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Introduction , Introduction 1. See Ōtomo Katsuhiro, AKIRA (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1984), 1:8–9. See Ōtomo Kat- suhiro, AKIRA (New York: Epic Comics, 1988), 1, no. 1: unpaginated; Ōtomo Katsuhiro, AKIRA (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2000), 1:5 and 10. The animated adaptation shifts the date of the explosion to July 16, 1988, which was the date of the anime’s release in Japan. In the discussion that follows, I have respected Ōtomo’s preference for English capitalization in designating the title of the AKIRA manga series. During the course of its serialization in Young Magazine, Ōtomo experimented with a number of different fonts for the title logo, includ- ing both English and Japanese katakana, before settling on the English uppercase font Impact that adorns the paperback collections and anime, which he thought evoked “an air of American comics.” A diagram showing the various fonts used for the AKIRA logo, as well as Ōtomo’s annotations, is included in Ōtomo Kat- suhiro, Akira Club: The Memory of Akira Lives on in Our Hearts! trans. Kumar Sivasubramanian (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Manga, 2007), unpaginated. 2. That Akira appears not to have aged at all, despite the passage of time since the destruction of Old Tokyo and rebuilding of Neo-Tokyo, is apparently due to his having been stored in a state of suspended animation in a cryogenic chamber following World War III. Akira’s eternal youth also reinforces the perception of his godlike aura. 3. On the symbolism of the Olympic stadium in AKIRA, which was modeled after the National Olympic Stadium that was used as the main stadium for the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 1964, see Susan J. Napier, “Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagi- nation of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira,” Journal of Japanese Studies 19, no. 2 (1993): 347. 4. In the United States, Geof Darrow, the illustrator of Hard Boiled (1990), written by Frank Miller, approaches Ōtomo’s attention to detail and visceral evocation of the beauty of destruction. See Frank Miller and Geof Darrow, Hard Boiled (Mil- waukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1993). On AKIRA’s “postmodern celebration of apocalypse,” see Susan J. Napier, Anime from “Akira” to “Howl’s Moving Castle”: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 260–63; Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Sub- version of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1996), 219; Isolde Standish, “Akira, Postmodernism and Resistance,” in The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, ed. D. P. Martinez (Cambridge: !((PQVAU Cambridge University Press, 1998), 69; and see Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 40–47. 5. Ōtomo, AKIRA (Kōdansha, 1990), 5:343. 6. Ōtomo, Akira Club. Japanese text from Ōtomo Katsuhiro, Akira Club: The Mem- ory of Akira Lives on in Our Hearts! (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1995), unpaginated. 7. Freda Freiberg, “Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime,” in Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, ed. Mick Broderick (London: Kegan Paul International, 1996), 100. 8. This also extends to AKIRA’s genre hybridity, as Freda Freiberg notes, which includes “elements from scifi fiction and movies (the mad scientist, the dystopic future, time and space travel, psychic phenomenon), the horror movie (meta- morphosis from human to monstrous non-human form), the disaster movie (the spectacle of destruction on a massive scale, through fire, flood, earthquake, war, nuclear disaster; escalating panic), the teen pic (classroom capers, teen romances, teenage rebellions) and the suspense thriller (high-speed chases, col- lisions, explosions, thrills and spills) alongside references to indigenous religions and spiritualism.” See Freiberg, “Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime,” 94–95. 9. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 10. See Napier, Anime from “Akira” to “Howl’s Moving Castle,” 39–40, 46. 11. Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, 137; Napier, “Panic Sites,” 343. 12. On bōsōzoku subculture, see Satō Ikuya, Kamikaze Biker: Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Satō Ikuya, Bōsōzoku no esunogurafi: Mōdo no hanran to bunka no jūbaku (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1984); Satō Ikuya, Yankī bōsōzoku shakaijin: Itsudatsuteki raifu sutairu no shizenshi (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1985); Karl Taro Greenfeld, Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan’s Next Generation (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); and Standish, “Akira, Postmodernism and Resistance,” 57–62. 13. Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, 216. Elsewhere, Napier pro- vocatively suggests that “in their frantic motorcycle chases and endless muta- tions,” the bōsōzoku of AKIRA are “attempting to get away from history.” See Napier, “Panic Sites,” 351. 14. Standish, “Akira, Postmodernism and Resistance,” 57–58. On the motorcycle as an ideological symbol, see Yomota Inuhiko, Manga genron (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1999), 376–78; as “an agent of change,” see Napier, Anime from “Akira” to “Howl’s Moving Castle,” 41. 15. I borrow the terms “lines of flight” and “lines of segmentarity” from philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who argue in A Thousand Plateaus that the entire world can be conceived in such terms. In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, these two types of lines pertain to everything from the movement of bodies to the flow of capital. Both society and individual are defined as much by their lines of flight (movements of decoding and deterritorialization) as they are by their segmentary stratifications (movements of overcoding and reterritorial- ization). See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism PQVAU !() and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–4, 216, 222–24. 16. Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, 215. See Freiberg, “Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime,” 97. 17. See David Desser, “Consuming Asia: Chinese and Japanese Popular Culture and the American Imaginary,” in Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia, ed. Jenny Kwok Wah Lau (Philadelphia: Temple Univer- sity Press, 2003), 190–91; see Freiberg, “Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime,” 92, 97–98. 18. An ironic, self-critical reference to the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” a propagandistic concept decreed by the Shōwa-era Japanese government and military to justify Japanese imperialism in China, Manchukuo, and parts of Southeast Asia under the pretense of liberating Asian nations from Western domination. 19. Ōtomo Katsuhiro, AKIRA (Dark Horse Comics, 2002), 6:421. The phrasing of the Japanese text here is a little different from the English translation but gets across the same point: “I hope you’ll consider [what you’re doing] as interference in the internal affairs facing our country [Wa ga kuni ni taisuru naiseikanshō to minasu ii na]!” (6:421). For some reason, although “AKIRA” appears in English on the banner unfurled before the UN troops in the Japanese edition (6:414–15), it is removed from the English translation published by Dark Horse Comics (6:414–15). 20. On the tension between power and control, see Napier, Anime from “Akira” to “Howl’s Moving Castle,” 44. 21. See Freiberg, “Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime,” 95; see Frances Ferguson, “The Nuclear Sublime,” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 5–10. 22. Bill Powell, “Don’t Write Off Japan,” Newsweek 919 (1992): 48. 23. See Napier, “Panic Sites,” 348–49; Napier, Anime from “Akira” to “Howl’s Moving Castle,” 40; Freiberg, “Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime,” 100. 24. See Freiberg, “Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime,” 100–101; Napier, Anime from “Akira” to “Howl’s Moving Castle,” 42. On comparisons between Akira and the titular kami of the Kasuga Wakamiya (“Young Prince Shrine”) dedicated by Fuji- wara Tadamichi in 1135 inside the compound of the Kasuga Shrine in Nara, see Komata Toji, “Nagare to chikara no hate ni,” Yuriika 20, no. 10 (1988): 54–67. Kasuga Wakamiya is a youthful syncretic god combining the attributes of renewal and wisdom. He is thought to be the incarnation of Manjusri, the Buddhist bod- hisattva of wisdom who wields a sword to cleave ignorance. 25. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7–13. 26. Azuma Hiroki, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2009), 103. 27. I am using the term “defamiliarization” in the sense given to it by Fredric Jame- son in relation to the genre of science fiction: “In reality, the relationship of this form of representation, this specific narrative apparatus, to its ostensible con- tent—the future—has always been more complex than this. For the apparent realism, or representationality, of SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us ‘images’ of the future—whatever such images might mean for a reader who will necessarily predecease their ‘materialization’— but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present, !) PQVAU and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization.” See Fredric Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 27 (July 1982): 152. 28. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Part I An earlier, much abridged version of Part I was published in Mechademia 3: Lim- its of the Human, ed. Frenchy Lunning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 222–53. 1. Oshii Mamoru and Ueno Toshiya, “Anime wa zure kara hajimaru: 2D to 3D no hazama de,” Yuriika 30, no. 4 (2004): 59. Also see Sharalyn Orbaugh, “Franken- stein and the Cyborg Metropolis: The Evolution of Body and City in Science Fiction Narratives,” in Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Ani- mation, ed. Steven T.
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