"I Am Not a Machine": Remapping Political Discourse in Postmodem Japanese Media Presented for Distinction in the Field
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"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.