Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams : Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime / Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, Editors
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ROBOT GHOSTS WIREDAND DREAMS This page intentionally left blank ROBOT GHOSTS WIREDAND DREAMS to Anime Origins from Fiction Science Japanese CHRISTOPHER BOLTON, ISTVAN CSICSERY-RONAY JR., AND TAKAYUKI TATSUMI, EDITORS University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London See page 261 for information on previously published material in this book. Copyright 2007 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robot ghosts and wired dreams : Japanese science fiction from origins to anime / Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, editors. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN: 978-0-8166-4973-0 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8166-4973-1 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-0-8166-4974-7 (pb : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8166-4974-X (pb : alk. paper) 1. Science fiction, Japanese—History and criticism. I. Bolton, Christopher. II. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. III. Tatsumi, Takayuki, 1955– PL747.57.S3R63 2007 895.6'30876209—dc22 2007027032 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 12111009080710987654321 CONTENTS Introduction. ROBOT GHOSTS AND WIRED DREAMS Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi vii Part I. Prose Science Fiction 1. HORROR AND MACHINES IN PREWAR JAPAN The Mechanical Uncanny in Yumeno Kyu¯saku’s Dogura magura Miri Nakamura 3 2. HAS THE EMPIRE SUNK YET? The Pacific in Japanese Science Fiction Thomas Schnellbächer 27 3. ALIEN SPACES AND ALIEN BODIES IN JAPANESE WOMEN’S SCIENCE FICTION Kotani Mari 47 4. SF AS HAMLET Science Fiction and Philosophy Azuma Hiroki 75 5. TSUTSUI YASUTAKA AND THE MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE OF AUTHORSHIP William O. Gardner 83 Part II. Science Fiction Animation 6. WHEN THE MACHINES STOP Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments: Lain Susan J. Napier 101 7. THE MECHA’S BLIND SPOT Patlabor 2 and the Phenomenology of Anime Christopher Bolton 123 8. WORDS OF ALIENATION, WORDS OF FLIGHT Loanwords in Science Fiction Anime Naoki Chiba and Hiroko Chiba 148 9. SEX AND THE SINGLE CYBORG Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity Sharalyn Orbaugh 172 10. INVASION OF THE WOMAN SNATCHERS The Problem of A-Life and the Uncanny in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within Livia Monnet 193 11. OTAKU SEXUALITY Saito¯ Tamaki 222 Afterword. A VERY SOFT TIME MACHINE From Translation to Transfiguration Takayuki Tatsumi 250 PUBLICATION HISTORY 261 CONTRIBUTORS 263 INDEX 265 Introduction. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi vii ince the end of World War II, Japanese science fiction has been as much a world cultural presence as U.S. science fiction was after SWorld War I, and for many of the same reasons. But Japanese science fiction did not arrive on the world scene by way of prose literature. The translation of Japanese prose science fiction into English was extremely lim- ited through the end of the twentieth century; the situation was somewhat better for languages like French and Russian, but by and large Japanese science fiction entered global culture through new media. Like the pulp magazines that made science fiction a shaping genre of twentieth-century popular culture, Japanese science fiction has been distributed throughout the world in the most popular new communications technologies—tele- vision, videocassettes, arcade games, personal computers, and game con- soles. These new media, moreover, have usually been introduced as ve- hicles for science fiction–themed spectacles that reinforce their futuristic aura. The marriage of medium and techno-scientific mythmaking has al- lowed Japanese science fiction filmmakers, game designers, animators, and manga artists to operate under the radar of cultural control exerted by American and European entertainment monopolies, and to develop themes, stories, and effects that synthesize the attitudes of their primary constituency: global youth culture. The producers of Japanese science fiction have always been familiar with their Western counterparts, and in new media they have often had an eye on Western markets. As a result, Japanese science fiction texts have frequently been double coded, evoking Japanese national concerns and popular myths while resonating strongly with foreign audiences. This has been true for many parts of North America and Europe, but we can con- sider the specific history of the United States as a representative (if not universal) case. The breakthrough works of global Japanese science fiction were the kaiju¯ eiga—the big monster movies produced by Japanese studios, begin- ning with Gojira in 1954. These were reinvented by American producers, renamed (Gojira became Godzilla, King of the Monsters!), and remixed to satisfy American tastes. In the United States, the Japanese monster film became the archetype for cheap, cheesy disaster movies because of the sort of cultural and technological interference patterns that still characterize the reception of Japanese science fiction in North America today. In many cases, the original films’ anamorphic wide-screen photography, which lent images greater scale and depth when properly projected, was reduced for American showings to a smaller format; the original stereophonic sound- tracks (among the most technically innovative and musically interesting in the medium at the time) were rerecorded and rearranged; and additional scenes with American actors, shot on different screen ratios, were added, along with woeful dubbing. The American versions inevitably stripped out the stories’ popular mythological resonances, their evocation of Japanese Introduction theater, and the imaginary management of postwar collective emotions.1 Even so, Japanese monster films gained immense popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, through a medium they had not been made for: television. The films came cheap; U.S. stations bought them for programs targeting children and teenagers. For this audience, the films’ relative innocence viii and intimacy provided a pleasure different from the techno-moralistic para- noia of cold war American science fiction. The monsters had names and legendary provenance, in contrast with the absolutely othered menaces of The Thing (1951), Them! (1954), and It! (1966). They were not reducible to simplistic moral dualisms.2 The kaiju¯eiga’s affection for monsters was paralleled by a love of robots, particularly in Japanese comics, or manga, and animation, or anime. Tezuka Osamu’s Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) appeared on Japanese and Ameri- can televisions in 1963 and was the first of many friendly Japanese robots that contrasted with the phobic images of dehumanization dominating Western science fiction.3 Cute anime automatons vitalized the robotic toys that Japan exported in large quantities in the postwar years, which has led one scholar to claim that “the American consumption of toy robots may have more to do with the Japanese presence in science fiction than does their success in industrial robotics.”4 Affectionate ambivalence has extended to each new step in the process of imagining virtual creatures, from boy robots to the superrobots of the 1970s, the “real robots” of the 1980s, the cyborgs of the 1990s, and the virtual pocket creatures that cur- rently dominate children’s television programming in both Japan and the United States. The rise of Japanese economic power in the 1970s and relative eco- nomic decline in the United States led to an ambivalent fascination with Japanese attitudes toward development—the synthesis of robotic indus- trialization, neofeudal corporate culture, and the enthusiastic acceptance of new communication and simulation technologies in daily life. As Japa- nese investment and market share leaped worldwide, the future appeared to be saturated with Japanese elements, a Western perception distilled in Blade Runner’s enormously influential image of a futuristic Los Angeles that resembled Tokyo. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film was the forerunner of japo- naiserie in cyberpunk novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Idoru (1996), which took an adrenalized dreamscape Japan as their model for the future. Although he had little firsthand knowledge of the Japanese ix context, Gibson understood the science-fictional ramifications of the rest- Introduction less mixing of fashions and personal technologies conveyed in the image of the shinjinrui—the “new human” Japanese youth culture of the time. These interests ranged from techno-mystical cults to the adulation of “vir- tual idols” like Date Kyo¯ko, a computer-generated simulacrum of a singer treated by her fans as a living rock star.5 Cyberpunk, which was often derided by Western science fiction crit- ics for being cartoonish, immediately appealed to a Japanese sensibility that had been nurtured on science fiction manga and Japanese animation. The results were texts that synthesized the main themes of both Japanese and Western postmodernist science fiction—the breakdown of ontologi- cal boundaries, pervasive virtualization,