CHAPTER ELEVEN

TECHNO-ORIENTALISM IN EAST-ASIAN CONTEXTS:

REITERATION, DIVERSIFICATION, ADAPTATION

ARTUR LOZANO-MÉNDEZ The term techno-orientalism was coined by David Morley and Kevin

Robins in 1995.1 It refers to a discourse that, from the sixties onward, has promoted an array of stereotypes and deformations about Japan, so that the country has come to epitomize a hyper-technified, dehumanized and materialist society. The aim of this contribution is to incorporate a contrapuntal approach to the study of techno-orientalism. We will first draw a general overview of such discourse, and then we will look at its historical evolution, pointing out some of its changes and continuities. In the eighties and the nineties, techno-orientalist images begun to be projected on other East Asian populations (Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and China), but we will devote most of our space to late techno-orientalist representations of Japan. For this purpose, we will draw examples from mass-media and popular culture, since techno-orientalism is a matter of culture and civil society and manifests itself in “a whole series of interests.” 2 In the conclusions, we will reflect on the contrapuntal approach to the complex amalgam of interests that this discourse relates to, both as an agent and as a result, and both outside and inside Japan (where self-orientalist trends favor a positive interpretation of techno-orientalist assumptions).

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Techno-orientalism as discourse and its connection to orientalism and self-orientalism

Techno-orientalism is an orientalist discourse that the West established hegemonically at a global scale as a power-knowledge structure.3 It is a discourse in the foucaldian sense 4 that derives from the orientalist knowledge referring to Japan, and also from the orientalist knowledge built around the “imaginative geography”5 that is usually labeled “East Asia.” Techno-orientalism recycles and adapts objects, archival lore, and even many of the strategies from both discursive formations on Japan and East Asia.6At the same time, its rules of formation allow for novelty and the incorporation of new words to the lexicon inherited from those two preexisting discourses. The discursive relations7 enacting techno-orientalist discourse allow us to reveal what kind of statements about the discursive objects have become central to that discourse. The knowledge generated through techno-orientalist “discursive practice”8 attempted to explain both the role of Japan, first, and then the role of East Asia in the configuration of global economy after World War II, in a context of technological leap and acceleration of globalization.9 Nevertheless, it is not just a matter of objects and the content of statements about them. Discourse is a practice, and so it implies the entanglement of attitude, medium, support, opportunity, expectations (even cultural horizon), and a range of other factors whose relevance is sorted out by the rules of formation.

Techno-orientalist discourse both produces and consists of complex and cohesive “technologies of recognition,”10 which frame the perception of everything “Japanese”—they tell us what is to be reckoned “Japanese” to begin with. Such power-knowledge structure relies on “schema of co-figuration” through “regimes of translation.”11 Techno-orientalism is not a substitute of “traditional” orientalism—rather, it co-exists with it coherently.12 Thus, techno-orientalism incorporates and gives a new spin to prejudices and misjudgments that can be traced as far back as the writings by the first Jesuit missionaries that traveled to the archipelago after St. Francis Xavier arrived to Kagoshima in 1549.13

Early in the history of exchange with Europeans, Japan was presented as the most conspicuous instance of il mondo alla riversa, “the world upside down”. After many decades of globalization, that topos from the Renaissance clings on to the Western imagination. The following words were written by the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, who visited the East Indies from 1574 to 1606:

“They also have other rites and customs so different from all the other

Techno-Orientalism in East-Asian Contexts 185

nations that it would seem that they deliberately studied how to differ from everybody (…) because honestly it can be said that Japan is a world upside down compared to the ways of the world in Europe; as it is so different and contrary, that there is almost no issue where they adjust to us.”14

Such all-encompassing othering perceptions spread quickly and rooted deeply. Even today, after many decades of globalization, Japan is presented sometimes as the radical other versus Euro-American cultural horizon.

Following the logics of schema of co-figuration, the identity of the West had been supported by antonymous couplings such as civilized–uncivilized, modern–pre-modern, etc. According to Morley and Robins,15 the idea of the West draws legitimacy from the unequivocal and exclusive correspondence that bound together the words “West–Modernity–Progress”. Thus, techno-orientalism started to take shape when such discursive exclusivity was unmistakably refuted, when the other “refused” to render themselves as the docile signified to a preset signifier. As Morley and Robins write:

ing force of modernization has passed from Europe to America to pan.”17

“Those anxieties must be seen in the context of an increasing sense of insecurity about European and American modernity. Modernity has always been that ‘mysterious and magical word that puts a barrier between the European [and American] ego and the rest of the world’.16 If it was the West that created modernity, it was also modernity that created the imaginary space and identity described as ‘Western’. (...) however, the very dynamism of modernity also worked to undermine its Western foundations. The modernisation project was cumulative, future-orientated, based upon the logic of technological progression and progress. Its various elements were also designed to be exported and to transcend their European origins and exclusiveness. Modernisation and modernity, with their claims to universalism, could be transposed to other host cultures. In Japan this project found a fertile environment. The technological and futurological imagination has now come to be centered here; the abstract and universalizJa An instrumental factor in the successful expansion and acceptance of

techno-orientalist tenets lay in their early adoption by self-orientalist discourse in Japan. Self-orientalism takes the images supplied by Western orientalism and changes their polarization from negative to positive. The mutual feedback benefits power structures both internationally and within Japan, where the nihonjinron—a trend of publications analyzing the “particularism” of Japanese people—already promotes conformity to specific models of citizenship.18 Thus, discourse informally induces people

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to adopt certain lifestyles and values. Those perceived cultural traits are turned into cultural assets, and merchandised as such. What the techno-orientalist deformative lens perceives as robotic, gregarious and self-emasculated way of life is presented as a considerate, balanced and reliable behavior.19 Paradoxically, the culture, tourism and entertainment industries from Japan have been exporti g products that undergo symbolic negotiation in Western markets

n

t are constantly utilized by the geopolitics of the modernization theory.”21

Techno-orientalis eavy industries, to state-of-the-art technology

pplied to p

supply scapegoats to a population issatisfied with economic hardships:

ng. He says

blind

ree wo weeks in España and Sunday striptease.”24

20 and, all too often, become techno-orientalist avatars. The result of such symbolic negotiation comes naturally since the mainboard of technologies of recognition is already printed with techno-orientalism and the “binary structuring schemata tha

m's path from sweatshops, to h

During the economic miracle decades of the fifties and sixties, products manufactured in Japan were considered to be cheap and shoddy copycats of Western technology. That image would successively be adapted and a

roducts exported by Taiwan, South Korea, China and Vietnam. Such sweeping assumption lent imaginary grounds to the belief that the

Japanese were untrustworthy and that their workshops and factories were flooding “the West” with exports that drastically cut market prices.22 The twisted “reasoning” would follow by stating that Japanese companies had gained an “illegitimate” competitive edge over their Western counterparts because “they” would not meet quality standards, would not respect workers' rights and would not fulfill agreements or would resort to ambiguous statements to avoid commitment.23 In the eighties, Japanese consumer electronics products had gained a significant presence in Western households. In their song “Industrial Disease,” Dire Straits ridiculed official discourses that would wag the dog andd

“There’s a protest singer, he's singing a protest soThey wanna have a war to keep us on our kneesThey wanna have a war to keep their factories They wanna have a war to stop us buying JapaneseThey wanna have a war to stop industrial disease They’re pointing out the enemy to keep you deaf and They wanna sap your energy, incarcerate your mind They give you rule Britannia, gassy beer, page thT

Techno-Orientalism in East-Asian Contexts 187

During the seventies, Japan's heavy industries gained attention as well. A few years later, in the eighties, Japan was finger pointed as the responsible for global ecological hazards and for wrestling energetic resources from the hands of Western competitors. Again, we will reproduce a sarcastic parody of official discourses, this time in Pink Floyd's “Not Now

hn”:

ese

gh trees. So fuck all that we've got to get on with these.”25

cha

d article from the paper's website on Saturday, December 15th, 2007:

od in the world, and the

, are discharging wastewater that rther pollutes the water supply (…)”26

ry.

Jo

“Fuck all that we've got to get on with thGotta compete with the wily Japanese. There's too many home fires burning and not enou

The “wily Japanese” image also builds on a legacy from “traditional” orientalism—the “yellow peril” and the “scheming Asian man.” The latter is a blanket archetype readily applied to both historical and fictional

racters (Genghis Khan, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu...). Nowadays, the culprit for our toxic and Malthusian future seems to be

China. There has been a proliferation of news that either fosters such assumption or are forcefully fit into this burgeoning hermeneutic trend among news audiences. This following piece from the The New York Times was the most e-maile

“FUQING, China — Here in southern China, beneath the looming mountains of Fujian Province, lie dozens of enormous ponds filled with murky brown water and teeming with eels, shrimp and tilapia, much of it destined for markets in Japan and the West. Fuqing is one of the centers of a booming industry that over two decades has transformed this country into the biggest producer and exporter of seafofastest-growing supplier to the United States. But that growth is threatened by the two most glaring environmental weaknesses in China: acute water shortages and water supplies contaminated by sewage, industrial waste and agricultural runoff that includes pesticides. The fish farms, in turnfu China confronts many ecological hazards, and the Chinese citizens are

the first to suffer the consequences. The situation is being contested by voices from the civil society, which keeps expanding steadily.27 Artists such as Yin Xiuzhen have repeatedly dealt with that subject from a critical stance (her “Washing the River” outdoor project dates back to 1985). The problem lies in the way that these realities are presented. In most instances, they are described with a biased vision of their context or previous histo

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On

Let us com are the representations of such phenomena in another song by Pink Flo om the Spanish film Mondays in the Sun.

yde

e?

reans will come to live in them and they'll laugh in our fucking faces. That's the way it is—It's as simple as that!

e need not perform critical discourse analysis to detect orientalist mannerisms.

Also, at the beginning of the eighties, Japan was blamed for the shutting down of the shipyards at the river Clyde (UK). When shipyards closed at the nineties in the north of Spain, anger was steered against South Korea.

pyd and in a dialogue fr “If it wasn't for the nips Being so good at building ships The yards would still be open on the ClAnd it can't be much fun for them Beneath the rising sun With all their kids committing suicide What have we done? Maggie, what have we donWhat have we done to England? Should we shout, should we scream ‘What happened to the postwar dream?’ Oh, Maggie. Maggie, what have we done?”28 “Reina: Alright, Santa, but still one thing is clear. I come to this bar, but if the one across the street served cheaper drinks, I'd have my drinks there. Same thing here. If the Koreans build ships at lower prices, naturally they’re the ones whose ships are being purchased. Santa: No, no, no, no… I'm already pissed off with Koreans. Stop feeding me that line about the Koreans, for fuck's sake! The shipyard is competitive. Fuckin' hell, we work fast. We even bargained to work whole hours for free so that costs could be lowered. What else do we have to do? The thing is, the thing is that the yard stands where it stands. And that field is now worth a shitload of money. Why? Cos it's by the sea. Have you not seen the machines? And they'll knock the yards down, and they'll build hotels and luxury apartments, and those fucking Ko

As simple as that...” (our translation)29

Techno-orientalism in the USA verged on hysteria by the end of the eighties, after Sony acquired Columbia and Mitsubishi bought the Rockefeller Center, in 1989.30 Techno-orientalist statements reached high levels of virulence at the time. Japanese companies were perceived as purchasers of American properties iconic to the social imaginary. 31 The transactions were presented as part of a strategy to colonize the country through the absorption of economic and cultural assets. Twenty years afterwards, we can still ask ourselves ironically,32 is any US artist from the CBS catalog (like Bruce Springsteen) any less American than they were

Techno-Orientalism in East-Asian Contexts 189

when the deal was signed? Ludicrous as it may seem at present, back in the day there was a strong trend of opinion that predicted a future of tyranny under the rule of Japanese corporations. Moving on to the last decade, there has been a burgeoning trend of publications and public events dealing with China and the perception of its status both in the fields of international relations and economy.33 While it is never advisable to draw comparisons at large, it would be interesting to analyze similarities and differences with the process undergone by the international image of Japan. When China is repeatedly presented as the world’s next superpower, it is all too often perceived as a threat by audiences in Western countries. In turn, this fost

d with miniaturization, xcellence of design, safety, quality, reliability and robotics. The following

dial blockbuster Transformers:

Sam: It's a robot. But like a different…, you know, like a super-advanced robot.

Trends in Japan-focused techno-orientalism

al reason that cultural forms are hybrid, ixed, impure, and the time has come in cultural analysis to reconnect their

Wired ma zine is often quoted as an example of the derision injected in news abo :

ered concern feeds back a demand for more analyses, many of which are invested with “schematic authority.”34

Finally, from the seventies onwards, Morita Akio’s Sony, as well as some keiretsu (corporate conglomerates such as Mitsubishi, Sumitomo or Mitsui) and other consumer electronics companies, made a bet on first-rate quality products. Nowadays, Japan is quickly associatee

ogues are from 2007

“Mikaela: What is it?

It's probably Japanese. Yeah, that is definitely Japanese.”35,36

since the end of the nineties.

“Neither culture nor imperialism is inert, and so the connections between them as historical experiences are dynamic and complex. My principal aim is not to separate but to connect, and I am interested in this for the main philosophical and methodologicmanalysis with their actuality.”37 The Japanese prowess with robotics and gadgetry is observed with

contempt in many of the news reaching Western audiences. gaut electronics market in Japan. Let us see a couple of instances “Japanese Schoolgirl Watch: OMG! MMORPG on My Cell phone! Second Life on the go? It's a reality for Japanese gals. Mobile tech company Media Groove just launched Chipuya Town, a virtual world accessible on any Flash-enabled keitai. Users create a custom avatar, then step into a

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cute-ified version of Tokyo's Shibuya shopping district that's accurate right down to the advertising overload. (Companies pay up to $4,000 a month for ads on in-world billboards.) Players socialize with other avatars and rack up currency — called Grooves — by recruiting friends, going on treasure hunts, and attending sponsored events. And just as in the real-life Shibuya, they shop and shop and shop... and shop and shop. A hundred Grooves buys a pair shoes; 300 scores a dining table for your avatar's apartment. Vehicles

o Chinese black marketeers for extra Grooves.”

little liar, Pinocchio — were ordered in the the model launched (twice Nissan's target). What gal could

ofand pets will hit the market in 2008. Won't be long till gals are paying hard cash t 38

“Japanese Schoolgirl Watch: Primp My Ride — Nissan's Supercute New Pino Say konnichiwa to the Nissan Pino, the most kawaii (cute) auto ever. Prospective buyers start by visiting www.pinoshop.jp, where they can pimp the $8,000 micro-minicar with an enormous selection of adorable accessories — patterned seat covers, tissue dispensers, stuffed animals, matching handbags, stickers, CD cases. Drag and drop your fave selections to the car, then decorate it with stickers and colorful backgrounds the way you would your purikura photo-booth images. More than 5,500 Pinos — a reference to Disney's darlingmonth after resist? As the Pino site says: ‘From your clothes to your goods to your car, everything is better cute!” 39 This penchant for ridiculing Japanese technology and people, especially

young urban women, can be found outside semi-specialized publications too. The way news items are selected and presented falls into a pattern that reinforces the perception of Japan as an eccentric and techno-fetishist paradise of pointless consumerism, the land where capitalism has gone awry (thus making capitalist excesses in Western societies look reasonable). In a moment of global history when absolutely everything is commodified, most media fail to mention that chance of commercialization has become crucial to financing scientific research and technical progress in peacetime,40 either in Japan or in Western countries. The technologies and services described in the previous quotations can (and probably will) be used for much more relevant purposes than what the articles imply. Think of current attempts at developing virtual university campuses that allow for actual real-time interaction; think of the traits of the current Post-Fordist production model (how industries have had to transform themselves since Henry Ford wrote “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”),41 and how these adaptations have become instrumental in ensuring the continuity of capitalism. Then again, the kind of representations that we have just seen would seem perfectly accurate according to the “schematic authority”42 accrued by multiple

Techno-Orientalism in East-Asian Contexts 191

representations of a wacky-sappy Japan. Since all of them are cohesive, they all lend truth and reality to each other, and thus, legitimize the “textual attitude”43 that they favor. Since the late nineties, a streak of contempt has become apparent in that textual attitude. The extent to which recent tec

ction” and not just a single one of the units or objects of the discourse.

and Spanish speaking ma

y, a government-backed organization, said their ‘cybernetic

blicity in the media that the eve

hno-orientalism implies “pouring derision” suggests that this strategy belongs to the “operational field of the enunciative fun 44

toThe following news appeared in English speakinginstream media all over the world in March 2009:

“Walking, Talking Female Robot to Hit the Catwalk TSUKUBA, Japan — A new walking, talking robot from Japan has a female face that can smile and has trimmed down to 43 kilograms (95 pounds) to make a debut at a fashion show. But it still hasn't cleared safety standards required to share the catwalk with human models. Developers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technologhuman,’ shown Monday, wasn't ready to help with daily chores or work side by side with people — as many hope robots will be able to do in the future.”45 The string of news informing about this robot (named HRP-4C) prompts

us to reflect upon the responsibility that lies on the side of the manufacturer for programming such a “product presentation.” The question refers us again to the role of self-orientalism in easing the reproduction of techno-orientalist views. Quite probably, the managers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology anticipated and expected precisely the kind of reactions and pu

nt raised. Also, the exploitation of a techno-Japan image is backed by the State, very much in the same fashion as the institutions periodically exploit a certain image of traditional Japan.46

On the other hand, we must not sell short the power that private media exert simply by selecting and reproducing some news items instead of others, even regardless of how they are presented. For instance, another piece of news regarding a female robot appeared on March 2009. This information regarded a gynoid 47 named Saya, developed by professor Kobayashi Hiroshi's team at Tokyo University, where the android worked as a front desk clerk. The robot Saya was to be tested as a teacher for primary students— “It is multilingual, can organize set tasks for pupils, call the roll and get angry when the kids misbehave.”48 Which information is more newsworthy? Probably both Saya and the HRP-4C deserved attention since both represent breakthroughs in robotics, but most of the media opted

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to neglect informing about Saya while they widely informed about the HR

echanical girl

l movies (19

f the audience. Still, more often than not, a single reader will exp

P-4C presentation. Such preference was probably shaped by the opportunity of delivering hilarious headlines and remarks about a “naked” female robot “walking the catwalk,” or “strutting her stuff.”49

This brings us to another important issue regarding late techno-orientalism. From the nineties onward, gender issues entangled in the core of techno-orientalist assumptions and manifestations have become apparent. Thus, the HRP-4C was said to have trimmed down to 43 kilos—as if weighing 43 kilos was actually neat. In science-fiction anime, there are abundant productions that revolve around mecha musume, or “m

s.”50 Many of the titles re-enact the Pygmalion myth.51 There is even sci-fi “harem anime” (sic), where the main (male) character often finds himself surrounded by a number of obliging mechanical girls.52

While it is true that Japanese entertainment industry produces such products, it has also produced much of the most mature and thought-provoking animations in history, many of which raise questions about the future of humankind and technology: Ghost in the Shel

95, 2004) and TV series (2002-2005), Serial Experiments Lain (1998), Gasaraki (1998), Gunslinger Girl (2003), Ergo Proxy (2006), The Sky Crawlers (2008).53 And there are many more titles that stand out.

Contrapuntal methodology is especially useful when it comes to these products since it provides us with a theoretical framework that can account for readings and traces that seem to go in opposite directions but are nevertheless prompted by the same work. Series like Gunslinger Girl may be filtered by dominant discourses and be presented as yet another Japanese animation that features pubescent young cyborg girls and gory violence. Nevertheless, the work seriously resists and sets hurdles against that kind of reading. The episodes open challenging spaces of reflection and infuse the characters with complex psychology. Indeed, many of the narrative and aesthetic choices (like setting the action in present day Italy and using Scottish indie rock band The Delgados themes for the soundtrack) distance the series from genre commonplaces. Whether the hermeneutic hierarchy tilts one way or the other has much to do with the individual consumer’s background and predisposition—by acknowledging this we are not denying the fact that there are both products that willingly conform to and exploit dominant discourses and products that doggedly seek to upset the expectations o

erience a wide range of implicit readings, rather than a single monolithic interpretation, thus producing hybridized readings (as Said already suggested).54

Expectations are also at the core of “managed multiculturalism” and

Techno-Orientalism in East-Asian Contexts 193

“self-culturization” issues.55 As discourse puts forward discursive objects, the statements about such objects are enacted with a given set of discursive relations that concur so that the objects can be named and explained. Most importantly, the rules of formation determine what can be said about the objects—what they are and so what they can be expected to be in actuality. Instances of an object that do not comply with the statements about that object may therefore fail to be reckoned as being that object. 56 In the marketplace, in order to attach value to an object one has to turn it into a commodity first. The distribution networks in global markets promote a certain catalog of cultural images and perceptions, meaning that those who adapt to such catalogue have better chances of effective distribution. As they are exported, Japanese cultural products that exploit Japan’s “national cool”57 are assimilated into the international perception and circulation of Japan’s popular culture. Since techno-orientalism plays a central role in the international perception of Japan, it is also intervening in the semiotic negotiation of these products. The paradox is that, even if the act of consuming the products may disavow techno-orientalist assumptions (that is, provided that such assumptions do not override any other possible receptions), in order to reach the consumers, the products are marketed and cataloged in compliance to an archive that holds detrimental images of the quality and content of such products, and of the cultural practices associated to them. One must add to this picture the case of international co-

mony had be discursively negotiated. Now, both manga and anime-looking

car find articles that cla

ith what manga

productions of animations managed by Japanese studios, and also the increasing offshoring of the material production of animation to other companies of East Asian countries by Japanese studios.

Already in 1996, Ueno made the case for applying Chen Kuan-Hsing’s concept of sub-empire to Japanese sub-cultural exports: “the sub-empire is secondary dependent empire which has hegemony much more in culture and economy than military system.”58 But the terms of such hegeto

toons are produced in Western countries. One can evenim (and rejoice at) the successful assimilation of the foreign:

“The ascent of manga: Japan's hottest export goes global. (...) it's hard not to be taken aback by the flowering of a home-grown British manga culture, whose (mostly female) creators borrow the idiosyncratic visual style of the Japanese originals and infuse it with an unmistakably British attitude. One series, by Laura Howell, follows the bumbling adventures of Gilbert and Sullivan, as they endeavour to avoid trampling Japanese sensibilities with their production of The Mikado; another, by Mary Beaird, infuses anthropomorphic animal drawings wcritic Helen McCarthy calls "the comic spirit of Morecambe and Wise". It

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seems safe to say that neither of these illustrious duos would be likely to crop up in strips from anywhere but our own dear land.”59

Things are slowly changing, but the vague perception among the general

public is still that Japanese animation is characterized by (a) silly female characters with oversized breasts and a cute pose (mostly schoolgirls, too), and (b) pointless violence. It makes no difference that those familiar with Japan's entertainment industry try to counteract negative generalizations, because their own image doesn't fare any better. They are labeled otaku,60 the term itself implying discredit, and they are thought to be puerile col

tha

ieties at the same pace or even faster than

in the Shell (1995). Techno-orientalism jumped at the chance of disavowal

lectors obsessed with Japanese popular culture. Again, though there are individuals that seem a clear-cut case for such a representation, this is hardly the case of the majority nor does it justify resorting to the schematic authority of such representations.61

The modifications that techno-orientalist images of Japan underwent in the nineties were due to a number of factors. First of all, the crash of the Japanese asset price bubble in 1990 marked the beginning of what would later be called the “lost decade” for Japan’s economy, and Japanese conglomerates and lobbies became less conspicuous for their Western counterparts. Thus, the Japanese “strategy of world conquest” theory lost strength, even if the words we have just quoted belong to statements by Edith Cresson while she was Prime Minister of France in 1991-1992.62 Although Japanese economy kept a high profile and slowly recovered, thanks mainly to exports, it was becoming clear that playing on the fear of universalizing technology would no longer work as a discursive strategy. Globalization has been more a case of technology adapting to the social environments or even transnational niches (job profiles, youth cultures),

n a case of assimilating the world into the ways of a single tech provider.63 The future painted in the early eighties had already caught up with us, and indeed it didn’t look quite like it had been portrayed. Why did techno-orientalism appeal to ridicule as its main discursive strategy then?

In the root of this discredit there is the issue of postmodernity. Not only did Japan catch up with Western progress, but it also developed the symptoms of postmodernist socthe most advanced Western countries.64 Japan had become a mirror for Western societies, and dominant discourses in Western societies were not comfortable with their own reflection (even if the Western imaginary got a narcissistic arousal out of it).65

Though Japan had been exporting some popular culture products for decades, it was in the nineties that the demand for manga and anime experienced a leap forward thanks to titles such as Akira (1988) and Ghost

Techno-Orientalism in East-Asian Contexts 195

and caricature. Building on its legacy, techno-orientalist discourse presents the West as the balanced center, while Japan would be sick with onsumerism, materialism, nerd techno-fetishism and shunning human

rel s of

and the comparative

and puzzling occurrences, though, its bas

e, techno-orientalism can

cationships. That has been the last resource so far for the othering efforttechno-orientalism.

“A certain freedom of intercourse was always the Westerner’s privilege; because his was the strongest culture, he could penetrate, he could wrestle with, he could give shape and meaning to the great Asiatic mystery, as Disraeli once called it. Yet what has, I think, been previously overlooked is the constricted vocabulary of such a privilege,limitations of such a vision. My argument takes it the Orientalist reality is both antihuman and persistent. Its scope, as much as its institutions and all-pervasive influence, lasts up to the present.”66 We have seen further proof that orientalism is persistent. The very

emergence of techno-orientalism in the sixties testifies to that. And there is more evidence within the evolution and features of techno-orientalism itself. It may resort to opposite images (from trashy transistors in the past to advanced robotics presently). It can portray Asians as insidious, but it can portray them as extremely naïve too, according to another widespread archetype.67 It can develop features of an oriental other for one country, then it can adapt them for different countries under different circumstances. It can pull back in history to the first registered orientalist accounts—or it can start to develop a new blanket techno-orientalism covering the whole of East Asia.68 Throughout its multiple

ic vocabulary and functions remain the same. It is always a matter of orientalizing the other. At the same time, it shifts and adapts itself skillfully, as can be expected from discourse.

Historically, antihuman discourses have proved successful at collaborative and interdisciplinary efforts that look to the future. Thus, techno-orientalism coherently collaborates with previous orientalist representations, but it also engages in contemporary sexism. Its role in discourses of social and national conformity deserves special attention. Not only is it used by self-orientalism and nihonjinron, but it also builds a modular other that helps shape Western societies (identities being a “contrapuntal ensembles” themselves ) 69 and what their citizens think is acceptable or “natural,” that is, balanced, centered. Thus, techno-orientalism also serves regimes of translation. These currents of discourse are complementary because they intertwine and reinforce each other. They are fractal because of their multilevel reach. Thanks to its entanglement with all sorts of socially constructed beliefs and knowledg

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int

edge, but it is also a form of knowledge itself, one that is “always in motion,” that needs no unitary dominating principle (“no ha hat is willing to experience itself as a “cluster of flowing

—. dai Visual, Madhouse Studios, Marvelous

“A endent

ainment/art/features/the-asce

Ba April 1, 2009

tml?ex=13558

Co la Libanisation –

Familari, Peter. “Saya the teaching robot, makes debut in a Japanese

ervene both in the reception of one manga and in the political division of the world, it reaches from a funny story retold in a bar to our understanding of what is civilization and what it should be.

After this overview of techno-orientalism and its clockwork, it becomes clear that the Academy also needs collaborative and interdisciplinary efforts. More contrapuntal analyses are called for. What about techno-orientalism in all forms of art (design, architecture, sculpture, photograph, digital art...) or literature? What other discursive formations does it concur with? What other lines of continuity are there between orientalism and techno-orientalism? How have techno-orientalist images originally applied to Japan been adapted to other countries? What about the surging blanket fashion of techno-orientalism that subsumes all of East Asia into a single universalizing entity? Fortunately, much is being done in the field of orientalism and cybernetics, and in regard with orientalist readings of specific cultural products. Nevertheless, the complexity and the intermeshing of voices within cultural manifestations and so the fractal echoes from those voices need to be met by contrapuntal readings that aim to worldliness, wider contextualization. Contrapuntal reading supplies an assessment of the production of knowl

rmonizing”) and tcurrents”.70

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Notes

1 They had already introduced the neologism in David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism: Futures, Foreigners and Phobias,” New Formations 16 (1992): 136–56. Nevertheless, the term begun to be used by other scholars after David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism. Japan Panic,” in Spaces of Identity. Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995), 147–173. 2 Edward Said, Orientalism. (London: Penguin, 1978), 12. 3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981), 92-102. 4 Said’s words will help us frame the notion of discourse as well as the subject of this chapter: “A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of circumstances similar to the ones I have just described, is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it. This kind of text is composed out of those pre-existing units of information deposited by Flaubert in the catalogue of idées reçues.” (Orientalism, 94) 5 Ibid., 53-4. 6 See Foucault’s elaborations on “objects” of discourse, “archive,” and discursive “strategies” at Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London; New York: Routledge, 2002). 7 Ibid., 50. 8 Ibid., 131. Foucault defines “discursive practice” as “a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the enunciative function.” 9 For more on this discursive formation and its genealogy see Artur Lozano-Méndez, “Genealogía del tecno-orientalismo,” InterAsia Papers 7 (Barcelona: Institut d'Estudis Internacionals i Interculturals, 2009). In Spanish. 10 Shih Shu-mei, “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition,” PMLA 119. 1 (2004): 16–30. 11 Sakai Naoki, “Translation,” Theory, Culture & Society 23.2-3 (2006): 71–86. 12 Even if I'm calling it “traditional' orientalism,” I am referring to what Said identified as “modern orientalism”.which stems from the second half of the XVIIIth century. Said, Orientalism, 22 and 39. 13 See our commentary on the image of Japanese businessmen in the eighties and how it blended in historical orientalist prejudices about the “Japanese character”: Artur Lozano-Méndez, “Genealogía...”. 14 Our translation. The original reads “Tiene[n] también otros ritos y costumbres tan

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diferentes de todas las otras naciones, que paresce estudiaron de propósito cómo no se conformar con nenguna gente (…) porque realmente se puede decir que Japón es un mundo al revés de cómo corre en Europa; porque es en todo tan diferente y contrario, que quasi en ninguna cosa se conforman con nosotros.” Carmelo Lisón Tolosana, La fascinación de la diferencia. La adaptación de los jesuitas al Japón de los samuráis, 1549-1592 (Madrid: Akal, 2005), 129. 15 David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism. Japan Panic.” 16 G.C. Corm, L’Europe et L’Orient: de la Balkanisation à la Libanisation – histoire d’une modernité inaccomplie (Paris: La Découverte, 1989), 14. 17 Morley and Robins, “Techno-Orientalism. Japan Panic,” 153. 18 Blai Guarné, ed. “Identitat i representació cultural: perspectives des del Japó,” Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya 29 (2006). 19 More on this symbolic negotiation in Artur Lozano-Méndez, “Corrientes contemporáneas y diversificación del tecno-orientalismo,” InterAsia Papers 8 (Barcelona: Institut d'Estudis Internacionals i Interculturals, 2009). In Spanish. 20 For reflections on the symbolic negotiation of cultural products in a globalized marketplace, see Néstor García Canclini, Diferentes, desiguales y desconectados. Mapas de la interculturalidad (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2004). 21 Sakai Naoki, “You Asians’: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary,” South Atlantic Quarterly 99.4 (2000): 797. 22 Michael Schaller, “The Nixon Shocks and US-Japan Strategic Relations 1969-1974,” National Security Archive, George Washington University, 1996. Schaller reports on the conflict over Japanese textile exports at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, and on conversations between President Nixon and Prime Minister Satō. China joined the World Trade Organization in december 2001, and WTO members progressively lifted restrictions and quotas over Chinese exports in compliance with WTO regulations and schedules. If one digs up the news in European media about the textile manufactures “conflict” between the EU and China in 2005, it is not hard to draw some parallels with the textile issue analyzed by Schaller. 23 Clyde Haberman, “Some Japanese (One) Urge Plain Speaking,” New York Times, March 27, 1988. 24 Mark Knopfler, “Industrial Disease,” Love Over Gold, Dire Straits. Vertigo, 1982. 25 Roger Waters, “Not Now John,” The Final Cut, Pink Floyd. EMI, 1983. 26 David Barboza, “In China, Farming Fish in Toxic Waters,” New York Times, December 15, 2007. 27 Yu Keping, “La sociedad civil en China hoy” (“Civil Society in China Today”), in Anuario Asia Pacífico 2006 (Asia Pacific Yearbook 2006) (Casa Asia, Fundació CIDOB, Real Instituto Elcano, 2007). 28 Roger Waters, “The Postwar Dream,” The Final Cut. 29 Fernando León de Aranoa, dir, Los lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun) Elías Querejeta, 2002. 01h:19m:10s. Needless to say, no significant increase of Korean population in luxury seaside resorts has been detected. Director and writer Fernando León de Aranoa makes the case of discourse even more poignant by putting such words in the mouth of the working class hero character in the movie, Santa.

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30 There has been an argument about whether Mitsubishi had purchased just a minority interest in the Rockefeller Center or whether it had acquired practical ownership of the landmark. What is most relevant for us is the reaction of the US media and population. 31 Morley and Robins also draw on Cornelius Castoriadis to explain the techno-orientalist reaction to growing Japanese international presence: “The sole foundation for the institution or (‘our’) society ‘being belief in it and, more specifically, its claims to render the world and life coherent, it finds itself in mortal danger as soon as proof is given that other ways of rendering life and the world coherent and sensible exist” (David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism. Japan Panic,” 163). 32 As Morley and Robins encouraged us to do. See David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism. Japan Panic,” 152. 33 Vanguardia, La, “China: superpotencia emergente,” Vanguardia Dossier 2, July-September, 2002. Vanguardia, La, “Potencias emergentes: China, India, Brasil, Sudáfrica,” Vanguardia Dossier 12, July-September, 2004. Vanguardia, La, “Asia, ¿el poder del siglo XXI?” Vanguardia Dossier 16, July-September, 2005. Rosita Dellios, “China—the 21st century superpower?” (lecture at Casa Asia, Barcelona, September 13, 2005). None of the refrences quoted here hold the kind of “textual attitude” that other instances unabashedly manifest—actually, Dellios’ conference, which I attended, was nowhere near “textual attitude.” Nevertheless, they testify to the anxieties about China’s international role in Western audiences. 34 See note 44 on “textual attitude” and “schematic authority.” 35 Michael Bay, dir, Transformers. Dreamworks SKG, 2007. 00h:52m:50s. See also: Agent Simmons: Anybody have any mechanical devices? Blackberry, key alarm, cell phone? Glen: I got a phone... [throws it to agent Simmons] Agent Simmons: Uff... Nokia's a real nasty. You gotta respect the Japanese. They know the way of the samurai. Maggie: [in a hush, to Defense Secretary Keller]: Nokia is from Finland... Defense Secretary Keller: Yes..., but he's, you know, a little strange. He's a little strange...” (Ibid., 01h:36m:10s) 36 Anthropologist Ito Mizuko disavows the notion that any miniaturized technology must necessarily be Japanese. Many citizens of Western countries take for granted that everybody in Japan owns state of the art cameras, laptops and handheld consoles, which is also a myth. See Ito Mizuko, “Introduction: Personal, Portable, Pedestrian,” in Ito Mizuko et al., ed. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian. Mobile Phones in Japanese Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). 37 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993), 15. 38 Lisa Katayama, “Japanese Schoolgirl Watch: OMG! MMORPG on My Cellphone,” Wired Magazine 15.12, November 27, 2007,) 39 Asami Novak, “Japanese Schoolgirl Watch: Primp My Ride — Nissan's Supercute New Pino,” Wired Magazine 15.10, September 25, 2007. 40 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (Michael Joseph Ltd., 1994), 257–286.

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41 Henry Ford, Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work, (Doubleday, 1922), 72. 42 “It may appear strange to speak about something or someone as holding a textual attitude, but a student of literature will understand the phrase more easily if he will recall the kind of view attacked by Voltaire in Candide, or even the attitude to reality satirized by Cervantes in Don Quixote. What seems unexceptionable good sense to these writers is that it is a fallacy to assume that the swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be understood on the basis of what books—texts—say; to apply what one learns out of a book literally to reality is to risk folly or ruin. One would no more think of using Amadis of Gaul to understand sixteenth-century (or present-day) Spain than one would use the Bible to understand, say, the House of Commons. But clearly people have tried and do try to use texts in so simple-minded a way, for otherwise Candide and Don Quixote would not still have the appeal for readers that they do today. It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounter with the human. But is this failing constantly present, or are there circumstances that, more than others, make the textual attitude likely to prevail?” (Said, Orientalism, 92-3). 43 Ibid. 44 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 120. 45 Kageyama Yuri, “Walking, Talking Female Robot to Hit the Catwalk,” Yahoo News, March 16, 2009. 46 Iwabuchi Koichi, “Complicit Exoticism: Japan and its Other,” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture. Special Issue on Critical Multiculturalism 8.2, 1994. I came across another instance of state promoted techno-Japan image at the Japanese consulate of Barcelona in spring 2008, where posters reading “Welcome to the Future—Tokyo” were hanging from the walls. 47 “Gynoids” are androids modeled on the human female body. 48 Peter Familari, “Saya the teaching robot, makes debut in a Japanese school,” Herald Sun, March 10, 2009. 49 We came across all of these expressions in pieces from newspaper sites, news feeds and blogs. We do not want to demonize the media. The press also holds notable spaces of discourse discontinuity and even active discourse deconstruction. Besides, it is not just the media that present techno-orientalist instances, they can be found in many other social spheres. 50 To name a few, Kimura Shinichirō, dir, Hand Maid May, TNK, Pioneer LDC, 2000; Nishijima Katsuhiko, dir, Najica Blitz Tactics, Amber Films Works, Studio Fantasia, 2001; Yamaga Hiroyuki, dir, Mahoromatic: Automatic Maiden, Gainax, Shaft, 2001; Asaka Morio, dir, Chobits, Madhouse, 2002; Gotō Keiji, dir, Kiddy Grade. Gonzo, 2002. 51 For instance, Asaka Morio, dir, Chobits. 52 See Kimura Shinichirō, dir, Hand Maid May. For a number of valuable essays touching upon desire in Japanese popular culture, see Frenchy Lunning, ed. Mechademia 2. Networks of Desire (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 53 Oshii Mamoru, dir, Ghost in the Shell, Bandai Visual, Manga Entertainment,

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1995; Oshii Mamoru, dir, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Production I.G., 2004; Oshii Mamoru, dir, The Sky Crawlers, Production I.G, 2008; Kamiyama Kenji, dir, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Production I.G, 2002; Kamiyama Kenji, dir, Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG, Production I.G, 2004; Nakamura Ryūtarō, dir, Serial Experiments Lain, Triangle Staff, Pioneer LDC, 1998; Takahashi Ryōsuke, dir, Gasaraki, Sunrise, 1998; Asaka Morio, dir, Gunslinger Girl, Bandai Visual, Madhouse Studios, Marvelous Entertainment, MediaWorks, 2003; Murase Shūkō, dir, Ergo Proxy, Manglobe, Geneon Entertainment, Geneon Entertainment USA, Wowow, 2006. 54 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 95-115. 55 Shih Shu-mei, “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition,” 24. 56 This is connected with the textual attitude to reality favored by discourse: “The idea in either case is that people, places and experiences can always be described by a book, so much so that the book (or text) acquires a greater authority, and use, even than the actuality it describes” (Said, Orientalism, 93). See Franco Farinelli, “La razón cartográfica, o el nacimiento de Occidente,” Revista de Occidente 314-315 (2007): 5-18. 57 The term “national cool” was penned by Douglas McGray and it refers to the commercialization of Japanese popular culture products (music, video games, manga, anime, live-action movies, figures, memorabilia, etc), as well as design, art and fashion trends. More specifically, the term “gross national cool” stresses the increasing weigh of the “national cool” for Japanese economy: “(...) Japan is reinventing superpower again. Instead of collapsing beneath its political and economic misfortunes, Japan’s global cultural influence has only grown. In fact, from pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and food to art, Japan has far greater cultural influence now than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic superpower. Its cultural sway is not quite like that of American culture abroad, which, even in its basest forms, tends to reflect certain common values—at the very least, American-style capitalism and individualism. Contemporary Japanese culture outside Japan can seem shallow by comparison. Or it can reflect the contradictory values of a nation in flux, a superficiality that prompted the Japanese art magazine BT to equate contemporary Japanese culture with ‘Super Flat’ art, ‘devoid of perspective and devoid of hierarchy, all existing equally and simultaneously.’ ‘We don’t have any religion,’ painter Takashi Murakami told the magazine, a bit more cynically. ‘We just need the big power of entertainment.” Douglas McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” Foreign Policy, May-June, 2002. 58 Ueno Toshiya, “Japananimation and Techno-Orientalism,” 1996. Also in Bruce Grenville, ed. The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2001). 59 “Ascent of Manga: Japan's Hottest Export Goes Global, The,” Independent, December 4, 2008. 60 In Japanese, the word otaku refers more broadly to fans and collectors that become obsessed with their interest (be it photography, mug jars, etc). Internationally, though, the term is used specifically to label the fans of Japanese

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popular culture. The Japanese original has derogatory connotations that the international use of otaku has retained. 61 Said, Orientalism, 93. 62 Morley and Robins, “Techno-Orientalism. Japan Panic,” 147. 63 See Ito Mizuko, “Introduction: Personal, Portable, Pedestrian.” See also Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi, “Approaching the Mobile Culture of East Asia,” Media / Culture Journal 10.1, 2007. 64 Miyoshi Masao and H.D. Harootunian, eds, Postmodernism and Japan (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989, 2003 ed.). See also Kenny Loui, Tokyo Phantasmagoria. An Analysis of Politics and Commodity Capitalism in Modern Japan through the Eyes of Walter Benjamin (Boca Ratón, Florida: Dissertation.com, 2008). 65 After all, “American pop culture completely transformed Japanese comics and animation and music in the postwar period” (Frederik Schodt quoted in Roland Kelts, Japanamerica. How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US (New York and Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 181. 66 Said, Orientalism, 44. 67 Japanese tourists are vulnerable to mugging or snatching in European cities. Some voices have taken this fact as a ground to affirm that Japanese are too naïve—but compared to what?, does that affirmation apply to all aspects of social life? Apparently, Western countries purport to be the balanced center even when it comes to crime rate. Also, Iwabuchi (“Complicit Exoticism...”) quotes descriptions by German missionaries in Japan at the end of the XIXth century that portray an image of Japanese workers as the paradigm of laziness—a portrait far removed from the image that techno-orientalism promoted of the “salary men,” who, according to the cliché, would inhumanly be willing to work themselves to death (karōshi). Whatever the image, it is always a naturalization that transforms historical worldly diversity into a manageable universal. 68 See John Nguyet Erni and Siew Keng Chua, "Introduction: Our Asian Media Studies?" in Asian Media Studies. Politics of Subjectivities, ed. John Nguyet Erni and Siew Keng Chua (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 5-8. The authors study the spread from the Philippines to the rest of the world of the computer Love Bug virus in the year 2000. Then they offer some samples of the ensuing reactions in media across the globe and analyze their articulation. "Indeed, the narrative of ‘Asia rising’ must be taken seriously as a locus for understanding the discursive positioning of a media-saturated ‘Asia’ as a point of conflict between Asian (national) assertion, especially of technological prowess, and aspects of Asia-based transgressions, especially in media matters (e.g. media piracy being the most acute and well-publicized problem)" (6). 69 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 60. 70 Said writes: “I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one's life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing, They are ‘off’ and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in

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place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I'd like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place”. Said, Out of Place. A Memoir (London: Granta Books, 1999), 295.