visual media forms of anime, manga, and video games.8 The Japanese government seized on this opportunity with the Cool Japan initiative, hoping that popular culture would be the way to revive the economy. SF suddenly became a national export, promoted heavily abroad by government policy. This represented a volte-face for the genre—having previously been the purview of subculture—one that I would argue was part of a more general “coming out” of subculture that provoked a great deal of social anxiety within Japan. Despite the government’s attempts at a speedy rehabilitation for the image of subcultural genres and those who consumed them, such that they could serve the needs of capital, an association indelibly linked to subcultural production and consumption at the time was that of the so-called “otaku killer” Miyazaki Tsutomu, who had only recently been apprehended following a string of gruesome crimes. With his capture and the media spectacle that followed, a host of social “dysfunctions” were put on display and linked in turn to a generational shift in Japan. Social withdrawal, antisocial behavior, “aberrant” sexuality, and a breakdown in the nuclear family condensed around a salaryman patriarch were all sources of concern that would bubble to the surface of Japanese society at the turn of the millennium. They would be understood in large part through their relation to the newest media shift taking place at the time: the personal computer and the internet, which seemed to afford the paradoxical status of highly networked isolation for its users. In this chapter, I will examine the uncomfortable marriage of Cool Japan-style soft power diplomacy with subcultural practices of production, consumption, and socialization surrounding the internet, as that linkage was understood in contemporary SF. Much like Cold War-era liberal humanism, global capitalism promises, if not equality, equivalence under the commensurability of all things to capital. And yet it was only through being marked as Japanese—that is, as somehow racially and culturally different from the Western consumer—that Japanese popular cultural products found value in the Western marketplace. Despite the promise held out to Japanese cultural producers that their products would compete in an equitable global market, Western consumers were still receiving those products as racially coded. This was the underlying logic that enabled a set of policies like Cool Japan to make sense; without the consciousness of race that ran through

8 I do not mean to imply that this was the first Western craze for consuming Japanese cultural production. Susan Napier has provided a compelling comparative case study of the Japonisme movement in Western fine art at the turn of the 20th century. I believe there are fruitful connections to be made with my own study of the 1990s and 2000s. See Napier, From Impressionism to Anime.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 11 Western demand for Japanese products, the Japanese government would not be able to promote a soft power agenda (which often relies on essentialist perceptions of culture) through its cultural exports. Similarly, the newly ubiquitous internet held out the promise of complete disembodiment for the subject, as reflected in the SF trope of “jacking in” to a sovereign digital realm in a form of Information Age astral projection. Yet as many of the SF texts of the ‘90s and ‘00s testify, the body always seems to return as a site of ongoing anxiety for the subject seeking disembodiment. Completely shedding the body as a locus of subjective identity is impossible, in other words, while the racial difference identified through those bodies gives them value under capitalism. In this chapter, I will look at the ways in which contemporary SF creators have articulated and worked through the “problem” of embodiment. I argue that the preponderance of body horror within SF media (Tsukamoto Shin’ya’s 1989 Tetsuo: The Iron Man being a prominent early example), as well as a more ambivalent understanding of global connectivity visible in texts such as (Itō Keikaku)’s 2007 short story “The Indifference Engine” represent an implicit critique of the capitalist logic that casts SF as a racially “de-odorized”9 commodity to be exported. I examine the ways in which the body of SF is still racially marked, even as that marking is disavowed under the logic of capitalism. I understand this logic to be one that takes specific material products (such as an SF film) as reservoirs for the more abstract value of capital, similar to the logic of computers that understands what is displayed on a screen as a contingent materialization of underlying informational code. Both of these logics treat disembodied information as the more important term, holding out the possibility of an entirely disembodied world where the marked, contingent body falls away in favor of the more stable, unmarked, and implicitly “pure” code that composes it. As I will show through the case of Japanese SF at the turn of the millennium, however, the body cannot entirely disappear as a structuring element of contemporary society, and so the promise of abstract disembodiment must always be deferred.

Conclusion – The Body In/Difference My conclusion will tie together the overarching threads of SF, embodiment, and technology that have guided the bulk of the dissertation in an attempt to look toward where this research might lead in the future. In short, this is a call to acknowledge bodies in all their difference. Capitalist-

9 I borrow this term from Koichi Iwabuchi’s notion of the “cultural odorlessness” behind the success of anime exports.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 12 informed geopolitics of the last century have held out the dubious promise of total erasure of national, racial, and cultural difference in favor of a universal humanity and of totally free circulation of capital, but as I will have demonstrated over the course of this dissertation, the assumption of universality is something reserved for white, heteronormative, cis-gendered males of means. Despite the idea (in high modernism, in the Cold War, in late capitalism) that the body need not matter once technological development has advanced far enough to efface it, Japanese SF production of the 20th century amply demonstrates the oppressiveness concealed behind a disembodied ideal. The drive toward disembodiment only masks a drive to further enshrine the mind/body dyad, wherein the former can be equated with the male, the cultured, the superior, and the latter can be denigrated as the female, the savage, the imperfect. A posthumanist study of Japanese SF production helps identify this pitfall, since posthuman does not mean post-bodied. Indeed, the study of the posthuman is precisely a study of the human in relation with its Others—the natural environment, material culture, and other races and cultures of the human. A call to attend to difference, however, is not meant to say that the project of equality is not worthy to pursue. Instead, I seek to avoid hasty erasures that institutionalize inequality more than reduce it. Outside the Japanese context as well as within, an overzealous postmodern negation of a transcendental Real that gives meaning to signification does not inaugurate a culture that has “moved beyond” issues of race so much as it further sustains the racial status quo.10 It is critical to remain attentive to the ways in which technology—as part of cyborg subjectivity—is interwoven with the physical, embodied experience of subjectivity, and to the ways in which technology calls into being certain embodied relations to the world in order to keep from sweeping aside marginalized bodies in the march toward an abstract, universal “body.” SF is the arena in which these concerns are played out most dramatically, and it is for this reason that its study is crucial. With the media-historical groundwork laid by this dissertation, a broader engagement with the place of embodiment in the production and consumption (both domestically and transnationally) of will be possible. This line of thinking will privilege specificity over

10 The 2017 Hollywood adaptation of Ghost in the Shell that drew controversy for its casting of white actors in Japanese roles provides a useful example of how whiteness is often understood as the “universal” standard, a naturally “unmarked” base from which all other races are understood as deviations. In this case, such a white supremacist assumption of universality combined with the science fictional imagination of a future in which all humans are similarly “unmarked,” such that an almost entirely white cast could paradoxically be understood as a kind of “liberation” from histories of racist oppression in the United States.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 13 abstraction in its treatment of bodies, and will understand “Japanese culture” as a materially instantiated concept, produced and reproduced through relations of embodied difference.

Research Timeline The research for this dissertation will be completed over the course of approximately the next two years. I have already obtained a Fulbright Fellowship to perform a year of archival research in Japan, starting March 2018. Until then, I intend to more thoroughly investigate the body of English language scholarship in SF studies, a field which is critical to my dissertation topic, but which was not included in my qualifying exams. The vast majority of work in SF studies of which I am aware has been focused on English-language SF texts, but the theoretical insights offered by this body of scholarship—especially with regards to race in the Afrofuturist studies subfield—will be very useful to me as I position my own research within the field. In addition, I will spend some of my time over the next 9 months investigating Japanese SF publications, including the extensive run of SF Magazine held by the University of Kentucky. I want to begin to reconstruct the discursive space of SF in Japan over the course of the 20th century, and because it is one of the largest and longest-running SF periodicals in Japan, SF Magazine will be a good place to start. Based both on my findings from this magazine survey and also on the objects examined by other studies of Japanese SF, I will also seek out Japanese SF literature and film that is available in the United States in order to find appropriate “case study” texts for each historical period under examination in my dissertation. Ideally, I would like to identify these case studies and begin studying them in-depth before I begin my research year abroad, but this will largely depend on the availability of salient primary texts in the United States. From March of 2018, I will perform archival research in Japan while based at Keio University under the guidance of Tatsumi Takayuki, one of the leading SF critics in Japan. I will visit several different archives in order to discover additional primary materials, especially from the two earlier historical periods covered in my dissertation chapters, as I expect texts from these periods will be more difficult to locate in the United States. These archives include the Setagaya Bungakukan, which holds a collection of materials from the Nihon SF Sakka Kurabu. I had a chance to see an exhibition of these materials there in 2014, and I believe they will be very valuable in trying to reconstruct the discourses that surrounded SF in the 1960s, such as those detailed in Dr. Tatsumi’s edited volume on debates surrounding Japanese SF. For earlier materials, I will look at both the Japanese Diet Library and the Oya Soichi Bunko, which holds a large collection of popular

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 14 magazines from throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Through my work in these archives, as well as with Dr. Tatsumi himself, I will arrive at a more nuanced and historically-grounded picture of Japanese SF production and discourse across the 20th century. I will return to Chicago in March 2019, where I will spend the following year finishing the writing process before defending and submitting the dissertation in the spring quarter of 2020. In terms of the order in which I will write the chapters, it will be most efficient to start from Chapter 3, as primary materials from the 1990s and 2000s will be the simplest to acquire before I go to Japan next year, given that many of them are still commercially available. In addition, I will be able to write much of the Introduction before I leave, having completed my field exams and done the additional reading in SF studies that will provide the basis for my literature review. I suspect the 1960s will prove to have the largest variety of primary materials, as this was the “Golden Age” of Japanese SF production, so I will begin my time in Japan working on Chapter 2. In addition to giving myself enough time to work through all of the materials, this will help me solidify the terms in which I want to make the argument of Chapter 1. Given that SF had not yet emerged in Japan as a recognized genre at the beginning of the Shōwa period, it will be important for me to have the strongest conceptual scaffolding possible in place as I begin to tackle the archives from this era. Keeping the discursive terms I want to trace from the later chapters clearly in mind will help me set boundaries around the primary materials I deem relevant from the colonial period, such that I am able to focus on those materials which are most salient, even in the absence of “SF” as a guiding term. The Conclusion and parts of the Introduction will be the last sections I write, likely after I return to Chicago and have a clear idea of what I will argue in the three main chapters.

Methodological Considerations With the methodologies of posthumanism and media studies both concerned with looking outside the bounds of the text itself, one methodological concern of this dissertation is preventing my objects of analysis from proliferating beyond the scope of feasibility. This is one of the reasons why I have decided to focus my chapters on case studies. By restricting my analytical lens to a given text and its discursive milieu in each time period, I will keep the chapters anchored in a way that will keep the scope of the dissertation from expanding so widely as to become meaningless. This will also allow the texts themselves to drive the argument, rather than me imposing a narrative from my vantage point in the 21st century in the United States. Given that the dissertation’s project is to stay

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 15 rooted in embodied reality, avoiding such transhistoricisms will be key. Furthermore, close reading individual texts in their historical contexts will allow me to remain more attentive to subtle shifts in discourse over the course of the 20th century, which will reveal the nuanced changes in conceptualizations of embodiment within SF discourse throughout history. Case studies are therefore useful in both the dissertation’s scope and in its content. In using case studies, however, I wish to avoid the appearance that these texts are representative of a “standard model” of SF in any given moment. Rather, taking a cue from Miriam Silverberg’s “montage” method in her book Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, I take these texts to be crystallizations of certain key issues in particular historical contexts. In other words, rather than standing in as single instances of a “universal” state for Japanese SF in each period, from which I comprehensively reconstruct the entire cultural sphere around SF in a historical moment, these texts are instead especially vivid examples of the issues of technology and embodiment as they manifest in the historical periods I cover in the dissertation, issues which might be more or less visible in other SF texts in each period. At present, I have three authors in mind for my case studies, and I will begin my research by focusing on works by them. For Chapter 1, I believe Unno Jūza’s combination of modernist sensibilities and proto-SF detective fiction writing will provide an apt lens through which to examine the 1920s and 1930s. In Chapter 2, Komatsu Sakyo’s depictions of an apolitical and transnational practice of science in his apocalyptic fiction presents a fascinating juxtaposition of hope and disaster that I believe will be fruitful to read against the Cold War moment. Finally, in Chapter 3, Project Itoh’s novels and short stories reveal a suspicion of globalization linked to an awareness of the erasure of marginal identities by the operations of capital that sheds fascinating light on the intersection of culture and capital in the early 2000s. While these three authors all appear promising to use as case studies, I am nevertheless open to the possibility that new texts or new authors may emerge over the course of my research that prove more applicable to the issues I take up in this dissertation. I am somewhat concerned at the moment that each case study author is male, and so I will be looking especially at female producers of SF to see where a female author’s perspective could be brought into the discussion. Additionally, the case studies listed here will not be the only texts I read closely in each chapter. In their historical situation within their discursive milieus, these texts would necessarily come into contact with other SF cultural productions, and so I will look at those connections as they arise. In particular, I will be thinking about the transmedial connections I can make to SF film and television production,

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 16 potentially bringing in case studies from non-literary media in each chapter, as well. In short, I will allow my case studies to emerge naturally in conversation with the discursive environments of each historical moment, just as I allow the meaning of those discourses to emerge naturally in conversations with the texts. I do not intend either side of the relationship between text and milieu to be intellectually prior to the other. They are mutually constitutive entities that each exert agency over the relation between them.

Selected Bibliography Abe, Kobo. “Two Essays on Science Fiction.” Translated by Christopher Bolton and Thomas Schnellbächer. Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 3 (November 2002). http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/88/abe.htm. Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Asami, Katsuhiko. SF eiga to hyūmaniti: saibōgu no fu. Tōkyō: Seikyūsha, 2009. Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Bolton, Christopher. Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe Kōbō. Harvard East Asian Monographs 319. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009. Bolton, Christopher, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, and Takayuki Tatsumi, eds. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Bourdaghs, Michael. Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Brown, Steven T. Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Carrington, André M. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 17 Combes, Muriel. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. Translated by Thomas LaMarre. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013. Condry, Ian. The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Feeley, Jennifer, and Sarah Ann Wells, eds. Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Figal, Gerald. “Monstrous Media and Delusional Consumption in Kon Satoshi’s Paranoia Agent.” Mechademia 5 (2010): 139–55. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Fujita, Naoya. Kyokōnai Sonzai: Tsutsui Yasutaka to Atarashii “Sei” no Jigen. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2013. Galbraith, Patrick W, and Jason G. Karlin, eds. Media Convergence in Japan. Kinema Club, 2016. https://ia801507.us.archive.org/16/items/MediaConvergenceInJapan/Media%20Converge nce%20in%20Japan.pdf. Genkaiken, ed. Posutohyūmanitiizu: Itō Keikaku Igo no SF. Tokyo: Nan’undō, 2013. Gerow, Aaron Andrew. A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2008. ———. Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Golley, Gregory. When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008. Grosz, E. A. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Hillis, Ken, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Petit. Networked Affect. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2015. Itō, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji, eds. Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Jacobowitz, Seth. “Between Men, Androids, and : Assaying Mechanical Man in Meiji Literature and Visual Culture.” Mechademia 9, no. 1 (2014): 44–60. ———. “Unno Juza and the Uses of Science in Prewar Japanese Popular Fiction.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 18 LaMarre, Thomas. Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō on Cinema And “oriental” aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2005. ———. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Langer, J. Postcolonialism and Science Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/docDetail.action?docID=10522238. Lippit, Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Lukács, Gabriella. Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Mack, Edward Thomas. Manufacturing Modern : Publishing, Prizes, and the Ascription of Literary Value. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Martin, Reinhold. “The Organizational Complex: Cybernetics, Space, Discourse.” Assemblage, no. 37 (December 1, 1998): 103–27. Napier, Susan J. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1996. Napier, Susan Jolliffe. From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Ogg, Kerin. “Lucid Dreams, False Awakenings: Figures of the Fan in Kon Satoshi.” Mechademia 5 (2010): 157–74. Orbaugh, Sharalyn. “Emotional Infectivity: Cyborg Affect and the Limits of the Human.” Mechademia 3 (2008): 150–72. Ōtsuka, Eiji. “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative.” Translated by Marc Steinberg. Mechademia 5 (2010): 99–116. Page-Lippsmeyer, Kathryn. “The Space of Japanese Science Fiction: Illustration, Subculture, and the Body in ‘SF Magazine.’” Dissertation, University of Southern California, 2016. Partner, Simon. Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Prough, Jennifer Sally. Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2011.

Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 19 Rampo, Edogawa, and Takayuki Tatsumi. The Edogawa Rampo Reader. Translated by Seth Jacobowitz. Fukuoka: Kurodahan Press, 2008. Saito, Tamaki. Beautiful fighting girl. Translated by Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Sato, Takumi. Kingu no Jidai: Kokumin Taishū Zasshi no Kōkyōsei. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Seaman, Amanda C. Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. London: Routledge, 2014. Silverberg, Miriam Rom. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Ninian Mellamphy. University of Western Ontario, 1980. ———. “The Genesis of the Individual.” Translated by Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter. Zone 6 (1992): 296–319. Steinberg, Marc. Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2012. Takatsuki, Maki. Senzen Nihon SF Eiga Sōseiki: Gojira wa nani de dekite iru ka. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2014. Tatsumi, Takayuki, ed. Nihon SF Ronsō-shi. Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 2000. Tatsumi, Takayuki, and Larry McCaffery. Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006. Ueno, Toshiya. “Japanimation and Techno-Orientalism.” Accessed March 15, 2017. http://www.t0.or.at/ueno/japan.htm. Yasar, Kerim. “Electrified Voices: Media Technology and Discourse in Modern Japan.” Dissertation, Columbia University, 2009. Yoshida, Morio, ed. Tantei Shōsetsu to Nihon Kindai. Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2004.

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