Frenchy Lunning - Mechademia 9 - Origins (2014, University of Minnesota Press)

mechademia
9
Origins
Mechademia
An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and Fan Arts
frenchy lunning, editor-in-chief

Mechademia is a series of books published by the University of Minnesota Press devoted to creative and
critical work on anime, manga, and the fan arts. Linked through their specific but complex aesthetic, anime,
manga, and the fan arts have influenced a wide array of contemporary and historical culture through design,
art, film, and gaming. This series seeks to examine, discuss, theorize, and reveal this unique style through its
historic Japanese origins and its ubiquitous global presence manifested in popular and gallery culture. Each
book is organized around a particular narrative aspect of anime and manga; these themes are sufficiently
provocative and broad in interpretation to allow for creative and insightful investigations of this global
artistic phenomenon.
Mechademia 1: Emerging Worlds of Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies

Anime and Manga Mechademia 6: User Enhanced
Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire Mechademia 7: Lines of Sight
Mechademia 3: Limits of the Human Mechademia 8: Tezuka’s Manga Life
Mechademia 4: War/Time Mechademia 9: Origins
mechademia
9
Origins
Frenchy Lunning, Editor
u n i V e r s i t y o f m i n n e s ota P r e s s m i n n e a p o l i s • lo n d o n
http://www.mechademia.org
Spot illustrations by Rana Raeuchle
“From Street Corner to Living Room: Domestication of TV Culture and National Time/Narrative”
is an abridged translation of “Terebi ga ie ni yatte kita: Terebi no kûkan, terebi no jikan,” originally
published “Terebijon saikô (TV Reconsidered),” Shisō 956 (2003).
Copyright 2014 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

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Mechademia Editorial Staff
Frenchy Lunning, Editor-in-Chief

Michelle Ollie, Associate Editor
Thomas Lamarre, Associate Editor
Christopher Bolton, Associate Editor
Wendy Goldberg, Associate Editor
Andrea Horbinski, Copy Editor
Margherita Long, Online Review and Commentary Editor
Miri Nakamura, Online Review and Commentary Editor
Brian Ruh, Research Editor
Editorial Board Gilles Poitras

Brent Allison Marc Steinberg
C. B. Cebulski Toshiya Ueno
Patrick Drazen Theresa Winge
Pamela Gossin Mark J. P. Wolf
Marc Hairston Wendy Siuyi Wong
John A. Lent
Tom Looser Production
Hajime Nakatani Michael Baxter
Susan Napier Ursula Husted
Abé Mark Nornes Rana Raeuchle
Nora Paul
Contents
ix Dedication to Dr. John A. Lent
xi Introduction
C H R I S T O P H E R B O LT O N
Subjects of Desire
3 Hagio Moto’s Nuclear Manga and the Promise of

Eco-Feminist Desire
M A R G H E R I TA LO N G
25 Where Is My Place in the World? Early Shōjo Manga

Portrayals of Lesbianism
FUJIMOTO YUKARI
T R A N S L AT E D B Y L U CY F R A S E R
44 Between Men, Androids, and Robots: Assaying

Mechanical Man in Meiji Literature and Visual Culture
SETH JACOBOWITZ
Bodies in Motion
63 Carbon as Creation: On Tsuji Naoyuki’s Charcoal Anime

PAU L R O Q U E T
77 Powers of (Dis)Ability: Toward a Bodily Origin in Mushishi
STEVEN R. ANDERSON
90 South Korea and the Sub-Empire of Anime: Kinesthetics of

Subcontracted Animation Production
J O O N YA N G K I M
Boundaries
107 Japanese Cartoon Films

I M A M U R A TA I H E I
T R A N S L AT E D B Y T H O M A S L A M A R R E
126 From Street Corner to Living Room: Domestication of

TV Culture and National Time/Narrative
S H U N ’ YA Y O S H I M I
T R A N S L AT E D B Y J O D I E B E C K
144 Hyperbolic Nationalism: South Korea’s Shadow

Animation Industry
KUKHEE CHOO
164 Conceptualizing Anime and the Database Fantasyscape

BRIAN RUH
Rescripting History
179 Rebranding Himiko, the Shaman Queen of Ancient History

LAURA MILLER
200 Tezuka’s Buddha at the Tokyo National Museum:

An Interview with Matsumoto Nobuyuki
217 Genesis at the Shrine: The Votive Art of an Anime Pilgrimage

DALE K. ANDREWS
Repetition, Remediation, Adaptation
237 The Girl at the Center of the World: Gender, Genre,

and Remediation in Bishōjo Media Works
FORREST GREENWOOD
254 The Localization of Kiki’s Delivery Service

ALEXANDRA ROEDDER
269 Franchising and Failure: Discourses of Failure within the

Japanese-American Speed Racer Franchise
R AY N A D E N I S O N
283 Evangelion as Second Impact: Forever Changing That

Which Never Was
A N D R E U B A L L Ú S A N D A L B A G . T O R R E N T S
295 From Ground Zero to Degree Zero: Akira from

Origin to Oblivion
317 Contributors
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Dedication to Dr. John A. Lent
Dr. John A. Lent represents one of the early origins in the research of Asian
comic and animation history and practice. Much like the early images of lone
traveling scholars in the early Chinese scrolls, John Lent has journeyed ex-
tensively across Asia, interviewing and researching the artists of comics and
animation long hidden from global view, tucked away in obscure locations,
frequently in danger and/or under censure, and woefully underrepresented in
scholarly and popular media. Lent has been a stalwart editor, colleague, and
friend of Mechademia, and always a strong supporter of young and emerging
scholars. The list of his accomplishments is astounding, and we thought it ap-
propriate that we celebrate this wandering scholar and his work in this volume
dedicated to the origins of manga and anime.
Lent has been teaching mass communications at the university and col-
lege level since 1960. He received a PhD in mass communication from the
University of Iowa in 1972 and has held the title of professor since 1976. In
2000, he was the Rogers Distinguished Professor of Media Studies at the Uni-
versity of Western Ontario, Canada. From January 2002 to January 2005, he
was guest professor at Shanghai University, and is now professor in charge of
PhD dissertations at the Animation School of the Communication University
of China. He has been a consultant to different educational and governmen-
tal groups, has served on international cartoon and animation competition
juries, and has given hundreds of speeches, academic papers, and lectures to
all types of groups all over the world.
ix d e d i cat i o n i x
His publications include the astounding sixty-five books and monographs
he has authored or edited, three of which have won the Pat and Ray Browne
Popular Culture Book Award and the Broadcast Industry Conference Award.
Among his latest books are Cartooning in Latin America, Cartooning in Africa,
Animation in Asia and the Pacific, Illustrating Asia, and a ten-volume bibliog-
raphy on comic art worldwide. Most of his books were the first to explore
Asian mass communications such as broadcasting, newspapers, film, popular
culture, cartooning, animation, and media bibliography. Other areas covered
by his books include media and the international division of labor, transna-
tional communications, new world communication and information order,
cartoons and comics, animation, women and mass communications, video-
cassettes worldwide, and so on. He also has written more than eight hundred
articles and critical reviews for a variety of journals and periodicals on every
continent.
Additionally, Dr. Lent has actively engaged in either starting or fostering
professional activities in various areas. He founded and edits the International
Journal of Comic Art; for twenty-six years, he edited Berita, a periodical on
Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei studies. From 1987 to 2001, he was founding man-
aging editor of Witty World International Cartoon Magazine, and since 1994,
editor of Asian Cinema. He chairs the Asian Cinema Studies Society, the Asian
Popular Culture Group of the Popular Culture Association, and the Comic Art
Working Group of International Association for Media and Communication
Research. He founded the latter two groups and had a hand in the launching
of the Asian Cinema Studies Society. He also is coorganizer of the Silver Fly
Animation Workshop in Florence, Italy.
Dr. Lent serves or has served on many association and editorial boards,
including the Popular Culture Association, Comics Journal, Journal of Asian
Pacific Communication, Crossroads, Human Rights Quarterly, Jurnal Komunikasi,
Asian Thought and Society (where he was also associate editor), ImageText:
Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Seoul International Cartoon and Animation
Festival, Mechademia, and many others.
Dr. Lent has done so much for both the international artists whose work
he preserves and for the scholars whose work he supports that the editors at
Mechademia wish to honor this stellar leader in our field by dedicating this
volume to him.
Wendy Goldberg
Frenchy Lunning
x dedicat ion
Introductionch ristoP h er bolton
For a volume on origins, a volume that simultaneously enacts and questions

the search for fixed starting points, perhaps it is appropriate to start with the
beginnings of Mechademia itself. The annual process of building each of these
volumes sometimes feels like a construction montage from a mecha anime:
from the blueprint of the call for papers the framework rises, then the body
slowly takes form as individual essays are machined, polished, and bolted on.
Finally we throw the power, the various moving parts mesh with one another,
and the machine stirs to life.
After nine iterations, this annual process has become familiar. But in fall
2003, when Frenchy Lunning pitched her idea for an academic journal about
manga and anime to me and some other attendees at the third Schoolgirls and
Mobile Suits conference, the idea seemed as improbable as it was exciting—
the academic equivalent of a giant walking robot. At that time there were a
number of good books on anime and manga for general audiences, but the
first academic volumes on these topics were just beginning to appear.1 So I
was both delighted and surprised when plans for the series went forward and
Mechademia 1 appeared just three years later, an invitational volume that in-
cluded articles by members of the editorial board and other critics who were
writing about anime and manga at the time. Subtitled Emerging Worlds of
Anime and Manga, it was a snapshot of an academic field that was just then
getting off the ground.
Since then Mechademia has published something in the neighborhood
of a million words, and comparing that first volume with this one, it is
xi
striking how much the field has expanded. Mechademia 9 contains contri-
butions by senior and junior scholars not only from North America and
Japan but also from Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and the variety
of fields and methodologies represented extends from literary and media
studies to art history, anthropology, folklore, and musicology. Target texts
and media include not only mainstream Japanese manga and anime but al-
ternative Japanese animation, video games, nineteenth-century novels and
newspapers, television programming, devotional art, Buddhist sculpture,
tourism, and Hollywood film, while several metacritical articles analyze
popular culture criticism itself.
But while the range and variety of approaches and perspectives are con-
tinually expanding, one could say that the question critics have asked about
popular media like anime and manga has largely remained constant and in
some sense conservative: “where does it come from?” If the first, incomplete
answer is Japan, then the question inevitably becomes “where in the Japanese
historical or cultural context (or the global one) do we find the origin of anime
or manga’s particular qualities?” It is easy to respond to this question with
reductive generalizations about Japanese culture—to explain these media
with various essentialized theories of Japaneseness. But the more interesting
answers let these media challenge our present understanding of what Japan
is, or lead us to understand the extent to which “Japan” is in fact an idea pro-
duced by anime, manga, and other texts, rather than the reverse.
Another version of this query about the origins of anime or manga asks
the question from the perspective of media: what other media is anime re-
lated to (and is it a medium at all, or a genre of animation, or something in
between)? This provokes us to ask in turn what tools we can use to read these
texts. Can we analyze manga with the methods of film criticism? Can the plot
of an anime be interpreted in the same way as the plot of a novel? Again, the
most interesting answers point to the complexity of these media origins, lead-
ing us to think about the effects and meanings anime and manga can produce
that no other medium can precisely duplicate, and the ways we must adapt
existing critical modes in order to read these new kinds of texts.
All the essays in this volume start from these kinds of intuitive questions
about the origins of Japanese popular culture and media, but none arrive at
simple answers. They invoke a wide range of theoretical work to think through
the notion of the origin: media theory, feminist criticism, Japanese fanthro-
pology, poststructuralist textual criticism, postcolonialism, art history, film
theory, phenomenology, and more. But in one way or another they all produc-
tively question the notion of origin itself. They are arranged in five sections,
xi i christopher b o lto n
each corresponding to a different kind of origin: epistemological, biological,
national, historical, or textual.
In the first essay of the volume, Margherita Long describes the focus on
epistemological uncertainty that has dominated academic literary criticism in
recent decades, and the resulting skepticism of original or decisive meanings.
Long asks what lies behind and beyond this skepticism, which she examines
through prevailing models of desire and their idea that, in her words, “it is
only after some original, physical object goes missing that we can begin to de-
sire its substitute,” an uncertain, constructed, or textual artifact cut off from
the original. Reading Hagio Moto’s manga against Japan’s ongoing nuclear
disaster at Fukushima, Long asks if we could not recover a meaningful notion
of desire’s object, and with it the promise of meaningful intervention in the
world, by a sophisticated reformulation of desire that focuses on ontological
presence rather than absence. The other pieces in this section, “Subjects of
Desire,” likewise ask if desire is to be located in the desiring subject or a de-
sired object or somewhere in between. Fujimoto Yukari analyzes the subjects
and objects of lesbian desire in early shōjo manga to reveal the limits and pos-
sibilities for female agency depicted in these texts. Seth Jacobowitz looks at
the nineteenth-century beginnings of Japanese discourses on the mechanical
body that run through contemporary popular culture; he traces the anxieties
and desires focused on male, female, and mechanical bodies, and also the sub-
stitutions whereby woman and machines act as mediators for a homosocial
desire that is originally between men.
The next section, “Bodies in Motion,” picks up from Jacobowitz by con-
sidering anime’s connection to the body. Steven R. Anderson and Paul Roquet
both investigate the relationship between the notion of a stable body as ori-
gin, and anime’s power to transform that body. Anderson examines the an-
ime Mushishi through the lens of disability studies and argues that it inverts
the notions of “able” and “disabled,” while Roquet looks at Tsuji Naoyuki’s
charcoal-drawn animation and the interplay between the malleability of Tsuji’s
animated figures and the concrete physicality of the medium: the texture of
the charcoal line, the trace of Tsuji’s own hand. Finally, Joon Yang Kim probes
the discourse surrounding Korean animation and subcontracting work on Jap-
anese anime, in particular the hierarchical division between the conceptualiza-
tion performed by the designer or artist’s brain and the drawing or execution
performed by the hand of the artist or subcontractor. Kim provocatively over-
turns that hierarchy, suggesting that the brain follows the body as much as the
body follows the brain, and in the process he complicates our understanding
of the origin and direction of the global cultural flows that create these works.
i n t r o d u ct i o n xi i i
Kim’s essay also introduces the question of whether anime, even explic-
itly “Japanese” anime, really originates within Japan’s borders or any border.
That question occupies the writers in the third section, “Boundaries.” Writ-
ing in 1938, Imamura Taihei discusses the portrayal of the moving body in
animated cartoons and looks to Japanese art traditions going back to the
twelfth century to suggest ways that Japanese animators can compete with
American cartoons like Disney’s. Shun’ya Yoshimi takes this idea of media
competition with countries outside Japan and effectively turns it inside out,
asking to what extent mid-twentieth-century Japan formed and defined its
borders through media, in particular how early television subdivided time,
urban space, and ethnicity. Kukhee Choo examines the relationship between
Japanese anime produced by Korean subcontractors and animation for the
Korean market produced at the same time. Choo questions the stereotype
that Korean animators simply plagiarized Japanese stories and styles, arguing
instead that their adaptations were a pointed and ironic comment on the Jap-
anese originals. Finally, Brian Ruh seeks to move beyond national geography
with a delocalized definition of anime as a “fantasy datascape,” a distributed
database of media and elements that are assembled creatively and locally by
each user wherever she or he happens to be.
The fourth section, “Rescripting History,” shifts the coordinates from
space to time, with three essays that all ask how historical origins are de-
picted by popular media or, more radically, how those historical scripts can
be rewritten. Laura Miller looks at popular culture incarnations of the third-
century female ruler Himiko and the systematic differences between the his-
torical anthropological record and the contemporary media one. Matsumoto
Nobuyuki describes an exhibition he curated at the Tokyo National Museum
that displayed premodern Buddhist statuary alongside pages from Tezuka
Osamu’s manga account of the Buddha’s life, and the surprising conclusions
that resulted from that juxtaposition. And Dale K. Andrews describes fans’
attempts to rewrite the history of the Hachiman Shrine in Shirakawagō to re-
make it as the fictional Furude Shrine from the anime Higurashi no naku kokoro
ni. The rewriting that Andrews examines takes place on devotional plaques
that are purchased by temple visitors, who draw on them and leave them for
display at the temple; Andrews argues that the nature of fans’ rewriting and
entering into the anime world can be understood only by a careful reading of
this novel medium.
Andrews’s examination of media translation forms a transition to the
volume’s final section, “Repetition, Remediation, Adaptation.” The essays in
this section look at the way texts (particularly canonical ones) have made the
xi v christopher b o lto n
transition to different markets or media. Rayna Denison takes up the 2008
Hollywood film adaptation of Speed Racer, including the contested ways that
the idea of “adaptation” was interpreted and how this influenced the film’s
reception. Alexandra Roedder discusses the first U.S. localization of Kiki’s De-
livery Service and the ways Hisaishi Joe’s soundtrack was rescored by Paul Chi-
hara, concluding that the two versions of the film speak very different musical
languages. Forrest Greenwood looks at dating simulations, a video game genre
that seems to represent a decisive replacement of reality by representation,
and argues that something can be recovered or regained by reinterpreting
the dating simulation in the medium of animated film. And my own essay
examines the ways the Akira anime and manga tell similar stories but seem
to inhabit two very different visual and political worlds. Finally, Evangelion is
well known for repeatedly reinventing itself with new film releases that cover
the same story, but Andreu Ballús and Alba Torrents show how this quality of
repetition exists in a nested, fractal way even at the level of the original series.
In the process of creating Mechademia, the introduction is written last, a
kind of retroactive beginning. To the extent that it describes a call (for papers)
and a response, it has a constructed quality: in the end, the essays often de-
fine the topic as much as the planned topic determines the content. Perhaps
the introduction itself should acknowledge this circularity. So to conclude my
summary of the volume, I will point out that the last two essays (by Ballús and
Torrents and myself) relate anime of the 1990s with a contemporary textual
turn in literary criticism that sees the world as an unstable text in which pu-
tatively “original” meanings are continually rewritten—the very position that
Margherita Long introduces and challenges at the outset. Mechademia 9 thus
ends where it began, which only seems fitting for a volume that simultane-
ously enacts and questions the search for fixed starting points.
Note
1. Susan Napier’s breakthrough book, Anime: From “Akira” to “Princess Mononoke”
appeared in 2001 (New York: Palgrave). In 2002, Thomas Lamarre edited a special issue
of Japan Forum, “Between Cinema and Anime” (vol. 14, no. 2), and later that year Istvan
Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Tatsumi Takayuki, and I coedited a special issue of the journal Science
Fiction Studies (no. 88) on Japanese science fiction, with several articles on anime. At the
time, anime was popular with students, and anime criticism was definitely topical, but
even as I was editing our volume, I was not certain what the long-term prospects for this
kind of criticism might be.
i n t r o d u ct i o n x v
Subjects of Desire
MARGHERITA LONG
Hagio Moto’s Nuclear

Manga and the Promise
of Eco-Feminist Desire
In April 2012 the leading shōjo manga artist Hagio Moto published a collec-
tion of five new works in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Titled
Nanohana (Rape blossoms), the volume was hailed by a review in the Mainichi
newspaper as proof that manga subculture responds to societal problems
“more quickly and more incisively than any other medium” (Figure 1).1 But
the Mainichi review, like those in the Yomiuri and Asahi Weekly, stopped short
of spelling out the exact nature of Hagio’s insight.2 And there were also dis-
gruntled otaku bloggers who complained that Nanohana merely repeats the
same antinuclear slogans (“It’s not safe!”) we have already been hearing for
decades.3
In this essay I propose that what is interesting about Hagio’s contribution
to Japan’s denuclearization debates is the way she connects the problem of
the nuclear with the problem of desire. In “Purūto fujin” (Madam Pluto) and
“Ame no yoru: Uranosu hakushaku” (A rainy night: Count Uranus), radioac-
tive elements take human form and become irresistible to everyone but a tiny
minority who refuse to forget their chemical properties. With wry precision,
Hagio equates the ability to be humanly wanted with the inability to be mate-
rially questioned or acknowledged. The target of her critique is our dominant
3
Figure 1. Cover image from the first edition of Nanohana (Rape blossoms)
(Shōgakukan, 2012).
model of desire, in which it is only after some original, physical object goes
missing that we can begin to desire its substitute, which is de facto entirely
cultural.
This essay expands my reading of Nanohana by drawing out its affin-
ity with an earlier and much longer work by Hagio, Sutaa Reddo (1980, Star
Red). Here Hagio not only sharpens her critique of desire-as-usual but of-
fers a brilliant alternative. The heroine Sei is a galaxy-traveling shōjo who
refuses to accept “love” as compensation for the destruction of her beloved
planet, Mars. In the process, she teaches her lover Erg how to go back to his
own culture’s dead planet. There, at her insistence, he relearns human love
by reawakening his capacity for human/nonhuman interaction. The result is
joyously eco-positive—the rebirth of a planet! And yet, in the rich body of
4 ma rgherita lo n g
Figure 2. Cover image from a later edition of Sutaa Reddo (1980, Star
Red) (Shōgakukan Bunko, 1995).
Japanese feminist writing on Hagio, this eco-critical element has gone mostly
unremarked (Figure 2).
At stake, I think, is how we conceive our relation to material origins. What
does it mean to love a planet the way Sei loves Mars? Do we really need to
sever our relation with the physical object before we can begin to make sense
of it? Desire it? Desire each other? Indeed, what would it mean for intra
human relations if they were not founded in a prior sacrifice of the material
world? These are questions that a group of North American feminists has
recently begun to ask under the rubric of “new materialism.”4 What I propose
in this essay is that a similar set of questions is key to a rich but tantaliz-
ingly incomplete debate that has been swirling around Hagio’s work since the
1980s: the debate about the hyper-girl.
h agio moto ’s n u c le ar ma n g a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 5
“Hyper-girl” (chōshōjo) is a term coined in 1984 by critic Miyasako Chizuru
in her study of Hagio’s early manga, Chōshōjo e (1984, Toward the hyper-girl).
Miyasako argues that we can situate Hagio’s heroines along a continuum of
feminist progress from the shōjo demanded by patriarchy, to the hishōjo (anti-
girl) of works like Heart of Thomas (1974, Tōma no shinzō) and Pō no ichizoku
(1972, The Poe clan), who seizes agency as a “boy with no genitals.”5 Then, even
more positively, we have the chōshōjo of Star Red, who takes the stage em-
phatically as a girl. The chōshōjo draws her identity from a set of hyper-powers
(chōnōryoku) that, according to Miyasako, honor a “feminine principle” (josei
genri) of receptivity to alterity. In her 1995 afterward to Shōgakukan’s bunko
edition of Star Red, Kotani Mari credits Miyasako’s “hyper-girl” concept with
capturing “the power of the heroine’s vital force, something we might even
call the assertiveness of her female corporeality (josei shintai no sekkyokusei).”6
In 2001, in a major public forum on Japanese popular culture, Kotani posited
the hyper-girl as an important feminist alternative to Saitō Tamaki’s “beauti-
ful fighting girl” (sentō bishōjo), with whom she is often confused.7 However,
on the pages of Mechademia in 2006, Kotani lamented that the hyper-girl had
failed to attain critical visibility:
Oddly, after the publication of Star Red in 1980, Hagio Moto never again
worked with the figure of the hyper-girl. Moreover, despite its genuine
interest, Miyasako’s conception of the hyper-girl never came to be widely
accepted.8
Where did the hyper-girl go? It is not hard to guess that her disappearance
had something to do with the vexed terms (“feminine principle,” “female
corporeality”) that critics have used to describe her. Associated with “bio-
logical essentialism,” such terms fell out of favor in both Japan and North
America with the shift to the cultural constructivist paradigm in feminist
theory. Reading Hagio after Fukushima, is it time to reinterpret them? That
is, can we redefine “biologism” as the opposite of determinism? As a kind of
receptivity to biologies, climates, and, indeed, entire galaxies, that are never
directly knowable in their materiality, but that nevertheless exert tremen-
dous pressure for cultural change? Both Nanohana and Star Red make it obvi-
ous why this pressure would be felt most urgently by girls. But Hagio never
stipulates that only girls can feel it. She entices all her readers to embrace the
chōshōjo state of mind that, at the time of this writing, may finally be opening
Japan to a nonnuclear future.9
NANOHANA: THE PROBLEM OF THE NUCLEAR
IS THE PROBLEM OF DESIRE
The opening and closing stories of Nanohana feature a shōjo struggling with
loss after being evacuated from her Fukushima home. In contrast, the middle
three stories parody the far more powerful national and international charac-
ters who find ways to justify nuclear power despite the reality of accidents. Let
me focus on the first two of these three, which Hagio calls her “personification
of radiation” trilogy.10
In both “Madam Pluto” and “A Rainy Night: Count Uranus,” a radioac-
tive element takes glamorous human form. Using the Greek names of the
associated planets, Uranus and Pluto, uranium and plutonium appear before
a body of judges. In the first story this body is a cross-section of affluent
Japanese society assembled in a stately mansion on a rainy night. In the
second, it is a group of Western gentlemen assembled in what looks like a
nineteenth-century British court of law. As the would-be judges begin to
speak, we realize they are so smitten with their respective defendants that
they can utter nothing but starry-eyed admiration (“He’s beautiful!” [72];
“She’s heaven!” [36]). Only a tiny minority uses the element’s chemical name
and reminds the group that they are dealing with a radioactive substance
harmful to humans.
What Hagio satirizes is how masterfully Count Uranus and Madam Pluto
deflect these criticisms with an over-the-top discourse of love. “But I love you
all!” says Count Uranus, “I received my power from you.” “I want to repay your
kindness by putting it all at your disposal!” (72, 77). To her own “dear humans”
(56) Madam Pluto purrs, “Take it! Take all my love!” (42). Readers sense how
ridiculous it is for radioactive elements to make proclamations of love to hu-
mans, and the most trite sorts of heterosexual love at that. But they also sense
how familiar it is for humans to consider the “thing itself” obsolete and to pro-
ceed on the assumption that culture, discourse, and desire are all that matter
when it comes to how the world makes sense. In the humanities, we tend to
associate this mode of thinking with what Jacques Derrida called the absence
of an “outside the text.” Here, Hagio points to the limits of such thinking
for pondering the nuclear. In both “Count Uranus” and “Madam Pluto,” it is
impossible to put the elements on trial because what was required for them
to be humanly wanted in the first place—to be “discovered” and sold to the
public—was their complete transformation from the “nature” of plutonium
and uranium to the “culture” of Madam Pluto and Count Uranus.
h agio moto ’s n u c le ar man g a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 7

Consider the story “Rainy Night: Count Uranus.” Here the culture that re-
places the “thing itself” has a strong Japanese inflection. Count Uranus offers
his interlocutors “anything and everything, just as they wish” (73), and there
ensues an orgy of consumer indulgence reminiscent of the bubble economy
of the 1980s. Up pop not only factories, airports, hospitals, and roads but also
Ferraris, Parisian Opera Houses, and diamond earrings. The only person who
resists is a young woman named Ann, who asks for “clean water, food, and
soil, free from nuclear contamination” (77). This is of course the one wish the
Count cannot grant. What is interesting is that Hagio has his admirers defend
him with lines that could easily have been borrowed from one of Japan’s best-
known nuclear advocates, Nakasone Yasuhiro. In April 2011, Nakasone told
the Asahi newspaper that, although the Fukushima accident was regrettable,
the economy remained just as dependent on nuclear energy as in the immedi-
ate postwar period, when it allowed Japan to avoid the fate of a “fourth-rate
agricultural nation.” He emphasized that most of the world was not against
nuclear power, that “solar and wind are not capable of meeting even one tenth
of Japan’s energy needs,” and that today’s Japanese have a responsibility to
history to recover from the disaster in the same way as “Japanese of the past”
(kako no Nihonjin).11 Using similar language, a nationalist grandmother in
“Count Uranus” rejects green energy with “Don’t be daft!” “Wind and solar
can’t make Japan a first-rate nation!” She continues, “If we don’t get rich
from Count Uranus’s gifts like other nations, we’ll be letting Japan alone fall
behind! It would be an affront to our ancestors!” (79).
Next, Ann cites the problem of nuclear waste and its potential rogue use in
nuclear weapons. This time the Count’s devotees counter with the discourse of
“completely peaceful nuclear applications” (akumademo kaku no heiwa riyō, 80)
that played a key role in Japan’s acquiescence to nuclear power in the 1950s.12
But perhaps the most “Japanese” of all the Count’s lovers is a boy named Tarō,
who illustrates Murakami Takashi’s point about otaku being one of the few
postwar contingents to own up (albeit too enthusiastically) to the magnitude
of Japan’s World War II nuclear trauma.13 For Tarō, the term “peaceful appli-
cations” immediately conjures the inverse it is meant to disavow. Playacting
a giant detonation, he shouts gleefully, “mushroom cloud!” This prompts the
oldest member of the gathering, a sickly grandfather, to wake from a nap and
shout angrily “Hi-ro-shi-ma!” “Na-ga-sa-ki!” (80). No one pays attention; it
is as if the only person old enough to have had a corporeal encounter with
Japan’s nuclear past is too close to death to make his opinion matter.
Still, what about Japan’s nuclear present, at Fukushima? Ann points out
that the cesium contamination there is one hundred times worse than at
Hiroshima. But Count Uranus upstages her, in a virtuoso performance of how
easily Fukushima’s lessons can remain unlearned. In a speech as eloquent as it
is preposterous, the Count propounds the necessity of sacrifice for a world of
peace and wealth. He concedes that, globally, nuclear accidents may well take
place every twenty-five years. But, he says, this is a small price to pay for the
absence of war. “Tens of millions died in World Wars I and II” (82), he intones,
“but the world is now rich thanks to the massive heat I generate” (78), and we
know that “people only fight when we have poverty and disparities in wealth”
(81). “Quite right!” affirms one of his lovers, a company president. “You’ve
completely eradicated hunger, even war!” (82). With bitter irony, Hagio in-
dicts the way our first-world love affair with nuclear rhetoric simultaneously
justifies and erases the material realities of places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and
East Africa. And she goes further. She also indicts the way we cover over this
structure of sacrifice by calling the result “love.” Comforting a woman who is
frightened about Fukushima, Count Uranus pulls her teary face toward his in
a classic pre-kiss close-up. Looking up into his eyes, she is weak and confused.
Looking down into hers, he is reassuring:
woman: It’s scary! I don’t like worrying. I want to live a beautiful life!
uranus: You can! Go ahead and forget it, this “accident.”
woman: Forget?
uranus: Yes! Focus on everyday life! . . . If you are injured I can satisfy you
with my wealth.
woman: Oh Count Uranus, how thoughtful of you to take care of us!
uranus: It’s because I love you all so much! (87–88)
With this scene, Hagio draws a connection between the most clichéd formu-
lations of heterosexual “love” and a philosophy of desire that comes danger-
ously close to predicating the meaningfulness of everyday life on an extreme
prior injury that must be disavowed.
One of the things I love most about Nanohana is how Hagio exposes the
starkly different positions that men and women are required to assume in
these cliché formations. In “Count Uranus,” the personified nuclear substance
appears as a fully clothed figure of rhetorical authority and active desire. In
”Madam Pluto” she is a send-up of what we might call the pornification of
women. Scantily clad in a dominatrix outfit, she trades the Count’s honorif-
ics for the debased vernacular of a sex worker. “You want me, don’t you?” she
beckons. “Isn’t it me you crave?” (41). On hands and knees, with her mouth
open and her ass in the air, she belies her dominant persona with a series of
h agio moto ’s n u c le ar man g a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 9

submissive poses, and her appeal to those who would judge her follows suit.
She praises man for his transcendence over animals, by means of fire, weap-
ons, language, writing, and mathematics. And she says she is indispensable to
him, because his history of increasingly powerful technologies—soon to cul-
minate in stem-cell science that will master death—can only be powered by an
equally eternal energy source: herself. Hagio’s joke is that one does not have
to change much about men’s fantasies of either the ideal woman or the ideal
energy source to make the analogy work. Both are endlessly available, end-
lessly compliant, and endlessly “hot.” What is more, they are endlessly specu-
lar, rewarding every glance with the reflection of man’s god-like omnipotence.
The biggest difference between the “Pluto” and “Uranus” stories is that,
whereas Count Uranus seduces everyone with his discourse of love, Madam
Pluto stumbles. Is it because she is never fully a subject of that love? Only its
object? The assembled gentlemen charge her with the scission of human DNA
and announce that she will have to be buried underground. At this she be-
comes enraged and, in a bizarrely wonderful basketball interlude, scores four
goals of 24,000 points to teach them about her half-life. It will take 96,000
years for her poison to begin to dissipate! As many of us realized keenly after
Fukushima, this is a unit of time that tends to exceed human understanding.14
By attempting to score what are essentially extradiscursive points against her
interlocutors, Madam Pluto emphasizes that she has never fully completed
the journey from nature to culture. And so it turns out that she cannot be fully
wanted by humans, because she cannot speak a language of desire that fully
divorces itself from its material outside.
In this way, Nanohana makes a very specific point about desire and about
nuclear energy. Hagio is saying that desire-as-usual seals itself off from the
contingencies of nature, and at great human peril. But she is not saying that
by simply embracing the alternative, and maintaining our relation with ma-
teriality, we will necessarily keep ourselves or our planet safe. Hers is a much
more nuanced eco-politics, a politics she develops with astonishing scope over
the 526 pages of Star Red.
PLANET LOVE AND THE ECO-POLITICS

OF THE HYPER-GIRL
Serialized in 1978–79, Star Red is set three centuries in the future, in the year
2276. Writing at the peak of the U.S.–Soviet arms race, Hagio imagines a fu-
ture in which nuclear humans have remained in charge. They have not yet
Hagio’s joke is that one
destroyed the Earth with radiation, but a
does not have to change
war to control satellite defense missiles
much about men’s fantasies
(anticipating Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars”
of either the ideal woman
by four years) has come close, so that each
or the ideal energy
and every city is protectively domed, and
source to make the
all suburbs are abandoned. Even before the
analogy work. Both are
doming of the cities, overpopulation has
endlessly available,
prompted an increasingly ambitious set
endlessly compliant, and
of colonizations, first of planets in Earth’s
endlessly “hot.”
own solar system, and then in the stellar
systems of Proxima, Alpha Centauri, Bar-
nard’s Star, and Sirius. To convey the brutality of this “glorious age of galactic
development,” Hagio offers the sad example of Mars.15
Poor Mars! Originally settled by Earth in 2050, it is converted to a penal
colony in 2070, when high fetal mortality makes it hard to sustain the colo-
nial population. Focusing on more exploitable planets, the people of Earth
begin to ignore the Martian prisoners, and by 2150 they have been left to die.
But they do not die. In symbiosis with Mars’s atmosphere, their women start
giving birth to babies who deal with the lack of water and oxygen by means
of chōnōryoku or hyper-powers, the scope of which increases exponentially
with each generation. When Earth becomes interested in recolonizing Mars in
2264, scientists are shocked to find a thriving population of fourth-and fifth-
generation Martians whose DNA differs significantly from humans’. In this
new species, we have Hagio’s answer to the question, “What would happen if
we did not sever our relation to material reality?” Rather than engineer, pol-
lute, and abandon an ever-expanding set of environments, the Martians have
stayed put, used less, and adapted. And the result is not that they are nontoxic
or eco-balanced but simply that they are different, even while they themselves
cannot control this difference or predict its implications. The protagonist,
Reddo Sei (Red Star), or Sei for short, is one of the few fifth-generation Mar-
tians to have survived Earth’s recolonization of her planet. Accordingly, her
chōnōryoku abilities are the most powerful in the text, and overtly feminized.
That is, chōnōryoku evokes chōshōjo and vice-versa, with both “hyper-powers”
and “hyper-girl” serving as metaphors for the ability to sustain a human–
nonhuman interaction.
The people of Earth, in their ignorance, imagine that this interaction
is simple. Hagio gives us two different versions of their mistake. The first
comes from Anju, a woman who works for a government agency that wants
to appropriate Martian powers “for the betterment of society” (270). Anju
h agio moto ’s n u c le ar ma n g a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 11
and her colleagues take Sei into custody, examine her, and remark with envy
on her three main powers: telepathy (kannōryoku), teleportation (seishindō),
and telekinesis (nendōryoku). As Kotani Mari explains, American science fic-
tion had been depicting all three since at least the 1950s.16 In Japan as in the
United States, readers had come to equate them with domination—with the
certainty that one can read someone else’s mind in terms legible to oneself
(telepathy), that one can fit naturally wherever one projects oneself (telepor-
tation), and that one can use the power of the mind to remake the material
world according to one’s own will (telekinesis). None of the three abilities
admits of any uncertainty, any acknowledgment that the object acted upon
might exert its own force in return. Anju holds fast to these definitions, cer-
tain that telepathy especially can attain a high “safety index” and be used for
things like solving crimes and preventing accidents (269). But Anju is bitterly
disappointed. Feeling trapped and misunderstood, Sei inadvertently explodes
Anju’s government agency with the power of her unconscious. When she tele-
kinetically transports everyone in the unit back to the “soil that birthed them”
(shusshōchi), her hyper-powers seem to assert that their true usefulness is for
communing not with one’s government but with one’s environment (318).
Yet if hyper-powers do not ensure mastery over the material world, nei-
ther do they ensure subordination. Hagio critiques this idea by means of a
second Earth character named Paveman. As head of an agency called the “Bu-
reau of Information, Department of Martian Research,” Paveman must make
sure Earth’s resettlement of Mars remains safe from the renegade fourth-and
fifth-generation populations who have been driven from their sacred capital
and into the hinterlands. He carries out his duties sadistically, using biological
experiments on live Martians in an attempt to neutralize their hyper-powers.
Unlike Anju, he knows these powers are incompatible with the status quo—
that they represent a divergent human future. But he is unable to conceive of
that future as anything but “regression.” He rants:
Their power of vision is zero! They apprehend things with extrasensory

perception! Their eyes are completely unnecessary. And isn’t it true that
people who have the power to move objects by telepathy can go perfectly
well without fingers or hands? They can teleport, so what do they need with
legs? They have telepathy, so why would they need vocal cords? Right? What
do they need with words? Before long they will stop needing noses, mouths,
ears . . . And how will that be? When people just rattle around the face of the
earth like mineral deposits? Even thinking will become obsolete. And living!
If this is not regression, what is it? (306–8)
Paveman’s speech is remarkable for the forced logic of his conviction that their
hyper-powers will turn Martians into rock formations. It seems ludicrous
given the vitality of Star Red ’s Martians. But he is constrained by what Miya-
sako Chizuru calls “limitless allegiance to the linearity of his own temporal
thinking.”17 Paveman locates humans at the end of an evolutionary timeline
beginning billions of years ago with tiny sea organisms, and shouts, “It is
completely unacceptable for anyone but humans to rule the universe!” (309).
It is a highly un-Darwininian understanding of evolution, an understanding in
which all nature’s adaptations can be charted teleologically along a single tem-
poral axis with “Man” at its frozen endpoint. Although Paveman knows hyper-
powers seek different destinations, in his schema there is nowhere to go but
backward, to an original, mineralized “nature” that is inert and unchanging.
NATURE/CULTURE AND THE “DEAD”

PLANETS OF ZESNUSERU
This view of nature is amplified by the villains in the second half of Star Red,
where Sei learns that the Earth–Mars conflict is but the most recent chapter
in a much older conflict between a group of victorious “Zesnuseru” and the
red planets (sekishoku keisei) they have been persecuting for thirty thousand
years (Figure 3).18 According to the Zesnuserians, the only way to keep the
universe safe for humanity—for “wisdom, virtue, and reason” (394)—is to
seal away the demons (mamono) that lodge in the hearts of all who dwell on
red planets (398). They accomplish this by blowing up the offending planets,
relocating the inhabitants, and “regulating” them with locks or “seals” (fūin)
on their hyper-powers. Like the people of Earth, the Zesnuserians believe
there are “any number of livable planets” (396) in the universe, and that what
defines humanity as such is its consciousness—indeed, a consciousness that
becomes human in direct proportion to its freedom from planetary input.
In a brilliant third gesture of historical framing, Hagio has the Zesnuserians
trace their fear of red planets to an even more ancient civilization reported to
have been destroyed by chōnōryoku (Figure 3). The ruins of this civilization oc-
cupy some two hundred planets that the Zesnuserians have designated “Zero
Ward,” placed off limits, and declared officially dead.
How are we to understand this death? One thing that makes Star Red a
compelling contribution to Japan’s denuclearization debates is the parallel
between one of the pro-nuclear faction’s main arguments and this Zesnuse-
rian ideal of humanity divorced from planetary input. We often hear that the
h agio moto ’s n u c le ar mang a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 13

Persecuted
Time Period Relative Dominant Ability Hyper-ability
to the Year 2276 (Nōryoku) Race (Chōnōryoku) Race
First Frame The last 226 People of Earth People of Mars

(First Half of years Representative: Paveman Representative: Sei
Star Red)
Second Frame The last People of People of “Red

(Last Half of 30,000 years Zesnuseru Planets”
Star Red) Representative: Erg
Third Frame Between An “ancient civiliza-

(Prehistory) 900,000 and tion” that tried to
one million master chōnōryoku
years ago but failed
Figure 3. The narrative frames of Star Red.
Fukushima disaster cannot be allowed to dictate nuclear policy because of the

sōteigai or “unforeseeable” status of the earthquake and tsunami that caused
it. According to Tokyo Electric Power Corporation and its government spon-
sors, since tectonic plates and the Pacific Ocean are unlikely to deliver such
a devastating combination again, the disaster is statistically irrelevant. With
arguments like this, are they not telling us, like the Zesnuserians tell their
victims, to put a lock on our receptivity to the inexplicability of the material
outside? Are they not saying that, when it comes to planning for humanity’s
future, any force of nature that exceeds our imagination is prohibited from
exerting pressure on our decisions? It is the sort of resolute anthropocen-
trism we have heard steadily since Fukushima, as when economics minister
Yosano Kaoru remarked in August 2011, “We thought that human beings—
the Japanese—can control nuclear by our intelligence, by our reason. With
this one accident, will that philosophy be discarded? I don’t think so.”19
In Star Red, Sei’s definitive gesture as hyper-girl is to insist on travel-
ing to the most ancient of the Zesnuserian’s off-limits planets and seeing for
herself whether it is really dead. Hagio stages this journey as Sei’s reaction to
learning that the Zesnuserians plan to blow up Mars. Rather than save her
home planet, which may be impossible, Sei wants to challenge the premise
that mandates the destruction of all “red” planets. She wants to challenge
the premise that nature’s force must be foreclosed, declared inert, for human
culture to evolve and flourish.
As part of the new materialism debates in North American feminism,
it is not a matter of
Elizabeth Grosz has argued that feminists them-
knowing directly what
selves come close to adopting such a premise
the foreclosed origin
when we rely exclusively on theories of cultural
has to say. Rather, for
constructivism to understand how gender and
the hyper-girl, it is a
culture evolve over time. In an essay called “The
matter of finding out
Nature of Culture,” Grosz offers a sympathetic
what we ourselves can
account of cultural constructivism’s post-1968
say differently as a
resistance to prevailing naturalisms that justi-
result of orienting
fied divisions of labor, sex, and race by attribut-
ourselves to it, and
ing them to the laws of nature. But Grosz points
responding to its
out that we lose important political and concep-
provocation.
tual resources if we recognize only culture as
productive and generative, and accept the con-
servative view of nature as invariable, universal, or predictive. If feminists
want to understand all the ways culture can change, and if we want better to
effect that change, Grosz says we need to understand nature as something
that “bequeaths . . . a series of problems or provocations which each cultural
form must address, in its own way, even if it cannot solve them.”20 She writes:
the natural is not the inert, passive, unchanging element against which cul-
ture elaborates itself but the matter of the cultural, that which enables and
actively facilitates cultural variation and change, indeed that which ensures
that the cultural, including its subject-agents, are never self-identical, that
they differ from themselves and necessarily change over time.21
In Star Red, what is depressing about the Zesnuserians is that they

have remained self-identical (for thirty thousand years!) precisely by seal-
ing themselves off from the dynamism of their environment. Worse, they
have projected their denial of nature’s generativity backward in time, to the
million-year-old civilization that Sei visits. It comes as no surprise that when
she arrives there she feels the planet “resonate” and declares, “nothingness
and death each have their own kinds of meanings” (436).
What kind of meanings? As Star Red soon shows, it is not a matter of
knowing directly what the foreclosed origin has to say. Rather, for the hyper-
girl, it is a matter of finding out what we ourselves can say differently as a
result of orienting ourselves to it, and responding to its provocation. Grosz
calls it “the force of an outside that induces thinking,” “that incites culture.”22
In Star Red, the result is nothing short of a new set of definitions for desire
and sexual difference.

REENGAGING THE ZERO-POINT OF THE
UNIVERSE: A NEW MODE OF DESIRE
At the same time that Sei learns the Zesnuserians plan to destroy Mars, she
also receives a confession of love from a shōnen named Erg. Because Erg has
been Sei’s loyal fellow-traveler since the start of the adventure, readers are
well disposed toward him. The problem is that Erg has been brainwashed by
the Zesnuserians. Although he too has hyper-powers, having grown up on a
red planet, he willingly gave them up when his planet was destroyed six thou-
sand years earlier, installing the required lock and declaring himself safe from
“nothingness, darkness, and madness” (520). Visually and conceptually, Erg’s
salient feature is the form this lock takes: a short, sturdy horn on the top of
his head, like a unicorn’s. The horn is distinctly phallic, and as Erg spells out
the terms of his love for Sei, we realize that Star Red is setting them up as the
foils for a vastly superior alternative.
Faced with the loss of Mars, Sei declares her intention to die there with
it. But Erg cites the Zesnuserian Law (okite) that one can never go home
again, and says she should find a new planet, like he did (400).23 Surprised,
Sei presses him on the location of this new planet:
sei: You . . . where were you able to find your new home (furusato)?
erg: In you. I’ve been looking for you all this time.
Without a doubt.
Will you be my Mars? (403–4)
Sei’s second quintessentially chōshōjo gesture in the text is to reject Erg’s

proposal out of hand. For what would it mean to “be Erg’s Mars”? Like Erg’s
horn, which represents the loss of his hyper-powers, Erg’s “Mars” would
also represent a lack, the exploded planet. It is this strange status as the
symbolization-of-lack that makes both the horn and Erg’s would-be lover
phallic. Because they point simultaneously to the existence of some prior state
of wholeness and to its eternal prohibition, they function as classic examples
of the master signifier of desire in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
In an essay called “Refiguring Lesbian Desire,” Elizabeth Grosz points out
that lack-based desire is not unique to Lacan. Tracing it as far back as Plato,
for whom desire “is a lack in man’s being, an imperfection or flaw in human
culture,” Grosz reminds us that Hegel is also an important antecedent:
Hegel conceives of desire as a lack, a unique one that, unlike other lacks, can
only function if it remains unfilled, a lack, therefore, with a peculiar object
all of its own . . . The only object desire can desire is one that will not fill the
lack or provide complete satisfaction.24
Grosz posits two main consequences of the dominance of this model of

desire, with its impossible object. In Star Red, Hagio can be seen to skewer
both of them by means of Erg’s proposal. The first consequence Grosz notes
is the model’s usefulness to capitalist and other modes of perpetual acquisi-
tion. Consider the Earth’s acquisition of Mars, which was merely the first in
a series that included Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, as well as planets in the
systems of Proxima, Alpha Centauri, Barnard’s Star, and Sirius.25 Given that
the text defines planetary “desire” as a galactically scaled, imperial capitalism
constantly cycling through the consumption, manipulation, dissatisfaction,
and (in the Zesnuserian case) destruction of successive planets, Erg’s request
that Sei “be his Mars” could hardly be more terrifying. Even assuming she
avoids the worst, if desire is inherently unfillable, then Erg’s taking her as
his replacement home planet is destined to be just the first in a long chain of
decidedly unloving substitutions.
A second consequence of lack-based desire is sexual difference, or, more
accurately, the fake difference we get when a dominant group covers over
humanity’s origin and defines what remains exclusively in terms of the im-
possible master signifier that takes its place. Erg’s horn is a perfect example.
When Sei asks him if what the Zesnuserians say could really be true—that
the existence of beings with hyper-powers is meaningless, superfluous—Erg
hedges. “I don’t know” (read: yes). “No one knows. But doesn’t it mean some-
thing that you and I are here like this in conversation?” (400). Erg tries to
redirect Sei to a conversation he calls “love,” but he is only willing to have it
if he can count on his horn to keep him sealed away from her defining differ-
ence. Like the discourse of “love” in Nanohana, it is premised on the exclusion
of what matters most about the other.
We see Hagio’s alternate model of love when Sei asks Erg to remove his
horn, and he agrees. Readers can’t help regretting that Hagio waits until the
final fifty pages of Star Red to make this happen. We want more time in this
new world of phallus-free desire! We want more time not least to appreciate
the two powerful events of rebirth that it enables.
The first is the regeneration of the ancient dead planet the Zesnuserians
call “Zero Ward.” Erg has traveled there with Sei and has fearfully witnessed
her receptivity to its resonance. Ultimately, that resonance absorbs her, body
and mind, and she is teleported from Zero Ward to a limbo-space far from
Erg. Left alone on his planet, he begins to reconsider his definition of love,
and it is in his desperate solitude and yearning that he decides to remove
h agio moto ’s n u c le ar man g a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 1 7

his horn. As soon as he does, we see the Zesnuserians panic at the geophysi-
cal data emerging from Zero Ward. The amount of carbon is exploding. The
surface temperature is rising. Within three thousand revolutions, the planet
will regenerate its swamps, and organic life will flourish. If we read the scene
literally, it is a miracle that human receptivity can beget such spectacular re-
birth. But if we read it metaphorically, it is a vibrant symbol of the dynamism
that nature has possessed all along, independent of human willingness to
acknowledge it.
The second rebirth is Sei’s. Stuck in limbo after being absorbed by the
resonance of the dead planet, she reconnects with an old Martian ally, the
third-generation shōnen Yodaka. From the start Yodaka has been helping her
in her struggles against Paveman and the Zesnuserians. But his own hyper-
receptivity to the spirit of death has landed him, too, in this limbo, which
Hagio depicts as a black, galaxy-dappled backdrop to their floating bodies.
From here they continue to exercise telepathy, channeling the grief of a group
of Martians gathered around Yodaka’s comatose body. It is at this point that
the two decide to use hyper-powers to inhabit this body together, with Yodaka
growing a uterus and Sei becoming a fetus. In some of the text’s most quoted
lines, Yodaka intones, “Sei! Just make yourself tiny! Be small and tuck yourself
in here. I’ll help you . . .” (501). In this way Yodaka becomes “Yodaka Mama,”
and Star Red ends with a sixth-generation “Junior Sei” still gestating inside
him but already blessed with a remarkably queer set of committed parents. As
Miyasako Chizuru points out, these parents include the newly transgendered
Yodaka, an anticapitalist Egyptian man Labaaba who takes Yodaka as his wife,
and even the watchful spirit of a cross-dressing fourth-generation Martian
named Kuroba, who has given her life for Sei.
Miyasako calls these parents “sexual outlaws” in a Zesnuserian world,
people whose “extraterritorial sexuality” remains impossible so long as society
assigns the work of deciding what is dead and not dead exclusively to shōnen
like Erg.26 She writes:
At the zero-point, the modern shōnen stands rigid, as if frozen, but the
chōshōjo does not falter. Having arrived at this point . . . Hagio Moto rep-
resents a “feminine principle” that discerns a source of rebirth in the zero-
point deemed “nothingness” by linear temporal thinking.27
Miyasako derives her term “zero-point” both from “Zero Ward” and
from her argument that linear temporal thinking charts a static course for
men’s lives toward what Erg refers to memorably as “the conclusion called
death” (408). Although many have interpreted Miyasako’s as a biologically
essentialist point—namely, that the “feminine principle” avoids this conclu-
sion because women are the “sex that gives birth”—I take her to be making
a much more nuanced argument about the relation between material origins
and the conditions of possibility for sexual difference. We know that, for Erg-
as-modern-shōnen, the horn (the dead-lock!) both determines what is desired
(woman-as-lack) and regulates what is sexually legible (the other as substitute
origin). Therefore, to break this deadlock and make “outlaw” sexualities pos-
sible, it is not enough simply to struggle against the terms mandated by the
horn, from within its cultural sphere. The answer lies instead with renegoti-
ating the relation to origin—with discovering what Miyasako calls “a source
of rebirth at the zero-point”—in order to break the cycle of prohibition and
substitution, and replace lack-based desire with something much more pro-
ductive. In Star Red, that something goes by the name chōnōryoku.
Let me clarify this point by means of two critics who would seem to dis-
agree with Miyasako. In his 1989 essay, “‘Umu sei’ to shite no shōnen—‘Seisa
no shōjo mangashi’ no tame ni” (Shōnen as the “sex that gives birth”: Toward
a shōjo manga history of sexual difference), preeminent popular culture critic
Ōtsuka Eiji emphasizes that there are two crucial rebirths in Star Red: of Erg’s
planet, first, and of Sei as Junior Sei, second. For Ōtsuka, it is essential that
both are carried out by young men.28 Affirming Ōtsuka’s point, feminist Fuji-
moto Yukari writes, “it is emphatically not Sei who gives birth to a child and
in this way regenerates life. Star Red ’s plot does not depend on facile maternal
myths but rather on straightforward miracles.” We should note that Japanese
feminism has waged a long and important battle against the modern state’s
abuses of the “maternal myth” (bosei shinwa) of mothers as naturally selfless
caregivers.29 But we should also consider whether we do mothers a disservice
when we reassign their reproductive capacities to men and call it a feminist
victory. This runs the risk of becoming a reappropriation of origin, rather than
a renegotiation with it.
It also runs the risk of misreading Star Red, since the rebirths accom-
plished by Erg and Yodaka are not miracles but culminating instances of the
chōnōryoku for which Sei has been fighting from the start. What is more, they
are both the direct results of Sei’s having said no to becoming Erg’s Mars and
perpetuating lack-based desire. It is true that Erg is responsible for the regen-
eration of his planet. But it is also true that he would never have gone there
had it not been for Sei, and would never have chosen to open his hyper-powers
to his planet’s resonance if she had not insisted it was the only way he could
love her without annihilating her. Similarly, Yodaka is clearly the mother of

Junior Sei. But Hagio explicitly positions his use of hyper-powers as the re-
sult of having telepathically witnessed Erg remove his horn and cry, “Sei! I
love you!” (498–99). In other words, it is only because Yodaka is so moved by
Erg’s affirmation of material origins, and the new love it enables, that he is
prompted to suggest the pregnancy that will allow Sei, via Junior Sei, to make
her way back to Erg.
How, when, and even whether this reunion will happen is left uncertain
at the end of Hagio’s text. Likewise, we do not know whether our beloved Red
Planet characters will continue to evade their persecutors. What we do know
is that it is the chōshōjo, more than anyone, who offers them all their best and
most open-ended chances. This is because Star Red looks ultimately to the
hyper-girl to accomplish rebirth—of girls, of love, and of planets—by means
of an eco-feminist desire as productive as it is unpredictable.
Notes
I would like to thank Kotani Mari for her encouragement and intellectual generosity.
Kotani Sensei wrote the Mechademia 1 essay that first spurred my interest in the hyper-
girl. She also introduced me to Hagio’s Nanohana in 2012 and served as discussant for an
earlier version of my work on Star Red at the Association for Asian Studies meeting in
Atlanta in 2008. Thanks also to Anne McKnight and Brian Bergstrom for being inspiring
panel mates in 2008 and to Christopher Bolton for his expert editing.
1. “Konshū no hondana: Shinkan Nanohaha—Hagio Moto sakuhinshū” (This week’s

bookshelf: New publication Nanohana—A collection of works by Hagio Moto), Mainichi shin-
bun, May 6, 2012, http://mainichi.jp/feature/news/20120506ddm015070028000c.html.
2. The Asahi Weekly offers an intriguing if ultimately unsatisfying interpretation,
likening radioactivity in Nanohana to vampirism in Hagio’s The Poe Clan. See Tomiyama
Akiko, “Wadai no shinkan: Hagio Moto sakuhinshū Nanohana” (New titles in the news:
Hagio Moto’s anthology Nanohana), Asahi Weekly, May 13, 2012, http://book.asahi.com
/reviews/column/2012051300003.html. For the Yomiuri review, see “Shinkan nabi: Manga
to anime” (Navigating new titles: Manga and anime), Yomiuri shinbun, April 26, 2012,
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/book/comic/sinnavi/20120426-OYT8T00575.htm.
3. “Sōshoku kata, kagakusei kihaku na wadaisaku Nanohana” (Thick on ornament,
thin on science: The much discussed title Nanohana). Karasumaru no kurukuru kaiten to-
shokan kōendōri bunkan (The Kōendōri annex of Karasumaru’s revolving library), Book and
Manga Review Blog, http://karasumaru.txt-nifty.com/kurukuru/2012/04/post-818c.html.
4. Some key titles in the new materialism debates are Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hek-
man, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008); Jane
Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2010); and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and
Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). See also my essay on nuclear politics
and material feminism, “What Kind of Science? Reading Irigaray with Stengers,” in Philoso-
phy after Irigaray, ed. Mary Rawlinson, Danae Mcleod, and Sara McNamara (Albany: State
University of New York Press, forthcoming).
5. Miyasako Chizuru, Chōshōjo e (Toward the hypergirl) (Tokyo: Shūeisha Bunko,
1989), 200. Miyasako defines “hishōjo” in contradistinction to the way Honda Masuko de-
fines “shōjo” in the “Hira hira” (Fluttering) chapter of her book Ibunka toshite no kodomo (The
child as another culture) (Tokyo: Chikuma Gakugei Bunko, 1992). For an overview in English
of Honda’s book, see Aoyama Tomoko, “Nodame as ‘Another Culture,’” U.S.–Japan Women’s
Journal 38 (2010): 25–42. Honda’s “Fluttering” chapter has been translated by Aoyama and
Barbara Hartley as “The Genealogy of Hirahira: Liminality and the Girl,” in Girl Reading Girl
in Japan, ed. Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley (New York: Routledge, 2010), 19–37.
6. Kotani Mari, “Sutā Reddo no watashitachi” (We who are Star Red), in Sutā Reddo,
by Hagio Moto (Tokyo: Shōgakukan Bunko, 1995), 530.
7. Kotani Mari, “Ota kuiin wa, ota kuia no yume o mita wa” (The queer dream of an
ota-queen), in Mōjō genron F-kai (Net discourse version F), ed. Azuma Hiroki (Tokyo:
Seidosha, 2003), 122. Kotani delivered this paper at a symposium on postmodern otaku
sexuality organized by Azuma Hiroki and featuring Saitō Tamaki, Nagayama Kaoru, Itō
Gō, and Takekuma Kentarō.
8. Kotani Mari, “Metamorphosis of the Japanese Girl: The Girl, the Hyper-Girl, and
the Battling Beauty,” Mechademia 1 (2006): 166.
9. See Hiroko Tabuchi, “Japan Sets Policy to Phase Out Nuclear Power Plants by
2040,” New York Times, September 14, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/world
/asia/japan-will-try-to-halt-nuclear-power-by-the-end-of-the-2030s.html. But see also
Hiroko Tabuchi, “Japan Backs Off Goal to Replace Nuclear Power by 2040,” New York
Times, September 19, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/world/asia/japan-backs
-off-of-goal-to-phase-out-nuclear-power-by-2040.html.
10. Hagio Moto, “Nanohana to” (On the title Nanohana), afterword to Hagio Moto
sakuhinshū: Nanohana (Rape blossoms: A collection of works by Hagio Moto) (Tokyo:
Shōgakukan, 2012), 157. Hereafter, page numbers will be given parenthetically in the text.
I read the third story in the trilogy, “Salome 20xx,” as an amplification of themes in the
first two. In this story, Hagio casts Plutonium as the perverse female hero of Oscar Wilde’s
1891 play Salome.
11. Nakasone was prime minister from 1982 to 1987 and, as a Diet member in the
1950s, influential in setting up Japan’s nuclear power infrastructure. See Nakasone
Yasuhiro, interview with Yoshida Takafumi, “Genshiryoku to Nihonjin” (Nuclear power
and the Japanese), Mainichi shinbun, April 26, 2011. A partial translation appeared as
“INTERVIEW/ Yasuhiro Nakasone: Learn Lessons from Fukushima Crisis and Continue to
Promote Nuclear Energy,” Asahi Shimbun Asia and Japan Watch, May 23, 2011, http://ajw
.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/opinion/AJ201105232599.
12. Since March 11, 2011, there have been a number of essays in the online journal
Japan Focus about the process by which Japan was persuaded to accept nuclear energy in
the early and mid-1950s, after having been the target of nuclear attacks in 1945. Peter
Kuznick quotes a Defense Department consultant to Eisenhower’s 1953 United Nations
“Atoms for Peace” speech advising the president, who needed nuclear fuels and technolo-
gies for the arms race with the Soviet Union, “the atomic bomb will be accepted far more
h agio moto ’s n u c le ar man g a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 2 1

readily if at the same time atomic energy is being used for constructive ends.” See Yuki
Tanaka and Peter Kuznick, “Japan, the Atomic Bomb, and the ‘Peaceful Uses of Nuclear
Power,’” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 9, no. 18 (May 2, 2011), article no. 1, http://
www.japanfocus.org/-Yuki-TANAKA/3521. Oguma Eiji notes that the countries that have
promoted nuclear energy’s “peaceful applications” from the Cold War to the present day
are the same ones whose nuclear arsenals play the biggest role in their international dip-
lomatic standing: “International opinion poll surveys in response to Fukushima demon-
strate that Japan, Germany, and Italy indicate a preference for breaking away from nuclear
power generation, while the United States, France, Russia, China, and others adhere to
their standpoint of nuclear power promotion. In other words, the standing members of
the UN Security Council, who armed themselves with nuclear weapons after winning
World War II, maintain their position of promoting nuclear power.” Oguma Eiji, “The
Hidden Face of Disaster: 3.11, the Historical Structure and Future of Japan’s Northeast,”
trans. Kyoko Selden, The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus 9, no. 31 (August 1, 2011), article
no. 6, http://www.japanfocus.org/-Oguma-Eiji/3583.
13. Murakami Takashi, “Earth in My Window” (Mado ni chikyū), trans. Linda Hoag
lund, in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2005), 123.
14. This point is elaborated compellingly in Peter C. van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste,
Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 33–76.
15. Hagio Moto, Sutaa Reddo (Star Red) (Tokyo: Shōgakukan Bunko, 1995), 120.
Hereafter, page numbers will be given parenthetically in the text.
16. Kotani, “Sutaa Reddo no watashitachi,” 532.
17. Miyasako, Chōshōjo e, 264.
18. Translating an essay by Kotani on Japanese women’s science fiction, Miri Naka-
mura uses “Zesnusers” for the plural of “Zesunuseru.” Here, I use “Zesnuserians.” Kotani
Mari, “Space, Body, and Aliens in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction,” trans. Miri Naka-
mura, in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, ed.
Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2007), 58.
19. Quoted in Evan Osnos, “The Fallout—Seven Months Later: Japan’s Nuclear Pre-
dicament,” The New Yorker (October 17, 2011): 61.
20. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Nature of Culture,” in Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 51.
21. Ibid., 47.
22. Ibid., 48.
23. There is a strong affinity between this Zesnuserian law and the Lacanian frame-
work Deborah Shamoon reads in Takemiya Keiko’s 1977–1980 science fiction series To
Terra (Tera e). See Deborah Shamoon, “Humanity Grows Up,” in Manga and Philosophy, ed.
Josef Steiff and Adam Barkman, 149–59 (Chicago: Open Court, 2010). For a reading of
Hagio and Takemiya’s contrasting approaches to the politics of desire, again defined
psychoanalytically, see Midori Matsui, “Little Girls Were Little Boys: Displaced Femininity
in the Representation of Homosexuality in Japanese Girls’ Comics,” in Feminism and the
Politics of Difference, ed. Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman, 177–96 (San Francisco: West-
view Press, 1993).
24. Elizabeth Grosz, “Refiguring Lesbian Desire” in Space, Time, and Perversion (New
York: Routledge, 1995), 176.
25. We know that Neptune and Pluto have been colonized because Sei wonders if Erg
might be from either of them, before she learns of his true origin in the Zesnuserian Gal-
axy. And we know that Jupiter has been colonized because Erg carries a fake passport from
there, or rather from its moon Ganymede, to fool the Martian immigration authorities.
26. Miyasako, Chōshōjo e, 276.
27. Ibid., 277.
28. Ōtsuka Eiji, “‘Umu sei’ to shite no shōnen—‘Seisa no shōjo mangashi’ no tame ni”
(Shōnen as the “sex that gives birth”: Toward a shōjo manga history of sexual difference),
in Kodomo ryūritan: Sayonara “kodomo” tachi (Tales of the exiled wanderings of a child:
Goodbye children) (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1990), 180.
29. Fujimoto’s essay on Hagio appears in a volume of Ueno Chizuko’s six-volume New
Feminism Review series. Titled Bosei fashizumu (Maternity fascism), this volume is edited
by women’s historian Kanō Mikiyo and features essays on successful efforts by both the
state and nationalist feminists to appropriate maternity for right-wing ends. Fujimoto
Yukari, “Seishoku kara no tōsō, aruiwa, sekai no saisei: Hagio Moto o chūshin ni” (Escape
from reproduction, or, the world’s regeneration: With a focus on Hagio Moto), in New
Feminism Review 6: Bosei fashizumu: Haha naru shizen no yūwaku (Maternity fascism: The
temptation of mother-as-nature), ed. Kanō Mikiyo (Tokyo: Gakuyō Shobō, 1995), 134.
Interestingly, the same volume, which came out nine years after Chernobyl, features two
pieces actively critical of both German and Japanese antinuclear activism that rallied
around “mothers who give birth to life, protecting life” (seimei o umidasu hahaoya wa,
seimei o mamoru) (183). This is an important context for Fujimoto’s constructivist read-
ing. Kanō Mikiyo, “Hangenpatsu undō no naka no bosei: Kansha Taeko Mada maniau no
nara o chūshin ni” (Maternity in the anti–nuclear power movement: With a focus on Kan-
sha Taeko’s Is it Too Late?), in New Feminism Review 6, 180–85; Kanō Mikiyo and Claudia
Von Werlhof, “Bosei wa sekai o sukuu? Yōroppa hangenpatsu undō no shimesu mono”
(Will maternity save the world? What Europe’s anti–nuclear power movement shows),
in New Feminism Review 6: 166–78.
h agio moto ’s n u c le ar mang a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 2 3

FUJIMOTO YUKARI
Translated by Lucy Fraser
Where Is My Place
in the World?
Early Shōjo Manga
Portrayals of Lesbianism
I have often been asked about the lack of lesbians depicted in shōjo manga,
especially compared with the numerous depictions of gay men. At one event I
spoke with a lesbian woman for a long time, and the heart of the issue finally be-
came vividly clear to me: “Why is it that there are so few lesbian shōjo manga?”1
I attempted to respond with this explanation: “Lesbianism introduces
reality into the work.” After all, doesn’t Hagio Moto say that when she was
writing “Jūichigatsu no gimunajiumu” (1971, November gymnasium)—which
was the model for her masterpiece The Heart of Thomas (1974, Tōma no shinzō),
that set shōnen’ai in motion—doesn’t she say that at the draft phase, she tried
writing both a female and a male version, and she gave up the female version
because it was too raw and fleshy?2 Girl readers do not want to embrace female
bodies; they want to create a distance between themselves and sexual love. If
that is indeed the case, then girls have no reason to desire lesbianism.
The lesbian woman I was speaking with responded: “Yet before the war
the world of ‘S’ that Yoshiya Nobuko created was so well supported by girls. I
can’t believe that there is no demand from readers for that kind of work now.”3
I could not produce an answer that completely satisfied this particular
woman, and I continued to wrangle with the issue: “Why can’t love between
25
the heart of the
women provide sufficient fantasy for girls today?”
issue finally became
One explanation that I might give is that the
vividly clear to me:
closed, girls-only time and space that comprised
“Why is it that there
Yoshiya Nobuko’s world does not exist as a commu-
are so few lesbian
nal object any more. Of course there are still girls’
shōjo manga?”
schools now, and in those places there are still waver-
ing emotions between girls, and this is reflected in
works such as Yoshida Akimi’s Sakura no sono (1985–86, The cherry orchard).4
However, these works do not replicate the experiences of the general masses,
and although girls’ schools may exist, these days they are substantially in-
fluenced by the outside world. The schools can no longer exist as maidens’
gardens (otome no sono).5
Most important, in Yoshiya’s time, girls’ schools provided a temporary
respite before marriage. Marriage was usually something parents imposed
on girls with or without the girls’ agreement. Therefore in the limited time
before marriage, girls desired the only love that they could freely choose for
themselves: the fantasy of love between girls. And they savored it. However,
as the concept of freedom in romantic relationships was popularized, romantic
relationships with the opposite sex surfaced as a means for girls to choose
their own paths through marriage. We label this concept “modern romantic
love ideology.” This powerful fantasy drove out all other fantasies.
Thinking through my explanation, I have come to realize that my first in-
stinct, that “lesbianism introduces reality into the work,” conceals an essential
issue. I would like to consider that issue here, by examining some of the few
shōjo manga that actually portray lesbianism, starting with the origins of this
phenomenon in the early 1970s.
DARK ENDINGS IN LESBIAN WORKS
The earliest and most famous shōjo manga work portraying lesbians is Ya-
magishi Ryōko’s “Shiroi heya no futari” (1971, The two of the white room).6
This is the tragic love story of Simone and Recine, who are assigned a shared
room in their school dormitory. When Simone is called on in class, she recites
a Rainer Maria Rilke poem that is not in the textbook:
I must die because I have known her

Die for the indescribable radiance of her smile
For her light hands I must die, for her . . . 7
26 fujimoto yuk ari

It is a very affecting poem. Simone then leaves Recine murmuring mysteri-
ously, “I was looking at you as I said it.”
Backing up slightly, the story begins with Recine, who has just lost her
parents in an accident, coming into the dormitory of the girls’ school. Her
roommate, Simone, is beautiful and an all-around sports star, but she breaks
the rules and constantly goes out at night. She is a “bad girl,” which alienates
her from her classmates. At first Recine is spun about by Simone and feels at
a loss, but then she learns that Simone’s rough lifestyle is her way of acting
out to her mother, a famous actress who goes from one man to the next and
who has dumped her daughter in boarding school. After this revelation, Sim-
one and Recine are rapidly drawn to each other; Recine, although confused,
allows Simone to kiss her. However, Recine is then shocked to hear rumors
that she and Simone are lesbians and tries to distance herself from Simone,
who tells her, “You just don’t want to sully your name. You don’t want to lift
yourself out of the tracks of ordinary society. But I won’t run away from the
truth. I love you, Recine. I love you!!” Simone tries to follow Recine, but Recine
brushes her off and runs into the rain. She arrives at her aunt’s house and
faints with a fever; when she recovers it is to be notified of Simone’s death,
from what amounts to a suicide.
“Shiroi heya no futari” set off a fascinating phenomenon: over the next
few years in the early 1970s, the writers who were to become the leading fig-
ures in shōjo manga published works that followed the same pattern. While
not portraying lesbians as their subject, these works clearly deal with lesbian
relationships (though, because they were published in shōjo manga maga-
zines, they do not involve any actual sex). The works include Ikeda Riyoko’s
“Futaribotchi” (1971, Just the two of us) and Oniisama e . . . (1974, Dear elder
brother . . .), Ichijō Yukari’s “Maya no sōretsu” (1972, Maya’s funeral proces-
sion), and Satonaka Machiko’s Ariesu no otometachi (1973, Maidens of Aries).8
In fact they form a set: in all of them, lesbian relationships develop between
sisters who have been raised in separate households.
In Ikeda Riyoko’s early work “Futaripotchi,” two girls are engaged in a
bitter feud (Figure 1). (Reiko is a rich girl with long curly hair, Kaoru is poor
with short hair; it is very much a product of its strange time.) Then the girls’
single parents marry, and the girls become stepsisters. At first the two repel
each other at every turn, but Reiko comes to acknowledge that she is drawn
to Kaoru; after that the two rapidly become intimate. At that point, it comes
to light that their remarried parents, Reiko’s father and Kaoru’s mother, were
once lovers. So, does that mean that while Reiko and Kaoru may have differ-
ent mothers, they are actually sisters . . . ? No, in a sudden twist, they learn
w h e r e i s m y p l ace i n t h e wo r l d ? 2 7
Figure 1. Cover image for Ikeda Riyoko’s Futaripotchi (1971), from the 1971
Margaret Comics paperback edition.
that the revelation that Kaoru’s new stepfather was actually her biological
father was a lie told by Kaoru’s mother to bring stability to her life. The truth
is that Kaoru was conceived when her mother was forcefully impregnated by
a robber-murderer. When Reiko and Kaoru learn this, they lose all hope for a
happy future and commit suicide together.
Oniisama e . . . has a slightly more complicated plot. The heroine Nanako
has entered an exclusive private school for young ladies that has a sorority for
28 fujimoto yuk ari

selected students. Nanako is not a typical invitee, but she becomes a mem-
ber because the sorority leader, Ichinomiya Fukiko (respectfully nicknamed
“Miya-sama”) takes a liking to her (Figure 2). However, there is something
strange and jarring in the relationship between Fukiko and another student—
Asai Rei (nicknamed “San Jusuto no Kimi” or Saint-Just), with whom Nanako
has fallen in love at first sight. The story revolves around Fukiko and Rei’s
relationship, but others become entangled: Rei’s good friend Orihara Kaoru
(nicknamed “Kaoru no Kimi”), as well as Shinobu Mariko, a proud solitary girl
who hates men and is deeply attached to Nanako.9 Finally, it is revealed that
Figure 2. Cover image for Ikeda Riyoko’s Oniisama e . . . (1974, Dear elder
brother. . . ), from volume 2 of the 2002 Chūkō Bunko paperback edition.
the scar on Saint-Just’s right wrist was a cut made by Fukiko, who told her “I
will die together for you.” Rei and Fukiko are also revealed to be sisters sharing
both mother and father. (Fukiko had known that Rei was the illegitimate child
of her father’s mistress, but then discovers she has the same mother.) Then
the enraged Fukiko informs Rei that she does not have a single feeling of love
for her, that she was only using Rei to enhance her own sense of superiority.
The next day at school they are notified of Rei’s suicide.
“Maya no sōretsu” is basically the same in its tragedy involving a (possible)
sister/lesbian couple (Figure 3). Reina is the privileged daughter of a family in
the jewelry trade. She visits her family’s holiday home after a long absence and
encounters a beautiful woman, Maya, who has some kind of shadow hanging
over her. Maya, too, was once the happy daughter of a jeweler family, but
her parents were killed by Reina’s parents, who destroyed the business be-
longing to Maya’s family by burning their building; Maya and her elder sister
were permanently marked with burns and now seek revenge. Maya moves
steadily closer to her revenge, but even
so, Reina and Maya are strongly drawn
to each other. When the story reaches
the crucial closing act of vengeance,
Maya learns from Reina’s mother that
Maya and Reina are sisters by the same
father. Reina’s mother was abandoned
by Reina’s father, so out of spite the
mother killed him and took the jew-
elry business. Maya, having achieved
her revenge, leaves only Reina behind
and disappears into the flames.
As you can see, each one of these
works reaches a dark conclusion. The
one exception is Satonaka Machiko’s
Ariesu no otometachi. In this story,
Ekubo does not realize that the dash-
ing, fiery, and outspoken Romi (also
a talented horseback rider) is her own
sister (Figure 4). The text is the same
as the others up to the point where
the two main characters experience
Figure 3. “Maya no sōretsu” (1972, Maya’s funeral pro-
cession) is the title manga for this 2005 Shūeisha Bunko
a powerful mutual love and admira-
paperback collection of Ichijō Yukari’s work. tion even though they are of the same
30 fujimoto yuk ari

Figure 4. Cover image for Satonaka Machiko’s Ariesu no otometachi (1973–,
Maidens of Aries), from volume 2 of the 2005 Chūkō Bunko paperback edition.
gender. However, when they discover that they are sisters, their relationship
changes. (In other words, they come to a realization that they were drawn to
each other because they share the same blood.) In fact after that point, the
narrative shifts to focus on their rivalry over the same boy. As a result, the
tragedy worthy of a classical painting that characterizes each of the other
texts is absent here.
What I want to establish is that while the subject of Ariesu no otometachi
is not “lesbians” (as it is, for example, in “Shiroi heya no futari”) and while
the girls’ intense emotions are explained away as “blood ties,” it is clear that
the girls’ relationship was bound to end in tragedy if it had not changed to
another form.
THE CRIMSON ROSE AND THE CANDY GIRL
Skipping ahead a few years to the mid-to late 1970s and early 1980s, a number
of lesbian works were published in Sebuntiin (Seventeen), a magazine aimed at
an older bracket of shōjo readers and a forerunner of the ladies’ comics genre.
Examples include Fukuhara Hiroko’s Kurenai ni moyu (Blazing crimson) and
Hadashi no Mei (Barefoot Mei), and Kashi Michiyo’s Kanojotachi (Those girls).
A little more recently, in the mid-1980s, Nagahama Sachiko’s Ibutachi no heya
(Eve and the others’ room) was serialized in Gyaruzu komikku (Girls comic).10
In keeping with publications aimed at an older readership, the stories included
not only kisses but also actual sexual relations. However, all of these works
with lesbians as their subjects (including “Shiroi heya no futari,” discussed
above) are surprisingly similar on a structural level.
The two main characters in every work are invariably a beautiful, cool
superwoman with a bold personality matched with an extremely girly, art-
less type. I will refer to the former as the “Crimson Rose” and the latter as
the “Candy Girl.” Both these protagonists—but particularly the Rose—are
burdened with unhappy homes. While not every Candy Girl suffers from this
particular problem, she is always dosed with some measure of unhappiness,
and the unhappier the Candy Girl is at home, the more she is inclined toward
the Rose. (One exception to the rule is the Candy Girl in Kanojotachi, Misono,
who has a supportive family.)
These lesbian relationships are consistently gossiped about and treated
as a scandal by the cruel characters surrounding the protagonists. The threat
of exposure as lesbians through photographic evidence is a common device.
The late 1980s work, Ibutachi no heya, is no exception: even though it is set at
a girls’ high school where students simper over fellow girls about as regularly
as they eat meals, when the two main characters are discovered to have seri-
ous feelings, they are the sudden victims of slander and backbiting comments
such as “Ew, so they’re lesbians. That’s so disgusting,” and “How far do you
think they’ll take this lesbo thing?” As a result the Rose—trying to protect
her Candy Girl even if she cannot protect herself—either kills the blackmailer
then herself (in Kurenai ni moyu), or loses all hope and undergoes a death
32 fujimoto yuk ari

that is near suicide (in Kanojotachi and “Shiroi heya no futari”). Whatever the
events, it seems that the Rose is fated to die in every story.
The circumstances surrounding these dark endings and deaths are the
same as in the sister/lesbian stories of the early 1970s texts. The only real
difference is that, in the earlier works, lesbianism is not cited as the direct
reason for the death. Rather than slander and outside pressure, the death is
the result of complicated circumstances arising from the secrets surrounding
the character’s birth and origins.
Even when the characters do not actually die, the specter of suicide is still
present. In Hadashi no Mei the two characters do not precisely enter a lesbian
relationship, so neither one dies; but the Rose protagonist is the survivor of
a previous lesbian double suicide, so that element is still inserted into the
story. In Ibutachi no heya the Candy Girl loves the Rose, but unable to stand
the slander, she betrays her and decides to marry. On the day of the wedding,
the Rose sneaks into the bridal dressing room and demands the Candy Girl
take poison and commit suicide with her. The Candy Girl takes the poison
mouth-to-mouth from the Rose, but the latter reveals that it was a ruse; hav-
ing confirmed that the Candy Girl still loves her, the Rose departs and leaves
her at the ceremony.
Texts that portray male homosexuality—which I believe are the essen-
tial opposite of these lesbian texts—do not deal similarly with the censor-
ing gaze of society, rumor and gossip, or taboo. This contrast illustrates the
fact that shōjo manga about male–male relationships are not attempting to
portray “homosexuality.” At heart, these texts attempt to portray not men
whose sexual orientation makes them capable of loving only other men but
the extreme opposite. These works are an attempt to remove the existing
symbolism and imagery that has surrounded heterosexuality, and to portray
the shape of a more purified sexual love. Therefore, even if characters face
interior conflict because their love is not easily accepted, on the outside they
do not work out problems of being different or being judged for being a male
attracted to other males.
On the other hand, the fact that lesbian works cannot escape from soci-
ety’s gaze is proof that they are dealing with “reality.” This is the reason lesbian
texts cannot expand into the territory of fantasy. They exist in opposition
to the male homosexual texts, which adopted the figures of boys in order to
soar away from reality and acquire the excitement and fascination of human
relationships removed from everyday experience.
There are a very small number exceptions to the patterns describe
here, and in any case, as I have already pointed out, shōjo manga that treat
lesbianism are very few to begin with.11 Other manga that might touch on
the subject all involve beautiful-girl-in-boy’s-clothing types. There is Rosalie’s
admiration and affection for Oscar in The Rose of Versailles (1972–73, Berusaiyu
no bara); Romantsa’s confession of love for her girlhood friend Valentino/a,
the female sovereign of Venice disguised as a man, in Morikawa Kumi’s “Suk
yandaru mūn wa yoru no yume” (The scandal moon is a night dream); and
the love between the male-dressing Queen Erminia and the servant Fiona in
Parosu no ken (1986–87, The sword of Paros).12 That is about the extent of it,
and what’s more, all three of these couples are still Crimson Rose–Candy Girl
combinations. Comparing these few works with the profusion of talent in
male homosexual shōjo manga is like comparing earth with heaven.
THE CAGE OF REALITY
So why on earth is it that reality is bound to intrude upon lesbian works, and
why is it that they cannot then break away from stereotypical portrayals? Why
is it that the minute the protagonist dresses up as a boy, shōjo are released
from reality and a free world full of excitement is created? It can only be that
for shōjo, and also for women, being a woman is the most insurmountable sym-
bol of reality. And sadly, for shōjo this particular reality is difficult to accept.
First and foremost is the fear of sexuality. The majority of girls cannot
feel 100 percent open to the idea of sexual maturity. It is something they
want to look forward to as well as something to put off. These works, begin-
ning with the shōnen’ai I have discussed and encompassing the great variety
of shōjo manga that experiment with transgressing gender boundaries, are in
fact flowers that have bloomed from an earth made fertile by girls’ inability
to experience positive affirmation and acceptance of their own sexuality as
women. We see this in the misogynistic remarks dropped by the protago-
nists of shōnen’ai works, but girls’ dispositions toward their own sexuality are
most clearly represented in the prototypes that gave birth to all these texts
that depict gender transgression: that is, the works that explore “the girl in
boy’s clothing.” The figure of the boy is a disguise for the souls of those girls
who want to put off being women. In most cases these girls accept their own
female sexuality with the appearance of a member of the opposite sex whom
they like: they remove their male costume and fall into the arms of the one
they love. (Of course I am speaking metaphorically here.) This act echoes a
wish to “be a woman only in front of the person I love.” There are not many
women who do not experience this wish.
34 fujimoto yuk ari

Considered from another angle, this means that there is only one way a
woman can affirm her own sexuality: “being loved by a man (whom I love).”
The structure of this belief is also connected to the
fantasy that “someday my prince will come.” In
It is no exaggeration
contrast to their apparent sweetness, these fan-
to say that the words
tasies cannot be neatly dismissed as girls’ dreams
“Where is my place in
and yearnings: at their root is a desire that con-
the world?” may be
cerns the very foundations of existence.
used to represent
For the last thirty years, I have absorbed shōjo
the theme of nearly
manga at about the same rate as I absorb oxygen,
every shōjo manga.
and what preoccupies me deeply is the extreme de-
gree to which girls cannot help but want their own
identities to be confirmed by another. The girls keep shouting “Somebody
love me. Someone tell me that it is alright for me to be alive!” While much of
this desire takes the form of a longing for heterosexual love, sometimes it is
voiced directly to parents. It is no exaggeration to say that the words “Where
is my place in the world?” may be used to represent the theme of nearly every
shōjo manga. And the wonder drug that resolves this anxiety about the exis-
tence and acceptance of sexuality is a member of the opposite sex, someone
you love telling you that he loves you and affirming your own existence. It is
at that moment that the negative marker “woman” is changed dramatically
into a positive one, and, it seems, the moment the woman begins to shine.
However, the structure of this apparent “wonder drug” conceals the way
the fantasy itself actually exacerbates women’s anxieties about their own ex-
istence. Why does a woman become so desperate to be loved? No other affir-
mation can rescue her from these anxieties; if she achieves love from a man
then she is fine, but if not she will never be able to reconcile herself with the
reality of her existence as a woman.
This is the message of the modern romantic love ideology: “Couple. If
you do not couple you are nothing.”13 A woman is of no value in and of her-
self. A woman who is not loved by a man is second-rate—no matter how
successful she might be in society. Women are constantly exposed to this
threat. They have been impelled to suffer a variety of disadvantages because
their sexuality has been judged essentially inferior, and love with a man
is the only means of improvement and the only way to finally have their
place in society recognized. Women have internalized this process, and it
has manifested itself as an evasion of our own inner sexuality. It has become
the single-minded belief that a man’s sympathy and deep love can rescue a
woman from her anxiety.
This process of anxiety and desire, discernible when we consider the gaps
in the portrayal of lesbianism in shōjo manga, certainly gives me the shivers.
It reveals a dexterous form of control in which male-dominated society has
imprinted girls with an anxiety about themselves and then led them to believe
that only men can save them from their anxiety. Yet is there anyone who can
renounce this belief and escape it?
The question of “Where is my place in the world?” is the powerful theme
of shōjo manga; it is the desire for self-affirmation through the other, and it is
especially emphasized in lesbian works. Two souls are called together by their
mutual loneliness and unhappiness at home. For example, in Kurenai ni moyu,
Reina (the Candy Girl) says:
I’ve finally found a place to belong

I had been searching for it since I was small
somewhere that will care for my heart
a place that will warm my loneliness
where time is easy on me . . .
If this were a comic about heterosexual love, this would be the ultimate happy
ending. Readers would expect Reina and her partner to overcome the obsta-
cles keeping them apart, and the writer would meet those expectations. But
in manga about lesbians, this cannot be. For one thing, even if a girl’s spiritual
hunger for someone to affirm her existence is sated, the second function of
affirmation by the opposite sex cannot be fulfilled—that is, the male’s func-
tion as a passport to becoming a regular member of society.
Furthermore, because the medium is shōjo manga, neither the protago-
nists nor the readers are yet conditioned as responsible adults who can con-
sciously choose lesbianism. Inevitably, the period where the shōjo can believe
that “a man will appear who can save me from everything” is the quintessence
of shōjo manga. On the other hand, when she has lost hope and realized that
“no man will save me,” the reader becomes independent, or assumes a ladies’
comic attitude where all she desires from men is the guarantee of social sta-
tus, sex, and entertainment. If all that is the case, then for girls who cannot
discard the hope of “someday, somewhere,” lesbianism can only ever be an
emergency escape.
Before their suicide pact in Hadashi no Mei, the girl protagonists’ class-
mates speculate that their “indecent relationship” is the result of their un-
happy upbringings. The words Misaki (the Rose) shouts back at them are
characteristic of lesbian shōjo manga:
36 fujimoto yuk ari

We’re two children who didn’t know our fathers, whose homes are troubled,
and well, our hearts didn’t fit in with everyone else’s. One day we met, and
comforted one another, warmed one another, and made a world just for the
two of us. Even though we knew that having our own private world created
a bigger and bigger distance between us and everyone else, we couldn’t let
go of the warmth we had finally found. Don’t you get it? For a truly lonely
person, if you find someone who will fill your loneliness you don’t care who
they are!
In essence, she describes a closed existence into which the girls retreat to
nurse each other’s wounds. Of course this is not a realistic portrayal of lesbian
relationships. However, because the vehicle is shōjo manga, and because the
shōjo’s fantasy that “a man will save me” is still being perpetuated, the works
cannot move past this image.14
The existence of women reminds girls unavoidably of “the cage of real-
ity.” Whether it is imagining love with a male, or imagining oneself as a male
as in shōnen’ai, girls cannot escape from that cage unless the medium is that
symbol known as “a man.” Unconscious or not, this feeling is at the heart of
the issue.
EMOTIONAL EXCHANGE BETWEEN WOMEN
As I have written elsewhere, from the 1990s onward, lesbian works all at once
became more bright and cheerful.15 But in this earlier period of the 1970s and
’80s, where does lesbianism exist apart from sexual taboo, a mutual nursing
of wounds in a closed space, and pornography? On which horizon does it
have new meanings? I will consider the answer to my final question through
a discussion of Kimura Minori’s Umibe no Kain (Cain of the seaside), published
in Mimi in 1980–81 (Figure 5).16 (Mimi was one of the first magazines of the
genre now known as “young ladies”—shōjo manga magazines marketed to the
upper age bracket—but unfortunately it ceased publication in 1996.)
The story begins with Mori Nobuko, who works as a waitress or sings and
plays guitar in late-night cafés; she is what is now known as a “freeter.”17 No-
buko comes to a seaside town and gets to know Sano-san, a children’s clothing
designer. The women form a close friendship, and Nobuko confides in Sano-
san about the emotional wounds inflicted by her mother. Through Sano-san’s
advice and support, Nobuko is able to straighten out her feelings and visit her
parents for the first time in a long time.
One night, that same Sano-san who
understood Nobuko’s feelings so well in-
vites Nobuko to bed with her. In reply,
Nobuko confesses that: “I have always
loved you, I think from the time I first
met you, but I was worried that I didn’t
love you for yourself, that I was loving
you in replacement for my mother. But
now I have reconciled with my mother,
so there is no reason for me to feel guilty
about my feelings for you.” Sano-san’s ex-
pression changes slightly, and after that
night she rejects Nobuko, saying that No-
buko’s “intentions” “disgust” her. “I was
acting out of curiosity . . . a woman loving
a woman,” she says. “You are unnatural.
It’s abnormal.”
In a desperate whirl of emotions, No-
buko realizes that, as with her mother,
she is “angry when the other person does
Figure 5. Cover image for Kimura Minori’s Umibe not love me.” She goes to meet Sano-san
no Kain (1980–81, Cain of the seaside), from the 1981 again. This time Sano-san invites her in-
Kōdansha Comics Mimi paperback edition.
side and presses her with, “It was curios-
ity for you too, you know.” Nobuko wonders, “Does she want me to say yes?”
She tries to answer but the tears stream down her face, and she cannot say
anything. The final lines conclude with, “I left the town by the seaside, and
never returned.”
While some might read Sano-san’s rejection of Nobuko as showing the
taboo against lesbianism, others might feel that nothing really happens in
the story. Kimura Minoru later published Hahaoya no musumetachi (Moth-
er’s daughters), which depicts a situation very similar to the one in Umibe no
Kain.18 That is, a woman (who feels that her mother didn’t love her) admires
an older woman and shares her bed once, at the older woman’s invitation,
but is then treated coldly. In Hahaoya no musumetachi the psychology of the
older woman is explicated: another female friend explains to the protagonist,
“She just wanted to tease you a little. She was surprised when she found your
feelings were serious.”
The title Hahaoya no musumetachi proves that mother–daughter relation-
ships are among Kimura Minori’s personal interests. As I have already shown,
38 fujimoto yuk ari

in shōjo manga, conflicts with parents, unhappiness at home, and loneliness
are the foundations through which people connect. The same elements are
also emphasized in the portrayal of male–female relationships. So what ex-
actly is new about Kimura’s portrayal of lesbianism? What is the element that
is unique to love between women that cannot be narrated through analo-
gies with male–female love? I believe that it is the subtle exchange of feelings
made possible because what we might call the pressure of their emotions is
equalized between both partners. The similarity of their experience as women
is what allows their emotions to permeate the barriers between them. That
mutual exchange is not possible if one of the partners is male.19 Regardless
of the final break between the two characters, this is what Kimura’s work has
captured.
Here we are finally emancipated from the Crimson Rose–Candy Girl pair-
ing. A glance at the illustrations shows that the two characters do not have
especially alluring figures; they are ordinary women one might find anywhere.
For example, Sano-san’s distorted feelings about problems in her design ca-
reer are something that, on the whole, we would rather not see. However,
Nobuko views Sano-san as “someone who is honest about her feelings” and
says “sometimes Sano-san has an incredibly lonely look on her face.” In fact,
on the inside, Sano-san shares Nobuko’s feeling that her sexuality is not ac-
cepted. She says, “I think I’m probably someone other people don’t love,” and
Sano-san’s rejection of Nobuko is colored by her experience, long ago, of hav-
ing sex with a man who then stopped contacting her and dumped her.
This reminds me of Yoshida Akimi’s Sakura no sono. Yoshida’s work also
portrays that subtle exchange of feelings enabled because both partners are
female. “If we do this it makes our breasts less obtrusive,” Shimizu-san ex-
plains to Kurata-san as she sews ribbon into her costume; and I cannot think
of two stories more heartbreaking than the ones Shimizu-san relates in this
scene. She says, “I have large breasts too, and I’ve worried about them since
I was small . . . I thought I had done something wrong,” and again, “I still
remember clearly the vivid red stain on my underpants, as though someone
had swept a crimson crayon across them. I washed my body again and again
in the bathroom. And while I washed, I cried.”
Here we find that two girls can understand each other because they are
both female, because they both share the same realities, and because they
share the same level of emotion, their feelings are able to permeate into each
other. As a result, through their exchange of sensations and feelings, women
are able to accept the existence of their own sexuality in a way that does not
use the existence of men as its medium.
Here we find that two girls
In times when women enjoyed less
can understand each other
freedom, there was a period when their one
because they are both
hope was a “modern love relationship” with
female, because they both
a man who understood them. However, to-
share the same realities,
day the thought that this relationship is
and because they share
the only path available is trapping women
the same level of emotion,
in anxiety. When women can affirm their
their feelings are able to
own sexuality as women, or better, affirm
permeate into each other.
their own existence as women, a completely
new horizon will open. That is an image of
a new society that no one has yet seen. In the world of manga written for
women, there are some texts such as Yoshimura Akemi’s Kirin-kan gurafiti
(Kirin Hall graffiti) that, while they may not be lesbian, feature women who
meet one another through men and join together to transcend the existence
of men and affirm one another’s existence. These provide us with a vivid image
of an ideal world created by women.20
“Woman-loving” means women affirming their own sexuality from within
themselves. The possibilities that accompany love between women exist not
within fantasy but within women’s shared ownership of the same reality. And
this sharing allows women to forge connections that may work toward chang-
ing that reality.
Notes
1. [This text is an abridged translation of “Rezubian: Onna de aru koto o aiseru ka”
(Lesbianism: Can We Love Our Own Existence as Women?), a later chapter from Fuji-
moto’s book Watashi no ibasho wa doko ni aru no? Shōjo manga ga utsusu kokoro no katachi
(Where is my place in the world? The shape of the heart reflected in girls’ comics) (Tokyo:
Gakuyō Shobō, 1998). For a translation of the preceding chapter see: “Transgender: Female
Hermaphrodites and Male Androgynes,” trans. Linda Flores and Kazumi Nagaike, U.S.–
Japan Women’s Journal 27 (2004): 76–117. For other English translations of Fujimoto’s
work, see “Takahashi Macoto: The Origin of Shōjo Manga Style,” trans. Matt Thorn,
Mechademia 7 (2012): 24–55; “Historical Shōjo Manga: On Women’s Alleged Dislike,”
trans. Jaqueline Berndt, in International Journal of Comic Art, 13, no. 2 (2011): 87–102; “A
Life-Size Mirror: Women’s Self-Representation in Girls’ Comics,” trans. Julianne Dvorak,
Review of Japanese Culture and Society 4 (1991): 53–57. For an English-language outline of
shōjo manga scholarship in Japan, see Takeuchi Kayo, “The Genealogy of Japanese Shōjo
Manga (Girls’ Comics) Studies,” U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal 38 (2010): 81–112.—Trans.]
2. Hagio Moto, “Jūichigatsu no gimunajiumu” (November gymnasium), in Seera
Hiru no seiya (Sara Hill’s holy night), season 1, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1977), first pub-
lished in Bessatsu shōjo komikku, November 1971; Hagio Moto, Tōma no shinzō, season 1,
40 fujimoto yuk ari

vols. 11–12 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1978); translated as The Heart of Thomas by Matt Thorn
(Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2013); Yoshimoto Takaaki and Hagio Moto, “Jiko hyōgen to shite
no shōjo manga” (Shōjo manga as self-expression), Yuriika 13, no. 9 (July 1981): 82–119.
3. [“S” describes romances or intimate friendships between girls; Sarah Frederick
notes that the letter “can refer to ‘sister,’ shōjo, or the German schöne” (68). For more on
Yoshiya Nobuko’s girl characters see Frederick’s chapter, “Not That Innocent: Yoshiya
Nobuko’s Good Girls,” in Bad Girls of Japan, ed. Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 65–79.—Trans.].
4. Yoshida Akimi, Sakura no sono (The cherry orchard) (Tokyo: Hakusensha, 1986).
5. [Apart from playing on Yoshida’s title, the phrase otome no sono (maidens’ garden)
has several connotations in the field of shōjo studies. The word sono might remind readers
of a private, enclosed garden such as is found in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Gar-
den (1910; rpt., London: M. Joseph, 1986), which, in Japanese translation, became one of
the classics of the shōjo shōsetsu (girls’ novels) genre that gave birth to shōjo manga. Also,
Honda Masuko, in her pioneering essay on the shōjo, used garden imagery to describe
girls’ reading: “When I was a girl, there was nothing more important than the infinitely
rich ‘world of our own.’ So those of us who cherished this world joined together and built
a small enclosure to protect our secret garden. What did our enclosure protect? Girls today
guard their paradise known as the girls’ comic. What flowers bloom therein?” Honda
Masuko, “The Genealogy of Hirahira,” trans. Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley, in Girl
Reading Girl in Japan, ed. Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley (New York: Routledge,
2010), 36.—Trans.]
6. Yamagishi Ryōko, “Shiroi heya no futari” (The two of the white room), vol. 28
of Refuto ando raito Yamagishi Ryōko zenshū (Left and right, complete works of Yamagishi
Ryōko) (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1986). First published: Ribon komikku (Ribbon Comic),
February 1971.
7. [Yamagishi’s text shifts from the more generalized “we” or “one,” and the plural
object “them” common in English and Japanese translations to the more personal “I” and
“her,” which may be a deliberate change by Yamagishi/Simone.—Trans.]
8. Ikeda Riyoko, “Futaribotchi” (Just the two of us), Maagaretto (Margaret), no.
23–27, 1971; reprinted in Aizōhan Ikedo Riyoko chūhenshū II (Classic Ikeda Riyoko, central
volume II) (Tokyo: Chūo Kōronsha, 1989); Ikeda Riyoko, Oniisama e . . . (Dear elder
brother . . .), Maagaretto (Margaret), no. 12–39, 1974; reprinted in Aizōhan Ikedo Riyoko
chūhenshū I (Classic Ikeda Riyoko, central volume I) (Tokyo: Chūo Kōronsha, 1989); Ichijō
Yukari, “Maya no sōretsu” (Maya’s funeral procession), Ribon (Ribbon), May supplement,
1972; reprinted in Kurisuchiina no aoi sora • Maya no sōretsu • Kugatsu no popii (Christina’s
blue sky; Maya’s funeral procession; September poppy) (Tokyo: Shūeisha SG Komikkusu,
1991); Satonaka Machiko, Ariesu no otometachi (Maidens of Aries), Shūkan shōjo furendo
(Girl’s friend weekly), nos. 33–, 1973; reprinted in 4 vols. (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan Manga
Kessakushu, 1996).
9. [Rei’s nickname is taken from the ruthless French revolutionary, Louis Antoine
Léon de Saint-Just. Kaoru’s nickname is taken from Prince Genji’s nephew, an ambiguous
character in Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh-century classic, The Tale of Genji.—Trans.]
10. Fukuhara Hiroko, Kurenai ni moyu (Blazing crimson), 2 vols. (Tokyo: Shōgakukan
Manga Bunko, 1982); Fukuhara Hiroko, Hadashi no Mei (Barefoot Mei) (Tokyo: Shōgakukan
Manga Bunko, 1977); Kashi Michiyo, Kanojotachi (Those girls) (Tokyo: Shōgakukan Manga
Bunko, 1982); Nagahama Sachiko, Ibutachi no heya (Eve and the others’ room) (Tokyo:
Shufu no Tomo-sha GL Komikkusu, 1983).
11. For two rare exceptions that portray lesbianism with no hint of taboo, see Naka
Tomoko’s woman-loving protagonist Duchess Vistaria in Sharutoru kōshaku no tanoshimi
(The Duchess of Chartres’s pleasure), 7 vols. (Tokyo: Shogakukan Bunko, 2004), and
fashion model Shijō Maki in Ikesumi Chieko’s Kujaku no bishō (The peacock’s smile), first
serialized in Purinsesu (Princess), 3 vols. (Tokyo: Akita Shoten Purinsesu Komikkusu,
1976–77).
12. Ikeda Riyoko, Berusaiyu no bara (The rose of Versailles), Maagaretto (Margaret),
nos. 21–52 (1972–73); reprinted in 5 vols. (Tokyo: Shūeisha Bunko, 1994); Morikawa
Kumi, “Sukyandaru mūn wa yoru no yume” (The scandal moon is a night dream), in
Barenchiino shiriizu 1 (Valentino series vol. 1) (Tokyo: Take Shobō, 2001); Kurimoto Kaoru
(text) and Igarashi Yumiko (illus.), Parosu no ken (The sword of Paros), 3 vols. (Tokyo:
Asuka Komikkusu, 1987).
13. Ueno Chizuko, Afterword to Seiairon (Theory of sexual love) (Tokyo: Kawade
Shobō Shinsha, 1991).
14. [Here I have omitted Fujimoto’s discussion of two rare exceptions. The first is
Ariyoshi Kyōko’s important lesbian work Apurōzu (1981–82, Applause), which portrays
the strong bond and tension between two aspiring actresses. Second, while depictions of
lesbianism in the ladies’ comics genre for adult readers tend to be pornographic, Tsukumo
Mutsumi’s Mūnraito furawaazu (1989–90, Moonlight flowers) is seemingly a culmination
of the shōjo manga portrayals. One of the characters speaks the following line: “[In this era
of women’s social advancement] Many men find it difficult to accept lesbianism because
it encroaches on their privileges. For men, sex, most of all, is the last bastion. Men always
believe that ‘women are not allowed to have sex without men’ and ‘women are always
waiting for men who will love and desire them.’” Tsukumo Mutsumi, Mūnraito furawaazu
(Moonlight flowers) (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1991).—Trans.]
15. [See the chapter that follows this one in Watashi no ibasho wa doko ni aru no, “Jidai
wa akarui rezubian” (The bright era of lesbian works).—Trans.]
16. Kimura Minori, Umibe no Kain (Kain of the seaside) (Tokyo: Kōdansha Komikkusu,
1981).
17. [Furiitaa (freeter) is the name for freelancers or people working in casual, usually
low-paid jobs, who often exist on the fringes of society.—Trans.]
18. Kimura Minori, Hahaoya no musumetachi (Mother’s daughters) (Tokyo: Kawade
Shobō Shinsha, 1986).
19. [Fujimoto’s original metaphor involves the notion of osmotic pressure and osmotic
exchange between two fluid solutions.—Trans.]
20. Yoshimura Akemi, Kirin-kan gurafiti (Kirin Hall graffiti), 13 vols. + extra edition
(Tokyo: Shōgakukan Furawaa Komikkusu, 1987–92).
42 fujimoto yuk ari

SETH JACOBOWITZ
Between Men, Androids,

and Robots: Assaying
Mechanical Man in Meiji
Literature and Visual Culture
Despite the seeming ubiquity of androids, robots, and their biomechanical

kin in contemporary Japanese popular culture, we are sorely beset by a lack of
understanding of their discursive origins. Conventional narratives on the sub-
ject all too often breezily skip from eighteenth-century karakuri (handmade
automata) to postwar icons such as Tezuka Osamu’s Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro
Boy) and beyond, with scant mention of the major developments that trans-
pired between them.1 Even pioneering studies such as Inoue Haruki’s Nippon
robotto sōseiki, 1920–193 (1993, The genesis of Japanese robots, 1920–1938),
which have done much to refocus attention on the intellectual ferment of the
interwar years, essentially bypass the half-century of industrialization and
technological innovation in the Meiji period (1868–1912).2 The frequency with
which tropes of “machine-like” (kikai no yōni) and “mechanical” (kikaiteki) hu-
man beings are expressed in modern Japanese literature and visual culture,
however, necessitates closer scrutiny of the episteme of “mechanical man”
that arose during this time. It further raises the question how these notions
of mechanization ought to be reconciled with the Meiji ethos of “civilization
and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika) that placed strong emphasis on Western
44
humanism and Romanticist philosophy. If Meiji thought culminated in calls
for emancipated individualism such as Natsume Sōseki’s “My Individualism”
(1914, Watakushi no kojinshugi), it did not forestall the disquieting apprehen-
sion of the individual’s limits under the conditions of what can rightly be
called Japan’s first machine age.3 To that end, this article seeks to assay—I
intentionally use this term from the hard sciences to determine the quantity
of metallic or biological substance in a given object—the recurrent trope of
mechanization that appears in Meiji literature and visual culture. Even as
individuality was being discovered in modern Japan, so too were its techno-
logically and socially defined boundaries.
My critical approach is principally informed by the methodological in-
sights of Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 100/1900 and Eve Kosovsky
Sedgwick’s Between Men.4 Kittler identifies a new class of privileged, male
authors, protagonists and readers in German Romanticism for whom Woman
(not individual women) is elevated to sacred Muse of Nature and Beauty, who
does not speak for herself but instead circulates as a signifier in Romanticism’s
constellation. While we may already detect in this arrangement the inter-
nal workings of what Sedgwick calls “homosociality,” I wish to argue that the
continuum of male–male relationships in Romanticism and its outgrowths is
always already tempered by the simultaneous apprehension of machinery as
a metaphor for degraded or servile humanity.5 Accordingly, Romanticism can
be seen as much a reaction against mechanical instrumentality as an endorse-
ment of the supposedly innate ties of blood, soil, and spirit.6
In Meiji Japan, Romanticism made substantial inroads from the 1890s,
effectively transforming the literary landscape with the modern, realist (sha-
jitsu shugi) novel and free verse poetry (shintaishi) as its primary conduits. At
the same time, Western-style typography, lithography, and visual arts began
to articulate the promises and perils of a mechanically organized way of life.
In the three sections of this article I seek to fill in some of the blanks in this
lacuna of origins for mechanical man. The first section examines the origins
of the concepts “android” and “robot” in the West that chronologically bracket
developments in Meiji Japan; first, to demonstrate the permeability of these
two concepts well into our own time, and second, to argue that the literary
texts under consideration here owed more to Romanticism per se than to the
incipient genre of science fiction. It is particularly with respect to the homo-
social question that these texts can be drawn into productive comparison with
Meiji representations of mechanical man.
In the second section I analyze several examples from Meiji visual culture
that attest to the crisis of the individual under mechanical civilization, first
be t w e e n m e n , a n d r o i d s , a n d r o bots 4 5
with the convergent arrangements of human bodies and machines in a page
of advertisements from the Tokyo asahi shinbun (1889), then in the disturb-
ing representation of a tortured mechanical man in Kobayashi Kiyochika’s
cartoon “The Eye-Rotating Machine” (1885) from the comic journal Marumaru
chinbun. They constitute the conditions that made it possible for the mechani-
cal man to emerge with the coherence of a discourse, in this case what I am
primarily identifying as Meiji-era Romanticism.
The third and final section turns to three literary texts, Tayama Katai’s
The Quilt (1907, Futon), Mori Ōgai’s “The Dancing Girl” (1890, Maihime), and
Natsume Sōseki’s novel And Then (1909, Sorekara), to show how a host of
machine-driven topoi offer a striking counterpoint to the unfettered notions
of individualism typically attributed to Sōseki and Meiji Romanticism more
generally.7 Of equal importance is that all three represent homosociality as
that which mitigates anxieties over technology by providing a sympathetic
audience of peers with whom to commiserate.
BRACKETING ANDROIDS AND ROBOTS
The fact that “mechanical man” was primarily articulated in Meiji Japan
through Romanticist literature and related visual imagery is not altogether
surprising when we consider how science fiction has occluded a larger field
of discursive relations. Two of the central concepts for humanlike machinery
in the sci-fi lexicon did not emerge from within that genre per se, but from
European modernism: the “android” from Villiers d’Isle Adam’s symbolist
novel Tomorrow’s Eve (1886, L’Ève future) and “robot” from Karel Čapek’s Czech
avant-garde play Rossum’s Universal Robots (1921, R.U.R.).8 It is thus neces-
sary to revisit these urtexts, however briefly, to observe how they exceed the
narrow confines of science fiction and to insist that even its contemporary
concepts and categories are not as definitively settled as we might imagine.
Tomorrow’s Eve and R.U.R. provide quite a few reversals of expectation
about the origins of the android and the robot. In the former, the female
android Hadaly is created by the great Creator himself, Thomas Alva Edison,
as a gift to his male friend Ewald. Romantic irony predominates where the
presumptive copy of nature incarnates the beauty of one Alicia Clary, a flesh-
and-cold-blooded woman so lacking in mental or spiritual capacity as to drive
Ewald to the point of suicide.9 Hadaly is as much a product of the Symbolist
fascination with the fantastic and supernatural (itself an outgrowth of the Ro-
mantic imagination) as she is an uncanny product of Edison’s techno-scientific
46 seth jacobow it z
Two of the central concepts
prowess. As it turns out, she is not only
for humanlike machinery in the
a mechanical being but is suffused with
sci-fi lexicon did not emerge
the spirit of Edison’s mystical assis-
from within that genre per se,
tant Sowana, although her premature
but from European modernism:
drowning in the novel’s conclusion cur-
the “android” from Villiers
tails any development of this intrigu-
d’Isle Adam’s symbolist novel
ing potentiality.
Tomorrow’s Eve (1886, L’Ève
Hadaly’s scientific- supernatural
future) and “robot” from
hybrid makeup notwithstanding, she
Karel Čapek’s Czech avant-
is, outwardly speaking, closer in type
garde play Rossum’s Uni
to our contemporary definition of the
versal Robots (1921, R.U.R.).
robot, while Čapek’s robots better ap-
proximate the definition of androids.
In contrast to the nuts and bolts that gird Hadaly’s body, the robots of R.U.R.
are not mechanical at all, but, in fact, mass-produced from a synthetic mate-
rial that is mixed and kneaded in vats, then assembled in a factory. Although
they are not made from the same organic substances as human beings, in
one of the first scenes in the play a female robot is mistaken for a human
being. But as we may glean from photographs taken from international per-
formances in London and New York in the 1920s, however, it did not take
long for Čapek’s artificial human beings to be recast as ironclad automatons
(Figure 1).10
The basic narrative of R.U.R. has become the fodder of endless science
fiction remakes ever since its debut: the robots are created to serve as slave-
laborers, only to rebel and assert their supremacy over humanity. Initially the
robots are manufactured without affect and hence no desire to rebel. It is only
at the insistence of Helena Glory, a human-rights crusader who becomes the
wife of Domin, the general manager of the factory, that one of the scientists
enables the robots to experience pain. This in turn leads them to recognize
and resent their bondage. It is imperative to point out, however, the entirely
male human team of scientists is absolutely devoted to each other, with Hel-
ena as the one woman whose presence prevents their male homosocial desire
from crossing over into more dangerous territory. No sooner have the scien-
tists assured her that the robots are not being exploited than Domin, standing
in for the group, proposes marriage:
domin: Helena, you wouldn’t be so cruel as to refuse us.

helena: But, but—I can’t marry all six.
domin: No, but one anyhow. If you don’t want me, marry Fabry.11
Irony is in no short supply here, too, where their collective desire to act in
unison and satisfy Helena’s sentimental wishes to humanize the robots (much
as she humanizes them, homosexual desire is apparently out of the question)
is what precipitates the downfall of man.
It would be a mistake to assume contemporary science fiction has
erased the ambiguity between robot and android. The “replicant” androids in
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Ridley Scott’s
Figure 1. R.U.R.’s robot as “mechanical man.”
48 set h jacobow it z
film adaptation Blade Runner (1982) are physically indistinguishable from or-
dinary humans, despite possessing superhuman strength and stamina.12 It
is only in the infamous Voight-Kampff test that a physiological response can
betray their simulated souls. The androids’ lack of innate empathy is offset
by implanted false memories that have as their complement the faded evi-
dence of black-and-white photographs (i.e., replicated minds as well as bod-
ies). As if this were not already closer to the spirit of Čapek than Villiers,
Dick’s novel further alludes to R.U.R.-like artificial being by naming the lead
android Roy Baty, which all but spells out the connection when the letter “y”
(or the “whys”) are removed: R-O-B-[O]-T. Although Scott tweaked the lead
android’s name to Roy Batty as if to indicate his mad desperation to overcome
the android’s built-in lifespan of four years, Blade Runner, too, makes much of
the association of androids with lifelike dolls, toys, mannequins, and puppets.
Second only to Dr. Tyrell, the master inventor of the androids, is the genetic
engineer J. F. Sebastian, who doubles in his spare time as a toymaker. His
living/work space—the now-abandoned Bradbury Building in Los Angeles—
overflows with Victorian toy soldiers and porcelain-faced dolls, who provide
the backdrop for the climactic showdown between the last two androids and
the bounty hunter sent to “retire” them.
There is an additional impetus for situating the extensive mechanical
tropes of Meiji between the history of androids and robots given that the
preferred Japanese translation for robot in the early 1920s was jinzō ningen,
or “artificial human being.” Almost immediately after Čapek’s R.U.R. made its
international debut, scientist-cum-science fiction writer Unno Jūza began to
employ jinzō ningen interchangeably, or rather simultaneously, with the pho-
neticized robotto in order to exploit the full range of ontological ambiguity in
the continuum from human to machine.13 Likewise, as Miri Nakamura has
observed of the interwar period:
Japan saw a “robot boom” during which such popular science magazines
as Kagaku gahō (Illustrated Magazine of Science) and satirical writers as
Mizushima Niou began to feature robots in their texts. . . . The image of
jinzō ningen (literally, “artificial humans”) also became popularized through
works such as Mizushima’s “Jinzō ningen jidai” (1923, “The Age of Artificial
Humans”).14
Although it is far less common than “robot” in daily usage, jinzō ningen never-
theless remains in active circulation today. To cite but one prominent example,
in the first episode of the blockbuster television anime series Neon Genesis
Evangelion (1997, Shin seiki Evangerion), the semi-sentient, humanoid-looking
giant robots are repeatedly and matter-of-factly referred to as jinzō ningen.15
My point here is not to project backwards a genealogy from mechanical to
artificial human beings, which presupposes a continuous or direct lineage,
but rather to underscore the fluidity of the signifiers “robot” and “android”
in relation to each other. Moreover, as we shall see in the final section of this
essay, what determined “mechanical man” in Meiji was not only a machine
anxiety registered in flesh and blood but also a set of shared relations from
which women were either exempt or excluded.
EYING MECHANICAL CIVILIZATION
We need look no further than the daily newspaper for evidence of a mechani-
cal civilization of Meiji, replete with juxtapositions of what Mark Seltzer has
called the binary “machine process” and “life process” of modern industrial
civilization.16 To borrow a fairly typical advertising page from the August 15,
1889, issue of the Tokyo asahi (Figure 2), lithographic illustrations of cog-and-
gear-driven mechanisms sit comfortably alongside timetables for the postal
service and newspaper delivery, while a smattering of maps, fountain pens,
magic lantern shows, and self-instruction manuals in shorthand notation
are further reminders of increasingly networked technologies of writing and
projection. Pocket watches that reveal the inner workings of cogs and gears
appear alongside a medicinal remedy that seeks to prove its efficacy by mak-
ing visible an anatomical cross-section of the lungs. What transpires in these
multiple arrangements is an increased visibility of circulation systems, the
shifting of gears and pumping of fluids. Precision machinery and the organic
pathways of the human body are thus held up as mutually legible and po-
tentially interchangeable systems. These casual, but increasingly ubiquitous,
juxtapositions should not mislead us into thinking the dehumanizing implica-
tions of mechanical civilization were easily swallowed even by the most ardent
modernizers.
As early as the September 5, 1885, issue of the comic weekly Marumaru
chinbun new fears of human beings disposed as interchangeable parts in a ma-
chine assembly, their humanity reduced to a ghost or tortured body, converge
in Kobayashi Kiyochika’s cartoon “The Eye-Rotating Machine” (Figure 3). In an
abrupt departure from the rosy-hued scenes of daily life in his earlier “light-
and-s hadow” (kōsenga) prints and also at a considerable remove from his later
patriotic war prints, Kiyochika’s political cartoons of the mid-1880s often
5 0 set h jacobow it z
Figure 2. The mechanical universe of Meiji visual culture, from the Tokyo asahi shimbun, August 15, 1889.
be t w e e n m e n , a n d r o i d s , a n d r o bots 51
caricatured the excesses of modern bureaucracy and the physical machinery
that drove it. “The Eye-Rotating Machine” depicts a civil servant confronted
with the ever-growing piles of documents that proliferate with the modern
nation-state: taxes, national education, public sanitation, military conscrip-
tion, and so on. His face contorted with horror, the man throws up his hands
as if to fend off the oncoming tide. The caption in English, which corresponds
to the Japanese text in the upper-right corner of the picture, further conveys
the helplessness of the situation: “‘Mercy!’ Ejaculated the Honorable district
magistrate, and kept on his bewilderment by saying, ‘O! busy, busy sir! This
[is] too much for us!’ ”17 As was standard practice for the political cartoons in
the Marumaru chinbun, Western and Japanese conventions of word–image
relations both apply. In keeping with the former, an English caption is lo-
cated below the picture frame, while the Japanese text is located within, right
alongside the image:
“Waterwheels on the river Yodo turn and turn. . .” goes the song of the
Kakubei dancers. It’s a fine machine, and in this heat there’s plenty of sweat
to keep it oiled. So I’ve got to turn, turn. Is something wrong with my eyes?
Figure 3. Kobayashi Kiyochika’s “Eye-Rotating Machine,” from Marumaru chinbun, September 5, 1885.
The machinery of bureaucracy
Round and round it goes, the wheels
and the printing press are
turning clatter, clatter. If only my in-
literally hooked up to the
vestments would bring in returns as
sockets of the modern gaze.
fast as my eyes are turning!18
Kiyochika’s grim caricature
leaves no question about the
Yet it is not the bilingual address that
impossibility of immersion in
captures the viewer’s attention but the
machinery without becoming
hypnotic gaze of the unfortunate bu-
machines ourselves.
reaucrat’s beveled and bedeviled eyes
as they are twisted round in his head by
two manually operated, wheel-driven pulleys. The machinery of bureaucracy
and the printing press are literally hooked up to the sockets of the modern
gaze. Kiyochika’s grim caricature leaves no question about the impossibility
of immersion in machinery without becoming machines ourselves.
SELF-PITYING MACHINES:
ROMANTICISM AND MECHANICAL MAN
Concerns about a similar degradation of the human recurs in Meiji Romanti-

cist fiction, where the male protagonists frequently define their mechaniza-
tion against the love of a woman who is herself outside the alienating forces
of modernity. The consistent motif about anxieties over technology is that
they are mediated by male homosociality, with male self-pity as the preferred
means by which male authors, narrators, protagonists, and readers could
readily detect their own conscription into the machinery of the state, indus-
trial, and capitalist apparatuses.
Resonant with Kiyochika’s “Eye-Rotating Machine,” the spectacle of male
self-pity is fed directly into the apparatus of the printing press in the opening
scene of Tayama Katai’s The Quilt (1907, Futon). The protagonist, Takenaka To-
kio, a small-time romance novelist who dreams of ditching his old-fashioned
wife and finding a modern girl to love, earns a living by working in a map-
making factory. After commuting by suburban trains that expose him on a
daily basis to the modern schoolgirls who are both the object of his liter-
ary ambitions and his secret desires, he enters the factory, literally passing
through the greasy innards of the heavy machinery:
Every day, then, he would go mechanically along the same route, in through
the same big gate, along the same narrow passage with its mixture of
vibrating noise from the rotary press and smelly sweat from the factory-
hands. He would casually greet the employees in the office, climb laboriously
up the long and narrow steps, and finally enter that room.19
His occupational entrapment within the machine thus established, the narra-
tive of The Quilt thereafter traces a meandering path composed of love letters
and train lines whose collisions, or at least derailments, determine Tokio and
his pupil Yoshiko’s fates. This, too, is foreshadowed at the beginning of the
novel when Tokio tracks Yoshiko down on a map using the train lines as his
guide, gazing at the topography of the map as though it were her own body,
and no less amorously studying the contours and style of her writing: “three
pages of small characters written laterally in violet ink across blue-ruled
Western-style paper.”20 His dominion over her through writing thus estab-
lished, Tokio is thwarted in achieving a more intimate relation with the girl
in the flesh. In the cruelest of reversals, it is Yoshiko who makes good on the
carnal possibilities of romantic love without Tokio’s knowledge or participa-
tion. When her family gets wind of her affair with a young male student, her
reputation is ruined and she disappears back to the countryside in disgrace.
Yet it is the weeping, pathetic figure of the male protagonist clutching her
soiled quilt that concludes the story and seals the novel’s identification of the
privileged male subject as the truest victim of Meiji enlightenment.
Among the Meiji literati, Mori Ōgai’s bona fides regarding science and
technology are by far the best established: he studied medicine and hygiene
in Germany from 1884 to 1888 and in his career as a military surgeon rose
to become surgeon general of the Imperial Japanese Army by 1907. In his
early literary career, however, he was no less accomplished as the preeminent
Japanese translator and disseminator of German Romanticism. What is ap-
parent, particularly in his literary debut, the novella “The Dancing Girl” (1890,
Maihime), is how keenly Ōgai grasped the paradoxes of the heroic Romantic
individual versus soulless mechanical man. The novella is written from the
perspective of an elite Japanese student who is sent to Berlin for legal studies.
The protagonist, Toyotarō, who deeply imbibes the atmosphere of German Ro-
manticism immediately upon arrival in Berlin, reflects on his unhappy coming
of age in Japan in familiar tropes of mechanization:
There is always a time when, come what may, one’s true nature reveals itself.
I had obeyed my father’s dying words and had done what my mother had
taught me . . . But all that time I had been a mere passive, mechanical being
with no real awareness of myself.21
Building upon this notion of mechanization-as-enslavement, Toyotarō re-
marks on the unhappy start of his career in Tokyo: “my department head had
obviously tried to turn me into a machine that could be manipulated as he
desired.”22 In his studies in Berlin, however, he unexpectedly falls in love with
a lower-class German woman—the eponymous dancing girl—and veers from
his preordained path. Already engaged in the study of the Romantic canon on
the side of his official studies, Toyotarō takes it upon himself to educate the
girl, Elis, not only teaching her to read the likes of Schiller but even correcting
her faulty (read: lower-class) German pronunciation!
When word of his extracurricular activities reaches his superiors, he is cut
off from his scholarship and forced to earn a living as a freelance journalist,
writing on issues of culture and politics. For a time this suits him well. While
now financially impoverished, his writings on culture, history, and politics
provide him a greater sense of satisfaction than he ever felt in his technocratic
education. He lives with Elis, who becomes pregnant. Their bohemian idyll is
interrupted when Toyotarō’s colleague, Aizawa, calls on him to return to his
career in the service of the state and patriarchal system. For Ōgai, the tensions
between Romantic hero and mechanical man are not only irreconcilable, the
decision they force upon Toyotarō can have only one outcome. It reminds us
that male–male bonding was not merely a shared idea but a matter of educa-
tional formation and compulsory national service.
Toyotarō opts to return to service and leave Berlin for good, a decision
that drives Elis insane. Yet consistent with the homosociality of Romanticism,
the reader’s sympathies are not meant for the abandoned, destitute German
woman with an unborn child in her womb but the unhappy Japanese man
whose career is once more in ascent. Toyotarō last words are especially telling
of the substitution of one set of relations for another, namely the grudging
prioritization of the homosocial bond over mere love for a foreign woman:
“Friends like Aizawa Kenkichi are rare indeed, and yet to this very day there
remains a part of me that curses him.”23
These crises of the individual as degraded mechanical man come home
to roost in Sōseki’s And Then (1909, Sorekara), whose title simultaneously re-
flects its nature as a serial newspaper novel in the Asahi and the ennui-ridden
dilemma (“and then?”) at the heart of modern existence. The novel revolves
around the figure of Daisuke, the dissolute and irresolute second son of a
wealthy Meiji industrialist. At age thirty, Daisuke has chosen neither the busi-
ness path of his father and older brother nor the hardscrabble intellectual life
of his former classmates, who scrape by working as editors and translators for
newspapers and literary journals like Teikoku bungaku (Imperial literature),
instead preferring a life of indolence. A bachelor by choice, he fends off the
photographs of prospective brides brought by his sister-in-law by complain-
ing about the irregularity of each woman’s features. Yet his objections mask a
more fundamental problem: he nurtures within him a secret love for Michiyo,
the wife of his former classmate Hiraoka.
Although “he loathed the absurdity of shackling himself like a machine”
(kikai no yō ni sokubakusuru no gū o inda), Daisuke embodies virtually all of the
modern anxieties and routines of mechanical man.24 His existence is made
known to him by the morning rituals that start each day, and which set the
tone for the beginning of the narrative. Daisuke keeps a watch by his pillow,
not to check the time but to measure his pulse upon waking. This is followed
by reading the daily newspaper, a trip to the toilet, and grooming—daily acts
of composition (sans writing) for no greater cause than contemplation of his
being. The first waking scene in the novel exposes the automatism of the body
that lies outside Daisuke’s control and that consequently threatens to erase
the dividing lines between the life process and machine process:
With his hand still on his chest, he tried to imagine the warm, crimson
blood flowing leisurely to this beat. This was life, he thought. Now, at this
very moment, he held in his grasp the current of life as it flowed by. To his
palm it felt like the ticking of a clock. But it was more, it was a kind of alarm
that summoned him to death. If it were possible to live without hearing this
bell—then how carefree he would be! How he would savor life! But—and
here Daisuke shuddered involuntarily. He was a man so attached to life that
he could scarcely bear to picture his heart calmly beating to the coursing of
his blood . . . Lifting his hand from his heart, he picked up the newspaper
beside his pillow. He reached from beneath the covers and with both hands
spread out the paper . . . [Later] he carefully brushed his teeth, taking plea-
sure, as always, in their regularity.25
Even as he fantasizes about an embodied possibility beyond the limits of flesh

and blood, Daisuke equates these vital “life signs” with a fragile and finite
machine: the existential clock ticking from within that cannot be reset or (as
yet) replaced. Despite his excellent health and youthful good looks, Daisuke
is obsessed with the regularity of these rhythms and fearful of the ease with
which they may come undone. Moreover, he is keenly sensitive to the artifi-
ciality that represents modern existence and the inner, involuntary rhythms
produced by his own body. Of course, as Otto Mayr points out, the equation
of the human heart with a clock was nothing new, having served as a basis
in seventeenth-century Europe for comparing the human body with that of
clockwork automata.26 What sets this apart from early modern Europe or
Japan, however, is not only the existential anxiety that such a comparison
elicits but also the host of other mechanical conditions and metaphors to
which it is linked.
Further along in the narrative Daisuke suffers a gradual psychological
collapse that presents itself to him as confused symbols of writing that under-
mine the integration of his mind and body. Later he stares at his naked legs
in the bath only to find they “no longer seemed to grow from his trunk at all,
but rather, completely unconnected, they sprawled rudely before him . . . With
hair growing unevenly and blue streaks running rampant, they were terribly
strange creatures.”27 The human body (shintai) is overlaid with an illegible,
even grotesque, written script (jitai): the blue veins of his body are a text that
no longer makes any sense. This sense of becoming illiterate to the text of
one’s body is reinforced by Daisuke’s estrangement from the printed word.
While, in his younger days, foregoing even a single day of serial reading left
him with “a vague sense of decay,” the pressure to commit to Michiyo builds
until he can no longer sustain his powers of readerly concentration. When he
sits down to read a book, he finds it incomprehensible: “Daisuke persevered
and kept his eyes on the pages for some two hours. Finally, he could stand it
no longer. True, as a collection of print (katsuji no atsumari) the words pro-
jected a certain meaning on his mind. But they showed no sign of circulating
to his flesh and blood.”28
These relations of the human–machine interface also manifest elsewhere
in Sōseki’s oeuvre. In his later novels Mon (The gate, 1910) and Kokoro (1914),
male protagonists describe a similar state of mental disarray, where their pow-
ers of concentration can no longer animate the words on a page or bring the
meaning of Chinese characters to mind. In Kokoro the metaphor of the clock
is also invoked, although this time it is not to affirm the metronome-like
qualities of the beating heart but to protest the inherent deceptiveness of
human behavior. The misanthropic character known only as Sensei reflex-
ively asks, “Can one expect the complicated mechanism of the human mind
to betray its purposes so obviously, as if it were some kind of clock?”29 Yet
even as autonomic nervous system functions are recast in mechanical terms,
it is important to recognize that the existential crises read from their signs
are always “between men,” setting men apart from the women such as Elis,
Michiyo, and Sensei’s wife.
CONCLUSION
In assaying the origins of mechanical man in Meiji Japan, I have outlined how
the dehumanizing effects and anxieties over technology that accompanied
Romanticist notions of the modern individual were particularly registered
by homosocial appeals to self-pity between men. It is noteworthy that the
emergence of the figure of the android in the French symbolist novel and the
robot in Czech avant-garde theater, which respectively precede and postdate
these developments in Japan, do not derive from the “low” genre of science
fiction. These works, too, share in a debt to the homosocial underpinnings
that mark male–male, male–female, and man–machine relationships. Accord-
ingly, one need not adopt a defensive posture about the presumed lack of
indigenous science (or speculative) fiction in the Meiji era to locate critical
insights into the changing human condition vis-à-vis machine technology, to
say nothing of the social, capitalist, and industrial relations upon which they
are predicated. While the historical avant-garde in Japan developed only in
the interwar period alongside a mass culture that no less quickly embraced
concepts of robots and the like, the instances provided by Kiyochika, Sōseki,
Ōgai, and others underscore the consistency of an episteme already in place
by the late nineteenth century in which mechanical man is both a leading
indicator of modernity and inevitable consequence wrought by “civilization
and enlightenment.”
Notes
1. Timon Screech’s The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular
Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002) has done much to
show the extent to which karakuri, clockwork mechanisms, and the precision instruments
associated with “Dutch Learning” (rangaku) percolated through Tokugawa society in the
preceding two-and-half centuries. Nonetheless, there is profound difference between the
Edo period’s amateur scientists and affluent artisans dabbling with novel technologies
and the systematic, and system-wide, national transformations of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
2. Inoue, Haruki, Nippon robotto sōseiki, 1920–1938 (The genesis of Japanese robots,
1920–1938), (Tokyo: NTT Publishing, 1993).
3. Sōseki cautions in this famous address against “mechanical knowledge” (kikaiteki
no chishiki) and uncritical acceptance of received ideas, whether they amount to vulgar na-
tionalism or the supposedly superior opinions of Westerners about poetry and literature.
As we will see in this article, what is philosophically expressed to a far greater degree in
his fiction is that one’s individuality is inescapably constructed from within the confines
of mechanical civilization. See Natsume Sōseki, “My Individualism” and “The Philosophical
Foundations of Literature,” trans. Sammy I. Tsunematsu (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2004).
4. Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with
Chris Cullens as Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1990): 124–73; and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Ho-
mosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
5. As Sedgwick explains in the introduction of Between Men, “‘Homosocial’ is a word
occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds be-
tween persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with ‘homo-
sexual,’ and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from ‘homosexual’” (1).
6. While American scholarship such as Susan Napier’s The Fantastic in Modern
Japanese Literature (London: Routledge, 1995) and Joseph Murphy’s Metaphorical Circuit:
Negotiations between Literature and Science in Twentieth Century Japan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 2004) have invoked Sōseki to register generalized anxieties about tech-
nology in modern Japan, this article is specifically concerned with the human–machine
interface in his work and elsewhere subtended by homosocial bonds.
7. Tayama Katai’s Futon, trans. Kenneth Henshall as The Quilt (Tokyo: University of
Tokyo Press, 1981); Mori Ōgai’s “Maihime,” trans. Richard Bowring as “The Dancing Girl”
(Monumenta Nipponica 30, no. 2 [Summer 1975]: 151–76); Natsume Sōseki’s Sore kara,
trans. Norma Field as And Then (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
8. Karel Čapek, Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.), trans. Claudia Novak-Jones (New
York: Penguin Classics, 2004); Villiers de l’Isle Adam, L’Ève Future, trans. Robert Martin
Adams as Tomorrow’s Eve (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
9. Some significant differences notwithstanding, the desire for an artificial woman
can be traced back at least to Mary Shelley’s Romantic novel Frankenstein (1818). The
creature, who relentlessly pursues his maker, demands that he create a female counter-
part, an Eve fashioned like him from the animated flesh of corpses, with whom he will flee
into the Edenlike jungles of South America—the fulfillment of Enlightenment philoso-
phy’s wish to return to the state of nature as noble savages.
10. See also Inoue’s Nippon robotto sōseiki, chapter 1.
11. Čapek, R.U.R, 29.
12. Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968; rpt: New York: Del Rey,
1987); Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott (1982), DVD (Warner Bros., 2007).
13. The Chinese characters for “artificial human” (人造人間) are glossed with the
katakana syllabary spelling out the reading and simultaneous meaning of “robot.”
14. Miri Nakamura, “Horror and Machines in Prewar Japan: The Mechanical Uncanny
in Yumeno Kyūsaku’s Dogura magura,” Science Fiction Studies no. 88 (2002): http://www
.depauw.edu/site/sfs/backissues/88/nakamura.html.
15. Gender and genealogy via Judeo-Christian mysticism play a critical role in the
make-up of the artificial humans in Evangelion and the human–machine interface required
to pilot them. See Mariana Ortega’s “My Father, He Killed Me; My Mother, She Ate Me:
Self, Desire, Engendering, and the Mother in Neon Genesis Evangelion,” Mechademia 2
(2007): 216–34.
16. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (London: Routledge, 1992): 3–12.
17. Kobayashi Kiyochika, “Me o mawasu kikai,” Marumaru chinbun 16 (1885): 110–11.
18. Henry D. Smith II, Kiyochika: Artist of Meiji Japan (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa
Barbara Museum of Art, 1988), 76.
19. Tayama, The Quilt, 37.
20. Ibid., 40.
21. Mori, “The Dancing Girl,” 153.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 166.
24. Natsume, And Then, 188.
25. Ibid., 1–2.
26. Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 45.
27. Natsume, And Then, 78.
28. Ibid., 170–71.
29. Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro, trans. Edwin McClellan (New York: Gateway Editions,
1996), 210.
6 0 seth jacobow it z
Bodies in Motion
PAUL ROQUET
Carbon as Creation:
On Tsuji Naoyuki’s
Charcoal Anime
Think about where to move the lines to next. Rip off a piece of bread and dab
at the paper, pulling the carbon residue off the page. Pick up a stick of charcoal
and draw some new lines a little to the side of the ones you just erased. Record
this new image onto a few frames of film. Repeat once you decide where to
take the lines next.
This is how you create a charcoal anime. This looping method takes anime
back to the basics, rooting it to the manual encounter between hand, carbon,
and paper. Tsuji Naoyuki (b. 1972) pioneered the style in Japan, at a time when
most anime was pushing further into digital technology and increasing lay-
ers of electronic mediation. Charcoal anime strips these layers away instead.
After graduating with a degree in sculpture from Tokyo Zōkei University
in 1995 and experimenting with stop-motion animation, Tsuji began develop-
ing short sequences of monochrome charcoal drawings and recording them
on 16mm film. A Feather Stare at the Dark (1995–2003, Yami o mitsumeru hane)
and Trilogy about Clouds (2005, Mittsu no kumo) both went on to screen at
the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, securing Tsuji’s place
as a central figure in the burgeoning world of Japanese art animation. Like
many working in the field, Tsuji situates his work at a complex remove from
63
Tsuji’s turn to charcoal
the commercial anime industry, presenting
can be understood as a
it at festivals, screenings, museums, and gal-
return to the hand, an
leries, but without denying the influence of
attempt to insert the
more mainstream trends in anime style. In-
physical act of drawing
spired as a youth by the manga duo Yudeta-
back into the hyper-
mago (Shimada Takashi and Nakai Yoshinori),
mediation and visual
Tsuji initially approached the pair to become
excess of contemporary
their apprentice but, on seeing their original
anime production.
manuscripts in person, found himself over-
whelmed by the size and complexity of series
like Ultimate Muscle (1979–, Kinnikuman). Instead, he eventually turned to the
more diminutive but carefully crafted world of charcoal anime. Operating at
a similar frame rate to limited animation (with several frames of film per still
image), Tsuji’s work adopts even greater material limitations. Tsuji’s turn to
charcoal can be understood as a return to the hand, an attempt to insert the
physical act of drawing back into the hyper-mediation and visual excess of
contemporary anime production.
As W. J. T. Mitchell writes, “drawing remains closest to the center of the
vortex of image production [ . . . ] emanating from and returning to the body.”1
The hand drawn helps to slow down contemporary media’s rapid succession
of images and renders the initial contact between body and paper percep-
tible once again. Rosalind Krauss notes “the upsurge of the autographic, the
handwrought, in an age of the mechanization and technologizing of the im-
age via either photography or digital imaging.”2 While shared by a number of
Japanese art animators, this return to the hand drawn is nowhere more vivid
than in Tsuji’s charcoal anime, where the residue of each gestural movement
of the carbon remains on the page, the bread eraser never completely clearing
the trace of what came before (Figure 1).
To make charcoal for drawing, pieces of wood are packed tightly in air-
tight containers and heated under the subsiding embers of a fire, then cooled
slowly. The more prolonged the heating, the softer the charcoal that results.
The sticks Tsuji uses are composed of the rough and impure carbon produced
by the burnt wood of willow trees, producing particularly dark tones well
suited for capture on film. When applied, this charcoal sits rough upon the
page, its microscopic flakes splintering and scattering unevenly across the
surface of the paper.3 Charcoal is too coarse a medium for sketching out fine
detail or crisp lines, favoring instead broad, vigorous strokes emphasizing
mass and movement. Drawing with charcoal often involves articulating not
just the hand but elbow and torso as well.
6 4 pa ul roquet
Figure 1. The boy in A Feather Stare at the Dark moves by being drawn, erased, and drawn again,
leaving a trail of charcoal residue in his wake. Thinking and Drawing: Japanese Art Animation of
the New Millennium (Image Forum Video/Daguerreo Press, 2005).
Charcoal markings do not “dry” in the manner of paint or ink, leaving

them continuously malleable on the page. The lines can be erased, smudged,
and redrawn, their contour shifted a minute later, a month later, a year later.
As a result of this insistent malleability, drawings in charcoal for a long time
suffered from a lack of permanence, though they proved quite durable when
left alone. Some of the earliest drawings still in existence, at the caves of
Altamira and Niaux, are renditions in charcoal. Just barely hanging on to
the rock walls, these sketches must now be actively protected as they are just
as primed to shift and dissolve now as they were when originally conceived
more than ten thousand years ago. The expressive power of charcoal images
comes in part from how they preserve the mutability of the initial moment
of drawing, resisting the patina of age and decay that sets in with most other
materials.
Most charcoal drawings did not have the protection of the caves, of
course, and for centuries, charcoal remained but an interstitial medium, a
good tool for sketching out a plan but rarely the one used for the final product.
Underdrawings and preparatory studies in charcoal were usually tossed aside
ca r bo n a s cr e at i o n 6 5
on the way to more durable media like oil and stone. From the late fifteenth
century, however, charcoal drawing achieved greater permanence thanks to
the invention of the “fixative,” a spray applied to finished works to secure the
carbon in place and preserve it from further alteration.
With the emergence of photography, a less invasive approach to fixing
charcoal became available. Unlike the fixative spray, the camera’s registration
of light reflecting off the carbon did not prevent the continued manipulation
of the carbon itself. By preserving a space for the hand to come between the
drawing paper and the fixative of photographic film, the possibility of both
fixing and further moving the charcoal emerged—in other words, the pos-
sibility of charcoal animation. With the arrival of the motion picture camera,
the movement of charcoal itself could be fixed in a photographic series. As
with stop-motion animation, each manipulation of the charcoal image could
be recorded on a few frames of film, then shown in sequence to render al-
terations to the drawing perceptible as continuous movement. By means of
film, charcoal could now seemingly move by itself—the hand disappearing
into the spaces between the frames even as it leaves its traces everywhere on
the canvas.
Oscar Fischinger was the first to develop charcoal animation as a practice,
creating his groundbreaking abstract charcoal animation Studies (1929–34,
Studie Nr. 2–13) while working for Fritz Lang in Berlin in the late 1920s. Paired
with music, the works screened in theaters in Europe, the United States,
and Japan. Canadian animator Ryan Larkin experimented with charcoal ani-
mation in the 1960s, and in recent decades William Kentridge brought the
medium to wider attention through his widely exhibited 9 Drawings for Pro-
jection (1989–2003), a series of deeply moving ruminations on South African
cultural memory.
Part of this diminutive but distinguished lineage of charcoal animators,
Tsuji’s work is distinctive both for its monochrome austerity and its conscious
alignment with anime (as opposed to animeeshon) as a form. Tsuji’s anima-
tions are also unique in their use of close-ups, where the camera cuts in to
magnify one portion of the drawing. These shots imitate the grammar of
live-action cinema by focusing in on a character’s facial expressions. Unlike a
live-action close-up, however, the charcoal close-up magnifies not only facial
details but also the materiality of the medium itself, revealing in greater detail
the grain of the carbon and the paper it rests upon (Figure 2).
Drawing attention to the texture of the paper and the fragility of the me-
dium, Tsuji’s work echoes the surface consciousness of the earlier cave char-
coals, where the drawn lines often seem to engage directly with the texture of
6 6 pa ul roquet
Figure 2. The “close-up” from A Feather Stare at the Dark, revealing both the woman’s body and
the texture of the carbon on the page. Thinking and Drawing: Japanese Art Animation of the New
Millennium (Image Forum Video/Daguerreo Press, 2005).
the walls they sit on. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the Lascaux caves,
“the animals painted on the walls of Lascaux are not there in the same way
as the fissures and limestone formations. But they are not elsewhere. Pushed
forward here, held back there, held up by the wall’s mass they use so adroitly,
they spread around the wall without ever breaking from their elusive moor-
ings in it.”4 By drawing the viewer back toward the contours of the paper,
Tsuji’s work similarly pulls anime back to a focus of the surface of inscription,
to the moment of contact between animator and canvas. The charcoal stays
close to its origins in burnt wood, and the animated lines stay rooted in the
mutual push and pull of paper, hand, and bread.
SLOWING ANIME DOWN
Unlike the cel animator, who assembles a series of drawings to produce the
illusion of continuous movement, or the digital animator, who works nonlin-
early through a series of software commands, the charcoal animator sticks to
a single piece of paper for the entirety of a sequence, manually erasing and
redrawing the image over and over to create a film one shot at a time. Cel and
digital animation both leave a collection of frames behind, with the potential
to use or modify them again later if needed. The draw-shoot-redraw-shoot
rhythm of charcoal animation leaves nothing behind but the very last image
of each sequence, smudged with the residual traces of lines drawn for earlier
shots. As each sequence of a film progresses, the paper is gradually covered
over with the shadows of Tsuji’s previous lines, so that each new movement
arises not from a blank page (or a fresh cel), but out of the foggy carbonate
echo of each movement that came before.
The music for Tsuji’s charcoal films, improvised on bass guitar by his part-
ner Takanashi Makiko, echoes the slow gestural quality of the medium. In
Takanashi’s playing, “every stroke of the musician’s hand is audible, accentu-
ating the tactile and intimate nature of the drawings.”5 The low rumble of the
bass resonates with the dark registers of the charcoal, and the way Takanashi’s
repeated patterns often slide from the free play of rising and falling melodic
lines into a muddle of low tones matches the resistant smudge of the charcoal
as it makes its way across the paper.
Like William Kentridge, Tsuji does not use storyboards or other planning
tools prior to recording, preferring to allow the state of the drawing at each
moment to determine where the film goes next:
My method is quite simple. I sit in front of the paper and wait for an idea.
When I get an idea, I draw it down and click the shutter a few times. Then I
erase a bit and redraw and click the shutter a few more times, and so on. So
it’s random, yet with direction, ordered towards the future. I start with no
set idea for the film. Each image I draw and photograph creates suggestions
which lead to the next image, and these images build up inside me as the
film advances. The reason I take this approach to filmmaking is to pursue
the unique possibilities of this particular medium, which doesn’t require any
special preparation beforehand other than charcoal and paper.6
Drawing hints from the flexibility of charcoal itself, Tsuji allows his own em-
bodied intuition to substitute for a more carefully plotted narrative trajectory:
It might be easier for the audience to understand if I make a precise story-

line, but if I do that there isn’t much of a point in using charcoal. It feels ap-
propriate to allow more flexibility with the contents of the image, and create
together with my own biorhythms.7
6 8 pa ul roquet
In Tsuji’s work,
In recording the spontaneous modification of a
charcoal’s material
single drawing as he reflects on what came be-
resistance works as
fore and how the film might move forward, Tsuji
a counter to anime’s
departs radically from the well-plotted temporal-
usual tendency toward
ity of cel animation. His working process renders
metamorphic excess.
the time of anime aleatory and imminent, per-
sistently returning to the open-ended encounter
between hand and paper. This irreducibly linear style of working gives equal
weight to each moment of the film. Whereas cel and digital animators usu-
ally focus on “key” frames to articulate the fundamentals of a movement and
only later have an assistant or a computer fill in the inbetweens, for charcoal
animators every subsequent image presents the opportunity for the film to
spin off in a new direction. This causes the flow of the film to stutter at times.
A character’s movement is momentarily arrested or suddenly switches direc-
tions. The carbon’s refusal to move smoothly forward repeatedly draws viewer
attention back to the labor involved in the act of drawing, redrawing, and
photographing by hand.
In her analysis of Kentridge’s 9 Drawings for Projection, Rosalind Krauss
notes how “it is this very density and weight of the drawing, this way it has
of producing the hiccup of a momentary stillness and thus dragging against
the flow of the film, that opens up the gap between [the charcoal] medium
and that of film itself.”8 Krauss examines how this weight runs counter to
the frequent association (going back to Sergei Eisenstein) of animation and
image plasticity. As Eisenstein noted, the near weightless immateriality of
the animation cel often tempts animators to indulge in rapid transforma-
tions of form, exploring modes of embodiment freed from gravity and the
laws of physics. In charcoal animation, however, the linear, labor-intensive
process and the insistent materiality of the carbon helps put the brakes on
animation’s tendency toward swift transformations. Krauss notes Kentridge’s
“sense that this transformative power needs to have a certain drag placed on
it, a certain resistance or pressure exerted against its weightless fluidity.”9
In Tsuji’s work, charcoal’s material resistance works as a counter to anime’s
usual tendency toward metamorphic excess. Tsuji’s use of 16mm film, with
its own manual limitations, lends additional layers of mediated slowness and
textural drag.
This insistence on slower forms of materiality works its way into the con-
tent of the drawings themselves. Krauss points to Kentridge’s repeated focus
on the most basic gestural repertoires of the body: small movements of the
head and limbs, breathing lungs, and beating hearts. Tsuji’s work meanwhile
appears obsessed with the effects of gravity, presenting bodies seated, lying
down, or walking with slow and deliberate strides. Occasionally, characters
overcome the weight of the body through winged flight or by transforming
their body into a gaseous state, only to later come crashing, Icarus-style, back
down to earth.
Film critic Kitakōji Takashi recalls that when Tsuji was asked why he chose
to study sculpture in college, he half-jokingly described wanting to use sculp-
ture to “develop his body.” Kitakōji takes him at his word, observing how this
early sculptural attention to weight and volume carries over to inform Tsuji’s
approach to animation.10 Tsuji’s films draw on the materiality of charcoal to
depict the tension between anime’s promise of physical transcendence, and
the weight and drag of the human body in all its stubborn inertia.
STARING AT THE DARK
This tension is particularly evident in Tsuji’s first major work of charcoal an-
ime, A Feather Stare at the Dark. The character designs in this work echo the
late nineteenth-century charcoal “noirs” of Odilon Redon: angels, skeletal de-
mons, and winged orbs with human faces float across symbolist landscapes
governed by a pantheon of naked mythic creatures. The film’s central focus is
on the construction and destruction of worlds. Tsuji provides a partial sum-
mary of the first few minutes of the film on his blog:
Male and female gods with large wings make a baby as they fly through the
sky. After a while a boy is born, and the male god creates a world for his son.
One time while the son is sleeping his left hand turns into a woman, who
goes off somewhere. The boy sets off travelling in search of the woman, wan-
dering through a newly created woods. He looks through a hole in one of the
trees and glimpses a different world [betsusekai] beyond it. He crawls into
the hole to go to the other world, but falls asleep before emerging out the
other end. A dead skeleton god pulls the boy fully into this other world . . . 11
The rest of the seventeen-minute film further extrapolates on this mythic

search for the woman, freely mixing different religious and folkloric iconog-
raphies. At moments the film appears to reference charcoal’s own ability to
imagine new universes, as when the boy reaches the other world by passing
through a tree.12
After waking up in this other world, the boy discovers a volcano that
7 0 pa ul roquet
begins to erupt profusely, covering him and the surrounding landscape. The
film cuts back to the winged father god, now giant in size. The skeleton re-
turns and transforms into a demon woman, who flies to the god’s genitals and
quickly brings him to a giant orgasm. The semen begins to spill out continu-
ously in an unstoppable flood, covering the forest and giving instant life to
hundreds of small humans (Figure 3) as well as a city for them to live within.
A Feather Stare at the Dark includes persistent nudity and the frank depic-
tion of sexual pleasure, sexual pain, and bodily excretions. The latter include
not just semen but the ingestion and defecation of the human characters by
the giant gods. As Tsuji hints in an interview, the seeming innocence and im-
precision of the charcoal medium allows him to get away with these kinds of
images, presenting them not as something vulgar or scatological but as part
of what Kitakōji calls the broader “ecological thought” running through his
work.13 The use and reuse of the black carbon particles to depict these physical
transformations lend an organic unity to this rapid circulation of energies.
However, the film shows how these unbounded transformations quickly
begin to undermine themselves in their very excess. The boy takes revenge
Figure 3. The father god’s inadvertent but ultra-productive orgasm, miming the unwieldy cre-
ative potential of the charcoal stick. Thinking and Drawing: Japanese Art Animation of the New
Millennium (Image Forum Video/Daguerreo Press, 2005).
on his father, cutting off the giant god’s wing in exchange for the earlier loss
of his own arm. This act of revenge triggers a spiraling apocalypse where the
world gradually begins to crumble, only to give way to new worlds in turn.
These transitions feature rapid shifts of scale and swift physical metamor-
phoses, in familiar anime style. Yet the film also attends closely to the fatigue
that follows from these orgasmic bursts of productivity. As noted above, the
boy falls asleep on his way to the other world, a scene the film returns to in
its ending credits. The god’s facial expression shows not pleasure but annoy-
ance at the spilling of his seed. And at the end of the film, after the cosmic
upheaval, we witness the various gods assembled in a room inside the sun for
a kind of apocalyptic after-party, sitting around a dining table and sharing a
bottle of wine. The boy, clearly bored with the gathering, gets up and heads
for the door. In moments like these, the film introduces doubts about anime’s
desire for transformative freedom, presenting tired, heavy bodies as if they
were bearing the fatigue of Tsuji’s own fecund imagination.
This questioning of anime’s omnipotent fantasies of creation and de-
struction has its roots in the artist’s struggle to make sense of the apocalyptic
desires driving violent behavior in Japan and overseas during the years Tsuji
was working on the film. Enthusiastic about new age forms of spirituality
during his college years, Tsuji recalls his shock at the transformation of Aum
Shinrikyō from a yoga-practicing new religion into a terrorist doomsday cult.
The group launched their sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in March
1995, just as Tsuji was about to graduate from art college.14 This stark re-
minder of the dark side of the mythic imagination cast a pall over his early
work on A Feather Stare at the Dark, and for a time he stopped working on
the film entirely. After finally moving to continue with the work in the early
2000s, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war in Iraq again forced
him to confront the tragic hubris of fantasies of world creation and destruc-
tion. Looking back on the film, he describes it as the trace of his own con-
fused “search for the world” amid these unsettling events around the turn
of the millennium.15
The final scene of the “good” and “evil” gods relaxing together with a
bottle of wine radically relativizes the apocalyptic struggle acted out earlier
in the film: the little people may have had their whole world destroyed, but
the gods in charge appear to have enjoyed putting on the show (Figure 4).
The boy, neglecting to touch his wine, unceremoniously leaves the gods at the
table and opens the door to look outside. There, floating in a peaceful pastoral
landscape, he finds a floating dark mass of charcoal. This soon resolves into
the form of the woman born from his arm (Figure 5).
7 2 pa ul roquet
Figure 4. The dinner party of the gods, with the bored boy seated at right. Thinking and Drawing:
Japanese Art Animation of the New Millennium (Image Forum Video/Daguerreo Press, 2005).
Figure 5. As the boy looks on, the dark mass of charcoal resolves itself into the figure of the
woman. Thinking and Drawing: Japanese Art Animation of the New Millennium (Image Forum
Video/Daguerreo Press, 2005).
Rejecting apocalyptic
The boy’s turn from the violent play of
fantasy, the film hearkens
the gods to the more contained physicality of
back to an older fantasy
his naked female companion—born from his
from the age of
own (drawing?) hand—stages Tsuji’s rejec-
romanticism, rooted
tion of anime’s imaginative excesses in both
in the more familiar
aesthetic and gendered terms. The intemper-
physicality of carbon-
ate male potency portrayed earlier in the film
based life-forms.
contrasts with the immanent physicality of
the pastoral female nude, as the guiding de-
sire shifts from one of mythic world creation and destruction to a search for
the restorative embrace of woman-as-charcoal-as-nature. Rejecting apocalyp-
tic fantasy, the film hearkens back to an older fantasy from the age of ro-
manticism, rooted in the more familiar physicality of carbon-based life-forms.
Unlike the continuous and often violent movements of the gods, the woman
stands still, patiently and smilingly accepting the boy’s gaze. The subject of the
film’s earlier (and only) close-up, she finally pulls the film away from anima-
tion and back to the welcoming simplicity of the still image.
While other contemporaneous anime also grappled with questions of
physical transcendence and apocalyptic desire, A Feather Stare at the Dark is
unusual in pursuing these questions so deeply into the materiality of drawing
itself.16 Diminutive and slow in an age of imaginative excess, the film dis-
tances itself from anime’s tendency toward free-form transformation, seeking
instead to reestablish the unadorned and unmediated body as the source of
every animated line. Tsuji’s charcoals push anime to continually return to its
founding gestures of drawing and erasing, while never forgetting the dark
afterimage of so much carbon shifted around the page.
Notes
1. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Architecture as Sculpture as Drawing: Antony Gormley’s
Paragone,” in Antony Gormley: Blind Light, eds. Anthony Vidler, Susan Stewart, and W. J. T.
Mitchell (London: Hayward Publishing, 2007). Quoted in Isobel Harbison and Brian
Dillon, The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing (London: Hayward Publishing, 2009), 6.
2. Rosalind Krauss, “‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,”
October 92 (Spring 2000): 25.
3. “Kurōzu appu: Mokutanga anime no eizō sakka Tsuji Naoyuki” (Close up: Charcoal
anime moving image maker Tsuji Naoyuki), Yomiuri shinbun, morning edition, July 4,
2005; Gerald W. R. Ward, ed., The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 102.
74 pa ul roquet
4. Quoted in Akira Mizuta Lippitt, “Archetexts: Lascaux, Eros, and the Anamorphic
Subject,” Discourse 24, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 23; emphasis in original.
5. Harbison and Dillon, The End of the Line, 92.
6. Quote from “Naoyuki Tsuji,” Gallery Simon website, http://www.gallerysimon.net
/CV/tsuji_english.html.
7. From a prescreening talk at Image Forum, Tokyo, celebrating the release of Image
Forum’s Thinking and Drawing DVD (an anthology including A Feather Stare at the Dark).
Quoted in Eichi, “‘Kansō’ saikin mita eiga, ‘Gyakkyō nain’ ‘Yami o mitsumeru hane’ hoka”
(Thoughts on recently seen films ‘Adversity Nine,’ ‘Feather Stare at the Dark,’ etc.),
Aa, terebi to shinema—zakki (Ah, Television and Cinema—Scattered Thoughts) blog,
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/eichi44/20050813/p2. My translation.
8. Krauss, “‘The Rock,’” 10.
9. Ibid., 17.
10. Kitakōji Takashi, “Tsuji Naoyuki ‘Mittsu no kumo:’ Toraware to kaihō o meguru
torirojii” (Tsuji Naoyuki “Trilogy about clouds”: Trilogy on captivity and liberation), Bijutsu
techō 57, no. 868 (August 2005): 123.
11. Tsuji describes it as the boy’s left hand but in the film it is clearly his right. Tsuji
Naoyuki, “Yami o mitsumeru hane” (Feather Stare at the Dark), Tsuji Naoyuki blog, http://
cannes.exblog.jp/423227/. My translation.
12. The arboreal basis of charcoal drawing is clearer in Japanese, as the word for char-
coal (mokutan) begins with the character for tree (moku).
13. Tomio Koyama Gallery, “Artist Interview: Tsuji Naoyuki,” http://www.tomio
koyamagallery.com/interviews/naoyuki-tsuji-interview-2009/; Kitakōji, “Tsuji Naoyuki
‘Mittsu no kumo,’” 123.
14. Numerous commentators have noted the influence of apocalyptic anime and
manga narratives on the group’s historical imagination. See Miyadai Shinji, Owarinaki
nichijō o ikiro: Ōmu kanzen kokufuku manyuaru (Living the endless everyday: Complete
guide to defeating Aum) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1995).
15. Tsuji Naoyuki, Okabe Masao, Miyaoka Hideyuki, and Minamoto Asako, “Tsukuru
~ creation ~ Tsuji Naoyuki o chūshin ni” (Making ~ creation ~ focus on Tsuji Naoyuki),
symposium at Doshisha University, Kyoto, November 20, 2008. Transcript at http://
1st.geocities.jp/mothermonika/m_works/screening/tsuji_screening.html.
16. While working at radically different scales, A Feather Stare at the Dark makes an
interesting comparison with the contemporaneous television anime series Neon Genesis
Evangelion (1995–96, Shinseiki Evangerion), which similarly seeks to make sense of the
animated apocalypse in post-Aum Japan. Evangelion continuously shuttles between the
fragile physicality of its young male protagonist and mythical concerns with world cre-
ation and destruction. It also presents an infamous sequence in the final episode in which
the animation style briefly slips back into rudimentary black ink sketches on white paper,
questioning anime’s “freedom” to create alternative realities and forcing audiences to con-
front the hand-drawn origins of the otherwise slickly-produced characters. See Mariana
Ortega, “My Father, He Killed Me; My Mother, She Ate Me: Self, Desire, Engendering, and
the Mother in Neon Genesis Evangelion,” Mechademia 2 (2007): 216–32.
STEVEN R. ANDERSON
Powers of (Dis)Ability:
Toward a Bodily Origin
in Mushishi
The anime series Mushishi (2005–6),1 adapted from the manga by Urushibara
Yuki, continues anime’s tradition of reconfiguring the physical form to ex-
pose more than just vital organs. Paul Wells describes metamorphosis as “the
constituent core” of animation, and the climactic scene in Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s
Akira (1988), when Tetsuo’s psychic abilities finally overwhelm him, stands
as one of the most memorable examples.2 Akira proposes a transition from
adolescence to adulthood that is directionally inside out, the body its signifi-
cant origin point. Tetsuo’s metamorphosis in the film can be viewed literally,
a change of physical form, as well as symbolically, an expression of Japan’s
own ambivalence toward its economically powerful identity in the late 1980s.3
While readings of transformation that link to broader sociocultural
themes may appear more promising for analysis, Mushishi calls for an ana-
lytic gaze that is exceedingly close to the body itself, largely resisting inter-
pretations of Japanese society or identity. The series’ quiet tone, minimal
aesthetic, historically vague setting, and natural beauty are contrasted with at
times shocking depictions of illness, disability, and bodily invasion. Following
a type of healer known as a mushishi (literally, “insect master”) named Ginko,
the series depicts consecutive medical mysteries set around the interaction
77
between humans and the creatures known as mushi. “Neither beings like us,
nor illusions,” the mushi are described as “a different form of what we consider
‘life.’” Pervasive yet visible only to certain individuals, the mushi are notable
for their uncertain ontological status as well as their role in reconfiguring the
boundaries of the human body. One of the central paradoxes of Mushishi is
that human interaction with the mushi—creatures described as deriving from
“life itself”—often results in suffering and loss. Characters lose their ability to
see, walk, hear, and think because of mushi. Yet the suffering and loss of the
human characters is often accompanied by curious new powers. In this essay
I will argue that for the characters in Mushishi, loss and gain, ability and dis-
ability, coalesce within the body to form a uniquely (dis)abled state.
Inspired by the recent “transdisciplinary” field of body studies, which syn-
thesizes works in psychology, philosophy, disability studies, and medical soci-
ology, I aim to begin from this state of (dis)ability and work backward, tracing
paths of digression to reconfigure previously held boundaries.4 Although I
hope to challenge the normative body through an inversion of human ability
and disability, my larger goal is to utilize theory on the digressive body to situ-
ationally locate it in an original space, a “bodily origin” that reveals something
about what it even means to be a body. Approaching a bodily origin requires
us to fearlessly catalog potential states—a broken rib, a dancer’s mastery, a
cancer that has metastasized to the lungs—to understand both where we
came from and where we might be going. Animation has the ability to imag-
ine the human body as a “magical tabula rasa” that can project “both dreams
and nightmares of what it is to be human”; through Mushishi I will delineate
what exactly those dreams and nightmares can be.5 Then, I will go one step
further, approaching the space between the normal and abnormal, the desired
and feared, where an ambiguous, (dis)abled other resides—able although dis-
abled, disturbed although magically enhanced. In these interconnected bodily
extremes, repulsion and fascination meet in a challenge to human potential-
ity. There, at what the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva describes as the
“border” of our existence, lies the bodily origin.6
PURE INVADERS: MUSHI REPRESENTATIONS
Although described as deriving from life itself, the identity or even symbolic
possibilities of the mushi remain enigmatic. Insectoid in their ubiquity, di-
versity, and ephemerality, yet visible only to certain individuals and able to
interact with mammals and humans alike, the mushi seem to reside in a gray
7 8 stev en r. a nde rs o n
Although Jackson notes that
zone that resists most symbolic read-
the mushi are “more elusive”
ings. In the first episode of the series,
than their direct translation
the mushishi Ginko attempts to explain
(insect) suggests, examining
the creatures by presenting his arm as
them as insect-like
a metaphorical tree of life. Tracing the
creatures nonetheless
length of his arm, he ends with his
offers us insight into their
thumb pressed against his heart and
complex nature, as humans
says that this is where mushi reside, call-
have been assigning
ing it “green matter” (midori mono). They
characteristics to them for
exist somewhere “between the living
thousands of years.
and the dead . . . living, like people, and
inanimate, like objects.” We later learn
that mushi are born from a river of light called kouki (literally “light wine”)
that flows beneath the earth. Kouki is pure, ancient, and closely connected to
life forces, but the exact nature of this “life” is left ambiguous. Are the mushi
born from the river of light actually living, earthly creatures? Or are they
more like ghosts (yūrei), gods (kami), or monsters (bakemono)? In his review
of the series, Paul Jackson draws parallels to Japanese mythology to argue
that mushi may be most closely associated with kami,7 noting in particular
the ability of kami to enter the human body.8 Although Jackson notes that
the mushi are “more elusive” than their direct translation (insect) suggests,
examining them as insect-like creatures nonetheless offers us insight into
their complex nature, as humans have been assigning characteristics to them
for thousands of years.
Writing in the second century C.E., the Greek diviner Artemidorus inter-
preted insects in dreams as symbols of worry and anxiety.9 Much later, the
psychoanalyst Otto Rank, a member of Sigmund Freud’s inner circle, theo-
rized that the insect’s ability to disappear into small holes in the earth, like
the journey by which the spermatozoa and ova unite, may be the origin of all
small creature phobias.10 In contrast, Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900, Die Traumdeutung), emphasizes the sexual power of insects, noting that
the most important aspect of a patient’s dream, which involved various acts of
insect mutilation, is the connection between the patient’s anxiety about her
husband’s sexual dysfunction and her act of crushing Spanish flies, a noted
aphrodisiac.11 The biologist and cultural entomologist Barrett Klein, in his
2012 paper on insects and dream mythology, writes further on the power
of insects, specifically on their ability to act as “dream vectors” capable of
inducing feverish and dream-like states through (often malarial) infection
and parasitism.12
p ow e r s o f ( d i s ) a bi l i t y 7 9
The simultaneous fear and power associated with insects is depicted in
episode 4 of Mushishi, in which a man’s dreams become infected with a type of
mushi that, like the pestilent bedbug, gathers in the host’s bedding between
nightly acts of parasitism. In the beginning, the man’s dreams appear to be
powerful visions of the future, foretelling the discovery of a well in the village
and providing life-saving warning of an impending landslide. In time, how-
ever, the man’s calamitous dreams become less premonitory and more causal,
invading reality until his family and entire village are destroyed by a green
mold. Ginko visits the distraught man and explains that although the mushi
normally reside in the person’s dreams at night, they occasionally come out
and “become the medium to make the dream the host was having infect real-
ity.” The insect-like mushi affects both dreams and reality via dreams, adding a
fantastical element to what Klein has observed as a real-world phenomenon.
Our relationship with insects is characterized by a combination of ex-
tremes, with the resulting affinity and repulsion, closeness and distance fre-
quently expressed in works of fiction. Within film and anime, the mushi may
evoke the jointly adorable and disturbing tree spirits (kodama) in Miyazaki
Hayao’s Princess Mononoke (1997, Mononokehime).13 Paul Jackson notes the
“enchanting luminescence” that characterizes both kodama and mushi, al-
though the mushi are not nearly as benevolent or even neutral as their kami
counterparts. Their frequently antagonistic relationship with humans may
more closely recall Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984, Kaze no
tani no Naushika), yet the pure and natural mushi also stand in stark contrast
to the segregated and toxic Ohmu that rampage in Nausicaä.14 The difficulty
in finding a representational analogue for the mushi reveals the divergent
symbolic relationships between body and nature, human and creature in
Mushishi. An example from literature that perhaps better captures this dual-
ity is the collector’s case filled with butterflies and beetles in Joseph Con-
rad’s Lord Jim (1900), which are described as representing the “qualitative
extremes of humanity” with their positive (gorgeous, transformative) and
negative (ugly, dirty) characteristics, respectively.15 Teshigahara Hiroshi’s
Woman in the Dunes (1964, Suna no onna), in which an entomologist’s quest
to capture and catalog an elusive sand dune beetle is derailed by his own
physical and spiritual entrapment in a sand pit, explores the dehumanizing
consequence of our ambivalent associations with insects.16 In her review of
the film, Judith Shatnoff notes that what the entomologist does to insects,
“life does to him,” a role reversal that resonates primarily through its disso-
lution of one of the strictest hierarchical boundaries—that between human
and diminutive creature.17
80 stev en r. a nde rs o n
BODY AS (DIS)ABILITY
Pure and infecting, the mushi originate from a stream of light (kouki) to im-
pregnate, control, and disable the human body. The paradox of the “pure in-
vader” mirrors the complex associations ascribed to real-world insects. It is
therefore not surprising that the result of mushi–human interaction is equally
complex, neither uniformly positive or negative. In the second episode of the
series, “The Light of the Eyelid” (“Mabuta no hikari”) a girl named Sui contracts
an eye disease that causes a debilitating sensitivity to light. Sui must wear
bandages over her eyes and spend most of her time in a windowless shed as
a result of her affliction. While talking to Biki, a young boy unaffected by the
disease, she tells him that she thinks a mushi is the cause of her blindness. She
also tells him that the only way for her to experience total darkness is to close
her “second eyelid” (futatsume no mabuta). In Sui’s case, ability has become
disability: she is blind not because she can’t see but because she sees too well.
The power of light is magnified in Sui’s eyes, and it is only within utter dark-
ness, from behind a barrier that is unknown to able-bodied individuals (the
“second eyelid”), that she gains an ability to see. In one scene, the children play
together in the darkness of the shed and Biki complains that he can’t close his
second eyelid. “Really? You’re so uncoordinated (fukiyou),” she retorts. Once
she closes all four of her eyelids, Sui’s surroundings are illuminated by the pure
river of light (kouki) beneath her, enabling her to see. Although Sui hears the
voice of a distant man (Ginko) warning her not to stare at the kouki too long,
the river of light gifts the otherwise blind girl with an unusually abled body,
as well as allows an embodied communication between the two children via
the skin, which psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu prioritized as the “intermediary
screen” that facilitates interaction between the self and others.18
In the episode that follows, “The Tender Horns” (“Yawarakai tsuno”), vil-
lagers in a remote snow-covered region become deafened en masse, and Ginko
is summoned. After curing the villagers of the afflicting mushi residing in the
cochlea organs of their inner ears, Ginko meets a boy, Maho, who is not only
deafened but has also grown horns. Like Sui in the previous episode, Maho
is debilitated and confined to seclusion due to sensory overload, in his case
unbearably loud noise that deafens him. Ginko deduces that the rare mushi
known as ah is the cause of Maho’s deafness. Ah creates horns on the host
that detect noises humans can normally never hear. Ah hates the sound of the
living body, and when using a living body as a host it tries to erase the body’s
noise, deafening it. This rare creature is ultimately eliminated when one covers
the ears with the hands, assaulting it with the sound of one’s own body. In
these episodes, disability is conceptualized not in terms of a deficit but as a
painful acuity: Sui sees light so sensitively that she must not see at all; Maho
is assaulted with so much noise that he is immobilized by pain. Heightened
ability is perversely transformed into disability in these instances, and it is
through this inversion that the ability/disability dichotomy is destabilized.
To question this dichotomy is to question the normative body, which
forms the basis of various postmodern, quasi-political academic fields that
gained acceptance in universities by the 1990s,
such as queer theory, gender and sexuality stud-
Cultural theorists
ies, and whiteness studies. Disability studies,
have noted the deeply
which can be traced to the founding of the So-
embedded cultural
ciety for Disability Studies in 1986, explicitly re-
and social processes
jects the medical model that views disability as
of “othering” that
inseparable from impairment and interrogates
separate normal,
the assumption of normalcy that bifurcates the
healthy bodies from
able from the disabled body. Through the alterna-
those that are deemed
tively proposed social model of disability, norma-
abnormal or deficient.
tivity as it relates to the body becomes the object
of study itself.19 The physicality of the body is
erased from the identity of being disabled in this model, broadening the scope
of disability from a random group of people who deviate from established
norms and into a social category worthy of the same attention as gender,
sexuality, or race.20 Cultural theorists have noted the deeply embedded cul-
tural and social processes of “othering” that separate normal, healthy bodies
from those that are deemed abnormal or deficient.21 These include the ways
individuals with disabilities may be physically restricted by the world around
them, as well as through less apparent barriers. Sociologist Nikolas Rose iden-
tifies Western psychology’s “regime of the self” that privileges individual-
ization, autonomy, and inward examination as contributing to a “regulative
ideal” that dictates what is normal and abnormal.22 For Rose, bodily difference
can be enacted not only through outright coercion but from the inside out,
planted and seeded through a self-centered definition of identity. Disability
is threatening precisely because it “exposes the illusion of autonomy, self-
government, and self-determination” that is the foundation of the regulative
ideal of the healthy, strong, and able-bodied individual.23 As will be explored,
however, the characters of Mushishi do not simply challenge the regulative
ideal through the inversion of ability and disability, as illustrated in episodes
2 and 3. Rather, bodily loss and gain are integrated into the subject to create
a newly (dis)abled state.
(DIS)ABILITY AS SUBJECT
The humans in Mushishi are not simply disabled by their interaction with
mushi. Characters lose their ability to see in the daytime but gain the ability
to see at night. The simultaneous loss and gain that characterizes the (dis)
abled bodies in Mushishi is reified through its incorporation into personal
identity. In the episodes that follow, I will discuss how (dis)ability is made real
in the lives of the characters of Mushishi, affecting both their identities and
occupations. Through this discussion, I will offer a critique of the traditional
social model of disability, which at its most extreme does not acknowledge
physical impairment and opposes medical or helping professions that aim to
treat disability physically. Mushishi provides a critique of this model on two
counts: first, in its presentation of disability/ability not as dichotomy but
rather as coexistence—what I have termed (dis)ability—and second, in the
way that nondichotomous ability/disability informs the livelihoods and iden-
tities of the affected characters, most notably the series protagonist, Ginko.
Prominent scholars within disability studies have noted the constraint that
the politically motivated social model of disability places on identity, i.e., that
one is either disabled or abled, us or them.24 Physical impairment, as well as
the desire to simply be “normal,” apolitical, and not defined by one’s disability,
is excluded in the social model. Yet Mushishi, by presenting identities of (dis)
ability as well as an unremitting acknowledgment of physical impairment,
offers a compromise between these two models.
A central example is Ginko’s origin story, which is detailed nearly halfway
through the anime series in episode 12. Owing to its rarity and importance
within the series, Ginko’s origin figures prominently in Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s
2006 live-action adaptation (Mushishi), which weaves together multiple epi-
sodes from the series into a feature-length film.25 Despite being one of the
only recurring characters in the series, Ginko’s past and internal motivations
are rarely explored. The exception occurs in “One-Eyed Fish” (“Sugame no
uo”), in which a young Ginko (known as “Yoki” prior to his magical trans-
formation) is shown losing his mother in a landslide and wandering into a
forest. There, a stern woman with white hair and only one eye discovers him
and becomes his adopted mother figure. The woman, Nui, teaches Ginko her
unusual abilities, including the use of a cigarette that can control mushi and
the ability to see even in complete darkness. Ginko eventually learns why Nui
stays close to a pond that emits an eerie glow at night, for as she explains to
him, an enormous, fish-shaped mushi named ginko lives in the pond, feeding
on another type of mushi known as tokoyami (perpetual darkness). The mushi
cannibalism in the pond results in an “enchanting luminescence” that can
permanently disfigure any creature—human or otherwise—exposed to it.26
Nui lives alone by the pond in search of her husband and children, who she
believes were drawn by the enchanting glow. While attempting to prevent
Nui from committing suicide at the pond, Ginko comes into contact with the
unusual light and loses consciousness. When he awakens, his hair is white, he
has only one eye, and he suffers from retrograde amnesia, adopting the name
“Ginko” after the mushi that transformed him. Ginko’s transformation in this
episode is an example of ability and disability truly intertwined. His newfound
disabilities, which include attracting mushi wherever he goes, force him into
the peripatetic lifestyle of a Mushishi. Yet he has also been magically endowed,
able to see otherwise invisible mushi and control them with the smoke of his
cigarette. The incorporation of identity allows Ginko to live as “a person with
disability, rather than being overwhelmed by the disability.”27 This distinction
recalls the semantic difference, central to the social model of disability and
codified in the American Psychological Association’s Style guide, between a
“disabled person” and a “person with disability,” with the latter preferred for
its “person-first” focus.28
Episode 20, “A Sea of Writings” (“Fude no umi”) describes a woman
cursed by a mushi that has been sealed into the bodies of her descendants
for generations. Ginko meets the woman, Tanyu, who is immobilized by the
blackened leg that is the mark of her ancestor’s curse. Like many of the char-
acters in Mushishi, the woman in this episode is isolated from the outside
world, resigned to an existence of specialized work in solitude as a result of
her disabled body. The isolating effect of disability can be contrasted with
social categories such as ethnicity; yet as Rosemarie-Garland Thomson notes,
“like gays and lesbians, disabled people are sometimes fundamentally iso-
lated from each other, existing often as aliens within their social units.”29 Like
Tanyu, Ginko is both isolated and alien, wandering from place to place with
few discernible friends or family, and marked by both his unusual physical ap-
pearance (white hair and only one eye) as well as his modern clothes. Tanyu’s
leg endows her with the ability to control mushi living in strings of Japanese
characters. The only way to keep the mushi living inside her from killing her
is to put it to “sleep” by recording stories of Mushishi exterminating mushi.
However, because she hears only tales of killing, Tanyu is gradually saddened
by the visiting mushishi’s “arrogance toward tiny, lower life forms” and their
“unfounded fears of things different than themselves.” The simultaneous loss
and gain that Tanyu experiences as a result of her curse is emblematic of the
ambiguous state of (dis)ability that affects many of the humans in Mushishi.

But there is another layer as well, which is the crystallization of identity that
Tanyu’s (dis)abled state confers, resulting in an uneasy identification with
the very creatures that diminish her life. In short, Ginko and Tanyu’s altered
bodies inform their altered lives.
BETWEEN SUBJECT AND OBJECT
The (dis)abled body is incorporated into the identity of the subject, creating a
feedback loop where selfhood is defined and reinforced by coexisting loss and
gain. However, to use a concept developed by the Julia Kristeva in Powers of
Horror (1980, Pouvoirs de l’horreur), the (dis)abled body is also abject. Kristeva
writes how the abject is both of the body and not of the body, pushing us to
the “border” of our existence through the transgression of previously held
boundaries.30 The human bodies in Mushishi are transformed through mushi
interaction, becoming both abled and disabled. Yet it is precisely because of
this coexistence of states—a blurring of boundaries around the regulative
ideal—that the (dis)abled body may be viewed as
abject. A change of familiarity is key. “Abjection
The human bodies in
is elaborated through a failure to recognize its
Mushishi are
kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a
transformed through
memory,” Kristeva writes.31 Closely related to the
mushi interaction,
body—for what could be more familiar to us?—
becoming both abled
the abject disrupts our deepest self-familiarity,
and disabled.
inspiring revulsion precisely because it lies both
within the body and in opposition to it. As Susan
Napier notes, when “given access to the secret depths of the body,” as in Tet-
suo’s monstrous transformation at the end of Akira, “the viewer cannot quite
look away.”32
In episode 21 of Mushishi, “Cotton Changeling” (“Watabōshi”), a woman’s
unborn child is killed in the womb and replaced by a spore-like mushi. When
the woman, Aki, gives birth a green slime emerges, quickly escaping beneath
the floorboards. Mysterious children begin to appear underneath the house,
and although Aki raises them as her own, she struggles to reconcile her in-
tense desire to bear children with her knowledge of their inhuman origin. The
episode recalls aspects of David Cronenberg’s film The Brood (1979),33 in which
a woman undergoing “psychoplasmic” therapy gives birth to murderous fac-
similes of her daughter Candice. Although even more horrific in tone than
episode 21 of Mushishi, the two works share a disturbing similarity. Nola,
the woman giving birth to the Brood, remains isolated in a cabin through-
out the film, seemingly unaware of the presence of her murderous progeny.
Her ignorance is questioned by the film’s end, however, where she reveals
a fetal creature appended to her abdomen, an external womb from which
she “births” the Brood in front of her estranged husband. This establishes
a familial closeness between Nola and her psychogenic children. As a result
of a past miscarriage that led to divorce, Aki shares an immediate affinity
with her mushi children despite their alien origin. Similarly, in the final scene
of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968),34 Mia Farrow’s character over-
comes repulsion to approach (and presumably comfort) her recently birthed
devil child, signaling an acceptance of the inhuman product of her traumatic
parturition.35
My point in illustrating these examples is that coexistent bodily addition
and negation link the (dis)abled body with the abject body. Like the insects
described earlier in this paper, the power of abjection lies in its extremities:
self and other, repulsion and fascination, “unapproachable and intimate.”36
Insects are symbols of sexual power as well as worry; the birth of a child is an
event to celebrate as well as dread. The abject arises from the transgression
of boundaries, yet paradoxically, the abject is also what defines us, “what life
withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.”37
TOWARD A BODILY ORIGIN
The mushi infect, distort, and rob the human characters in Mushishi, but they
do not merely disable. Ability and disability are inverted and finally consoli-
dated into selfhood to magically (dis)able the characters in Mushishi. Although
the body may now be considered abject due to this boundary transgression,
the “plastic corporeality” of these simultaneous bodily states leads me to
conclude that the primordial mushi function as an origin point from which
all possible bodily forms emerge.38 The development of abject (dis)ability via
ostensibly “pure” creatures in Mushishi calls into question the purity of origin.
At the end of Powers of Horror, Kristeva quotes the twentieth-century writer
Louis-Ferdinand Céline to argue that the abject ultimately “cancels our exis-
tence.” My interpretation of this is that the abject, as representing the parts
of us we most want to deny, functions as the ultimate revealer of ourselves. In
our being, disability is denied and avoided; the abject confluence of ability and
disability may be even more threatening. Yet it is there, in that most feared
place, that our origin lies.

Notes
1. Mushishi, dir. Nagahama Hiroshi, TV series, 26 episodes (2005–6); 4-DVD box set
(Funimation Productions, 2011).
2. Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998), 69; Akira, dir.
Ōtomo Katsuhiro (1988); DVD (Geneon, 2001).
3. Susan J. Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, Updated Edition:
Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 40.
4. Lisa Blackman, The Body: The Key Concepts (New York: Berg, 2008).
5. Napier, Anime, 36.
6. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur; translated by Leon S. Roudiez as Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3.
7. Paul Jackson, “The Space between Worlds: Mushishi and Japanese Folklore,” Mech-
ademia 5 (2010): 342.
8. This is also supported in the writings of the early Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn
(1850–1904), who details the “madness” that overcomes those affected by fox spirit posses-
sion (kitsunetsuki), writing how “on some part of the body of the possessed a moving lump
appears under the skin, which seems to have a life of its own.” Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of
Unfamiliar Japan (1894; rpt., North Clarendon, Vt.: Tuttle Publishing, 2008), 158.
9. Artemidorus Daldianus, Oneirocritica; translated by R. J. White as The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams = Oneirocritica (Park Ridge, N.J.: Noyes Press, 1975).
10. Otto Rank, Das Trauma der Geburt (1924); trans. E. James Lieberman as The
Trauma of Birth (New York: Martino Fine Books, 2010).
11. Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900); trans. as The Interpretation of Dreams,
line 28, http://www.bartleby.com/285/6.html.
12. Barrett A. Klein, “The Curious Connection between Insects and Dreams,” Insects 3
(2012): 1–17.
13. Mononokehime, dir. Miyazaki Hayao, 1997; translated as Princess Mononoke, DVD
(Walt Disney Home Entertainment, 2000).
14. Kaze no Tani no Naushika, dir. Miyazaki Hayao, 1984; translated as Nausicaä of the
Valley of the Wind, DVD (Walt Disney Home Entertainment, 2005).
15. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900; rpt., New York: Empire Books, 2012); Tony
Tanner, “Butterflies and Beetles—Conrad’s Two Truths,” Chicago Review 16, no. 1 (1963):
123–40.
16. Suna no onna, dir. Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1964; translated as The Woman in the
Dunes, DVD (The Criterion Collection, 2007).
17. Judith Shatnoff, “Review: Woman in the Dunes (Suna no Onna) by Hiroshi Teshiga-
hara,” Film Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1964): 43.
18. Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 4.
19. Rethinking Normalcy: A Disability Studies Reader, ed. Tanya Titchkosky and Rod
Michalko (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2009), 6.
20. Ibid., 3; Mark Oliver, Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1996).
21. Blackman, The Body, 60.
22. Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–4.
23. R. G. Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Cul-
ture and Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
24. Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson, “The Social Model of Disability: An Out-
dated Ideology?” Research in Social Science and Disability 2 (2002): 9–28.
25. Mushishi, dir. Ōtomo Katsuhiro, 2006; translated as Mushi-Shi: The Movie, DVD
(Funimation Productions, 2009).
26. Jackson, “The Space between Worlds,” 342.
27. Margaret Wangui Murugami, “Disability and Identity,” Disability Studies Quarterly
29, no. 4 (2002), para. 17.
28. American Psychological Association, Publication Manual of the American Psycho-
logical Association, Sixth Edition (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association,
2010); Ken Davis, “The Social Model of Disability and Its Implications for Language Use”
(Glasgow: Glasgow Center for Inclusive Living, 1996).
29. Rosemarie-Garland Thomson, “Disability, Identity, and Representation: An Intro-
duction,” in Rethinking Disability: A Disability Studies Reader, ed. Tanya Titchkosky and Rod
Michalko (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, Inc., 2009), 71.
30. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3, 5.
31. Ibid., 6.
32. Napier, Anime, 46.
33. The Brood, dir. David Cronenberg (1979); DVD (MGM, 2003).
34. Rosemary’s Baby, dir. Roman Polanski (1968); DVD (The Criterion Collection,
2012).
35. Lucy Fischer, “Birth traumas: Parturition and Horror in Rosemary’s Baby,” Cinema
Journal 31, no. 3 (1992): 3–18.
36. Ibid., 6.
37. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3.
38. Blackman, The Body, 324.
JOON YANG KIM
South Korea and the

Sub-Empire of Anime:
Kinesthetics of Subcontracted
Animation Production
The relationship in the animation industry between Japan and South Korea
has been as close as the geographic distance between the two countries. Since
the mid-1960s, South Korean studios and workers have manufactured Japa-
nese animation in a mode of production referred to as hacheong in Korean and
shitauke in Japanese, both of which mean “to subcontract.” In the global anime
wave that started in the 1990s, this material condition of production has often
been neglected or ignored, by academics as well as fans. Meanwhile in South
Korea, since the mid-1990s when the government started to promote film and
animation as a new national industry, the Korean term hacheong has been
replaced by the English acronym OEM (original equipment manufacturing),
despite no substantional changes in the condition of subcontracted produc-
tion, as the former term seemed likely to offend many South Koreans’ national
pride. Indeed, the issue of internationally subcontracted animation production
in South Korea has long been viewed and spoken of from a nationalist perspec-
tive. While intentionally ignoring the material reality of subcontracted work
that has acted on the majority of the country’s animation industry, the South
Korean mass media has not hesitated to propagate the notion that South
Korea is the third-largest producer of animation in the world.
90
Subcontracted production in the Japanese animation industry, which I will
explore in the main part of this essay, was encouraged by politico-economic
factors that included location, diplomatic agreements, wage levels, and ex-
change rates, and then materialized by a Taylorist work organization that
went along with technologies of celluloid animation. My focus is, however,
not on the perennial issue of developed countries’ transnational exploitation
of underdeveloped or developing countries’ labor. Rather, subcontracted pro-
duction is widely experienced at a domestic, as well as international, level, and
the Japanese animation industry has long used a subcontracted production
system within the territory of Japan. What I will bring into focus in this essay
is the dominant discourse in this mode of animation production that places
manual labor and laborers at a lower rank in the artistic-production hierarchy
of brain over hand. Imagined and reproduced internationally through the ani-
mation subcontracting between South Korea and Japan (and possibly going
further to the United States), this cerebral/manual dichotomy is a discursive
construct I wish to call into question, with regard to animation’s aesthetics as
well as its kinesthetic processes.1
ANIME SUBCONTRACTION IN HISTORY
Subcontracted production in South Korea for foreign animation industries

traces back to Ōgon batto (Golden bat) and Humanoid Monster Bem (Yōkai Nin-
gen Bemu), first broadcast in Japan in 1967 and 1968, respectively. These were
animated TV series produced by the Japanese animation company Daiichi
Dōga and subcontracted to a South Korean TV station named TBC (Tongyang
Bangsong); this station was part of the South Korean mega-conglomerate
Samsung and is currently one of the state-owned TV stations, KBS 2. How-
ever, TBC stopped animation production a few years later. As suggested by
Jeong Wook in a documentary television program about the South Korean
history of cartoon animation, Lee Byung-chul, then chairman of the Sam-
sung Group, did not judge animation to be a promising business because it
was contingent on manual labor, noting in particular that Tōei employees
in Japan had gone on strike at that time.2 Today, the Samsung Group is well
known for its technology-intensive businesses and for not allowing the activ-
ity of labor unions.3
Tōei Animation also prevented employees from forming a union. Yama-
guchi Katsunori suspects that the Tōei management was concerned about
such a movement because it was looking to coproduce animation with the U.S.
s o u t h ko r e a a n d t h e s u b-e m p i r e o f a n i m e 9 1
For Ōkawa, who was
film company MGM.4 In 1961, however, Tōei
dreaming of Tōei Animation
employees succeeded in organizing a union,
as the “Disney of the
and management stopped them from com-
Orient,” the United States
ing to work, eventually ordering a lockout.
may have been a new
Many employees were forced to leave the
resource for ideas to be
studio, and some moved to Mushi Produc-
simply absorbed and then
tion, established by Tezuka Osamu in 1963.5
materialized by the
In 1965 Tōei Animation stopped employing
animators’ skill.
regular workers, turning to the policy of hir-
ing temporary workers for discrete projects.6
Finally, Tōei’s ambitions of international coproduction came true in 1966 with
The King Kong Show, an animated TV series from the U.S. company Videocraft
International, which was followed by other coproduced (actually outsourced)
projects with Western companies until the 1980s.7 In his 1960 interview with
Shūkan asahi (Asahi weekly), Ōkawa Hiroshi, then president of Tōei Anima-
tion, referred optimistically to this mode of animation production as a promis-
ing business.8 For Ōkawa, who was dreaming of Tōei Animation as the “Disney
of the Orient,” the United States may have been a new resource for ideas to
be simply absorbed and then materialized by the animators’ skill. In contrast
with Ōkawa’s expectations, however, young animators were not content with
merely drawing pictures as ordered, but rather wanted to play a creative role
in animation production.9 One example that makes clear the studio’s situa-
tion is The Little Norse Prince (Tayō no ōji, Horusu no daibōken), the 1968 ani-
mated feature directed by Takahata Isao. The film was made both creatively
and manually by the production crew—all union members—independently of
and against the studio’s management. This film is well known for the fact that
Miyazaki Hayao, who had just started his animation career as an in-between
artist, made a much greater contribution than he had in previous roles, pro-
viding a lot of creative artistic and technical input.
In 1971, Tōei Animation suffered more substantial changes. Ōkawa passed
away, and his once-Disneyesque studio was cut in half in terms of workspace,
number of employees, and technical resources.10 It was in the same year that
Takahata left the company with Miyazaki and Kotabe Yōichi, who were to
become longtime colleagues. Two years later, the studio’s management began
outsourcing the manual process of animation production to small overseas
studios located in neighboring Asian countries, one of which was South Ko-
rea.11 Along with these changes, the practice of animation was increasingly
dealt with as a mechanical skill, not as an artistic activity. A relevant example
might be the business run by a Japanese company named Minwasha for a few
9 2 joon ya ng ki m
years until 1974. With the sales pitch of “animation as a second job,” Minwasha
sold housewives a correspondence course in animating skills and hired some
of them, calling them “home staff.”12 The growing fragmentation of animat-
ing labor took place in parallel with the growth of subcontracted animation
production at home and abroad.
Although continuing to some extent even now, Japanese studios’ sub-
contracted or outsourced animation production for Western companies be-
gan to show a sharp decrease in the mid-1980s. Having worked on as many
as seventy projects from the United States by 1984, Tōei Animation pulled
out of this production business around 1988.13 This was largely due to the
commercial success of Dragon Ball and the studio’s other animated television
series starting in 1986, and at the same time to the waning of the U.S. dollar’s
strength against the yen during the period of the Japanese bubble economy.14
On the other hand, the studio paved the way to further outsource its own
productions, establishing a studio to handle in-between cels, backgrounds,
and finishing in the Philippines in 1986; since the Filipino studio was turned
into a subsidiary of Tōei Animation in 1999, it has covered seventy percent of
the animation production.15 In this sense, neighboring Asian animators and
animation workers deserve to be recognized as having supported the anima-
tion boom in 1980s Japan and the “anime” wave that started in the 1990s.
What is noteworthy is that this new geography of Japanese animation
production in Asia was literally effaced in terms of cultural politics. Accord-
ing to Sawada Yukari, the names of Korean animators or in-betweeners were
often replaced with fictitious Japanese names in the credits of animated series
broadcast on television in the 1980s. It was necessary to disguise overseas
subcontracting, given that there were sometimes noticeable visual inconsis-
tencies, supposedly due to overseas animators’ not fully controlled labor, in
one and the same animated television series.16 “Made in Japan” did and still
does function as a national myth of animation production in Japanese soci-
ety, and it was not until the mid-1990s that audiences could see many South
Korean (and soon Chinese) names in the credits of Japanese animation, while
more often the credit titles featured the names of the subcontracting studios
(both Japanese and non-Japanese) rather than the names of their workers.
The sub-empire called “anime” today is based on these subcontracting struc-
tures, set up under specific socioeconomic conditions in Asia.17 A grotesque
vision of those studios and workers is seen in Banksy’s controversial 2010 title
sequence for the “MoneyBart” episode of The Simpsons, in which he imagines
a South Korean animation sweatshop, and displays his critical view of the Fox
media empire.
I have examined how the manual labor of animating has been marginal-
ized in the anime industry, within and outside of Japan. Now I will proceed to
discuss the discourses that pertain to this way of deploying human resources
in animation production.
DISCOURSES OF BRAIN AND HAND

IN ANIMATION AND ART
In South Korea in the late 1980s there were attempts to change the fact that
most of the country’s animation production was dependent on foreign indus-
tries. Yet, one of the main strategies was centered on the dichotomous hierar-
chy of brain over hand—in other words, on a strategy for replacing the foreign
brain with a national one. The cerebral element of animation production was
often described as creativity, ideas, or the ability to write original stories and
screenplays. On the other hand, there was no critical discussion of the tech-
niques of animators trained in subcontracted production. First, it was feared
that raising these technical issues would hurt animators’ professional pride;
and second, artistic issues have been regarded as irrelevant to the field of ani-
mation because the concept of art in South Korean society has long been one
associated with Western “High Art” like classical music or oil painting. In the
context of this cerebral/manual split, government institutions and the private
sector tried to find a way to combine Korean ideas with the Korean animating
skills that could supposedly materialize them. Such a simplistic combination
was just an inverted version of what Ōkawa Hiroshi had attempted in dream-
ing of the internationalization of Tōei Animation in the 1960s.
In South Korea, the quasi-Romantic view placing human mind or spirit
over materiality and corporality in artistic production has manifested it-
self again under the state-led project named BK 21 (BrainKorea21), in which
the moving image (along with information technology, life science, design,
traditional Korean medicine, and the like) was chosen as an emerging in-
dustrial field. The aim of the project is to foster “core experts” in advanced
scientific and/or cultural technologies by supporting master’s and PhD stu-
dents in those fields.18 If not appropriated for three-dimensional computer
graphics or mediated by new digital devices, however, the manual labor and
skills of animation are unlikely to find their proper place. Higher education
tends to be dominated by a traditional Korean value system that has placed
manufacturing work below literature for centuries. Much the same view is
found among some “brain-oriented” Japanese experts, too. The animation
9 4 joon ya ng ki m
journalist Kakizaki Shundō evaluated South Korean director Lee Sung Gang’s
2002 animated feature My Beautiful Girl, Mari (Mari iyagi) as the result of
the simple combination of an outstanding director, with animators trained
through subcontracted production. He viewed the animators as having been
waiting for just such a talented person.19 And on a Japanese television talk
show which discussed South Korean animation as an emerging competitor,
Kubo Masakazu (the Shōgakukan editor and producer who had huge success
with Pokémon) took a biological-sounding tone: he stated that the “brain,” as
well as the ability to develop and write scenarios, was not mature in South
Korea’s animation production.20
Such cerebral/manual splits can trace back as far as the Renaissance in
Europe, well before the appearance of the modern film industry. E. H. Gom-
brich suggests that poets who “wrote” with their brains were loved by Re-
naissance snobs, but the artists who worked with their hands were not.21
The Renaissance painter Giotto could obtain fame and distinguish himself
from shoemakers or other craftspeople only through his scientific pursuit of
mathematics and anatomy.22 Furthermore, Da Vinci argued that the manual
labor of a painter working with brushes was not as essential as that of a poet
writing with a pen.23 Gombrich denounces their view as snobbish and points
to Aristotle as most responsible for its creation.24 Likewise, in the field of
live-action cinema, Alexandre Astruc proposed the movie camera as a new
pen in the first half of the twentieth century.25 In contrast, at the beginning
of the twenty-first century Lev Manovich attempted to introduce the idea
of a “kino-brush,” in which cinema becomes closer and closer to animation
through digital image-processing technology.26 In his view, animation is lo-
cated somewhere other than where cinema has been for the last century.
What I am concerned with here is not the distinction or relationship be-
tween the two concepts of “cerebral” pen and “manual” brush, which would be
too big a project for this essay. Rather, I am interested in how it is possible to
get over—in a practical way—the dichotomous hierarchy that seems to remain
at work despite Manovich’s sophisticated conceptualization of digital film-
making. The fact is that we can immediately experience something emotional
or mental from a series of subtle bodily gestures in an animated character,
even if we “know” it to be merely composed of pixel-based, virtually three-
dimensional images or flat, discrete, hand-drawn pictures. Such experience
tells us that our sensation of animated visuals is not determined simply by
cerebral intelligence. Rudolf Arnheim understands the relationship between
brain and hand not in a causal way but rather as a structural similarity that
allows a resonance between them.27 He refers to “isomorphism” in discussing
A. Observed Person
I. State of mind psychological
II. Neural correlate of I electrochemical
III. Muscular forces mechanical
IV. Kinesthetic correlate of III psychological
V. Shape and movement of body geometrical
B. Observer
VI. Retinal projection of V geometrical
VII. Cortical projection of VI electromechanical
VIII. Perceptual correlate of VII psychological
Figure 1. Isomorphic Levels from Rudolf Arnheim
perception, stating that there are a series of different levels—psychological,

electromechanical, mechanical, and geometrical—each of which is structured
to resonate with its neighbors (Figure 1).28 Significantly, the psychological
state of mind does not occupy a privileged, dominating place over the geo-
metrical shape and movement of the body and other physical levels; Level II
is not the product but the correlation of Level I.
It should be noted that Level I and V in the observed person are mediated
through hypodermic operations that are neural, muscular, and kinesthetic;
these are not as visible as bodily shape and movement but not as supposedly
mental as mind or perception. In Arnheim’s view, dancers or actors are able
(and trained) to enact bodily gestures, postures, and facial expressions that
adequately correspond to their emotional or mental states through the kin-
esthetic correlation experienced while they are moving their own bodies.29 In
a phenomenological sense, an observer can experience the kinesthetic and
other isomorphic levels of the expressing person’s body, through resonance
with its geometrical shape and movement. Given that people can become ac-
tors of sorts in specific social contexts, Arnheim’s two terms, observed and
observer, should not be understood as essentially and permanently separated
from each other.
9 6 joon ya ng ki m
It is not strange, then, that animators have often been referred to as ac-
tors or choreographers. This type of performing artist expresses her-or him-
self by animating the extrinsic body-object or body-image of a character, but
the central locus of neural, muscular, and kinesthetic operations should be
the animator’s body in the first place. For example, looking at his own face
in a mirror, Peter Lord intentionally moves his lips and facial muscles to the
recorded voice of the interviewee Bill Perry, while he is animating the lips of
a clay figure that is Perry’s representation in his animated documentary War
Story (1989) (Figures 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).30 He could have relied on live-action foot-
age of the interviewee telling his own story, but it is obvious that this cannot
substitute for the hypodermic levels within the very body of the animator.
These levels are required to function as the expressing (not just receiving)
intermediary between the photorealistic representation of the interviewee’s
moving lips, the animator’s eyes and hands, and the surface and mass of the
clay figure. Another example is Miyazaki Hayao’s bodily demonstration seen
during the production of his animated feature Ponyo (2008, Gake no ue no
Ponyo).31 The director moves the entire upper part of his body, including his
arms and hands, while talking with an animator about how to show to audi-
ences the movements of a fictitious marine life-form that nobody has ever
seen. William Schaffer’s investigation of similar practices leads to a post-
Cartesian account of the relation between the animating human subject and
the animated nonhuman object. He comments:
The animator finds himself reanimated in turn by the characters he ani-

mates and feels himself becoming a cartoon. Resonances of influence are
conducted back through the pencil into the vibrating network formed by
the strings of the artist’s nervous system . . . the multiple strings of the
moving puppet are never simply controlled from a single point embodying
the “will” of the puppeteer . . . The puppeteer or animator may initiate this
dance of strings and displaced bodies; but once in set in motion, it rever-
berates unpredictably, takes on a life of its own, in which the artist’s entire
body becomes but one of many dancing limbs.32
If more attention is paid to hand-drawn animation that does not deal

with characters as physical objects in space, Gilles Deleuze’s theory of painting
should be taken into account. Deleuze’s approach differs from Da Vinci’s. In
the French philosopher’s thought, there is a quality inherent to the painting,
something material, physical, and dynamic on the canvas, something that
originates from the hands; but we lose the capability of feeling it when the
Figure 2. Peter Lord with his clay puppet Figure 3. A tape cassette player with his right hand
Figure 4. His facial movements in front of a mirror Figure 5. His facial movements in front of a mirror
Figure 6. Animating the lips of the puppet Figure 7. Bill Perry, the owner of the voice
9 8 joon ya ng kim
manual is neglected by the cerebral.33 It is impossible to see anything on the
canvas with the eye, the retina, and the optic nerve, as long as they are domi-
nated by the brain. Remind yourself of the apples of Paul Cézanne or René
Magritte, and you are likely to think you see apples in their paintings, trained
to do that in accordance with your given languages and schemata (apple, ringo,
sagwa, pomme, and so on), but they are not what you believe you see. Similarly,
you might think you see Ponyo in Miyazaki’s animated feature, but you have
never seen her before. In drawing the line of flight from such a visual field,
you can see something tactile, visceral, and motile from the deterritorializing
girl-fish and the other protean figures on the screen, then feel it in your retina,
neural networks, kinesthesia, and muscles.34 This mode of sensation is the
same for the clay figure of Peter Lord, even when it aims at representing a
human interviewee in a documentary film. We can see the mushy clay mass
in flux, and the animator’s manual marks on/beneath/around its surface, at
almost the same time we see a human being smiling or talking. Keeping this
in mind, now I will discuss how the global subcontracting structure of anima-
tion production can twist and fragment the embodied identity of both the
animator and the spectator.
GESTURE AND IDENTITY: HOW TO MOVE

AND LOOK LIKE A GENTLEMAN
In 1981, a South Korean national newspaper ran a disturbing story about the
economic boom in South Korean animation. With an optimistic tone, an in-
terviewee argued that on-the-job training in overseas productions will help
Korean animators learn better techniques and make them more skillful at
expressing the emotions of Western people.35 One of the most important
goals required of South Korean animators at that time was not to express
their own emotions but the emotions of others—most of whom had never
met, nor lived with in the same community. Encouraged by studio owners and
the government, and appropriated by subcontracted production, South Ko-
rean animators’ hands in the 1980s became more and more coded to specific
cultural-industrial types of emotional and bodily expression. Their hands were
trained to draw lines in the styles demanded by the Japanese and Western
animation industries. During this process, the animators’ bodies were broken
down in time, through the process of breaking down characters’ bodily move-
ments, and the former also in-betweened through in-betweening the latter.
My suggestion here is that the hand and body of the animator (particularly
working in industry) is not entirely autonomous but likely to be controlled by
industrial powers. For example, when discussing American animator Chuck
Jones’s self-referential animated short Duck Amuck (1953), William Schaffer
points out that animators regularly find themselves to be puppets or cartoon
characters manipulated by invisible controlling powers—slaves to the me-
chanical operation of capital.36 Working in communist Czechoslovokia, Jiří
Trnka also expressed this notion that the animator does not only animate ex-
trinsic objects but is also animated through them, by extrinsic powers. Trnka’s
last animated film, The Hand (1965), portrays a puppet character forced to be
a propaganda artist by the hand of a dictator.
The voice heard in the 1981 news story about incorporating animators’ or
in-betweeners’ bodies into the engine of capital was reproduced with a differ-
ent inflection in a recent interview. The story, which covers a South Korea–
based studio owner and his success in working on the U.S. animated television
series The Legend of Korra (2012), reports:
His success was backed up by a thorough analysis of the U.S. market. . . .

He researched intensively the emotional codes of U.S. audiences. The pro-
tagonist of the heroic story . . . was set as a gentleman who covers up for a
female partner.37
Here, attention is paid not to manual skills but rather to the cerebral
ability to analyze a market and research emotional and behavioral codes. The
brain-centric logic delivered and reinforced here by the South Korean press
looks only at how U.S. audiences prefer a person to act in terms of social
norms: a gentleman should cover up for a female partner. It does not seem
to have any interest in the way the gentleman will move in terms of gesture.
Arnheim suggests that gentleness as a gesture should be embodied in the
velocity and acceleration or deceleration of moving limbs, the shape of their
curves, and other elements,38 but these will vary with the identity of each fi-
nite and socially situated human being. Heather Crow suggests that the corpo-
real articulation of gestures is subordinated to the systems of representation
(film, stage, social milieu), which make them perceptible and thereby manage
their circulation and repetition.39 She cites film scholar Leslie Stern’s notion
that gestures are performed but not owned by an individual: directly related
to identity, gestures are foreign but familiar, public but private, wandering
homeless ghosts that are ready to haunt human bodies.40
According to Yoo Sun Young, many Korean audiences in the early twen-
tieth century seem to have been possessed by gestural ghosts invoked in the
10 0 joon ya ng k im
new medium of film. In her view, their bodies were imbued and animated with
the gestures of Hollywood actresses or actors, as they imitated ways of walking
and laughing, and came to feel that eating a piece of cake with a fork was more
cultured than eating kimchi with chopsticks.41 Yoo conceptualizes this trend
as a process of early Korean modernization under colonization, where people
were forced to be “naked” individuals who lost traditional communities.42 My
suggestion is that animation is an optimal medium for examining such wan-
dering and haunting ghosts, because it enables us to deal with bodies not as
given from a “real” world but as artificially constructed from discrete elements,
in an infinitesimal, differential, and fluxional manner—frame by frame, or
even pixel by pixel. At the heart of this discursive practice is the animator as a
neurally, muscularly, and kinesthetically processing/processed entity.
This raises two questions regarding the news story about the U.S. code
of gentlemanly behavior. The first asks what gestures will be imparted to the
heroic gentleman character for U.S. audiences who embrace many different
and diverse communities. The second question asks about the attribution of
gentlemanly behavior to U.S. society, although the animated story enacts sup-
posedly Asian (male) protagonists against Asian-looking scenery. With this,
it seems to follow that such behavior should not be South Korean or Chinese.
How many Asian children audiences will agree on such an idea? Certainly,
the word, “gentleman” (shinsa in Korean) is likely to be associated with the
“English gentleman” (youngguk shinsa), something foreign in South Korea; but
nonetheless the word does not discourage one from imagining such a charac-
ter as proper to another society. In relation to embodied identities and morals,
these issues will be important for many young audiences who are situated in
given social contexts (or situate themselves in different, chosen ones). Any of
them could be animators in the future.
Notes
1. When the cerebral is spoken of here and other places in this essay, it does not
only imply the intellectual but also refers to the brain itself. Indeed, many discourses in
artistic production have attributed intelligence to the human brain, as will be shown later
in this essay. In them, the brain has been understood as a superior locus, not just as a
lump of meat, distinguished from the other biological organs of the human being by virtue
of the metaphysical, often transcendental, notion of intelligence. The diametric view has
been applied to limbs and their physical operation. But there are theories opposing this
deep-rooted, brain-centric view of intelligence. For broader conceptions of intelligence,
refer to Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, 3rd ed. (Phila-
delphia: Basic Books, 2011).
2. Jeong Wook, “Part Two: Bit gwa gurimja” (Light and Shadow), Hanguk manhwa
yeonghwa saship nyeonsa (Forty years of Korean cartoon animation), TV (Tooniverse,
December 19, 1998).
3. Choi Ji Yong, “Interview with the Samsung Union President Park Won Wu,” Oh My
News, July 17, 2012, http://www.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/View/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD
=A0001758164.
4. Yamaguchi Katsunori and Watanabe Yasushi, Nihon animeishon eigashi (The history
of Japanese animation) (Osaka: Yūbunsha, 1977), 68.
5. Ibid., 106–7.
6. Ibid., 132.
7. Ibid., 116; Kusanagi Satoshi, Amerika de nihon no animeishon wa dō mirarete kitanoka?
(The way in which the USA has seen Japanese animation) (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 2003),
93, 183.
8. Ibid., 35–36.
9. Kimura Tomoya, “Shoki Tōei Dōga ni okeru eizō hyōgen to seisaku taisei no hen-
kaku” (Changes in the production system and the visual expression of early Tōei Anima-
tion), Dōjidaishi kenkyū 3 (2010): 19–34.
10. Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animeishon eigashi, 132–33.
11. Tōei Animation website, http://corp.toei-anim.co.jp/company/history.php.
12. Yamaguchi and Watanabe, Nihon animeishon eigashi, 178–79.
13. Kusanagi, Amerika de nihon no animeishon wa dō mirarete kitanoka? 157–83.
14. Ibid., 183.
15. Tōei Animation website, http://corp.toei-anim.co.jp/company/companies.php.
16. Sawada Yukari, “Higashi Asia no manga bunka: grōbaraizeishon no genjō” (Culture
of cartoon in East Asia: The current situation of globalization), Tokyo University of Foreign
Studies website, July 18, 2003, http://www.tufs.ac.jp/21coe/area/hyoushou/vmg_seminar
_030718.pdf.
17. The term “Sub-Empire” is cited from Ueno Toshiya. See Ueno Toshiya, “Japani-
mation and Techno-Orientalism: Japan as the Sub-Empire of Signs,” Documentary Box 9
(1996), http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/9/box9–1-e.html.
18. Brain Korea 21 website, http://bnc.krf.or.kr/home/kor/index.do?method=getList.
19. Kakizaki Shundō, “Kankoku anime jijō” (Situation of Korean animation), Argo
Pictures website, http://www.argopictures.jp/mari-summer/anime.html.
20. Kubo Masakazu, “Grōbaru ueibu 2003: Anime ga sekai o kakemeguru” (Global wave
2003: Anime in focus around the world), TV (NHK BS-1, October 26, 2003).
21. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon Press, 2006), 216.
22. Ibid..
23. Ibid., 223.
24. Ibid.
25. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” in The New
Wave, ed. Peter Graham, (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 17–22; first published as
“Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” L’Ecran français 144 (March 20,
1948).
26. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
10 2 joon ya ng kim
27. Rudolf Arnheim, Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1966), 57–63.
28. Perception can be dealt with as distinct from sensation, especially in terms of
theorist Gilles Deleuze, whom I will refer to later in this essay.
29. Ibid., 67–70.
30. “War Story” and “State of the Art,” in Aardman Animations, Laserdisc (Lumivision,
1992).
31. See the documentary television program Purofesshonaru shigoto no ryūgi supesharu
Miyazaki Hayao no subete: Ponyo mitchaku 300 nichi (Professional, the way of work: All
about Miyazaki Hayao with 300-day close coverage of Ponyo), TV (NHK, 2008).
32. William Schaffer, “Animation 1: The Control-image,” in The Illusion of Life II: More
Essays on Animation, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications, 2006), 462.
33. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 129.
34. For more on deterritorialization, see Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari, Anti-
Oedipus: Capitalization and Schizophrenia (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009), 206.
35. Lee Seong Ju, “Boolhwang sog ui hohwang: manhwa yeonghwa soochul” (A boom
in the middle of recession: Export of cartoon animation), Dong-a ilbo, January 13, 1981,
http://newslibrary.naver.com/viewer/index.nhn?articleId=1981011300209212001.
36. Schaffer, “Animation 1: The Control-image,” 474.
37. Min Byeong Sun, “‘Pororo’ do gongryak mot han nangongbulak mi eni shijang,
hanguk gojol gamdog i jeomryeong” (A South Korean director with a high-school diploma
overpowers U.S. market where Pororo failed to do that), Dong-a ilbo, July 1, 2012, http://
news.donga.com/3/all/20120630/47413110/1.
38. Arnheim, Toward a Psychology of Art, 59–60.
39. Heather Crow, “Gesturing toward Olympia,” in Animated ‘Worlds,’ ed. Suzanne
Buchan (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2006), 49.
40. Ibid., 49–50.
41. Yoo Sun Young, “Yookche ui gundaehwa: Hollywood modernity ui gagin”
(Modernization of the body: The imprint of Hollywood modernity), Moonhwa gwahak 24
(2000): 233–50.
42. Ibid.
Boundaries
IMAMURA TAIHEI
Translated by Thomas Lamarre
Japanese
Cartoon Films
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
Renowned as the author of the world’s first book of animation theory, Manga
eigaron (A theory of cartoon films), first published in 1941, revised and pub-
lished again in 1948 and 1965, and recently republished in 2005, Imamura
Taihei merits special attention for his combination of practical analysis, philo-
sophical inquiry, and Marxist paradigms, which enabled him to develop highly
influential theories both of animation and of documentary film.1
When Imamura embarked into film theory in earnest in 1934, contribut-
ing to the reader’s column of Kinema junpō and founding and contributing to a
film magazine Eiga shūdan, a series of mass arrests of communists and others
deemed politically suspect (including Marxists) was leading to the collapse of
the Japanese Communist Party and to “conversions” (tenkō) of intellectuals
and artists from Marxism to nationalism, among them Imamura. It is thus
difficult to gauge the impact of Marxism on Imamura. Irie Yoshirō calls atten-
tion to the Marxist currents of Imamura’s film theory, “Imamura’s investiga-
tions into the essence of cinema began alongside his emerging consciousness
of Marxism.”2 In volume 8 of Mechademia, Ōtsuka Eiji stresses Imamura’s
107
renunciation of Marxism. It is clear, however, that Marxist dialectic analyses
of film, especially that of Sergei Eisenstein, appealed to Imamura, evident in
his use of concepts such as contradiction, mediation, and synthesis, and in
his emphasis on realism.
At the same time, another aim of Imamura’s cartoon theory was to re-
form cartoon and film production in Japan. Imamura’s theory thus shows
continuity with concerns of prior film criticism for reforming national pro-
duction, particularly as articulated in the Pure Film Movement that gathered
steam from late 1910s through the 1920s in Japan. Yet Imamura’s interest in
reforming Japanese cartoons took a turn that seems, at least at first, to be at
odds with his interest in Marxist social realism. His reflections turned toward
how cinema might enable a practical repurposing of traditional Japanese art
forms, and he draws inspiration from the aesthetic philosophy associated with
the Kyoto School, especially that of Watsuji Tetsurō. The result is a provoca-
tive combination of modernism and realism, traditionalism and Marxism, and
cultural nationalism and socialism.
Originally published in 1938, the essay translated here, “Nihon manga
eiga no tame ni,” not only anticipates the arguments of his famous 1941 book
but also presents them in a condensed form, making clear the connections
between arguments that are sometimes held apart in the book.3 This essay
also addresses a specific moment in the history of animation: the introduc-
tion of new techniques for producing a sense of depth in animation, that is,
the multiplanar camera system, which received a great deal of popular and
critical attention in the context of Disney’s The Old Mill (1937) and the Fleisch-
ers’ Popeye the Sailor and the Forty Thieves (1937). Imamura would continue to
evoke recent American cartoons throughout his career, but there is a sense
of historical urgency vis-à-vis questions of the materiality and realism of car-
toons at this early stage of his thinking.
Such historical circumstances and social concerns allowed Imamura to
build a theory of animation that is highly unusual in two respects: it does not
construct a divide between animation and documentary, and consequently, it
succeeds in offering a theory of animation as a form of realism, a real experi-
ence of life. And this is what makes his account of cartoon films so timely and
thought provoking today.
I recently went into a theater for short films, and there was but one cartoon.
To my surprise, it was a Japanese cartoon, Kaeru no kenpō (1933, Frog sword
art).4 Accustomed to seeing cartoons like Mickey Mouse and Popeye the
Sailor, I found Japanese cartoons quite wanting.
10 8 ima mura ta ih e i
How is it that a crude
Walt Disney’s works invariably feel like they’re
drawing done with
pulsing with life. The little animals on the screen
heavy lines without
seem to be more than just a drawing, and the most
any particular charm,
familiar objects around us appear utterly trans-
when set in motion,
formed.5 Even if the background art often looks
appears full of life
mediocre, the joy of life overflowing in the moving
and inner purpose
animals makes for marvels. Whether they are leap-
and, simply put, is no
ing about or lying down, the life force bubbling up
longer a drawing?
on the screen courses through us like wine. Clearly,
this is what gives us such a delightful feeling of in-
toxication. There is nothing like viewing a Disney cartoon for making we mod-
erns understand the festive spirit of ancient Dionysian rites.
These animals truly are modern-day satyrs. Taken one by one, the still im-
ages have no particular charm.6 The still image of a figure like Mickey Mouse
tends rather to be unsightly. How is it that a crude drawing done with heavy
lines without any particular charm, when set in motion, appears full of life
and inner purpose and, simply put, is no longer a drawing?7 The secret must
lie in movement itself, that which moves the drawings. What makes Japanese
cartoons so boring lies in this secret of movement. Movement of Disney car-
toons is endowed with a dimension of inner purpose, like human psychology.
Japanese cartoons lack this dimension. It is painful to watch movement that
is not endowed with inner purpose. This is because inner purpose is precisely
what we feel to be most vital. Put another way, any movement that has inner
purpose will feel full of life. It is delightful when forms that we expect to be
animate start to move. Yet it is quite unpleasant if things without animate
form start moving or stopping. A body not endowed with the power of move-
ment cannot be considered alive.
Watching cartoons like Kaeru no kenpō, one never gets any feeling of the
inevitability of movement, that any of these drawn forms have to move. It
makes no difference whether these forms move or not. Consequently, they
don’t really have to have a particular form. Compare the frog in Disney’s The
Old Mill with the one appearing in Kaeru no kenpō: Disney’s frog has been
simplified in a realistic manner, while the latter has no grounding in realism,
which makes a transformation from frog into human meaningless because it
feels so easy.8
Now then, the realism of Disney’s cartoons—this wellspring of life
force—where does it come from? It comes from that fact that their drawings
are not just drawings; they are drawings combined with photography.9 In fact, in
cartoons, photographic techniques prevail over the arts of drawing and painting.10
j a pa n e s e ca rto o n f i l m s 10 9
the cartoon is
The actions of the drunken mouse in The Country Cousin are
something
a good example (Figure 1).11 It is nothing less than photo-
fundamentally
graphic footage of a person in an inebriated state.12 Each
different from
frame of the film has been copied in drawings. Another
prior arts of
good example is the depiction of the long takeoff when the
drawing and
Roc takes flight at the beginning of the Fleischers’ Sinbad
painting.
the Sailor, which closely resembles the takeoff of a Douglas
passenger plane (Figure 2).13 The realistic movement of the
Roc’s wings is clearly a pictorial depiction based on parsing the movement of
a bird in flight with film photography.14
What I wish to make clear here is that, conceptually, the cartoon is some-
thing fundamentally different from prior arts of drawing and painting.15 Of
course, each image entails drawing and painting. Yet, taken one by one, the
drawings in cartoons do not have any particular artistic significance. Drawing
is essentially a spatial art. While the drawings in the cartoon film might be
considered spatial, they only become art under conditions that enable them
Figure 1. An image from The Country Cousin (1936), directed by Wilfred Jackson
110 ima mura ta ih e i

Figure 2. An image from Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor (1936), directed by Dave Fleischer
to become temporal art. As such, insofar as the arts of drawing and paint-
ing in cartoons are grounded in photographic techniques and combined with
photography, cartoons come into being as a temporal art, wherein lies their
specificity.
Without the use of photography to parse actions instant by instant, it
would be impossible to express the liveliness of the mouse, duck, and dog.
The use of film photography to parse the entire chain of a living movement
brought movement-time to images for the first time.16 While the realism of
Disney’s cartoons lies in their reliance on parsing movement with photogra-
phy, Japanese cartoons today are almost always based on print cartoons in
newspapers and magazines. People on the whole seem oblivious of the fact
that the reality of movement in Disney cartoons is based on techniques of
photographic parsing. This is why Japanese cartoonists are not able to create
realistic movement: because they are not combining images with techniques
of photographic parsing.
Like images on one of those revolving magic lanterns, movement in
Japanese cartoons do not impart any sense of inner motivation because the
j a pa n e s e ca rto o n f i l m s 11 1
pictures have been drawn in accordance with techniques of still images.17 The
Japanese cartoon I saw recently was cartoon as drawing without any parsing by
photography, in contrast to the Disney cartoon, which is cartoon as photogra-
phy. This fundamental difference makes clear why Mickey Mouse and Donald
appear so full of life and inner purpose.
The question of why cartoon films have undergone great advances only in
America must be considered carefully. We have yet to see anything that rivals
Disney. Similarly, confronted with Chaplin, all kinds of American slapstick
comedies fell out of favor. Faced with American cartoons, both Reininger’s
silhouette animations and Starevitch’s puppet films fell out of the limelight.18
Why did this happen? It cannot be explained solely in terms of capital invest-
ment. Clearly, the key to such success was their use of techniques that were
more cinematic. Capital merely brought them to light. Prior to capital there
were more cinematic techniques that beautifully tied into a poetic sentiment.
Film criticism then must always address the question of these very cinematic
techniques. Disney was a poor artist living in an attic when he first took an
interest in cartoons and made his first works. Well before the bank put up the
necessary funds, he had already grasped an important principle.
The principle was that of drawing images strictly in accordance with move-
ment as parsed with film photography.19 This is what “animating” is all about.
If I may speculate a bit, it seems likely that he parsed movement through close
observation of the dynamics of the actions of various animals and humans.
And film photography is the only way to show all the stages of such actions in
still images. Thus, he would have carefully observed the continuity of various
actions as given on film and copied it into drawings.
In the work Clock Cleaners, a dog whose head is gonged [inside the clock
tower bell] weaves about unsteadily, vibrating (Figure 3).20 Surprisingly
enough, it is a waltz that accompanies his movements. It is surprising because
it is already difficult enough to depict the movement of walking unsteadily as
if in a daze. For an actual person, walking in a stupor to the pace of a waltz
would be quite a marvelous feat. Such a sequence is not one that could be
drawn without an object of reference. In other words, we can well imagine that
film photography provided a model for parsing movement, which was drawn
in keeping with the tempo of a waltz. The dog’s manner of walking especially
shows the influence of high-speed filming.21 It wouldn’t have been possible
to create the impression of the dog stumbling about while vibrating without
recourse to techniques of parsing movement with high-speed filming.
The success of American cartoons is rooted above all in the character-
istics of this country, where there are no long established traditions of art,

Figure 3. An image from Clock Cleaners (1937), directed by Ben Sharpsteen
and mechanical techniques are the most highly advanced. Due to the lack of
constraining traditions, drawings are most confidently combined with pho-
tography. In other words, their art is based on use of the camera for a temporal
partitioning of the movement of objects. It was surely Impressionism that
first attempted a serious treatment of time within art. We may think of the
Impressionist artist who tried to capture the essence of a haystack as it cease-
lessly transformed with the changing light as one who investigated time with
images.22 An artist like Degas, who tried to grasp the ballerina’s pose in the
instant, was another investigator of movement-time within art. Nevertheless,
in the fact that not a single creator of cartoon films has appeared in France,
we must see the considerable and heavy constraints of that artistic tradition.
Such concerns become especially salient in the case of Japan, insofar as
the tradition of Oriental arts is very long. In its deep resistance to photog-
raphy, Japanese art is quite unlike French art. Such resistance may well be
explained in terms of the difference between ink painting and oil painting.
The historical development of oil painting techniques has been realistic and
materialistic to the point where it shows a tendency toward embossing or re-
lief carving, especially when it comes to modern art.23 As such, oil painting is
j a pa n e s e ca rto o n f i l m s 1 1 3
Everyone is
the formative matrix of photography. Rubens and Rembrandt
learning how
come to mind in such a context. Oil painting itself has moved
to look at
steadily toward a sort of photography of things.
things with
In contrast, Japanese art—or Oriental art—stands diamet-
photography.
rically opposed to photographic realism. Instead of placing great
emphasis on the external reality of things, this is of secondary
importance. In Japanese art, the tendency is far removed from photography;
it is to draw materials from the imagination, materials that could not become
objects of the camera. This tradition has been sundered due to the introduction
of oil painting techniques, which has made matters excessively complicated.
We may have a better understanding of and appreciation for the traditions of
Japanese art, and yet, mechanical techniques, not at all different from those in
America, are developing all around us; photography is flourishing, and everyone
is learning how to look at things with photography. Of course, traditions of
Japanese art will necessarily have a perceptible impact on Japanese oil painting
and photography, insofar as those who adopt them are Japanese. Such impact
can be said to be inevitable, without need for any further deliberation.
Our feeling of being caught between the tradition of Japanese painting
and the countertradition of oil painting is identical to the circumstances of
contemporary Japanese culture in general. Around the world today, the con-
tradiction between cinema and art has become greater and greater. Judging
from trends in modern culture, I think that the received modes of still pictures
will continue to undergo transformation into moving pictures. The solitary
artist who, like the solitary novelist, retreats into his studio to create still im-
ages aloof from the world—has he not lost all significance? Would the most
social art not be based in the industrial system, entailing the cooperative work
of hundreds of artists, like the production facilities for Disney cartoons?
Is it not the case that a single moving artwork, such as Disney’s Silly
Symphonies, can be enjoyed on screens across the world, in contrast to the
individualized appreciation of art exhibitions?24 It is obvious that, due to the
emergence of cinematic techniques, art is moving from the stage of artisanal
production into that of mechanical production. A new generation of musi-
cians has become aware of cinematic techniques, and likewise, new artists
are becoming aware of cinema. Salvador Dalí, Fernand Léger, and Maurice de
Vlaminck are prime examples. In this era in which the contradiction between
the spatiality of art and the temporality of cinema is gradually being exposed
around the world, the contradiction between Oriental art and Western art
will become ever more acute, whence the emerging historical significance of
Japanese cartoon films.

The development of Japanese cartoon films necessitates finding a resolu-
tion to the contradiction between Japanese art and Western art. All in all,
the lack of creativity in Japanese cartoons is a befuddled reflection of the
contradiction of contemporary Japanese art. It would be a mistake to set aside
an examination of this aesthetic problem and to think that, if we invested as
much capital as the Americans, we could make Japanese cartoon films. Such
an approach would only make for duplications of Mickey Mouse and Popeye.
Like it or not, to conjoin drawing with photographic techniques, the tradition

of Japanese art must assimilate the material pictorial techniques of West-
ern art. In the recent cartoons of Disney and Fleischer, shading has been
enhanced, imparting greater dimensionality, and color has become more nu-
anced, aiming for realistic photography. Take, for instance, the ocean in the
background of the opening sequence for Sinbad the Sailor, or the desert in the
first scene of Forty Thieves (Figure 4).25 The latter picture in particular might
well be mistaken for photography. The silhouettes of the forty thieves appear
Figure 4. An image from Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937), directed by Dave Fleischer
running across the distant horizon. The subtle shading and perspective used
to depict the undulating dunes of the desert and the remains of a skeleton in
the foreground are very close to color cinema. Such techniques are on par with
The Old Mill. As the summer rainstorm tears open the roof of the small wind-
mill amid flashes of lightning, the rain shines brilliantly white. The streams
of pouring rain, glowing whitely, do not feel at all like a drawing. With the
portrayal of moonlight shining through an old roof in Lonesome Ghosts (1937),
or the dazzling flood of sunlight in the southern lands of Hawaiian Holiday,
the images before our eyes are closer to color cinema photography than to
conventional oil painting.26 It is only normal that, as cinema comes as close
as possible to actual reality, images in cartoons turn toward drawings aiming
for real photography.
If Japanese cartoons rest content with simple line drawings or ink paint-
ing, they cannot possibly compete with Western cartoons. Perfecting Japa-
nese cartoons will be a matter of conquering Western techniques of material
realism from the standpoint of Japanese painting, as well as innovating in
various ways with traditions of Japanese painting that agree with the pho-
tographic factual way of seeing things. Traditions that are truly carried on as
traditions are blessed with renewal through incessant innovation. Traditions
not allowing for innovation become formalist, rigid, and decrepit, and perish.
Although the tradition of Japanese art is nonphotographic and spiritual in
tendency, it will become increasingly permeated with the materialist way of
looking at things, as with the camera. Photographic equipment can be found
in every household today, along with radio and records. Photographs are in-
dispensible features of newspapers and magazines, for covers and as illustra-
tions. The advance of photography is such that, even in Japan, it is inevitably
bringing about new techniques of drawing that parse the movement of things
through the mediation of photography.
I have particularly high hopes that the received styles of Japanese art will
be artistically combined with photographic techniques within cartoon films.
This is because, within the long history of Japanese arts, many splendid tech-
niques suited to today’s cartoon films have appeared.
I have said that cartoons are temporal art. Japanese picture scrolls, which
rank among the finest of arts, may also be one of the oldest forms of art
striving to be temporal. Much like contemporary cartoons, they develop a
story with pictures. It is surprising how close they come in that respect to the
temporal techniques of cinema. Seen from the standpoint of Western paint-
ing, the bulk of such pictures appear utterly chaotic in terms of perspective.
One scroll of a warship loaded with warriors, for instance, shows not just the

Perfecting Japanese
side facing us but the side facing away as well. As
cartoons will be a
a result, the ship looks oddly twisted. To borrow
matter of conquering
from Hinago Motoo’s discussion, it is exactly as if
Western techniques
the artist had done a pan with a camera to show
of material realism
us both sides simultaneously.27 Establishing con-
from the standpoint
tinuity between two pictorial planes upon a single
of Japanese painting.
pictorial plane, then, is just like a type of motion
cinematography.28
The image does not render all parts equally, as in Western painting. For
instance, the significant parts of a building are depicted, while the rest of it
remains hidden in the clouds. This technique of ellipsis using clouds is very
common. It recalls temporal techniques of cinema such as fade-in, fade-out,
and overlap. Displays of different space-times within a single picture happen
constantly in picture scrolls.
This does not occur only in picture scrolls. Illustrated maps of Kyoto,
for instance, which were painted in the Edo period on large folding screens,
show a reversal of techniques of perspective. Such a tendency also appears in
smaller works of art, and so it is difficult to determine where to look for its
conceptual basis. Yet, if you will permit me to speculate, I tend to think that
these techniques indifferent to proportion appearing in large-scale works like
the illustrated maps of Kyoto are related to the temporal forms found in pic-
ture scrolls. For, instead of overall spatial balance and proportion, the artists’
goals are to present distant sites in the same manner as nearby ones. A small the-
ater in Sanjō Kawara, for instance, had to be drawn as large as the Shimizudera
temple complex. What was distant and what was close had to be shown in
the same way. As a result, techniques of perspective run haywire. A path may
become wider and wider as it goes from foreground into the distance. The im-
age is clearly not drawn from the standpoint of equalizing spatial proportions;
rather such techniques are designed to allow for temporal progress related to
narrating—and explaining—things here and there in Kyoto. The picture scroll
form seems to be one that rejects pictorial space in favor of narrative time. It
is much the same with the warped perspective of the actors’ faces in Sharaku’s
woodblock prints.29
Such examples lead us to believe that the influence of picture scrolls
extends to other kinds of pictures as well, confirming the important role
played by picture scrolls in Japanese art. These picture scrolls usually strived
to recount unusual events such as battles, or improbable tales of changing
fortunes stemming from the religious imaginary. As an art of the fantastic,
picture scrolls provide clear historical precedents for the fantastic tendencies
of contemporary cartoon films. Japanese cartoon films cannot develop if they
do not revive such traditions and call upon the splendid fantastical art in the
Tobae lineage.30
The ghost appearing in Disney’s Lonesome Ghosts has a transparent body,
not visible to Mickey or Donald. Incredibly gruesome fantasies are also de-
picted in the Gaki zōshi (Scroll of the hungry ghosts) of the Kamakura pe-
riod.31 People are polishing grains of rice in the vicinity of a well. Ghouls have
come forth, voraciously gobbling up scattered grains of rice and discarded
husks in the water. They are ghastly in appearance. The people, however, are
not aware of the ghouls alongside them. In La mort de Tintagiles and L’Intruse,
Maeterlinck described that terror of something next to you that you cannot
see, but Disney puts it into images in Lonesome Ghosts.32 In Japanese reli-
gious art, what captures our attention is the way that illusion and reality are
depicted side by side. Were Disney to see these fantastical scrolls in which
hungry ghosts, with their swollen bellies and arms and legs skinny as twigs,
bend to scoop water from the river to drink, only to have the water burst into
flames at their touch, Disney would be as full of admiration for Japanese pic-
ture scrolls as Eisenstein was full of wonder over Sharaku.33
Nothing quite compares with Tobae for its depiction of animals with sim-
ple lines, such as its rabbits and monkeys capering about mounted on deer,
yet such beautiful fine lines have appeared in Japanese painting for longer
than one can say. There’s no reason to doubt that the simple ink strokes of
Japanese painting would have a special impact when shown upon the screen.
Yet not one of these exquisite treasures of traditional art has been taken up
in cinema. Similarly, although nearly half of Japanese films to date are period
pieces, it seems fair to say that the artistic traditions of kabuki and noh have
hardly ever been consciously taken up in cinema.
Among the techniques of noh drama and puppet theater that had a pro-
found impact on kabuki performance, there are also a couple of significant
principles that Japanese cartoons films must adopt. As Watsuji Tetsurō has
pointed out, in puppet theater, substantial reality lies in the material body of
the puppet.34 Because the puppeteer manipulates the puppet only with his fin-
gers, the performance is exceedingly limited, largely transmitted into move-
ments of the head and shoulders. The principle of the cartoon film is precisely
the principle of puppet theater. Like the puppet, the image that is drawn sheet
by sheet is but the material body. If manipulation of this material body is to
impart the feeling that it is alive, one must select only the most distinctive
actions. As in photography, in cartoons it is not possible to capture all move-
ments equally, so it is necessary to draw the viewers’ eyes only to the most

significant movements of the actor. Close observation of Disney’s animals
confirms that the repetition of simple operations similarly has complicated
effects on us. If you look at that Donald’s action, for instance, the operation
consists almost entirely of him wagging his rump back and forth.
In noh drama as well, one finds a mechanical parsing of human actions
similar to puppet theater. Noh makes no pretense about being abstract, reduc-
ing backdrops and props to the bare minimum. Noh is clearly an imitative art.
It should be noted that the renowned artist and theorist of noh, Zeami Mo-
tokiyo (ca. 1363–1433), begins his treatise Sarugaku dangi (ca. 1430, Talks on
sarugaku) by writing, “The way of theater is all about the imitation of things.”35
Similarly, in Kadensho (1400, Book of transmission of the flower), he opens
the second section with a statement that makes evident how much noh aimed
for realistic depiction: “It is difficult to set forth the various facets of imitat-
ing things. Nonetheless, because they are fundamental to the way, you must
try to attain them above all else. All in all, the aim is to imitate without omitting
anything.”36 It would seem that stripping away backdrops and props was, in
fact, a way to impart absolute power to the performance. It would be no easy
matter for the personage standing on the planks, without any of the relevant
attire whatsoever, to recreate in all their detail the manners of “wood chop-
pers, grass cutters, charcoal burners, salt scoopers.”37
There is no way to disagree with Iwasaki Masumi placing noh among
Wundt’s genre of imitative arts. Noh is an art that is born above all of “imi-
tating things,” placing the imitation of things at its very heart, such that
“not a single aspect would slip by.”38 Such highly detailed imitation gradually
became abstract and practiced consciously, providing a mechanism for the
parsing of action.
Watsuji Tetsurō writes, “The noh actor moves into a position to step for-
ward, putting one foot forward and holding it level to the ground, and then
suddenly, stomps loudly with the sole of his foot. Such an action parses our
natural way of walking into two movements. It has thus made for a transmuta-
tion of an organic way of moving into a mechanical way of moving.”39
It is the same principle that is discovered in the movement of cartoons.
Actions in cartoons are also a revival of new life through “negation of natural
life.”40 Their actions entail a thorough simplification and mechanization of
actual actions, which constitutes a truly striking deformation of reality.
Japanese artistic traditions, in so many respects, have an amazing power
of dynamic evocation geared toward imbuing images with movement greater
than that of cartoon films.
The extreme combination of image and sound of the kind occurring in
Disney cartoons has striking implications for Japanese dramatic arts.41 De-
spite Wagner’s efforts, foreign opera has unwittingly exacerbated the split
between theatricality and musicality. This is probably due to the remarkable
development of autonomous instrumental music. In contrast, Oriental drama
generally has developed with close relations between performance and music,
and Japanese dramatic arts are one example.
In the case of Japanese music, due to the absence of autonomous in-
strumental music like that of the orchestra, musical instruments such as the
shamisen developed as musical accompaniment for performance. As a conse-
quence, in kabuki and puppet theater, it is common for the performance to be
enacted with the accompaniment of songs performed by musicians and chant-
ers called degatari who narrate on stage. A row of nagauta vocal performers
is on stage in the background, a chorus that provides an ongoing explanation
of events, whose appearance recalls the nonindividualized chorus of ancient
Greek drama. Cinema has indeed resurrected such dramaturgy. Cine-operetta
and musical films are obvious examples, but even in such films as La Kermesse
hérioque (1935), for instance, the crowd takes on a role like that of the chorus
vis-à-vis the film’s protagonists.42
The problems confronting Japanese cartoon films lie not only in the visual
arts. They face similar problems with music. In sum, it is a question of how
to create music that will link with the images on screen. Shamisen accompa-
niment like that in Kaeru no kenpō is pointless. For marching triumphantly
along, Disney cartoons can promptly take up the overture to Light Cavalry
as accompaniment, but what sort of music is there for Japanese cartoons?43
Instruments such as the shamisen, koto, and shakuhachi cannot stand alone as
accompaniment. The problem lies in the contradiction between the discordant
tones of Japanese music and harmonious Western melodies. The problems
entailed in such a contradiction are the same as those entailed in the contra-
diction between ink painting and oil painting.
The observations presented above make evident that the development
of Japanese cartoon films is linked to a number of serious problems. The de-
ficiencies of cartoons imported from abroad offer a fine opportunity for the
takeoff of Japanese cartoons. We must review which principles discovered by
our ancestors are truly significant from the point of view of cinema.
Notes
1. The most recent collection of Imamura’s writings reprints the original 1941 text
of Manga eigaron: Imamura Taihei, Imamura Taihei eizō hyōron 5: Manga eigaron (Tokyo:
Yumani Shobō, 1991). Ghibli Studios recently promoted the republication of the revised
1965 edition: Imamura Taihei, Manga eigaron, Ghibli Library (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten,
2005). Despite his importance, Imamura has hardly been translated. A partial transla-
tion of one of the chapters from the revised 1965 edition has appeared: Imamura Taihei,
“Japanese Art and the Animated Cartoon,” The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television 7,
no. 3 (Spring 1953): 217–22. Michael Basket recently translated two essays, “A Theory of
the Animated Sound Film” and “A Theory of Documentary Film,” in Decentering Theory:
Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film Theory, special issue of Jōsai University Review of
Japanese Culture and Society 22 (December 2010): 44–51, 52–59.
2. Irie Yoshirō, “Approaching Imamura Taihei,” in Decentering Theory, 60–61.
3. This essay, originally published in Eigakai in 1938, was reprinted in the 1991 col-
lection of Imamura’s film criticism. Imamura Taihei, “Nihon manga eiga no tame ni,” in
Imamura Taihei eizō hyōron 2: Eiga geijutsu no seikaku (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 1991), 137–59.
4. Presumably the cartoon in question is actually Kaeru kenpō (dir. Iwao Ashida, 1933).
See, too, the listing on the Toy Film Project website, http://toyfilm.jp/2010/06/post-142
.html. Imamura provides only two references within his text, to Iwaskai Masumi (note 36
below) and Watsuji Tetsurō (note 37 below). All other notes are the translator’s.
5. The meaning of the Japanese term e can be rendered as “drawing,” “image,” or
“picture,” and depending on the context, I use all three translations in this essay. But I
distinguish e from kaiga, consistently translating this latter term, which means some-
thing like painting and drawing, simply as “art” (and on one occasion as “visual art”
when the contrast is necessary), to avoid confusing it with the former term e. In sum,
the reader can be sure that, when the terms “drawing,” “image,” or “picture” are used, the
Japanese term is e. Also, I translate bijutsu as “arts” to differentiate it from kaiga. Finally,
near the end of the essay, Imamura uses the term eizō in reference to cinematic or photo-
graphic images.
6. Imamura uses the term seishi-e for still images or drawings that do not move.
7. In the context of discussing the secret of movement, Imamura uses a series of
interrelated terms—seishin, shinri, and kokoro. Because Imamura is making a fairly familiar
argument about how animated figures seem to be self-causing, I have generally translated
these terms as “inner purpose” (or in one instance as “motivation”), because it seems to
me that although there are implications of a soul, psyche, or even psychology, Imamura is
interested in how the appearance of having an inner cause, purpose, or motivation makes
animated images appear to be alive, and shows little interest in psychology in the usual
sense. Nonetheless I gloss the use of ningen shinri later in this paragraph as “human psy-
chology” to offer some indication of the potential nuance of his approach.
8. Walt Disney produced and Wilfred Jackson directed The Old Mill (1937) as part of
the Silly Symphonies series. This animated film is credited as the first to use Disney’s multi-
plane camera system.
9. Imamura uses the phrase shashin to ketsugōshita e. There are two or three senses
of ketsugō implicit in Imamura’s usage. The term calls attention to combining the arts
of drawing and photography within the image (in the sense of producing a more photo-
graphic style of drawing in terms of composition and dimensionality, for instance). It may
also imply a combining of images in a cinematic fashion, that is, a series of images or film
footage. Finally, Imamura also seems to use ketsugō in the stronger conceptual sense of
“synthesis,” claiming cartoon films enable a synthesis of drawing and photography that
overcomes the contradiction between them.
10. Although the term hōhō is more commonly translated as “method(s),” I translate
it here consistently as “techniques,” for that seems better to convey Imamura’s argument,
which focuses on the contradictions that arise between different technical determinations,
thus flirting with but ultimately avoiding a technological determinism (an “essence” of
film photography grounding a teleological progress).
11. I consistently translate dōsa as “actions,” in contrast to undō and ugoki, which are
rendered as “movement” or “movements.” Another entry in the Silly Symphonies series, The
Country Cousin, was produced by Walt Disney and directed by Wilfred Jackson in 1936.
12. The term shashin or “photography” is the most difficult in this essay to translate,
for photography implies two things for Imamura. On the one hand, he calls attention to
the realism of the photographic image, and on the other hand, he uses photography to
refer to film photography, that is, shooting a series of images. While I translate the term
consistently as “photography,” I occasionally add the gloss “photographic footage” when
the context seems to demand it. I render shashin satsuei as “film photography.”
13. Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor, released in 1936, was produced by Max
Fleischer and directed by David Fleischer. The plane in question was probably the Douglas
DC-2, introduced in 1934, or the DC-3, introduced 1936.
14. I consistently use the verb “parse” for Imamura’s bunkaisuru, which refers to the
process of breaking down or decomposing a movement into a series of instants when film-
ing. I use “parse” to emphasize the analytic and conceptual bent of Imamura’s argument.
15. Here I translate kaiga fully as “arts of drawing and painting,” but subsequently it
will simply be “art,” for it usually appears modified, for instance as Nihon kaiga or Japanese
arts of drawing and painting, which I render as “Japanese art.”
16. Imamura introduces a hyphenated term undō-jikan or “movement-time.” In this
instance, “film photography” is katsudō shashin.
17. “Inner motivation” is ishi, that is, motivation or will.
18. Charlotte “Lotte” Reininger is famous for her pioneering work in animation, es-
pecially silhouette animations such as The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), which was a
critical and popular success. Ladislaw Starevitch, Russian and French animator, is credited
with making the first stop-motion puppet animation, The Beautiful Lukanida (1912). Like
many subsequent films, it used dead animals (here insects) as “puppets.”
19. “Film photography” here is, in fact, katsudō shashin, but the translation “moving
pictures” would make the phrase unwieldy in English.
20. Directed by Ben Sharpsteen and produced by Walt Disney Productions, Clock
Cleaners (1937) features Mickey, Donald, and Goofy. This short animation, a critical and
popular success, clearly had an impact on Imamura at the time of this essay, for he makes
reference continually to Disney’s mouse, duck, and dog.
21. “Filming” here is satsuei.
22. The reference is to Monet’s Haystacks (1890–91).
23. Imamura uses the term ukibori, relief or embossing, to describe the quality of oil
painting. Presumably he wishes to call attention to the thickness of paints and their appli-
cation in brushstrokes.
24. Imamura here uses the term ugoku kaiga (moving art) to refer to cartoons, thus
stressing their status as art.
25. Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves, released in 1937, was produced by
Max Fleischer and directed by David Fleischer.
26. Directed by Burt Gillett and produced by Walt Disney Productions, Lonesome
Ghosts opened in 1937. Hawaiian Holiday was directed by Ben Sharpsteen and produced by
Walt Disney Productions in 1937.
27. Hinago Motoo, a historian of art and architecture, is especially known for his
postwar work on Japanese castles.
28. Imamura uses the term undō satsuei or “motion cinematography.” When he later
revised this argument in his book Manga eigaron, he refers to this technique as a form of
double exposure, mentioning Cubism and Futurism.
29. Little is known about Tōshūsai Sharaku except that he was actively producing
ukiyoe in the years 1794–95. Sharaku is noted for his portraits of kabuki actors and sumo
wrestlers.
30. “Tobae” is a lineage of Japanese painting prevalent in eighteenth-century Japan,
based on the styles of Toba Sōjō, or more precisely, the twelfth-century frolicking animal
picture scrolls attributed to him, Chōjū jinbutsu giga.
31. Gaki zōshi or “Scroll of Hungry Ghosts” is also a twelfth-century picture scroll,
depicting the realm of hungry ghosts, one of the six paths of transmigration within certain
strands of Buddhist thought.
32. Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck is renowned for his symbolist plays,
many of which were adapted to music in the form of operas, cine-poems, and symphonic
poems.
33. Imamura is referring to Sergei Eisenstein’s 1929 essay “A Dialectic Approach
to Film Form.” Eisenstein’s comments on Sharaku’s late eighteenth-century woodblock
prints are worth repeating here, for they suggest a strong relationship between Imamura’s
dialectic and Eisenstein’s in their quest for new forms of temporality: “The secret of his
extremely perfected strength of expression lies in the anatomical and spatial disproportion
of the parts—in comparison with which, our I [roman numeral one] might be termed
temporal disproportion.” Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, translated by
Jay Leyda (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1977), 51.
34. Imamura appears to be drawing on Watsuji Tetsurō’s essay, “Bunrakuza no ningyō
shibai,” Shisō (August 1935), which is reprinted in Watsuji Tetsurō zenshū, vol. 17 (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1963), 309–15. The term keigai is used to stress the materiality of the doll
or puppet body, and jittai to indicate its substance or reality.
35. I have translated this phrase from the opening sentence of Zeami’s Sarugaku
dangi in such a manner as to convey Imamura’s take on it, but basic terms such as sarugaku
(literally “monkey play”), which Zeami uses to indicate noh (hence “theater” in this trans-
lation), and monomane (“imitating things”) are subject to very different interpretations.
For instance, J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu translate the same phrase as “the
way of sarugaku is chiefly concerned with Role Playing.” Zeami Motokiyo, On the Art of
the Noh Drama: The Major Treatises or Zeami (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1984), 172.
36. Rimer and Yamazaki offer this translation: “It would be impossible to describe
in writing all the various aspects of Role Playing. Yet as this skill forms the fundamental
basis of our art, various roles must be studied with the greatest care. In general Role Play-
ing involves an imitation, in every particular, with nothing left out.” Zeami, On the Art of
the Noh Drama, 10.
37. This quote is from the same section of Kadensho, at the end of the first paragraph
of the second chapter or section.
38. Iwasaki Masumi, “Nōgaku ni okeru kamen shiyō no igi,” Shisō (February 1933).
German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt describes imitative gestures as those that replicate
the form of an object—for instance, drawing an object in the air, in a chapter of his multi-
volume work later published as a book under the title The Language of Gestures (1921).
39. Watsuji Tetsurō, “Nōmen no yōshiki,” Shisō (July 1936), reprinted in Watsuji
Tetsurō zenshū, vol. 17 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1963), 297.
40. Imamura here uses sei to refer to life, in contrast to his prior use of seimei.
41. “Image” here is eizō.
42. La Kermesse héroique was released simultaneously in German and English as Die
klugen frauen and Carnival in Flanders, in 1935. It was directed by Jacques Feyder.
43. Franz von Suppé’s overture to Light Cavalry was used in the 1942 Mickey Mouse
cartoon Symphony Hour, directed by Riley Thompson and produced by Walt Disney
Productions.
SHUN’YA YOSHIMI
Translated by Jodie Beck
From Street Corner to

Living Room: Domestication
of TV Culture and
National Time/Narrative
For postwar Japanese, television was a form of media that had overwhelm-
ing influence and special symbolic significance. With rapid growth, our lives
came to be surrounded with various types of new media; however, televi-
sion held a particularly privileged position among them. Even now, Japanese
people watch an average of more than three hours of television per day; the
most time spent at home next to sleeping is spent watching television. Ac-
cording to a 2002 comparative international survey conducted by the Nip-
pon Hōsō Kyōkai [NHK] Broadcasting Culture Research Institute, about 23
percent of people in Japan watch more than five hours of television a day, a
rate significantly higher than in the United States and France at 14 percent.
Furthermore, the rate of people who believe that the most important type of
communications activity is “watching” stands at 7 or 8 percent in the United
States and France, yet in Japan the rate is 28 percent. On the other hand,
those who believe that “reading” is the most important type comprise more
than a third of respondents in the United States and France, but only 17 per-
cent in Japan. Compared to other countries, then, it seems that Japanese
people really love television.
This pattern is more similar to results seen in Thailand than in the West,
126
but Japanese people still love TV more than Thais. In response to the question,
“which would you choose if for the next several months you could have only
one of the following six items: newspapers, television, cell phone, personal
computer, car, or refrigerator?” most Japanese people answered “television”
at 23 percent. Most Americans, however, answered “car” at 42 percent, with
only 5 percent of respondents answering “television.” Among the French, “car”
was also the most popular response at 31 percent; only 10 percent chose televi-
sion, which rated even lower than newspapers at 14 percent. In Thailand, too,
compared to the 40 percent for cars and the 23 percent for computers, televi-
sion only reached 13 percent.1 This heavy slant toward television in Japan
has remained constant since the 1960s, and as I will discuss shortly, a study
conducted in the early 1970s showed very similar trends. We can probably say,
then, that the privileged value accorded to television has been a consistent
feature of postwar Japanese society.
Moreover, the time that Japanese spend watching television has consis-
tently increased since the end of the 1980s; the daily average at present [2003]
has surpassed three and a half hours and is approaching four.2 With all we
hear about the end of the era of television, and as new media cultures swirl
across borders, as seen with the spread of the Internet in Korea, Japanese so-
ciety still seems to be attached to the same primary postwar medium of televi-
sion. Any time a critical event occurs, from the Great Hanshin earthquake and
the Aum Shinrikyō incident, to the Gulf War, to the 9/11 attacks in the United
States, to the Iraq War, the first thing people do is virtually “become glued to
the TV,” thus continuing to reimagine the nation through their relationship
with this medium. In order for this reimagining to be carried out effectively,
television today is developing advanced grammatical, visual, and technical
systems that mediate the public and the private in multilayered ways. Indi-
vidual viewings of information and variety shows, news, and dramas combine
in complex ways with our conversations with others, sustaining this simulta-
neously public and private system of relating known as television.
Once, Shimizu Ikutarō predicted that the appearance of images directly
before people’s eyes on TV would make it difficult for them to peel them-
selves away from the reality presented there. Furthermore, as the medium
develops technically, the “mechanism gets stronger, so it is easy for its con-
tents to become conservative or reactionary.” If that kind of TV-like reality is
still deeply conditioning everyday consciousness in Japanese society today,
it is worthwhile to go back half a century to the time when this connection
began to form and retrace the history of the relationship between television
and its audience.
f r o m s t r e e t co r n e r to l i v i n g r o o m 12 7
RIKIDOZAN AND THE STREET AUDIENCE
The streets were the stage on which television made its postwar Japanese
debut. Before TV appeared in the living rooms (chanoma) of people’s homes, it
emerged in outdoor spaces such as in front of stations, in busy areas of town,
within the grounds of temples and shrines, and in front of department stores
and electrical goods shops. This outdoor TV culture began with the televisions
installed in various locations on the streets by NTV, the first private televi-
sion station. At the time, TVs for home use cost about 200,000 yen, while the
starting salary of a university graduate was about 8000 yen per month. TVs
were luxury items that “middle class” people could not hope to have. Before
opening its station in 1953, NTV installed 220 large-size TVs in 55 locations in
front of stations and in busy areas around the capital, aiming to give the ex-
perience of television to the public, who were likely to be fervently interested
in TV broadcasts. This would then generate revenue from program advertise-
ments. By 1957, NTV had installed street TVs in 278 locations.
The importance of street TVs is owed not only to the fact that they trig-
gered the spread of TVs overall but also that they demonstrate the inherent
connection between television and the mass imagination in the early postwar
period. The strength of street TV was never in its dramas or documentaries
but rather its sports broadcasting, and the biggest draw was professional wres-
tling with Rikidōzan; crowds of several thousand people would cram together
around one TV, making the place look like the site of some kind of open-air
assembly. With the film technology available at the time, it was not possible
in a baseball broadcast to cover the entire area of the field at once. However,
professional wrestling was characterized by speedy moves within a small ring,
making it the perfect genre to fit the TV screen. The wrestler Rikidōzan, well
aware of the camera, made full use of this characteristic. As Inose Naoki has
noted, “TV became known through pro wrestling, and pro wrestling became
known through TV. Rikidōzan became a hero because of TV, and TV gained
viewers because it produced a hero.”3
Furthermore, in addition to the camera-conscious showmanship he ac-
quired in the United States, Rikidōzan consciously presented himself as a brave,
small-built Japanese going against giant American wrestlers who were con-
stantly committing fouls. Regarding the overwhelming popularity of profes-
sional wrestling on TV, several years later a commentator in the Asahi shinbun
newspaper suggested that for people at that time, the idea “that there was a
world in which rules could be broken” was incredibly attractive.4 However, the
unprecedented boom in professional wrestling in the 1950s was likely linked
12 8 shun’ya yos h imi

to a consciousness of the times that cannot be reduced to an argument about
the urge for communitas or a general desire for lawlessness. That is, the post-
war boom in professional wrestling in Japan was more than anything else
a Rikidōzan boom. A determined Kim Shin-rak (Rikidōzan’s real name) had
crossed the Genkai Sea from the Korean peninsula to Japan and skillfully gave
shape to Japanese people’s complicated feelings toward America, an enemy
country that had become both Japan’s occupier and protector. While other
postwar pro wrestlers based in Osaka and Kyushu did not see professional
wrestling as anything other than a martial art, Rikidōzan understood that it
was not simply a sport or a spectacle but rather a national symbolic drama. It
is said that in his first tag-team match with the Sharpe brothers in February
1954, massive crowds formed around street televisions, and the scenes in which
Rikidōzan sprang into the ring and knocked down these American giants with
karate chops raised cheers that resounded like great rumbles in the earth.
Of course, there was more to the overwhelming popularity of Rikidōzan
than the idea that he embodied the “anti-American nationalism” deeply felt
by postwar Japanese. Superimposing the fictionality of Rikidōzan, who played
the part of “a Japanese,” and the fictionality of the “sport” of professional
wrestling, Kawamura Takashi argues that “watching professional wrestling
could be a truer experience of space and time not because it was built on truth
but, on the contrary, precisely because it was built on a sensational fiction.”
From Kawamura’s perspective, then, in the fictional space of professional
wrestling, the fact that Rikidōzan was not “a Japanese” bestowed even more
reality on his performance of the role of the heroic “Japanese.” Rikidōzan’s
background became known publicly after the late 1970s, when Ushijima Hide-
hiko’s detailed reportage was published and Weekly Playboy (Shūkan pureibōi)
publicized the “Rikidōzan boom” occurring in his home country, North Korea;
but it seems that in the 1950s his background was generally known by the
public from rumors, and certainly by his zainichi Korean compatriots. Within
this ambivalent mass consciousness of “knowing, but behaving as though not
knowing,” Rikidōzan’s professional wrestling functioned such that Japanese
people themselves performed the drama of “being Japanese.” Ultimately,
“while Kim Shin-rak from Korea became Momota Mitsuhiro and passionately
played the role of ‘the Japanese hero Rikidōzan,’ the audience also passion-
ately played the role of ‘the Japanese shocked by defeat and suffering from a
pent-up complex toward foreigners.’”5
The point that I would like to add to Kawamura’s argument is that it was
precisely street TV that made this double performance possible. In the mid-
1950s, TVs for home use were still few and far between. Around the time
that NHK began broadcasting in 1953, the number of households that had
reception contracts was only 866, and although this number had reached as
many as 50,000 households by 1955, watching TV at home with the family was
certainly not the prevailing style of TV viewing, at least until the end of the
1950s. According to a field survey by NTV from September 7 to 18, 1953, the
average number of viewers in a fixed time frame around street TVs in twenty-
six locations around the capital was 9,200, so the estimated number of viewers
in one day was calculated at more than 100,000 people.6
THE THEATRE OF STREET TV
So, where were these street TVs placed, who was viewing them, and in what
way? In fact, we know the details for the fifty-five locations of TVs installed
by NTV as well as for the 278 locations installed after the station opened.
The fifty-five locations included major sites such as Tokyo Station Meitengai,
Ginza Owarichō, Hibiya Park, in front of Shinjuku Station and in Shinjuku
Nishiguchi Hiroba, in front of the head offices of the newspapers the Asahi
shinbun, Mainichi shinbun, and Yomiuri shinbun, as well as in temple and shrine
grounds such as Asakusa Kannon, Suitengū Shrine, Sugamo Togenuki Jizō,
and Kagurazaka Bishamonten. In addition to the sites already noted, the
278 locations where TVs were set up after the TV station opened covered a
comprehensive area including station fronts, shopping areas, and temple and
shrine grounds, as well as facilities and establishments such as Tokyo Bowling
Center and Shinjuku Skating Rink. Multiple TVs were set up in areas like Ueno
and Asakusa, making these areas into “TV city”–type zones. At this point,
TV installations were also spreading out to Gunma Prefecture, Tochigi Pre-
fecture, Ibaraki Prefecture, and Shizuoka Prefecture; but in these prefectures
TVs were mainly installed in front of city halls, in major shopping districts,
and in temple and shrine grounds.7
When considering the locations in which street TVs were installed, the first
thing that becomes clear is how carefully these locations were chosen according
to where people in Tokyo would be most likely to congregate. According to Sano
Shin’ichi, the mogul Shōriki Matsutarō “made it obligatory to produce a ‘daily
street TV report’ for every single TV. As he looked over these reports each day,
he would take meticulous charge, yelling, ‘There aren’t a lot of viewers around
here. It’s a bad location. Hurry up and move it somewhere else’; and if any of
the TVs broke down, steam would come out of his ears and he would shout,
‘What do you mean, broken down? Hurry up and go fix it!’”8 Then, staff who
130 shun’ya yosh imi

had received Shōriki’s strict orders would “arrive at a proposed installation site,
alight from the train, make a rough sketch [of the area], find someone who
seemed willing to manage a TV, and then negotiate. Since agreements were
never made right away, they would withdraw at a suitable moment and then
dash off to the next place. From inside the train, too, they would stare outside,
searching like hawks for available land or sites with wide pedestrian streets.
They were repeatedly mistaken for land brokers.”9 If an agreement could not be
reached with a shop, the NTV staff would negotiate with the local officials to
find an installation site and caretaker in that way. Since managing a TV really
only meant “locking and unlocking it, and turning the power on and off,” they
said—no remuneration was paid to caretakers. Documents from NTV state
that “at many places, [NTV] did not even pay for the electricity fees.”10
Although NTV’s street TVs had an overwhelming impact around Tokyo,
in other areas of the country the general public’s first experiences with TV was
more likely to be with the televisions installed at electrical goods shops than
with NTV’s street televisions. The daughter of an electrical shop owner who
displayed a TV that he made himself looks back on those days:
At the time my father was running a small electrical shop; he would design
his own radios and TVs and things, buy the parts like the vacuum tubes and
picture tubes and then put them together . . . but even for a child like me,
the TV he made was not really all that cool. There were fat glass rods around
these thick bulky picture tubes, vacuum tubes mounted on the chassis,
transformers, and condensers. Since there was no case covering these parts,
everything looked so exposed, and I was always afraid that someone would
get an electrical shock. But my father looked so happy. He set that TV up in
front of a small window so that the screen faced outside. At that time TVs
were not very common, so people passing by would stop and stand there to
watch it. When children’s programs came on, the kids from the neighbor-
hood would all gather around. When popular programs came on, people
would bring chairs and congregate there, and I would take a chair from the
shop and go sit out there together with them and watch TV. It was good
business for my father to have crowds of people gather in front of his shop,
and for me, too; it made me happy to sit there next to someone who was
usually a bully, being all quiet and well-behaved.11
So how many of these electrical shops were there around Japan that in-
stalled TVs in front of their shops, and how did they go about it? In 1953,
the year that television broadcasting began, there were more than 20,000
electrical goods shops around the country; 30,000 shops in 1958, as TV sales
began to boom; and more than 40,000 in 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olym-
pics. If many of these stores were also setting up TVs in front of their shops at
this initial stage, this means that massive numbers of “street TVs,” far exceed-
ing the number installed by NTV, were making their way onto street corners
in every nook and cranny of the country. Iida Takao has analyzed the promo-
tional magazine National Shop, which Matsushita Electric distributed to its
affiliated stores, and made some very interesting findings about this period.
According to Iida, in the case of one shop owner who had built his own TV and
made it available to the public in May 1954, “so many people gathered inside
the store and on the street outside that there was literally no room to breathe;
finally there was a commotion trying to get the window closed, and ultimately,
the owner received a warning from the police for obstructing traffic.” With no
other options, the owner used the empty shop next door to display his TV,
and “for popular programs like professional wrestling he would borrow the
rooftop of a nearby apartment building, and every time more than a hundred
people gathered there.”12 So if a considerable number of shops like this existed
all over the country, that means that in the mid-1950s perhaps more than one
million people were simultaneously and enthusiastically watching what was
happening in professional wrestling and baseball games, on both NTV’s street
TVs and also on televisions in front of various electrical goods shops.
However, the connection between the street TVs that I have been discuss-
ing and the crowds on the streets was not “invented” by NTV and electrical
shops. In fact, this connection goes back at least to the 1920s, when radio first
appeared in Japanese cities. Yamaguchi Makoto, focusing on midday baseball
broadcasts in the early stages of radio broadcasting, reveals that at the time
“the style in which ‘family members would all spend some time together sit-
ting around the radio’ was neither primary nor typical.” As Yamaguchi con-
vincingly shows, in the late 1920s when radio was beginning to spread rapidly,
even in major cities like Osaka the vast majority of ordinary households had
fixed-rate contracts with electric companies and did not receive electric power
during the daytime; so even if they did own a radio, the number of households
that could actually listen to it in the daytime was very small. Rather, in cities
like Osaka and Tokyo, extremely large numbers of retail radio stores would set
up radios with speakers in front of their shops, and audiences would flock to
listen. When a game was on, “no matter how busy you were, you would man-
age to make the time to go to a radio shop or any other shop where a radio was
set up in front, and you’d rub shoulders with the people gathered there, and
for this short period of time, you would chat with the other people there like
132 shun’ya yos h imi

friends, waiting for the broadcast to start.” As demonstrated by Yamaguchi,
then, crowd-like audiences, like those that surrounded street TVs later, were
already present in large cities in the 1920s.13
As Iida Yutaka points out, the direct predecessors to NTV’s street TVs
were experiments in which televisions were publicly exhibited at fairs and
at all kinds of special events. From the late 1920s, radio dealers and amateur
wireless receivers were presenting prototype televisions at fairs and exhibi-
tions. Before long, NHK and the research institute of the Ministry of Com-
munications and Transportation became involved in these exhibitions and
experimental public displays; and as the country faced war, crowds increas-
ingly gathered around televisions.14At this experimental stage, people likely
were already well accustomed to the crowds, since, as Yamaguchi has shown,
it was already an everyday occurrence with street radio. In other words, in the
modern city of the 1920s, various types of spaces were already being created
in which crowds of people and new media were coming into contact on the
streets, and people’s everyday sensibilities were increasingly bound up with
this city/media environment. According to Sano Shin’ichi, Shōriki repeatedly
stressed that street TVs were his own “original idea,” despite the fact that it
was the American electrical engineer William Halstead who taught him how
to increase advertising profits by aiming for as large an audience as possible.15
By emphasizing this, Shōriki not only concealed the origin of his own ideas
but also the most important background for understanding how street TVs in
the 1950s were so widely supported by the Japanese general public.
FROM KARATE CHOPS TO MITCHI’S SMILE
By the end of the 1950s, with the popularity of Rikidōzan’s professional wres-
tling still undiminished, the relative importance of street TVs and home TVs
had started to reverse. Judging from the success of street TVs, restaurants,
bars, and all kinds of shops realized how effective TVs were for bringing in
customers and soon started installing TVs inside their stores and in their
shop windows. Television thus slowly began to move from the streets and
into shops and homes. With the shift in “the places where TV was watched,”
the social meanings of television media also began to change. On October 9,
1955, the Asahi shinbun reported that street television had already passed its
peak in popularity and that television had begun to move “from street corners
to living rooms.” This article predicted that, as the location of TVs changed,
programming content was also bound to change. In fact, “the reason that
With the shift in
sports broadcasts have occupied a privileged position is
“the places where
precisely because it has been an age of street television.
TV was watched,”
While this period has not ended, studio programs more
the social mean-
suited for viewing in a relaxed atmosphere at home are
ings of television
gaining more and more popularity. Even at private TV
media also began
stations, regular programming that has been ignored by
to change.
sponsors until now is doing very well.” If this trend con-
tinued, programs aimed at home viewing would become
the mainstream, and new types of sponsors would flood to the stations. It is
true that even after television had begun to spread to ordinary households,
professional wrestling broadcasts still boasted viewing rates overwhelmingly
higher than other programs. For example, in October 1960 a large gap can
be seen in viewing rates between professional wrestling, at 50.3 percent, and
second-place Lassie, at 36.7 percent. By May of the following year, the rate for
professional wrestling broadcasts had gone up to 57.4 percent.16 At the same
time, however, in surveys conducted by private television stations, viewers
consistently named professional wrestling broadcasts first for programs that
were “boring” or “inappropriate for viewing at home.”17
In other words, while professional wrestling was as popular as ever in
terms of ratings, for home television viewing it was criticized as inappropriate
and aberrant. Also around this time, some negative incidents caused profes-
sional wrestling to be seen as a bad influence on the public. For example, a
widely circulated report in April 1962 stated that two elderly people who were
watching a Rikidōzan match “died of shock from the brutality.” In fact, they
had chronic diseases like cardiac asthma, and a causal relationship between
the contents of the show and the heart attacks cannot be substantiated. How-
ever, in the press, the “brutality” of professional wrestling in particular was
emphasized. A month after this incident, the Osaka Prefectural Police submit-
ted a request to TV stations that broadcasts of professional wrestling matches
be suspended. Between this and frequent reporting about incidents of vio-
lence involving wrestlers, professional wrestling gradually came to acquire a
dark image. When Rikidōzan was stabbed to death by a gangster in December
1963, the nationwide treatment by newspapers of the death of this postwar
“hero” was unnaturally cool, considering his prior national popularity.
Until the mid-1950s, Rikidōzan was the center of mass television con-
sumption on the streets. However, as television later began to move from the
streets to people’s living rooms, Rikidōzan could no longer be a “national”
hero. So with this shift in the social space of television, did a new image for
consumption appear? The obvious answer to this question is the 1959 wedding

parade of the Crown Prince and the smile of the Crown Princess, “Mitchi,” dis-
played there. NHK and the NTV and KRT (now TBS) conglomerate networks
vied for the best wedding parade broadcasting.
Of course, this transformation of the “royal wedding” into a media event
did not stop at simply broadcasting the parade. Although that was certainly
the climax, the romance between “the Imperial household” and “the people”
(kokumin) was uniformly produced by all the TV stations through the compo-
sition of TV programs starting several days before. For example, NTV, which
had been the most important station in broadcasting professional wrestling
on street TVs, planned a series of “special programs from April 5 to April 12
celebrating” the wedding, programs that would “thoroughly capture the ap-
pearance of the Crown Prince and Michiko-san as the happy day approaches
and the joy of the people on the streets; furthermore [NTV would] incorporate
the happy expressions on people’s faces all over the country by relay through
Sapporo TV, Yomiuri TV, and Nishi Nippon TV, thus unfolding the momen-
tous picture scroll of the century.” Then, on the day of the wedding itself,
various programs were to be shown that would “combine images of Shōda
Michiko-san as she begins this happy day in front of the Shōda residence, as
well as images taken with cameras placed at various locations, to present a
picture of her facial expressions.”18 It is important to note here that the focus
of the camera in this series of programs was clearly on “Michiko-san” rather
than the Crown Prince himself.
NATIONAL TIME, NATIONAL NARRATIVE
Through the programs it broadcasts, television forms a part of our world of

meaning, and broadcasting itself functions to construct our lives. Television’s
biggest effect at this time was to introduce “national time” into the home.
Until then, “in everyday life, time and media did not exist in a closely linked
relationship.” However, with the penetration first of radio into society, “pre-
cise time came to acquire the status of a shared social standard of behavior.”
The transmitter was thus able to become the object of “a consciousness [on the
part of viewers] that did not exist in previous types of media, a consciousness
in which people’s lifestyles were thought of in terms of time.”19 Sada Kazuhiko
summarizes this point as follows:
In order to continue to broadcast a large number of programs every day,

programs were lined up based on a certain way of thinking; as a result,
delimitations were applied to the passage of “time,” and so-called “time”
came to be articulated. Furthermore, the relationship between program
contents and time slots was carefully considered, contributing to the
meanings given to everyday “time” . . . It was not only direct methods
such as time announcements but the process of broadcasting a large
number of programs itself that resulted in the articulation of “time.”20
Eventually, television would inherit this function of time scheduling from

radio and bring it to a much deeper level. Through viewing times, a large num-
ber of channels, and the formation of many programs, television functioned
to create a uniform sense of national time all over the country.
The time-scheduling function of television was seen most strikingly in the
construction of the so-called “golden hour,” “morning hour,” and “afternoon
hour” time slots. “Golden hour” in particular, which was generally the three-
hour period from seven until ten in the evening, represented the highest con-
centration of TV viewing in Japan from the 1960s to the 1980s. For many
households, this time frame was experienced in largely homogenous ways.
That is, in many cases, families would begin by watching the 7:00 news, then
a program that targeted children, such as cartoons or a family quiz show. After
8:00, dramas or variety shows were the main attraction, and after 9:00 dramas
took center stage. Otherwise, professional baseball was almost permanently
on the air between seven and nine at night, so it was also common for fathers
in particular to be watching. In Japanese society since the high-growth period,
this basic viewing pattern has been firmly maintained.21
Of course, the “golden hour” was not the only “national time slot” devel-
oped for television. From the 1960s through the 1970s, television produced at
least two others. One of these was from about seven to nine in the morning.
For an urban salaried (sarariiman) household, this corresponds to the busy
time of the morning when family members are getting ready for work and
school. Since the 1960s, NHK’s morning serial dramas (asa no renzoku terebi
shōsetsu) and commercial broadcasters’ “morning shows” provided meanings
to this time slot that were complementary to the “golden hour.” TV functioned
in place of a clock to ensure that people would not be late, and we must not
forget that through this type of viewing, people’s actual daily time at home
overlapped with a particular historical consciousness of time circulating in
the postwar. The third time slot that was developed was from about eleven in
the morning until two in the afternoon, occupied by melodramas and “wide
shows” (talk and variety shows). While the other two time slots functioned
to align the rhythm of family life with a consciousness of national time, the
136 shun’ya yosh imi

audience for this slot was primarily housewives, and it produced images of a
gendered reality linked with the sphere of women’s weekly magazines. Thus,
since the 1960s Japanese TV broadcasting has been organized around the
three characteristically different national time slots of “morning,” “after-
noon,” and “evening”; the time slots in between have been peripheral, without
a distinct character.22
What is important here is that through the creation of these three time
slots, the meaning of those times was experienced in relation to television, and
forms of social gathering were thus also reorganized. For example, according to
the NHK survey Zenkoku seikatsu jikan chōsa, there was a remarkable correla-
tion between the time flows of “people watching TV” and “people eating,” but
this did not simply mean that people had started watching TV at mealtimes.
People also started having meals at TV time. A similar situation can be seen
in the way that people experienced time itself; for example, it is uncertain
whether people would start watching NHK news when 7:00 pm rolled around,
or whether the time “7:00 pm” itself existed as the experience of watching NHK
news. Thus, the flow of television is never just an external factor that condi-
tions our experiences of time and our lifestyle habits; rather, it is the moment
of organization that makes those experiences and habits possible.
Therefore, in postwar Japan, television was not some strange object that
infiltrated a previously closed home space. On the contrary, the postwar sense
of the intimate sphere of the home itself (pleasant time spent with the family
[ikka danran]) was produced through the medium of television. With regard
to this point, Fujitake Akira notes that “it is not just a matter of the simple
fact that television was being viewed in the home, but that the home itself
was being organized as a sacred space for people at the time, the place where
family members could most easily secure privacy, and where they could go for
refuge from the pressures of outside society.”23 In a survey conducted from
1979 to 1980 by NHK’s hōsō yoron chōsajo, there was a positive correlation be-
tween television viewing time and the frequency of family communication.
The rate of people who answered that television had increased opportunities
for the family to talk together (50 percent) far surpassed the rate of people
who answered that it had decreased such opportunities (19 percent). In re-
sponse to the question of whether television was necessary to family time
(ikka danran), 46 percent of respondents from Tokyo and 61 percent of re-
spondents from rural areas answered that it was “more necessary than not,”
a significantly higher number than those that answered that TV was “more
of an intrusion” (15 percent in Tokyo and 10 percent in rural areas). Further-
more, in response to the question of whether the TV was turned on during
media is not simply
family time, 77 percent of respondents in rural areas
an information
and 67 percent of respondents in Tokyo answered
medium; it is a
that “it is usually turned on.”24 To state it broadly,
mediating agent that
family time in the space of the postwar family was
organizes social
created through and has operated via the medium
relationships.
of television.25
Radio had already been functioning as a medium
for family relationships in characteristic ways. For example, shortly after the
war, one housewife had this to say about the radio in her house:
For housewives who were often holed up inside, radio was the only real en-
joyment, and I think it was also a way to absorb culture and learning. But I
felt hesitant with my mother-in-law there, so I didn’t listen to the programs
that I wanted to as often as I would have liked. But for news or women’s pro-
grams that I really wanted to listen to, I would turn the radio on and invite
her to listen, too. At first she wouldn’t listen with me, but eventually she
started to, and then she found that she was able to chat more with my hus-
band at night, too. So she started listening happily to the radio, which she
had just thought was noisy before. This is a really small thing, but from this
experience, my life and my mother-in-law’s life were able to blend together,
and I was also able to have some free time.26
These examples teach us that media is not simply an information medium; it

is a mediating agent that organizes social relationships.
Since the mid-1960s, people have thus consumed countless groups of
image texts that have established their own styles as genres, such as family
dramas (hōmu dorama), period dramas, quiz shows, singing shows, documen-
taries, variety shows, and talk shows (waido shō). This consumption, further-
more, has occurred within the time structures of daily broadcasting that had
been formed up until the early 1960s, and within the family relationships that
had been mediated by this construction of time. In recent years, detailed semi-
otic analyses of each genre have become an especially productive field within
new research on television culture.27 The rise of this trend is good news, but
to avoid an analysis that remains bound up in the image text of television, it is
important to be conscious of the fact that television is fundamentally a tem-
poral medium. Not only does each image text get constructed temporally but
the “time” of these texts is positioned within the temporal structure of daily
broadcasting and is consumed within the temporality of social relations that
are mediated by this construction. If we continue to broaden our perspective

in this way, it is likely that a central question that will arise in television re-
search is the relationship between the “time” of families’ ordinary lives and
life histories, and the fictional “time” that is related through television.
CONCLUSION
Ever since television started to spread widely to ordinary postwar Japanese

homes in the 1960s, countless multilayered relationships, including amplifi-
cation and resistance, twists and slippages, adjustments and collisions, have
been played out between the “time” being related on the TV and the “time” of
the receiving viewers. Especially since the 1960s in Japan, television has taken
root in ordinary life as national media. Therefore, perhaps the most impor-
tant question to explore is in what ways national time recounted to viewers
through various program genres has been entwined with the “time” of each
family’s life history as consumers of TV. Although space does not permit me
to adequately address this question here, I would like to end with a simple
reference to NHK’s morning serial dramas (asa no renzoku terebi shōsetsu) and
Sunday night historical dramas (taiga dorama), in order to suggest some pos-
sibilities for worthwhile future research.
NHK’s morning serial dramas began in 1961 with an adaptation of Shi-
shi Bunroku’s Musume to watashi (My daughter and me). The original story,
serialized in Shufu no tomo magazine from 1953 to 1956, portrays the history
of the author’s family from the end of the Taishō period (1912–26), through-
out the war period, and up to when the “daughter” crosses over into Europe
after the war. To create a series that ran from April 1961 to March the follow-
ing year, the scriptwriter Yamashita Yoshikazu decided to “recreate Japanese
people’s most difficult memories of having been born during wartime.”28 The
history of NHK’s morning serial dramas (ren dora) began here, and the pro-
totypical style of these programs was already evident in this very first series.
Other major hits such as Ohana-han (1966) and Oshin (1983) all portray the
biographies of women who survived a national context of prewar and war-
time hardship to find happiness.
On the other hand, when NHK’s taiga dorama began in 1963 with Hana
no shōgai, the intention of the creators was not so much just to produce his-
torical dramas but to create “large-scale wholesome amusement productions.”
Therefore, many of the works proposed for adaptation were popular historical
novels such as Nakazato Kaizan’s Daibosatsu tōge (1913–41, Bodhisattva pass;
movie, 1966, The Sword of Doom) and Naoki Sanjūgo’s Nangoku taiheiki (1931,
Record of the peaceful southern countries). “The creators were thus made to
believe” that in order for this type of TV adaptation to succeed, and for this
particular series to succeed, the protagonists of the drama must be “national
heroes” based on actual history.29
Questions that remain to be explored are how such time structures of
national storytelling, including their gendered organization, have connected
with the “time” of the lives and memories of the people who welcomed tele-
vision into their homes, and what the role of broadcasts, as technologies of
time, has been. Clearly, an analysis of this sort must also link together ques-
tions such as where televisions were placed and how the social groupings of
audiences changed. An analysis of television as media must not simply stop
at a structural analysis of images, nor simply examine the history and func-
tion of broadcasting. Even a detailed examination of the social history of the
purchasing of TVs as “consumer electronics” would only be considering one
aspect of television. In order to grasp the cultural dynamics of the television
medium, we must concretely and theoretically reconsider the processes by
which its various aspects intertwine. We must consider television as an appa-
ratus that is positioned in some kind of social space, and its symbolic meaning
(television = apparatus); broadcasting as schedule and its relationship with
the rhythms of daily life (television = time); and TV as a text in which the
interpretations of subjects confront each other in multilayered ways and in
which stories are told based on a specific consciousness of time and construc-
tion of memory (television = program).
This is an abridged translation of “Terebi ga ie ni yatte kita: Terebi no kūkan, terebi

no jikan,” originally published in “Terebijon saikō (TV Reconsidered),” a volume of
the journal Shisō (no. 956, [2003]).
Notes
1. NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūjo Yoron Chōsabu, Shichōsha kara mita “terebi 50 nen”
(Fifty years of television seen from the audience) (Tokyo: NHK Broadcasting Culture
Research Institute, 2002), 13, 29.
2. Ibid., 19.
3. Inose Naoki, Yokubō no media (Media of desire) (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1990), 268–88.
4. Shimazaki Toshiki, “Puroresu o miru shinri” (The truth the press sees), Asahi
shinbun, May 1, 1962, 13.
5. Kawamura Takashi, “Enjirareta ‘Rikidōzan,’ enjirareta ‘Nihonjin’” (The ‘Rikidōzan’
who could play a part, the ‘Japanese’ who were played), in Rikidōzan to Nihonjin (Rikidōzan
and the Japanese), ed. Okamura Masashi (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2002), 48–60.

6. Hōsō Bangumi Iinkai, “Terebi 50 nen o kangaeru” (Thinking about fifty years of
TV); Sankō shiryō, “‘Gaitō terebi’ ni kansuru Nihon terebi no chōsa kekka” (Results of a re-
search study on Japanese TV starting with “street TV”), Hōsō Bangumi Kōjō Kyōgikai geppō,
February 2003, 28.
7. Ibid., 29–31.
8. Sano Shin’ichi, Kyokaiden (Legends of great wonders) (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū,
1994), 474.
9. NTV junpō 5, August 15, 1956.
10. Hōsō Bangumi Iinkai, “Terebi 50 nen o kangaeru,” 28.
11. “Watashi to terebijon: Omoide no deai,” (Television and I: Meeting with memo-
ries), in Jinsei tokuhon: Terebi (Guidebook to life: TV) (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha,
1983), 42.
12. Iida Takao, “Mono = shōhin” toshite no media: Terebijon juzōki no shakaiteki
juyōshi” (Media as “things = goods”: The history of social demand for television sets)
(Master’s thesis, Tokyo University Jinbun Shakaikei Kenkyūka, 2001), 69.
13. Yamaguchi Makoto, “‘Kiku shūkan,’ sono jōken: Gaitō rajio to ōdiensu no furumai”
(“Listening to customs,” those conditions: The conduct of street radio and its audience), in
Masu komyunikeeshon kenkyū 63 (2003): 144–61.
14. Iida Yutaka, 1930-nendai Nihon ni okeru terebijon no gijutsu shakaishiteki kenkyū:
Hakurankai jigyō to no kakawari o chūshin ni (Research on the social history of television
technology in 1930s Japan: Focusing on matters relating to the expo project) (Master’s
thesis, Tokyo University Gakusai Jōhōgakubu, 2004).
15. Sano, Kyokaiden, 470–72.
16. Minpō Gosha Chōsa Kenkyūkai, ed., Nihon no shichōsha (The Japanese television
audience) (Tokyo: Seibundō Shinkōsha, 1969), 22. At the time, although Lassie’s popular-
ity rate was high overall, it was extremely low only among the working classes. In a survey
conducted in 1957 by the Public Opinion Research Center (Yoron Kagaku Kyōkai), among
the working classes this program had a viewing rate of only 18 percent and a very low sup-
port rate, while with other classes it enjoyed a viewing rate of over 30 percent and high
support ratings. “Dono bangumi ga omoshiroku mirarete iru ka: Kansai-hen” (Which pro-
grams are seen as interesting? Kansai), Shijō chōsa 79: 10–13.
17. For example, see Kokumin Seiji Kenkyūkai, Shufu wa terebi o dō miru ka (How do
housewives watch TV?) (April 1964), 11. Here, we see opinions such as “In professional
wrestling, a lot of the scenes are staged, and some scenes are grotesque and brutal; you
can’t say it’s a healthy sport. I wouldn’t want to show it to a child, who has little sense of
judgment.”
18. Kōtaishi goseikon hōshuku tokubetsu bangumi (Special programming for the Crown
Prince’s wedding celebration) (Tokyo: Nihon Terebi Hōsōmō Kabushiki-gaisha, 1959).
19. Takeyama Akiko, Rajio no jidai (The radio age) (Tokyo: Sekai Shisōsha, 2002),
44–45.
20. Sada Kazuhiko, Hōsō to jikan (Broadcasting and time) (Tokyo: Bun’ichi Sōgō Shup-
pan, 1988).
21. “Golden hour” was a Japanese-made English word; in English this period of time
was only referred to as “prime time.” Attaching an adjective like “golden” to this time
frame, and naming it as though it were actually “English,” and furthermore having it
spread into common use, seems to project the special consciousness that Japanese people
had toward TV during the high growth period.
22. In general, television viewing other than during the three major time slots was
probably not a focused activity from the beginning. One housewife had this to say about
watching TV in the early 1960s: “Housewives are essentially not suited to constantly refer-
ring to the program guide in newspapers, or to properly sitting down to watch and listen.
You just kind of think to yourself that you would like to listen to music while ironing or
something, so you turn the dial, and if the program that comes on after that song happens
to be good, then you just forget to turn it off. My children often do their homework in
front of the TV, or they try to talk with my husband about social issues that they learned
about from daytime broadcasts. But in any case the TV is always singing or talking in the
background.” Sakai Ayako, “Shufu to hōsō” (Housewives and broadcasting), Hōsō asahi,
June 1962.
23. Fujitake, Terebi media no shakairyoku, 99.
24. NHK Hōsō Yoron Chōsajo, Kazoku to terebi (Family and television) (Tokyo: Nihon
Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai, 1981), 108–19.
25. In terms of living space, it has been generally thought that TV viewing was more
strongly linked to people living in apartment complexes (danchi) than to lifestyles in or-
dinary residences. Around 1960, 61 percent of housewives living in apartment complexes
said that the way they spend their free time is by watching TV—a rate almost 20 percent
higher than wives living in shopping areas, at 42.9 percent, and almost 15 percent higher
than ordinary residences, at 48.5 percent. Rōdōsōhō Fujin Shōnen Kyoku, Seikatsu jikan
hakusho (Tokyo: Ōkurashō Insatsukyoku, 1961). Wives living in apartment complexes
show a much higher rate of engaging not only with TV but also with newspapers and other
kinds of reading than women from shopping areas or ordinary residences, and an increase
in media contact that correlated with a new kind of lifestyle in apartment complexes has
been generally acknowledged. However, perhaps this correlative relationship between the
type of residence and media contact is a false correlation, and it is not the case that people
started watching a lot of TV because they were living in apartment complexes but rather
that a lot of people who lived in apartment complexes had the kind of income and lifestyle
that allowed for a lot of TV watching.
26. Ibid., 21–22.
27. See for example, the excellent work by media researchers such as Fujita Mafumi
for period dramas, Ishida Saeko for quiz shows, Ishida Hidetaka for detective shows, Niwa
Yoshiyuki for documentaries, and Muramatsu Yasuko and Sakamoto Kazue for home
dramas.
28. Yamashita Yoshikazu, “Konnichiteki igi no aru kyakushoku” (Dramatizations
with Significance for Today), Hōsō bunka, July 1962, 15–18.
29. Mikuni Ichirō, “‘Hana no shōgai’ kara ‘Kunitori monogatari’ made” (From “Flamboy-
ant and Ephemeral Life” to “A Tale of Acquiring Provinces”), in Taishū bunka no sōzō (Tokyo:
Kenkyūsha Shuppan[?], 1973).

KUKHEE CHOO
Hyperbolic Nationalism:
South Korea’s Shadow
Animation Industry
South Korean popular culture has become an integral part of the global media
flow, from the popularity of K-Drama, K-Pop, and films over the past decade
to the explosive circulation of “Gangnam Style” around the world in 2012. But
as critics have pointed out, South Korean popular culture has mostly been
represented abroad by its live-action films and television drama, as well as by
its attractive entertainers.1 What remains largely unexamined is the produc-
tion, since 1950, of animated series and movies for South Korean audiences,
most of which were developed by South Korean animation studios that were
used by Japanese anime companies.
The Japanese animation industry is built on its vast subcontracting net-
works, which include many international companies. Currently there are ap-
proximately 700 animation studios in Japan, with sixty-five major companies
that belong to the larger animation production organization called the Asso-
ciation of Japanese Animations (Nihon dōga kyōkai).2 Those that are not a part
of this organization are mostly small studios—sometimes as small as a room
with a handful of employees—that work as subcontractors to larger ones.
Therefore, major animation studios often subcontract to foreign production
houses that can complete work more quickly.
144
Currently, Japanese animation companies rely heavily on subcontractors
in China, the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan; however, Japan’s earliest
major outsourcing country was South Korea. Beginning in the mid-1960s,
South Korea became an essential part of Japanese animation production. In
fact, subcontracting for Japanese animation studios (as well as for U.S. and
European cartoons) not only made animation production a viable industry
in South Korea but also contributed to South Korea’s position as the third-
largest animation producer in the world until the end of the 1990s.3 As Thomas
Lamarre points out, the fact that Japanese animation studios outsourced so
much of their production to other countries complicates the “Japaneseness”
of the finished animation.4
In a similar vein, I argue that the very notion of “Japanese” anime be-
comes more complex and nuanced when viewed from within the larger his-
tory of animation in Asia, and that often the outsourced animation work of
the “other” has been overlooked by global audiences due to the dominance
of the Japanese anime industry. In this article, I will map the historical de-
velopment of South Korean animation, tracing its origins back to the 1950s
and focusing particularly on titles with conspicuously hybridized narratives
and visual qualities. By doing so, I aim to bring to light the various modali-
ties and praxes that allowed South Korea to come out from the shadow of the
Japanese anime industry.
It was on HLKZ Television (Daehan Bangsong), South Korea’s first private
television station established in 1956, that animation became an integral part
of the emerging media industry in postwar South Korea.5 A few short adver-
tisements and experimental animations appeared throughout the late 1950s
and early 1960s, and in 1967 South Korea saw its first animated theatrical
film, Hong Gil-dong, produced by Shin Dong-heon. Since then there have been
five to ten animated films released annually, but production has dwindled as
viewership of South Korean animation has decreased over the years. Recent
South Korean media has asked questions such as why South Korea, a country
with an animation production infrastructure similar to Japan’s, and a country
that has been actively creating Korean-language animation for years, has not
produced a figure such as Tezuka Osamu. Some analyses suggest that South
Korean audiences do not accept animation.6 Nevertheless, owing to decades
of active production, South Korea’s animation industry eventually attracted
the government’s attention, which led to official recognition and promotion of
digital animation in 1999.7 This influenced the Japanese government to push
for its own “Content Industry” promotion policy in 2004.8
Despite this official acceptance, there have been few studies of Korean
h y p e r bo l i c n at i o n a l i s m 14 5
animation compared to the scholarly work on Japanese anime: John A. Lent
and Yu Kie-Un present a brief history, and Yoon Ae-ri explores how South
Korean animators are situated “in-between” the demands of globalization
and their traditional ideologies.9 Yet, there are virtually no studies that look
into the history of South Korean animation, especially to examine titles that
purportedly “plagiarized” Japanese animations. These so-called copies con-
stituted the majority of animation production in South Korea from the 1960s
to the 1980s. Plagiarism is defined as “an act or instance of using or closely
imitating the language and thoughts of another author without authorization
and the representation of that author’s work as one’s own, as by not crediting
the original author.”10 However, as Marilyn Randall notes in her analysis of
plagiarism in literature, “Plagiarism . . . cannot be found in the text, or even
in the intertext. It exists only in the space circumscribed by texts, readers, and
their cultural presuppositions, that is, in the pragmatic space of the literary
context.”11
In other words, plagiarism is not defined by the simple act of reproducing
the original without acknowledgement, but, according to Randall, “plagiarism
expresses structures of and struggles for power that implicate far more than
the individual agents or victims.”12 Similarly, it may be difficult to categorize
South Korean animation as plagiaristic products because the companies were
created to reproduce (or copy) Japanese animation. That is to say, if South Ko-
rean animation originated from the continuous practice of duplicating Japa-
nese anime cels, the definition of plagiarism is inadequate because it does
not capture the processes and intricacies at the very origin of South Korean
animation. Furthermore, although South Korean children grew up watching
Japanese television anime without knowing its country of origin, there needs
to be a more comprehensive understanding of how South Korea’s nationalistic
animation also contributed to this “unawareness,” as the boundaries between
Japanese and South Korean animation were blurred by hybrid visual represen-
tations. In this way, analyzing the development of South Korea’s prolific, yet
globally invisible, domestic animation production provides a new perspective
on Japan’s globally popular anime enterprise.
EARLY YEARS
The first animation in South Korea was long thought to be the Lucky Brand
toothpaste commercial created by Mun Dal-bu in 1956.13 Mun was the art di-
rector of HLKZ Television, and he completed the entire production by himself,
14 6 kukhee choo
including drawing, tracing, and filming. The black-and-white commercial was
shot cel by cel with a still camera, because no animation cameras existed in
South Korea yet.14 However, in 2006 it was found that another CM anima-
tion by Mun, an advertisement for OB Shinalko, preceded the Lucky Brand
commercial by two months. According to Kim Dae-hong, this new discovery
altered the history of South Korean animation and provided more insight into
how animation was closely tied to film culture; these advertisements were
shown in movie theaters during the golden era of Korean cinema.15 Unlike
Japan, whose anime industry began in 1962 with Tezuka Osamu’s Mushi Pro-
duction and relied mainly on television sponsorship, South Korea’s animation
originated from tie-ins with commercial enterprises and relied on the theater
networks. The first theatrical animation director Shin Dong-heon, who cre-
ated Hong Gil-dong in 1967, also started out as a creator of animated commer-
cials. Success with both Jinro soju (Jinro vodka, 1960) and Jinro-paradise (1962)
gave Shin the confidence to venture into full-length theatrical animation.
However, it was the development of the Japanese animation industry
that truly ignited South Korean animation production. Although there was
no direct connection to Tezuka’s Mushi Production, the spillover effect of his
studio’s success in Japan stimulated animation production in South Korea
throughout the 1960s. After South Korea and Japan established diplomatic
ties in 1965, Samsung Mulsan (Samsung Group) contracted with the anima-
tion company Jeil Donghwa (Jeil Moving Pictures) and began to subcontract
for Japan’s Tōei Animation.16 The storylines and scripts were delivered from
Japan, but everything else, including drawing, tracing, and filming, was ex-
ecuted in South Korea. Samsung began to hire full-time staff and invited Japa-
nese animator Morikawa Nobuhide to educate a new generation of Korean
animators. The two animations that emerged from this effort were Golden
Bat (1967, Hwanggeum bakjui) and Phantom Human (1968, Yogwae ingan). Both
series were produced during Morikawa’s four-year stay in Korea. Because the
first broadcast of Golden Bat was in 1967 for Japan and 1968 in South Korea,
it was long thought that the series was a Japanese animation imported into
South Korea (and the same goes for Phantom Human). However, according
to Morikawa, both series were actually produced in South Korea and then
exported to Japan.17
After the production of these two series, South Korean television ani-
mation became more or less limited to subcontracting for Japanese studios.
The formal broadcast of Japanese animation in South Korea began in 1970
with Marine Boy (1966, Kaitei shōnen Marin), which was featured on Munhwa
Bangsong (MBC). In the same year, Tetsuwan Atomu (1963, Astro Boy) was also
broadcast on Dongyang Bangsong (TBC) under the Korean title Uju sonyeon
Atom (Space boy Atom). Most of the animated television programs that ap-
peared on South Korean television over the years were Japanese anime titles
that were outsourced to South Korean companies and then purchased by the
television stations at low cost. However, it was through this subcontracting
and coproduction that South Korea was first introduced to Japanese anima-
tion, rather than through purchasing television animation series directly from
Japan. In this sense, South Korea’s position is unique in that it was not a pas-
sive consumer but rather an active participant in the production process of
Japanese animation, which led to its booming domestic industry.
Around the same time Golden Bat was produced, there were other anima-
tions being made in South Korea. In 1967 the first full-color theatrical anima-
tion, Hong Gil-dong, was released, as well as Hopi wa Chadol bawui (Hopi and
Chadol stone), both by Shin Dong-heon. The first stop-motion animation,
Heungbu wa Nolbu (Heungbu and Nolbu), was also produced that year using
doll-like puppets. All three animations were based on traditional Korean folk-
lore that emphasized moral values such as bravery, modesty, and kindness.
None of the films resembled Japanese animation, with its often large-eyed
characters and prominent science fiction narratives.
The year 1968 saw not only more folktale animations, such as Seonhwa
gongju wa Son oh-gong (Princess Seonhwa and Monkey King), but also the first
“science fiction” title, Hwanggeum Cheolin (Golden Ironman), both of which
were produced by Pak Yeong-il. What is more, Golden Ironman was also the
first official South Korean animation exported to Japan, in 1969. Also in that
year, a sequel to Hong Gil-dong (dir. Yong Yu-su) was produced, and the West-
ern children’s story Bomulseom (Treasure Island, dir. Pak Yeong-il) became the
first Korean animation to feature anthropomorphized animal characters.
After a year without any domestic releases in 1970, 1971 saw three produc-
tions, Wangja Hodong gwa Nakrang gongju (1971, Prince Hodong and Princess
Nakrang), another traditional Korean myth, as well as Beongae Ateom (1971,
Lightning Atum), produced by Yong Yu-su. As Japan’s Tetsuwan Atomu was
first introduced to South Korean audiences in 1970, it is not difficult to notice
the similarity between it and Yong’s film.
When Lightning Atum was released in theaters in 1971, the boy character
named Atum (instead of Atom) registered as similar to Tetsuwan Atomu and
attracted a young audience. The popularity of Tetsuwan Atomu was such that
there was a nation-wide rerelease of Lightning Atum in 1975 under the differ-
ent title Dolaon Beongae Atom (1971, Return of Lightning Atom). From the
posters (Figures 2 and 3), Yong’s Lightning Atum and Return of Lightning Atom
14 8 kukhee cho o
Figure 1. Shin Dong-heon’s Hong Gil-dong (1967), a tale about a thief who steals from the rich to
help the poor.
Figure 2 ( left ) . Yong Yu-su’s Beongae Ateom (1971, Lightning Atum). Figure 3 ( right ) . Yong
Yu-su’s Dolaon Beongae Atom (1971, Return of Lightning Atom).
appear to be two distinctly different animations. The original film poster is
faithful to the character designs in the film, which appears to be influenced
more by U.S. cartoons and Disney animation. On the other hand, the 1975
poster for the film’s rerelease shows the clear influence of Tetsuwan Atomu
both in terms of character depiction and pronunciation of the protagonist’s
name. Rereleasing the film in 1975 under the old title Lightning Atum may
have been deemed inadequate, as South Korean children already knew the
Tetsuwan Atomu anime by its Korean name Uju sonyeon Atom. In the 1971 film
poster, the protagonist’s name “Atum” is pronounced as “Ah-t-uhm,” while
the 1975 version uses the same name as Tezuka’s “Atom,” which sounds like
“Ah-t-ohm.” The one vowel difference renders the 1971 “Atum” an awkward
mimicry, yet at the same time evokes nostalgia among contemporary South
Korean audiences, who view Lightning Atum as one of the early original ani-
mations produced in South Korea, with a narrative completely independent
from Tetsuwan Atomu.18 Moreover, throughout the film we witness blatant
national branding, with “ROK” (Republic of Korea) written on technological
devices, asserting the creators’ strong nationalistic sentiments. In short, al-
though Lightning Atum’s imitation of Tetsuwan Atomu ends with its title and
the 1975 rerelease poster, this weak, yet distinct, linkage to a popular Japanese
title of the time makes it possible to consider it the beginning of South Korea’s
ostensible copying of Japanese anime.
After Lightning Atum, director Yong Yu-su also created Gwaesu daejeon-
jaeng (Great monster war), the only animation produced in 1972.19 There was
no another domestic production until 1976, as subcontracting for Japanese
animation became the sole focus of South Korean animation studios. Overall,
South Korean animation produced from the late 1960s to the early 1970s con-
sisted of traditional Korean stories and Japanese-inspired narratives; how-
ever, the proportions changed drastically during the second half of the 1970s.
ROBOTORAMA: KOREA’S NATIONAL ANIMATIONS
In the decade from 1976 to 1986, South Korean animation generated a strong
domestic following. Up to ten theatrical animation films were produced annu-
ally during the peak years between 1979 and 1983, surpassing the number of
Japanese animation films produced during the same time. This period could
be viewed as the golden age of Korean animation. Most of these animations
were science fiction narratives, which were shown either as Children’s Day
specials on May 5, or as summer vacation specials at local theaters and culture
15 0 kukhee choo
centers. Children—mostly boys—waited in anticipation all year for these
films. Most showed strong parallels to Japanese animation of the time. Some
titles, including Roboteu taegweon V (1976, Robot Taekwon V), Dalryeora Ma-
jinga X (1978, Run Mazinga X), Mujeok yongsa hwanggeum nalgae (1978, Invin-
cible warrior golden wing), Uju heukgisa (1979, Space black knight), Heukseong
roboteu sseondeo A (1981, Black planet robot Thunder A), Solla won tu sseuri
(1982, Solar one two three), Seupaeiseu Gandam V (1984, Space Gandam V), as
well as many other films, used visuals and narratives reminiscent of popular
Japanese anime series. As evident from the titles and film posters, most of
the influences came from anime such as Mazinger Z (1972–74, Majingaa zetto)
and Grendizer (1975–77, UFO robo gurendaizaa).
Starting with Robot Taekwon V, Kim Cheong-gi emerged as a visionary
science fiction animation director. He made more than thirty animated films
in fifteen years, including five Taekwon V sequels as well as the famous Ddori
boy-adventure series. Kim began as a comic book artist in the early 1960s,
drawing storylines inspired by U.S. film narratives.20 He worked as an ani-
mator on Princess Seonhwa and Monkey King (1968), but after establishing
his own company, Seonjin Munhwa (Advanced Culture) in 1971, he mostly
worked with Dongyang Bangsong (TBC) creating animated commercials. Kim
Figure 4 ( left ) . Roboteu Taegweon V (1976, Robot Taekwon V). Figure 5 ( right ) . Dalryeora
Majinga X (1978, Run Mazinga X).
h y p e r bo l i c n at i o n a l i s m 151
was known to be dissatisfied with South Korea’s position as a subcontractor
to Japanese animation houses.21 He opened his animation studio Seoul Dong-
hwa (Seoul Moving Pictures) in 1975, and his dream to create autonomous lo-
cal animation began with Robot Taekwon V, which generated a huge following
in South Korea.22 Kim wanted to differentiate his films from Japanese anime,
and he asserted their Korean-ness by incorporating the national martial art
Taekwondo in order to “reimagine” and “reinvent” Korea’s identity after the
consecutive national traumas of Japanese colonialism (1910–45), Korean War
(1950–53), and the subsequent division into two Koreas.23 Kim produced simi-
lar films over subsequent years, but none rivaled the success of his first film.
In fact, the repetitious production of similar narratives seemed to damage
his reputation.
Kim’s Roboteu gundan gwa meka 3 (1985, Robot corps and mecha 3) was a
hodgepodge, cut and pasted together from separate films that Kim had pre-
viously directed—Solar one two three, Space Gandam V, and Robot Taekwon V.
Due to the patchwork editing, the robots and human characters never appear
in the same scene together, as they are originally from separate animations.
Therefore, the entire film consists of long robot battle scenes with nondiegetic
theme songs for each robot playing whenever they appear. The film suddenly
cuts between different battle scenes without any continuity, resulting in bi-
zarre lapses in character interaction as well as discontinuities in the narrative
structure; a comical effect for some audiences
but completely distasteful for others. For ex-
ample, characters whose body parts had been
cut off reappear intact later in the film. Also,
the text “to be continued in the second part”
appears randomly midway through the film
without any break in the scene or narrative,
indicating that the hour-long film may have
been a two-part television series sutured to-
gether.24 The battle scenes and reaction shots
of both protagonists and enemies are all mixed
to the point that even the children viewing
the film in 1985 felt a sense of “betrayal,” es-
pecially those who had been anticipating new
entertainment.
Figure 6. Kim Cheong-gi’s Roboteu gundan gwa meka 3

(1985, Robot corps and mecha 3).
15 2 kukhee choo
However, this type of rushed production was not uncommon in South Ko-
rea at the time. In the South Korean manhwa industry, copying and borrowing
characters from Japanese manga and collaging them together into a new nar-
rative under a Korean name (what I have termed “patchwork” manhwa) was
widespread and popular throughout the 1980s,25 so Kim’s appropriation of
such a method was not unusual at the time. But in retrospect (especially after
the explosive popularity of Japanese anime around the world), Kim’s “patch-
work” practice and the resemblance to Japanese characters may be viewed as
wounding Korean national pride. Kim has come to represent South Korea’s
vigorous animation production of the past. For example, recent South Korean
bloggers appear to be split about Kim: they either accept him as a product of
his time or condemn him for blatantly copying Japanese anime.
These two reactions to Kim’s work correspond to Marilyn Randall’s two
discourses about plagiarism, “apology and condemnation.” One camp argues
that most human activity consists of constant repetition, and therefore pla-
giarism is “inevitable,” whereas the second honors “intellectual property,
originality, and individual authenticity.”26 Randall notes that plagiarism is
viewed as bad “only when it is not good.”27 However, I would argue that Kim’s
“bad” animations might be interpreted as a parody of his own films as well
as an effort to toy with, or bring attention to, the fact that most Japanese
robot anime were produced in Korea at the time. By overtly and hyperbolically
Koreanizing the Japanese anime subcontracted to Korea, Kim was undermin-
ing the authenticity of these Japanese works. Years of experience as Japa-
nese anime subcontractors enabled South Korean animators to feel confident
in creating their own narratives. In a sense, being subcontractors to their
former colonizer instilled a stronger sense of nationalism among the South
Korean animators because they were driven by the desire to produce South
Korean–brand animation similar to the subcontracted animation consumed
by Japanese audiences. In other words, the motivation to create animations
featuring robots that resembled Japanese anime was driven by a strong sense
of competition, resulting in what I term “hyperbolic nationalism” and “un-
apologetic mimicry.”28 These phenomena were only accelerated by the rising
economic position that Japan enjoyed during the 1970s and 1980s.
The South Korean animators’ “unapologetic” nationalism was not limited
to animation produced for their domestic audiences. The former board direc-
tor of the Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) Yamaguchi Yasuo told
me in an interview that South Korean animators had a strong sense of pride
as artists, which sometimes led to problems for Japanese animation compa-
nies.29 Yamaguchi had to deal with South Korean animators on a regular basis
as the producer of the popular television series Candy Candy (1976–79), based
on the well-known girls’ comic book series by Mizuki Kyōko and Igarashi Yu-
miko. He explained that numerous times he had to return cel drawings to
South Korea via mail (which sometimes took up to a month) because artists
had tried to leave their “stamps” on the animation cels. One particular artist
repeatedly put small Korean temples in the background, even though the nar-
rative of Candy Candy was set in the United States and Europe. In other words,
through these “stamps” or “signature marks,” the cel artists asserted that they
were not mere subcontract laborers to Japanese animation companies but
Korean artists who could intentionally sabotage, undermine, and subvert
the authentic “Japaneseness” of anime. Although Yamaguchi light-heartedly
reminisced about his experience thirty years later, he said that it was one of
the most difficult things about dealing with South Korean animators, because
these attempts sometimes delayed production of the weekly series, which
spanned 115 episodes.30
In a similar vein, it could be argued that Kim Cheong-gi’s robot animations,
which appeared to be insipid copies of Japanese mecha anime, were also na-
tionalistic attempts to break away from the confines of being Japan’s invisible
labor force. Other examples include the way Gundam was transformed into Uju
heukgisa (1979, Space black knight, dir. Pak Jong-hi) and the way Space Battle-
ship Yamato (1977, Uchū senkan Yamato) was appropriated for Nalara! Uju jeon-
ham geobukseon (1979, Fly! Space battleship turtle ship, dir. Song Jeong-r yul).
This last title was an especially potent historical symbol of Korean iden-
tity. Turtle ships defeated Japanese forces during Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s inva-
sions of Korea during the sixteenth century. By taking Japan’s nationalism in
Space Battleship Yamato and reconstructing it as a Korean modality, the film
constituted a postmodern hyperbolic mimicry, which differs from Homi Bhab-
ha’s postulation of postcolonial mimicry.31 Bhabha argued that the colonized
used mimicry to emulate and “become” the colonizer. However, in the case of
Fly! Space Battleship Turtle Ship (1979, Nalara! Uju jeonham geobukseon), the re-
appropriation was to “overcome” rather than to “become.” The in/visible gaze
of the colonizer and its associated anxieties, ambiguities, and ambivalence
were here circumvented by the fact that the praxis of mimicry in South Korean
animations were unknown to both the Japanese and South Korean audiences
at the time. Unlike Bhabha’s “almost the same but not quite/not white” rela-
tion, the South Korean animators’ overdetermined and unapologetic appro-
priation of Japanese anime created a hyperbolic mode of mimicry—“not only
the same, but actually Korean”—that existed for the gratification of South
Koreans only.32
15 4 kukhee choo
Figure 7 ( left ) . Uju heukgisa (1979, Space black knight). Figure 8 ( right ) . Nalara! Uju jeon-
ham geobukseon (1979, Fly! Space battleship turtle ship). The turtle ship was the traditional
warship of the Joseon Dynasty (fifteenth to nineteenth century), which aided in the defeat of
Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s attacks on Joseon during the sixteenth century.
DISLOCATED YET SHARED IDENTITIES
Another unique case study in South Korean animation is the Kagaku ninja-
tai Gatchaman (Science ninja team Gatchaman) franchise. Gatchaman was first
broadcast on Fuji TV in 1972, and the theatrical film and second television
series were released in 1978, followed by another television series in 1979. The
1972 Gatchaman was broadcast on Korea’s TBC in 1979 under the title Doksuri
5 hyeongjae (Eagle 5 brothers) and rerun on the national broadcast station
KBS in 1990 and 1996.
There are three distinct South Korean animations that share the Gatchaman
lineage. In Cheolin 007 (1976, Iron man 007), directed by Han Ha-rim, the five
characters were decreased to four, but dressed the same as the Gatchaman char-
acters. Another related film, Kim Tae-jong’s Taegeuk sonyeon huindoksuri (1979,
Taegeuk boy white eagle), was the world’s first 3D animation feature. It required
the audience to wear special blue and red cellophane glasses. The copy line on
the poster read “Wow! Exciting! Completely three-dimensional full-length ani-
mation film that only our country’s children will get to see for the first time
h y p e r bo l i c n at i o n a l i s m 155
in the world” (emphasis added, Figure 9). Here,
we observe a solicitation of national sentiment
directed not only toward the potential viewers,
the children, but also toward the parents who
would be taking them to the theaters.
The word uri nara (our country) is a com-
mon term that South Koreans use whenever
speaking about their country among them-
selves.33 In combination with the title, the
“Taegeuk” symbol from the South Korean flag,
and a reference to the ancient traditions of
Korean spirit, the poster emphasizes that only
“uri nara” children would be able to view and
understand the animation. This appeal spoke
to both the children and their parents’ sense
of nationalistic identity. 34
Figure 9. The first 3D animation film Taegeuk Japanese animation companies outsourced
sonyeon huindoksuri (Taegeuk boy white eagle), animation to South Korean studios due to their
produced by Kim Tae-jong in 1979.
ability to create works with high production
values at efficient speeds. Therefore, many Japanese companies turned a blind
eye to the explicit copying practices carried out by their South Korean counter-
parts.35 When Samjeong Production, the South Korean subcontractor for Tat-
sunoko Production’s Gatchaman series, saw that the Korean broadcast of the
series in 1979 had become popular, they requested permission from Tatsunoko
Production to create a South Korean version for domestic audiences.36 Possibly
to maintain a good relationship, Tatsunoko Production consented to this plan.
This rare event resulted in Doksuri 5 hyeongjae, produced in 1980 by the
newcomer filmmaker Lee Gyu-hong.37 What is unique about Doksuri is the fact
that the entire production consisted of animators who were already working
on the Gatchaman series, enabling them to immediately use the resources
at hand. With a few tweaks in characters, scenes, and narratives, the South
Korean version of Doksuri became a new spin on the previous television series
and the 1978 theatrical film. Furthermore, the nationalist desire to create a
“better” version of the same narrative was actualized through Doksuri: the
South Korean artists paid more attention to details and artistry in producing
the film (Figure 11). Since Tatsunoko Production granted permission for the
production of Doksuri, this film can be considered a legitimate sequel to the
famous Gatchaman franchise. But because many regarded the film as simple
plagiarism, it has yet to be remastered and receive its due recognition.38
15 6 kukhee choo
Figure 10. Japanese Gatchaman.
Figure 11. South Korean Doksuri.
Similar practices exposed South Korean audiences to animation narra-
tives that were parallel but altered versions of Japanese counterparts. This
parallelism may be one of the primary reasons behind South Korea’s “oblivi-
ous” consumption of early Japanese television anime, rather than, as some
scholars have argued, an inherent “nationless” or “odorless” quality of anime
that disconnects it from its country of origin. It also complicates criticisms
leveled against so-called South Korean plagiarism of Japanese anime. Such
criticisms fail to take into account the multiple processes, layers, and direc-
tions of globalization which produce media that transcend spatial, textual,
and cultural boundaries.
The South Korean–produced animations functioned as nationalist media
for domestic youth audiences. Furthermore, they were virtually no different
from Japanese anime in terms of narratives and character design, paradoxi-
cally creating a dislocated yet shared animation identity. Other similar phe-
nomena include the recent development of Bucheon’s manhwa and animation
cluster center and the creation of Robot Land in Incheon, both closely tied to
South Korea’s present nation-branding strategy.39 With the 1988 Seoul Olym-
pics in mind, South Korean animation began to create local narratives that
were less influenced by Japanese productions, mostly adapted from domestic
manhwa titles. Most of the science fiction robot animations disappeared from
the South Korean landscape starting in 1987.40 Without a “rival” to mimic and
overcome, South Korean animation lost its direction and entered a transi-
tional period in its search for an identity. Nonetheless, some domestic titles
that tried to assert Korean-ness still bore a strong resemblance to popular
Japanese titles. The first “adult” animation, Blue Seagull (1994, Beullu sigeol)
corresponds to City Hunter (1987–88), and the adventure feature Jeonsa Raian
(1997, Warrior Raian) calls to mind various Japanese saga anime.
The quest for something more local resulted in a decrease in popularity.
What failed the industry was not a lack of talent but the perception by the
South Korean public that South Korean animation was childish, even shame-
ful, low-quality plagiarism. Ironically, it was these “imitations” that the South
Korean animation industry was built upon and which audiences enjoyed for
decades. To reiterate, South Korea’s seemingly gratuitous reappropriation of
Japanese animation functioned as a tool to move beyond Japanese works; the
manner in which the South Korean animators imagined they could overcome
their positions as “shadow labor” for Japanese anime was, ironically, to cre-
ate similar products. In a sense, it was not the lack of resources or talent but
rather the limited nationalistic mindset of South Korean animators that may
have restricted their creative potential.
15 8 kukhee choo
Figure 12 ( left ) . Blue Seagull (1994, Beullu sigeol). Figure 13 ( right ) . Jeonsa Raian (1997,
Warrior Raian).
What stands out in the contemporary discourse on South Korean anima-

tion is the fact that the two decades of robot animation titles that dominated
the industry were considered a disgrace and were erased, only to resurface
when the “nation” deemed it necessary. South Korea’s 2013 development of
Incheon Robot Land, a $5.6 billion theme park filled with robots from anima-
tion and live-action films, is planned to open in 2016.41 The proposed design
features a giant Robot Taekwon V statue towering over the entire theme park.
Another robot-themed park is to be developed in Masan, in the southeast
region of South Korea. The urge to envision and assert South Korea’s competi-
tiveness in a digital/robotic technological future is being manifested in the
vigorous development of these robot-related theme parks across the country.
It is only natural that South Korea looked to Robot Taekwon V when searching
for the “origin” of its national robot imagination.
In sum, South Korean animation appears to have been caught in a mire:
trying to escape, yet continuously mimicking Japanese anime, engaging in a
reactionary hyperbolic nationalism in order to “overcome” the rival within.
However, the latest movement to eliminate Robot taekweon V as a national
symbol from the Incheon Robot Land is another confirmation that South
Korea has yet to overcome and embrace its complicated animation history
vis-à-vis Japan.
Notes
1. Sun Jung describes the rising phenomena of attractive Korean male entertainers
as “Kkonminam” (Flower boy) syndrome in her article “Chogukjeok Pan-East Asian Soft
Masculinity,” in Complicated Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power, and East Asia, ed. Daniel
Black, Stephen Epstein, and Alison Tokita (Victoria, Australia: Monash University ePress,
2010), 8.1–8.16.
2. “The Association of Japanese Animations” website, http://www.aja.gr.jp/english/.
3. Kim Ho-rim, “Study on Animation Industry of Korea in the Process of Cultural
Industry” (Masters thesis, Jungang University, 2002).
4. Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 90.
5. HLKZ Television was also the fourth broadcast station established in Asia and the
fifteenth in the world. It became the public Korea Broadcast Station (KBS) in 1961. Jang-
soon Park, http://www.ibcm.tv/skin/board/register/daily_example.html.
6. Jujak, “We hangukpan dejuka osamu neun tanseng mothana?” (Why can’t there
be a Korean version of Tezuka Osamu?), December 14, 2010, Sesang modeun geot eui ribyu
website, http://zazak.tistory.com/1320.
7. See South Korea’s Digital Media Promotion Policy.
8. Kukhee Choo, “Nationalizing ‘Cool’: Japan’s Global Promotion of the Content
Industry,” in Popular Culture and the State in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Nissim Otmazgin
and Eyal Ben-Ari, 83–103 (London: Routledge, 2011).
9. John A. Lent and Kie-Un Yu, “Korean Animation: A Short but Robust Life, ” in
Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. John A. Lent, 89–100 (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 2001); Ae-Ri Yoon, “In Between the Values of the Global and the National: The
Korean Animation Industry,” in Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia,
ed. Chris Berry, Nicola Liscutin, and Jonathan D. Mackintosh, 103–16 (Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 2009).
10. Dictionary.com, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/plagiarism.
11. Marilyn Randall, Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2001), 190.
12. Ibid.
13. The first animation in the Korean peninsula was “Gae Ggum” (Dog Dream),
reported in Choseon Ilbo on November 25, 1936, http://www.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web
/view/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A0000253320.
14. Jang Sang-yong, “Pilleum/poseuteo deung enimeisheonbakmulgwan gaegwan”
(Film/poster, animation museum opens), Ilgan seupotseu (Daily Sports), October 6 2003.
15. Kim Dae-hong, “Presenting ‘OB Shinalko,’ the first Korean animation,” OhmyNews,
May 5, 2006, http://www.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/Articleview/article_print.aspx
?cntn_cd=A0000328588.
16. See the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, available
at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Basic_Relations_between_Japan_and_the
_Republic_of_Korea.
17. “Morikawa Nobuhide no sekai” website, http://www.k2.dion.ne.jp/~nersury/page
007.html#lcn002.
16 0 kukhee cho o
18. Lightning Atum is about an alien prince who comes to Earth, where he regains his
superpowers to fight against a galactic dictator.
19. Gwaesu Daejeonjaeng is a cel animation featuring characters similar to Japan’s
Godzilla and Ultraman.
20. Kim Chang-deok, “‘Taekweonbeui’ abeoji Gim Cheong-gi ‘Il Majinga bogo . . .’”
(Father of Taekwon V, after seeing Japan’s Mazinga . . .), January 26, 2013, Donga Ilbo web-
site, http://news.donga.com/3/all/20130125/52591732/1.
21. Jenka, “Gim Cheong-gi gamdok e daehan dareun saenggak” (Other thoughts on
Kim Cheong-gi), June 17, 2004, Egloos website, http://taeppo.egloos.com/96199.
22. According to Kim Chang-deok, the film attracted audiences of approximately
300,000 people in Seoul alone during its first three weeks in theaters.
23. Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park, “Technologized Tae Kwon Do Millennialism:
Robot Taekwon V and the Assertion of a Triumphant South Korean National Identity,”
Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 2, no. 2 (2010): 109–30.
24. It is unclear whether the text “to be continued in the second part” appeared on
the screen when the film was first released in the theaters in 1985. However, in the video-
cassette released in 1993, the text is embedded in the animation.
25. Kukhee Choo, “Consuming Japan: Early Korean Girls Comic Book Artists’ Resis-
tance and Empowerment,” in Complicated Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power, and East Asia,
ed. Daniel Black, Stephen Epstein, and Alison Tokita (Melbourne: University of Monash
ePress, 2010), 6.1–6.16.
26. Randall, Pragmatic Plagiarism, 3.
27. Ibid.
28. The terms “hyperbolic mimicry” and “unapologetic nationalism” may be used
interchangeably. The term “unapologetic” has been inspired by Kyung Hyun Kim’s analysis
of “apologetic” South Korean men depicted in Lee Chang-dong’s films Peppermint Candy
(1999) and Poetry (2010). According to Kim, generations of South Korean men have as-
sumed the historical and psychological burden of consecutive military dictatorships and
the Kwangju Massacre, producing “apologetic” masculinity in Lee’s films (working paper
presented at Tulane University, February 19, 2013).
29. Author’s interview, March 18, 2008.
30. Ibid.
31. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
32. Ibid., 86–92.
33. It is a term that presupposes imaginary bonds among South Koreans as well as
creating an invisible shackle that limits global mobility. Even though the term carries a
nuance that “all Koreans” are included, in fact it excludes North Korea.
34. The South Korean flag is called “Taegeuk-gi,” which means “Taegeuk flag.” The
protagonist’s belt in the animation poster has an engraved Taegeuk mark. The film begins
with the male protagonist gaining supernatural power after receiving a ginseng root from
Korea’s founding God, Dangun, and after the space aliens are defeated, Jesus appears to
bless the protagonists, creating a postmodern blurring of Eastern and Western elements.
35. Yamaguchi Yasuo, author’s interview, March 18, 2008.
36. Pennyway, “Gweajak yeoljeon No. 119” (Encyclopedic list of strange films), Penny-
way.net website, http://pennyway.net/1773.
37. Lee’s only other work was Shupeo teukgeup Majinga  (Super ultra Majinga 7), pro-
duced in 1983, which was another film influenced by Mazinger Z.
38. Pennyway, “Gweajak yeoljeon No. 119.”
39. The 364-foot Robot taekweon V statue planned to be built in Robot Land is
six times taller than the 59-foot Gundam Statue built in Odaiba, Tokyo, in 2009. Jeong
Ji-seon, “Robot Taekweon V Is Coming to Incheon?” Seoul Munhwa Today, Feb 12, 2010,
http://www.sctoday.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=4117.
40. Examples of South Korean animation from this time included stories about an
insolent baby dinosaur (1987, Agi gongryong Duli [Baby dinosaur Duli]); a rebellious girl
marathoner (1988, Dalryeora Hani [Run Hani]); and an updated version of the Monkey
King narrative (1990, Nalara supa bodeu [Fly! Superboard]), which was an overt imitation
of Toriyama Akira’s Dragon Ball (1986).
41. Bang Eun-ju, “Incheon Robot Reandeu 3 weol cheot sap ddeunda” (Inchon Robot
Land starts its project in March), January 2, 2013, ET News website, http://www.etnews
.com/news/device/device/2700526_1479.html.
16 2 kukhee choo
BRIAN RUH
Conceptualizing Anime
and the Database
Fantasyscape
In spite of the growing body of literature on anime, very few people have ex-
amined what the term denotes. Most simply equate “anime” with “Japanese
animation”; this is a relatively easy “out” in order to get past tricky questions
of definition, and one to which I must admit engaging in on occasion. For ex-
ample, in Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii, I wrote that “‘anime’
does not denote any particular style or content; it simply means animation
from Japan.”1 Carl Silvio has rightly criticized me for this overly simplistic
statement, asserting that “Ruh offers us a definition [of anime] that is vir-
tually invulnerable to refutation.”2 This definition presents something of a
problem because many fans would not consider all animation from Japan as
anime. For example, when Yamamura Kōji’s Mt. Head (2002, Atamayama) was
nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short film in 2003, it was
relatively ignored by “anime” fans. The film’s entry in the online encyclopedia
on the Anime News Network website even states “Some people would not
consider this as Anime [sic], but rather ‘Alternative Japanese Animation.’”3
This entry goes into no further detail and does not explain how “Alternative
Japanese Animation” differs from “anime,” but it seems clear that some fans
164
have drawn a line around the concept of “anime” that does not include all
animation from Japan.
A useful tool for examining the definitional limbo of the term “anime” is
Matt Hills’s study of fan cultures. In his book’s preface, Hills explicitly states
that he is taking a “suspensionist” position in which he is “approaching the
contradictions of fan cultures and cult media as essential cultural negotiations
that can only be closed down at the cost of ignoring fandom’s cultural dynam-
ics.”4 Like Hills, it is not my intention to arrive at a singular “expert” definition
of anime but to pursue how anime is discussed within English-language fan
and academic circles in order to explore how the meanings of such terms may
change over time, sometimes taking on and discarding new connotations.5
However, even within this suspensionist viewpoint, “anime” cannot mean just
anything. In order for the term to be meaningful, it needs to be given struc-
ture, even if this structure does not point in the end to a singular definition.
Before the term “anime” came into widespread use in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, such animation had often been called “Japanimation” in English.
Anime historian Fred Patten traces the first use of the word “Japanimation”
to around 1978, shortly after anime fandom became formalized with the es-
tablishment of the first U.S. anime fan club, called the Cartoon/Fantasy Or-
ganization (CFO), in May 1977.6 The term “Japanimation” began to fall from
popularity nearly a decade later—one reason was that it got too easily twisted
into a racially derogatory term by detractors (e.g. “Jap animation”). Most
people now writing use the term “anime,” save a few. Japanese media scholar
Ueno Toshiya, for instance, defends his use of the term “Japanimation,” say-
ing, “I use this term to emphasize both geography and the particularity of
its characteristic styles, for these are quite different from animations in the
general sense.”7 In this way, such animation becomes territorially marked by
the term “Japanimation”; “anime,” on the other hand, does not necessarily
carry such connotations and seems to have the potential to be a much more
fluid marker.
Some books on anime have introduced their topic of discussion in these
ways: “Japanese cartoons (more properly, anime, which simply means ‘anima-
tion’)”; “anime (Japanese animation)”; and “Japanese animation, or ‘anime,’ as
it is now usually referred to in both Japan and the West.”8 Other writers take
a different approach to examining anime. In his introduction to the edited
collection Cinema Anime, Steven T. Brown writes, “What is anime? Anime is so
multifarious in its forms and genres, its styles and audiences, that one needs
to pose the question differently: Where is the anime screen?”9 Brown’s refor-
mulated question suggests that the meaning of anime comes about through
c o n c e p t u aliz i n g a n i m e a n d t h e data ba s e fa n ta s ys ca p e 1 6 5
the process of viewing anime onscreen, wherever that may be, and, as such,
the term “anime” is situationally dependent. In this way, anime may not nec-
essarily denote animation from a specific country but rather indicates a way
of positioning images and information onscreen and how viewers interact
with them.
One might notice that all of these definitions of anime are relatively re-
cent. This is due to the fact that academics did not begin paying serious atten-
tion to it until the mid-1990s. For example, of the 814 entries in the Online
Bibliography of Anime and Manga Research in 2010, only 84 (or 10.3 percent
of the total) were published before 2000, and only one of those was published
before 1990.10 Thus, the English-language study of Japanese comics and ani-
mation is a relatively recent field, with the vast majority of the work published
in the past ten years. This growth coincides with the development and popu-
larity of anime in the United States. This popularity began to increase in the
early 1990s because of the international success of Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s Akira
(1988), the growth of fansubs (which began to be technically feasible in the
late 1980s), the founding of U.S. distribution companies like AnimEigo and
AD Vision (which were essentially founded by anime fans who became profes-
sionals) that increased anime’s presence in retail stores and on rental shelves,
and the expansion in communication on the Internet, which enabled anime
fans who did not live in Japan to be more aware of the latest developments in
anime programs, films, and culture.
That such previously debased media forms began to receive serious schol-
arly attention in the 1990s was indicative not only of a change in how media
scholars constructed objects of study but also of a new kind of Japanese power
that was seen as cultural rather than military or economic.11 There were almost
no scholarly studies of Japanese animation before the 1990s, and the first
in-depth book in English to look at Japanese animation was not published
until 1993.12 Other works that came out around this time also took Japanese
popular culture as a site of serious academic inquiry, trying to figure out the
reasons for its growing popularity. Some like Ron Tanner used discourse that
explicitly tied such pop culture imports directly to the events of World War
II (“How Japan Really Won the War”), couching the popularity of such prod-
ucts in terms of a Japanese “victory” over the United States.13 This rhetorical
metaphor of popular culture flows as conflict is a device that continues to be
employed in writing about anime. Others scholars like Annalee Newitz pos-
tulate that the content of Japanese pop culture is relatively conservative, and
that U.S. consumers have turned to Japanese products because they could not
find such entertainment in their own “politically correct” culture.14
16 6 bria n ruh
Subsequent articles on anime have touched on other issues related to the
form, from textual analyses to discussions of its global popularity. However,
as Rayna Denison points out in her examination of the anime markets in
Japan, France, and the United States with regard to Miyazaki Hayao’s film
Spirited Away (2001, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi), “Where studies of anime
as a global phenomenon do exist, they tend to understand the globalization
of anime as its Americanization.”15 Denison’s criticism is a reminder that an-
ime has traveled to many countries outside of Japan and has relatively long
histories in East Asia, Australia, and Europe.16 At the same time, though, we
need to be aware that, as Azuma Hiroki puts it, “the history of otaku culture
is one of adaptation—of how to ‘domesticate’ American culture.”17 Therefore,
although anime is global, it is important to pay particular attention to the
cultural and economic exchanges between Japan and the United States in
order to understand the form’s development.
ANIME IN A GLOBAL FRAMEWORK
It is the intersection of U.S. and Japanese popular culture that seems to be

driving much of anime’s popularity. A related term that often comes up in
discussions of anime is mukokuseki. Both Susan J. Napier and Koichi Iwabuchi
reference the term in their respective studies of how Japanese popular culture
flows transnationally, although each gives a slightly different interpretation
of its meaning. Napier describes the term as “meaning ‘stateless’ or essen-
tially without national identity,” while Iwabuchi writes that the term is used
“to suggest the mixing of elements of multiple cultural origins, and to imply
the erasure of visible ethnic and cultural characteristics.”18 Probably the most
salient reference point for anime’s mukokuseki nature is the physical appear-
ance of many anime characters. Even when an anime series is supposed to
take place in Japan, often many of the characters do not look “Japanese.” This
leads some critics to assert that anime is symptomatic of a general Japanese
cultural inferiority vis-à-vis the United States.19 Although it is true that such
anime characters do not necessarily adhere to the usual Japanese phenotype,
it would be false to infer that, because of this, such characters look “Western”
or “Caucasian.” Rather, the characters look nationless and are drawn as rep-
resentations of the human body that can be more or less abstracted depend-
ing on the creator as well as narrative and genre tropes. For example, Mizuki
Takahashi chronicles the development of style in Japanese girls’ comics and
asserts that the large eyes found in such manga are used to portray emotion
c o n c e p t u alizi n g a n i m e a n d t h e data ba s e fa n ta s ys ca p e 16 7
and to elicit an emotional response from the reader.20 The use of such mu-
kokuseki characters has two main results. One, according to Napier, is that
mukokuseki-ness is a way for contemporary Japanese to playfully escape their
own concepts of Japan and their own feelings of Japaneseness. That is to say,
fantasized mukokuseki anime bodies can be free from the cultural and societal
baggage of physical bodies; this characteristic works not only for Japanese
consumers who wish to “try on” different identities but also for non-Japanese
viewers as well—some of whom may very well wish to play with the idea of
having a Japanese identity. The second result is that such programs in which
the characters appear nationally and culturally unmarked are much easier to
export to other countries, where they can be relocalized by the importer.
This brings up one of the main ironies regarding anime’s mukokuseki na-
ture: its style allows it to travel transnationally with relative ease, while at
the same time such “stateless” anime has become to represent Japan and has
attracted international fans to the study of Japanese language and culture.
Iwabuchi sees Japan’s mukokuseki popular culture to have been stripped of
elements identifying such products as Japanese. Because of this, he wonders
if the newfound global appreciation of Japanese popular culture is in fact
a yearning for “an animated, race-less and culture-less, virtual version of
‘Japan’” and theorizes that “what is experienced through Japanese popular
culture is actually a highly materialistic Japanese version of the American
‘original.’”21 Because, according to Iwabuchi, such popular culture goods lack
a strong “cultural odor” marking them as Japanese, the current discourse in
Japan and elsewhere celebrating Japan’s increasing global cultural power is
somewhat misguided. However, returning to my introduction of Matt Hills’s
“suspensionist” approach to fan studies, I think holding the contradictions
inherent in mukokuseki anime in suspension without trying to make them
resolve into a singular conclusion is a useful approach. Anime may not nec-
essarily carry with it markers of an “authentic” Japan (however this may be
construed), but in practice many people now associate these “stateless” anime
programs with ideas of Japan, and in this way the culturally “unmarked” an-
ime becomes “marked” as Japanese not because of necessary elements within
the text, but because of how anime has become a part of popular discourse.
In order to see how anime became a hybrid mukokuseki media product,
it is necessary to briefly examine the historical roots of animation in Japan.
Daisuke Miyao gives an account of anime’s early antecedents, which are lo-
cated in the Pure Film Movement, an effort in Japan in the 1910s that tried
to establish film as its own medium, as distinct from literature and live the-
atrical drama.22 This move was a rejection of previous “theatrical” methods of
16 8 bria n ruh
its style allows it to
Japanese cinematic communication in favor of
travel transnationally
American and European techniques. Much of
with relative ease, while
the imported animation first shown in Japan
at the same time such
in 1909 was from France and served as a model
“stateless” anime has
for subsequent Japanese experiments. Since
become to represent
efforts in animation were inherently nonthe-
Japan and has attracted
atrical, Miyao suggests that the early Japanese
international fans to the
animators may have fulfilled the goals of the
study of Japanese
Pure Film Movement better than many of the
language and culture.
live-action filmmakers.23 However, there were
debates over the form and content of anima-
tion among some in the movement due to the fact that one of its intended
results was to bring Japanese film into line with other global cinema. Mi-
yao writes that although some in the movement “insisted on the necessity of
Japanese stories and landscapes in order to differentiate the Japanese product
for the foreign market, many opted nonetheless for subjects and stories that
would be comprehensible to audiences accustomed to Western films.”24 One
can see even at this early stage of animation in Japan the tension between
making a recognizably Japanese product and an easily exportable global one.
This is because in order to be recognized as a Japanese film by the rest of the
world, early Japanese cinema had to become less “Japanese,” or as Darrell Wil-
liam Davis puts it, “To become Japanese, Japanese cinema had to make over-
tures to foreign recognition as a prelude to the seduction of foreign markets.
The films had to shed their provincial trappings and put on the ‘high class’
garb . . . of the universal commodity.”25 That is to say, Japanese cinema had to
become more familiar and commodifiable to a global audience by incorporat-
ing the increasingly standardized language of cinema in order to be perceived
as Japanese. In some ways this is exactly what happened with anime—in
order to create a space for Japanese animation to thrive, it needed to secure
its own marketplace niche by first becoming less Japanese and more “global.”
It was only after that that the form could be recognized as Japanese.
THE DATABASE FANTASYSCAPE
As we can see from the previous discussion of anime, to a certain extent it

is relatively futile to force a singular definition of “anime.” We can analyze
the discourse surrounding the term, as above, which can bring us toward an
understanding of how anime has been conceptualized, but this still gets us
no closer to a discussion of how something like anime moves transnationally.
This is the main question on which I want to focus—the “how” rather than
the “what” of media globalization.
As mentioned above, the idea of mukokuseki explains in part how certain
aspects of anime could cross national boundaries by seeming culturally un-
specific. However, the biggest problem with this way of thinking about global
media is that it ignores the fact that nothing can ever really be nationless
since, as mentioned above, nothing really has pure national characteristics.
Thinking about a media product like anime in such a way sets the stage for
our discussion of what enables the products of popular culture, like anime,
to flow and flourish outside of their native (and ostensibly intended) viewing
community. The framework I have developed for analyzing this transnational
media movement is called the “database fantasyscape.” This framework melds
two different ideas, by Azuma Hiroki and Susan J. Napier respectively, into an
overall way of thinking about the flow of contemporary media. My analysis of
anime is an example of a general trend in contemporary media that blurs the
boundaries between different forms.
The “database” part of this concept comes from the writings of media
theorist Azuma Hiroki on otaku media, in which he postulates a “shift from
the supremacy of narrative to the supremacy of characters.”26 This focus on
“characters” does not, however, mean more attention is being paid to charac-
terization. In fact, it is just the opposite—instead of complex, well-rounded
characters in stories, this shift toward “characters” signals an increased em-
phasis on affective elements such as characters’ looks, personality traits, and
other archetypes that can be easily recognized and transferred from medium
to medium. As Azuma writes, “many of the otaku characters created in recent
years are connected to many characters across individual works, rather than
emerging from a single author or work.”27 Therefore, Azuma formulates the
concept of what he calls “database consumption,” since to consume a modern
anime product “is not simply to consume a work (a small narrative) or a world-
view behind it (a grand narrative), nor to consume characters and settings (a
grand non-narrative). Rather, it is linked to consuming the database of otaku
culture as a whole.”28 This type of consumption also influences how one reads
contemporary anime texts. Thomas Lamarre has written that “limited anima-
tion [of the type commonly associate with anime] . . . shaped a new kind of
viewing and consuming, one that entails scanning, re-reading, searching in-
formation, discerning technical innovation, and so forth. In other words, one
might say that anime generated a viewer experience that was very much like
an experience of informatization itself.”29 Thus, in Lamarre’s perspective, how
17 0 bria n ruh
we view and process media like anime have strongly influenced how we inter-
act with and evaluate information in general. This is a powerful assertion and
indicates the degree to which anime can give rise to the “anime-ic,” a term that
can be used to describe the tendency toward anime or anime-like characteris-
tics. My concept of the anime-ic derives strongly from Thomas Looser’s work,
in which he writes of anime, “the insistence on multiple layers, consisting of
mixed styles and mixed media each with their own particular orientations,
brought together on a single plane without any one point of origin that would
fix the relations between them . . . this, I think, is a productive approach to
anime and, more generally, to an understanding of the everyday in the latter
part of the twentieth century.”30 In other words, an anime-ic space is a space
containing multiple (not unified) points of view that lacks a fixed perspec-
tive. The term anime-ic can be used to describe off-screen spaces as well as
onscreen ones and does not necessarily dictate that such spaces be animated.
In this way, anime not only becomes something to view onscreen but a way
of organizing and conceptualizing the world around us and the information it
contains. Thinking of spaces as anime-ic is a potentially useful way to describe
the diffusion of animated spaces away from the screen and into interactions
with off-screen spaces. To describe a certain space as “anime-ic” is not neces-
sarily to ascribe some inherent quality to the space as much as it is to describe
a way of thinking about and experiencing that space.
The “fantasyscape” part of the “database fantasyscape” comes from
Susan J. Napier’s discussion of the development and transnational flow of
anime.31 In her formulation, what she calls the “fantasyscape” can be seen as
a useful addition to Arjun Appadurai’s idea of the five global flows—the eth-
noscape, financescape, technoscape, mediascape, and ideoscape.32 However,
although Napier originated the concept of the fantasyscape, her book does
not fully unpack the term. However, it is a useful tool that fits into Appadu-
rai’s model and allows us to envision global flows in ways that might help us
to see clearly things that may have been otherwise opaque.
The absence of a specific fantasy dimension to Appadurai’s theoretical
framework is very interesting because he begins the personal narrative in
the first chapter of Modernity at Large by sketching out the fantasies of his
youth. These fantasies came to Appadurai in various forms, including maga-
zines, films, clothing, and even deodorant. In this short narrative, the reader
can begin to sense the multifaceted ways in which a young Appadurai was
confronted and enticed by these small things, none of which had critical
importance in themselves but which all contributed to feeling “modernity
as embodied sensation.”33 Appadurai goes on to state the importance that
c o n c e p t u aliz i n g a n i m e a n d t h e data ba s e fa n ta s ys ca p e 17 1
imagination has in his work. Indeed, as in the imagined communities of Bene-
dict Anderson, Appadurai places a great deal of emphasis on the function-
ing of what he calls the “work of the imagination,” which is “neither purely
emancipatory nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which
individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of
the modern.”34
However, one of the reasons there may not be a specific fantasyscape
in Appadurai’s formulation is that he seems to take a relatively dim view of
fantasy as compared to the imagination, and he makes distinctions between
the functions of the two. He seems to consider fantasy as essentially impotent
and inward looking, while imagination is a catalyst for action and outward
looking. He writes that “the idea of fantasy carries with it the inescapable
connotation of thought divorced from projects and actions, and it also has a
private, even individualistic sound about it . . . [it] can dissipate (because its
logic is often so autotelic), but the imagination, especially when collective,
can become the fuel for action.”35 In other words, the purpose of fantasy is
fantasy itself, while the purpose of imagination is to conceive of how things
could be better.
I am not going to dispute Appadurai’s division of mental labor between
the fantasy and the imagination, but I do want to argue with the duties he
extracts from them. Even if fantasy is inherently directed toward one’s self,
that certainly does not mean it can be divorced from outward behaviors. I
would argue that it was fantasy, not imagination, that provided Appadurai’s
“embodied sensation” of modernity. In many cases it is the pull of fantasy that
spurs people to action; in the case of anime fans, this might include buying
DVDs, reading manga, downloading programs online, learning Japanese, at-
tending conventions, and even traveling to Japan. Even though fantasy may
be directed inward, it does have very real outward results that can be felt in
social and economic ways. Therefore, how these fantasies travel around the
world is an important consideration when thinking about Appadurai’s theory
of global flows.
Merging Azuma’s database concept and Napier’s fantasyscape concept
to examine the flow of media provides a useful way of thinking about how
a media phenomenon like anime spreads. It is transmedia storytelling in a
global context. If we can stretch the database metaphor, we might be able to
think about the flow of anime, even within Japan, as similar to how data is
transmitted via the Internet. Just as a Web page or an e-mail is broken into
simpler parts, transmitted, and reconstituted at its endpoint (a drastic over-
simplification, of course), an anime series is broken into smaller elements
17 2 bria n ruh
both textual and extratextual—characters, dialogue, scenes, episodes, DVDs,
and so on—in order to make the journey. However, the reconstitution process
for cultural products is much more variable than that of an e-mail because
these different parts do not necessarily all flow at the same rate, and, due to
reasons both commercial and cultural, the final product often does not look
the same as its initial formulation. The reason some of
the database elements flow and others do not depends
Merging Azuma’s
to a significant degree on certain cultural norms, ide-
database concept
als, and fantasies, and how these individual and collec-
and Napier’s
tive fantasies play out on multiple levels.
fantasyscape
Fantasyscape is how the database travels. It is both
concept to examine
the conduit that conducts certain of the database ele-
the flow of media
ments as well as how the pieces are understood. Data
provides a useful
base provides an immediate apprehension that may
way of thinking
directly influence how we choose what we watch and
about how a media
how we watch it.
phenomenon like
Bringing my own experience to bear, there are
anime spreads.
many anime series and films that I do not watch be-
cause I can tell immediately from the art (character
designs, backgrounds, style of animation, and so on) that it will not be to
my taste. This is not simply a bias against a type of design or animation. The
elements of animated art serve as stylistic shorthand that can communicate
to the viewer certain aspects of what the show might be like and allows for
a more successful navigation of animated “waters.” Of course, as with any
form of shorthand, mistakes can be made and elements can be misread. But,
in general, what happens when someone creates a new anime series or film is
that one is not only trying to create something new but is also engaging many
decades of animated history that have given rise to certain taste formations
within the anime-watching community. This large amount of history is the
database that can be selectively referenced. The database is inescapable; even
if a creator is not trying to reference previous anime or manga, the viewers
may bring these database assumptions with them when engaging the works
of the creator.
The database fantasyscape engages with Henry Jenkins’s idea of me-
dia convergence, which, he writes, “represents a cultural shift as consumers
are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among
dispersed media content.”36 In other words, Jenkins argues that contempo-
rary media convergence owes in part to consumers taking in diverse media
sources and piecing them together based on their own personal experiences.
One might rightly wonder, though, how such “dispersed media content” came
about in the first place. For example, in the case of an anime film or televi-
sion program, why are viewers encouraged to read the manga and light novels
(which may or may not have preceded the animation), play the video games,
purchase the supplementary DVDs, and collect the figurines? I believe the
answer lies in the idea of the database fantasyscape and that ability of both
producers and consumers to apportion a work into its component pieces,
which are then available for reuse and movement into other media and across
national borders.
Notes
1. Brian Ruh, Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), 1.
2. Carl Silvio, “Animated Bodies and Cybernetic Selves: The Animatrix and the Ques-
tion of Posthumanity,” in Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation, ed.
Steven T. Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 135.
3. “Mt. Head,” Anime News Network, http://www.animenewsnetwork.com
/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=2275.
4. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002), xiii (emphasis in original).
5. A discussion of the boundaries of “anime” in the Japanese-language context is
unfortunately beyond the scope of this article.
6. Fred Patten, Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews
(Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2004), 24–25.
7. Toshiya Ueno, “Techno-Orientalism and Media-Tribalism: On Japanese Anima-
tion and Rave Culture,” Third Text 47 (1999): 97.
8. Patrick Drazen, Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! of Japanese Animation
(Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2003), vii; Antonia Levi, Samurai from Outer Space:
Understanding Japanese Animation, (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), ix; Susan J. Napier, Anime
from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3.
9. Steven T. Brown, “Screening Anime,” in Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with
Japanese Animation, ed. Steven T. Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 2.
10. Mikhail Koulikov, “Online Bibliography of Anime and Manga Research,” http://
www.corneredangel.com/amwess/acad_1.html.
11. Douglas McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” Foreign Policy (June/July 2002):
44–54.
12. Helen McCarthy, Anime! A Beginner’s Guide to Japanese Animation (London: Titan
Books, 1993).
13. Ron Tanner, “Toy Robots in America, 1955–75: How Japan Really Won the War,”
Journal of Popular Culture 28, no. 3 (1994): 125–54.
14. Annalee Newitz, “Magical Girls and Atomic Bomb Sperm: Japanese Animation in
America,” Film Quarterly 49 no. 1 (1995): 2–15. Newitz’s article was written before a turn
174 bria n ruh

in the late 1990s to more “politically incorrect” entertainment; in the case of U.S. anima-
tion, probably best represented by shows like South Park (1997–present) and Family Guy
(1999–2002, 2005–present).
15. Rayna Denison, “The Global Markets for Anime: Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away
(2001),” in Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, eds. Alastair Philips and Julian Stringer
(Routledge: New York, 2007), 308.
16. See Marco Pellitteri, The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies, and Identities of
Japanese Imagination: A European Perspective (Latina, Italy: Tunue, 2010).
17. Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and
Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 13.
18. Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, 24. Koichi Iwabuchi, Recenter-
ing Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 71.
19. Sato Kenji, “More Animated Than Life: Ethnic Bleaching in Japanese Anime,”
Kyoto Journal 41 (1999): 22–27.
20. Mizuki Takahashi, “Opening the Closed World of Shōjo Manga,” in Japanese
Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, ed. Mark W. MacWilliams
(Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2008): 114–36; Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 33.
21. Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 33, 35.
22. Daisuke Miyao, “Before Anime: Animation and the Pure Film Movement in Pre-war
Japan,” Japan Forum 14, no. 2 (2002): 191–209.
23. Ibid., 197–98.
24. Ibid., 200.
25. Darrell William Davis, Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity,
Japanese Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 28.
26. Hiroki Azuma, “The Animalization of Otaku Culture,” trans. Yuriko Furuhata and
Marc Steinberg, Mechademia 2 (2007): 181.
27. Azuma, Otaku, 49.
28. Ibid., 54.
29. Thomas Lamarre, “From Animation to Anime: Drawing Movements and Moving
Drawings,” Japan Forum 14, no. 2 (2002): 337.
30. Thomas Looser, “From Edogawa to Miyazaki: Cinematic and Anime-ic Architec-
tures of Early and Late Twentieth-Century Japan,” Japan Forum 14, no. 2 (2002): 310.
31. Susan J. Napier, From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the
Mind of the West (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
32. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
33. Ibid., 2.
34. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 4.
35. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 7.
36. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York:
New York University Press, 2006), 3.
c o n c e p t u alizi n g a n i m e a n d t h e data ba s e fa n ta s ys ca p e 17 5
Rescripting History
LAURA MILLER
Rebranding Himiko,
the Shaman Queen of
Ancient History
While doing fieldwork on the divination industry in Tokyo, I discovered a

place where a specialist offered tarot card readings using the famed 1889 Tarot
de Marseille deck. In order to get an interview I went to her place of busi-
ness, located in a decrepit office building in Shibuya. She greeted me at the
entryway together with her officemate, a woman named Yasuko. Yasuko was
also in the divination business and told me she was carrying on a tradition
established by the first great Japanese shaman, Himiko, a third-century CE
ruler described only briefly by Chinese historians. Why does a contemporary
divination professional feel the need to link divination entrepreneurship to
an ancient sovereign? Yasuko is not alone in her fascination with Himiko, and
it is this interest in a historical figure about whom we know very little that I
wish to explore in this essay.
Other visions of Himiko’s persona are less inspiring than Yasuko’s. Some
manga and anime creators portray Himiko as a presumptuous tyrant, promis-
cuous sorceress, or vain hag unworthy of power. At first glance these disparate
perceptions seem to have no relationship to each other. Was Himiko a dia-
bolical dictator, a talented witch, or an adorable shrine attendant? Do people
see in Himiko a sexy manipulator or a spiritual mastermind? Interpretations
179
Representations of
vary depending on the goals and attitudes held
Himiko are rarely
by creators of her image, particularly their ideas
neutral, as most entail
about female power. Women such as Yasuko view
encoding of selected
Himiko as a metaphor for female agency and in-
assumptions about
nate occult abilities. Other popular culture pro-
ancient history and
ducers see in Himiko an aberrant and unwise
female authority.
attribution of political authority to women. As
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich pointed out, the figure of
Joan of Arc has been many things across the years, including witch, virgin,
heretic, whore, transvestite, peasant, and saint.1 A woman demonized in one
era might be venerated in another. Himiko also reflects this type of shifting
assessment, often holding contrasting personas within the same time period.
My aim is not to engage in recuperation of Himiko as a positive origin
symbol but rather to survey the diversity in uses of her image. She is put to
service for civic boosterism, national-identity construction, and to legitimize
the divination enterprise. Some of the more interesting images of Himiko are
also the most challenging to understand. Representations of Himiko are rarely
neutral, as most entail encoding of selected assumptions about ancient his-
tory and female authority. This essay will review some ways she is depicted in
literary treatments and in visual culture, where she appears as shaman priest-
ess, alluring ruler, and dangerous witch. I draw on history and popular culture
texts to trace how the hazy yet tantalizing aspects of her story make her an
appealing icon easily available to serve a range of interests. The iconography
depends on who is looking at Himiko and for what purposes they include her
in their project.
HIMIKO’S ORIGIN STORY
Himiko might be the subject of more media than any other woman in Japa-
nese history. She fascinates not only scholars but anyone interested in Japa-
nese history and identity. She was described in ethnographic chronicles about
Japan written by third-century Chinese, yet is not named in the earliest Japa-
nese mythological histories, the Kojiki (712, Record of ancient matters) and
the Nihongi (720, Chronicles of Japan, alternate title Nihon shoki). Because the
Japanese compilers of these mytho-histories consulted much earlier Chinese
sources that contained details about Himiko, it is clear they intentionally ex-
cised her name. No doubt, acknowledging Himiko’s role would have interfered
with their ideological project to establish a patrilineal kinship group as the
18 0 la ura mille r
divinely ordained rulers. One outcome of this discrepancy, however, is that
Himiko’s biography has been the subject of extremely broad interpretation.
In one of the early Chinese histories, the Wei zhi (Records of Wei) book of
the Sanguozhi (Records of the Three Kingdoms), compiled by historian Chen
Shou (233–97), there is a section on Japan entitled “Account of the Eastern
Barbarians” that describes Himiko with some intriguing information.2 She
was the ruler of a confederation of chiefdoms, was the recipient of a return
gift of one hundred Chinese bronze mirrors from the Wei court, was mature
in age yet remained unmarried, and was a shaman who was buried in a lavish
tomb. There have been centuries of speculation and theorizing about Himiko
and the polity she ruled, which the Wei zhi called Yamatai. The people of Hi-
miko’s time spoke an unknown proto-Japanese language that was transliter-
ated by Chinese scribes using a third-century form of classical Chinese. I use
the modern version of her name as a placeholder for what her actual name
may have been.
Himiko assumed leadership of the Yamatai confederation in 190 CE, when
she was a young woman, and ruled until her death in 248. Current scholarship
is a hotbed of debate, but one camp supports the theory that she was a royal
princess known as Yamato-t otohi-m omoso-hime-no-mikoto.3 She may be bur-
ied in the Hashihaka Kofun (Chopstick Tomb), located in Sakurai city in Nara
Prefecture, evidently the oldest tomb of its type and size. This time frame pro-
vides another reason the representations of Himiko can be so diverse. Himiko
lived during a transitional period between the Yayoi (usually 300 BCE–250 CE,
but may be earlier) and Kofun (250–538) eras. The evolution from late Yayoi to
early Kofun is generally based on the presence of huge mounded tombs in a
distinctive keyhole shape, of which Hashihaka Kofun is the earliest. However,
clothing styles and other forms of material culture changed gradually over the
nearly six-hundred-year span of the Yayoi and Kofun periods, so artists and
illustrators of Himiko often conflate these periods in their representations.
HIMIKO’S MAGIC AND RULERSHIP
The precise nature of Himiko’s power and her status in the court hierarchy of
her Yamatai kinsmen is the subject of conflicting conjecture. The majority of
scholars accept the Wei zhi account that she was selected by her people to be
their ruler and that her reign initiated a new cultural era. Images of Himiko
often include objects from archeological sites and tombs of the Kofun pe-
riod. Her principal ritual accoutrements most likely included items found in
re b ran din g h im i ko , t h e s h a m a n q u e e n o f a n ci e n t h i s to ry 18 1
the archeological record, such as Chinese bronze mirrors, swords, distinctive
comma-shaped beads known as magatama, and a special type of bronze bell,
called a dōtaku, which characterized Yayoi sites but which was not included in
the Kofun-era repertoire of ritual objects.4 As Ishino Hironobu has discussed,
it is right after Himiko’s accession to power that dōtaku begin to be discarded,
broken, and burned; thus they “tell a tale of rejection” of the ritual objects as-
sociated with rulers who preceded her.5 Nevertheless, manga, anime, museum
exhibits, and book illustrations often depict Himiko with dōtaku. For example,
in the Osaka Prefectural Museum of Yayoi Culture, a painting by the artist
Einaga Dajirō shows Himiko as a young woman wearing a simple white kosode
(the basic unisex robe form) with a red sash and underskirt, embellished with
two strands of green magatama and holding both a Chinese bronze mirror and
a rod of office. Next to her are two large dōtaku bells.6
The Chinese bronze mirrors associated with Himiko were part of her rit-
ual set and not simply precious exchange goods. These round cast-metal ob-
jects had a polished reflecting surface on one side and an intricately decorated
back with ridged rims and a protuberant knob in the middle. The mirrors were
held in the hand by the knob or a cord drawn through it. If we find an image
of a woman wearing ancient clothing and holding a bronze mirror, it is safe to
assume that we might be looking at an image of Himiko. An example of this
framing of Himiko is found in a manga history series of fifty notable Japanese
figures (Figure 1).7 Himiko inaugurates the series, and although she is shown
wearing clothing that seems more like that from the Jōmon era (13,000–300
BCE), she has a bronze mirror clasped to her chest.8 Her hair is in the looped
fashion called mizura, seen in Kofun-era imagery and described in the Wei zhi
as being for men. She wears an elaborate diadem with a sunburst motif.
The descriptions of Himiko in the Wei zhi indicate that she was a sha-
man, a ritual specialist able to communicate with the supernatural realm af-
ter achieving an altered state of consciousness. There are various techniques
for arriving at this trance state, including ascetic practices, ingesting drugs,
and ecstatic dancing. Accounts of ancient history written in Japan occasion-
ally lack a comparative perspective, ignoring the fact that the shaman role is
rather common in the global ethnographic record, and that female shamans
are the norm in East Asia.9 We know from history and ethnography that fe-
male shamans in Japan received great respect from their local communities.10
In regards to Himiko’s form of shamanship, the Wei zhi described it as guidao
(Japanese kidō), a term generally used to mean Daoist folk practices. The
literal translation, “way of demons,” refers to the shaman’s ability to make
contact with dead spirits. Contemporary image creators often interpret this
18 2 la ura mille r
term negatively as “black magic” practiced by a calculating witch, but not al-
ways: a recent book entitled Gakkō de oshiete kurenai: Hontō no Nihonshi (2012,
You aren’t taught this in school: The real history of Japan), makes the point
that kidō is merely shamanism that involves serving as an oracle. Himiko, a
smart cookie and a “charisma queen,” is illustrated in the book as a racially
ambiguous woman with long hair encircled by an ornate crown and holding
an evergreen sakaki branch.11 This positive image of Himiko practicing “good”
magic, however, is balanced by equally negative imagery of her entanglement
in murky and mysterious forms of kidō.
In Himiko’s case, some scholars also see a close association between her
and snake cults and deities, as well as the imported Chinese cult of the Queen
Mother of the West.12 Interestingly, few manga or anime make reference to
these themes. When the illustrator of Himiko wants to emphasize her nature
as a religious leader, she is most often shown holding a bronze mirror or a
sakaki branch (Figure 2). Within Shintō, sakaki is one of the trees associated
with ritual and practice. The thick-leaved, dark evergreen branches are used to
adorn shrines and sacred spaces, as purification tools, and as props in ritual
Figure 1 ( left ) . Cover of Fujiwara Kamui’s Himiko: Shūkan manga Nihonshi (2009, Himiko: Weekly manga
history of Japan). Figure 2 ( right ) . Cover of Gakken manga new Nihon no rekishi (2012, Gakken’s new manga
history of Japan), by Ōishi Manabu, Takano Kazuhiro, and Himekawa Akira.
re b ran din g h imi ko , t h e s h a m a n q u e e n o f a n ci e n t h i s to ry 18 3

dancing. A wonderful example is a fan drawing of Himiko submitted to the
website sponsored by Nico Nico Seiga, where amateurs share illustrations. On
the pages tagged with the name Himiko, there is one that represents a typical
manga schoolgirl with huge eyes and long hair embellished with an enormous
puffy red bow. Over a cushiony red skirt she is wearing a robe edged with
Yayoi-style geometric designs, and she is waving a healthy branch of sakaki.13
Himiko is also the subject of numerous other fan art websites, where she gets
similarly “cutified” and infantilized.
WHAT DID HIMIKO REALLY LOOK LIKE?
In popular depictions of Himiko like the one described above, how much has
a basis in the historical record, and how much is simply imagined? In Himiko
iconography there are many productive elements that manga artists, illustra-
tors, museum curators, and costume designers have available to draw on for
creative expression. One can imagine her wardrobe, her hairstyle, and also
the possible ritual paraphernalia she held or owned. As noted above, the great
diversity in Himiko styles reflects her position as a transitional figure between
two eras. Even so, as a late Yayoi queen who ushered in the new Kofun cultural
milieu, she probably wore continental-inspired fashion, most likely a one-
piece, wide-sleeved kosode, under a vest-like garment, as well as a skirt, a belt,
and a sash. The sash is seen on female shamans depicted on haniwa (clay cylin-
ders with figures of people, animals, and objects on them, implanted around
the burial mound). Most illustrators depict Himiko bejeweled with strands of
beads, especially magatama. But her hairstyle seems to pose a special problem
for the imagination. Did she wear it straight and long or tied up in the mizura
fashion? Haniwa figures of female shamans show them with hair tied up and
topped with flat hats.
There are archeological remains of looms, shuttles, and spindle whorls
from the Yayoi era, so we know people made interesting textiles. Some of the
cloth was made of hemp, flax, ramie, and silk. Immigrants from the Korean
peninsula entered the Japanese islands in waves during the Yayoi and Kofun
eras, armed with the latest weaving technology. Himiko, according to the Wei
zhi, sent gift textiles as part of her tribute to the Wei court, and in return she
received crimson brocade, white silk, and dark blue brocade. She may have had
a bronze mirror hanging from her belt, as well as jingle bells. There is no way
to tell whether Himiko wore a simple cloth headband or an elaborate diadem.
Both are found in manga, anime, and historical illustrations.
18 4 la ura mille r
Many of the precise illustrations and museum displays of what Himiko
might have worn reproduce inferences made by costume historians such as
Takeda Sachiko, a professor at Osaka University, who based her reconstruc-
tions on late Kofun haniwa, and Asuka-era (538–710) textiles and paintings.
Her reconstructions are among the most widely known and show Himiko
wearing an elaborate “treasure crown.” Historical painter Yasuda Yukihiro
contributed another popular Himiko image in 1968. His modern painting is
part of the collection in the Museum of Modern Art, Shiga, and depicts a
fleshy, mature Himiko in a headdress decorated with a gold phoenix and rays,
wearing a small bead necklace with magatama, and holding a rod of office. Her
deep orange robes are decorated with a design of paired fish.
POSITIVE IMAGES OF HIMIKO AND

POSTWAR CIVIC IDENTITY
Beyond (but related to) her appearance, the other interesting thing to look
at in depictions of Himiko, is the characterization of her political authority,
which connects in an interesting way with Himiko’s role as a symbol of local
civic engagement.
A popular depiction of Himiko that emphasizes her authority is Ishi-
nomori Shōtarō’s 1997 manga history of Japan. His story of Himiko begins
when she is a serious young woman intensely lobbied by male elders to take
on leadership of their warring chiefdoms. She wears a simple kosode covered
by a long-sleeved white tunic tied in the front with a white sash. Her white
headband is knotted into bows on either side of her head. Around her neck
is a strand of magatama beads, while in her hand is a sakaki branch. In the
scene where she assumes queenship, she announces to the crowd standing
below her elevated Yayoi-style palace: “From now on all the chiefdoms will
cease fighting. My heart will reflect the mind of the deities.”14 Ishinomori’s
Himiko is given the mandate to rule because of her great spiritual authority.
He uses the term matsurigoto, an ancient word for governance, to reinforce
that Himiko was both a secular and religious leader.
Another powerful image of Himiko appears in a surprising context, a
manga by the ultraconservative manga artist Kobayashi Yoshinori. His politi-
cal manga Shin tennōron (2010, A new theory of the emperor) contains draw-
ings of a sober, commanding Himiko.15 She looks intent as she stands near
a blazing fire and brandishes a tortoise plastron above her head, indicating
a type of divination called scapulamancy. Scapulamancy is the interpretation
re b ran din g h imi ko , t h e s h a m a n q u e e n o f a n ci e n t h i s to ry 1 8 5

of cracks on charred shoulder bones of deer and wild boar, a term generally
extended to include turtle shells. Unlike the corresponding practice in China
there was no writing on them.
Departing from the right wing’s usual fierce support for a male-only impe-
rial line, Kobayashi makes a case that Japan should change its succession law
to allow a female Emperor. He mentions her as an early shaman, writing that
although her female power is “primitive,” it is close to the gods.
The issue of Himiko’s political authority and her role as a unifier maps
intriguingly onto the landscape of postwar Japan’s local politics and gender
politics. To examine this we first need to ask where Himiko was from. One of
the thorniest issues surrounding Himiko is the location of her realm. Over the
centuries, two different theories locating Yamatai have vied for prominence—
one placing it in north Kyūshū and another locating it in the Kinki region near
present-day Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, and Kobe. Archaeological discoveries since
the end of the Pacific War have contributed to the dispute. The discovery of
a late Yayoi site in Yoshinogari, Saga Prefecture (Kyūshū), in 1986 generated
renewed interest in Himiko. For example, the famous literary figure Saegusa
Kazuko claims in the afterward to her novel about Himiko that she was in-
spired by the discovery of the Yoshinogari ruins to tackle this subject. In her
story, Himiko is a rustic Yayoi-era shaman who eventually goes blind.16
Yoshinogari archeologists unearthed fabulous Korean-style daggers,
molds, weapons, and tools in what was a vast settlement with massive el-
evated stockades. A bestselling 1967 book Maboroshi no Yamataikoku (1967,
The illusive country of Yamatai), about a retired man’s fanatical hunt for Hi-
miko, supported the Kyūshū theory.17 In the film version of the book, released
in 2008, the beloved actress Yoshinaga Sayuri played the part of a dignified
Queen Himiko. Yoshinaga’s intelligent, calm visage and Juno-esque appear-
ance has become an enduring model of Himiko.18 According to one source,
Yoshinaga herself contributed ideas to the design of the costume, which re-
quired a team of twenty to create.19 Yoshinaga’s hair is worn long, covered by a
headband with attached jewels dangling to her shoulders, and draped around
her neck is a strand of beads interspersed with green magatama. Her white
kosode with pale dusky rose details cost ten million yen to create. Yoshinaga’s
performance as Himiko has a staying power akin to Elizabeth Taylor’s role as
Cleopatra. This image is so endearing it was selected for a set of commemo-
rative stamps released in 2008. It also appears on many Kyūshū goods and
products, such as Sun Brewing’s special release of Kagoshima shōchū named
“Himiko Fantasia” (Figure 3).
Himiko is a rich resource for regional groups in need of a city mascot,
18 6 la ura miller
Himiko is a rich resource
beauty contest theme, or touristic motif. The
for regional groups in
debate over the location of Yamatai provides
need of a city mascot,
an opening for several cities to claim her as
beauty contest theme,
their very own icon that represents both local
or touristic motif.
identity and historical authenticity. She fulfills
this civic duty in multiple ways. She is featured
in parades and floats and her statue is placed in prominent positions.20 Cities
continue to jockey for recognition as the birthplace of Himiko, even though
the newest archaeology supports a Nara basin location for her capital. One
of the loudest claims emanates from the city of Yoshinogari in Kyūshū. The
city hosts an annual Fire Festival that climaxes with a dramatic ritual bonfire,
set ablaze by a woman dressed up as Himiko. She wears colorful garb and a
headdress that looks rather like something associated with Native Americans.
The Yoshinogari City Hall also sponsors costume exhibitions of Kofun-esque
garments of the sort that might have been worn by Himiko. Promoters also
worked with Sanrio to create a Himiko-themed Hello Kitty keychain. Kitty-
chan as Himiko wears a pink kosode with a bright red sash, blue beads, and a
red headband with her ubiquitous bow attached.
Not to be outdone, Sakurai city in Nara Prefecture began vigorously pro-
moting Himiko following news reports that Hashihaka Kofun may be where
she is buried. Signs around town feature “Himiko-chan,” the town’s cute
Figure 3. Advertisement for Sun Brewing Company’s special release of Kagoshima shōchū
named “Himiko-Fantasia.”

character mascot, with the words “Welcome to Himiko country!” City leaders
created some comical Himiko-chan anime that are posted online. A few fea-
ture Old Lady Himiko, a humorous battle-ax version of the queen.21
A popular method to celebrate regional roots and civic pride is to sponsor
Queen Himiko Contests in which young women compete on the basis of charm
and appearance. For most of the Himiko contests, the queen slot is open to
any woman over eighteen. There are usually large cash prizes given to the win-
ners. One of the earliest was created by the smallish town of Yamatokōriyama
in the Nara area (Figure 4). Their Queen Himiko contest was established in
1982, based on an author’s contention that this town is the origin site.22 A
competing thesis was published in 2010, proposing that Yamatai was located
in Ōmi, present-day Shiga Prefecture.23 This claim sent the city of Moriyama
into high gear to advocate their version of the Miss Queen Himiko Contest,
fondly nicknamed “Himikon.”
The Moriyama Himikon explicitly promotes the “Ōmi Theory” as justi-
fication for its first contest, held in 2011. The costuming of Queen Himiko
was of great interest to the men in the Moriyama city office. The unveiling
of the official Himiko costume was itself a media event, and officials held
numerous press conferences highlighted in newspapers. Photos show them
posing with the outfit that the selected winner would eventually wear. Oddly,
there were never any women included
in these photos of the disembodied
dress. The costume, with a gauzy mud-
red top layer, was created by a local de-
signer named Mama Riina, whose blog
describes the difficulties she had ob-
taining materials and constructing this
fantastical ensemble.24
A third Himiko contest is held in
Asakura, in Kyūshū’s Fukuoka Prefec-
ture, as part of the local Yamataikoku
Festival of Flowers. The Himiko images
in their contest posters construct no-
tions of cute girlhood and a form of cos-
tume play. Most of the posters feature
two young women dressed in would-be
Figure 4. Poster for the Yamatokōriyama Queen

Himiko contest.
18 8 la ura mille r
Himiko garb (Figure 5). These posters of two
Himiko queens shift focus away from the Ya-
matai ruler and toward the community service
activity of dressing up as a historic figure pur-
portedly from one’s hometown.
In announcements, books, and manga seen
widely in Japan, Himiko is put forth as a role
model for all age groups, from children to adult
women. A popular campaign targeting school
children urges them to chew their food well,
just as Himiko did, with the slogan “Himiko’s
teeth are great!” (Figure 6). Created by the
Gakkō Shokuji Kenkyūkai (School Meals Study
Group), the movement was based on the idea
that ancient Japanese ate less processed food,
so remained healthy. According to the posters,
Figure 5. Poster for the “Yamataikoku Festival
chewing well prevents obesity, tooth decay, and
of Flowers” Himiko contest in Asakura, Kyūshū.
cancer, develops taste, aids pronunciation and
the digestive system, contributes to brain de-
velopment, and promotes physical strength.
For the older set, the founder of the new
religious group Kōfuku no Kagaku (Happy
Science) published a book entitled Josei ri-
idaa nyūmon: Himiko, Kōmyō Kōgō ga okuru,
genzai joseitachi e no adobaisu (2011, Introduc-
tion to female leaders: Advice for contempo-
rary women given by Himiko and Empress
Kōmyō).25 Empress Kōmyō (701–60) was a po-
litically astute ruler who supported Buddhism
and philanthropic projects. The book coaches
readers on how they can combine their intui-
tive spiritual capacities and pragmatic skills in
order to achieve life goals.
But in contrast to instances in which Hi-
miko is held up as a paragon of female capabil-
ity, there are also intriguing images of her that
ignore the inconveniently mature and power- Figure 6. “Himiko’s teeth are great!” Public ser-
vice poster for the Campaign for Better Chew-
ful queen of history in favor of something al- ing, promoted by the Gakkō Shokuji Kenkyūkai
together different. (School Meals Study Group).

THE BAD, SAD, AND NAUGHTY HIMIKO
Not all artists and illustrators depict Himiko’s power as located in superior
spiritual and leadership skills. Often she is seen as manipulative, tyrannical,
or downright wicked. In much contemporary culture, the experienced reli-
gious leader who united warring clans into a petty kingdom becomes a slutty
babe with attitude. Himiko appeals particularly to the otaku dreams of game
creators and card illustrators. Perhaps some culture producers believe that
only an eroticized (or erotically infantilized) woman is capable of projecting
enough convincing authority to usurp male privilege. These images of Himiko
include sexy witches with hitched up skirts, plunging corsets, and enormous
bosoms. In the Atlantica Online role-playing game, produced in Korea, she is
just such a figure, the “Mercenary Empress Himiko.”26 Her wardrobe is neo-
Renaissance steampunk streetwalker with hints of dominatrix.
In an erotic manga series aimed at women, Taniguchi Chika depicts Hi-
miko as a raunchy queen who manages to rule while also spending much of
her time engaged in interesting sexual adventures (Figure 7).27 Another ver-
sion of a sexpot Himiko is found in the Marvel comic series The Savage Sword
of Conan The Barbarian.28 The 1992 Witch Queen of Yamatai places Conan in
the Far East, where he battles a cunning Queen of Yamatai, renamed No-
jingo, who has kidnapped the Chinese Emperor. This vipress ruler wears a
stripper’s black plunging thong monokini with
decorated tights. She is served by a troupe of
samurai-attired Amazonian women. Similarly,
Shinoda Masahiro’s 1975 softcore film entitled
Himiko used her persona in order to show lots
of vivid writhing (Figure 8).29 Here Himiko
is a lascivious and conniving seductress who
wants to have sex with her half brother. She is
content to serve as a symbolic leader while the
men around her hold the real authority. Even-
tually, she is justly executed by male kinsmen
due to her depravity.
Tezuka Osamu’s much lauded Phoenix se-
ries, which stretches from the origins of civi-
lization into the far future, includes Himiko
Figure 7. Cover image from volume 2 of Taniguchi Chika’s

manga Ero meruhen onna Himiko (2012, Adult fairytale
Himiko), from the 2013 Sekirara Bunko digital edition.
19 0 la ura miller
In much contemporary
in the first volume. In The Phoenix: Dawn (1967,
culture, the experienced
Hi no tori: Reimei hen), Himiko is a ridiculous,
religious leader who
brawling scold consumed with vanity.30 From
united warring clans
the Wei zhi we know she was savvy enough to
into a petty kingdom
begin diplomatic relations with the Chinese
becomes a slutty babe
court, yet Tezuka presents her as narrowly ob-
with attitude.
sessed with appearance and with finding the
Phoenix who will restore eternal life and youth-
ful beauty. When a solar eclipse occurs, Himiko cowers inside a cave, calling
into question the shamanistic abilities that were part of her status. Scholars
such as Rachael Hutchinson believe that Tezuka represented Himiko as an
evil shrew because he was interested in discrediting the Nihongi and Kojiki
through their portrayal of the kami (deity) Amaterasu. In other words, Himiko
was a “mad shamaness that later became the tale of Amaterasu.”31 Tezuka’s
cave scene was meant to evoke the story of Amaterasu hiding in a cave after
she was bullied by her brother. Most manga scholars and fans similarly hold
an affirmative interpretation of Tezuka’s portrayal, emphasizing that he was
engaged in debunking mainstream historical discourse. It is indeed clear from
the rest of the Hi no tori series that Tezuka uniformly draws authoritarian
Figure 8. An image from the opening of Shinoda Masahiro’s 1975 film Himiko.

rulers as venal and corrupt. But my criticism of how he uses Himiko for this
critique rests on the manner in which he goes about demonizing her. There are
many ways to illustrate women as wicked rulers without having to resort to
sexist imagery. It is odd that, if this was Tezuka’s intended critique, he would
feel it important to include so many scenes of her yelling “My face! My face!”
A female leader can certainly be symbolic of totalitarian excess without having
to paint her as a presumptuous and unhappy virago.
Furthermore, the “Himiko became Amaterasu” theory is neither obvious
or established. For centuries Himiko has been identified with various female
characters mentioned in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, including Empress Jingū
and two different Yamato princesses. Amaterasu was the clan deity (ujigami)
for the Yamato lineage, and this is why she is featured in the Yamato mytho-
histories. If we seek Himiko in these chronicles, she is most likely the per-
son identified as the shaman aunt of Emperor Sujin, stripped of any political
power. I find Patricia Tsurumi’s discussion of early female rulers useful be-
cause she notes that women rulers were not necessarily intermediaries or
exceptions, as many historians seem to assume.32
Scholars do not need to conflate different historical and mythological
women in order to make sense of them. Female shamans were important
figures in ancient Japan, and thus were not anomalies usurping male preroga-
tive. Yet Tezuka depicted Himiko as ruling through bullying and fear, rather
than the religious respect history indicates was accorded to her. Tezuka is
often said to have been a great fan of Disney animation, and certainly his Hi-
miko bears some slight resemblance to both Snow White’s awful stepmother
and Cruella De Vil. Among the anime adaptations of Phoenix is a 2004 TV
series directed by Takahashi Ryōsuke (Figure 9).33 Like the manga, the TV
series does not recognize Himiko’s power and authority as legitimate, and
instead of a wise auntie queen’s melody, her grating voice continuously deliv-
ers unreasonable demands. Rob Vollmer, in his review of this anime, states
that Himiko is “the least ambiguous villain in a piece populated by heartless
bastards all around.”34
In other manga Himiko might be less vicious, yet remains a vehicle for
expressing current cultural and political issues. In Mutsuki Nozomi’s manga
Hakoniwa kigeki 1 (2012, Comedy garden 1), Himiko is a depressed young
woman who feels trapped and frustrated by life’s circumstances.35 Mutsuki’s
melancholy Himiko grumbles about her gloomy life shut indoors with her
handmaidens. When Himiko has a tantrum and bawls, “I want a boyfriend!”
her assistants remind her that such a thing is impossible for a miko and in-
stead find a pet gorilla to keep her company. She ends up liking the gorilla a bit
19 2 la ura mille r
Figure 9. An image of Himiko from episode two of the Phoenix TV series, directed by Takahashi
Ryōsuke.
too much. Instead of a great queen, she is an impaired and conflicted twenty-
something who lacks magical talent and no longer performs at ritual events.
HIMIKO PARADOXES
Yasuko, the Shibuya divination provider introduced at the beginning of this

essay, told me she was carrying on the knowledge passed down from the origi-
nal queen shaman. In saying this, she was joining a larger discourse found in
contemporary girl culture. Himiko appears in divination products and adver-
tising to denote female power and ethnic spirituality. Himiko can be imagined
as a symbol of female supernatural power today because creators of her image
are not concerned with the same issues that obsessed illustrators in the past,
such as her place in the imperial line. Yet even in the divination domain, Hi-
miko reflects odd inconsistencies.
In Akujo uranai (2011, Evil woman divination), an ironic spin on divina-
tion types, the authors point out that the so-called evil woman of today is not
what she was in the past.36 Although rebellious and nonconforming, these
bad girls might be an instructive way to gauge one’s own character and future
possibilities. “Evil women don’t have such a bad meaning,” they say, and of-
fer a collection of types from world history, including Abe Sada, Murasaki
Shikibu, Queen Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc, Mary Stuart, Cleopatra, and Himiko.
The reader uses her own birthday to determine which of the evil woman cat-
egories corresponds to her own destiny. The “Villainess Type Himiko” is a
divination maniac, self-centered and totally unrealistic. Neurotic and prone to
emotional instability, she cares nothing for the opinions of others. So in this
case, even though the text starts out to validate women previously labeled as
troublemakers, Himiko’s association with kidō has effectively erased any of
her positive attributes.
But other contemporary divination-related images of Himiko are more
positive. Hieda On Mayura is a divination provider and popular author of
divination books and articles in most of the major weekly women’s magazines,
and claims to be the present-day reincarnation of Himiko.37 She uses vari-
ous methods, including tarot cards, a crystal ball, and a form of kidō. Hieda
wears Chinese-style clothing, but her dangling earrings have tiny magatama
on them. In her advertising profiles she presents a rather stern face to her
prospective clients.
One fascinating development is the manner in which Himiko has become
a motif on Japan-made tarot cards (Figure 10).38 On these decks she replaces
the High Priestess (the Papess or female Pope) to symbolize female religious
authority. Many artists who make new
tarot decks in Japan reject the Chris-
tian iconography found on early decks,
and instead replace figures from Euro-
pean feudal times with those from an-
cient Japanese history and mythology.
Because the original card was meant to
depict a woman with a potent religious
mandate, replacing the High Priestess
with Himiko is common. On some of the
Himiko High Priestess cards, she is de-
picted with magatama beads, a Chinese
bronze mirror, a sword, or sakaki branch.
She is often eroticized, and appears nude
on at least one card.
These divination-related examples il-
lustrate the oddity and diversity of nar-
rative views that inform constructions
of Himiko. Her images are symbolic of
Figure 10. A tarot card design showing Himiko as

the High Priestess, by Haru Usagi, originally pub-
lished at http://albireo-haru.sakura.ne.jp/t.1saiguu
.html. Courtesy of the artist.
19 4 la ura mille r
The threatening
tussles going on in gender politics. Sometimes
possibility of female
she is part of a general effort to redeem seem-
power is contained by
ingly rebellious women.39 Control of Himiko
rescripting Himiko as
images no longer resides in the hands of elite
an adorable yet weak
scribes or historians. Anyone—manga artists,
maiden, an unhinged and
fans, filmmakers, and others—may play with
ill-tempered dictator,
her story, persona, and image, which they freely
or a wanton intriguer.
imagine and promote in more widespread ways.
Culture producers like to speak for her. “Kill that
woman!” shrieks a jealous and hysterical Himiko in Tezuka’s manga, while
a calmer woman addresses her willing subjects in Ishinomori’s version with
“I do this for the sake of the people’s happiness and the preservation of the
country of Yamatai.”40 Knowledge of Kofun-era clothing styles has not pre-
vented anyone from putting Himiko into a revealing bustier and stiletto
boots. Knowing that she was the unifying ruler of warring chiefdoms has
not stopped anyone from refashioning her as an ineffectual schoolgirl, or as
a ditzy gal attired in a Jōmon-era tunic paired with Heisei-era Kogal boots.41
She is a wicked necromancer in many media, but a shaman hero among divi-
nation specialists. These iterations have less to do with her origin story than
with postwar anxieties about status and dominance. The threatening possi-
bility of female power is contained by rescripting Himiko as an adorable yet
weak maiden, an unhinged and ill-tempered dictator, or a wanton intriguer.
Her role as a capable ruler appears to be beyond the imagination of modern
audiences and producers.
In the case of other resurrected historical figures, we may be able to trace
their reemergence to specific cultural developments. Medieval wizard Abeno
Seimei’s sudden celebrity status in popular culture followed the publication
of a series of popular novels and manga.42 The interest in Himiko, however,
is much more diffuse. It is obviously linked to a relaxation in older imperial
ideology that reified patrilineal kinship, yet her postwar uses among pornog-
raphers, filmmakers, manga artists, game creators, divination card illustra-
tors, and novelists reflects many issues beyond this. Current Himiko branding
allows the viewer to place her in a known constellation of female slots that
either buttress or challenge existing stereotypes. What we know about Hi-
miko is so provocative, so murky, and so far in the distant past that it provides
much room for creative intervention. In a cultural field populated with women
warriors, avatars, and continued debate over how to locate women’s power in
Japan, Himiko’s own elastic story makes her image ripe for ideological work
in the twenty-first century.
Notes
I would like to thank participants at the Symposium on Pop Heroines and Female Icons of
Japan, hosted by the University of Missouri–Saint Louis, where I initially presented this
essay. Gratitude for generous funding is also extended to the Japan–United States Friend-
ship Commission and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. Jan
Bardsley and Christopher Bolton gave me especially helpful feedback. Rebecca Copeland,
Jennifer Robertson, and others also contributed suggestions.
1. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).
2. For a recent English translation of this section of the Wei zhi, see Edward J. Kid-
der, Himiko and Japan’s Elusive Chiefdom of Yamatai: Archaeology, History, and Mythology
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007).
3. Some of the most recent English language scholarship is found in Kidder, Himiko,
and Gina L. Barnes, State Formation in Japan: Emergence of a Fourth-Century Ruling Elite
(London: Routledge, 2007). See also Walter Edwards, “In Pursuit of Himiko: Postwar
Archaeology and the Location of Yamatai,” Monumenta Nipponica 51, no.1 (1996): 53–79.
4. Magatama, because of their long association with ancient Japan and Himiko, have
become a faddish charm in girl culture, and are featured in magazine articles and sold in
bead shops.
5. Ishino Hironobu, “Rites and Rituals of the Kofun Period,” Japanese Journal of Reli-
gious Studies 19, no. 2–3 (1992): 191–216.
6. The confusion about Himiko’s era is widespread. Esther Friesner produced two
novels featuring Himiko as a child and shaman warrior. In interviews Friesner claims she
consulted reliable histories, yet details in the books suggest an early Yayoi milieu. Oddly,
the covers depict Himiko wearing later kimono-style clothing. Esther Friesner, Spirit’s
Princess (New York: Random House, 2012); Esther Friesner, Spirit’s Chosen (New York:
Random House, 2013); Matt Staggs, “An Interview with Esther Friesner, Author, Spirit’s
Princess,” http://suvudu.com/2012/04/an-interview-with-esther-friesner-author-spirits
-princess.html.
7. Fujiwara Kamui, Himiko: Shūkan manga Nihon shi 1-gō (Himiko: Weekly manga
history of Japan, issue 1) (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2009).
8. One wonders if the Jōmon-era clothing was an attempt to make Himiko appear
to be more natively Japanese and less like the Korea-derived culture and people that char-
acterize the Kofun era.
9. Carmen Blacker, The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1975).
10. Blacker, The Catalpa Bow, chapters 6, 7, and 8.
11. Rekishi no Shinsō Kenkyūkai, Gakkō de oshiete kurenai: Hontō no Nihonshi
(You aren’t taught this in school: The real history of Japan) (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha,
2012), 302.
12. See Kidder, Himiko, for snake cult, and Barnes, State Formation, for Queen Mother
of the West.
19 6 la ura mille r
13. Iio posting to “Tagu Himiko o fukumu irasuto” (Illustrations with tags that
include Himiko), http://seiga.nicovideo.jp/seiga/im752459?track=seiga_illust_keyword.
14. Ishinomori Shōtarō, Manga Nihon no rekishi vol. 2: Yamataikoku to Himiko no
matsurigoto (The country of Yamatai and Himiko’s governance) (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha,
1997), 18.
15. Kobayashi Yoshinori, Gōmanizumu sengen special: Shin tennōron (A special arrogant
manifesto: A new theory of the emperor) (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2010).
16. Saegusa Kazuko, Joō no Himiko (The Empress Himiko) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1991).
17. Miyazaki Kōhei, Maboroshi no Yamataikoku (The illusive country of Yamatai)
(Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1967).
18. Maboroshi no Yamataikoku (The illusive country of Yamatai), dir. Tsutsumi Yukihiko,
DVD (Tōei, 2009).
19. “Yoshinaga Sayuri Is Queen Himiko,” Japan Zone Entertainment News, http://
www.japan-zone.com/news/2008/08/22/yoshinaga_sayuri_is_queen_himiko.shtml).
20. Himiko statues are found all over Kyūshū: outside Kanzaki Station, near Miyazaki
Takachiho Gorge, and on the grounds of Himiko Shrine in Hayato.
21. Sakurai City, “Himiko-chan no peeji” (Miss Himiko’s page) http://www.city.sakurai
.nara.jp/himiko/index.html.
22. Torigoe Kenzaburō, Oinaru Yamataikoku (Great country of Yamatai) (Tokyo:
Kōdansha 1975).
23. Sawai Ryūsuke, Yamataikoku Ōmi setsu: Kodai Ōmi no ten to sen (Yamataikoku Ōmi
theory: Points and lines to ancient Ōmi) (Tokyo: Gentōsha Renaissance, 2010).
24. Mama Riina, “Kuiin Himiko ishō” (Queen Himiko’s costume), http://ameblo.jp
/ri-namama/theme-10038768211.html.
25. Okawa Ryūhō, Josei riidaa nyūmon: Himiko, Kōmyō Kōgō ga okuru, genzai joseitachi
e no adobaisu (Introduction to female leaders: Advice for contemporary women given by
Himiko and Empress Kōmyō) (Tokyo: Kōfuku no Kagaku Shuppan, 2011). The idea of
Himiko as a leader is also seen in Takemoto Novala’s novel Shimotsuma monogatari, in
which the mythical embroiderer and head of the Ibaragi group of girl bikers was named
Himiko. Takemoto Novala, Shimotsuma monogatari (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2002); translated
by Masumi Washington as Kamikaze Girls (San Francisco: Viz, 2008).
26. Atlantica Online, free computer game (NDOORS/Nexon Corporation, 2008).
27. Taniguchi Chika, Otona: Meruhen onna Himiko (Adult: Fairytale woman Himiko)
(Tokyo: Takarazuka Wandaanetto, 2012).
28. Roy Thomas, John Buscema, and Ernie Chen, The Savage Sword of Conan The Bar-
barian: The Witch Queen of Yamatai, no. 194: 1–45 (New York: Marvel Comics, 1992).
29. Himiko, dir. Shinoda Masahiro, DVD (Art Theatre Guild, 1975).
30. Tezuka Osamu, Hi no tori: Reimei hen, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1967);
translated by Dadakai as Phoenix, vol. 1: Dawn (San Francisco: Viz, 2003).
31. Rachael Hutchinson, “Sabotaging the Rising Sun: Representing History in Tezuka
Osamu’s Phoenix,” in Manga and the Representation of Japanese History, ed. Roman Rosen-
baum (New York: Routledge 2012), 27.
32. Patricia Tsurumi makes the point in regard to a later string of female sovereigns,
of which there were eight between 592 and 770. Patricia Tsurumi, “The Male Present ver-
sus the Female Past: Historians and Japan’s Female Emperors,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian
Scholars 14 (1982): 71–75.

33. Hi no tori, dir. Takahashi Ryōsuke, TV series, 13 episodes (2004); translated as
Phoenix: Perfect Collection, 3-DVD box set (Anime Works, 2010). For the early episodes that
feature Himiko, see volume 1 (2004, The Persistence of Time).
34. Rob Vollmar, “Phoenix Volume One: Dawn-Recommended,” Manga Reviews,
http://comicsworthreading.com/2007/06/01/phoenix-volume-one-dawn-recommended/.
35. Mutsuki Nozomi, Hakoniwa kigeki 1 (Comedy garden 1), (Tokyo: Entaaburein,
2012).
36. Fumiki and Noguchi Kōshin, Akujo uranai (Evil woman divination) (Tokyo: Futami
Shobō, 2011).
37. Hieda Onmayura, “Genzai ni yomigaeshi Himiko Hieda Onmayura,” http://www
.nifty.com/onmayura.
38. Laura Miller, “Tantalizing Tarot and Cute Cartomancy in Japan,” Japanese Studies
31, no. 1 (2011): 73–91.
39. See Rekishi no Shinsō Kenkyūkai, Jidai o yurugashita dokufu no shinjitsu (The truth
about poison women who rocked the ages: The enigma of ninety-nine evil women from
Japanese history) (Tokyo: Takarajima-sha, 2009).
40. Tezuka, Hi no tori, 224; Ishinomori, Manga Nihon no rekishi, 146.
41. Warriors Orochi 2, Playstation 2 video game (Koei, 2008). Her weapons are anach-
ronistic Jōmon-derived dogū figurines that fire laser pellets.
42. Laura Miller, “Extreme Makeover for a Heian-Era Wizard,” Mechademia 3: 30–45.
19 8 la ura miller
CHRISTOPHER BOLTON
Tezuka’s Buddha at the

Tokyo National Museum:
An Interview with
Matsumoto Nobuyuki
In the summer of 2011, the Tokyo National Museum held an unprecedented

exhibition titled Buddha: The Story in Manga and Art, featuring Tezuka
Osamu’s landmark Buddha manga (1972–83).1 This was the first exhibition to
include manga in the 140-year history of the museum, the flagship cultural
institution that anchors museum row in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. But what was
most remarkable was the visual and cultural context in which it placed Tezuka,
by juxtaposing pages from the manga with twenty examples of premodern
Buddhist sculpture, ranging from second-century Pakistani stone reliefs to
medieval Japanese statuary.
The exhibition demonstrated something that has been argued several
times in the pages of Mechademia: that we can discover a great deal about
manga and anime as media by examining how they have been translated for
display, study, or consumption in the space of the museum.2 To learn more
about the Buddha exhibition, I spoke with its curator Matsumoto Nobuyuki,
director of the Curatorial Planning Department at the museum and head cu-
rator in Asian Art. I have translated our conversation, which took place two
weeks after the opening in early May of 2011. It was also just two months
200
after the earthquake and tidal wave in eastern Japan, and in the midst of the
ongoing nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plants 150 miles north of
Tokyo. I had threaded my way through darkened streets to the museum for
the interview: many streetlights and neon signs still remained eerily extin-
guished at night, to conserve electricity and observe a respectful austerity.
As discussed at the end of the interview, this provided both a poignant and a
pointed context for the exhibition.
In addition to revealing how the show came together, Matsumoto’s com-
ments shed light on several senses of “origin” that are taken up in this volume:
the connections between premodern and contemporary art, the status of an
original artwork in the context of mass media like manga and anime, and the
issues of historical and artistic biography that inevitably seem to dominate
our thinking about a work like Tezuka’s Buddha.
christoPher bolton: I saw the exhibition this week, and I thought it was
wonderful. The individual artworks are striking in their own right, but the way
they are juxtaposed is also very thought provoking. My own work centers very
much on media comparisons, and what we can tell about anime and manga by
contrasting them with other media. Comparing Tezuka’s Buddha manga with
Buddhist statuary is an inspired idea. What was the initial impulse for this
show, and where did the idea for that comparison come from?
matsumoto nobuyuki: I’m delighted you liked the exhibition. As you know
the anime film based on Tezuka Osamu’s Buddha manga is due out later this
month. Tōei Company contacted us last fall to say they were making this film
and asked us if we would consider an exhibition related to Tezuka’s Buddha.
But because this museum deals with traditional Japanese and Asian culture
(basically pre-nineteenth-century materials), a show just on Tezuka falls out-
side our purview. So at first I suggested that Tōei approach one of the modern
art museums in Tokyo; the National Museum of Modern Art had a large-scale
Tezuka exhibition several years ago. But they were very interested in doing
something with us, and I was interested myself—I read the manga when it
came out and I’m a fan. So I started to think about how to combine contem-
porary manga and anime with traditional culture.
The hero of Tezuka’s manga is obviously the historical figure of the Bud-
dha, so I thought if we brought it together with Buddhist statuary, one could
see the manga in a historical context, and we could get fans of anime and
manga interested in traditional culture. And since most of our usual visitors
are interested in traditional culture or history, I thought with this exhibition
t e zu ka’s bu d d h a at t h e to k yo n at i o n a l m u s e u m 2 0 1
By comparing two-
we could also show them the merits of manga and an-
dimensional and
ime. That was the origin of the idea.
three-dimensional
media, we wanted
cb: That’s very interesting. But if you wanted to juxta-
to encourage
pose the manga with traditional or historical images of
people to expand
the Buddha, you could have chosen Buddhist painting
the image they had
for example, or something in a similar medium. Why
of this figure.
did you choose Buddhist sculpture?
mn: Comparing different two-dimensional media does not provide a very in-
teresting contrast. And I think it is three-dimensional art, like reliefs and
statuary, that provides the strongest image (imeeji) of the historical Buddha,
of Shakyamuni. It lets you picture him. By comparing two-dimensional and
three-dimensional media, we wanted to encourage people to expand the im-
age they had of this figure.
cb: And Tezuka’s Buddha manga is represented by hand-drawn and -inked

page art. Can you say something about that?
mn: All manga is printed from these hand-drawn, camera-ready originals

called genga. But the genga and the final printed version of the manga are
not at all the same. The size, the color, the touch of the pen—everything is
different. I think it’s the genga that more closely convey Tezuka’s original idea
(orijinaru na omoi), so I thought that’s what we should display. After all, the
sculptures are all original artworks, too. We wanted to emphasize that original
quality.
There really are all sorts of things you can’t see once the genga are printed
and published as manga—like the way Tezuka traces the design, drawing one
layer over another, or the texture of the ink. We have some color drawings in
the exhibition that appeared on the covers of the manga volumes, and the
actual drawings are completely different from the printed covers—the way the
paint is applied, the detail, and the three-dimensional quality that emerges
even in a two-dimensional medium. Again, this is a museum, so as far as pos-
sible we want visitors to see original works.
cb: In many of those color images, Tezuka draws the Buddha against a back-
ground that simulates a relief carving or a three-dimensional surface (Figure
1). It’s a flat medium, but there is definitely a three-dimensional quality.
20 2 christophe r b o lto n
Figure 1. A watercolor genga (camera-ready artwork) for the cover of Buddha, volume 3, in the
Osamu Tezuka manga zenshū edition (Kōdansha, 1983–84). Copyright Tezuka Productions. Im-
ages 1–7 are reproduced from the exhibition catalog, Tezuka Osamu no Budda ten / Buddha: The
Story in Manga and Art, ed. Tokyo National Museum and TŌEI Company Ltd., trans. Maiko Behr
(Tokyo National Museum, 2011).
mn: Yes, exactly. This show is a rare chance to see so many of Tezuka’s color
genga. There’s a real beauty to these, in the color and in the level of detail.
These are drawn with much more care than his black-and-white pages. For
Tezuka, I think these color genga were works of art that go above and beyond
his manga. This was his work as a fine artist. And again, you can only see that
in the original genga. That’s why we chose to put them in frames so you could
get close to them. As much as possible we also avoided putting the sculptures
in cases, so you can see them up close as well. Even just doing away with the
glass lets us have visitors get near the art, and reduces that feeling of separa-
tion (iwakan).
cb: But as you said, I noticed you can see some of those details and even that
three-dimensional quality in genga for the regular manga pages as well. There,
t e zu ka’s bu d d h a at t h e to k yo n at i o n a l m u s e u m 2 0 3
too, I noticed the layers created by pieces of paper pasted over revisions or
mistakes (Figures 2 and 4).
mn: Yes, and some areas are painted over with white out.
cb: But those corrected areas become fewer and fewer as the series goes on.
The scene of the Buddha’s death, from the end of the final volume, is pristine,
with no corrections whatsoever.
figure 3. Standing Bodhisattva.

This second- or third-century
figure 2. The head-shaving scene that signifies renunciation of the stone image from Gandhara,
world, from Tezuka’s Buddha. This hand-drawn genga has a layer of Pakistan, shows the same kind of
paper pasted over the center area, showing where Tezuka redrew the halo depicted in Tezuka’s drawing
head with slightly different proportions. In the original serialization, (Figure 2). 100 cm. Collection of the
this page appeared in the August 1974 issue of Kibō no tomo. Copy- Tokyo National Museum. Copyright
right Tezuka Productions. Tokyo National Museum.
mn: Yes. It seems Tezuka became very practiced at drawing these images as
time went by.
cb: So the exhibition is organized around the biography of the historical Bud-
dha, but the drawings become a record of the artist’s life as well.
mn: Exactly. And you can only see that in the genga.
POINTS OF COMPARISON
cb: I was interested in your essay in the exhibition catalog. You write that
Tezuka’s manga and the sculptures are all interpretations of the Buddha’s
life, each informed by its own place and time, and you suggest that visitors
can construct their own vision of the Buddha. You also mention that there
are faithful or historical parts to Tezuka’s depiction but also more creative
parts.3 Comparing the manga with the sculpture, what are the contrasts that
stand out most for you?
mn: Before I actually put them side-by-side, when we were still in the plan-
ning stage imagining what the gallery would look like, I was worried that the
sculpture and the manga would present themselves as completely different
things. So I wanted to try to blend them in such a way that there would be no
disjunction between them, so that visitors could look at each separately but
also see them as a whole and create an image of the Buddha’s life. But when we
actually put them side-by-side, they blended (tokeatta) much more naturally
than I had thought. So it’s not the contrast but this unexpected similarity or
harmony that stands out for me.
cb: Yet the sculpture has been carefully chosen to present a wide variety of
images of the Buddha at different stages of his life, and the manga adds even
more variety.
mn: Yes, but they’re not just lined up together; they supplement one another.
The manga captures one part, and what’s not in the manga is captured by
the sculpture. I believe in the gallery they achieve a kind of interdependence
(sōkan kankei).
t e zu k a’s bu d d h a at t h e to k yo n at i o n a l m u s e u m 2 0 5
cb: The portions from the manga that you selected match the sculptures per-
fectly (Figures 2, 3, 4, and 5). But the manga must have offered a wide range of
scenes that would resemble any given sculpture. How did you select the manga
scenes that you would exhibit?
Figure 4. Buddha converts the Kasyapa brothers. In the original genga, one can see that an ad-
ditional figure just to the Buddha’s left has been pasted over, giving more prominence to the two
figures in the foreground. Originally published in Kibō no tomo in July 1980. Copyright Tezuka
Productions.
20 6 christopher b o lto n
figure 5. “Kasyapa Brothers Worshipping Buddha,” from Illustrated Scenes of the Life of Buddha.
A second- or third-century stone relief from Afghanistan. 59 × 88 cm. Copyright The Japanese
Committee for the Protection from Dispersement of Cultural Properties.
mn: That was the most challenging part. Buddha is fourteen volumes, over a
thousand pages in all, with several frames on each page. And there’s an endless
amount of Buddhist sculpture out there, from India, Pakistan, China, Korea,
Southeast Asia, and Japan, dating from the second century down to today.
The hardest thing was deciding which sculpture to combine with which image
from the manga. But we didn’t just match things that resembled one another;
we deliberately paired things that were a little bit different, to produce that
mutual supplementarity I mentioned. The result is that you see both, and then
you start to construct a story from them.
cb: But the point of departure was the idea to trace the Buddha’s life chrono-
logically, in both media?
mn: Yes, that was the starting point, and we chose the materials from there.
Tezuka only portrayed the life of Shakyamuni from birth to death, but actually
in Buddhism there’s also the story of his previous incarnations. So we chose
to include two reliefs depicting the Buddha’s previous existence and the time
after his death, when he is placed in the coffin—things not in the manga. Then
we picked the highlights from his life that we wanted to portray, for example
his birth, his marriage, his leaving the palace. Finally we thought about which
sculpture would go with a specific event, for example, and which page in the
manga would fit that sculpture.
Time and the
cb: So you chose the sculptures first, and then selected the
story unfold
manga scenes to match?
from one
work to the
mn: No, it went both ways. There were some powerful scenes
other. This is
from the manga that I knew I wanted to use, for example the
how we put
scene where he shaves his head (Figure 2).
the exhibition
together.
cb: Were there any other scenes you particularly wanted to
include?
mn: The scene of the Buddha as a baby. Also the marriage scene. There’s not
a single example of the marriage depicted in sculpture, but it’s an important
moment, and the language in that section of the manga shows Tezuka’s sense
of humor, a trademark of this work. If you look only at sculpture, you’ll never
be able to picture this scene and its humanity (ningensei).
As for sculpture, there was one particular statue from the Nara National
Museum that I definitely wanted to include. It’s a rare opportunity to see this
work; it hasn’t been exhibited in Tokyo in decades. It shows the Buddha after
he has emerged from the mountains at the end of a period of ascetic practice.
The subject is a common one—there would be no real point in comparing
it with the same scene from the manga. So we chose these scenes from the
manga where he’s in the midst of these austerities (Figures 6 and 7). Time and
the story unfold from one work to the other. This is how we put the exhibition
together.
cb: It’s striking how the different pieces work together in the gallery. The
atmosphere of the exhibition space itself was also very innovative. The high
ceiling, and up on the walls, the green lighting that outlined those leafy
silhouettes—it was like being in a jungle, or in one of Tezuka’s primeval
worlds (Figure 8).
mn: I was thinking if one were to represent the image of the Buddha, Shakya-
muni, with a color, what would it be? Buddhism is a religion centered on free-
dom from struggle: learning peace, escaping suffering, helping others. For me
the color that matches that image is green. And Nepal, where the Buddha was
active, is a lush green place. So the image of the environment when the Bud-
dha was alive was probably forests, groves, grasslands. That’s how we chose
green for the background color. Did you notice the shadows were moving?
figure 6. The Buddha practicing austerities. Genga for a page figure 7. Shakya Emerging from
originally published in Kibō no tomo in November 1975. Copyright the Mountains. This fourteenth-
Tezuka Productions. century Japanese sculpture depicts
Buddha at the completion of his
austerities. Wood with gold overlay.
96.3 cm. Collection of the Nara
National Museum. Copyright Nara
National Museum.
cb: Yes, that was very effective!
mn: We used small fans to move the leaves and projected the shadows on
the wall. The manga and statuary don’t move, so to enrich the image visitors
would have, we wanted to introduce some movement separate from the art.
Even if you don’t look up at the moving shadows, you notice them at the edge
of your vision when you are in the gallery. It affects you without your real-
izing it.
Figure 8. The exhibition space was characterized by its innovative arrangement and display
of materials, as well as a subtle sense of movement generated by lighting effects projected on
the upper walls. Photograph courtesy of the Tokyo National Museum. Copyright Tokyo National
Museum.
YOUNG AND OLD, OLD AND NEW
cb: So this is the first exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum to incorpo-
rate manga?
mn: Yes, the first one.
cb: It has been open for two weeks now. What has the response been like so
far?
mn: The majority of the people who come to the museum are in their forties,
fifties, or sixties. But for this exhibition, the largest category of visitors has
been people in their thirties, then teenagers, then people in their twenties.
That includes a number of people who are coming to the museum for the first
time.
cb: There was quite a variety of visitors when I was there, and different people
definitely seemed to be looking at the art in different ways. How many people
have seen the exhibition?
mn: We have had about 1,800 people a day on average, which is surprisingly
good for something this size. The proposal came just last fall, so we put it
together in six months, a very short time, and we could only allot about 500
square meters of gallery space. (In comparison, we’re now doing a major show
of the eighteenth-century woodblock print artist Sharaku, and that gets
4,000–5,000 people a day, but it occupies about six times the floor space.)
Ideally I would have liked to make the Buddha exhibition somewhat larger,
with a greater variety of materials, but given the restrictions I’m happy with
the result. This time was a kind of experiment. We wanted to have as many
people as possible see the exhibition and get as much feedback as we could.
cb: It’s impressive that at a museum specializing in pre-twentieth-century

material, Tezuka can compete with Sharaku. He is among the most well-
known artists in a popular genre, ukiyoe woodblock prints.
mn: Yes, and the Sharaku exhibition is a major event. It has been five years in
the making, and it brings the best Sharaku prints from around the world. It’s
conceived of as a definitive show.
cb: The first time I visited this museum was in the 1980s, and my memory
is that there were not many woodblock prints exhibited. For me things like
manga, graphic design, and ukiyoe prints like Sharaku’s all share some of the
same aesthetic qualities. Manga has certainly become more and more popular.
Have exhibits of things like ukiyoe increased in the last three decades?
mn: The status of ukiyoe as art has not changed so much. What has changed
a little bit is that Japanese themselves have attained a more global perspec-
tive and become conscious of the judgments of people abroad. For example,
woodblock artists like Sharaku and Hokusai are very popular in the United
States and Europe. It’s true that to some extent museums have begun to ex-
hibit more of this work. But for Japanese, ukiyoe is just one part of Japanese
culture, so even now we don’t have many large exhibits focusing exclusively
on ukiyoe.
cb: Manga and anime are also popular abroad, and the Japanese government
has become conscious of these as cultural exports. There’s the Cool Japan
campaign, for example. Do you think museum practices will change in con-
nection with this?
t e zu k a’s bu d d h a at t h e to k yo n at i o n a l m u s e u m 2 11
The design of the
mn: Yes, to some extent. But for Japanese (and others),
exhibition poster
manga and anime were rooted in everyday life long be-
incorporated
fore the government did any of this. Even people in my
some things that
generation think the government’s idea to incorporate
were new for us,
anime and manga into national policy is coming rather
both in the
late [laughs].
graphics and the
text. That bright
cb: But when something is familiar from everyday life,
pink text against
doesn’t that make it hard to start thinking of it as fine
the green
art?
background-we’ve
never used a
mn: It’s true, it does. When something is always so in-
color quite like
timately present, often people are less likely to think
that before.
of it as part of art or tradition. But just as in the case
of woodblock prints, when manga and anime became
popular in other places, then Japanese realized there might be more to these
things than they had thought, and began to think of them as fine art or as an
extension of traditional culture. In a way it’s a case of reverse importation.
cb: That’s very interesting. Was there anything that was particularly challeng-
ing about organizing the Buddha exhibition?
mn: We changed the publicity activities significantly from the way we’ve tra-
ditionally done things at this museum. The design of the exhibition poster
incorporated some things that were new for us, both in the graphics and the
text. That bright pink text against the green background—we’ve never used
a color quite like that before.
And the Sharaku exhibition poster was influenced by that. It is also very
different from previous posters. For example, the image of the Sharaku print
on the poster is cropped—we cut out the center of the image to bring the top
and bottom parts together. We had never done that. At this museum one of
our first principles is to exhibit the thing as is; so as far as possible we avoid
manipulating the original. But this time we aimed for visual interest (Figures
9 and 10).
To appeal to a young audience we also used blogging and Twitter much
more actively than for other exhibitions. Mizuki Nana, a voice actress from
the anime, recorded the audio guide and attended the opening. We had some
interesting guests there, the kind of people we don’t usually see at the mu-
seum, who came to see her [laughs].
Figure 9. The exhibit flyer’s
novel design. The text says
in part: “The sanctity of life,
as expressed by the god of
manga.” Copyright Tokyo
National Museum.
Figure 10 ( below ) . A sign

outside the museum adver-
tising the Buddha and Shar-
aku exhibitions together.
Like the flyer in figure 9, the
Buddha sign has a bright
green background with text
in white and hot pink, which
is carried over into a pink,
black, white, and yellow
scheme on the strikingly
cropped Sharaku poster.
Copyright Tokyo National
Museum. Photograph by
Christopher Bolton.
t e zu ka’s bu d d h a at t h e to k yo n at i o n a l m u s e u m 2 13
cb: I’ve been to some conferences like that! But that’s part of the fun.
mn: Yes, certainly. As a museum, unless we change, if we think only of tradi-

tion, tradition, tradition, and nothing else, we’ll quickly become a stale place.
We have to be as creative as possible.
cb: That’s exciting—I’m very excited to see what you come up with in the
future.
mn: Thank you.
cb: Before we end, is there anything we didn’t touch on that you wanted visi-
tors to know about the exhibition?
mn: One hidden message of the exhibition relates to the recent earthquake
and disasters in eastern Japan. As I mentioned, when we were first planning
the exhibition, the themes we wanted to include through Tezuka’s Buddha
included things like peace, or helping others, or escaping suffering. Then the
earthquake happened, and now all of Japan is suffering. So we’re hoping
people can enjoy the exhibition but also take away that message of aiding
others, of peace.
cb: In the wake of the earthquake, certainly some of us who write about these
things are asking how art, literature, or popular culture can respond to it, and
how we can respond in our own writing.
mn: It does make you think. From that perspective, I’ve felt anew that Tezu-
ka’s manga, including Buddha, has a universality to it. Among manga, Tezuka’s
style is not at all new; he probably falls under the category of classic manga.
But because of that, I think maybe it’s a form that will always be with us.
Notes
1. Tezuka Osamu, Budda, vols. 288–300 of Tezuka Osamu manga zenshū (Tezuka
Osamu’s complete manga) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1983–84); translated by Yuji Oniki, Maya
Rosewood [et al.?] as Buddha, 8 vols. (New York: Vertical, 2003–2005).
2. For example, see Michael Foster’s travelogue comparing the treatment of war and
remembrance at the Mugonkan and the Mizuki Shigeru Kinenkan, in volume 4 (2009):
164–81, as well as my articles discussing the MAK museum in Vienna, the Kyoto Manga
Museum, and the Art Mecho Museum in Second Life, in Mechademia, volume 2 (2007):
298–99; volume 3 (2008): 191–98; and volume 4 (2009): 198–210.
3. Tokyo National Museum and TŌEI Company Ltd., eds., Tezuka Osamu no Budda
ten / Buddha: The Story in Manga and Art, trans. Maiko Behr (Tokyo: Tokyo National
Museum, 2011), 13. Matsumoto pointed out that most of the text in the catalog appears
in both Japanese and English—a conscious effort to make the catalog accessible to readers
from outside Japan.
t e zu ka’s bu d d h a at t h e to k yo n at i o n a l m u s e u m 2 15
DALE K. ANDREWS
Genesis at the Shrine:

The Votive Art of an
Anime Pilgrimage
In 2002 a dōjin group known as 07th Expansion produced a sound novel (visual
novel) format game called Higurashi no naku koro ni (“When they cry,” here-
after referred to as Higurashi).1 Over the next several years, anime, manga,
light novels, films, and other Higurashi products swept into the marketplace
for an ever-expanding fan base. Higurashi is a mystery story that follows six
central characters who are haunted by a series of murders. Much of the action
of the narrative takes place in the rural community of Hinamizawa in June
1983. Besides one male protagonist, Maebara Kei’ichi, the main characters
are all female and include Furude Rika, Hōjō Satoko, Ryūgū Rena, and the
Shinozaki sisters, Mion and Shion. Additionally, there is one more character
of interest: Rika’s ancestor, Hanyū, who happens to be the deity worshipped
in the local shrine in Hinamizawa.
All of this, of course, is standard enough for an anime. But there is a
twist—not with the story itself but rather with how fans reacted to it. Particu-
larly stimulated by the television airing of Higurashi in 2006, fans set off on
a quest, driven by Japan’s popular culture and accented by artistic intention,
to enshrine their beloved Higurashi anime characters at the crossroads of the
two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds. They traveled to the site of
the genesis of the anime.
217
THE HIGURASHI PILGRIMAGE
In the same way that motion pictures, TV dramas, and commercials are filmed
on location, anime productions regularly incorporate backdrops adopted
from real places; in recent years, more and more anime fans are choosing
to actually embark on trips to these places, journeys that bring the two-
dimensional world of the anime to the three-dimensional setting on which
it is modeled. Fans have adopted the term seichi junrei, a compound meaning
“sacred site” (seichi) and “pilgrimage” (junrei), for this spiritual enterprise.2
Within Japan’s otaku culture, seichi are not limited to the settings of anime
and games but also include thriving maid cafes, the homes and workplaces of
anime or manga artists, factories manufacturing otaku-valued commodities,
and Tokyo’s Akihabara shopping district, a mecca for assorted hobbyists.3
In this way, the term seichi is pervasively used by otaku in general, but it is
anime fans in particular who tend to use the expression seichi junrei, which
further emphasizes the pilgrimage aspect and the act of actually journeying
to the sacred site in question.
Although seichi junrei remain largely unknown outside the fan commu-
nity, such pilgrimages first started in the 1990s when fans began to seek out
sites connected with specific anime. One of the earliest known pilgrimages
occurred when fans inspired by the series Sailor Moon (1992–97, Bishōjo senshi
Seeraamūn) gathered at the Hikawa Shrine in Tokyo’s urban neighborhood of
Motoazabu.4 Since that time, the cultural phenomenon of anime seichi junrei
has grown, and today there is an emerging genre of books listing pilgrimage
sites throughout the country.5 Although academic research into anime pil-
grimage is in its infancy, studies of pilgrimage as a form of tourism are more
and more common, and one can even find a handbook instructing municipali-
ties how to use pilgrimages to invigorate their local economies.6
In the case of Higurashi, fans perform the pilgrimage in order to spiritu-
ally connect with other fans, with the production of the anime, with its cre-
ators, and above all, with the characters. Although Hinamizawa is a fictitious
village created for the narrative, it is based on an actual site: Shirakawagō,
a village in Gifu Prefecture famous as a tourist showpiece of nostalgic rural
Japan. Some Higurashi fans make the pilgrimage to Shirakawagō only once,
some several times, and those enraptured by Higurashi visit repeatedly.
To facilitate the pilgrimage, fans have appropriated a tourist map of the
real site of Shirakawagō and transformed it into a downloadable map of Hin-
amizawa, overwriting the original locations with those in the Higurashi story.7
Fans carry these maps in order to find, for example, a building that serves as a
21 8 da le k. a ndre w s
Fans, who begin their
model for a character’s home depicted in the anime.
journey by viewing
Methodically capturing a photographic image of a
the two-dimensional
building from the same angle as in Higurashi, fans
Higurashi, travel
will then post the photo on their blogs and home
through the three-
pages along with an account of their journey.8 This
dimensional space of
coincides with what John Urry calls the “hermeneu-
Shirakawagō and then
tic circle,” which entails “travellers demonstrating
proceed to document
that they really have been there by showing their
this categorically
version of the images that they had seen before
“analog” activity in a
they set off.”9 Furthermore, such images not only
digital space online.
commemorate their trip, but also monumentalize
the site as a sacred place of pilgrimage.10 Fans, who
begin their journey by viewing the two-dimensional Higurashi, travel through
the three-dimensional space of Shirakawagō and then proceed to document
this categorically “analog” activity in a digital space online. The fans’ engage-
ment with Higurashi moves full circle, further cementing the two-dimensional
and three-dimensional worlds together.
THE SHRINE WITHIN THE SHRINE
One major reason that fans are increasingly interested in pilgrimage is the
associated ema (votive tablet). An ema is a small wooden tablet or plaque on
which visitors write their wishes or prayers; these are often left at a shrine
with the hope that their prayers will be fulfilled by the resident deity. The word
ema literally means “picture-horse,” because the tradition developed out of an
old custom of dedicating horses to the gods. Over time the horse came to be
embodied in painted form on a wooden tablet, the three-dimensional living
creature transformed into a two-dimensional representation. The pictures on
ema expanded beyond just horses to encompass a myriad of symbolic im-
agery including other animals, religious objects, and the deities themselves.
The Japanese continue to use ema to petition deities or to express gratitude
for their divine grace, but nowadays the practice has become primarily text
centered, and drawing or painting on ema by worshippers is more the excep-
tion than the rule. Generally shrines and temples market ema with preprinted
designs; supplicants personalize these by simply writing in their prayers.11
The anime fan on pilgrimage goes against this trend and often draws a
picture of his or her own design. If a shrine that appears in an anime actually
exists, then fans are certain to visit. And if they find an emakake (the rack
g e n e s i s at t h e s h r i n e 2 19
used to hang ema) they may offer ema adorned with their own illustrations
of anime characters. They may also write in a comment about the pilgrimage
experience, express appreciation for the anime production or pilgrimage loca-
tion, or jot down a character’s set phrases and the argotic language of anime
fans and Internet users. But more than the writing itself, it is the illustrations,
the visual portrayal of characters, that represent the most distinctive charac-
teristic of fan-generated ema.
If most people who offer ema refrain from illustrating them, what then
compels anime fans to make this effort? This is a critical question, for cer-
tainly a copious amount of thought, energy, and skill go into composing what
the fans call an itaema, which translates roughly as “painful votive tablet.” The
naming alludes to the pain of being socially stigmatized for bringing one’s
private obsession with anime out into the open and subjecting it to public
scrutiny, perhaps even ridicule.12 If the “medium is the message,” as Marshall
McLuhan long ago suggested, then it is deeply meaningful that these fans
choose to express themselves through the physical object of the ema and that
they do it through images, not just words.13 By drawing their own versions
of the anime characters, they not only replicate the actions of the illustrators
of the original text, but they also make that text their own, personalizing it,
animating it, and indeed, creating it themselves.
Despite their creative and collective participation in the pilgrimage and
their shared interest in the itaema, however, fans tend to refrain from enter-
ing into face-to-face conversation with each other. From the fans’ perspective,
then, the emakake is not only a hallowed space within the shrine but also a site
of communication. Through personal observation at the Shirakawagō Hachi-
man Shrine, I estimate that although only a small minority of fans actually
produces ema, all the fans making the Higurashi pilgrimage circuit of Hinam-
izawa (Shirakawagō) stop by to check out the emakake. Communication be-
tween fans is neither face-to-face nor virtual, but it is vital and real, anchored
in the material plane through the medium of the ema. The emakake serves as
the solitary place in Shirakawagō where fans communicate with each other,
albeit indirectly. The itaema on display signify the fans’ “public show of labor”
and commitment to the Higurashi community.14
Communicative exchange among fans in this way is in constant flux as
new ema are dedicated at the emakake. The rack has rows of pins on which visi-
tors hang ema by a fastened string, usually placing new ema in front of older
ones. Fans will often lift up or push aside ema to get a look at those hidden
from view. And some visitors, on finding a well-drawn ema, will physically
move it into the front row to be better viewed by all. In a reflection of their
social media literacy, fans curate this physical forum as they might an Internet
site, contributing postings (ema) to a message board (emakake). At times, writ-
ten comments directed at surrounding ema even mirror a threaded discussion
online. And just as with an online discussion, nonfans may find themselves at
a loss when confronted by unfamiliar language and imagery.
It is plausible that without an emakake, the fan experience, both on and
off the pilgrimage, would be significantly altered. On other anime pilgrimages
fans employ communicative strategies, such as writing in notebooks, but the
visual allure and the open, public quality of the emakake cannot be matched.15
Fans appreciate and anticipate fan-made renditions of the characters that
are artistically, intellectually, and even emotionally stimulating. The visual
conspicuousness of the itaema is what sets the fans’ work apart from other
ema. In essence, fans have taken the languishing craft of illustrating ema and
reinvigorated it with a vibrant, contemporary aesthetic.
THE ART OF PRAYER
At the Shirakawagō Hachiman shrine, the raw color emanating from the
itaema immediately grabs one’s attention. Volant in the wind, the ema signal
their presence with an unrhythmical click-clacking sound. At most shrines the
ema’s bidding, more often than not, goes unheeded by the passerby. But even
for people familiar with seeing ema at shrines, the in-your-face compositions
distinctive of an anime pilgrimage are unusual and attract attention.
I conducted a field survey of the ema at the Shirakawagō Hachiman Shrine
on November 11, 2007. In total I found 577 ema. Of these, 511 (almost 90
percent) contained textual or image references to anime or the Internet, and
inferably can be associated with fan pilgrims.16 A total of 469 (about 80 per-
cent) made direct reference to Higurashi. All together 303 (just over 50 per-
cent) contained artwork, most with Higurashi characters.17 The ema included
in this survey represent this originating period of the pilgrimage, from 2005
to 2007. Some, but not all, ema have dates inscribed on them; the three earliest
ema date back to 2005, which predates the television release of the anime but
is presumably when the shrine first started selling ema.18 One of these three
was an itaema. In 2006, after the broadcast of the anime series, we witness a
sharp increase in the number of itaema, and an even greater proliferation as
we move into 2007.19
Fans produce votive art according to their own tastes and abilities. Drawn
by male and female fans alike, female character illustrations predominate. A
g e n e s i s at t h e s h r i n e 2 2 1
machete-like hatchet and a baseball bat, weapons in Higurashi’s murderous
storyline, appear repeatedly as motif objects. Some fans create extemporane-
ous works, ranging from a quick sketch to a detailed drawing. Others prepare
ahead, bringing graphics or stickers that they affix to the ema. Still others
purchase an ema, take it elsewhere, and bring it back when it is completed,
presumably to produce votive art of higher quality. And a devoted few manu-
facture the ema themselves, crafting it from a cut of wood.
CREATING PRESENCE
Fan art springs from mundane fan-life activities, such as watching animations
or playing games, much of which entails appreciation of and interaction with
images.20 Indeed, Japanese culture has long placed emphasis on the visual,
particularly within the arts.21 But in and of itself, this immersion in visual
culture does not explain why fans would go through the effort to illustrate
ema with anime images.
Based on Azuma Hiroki’s work and with reference to the Higurashi pil-
grimage, Maruta Hajime explains that because anime are often modeled on
actual places, fans can physically retrace the footsteps of fictional characters
in the three-dimensional landscape within a “manga/anime realism.” But ul-
timately fans recognize that an anime is fiction and that their own experience
is limited to physically being in the place where characters stand; they do not
actually experience the place as the characters would.22 He further posits that
an alternative way of processing experience is present in what is known as
“game realism,” in which a character comes down into the three-dimensional
world the fan inhabits.
It has been suggested that itaema represent an attempt to transcend the
limitations of “manga/anime realism” in accordance with “game realism.”
In studying the Sengoku Basara (2005, Sengoku BASARA) game pilgrimage,
Satō Yoshiyuki notes the overriding significance of itaema. Through creating
and offering an itaema, he argues, fans can imagine that the characters over-
come the restrictions of the two-dimensional anime and enter into the three-
dimensional world where the fans themselves exist. Manifested on the itaema,
the characters literally become part of the living world of the pilgrims. The
fans are no longer just experiencing the places characters have been; rather it
is as if they are playing a game in the three-dimensional world, where they are
both creating the characters through their art and also observing themselves
as reflected in the characters they have produced.23 While Satō’s conclusion
gestures to the general importance of the visual images on itaema, I would
argue that in order to better understand the dynamics of fan interaction with
the anime and with each other, it is critical to closely examine the actual art-
work found on the itaema. If, as Satō suggests, fans are actively engaging with
characters at the pilgrimage site, then details of the illustrations will shed
light on the nature of this engagement.
The first Higurashi itaema I will use to exemplify anime votive art is an
anonymously drawn and brilliantly illustrated piece featuring a female char-
acter in a fit of psychotic laughter (Figure 1). The face, the central element,
seems to overflow the 14 cm wide by 10 cm high, elongated diamond shape
of the ema, creating a close-up that gives an impression of movement toward
the viewer. A tilting of the head further contributes to the animated effect.
Opened wide, with retinas like those of a snake, her eyes peer out and gaze
down on the viewer. An elongated mouth reveals a thin, white line of small,
jagged, razor-like teeth running from corner to corner. Under this row of teeth
the tautly stretched mouth is a dark pit from which an eerie laugh emerges.
The laugh is the only script on this particular ema: the hiragana characters
translate as an echoing “ha-ha-ha.” The letters encircling the face float off
Figure 1. A Higurashi character laughs eerily. Photograph by the author.
haphazardly in all directions, conveying a demonic energy. This ema is an ex-
ample of the artwork’s capacity to visually communicate an animated pres-
ence. Even for a viewer with no firsthand knowledge of the storyline, the
impression delivered by this image is unsettling. Folklorist Simon J. Bronner
has recognized that “a key characteristic of the Internet that distinguishes
it from face-to-face talking is how visual it is.”24 Although the emakake is a
pointedly nondigital space of communication, here, too, visuality is key to a
form of communication that is not face to face.
An ema with Hanyū (Figure 2) provides insight into another critical aspect
of itaema, namely the opening of interplay between characters and fans. On
the ema, the demon-goddess Hanyū has raised her right-hand level with her
face to forcibly point an index finger at the viewer. Boldface in red, and posi-
tioned vertically along both sides of her head, are the ominous words: “If you
do not offer (an ema), a curse on you.” Because her mouth itself is drawn as a
miniscule triangle, this threat bellows forth as if telepathically transmitted,
penetrating into the viewer’s inner psyche.
On the one hand, the prayer is a comical plea from one fan to another to
make an appreciable contribution to the pilgrimage experience, thereby inten-
sifying it for everyone. On the other hand, in complying with Hanyū’s decree
to offer a votive tablet, fans engage in a dialog with the characters as well as
Figure 2. The demon-goddess Hanyū threatens fans. Photograph by the author.
with other fans. Through (re)producing and displaying a visual representation
in this way, fans transfer the narratives of the characters from the screen of a
television or video monitor to the physical setting of the pilgrimage site. Both
the image and the accompanying text, in the form of dialog, allow the illus-
trated characters to interact with pilgrims and vice versa. In a sense, Hanyū
serves as a conduit, voicing a message from one pilgrim to others who follow.
When Donald H. Holly Jr. and Casey E. Cordy investigated present-day
activities surrounding the gravesites of alleged vampires in Rhode Island, they
commented that they learned little if anything about the motivations of the
people who left objects (coins, candles, and so on) at the graves.25 Unlike the
material record in their research, however, itaema contain explicit illustrations
and therefore provide a plethora of information about Higurashi fans and
offer insight into why they invest so much time and energy on the pilgrim-
age. One example contains a large figure of Hanyū backed by a smaller Shion
(Figure 3). Looking straight forward, Hanyū wears a matter-of-fact expres-
sion as she instructs fans on how to make a petition. Her rounded mouth is
opened to suggest that she is uttering the written text. She informs us that we
should offer her favorite food, cream puffs.26 At first glance we see that fans
entertain each other with tantalizing references to the Higurashi story; shared
knowledge is continuously communicated by both text and visual image on
Figure 3. Hanyū instructs fans how to petition her by offering cream puffs. Photograph by the
author.
by collectively
the itaema. Yet we also witness the establishment of a
superimposing
relationship with the characters that is a step beyond
Hinamizawa on the
what is ordinarily expected. In this example, although
three-dimensional
presented as inside humor, fans overtly sanction the
space of Shira
petitioning of the Higurashi characters.
kawagō, fans bring
Fans use the ema to restructure their surround-
their beloved anime
ings in order to bring themselves and the characters
characters into a
to the source of the Higurashi world. On one side of
material realm.
the ema sold by the shrine is the shrine name printed
with a scene of the local traditional lion dance, ani-
mals connected with birth years, and other such auspicious images. The other
side is left blank to provide space to write a prayer. Of the ema I examined, I
found that eight fans elected to write Hinamizawa’s shrine’s fictional name,
Furude Shrine, on the ema. Two ema had the name of Shirakawagō Hachiman
Shrine crossed out and rewritten with the fictional shrine’s name. A third was
blackened over with a marker so that the scene was completely indiscernible.
We can interpret these actions as the fans actively working to imagine that
Shirakawagō is the fictional Hinamizawa; that is, by overwriting the name in
this way, fans transform Shirakawagō Hachiman Shrine, where Ōjin Tennō
(Emperor Ōjin, reign circa 270–310) is enshrined, into Furude Shrine, where
Oyashiro-sama is worshipped. In a sense, they are also questioning which
is the original: was Furude inspired by Hachiman, or is it actually the other
way around? Through their active participation the pilgrims blur the lines
between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds, between fiction
and reality.
Moreover, by collectively superimposing Hinamizawa on the three-
dimensional space of Shirakawagō, fans bring their beloved anime charac-
ters into a material realm. For them, Hanyū, the deity who is worshipped
at Furude Shrine, replaces Shirakawagō Hachiman Shrine’s deity not just in
name but in practice. In her work on the modern popularity among Japanese
schoolgirls of the tenth-century sorcerer Abe no Seimei (921–1005), Laura
Miller has noted that worshippers offer ema so the enshrined deities can read
them, which is standard practice at shrines and temples throughout Japan.27
A review of all of the ema at Shirakawagō Hachiman Shrine shows that on nu-
merous occasions the fans directly petitioned Hanyū and other characters to
grant their wishes.28 In 2007, out of 511 itaema, 231 (45 percent) were inscribed
with prayers and petitions. For all practical purposes, the anime characters
have become the deities.
Media and technology scholar Sherry Turkle has posited that Internet
users are akin to “dwellers on the threshold between the real and virtual,”
an observation that certainly applies meaningfully to anime pilgrims as
well.29 Indeed, some pilgrims demonstrate a vivid awareness of the fact that
they are enacting a link between the real and the virtual, between the three-
dimensional world and the two-. One example that explicitly comments on
this point is an ema (Figure 4) with multiple characters: Satoko, Rika, and
Rena (from left to right) with a smallish figure on top of Rika’s head, possibly
Hanyū. The figures are drawn in a more childlike style than most other vo-
tive illustrations in the survey, and the low placement of the characters on
the tablet contributes to the effect of short stature. Moreover, because their
rounded eyes are expressed rather flatly, lacking lucidness, the three main
figures exude a sense of innocence. Consequently, the image attains an added
quality of sincerity that complements a thought-provoking supplication: Sa-
toko prays for more people to be able to distinguish between reality and the
two-dimensional world. Here the separation between the two worlds becomes
all the more blurred, as fans turn to the two-dimensional world of the anime
to communicate with each other in the three-dimensional world.
The image also raises some important questions. Is Satoko’s wish simply
tongue-in-cheek commentary about the perceived mental state of Higurashi
Figure 4. Satoko prays for people to be able to distinguish between reality and fiction. Photo-
graph by the author.
fans, or does it, more profoundly, reveal a philosophical outlook that could
help explain the need to produce ema illustrated with anime characters? Sa-
toko advocates for people to distinguish
between reality and fantasy, an ironic
when they travel to the
request of course, considering that it is
three-dimensional Hinamizawa,
being made by an anime character. But
they sense an emptiness, an
if we read between the lines, this irony
incompleteness, without the
reveals that the fans are, as Satō seems
animating presence of the
to suggest, able to transcend the para-
characters who are
dox of their liminal condition. The votive
inseparable from Hinamizawa.
art is central to connecting the three-
So, fans undertake to
dimensional (human/real) with the two-
complete the picture, as it
dimensional (divine/fictional).30
were, to draw the Higurashi
One final example (Figure 5) presents
characters into the three-
an image reminiscent of a traditional ema
dimensional Hinamizawa as
motif of a worshipper in prayer.31 We find
illustrations on ema.
Satoko with head slightly lowered, eyes
gently closed, hands raised with palms
pressed against each other. Her mouth is hidden from view by her hands. The
high positioning accentuates the act of worship while simulating the manner
in which Japanese customarily pray at shrines and temples. The image is sim-
ple enough, but the accompanying text presents a puzzle that once more blurs
the lines between the real and the virtual. In Higurashi, the main characters
of the story organized themselves into a club, and the text of this ema reads,
“(I pray) that I can make a scenario in which I am doing the club (activities)
with my big brothers and sisters.” The words are straightforward, but because
of the site and context of its articulation, the meaning is ambiguous. Is the
ema referencing the artist’s desire to interact with other pilgrims, the desire
of Satoko to play with the other members of the club, or is Satoko expressing
a desire to have the pilgrims become a part of her world?
Such “pictorial and narrative polysemy,” as Jennifer Robertson has noted
about ema in other contexts, is characteristic of many of the ema found at
the Shirakawagō Hachiman Shrine.32 It is up to the viewers to interpret the
meaning of text and image. Moreover, it is the viewers who ultimately decide
who is speaking: the character, the fan who offered up the ema, or both. Had
fans refrained from adding art and simply followed the general custom of only
inscribing text on their votive offerings, then the ema would not have become
so readily observable (visual), and the relation with the characters would not
have become as lively and interactive.
Figure 5. Satoko in prayer. Photograph by the author.
In fact, I would argue that it is the illustrations that constitute the ve-
hicle for this transference of characters from the flat world of anime into the
three-dimensional pilgrimage terrain. Despite being recognizable as material
products, the characters on the ema are “in the status of persons.”33 It has been
noted that in contemporary Japan, the anthropomorphizing of objects is now
part and parcel of everyday life, and many people express an emotional at-
tachment to fictional characters.34 On an ema featuring a drawing of Rika one
fan wrote, “Rika, I love you, I love you! So please raise my grades.”35 In such
instances, we see fans pursuing intimate interaction with Higurashi characters
as well as treating them as if they were deities to be petitioned.
In describing how a person receives an amulet from a shrine or temple,
H. Bryon Earhart explains that the shrine or temple contains more power and
sacrality than the home.36 Extending this train of thought to our subject, the
movement of the characters out of the private and into the public sphere—
more specifically off the TV or computer screen in the home to the emakake
at the pilgrimage site—is a sacralizing action that imbues the characters,
embodied on the fans’ ema, with ubiety in the three-dimensional world. The
Higurashi world arose from the scenery found in Shirakawagō; fans recognize
that Shirakawagō is the origin of Hinamizawa. But when they travel to the
three-dimensional Hinamizawa, they sense an emptiness, an incompleteness,
without the animating presence of the characters who are inseparable from
Hinamizawa. So, fans undertake to complete the picture, as it were, to draw
the Higurashi characters into the three-dimensional Hinamizawa as illustra-
tions on ema.
Bronner has suggested that people tend to doubt the realness of what
they see on the screen because of an object’s intangibility.37 Accordingly, by
situating the image of characters within the three-dimensional world, fans
invest them with an added, real-world authenticity. They make them tangible.
The materialization of the characters’ presence within the physical landscape
of the pilgrimage is an act of genesis that simultaneously animates the in-
strumentality of the Higurashi characters and also makes real a place called
Hinamizawa. McLuhan defined “medium” as “any extension of ourselves”:
by extending themselves through itaema imagery in the sacred space of the
shrine, Higurashi fans literally make themselves part of the story, and part
of the place where it occurs.38 Through this act of creation, fans give birth to
their own world.
Notes
Thanks to Mechademia’s anonymous reviewers, and thanks to Michael Dylan Foster. His
editorial attentiveness to both the author’s and the readers’ needs is inspirational. Finally,
I extend my deepest gratitude to Suzuki Iwayumi, professor of religious folklore, for years
of untiring tutelage.
1. A dōjin circle is a group of people with shared interests, i.e. in making fan-created
works. Higurashi no naku koro ni, PC (07th Expansion, 2002).
2. Seichi junrei commonly refers to a pilgrimage to a traditional religious setting;
however, the parameters of the term are expanding to reflect current social attitudes re-
garding spirituality. For an overview of contemporary pilgrimage sites both in and out of
Japan, see Seichi junrei tsūrizumu (Pilgrimage tourism), ed. Hoshino Eiki, Yamanaka Hiro-
shi, and Okamoto Ryōsuke (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 2012).
3. Nomura Sōgō Kenkyūjo, Otaku shijō no kenkyū (Otaku marketing) (Tokyo: Tōyō
Keizai Shinpōsha, 2005), 34.
4. Ishii Kenji, Terebi to shūkyō: Oumu igo o toi naosu (Television and religion: A new
inquiry in the wake of Aum Shinrikyo) (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha, 2008), 214–15.
5. Dorirupurojekuto, Seichi junrei navi: Anime & komikku (Pilgrimage navigation:
Anime and comics) (Tokyo: Asuka Shinsha, 2010); Kakizaki Shundō, Seichi junrei: Anime
manga 12 kasho meguri (Sacred site pilgrimages: A tour of 12 anime and manga locations)
(Tokyo: Kirutaimu Comyunikeeshon, 2005). There are also manga-based pilgrimages:
Ofusaido Bukkusu Henshūbu, Manga no arukikata (How to find manga settings) (Tokyo:
Sairyūsha, 1999).
230 da le k. a ndre w s
6. Imai Nobuharu, “Fan ga nichijō o ‘seika’ suru: Ema ni kakerareta negai” (Fans
sacralize the everyday: The prayers written on votive tablets), in Shūkyō to tsūrizumu: Sei
naru mono no henyō to jizoku (Religion and tourism: The change and continuity of sacred
things), ed. Yamanaka Hiroshi, 170–89 (Kyoto: Seikai Shisōsha, 2012); Okamoto Takeshi,
“Rakisuta seichi ‘Washimiya’ junrei to jōhōka shakai” (The pilgrimage to the Lucky Star
sacred site ‘Washimiya’ and the information society), in Kankō no kūkan: Shiten to apurōchi
(The space of tourism: Viewpoint and approach), ed. Kanda Kōji, 133–44 (Tokyo: Nakan-
ishiya, 2009); Yamamura Takayoshi, Anime/manga de chiiki shinkō: Machi no fan o umu
kontentsu tsūrizumu kaihatsuhō (Local development by means of anime/manga: A content
tourism developmental method to create fans of the local community) (Tokyo: Tōkyō
Hōrei, 2011).
7. “Hinamizawa kankō annai chizu” (Hinamizawa tourist map), http://outdoor
.geocities.jp/hinamy2006.
8. A parallel can be drawn with the Edo-period pilgrim as explained by Akinori
Kato, who would take back a souvenir for those who could not join the pilgrimage. The
Higurashi fan’s souvenir is a posted image on a blog, for example, that she or he can share
with friends. Akinori Kato, “Package Tours, Pilgrimages, and Pleasure Trips,” in The Electric
Geisha: Exploring Japan’s Popular Culture, ed. Atsushi Ueda, trans. Miriam Eguchi (Tokyo:
Kodansha International, 1994), 54.
9. John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 179.
10. E. Frances King points out that the act of taking home souvenirs (material culture)
from a pilgrimage is invaluable in communicating the experience to others. E. Frances King,
Material Religion and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010), 97.
11. Ian Reader provides a comprehensive explanation of ema. Ian Reader, “Letters to
the Gods: The Form and Meaning of Ema,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 18, no. 1
(1991): 23–50.
12. This interpretation of itaema is based on conversations with numerous fans at
various venues, including gatherings of itasha (anime-decorated automobiles) enthusiasts.
13. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1965), 7.
14. Simon J. Bronner, Grasping Things: Folk Material Culture and Mass Society in Amer-
ica (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 130.
15. I documented a Kamichu! fan-made spiral notebook at the emakake of Misode
Tenmangū Shrine in Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture in April 2008. Multiple fans added
comments, prayers, and illustrations.
16. The remainder (roughly ten percent) may also include fans.
17. In a March 2012 survey this number had risen to just under 64 percent.
18. The shrine’s caretakers did not disclose the exact year they began selling ema.
19. From 2008 onward, the shrine’s caretakers began to periodically remove many of
the ema, presumably to make space available for new ema to be dedicated. Periodic removal
is common practice at many shrines and temples; see Reader, “Letter to the Gods,” 35.
20. Henry Jenkins, “‘Strangers No More, We Sing’: Filking and the Social Construc-
tion of the Science Fiction Fan Community,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popu-
lar Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London: Routledge, 1992), 210.
21. Richard Chalfen and Mai Murui, “Print Club Photography in Japan: Framing
Social Relationships,” in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, ed.
Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (New York: Routledge, 2010), 175.
22. Maruta Hajime, Bashoron: Webu no riarizumu chiiki no romanchishizumu (Theory of
location in the information society) (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan, 2008), 109–11; Maruta refer-
ences Azuma Hiroki, Geemuteki riarizumu no tanjō: Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan (The birth
of game realism: Japan’s database animals 2) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2007).
23. Satō Yoshiyuki, “Otaku ema to wa nani ka: Miyagi-ken gokoku jinja no ema chōsa
kekka to sono bunseki” (What are otaku votive tablets? The survey results and analysis of
the votive tablets at Gokoku Shrine, Miyagi Prefecture), in Community Development and
Tourism for the Next Generation, ed. Yamamura Takayoshi and Okamoto Takeshi (Sapporo:
Hokkaido University, 2010), 125. For other articles concerning itaema, see Imai Nobuharu,
“Anime ‘seichi junrei’ jissensha no kōdō ni miru dentōteki junrei to kankō katsudō no
kakyō kanōsei: Saitama-ken Washinomiya jinja hōnō ema bunseki o chūshin ni” (The tra-
ditional pilgrimage and the connective potential of tourist activities as seen in the actions
of anime pilgrimage participants: A focus on the analysis of votive tablets dedicated at the
Washinomiya shrine in Saitama Prefecture), in Media Contents and Tourism: An Experience
of Washimiya Town and Neon Genesis of Tourism, ed. Cultural Resource Management Re-
search Team, CATS, Hokkaido University (Sapporo: Center for Advanced Tourism Studies
Hokkaido University, 2009), 85–111; Imai Nobuharu, “Fan ga nichijō o ‘seika’suru”; Satō
Yoshiyuki, “Ika ni shite jinja wa seichi to natta ka: Kōkyōsei to hinichijōsei ga umidasu
seichi no hatten” (How did a shrine become a sacred site? The public and extraordinary
give birth to the development of a sacred site), in Media Contents and Tourism, 71–84.
24. Simon J. Bronner, “Digitizing and Virtualizing Folklore,” in Folklore and the Inter-
net: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, ed. Trevor J. Blank (Logan: Utah State Univer-
sity Press, 2009), 29.
25. Donald H. Holly Jr. and Casey E. Cordy, “What’s in a Coin? Reading the Material
Culture of Legend Tripping and Other Activities,” Journal of American Folklore 120, no. 477
(2007): 346.
26. Another ema displayed three months later shows Hanyū eating cream puffs while
restating that pilgrims should offer some to get their wishes granted.
27. Laura Miller, “Extreme Makeover for a Heian-Era Wizard,” Mechademia 3 (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008): 37.
28. Many fans petition to Oyashiro-sama, Hanyū’s alter ego, whose name means
roughly “Master (of the) Shrine.”
29. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York:
Touchstone, 1997), 10.
30. Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 39.
31. For excellent visual examples, see Kondō Masaki’s publication on votive offerings.
Kondō Masaki, ed., Negai, uranai, omajinai: Yokubō no zōkei kikakuten (Prayer, divination,
incantation: Exhibition on the form of desire) (Mito, Japan: Ibaraki Kenritsu Hakubutsu-
kan, 2000), 9–11.
32. Jennifer Robertson, “Ema-gined Community: Votive Tablets (Ema) and Strategic
Ambivalence in Wartime Japan,” Asian Ethnology 67, no. 1 (2008): 46.
232 da le k. a ndre w s
33. Michael Ashkenazi and John Clammer, “Introduction: The Japanese and the
Goods,” in Consumption and Material Culture in Contemporary Japan, ed. Michael Ashkenazi
and John Clammer (London: Kegan Paul International, 2000), 17.
34. Yoshimasa Kijima, “Why Make E-moe-tional Attachments to Fictional Charac-
ters? The Cultural Sociology of the Post-Modern,” in Pop Culture and the Everyday in Japan:
Sociological Perspectives, ed. Katsuya Minamida and Izumi Tsuji, trans. Leonie R. Stickland
(Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2012), 153–55.
35. This adoration for characters is reflected in a questionnaire I administered to
sixty-eight Tohoku Gakuin University students who participated in my lecture class on
October 10, 2012. In response to the question “Do you think it is possible to have an
emotional feeling close to love for anime/game characters?” 47 percent answered in the
affirmative.
36. H. Byron Earhart, “Mechanisms and Process in the Study of Japanese Amulets,”
in Nihon shūkyō e no shikaku (Approaches to Japanese religion), ed. Okada Shigekiyo
(Osaka: Tōhō Shuppan, 1994), 618.
37. Bronner, “Digitizing and Virtualizing,” 29.
38. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 7.
Repetition,
Remediation,
Adaptation
FORREST GREENWOOD
The Girl at the Center

of the World: Gender,
Genre, and Remediation
in Bishōjo Media Works
In the sculpture garden at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center stands a most cu-
rious piece. Deborah Butterfield’s Woodrow (1988), a sculpture cast in bronze,
depicts a skeletal horse-like figure constructed entirely out of what appears
to be wooden sticks, logs, and branches. The statue catches the eye with its
arresting appearance, but what truly holds the attention is its accompanying
inscription. In it, the sculptor describes her early experiences making “horses
out of real mud and sticks . . . to reflect how much a horse is part of his en-
vironment.” This statement is interesting for the way that it reflects a com-
mon perception about animals: that they lack sufficient distance from their
environment and thus do not have access to the world as such, in the manner
of human beings. As Martin Heidegger argues, “a stone is worldless. Plant
and animal likewise have no world; but they belong to the covert throng of a
surrounding into which they are linked.”1 The environment that plants and
animals inhabit is not a world, with the full expanse of possibility and poten-
tiality implied by the term. Or perhaps, as Akira Mizuta Lippit puts it, animals
do inhabit a world of sorts, “but this world is not their own: it is another’s
world.”2 It is our world, humanity’s world: a world secured for our benefit by
means of our faculty of language. We speak and listen in the abstract thoughts
237
the shōjo reaches out
enabled by language, thus affording us the abil-
into the world through
ity to conceive of the future: to anticipate, to
her gaze, reemerging
fear, to hope, to dream.3
from the page or
This essay seeks to address the topic of ori-
the screen to address
gins by analyzing the agency of the shōjo, the
the viewer, to make
ever-cute emblem of femininity who circulates
demands, to promise
through multiple spheres of anime and manga
potentialities and
fandom. Like the animal, the shōjo finds her-
futures untold.
self cast as an integral part of her environment,
lacking distance from it. Here, however, the en-
vironment in question is not that of “nature”—the environment of rocks,
plants, and animals. Rather, it is a mediated environment, an environment
constructed from media. When we differentiate the shōjo as a concept (char-
acters in media) from the shōjo as a class of human beings (girls, or women
in a more general sense), we do so on the basis of the signifiers of her media-
tion: the quality of a line that forms a portion of a facsimile of a face (or a
particular arrangement of lines), the layout in which she presents herself on
a page (surrounded by bouquets of lilies and halftone), the manner in which
she operates through narratives, or the presence of a generic signifier. When
we speak of the shōjo as a concept, then, we implicitly reference what Thomas
Lamarre refers to as “a gap between girl and image.”4
But though the shōjo remains as enmeshed within her environment as
the animal does within its own, she may not entirely lack agency because of
it. For while the animal may lack access to language, it does not sacrifice the
ability to reemerge in the world because of that. Rather, the animal privileges
other forms of communication, other modes of knowledge, other means of
accessing the world and the future. “Animals,” Lippit writes, “and their capac-
ity for instinctive, almost telepathic communication . . . put into question the
primacy of human language and consciousness as optimal modes of commu-
nication.”5 They invite consideration of the potential of the unconscious and,
by extension, the cinema.6
Similarly, the shōjo reaches out into the world through her gaze, re-
emerging from the page or the screen to address the viewer, to make demands,
to promise potentialities and futures untold. She speaks across the boundar-
ies of language and culture, unveiling with each glance something of the struc-
ture of the hypermediated world we humans choose to construct and inhabit.
To explore this unveiling, this paper will examine the mechanisms
through which the shōjo’s gaze operates in The Garden of Sinners (2008–11,
Kara no kyōkai)—a media saga comprising seven theatrical films and one
238 forrest gre e n wo o d

direct-to-video episode. Produced by the animation studio ufotable and the
independent game developer Notes (better known to their fans as TYPE-
MOON), The Garden of Sinners follows its murderous protagonist, Shiki Ryōgi,
as she adopts agency by learning to direct and interpret her quite unique gaze.
In so doing, these films reveal how the shōjo does much the same.
Perhaps the films’ most interesting aspect, however, is the manner in
which they complicate the prevailing gender norms for works within the
bishōjo media sphere—those sub-genres of media, like bishōjo games, bishōjo
anime, bishōjo manga, and related light novels and dōjinshi, and their atten-
dant fan cultures, which primarily focus on the activities of young female
characters and which share certain representational and aesthetic norms.
The Garden of Sinners films achieve this complication principally through the
character of Shiki. Positioned unsteadily within the gender binary, she reveals
herself as neither entirely female nor entirely male. Rather, she oscillates in
and out of the shōjo paradigm, challenging viewer preconceptions and resist-
ing reading strategies that seek to contain and categorize.
This ambiguity mirrors what Frenchy Lunning identifies as the almost un-
canny power of the shōjo: simultaneously sexualized yet desexualized, femi-
nine yet not entirely female, a shōjo “secures her identity as a desirable female
yet keeps the abject content of mature feminine sexuality at bay.”7 Similarly,
Brian Bergstrom identifies a theoretical dialogue that “posits a definition of
shōjo that ostensibly distinguishes it from femininity, sometimes calling it a
separate gender altogether.”8
Laden with meaning and seeming contradiction, while being all image
and no body, the shōjo wields a special sort of power. She freely navigates the
labyrinthine commercial flows of the transmedia age, representing “the origin
of the feverish proliferation and manic repetition of objects . . . a complex of
concepts, conditions, and commodities.”9 This inherent multiplicity, according
to Anne Allison, makes the shōjo a particularly potent vehicle for the consum-
erist imperatives of post-Fordist culture, “mak[ing] play and identification a
pursuit ever more linked to consumerism”; the shōjo’s inherent ambiguity and
malleability yields “a plethora of body and character types” reminiscent of the
variety of goods on sale in a shopping mall.10
Given ethereal form through evocative character design, she easily be-
comes one of Thomas Lamarre’s “soulful bodies”—figures able to survive and
communicate expression even under the conditions of restrained movement
found in limited animation, as commonly practiced in the anime/manga me-
dia sphere—and she slips easily between the cycles of remediation that form
the core of creative activity within this space.11
t h e g i r l at t h e ce n t e r o f t h e wo r l d 2 3 9
VISUAL NOVELS AND ANIME’S
REMEDIATION FEEDBACK LOOP
In their book, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and
Richard Grusin argue that media in Western cultures operate according to two
logics: immediacy and hypermediacy. The logic of immediacy holds when media
aim for perfect transparency in representation; as Bolter and Grusin put it,
“the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing
represented.”12 Media operating under the logic of immediacy aim to reveal
their representational content in the manner of an Albertian window, provid-
ing a clear, unobstructed view.13 At their most opaque, immediate works aim
to frame the view, directing our gaze but never blocking or occluding it.
The logic of hypermediacy, however, aims for perfect opacity, placing the
medium itself, and not its represented subject, at the center of attention.
Hypermediacy “acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes
them visible . . . and in this way tries to reproduce the rich sensorium of the
human experience . . . In every manifestation, hypermediacy makes us aware
of the medium or media.”14 In works operating under the logic of hyper
mediacy, “the artist (or multimedia programmer or web designer) strives to
make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in that
acknowledgement.”15
These logics combine in the process of remediation, which Bolter and
Grusin define as “the representation of one medium in another,” and which
they note as being “a defining characteristic of the new digital media.”16
Some remediations primarily adhere to the logic of immediacy, as in digi-
tally scanned documents, digital video telecined from a film source, or digital
photographs of paintings. These all remediate an older medium (print, film,
or paint-on-canvas) through a newer one (digital imaging, digital video, or
digital imaging again), but they aim to do so with minimal intrusion and maxi-
mum transparency; ideally, the viewer should “stand in the same relationship
to the content as she would if she were confronting the original medium.”17
Other mediations, including bishōjo games, emphasize hypermediacy.
These games, also known as galge or gyaruge (short for “gal games”), task the
player with managing potentially romantic relationships with one or more
characters by navigating dense text-based narratives with multiple branching
story paths.18 Often, such games cast the player as a male avatar pursuing fe-
male characters, and commonly present the player with a dual-window inter-
face similar to that found in a modern personal computer operating system.19
24 0 forrest gre e n wo o d
Here, the lower third of the screen displays a text-based menu system that
serves as the player’s primary means of interaction with the game world, while
the upper two-thirds of the screen displays still or motion graphics that pro-
vide a visual reference for the menu-screen text.
Different sub-genres of bishōjo games employ these windows in different,
but superficially similar, ways. Some games, often referred to colloquially as
“dating sims,” revel in their hypermediacy, compelling the player to manipu-
late stat bars as in a MMORPG [massively multiplayer online role-playing
game]; when the player raises one or more bars to a sufficient level by per-
forming repetitive tasks, romance paths open up with one or more of the
game’s characters. Other games invoke the relative transparency of the novel,
presenting the player with lengthy first-person textual narratives that require
minimal input to navigate.
In either case, several layers of remediation operate within most bishōjo
games. The menu windows remediate printed novels, if the game focuses on
narrative, or accounting ledgers, if the game focuses on statistics. Meanwhile,
the image-display windows remediate painting or photography, often with
a particular emphasis on naturalistic detail and linear perspective, at least
in the case of background art. Taken in total, the compartmentalized, win-
dowed interface of the bishōjo game (Figure 1) is hypermediated in much the
same manner as the graphical user interface of a modern computer operating
system, where the user “oscillates between manipulating the windows and
examining their contents.”20
Yet, as Patrick Galbraith notes, bishōjo games do strive for a sort of imme-
diacy. This, however, is an immediacy born not of naturalistic representation—
for, backgrounds aside, bishōjo games generally employ an art style that is
profoundly abstract and stylized—but of “intensity, in the sense of affect.”21
Such games, in other words, strive for an immediacy of feeling—yet they
do so seemingly in defiance of their remediations. One notable characteris-
tic of bishōjo games is their use of the first-person perspective. Textual ele-
ments, particularly in the visual novel sub-genre, often assume the form of
first-person narratives, with the player-controlled character serving as the
narrator. Meanwhile, visual elements often assume a first-person linear per-
spective to visually represent the player character’s view of the game world,
though often this view takes the form of static digital imagery, rather than the
volumetric, navigable environments of first-person shooter titles. From this
perspective, environments unfold from a point of view at roughly eye height,
and female characters directly address themselves to the viewer.
Figure 1. A screen image from OVERDRIVE’s Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~ (released
as an English-language title through publisher MangaGamer), illustrating the sort of windowed,
hypermediated interface commonly found in most bishōjo games.
SIGHTS AND SPECTACLE
Bishōjo games would thus seem to perfectly articulate the male gaze identified
by Laura Mulvey. Indeed, Mulvey’s description of how “women are simultane-
ously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual
and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness,”
could well apply to the visual and thematic setup of any number of titles in
this genre.22 In an early article on the bishōjo game genre, Emily Taylor reaches
nearly this exact conclusion, albeit without reference to Mulvey or gaze the-
ory. Noting that narrative agency in these games seems to rest entirely with
the male protagonist, Taylor argues that female characters either figure as
“defenseless playthings for the male character or are reduced to such by the
end of the game.”23
Yet Patrick Galbraith argues that Taylor’s analysis oversimplifies mat-
ters: although we assume the position of a male-gendered avatar, the game’s
emotional core lies not within that avatar but within the female characters.
Reflecting on how bishōjo games often focus intently on the emotions of female
characters, Galbraith suggests that “this bias in expressivity encourages iden-
tification” with those same figures.24 In other words, we may view the world
through a male gaze, but that gaze lacks the ability to control and dominate
the shōjo in the manner that Mulvey suggests it does within the Hollywood
cinema. The shōjo, rather, adopts a controlling power all her own: bursting free
of the games’ narrative structure, she compels the viewer to become swept up
in emotion and thus claims for herself a potent, if circumscribed, agency.
This issue of viewer-character positioning, however, proves arguably more
nuanced than either Taylor’s or Galbraith’s analyses seem to indicate. In many
bishōjo games, such as Capcom’s Ace Attorney (2001–present, Gyakuten saiban)
series, the shōjo only assumes agency in a few key scenes. Ace Attorney pro-
tagonist Phoenix Wright (Naruhodō Ryūichi) proves to be a power-fantasy
vehicle straight out of central casting: a good-natured fool who gradually be-
comes the confident, near-miraculous litigator suggested by the series’ English
title.25 His assistant, Maya Fey (Ayasato Mayoi), largely provides comic relief in
the form of bizarre non sequiturs and spacey comments on narrative happen-
ings. These create room for Phoenix, and by association the player, to distance
himself from Maya, often through sardonic inner monologues that treat her
as something akin to an interloper from another planet (Figure 2).
At such moments, the shōjo’s excessiveness becomes a source of bewil-
derment or comic relief, and she is othered accordingly. Yet she retains a key
power: a mediated tendency to return the player’s gaze. Today’s anime me-
dia mix explodes with a profusion of female characters who stare out at the
viewer. The frequency and intensity of this eye contact is arguably without
parallel in other media environments, spreading as it does across a limit-
less array of media and products. This tendency toward direct address calls
to mind Tom Gunning’s cinema of attractions, which proudly “displays its
visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to so-
licit the attention of the spectator.”26 The anime media mix, in fact, proves a
quite capable successor to the cinema of attractions, with works consistently
foregrounding ever more inventive ways of moving characters out from the
diegetic world behind the screen and into the world of sense perception in-
habited by the player/viewer.27 While this movement often takes the form
of personalization—many bishōjo games allow the player to choose a name
for the protagonist, and some, like Konami’s LovePlus games (2009–12), take
advantage of the limited number of phonemes in the Japanese language to
allow the heroines to speak aloud the player’s chosen name—it occasionally
goes much further. Sega’s concerts featuring virtual idol Hatsune Miku, for
Figure 2. A screen image from Capcom’s Nintendo DS adventure game, Phoenix Wright: Ace
Attorney (Gyakuten saiban), illustrating an internal monologue of protagonist Phoenix Wright
(Naruhodō Ryūichi) as he regards supporting character Maya Fey (Ayasato Mayoi, pictured).
Bishōjo games negotiate
example, pair a dual-projector setup with
a complex interplay of
a transparent screen to create the illusion
spectatorial positioning:
of a computer-animated Miku dancing
at times adopting the
live on stage alongside flesh-and-blood
controlling, domineering
musicians. Most dramatically, Konami’s
male gaze, while at other
LovePlus games employ the Nintendo DS’s
times ceding ground to the
internal clock to synchronize their events
shōjo’s emotive agency.
with real-world time, allowing players to
schedule dates with their virtual girlfriends
according to a real-world calendar, with appropriately dire consequences for
missed appointments.
The shōjo thus holds the potential— admittedly not always fully
realized—for a uniquely mediated, almost cyborg agency. Even if the limi-
tations of technology render her actions and yearnings as “trace communi-
cations, faint whispers of an ephemeral presence,” she yet makes genuine
emotional demands.28 Bishōjo games thus negotiate a complex interplay of
spectatorial positioning: at times adopting the controlling, domineering male
gaze, while at other times ceding ground to the shōjo’s emotive agency. This
interplay extends into the realm of mediation; unlike the first-person cinema,
bishōjo games do not convey their content in a transparent, immediate fash-
ion. Rather, they compete for the viewer’s attention with menu windows and
gameplay icons. Meanwhile, their database-derived structure—in which the
computer assembles the final mise-en-scéne from a combination of image,
text, and audio files—foregrounds and calls attention to their hypermediated
nature.29 In this environment, players must choose where to direct their at-
tention; no one element dominates the visual field.
Bolter and Grusin argue that this multiplicity of views fundamentally
changes the position of the player, and the player’s relation to the ludic die
gesis. In contrast with the totalizing gaze of the film camera, which seeks to
possess and control through its narrow intensity, the bishōjo game’s hyper-
mediated image field facilitates and encourages a different mode of viewing:
a scanning across the image field. When we view in this way, “we do not look
through the medium in linear perspective; rather, we look at the medium or at
a multiplicity of media that may appear in windows on a computer screen . . .
We do not gaze; rather, we glance here and there at the various manifestations
of the media.”30 The numerous, overlapping media elements of the bishōjo
game thus confuse and redirect the spectator’s gaze, which may facilitate the
movement between identification with the male avatar and identification
with the shōjo posited by Galbraith.
GAZING UPON THE GARDEN
With its unique approach to bishōjo genre conventions, The Garden of Sinners
film series provides a narrative and thematic elaboration of this movement,
posing interesting challenges to the conventional spectatorial position. The
films certainly boast a blue-ribbon generic pedigree, stemming as they do from
the creative output of writer Nasu Kinoko and illustrator Takeuchi Takeshi,
who, along with support staff, comprise the amateur group Type-Moon and
the independent game developer Notes. Bursting onto the gaming scene in
2000, at the Fifty-ninth Comic Market in Tokyo, with the release of the PC-
based visual novel game Tsukihime, Nasu and Takeuchi quickly made waves,
with the title reportedly selling 65,000 copies.31
Fueled by the success of Tsukihime, Type-Moon formally incorporated
in 2003 as the production company Notes, following up with 2004’s Fate/
stay night, a relative blockbuster whose success paved the way for a series
of spin-offs, sequels, and derivative works, as well as a commercial revival
of one of Nasu and Takeuchi’s earliest works: The Garden of Sinners.32 Origi-
nally published online as a serialized novella, the series evidently proved less
than successful in its initial outing; in an interview, Nasu argues that “you
can’t get around the fact that print media doesn’t fare well on the Internet,”
with Takeuchi describing the venture as “a bitter failure.”33 But the success of
Tsukihime and Fate/stay night evidently prompted a public reassessment of The
Garden of Sinners, as Nasu eventually finished the series, producing a proper
print run of novels. Then, beginning in 2007, the animation studio ufotable
adapted the series into seven films: one for each book.
At the level of their visual presentation, the films rely heavily on rich,
evocatively composed scenic images, similar to those found in bishōjo games
with relatively high production values. Furthermore, these images often fore-
ground the traces of computer-graphics enhancement, sporting vivid, super-
saturated colors that draw attention to the films’ mediations. Meanwhile, in
their discontinuous narrative structure, the films suggest database narratives
in which the player is free to move between different story branches at will, by
returning to a previous decision point and choosing a new option. The Garden
of Sinners films challenge the spectator to divine the overarching narrative
route of the series, as each film jumps forward or backward in time and space,
sometimes returning to a previous point before jumping off again into un-
charted territory. They present a varied cast of characters who blend the fan-
tastic with the naturalistic, in much the same manner as in games: the films
(and novels) follow the murderer Ryōgi Shiki, the investigator Kokutō Mikiya,
the good magus Aozaki Tōko, and the magus-in-training Kokutō Azaka as
they struggle to defuse the machinations and schemes of the demented
Araya Sōren, a former colleague of Aozaki who employs a rather extreme
ends-justify-the-means approach to his arcane research. But the interaction
between protagonists Shiki and Mikiya constitutes the films’ thematic core,
where they hint at and toy with the complex interplay between player and
shōjo that forms the core of the bishōjo game experience.
The first film, Thanatos (Overlooking View) (2007, Fukan fūkei—Thanatos),
sets up this interaction quite vividly in its opening moments. We hear a door-
bell ring, we see an eye looking out through what appears to be a door’s se-
curity window, we hear a man’s voice calling out for Shiki. As we soon learn,
in this scene we share Mikiya’s point of view as he calls at Shiki’s apartment.
Already a relatively bland character in the manner of most bishōjo-game ava-
tars, Mikiya is thus presented as the lead character by default, and we prepare
ourselves to see the films’ narrative through his eyes. Yet, right away, Shiki
aggressively returns Mikiya’s (and our) gaze (Figure 3), suggesting that this
apparent balance of power may not hold.
Indeed, Shiki quickly establishes her place as the true main character of
the series when events render Mikiya comatose, forcing Shiki to investigate.
Mikiya will never again wield ultimate narrative agency, though he does set
certain events in motion. As the films progress, Shiki even takes Mikiya’s place
as the audience avatar: we begin to see directly through her point of view. This
Figure 3. An image from the first Kara no kyōkai film, Thanatos (Overlooking View) (2007,
Fukan fūkei—Thanatos). Here, we see through male lead Kokutō Mikiya’s eyes as female lead
Ryōgi Shiki pointedly returns his gaze.
shift in audience positioning turns out to serve an expository function: Shiki,
we learn, possesses the ability to see the lines of life and death that sustain the
existence of everything in the films’ world. And if she can see them, she can
cut them, which makes her an uncannily effective fighter and killer.
The Garden of Sinners filmmakers delight in showing the world as Shiki
sees it, complete with glowing red lines of existence.34 In addition to pro-
viding us with a physical point of view—and a
nonmale gaze—Shiki also becomes the emotional
By owning her gaze
center of the films’ overarching narrative. Full of
and choosing where to
mystery and ambiguity, Shiki compels us to learn
direct it, Shiki joins
more about her, whereas Mikiya remains consis-
the growing throng
tently droll, invariably the trusty sidekick to our
of shōjo characters
murderous heroine. The Garden of Sinners, it turns
who transgress the
out, is truly Shiki’s story, and the films chronicle
boundary of the
the path she walks toward assuming ultimate
screen in order to
narrative agency. Yet the films never entirely
disrupt the player/
commit to Shiki’s agency; they oscillate between
viewer’s gaze.
treating her as a proper agent, and treating her
as an object to be gazed upon. While we may see
through Shiki’s eyes, we also see her undress (albeit in the first person), and
the animators occasionally linger over third-person close-ups of Shiki adjust-
ing her kimono.
Just as the films remain slightly ambiguous about Shiki’s subject position,
they also openly raise questions about her gender identification, for Shiki
possesses two unique personalities that exist simultaneously—and, most in-
triguingly, each half adopts a distinct gender. Shiki, the female personality, is
taciturn, guarded, and severe (Figure 4), while Shiki-kun, the male, is bubbly,
outgoing, and emotive (Figure 5).35 In revealing this information to us, the
films play with our understanding of how gender is constructed within bishōjo
works; what we expect to be male turns out to be female, and vice versa.
Much as the interplay between the impotence of the male player and
the emotive power of the female character forms the core of the character’s
agency in bishōjo games, so too is Shiki’s ambiguous gender identity integral
to her narrative quest for agency. In an arc that spans the second, fourth,
and seventh films, Shiki ends up comatose after a car accident. When she
wakes, she discovers to her horror that her Shiki-kun personality perished
and will never return. Though nominally male, Shiki-kun displayed many of
the outward signifiers of the shōjo, including a naive flirtatiousness and ef-
fervescent cheer, and the loss of this personality throws Shiki into a state of
Figure 4. An image from the second Kara no kyōkai film, . . . and nothing heart (Murder Specula-
tion, Part One) (2007, Satsujin kōsatsu [zen]). Here, we see Mikiya attempt to engage with Shiki’s
guarded, taciturn female persona.
Figure 5. An image from the second Kara no kyōkai film, . . . and nothing heart (Murder Specula-
tion, Part One) (2007, Satsujin kōsatsu [zen]). Here, Mikiya goes along for the ride as Shiki’s bub-
bly, outgoing male persona, Shiki-kun, explores a shopping mall.
crisis. From this point onward, Shiki struggles to establish a stable sense of
self. In so doing, she gradually grows comfortable expressing emotions and
desires through her gruff female personality that she could previously express
only by ceding control to Shiki-kun.
In a pat reversal of Miyadai Shinji’s argument that otaku and other fans
of bishōjo works retreat to their fictional goddesses in order to maintain
“homeostasis of the self,” Ryōgi Shiki sheds the outward trappings of shōjo-
hood to achieve the same end.36 At the same time, The Garden of Sinners films
realign their narrative and visual structure to place Shiki both as the driving
agent of the story and as the subject through whom the audience directs its
gaze. By owning her gaze and choosing where to direct it, Shiki joins the grow-
ing throng of shōjo characters who transgress the boundary of the screen
in order to disrupt the player/viewer’s gaze, challenge it, or even reverse it
to make actual demands. She counters her minimum safe distance from her
mediated environment by adapting nonlinguistic forms of communication—
forms that, like the communications of animals previously thought mute
and dumb, enable her to move into states of knowledge and being previously
thought beyond her grasp. She gains narrative agency, but more than that,
she gains a future, a boundless expanse of potentiality that she may freely
colonize in ways yet unimaginable.
This potential, of course, stands in contrast to the way in which we con-
ventionally read fictional characters. When Derrida writes of the animal as
being “naked without knowing it . . . not having knowledge of their nudity,
in short, without consciousness of good and evil,” he summarizes the line
of philosophical thought, taken up by Heidegger, that argues that animals,
without access to language, without sufficient distance from their environ-
ment, lack the capacity to comprehend abstract notions like death or shame.37
The shōjo, seeming to also possess this lack, thus appears to be in a position
of absolute exposure, naked before the eyes of the viewer, powerless to do
naught but accede to his demands. In directing the shōjo’s gaze out toward the
viewer, however, the creators of The Garden of Sinners, and of many modern
bishōjo games, disrupt this hierarchy, forcing the viewer to regard the shōjo
as being something more than a mute, passive object. Unlike Butterfield’s
horse, the shōjo is not inseparable from the trappings of her environment;
she shows flickerings of being more than mere ink and paint. She transcends
her environmental origin, and opens herself to a world.
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, trans. David
Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 170.
2. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis:
3. Ibid., 65.
4. Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis:
5. Lippit, Electric Animal, 2.
6. Ibid., 24.
7. Frenchy Lunning, “Under the Ruffles: Shōjo and the Morphology of Power,”
Mechademia 6 (2011): 16.
8. Brian Bergstrom, “Girliness Next to Godliness: Lolita Fandom as Sacred Criminal-
ity in the Novels of Takemoto Novala,” Mechademia 6 (2011): 34.
9. Lunning, “Under the Ruffles,” 17.
10. Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 160.
11. Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 201.
12. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 6.
13. Ibid., 25.
14. Ibid., 33–34.
15. Ibid., 41–42.
16. Ibid., 45.
17. Ibid.
18. Patrick W. Galbraith, The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insider’s Guide to the Subculture of
Cool Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2009), 90.
19. Many games targeted at different audiences also employ a similar premise and
format. Hatoful Boyfriend (2011, Haatofuru kareshi) and the Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side
series (2002–2010), for example, position the player as a female avatar pursuing attractive
male characters. Many of the features, qualities, and implications of user-interface design
for bishōjo games apply equally to these titles.
20. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 33.
21. Patrick W. Galbraith, “Bishōjo Games: ‘Techno-Intimacy’ and the Virtually Human
in Japan,” Game Studies 11, no. 2 (2011), http://gamestudies.org/1102/articles/galbraith.
22. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism,
7th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 715.
23. Emily Taylor, “Dating-Simulation Games: Leisure and Gaming of Japanese Youth
Culture,” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 29 (2007): 202.
24. Galbraith, “Bishōjo Games.”
25. The games’ main innovation in this regard, one might argue, is that they take
their time building Phoenix up to that level, with plenty of setbacks along the way.
26. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the
Avant-Garde,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 382.
27. See Marc Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
28. Forrest Greenwood, “A Spectral Pop Star Takes the Stage: Hatsune Miku and the
Materialization of the Ephemeral in Contemporary Otaku Culture,” Spectator 33, no. 1
(2013): 10–17. See this article for a more thorough discussion of direct address and the
boundary-crossing nature of the shōjo.
29. Azuma Hiroki, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and
Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 80.
t h e g i r l at t h e ce n t e r o f t h e wo r l d 2 51
30. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 81. My emphasis.
31. Fan-Yi Lam, “Comic Market: How the World’s Biggest Amateur Comic Fair Shaped
Japanese Dōjinshi Culture,” Mechademia 5 (2009): 243.
32. Ibid., 242.
33. Nasu Kinoko, Takeuchi Takashi, and Sakamoto Maaya, “The Roots of the Garden
of Sinners,” in The Garden of Sinners Visual Chronicle: English Translation (Santa Monica,
Calif.: Aniplex of America, 2011), 1.
34. Each film uses a different director, though the cast and many of the core creative
staff remain the same throughout.
35. A shot in the second film, . . . and nothing heart (Murder Speculation, Part One)
(2007, Satsujin kōsatsu [zen]), demonstrates that Shiki writes the name of each of her
personalities using a different character. The—kun diminutive only appears in the films’
spoken dialogue.
36. Miyadai Shinji, “Transformation of Semantics in the History of Japanese Subcul-
tures since 1992,” trans. Shion Kono, Mechademia 6 (2011): 240.
37. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-
Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5.
ALEXANDRA ROEDDER
The Localization of
Kiki’s Delivery Service
In 1997 when Buena Vista, working for the Walt Disney Company, was handed
Miyazaki Hayao’s Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989, Majo no takkyūbin) to localize for
United States distribution, they went beyond the usual requirements of trans-
lating and dubbing the script. They hired composer Paul Chihara to edit Hisai-
shi Joe’s original score to, in Chihara’s words, “make the film work” for U.S.
audiences.1 These edits are simple but powerful: music is shifted to hit points
of audiovisual synchronization, extra music is added to scenes that were pre-
viously silent, and some scenes have their existing music supplemented with
additional countermelodies. As a result, the initial English-language version
of Kiki that U.S. audiences experienced on VHS was a very different film from
the one experienced by Japanese audiences in 1989 in theaters. Instead of a
quiet coming-of-age story about a young witch discovering the importance
of believing in herself, Disney’s localized Kiki’s Delivery Service was a series of
comic misadventures returning to the status quo—with a boyfriend in tow—
at the end. In considering Studio Ghibli’s reception in the United States, we
must understand why the film’s score was changed and the effect of those
changes on the film. Examining the differences between the two scores is also
essential to understanding the implications of the 2010 rerelease on DVD,
254
Disney’s localized
which reinstates Hisaishi’s music, removes addi-
Kiki’s Delivery Service
tional lines from the score, and attempts to erase
was a series of comic
any evidence that there had ever been a need to
misadventures return-
tinker with the film beyond translating it.2
ing to the status
Kiki’s Delivery Service is based on the popular
quo-with a boyfriend
1985 novel by Eiko Kadono. The titular Kiki is a
in tow-at the end.
thirteen-year-old witch who, following tradition,
sets off to find a town of her own to live and work
in for a year. In the novel, she encounters a series of challenges and adven-
tures, and overcomes each in turn before returning home to visit her parents,
with the clear intention of going back to her beloved new town just in time for
book two. In the film, Kiki’s character undergoes extensive development: she
learns to see the good in all kinds of people, including herself. Midway through
the film, Kiki loses her self-confidence and with it, her magic powers—the
ability to fly and to understand her cat familiar, Jiji. Only a desperate need to
rescue a friend in danger allows her to regain the ability to fly, though she has
matured beyond needing to speak with Jiji. Due to small changes in dialogue
and the edits to the music, the 1997 Disney version is quite different: not only
can Kiki speak with Jiji again at the end, but the small adventures are empha-
sized in such a way that the large-scale arc of development is completely lost.
FROM THE BEGINNING
The changed score is evident from the beginning. As the film opens, the cam-
era pans across an idyllic lakefront with wildflowers waving in the foreground
and clouds skating through a windy sky. A radio can be heard giving the
weather report. In Japanese, this report is strictly predictions and informa-
tion; in English, the DJ is chatty, giving information about the airship which
will figure heavily in the second half of the story, and, in saying that the
weather will be clear that night, adds, “If you’ve been planning something
special, tonight . . . might be the night!” which, like the chatter about the
airship, foreshadows Kiki’s leaving home.3 Musically, the scenes employ the
exact same segment of music (in film music terms, a “cue”), “Hareta hi ni”
(“On a Sunny Day”). The cue uses a typical Hisaishi melody, regular in shape,
in a gentle rolling waltz time.
Hisaishi’s melodies are highly recognizable and are an important part of
what defines his style. For that reason, it is necessary that I take a moment to
explain how this melody is structured. Like most of his melodies, “Hareta hi
t he lo ca l i z at i o n o f k i k i ’s d e l i v e ry s e rv i ce 2 55
ni” is in what music theorists call a rounded binary form: the entire piece can
be split into three sections, with the final section a repeat of the first. Despite
having three sections, it only has two segments, A and B—hence “binary.”
Because the final section is nearly identical to the first, it is called “rounded.”
Usually music theorists write the form as A-B-A or A-B-Aa. Rounded binary
form is one of the most common forms for music to take, and fits comfortably
in our ears because of the balance of repetition and contrast: we come back
at the end to something we recognize. (Think of a popular song you know
which starts and ends with the chorus and only has one verse in between.)
In the case of “Hareta hi ni,” not only is the cue in large-scale rounded binary
form, but also the A and B sections are themselves parsable into recognizable,
repeating phrases, little a and aa and b and ba phrases, almost like a fractal or
snowflake showing symmetrical splits continuously as one zooms further in.
The effect is one of delicate balance between repetition and variation, and this
balance has become part of Hisaishi’s trademark melodies.
There are two small differences between Hisaishi’s version and Chihara’s
version at the beginning: when and how each begins. Hisaishi’s version has
the cue beginning as Kiki gets up from the grass and begins running home,
segmenting the scene into Kiki-at-rest versus Kiki-in-motion. The music starts
with a firm tonic chord, unashamedly announcing its presence.4 In contrast,
Chihara’s version begins some twenty-five seconds earlier, as a bee lands on a
flower, and is preceded by a twinkly dominant seventh chord (or V7 in tradi-
tional Roman numeral analysis) in synthesized chimes. In Western music, a
dominant seventh chord is the chord with the strongest sense of wanting to
resolve back to the home tonic. If on a piano you play a chord of G, B, D, and
F, you will feel massively unsatisfied if you do not follow that with a chord
of C, E, G. Chihara’s use of this leading chord effectively softens the theme’s
entrance. As Claudia Gorbman points out, for over half a century, film com-
posers have exhorted each other to write music that enters subtly, underneath
the conscious listener.5 The shift in starting time also enables Chihara to hit
a number of small sync points aside from the bee’s landing: for instance, as
Kiki splashes through the mud on the other side of a fence, her three steps
are synced with the three stepwise chords which link the aforementioned a
and a’ phrases of the A section.
The big changes to the opening sequence come as Kiki arrives at her home
and tells Jiji to “Wake up! Tonight’s the night!” (or, in Japanese, “Kon’ya ni
kimeta wa! Shuppatsu yo!”, literally, “I’ve decided on tonight! We’re leaving!”).
Hisaishi lets the theme play out at its full two-minute length. The only sync
point is more of what Michel Chion would term a moment of “audiovisual
25 6 a lexa ndra ro e dde r

phrasing” between the B section and the return of the A section: after Kiki
has dropped the bombshell on her mother that she’s leaving that night, the
distracted mother’s potion quietly explodes out of its test tube into her face.6
The synchronization of this moment with the musical form cannot be coinci-
dental; writing to match such a moment is common among Hisaishi’s other
film scores from the era.
Instead of presenting the scene as a single event, Chihara’s score splits
the scene into three distinct events: Kiki running home, Kiki talking to her
mother, and then Kiki’s mother talking with her customer. Each scene’s music
has a different emotional affect, setting it apart from the one before it and the
one after it. Chihara’s version does not even let the cue reach its B section. He
cuts it off at the closure of the A section, which occurs at about the same time
that Kiki pokes her head in through her mother’s workshop window, inter-
rupts a customer, and announces, “Hey Mom! It’s gonna be clear tonight!”
As Kiki’s mother begins gently castigating her daughter for borrowing her
father’s radio and resigns herself to Kiki’s sudden announcement that she’s
leaving, Chihara replaces Hisaishi’s B section with a bouncy, jolly background
non-melodic accompaniment in a key as distant from “On a Sunny Day” as
possible: a tritone, or six half-steps, half an octave away (for example, the
distance between C and F-sharp). The potion exploding marks the end of this
new theme. After a pause in which Kiki’s mother sighs, Chihara reintroduces
Hisaishi’s theme, again using a dominant fifth arpeggio to soften its entrance.
Chihara ends in the middle of the A section as the customer begins reminisc-
ing about the arrival of Kiki’s mother to the town many years ago. The return
of Hisaishi’s music and its abrupt closure only highlights the bouncy accom-
paniment to Kiki’s enthusiastic departure announcement. A final addition
Chihara makes to the existing music is to introduce Jiji’s theme, or leitmotif,
at the cat’s first appearance on the window ledge. Jiji’s leitmotif is a sinuous
little question mark of a motif, ambiguous and chromatic, shaped almost like
the cat’s tail itself. The leitmotif recurs throughout the film, particularly when
Jiji is the focus of the action.
Thus we see how the rounded binary of Hisaishi’s original cue is impor-
tant in keeping the scene’s sense of unity. When Chihara inserts original mu-
sic, the rounded binary form is disrupted, and we understand the first few
minutes of the film to be completely separate scenes instead of one scene split
into multiple cuts.
Throughout the entire film Chihara’s music frequently performs a similar
function, breaking up Hisaishi’s long stretches of melody into shorter phrases,
usually never more than a minute long. As Marco Bellano has pointed out,
t he lo ca l i z at i o n o f k i k i ’s d e l i v e ry s e rv i ce 2 57
Hisaishi’s use of these long melodies can be linked to the original production
method of Ghibli films.7 For each film, Hisaishi is given a bit of text, the “mu-
sic memo,” explaining the film and its characters, and from that information
writes an “image album,” which is usually released about a year in advance of
the film, sometimes before even a trailer is out. The image album performs
two functions. First, it allows Hisaishi and the studio to test musical mate-
rial in advance, deciding on character themes and musical ideas. Second, it
is a useful marketing tool, generating excitement about the film in advance.
As Hisaishi has grown more and more famous over the years, his new album
releases become much anticipated events. Hisaishi’s long sweeping melodies
are so closely associated with his name and style that, according to Kyoko
Koizumi and my own ethnographic work, the term “Hisaishi melody” has
become common parlance in Japan.8
In direct contrast to the way that Ghibli’s films are made with the musical
ideas first, U.S. film music composers since the earliest days of sound cinema
have been exhorted to write music that can be easily chopped up and still
be comprehensible. Function takes precedence over form. In U.S. animation
this was—is—even more pronounced, resulting in frenetic action sequences
to frenetic action music. The term “mickey-mousing” has come to refer to a
one-to-one relationship between music and visuals because of this historical
use of highly synchronous music. While Chihara’s edits to the opening cue are
hardly “mickey-mousing,” being only the synchronization of a few footsteps
and a cut-and-paste of existing ideas, he does employ the tactic elsewhere in
the film to comic effect, as when Kiki is trying to use the outdoor bathroom
without being seen by her landlords: Chihara provides an exactly isomorphic
and isochronic accompaniment to each and every one of her movements, from
getting up out of the bed to going down the stairs, to coming back up the stairs
and sighing in relief.
The terms used above, “isomorphic” and “isochronic,” should be self-
explanatory. Michel Chion appropriated the term isomorphic, presumably
from mathematics, to apply to audiovisual relationships that share shapes.9
I have supplemented that with my own term, isochronic, to refer to the syn-
chronicity in time: footsteps matching rhythm, for example, or a ship tossing
in a storm to chaotic music that changes direction at the same time as the ship.
It is possible for music to be isochronic without being isomorphic—“audio
visual phrasing” is an example of this, though on a large scale. And it is possible
to be isomorphic without being isochronic, though in my experience this is a
rare occurrence: an upwards melodic gesture in advance of a spaceship taking
off, for instance, or a larger-scale movement in which smaller sync points are

Music’s presence
ignored. It is my hope that these two terms will become
imposes a single
more widely used, as they separate out the vague “syn-
interpretation
chronized” into separate axes of gesture and pacing.
on a scene.
The second important way Chihara’s score changes
the filmgoer’s experience is by what I can only refer to as
removing emotional autonomy and agency from the viewer. Scenes that had
been silent—the “low-key enchantment” Roland Kelts so admires—instead
have music.10 The silence had allowed individual viewers to experience scenes
differently, letting past experiences or expectations determine a scene’s mood.
Music’s presence imposes a single interpretation on a scene, such as the comic
effect mentioned above in connection with the use of highly isomorphic and
isochronic music to accompany Kiki’s anxious trip to the bathroom. When I
watched that scene my first reaction was one of nostalgic embarrassment: as a
child about Kiki’s age I certainly hadn’t wanted to be caught in my nightgown,
much less coming out of a bathroom, by any adult, not even my parents. Other
people may have different reactions, and when the scene is silent they are
given the leeway to experience it as they choose.
An excellent example of this occurs just after Kiki settles with the friendly
baker’s wife, Osono, to borrow their storage room in exchange for help around
the shop during Osono’s pregnancy. Hisaishi leaves this scene silent: the only
sounds are the dialogue between Kiki and Jiji:
jiji: Covered in flour, isn’t it.

kiki: Mm.
jiji: When tomorrow comes, I think I’ll have turned into a white cat.
kiki (opens window): Jiji, [one] can see the ocean.
jiji: Tomorrow, [shall we] look for another town?
In the Japanese version, this is a moment of narrative closure. Kiki left

her home the previous night, slept in a cattle train to escape a sudden down-
pour, and arrived in the new big town in the morning full of optimism. Her
good mood, though, had been crumbling away bit by bit all day. She nearly col-
lided with a bus, got into trouble with a policeman, was seemingly accosted by
a boy who wanted to flirt with her, couldn’t get a room at a hotel because she
had no identification and no parents, and couldn’t even sit quietly in a park
without feeling hunted and out of place. The film is at an emotional low point
when Kiki performs a random good deed for the baker Osono, flying on her
broomstick to return a pacifier to a customer who’d left it in the shop. Upon
meeting Osono, Kiki’s troubles seem to be over. She’s found a friend, she has
t h e lo ca l i z at i o n o f k i k i ’s d e l i v e ry s e rv i ce 2 59
a room to stay in, and she can move forward to the next step of self-discovery.
Her tone of voice and her dialogue are neither optimistic nor depressed. The
relative neutrality of this scene leads the viewer into a place of waiting: What
will the morning bring?
The U.S. version is completely different. The changes—additional music
and dialogue translation—combine to position the scene not as closure of a
narrative arc but as a continuation of adventure and narrative tension. First,
the dialogue is liberally translated to:
jiji: This is . . . quaint.

kiki: (exasperated) Jiji . . .
jiji: (off frame) This isn’t dust on the floor, you know, it’s flour. (on frame)
If you wake up tomorrow and find a white cat, it’s me.
kiki: (opens window): Ooh, Jiji, we can see the ocean from here! (Exclaims
sounds of pleasure.)
jiji: (disappointed, almost whining) Can we look for a new town? (When no
answer, grumbles.)
The duo’s fairly steady assessment of the situation evident in the Japanese
lines has become a cynical, almost snide, judgment of the situation on Jiji’s
part, and a determined cheerfulness on Kiki’s. The delivery of these lines is
strikingly different from the almost neutral performance of Kiki’s and Jiji’s
Japanese voice actors. Even though in both versions Jiji suggests looking for
a new town, the Japanese hoka no machi o sagasu? (“Shall we look for a new
town?”) is more of a suggestion, request, or even a simple question rather than
a complaint. Jiji’s English lines encourage the viewer to be pessimistic about
their situation and to juxtapose Kiki’s optimism against negative odds.
The music Chihara uses for this scene is a solo piano rendition of “Tabi-
dachi” (Setting off), which Hisaishi used to accompany the stretch of time
between Kiki’s affectionate cuddle with her father shortly before setting off
and her actual departure. Again, as he did when editing the opening music,
Chihara only uses a snippet of Hisaishi’s extended melody. The music colors
the scene with homesickness, not only because of its leitmotivic association
with Kiki’s parents and home but also because of its performance in a loose,
slow-jazz affect that reminds me of the pianists one used to hear at upscale
department stores. The performance is soulful and nostalgic without being
sappy or dolorous. While certainly appropriate to an interpretation of the
scene as one of homesickness, the question is whether the interpretation is
needed. To Japanese audiences, it evidently wasn’t: from the film producer to

the composer to the audiences—whose support of the film skyrocketed Ghibli
to its current fame—the scene apparently held up fine by itself. To the U.S.
film professionals who localized Kiki, though, it was. Why?
There are two reasons. First, U.S. animated films, from the beginning
with Disney’s Snow White in 1937, have historically been musicals. In 1996
and 1997, when the Walt Disney Company and Studio Ghibli were negotiating
the distribution agreement, Disney had recently released Pocahontas (1995),
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), and Hercules (1997), all of which are clas-
sic animated musicals. Suzuki Toshio mentioned in an interview in May 2012
that selling the films to the United States, particularly to Disney, had been
difficult for this very reason: Ghibli films are not musicals.11 To a viewer fa-
miliar with Japanese film and television, the silences of Kiki’s Delivery Service
are calming, charming, and comfortable. To an audience accustomed to the
lively spectacle of Disney’s films, Kiki’s soundtrack—not just the score but also
pauses in dialogue and a low level of background noise—may easily have been
awkward and uncomfortable.
In addition to the historical bias toward animated musicals, there is also
the issue of what is now common knowledge to Americans exposed to anime:
in the United States, cartoons are mostly “for kids,” but Japanese animation
had aimed at varying demographics for half a century. U.S. cartoons for adults
certainly do exist now: The Simpsons, Family Guy, King of the Hill, and other
shows that poke fun at our society. But these shows are aimed at adults, not
at the discrete demographics of Japanese shōnen, shōjo, and other genres.
Additionally, even now an animated film aimed at all ages (not “at families,”
which in the U.S. often means “at children”) is rare. The way Chihara used and
placed music in editing Kiki comes across as assisting an uncertain viewer in
interpreting events. This is exactly the kind of helping hand a viewer new
to the conventions of anime would want or, more important I believe, the
kind of assistance children often get when processing new information. One
of music’s primary functions in narrative film is to provide emotional cues,
and Chihara’s score does this splendidly, often excessively. Although Chihara
has said that aiming the film at an audience of children was not his intent,
nevertheless his score positions the audience as a passive recipient of a pre-
determined interpretation of the film, rather than an active consumer of and
semi-participant in Kiki’s inner journey. This approach highlights a funda-
mental cultural difference in assumptions of what the experience of watching
an animated film should be.
The edits to Kiki’s score have largely passed under the radar of most view-
ers, although Andrew Osmond wrote:
th e lo ca l i z at i o n o f k i k i ’s d e l i v e ry s e rv i ce 2 6 1
There are such extensive reorderings, additions and “enhancements”—such
as Titanic-style wordless vocals—that the score is really a separate entity.
Most obviously, the additions cover the deliberate silences that typify Mi-
yazaki films (and much other anime). Elsewhere, passages are split into
shorter pieces, with old or new music pushed in between. Whole sections
of the film sound different. The sequence in which Kiki makes her first de-
livery, encountering geese and crows (accompanied in the dub by a cheesy
“Mountain King”) is almost entirely altered.
For Hisaishi purists (myself included), these changes are often clumsy
and ill-advised, leading to clashes and repetitions. (Indeed, there’s a mo-
ment just before Osono appears when two tunes are heard fighting each
other.)12
Most, though, don’t seem to have cared too much. Helen McCarthy’s
assessment of the film is that nothing major was changed.13 In Japan, the
edited score is effectively unknown, despite being available as the English-
language track on the 2001 Japanese DVD release. Even Suzuki Toshio, the
film’s producer, needed to be reminded of the fact that it was edited.14 He
then commented:
Certainly there are passages where the details are different, but I don’t think
it’s a problem. I think Hisaishi, were he to watch the movie properly, would
have the same opinion.15
Suzuki is musically literate and holds his own in discussions of music with
composers such as Sakamoto Ryūichi, and yet the changes to the score did
not have a strong impact on him.16 I sought Hisaishi’s opinion on the subject
during fieldwork in 2011–12 but was rebuffed by his formidable manager. She
forbade me to ask him anything about Disney, was shocked that the edited
score even existed, and seemed confident that Hisaishi didn’t know either. As
Hisaishi and Paul Chihara met in 1997 during the localization, it is probable
that the manager simply didn’t know Hisaishi’s earlier history.
In 2010, Disney released a new DVD of Kiki’s Delivery Service without Chi-
hara’s score and with almost none of the off-screen lines that are not pres-
ent in the original script, most of which were comic asides by Jiji. Crucially
gone is the line at the end where Jiji spoke to Kiki, which was essential in
the 1997 version to bring the plot full circle back to Kiki as a witch who can
speak with her cat, rather than progressing linearly as a journey into a mature
state where she doesn’t need to speak with Jiji.17 It is the reinstatement of

Hisaishi’s soundtrack that does the most to reclaim the quiet charm and en-
chanting silences of the original Japanese film, though only so much can be
done to counteract the occasional poor voice acting and clumsy translations.
The English-language version with Hisaishi’s score retains large-scale narra-
tive arcs instead of short ones, returns some emotional agency to the viewer,
and avoids “mickey-mousing” jaunts up staircases or crashes with buses. The
comic elements of Chihara’s score have been largely removed, allowing the
serious elements of Kiki’s coming-of-age story to progress more obviously.
While Miyazaki purists and fans in search of “authentic” anime may re-
joice over the reinstatement of the original soundtrack to the English-language
version, there is a negative side to the 2010 rerelease. By reverting the film’s
soundtrack to Hisaishi’s original and removing the extra dialogue, it is as if
Disney is trying to rewrite history, to say that, no, we never needed anything
other than a simple translation to make the film work for U.S. audiences.
This was not the case at the time. Let us keep in mind that the edits to Kiki
were not all that extreme when taken in context. In 1997, when Buena Vista/
Disney decided that the film needed extra lines and music, edit-dubs such as
Carl Macek’s Robotech (1985) and DIC’s Sailor Moon (1994) were considered the
norm. Films were not immune, either: back in 1960, Tōei’s Saiyūki (Journey
to the west) was completely rescored as a Disney-style musical and released
as Alakazam the Great, featuring the voice of Frankie Avalon. Fred Patten has
written of the rocky road toward anime’s current popularity and the varying
successes of localization tactics.18 Fred Ladd has likewise explained how his
job in localizing shows such as Astro Boy was to completely disguise its Japa-
nese origins.19 Even into the 1990s, U.S. producers had doubts about distribut-
ing foreign Japanese films, even the excellent works of Studio Ghibli. Recall
that Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind (1984, Kaze no tani no Naushika) received
its own edit-dub treatment to become Warriors of the Wind in 1985, a version
that, according to Suzuki, Miyazaki “would like everyone to please forget.”20
If anything, recent releases of animated films with only a dubbed script are a
revolutionary development in the U.S. reception of Japanese anime.
It is important in revealing this history not to forget that the many
soundtracks of Kiki’s Delivery Service involved hard work from many dedicated
people. Hisaishi has worked to make his music into what he described in a
1987 as a “special brand,” and it is safe to say that he has succeeded.21 He is Ja-
pan’s most popular film composer and has recently expanded his domain into
film with directors in other parts of Asia. Young composers strive to become
Hisaishi, whose minimalism-inspired melodic style has heavily influenced the
sound of other Japanese live-action and animation film scores.22 Since 1984
t h e lo ca l i z at i o n o f k i k i ’s d e l i v e ry s e rv i ce 2 6 3
he has composed for each of Miyazaki’s ten feature films, including Miyazaki’s
final film, Kaze tachinu (2013, The wind rises). What Hisaishi has written for
the Ghibli films has, for mainstream Western audiences, become the sound
of Japanese animation. Today, a Ghibli film without Hisaishi’s music is not
quite Ghibli.
In a 2011 interview, Chihara emphasized to me the difficulty of the entire
Kiki project, and specifically of the frustrations of working with the material
when they could not change a single frame. To Chihara, matching the lip-flap
with a script that corresponded closely to the original Japanese was a major
accomplishment. Chihara’s music, similarly, had to be squeezed into the film
to work with what was already there. To his ears at the time, his musical ad-
ditions improved an otherwise unsellable product. The VHS national sales
rankings show that the film did quite well, ranking eighth at its highest.23
Chihara sees his score as a bridge between Japan and the United States, and
is massively proud to have been the composer whose music was a part of the
beginning of Ghibli’s American popularity.24
It is highly likely that Paul Chihara’s version of Kiki has influenced, even
indirectly, how Hisaishi writes for animation. Hisaishi has said several times
that American audiences need more music than Japanese ones, and that
the Hollywood style of scoring, using character themes and isomorphic/
isochronic writing, is very different from the Japanese way, which empha-
sizes mood and emotion.25 In 1999, perhaps to avoid having someone else
do it, Hisaishi specifically asked Suzuki for permission to rewrite the score
for Castle in the Sky’s North American release himself, despite the amount of
work it would take. That version, which was Hisaishi’s first attempt at writing
a Hollywood-style score for an animated film, edits the original score in many
of the same ways that Chihara edited Kiki: adding more music, shifting cues to
create sync points, and supplementing existing music with countermelodies,
all for the sake of having music enter and exit more subtly and be more closely
tied to the visual action on screen. Although there is no space here to detail
my extensive studies of Hisaishi’s evolving film score style, the 1999 Castle in
the Sky score was Hisaishi’s first attempt at writing in the Hollywood style,
and the result sounds as if he used Chihara’s edits for Kiki as a model for how
American audiences wanted their cartoons. After Castle in the Sky, Hisaishi’s
next three scores for Studio Ghibli are all written in a grand symphonic style
that borrows not only the sound but also the tactics of classic Hollywood film
scores. Even if Hisaishi was not directly influenced by Chihara’s Kiki score, he
was definitely influenced by the knowledge that U.S. audiences want a par-
ticular kind of music.

it is nevertheless
The history of artistic exchange between Japan
clear that Chihara’s
and the United States has been reasonably well docu-
score for Kiki, or
mented as to visual elements. However, as yet, the
possibly just the
history of musical styles and practices is almost com-
knowledge that
pletely untouched. Above I mention the adaptation of
Ghibli films were
Astro Boy and Saiyūki in the 1960s, but there is also the
being distributed
fascinating story of Little Nemo: Adventures in Slum-
globally, influenced
berland (Japanese title Nemo, 1989; United States,
how Hisaishi put
1992), a fully collaborative work between Japan and
music to film.
the United States. The production was huge and in-
volved a number of people who either were impor-
tant at the time or would later become important: Ray Bradbury worked on
concept art; Chris Columbus of Harry Potter fame worked on the screenplay;
Disney animation giants Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas are credited as
“story consultants,” and all the characters look like Disney characters. In the
music department there are the Academy Award–winning Sherman brothers
of Mary Poppins fame writing the songs and Roy Prendergast, now a respected
film music historian, as music editor. The rest of the score, by Thomas Chase
and Steve Rucker, is a well-executed example of standard cartoon soundtrack
writing. Despite the lavish production, Little Nemo was a commercial flop in
both countries, and it is easy to see why Japanese audiences could have been
put off by its overtly American artwork and soundtrack when they had dis-
tinctly Japanese films coming one after another out of Studio Ghibli around
the same time. Fast forward fifteen years, however, and the same practices that
were off-putting in Little Nemo were successful in Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).
Therefore, this moment in history when someone at Disney decided that
the score for Kiki was too silent was not just a moment of blank-minded cul-
tural bias, as we “enlightened” anime fans and consumers of today could eas-
ily see. It was a very important moment in defining, first, that Ghibli’s films
would sell to North American audiences; second, that those North American
audiences wanted a certain kind of music in their films; and third, a few years
later, that Japanese audiences liked that kind of music, too. While it is overly
simplistic to say that Hisaishi changed his compositional practices for the
sake of reaching this North American audience, it is nevertheless clear that
Chihara’s score for Kiki, or possibly just the knowledge that Ghibli films were
being distributed globally, influenced how Hisaishi put music to film. Kiki’s
first localization and its edited score thus become intricately intertwined in
not only one popular composer’s personal development but also in the defini-
tion of what Studio Ghibli sounds like. And because Ghibli’s films are so widely
distributed, the sound of Ghibli is for many the sound of Japanese anime.
Further, because Ghibli’s films are so definitive as anime within Japan, and
because so many young composers want to write like Hisaishi and become
Hisaishi, it is Hisaishi’s style and practices, as influenced by this history, that
are defining contemporary anime music.
Scholars who write about the history of anime in America have a great
advantage in that many of the creators we study are still alive and can give us
their versions of this history. Therefore I would like to close not with a judg-
ment of which version of Kiki is “better” but rather with an exhortation that,
as historical documents, both are equally important. Instead of dismissing
early edit-dubs as mistakes or embarrassments to be covered up, scholars
need to understand these first attempts at localizing anime as exactly what
they are: first attempts. Reinstating Hisaishi’s score may have brought the
English-language audio track closer to the Japanese version of the film, but
in the end, watching a dub, no matter how good a translation, can never be
exactly the same as the Japanese-language experience. Understanding the
history of Kiki’s localization is not at all a question of which is right or which
is better or which is more “authentic.” It is a question of how Kiki’s localization
fits into the larger narrative of U.S. reception of anime as well as how Hisai-
shi’s scoring style, and consequently the sound of Ghibli films—and anime
soundtracks as a whole—have evolved.
Notes
1. Paul Chihara, personal interview, February 11, 2009.
2. To clarify, I am discussing the following releases: Majo no takkyūbin, dir. Miyazaki
Hayao (1989), DVD (Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2001); translated as Kiki’s Delivery
Service, dubbed VHS (Walt Disney Video, 1998); translated as Kiki’s Delivery Service, DVD
(Walt Disney Video, 2003); translated as Kiki’s Delivery Service, DVD (Disney Presents
Studio Ghibli, 2010). The second and third releases contain the same localized English
audio track with Chihara’s score.
3. Note to those who may be familiar with the film’s English-language subtitles: the
subtitles are not literal and are aimed at providing language appropriate to the situation
if experienced in English (“pack up your picnic baskets!”) rather than a translation (“warm
weather”). These are often called “dubtitles,” having often been taken from the dub script.
In Kiki, the dubtitles and the dub script are not exactly the same—often the Japanese lines
have a different timing than the dub—but they are very similar in meaning.
4. The tonic chord is the “home” chord of a piece of music. If a piece is in C major,
the tonic chord is C major. If a piece is in D-flat minor, the tonic is D-flat minor.
5. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987).

6. Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009), 469.
7. Marco Bellano, “The Parts and the Whole: Audiovisual Strategies in the Cinema of
Hayao Miyazaki and Joe Hisaishi,” Animation Journal 18 (2010): 4–55.
8. Kyoko Koizumi, “An Animated Partnership: Joe Hisaishi’s Musical Contributions
to Hayao Miyazaki’s Films,” in Drawn to Sound: Animation Film Music and Sonicity, ed.
Rebecca Coyle, 60–74 (London: Equinox, 2010).
9. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1994), 121.
10. Roland Kelts, Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 56.
11. Suzuki Toshio, personal interview, May 16, 2012.
12. Andrew Osmond, “Will the Real Joe Hisaishi Stand Up?” Animation World Magazine
5.01 (April 2000), http://www.awn.com/mag/issue5.01/5.01pages/osmondhisaishi.php3.
13. Helen McCarthy, Hayao Miyazaki, Master of Japanese Animation (Berkeley, Calif.:
Stone Bridge Press, 2002), 143.
14. Suzuki interview.
15. Suzuki Toshio, personal e-mail communication, June 11, 2012: “Ōki na henkō ga
kuwaerareta to iu ninshiki wa motte imasen. Saibu ni kanshite wa, tashikani chigau kasho
mo arimasu ga, mondai to wa omotte inai no desu. Chanto eiga o mireba, Hisaishi Jō-san
mo onaji iken o motsu to omoimasu.”
16. Suzuki Toshio, “Sakamoto Ryūichi kanshū commons schola vol. 10 no happyō kinen
tokubetsu tōku ibento ni ojama shite kimashita” (Intruding on Sakamoto Ryūichi’s Commons
Schola vol. 10 special announcement talk event to commemorate the album release), pod-
cast, May 24, 2012, http://podcasts.tfm.co.jp/podcasts/tokyo/rg/suzuki_vol226.mp3,
listened to as advance copy on May 18, 2012.
17. Interestingly, in this respect the episodic nature of the 1997 Disney version is
closer to the original novel.
18. Fred Patten, Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews
(Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2004).
19. Fred Ladd, Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas: An Insider’s View of the Birth
of a Pop Culture Phenomenon (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008).
20. Suzuki, interview.
21. Hisaishi Joe, 1987, “Supesharu intabyū–Hisaishi Jō ‘tsuneni supesharu burando
de aritai,’” (Special interview: Hisaishi Joe “I want to always be a special brand”), Kinema
junpo 973 (1987): 132–35.
22. Kuriyama Kazuki, personal interview, February 17, 2012.
23. The Hayao MIYAZAKI Web, “Ranking // Kiki’s Delivery Service // Nausicaa.net,”
http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/kiki/ranking.html.
24. Paul Chihara, personal interview, May 21, 2011.
25. Hisaishi Joe, interview with Miyazaki Mailing List, July 14, 1999, archived at The
Hayao Miyazaki Web, http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/laputa/interview.html; Hisaishi
Joe, personal interview, June 9, 2012.
RAYNA DENISON
Franchising and Failure:

Discourses of Failure within
the Japanese-American
Speed Racer Franchise
Two texts are commonly cited by those recounting anime’s early transnational
history in the United States: Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy (1963–66, Tetsuwan
Atomu) and Tatsuo Yoshida’s Speed Racer (1967–68, Mahha go go go).1 However,
where Astro Boy has been studied in some depth by academics, as a Tezuka
creation and as the first anime to cross over to U.S. television, Speed Racer has
received scant attention.2 Speed Racer’s relative academic invisibility is con-
trasted by its recent renewal as a multimedia franchise. Starting in the 1990s,
with the formation of Speed Racer Enterprises by John and Jim Rocknowski,
Speed Racer has been rerun (initially on MTV), has been adapted multiple
times for television and the cinema, and has been made available through a
wide range of merchandise.3 The franchise has also been augmented in Japan
by its original creators, Tatsunoko Production Co., whose Mach Project Pro-
duction Committee was created in 2003 to exploit the earliest incarnations
of Speed Racer, especially the television anime Mahha go go go.4 As these sepa-
rate national approaches to Speed Racer’s continuing production suggest, the
franchise is not a straightforwardly “Japanese” manga or anime property. This
article examines the recent live-action Speed Racer film in order to investigate
269
perceptions of its origins, as the franchise continues to be reproduced and
repackaged across decades, continents, and cultures.
Beginning life as a moderate hit on Japanese television, Mahha go go go
was only the second anime television series created by Tatsunoko Production
Co. From its inception, Mahha go go go had transnational roots. Ippei Kuri
(cocreator Toyoharu Yoshida’s pen name) has stated that the series “was based
strictly on our all-out adoration of America.”5 The Japanese version follows
the adventures of race car driver Mifune Gō, whose family, girlfriend, and
chimpanzee travel around the globe racing on futuristic tracks. The show was
adapted for the American market by Peter Fernandez, who translated and
redubbed Mahha go go go as Speed Racer for the Trans-Lux Television Corpora-
tion.6 As with many of its anime contemporaries, therefore, the early transna-
tional history of Mahha go go go was one of wholesale cultural reinterpretation
and origin erasure.7
Like those earlier television productions, the Speed Racer (2008, dir. Lana
and Andy Wachowski) film also has a transnational ethos at its heart: from
the hybridized national locations invented for its diegesis; to the nationally
specific car racing crews depicted within the film; to the mixture of European,
Asian, and American stars who play its characters; to its partial European
funding and production at Studio Babelsberg in Germany.8 In these ways, the
2008 Speed Racer film heightens discourses about the places and origins of the
Speed Racer franchise. The film also takes Speed Racer from cel animation into
a new mixture of live action and CGI-effects filmmaking, making it a challeng-
ing example of remediation. Using Julian Stringer’s approach to adaptation,
which examines the discourses around adaptation in order to investigate how
meanings are negotiated at specific historical-textual junctures, this article
examines the industrial and reception discourses around the release of the
Speed Racer film.9 Through this analysis of American popular and industry
reportage, it becomes possible to gauge how Speed Racer failed at the box office
and what roles its transnational anime roots played in this failed experiment
in blockbuster filmmaking.
Focusing on an unsuccessful adaptation also provides a rare opportunity
to test the limits of manga and anime’s global success. Its growing global
profile over the last two to three decades has been noted. Henry Jenkins,
for example, specifically cites anime and manga within his discussions of
transnational pop cosmopolitanisms, and anime features strongly in Koi-
chi Iwabuchi’s contention that globalization should be conceptualized as a
multidimensional process illustrated by Japanese media’s spread to the rest
of the world.10 These challenges to American pop-cultural dominance offer
27 0 rayna denis o n
the early transnational
useful correctives to discussions of popular cul-
history of Mahha go go
ture, but the risk is in overstating manga and
go was one of
anime’s global popularity and reach. The failure
wholesale cultural
of Speed Racer therefore provides an example of
reinterpretation and
the kinds of “structuring absences” sought in
origin erasure.
reception studies: in order to understand the
extent of anime’s success, this study focuses on
how an otherwise long-lived and successful manga-originated franchise can
lead to “the costliest misfire of the year.”11
Speed Racer’s box office failure was widely reported as the worst of 2008.
Commenting only a week after the film’s initial release, Ben Fritz of Daily Vari-
ety baldly proclaimed, “Warner has a bomb on its hands.”12 The New York Post,
meanwhile, quickly speculated on the implications of the film’s failure, “Box-
office bomb Speed Racer—which cost more than $120 million to make but raked
in less than $20 million last weekend—is causing speed bumps for all involved,”
claiming that the film’s perceived failure had thrown producer Joel Silver’s rela-
tionship with Warner Bros. into question, and had caused the film’s star, Emile
Hirst, to fire his agents.13 Estimates on the budget and box office for Speed
Racer varied wildly in the months that followed, clarifying (and exaggerating)
Speed Racer’s relative failure. Brooks Barnes of the New York Times estimated
the total cost at “$250 million to produce and market,” more than doubling
initial budgetary estimates.14 The escalating sense of calamity following the
release of the Speed Racer film offers a good example of how high the stakes
for anime adaptations can be, and why it is important to understand what
explanations were given for its failure. This article therefore asks how initial
critical disappointment with the Speed Racer film was couched in America and
how those discourses connect to larger questions about the status of anime as
an originating source for transnational, transmedia pop culture.
SPEED RACER’S FAILURE AND ITS

TRANSNATIONAL ANIME ORIGINS
Thanks to the kinds of gloomy reporting noted above, Speed Racer quickly
became synonymous with blockbuster failure. Even three years later, producer
Joel Silver was still on the defensive, saying: “I tried to do [something similar
to his new Ben 10 film] with Speed Racer and failed miserably . . . You always
learn more from the ones that don’t work than the ones that do work.”15 How-
ever, one of the major differences between Silver’s Ben 10 cartoon adaptation
f r a n ch i s i n g a n d fa i l u r e 2 7 1
and the adaptation of Speed Racer can be found in the latter’s ambiguous na-
tional origins.
Speed Racer’s complex transnationalism appears to have challenged crit-
ics, as they attempted to spot the “local” addressed in the film. At times, re-
viewers cited Speed Racer’s emphatic transnationalism as one of the problems
with its narrative:
The Wachowskis are unabashed; they want everything both ways, stuff-
ing the cast with multinational actors . . . yet still supplying the hero with
a pancake-flipping mother, a father who builds a winning car in his own
garage, and a glass of cold milk on the victor’s podium.16 Vying signifiers
of transnational and American cultures provide a source of tension for this
reviewer, whereas, for others, a confused sense of generalized Asianness
emerges.
Todd McCarthy, of Daily Variety, notes with some evident cynicism that
Speed Racer includes “an Asian racing team (among them a driver played by
Korean pop sensation Rain, who will boost B.O. [box office] in that part of the
world).”17 McCarthy’s recognition of a hybridized Asianness in Speed Racer
is taken further by the production staff’s labeling of their car races as “Car
Fu.”18 Kyle Smith is among those who responded negatively to this neolo-
gism, writing, “The Wachowski brothers call their movie’s motorized kung
fu—‘car fu’—but the monkey makes it more like Jar Jar Fu. This is the costli-
est piece of camp ever manufactured.”19 Smith denies the producer’s “car fu,”
associating Speed Racer with an earlier perceived special-effects failure, the
Star Wars prequels’ Jar Jar Binks character. Consequently, the transnational
becomes ambivalent within Speed Racer’s reviews, revealing tensions around
the filmmakers’ appropriations of national signifiers, but specifically within
the juxtaposition of American and Asian cultures. However, it is also in the
palimpsest of Asian identities that the film becomes most clearly signaled as
transnational—as having moved beyond a recognizable national origin point,
offering instead regional, globalizing spectacle.
This does not mean that Speed Racer’s Japanese origins were unimport-
ant. There was, however, considerable disparity about what, precisely, acted
as the origin point for the live-action film. Kirk Honeycutt, for example, offers
a complex reading of the film’s origins, labeling Speed Racer “a Wachowski
Brothers motion picture derived from a ’60s Japanese cartoon television se-
ries that was itself inspired by a manga.”20 On this occasion, the American
adaptation process of this anime into an Americanized cartoon is written out,
in favor of a wholly Japanese set of media origins. This elision of Americaniza-
tion is compounded by other reviews, as when Ann Hornaday in the Wash-
ington Post compares the “original” to its newest incarnation: “This frenetic
adaptation of the beloved 1960s Japanese cartoon bears little resemblance to
that anime classic of yore, unless you count Christina Ricci’s saucer-like brown
eyes.”21 The Speed Racer film, therefore, becomes associated with a number of
“originals,” from manga to anime to American cartoons. In this instability, the
significance of Speed Racer’s origin point is drawn into question, even while a
lingering sense of its cultural otherness remains.
A. O. Scott’s review goes even further, claiming: “Many of us who grew
up watching television in the 1960s and ’70s have fond if vague memories of
“Speed Racer.” . . . Whether we knew it or not, the series was a primer in the
aesthetics of Japanese animation, the love of which we could later pass along
to our children.”22 In this example, the “forgotten” origins of Speed Racer in
the United States are collapsed into the live-action film’s pleasures, offering
potential for a shared (re)discovery of the Japanese animated series, as well
as the pleasure of sharing that nostalgically remembered text with a new gen-
eration of viewers. In contrast, some reviewers bypassed the film’s Japanese
roots altogether, focusing instead on North American comparators.
Describing the film’s car races, one reviewer writes that, “the longest
is a cross-country rally/demolition derby which seems indebted to another
late ’60s cartoon, ‘The Wacky Racers’ [sic.].”23 Consequently, while there was
some agreement about the importance of an original Speed Racer text, the
origin of the adaptation remained a source of debate. Ambiguity about the
origin points for the Speed Racer film, in combination with perceptions of its
hybridized Asian–American content, suggest an emergent understanding of
this live-action film as a transnational object located in Japanese and Ameri-
can roots. In these ways, the complexity of Speed Racer’s national origins and
identity appear to have informed both sides of the divide in critical opinion,
making the film easy to attack for its betrayal of a nostalgized precursor text,
as much as it was lauded for its attempts to innovate around the transnational
identity of the blockbuster family film.
ANIME AESTHETICS AND DISCOURSES OF EXCESS
Speed Racer’s anime origins were read more deeply and ambivalently than
this might suggest, however. Anime’s influence on the aesthetic style of Speed
Racer became another crucial factor in assessing the franchise’s live-action
incarnation. The Boston Globe’s review contends that the filmmakers were
“aiming to replicate the experience of the anime on a metastasized scale, Speed
Racer unsnaps the characters from the frame and lets them deliver their lines
on floating multiple places of action, constantly wiping this way and that like
cars playing chicken on a crowded freeway”24 (Figure 1).
This idea, of an anime “experience” tied to excesses in Speed Racer’s vi-
suals, is repeated elsewhere. Richard Corliss, in Time magazine, parrots the
production team’s language, stating that they “don’t want to evoke feelings so
much as visualize them. When young Speed first meets young Trixie, candy
hearts and roses bloom around him, illuminating his innocent ardor”25 (Figure
2). Therefore, whether as an embellishment or as a form of “metastasized”
excess, anime’s aesthetics became central to how critics discussed Speed Racer.
Moreover, it is the filmmakers’ interpretation of anime’s aesthetic, not the
aesthetic itself, that is deemed problematic and excessive.
Figure 1. Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) narrates his memories in front of a constantly panning set
of matching images.
Figure 2. Young Trixie’s love for Speed expressed through background heart-shaped defocusing.
274 rayna denis o n

By contrast, Kyle Smith writes that Speed Racer comes to us from the cre-
ators of The Matrix, and as my cerebral cortex was reeling from the onslaught
of its jelly-belly colors and “Lucy in the Sky” graphics, I wondered if there
was some parallel universe where it might be considered an entertaining ex-
perience. Maybe Japan?”26 Smith’s refusal of Speed Racer’s aesthetic excesses
signals his sense of cultural dissonance with, and distance from, Japanese
popular culture. Here, though, Japan itself becomes negatively construed as a
space of aesthetic and cultural extremity. This denigration of Japanese culture
may also attest to the lingering recognition of Speed Racer’s Japanese cultural
origins.
Smith’s assessment of the impact of anime origins on Speed Racer’s style
was echoed across other reviews of the film. Tom Charity comments that “the
movie integrates live action and kaleidoscopic digital effects to create a highly
artificial, color-saturated fantasy world where race cars come equipped with
retractable weaponry and battle it out like spinning tops (or the “beyblades”
popularized by more recent manga).”27 The marriage of older technologies
(kaleidoscopes and spinning tops) with new digital technologies is a repeated
reception theme here, with traditional technologies used to explain Speed
Racer’s unusual aesthetics (Figure 3).
Additionally, Charity’s comment about “beyblades” suggests that there
was a tension around whom the film was aimed at: “Speed Racer proudly de-
nies entry into its ultra-bright world to all but gamers, fanboys, and anime
enthusiasts,” Kirk Honeycutt similarly proclaims in a review for The Hollywood
Reporter.28 The assumed audiences for Speed Racer—young children raised on
newer forms of Japanese culture, older audiences raised on Hanna-Barbera
cartoons, and fan groups for specific media—provide a sense of niches but
not a wider, general audience. Additionally, the fact that “anime enthusiasts”
Figure 3. Car battles and gadgetry: Beehive catapult about to be thrown at Speed Racer.
form only one such group suggests that anime was not seen as the sole ad-
aptation source for Speed Racer. That anime is bonded to notions of excess in
many of these reviews also reveals a continuing understanding of anime as
an extreme aesthetic, one perceived as separate from the aesthetics of the
Hollywood blockbuster.
TECHNOLOGICAL HYBRIDIZATION:
FAILURES OF THE OLD AND NEW
Within these discussions of anime’s aesthetic influence on the Speed Racer

film, critics were quick to assert links between its older, foreign cel animation
origins and the new visual-effects technologies employed to update and adapt
the Speed Racer concept. J. Hoberman calls this experiment a step toward
the “cyborganization of the cinema,” while David Ansen contends that “the
narrowing line between live action and animation is obliterated spectacularly
in Speed Racer.”29 Both positions are responses to the remediation processes
undertaken in the Speed Racer film, which marries studio filming and green
screen work to extended sequences of computer-generated car races. How-
ever, the hyperbole in the critical language about Speed Racer offers a glimpse
into the polarization of opinion that emerged regarding this experiment in
live action–animation hybridization.
What is unusual about Speed Racer’s critical discourse is that both sets of
technology, new and old, take the blame when the experiment is seen to fail.
Jim Emerson, of the Chicago Sun-Times, states: “The Wachowski brothers (of
the ‘Matrix’ movies) have spent $100 million on a mixture of photography
and digital animation and called it Speed Racer. They have captured (almost)
all the chintziness, inexpressiveness, and incoherence of the TV show in two
hours and nine minutes, or about two hours too long.”30 Emerson lays the
blame for Speed Racer’s failure squarely on the shoulders of both its anime
ancestor and its mixing of new technologies. The production design also plays
an important role in this hybridization debate: “Like so many other expen-
sive, technologically elaborate big-screen adaptations of venerable pop-culture
staples,” claims A. O. Scott of the New York Times, “this movie sets out to honor
and refresh a youthful enthusiasm from the past and winds up smothering
the fun in self-conscious grandiosity.”31 Both of these commentators also pick
up on the importance of size, found by Julian Stringer to be one of the core
components of blockbuster discourse, using excessive scale and cost to criti-
cize Speed Racer’s adaptation.32 However, they differ about the importance of
What is unusual
anime origins, with Emerson seeing them as a nega-
about Speed Racer’s
tive starting point, while Scott suggests Speed Racer
critical discourse
is part of larger group of failed nostalgic adaptations.
is that both sets of
Critics’ understandings of Speed Racer’s origins are
technology, new and
reframed through the lens of the film’s failure, with
old, take the blame
anime’s value as source text (chintzy or venerated)
when the experiment
put in doubt.
is seen to fail.
The extent of Speed Racer’s failure as a block-
buster is made clear by critical comparisons to Tron
(1982, dir. Steven Lisberger), a much earlier filmic experiment in CGI and live-
action hybridization. Mentioned in four of the reviews examined here, Speed
Racer was lambasted for being worse than that earlier failure: “some of us
would just rather re-rent Tron (1982), which was not only more immersive, di-
mensional, and original . . . but also funnier and more exciting.”33 Denying the
importance of either film’s technological experiments, Tron’s relative success
comes instead from its more apparent depth, humor, and action. As such, Tron’s
relative success is aligned with the failure of Speed Racer as a film adaptation.
Todd McCarthy asserts that the combined technologies augment “the de-
sired spectacle. But it doesn’t stimulate excitement or suspense, for the simple
reason that you don’t know what the rules are or what constitutes genuine
jeopardy.”34 Mick LaSalle concurs, arguing that “cars fly, flip, drive up the side
of icy mountains, do cartwheels, and burst into flames. These scenes come close
to straight-up animation, but they’re more like watching a video game—not
like playing a video game, but like watching other people play, and for a very
long time.”35 In this assessment, Speed Racer’s car races fail to engage because
they fail to be filmic. Kirk Honeycutt goes so far as to argue that Speed Racer
has the “sensation of being trapped inside a 3-D video game.”36 In these ex-
amples, instead of being reviewed as a hybridization of anime, CGI animation
and live-action techniques, Speed Racer’s aesthetic experiments were critiqued
for seeming to belong to another medium entirely. However, LaSalle argues
that there are so many technical experiments contained within Speed Racer
that “it soon becomes fun just to watch the ideas whiz by, even the bad ones.
All the same, if this action extravaganza is the future of movies, it’s going to be
a sad, dead, and awful future.”37 Here, the origins of the franchise are displaced,
with discourse circling around which aesthetic (CGI animation or videogame)
offers the dominant inspiration for the new film incarnation of Speed Racer.
As a consequence, the perceived failure of the film’s aesthetic experiments
commingle with discourses about the hierarchies in media production, and it
is video game aesthetics, not anime’s, that are seen to be the problem.
CONCLUSIONS: FAILURE AS A PLATFORM
FOR EXPANDING FRANCHISES
Even as Speed Racer came out, and subsequently failed at the box office, Vari-
ety began reporting on the separate production of a new CG-animated televi-
sion show.38 Other new texts tangentially related to the film, like Speed Racer
video games, also continued to be released in the months after the film’s
failure.39 Additionally, despite its status as a “bomb,” Speed Racer’s distribu-
tor, Warner Bros., made a point of continuing to use it when launching new
distribution formats, such as its Chinese video-on-demand platform.40 The
continuation of the Speed Racer franchise in the wake of its failed live-action
adaptation provides evidence for the resilience of anime-and manga-based
intellectual properties within the global marketplace. However, the contin-
ual failure of anime film adaptations, including the CGI-animated Astro Boy
(2009, dir. David Bowers) film, and the live-action adaptation of Dragonball
Evolution (2009, dir. James Wong), suggests that there are significant chal-
lenges remaining in adapting Japanese texts across media forms and for the
global marketplace.
In the case of Speed Racer, failure seems to have been generated out of
a surfeit of adaptation strategies. Critics struggled to address the hybridity
of remediation strategies used to shift Speed Racer from “limited” cel anima-
tion into high-definition digital filmmaking. Furthermore, even the produc-
ers struggled to articulate this shift. John Gaeta termed Speed Racer’s style
“Photo Anime,” going on to list the effects needed to generate this new style,
including “designer shape de-focus, infinite depth-of-field, bling and super-
bling flare enhancements, and candy-inspired ‘Techno Color.’”41 These new
techniques became entangled in comparisons with other problematic adapta-
tion types, from specific examples like Tron to general ones like videogames,
compounding the impression of Speed Racer as a failed blockbuster film.42
Consequently, instead of a new blockbuster cycle of “photo anime” films, we
are left with questions about the extent of anime’s cross-cultural adaptability.
Reviewers were quick to emphasize the mélange of national stereotypes
and signifiers deployed in Speed Racer, and they were also acutely aware of its
always already transnational status as an Americanized Japanese animation
text. Some reviewers took issue with Speed Racer’s global aspirations. High-
lighting the apparent tensions between its American and composite “Asian”
elements, reviewers repeatedly noted that this “American” blockbuster film
had not been made solely with American audiences in mind. The film’s an-
ime roots in Japan were therefore made more significant because the origin
point’s foreignness could be used to explain away the parts of the experimen-
tal filmmaking in Speed Racer that were difficult to understand or that seemed
culturally distant for American reviewers.
Reviewers paid careful attention to Speed Racer’s manga and anime ori-
gins, highlighting points at which the hybridization of anime’s aesthetics with
blockbuster filmmaking practices became problematic and using anime to ex-
plain away disparities between Speed Racer and other blockbuster films. Speed
Racer’s version of transnational film production, therefore, resides not simply
in its aesthetics, or its casting, or its distribution, but also in its history; in the
origins on which reviewers and filmmakers frequently drew to give meaning
to the live-action film. These varied discussions of Speed Racer’s palimpsest
of transnationalism and remediation encapsulate a significant historical mo-
ment wherein manga and anime were thrust to the forefront of global media
cultures. Therefore, the Speed Racer was not just a “bomb,” it was simultane-
ously a vehicle for relaunching the surrounding Mahha go go go and Speed Racer
franchises, for creating new spaces for anime nostalgia, and for successfully
shifting the discourse around anime adaptations.
Notes
The author would like to thank the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for their
generous support of this research project.
1. See, for examples, Anne Allison, “The Japan Fad in Global Youth Culture and Mil-
lennial Capitalism,” Mechademia 1: 13; Sean Leonard, “Progress against the Law: Fan Dis-
tribution, Copyright, and the Explosive Growth of Japanese Animation,” MIT Working
Papers 04.02 (2004): 10, http://web.mit.edu/mit-Japan/outreach/working-papers/Sean
%20Leonard.PDF; Mark W. MacWilliams, “Introduction,” Japanese Visual Culture: Explora-
tions in the World of Manga and Anime, ed. Mark W. MacWilliams (New York: M.E. Sharp,
2008), 14.
2. For examples of work detailing Tezuka Osamu’s emergence as a key figure in Jap-
anese manga and anime history, see Thomas Lamarre, “Speciesism, Part II: Tezuka Osamu
and the Multispecies Ideal,” Mechademia 5: 51–85; Susanne Phillips, “Characters, Themes,
and Narrative Patterns in the Manga of Osamu Tezuka,” Japanese Visual Culture: Explora-
tions in the World of Manga and Anime, ed. Mark W. MacWilliams, 68–90 (New York: M.E.
Sharp, 2008); Brian Ruh, “Early Japanese Animation in the United States: Changing Tet-
suwan Atomu to Atom Boy,” The Japanification of Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki,
ed. Mark I. West, 209–26 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2009); Frederick L. Schodt, The
Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, Manga/Anime Revolution (Berkeley, Calif.:
Stone Bridge Press, 2007); and Marc Steinberg, “Anytime, Anywhere: Tetsuwan Atomu
Stickers and the Emergence of Character Merchandising,” Theory, Culture, and Society 26,
no. 2–3 (2009): 113–38.
3. More recently the original Japanese producers, Tatsunoko Productions, have been
more aggressively and directly asserting their intellectual property rights. See “Tatsunoko
Sues over Speed Racer Anime Licensing,” http://www.animenewsnetwork.co.uk/news
/2012–10–30/tatsunoko-sues-over-speed-racer-anime-licensing. For more on Speed Racer’s
multimedia history, see Elizabeth Moran, Speed Racer: The Official 30th Anniversary Guide
(New York: Hyperion, 1997); Ben Fritz, “WB Gears Up for ‘Racer’ Game,” Daily Variety,
August 8, 2007, 3; Michael Schneider, “‘Speed’ Races at Lionsgate,” Daily Variety, June 20,
2007, 1.
4. Emiko Kishida, “Retro Characters Enjoying Rebirth,” Nikkei Weekly, June 9, 2003.
5. Moran, Speed Racer, 26.
6. Ibid., 23–29.
7. Brian Ruh, “Transforming U.S. Anime in the 1980s: Localization and Longevity,”
in Mechademia 5: 31–49.
8. Martin Blaney, “Joel Silver Keen to Bring Future Projects to Babelsberg,” Screen
International, May 31, 2007.
9. Julian Stringer, “The Original and the Copy: Nakata Hideo’s The Ring (1998),”
Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, eds. Julian Stringer and Alastair Phillips, 296–307
(Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007). The reception sources selected for this chapter represent
a cross-section of U.S. print media, including newspapers, magazines, and trade presses,
selected from across the political spectrum of American media news. All reception sources
have been selected for their close proximity to Speed Racer’s release in the United States.
10. Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Cultures (New
York: New York University, 2006); Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular
Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
11. Janet Staiger, “Taboos and Totems: Cultural Meanings of Silence of the Lambs,”
Film Theory Goes to the Movies, eds. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins
(New York: Routledge, 1993), 144; Pamela McClintock, “B.O. on Power Trip,” Daily Variety,
January 5, 2009, 1.
12. Ben Fritz, “‘Iron’ Pops Rivals’ Rivets,” Daily Variety, May 12, 2008, 1.
13. “Not So Fast, ‘Speed’,” The New York Post, May 14, 2008, 14.
14. Brooks Barnes, “At Movies, Fewer Eyes, Bigger Haul,” The New York Times, Septem-
ber 2, 2008, 1.
15. Sam Thielman, “Big ‘Ben’ for Silver,” Daily Variety, June 14, 2008, 1.
16. Anthony Lane, “Around the Bend,” The New Yorker, May 12, 2008: http://www
.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/05/12/080512crci_cinema_lane.
17. Todd McCarthy, “Speed Racer,” Daily Variety, May 2, 2008, 2.
18. See, for example, John Gaeta, Speed Racer’s VFX supervisor, in Warner Bros.
Entertainment, Inc., The Art of Speed Racer (New York: Universe, 2005), 5.
19. Kyle Smith, “No, Speed Racer, No!” The New York Post, May 9, 2008, 49.
20. Kirk Honeycutt, “Speed Racer,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 2, 2008.
21. Ann Hornaday, “Speed Racer Is Stuck on a Fast Track to Nowhere,” The Washington
Post, May 9, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008
/05/08/AR2008050803378.html.
22. A. O. Scott, “Gentlemen, Start Your Hot-Hued Engines,” The New York Times, May
9, 2008, http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/movies/09spee.html?_r=0.
23. Charity is likely referring to the Hanna-Barbera show The Wacky Races, 1968–70.
Tom Charity, “Speed Racer Rich in Color, Poor in Spirit,” CNN.com, May 9, 2008, http://
edition.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/05/09/review.speedracer/index.html .
24. Ty Burr, “‘Racer’ Tests Limits of Digital Overdrive,” The Boston Globe, May 9, 2008),
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2008/05/09/racer_tests_limits_of_digital
_overdrive/.
25. The positive tone of this review is not surprising, given the direct control of
Time magazine by Time-Warner, the parent company of the film’s producer, Warner Bros.
Richard Corliss, “Speed Racer: The Future of Movies,” Time, May 8, 2008, http://www.time
.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1738558,00.html. For comparison to production language,
see Warner Entertainment, Inc., The Art of Speed Racer (New York: Universe, 2008).
26. Smith, “No Speed Racer, No!”
27. Charity, “Speed Racer.”
28. Kirk Honeycutt, “Speed Racer,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 2, 2008.
29. James Hoberman, “Speed Racer on a Fast Track to Nowhere,” Village Voice, May 6,
2008 http://www.villagevoice.com/2008–05–06/film/speed-racer-on-a-fast-track-to
-nowhere/; David Ansen, “Car and Driver, and Monkey,” Newsweek 151, no. 20 (May 19,
2008): 50.
30. Jim Emerson, “Speed Racer,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 8, 2008, http://rogerebert
.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080507/REVIEWS/115192456.
31. Scott, “Gentlemen, Start Your Hot-Hued Engines.”
32. Julian Stringer, “Introduction,” Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer, 1–14
(New York: Routledge, 2003).
33. Emerson, “Speed Racer.”
34. McCarthy, “Speed Racer.”
35. Mick LaSalle, “Speed Racer: Not a Thrill Ride,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 8, 2008,
http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Movie-review-Speed-R acer-not-a-thrill-ride
-3214610.php.
36. Honeycutt, “Speed Racer.”
37. LaSalle, “Speed Racer: Not a Thrill Ride.”
38. Schneider, “‘Speed’ Races at Lionsgate.”
39. Brian Crecente, “Speed Racer: The Videogame,” Daily Variety, May 9, 2008, 14.
40. Patrick Frater, “Warner Bros. offers VOD Service in China,” Daily Variety, Novem-
ber 5, 2008, 46.
41. Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., The Art of Speed Racer, 5.
42. Corliss, “Speed Racer.”
A N D R E U B A L L Ú S and
ALBA G. TORRENTS
Evangelion as Second Impact:

Forever Changing That
Which Never Was
Since the airing of the original series in 1995 and 1996, Neon Genesis Evangelion
has acquired a quasi-mythical status for much of the otaku community in and
out of Japan. There are many flourishing franchises in the world of anime, but
the new installments and revisions of Evangelion that regularly appear are
not just an indication of its commercial success but reflect the content of the
series: the open, unstable nature of the fiction itself seems to propel the fran-
chise forward through a process of incessant revision, keeping the interest of
the audience alive. It is neither the first nor the most commercially successful
product of the manga and anime culture, but this instability and repetition
have made Evangelion a primus inter pares, an auratic and remarkable example
of anime and of Japanese popular culture. And although the idea may pose
a conundrum for the chronological history of anime, we will argue here that
Evangelion has become a sort of absent point of origin, its own instability
representing an archetypal and, at the same time, transformative force.
This is expressed in the way Evangelion coexists with itself as a fiction,
filling two very different roles at the same time: it is simultaneously an ongo-
ing series (with the original manga series and derivative material still in pub-
lication and the new reimagined episodes of the anime hitting the theaters
283
every two or three years) and a classic, canonical work that serves as a point
of reference to judge other manga and anime. This second role is evident in
the persistent presence of the series in serious academic works on anime as
well as in all kinds of rankings and top-ten lists produced by fans and experts
in the Internet.1 Like any other series, Evangelion has its detractors among
fans but is invoked with a surprising frequency as a touchstone for almost
any new anime that styles itself (or is proclaimed by the public) as “difficult,”
“dense,” “philosophical,” “groundbreaking,” or any other of the adjectives that
have become associated with Evangelion since its inception. This is true not
only for anime of the mecha genre (within which, albeit with some justified
reservations, most fans and academics locate the series) but also for other
technological anime like Serial Experiments Lain (1998), and even titles from
apparently unrelated genres, such as Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011).2
This coexistence of the series with itself in different forms is relevant, of
course, when trying to determine the meaning of its later instances or presen-
tations: the recent films that constitute Rebuild of Evangelion (2007–) cannot
be fully understood without comparison with the original series. But this same
phenomenon of recurrence and reference also occurs in the “original” fiction
considered by itself. In fact, even determining the exact boundaries of the
original fiction is nontrivial: the series originally ended with its twenty-sixth
episode (broadcast on television in 1996), and it can be interpreted as complete
in this form, but most fans and critics include as part of the canonical work
two theatrical films originally released in 1997: Death and Rebirth and The End
of Evangelion.3 The first is already a retelling of the first twenty-four episodes of
the series, in condensed form and with significant narrative differences, while
the second is an alternative ending (and clearly a very divergent one, despite
sustained attempts at harmonization from the fan community). By accepting
these addends as canonical, most interpretations of the original series present
an unavoidable element of autoreferentiality and comparison. But even for
those who attempt to approach to original twenty-six televised episodes by
themselves, Evangelion still presents a very particular kind of duplication, as
if it were acting simultaneously as original and copy, referent and reference.
That happens because, even if in its shortest form, Evangelion is an open
work, not only in Eco’s sense (a work not limited to one closed, linear, pre-
scribed interpretation) but also in a more general sense: it is a fiction without
clearly defined limits.4 The beginning of the series presents us with all the
classical elements of the mecha genre. There is a world under attack from inhu-
man enemies, the shito or angels. There is a teenage boy, Ikari Shinji, destined
to save humanity by piloting a giant robot (the EVA), which his father created
28 4 a ndreu ba llú s an d alba g. to rre n ts

and only he can master, and so on.5 The opening plays so clearly with the au-
dience’s knowledge of these conventions that it can be seen less as the start
of a new series than as an exercise in repeating (or at the very least continu-
ing) earlier referents. In more than one sense, then, the action starts in media
res. However, a “phantom” apparition of the character Ayanami Rei—subtly
located before her proper introduction in the story—connects this strangely
“unoriginal” beginning with the story’s final stages, those more clearly con-
cerned with the “Genesis” idea already present in the title. In a scene from the
beginning of the first episode, Shinji is standing at a public payphone when he
looks onto an empty street, and just for a second, as in an optical illusion, he
sees the figure of Rei, who is completely unknown to him at the time (Figure 1).
This scene is especially interesting when compared with the final scenes of The
End of Evangelion, where multiple instances of Rei approach every living per-
son on the planet just before they explode and are “returned” to a (supposedly
originary) state of indivision. In examples like this we can see something about
the topology of the text and the story: it is not a line segment, starting on one
point and traveling to another with no break in continuity, but something very
Figure 1. “Phantom” appearance of Ayanami Rei before she is formally introduced in the series.
This scene is reminiscent of similar ones in the conclusion of the series, where instances of Rei
appear to every person of Earth. All images captured from the series DVDs published as Neon
Genesis Evangelion: Platinum Collection (ADV, 2005).
e va n g e l i o n a s s e co n d i m pact 2 8 5
much like the real subjective experience of a period of time, with a past and
a memory always implied and effective, and an expectation founded on that
memory always extending into the future.
In this and other respects, we believe that Anno Hideaki’s ongoing mag-
num opus can be understood in terms of some of the fundamental concepts
in poststructuralist philosophy as developed by authors like Gilles Deleuze
and Jacques Derrida. Of course, these are not the only intellectual points of
reference in Evangelion. The clear references to various mystic traditions are
deep and interesting.6 And there are other philosophical references, including
an episode name after Schopenhauer’s “hedgehog dilemma” and compelling
connections to Sartrean existentialism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and other
philosophical sources.7 But the fundamental tropes or ideas of poststructural-
ist thinking correspond so closely to the structure, development, and impact
of Evangelion that they shed particular light on this anime’s ability to produce
meaning.
CHARACTER REPETITION AND

DELEUZEAN DIFFERENCE
One of the crucial poststructuralist principles represented in Evangelion is

that it is difference, not identity, that is ontologically fundamental. While its
most complete elaboration is probably Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repeti-
tion, much of poststructuralist thinking is permeated by the general idea that
self-consistent identity is not the ultimate basis for all existence, and that the
more profound aspects of reality are themselves dynamic, unequal, and dif-
ferent.8 The aforementioned features of Evangelion as a cultural product (its
autoreferentiality, its tendency to reappear beside itself and to acquire new
forms) might be taken to suggest that this fundamentally multiple character
is an inherent part of the Japanese (and global) culture industry, a radicaliza-
tion of Walter Benjamin’s concept of reproducibility.9 But we also find ideas of
difference and repetition in the story itself, when narrative elements give way
to nonnarrative, symbolic, and even “therapeutic” moments: it is not only that
the story unfolds by betraying the expectations set by its stereotypical begin-
ning but that the narration frequently breaks down, revealing that both the
background/world and figure/story depend on a volatile set of narrative and
imaginary choices, vague references, and simulations. This happens crucially
in the two separate endings, discussed below, but also in many other scenes
across the series, such as the beginning of episode 14 (labeled “Rei’s poem”
28 6 a ndreu ba llú s an d alba g. to rre n ts

it is not only that the story
by fans because of its fragmentary, cryp-
unfolds by betraying the
tic nature), or Shinji’s “train monologue”
expectations set by its
in episode 16. When the Twelfth Angel,
stereotypical beginning but
Leliel, attacks Earth and Shinji disap-
that the narration
pears inside the angel, we see him sitting
frequently breaks down,
in a train in front a younger version of
revealing that both the
himself. As the two Shinjis share a mono-
background/world and
logue/dialogue reminiscent of a psycho-
figure/story depend on a
analytic therapy session, abstract images
volatile set of narrative
of horizontal and vertical lines appear on
and imaginary choices, vague
the screen (apparently representing each
references, and simulations.
of Shinji’s “voices”); later we see images
from earlier in the series, as other charac-
ters intervene in the “conversation.” While resisting any definitive interpreta-
tion, scenes like these show that there is more to Evangelion than a fictional
narrative and its imaginary background; they point directly to the problematic
of difference and repetition and to the relationship between this issue and
that of representation itself.
Deleuze’s notions of simulation and simulacrum also suggest an interest-
ing interpretation of Evangelion—both its content and its commercial history.
Deleuze analyzed the platonic topic of the relation between the original or
authentic and its likenesses or copies in a way that questions not only the domi-
nant role of the former but also the supposedly primary ontological status of
the relation itself. Following a line of thought initiated by Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche, Deleuze asserts the positive role of simulacra:
Hence, to overthrow Platonism means: to raise up simulacra, to assert their

rights over icons or copies. The problem no longer concerns the distinction
Essence/Appearance or Model/Copy. This whole distinction operates in the
world of representation. The goal is the subversion of this world, “the twi-
light of the idols.” The simulacrum is not degraded copy, rather it contains a
power which negates both original and copy, both model and reproduction.10
This critique of originality and rethinking of simulation also plays an

important part in defining Deleuze’s project of a nonclassical, innovative im-
age of thought. In the Deleuzian conception of life and philosophy, the rhizom-
atic, hyperconnected configuration of experiences, feelings, and thoughts that
substitute for the Platonic order not only recalls Nietzschean masks but also
describes Evangelion’s game of repetition without origin.
For example, consider Ayanami Rei. At first she appears to be just another
of the teenage pilots who share the burden of protecting humanity from the at-
tacks of the Angels. When she is introduced (already her second appearance, if
we count her ghostly apparition in the payphone scene), she is shown injured,
incapable of walking, but nonetheless willing to pilot an EVA unit and fight the
Angels if Shinji refuses to do so himself. This scene and the first episodes seem to
present Rei as an equal to Shinji, a companion, maybe a future love interest. As
the story unfolds, however, we learn of the existence of several different incarna-
tions of Rei; then we find out that Rei is a clone of Shinji’s mother Ikari Yui; fi-
nally we realize that Rei is inhabited by the spirit of Lilith, mate of the primordial
angel and mother of the entire human race. Rei is thus multiplied, incarnated in
different bodies living separate lives, rediscovered at every turn as embodying
a new meaning always more originary than the last, but never finally definitive
(Figure 2). This situation is further complicated by the role she plays in the per-
sonal voyage of the antihero Shinji, whose relationships with Rei and the rest of
the female characters represent a permanent test of his authenticity: “are these
my friends, my family? How do they see me? Who am I?” As in the Deleuzian
rhizome, this effort to define a stable personality seems doomed to fail, under-
mined by a never-ending game of deterritorializations and reterritoralizations.
Figure 2. Image of multiple Reis in episode 14, popularly known as “Rei’s poem.”
28 8 a ndreu ba l lú s an d alba g. to rre n ts

ORIGIN STORIES AND DERRIDEAN DIFFÉRANCE
Even for those on the lookout for similarities, it is surprising how many ele-
ments of Deleuze’s dense, groundbreaking onto-epistemology are mirrored
in the narrative development of Evangelion, which is otherwise so difficult
to interpret. We can also compare the content, form, and development of
Evangelion with another great poststructuralist thinker, Jacques Derrida, who
provides a complementary perspective on the Deleuzian ideas of ontologi-
cal difference, simulation, and rhizome. Many of Derrida’s works concern a
particularly elusive relation of being with itself, a kind of relation we could
describe as “hidden” or “failed,” and marked by aspects that the history of
philosophy has tended to confine to its margins, such as contradiction, ambi-
guity, and absence. This notion of a constitutive but inconsistent relation of
being serves, like Deleuze’s difference, as a starting point for Derrida’s very
particular style of hermeneutics, revealing the paradoxes of language, textual-
ity, and signification.
Derrida develops his philosophical analyses using several strategies,
which include a series of related coinages (trace, archi-writing, pharmakós,
specter) that are used to critique or deconstruct fundamental binary relations
that he says structure the history of ontology.11 The most well known and
arguably most important of these deconstructions are those the author un-
dertakes in works like Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology.12 In them,
Derrida analyzes the complex historical relationships between the notions of
voice and writing. He critiques the existence of an implicit order of being and
thinking whereby the written form is always interpreted as dependent and
secondary with respect to an “original text,” generally thought of in terms of
“inner voice” and pure presence of being to itself. Derrida attempts to revert
this hierarchy, showing how the putatively “lesser” component of the oppo-
sition (in this case, writing) does in fact contain and produce the difference
itself. This reversion, however, cannot be understood as a mere reintroduction
of originality: on the contrary, it implies abandoning the idea of a pure origin
from which representation spreads, and accepting the dissemination of mean-
ing. In Derrida’s words:
Everything begins by referring-back (par le renvoi), that is to say, does not

begin; and once this breaking open or this partition divides, from the very
start, every renvoi, there is not a single renvoi but from then on, always,
a multiplicity of renvois, so many different traces referring back to other
traces and to traces of others.13
This idea of a sort of
To clarify the meaning of this reversion
“unfounded” foundational
or decentering of representation, it is help-
gesture-an ever-distant
ful to consider Derrida’s notion of différance.
origin that holds at its
“Différance,” Derrida writes, “is the non-full,
very core a passing of
non-simple, structured and differentiating
time that separates it
origin of differences. Thus the name ‘origin,’
from itself-permeates
no longer suits it.”14 Derrida insists that dif-
the conception of origin
férance is neither a concept nor simply a word;
presented in Evangelion.
it refers both to the idea of differing (as in De-
leuze’s ontologically fundamental difference)
and to the temporal sense of the English word deferring—leaving for later or
postponing. It thus expresses the inherently temporal aspect of the original
gesture, and also the lack of identity implied by the temporal dimension of be-
ing itself, and thus of any form of textuality or signification. This idea of a sort
of “unfounded” foundational gesture—an ever-distant origin that holds at its
very core a passing of time that separates it from itself—permeates the con-
ception of origin presented in Evangelion. In a certain sense it also describes
the function Evangelion has come to occupy in the world of anime: the revision
and recreation of something that was not completely there until it was revised
and recreated, through an operation that demands to be repeated again and
again. In the fictional universe of Evangelion, this very structure is represented
symbolically by the mysterious event known as the Second Impact—one of
the quasi-mythological elements that constitute the “background” of the ac-
tion, providing the illusion of a past within the story, the illusion of depth.
Information about the events that brought humanity to a conflict with
the Angels is scarce, and the ending (in both versions) reveals more about
Evangelion’s symbolism than about chronology and history. But the narrative
does mention a few past events, the most important of which is the Second
Impact that occurred in September 2001, fifteen years prior to the time of the
series (Figure 3). This prior event involved an unknown, dangerous experi-
ment performed on Adam, the First Angel; the experiment awakened Adam,
caused a disaster that decimated humanity and the planet’s ecosystem, mark-
ing the beginning of the Angel attacks. The Second Impact does more than
rationalize the setting for the series: Seele (the same political organization
that has concealed the original event with the cover story of a meteor impact
and developed the EVAs to confront the angels) is planning to recreate the
event in a controlled form. Ikari Gendo, the protagonist’s father, leads this
project with his own hidden agenda. This makes the Second Impact a constant
premonition of what is to happen at the end of the series, the final encounter

Figure 3. Image of the Second Impact appearing in episode 12, during a flashback to Misato’s past.
between Angels and humanity. It is also the direct or indirect source of every
expectation and project put forward in the series.
Even more significant, the Second Impact hints at the presence of a First
Impact that is never narrated, described, or directly referred to in the series.
Both we and the characters know it only through this vague reminiscence, a
repetition in which we do not know exactly what is new and what is properly
repeated. The relation of the Second Impact (and its projected echoes) to an
unknown yet always present First Impact is one possible key to unpacking
the complex notion of origin or genesis presented in Evangelion; it is also an
almost perfect metaphor for the prominent position of the series itself.
Finally, does this interrogation of the origin by poststructuralism change
our reading of Evangelion’s complex ending or endings? In a final turn that en-
raged some fans, the ending of the series abandons any clear narrative struc-
ture and undertakes what can be described as a therapeutic attempt: several
of the characters address first Shinji and then the spectator, and invite them
to stop hiding or cowering and to face real life with optimism. The second
finale, presented in The End of Evangelion, provides more narrative resolution,
but it also plays with breaking the fourth wall and pointing to the role of the
spectator: we are shown, for instance, images of an empty stage and several of
As in the most daring texts
the voice actresses. The film’s final scene is
of Derrida and Deleuze,
also open to interpretation, with the spec-
we are forced to abandon
tator left to decide what Shinji and Asuka
our position as mere
will attempt to do with the possibility of a
interpreter, searching for
“new genesis.”
the hidden but independent
These endings are concerned not only
truth of the text; instead
with the matters of originality, difference,
we must assume full
and repetition but also with the role of the
responsibility for the
reader. For critics like Deleuze and Derrida,
meanings we produce.
the reader is fundamentally responsible
for the meaning of any text or situation.
Evangelion expresses this in an almost aggressive way: both at the end of the
original series and after watching The End of Evangelion, we are left with the
impression that the story of Shinji is a trap revealing our role as spectators,
indicting us for being too passive or too comfortable in that role. What chal-
lenges Shinji is also a challenge to the spectator. As in the most daring texts
of Derrida and Deleuze, we are forced to abandon our position as mere inter-
preter, searching for the hidden but independent truth of the text; instead we
must assume full responsibility for the meanings we produce. In Neon Genesis
Evangelion, as in some of the core texts of poststructuralism, the critique of
the notion of origin serves as an instrument to force the reader to step out of
his or her hiding place, confront the condition of being a reader, and decide
what to do or make from that moment on.
Notes
1. For example, see the discussions of Evangelion in Susan Napier, From Impression-
ism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), and Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
2. These comparisons are made in academic criticism as well as in Internet forums.
See Susan Napier, “When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in
Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain, in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams:
Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, ed. Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-
Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, 101–22 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2007).
3. The original series and the two 1997 films discussed here (all directed by Anno
Hideaki), are available as Neon Genesis Evangelion: Platinum Collection, 6 subtitled DVDs
(ADV, 2005); Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, subtitled DVD (ADV, 2002); Neon
Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion, subtitled DVD (ADV, 2005).

4. Umberto Eco, Opera aperta, vol. 21 (Milan: Bompiani, 2000).
5. Evangelion draws heavily (to the point of metafiction) on previous mecha anime,
both the original Super Robot tradition, represented by series like Tetsujin-29 and Maz-
inger Z, and more realistic series such as Mobile Suit Gundam and Super Dimension Fortress
Macross.
6. Mariana Ortega. “My Father, He Killed Me; My Mother, She Ate Me: Self, Desire,
Engendering, and the Mother in Neon Genesis Evangelion,” Mechademia 2 (2007): 216–32.
7. For an analysis of Evangelion based in the philosophies of Hegel, Kierkegaard,
Heidegger, and Sartre, see Manabu Tsuribe, “Prison of Self-Consciousness: An Essay on
Evangelion,” February 1999, http://www001.upp.so-net.ne.jp/tsuribe/anime/critique
/evae.html. For connections to Sartre and Lacan, see Alba G. Torrents, “La relación con
lo materno en el cuerpo robótico en Neon Genesis Evangelion,” Debats, no. 119 (2013/2):
32–40.
8. Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?” Questions
of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 87–107 (London: Sage, 1996); Gilles
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 1994).
9. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (London:
Penguin, 2008).
10. Gilles Deleuze and Rosalind Krauss, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October 27
(1983): 52–53. Emphasis in the original.
11. Gayatri Spivak, Translator’s Preface to Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), ix–xc.
12. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980); Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1998).
13. Jacques Derrida, “Sending: On Representation,” trans. Peter and Mary Ann Caws,
Social Research 49, no. 2 (1982): 324.
14. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 11.
CHRISTOPHER BOLTON
From Ground Zero to

Degree Zero: Akira from
Origin to Oblivion
Let me begin with my own origin story. It was in March 1990 at the Music
Box Theater in Chicago that I first saw Akira, and as the anime unfolded from
its astonishing opening sequence, it set off a reaction in me. It was one of a
series of encounters with Japanese film and fiction that year that propelled a
software engineer improbably into graduate school in Japanese literature, as
if the light coming off the theater screen had changed me in parallel with the
film’s story of psychic radiation, mutation, and transformation.1
And clearly I was not alone. For anyone seeking the origins of the an-
ime boom in the United States, Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s 1988 film is an irresist-
ible starting point. One of the most lavishly produced anime to date, Akira
brought anime from U.S. TV screens onto movie screens, a format suited to
the epic physical scale of Ōtomo’s story. Even its limited U.S. theatrical release
in 1989 and 1990 attracted wide attention from audiences and critics. This has
led many to identify Akira as the origin or ground zero for the explosion of
anime’s popularity in North America in the 1990s.2
In what follows I will examine Akira’s critical reception in the United
States, to ask what was unique about this film at the time and what remains
remarkable twenty-five years later. Paradoxically, Akira has been regarded
295
both as a watershed moment in the history of anime and as an attempt to
erase history itself, based primarily on its frenetic visuals and complex plot. I
would like to look more concretely at the visual language of Akira by compar-
ing it with a similar story in a different medium, the epic Akira manga that
Ōtomo authored in parallel with the film. The comparison shows more specifi-
cally how the visual language of the film and the manga support or undermine
the search for the kind of historical and political narratives we might associate
with decisive origins or causes.
GROUND ZERO: AKIRA’S NUCLEAR ORIGINS
The characterization of Akira as a kind of bombshell that set off the anime
boom is all the more tempting given the film’s opening sequence, which is a
literal explosion. The film fades in on an aerial view of a city, with the superim-
posed title “1988.7.16. Tokyo” (the date of the film’s Japanese release). As the
camera pans up to take in more and more of the distant city, there is the sound
of wind on the otherwise silent soundtrack, and then a dome of alternating
light and darkness appears at a distant point in the city’s center. It illuminates
the entire city in a harsh glare and then expands toward the viewer, sweeping
away the city, until the light fills the frame (Figure 1). Slowly, an aerial view
of a new, transformed city resolves itself out of this whiteness. An echoing
drumbeat marks a transition to a more musical soundtrack, and a second title
appears: “31 years after WW III. AD 2019 Neo Tokyo.”
This ninety-second opening image—of a detonation that heralds violent
change and renewal—became a metaphor for the influence of Akira on North
American popular culture and anime’s fortunes in the United States. As one
popular guide to anime has it, “Just as the bubble of Japan’s economy of the
1980s was about to burst, a bomb of a more positive nature detonated, with
the premier of Akira.”3 But of course the more disturbing parallel is between
this opening detonation and the atomic bombings of Japan. To see Akira in
the United States in 1990 was to be transported back in history to the mo-
ment of Hiroshima at the very same instant one seemed to be lifted out of
the story and out of the theater to see a flash of a new future for Japanese
film (Figure 2).4 In fact, these two senses of the explosion—as a celebratory,
artistic, even metatextual one that seems to productively explode the rules
or boundaries a whole genre or medium on the one hand, and the dark im-
mersive or illusionistic historical reminder—seem to sum up the oscillation
that is at the heart of Akira.
Figure 1. The opening sequence of the 1988 Akira anime, with an explosion that seemed to sig-
nify both a past war and a future media revolution. Images from the anime are captured from the
2001 Pioneer DVD.
English reviews and criticism of Akira have emphasized both sides of the
film. In readings that emphasize the nuclear origins of Akira, it is said to repre-
sent a fixation on destruction that supposedly lies at the heart of Japanese pop-
ular culture, a legacy of the atomic bombings.
This reading suggests Hiroshima and Nagasaki
as original traumas that are then worked out
and mastered through their repetition in pop-
ular culture. “It is easy to recognize the out-
lines of the Japanese A-bomb anxiety that has
been embedded in their popular culture from
Godzilla onward,” Dave Kehr writes in an early
review of the film, and academic readings have
often followed a similar tack.5
This thesis about the nuclear origins of
Japanese popular culture has been sustained
more recently by the Japanese visual artist
Murakami Takashi. In 2005 Murakami cu-
rated a high profile exhibition titled “Little
Boy” at the Japan Society in New York City,
Figure 2. A movie poster used to advertise Akira for

its American theatrical release, purchased at Chicago’s
Music Box Theater in 1991. Note the focus on the trope
of explosion.
f r o m g r o u n d z e r o to d e g r e e z e r o 2 9 7
So while they talk about
where he displayed anime, manga, monster
its atomic origins,
films, and toys alongside his own paintings
academic readings of
and sculptures and the work of his artistic
Akira have also been
circle. The exhibit drew a direct line from the
inclined to see it as a
Hiroshima bomb (code-named “Little Boy” by
loss or effacement of
its inventors) to the otaku (the “little boys”)
origins, a text that
who produce and consume the narratives of
undermines the search
disaster, mutation, and invasion that figure
for unitary meaning or
so prominently in Japan’s popular culture.
interpretation and
“These images bespeak a profound psycho-
instead portrays a world
logical repression,” wrote Sawaragi Noi in the
in which there is no
exhibition catalog, suggesting that memories
stable ground that could
of defeat and later fears of Cold War nuclear
anchor interpretation.
annihilation “have never been channeled into
a legitimate political consciousness. Instead,
they have been transformed into the monstrous catastrophes and apocalyptic
delusions depicted in the bizarre world of manga and anime.” Significantly,
Ōtomo’s Akira manga occupied a central place in the exhibition catalog: Mu-
rakami’s programmatic essay in the catalog referred to the anime as “an epic
film that would define an era” and devoted more text to the manga than to
any other single work in the exhibit.6
The popularity of the “Little Boy” show clearly owes much to the rhetori-
cal power of this thesis, which is hard to refute and temptingly easy to un-
derstand and repeat. The idea of the nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and
Nagasaki as the origins of Japanese popular culture, a big bang from which
all else springs, satisfies our desire for origins or explanations. Faced with the
bewildering variety of Japanese pop culture products and the disturbing mix
of the familiar and alien that we find there, it is not surprising that we feel the
desire for some kind of historical key that will unlock the meaning of these
images, and this is precisely what Murakami provided.7
This is a powerful and plausible idea, but one with important political
pitfalls: it can encourage a kind of victim consciousness that elides Japan’s
own wartime responsibilities, as well as a passive stance focused on past ex-
perience rather than future responsibilities. But here I would like to highlight
a pitfall for reading, which is the reductionism of this interpretation, the way
its sense of a decisive origin seems to close off more complex, more original,
and potentially more productive interpretations.
For the last several decades at least, literary theory has struggled to rec-
oncile its desire to connect literature to concrete, real-world events with its
growing suspicion of unitary stable meanings for literary texts. There is a
range of shorthand for the core or irreducible meaning these theories call into
question, including “presence,” “metaphysics,” “transcendence,” or “depth”;
but “origin” will do as well as any other.8 So while they talk about its atomic
origins, academic readings of Akira have also been inclined to see it as a loss
or effacement of origins, a text that undermines the search for unitary mean-
ing or interpretation and instead portrays a world in which there is no stable
ground that could anchor interpretation. This literary critical suspicion of
origins arguably reached a peak in the early 1990s when Akira appeared, so it is
not surprising that this approach suggested itself at the time, but even today
many of these readings remain convincing in their core contention that Akira
is a text about the unreliable function of language itself.
DEGREE ZERO: AKIRA’S POSTMODERNISM
Readings of the Akira anime as an effacement of origins have often invoked

theories of the postmodern, theories that link the pace and flood of language
in contemporary art and literature with an inability to construct meaningful
political narratives. The term “postmodern” has been applied repeatedly to
Akira, beginning with Susan Napier’s influential 1993 article “Panic Sites,” it-
self a kind of origin point for academic criticism of anime in North America.9
These readings focus on the film’s frantic visual pacing, which looks to some
like a ceaseless rotation of vivid images unconnected by any coherent plot.
Fredric Jameson identifies the postmodern closely with this kind of rapid but
unstructured flow of language and imagery, which he relates to “the break-
down of the signifying chain . . . an experience of pure material signifiers,
or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.” The ef-
fect, says Jameson, is that the instantaneous present “suddenly engulfs the
subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly
overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the power of the material—or
better still, the literal—signifier in isolation.”10 This is the erasure of deep
meaning that Jean Baudrillard refers to as the “triumph of superficial form,
of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of mean-
ing.”11 For Jameson this loss of time and self not only erases our sense of
historical narrative (historical cause and effect), it also undermines the kind
of firm subjectivity that allows one to see oneself as an individual actor who
can intervene to affect the future course of events. The resulting sense of
freedom or lightness—exhilarating but disturbingly empty—is in some sense
the essence of Jameson’s postmodern aesthetic. Writing shortly after Napier,
Freda Freiberg describes Akira as postmodern in precisely these terms: “In
the absence of narrative coherence, the film grabs and grips the viewer by its
visceral excitement, a constant bombardment and battering of the senses, a
barrage of high intensity experiences.”12
This reading of Akira is supported not only by the film’s visuals but also by
the confusion of its plot. Many initial reviews of Akira found the events of the
film incomprehensible, and even later critics with the luxury of a DVD player
have asserted that it somehow defies summary.13 Although Akira’s politics
are often confounding, the events of the story are fairly straightforward: one
night while out riding with his motorcycle gang, the teenage Tetsuo crashes
his bike into a young boy with prematurely aged features, who turns out to be
a test subject escaped from a secret government project. The collision sets off
a series of transformations in Tetsuo that give him psychic powers like those
of the test subjects. As these powers grow, Tetsuo becomes increasingly un-
balanced and destructive, first killing his fellow gang members and eventually
battling the Japanese army through the streets of Tokyo. Tetsuo is following
a series of clues toward the font of psychic power at the heart of the secret
project, a force known to us only as “Akira.” This psychic energy, we discover,
is the source of the original explosion that touched off World War III at the
start of the project, thirty-seven years ago. Throughout the film Tetsuo is pur-
sued by his friend and rival in the gang, Kaneda, as well as the aged children
who are the other test subjects, the shadowy “Colonel” (Taisa), who is now in
charge of the project, and a group of guerrilla fighters, among other factions.
All form shifting alliances with one another to try to possess, control, kill, or
rescue Tetsuo before he locates Akira and risks reawakening its power. The
chase scenes become increasingly frenetic and the combat increasingly kinetic
until the film’s climactic reveal, when Tetsuo locates Akira and exposes its true
form, and all the forces converge for a final apocalyptic showdown.
Some of the factions in the film resemble real political actors and actions
in Japanese history: the Colonel leads a coup that suggests Japan’s prewar
militarization or postwar remilitarization; graphic images of street demon-
strations recall the massive public protests of the 1950s and 1960s, whose
targets included Japan’s support for U.S. military policy; and a vaguely de-
fined group of “urban guerrillas” suggests the Japanese Red Army terrorism
of the 1960s and 1970s. But the web of politics that connects these factions
is tangled. Viewers experience the film from constantly shifting perspectives,
as various characters take center stage one after another in a confusing rota-
tion that continually fleshes out or complicates their motivations and their
Many initial reviews of
relations to each other. Isolde Standish calls
Akira found the events of
the film’s politics a pastiche, Jameson’s key-
the film incomprehensible,
word for the postmodern accumulation of
and even later critics with
historical styles that robs those elements
the luxury of a DVD player
of any historical context or meaning and
have asserted that it
reduces them to free-floating signifiers.
somehow defies summary.
Standish suggests that Ōtomo’s film quotes
indiscriminately from the preceding fifty
years of Japanese political struggle: the militarization of the 1930s, World
War II, and Cold War politics are all intermixed in a way that collapses past,
present, and future. For Standish, Akira’s images of strikes and street demon-
strations become generic representations of “unrest” that neither provide nor
require any understanding of Japanese politics or history.
Added to this is the hallucinogenic quality of Ōtomo’s luminous cityscapes,
the kinetic excitement of the motorcycle chase scenes, and the detailed scenes
of the city’s destruction that begin and end the film. All this contributes to the
sense of an aggressive, even uncontrolled propagation of images that cannot
be reined in by meaning. The culminating image comes in the climax of the
film, when Tetsuo’s psychic powers increase to the point where his body can
no longer contain them, and he metamorphoses into a pulsating, pustulating
mass of flesh and machinery that explodes outward, absorbing or consum-
ing everything in its path. As Napier points out, the dissolution of bounded
individual subjectivity (what Jameson traces on the level of language) is here
enacted literally on the physical plane.14
The interpretation of Akira as a postmodern rejection of origins and de-
cisive explanations seems to be at odds with the nuclear origin theory, the
notion of a single traumatic historical event that forms the source of Akira’s
imagery and anxiety. But the two readings have been combined by interpret-
ers like Murakami Takashi into the idea that the atomic bombing represents
the end of conventional history and representation, and the inauguration
of a Japanese postmodern. Interpretations like Murakami’s often identify a
steady erosion of progressive political potential, beginning with the increas-
ing conservatism of the U.S. occupation from 1946 to 1952 and continuing
with Japan’s support for U.S. Cold War military policy from the 1950s onward
and the ostensibly failed public protests of the 1950s and 1960s, followed in
the 1970s by the bloodily destructive and self-destructive violence of under-
ground groups like the Japanese Red Army. Coupled with this political narra-
tive is the postmodern idea that popular political activism was undermined by
rising consumer culture: first the remarkable industrial and economic growth
of the 1960s (displayed to the world at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics) and later the
superheated bubble economy of the 1980s.15
In this narrative the events of the postwar, historically and symbolically
concentrated into the single initiating event of the atomic bomb, somehow
evacuate political and historical meaning from the present, in a way that is re-
flected by the frantic propagation of imagery in popular texts like Akira. This is
how Akira comes to represent an origin and a lack of origins at the same time:
the film’s opening explosion blows away meaning along with everything else.16
Neither the origin nor the oblivion thesis by itself is intensely interesting
or productive: each tends to close down meaning, by seeing Akira’s meaning as
either overdefined by the atomic (not up for discussion) or completely inde-
finable (and undiscussable). And interpretations like Murakami’s seem to do
both. I would agree that Akira reflects both the impulse to locate origins and
the impulse to efface them, but not in the way Murakami suggests. For me,
Akira oscillates productively between these two positions, with a realism that
provokes a shock of recognition, but also a presentation that makes spectators
question how that reality can be represented to begin with. As I’ve argued in
one way or another in most of my writing on anime, one of its chief strengths
is this power to alternate rapidly between illusionistic realism that expresses
some meaning or truth, and a kind of deconstruction of expression. In its best
moments, that oscillation provides a sense of the real stakes involved in the
slippery, often unreal project of representing the reality around us.
This oscillation manifests itself concretely in Akira in different ways: at the
level of the plot, it is easy to see the film as torn between a desire for a law-and-
justice resolution that would restore moral or political order and a visual or
visceral celebration of destruction for its own sake. And in its tone, Akira often
seems to drift frustratingly between juvenile and adult literature: many early
reviews of Akira state that this is a not a children’s cartoon, but it is also true
that scenes of slapstick violence and romantic farce constantly intrude in a way
that suggests the film has trouble staying on any one track.17 But ultimately I
would like to go beyond examining these tensions at the level of plot or tone
and ask if there is not a way that the visuals of Akira and other anime reflect,
address, or even resolve the tensions remarked above: the desire for historical
perspective and political direction, juxtaposed with the utopian fantasy of a
new visual mode that would permit us to move beyond the sometimes grim
realities of Japan’s postwar and start thinking or building anew.
How then do we begin to notice the specific visual details of Akira that
are important, and how do we attach meaning to them? Here I would like
to attempt that by comparing the anime with the manga drawn by Ōtomo.
Although the film was in some sense adapted from the manga, it is not my
intent to treat the manga as a backstory or a better story that will answer all
our questions about the anime. That would simply replace one origin with
another, replacing genbaku (the nuclear bomb) with gensaku (the nucleus of
the franchise, the original text). Instead, I want to use the comparison to fo-
cus our attention on the distinctive visual styles and devices these two texts
employ, and reveal how the same author working in different media can ac-
complish very different effects and even reach very different destinations.
This tells us something about the relative strengths and weaknesses of anime
as a medium, the things it can and cannot depict, and the problems and solu-
tions it can and cannot prompt us to think through.
AN INCONCLUSIVE CONCLUSION
Before it was a film, Akira was a publishing event in Japan, a long-running

manga series drawn by Ōtomo that began serialization in Young Magazine
in 1982.18 Archie Goodwin argues that Akira represents the origin of Japan’s
manga boom in the 1980s, that it helped establish Young Magazine, driving
its circulation over a million and paving the way for an entire genre of se-
rial comic magazines aimed at young men. At intervals, these twenty-page
biweekly installments were collected, sometimes revised again by Ōtomo,
and published in thick, large-format paperback volumes (an innovation at
the time, when collected volumes were typically published in smaller formats
than the original magazine publication). Eventually the series ran to 120 in-
stallments, published from 1982 to 1990 and collected in six volumes totaling
about 2200 pages. But the story became popular enough in its first few years
to spur interest in making a film, which was started before the manga narra-
tive was complete. In early 1987, about three quarters of the way through the
story, Ōtomo stopped serialization for a year and a half to work on the film.
The film follows the content of the first thirty episodes or so, but also carries
the story forward to a kind of resolution. After the film was released, serial-
ization of the manga resumed, and over the next year and a half it worked its
way toward its own resolution that borrowed some elements from the film
but changed others.19
While some aspects of the film’s pacing clearly borrow from the episodic
structure of the manga, ultimately the two works are organized visually in
very different ways.20 Consider the visual differences between the conclusions
of the two texts.
In the film’s climactic reveal, Tetsuo locates the force that has until now
been identified by the cryptic term “Akira” and learns it was the name of a
child, the most powerful of the military’s original test subjects, whose psy-
chic awakening generated the explosion that opens the film. Akira now exists
only as a series of tissue samples in glass jars, housed in a supercooled vault
beneath the old city, in the Colonel’s secret base located under the explosion
crater. (The base is concealed by a symbol of the reconstruction, a new Olym-
pic stadium being built over the old ground zero.) As Tetsuo breaks open the
vault, his rival Kaneda and the Colonel bring increasingly powerful weapons
to bear on him, but to no avail. Growing stronger by the minute, Tetsuo be-
gins to lose control of his growing power and transforms dramatically into an
explosion of flesh that begins to consume the stadium, the other characters,
and eventually the city itself. To stop him, the test subjects Masaru, Takashi,
and Kiyoko intervene by using their own powers to reawaken Akira, who re-
assembles himself and reappears momentarily as an embodied child. Then
almost immediately he turns into an expanding globe of light like the one in
the opening scene, a widening sphere that destroys the surrounding city and
engulfs Tetsuo, Kaneda, and the test subjects all at once.
This finale is full of light imagery. The glowing ball of light that emanates
from Akira seems to absorb and reconcile everything and everyone. Swirling
clouds and surging seas topple the surrounding buildings to the accompa-
niment of a dramatic organ fugue, but this ends relatively quickly, and the
clouds are shown clearing as rays of light pierce them and shine down bibli-
cally on the city. Inside the sphere of light, Kaneda and/or Tetsuo recall their
friendship in a series of flashbacks that seem to reconcile them, then Kaneda
is transported back to the city. We see him crouched in the rubble, cupping a
tiny light that is all that remains of the now contracting explosion, a personal
illumination (memory, realization, enlightenment) that he takes into himself
(Figure 3). Kaneda is reunited with Kei, and they ride off into the city on his
motorcycle. The screen fades to white, and then there is a series of light/dark
images—abstract flashing shapes, then stars and galaxies—accompanied by
a voiceover saying “I am Tetsuo.”
This imagery is distinctly spiritual, from the accompanying organ and
choral music and biblical sky to Kaneda’s entering the light and taking the
light inside himself, and finally the suggestion that Tetsuo presides over the
birth of a new universe. But this new-age transcendence fails to provide much
closure. It certainly does not address or resolve any of the political issues that
are in the background of the film. Consider the conflicted symbolism of Akira
himself. If the film portrays a conflict between order and oblivion—between
Figure 3. Near the end of the anime, Kaneda emerges from the giant sphere of light generated
by Akira and then cups the shrinking ball of light in his hands, in a gesture that seems intended to
signify growth and resolution. Both narratively and visually, this conclusion seems a little trite.
Note, too, the relatively flat background, which contrasts with the volumetric portrayal of rubble
in the manga.
the Colonel’s militaristic order and memories of World War II (or III) on the
one hand and the guerrillas’ violent revolution or the bikers’ blissful anar-
chy on the other—then Akira is the contradictory combination of both. He
is memory and history: like the Colonel, he is the regrettable military past
buried beneath a reconstructed Japan; with his fellow test subjects Masaru,
Takashi, and Kiyoko, he is the victim of war—the blameless child, the fallen
soldier, the buried casualty now disinterred. And yet with Tetsuo he is also
youthful revolution personified, the hope of a future that is cut off from the
sins of the past, an idealistic, violent cleansing that will wipe every slate clean.
These tensions are resolved by having Akira, Tetsuo, and the rest of the test
subjects disappear in a ball of light, leaving the film’s multiple political threads
hanging. The future seems to belong to Kaneda and Kei, a new Adam and
Eve who survive and embrace in the wreckage; but politically, what does this
domestic couple of biker and guerrilla now stand for?
Akira and the final explosion become a kind of new-age cheat, a divine
light that resolves everything by magic. One could consider this ending a
failure of narrative or political imagination. One could suggest that Ōtomo
resorted to the abstractions of this final deus ex machina or deus ex lumina
because he could not think of a way to resolve the plot. I would like to turn
this around and point out that the light and dark imagery is the grammar that
Ōtomo uses throughout the whole film, starting with the opening explosion
and the nighttime motorcycle chase. That language is optimized for depict-
ing particular problems and finding particular solutions, but it is not really
equipped to find a way out of the political and representational dilemmas
we’ve been discussing. In other words the film is inconclusive not because
Ōtomo could not think of a solution but because he could not animate it: his
film does not possess the visual language to describe how the characters might
navigate this maze of postmodern dilemmas.
ANOTHER CONCLUSION
(AND ANOTHER AFTER THAT)
Let’s compare this with the visual qualities of the manga, particularly its con-
clusion. About a third of the way through the manga Tetsuo awakens Akira
from his thirty-seven-year sleep in the cryogenic vault, which causes a second
explosion that wrecks a part of the city—just as in the film. But in the manga
this explosion does not carry away Tetsuo or the psychic child test subjects.
Instead, Tetsuo survives to form a gang and rule the ruins, holding United
Nations aid workers at bay and keeping Tokyo effectively cut off from the
world. All the main characters live on in the isolated city, scattered and forced
to survive in the rubble. But many of them are transformed, as factions shift
and old villains like the Colonel become new heroes. It is this struggle and
transformation that make up the entire second half of the manga narrative.
Ōtomo is famous for his meticulous draftsmanship, and these ruins
are unquestionably the manga’s visual signature.21 Accordingly, the manga
lavishes much more attention on the city’s destruction and transformation
than the anime does: page after page is devoted to depictions of toppled
buildings. These images resonate realistically and powerfully with scenes of
devastation and reconstruction in the immediate postwar period, and they
represent both destruction and survival. Many of the subnarratives revolve
around characters’ efforts to navigate the wreckage—to find a path, or a per-
son, to fight through a barrier, and so on. In the last four volumes, characters
struggle to restart from zero (or ground zero) and redefine their position,
geographically, socially, and morally. This is figured not only in terms of the
plot, which involves a lot of travel through the city on various quests, but
also in terms of the concrete visuals, which depict the characters in long-
distance views that display these symbolic and actual journeys through the
ruins (Figures 4 and 5).
Figure 4 ( left ) . Much of the Akira manga is dominated by scenes of rubble, which characters navigate in a
visual and narrative attempt to locate their place in the city. Cover image from the English color version of the
manga, issued serially by Marvel’s imprint Epic Comics (issue 23, 1990). Figure 5 ( right ) . Tetsuo with the city
spread out beneath him. The scene conveys his power, but with his back turned on the vista, he seems unable
to locate himself or find his own place in this new world. Cover image from the Epic Comics serialized English
version (issue 17, 1990).
There are also numerous sequences where we start with a view of a build-
ing in the distance and then zoom in frame by frame to a close-up of a previ-
ously invisible character in a window or doorway, locating the character in
a geographical context. In one of the more symbolic images, Tetsuo’s stone
throne sits on a concrete island floating in the middle of a half flooded Olym-
pic stadium—a visual riff on the imperial palace and moats in Tokyo, and the
idea of Japan or the city as an independent, self-sufficient island empire. In
other words, the manga’s three-dimensional landscapes become metaphors
for the political worlds that the characters are trying to build or locate them-
selves within.
For technical reasons, the anime cannot give the city this kind of volume:
in the manga Ōtomo is able to draw still images of architecture and collapsing
architecture in exquisite detail, but these kinds of images were impossible to
animate even with Akira’s budget, and except for a brief sequence of crum-
bling buildings at the end, the film defaults to the typical animation pattern of
moving the characters across relatively flat, stationary backgrounds (Figure 3).
Even in the opening scenes where it is introduced, the city remains a backdrop
of two-dimensional sliding layers. No matter how far or in what direction the
characters ride in that opening scene, the buildings do not seem to get any
nearer or further away, but exist as a kind of looming backdrop, like moun-
tains, impossibly large and impossibly distant (Figure 6).22
The light/dark dynamic that characterizes the anime also flattens the
film’s third dimension and makes everyone seem lost in the darkness. The
characters and their machines hurtle through night, struggling to light their
own way, but these lights rarely seem to penetrate more than a few feet into
the gloom. The result is that the characters seem trapped in a foreshortened
space they cannot escape. By the time obstacles appear in their headlights
(literally or figuratively), it is already too late to avoid a collision. This is a
central motif of the opening sequence: the black screen that follows the title
credit is revealed to be the inside of the bomb crater, but only after the cam-
era manages to pull back and show the crater edges, and this is the last time
for a while that the spectator or anyone in the anime will achieve that kind
of perspective. After a shot of the flickering light outside the Harukiya bar,
the motorcycles take off in a flash of sparking wheels, light trails, and glaring
headlights, but as the characters shoot out of the brightly lit new city and
into the darkness of the old city’s ruins, their headlights illuminate only small
patches of road ahead (Figure 7).
At the climax, the rival biker that Tetsuo is pursuing crashes when an
obstacle looms up of the darkness directly in front of him, and then Takashi
appears suddenly in Tetsuo’s headlights, too close to avoid. Moments later,
the Colonel’s helicopters materialize in the darkness at point-blank range:
magically the huge machines have remained undetected (unheard, unseen,
unfelt) until their probing searchlights reveal them directly overhead. Several
critics have commented on the play of light and darkness in the film.23 In my
reading, it is this device that makes the characters seem unable to gain a sense
of distance or perspective, or place themselves in the wider world. The faster
they drive, the less warning they have of what is ahead, so that the quicker
they try to get somewhere, the more compressed or foreshortened their world
becomes. The only way for the film to escape this regime is to light up every-
thing, with the ball of illumination that reveals everything to Kaneda in the
conclusion. But after the effective claustrophobia that has preceded it, that
solution seems both too sudden and too trite. Unlike the manga, the visual
Figure 6. Distant, unmoving, and impossibly large, the skyline in the background of the anime’s
opening sequence obeys no laws of linear perspective.
Figure 7. The bikers hurtling through the darkness near the beginning of the film can see only a
few feet ahead, a visual figure for the postmodern world the film portrays.
dynamics of the anime are optimized for portraying the character’s confusion
or oblivion, the flattened world from which they cannot escape.24
All this marks the anime as much more postmodern than the manga.
Jameson, for example, associates the postmodern strongly with a flatness or
depthlessness, his central figure that connects the literally flat picture plane
of artists like Warhol with all the symptoms of metaphorical depthlessness
discussed above: the loss of deep meaning, historical perspective, and psy-
chological interiority. This plays out dramatically in the work of Murakami
Takashi, whose “Superflat” art borrows ideas like Jameson’s. At the outset
we discussed Murakami’s thesis that Japanese fine art and political discourse
have both been unable to capture the political meaning of the atomic bomb
and occupation; only popular media like anime, manga, and character design
have come close to portraying these issues, but always in a flattened (dis-
torted, indirect, dimmer) way that corresponds to their two-dimensional vi-
sual aesthetic. Superflat art emulates that aesthetic deliberately, with very
two-dimensional compositions that defeat any sense of perspective, and even
sculptures that seem intended to mimic the flat images of anime. Not unlike
Jameson, Murakami suggests that there is something simultaneously empty
and liberating about this art.
But in the case of Akira, the manga seems to regain something that the
anime has lost. The kind of three-dimensional representation we see in the
manga represents the recovery of an origin that could orient the characters: it
is now literally the origin coordinate or vanishing point of a linear geometric
perspective.25
Consider the difference between the final images of the manga and the an-
ime. In plot terms, the manga’s finale is similar to the anime’s, but with more
factions (including, significantly, an invading contingent of U.S. special forces)
battling Tetsuo and each other. The result is that the story’s politics become
more complex. But on the final pages, Akira again envelopes Tetsuo, Kaneda,
and the child test subjects in a sphere of light, and the emphasis on friendship
as a resolution is repeated. Kei calls Kaneda back from inside the light, and
when the smoke clears, the two find themselves at the top of a ruined building
looking out on a sunrise. That was the final image of the serialized version of
Akira as it appeared in Young Magazine.26
This ending cannot resolve all the conflicts of the preceding 2200 pages.
The final pages leading up to this image display a few frames of each main
character to assure us that they have survived the explosion, but there is no
explicit resolution to the political conflicts between them. Furthermore, while
the sunrise seems intended to express optimism about the future, that visual
metaphor falls flat on the manga page. It is not just that the manga is in black
and white; it’s also that its vistas are dominated by an evenly lit deep focus
that reveals every detail of the cityscape, so that it has trouble harnessing
contrast in the dramatic way the anime does. The result is that the sunrise in
the serial’s final image seems washed out, anticlimactic.
However, I would argue that for readers attuned to the use of perspective
310 christopher b o lto n

The kind of three-
and the path-finding motif in the manga, the way
dimensional
Kaneda and Kei survey the city’s wreckage from on
representation we
high creates a kind of visual closure that is far more
see in the manga
interesting than the trite sunrise metaphor: it is the
represents the
panoramic quality of this final view that suggests
recovery of an origin
they will be able to locate themselves in the world
that could orient the
(individually, ethically, and politically) and move
characters: it is now
forward (even if it does not describe precisely how).
literally the origin
One might wish that the manga had concluded
coordinate or
with that image and remained finished. But appar-
vanishing point of a
ently either Ōtomo or his fans were dissatisfied
linear geometric
with this ending. In a move that further compli-
perspective.
cates the question of which text is the original
Akira, Ōtomo added a thirty-five-page epilogue
when the serialized episodes were collected into the final paperback volume,
a coda that renders the ending more blunt and more decisive, both in terms
of its plot and its perspectival visuals.
In that epilogue, Tetsuo’s gang collapses after his disappearance, and UN
aid workers are finally able to enter Tokyo. But at this point the remaining bik-
ers and guerrillas join forces and band together to repel these foreign intrud-
ers and form a new state resembling Tetsuo’s, the Akira Greater Tokyo Empire
(Daitōkyō Teikoku Akira). In the (new) final image, Kaneda rides off into the
city in an exaggerated perspectival shot that outdoes even the earlier pan-
orama from the top of the building. In this new final image, the road extends
infinitely to a clean vanishing point, while the city buildings rise dramatically
and geometrically on either side. In a collapse of present and future, the build-
ings seem to be rebuilding themselves from the rubble. So plot-wise, the idea
of friendship and community (nakama) is transformed into the rebuilding of
a state, or city-state. In terms of its formal elements, the manga’s second end-
ing has an architectural solution that is even more clearly expressed and more
optimistically inflected: we can locate ourselves geometrically and geographi-
cally in the city, we can restore the city’s clean lines from the rubble, and we
can chart our own future direction.27
If the anime seems to be better at expressing the confusion of Japanese
postwar politics with this inability to see ahead, it cannot find any way out of
this confusion (visually or narratively) except through this rather contrived
transcendence of a divine light. The manga seems more optimistic, even con-
structive, with this third dimension that gives us some perspective on our
problems and our position. But just as that aerial or three-dimensional view
has been implicated in the colonial or imperial gaze and all the ideological bag-
gage of the modern, the manga’s solution is conservative. It is kind of return
to Japanese militarism and nationalism.28
Broadening our focus to take in the Akira manga and anime at once, we
might suggest that these two different media combine to become more so-
phisticated than either one individually. If the manga falls into one set of
traps (the traps of the modern), and the anime falls into another (the traps
of the postmodern), maybe when they are read together, they can form some-
thing more productive—perhaps a dynamic dialectic if not a stable whole.
Akira could be regarded as a single text spanning multiple media, media that
interrogate each other.
Writing about the bewildering but potentially liberating possibilities of
postmodern space, Fredric Jameson suggests hopefully that new kinds of art
might serve as a kind of cognitive map for navigating the fraught political
and geographic spaces of modernity and postmodernity. For Jameson, such
a map might help to relate the coordinates of global knowledge with those of
representable experience, enabling “a situational representation on the part
of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality
which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.”29 In other words, it
might enable us to place ourselves in society and in history as well as space.
If we consider the anime and manga together, perhaps Akira suggests one of
Jameson’s cognitive maps—one that helps us begin to fix our position, but
that also supplies a healthy confusion, a skepticism that keeps us from being
too sure of where we stand.
Notes
1. My thanks to Yuko Kanno, whose “initiation tale” in an earlier volume of Mech-
ademia was one of the inspirations for this opening. Yuko Kanno, “Implicational Spectator-
ship: Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke,” Mechademia 6 (2011): 288.
2. Ōtomo Katsuhiro, dir., Akira, special ed., 2 subtitled DVDs (Pioneer, 2001). For
ways the film’s production broke new ground in Japan, see the documentary “Akira Pro-
duction Report” on this DVD. To locate Akira within the context of anime and manga’s
earlier history in North America, see Fred Patten, Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years
of Essays and Reviews (Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge, 2004), 52–73, 122–26, 128–29.
3. Simon Richmond, The Rough Guide to Anime: Japan’s Finest from Ghibli to Gankutsuō
(London: Rough Guides, 2009), 36.
4. This move forward and backward is even clearer in the chronology of the Akira
manga: there, World War III breaks out in December 1982, thirty-seven years after the end
of World War II, and the main action takes place in 2019, thirty-seven years after World

War III. December 1982 is also the same month and year the manga began serialization;
the anime version and the English-language manga altered the dates to associate the
initial explosion and the war with the viewer or reader’s own present and locate the main
action a generation later.
5. Dave Kehr, “Japanese Cartoon Akira Isn’t One for the Kids,” Chicago Tribune,
March 30, 1990, D.
6. Noi Sawaragi, “On the Battlefield of Superflat: Subculture and Art in Postwar
Japan,” trans. Linda Hoagland, in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture,
exhibition catalog, ed. Takashi Murakami (New York: Japan Society; New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 2005), 204–5; Murakami Takashi, “Earth in My Window,” trans.
Linda Hoagland, in the same volume, 109.
7. The extensive coverage of the “Little Boy” show in the New York Times and else-
where largely repeated Murakami’s arguments about Japanese art and history. Even
negative reviews of the show treated the underlying ideas credulously. For examples,
see Roberta Smith, “From a Mushroom Cloud, a Burst of Art Reflecting Japan’s Psyche,”
New York Times, April 8, 2005, E2:33; Matthew Gurewitsch, “Perpetual Adolescence as a
Counterweight to History,” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2005, D8.
8. Derrida writes of “the moment when language invaded the universal problematic,
the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse . . .
that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signi-
fied, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the tran-
scendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.” Jacques
Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences,” in Writing
and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 280.
9. Susan J. Napier, “Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla
to Akira,” Journal of Japanese Studies 19, no. 2 (1993): 327–51. To my knowledge this is
the earliest article on anime published in a major Japanese studies journal in the United
States.
10. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
N.C: Duke University Press, 1991), 27.
11. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor:
Michigan University Press, 1994), 87.
12. Freda Freiberg, “Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime,” in Hibakusha Cinema: Hiro
shima, Nagasaki, and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, ed. Mick Broderick (London:
Kegan Paul, 1996), 95. Isolde Standish also argues that “Akira is, above all else, concerned
with the esthetics of movement and destruction, subordinating any sense of narrative
sequence to images of the spectacular.” Isolde Standish, “Akira, Postmodernism, and
Resistance,” in The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries, and
Global Cultures, ed. D. P. Martinez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 64.
13. In 2001 when Akira was released on DVD, one reviewer mentioned this confusing
quality in a comment that simultaneously addressed Akira’s origins, Akira as origin, and
Akira as oblivion: “Animation has gone in various directions, of course, but the film, which
alludes to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, helped popu-
larize anime in the United States and remains fresh and startling despite its confused and
repetitive plot line.” Peter M. Nichols, review of Akira, New York Times, July 20, 2001, E27.
f r o m g r o u n d z e r o to d e g r e e z e r o 3 13
14. Napier’s early characterization of Akira as postmodern (in “Panic Sites”) empha-
sizes this destabilization of the bodily subject as well as the film’s open-ended narrative
and its paranoid anxiety about capitalist society. After Napier, Freiberg (in “Akira and the
Postnuclear Sublime”) and Standish (in “Akira, Postmodernism, and Resistance”) char-
acterize the film as postmodern particularly for its fast-paced pastiche of disconnected
images. Writing in 2001, Napier summarizes all these ideas: “Akira’s postmodern aspects
include four major elements: the film’s rapid narrative pace (reinforced by its soundtrack);
its fascination with fluctuating identity, as evidenced in Tetsuo’s metamorphoses; its use
of pastiche both in relation to Japanese history and cinematic styles; and its ambivalent
attitude toward history.” Susan Napier, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experienc-
ing Contemporary Japanese Animation, 1st. ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 204–5.
15. See Noi, “Battleground,” 202–5.
16. In the wake of the March 2011 earthquake and tidal wave in eastern Japan and
the subsequent disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plants, some critics have sought
to locate Fukushima as a new origin, one that sheds new light on Japan’s fraught postwar
relationship with U.S. nuclear weapons and power, and at the same time marks a turning
point or endpoint in postwar Japanese history, perhaps one where antinuclear activism
will actually return us to a new era of popular political engagement. This gesture has an
undeniable narrative power, but it seems to me to have some political risks: in addition
to the kind of reductionism discussed above, inherent in any search for historical origins,
it threatens to collapse multiple histories into one by conflating the politics of nuclear
weapons and the politics of nuclear power. For a compelling discussion of these issues
that treats both the political and theoretical dimensions in a nuanced way, see Margherita
Long’s discussion of Fukushima and Hagio Moto, elsewhere in this volume.
17. One reviewer wrote, “The film’s visual anarchy demands a snarling attitude that
never manifests itself in the kids—they are the Sex Pistols as played by the Care Bears.”
The Sex Pistols and the Care Bears seem to reflect the gap discussed above, between 1960s-
or 1970s-style activism and 1980s media culture. John Griffin, “The Mild Bunch,” review of
Akira, The [Montreal] Gazette, January 26, 1991, F13.
18. Ōtomo Katsuhiro, Akira, 6 vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1984–93); translated by Yoko
Umezawa, Linda M. York, and Jo Duffy, 6 vols. (New York: Kodansha Comics, 2009–11).
19. On publication formats, see Archie Goodwin, “Akira & Otomo,” in Akira #1 (New
York: Marvel-Epic, 1988), n. p. For detailed publication history, see the timeline in Ōtomo
Katsuhiro, Akira Club, trans. Kumar Sivasubramanian (Milwaukie, Ore.: Dark Horse,
2007), n. p.
20. Standish traces the anime’s postmodern fragmentation of the anime’s narrative
partly to the episodic quality of the manga as a serial genre. Steven Brown argues that
Akira is postmodern even in comparison with other manga, its multiple competing themes
recalling Jean-François Lyotard’s characterization of postmodernism as a loss of faith in
an overriding historical master narrative, or suggesting the laterally ramified rhizomatic
structures described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Standish, “Akira, Postmodern-
ism, and Resistance,” 64; Steven Brown, Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual
Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 3–10.
21. Ōtomo relates how, while drawing Akira, he collected photographic books with
scenes of rubble. Akira Club, n. p.

22. An exception that proves the rule comes in a scene where the politician Nezu and
the guerrilla Ryū traverse an elevated walkway past some skyscrapers, and the animators
try to make one of the background buildings “rotate” realistically as the characters walk
past it. This effect—achieved by dividing the building face into multiple sliding layers—
is far from realistic. In “Akira Production Report,” a backdrop painter remarks that if you
calculated the scale of the background buildings according to strict or realistic laws of
three-dimensional perspective, they would have to be thousands of stories tall.
23. Susan Napier (in “Panic Sites”) comments on the darkness of the film, which she
associates with a moral atmosphere using the term “Tech noir.” Marc Steinberg equates
light with weaponry, and notes that as spectators we repeatedly have this light shone in
our eyes before we somehow reverse our position and become its bearer, usually by climb-
ing onto or into the vehicles that have these lights mounted. Steinberg’s outstanding
essay relates this to the classical sublime, in a gesture allows us to link his reading with
Jameson’s postmodern sublime and Freiberg’s postnuclear sublime. Marc Steinberg, “The
Trajectory of Apocalypse: Pleasure and Destruction in Akira and Evangelion,” East Asia
Forum 8/9 (1999–2000): 1–31.
24. Even when it tries, the manga is not very good at portraying this enveloping
darkness or the lights. The first volume of the manga tries to depict the night with dark
backgrounds, but it is not as successful as the anime, and the bright lights cannot be dupli-
cated on the page. A color version of Akira produced by Marvel imprint Epic Comics for re-
lease in the United States is only a little more successful in this respect. The history of this
color version shows the difficulty of locating a single origin for the Akira franchise: it was
republished in Japan as the “International Version,” with sound effects in roman charac-
ters and pages mirrored to read left to right as in the U.S. comic, and with Ōtomo’s original
Japanese text now replaced by a Japanese reverse-translation of the English translation in
the U.S. version(!). Ōtomo Katsuhiro, Akira, color Steve Oliff, trans. Umezawa Yūko, Eng-
lish adapt. Jo Duffy, 38 issues (New York: Marvel-Epic, 1988–1995); translated back into
Japanese by Kuroma Hisashi as Furu karaa Akira, 6 vols. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2003–2004).
25. Natsume Fusanosuke also suggests generally that the manga responds to a loss
of meaning and political agency characteristic of 1980s Japan, a situation he describes in
vocabulary associated with the postmodern; but he is not so optimistic about its ability
to find a visual solution to this dilemma. Natsume Fusanosuke, Manga to sensō (Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1997), 115–32.
26. This image appears in volume 6 on page 399 of both the Japanese and English
editions.
27. Murakami Takashi seems to read this final image as ironic, a pastiche of Tezuka
Osamu’s utopian city images that also implicitly critiques the utopian conclusion of the
anime. It seems to me that Murakami’s reading looks at all the right elements, but his con-
clusions about the irony of the conclusion don’t seem to be supported by the way perspec-
tive has functioned in the manga up until this point. Murakami, “Earth in My Window,”
107–12.
28. For a more optimistic interpretation, see Thomas Lamarre’s reading of the Akira
Empire of Tokyo as a smaller, more local version of empire, in “Born of Trauma: Akira and
Capitalist Modes of Destruction,” positions: east asia cultures critique 16, no. 1 (2008): 131–56.
29. Jameson, Postmodernism, 51.
CONTRIBUTORS
steVen r. anderson is a clinical research co- Kairaku denryū (The electric current of plea-
ordinator in New York City. sure), and Aijô hyôron (Critique of love).
dale k. andrews is associate professor at forrest greenwood is a PhD student in the

Tohoku Gakuin University. Department of Communication and Culture at
Indiana University Bloomington.
andreu ballÚs is a PhD candidate in contem-
porary philosophy at the Universitat Autònoma imamura taihei (1911–1986), one of Japan’s
de Barcelona. most renowned and accomplished film crit-
ics and theorists, published a broad range of
jodie beck is a PhD candidate at McGill Uni- books on cinema, animation, art, literature, and
versity in Montreal, Canada. theory, among them Kiroku eigaron (1940, Doc-
umentary film theory), Manga eigaron (1941,
christoPher bolton is associate professor Cartoon film theory), Nihon eiga no honshitsu
of comparative and Japanese literature at Wil- (1943, Fundamentals of Japanese cinema), Eiga
liams College. He is the author of Sublime Voices: riron nyūmon (1952, An introduction to film
The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe theory), Itaria eiga, sono neoriarizumu (1953,
Kôbô and coeditor of Robot Ghosts and Wired The neorealism of Italian cinema), and Shiga
Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Naoya ron (1970, On Shiga Naoya).
Anime (Minnesota, 2007).
seth jacobowitZ is assistant professor of
kukhee choo is faculty of communication East Asian languages and literatures at Yale
at Tulane University. She is the coeditor of University. He is the translator of the Edogawa
Contents Transformation in East Asia: Popular Rampo Reader and the forthcoming Writing
Culture, Media, and Identity. Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History.
rayna denison is lecturer and researcher of joon yang kim is the author of Animation, Al-
film, television, and media at the University of chemy of Images and Empire of Images: Animation
East Anglia. on the Japanese Islands. The latter was awarded
the Poranabi Prize from the Japan Founda-
lucy fraser received her PhD from the tion. His essays have been published in Korean,
University of Queensland, Australia. She has Japanese, and English. He is associate editor
published translations of literary criticism, of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal and
short stories, and interviews with Japanese editor of the journal of the Japan Society for
writers. Animation Studies. He teaches at Tokyo Zokei
University.
fujimoto yukari is associate professor of
global Japanese studies at Meiji University, thomas lamarre teaches East Asian studies
Japan. She is the author of Watashi no ibasho and art history and communication studies at
wa doko ni aruno? (Where do I belong?), Shôjo McGill University. His books include Shadows
manga damashii (The spirit of shôjo manga), on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirô on Cinema and
317
Oriental Aesthetics, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Paul Roquet is an Andrew W. Mellon fellow
Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, and The in the humanities at Stanford University.
Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation
(Minnesota, 2009). Brian Ruh received his PhD in communication
and culture from Indiana University. He writes
Margherita Long is associate professor of about Japanese film and animation and is the
comparative literature and foreign languages author of Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Ma-
at the University of California, Riverside. She is moru Oshii.
the author of This Perversion Called Love: Read-
ing Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud. Shun’ya Yoshimi is professor of sociology,
cultural studies, and media studies at the Uni-
Matsumoto Nobuyuki is director of the cu- versity of Tokyo. He is the author of several
ratorial planning department and head curator books in Japanese.
of Asian art at the Tokyo National Museum.
Alba G. Torrents is a PhD candidate in
Laura Miller is Ei’ichi Shibusawa-Siego Arai contemporary philosophy at the Universitat
Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and Autònoma de Barcelona and in communication
professor of anthropology at the University of studies at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
Missouri–Saint Louis.
Alexandra Roedder received her PhD in

musicology from the University of California,
Los Angeles.
318 cont ributors

Frenchy Lunning - Mechademia 9 - Origins (2014, University of Minnesota Press)

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mechademia

frenchy lunning, editor-in-chief

Mechademia 1: Emerging Worlds of Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies

Frenchy Lunning, Editor

Spot illustrations by Rana Raeuchle

Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

Mechademia Editorial Staff

Frenchy Lunning, Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Board Gilles Poitras

ix Dedication to Dr. John A. Lent

3 Hagio Moto’s Nuclear Manga and the Promise of

25 Where Is My Place in the World? Early Shōjo Manga

44 Between Men, Androids, and Robots: Assaying

63 Carbon as Creation: On Tsuji Naoyuki’s Charcoal Anime

90 South Korea and the Sub-Empire of Anime: Kinesthetics of

107 Japanese Cartoon Films

126 From Street Corner to Living Room: Domestication of

144 Hyperbolic Nationalism: South Korea’s Shadow

164 Conceptualizing Anime and the Database Fantasyscape

179 Rebranding Himiko, the Shaman Queen of Ancient History

200 Tezuka’s Buddha at the Tokyo National Museum:

217 Genesis at the Shrine: The Votive Art of an Anime Pilgrimage

237 The Girl at the Center of the World: Gender, Genre,

254 The Localization of Kiki’s Delivery Service

269 Franchising and Failure: Discourses of Failure within the

283 Evangelion as Second Impact: Forever Changing That

295 From Ground Zero to Degree Zero: Akira from

For a volume on origins, a volume that simultaneously enacts and questions

Hagio Moto’s Nuclear

h agio moto ’s n u c le ar man g a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 7

h agio moto ’s n u c le ar man g a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 9

PLANET LOVE AND THE ECO-​POLITICS

Their power of vision is zero! They apprehend things with extrasensory

NATURE/CULTURE AND THE “DEAD”

h agio moto ’s n u c le ar mang a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 13

First Frame The last 226 People of Earth People of Mars

Second Frame The last People of People of “Red

Third Frame Between An “ancient civiliza-

Figure 3. The narrative frames of Star Red.

Fukushima disaster cannot be allowed to dictate nuclear policy because of the

In Star Red, what is depressing about the Zesnuserians is that they

h agio moto ’s n u c le ar mang a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 15

Sei’s second quintessentially chōshōjo gesture in the text is to reject Erg’s

Grosz posits two main consequences of the dominance of this model of

h agio moto ’s n u c le ar man g a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 1 7

h agio moto ’s n u c le ar mang a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 19

1. “Konshū no hondana: Shinkan Nanohaha—​Hagio Moto sakuhinshū” (This week’s

h agio moto ’s n u c le ar man g a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 2 1

h agio moto ’s n u c le ar mang a a n d t h e p r o m i s e o f e co -f e m i n i s t d e s i r e 2 3

DARK ENDINGS IN LESBIAN WORKS

I must die because I have known her

26 fujimoto yuk ari

28 fujimoto yuk ari

30 fujimoto yuk ari

THE CRIMSON ROSE AND THE CANDY GIRL

32 fujimoto yuk ari

PLANET LOVE AND THE ECO-POLITICS

1. “Konshū no hondana: Shinkan Nanohaha—Hagio Moto sakuhinshū” (This week’s

The rest of the seventeen-minute film further extrapolates on this mythic

perception, stating that there are a series of different levels—psychological,

If more attention is paid to hand-drawn animation that does not deal

Figure 6. Kim Cheong-gi’s Roboteu gundan gwa meka 3