Contemporary Shibuya and Its Digital Worlds
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Playing the City: Contemporary Shibuya and its Digital Worlds by Marlowe Gardiner-Heslin East Asian Studies McGill University, Montreal December, 2020 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy © 2020 Marlowe Gardiner-Heslin Table of Contents English Abstract 1 French Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 3 Author’s Note 5 Introduction 6 1. Shibuya and the Space of the City 26 2. Jet Set Radio and Pirate Spaces 60 3. The World Ends with You and Spaces of Modulation 93 4. 428: Shibuya Scramble and Agetopical Spaces 130 5. Persona 5 and Spaces of Encounter 164 Conclusion 206 Figures 212 Works Cited List 218 1 English Abstract This dissertation aims to offer an account of the spaces inherent to digital networks by analyzing how they are produced within local urban centres. Focusing on the neighbourhood of Shibuya at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which is characterized by dense flows of pedestrians, digital infrastructure, and a massive urban renewal project, I expose local “worlds” that are not fully absorbed into the operations of a homogenous network logic and, in fact, challenge the normative dimensions of movement yoked to commerce, retail consumption, and transit. Following the insistence of the philosopher Henri Lefebvre that space is primarily a social production constructed through the movements, perceptions, and imaginings of different societies and cultures, I examine these worlds as spatial pluralities produced by subcultural groups, creative communities, and local governing bodies. Strangely, it is digital games that are particularly well-suited to help us think about locally produced worlds. Spatially comprised of algorithms and player responses, games lead us to think about worlds produced as a tension between the digital and the analog, between procedural operations and improvised actions. By studying video game worlds set in digital recreations of Shibuya, such as Jet Set Radio, 428: Shibuya Scramble, and Persona 5, this dissertation exposes new kinds of space emerging within the acts of transgression, disruption, and appropriation that characterize the navigation of digitally mediated cities. 2 French Abstract La présente thèse vise à offrir une description de l'espaces inhérent aux réseaux numériques à travers une analyse de la manière dont ils sont produits au sein des centres urbains locaux. Prêtant une attention particulière au quartier de Shibuya au début du vingt-et- unième siècle, caractérisé par un dense flux de piétons, une infrastructure numérique et un projet de renouvèlement urbain majeur, j'expose les mondes "locaux" n'ayant pas été complètement absorbés par le fonctionnement de la logique d'un réseau homogène et défiant de ce fait les dimensions normatives de mouvement liées au commerce, à la consommation au détail et au transit. Donnant suite au philosophe Henri Lefebvre, qui insiste qu'un espace est principalement une production sociale construite à travers le mouvement, la perception et l'imaginaire de différentes sociétés et cultures, j'examine ces mondes en tant que pluralités spatiales produites par des groupes de sous-cultures, des communautés créatives et des organes dirigeants locaux. Étrangement, ce sont les jeux numériques qui se retrouvent particulièrement bien placés pour nous aider à réfléchir aux mondes produits localement. Spatialement composés d'algorithmes et de réponses de joueurs, les jeux nous poussent à penser aux mondes produits en termes de tensions entre le numérique et l'analogique, entre les opérations procédurales et les actions improvisées. En étudiant les mondes présentés au sein des jeux vidéo recréant Shibuya, tels que Jet Set Radio, 428: Shibuya Scramble, et Persona 5, la présente thèse expose de nouveaux types d'espaces émergeant au sein d'actes de transgression, de perturbation et d'appropriation caractérisant la navigation de cités arbitrées numériquement. 3 Acknowledgements I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without support from several individuals. Above all, I would like to thank Professor Thomas Lamarre for his mentorship throughout my doctoral studies. He has helped guide this project from its earliest stages through to its completion. His advice and guidance have helped widen the scope of my research and my thinking in ways I could have never anticipated. I am immensely grateful for everything he has done for me academically and otherwise. I am also grateful to the faculty of East Asian Studies at McGill. In particular, I would like to single out Professor Yuriko Furuhata, who has repeatedly gone above and beyond in her support. There were several times during my doctoral studies when I felt adrift and her rigorous intellect and thoughtful advice always steered me back in the right direction. My M.A. supervisor, Professor Atsuko Sakaki, has continued to be a guiding voice even after completing my studies at the University of Toronto. I would have never started on this path if it were not for her, and her advice and work is always inspiring. I am also indebted to Professor Thomas Keymer for first sparking my interest in graduate studies. The Nippon Foundation was generous enough to provide me with a fellowship which helped me complete a period of advanced language study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies in Yokohama. While there, I was fortunate enough to learn from Ohashi Makiko and Akizawa Tomotaro, who not only ensured that I had the linguistic proficiency to complete this project but also helped me formulate it. The conversations and time spent with several friends and colleagues helped me stay on track. Chiefly, I would like to thank Bailey Albrecht, Chen Cong, Dahye Kim, Nicholas Milette, and Hang Wu. My research and studies would have been dreary without our conversations, and our discussions helped me re-think portions of this project. 4 Additionally, I want to thank my mother, Jessica Gardiner, for making distant horizons seem reachable; my father, Peter Heslin, for always pushing me when I needed it; my grandfather, Robert Gardiner, for motivating me to explore; and Kathy Chung for morning dim sum and long talks in the park. Finally, I would like to thank Emily Wilson, who has been with me throughout the last eight years and has sometimes singlehandedly helped me get through this whole process. I couldn’t be more excited to be starting a new phase of our lives together. 5 Author’s Note Following the convention of Japanese cultural studies, all Japanese names cited in this dissertation are provided with the surname preceding the given name, except in cases where the individual publishes and resides primarily outside of Japan. For consistency, I have also followed this convention with the names of fictional characters, even in cases where I am dealing with a translation of the original Japanese publication. Unless otherwise cited, I have used published English translations of Japanese texts when available. All other translations are my own. Japanese texts are transliterated in conformity with the conventions of modified Hepburn romanization. 6 Introduction This dissertation is about space. It is about the space of cities and the space of video games. It is about the algorithmic, procedural, analog, and improvisational processes that run within the boundaries of both and those that flow across physical and digital enclosures, creating hybridized spaces: gameic cities and city games alike. It is about the actional forces that human players bring to bear on digital spaces and the machinic operations that shape and are shaped by those actions. It is also a dissertation about youth. More concretely, this dissertation uses digital games to analyze what was happening within Tokyo’s youth culture at the turn of the millennium and the dense urban neighborhood of Shibuya in which much of it was centralized. This approach may not seem like an intuitive one. Several scholarly and journalistic studies of Tokyo and Japan during the 1990s have already given a thorough account of the city’s youth culture without recourse to game-centred analysis, and the picture that emerges out of such histories is typically a bleak one. From the early 1990s onwards, Japan became mired in a prolonged period of slow economic growth, which followed the burst of the economic bubble that had buoyed real estate and stock market prices from 1986 to 1991. The Japanese recession did not signal a sea change in governance nor, contrary to popular belief, did it constitute the collapse of the Japanese economyi. Nevertheless, relative economic turmoil produced a great deal of rhetoric surrounding the “lost generation” and the disillusionment of Japan’s underemployed youth (Rowley and Hall 2007). As the centre of youth culture at the time, Shibuya became enmeshed in this rhetoric. As formations like gyaru culture (described in the first chapter) or graffiti gangs (detailed in the second chapter) attracted attention in the press, Shibuya began to be condemned for the excesses of contemporary youth culture and the delinquency it supposedly invited (Ishī 2017: 99). Criticism of youth formations was nothing new, but this time, the stakes seemed greater. A 7 new term for Japanese society emerged at this time: “muen shakai” or “society without bonds,” (Hommerich 2015: 48). The rhetoric of a relation-less society reflected a growing economic and generational gap that began in the early 1990s, and Shibuya’s youth were on the hook for much of it. The prospects of youth in such accounts are stark. Caught between the pressures of a failing economy and social rhetoric of delinquency, an almost uniformly negative picture emerges. Youth are either victim or offender, helplessly shaped by the socio-economic conditions they were born into or willfully failing to conform to the social norms that had transformed the nation into an economic powerhouse following the devastation of the Second World War.