"I Am Not a Machine": Remapping Political Discourse in Postmodem Japanese Media Presented for Distinction in the Field of English, May 2014 Patrick Carland Advisors: Christopher Craig, PhD Chad Diehl, PhD Kelly McGuire, PhD

©Patrick Carland Abstract

The aftennathof the 1989 economic recession in Japan, as well as the subsequent "Lost

Decade" for of the 1990s and 2000s, have generated profound social and cultural change throughout Japanese society. Concurrent to these changes have been the rise and internationalization of Japanese popular media, which hitherto has been read as largely apolitical and formed externally to changing socioeconomic conditions. In this paper, three specific Japanese new media texts, the 1995 series Neon Genesis Evangelion, 2008's Kaiba, and the video game Yume Nikki, are analyzed in relation to post-1989 social and economic change, and ultimately suggest a new, youth led subculture emerging from the Lost Decade, one that uses new media and discursive techniques to engage and critique contemporary social and political issues.

I. Introduction

In her essay "Suffering Forces Us to Think beyond the Right-Left Barrier", Tokyo- based writer Karin Amamiya shows us the oblique evolution of her political thought, tracing how her experiences as a young adult in the recessionary economy of the 1990s and the

2000s led her from frustration, to despairity, to becoming a member and spokesperson for the far-right nationalist group Totsugekitai, an organization that glorified both the Japanese

Empire and denied its war crimes. Her story, of alienation, desperation and isolation illustrates the situation of the so called "Lost Decade" in Japan, young people who have grown up in a recessionary Japan with little hope for the stable work or class security their parents took for granted. "Living in the so-called recession or job market ice age after the economic bubble burst, I knew in my heart that day by day I continued to lose more, and that my own will had nothing to do it with it. I knew it from the way that a guy at my part-time workplace confessed that he was unable to go to the university of his choice and was working there because his father was in enonnous debt after the bubble burst. 1 knew it in the way my salary kept going down little by little, and from the way that 1 couldn't see anything beyond life as a freeter, and from the way that the future just around the corner was far too unclear."

(Amamiya, 2010, p. 256) Amamiya's generation are part of a growing population of

"freeters"; those who, lacking access to the security corporate employment provided their predecessors, find themselves caught in a cycle of unstable, temporary work, lacking financial or social security and all but shut out from the Japanese political process; as

Amamiya puts it, "1 felt like 1 was alone, floating and drifting about five centimeters apart from "society". 1 wanted to fit in, but there was no place for me. 1 was a searching for a place where people would let me in. "

Her primary concerns, the question of labor security and material inequality, are at the core of labor and leftist discourse, but try as she may, she could never feel at home in such movements, writing that "the language they used was difficult, and 1 had no idea what they were talking about." Alienated from leftist discussion, she instead turned towards the far-right and nationalism, for she "saw the sanctity 1 had forgotten in the right-wing unifonn," and found a new nostalgia for a unified and unfragmentedJapan supposedly existing at the time before the War. Nationalist ideologies in Japan, as theorist Akira Asada notes, constitute a

"displaced expression of frustration" fonned from "a decade of economic stagnation and the discredit of a corrupt and ineffectual political system, which has been unable to refonn itself." (Asada, 2000) Politically, hegemony in the fonn of the ruling Liberal Democratic

Party, or LDP, for whom "everything was pennitted - no matter how corrupt - as long as the

Left was excluded from power," has made the fonnation of a salient leftist movement very difficult in Japan since the 1960s. Despite significant protest movements arising against the

US-Japan Security Treaty's renewal during this time, as Asada notes, the Japanese left-wing has stagnated in the face of long-tenn economic security, torn between Stalinist and New Left factions that have thus far remained divisive and lacked a united front to confront changing conditions in Japanese capitalism. Concurrently, neonationalism has seen a resurgent strength, exemplified by writers like Amamiya and in the successes of political figures like

Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara. And a result of the left'sinsolvency, it has been, alongside neoliberalism, remained mostly unchallenged, and gone on to shape the parameters for discussions of the recession for young people and the elite alike.

In the aftermath of the 1980s bubble economy and the prolonged recession emerging from it, Japanese social and political discourse has seen an intense debate regarding the source, nature and contours of the recession, and how it should be combated. As Tomiko

Yoda notes, the current dialogue has conceived of the recession as a discrete rupture in the previous postwar logic, an error that emerged either from the degradation of Japanese identity by the economic-political complex or from that complex's inability to adapt to the changing conditions of globalization. From the former camp, neonationalists like Ishihara posit the reintegration of a pre-modern, pure Japanese identity, disentangled from the United States and defined on racial and nationalistic lines as vital in reestablishing Japanese dignity and autonomy. The neoliberal camp points to the incestuous relationship between Japanese corporations and the state as the source of Japan's malaise, and argues that it is necessary for

Japan to dismantle the Keynesian state it has created in the postwar era so that it can establish a purer, globally oriented capitalism, in-line with the United States. Both narratives, however, are dependent on the modernist idea that Japanese economic and social evolution has been a steady march of progress since the occupation, and thereby occlude potential sites of resistance and subversion throughout Japanese history, such as the rise of student protestors in the 60s and anned left-wing paramilitary groups in the 70s. Rather than tracing the roots of Japan's economic and social malaise to the postwar reorganization of political capital, when domestic, corporate and international forces collaborated to make Japan not only a site of capitalist dominance but a critical bulwark against the communist forces of China and Russia, neonationalists and neoliberals alike conceive of the recession as a rupture, an aberration in the system rather than an efficacy of it. Furthermore, accepting the modernist narrative of uninhibited Japanese progress without historical or discursive interventions may lead us to diagnose the current social and fragmentation of the Japanese system as being endemic to all capitalist systems as they enter postmodernity. Accepting such a claim validates the naive hope that capitalism, left to its own devices, will simply collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, making any dialectical or critical interventions unnecessary. In order to understand the present condition of Japanese society and to break free of both neonationalist and neoliberal discourses, analysis of the recession, in both its roots and efficacies, must be undertaken. This begins firstly with the process by which modernism has paved the way to postmodernity; in positing the development of Japan's economy and society in totalizing Hegelian terms, the modernist narrative eventually gives way to posthistorical ideologies, to the idea that history has been closed off as a site of contention and that all that remains is an eternal present.

The posthistorical narrative, Asada notes, accounts for the popularity of such theorists as Baudrillard and Den"ida in Japan during the pre-recession 80s; in their theorizations of postmodern society as being liberated from the modernist signiferlsignified dichotomy,

Japanese intellectuals found validation in their country's economic configuration, which no longer depended on such feeble western binaries of state/market and which could endlessly propel its own growth and development. A popular anecdote even states that the head of a major department store chain made his employees read Baudrillard's Simulacra and

Simulation so that they would understand his company's goals. But in accepting the terms of modernist ideology, liberal intellectuals failed to develop a multifaceted historical analysis of the Japanese condition, and were thus blindsided by the recession and its corollary social effects, exemplified by the degradation of the Japanese lifetime employment system, the Aum

Shirinkyo gas attacks of '95, and the stagnation of Japanese wages and labor. While neoliberal intellectuals blame "Japan Inc. " and the effect it has had on Japan's international competitiveness, neonationalists bemoan the loss of an organic Japanese identity and desire the creation of a pure, antediluvian Japan, politically autonomous and racially pure. For the neoliberals, the flaw in the system is in its outmoded breed of capitalism wherein state and economy freely intermingle; for the neonationalists, it is the perennial Other, the Chinese,

Korean, Capitalist deviant that has impeded Japan in its march towards supremacy. The irony, of course, is that while both theories posit that Japan's long march towards greatness has been interrupted, both depend on the modernist narrative that progress itself is a constant and that capitalism in an ultimate condition that cannot be critiqued, impeded or intervened upon in its march towards posthistory.

But to suggest that this has been a wholly uncontested phenomenon, without opposition or intervention in any area of Japanese social or cultural life, would be to wholly ignore the complex responses the Japanese media landscape has produced in relation to the recession and its impact on the young. It is pertinent to look towards the recent evolution

Japanese popular media, particularly the mediums of animation and video garnes, both of which that have in the past two decades begun to exert enormous national and international influence. Unique among developed, capitalist countries, the crisis of Japanese capitalism predates the international 2008 recession crisis, by nearly two decades, and has already produced a wide range of social, psychological and cultural reactions in the short and long term to changing economic conditions those elsewhere are only beginning to realize. One specific text that marks a seminal shift from the long postwar to the recession mindset is the 1988 film Akira, directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. Akira tells the story of a post-apocalyptic

Tokyo as a dark, labyrinthine jungle of urban decay and violence, where the Japanese political and economic machines had begun cannibalizing themselves, and where the power of youth, represented by young psychics, was coercively controlled and weaponized by a government bent on achieving economic and political dominance. The dark, apocalyptic vision presented in Akira proved to be enormously successful, and subtly but perceptibly changed the course of 90s and 2000s anime. (Napier, 2005) The paradigmatic shift Akira presented led to the deconstruction of many of the classic tropes in Japanese animation, and directly inspired a number of series, including Mamoru Oishii's Ghost in The Shell franchise and Hideaki Anno's enormously successful Neon Genesis Evangelion. But more than just pushing a flashy, subversive aesthetic to the forefront of Japanese animation, Akira helped to establish a critical aesthetic currency, a set of narrative and visual techniques used to critique both the Japanese pop culture industry and the contemporary state of Japan. And, as this paper argues, it is through both the aesthetic and narrative techniques pioneered by the post­

Akira and post-1989 animation movement and the unique contours of the Japanese pop culture industry that that a new body of works producing salient, left-wing criticisms of the

Japanese economic and cultural condition has emerged and remained enormously successful to the present day.

Key to the continued success of the Japanese animation and pop culture industry is its interlocking nature; various media forms and narratives are constructed to bridge different mediums, to have multifaceted appeal and to be marketable through a spectrum of modes and means. For instance, the international hit franchise Pokemon represents not just a video game, but an endless array of toys, television shows, movies, fashion, music, and merchandise. This has led a number of theorists, among them Eij i Otsuka and Hiroki Azuma, to term the

Japanese pop culture industry as reflective of a postmodern shift of the nature of narrative consumption itself. Otsuka theorizes that the various smaller narratives, found in the form of collectible toys, cards, and purchasable materials, constitute smaller parts of a greater metanarrative; for the buyer, the purchasing of new merchandise is an unconscious striver towards creating a unified narrative, a logically continuous body of work and discourse.

Azuma, however, disagrees, and takes the consumption patterns of anime and video games a step further, saying that it represents the consumption of information with the need for narrative, a libidinally charged feast of floating signifiers and information (Azuma, 2009). In the "database" formation of Japanese pop culture, he argues, there is no narrative or meaning to be found, merely the triumph of a postmodern shift in consumption patterns, from narrative to non-narrative.

These two phenomena, of the discourse surrounding Japan's economic recession and the shift of narrative consumption in its culture industry, may seem incongruouswith one another. But it is impossible to understand the success of the potential of Japan's pop culture without first understanding the context from which it has emerged. With the demise of the metanarrative and the movement away from the structuralist signifier/signified binary, consumers of media have divided into disembodied and decontextualized groups organized by shared media interests and marked by an unwillingness to engage with larger cultural constructs, what Otsuka and Azuma both refer to as "metanarratives". This is a phenomenon that not only describes cultural consumption, but ideological consumption as well.

Amamiya's engagement with the Japanese far right can be read in these terms as well as more straightforward nationalistic ones: by joining a political organization whose goals, rather than being informed by a uniform set of ideologies or convictions, were disparate and focused on tangentially related topics (the revision of textbooks, the Korean/Chinese islands controversies, the usage of Japanese names by Zainichi Koreans) one can read her political engagement as an entry into this world of subculture, where data and information are consumed rather than engaged contextually. Politics, like pop culture, are built on a series of cues and semic codes, interchangeable and ahistorical bits of ideology which constitute an identity up for grabs to the consumer. It is no coincidence that much of the Japanese far right, especially young far rightists, are deeply attached to anime and various Japanese pop culture

(Marx, 2012). But the disjointed, database-structured nature of the Japanese pop culture narrative has allowed for something else; the critical intervention of artists and writers who, by manipulating the currency of the established form, have found the capability to shock mainstream viewers and confront them with new information, ideology and criticisms.

Through an adapted form of deconstruction, these creators have embedded their works with critiques of the contemporary state of recession-addled, capitalist Japan and simultaneously found huge success in doing so; they have adapted their own ideology and tenets to the non­ narrative based media that constitute Japanese pop culture with immense success. In this study, I will examine three such artists, analyzing their major works, the ways in which they have used the media of animation and video games to embody their ideology in unique ways, and the overall success and efficacies of their projects. Each of these creators represents a unique critique of contemporary Japan, and eac has had both domestic and international success in their endeavors. But has their success, it must be asked, been simply commercial, or have their works ultimately spurred social change and growth that can be seen today?

Firstly, I will examine the work of Hideaki Anno, the celebrated creator of the enormously successful Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise, first released in 1995. Hideaki

Anno's work is famous internationally for its borrowing from various theorists, philosophers and psychoanalysts in creating an abstract and emotionally charged character-based narrative, and it continues to draw the attention and analysis of cultural theorists today. However, some of the archetypes it set forth in its time, in particular the intense sexualization of young female characters, have been fully embraced by much of the contemporary Japanese pop culture industry in ways inimical to Anno's own critique of the subject, and the efficacies of the project remain to be seen in full. Second, I will analyze the newer works ofMasaaki

Yuasa, with particular attention to his 2008 work Kaiba. Kaiba is a science fiction anime about a world where bodies and memories can be physically separated from one another, and where bodies can be sold as commodities and the egregiously wealthy can have any number of bodies. Yuasa's work, though not as well-known as Anno's, explores many of the same themes of identity, alienation and existence in an oppressive world that the former's do, and utilizes novel aesthetic stylizations to drive its ideological arguments home. Lastly, I will analyze the 2004 video game Yume Nikki, an abstract, freely released internet game that, through abstract visuals and no dialogue, engages suicide, belonging and reality and which has spurred an enormous, unprecedented amount of lay analysis and discussion from its online fanbase.

These three narratives provide a unique triune analysis that shows the successive stages of reconceptualizing hegemonic spaces and creating a new site of resistance.

Evangelion first defines a set of problems with the current understandings and assumptions the Japanese condition is predicated upon, and Kaiba proposes a broad and revolutionary solution to the issues Evangelion calls attention to. Yume Nikki, finally, internalizes the messages of these works and provides a case study of the ways audiences will interpret their implications, and whether the possibility of gleaning revolutionary and critical meanings within popular texts mediated by a cultural industry is possible at all. I will analyze both their content and the contours of the medium from which they emerge, and whether their success represents the beginnings of nascent social change in Japan or the triumph of Azuma's post­ ideological database novel, wherein all forms of information and media are consumed without analysis or reflection. Ultimately, I will argue, that while it may not be possible for these media to produce devastating critiques of the Japanese political and culture machines as long as they remain at least partially embedded in them, they produce discursive sites of resistance often overlooked in contemporary analyses of Japan, and represent an exciting new arena of contradiction, contention and ideological struggle within Japanese cultural and political life.

II - How Selfish of Him, to be human: Evangelion, Violence and Identity

"I mustn't run away. I mustn't run away. I mustn't run away. " So repeats Shinji Ikari in the first episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, teary-eyed and collapsed on the ground, as he forces himself to pilot an enormous cyborg he's never seen before to fight a demonic, white-masked creature called an "Angel" at the request of a father who hasn't spoken to him in years. In a conventional anime setup, particularly one in the mecha genre, 14-year-old

Shinji would have no problem entering the robot with gusto, defeating the Angel and saving

Tokyo-03 without a second thought. He would then spend the series engaged in ever more destructive battles, culminating in an explosive and enthralling finale where the evil would be vanquished and the teenage heroes would triumph, regardless of cost. But the progression and fulfillment of such a narrative structure would depend on a single constancy; the knowledge that, no matter what they might do, the protagonist is always the protagonist, that his role is a constant and unchanging reality, the reality. In Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion, however, where from the outset the "hero" only manages to act in his prescribed role "with the greatest reluctance and aftera display of temper, fear, and vulnerability, "(Napier, 2005, p

425) no such stability can exist.

In her paper "Where the Machines Stop" Susan Napier notes an emerging trend of

"the apocalyptic critique of technology," which in the past three decades has developed in tandem with the growth of mecha anime. Such narratives "encompass a problematic contemporary vision of human identity vis-it-vis not only technology but often the nature of reality itself," (Napier 421). Incorporating notions of alienation, fragmentation and ambivalence towards technology, such narratives illustrate an anxiety regarding the relationship between technology and reality, problematizing the latter and raising the insistent question of "What happens to human identity in the virtual world?" (Napier 419). Quoting

Jeffrey Sconce, she notes that, in such narratives, "where there were once whole human subjects, there are now only fragmented and decentered subjectivities, metaphors of

'simulation' and 'simulacra'. " (Sconce, 2000) The notion of fragmentation here is especially critical, both in a literary and a physical sense; it describes the intrinsic relationship between technology and violence within the apocalyptic mecha narrative. In the most prominent anime series that follow this format, violence, usually directed towards the destruction of bodies and selves that are neither wholly biological nor artificial, is constant, both as a means of moving the narrative forward and towards actualizing an idealized, un-fragmented self. In a reality in which the demarcation between machine and flesh, stable and unstable become complicated and almost impossible to define, it is only through violence - its use, its repetition, its augmentation through technological means - that the characters in the narrative can hope to reclaim an identity that is anything more than terminal and arbitrary. And because of this problematic relationship, violence as an indicator of a stable "real" becomes increasingly distant and vague, allowing for a mystification and justification of apocalyptic forms of destruction through the mystification of technology itself.

In Evangelion, the protagonist, Shinji Ikari, initially resists the technology given to him, thoroughly convinced he is too weak and incompetent to use it. He is one of three specially designated 14 year olds known as the "Children" those born within a year of the apocalyptic Second Impact whose mothers' souls are infused in the Evangelion Units, massive cyborgs that are both biological and mechanical in nature. TheseEvangelions are used to combat the existential threat of the Angels, mysterious, inhuman beings that take on increasingly abstract fonns as the series progresses. It is here that the initial dialectic that defines Shinji's role in the series emerges; upon being asked to pilot the EVA (or

Evangelion), he experiences the Lacanian mirror stage, "identification ...the transfonnation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume1 an image-an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase," (Lac an, 2006).

To Lacan, the mirror stage "marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child," and "typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body image.". He posits a point in the development of the child at which they become capable of recognizing their mirror image as just that, an image; it is that this moment that the image becomes an imago for the child, a desired, whole and unified vision of the self that contrasts with the fragmented self over which they have little control, motor or emotional. Desire is thus inscribed unto the child, who seeks to actualize the imagined self-image, a theoretical point in space which they can only approach "asymptotically," and "in a fictional direction," as Lacan puts it Evangelion specifically invokes this theory in its juxtaposition of Shinji and his EVA unit; while he is initially consumed with anxiety and despair over his perceived inability to pilot the EVA, he soon gains a reason for doing so; when he does, he is praised.

His father, his friends, everyone tells him what a good boy he is, how excellent he is for being an EVA pilot and helping to protect the world. Shinji's desire to act as the EVA pilot, as Miller puts it, comes from the fact that "he exists in a state of pure lack," with desire forcibly inscribed onto him by others. (Miller, 2009) Shinji manifests the Lacanian fragmented body, and the EVA, the behemoth of technological might through which can act as a hero and win the affection of his father, is the image he seeks to become. Such self­ actualization, as the series goes on to show, is impossible, and only leads to further destabilization of the self. Throughout the course of the narrative, Evangelion continuously calls into question the motivations and psychologies of its protagonists, all of whom are shown to be as emotionally volatile as Shinji. It juxtaposes intense scenes of violence with the psychic struggles of its characters, playing the two out side by side in what Napier calls a "bifurcated" narrative. The violent exchanges between the EVA Pilots, Shinji and his copilots Asuka

Langley and Rei Ayanami, and the Angels that seek to destroy them, form the crux of the narrative for the majority of the series, with each episode taking the format of a battle between them. The viewer learns little about the nature of the Angels or the EVA Units, and although questions are raised by the characters as to the intent and nature of the organization they work under, NERV, little is revealed until the final episodes. A steady, almost monotonous rhythm builds, and the show plays out in a standard, 26-episode anime format, its smaller episodic narratives linking together to form a continuously building story arc. But the continuity of this pattern is abruptly and violently shattered by the 19th episode, when

Shinji is forced by his father to destroy the prototype EVA-Unit piloted by his classmate Toji, nearly killing him in the process.

It is here that Evangelion illustrates and illuminates a break in the previously invisible ideological apparatus in which Shinji operates. Althusser, in writing on the nature of ideology as an unseen system of control, notes that in an ideological apparatus, "The individual in question behaves in such a such a way, adopts such and such a practical attitude, and, what is more, participates in certain regular practices which are those of the ideological apparatus on which 'depend' the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen as a subject. " (Althusser, 26) The operation of ideology is such that its functions become embedded beneath a veneer of "commonsensical" decisions and practices, which the subject is led to believe he chooses to accept of his own volition. In Shinji's case, the opportunity to simply leave NERV, and to not be a pilot, is frequently presented to him, both seriously and as a means to motivate him, but its presence is always false. Like Tetsuo in Akira, upon whom telekinetic abilities were forced by the government, Shinji has at this point found himself integrated into NERV's apparatus of control, without whom he is convinced he is nothing. His identity, which he has only been able to define by his utility to NERV and the people around him, is one in which he acts as an interpellative subject; his existence has become predicated on continuously performed acts of violence, which he has hitherto managed to distance from himself, by directing it towards the Angels, abstractions towards which empathy is nigh impossible. Following Miller's thesis that "If a lack exists, then it is forced upon the subject by the sociocultural milieu in which s/he is situated," (Miller, 146)

Evangelion illustrates that Shinji's role within NERV is one in which he must subsume himself to the EVA in order to maintain an identity, a role which places him at the center of a systematic, global attempt by the organization to actualize a unified Lacanian imago: instrumentality.

After the incident with Toji, the narrative structure of the series begins to fall apart; instead of battling and defeating Angels in fantastical fight sequences, the characters begin to question the roles prescribed to them, and their purpose for fighting the Angels, and they revisit the psychological wounds that have plagued from the beginning. Shinji's copilot,

Asuka, slowly unravels after her defeat by an Angel, having hinged her entire identity on an image of herself as the world's greatest pilot, unbeatable and unparalleled. Shinji's caretaker,

Captain Misato Katsuragi, similarly finds herself realizing the shallowness of her relationships, even half-heartedly attempting to seduce Shinji after the death of her previous lover, Kaji Ryoji. For Shinji, the final rupture occurs when he is asked to kill the last Angel, who, unlike the others, is not monstrous, abstract, nor demonic - he is Kaworu Nagisa, the only person in the entire series who shows Shinji real, unconditional love. Present for only a single episode, Kaworu becomes a representation of everything Shinji seeks to actualize through his role as the EVA Pilot - he does not makes demands of Shinji, he does not seek to use him or hurt, and only shows him love and understanding, right up to the point where he tells Shinji to crush him in the hands of his EVA Unit. Kaworu's presence is itself a manifestation of the impossible desire that has been inscribed into Shinji through NERV, and it is no coincidence that it is NERV which ultimately forces him to kill Kaworu. The efficacies of Kaworu's death are twofold; it both illustrates the vapidity and illusory nature of

Shinji's imago and represents the final rupture, after which Evangelion drops its pretense of being focused on the confrontations between Angels and Humans, and instead focuses exclusively on the internal psyches of its characters and the ways in which their selves are constructed, reproduced, and can ultimately be deconstructed.

The final two episodes of Evangelion can be described as analogous to a psychoanalysis session, with the characters sitting in an otherwise empty space while an unseen diegetic voice speaks to them via text on the screen, asking questions such as "WHY

DO YOU PILOT EVA?" and responding to the answers given. Characters float in out of the non-linear narrative, explaining their neuroses, their anxieties, and their ultimate plans to this voice, all of which reveals the ultimate goal of NERV; Instrumentality, the ultimate actualization of the desired self. "Our minds lack something basic, " One of the characters starts in a narrative carried on by the others;

"We fear that deficiency. We fear it. That is why we are attempting to become one. We will meld with and fill each other. This is instrumentality. Mankind cannot live without being surrounded by others. Mankind cannot survive alone. [ ...] That's why life is sad and empty. That's why you want affection, the close physical and mental presence of others. That is why we wish to become one. [ ...] That's why, via Instrumentality, mankind must fill and complement each other. " (Anno, Ep. 26) But the text does not let this explanation stand unquestioned. "WHY?" it immediately intones via text on the screen. "M ust you ask?" Shinji's father replies, "Because there is no other way to exist."

"REALLY?"

The exchange between Gendo Ikari and the diegetic voice provide a microcosm for the entire argument Evangelion makes, both within itself and relationally to the genre from which it arises. For Gendo, the head of NERV, there is no other way to exist because there cannot be any other way to exist. In Ideology, Althusser describes the ideological conceptions men hold as "Not their real conditions of existence, their real world ...it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them here. It is this relation which is at the centre of every ideological, i.e., imaginary, representation of the real world. It is this relation that contains the 'cause' which has to explain the imaginary distortion of the ideological representation of the real world. " (Althusser, P. 24) The nature of instrumentality, of the purported preexisting lack that the characters can only fill through the actualization of protagonist roles, through their selves as EVA Pilots, agents of NERV, as utility to NERV in general, can only be fulfilled through the distortion that Althusser speaks of. The argument

Gendo furthers for the creation of the Instrumentality Project, which can within this context be understood as the ultimate culmination of the mystified violence it has reproduced, depends on an appeal to nature, an arbitrary and peremptory declaration that "there is no other way to exist." To destabilize these mystifications implicit in its own narratological premise, Evangelion questions and ultimately deconstructs the primary mystification that its plot hitherto has been constructed upon.

In Akira's ambiguous ending, we do not see what becomes of the world after it is

ii enveloped in Tetsuo's all-consuming jouissance\ and the same is true of Evangelion Within the narrative of the final two episodes, however, the potential for a new understanding of the self and desire emerges. In the final scenes of the last episode, the narrative shifts drastically, depicting a version of Evangelion as a slice of life anime, with Shinji as an average middle school student, Asuka as his girlfriend, and with a caring mother and father who love him wholly and without condition. Previously, Shinji says that without the EVA, he is nothing, but as this sequence of potentialities shows, the Shinji-As-EVA is only one construction of

Shinji in a potentially unlimited number of such. "I get it, this is also a possible world. " Shinji says as the sequence ends. "One possibility that's in me. The me right now is not exactly who

I am. All sorts of mes are possible. That's right. A me that's not an EVA pilot is possible too. " In recognizing that, as Miller says, he is composed of "a multiplicity of drives, none of which remains dominant for long," Evangelion frees Shinji of the need to actualize his imago through the EVA and destabilizes the very concept of Instrumentality, which exists as the logical conclusion of the ideology of technology and mystification of violence therein within

Evangelion. The final parodic sequence is of especially large significance here; in rewriting the story of Evangelion within a different genre framework, the text demonstrates that the characters, as signifiers within the text and the construction of a consciously delineated genre can only be understood within the text, as formations which obey the internal ideologies of the text. The source of the destabilization herein comes from Evangelion's introduction of the characters into a different ideological framework, showing their inherent mutability and the imperative of the text to categorize them by their function as protagonist, antagonist, and otherwise. This function serves an insidious role; it perpetuates and mystifies a system predicated on constant violence, a form of text that defines itself on the accumulation of violence, of new technology and modes of being derived exclusively from those two things.

The desired self thus becomes a desire for violence, which is in turn masked as a desire to save the world, a desire to be the "hero". One of the voice actresses on the series, Megumi

Hayashibara, commenting on Shinji's character, puts it best:

"Look at Shinji. Why does he continue to fight as an Eva pilot? The story keeps changing. He said it's because everyone tells him to. Because only he can do it. Because it has to be done to save humanity. Selfless and lofty sentiments for sure, and he believed those reasons to be genuine. Wrong; he wanted his father to approve of him. To say he was a good boy. How selfish of him, really, to be a human being. " (Sadomoto, Evangelion Vol. 3)

But to Evangelion, this desire is not so selfish. In fact, it isn't even real. Through

Shinji's struggle, Evangelion forwards a critique of technological apparatuses, a constant

iii presence in mecha anime and SF anime as a whole, as ultimately dehumanizing, unstable, and impossible to perpetuate without continuous, unmitigated violence. Like Akira before it,

Evangelion shows that the mystification of interpellative roles within texts, and the creation of desire that derives from these roles, creates an anxiety and psychoses that can only culminate in the destruction of all selves, all potentialities both real and imagined. But unlike

Akira, in Evangelion we find reason to believe this is not inevitable. As Shinji realizes, the hero is ultimately a product of ideology, of a system that inscribes an always present lack that produces the anxiety and need for some other self, something that is more. The self that is constructed for us is but one self, and beyond that one self, countless multiplicities, possibilities, and realities may exist, in a constantly shifting interplay wherein each self only defers to the next. And it is when this instability is recognized, acceptedand integratedinto the framework of the self, the ideology of lack can be demystified and the cycle of violence it reproduces can ultimately be broken.

III: Memories Without Bodies: Kaiba and the Postmodern Condition

From the time it came out in 1995 to the present day, the Evangelion franchise has been one of the most commercially and internationally successful anime franchises of all time. From the creation of massive numbers of spinoff toys, video games, manga and doujinshi and the continuation of the series in both the final End of Evangel ion film and the contemporary Rebuild series, Evangelion has been thoroughly integrated into the framework of the Japanese pop culture industry. What is especially striking about this marked success is the duality of its nature; even as Evangelion relentlessly critiqued contemporary anime archetypes and tropes, it still found itself catering to them, and ultimately has found itself fully ingratiated in the contemporary industry. Even as characters such as Rei Ayanami criticize the anime archetype of waifish, subservient moe girls by blowing them out of proportion, as a cultural and sex symbol she has been wholeheartedly embraced by the very communities her very character rhetorically attacked. The efficacy of Evangelion has been similarly mixed; even as subsequent anime and manga productions embraced much of the aesthetic and narrative techniques the Evangelion series helped to establish, this has not been paired with any sort of textual critique on par with the one the original 1995 show made about the pop culture industry as a whole. Ultimately, even as Evangelion helped to begin an ongoing discursive critique of Japanese society that has remained potent to the present day, as a piece of media its primary effect has been in influencing surface level aesthetics of subsequent productions, shaping the visual and shallow narrative components of contemporary media rather than pushing them in an inner-looking and self-critiquing direction.

The textual influence of Evangelion, however, has not been lost, and can be seen to varying degrees in an enormous amount of sci-fi related anime, whether as a direct influence or as a deletrious mass that must be responded to and pushed against. A more contemporary series that seems to both respond to and criticize Evangelion, as well as carrying on its broader social critique, is the 2008 anime series Kaiba, created and directed by Masaaki

Yuasa. Unlike the Evangelion franchise, the 13-episode Kaiba remains both in Japan and internationally an obscure series, relegated more to art-house crowds and sci-fi enthusiasts than the public at large. On an industry level, beyond collector's items there has been very little external merchandise produced of Kaiba, a key factor in analyzing any given series' popularity and influence. Nonetheless, in Kaiba, there is a shared concern for the conditions of the self in the postmodern condition, as well as in-depth exploration of the problem of identity in mechanistic and interpellative society.

Using a surreal science-fiction world and an artistic palette reminiscent of a childrens' storybook, Kaiba tells the story of a young man who awakes with a gaping hole in his stomach and no memory of who he is. As the series progresses, he finds himself enmeshed in the goings on of a science fiction world where the connection between body and memory, already fuzzy in our world, is completely severed. In the world of Kaiba, it is possible for memories to be dismebodied and stored in tiny cylindrical chips, thus allowing for bodies to be exchanged and sold at will. For the poor and marginalized of this world, the literal exchange of bodies is a necessity, and the ability to retain bodily autonomy is considered a luxury only the wealthy bouergeoise can afford. This is the central problem considered in

Kaiba, for as the protagonist continuously changes bodies (and in the process, genders) in the attempt to figure out who he is, he finds himself further and further alienated from any stable sense of identity, a problem only compounded when he learns that there are multiple copies of him running around, all claiming to be the true one. Like Evangelion, Kaiba shares a concern with alienation in the Marxist sense - embedded in the metaphor of bodies being literally commodified and the mind-body connection being severed as the result of intrisnically hostile economic conditions - and with Althusserian conditions of interpellation, wherein identity can only be maintained on the basis of fulfilling pre-prescribed socioeconomic positions.

The dependence on a capitalist system for the creation of identity is shown to be especially precarious in the fourth episode of Kaiba, an episode which deftly illustrates the basic thesis of the 13-episode show. In the episode, a girl named Chroniko, whose only prized possession are a pair of bright red boots she owns, decides to sell her body so she can help to support her impoverished family. However, though she is led to believe her memory will eventually be reinstalled into a new body and she will be able to continue her life, her memory chip is in reality crushed as soon as it is removed from her body on the behest of a scheming aunt who ostensibly hates her and cannot afford to take care of her. Justifying her actions in saying the money will help her immediately family, she seems to show no remorse in the killing of her niece - until she is confronted with her bright red boots and the piano they used top lay together. In a stunning sequence, the aunt is overwhelmed with positive memories of Chroniko, illustrating that beneath her veneer of indifference there exists a genuine love, from which a tortured conscience over her actions arises. As she plays the piano, the aunt confronts her own moral pain and reveals an inner humanity, born through her memories and connections to the niece she has sold away and murdered. The aunt, forced into a positon where she must destroy her loved ones and sense of self for the sake of survival, ultimately relocates her sense of being in the act of loving someone else - and has a breaks down as a result, trapped and crushed by a system where meaningful relationships are not possible.

In Evangelion, we are confronted with the issue of establishing a meaningful identity where the very act of claiming a self in an individualistic and capitalist framework is compromised by the inculcation of all possible identity markers in a capitalist nexus. Kaiba similarly illustrates the dilemna of identity by showing that the machine goes beyond our labor and seeks to penetrated our very bodies, commodifying and reducing them to interchangeable capital within the system. When our bodies themselves can be endlessly redirected through the apparatus of commerce and the flow of capital, the formation of identity and meaningful relationships becomes entirely predicated on the flow of economic structures themselves, and the human "I" is lost in an endless series of transactions on which they have no control. Such is the case with Chroniko, whose very existence as an autonomous human being is ended with the crushing of her memory chip, and the protagonist, Warp, whose litera self multiplies and becomes utterly indiscernable the harder he searches for it.

And yet, in Kaiba we see a simple and endlessly optimistic solution to the question of

"meaningful" identity, which is to say a sense of self no longer contingent on the structures and intercourse of capital itself. Even when Chroniko dies and her body becomes an undistinguishable part of the flow of human capital, part of her - an image, a fragment, an imprint in the Spinozan sense - remains in the melancholic piano song and memory of her aunt. In the social dimension, through the memories of the aunt and the people she has affected, a version of Chroniko arises - a self that is by no means stable or unchanging, but one which exists in some capacity external to the ideology of the world that physically destroys bodies and memories. This is the Kaiba's thesis; that even when bodies and memories can be commodified and the human I lost in their rearticulation, the only meaningful way we can understand who we are and where we are going is through one another. This thesis is repeated in the final episodes of the series, wherein Warp begins to reclaim memories not of himself but of his lover, Neiro. Through these memories, Warp begins to develop and articulate a new sense of himself, independent of the countless clone of himself that all claim to be the "real" Warp. And in the end, this is what allows Warp to begin a human "I" again - not through the memories of himself, nor through a process of accepting the diffusive multiplicites of self as in Evangelion, but in relocating the locus of identity to the social dimension, and affirming the place of the individual as part of a humanity that cannot and should not be reduced to interchangeable bodies and machines.

In the context of Japanese capitalism, the criticisms and theoretical positions Kaiba forwards are enormously salient. Convoy Capitalism, according to American political scientist Leonard Schoppa, was the dominant formation of Japanese capitalism in the postwar era and was responsable for a very specific form of "cradle to grave" employment system wherein a company employee was expected to remain part of the same company for his entire life (Schoppa, 2006). And as famed Japanese author Haruki Murakami notes in his book after the quake, this created a society where individual and social formations were always subordinate to the role of the individual within the corporation, wherein the worker was thoroughly alienated from his labor and only considered in the context of where he or she was employed. For western observors, this emphasis of the corporate body has often been diagnosed as a form of social collectivism and communitarianism, but artists like Yuasa and

Anno clearly demonstrate its thoroughly dehumanize and alienating qualities. And in a crisis of capitalism where it is no longer possible for young people to secure long term corporate employment the way their parents did, Anno and Yuasa both further new ways of conceive the human "I" outside of capitalism - first by accepting the fluidity of identity, as in

Evangelion, and secondly by relocating the 1 within the social sphere and reaffirming the role of man as a fundamentally social being, as in Kaiba. In both animes, a new understanding of the self, one that actively challenges the ideologies of late Japanese capitalism and corporatism, arises, and its theoretical positions actively question and critique the idea that a fully realized person can ever truly exist in the dehumanizing structures of global neoliberalism.

IV: The Little Red Knife: Yume Nikki and the Production of Meaning

While it is clear that media texts like Kaiba and Evangelion are invested in forming counter-hegemonic spaces and discourses, the question of whether or not their messages and theoretical underpinnings are actively disseminated in the popular sphere remains to be answered. In the case of Evangelion, the implications of its philosophical foundations are problematized by its total ingratiation into the pop-culture industry, and Kaiba, with its short run and relative lack of advertising or critical scholarship, has had limited efficacy outside small spheres of Yuasa and "avant-garde" anime circles. Thus, it seems apparent that the ability of such texts to spur social change, when they are faced with the untenable choice of surrending to the industry or wallowing in obscurity, is problematized and potentially rendered completely void. And yet, as scholarship by theorists like Stuart Hall and Raymond

Williams shows, the consumption of media on the part of viewers is not a unilateral process.

Rather, fans engage with media in contradictory and multifaceted ways, in various ways imbibing, rejecting and accepting the ideological positions central to discrete narratives. In particular, the process of cultural productivity (Fiske, 1992) on the part of fandom has shown how, in the late 20th century, consumers of mass culture have created new means of reclaiming and changing the ways texts are consumed, often to the benefit of consumers and to the detriment of the industry. The process of media consumption, while clearly guided and oriented towards industry goals and preoccupations (occupations which as part of a capitalist framework align with the basic structure of flow of capitalism), has become increasingly complex with the arising of fan communities, which through discrete cultural productions may completely alter the standard readings of any given text.

In Japan, there is one particular text that, through the process of fan interpretation and cultural production, has gained enormous influence completely external to industry interests and production. Yume Nikki, a 2004 RPG freeware game developed and released online anonymously, has through word of mouth become one of the most popular and well known

PC games released in Japan, and has been ported and translated by fans to countries from

Taiwan to Europe to the United States. What makes Yume Nikki so fascinating and important is this very community, which has in virtual imageboards, forums and discussions created an entire mythology for this game, a narrative and breadth of interpetation that rivals if not surpasses the previously discussed texts. In Yume Nikki (meaning "dream diary" in Japanese), the player takes the role of a voiceless young girl named Madotsuki, who every night enters a surreal dream world full of strange creatures and designs. In these vast dream expanses, the player can find a variety of strange characters, from bird-like aliens to multi limbed girls to floating, phallic shaped monsters that follow the protagonists movements as she goes by. The game lacks a stated purpose or goal, and there is no dialogue or guidance given to the player as they attempt to explore and decipher the virtual landscapes of the game. Madotsuki cannot die, and at any point the player desires they can simply press a button to make her pinch her cheek and wake up.

Further, with only a few exceptions the player cannot engage or interact with any of the characters they meet until they gain a specific item, a kitchen knife covered in blood. When they have access to this, the game suddenly changes course, and it becomes possible to murder virtually any NPC (non-player character) in the game.

The only "ending" the game provides is when the player collects all 24 of the items scattered throughout the dream worlds, at which point a ledge appears on Madotsuki's porch in the real world. Should the player choose to walk up this ledge, they can throw Madotsuki off the ledge and ostensibly to her death, resulting in a final image of a puddle of blood and a brief credits sequence featuring the unknown creator of the game, Kikiyama. As it lacks any dialogue or overt themes, trying to make sense of Yume Nikki is difficult. It bears aesthetic similarities to earlier 16-bit Japanese games such as the 1995 Mother 2 (released as

"Earthbound" in the United States) but utterly lacks the gameplay-narrative contours that define most video games. From what the in-game text provides, all we can effectively establish is that the player-character is a young woman haunted by surreal and oftenviolent nightmares, and who eventually commits suicide as a result. But this simple analysis does not come close to accounting to the massive fan production that surrounds the game. Since Yume

Nikki has come out, it has inspired an unprecedented level of fan interpretation, analysis and discussion. It has deeply resounded with Japanese youth culture of the 90s and 2000s, particularly those who use the imageboard site 2ch (where the game originated) and has even seen international success as it has ported by fans to numerous foreign countries. For many

Japanese fans, Yume Nikki is more than a video game; in its images of a isolation, despairing and melancholy, it has had an immense emotional impact, and some go so far as to say it saved their very lives.

To make sense of the Yume Nikki phenomenon is to make sense of how fan subcultures in Japan consume new media texts and works. In the Azuma-Asada configuration of media consumption, contemporary Japanese culture is plagued by the phenomenon of animalization, wherein consumers simply tear apart narratives and imbibe select media artifacts deemed pleasurable. In this mode of textual engagement, it becomes impossible for any pop culture text, particularly those produced in the nexus of the pop culture industry, to convey any meaningful message without the message being always­ already compromised by the structure that produces it. It is a paradox of media theory in the

Marshall McLuhan sense, wherein the medium is the message and the medium is a database of pleasurable, isolated artifices without the potential for meaning.

But with Yume Nikki, we see an opposite phenomenon to the one Azuma describes and Asada critiques. Rather than tearing apart narrative and reducing it to discrete pleasure variables, the fan community of Yume Nikki has collectively created a narrative for the game they love. As can be evidenced in both Japanese and English speaking fan communities, fans have not only assigned names and backstories to the various wordless characters in the game, but have also produced numerous theories describing their contexts and the very nature of the game world itself. A variety of theories exist as to the diegetic story of the game, the most common asserting that Madotsuki is a product of a previous trauma or that she is a metaphor for the individual in contemporary society, alienated and unable to make meaningful relationships beyond those imposed through violence. In no place within the text are any of these ideas stated explicitly, unlike previously discussed media like evangelion and kaiba.

But this has not stopped fans from interpreting the text in a strikingly similar ways, finding within the wordless and abstract virtual landscapes of Yume Nikki a potent metaphor for their own isolation, powerlessness and detachment from society.

In the cultural productions of fan communities surrounding Yume Nikki, a validation of the pop-culture text as having a socially transformative power is apparent. Without an active interpretation and analysis on the part of fans, as well as a discrete of meanings gaining semi­ canonical status as a result of their general acceptance, Yume Nikki would not be worth commenting on at all. It would be but a strange curiosity, an anonymous art game with no commercial viability. But in its simple, abstract message fans have produced an enormous array of meanings and interpretations, to such an extent that it has attracted the attention of the mainstream industry. In the coming year, a licensed Yume Nikki manga will be released, written by the anonymous Kikiyama themselves. Whether this release will validate or defy fan expectations remains to be seen. But the fact remains that in Yume Nikki, a real potential for fans to actively engage rather than passively disassemble and consume media can be seen.

And if fans can extract meaning, and even generate new forms of social critique, from such popular media, than it becomes apparent that other media texts like Kaiba and Evangelion also hold the potential for producing new meanings and ways of understanding society. In

Kaiba and Evangelion, we see popular media texts forwarding powerful social critiques of capialisn and neoliberal socioeconomic formations. In Yume Nikki, we see their validation, and the all important truth that fans are not thoughtless ciphers absorbing an industry. Yume Nikki shows that there is an active discourse between media texts and audiences, and from this discourse a new understanding a media, society and the world may very well arise.

V: Conclusion: "I am not a machine": Creating a Counter-Japan

In his book Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation

American journalist and University of Berkeley scholar Michael Zielenziger sets forth his own unique theory of the Japanese phenomenon of Hikikomori, or young people who refuse to leave their homes for years at a time. Most of the Hikikomori, he notes, are male, have a piqued interest in popular culture like anime and manga, and are not mentally ill. They have only emerged in the aftermath of 1989 and the Lost Decade, and, according to the Japanese government in 2010 (Hoffman, 2010), number approximately 700,000 today. For Zielenziger, the Hikikomori represent a unique class of people acutely effected by Japanese cultural expectations and the recession; for most of them, it is usually after some form of failure, either academically or after being bullied, that they become socially withdrawn and morbidly afraid of leaving their homes. The hikimori he visits and discusses, he finds, are not angry, violent, lazy or any of the stereotypes often assigned to them by Japanese media, but are rather intelligent and quiet people who have found themselves, for some reason or another, unable to assimiliate. In assimilation-obsessed Japan, according to Zielenziger, there is no room for such independent and unconventional spirits. The only place they can retreat to is their rooms, and their only sources of solace are the comforting confines of their walls.

Although Zielenziger's theory offers a unique starting point for studying the socialcultural effects of the recession, it runs into two significant problems. First is its dependence on a specific and racially charged mode of understanding Japanese society, broadly conceiving it as more vaguely collectivistic and less independent minded then Western society. The crux of this misinterpretation of Japanese capitalism arises from tempting but inaccurate conflation of Japanese pre-western culture with contemporary corporate culture; although Zielenziger is explicitly dealing with social and economic conditions that have arisen concommitantly to the recession and stalling of the Japanese capitalist machine, he does not effectively link the two, and instead reduces the very temporally significant genesis of the Hikikomori to fuzzy cultural reasons. For the

Hikikomori phenomenon to change, he implicitly argues, Japanese culture in the most abstract sense must be altered, rather than the international social, historical and economic conditions from which contemporary Japan arises be considered and critiqued.

The second failing of Zielenziger's analysis is the totalizing idea that Hikikomori are all unassimilable, and that all or most people who do not fit into the parameters of Japanese

Convoy Capitalism are in turn Hikikomori. As the Lost Decade and writers like Karin

Akamiya have shown, the pariahs of Japanese condition run the gamut of social and economic conditions, with the single unifying factor being their dissatisfaction with and inability to integrate into the system. The means by which they respond to this are mutliplicitous, from turning inward in the case of Zielenziger's Hikikimori, to moving towards seductively straightforward right-wing politics like Amamiya to simply abandoning the idea of political commitment and consuming media without regards to narrative or points of origin, as Azuma and Yoda analyze. Each of these positions have been thoroughly researched and documented, and continue to dominate discussions of the textual discourse surrounding post-1989 Japan. But there is a fouthfold position, one that has manifested popular media and audience responses alike, that is in this author's opinion wholly undocumented and underanalyzied; the position of active critique, political engagement, and renewal of anti-capitalistic politics that has reemerged in, to varying degrees, in contemporary Japanese discourse. While the fonns that this resistance has taken across various media has been varied, as well as the points of criticism raised and its interpretation of Japanese ideologies, there is one unifying metaphor that seems to shine through: that of machines, and their relationship to human subjects. To analyze anime is any capacity is to constantly return to the machine metaphor, which has been articulated from the very first anime series ever made, Osamu

Tezuka's 1963 Astra Boy, about a robot boy fighting to defend humanity. The machine recurs again and again in Japanese animation, from the mecha genre developed in the 70s to the dystopian landscapes of Katsuhiro Otomo and Mamuro Oishii (Ghost In The Shell, 1995) and is notably theorized by Thomas Lamarre is his seminal work The Anime Machine. This work connects the multifaceted production of visuals within anime to the time-image and desiring-machine schema of Deleuze and Guatari. For Lamarre, anime sets itself apart from other fonns of animation by essentially its own mechanistic processes, emphasizing and even celebrating the creation of discrete and interworking elements of sets for the create of a self­ aware body of desire creating. Anime does not pretend to be a representation, but is rather a series of "soulful bodies" moving autonomously across images towards which movement remains their primary relationity. Thus, anime itself is a machine, but in recognizing this reality, and in eschewing the tradition relationships between externalcharacter and interior landscape and portraying characters who may in reality freely and fluidly traverse this landscape, he posits it as a medium through which the traditional dichotomies of representation and memesis dominating animation are broken and the medium becomes to produce endlessly disparate meaning-constructions.

In Evangelion and Kaiba, anime directors use this inhibition to create messages that free themselves from the traditional standards of the animation medium and "pop out" at the viewer the way their characters pop out of their screen, challenging the expectations of the consumer and participant to their production. Lamarre goes on to theorize a new idea of the Otaku as a fluid receptor to the pleasurable discrete elements Azuma posits, and who in turn are proscribed a limit range of reaction on the basis of the limits of those elements: "[s]i mply put, the distributive field [of the pleasurable elements] generates affective asymmetries not subjective asymmetries. This is very much like what Felix Guattari calls a machine in contrast to structure" (275). Such a theorization opens the door to an Otaku who are supremely pliable, and a medium whose range of interpretation can be expanded at will by the basis of the distribution of these pleasurable elements. In Evangelion and Kaiba, the

Lamarrian field is expanded to its fullest extent, and in Yume Nikki, the field is barely set at all, allowing fan communities to set their own models forth and create a landscape of meanings that savagely critique their ostensible origins. In the use of the Anime Machine, in short, anime artists and audiences have created a new paradigm through which to criticize contemporary Japanese capitalism, which ironically can be summed up as such; "I am not a machine."

The primary thrust of the critical strain of post-1989 Japanese animation is fully this maxim. The machine is the dominant metaphor of the postwar Japanese condition, recurring from the creation of megacorporate entities to the literal shifting of the physical Japanese landscape since the beginnings of the Showa Era. In rejecting the integration of this machine, the Japanese artist radically rejects integration into the entire postwar schema, and in turn challenges the directionality of modernism since its very inception. A position neither neo­ luddite nor dependent on a Neonationalist idea of prelapsarian Japan, this new understanding fundamentally redefines the relationships between individual, society and state implicit to modernism by rejecting the mechanistic structures that mediate them. By utilizing the endless possibilities of the animation and computerized mediums, the Cartesian machine has been, at least metaphorically, rejected, and the new shift towards a post-machine Japan may indeed begin its realization. A number of concommitant effects, each critical to understanding the Japanese phenomenon, remain to be studied, primarily the quantitative ways fans interpret these new texts and what, exactly, is the criteria for a critical text emerging from the post-1989 condition, assuming any can be created. Also necessary is continuous assessment of the cultural landscape of Japan in relation to its economic one, and to what extent the two become one and the same. Audience studies and media reception theory, both as expounded by Stuart Hall and Henry Jenkins, the latter who effectively illustrates the means by which individual consumers link together contingently related media forms to inform hybrid and convergent understandings of the world, seem especially pertinent to continued research and analysis. Further, the implications of this study to those of us in the United States grappling with the beginnings of a recessive economic period similar to Japan's in the early 90s should also be examined. To mistake one situation for another would be a mistake of totalization, but the implict relationship between the United States and Japan, particularly with regards to the

American Occupation and the transplanation of capitalism as a mean of resisting Soviet and

Chinese domination of East Asia, remains paramount. A number of the discrete phenomenon once thought endemic to the Japanese recession, most notably the Hikikomori subculture, have already been observed by sociologists in the US (Teo, 2013), and the contemporary intercultural dialogue between American and Japanese producers of popular media is stronger than ever. The ways in which this Japanese media is interpreted by American audiences is also an open topic for analysis, and is asubject this study has only briefly brushed against.

Issues of intercultural exchange, the nature of capitalism in its recessive forms, and the role of the postmodern zeitgeist in media consumption all remain to be considered more deeply than they have been here. The field of media theory and communication is full of possibilities for these new avenues of discourse. There is a third issue to Zielenziger's analysis of the Hikikomori phenomena, namely its assumption that the only solvent response of the Hikikomori, and implicitly all those disaffected by the Lost Decade and current neonationalist and neoliberal discourses of Japan, is to "shut out the sun" and the world as a result. This politics of despair obscures not only the current work being done in the Japanese fields of animation and textual production to resistant modernist hegemony but also seems to suggest that there is no means to resist capitalism in any form in the current zeitgeist. Our only choices are surrender or retreat, struggling or hiding in our rooms. The discourse of the post-1989 critical movement, which can also be gleaned in such works as Asano Inio's Oyasumi PunPun, Shuz6 Oshimi's Aku no

Hana, in the artistic works of Takashi Murakami and literature of Haruki Murakami, wholly rejects this defeatism. And as their reception on the part of audiences have shown, the idea that the current generation is in full retreat is false as well. The Lost Decade generation is circling its wagons, refusing to take for granted the assumptions of its predecessors, and actively creating counter-hegemonic spaces in which society, bodily autonomy, and the ultimate goal of resistance are in active debate. If they are to continue gaining traction, and to begin the long and no doubt arduous process of trans plating their new paradigms to the arena of contemporary Japanese politics, they may very well succeed in completely and inexorably altering Japanese political discourse as we know it.

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i Jouissance, another Lacanian term, here refers to the pleasure garnered from actualizing the Real, from transgressing the pleasure principle that limits the subject. In tra nsgressing this, Tetsuo enjoys the jouissance of his all-consuming telekinetic power, but by its very nature as a transgression of a limit, it cannot be limited and thus ultimately consumes everyt hing in its never ending approach towards the Real. ii After its initial 26-Episode Run, a follow up movie, The End of Evangelion, was released, focusing on the "real world" ending of the show as NERV and its parent organization, SEELE, implemented the Instrumenta lity Project. Several theories exist regarding the ways in which the ending of the original series and this film interrelate, but for the sake of brevity, only the former will be examined. within the text and collections iii Science Fiction Anime.