Orient Orientalizing Itself

Transcription

1 The Orient Orientalizing Itself: Japanese Animation and Split Identity In Orientalism, Edward Said claims that, as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West (5). The complex network of political, economical, academic, cultural, or geographical realities of the Orient called Orientalism is a way of coming to terms with the Orient, or to be less geographically specific, the Other. Although Said defines Orientalism to be specifically Franco-British experience in the Arab world, his basic arguments can be applied to the process of Othering in a more general sense. Especially his idea of representation plays a central role in the epistemology of Orientalism. Representation, according to Said, can be characterized by exteriority and imaginativeness. Said affirms that Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West (21). In other words, Orientalism assumes that the Orient cannot represent itself: as not being allowed the subject position, the Orient needs both political and linguistic representation by the West. This leads to the second point, the idea that the Orient has little to do with real Orient. The Orient, conceived as representation in written texts, is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as the Orient (21). Said is not arguing that the true Orient is different from what Orientalists believe to be, but that the Orient is a dubious entity supported by the notion that there are geographical space, indigenous people and the essence of culture, all of which equal the idea, the Orient. A problem arises from these characteristics: based on Said s notion of Orientalism, is that any discussion of Orientalism, whether critical of it or apologetic for it, goes on only in the West, somewhere distant from supposedly Oriental indigenous people or culture. In other words, not only construction but deconstruction of the dubious entity Orient require the West (the Orient s agent) to speak for the Orient. Another problem is what Said calls a triumph of Orientalism (323) today, the major source of which is no longer Britain or France, but the United States, the democratically totalizing economy power. It means cultural domination on the one hand ( Orientals educated in the United States repeat the Orientalist cliché), and economic absorption of poor nations on the other (consumerism in the Orient). A simple example Said takes up is the paradox of an Arab regarding himself as an Arab of the sort put out by Hollywood (325). The Orient, in short, playacts its image as imagined by the West. This is far more problematic than the former form of Orientalism because the subject position of an Oriental is now realized only as the subject that (re-)presents itself as the Other before the Western eyes, as imagined by the West: and this Western gaze is what the Oriental subject identifies her/himself. It is disappointing in a sense that Said does not develop his arguments more than the idea that this phenomenon of cultural domination is only the Orient s adaptation of Western Orientalism. There are more complex power relationships involved in the new Orientalism, and there are also different modes of the Orient s Orientalization process in connection to cultural differences. In this essay, I take Japan as one form of the cultural representation consumed in the United States and focus on images of Japan (especially of Japanese body) that produce and re-produce themselves as the desirable Other to American eyes. (1 of 7) [1/31/2002 9:28:29 PM]

2 It is difficult to determine what are proper examples of Japan s cultural representation because there may be innumerable versions and modes of Japan as a discursive construct. The two works I am going to examine are Akira (Akira, 1988) and Ghost in the Shell (Kokaku kidotai, 1995). Both are animation films that were produced in Japan but planned to be released in the United States as well. Akira production prepared the original version for release in Japan, and the international version dubbed in English. Ghost in the Shell was the very first animation film that was released both in Japan and the United States at the same time. They were unusual in the sense that, among other Japanese animation that prefer non-japanese (often Western) representation of characters and settings thanks to animation s fictional character, they used images, music, storylines, characters, and settings (supposedly) peculiar to Japan. The media, animation, is also regarded as a culturally particular form of Japanese culture called anime. The point here is that these films were obviously produced in expectation of American audience (for ambiguously international purpose), to sell them the images of Japan. Some people may think that Japanese culture has other forms of art that have been well-treated in the United States compared to such a low pop-culture like anime, but the fact is that those typically Japanese cultural representations such as samurai, Kabuki, Noh, and Zen, are dead cultures lost in the beautiful past, along with the big waves of modernization. Regarding the 19th-century Orientalist paintings, Linda Nochlin points out that the Orient is depicted as the precious remnants of disappearing civilization that needs to be reserved by the West (since Orientals are ignorant of art). On the basis of Nochlin s discussion of the imaginary Orient, it is important that the exteriority of Orientalism is not only spatial formation of us (outside) and them (inside), but also historicization of the present and the past. While the present indicates continuous progress toward a higher form of civilization, of which the United States has enjoyed leadership, the past is objectified into reservable exhibitions, and thus obtains the value of a work of art because of its purity, i.e., alienation from political, social and cultural contexts. It is in this sense that I would like to examine contemporary culture, which hardly escapes political implications of our time and place. Film reviews of these films clearly show the way Japanese pop-culture should be treated in the United States. Both Akira and Ghost are celebrated because of their high achievements in animation technology, especially visual effects and music, while most reviews warn that the contents are highly violent, incomplete, and too corporeal (in both senses of sexual and bodily ). A Washington Post writer, Richard Harrington, calls Akira a visceral example of the future of animation. Roger Ebert writes in Chicago Sun-Times that this particular film is too complex and murky to reach a large audience [ ]. But I enjoyed its visuals, its evocative soundtrack (including a suite for percussion and heavy breathing), and its ideas. These remarks seem to express two contradictory but intertwined indications of Japan. On the one hand, Japan is a technologically and economically leading country. This is a condition that differentiates Japan s case from typical Orientalist fantasy of the 19th- to mid-20th century colonization period. The concept of technology and economy somehow secures the idea that the content of the culture (if technology and economy are only its exterior forms) belongs to the lower structure of society. On the other hand, Japan has beautiful and exotic art traditions: these are limited to supposedly apolitical modes of art. The most significant in this Orientalization process of Japan, like many other images of the Orient, is the combination of visual and corporeal. The Oriental bodies serve the interested spectators (2 of 7) [1/31/2002 9:28:30 PM]

3 of the West. Akira is set in Neo-Tokyo in 2019, 31 years after World War III. The rebuilt city, looking like an animated "Blade Runner" prototype, is under military rule, though packs of motorcycle-riding cyberpunks race through the streets. One pack, led by Kaneda, becomes the main focus of the movie. One of Kaneda's pals, Tetsuo, comes to be captured by the mysterious military-scientific coalition that rules Neo-Tokyo. Soon, Tetsuo's powers grow out of control and he becomes the focus of a battle between oppressive authorities and the coalition of an underground resistance group, Kaneda's gang and a trio of fellow psychics terrified that he will unleash "Akira" and once more destroy the world. As Tetsuo totally loses his control over his powers, the three psychics awaken Akira s powers and cause a gigantic explosion that absorbs Tetsuo and the whole city. In short, this film employs a typical Armageddon plot. In addition to this relatively superficial summary, I would like to add its cultural contexts. The images of both the explosion in WWIII and its repetition in 2019 mirror the atomic bombs dropped in Japan in Accordingly, the psycho-kinetic powers developed by scientists and militarists imply nuclear power, as a member of the revolution coalition says that everyone has the power (=Akira) more or less. The image of the resistance group comes from the New Leftist movement in the 60s and 70s. The Olympic site under construction, where the whole battle takes place, and also where Akira was sealed, is a failed version of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, for which Japan made flat-out efforts to show its full recovery from the defeat in WWII and its national pride (not in the imperial/military way this time, but in a democratic /cultural way). In short, this post-wwiii world parallels the actual post-wwii Japan struggling with the worldly political tension called Cold War and the fear of the possible WWIII in the near future. There are two Japanese bodies prominent in Akira: Tetsuo and Kaneda, both male Japanese bodies. Tetsuo is a small, powerless, and ugly figure, i.e., a feminized Asian man. When he finds himself conferred with great power that enables him to take over the world, he is ironically repeating the imperial Japan that suddenly realized after the incredible victory in WWI that Japan may have power to despotize over East Asia, and possibly, the whole world. Kaneda, whom Tetsuo has admired and blindly followed until the awakening of his great power, provides the audience with the Orientalist viewpoint. Kaneda enjoys his superior position by humanistically protecting Tetsuo, who is behind in every aspect; but once Tetsuo claims on dictatorship over the world, Kaneda heroically attempts to defeat this despot. Tetsuo, however, collapses by himself as he loses control over his own body: the body starts to expand by itself and turns into grotesque chunks of flesh and organs that limitlessly swell over the Olympic site. Tetsuo s body is represented as flesh (not quite as organized as a body ) that is totally irrational, borderless, expansive, and most of all, disgusting. The scene that Kaneda, having survived the Armageddon, sentimentally remembers the times when Tetsuo was good and faces the beautiful light of hope and future, seems to lead to the discourse of Japanese history of linear progression and modernization. For instance, Yamanouchi explains the dominant view of Japanese history as follows: Japanese history in the fascist era led the abnormal course that deviated from (3 of 7) [1/31/2002 9:28:30 PM]

4 the original process of maturity proper for modern society. [ ] The post-war reformation that started with the defeat in 1945 made Japanese history return to the line of the Taisho ( ) democracy. (33, my translation) Terms like deviation and abnormality characterize the imperial period of Japan in the quotation above. In this view of Japanese history as continuous progress toward higher civilization and democracy, the imperial Japan is a historical digression, an error that was not intended to make. Kaneda, who looks back at the error (Tetsuo), presumes this viewpoint of post-war Japan, the viewpoint democratized and modernized (=Westernized) enough to (literally) objectify the wartime Japan as the Other. His complacent heroism marks post-war Japan s insinuating attitude toward the United States on the one hand, and an attempt to differentiate itself from its own shameful past on the other. It is important to note the repeated image of the nuclear explosion in the film, because it is the historical break that sets the boundary between Japan as error (the past, the irrational) and as a politically correct member of the first world (the progressive present, the rational). Interestingly, the question of who dropped the atomic bombs is totally sanitized by the religious image of Armageddon so that any political argument against the States can be avoided. The nuclear explosion, therefore, emerges in the film as punishment conferred by an apolitical power (e.g., God or some power that is politically innocent such as the order of the world). The complete absence of American representation in the film is thus an indicator of its invisible domination, i.e., American ideology already located at the very center of Japan. Ghost in the Shell, released seven years after Akira, was the first breakthrough to the United States as being an animation film released at theaters internationally at the same time. The story is set in 2029, when humans coexist with cyborgs, who are part human, part machine and part computer. Major Motoko Kusanagi is a cop with cybernetic parts. She starts to question how much of her identity is actually her own, since ghosts (individual identity based on memory ) can be transferred from one shell (memory chips: the word motoko has another reading, soshi, which means chip as in biochip and memory chip) to another. When her police unit is called to look for "The Puppet Master," the question of identity begins to trouble her deeply. The Puppet Master describes itself as a living, thinking entity who was created in the sea of information. It exists only in the electronic universe, but is in search of another body to acquire the essential function of a life - reproduction (not just copies that can be easily destroyed altogether by one virus). Film reviews in America tend to conclude that its theme is merely a parody of Blade Runner, Robocop, or Star Trek while its technique is quite new. Acceptance of this film was quite similar to when Akira was released: technically well-developed, exotically attractive, but there is nothing new to add to civilization in any other ways than mechanically. In short, animation, which is originally designed for children, has now barely reached at the adult level of art. When one locates this film in more political contexts rather than innocently aesthetic values, however, it carries more significant implications: what I mean by political contexts is gender, race, and both cultural and economic power struggles between America and Japan. Unlike Akira, the body that entertains the spectators is a mostly nude, Japanese female body. This body is feminine not only because it has (unnecessary) feminine traits like big (4 of 7) [1/31/2002 9:28:30 PM]

5 breasts, but because it is highly dependent on other humans care, and must be frequently connected to other computer units. This connection obviously carries the connotation of sexual connection as well. Motoko, as a top governmental secret agent, is also masculine because of her military privilege, high-tech weapons, and policing power over political terrorism. Ebert points out that there are no characters in the film with whom the audience can identify. I would like to add that it is so unless Japanese men tired of playing a feminine role in Japanese society dream of gaining both masculinity and a feminine body which is relatively free from social hierarchy (because the female body is confined in the private space, though). Accordingly, the body is an amalgamation of the binary opposites such as masculine/feminine, subject/object of desire, human/mechanical, policing/being policed, etc. So-called cyborg feminism, one of the somewhat idealistic Western feminisms, claims that the transgressive nature of the cyborg enables subject automatons (i.e., women) to retain life and active voice to invent their own (hi)story (Haraway 173). In other words, the transgression of the oppositional categories itself provides a feminist perspective, a women s look that becomes the point of departure for feminist consciousness. In Postmodern Automatons, Rey Chow calls this first world feminism into question by discussing that, for non-western feminists, the question is never that of asserting power as woman alone, but of showing how the concern for women is inseparable from other types of cultural oppression and negotiation (67). In the Oriental postmodern condition that the subject position contradictorily coincides with the object position, as we see in the cyborg politics, this positionality of the hybrid body does not indicate possibility of a free subject position but the ironic impasse of cultural domination, or the convergence point where cultures try to Other one another. The question of how Japanese-ness or Oriental-ness is represented in the cyborg is another important issue in addition to these sexual signs inscribed on the body. If one takes a close look at the relationship of gender and nationality, Ghost in the Shell emerges as a cyberpunk version of Madame Butterfly. The Oriental features that constitute Otherness in the film are mainly landscape and music. The backgrounds are realistic, detailed sketches of streets in Hong Kong and markets in China: probably what American critics call Blade Runner style simply means Asian and local to East Asian people. It is local, however, in the contradictory way that the first-world Tokyo metropolis is geographically adjacent to third-world Chinese agricultural markets. The landscape depicted in the film is thus a conglomeration of East Asian sceneries, a combination that may seem uncanny even to those who live in each scenery. Similarly, music consists of mysterious percussion and chorus, of which it is difficult to identify nationality (other than ambiguously Asian origins). During the opening credits, the film shows high-tech production of a cyborg body while playing this amalgamate music along with a poem from an ancient marriage song in the Shinto tradition. Marriage between two different nations, or more precisely, between Japan (as the representative of Asia) and the United States, is an implicit focus of the film. The Puppet Master, a computer hacker who is supposedly an American man, hacks one of the bodies, a commercial merchandise, and escapes into the department where Motoko is working. This Puppet Master then claims to be the first life form born in the computer networks, without any physical body, and starts to question the definition of a legitimate human: his argument is that he was born as a sort of programming bug, an accidental knot of various threads of information. His identity politics corresponds to the idea Motoko has (5 of 7) [1/31/2002 9:28:30 PM]

6 repeatedly asked to herself, the idea that identity is not a stable entity consisting of signifiers for the self but a incessant questioning of which is a part of her body, or what is or is not her own memory. In short, identity is a crossroad where various categories like nationality or gender pass by, and does not have its own meaning. The most disturbing paradox in the film, therefore, is the fact that, in spite of their limitless possibility of identity, they must hold onto the representation of an Asian female body, or in the Puppet Master s case, a form of pure intellect (with masculine voice and a white body, though). Apart from the optimistic future of cyborg identity politics that Motoko finds in the Master s new life form, what actually happens is that the Puppet Master (purely intellect, but white male) proposes Motoko (Asian female puppet) to conjoin so they can procreate. A significant difference in this story from typical Orientalist fantasy such as Madame Butterfly is that, although Motoko is subject to the Master s control and submits her body to him, she makes a contract with him to make sure that she also has advantage of marrying the Master as he uses her. Now that Japan enjoys its economic dominance over the world, the Japanese cyborg does not simply give away the attractive high-tech body: it demands its Master to keep her as the best shadow of him the shadow as the Orient excluded and objectified by the West, in the service of its historical progress (Sakai 173), and furthermore, for the Orient s own profit as well. The prologue to the film explains the paradoxical simultaneity of Japan s representation we have seen in both Akira and Ghost: In the near future, in which the network of (commercial) companies reaches to the stars, and electrons and lights run through everywhere, but not as computerized as nations and ethnicities vanish: In Japan, which is a strange conglomerate nation located on a corner of Asia. (my literal translation) In our contemporary terminology, computerization is more likely to be globalization, the process of transnationalization led by multinational corporations. Miyoshi writes about TNC (trans-national corporations) as follows: The bourgeois capitals in the industrialized world are now as powerful, or even far more powerful, then before. But the logic they employ, the clients they serve, the tools available to them, the sites they occupy, in short, their very identities, have all changed. They no longer wholly depend on the nation-state structure. (732) In the process in which Japan proceeds to economic expansionism and new (non-military) form of imperialism, however, it presents itself as a culturally particular case. This view of Japan located in the limbo between economic globalization and cultural localism seems to clarify the paradoxical duality of the Western subject/oriental object position of the Japanese body. This is a deeply contradictory, desperate struggle that leads to the impasse: the Orient produces images of its own in order to Orientalize itself. And its economic global power enables to mass-produce particularity of its culture as cheap commodities. Both Tetsuo s grotesque body and Motoko s conglomerate body represent this paradoxical condition of Japan. Works Cited (6 of 7) [1/31/2002 9:28:30 PM]

7 Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, Haraway, Donna. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. In Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, edited by Elizabeth Weed, London: Routledge, Miyoshi, Masao. A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State. Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (1993): Nochlin, Linda. The Imaginary Orient. Art in America May-June (1983): Otomo, Katsuhiro. Akira. Toho, Said, Edward W. Orientalism. NY: Vintage, Sakai, Naoki. Translation & Subjectivity: On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P, Oshii, Mamoru. Ghost in the Shell (Kokaku kidotai). Shochiku, Ebert, Roger. Ghost in the Shell. Chicago Sun-Times, June Yamanouchi, Yasushi. Sisutemu shakai no gendaiteki isou. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, (7 of 7) [1/31/2002 9:28:30 PM]