"I Am Not a Machine": Remapping Political Discourse in Postmodem

Japanese Media

Presented for Distinction in the Field of English, May 2014 Patrick Carland

Advisors: Christopher Craig, PhD Chad Diehl, PhD

Kelly McGuire, PhD

©Patrick Carland

Abstract

The aftennath of the 1989 economic recession in Japan, as well as the subsequent "Lost

Decade" for of the 1990s and 2000s, have generated profound social and cultural change

throughout Japanese society. Concurrent to these changes have been the rise and

internationalization of Japanese popular media, which hitherto has been read as largely

apolitical and formed externally to changing socioeconomic conditions. In this paper, three

specific Japanese new media texts, the 1995 series Neon Genesis Evangelion, 2008's Kaiba,

and the video game Yume Nikki, are analyzed in relation to post-1989 social and economic

change, and ultimately suggest a new, youth led subculture emerging from the Lost Decade,

one that uses new media and discursive techniques to engage and critique contemporary

social and political issues.

I. Introduction

In her essay "Suffering Forces Us to Think beyond the Right-Left Barrier", Tokyo-

based writer Karin Amamiya shows us the oblique evolution of her political thought, tracing

how her experiences as a young adult in the recessionary economy of the 1990s and the

2000s led her from frustration, to despairity, to becoming a member and spokesperson for the

far-right nationalist group Totsugekitai, an organization that glorified both the Japanese

Empire and denied its war crimes. Her story, of alienation, desperation and isolation

illustrates the situation of the so called "Lost Decade" in Japan, young people who have

grown up in a recessionary Japan with little hope for the stable work or class security their

parents took for granted. "Living in the so-called recession or job market ice age after the

economic bubble burst, I knew in my heart that day by day I continued to lose more, and that

my own will had nothing to do it with it. I knew it from the way that a guy at my part-time

workplace confessed that he was unable to go to the university of his choice and was working

there because his father was in enonnous debt after the bubble burst. 1 knew it in the way my

salary kept going down little by little, and from the way that 1 couldn't see anything beyond

life as a freeter, and from the way that the future just around the corner was far too unclear. "

(Amamiya, 2010, p. 256) Amamiya's generation are part of a growing population of

"freeters"; those who, lacking access to the security corporate employment provided their

predecessors, find themselves caught in a cycle of unstable, temporary work, lacking

financial or social security and all but shut out from the Japanese political process; as

Amamiya puts it, "1 felt like 1 was alone, floating and drifting about five centimeters apart

from "society". 1 wanted to fit in, but there was no place for me. 1 was a searching for a place

where people would let me in. "

Her primary concerns, the question of labor security and material inequality, are at the

core of labor and leftist discourse, but try as she may, she could never feel at home in such

movements, writing that "the language they used was difficult, and 1 had no idea what they

were talking about." Alienated from leftist discussion, she instead turned towards the far-right

and nationalism, for she "saw the sanctity 1 had forgotten in the right-wing unifonn," and

found a new nostalgia for a unified and unfragmented Japan supposedly existing at the time

before the War. Nationalist ideologies in Japan, as theorist Akira Asada notes, constitute a

"displaced expression of frustration" fonned from "a decade of economic stagnation and the

discredit of a corrupt and ineffectual political system, which has been unable to refonn

itself. " (Asada, 2000) Politically, hegemony in the fonn of the ruling Liberal Democratic

Party, or LDP, for whom "everything was pennitted - no matter how corrupt - as long as the

Left was excluded from power," has made the fonnation of a salient leftist movement very

difficult in Japan since the 1960s. Despite significant protest movements arising against the

US-Japan Security Treaty's renewal during this time, as Asada notes, the Japanese left-wing

has stagnated in the face of long-tenn economic security, torn between Stalinist and New Left

factions that have thus far remained divisive and lacked a united front to confront changing

conditions in Japanese capitalism. Concurrently, neonationalism has seen a resurgent

strength, exemplified by writers like Amamiya and in the successes of political figures like

Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara. And a result of the left's insolvency, it has been, alongside

neoliberalism, remained mostly unchallenged, and gone on to shape the parameters for

discussions of the recession for young people and the elite alike.

In the aftermath of the 1980s bubble economy and the prolonged recession emerging

from it, Japanese social and political discourse has seen an intense debate regarding the

source, nature and contours of the recession, and how it should be combated. As Tomiko

Yoda notes, the current dialogue has conceived of the recession as a discrete rupture in the

previous postwar logic, an error that emerged either from the degradation of Japanese identity

by the economic-political complex or from that complex's inability to adapt to the changing

conditions of globalization. From the former camp, neonationalists like Ishihara posit the

reintegration of a pre-modern, pure Japanese identity, disentangled from the United States

and defined on racial and nationalistic lines as vital in reestablishing Japanese dignity and

autonomy. The neoliberal camp points to the incestuous relationship between Japanese

corporations and the state as the source of Japan's malaise, and argues that it is necessary for

Japan to dismantle the Keynesian state it has created in the postwar era so that it can establish

a purer, globally oriented capitalism, in-line with the United States. Both narratives, however,

are dependent on the modernist idea that Japanese economic and social evolution has been a

steady march of progress since the occupation, and thereby occlude potential sites of

resistance and subversion throughout Japanese history, such as the rise of student protestors

in the 60s and anned left-wing paramilitary groups in the 70s.

Rather than tracing the roots of Japan's economic and social malaise to the postwar

reorganization of political capital, when domestic, corporate and international forces

collaborated to make Japan not only a site of capitalist dominance but a critical bulwark

against the communist forces of China and Russia, neonationalists and neoliberals alike

conceive of the recession as a rupture, an aberration in the system rather than an efficacy of

it. Furthermore, accepting the modernist narrative of uninhibited Japanese progress without

historical or discursive interventions may lead us to diagnose the current social and

fragmentation of the Japanese system as being endemic to all capitalist systems as they enter

postmodernity. Accepting such a claim validates the naive hope that capitalism, left to its

own devices, will simply collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, making any

dialectical or critical interventions unnecessary. In order to understand the present condition

of Japanese society and to break free of both neonationalist and neoliberal discourses,

analysis of the recession, in both its roots and efficacies, must be undertaken. This begins

firstly with the process by which modernism has paved the way to postmodernity; in positing

the development of Japan's economy and society in totalizing Hegelian terms, the modernist

narrative eventually gives way to posthistorical ideologies, to the idea that history has been

closed off as a site of contention and that all that remains is an eternal present.

The posthistorical narrative, Asada notes, accounts for the popularity of such theorists

as Baudrillard and Den"ida in Japan during the pre-recession 80s; in their theorizations of

postmodern society as being liberated from the modernist signiferlsignified dichotomy,

Japanese intellectuals found validation in their country's economic configuration, which no

longer depended on such feeble western binaries of state/market and which could endlessly

propel its own growth and development. A popular anecdote even states that the head of a

major department store chain made his employees read Baudrillard's Simulacra and

Simulation so that they would understand his company's goals. But in accepting the terms of

modernist ideology, liberal intellectuals failed to develop a multifaceted historical analysis of

the Japanese condition, and were thus blindsided by the recession and its corollary social

effects, exemplified by the degradation of the Japanese lifetime employment system, the Aum

Shirinkyo gas attacks of '95, and the stagnation of Japanese wages and labor. While

neoliberal intellectuals blame "Japan Inc. " and the effect it has had on Japan's international

competitiveness, neonationalists bemoan the loss of an organic Japanese identity and desire

the creation of a pure, antediluvian Japan, politically autonomous and racially pure. For the

neoliberals, the flaw in the system is in its outmoded breed of capitalism wherein state and

economy freely intermingle; for the neonationalists, it is the perennial Other, the Chinese,

Korean, Capitalist deviant that has impeded Japan in its march towards supremacy. The

irony, of course, is that while both theories posit that Japan's long march towards greatness

has been interrupted, both depend on the modernist narrative that progress itself is a constant

and that capitalism in an ultimate condition that cannot be critiqued, impeded or intervened

upon in its march towards posthistory.

But to suggest that this has been a wholly uncontested phenomenon, without

opposition or intervention in any area of Japanese social or cultural life, would be to wholly

ignore the complex responses the Japanese media landscape has produced in relation to the

recession and its impact on the young. It is pertinent to look towards the recent evolution

Japanese popular media, particularly the mediums of animation and video garnes, both of

which that have in the past two decades begun to exert enormous national and international

influence. Unique among developed, capitalist countries, the crisis of Japanese capitalism

predates the international 2008 recession crisis, by nearly two decades, and has already

produced a wide range of social, psychological and cultural reactions in the short and long

term to changing economic conditions those elsewhere are only beginning to realize. One

specific text that marks a seminal shift from the long postwar to the recession mindset is the

1988 film Akira, directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. Akira tells the story of a post-apocalyptic

Tokyo as a dark, labyrinthine jungle of urban decay and violence, where the Japanese

political and economic machines had begun cannibalizing themselves, and where the power

of youth, represented by young psychics, was coercively controlled and weaponized by a

government bent on achieving economic and political dominance. The dark, apocalyptic

vision presented in Akira proved to be enormously successful, and subtly but perceptibly

changed the course of 90s and 2000s anime. (Napier, 2005) The paradigmatic shift Akira

presented led to the deconstruction of many of the classic tropes in Japanese animation, and

directly inspired a number of series, including Mamoru Oishii' s Ghost in The Shell franchise

and Hideaki Anno's enormously successful Neon Genesis Evangelion. But more than just

pushing a flashy, subversive aesthetic to the forefront of Japanese animation, Akira helped to

establish a critical aesthetic currency, a set of narrative and visual techniques used to critique

both the Japanese pop culture industry and the contemporary state of Japan. And, as this

paper argues, it is through both the aesthetic and narrative techniques pioneered by the post­

Akira and post-1989 animation movement and the unique contours of the Japanese pop

culture industry that that a new body of works producing salient, left-wing criticisms of the

Japanese economic and cultural condition has emerged and remained enormously successful

to the present day.

Key to the continued success of the Japanese animation and pop culture industry is its

interlocking nature; various media forms and narratives are constructed to bridge different

mediums, to have multifaceted appeal and to be marketable through a spectrum of modes and

means. For instance, the international hit franchise Pokemon represents not just a video game,

but an endless array of toys, television shows, movies, fashion, music, and merchandise. This

has led a number of theorists, among them Eij i Otsuka and Hiroki Azuma, to term the

Japanese pop culture industry as reflective of a postmodern shift of the nature of narrative

consumption itself. Otsuka theorizes that the various smaller narratives, found in the form of

collectible toys, cards, and purchasable materials, constitute smaller parts of a greater

metanarrative; for the buyer, the purchasing of new merchandise is an unconscious striver

towards creating a unified narrative, a logically continuous body of work and discourse.

Azuma, however, disagrees, and takes the consumption patterns of anime and video games a

step further, saying that it represents the consumption of information with the need for

narrative, a libidinally charged feast of floating signifiers and information (Azuma, 2009). In

the "database" formation of Japanese pop culture, he argues, there is no narrative or meaning

to be found, merely the triumph of a postmodern shift in consumption patterns, from narrative

to non-narrative.

These two phenomena, of the discourse surrounding Japan's economic recession and

the shift of narrative consumption in its culture industry, may seem incongruous with one

another. But it is impossible to understand the success of the potential of Japan's pop culture

without first understanding the context from which it has emerged. With the demise of the

metanarrative and the movement away from the structuralist signifier/signified binary,

consumers of media have divided into disembodied and decontextualized groups organized

by shared media interests and marked by an unwillingness to engage with larger cultural

constructs, what Otsuka and Azuma both refer to as "metanarratives". This is a phenomenon

that not only describes cultural consumption, but ideological consumption as well.

Amamiya's engagement with the Japanese far right can be read in these terms as well as more

straightforward nationalistic ones: by joining a political organization whose goals, rather than

being informed by a uniform set of ideologies or convictions, were disparate and focused on

tangentially related topics (the revision of textbooks, the Korean/Chinese islands

controversies, the usage of Japanese names by Zainichi Koreans) one can read her political

engagement as an entry into this world of subculture, where data and information are

consumed rather than engaged contextually. Politics, like pop culture, are built on a series of

cues and semic codes, interchangeable and ahistorical bits of ideology which constitute an

identity up for grabs to the consumer. It is no coincidence that much of the Japanese far right,

especially young far rightists, are deeply attached to anime and various Japanese pop culture

(Marx, 2012). But the disjointed, database-structured nature of the Japanese pop culture

narrative has allowed for something else; the critical intervention of artists and writers who,

by manipulating the currency of the established form, have found the capability to shock

mainstream viewers and confront them with new information, ideology and criticisms.

Through an adapted form of deconstruction, these creators have embedded their works with

critiques of the contemporary state of recession-addled, capitalist Japan and simultaneously

found huge success in doing so; they have adapted their own ideology and tenets to the non­

narrative based media that constitute Japanese pop culture with immense success. In this

study, I will examine three such artists, analyzing their major works, the ways in which they

have used the media of animation and video games to embody their ideology in unique ways,

and the overall success and efficacies of their projects. Each of these creators represents a

unique critique of contemporary Japan, and eac has had both domestic and international

success in their endeavors. But has their success, it must be asked, been simply commercial,

or have their works ultimately spurred social change and growth that can be seen today?

Firstly, I will examine the work of Hideaki Anno, the celebrated creator of the

enormously successful Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise, first released in 1995. Hideaki

Anno's work is famous internationally for its borrowing from various theorists, philosophers

and psychoanalysts in creating an abstract and emotionally charged character-based narrative,

and it continues to draw the attention and analysis of cultural theorists today. However, some

of the archetypes it set forth in its time, in particular the intense sexualization of young

female characters, have been fully embraced by much of the contemporary Japanese pop

culture industry in ways inimical to Anno's own critique of the subject, and the efficacies of

the project remain to be seen in full. Second, I will analyze the newer works ofMasaaki

Yuasa, with particular attention to his 2008 work Kaiba. Kaiba is a science fiction anime

about a world where bodies and memories can be physically separated from one another, and

where bodies can be sold as commodities and the egregiously wealthy can have any number

of bodies. Yuasa's work, though not as well-known as Anno's, explores many of the same

themes of identity, alienation and existence in an oppressive world that the former's do, and

utilizes novel aesthetic stylizations to drive its ideological arguments home. Lastly, I will

analyze the 2004 video game Yume Nikki, an abstract, freely released internet game that,

through abstract visuals and no dialogue, engages suicide, belonging and reality and which

has spurred an enormous, unprecedented amount of lay analysis and discussion from its

online fanbase.

These three narratives provide a unique triune analysis that shows the successive

stages of reconceptualizing hegemonic spaces and creating a new site of resistance.

Evangelion first defines a set of problems with the current understandings and assumptions

the Japanese condition is predicated upon, and Kaiba proposes a broad and revolutionary

solution to the issues Evangelion calls attention to. Yume Nikki, finally, internalizes the

messages of these works and provides a case study of the ways audiences will interpret their

implications, and whether the possibility of gleaning revolutionary and critical meanings

within popular texts mediated by a cultural industry is possible at all. I will analyze both their

content and the contours of the medium from which they emerge, and whether their success

represents the beginnings of nascent social change in Japan or the triumph of Azuma's post­

ideological database novel, wherein all forms of information and media are consumed

without analysis or reflection. Ultimately, I will argue, that while it may not be possible for

these media to produce devastating critiques of the Japanese political and culture machines as

long as they remain at least partially embedded in them, they produce discursive sites of

resistance often overlooked in contemporary analyses of Japan, and represent an exciting new

arena of contradiction, contention and ideological struggle within Japanese cultural and

political life.

II - How Selfish of Him, to be human: Evangelion, Violence and Identity

"I mustn't run away. I mustn't run away. I mustn't run away. " So repeats Shinji Ikari

in the first episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, teary-eyed and collapsed on the ground, as

he forces himself to pilot an enormous cyborg he's never seen before to fight a demonic,

white-masked creature called an "Angel" at the request of a father who hasn't spoken to him

in years. In a conventional anime setup, particularly one in the mecha genre, 14-year-old

Shinji would have no problem entering the robot with gusto, defeating the Angel and saving

Tokyo-03 without a second thought. He would then spend the series engaged in ever more

destructive battles, culminating in an explosive and enthralling finale where the evil would be

vanquished and the teenage heroes would triumph, regardless of cost. But the progression and

fulfillment of such a narrative structure would depend on a single constancy; the knowledge

that, no matter what they might do, the protagonist is always the protagonist, that his role is a

constant and unchanging reality, the reality. In Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion,

however, where from the outset the "hero" only manages to act in his prescribed role "with

the greatest reluctance and after a display of temper, fear, and vulnerability, "(Napier, 2005, p

425) no such stability can exist.

In her paper "Where the Machines Stop" Susan Napier notes an emerging trend of

"the apocalyptic critique of technology," which in the past three decades has developed in

tandem with the growth of mecha anime. Such narratives "encompass a problematic

contemporary vision of human identity vis-it-vis not only technology but often the nature of

reality itself," (Napier 421). Incorporating notions of alienation, fragmentation and

ambivalence towards technology, such narratives illustrate an anxiety regarding the

relationship between technology and reality, problematizing the latter and raising the insistent

question of "What happens to human identity in the virtual world?" (Napier 419). Quoting

Jeffrey Sconce, she notes that, in such narratives, "where there were once whole human

subjects, there are now only fragmented and decentered subjectivities, metaphors of

'simulation' and 'simulacra'. " (Sconce, 2000) The notion of fragmentation here is especially

critical, both in a literary and a physical sense; it describes the intrinsic relationship between

technology and violence within the apocalyptic mecha narrative. In the most prominent

anime series that follow this format, violence, usually directed towards the destruction of

bodies and selves that are neither wholly biological nor artificial, is constant, both as a means

of moving the narrative forward and towards actualizing an idealized, un-fragmented self. In

a reality in which the demarcation between machine and flesh, stable and unstable become

complicated and almost impossible to define, it is only through violence - its use, its

repetition, its augmentation through technological means - that the characters in the narrative

can hope to reclaim an identity that is anything more than terminal and arbitrary. And

because of this problematic relationship, violence as an indicator of a stable "real" becomes

increasingly distant and vague, allowing for a mystification and justification of apocalyptic

forms of destruction through the mystification of technology itself.

In Evangelion, the protagonist, Shinji Ikari, initially resists the technology given to

him, thoroughly convinced he is too weak and incompetent to use it. He is one of three

specially designated 14 year olds known as the "Children" those born within a year of the

apocalyptic Second Impact whose mothers' souls are infused in the Evangelion Units,

massive cyborgs that are both biological and mechanical in nature. These Evangelions are

used to combat the existential threat of the Angels, mysterious, inhuman beings that take on

increasingly abstract fonns as the series progresses. It is here that the initial dialectic that

defines Shinji's role in the series emerges; upon being asked to pilot the EVA (or

Evangelion), he experiences the Lacanian mirror stage, "identification . . . the transfonnation

that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume 1 an image-an image that is

seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase," (Lac an, 2006).

To Lacan, the mirror stage "marks a decisive turning-point in the mental

development of the child, " and "typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body

image.". He posits a point in the development of the child at which they become capable of

recognizing their mirror image as just that, an image; it is that this moment that the image

becomes an imago for the child, a desired, whole and unified vision of the self that contrasts

with the fragmented self over which they have little control, motor or emotional. Desire is

thus inscribed unto the child, who seeks to actualize the imagined self-image, a theoretical

point in space which they can only approach "asymptotically," and "in a fictional direction,"

as Lacan puts it Evangelion specifically invokes this theory in its juxtaposition of Shinji and

his EVA unit; while he is initially consumed with anxiety and despair over his perceived

inability to pilot the EVA, he soon gains a reason for doing so; when he does, he is praised.

His father, his friends, everyone tells him what a good boy he is, how excellent he is for

being an EVA pilot and helping to protect the world. Shinji's desire to act as the EVA pilot,

as Miller puts it, comes from the fact that "he exists in a state of pure lack," with desire

forcibly inscribed onto him by others. (Miller, 2009) Shinji manifests the Lacanian

fragmented body, and the EVA, the behemoth of technological might through which can act

as a hero and win the affection of his father, is the image he seeks to become. Such self­

actualization, as the series goes on to show, is impossible, and only leads to further

destabilization of the self.

Throughout the course of the narrative, Evangelion continuously calls into question

the motivations and psychologies of its protagonists, all of whom are shown to be as

emotionally volatile as Shinji. It juxtaposes intense scenes of violence with the psychic

struggles of its characters, playing the two out side by side in what Napier calls a "bifurcated"

narrative. The violent exchanges between the EVA Pilots, Shinji and his copilots Asuka

Langley and Rei Ayanami, and the Angels that seek to destroy them, form the crux of the

narrative for the majority of the series, with each episode taking the format of a battle

between them. The viewer learns little about the nature of the Angels or the EVA Units, and

although questions are raised by the characters as to the intent and nature of the organization

they work under, NERV, little is revealed until the final episodes. A steady, almost

monotonous rhythm builds, and the show plays out in a standard, 26-episode anime format,

its smaller episodic narratives linking together to form a continuously building story arc. But

the continuity of this pattern is abruptly and violently shattered by the 19th episode, when

Shinji is forced by his father to destroy the prototype EVA-Unit piloted by his classmate Toji,

nearly killing him in the process.

It is here that Evangelion illustrates and illuminates a break in the previously

invisible ideological apparatus in which Shinji operates. Althusser, in writing on the nature of

ideology as an unseen system of control, notes that in an ideological apparatus, "The

individual in question behaves in such a such a way, adopts such and such a practical attitude,

and, what is more, participates in certain regular practices which are those of the ideological

apparatus on which 'depend' the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen as a

subject. " (Althusser, 26) The operation of ideology is such that its functions become

embedded beneath a veneer of "commonsensical" decisions and practices, which the subject

is led to believe he chooses to accept of his own volition. In Shinji's case, the opportunity to

simply leave NERV, and to not be a pilot, is frequently presented to him, both seriously and

as a means to motivate him, but its presence is always false. Like Tetsuo in Akira, upon

whom telekinetic abilities were forced by the government, Shinji has at this point found

himself integrated into NERV's apparatus of control, without whom he is convinced he is

nothing. His identity, which he has only been able to define by his utility to NERV and the

people around him, is one in which he acts as an interpellative subject; his existence has

become predicated on continuously performed acts of violence, which he has hitherto

managed to distance from himself, by directing it towards the Angels, abstractions towards

which empathy is nigh impossible. Following Miller's thesis that "If a lack exists, then it is

forced upon the subject by the sociocultural milieu in which s/he is situated," (Miller, 146)

Evangelion illustrates that Shinji's role within NERV is one in which he must subsume

himself to the EVA in order to maintain an identity, a role which places him at the center of a

systematic, global attempt by the organization to actualize a unified Lacanian imago:

instrumentality.

After the incident with Toji, the narrative structure of the series begins to fall apart;

instead of battling and defeating Angels in fantastical fight sequences, the characters begin to

question the roles prescribed to them, and their purpose for fighting the Angels, and they

revisit the psychological wounds that have plagued from the beginning. Shinji's copilot,

Asuka, slowly unravels after her defeat by an Angel, having hinged her entire identity on an

image of herself as the world's greatest pilot, unbeatable and unparalleled. Shinji's caretaker,

Captain Misato Katsuragi, similarly finds herself realizing the shallowness of her

relationships, even half-heartedly attempting to seduce Shinji after the death of her previous

lover, Kaji Ryoji. For Shinji, the final rupture occurs when he is asked to kill the last Angel,

who, unlike the others, is not monstrous, abstract, nor demonic - he is Kaworu Nagisa, the

only person in the entire series who shows Shinji real, unconditional love. Present for only a

single episode, Kaworu becomes a representation of everything Shinji seeks to actualize

through his role as the EVA Pilot - he does not makes demands of Shinji, he does not seek to

use him or hurt, and only shows him love and understanding, right up to the point where he

tells Shinji to crush him in the hands of his EVA Unit. Kaworu's presence is itself a

manifestation of the impossible desire that has been inscribed into Shinji through NERV, and

it is no coincidence that it is NERV which ultimately forces him to kill Kaworu. The

efficacies of Kaworu's death are twofold; it both illustrates the vapidity and illusory nature of

Shinji's imago and represents the final rupture, after which Evangelion drops its pretense of

being focused on the confrontations between Angels and Humans, and instead focuses

exclusively on the internal psyches of its characters and the ways in which their selves are

constructed, reproduced, and can ultimately be deconstructed.

The final two episodes of Evangelion can be described as analogous to a

psychoanalysis session, with the characters sitting in an otherwise empty space while an

unseen diegetic voice speaks to them via text on the screen, asking questions such as "WHY

DO YOU PILOT EVA?" and responding to the answers given. Characters float in out of the

non-linear narrative, explaining their neuroses, their anxieties, and their ultimate plans to this

voice, all of which reveals the ultimate goal of NERV; Instrumentality, the ultimate

actualization of the desired self. "Our minds lack something basic, " One of the characters

starts in a narrative carried on by the others;

"We fear that deficiency. We fear it. That is why we are attempting to become one. We will meld with and fill each other. This is instrumentality. Mankind cannot live without being surrounded by others. Mankind cannot survive alone. [ . . . ] That's why life is sad and empty. That's why you want affection, the close physical and mental presence of others. That is why we wish to become one. [ . . . ] That's why, via Instrumentality, mankind must fill and complement each other. " (Anno, Ep. 26)

But the text does not let this explanation stand unquestioned. "WHY?" it immediately

intones via text on the screen. "Must you ask?" Shinji's father replies, "Because there is no

other way to exist. "

"REALLY?"

The exchange between Gendo Ikari and the diegetic voice provide a microcosm for

the entire argument Evangelion makes, both within itself and relationally to the genre from

which it arises. For Gendo, the head of NERV, there is no other way to exist because there

cannot be any other way to exist. In Ideology, Althusser describes the ideological conceptions

men hold as "Not their real conditions of existence, their real world . . . it is their relation to

those conditions of existence which is represented to them here. It is this relation which is at

the centre of every ideological, i.e., imaginary, representation of the real world. It is this

relation that contains the 'cause' which has to explain the imaginary distortion of the

ideological representation of the real world. " (Althusser, P. 24) The nature of instrumentality,

of the purported preexisting lack that the characters can only fill through the actualization of

protagonist roles, through their selves as EVA Pilots, agents of NERV, as utility to NERV in

general, can only be fulfilled through the distortion that Althusser speaks of. The argument

Gendo furthers for the creation of the Instrumentality Project, which can within this context

be understood as the ultimate culmination of the mystified violence it has reproduced,

depends on an appeal to nature, an arbitrary and peremptory declaration that "there is no

other way to exist. " To destabilize these mystifications implicit in its own narratological

premise, Evangelion questions and ultimately de constructs the primary mystification that its

plot hitherto has been constructed upon.

In Akira's ambiguous ending, we do not see what becomes of the world after it is

enveloped in Tetsuo's all-consuming jouissance\ and the same is true of Evangelionii Within

the narrative of the final two episodes, however, the potential for a new understanding of the

self and desire emerges. In the final scenes of the last episode, the narrative shifts drastically,

depicting a version of Evangelion as a slice of life anime, with Shinji as an average middle

school student, Asuka as his girlfriend, and with a caring mother and father who love him

wholly and without condition. Previously, Shinji says that without the EVA, he is nothing,

but as this sequence of potentialities shows, the Shinji-As-EV A is only one construction of

Shinji in a potentially unlimited number of such. "I get it, this is also a possible world. " Shinji

says as the sequence ends. "One possibility that's in me. The me right now is not exactly who

I am. All sorts of mes are possible. That's right. A me that's not an EVA pilot is possible

too. " In recognizing that, as Miller says, he is composed of "a multiplicity of drives, none of

which remains dominant for long," Evangelion frees Shinji of the need to actualize his imago

through the EVA and destabilizes the very concept of Instrumentality, which exists as the

logical conclusion of the ideology of technology and mystification of violence therein within

Evangelion. The final parodic sequence is of especially large significance here; in rewriting

the story of Evangelion within a different genre framework, the text demonstrates that the

characters, as signifiers within the text and the construction of a consciously delineated genre

can only be understood within the text, as formations which obey the internal ideologies of

the text. The source of the destabilization herein comes from Evangelion's introduction of the

characters into a different ideological framework, showing their inherent mutability and the

imperative of the text to categorize them by their function as protagonist, antagonist, and

otherwise. This function serves an insidious role; it perpetuates and mystifies a system

predicated on constant violence, a form of text that defines itself on the accumulation of

violence, of new technology and modes of being derived exclusively from those two things.

The desired self thus becomes a desire for violence, which is in turn masked as a desire to

save the world, a desire to be the "hero". One of the voice actresses on the series, Megumi

Hayashibara, commenting on Shinji's character, puts it best:

"Look at Shinji. Why does he continue to fight as an Eva pilot? The story keeps changing. He said it's because everyone tells him to. Because only he can do it. Because it has to be done to save humanity. Selfless and lofty sentiments for sure, and he believed those reasons to be genuine. Wrong; he wanted his father to approve of him. To say he was a good boy. How selfish of him, really, to be a human being. " (Sadomoto, Evangelion Vol. 3)

But to Evangelion, this desire is not so selfish. In fact, it isn't even real. Through

Shinji's struggle, Evangelion forwards a critique of technological apparatuses, a constant

presence in mecha anime and SFiii anime as a whole, as ultimately dehumanizing, unstable,

and impossible to perpetuate without continuous, unmitigated violence. Like Akira before it,

Evangelion shows that the mystification of interpellative roles within texts, and the creation

of desire that derives from these roles, creates an anxiety and psychoses that can only

culminate in the destruction of all selves, all potentialities both real and imagined. But unlike

Akira, in Evangelion we find reason to believe this is not inevitable. As Shinji realizes, the

hero is ultimately a product of ideology, of a system that inscribes an always present lack that

produces the anxiety and need for some other self, something that is more. The self that is

constructed for us is but one self, and beyond that one self, countless multiplicities,

possibilities, and realities may exist, in a constantly shifting interplay wherein each self only

defers to the next. And it is when this instability is recognized, accepted and integrated into

the framework of the self, the ideology of lack can be demystified and the cycle of violence it

reproduces can ultimately be broken.

III: Memories Without Bodies: Kaiba and the Postmodern Condition

From the time it came out in 1995 to the present day, the Evangelion franchise has

been one of the most commercially and internationally successful anime franchises of all

time. From the creation of massive numbers of spinoff toys, video games, manga and

doujinshi and the continuation of the series in both the final End of Evangel ion film and the

contemporary Rebuild series, Evangelion has been thoroughly integrated into the framework

of the Japanese pop culture industry. What is especially striking about this marked success is

the duality of its nature; even as Evangelion relentlessly critiqued contemporary anime

archetypes and tropes, it still found itself catering to them, and ultimately has found itself

fully ingratiated in the contemporary industry. Even as characters such as Rei Ayanami

criticize the anime archetype of waifish, subservient moe girls by blowing them out of

proportion, as a cultural and sex symbol she has been wholeheartedly embraced by the very

communities her very character rhetorically attacked. The efficacy of Evangelion has been

similarly mixed; even as subsequent anime and manga productions embraced much of the

aesthetic and narrative techniques the Evangelion series helped to establish, this has not been

paired with any sort of textual critique on par with the one the original 1995 show made

about the pop culture industry as a whole. Ultimately, even as Evangelion helped to begin an

ongoing discursive critique of Japanese society that has remained potent to the present day, as

a piece of media its primary effect has been in influencing surface level aesthetics of

subsequent productions, shaping the visual and shallow narrative components of

contemporary media rather than pushing them in an inner-looking and self-critiquing

direction.

The textual influence of Evangelion, however, has not been lost, and can be seen to

varying degrees in an enormous amount of sci-fi related anime, whether as a direct influence

or as a deletrious mass that must be responded to and pushed against. A more contemporary

series that seems to both respond to and criticize Evangelion, as well as carrying on its

broader social critique, is the 2008 anime series Kaiba, created and directed by Masaaki

Yuasa. Unlike the Evangelion franchise, the 13-episode Kaiba remains both in Japan and

internationally an obscure series, relegated more to art-house crowds and sci-fi enthusiasts

than the public at large. On an industry level, beyond collector's items there has been very

little external merchandise produced of Kaiba, a key factor in analyzing any given series'

popularity and influence. Nonetheless, in Kaiba, there is a shared concern for the conditions

of the self in the postmodern condition, as well as in-depth exploration of the problem of

identity in mechanistic and interpellative society.

Using a surreal science-fiction world and an artistic palette reminiscent of a childrens'

storybook, Kaiba tells the story of a young man who awakes with a gaping hole in his

stomach and no memory of who he is. As the series progresses, he finds himself enmeshed in

the goings on of a science fiction world where the connection between body and memory,

already fuzzy in our world, is completely severed. In the world of Kaiba, it is possible for

memories to be dismebodied and stored in tiny cylindrical chips, thus allowing for bodies to

be exchanged and sold at will. For the poor and marginalized of this world, the literal

exchange of bodies is a necessity, and the ability to retain bodily autonomy is considered a

luxury only the wealthy bouergeoise can afford. This is the central problem considered in

Kaiba, for as the protagonist continuously changes bodies (and in the process, genders) in the

attempt to figure out who he is, he finds himself further and further alienated from any stable

sense of identity, a problem only compounded when he learns that there are multiple copies

of him running around, all claiming to be the true one. Like Evangelion, Kaiba shares a

concern with alienation in the Marxist sense - embedded in the metaphor of bodies being

literally commodified and the mind-body connection being severed as the result of

intrisnically hostile economic conditions - and with Althusserian conditions of interpellation,

wherein identity can only be maintained on the basis of fulfilling pre-prescribed

socioeconomic positions.

The dependence on a capitalist system for the creation of identity is shown to be

especially precarious in the fourth episode of Kaiba, an episode which deftly illustrates the

basic thesis of the 13-episode show. In the episode, a girl named Chroniko, whose only prized

possession are a pair of bright red boots she owns, decides to sell her body so she can help to

support her impoverished family. However, though she is led to believe her memory will

eventually be reinstalled into a new body and she will be able to continue her life, her

memory chip is in reality crushed as soon as it is removed from her body on the behest of a

scheming aunt who ostensibly hates her and cannot afford to take care of her. Justifying her

actions in saying the money will help her immediately family, she seems to show no remorse

in the killing of her niece - until she is confronted with her bright red boots and the piano

they used top lay together. In a stunning sequence, the aunt is overwhelmed with positive

memories of Chroniko, illustrating that beneath her veneer of indifference there exists a

genuine love, from which a tortured conscience over her actions arises. As she plays the

piano, the aunt confronts her own moral pain and reveals an inner humanity, born through her

memories and connections to the niece she has sold away and murdered. The aunt, forced

into a positon where she must destroy her loved ones and sense of self for the sake of

survival, ultimately relocates her sense of being in the act of loving someone else - and has a

breaks down as a result, trapped and crushed by a system where meaningful relationships are

not possible.

In Evangelion, we are confronted with the issue of establishing a meaningful identity

where the very act of claiming a self in an individualistic and capitalist framework is

compromised by the inculcation of all possible identity markers in a capitalist nexus. Kaiba

similarly illustrates the dilemna of identity by showing that the machine goes beyond our

labor and seeks to penetrated our very bodies, commodifying and reducing them to

interchangeable capital within the system. When our bodies themselves can be endlessly

redirected through the apparatus of commerce and the flow of capital, the formation of

identity and meaningful relationships becomes entirely predicated on the flow of economic

structures themselves, and the human "I" is lost in an endless series of transactions on which

they have no control. Such is the case with Chroniko, whose very existence as an autonomous

human being is ended with the crushing of her memory chip, and the protagonist, Warp,

whose litera self multiplies and becomes utterly indiscernable the harder he searches for it.

And yet, in Kaiba we see a simple and endlessly optimistic solution to the question of

"meaningful" identity, which is to say a sense of self no longer contingent on the structures

and intercourse of capital itself. Even when Chroniko dies and her body becomes an

undistinguishable part of the flow of human capital, part of her - an image, a fragment, an

imprint in the Spinozan sense - remains in the melancholic piano song and memory of her

aunt. In the social dimension, through the memories of the aunt and the people she has

affected, a version of Chroniko arises - a self that is by no means stable or unchanging, but

one which exists in some capacity external to the ideology of the world that physically

destroys bodies and memories. This is the Kaiba's thesis; that even when bodies and

memories can be commodified and the human I lost in their rearticulation, the only

meaningful way we can understand who we are and where we are going is through one

another. This thesis is repeated in the final episodes of the series, wherein Warp begins to

reclaim memories not of himself but of his lover, Neiro. Through these memories, Warp

begins to develop and articulate a new sense of himself, independent of the countless clone of

himself that all claim to be the "real" Warp. And in the end, this is what allows Warp to begin

a human "I" again - not through the memories of himself, nor through a process of accepting

the diffusive multiplicites of self as in Evangelion, but in relocating the locus of identity to

the social dimension, and affirming the place of the individual as part of a humanity that

cannot and should not be reduced to interchangeable bodies and machines.

In the context of Japanese capitalism, the criticisms and theoretical positions Kaiba

forwards are enormously salient. Convoy Capitalism, according to American political

scientist Leonard Schoppa, was the dominant formation of Japanese capitalism in the postwar

era and was responsable for a very specific form of "cradle to grave" employment system

wherein a company employee was expected to remain part of the same company for his entire

life (Schoppa, 2006). And as famed Japanese author Haruki Murakami notes in his book after

the quake, this created a society where individual and social formations were always

subordinate to the role of the individual within the corporation, wherein the worker was

thoroughly alienated from his labor and only considered in the context of where he or she was

employed. For western observors, this emphasis of the corporate body has often been

diagnosed as a form of social collectivism and communitarianism, but artists like Yuasa and

Anno clearly demonstrate its thoroughly dehumanize and alienating qualities. And in a crisis

of capitalism where it is no longer possible for young people to secure long term corporate

employment the way their parents did, Anno and Yuasa both further new ways of conceive

the human "I" outside of capitalism - first by accepting the fluidity of identity, as in

Evangelion, and secondly by relocating the 1 within the social sphere and reaffirming the role

of man as a fundamentally social being, as in Kaiba. In both animes, a new understanding of

the self, one that actively challenges the ideologies of late Japanese capitalism and

corporatism, arises, and its theoretical positions actively question and critique the idea that a

fully realized person can ever truly exist in the dehumanizing structures of global

neoliberalism.

IV: The Little Red Knife: Yume Nikki and the Production of Meaning

While it is clear that media texts like Kaiba and Evangelion are invested in forming

counter-hegemonic spaces and discourses, the question of whether or not their messages and

theoretical underpinnings are actively disseminated in the popular sphere remains to be

answered. In the case of Evangelion, the implications of its philosophical foundations are

problematized by its total ingratiation into the pop-culture industry, and Kaiba, with its short

run and relative lack of advertising or critical scholarship, has had limited efficacy outside

small spheres of Yuasa and "avant-garde" anime circles. Thus, it seems apparent that the

ability of such texts to spur social change, when they are faced with the untenable choice of

surrending to the industry or wallowing in obscurity, is problematized and potentially

rendered completely void. And yet, as scholarship by theorists like Stuart Hall and Raymond

Williams shows, the consumption of media on the part of viewers is not a unilateral process.

Rather, fans engage with media in contradictory and multifaceted ways, in various ways

imbibing, rejecting and accepting the ideological positions central to discrete narratives. In

particular, the process of cultural productivity (Fiske, 1992) on the part of fandom has shown

how, in the late 20th century, consumers of mass culture have created new means of

reclaiming and changing the ways texts are consumed, often to the benefit of consumers and

to the detriment of the industry. The process of media consumption, while clearly guided and

oriented towards industry goals and preoccupations (occupations which as part of a capitalist

framework align with the basic structure of flow of capitalism), has become increasingly

complex with the arising of fan communities, which through discrete cultural productions

may completely alter the standard readings of any given text.

In Japan, there is one particular text that, through the process of fan interpretation and

cultural production, has gained enormous influence completely external to industry interests

and production. Yume Nikki, a 2004 RPG freeware game developed and released online

anonymously, has through word of mouth become one of the most popular and well known

PC games released in Japan, and has been ported and translated by fans to countries from

Taiwan to Europe to the United States. What makes Yume Nikki so fascinating and important

is this very community, which has in virtual imageboards, forums and discussions created an

entire mythology for this game, a narrative and breadth of interpetation that rivals if not

surpasses the previously discussed texts.

In Yume Nikki (meaning "dream diary" in Japanese), the player takes the role of a voiceless

young girl named Madotsuki, who every night enters a surreal dream world full of strange

creatures and designs. In these vast dream expanses, the player can find a variety of strange

characters, from bird-like aliens to multi limbed girls to floating, phallic shaped monsters that

follow the protagonists movements as she goes by. The game lacks a stated purpose or goal,

and there is no dialogue or guidance given to the player as they attempt to explore and

decipher the virtual landscapes of the game. Madotsuki cannot die, and at any point the

player desires they can simply press a button to make her pinch her cheek and wake up.

Further, with only a few exceptions the player cannot engage or interact with any of the

characters they meet until they gain a specific item, a kitchen knife covered in blood. When

they have access to this, the game suddenly changes course, and it becomes possible to

murder virtually any NPC (non-player character) in the game.

The only "ending" the game provides is when the player collects all 24 of the items

scattered throughout the dream worlds, at which point a ledge appears on Madotsuki's porch

in the real world. Should the player choose to walk up this ledge, they can throw Madotsuki

off the ledge and ostensibly to her death, resulting in a final image of a puddle of blood and a

brief credits sequence featuring the unknown creator of the game, Kikiyama. As it lacks any

dialogue or overt themes, trying to make sense of Yume Nikki is difficult. It bears aesthetic

similarities to earlier 16-bit Japanese games such as the 1995 Mother 2 (released as

"Earthbound" in the United States) but utterly lacks the gameplay-narrative contours that

define most video games. From what the in-game text provides, all we can effectively

establish is that the player-character is a young woman haunted by surreal and often violent

nightmares, and who eventually commits suicide as a result. But this simple analysis does not

come close to accounting to the massive fan production that surrounds the game. Since Yume

Nikki has come out, it has inspired an unprecedented level of fan interpretation, analysis and

discussion. It has deeply resounded with Japanese youth culture of the 90s and 2000s,

particularly those who use the imageboard site 2ch (where the game originated) and has even

seen international success as it has ported by fans to numerous foreign countries. For many

Japanese fans, Yume Nikki is more than a video game; in its images of a isolation, despairing

and melancholy, it has had an immense emotional impact, and some go so far as to say it

saved their very lives.

To make sense of the Yume Nikki phenomenon is to make sense of how fan

subcultures in Japan consume new media texts and works. In the Azuma-Asada

configuration of media consumption, contemporary Japanese culture is plagued by the

phenomenon of animalization, wherein consumers simply tear apart narratives and imbibe

select media artifacts deemed pleasurable. In this mode of textual engagement, it becomes

impossible for any pop culture text, particularly those produced in the nexus of the pop

culture industry, to convey any meaningful message without the message being always­

already compromised by the structure that produces it. It is a paradox of media theory in the

Marshall McLuhan sense, wherein the medium is the message and the medium is a database

of pleasurable, isolated artifices without the potential for meaning.

But with Yume Nikki, we see an opposite phenomenon to the one Azuma describes

and Asada critiques. Rather than tearing apart narrative and reducing it to discrete pleasure

variables, the fan community of Yume Nikki has collectively created a narrative for the game

they love. As can be evidenced in both Japanese and English speaking fan communities, fans

have not only assigned names and backstories to the various wordless characters in the game,

but have also produced numerous theories describing their contexts and the very nature of the

game world itself. A variety of theories exist as to the diegetic story of the game, the most

common asserting that Madotsuki is a product of a previous trauma or that she is a metaphor

for the individual in contemporary society, alienated and unable to make meaningful

relationships beyond those imposed through violence. In no place within the text are any of

these ideas stated explicitly, unlike previously discussed media like evangelion and kaiba.

But this has not stopped fans from interpreting the text in a strikingly similar ways, finding

within the wordless and abstract virtual landscapes of Yume Nikki a potent metaphor for their

own isolation, powerlessness and detachment from society.

In the cultural productions of fan communities surrounding Yume Nikki, a validation of the

pop-culture text as having a socially transformative power is apparent. Without an active

interpretation and analysis on the part of fans, as well as a discrete of meanings gaining semi­

canonical status as a result of their general acceptance, Yume Nikki would not be worth

commenting on at all. It would be but a strange curiosity, an anonymous art game with no

commercial viability. But in its simple, abstract message fans have produced an enormous

array of meanings and interpretations, to such an extent that it has attracted the attention of

the mainstream industry. In the coming year, a licensed Yume Nikki manga will be released,

written by the anonymous Kikiyama themselves. Whether this release will validate or defy

fan expectations remains to be seen. But the fact remains that in Yume Nikki, a real potential

for fans to actively engage rather than passively disassemble and consume media can be seen.

And if fans can extract meaning, and even generate new forms of social critique, from such

popular media, than it becomes apparent that other media texts like Kaiba and Evangelion

also hold the potential for producing new meanings and ways of understanding society. In

Kaiba and Evangelion, we see popular media texts forwarding powerful social critiques of

capialisn and neoliberal socioeconomic formations. In Yume Nikki, we see their validation,

and the all important truth that fans are not thoughtless ciphers absorbing an industry. Yume

Nikki shows that there is an active discourse between media texts and audiences, and from

this discourse a new understanding a media, society and the world may very well arise.

V: Conclusion: "I am not a machine": Creating a Counter-Japan

In his book Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation

American journalist and University of Berkeley scholar Michael Zielenziger sets forth his

own unique theory of the Japanese phenomenon of Hikikomori, or young people who refuse

to leave their homes for years at a time. Most of the Hikikomori, he notes, are male, have a

piqued interest in popular culture like anime and manga, and are not mentally ill. They have

only emerged in the aftermath of 1989 and the Lost Decade, and, according to the Japanese

government in 2010 (Hoffman, 2010), number approximately 700,000 today. For Zielenziger,

the Hikikomori represent a unique class of people acutely effected by Japanese cultural

expectations and the recession; for most of them, it is usually after some form of failure,

either academically or after being bullied, that they become socially withdrawn and morbidly

afraid of leaving their homes. The hikimori he visits and discusses, he finds, are not angry,

violent, lazy or any of the stereotypes often assigned to them by Japanese media, but are

rather intelligent and quiet people who have found themselves, for some reason or another,

unable to assimiliate. In assimilation-obsessed Japan, according to Zielenziger, there is no

room for such independent and unconventional spirits. The only place they can retreat to is

their rooms, and their only sources of solace are the comforting confines of their walls.

Although Zielenziger's theory offers a unique starting point for studying the

socialcultural effects of the recession, it runs into two significant problems. First is its

dependence on a specific and racially charged mode of understanding Japanese society,

broadly conceiving it as more vaguely collectivistic and less independent minded then

Western society. The crux of this misinterpretation of Japanese capitalism arises from

tempting but inaccurate conflation of Japanese pre-western culture with contemporary

corporate culture; although Zielenziger is explicitly dealing with social and economic

conditions that have arisen concommitantly to the recession and stalling of the Japanese

capitalist machine, he does not effectively link the two, and instead reduces the very

temporally significant genesis of the Hikikomori to fuzzy cultural reasons. For the

Hikikomori phenomenon to change, he implicitly argues, Japanese culture in the most

abstract sense must be altered, rather than the international social, historical and economic

conditions from which contemporary Japan arises be considered and critiqued.

The second failing of Zielenziger's analysis is the totalizing idea that Hikikomori are

all unassimilable, and that all or most people who do not fit into the parameters of Japanese

Convoy Capitalism are in turn Hikikomori. As the Lost Decade and writers like Karin

Akamiya have shown, the pariahs of Japanese condition run the gamut of social and

economic conditions, with the single unifying factor being their dissatisfaction with and

inability to integrate into the system. The means by which they respond to this are

mutliplicitous, from turning inward in the case of Zielenziger's Hikikimori, to moving

towards seductively straightforward right-wing politics like Amamiya to simply abandoning

the idea of political commitment and consuming media without regards to narrative or points

of origin, as Azuma and Yoda analyze. Each of these positions have been thoroughly

researched and documented, and continue to dominate discussions of the textual discourse

surrounding post-1989 Japan. But there is a fouthfold position, one that has manifested

popular media and audience responses alike, that is in this author's opinion wholly

undocumented and underanalyzied; the position of active critique, political engagement, and

renewal of anti-capitalistic politics that has reemerged in, to varying degrees, in

contemporary Japanese discourse.

While the fonns that this resistance has taken across various media has been varied, as

well as the points of criticism raised and its interpretation of Japanese ideologies, there is one

unifying metaphor that seems to shine through: that of machines, and their relationship to

human subjects. To analyze anime is any capacity is to constantly return to the machine

metaphor, which has been articulated from the very first anime series ever made, Osamu

Tezuka's 1963 Astra Boy, about a robot boy fighting to defend humanity. The machine

recurs again and again in Japanese animation, from the mecha genre developed in the 70s to

the dystopian landscapes of Katsuhiro Otomo and Mamuro Oishii (Ghost In The Shell, 1995)

and is notably theorized by Thomas Lamarre is his seminal work The Anime Machine. This

work connects the multifaceted production of visuals within anime to the time-image and

desiring-machine schema of Deleuze and Guatari. For Lamarre, anime sets itself apart from

other fonns of animation by essentially its own mechanistic processes, emphasizing and even

celebrating the creation of discrete and interworking elements of sets for the create of a self­

aware body of desire creating. Anime does not pretend to be a representation, but is rather a

series of "soulful bodies" moving autonomously across images towards which movement

remains their primary relationity. Thus, anime itself is a machine, but in recognizing this

reality, and in eschewing the tradition relationships between external character and interior

landscape and portraying characters who may in reality freely and fluidly traverse this

landscape, he posits it as a medium through which the traditional dichotomies of

representation and memesis dominating animation are broken and the medium becomes to

produce endlessly disparate meaning-constructions.

In Evangelion and Kaiba, anime directors use this inhibition to create messages that

free themselves from the traditional standards of the animation medium and "pop out" at the

viewer the way their characters pop out of their screen, challenging the expectations of the

consumer and participant to their production. Lamarre goes on to theorize a new idea of the

Otaku as a fluid receptor to the pleasurable discrete elements Azuma posits, and who in turn

are proscribed a limit range of reaction on the basis of the limits of those elements: "[s ] imply

put, the distributive field [of the pleasurable elements] generates affective asymmetries not

subjective asymmetries. This is very much like what Felix Guattari calls a machine in

contrast to structure" (275). Such a theorization opens the door to an Otaku who are

supremely pliable, and a medium whose range of interpretation can be expanded at will by

the basis of the distribution of these pleasurable elements. In Evangelion and Kaiba, the

Lamarrian field is expanded to its fullest extent, and in Yume Nikki, the field is barely set at

all, allowing fan communities to set their own models forth and create a landscape of

meanings that savagely critique their ostensible origins. In the use of the Anime Machine, in

short, anime artists and audiences have created a new paradigm through which to criticize

contemporary Japanese capitalism, which ironically can be summed up as such; "I am not a

machine."

The primary thrust of the critical strain of post-1989 Japanese animation is fully this

maxim. The machine is the dominant metaphor of the postwar Japanese condition, recurring

from the creation of megacorporate entities to the literal shifting of the physical Japanese

landscape since the beginnings of the Showa Era. In rejecting the integration of this machine,

the Japanese artist radically rejects integration into the entire postwar schema, and in turn

challenges the directionality of modernism since its very inception. A position neither neo­

luddite nor dependent on a Neonationalist idea of prelapsarian Japan, this new understanding

fundamentally redefines the relationships between individual, society and state implicit to

modernism by rejecting the mechanistic structures that mediate them. By utilizing the endless

possibilities of the animation and computerized mediums, the Cartesian machine has been, at

least metaphorically, rejected, and the new shift towards a post-machine Japan may indeed

begin its realization.

A number of concommitant effects, each critical to understanding the Japanese

phenomenon, remain to be studied, primarily the quantitative ways fans interpret these new

texts and what, exactly, is the criteria for a critical text emerging from the post-1989

condition, assuming any can be created. Also necessary is continuous assessment of the

cultural landscape of Japan in relation to its economic one, and to what extent the two

become one and the same. Audience studies and media reception theory, both as expounded

by Stuart Hall and Henry Jenkins, the latter who effectively illustrates the means by which

individual consumers link together contingently related media forms to inform hybrid and

convergent understandings of the world, seem especially pertinent to continued research and

analysis. Further, the implications of this study to those of us in the United States grappling

with the beginnings of a recessive economic period similar to Japan's in the early 90s should

also be examined. To mistake one situation for another would be a mistake of totalization, but

the implict relationship between the United States and Japan, particularly with regards to the

American Occupation and the transplanation of capitalism as a mean of resisting Soviet and

Chinese domination of East Asia, remains paramount. A number of the discrete phenomenon

once thought endemic to the Japanese recession, most notably the Hikikomori subculture,

have already been observed by sociologists in the US (Teo, 2013), and the contemporary

intercultural dialogue between American and Japanese producers of popular media is stronger

than ever. The ways in which this Japanese media is interpreted by American audiences is

also an open topic for analysis, and is asubject this study has only briefly brushed against.

Issues of intercultural exchange, the nature of capitalism in its recessive forms, and the role

of the postmodern zeitgeist in media consumption all remain to be considered more deeply

than they have been here. The field of media theory and communication is full of possibilities

for these new avenues of discourse.

There is a third issue to Zielenziger's analysis of the Hikikomori phenomena, namely

its assumption that the only solvent response of the Hikikomori, and implicitly all those

disaffected by the Lost Decade and current neonationalist and neoliberal discourses of Japan,

is to "shut out the sun" and the world as a result. This politics of despair obscures not only the

current work being done in the Japanese fields of animation and textual production to

resistant modernist hegemony but also seems to suggest that there is no means to resist

capitalism in any form in the current zeitgeist. Our only choices are surrender or retreat,

struggling or hiding in our rooms. The discourse of the post-1989 critical movement, which

can also be gleaned in such works as Asano Inio's Oyasumi PunPun, Shuz6 Oshimi's Aku no

Hana, in the artistic works of Takashi Murakami and literature of Haruki Murakami, wholly

rejects this defeatism. And as their reception on the part of audiences have shown, the idea

that the current generation is in full retreat is false as well. The Lost Decade generation is

circling its wagons, refusing to take for granted the assumptions of its predecessors, and

actively creating counter-hegemonic spaces in which society, bodily autonomy, and the

ultimate goal of resistance are in active debate. If they are to continue gaining traction, and to

begin the long and no doubt arduous process of trans plating their new paradigms to the arena

of contemporary Japanese politics, they may very well succeed in completely and inexorably

altering Japanese political discourse as we know it.

Sources and Citations

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an

Investigation)" Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press, 1971. P. 1-

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i Jouissance, another Lacanian term, here refers to the pleasure garnered from actualizing the Real, from

transgressing the pleasure principle that l imits the subject. In tra nsgressing this, Tetsuo enjoys the jouissance

of his a l l-consuming telekinetic power, but by its very nature as a transgression of a l imit, it cannot be l imited

and thus ultimately consumes everything in its never ending approach towards the Real. i i

After its initial 26-Episode Run, a follow up movie, The End of Evangelion, was released, focusing on the "real

world" ending of the show as NERV and its parent organization, SEELE, implemented the Instrumenta l ity

Project. Several theories exist regarding the ways in which the ending of the original series and this film

interrelate, but for the sake of brevity, only the former will be examined. within the text and collections iii

Science Fiction Anime.