The word Japanimation is a neologism that is made by two words, Japanese plus animation. In the present time, Japanimation is seen in the whole world. People outside Japan show great interested in Japanese subculture including Manga and Japanimation. About Japanese culture, people once asked "What is ZEN?"; now they ask "What is Otaku?". But I am very skeptical about this situation because this phenomenon is definitely a result of globalization and information capitalism.
Under the Fordist economic system of the past, globalization meant nothing more than Americanization. Media and entertainment were supplied by Disney animations. However, we must now seriously consider that the post-Fordist social environment of globalization will both include Japanimation and, at the same time, ponder its meaning.
In other words, the strategy of this cultural movement is the effect of Sub-imperialism. According to Kuan-Hsing Chen, the sub-empire is the secondarily dependent empire that has hegemony much more in cultural and economic systems rather than in a military system. This new version of imperialism uses sub-cultures in general. By analyzing a Japanimation film, I would like to illustrate and criticize Japan as a sub-empire of signs.
The GHOST IN THE SHELL
The film GHOST IN THE SHELL is set in the world of A.D. 2029. This near future is not so information-based that national or ethnic identity has vanished, although networks of many enterprises have covered the planet with electrons or light running through them. In this world, East Asia is a huge corporate zone dominated by multinational economic and information operations.
Also in this world, the lives of human beings are intertwined with advanced technologies. It is a world of cybernetics and sophisticated electronic information networks, where the borders between people and machines become blurred or invisible. For some people, reality is only virtual. There are many humans in this world that become cyborgs -- a combination of man and machine. Except for the kernel of their brain, these people have already substituted cybernetic and prosthetic bodies for their former physical bodies.
The main character of the film, a woman named Motoko Kusanagi, is the leader of the Shell Squad Section 9 of the Department of the Interior, which has been formed by the government to combat cyber-crimes and political terrorism in the information society. Through the net, crimes have become more sophisticated and more violent. The story of the film is about a conflict and conspiracy among some departments and agents in the government. The events are concerned with a strange hacker who has the code name Puppet Master. This unidentified super hacker started out as a computer virus manufactured by the Foreign Ministry. The Puppet Master can take over human beings to further his own purposes by means of what is called ghost-hacking.
Even though some humans in this world may have almost completely changed their own bodies into machines, they still remain human in so far as they have their own ghost. A ghost is a sort of spirit -- not a mind. It is indeed unconsciousness itself -- it is also memory, which helps to ground a persons identity. Puppet Master says "memory cannot be defined, but memory defines mankind." As though it is the water in a cup, the identity of a human being needs a form or shell at the same time that it needs ghost. We cannot distinguish between shell and ghost in human beings. The problem is not about the traditional philosophical dichotomy between mind and body -- rather, we come face with the very basic question in science fiction: Is a cyborg a human or a machine? What is self or identity for a cyborg?
The Shell Squad team as an organization tries to chase and catch the Puppet Master while Major Motoko Kusanagi tries personally to respond to that basic question. For some time Motoko is skeptical about her identity and whether she has ghost. Because her body is almost a machine, she is caught in a paranoia according to which she was made as an android and provided with a virtual self and an artificial ghost. In fact, some people arrested by the Shell Squad as the Puppet Master have turned out to be only agents who were given fictitious personalities by cyber brain hacking. They were puppets without ghost and they have only the illusion of self-image, memory, and self-identity.
These problems are closely concerned with the micro-politics of identity -- including opposition and segmentation between class, gender, ethnicity, and race. It can be said that humans and cyborgs belong to different tribes and races from one another. This context recalls the problematic of cyborg politics presented by Donna Harawey.
Broadly speaking, the question here is the following: Is the self a mind or a spirit or does the self consist of a suit, a shell, or a product of prosthetic technology? Does the vested shell or suit incorporate the body and become the self itself, or does it not? So, as the audience, we share the same question with Major Motoko: the problem of the "shell-ish-ness of self-ness" and the question of "Who am I?"
The Puppet Master has appeared to the Shell Squad and It (or perhaps he) speaks through a cyber body without ghost. It seems that he allows himself to be caught. He affirms, "I am not an Artificial Intelligence. I am a living, thinking entity who was created in the sea of information." It is easy to see here the problem of Artificial Life. For natural life DNA is nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself. Life, when organized into species, relies on genes for its memory system. Conversely the computer along with cyber technologies are the extension/explosion of human memory. Some programs can function independently from human will and so may gain autonomy. If these processes become more complicated and sophisticated, then certain programs or algorithms are going to become more similar to life itself. Of course it is very different from the life in nature, but at least we can see and define an information program such as Artificial Life (AL). In this sense, the Puppet Master-as-AL uses meme and cultural genes to control many humans and systems. It has ghost.
Informational Capitalism and Techno-Orientalism
Manuel De Landa has already remarked that interest in AL came out of a reflection on the failure of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) paradigm. He has always stressed the shift from a top down approach to a bottom up approach, for the latter depends upon emergent and autonomous processes in information science. Many AL experiments include the design of a simple copy of an individual animal. This animal must have the equivalent of a set of genetic instructions that are used to create its offspring -- as well as the capacity to transmit these instructions to that offspring. De Landa says:
"This transmission must also be 'imperfect', so that variation can be generated. The exercise will be considered successful if novel properties, not imagined by the designer, emerge spontaneously."
-- "Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason"
If AL truly were more than a simple program and could become life, it would send some information to its own offspring by "imperfect transmission". The behavior and intention of the Puppet Master in this film is based on this logic. Thus in the end of this film, the Puppet Master proposes to Motoko that they merge with each other. By this unification he would realize death, as in real life, while Motoko could generate varied offspring into the net.
One probably could say that we have already known Puppet Master in our ordinary lives. In fact it is possible to find invisible manipulators in the market and the financial system. The market and capital increasingly are becoming dependent on emergent processes and non-linear logic. Emergence here means the sudden change of some states in any system or a haphazard phenomenon relying on a radical contingency. In the paradigm of AL, this emergence and bottom up decision making in a system are very important. This is why we can consider the work of huge capitalist corporations and the complicated virtual financial system from the point of view of AL or the "Artificial Market". There is nothing like the "invisible hand of God", but there are the invisible hands of Puppet Masters. Of course this is just an anonymous process, but at least one can say that the Puppet Master is an allegory of information capitalism.
De Landa presents a similar point of view about the market in "Markets and Anti-markets in the World Economy" (in Techo Science and Cyber Culture, Routledge, 1996). Any replicating system that produces variable copies of itself in order to get new evolving forms needs "the divergent manifestation of the anti-market". The market for capitalism has always consisted of self-organized and decentralized structures. And it has always been an anti-market -- which is an aspect of the non-linear process of the market itself.
To analyze this film further, I would go back to the issue of Japanimation itself. Why is this kind of animation so highly developed in Japan? I think that one reason has to do with the gaze of Western people toward Japanese culture. The problem is also about Orientalism.
For example, in 70's when the German techno-pop band Kraftwerk used android or machine-like gestures in their live shows, they took the gestures of Japanese business men in Europe as their model. It is not surprising that they were interested in the robot-like bowing and expressionless laughter. David Morley and Kevin Rovins have argued, in their influential book The Space of Identity, that "Western stereotypes of the Japanese hold them to be sub-human, as if they have no feeling, no emotion, no humanity" ("Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic", in The Space of Identity, Routledge,1995). These impressions come from the high development of Japanese technology. They are a phenomenon of Techno-Orientalism.
The basis of Orientalism and xenophobia is the subordination of others in various areas of the world through a sort of "mirror of cultural conceit". A host of stereotypes appeared when binary oppositions -- culture and savage, modern and pre-modern, and so on -- were projected on to the geographic positions of Western and non-Western. The Orient exists in so far as the West needs it, because it brings the project of the West into focus. Naoki Sakai says on this point:
"The Orient does not connote any internal commonality among the names subsumed under it, it ranges from region in the Middle East to those in the Far East. One can hardly find anything religious, linguistic, or cultural that is common among these varied areas. The Orient is neither a cultural, religious, nor linguistic unity. The principle of its identity lies outside itself: what endows it with some vague sense of unity is that the Orient is that which is excluded and objectified by the West in the service of its historical progress. From the outset the Orient is a shadow of the West."
If the Orient was invented by the West, then the Techno-Orient also was invented by the world of information capitalism. In Techno-Orientalism, Japan not only is located geographically, but also is projected chronologically. Jean Baudrillard once called Japan a satellite in orbit. Now Japan has been located in the future of technology as. Morley and Rovins state:
"If the future is technological, and if technology has become 'Japanised', then the syllogism would suggest that the future is now Japanese too. The postmodern era will be the Pacific era. Japan is the future, and it is a future that seems to be transcending and displacing Western modernity."
Japanimation is defined by the stereotype of Japan as such an image of the future. The West is seduced and attracted by the model on the one hand, while on the other hand the model of Japan is looked down upon rather than envied by the West. Furthermore this complex about Japan seems to contain a psycho-mechanism similar to anti-semitism. As is will known, Japanese capitalism is highly developed and has become very powerful in many areas such as the US, the EU and Asia. Techno-Orientalism works there as a manipulator of the complex about Japan, in which Japan is the object of transference of the envy and contempt from other cultures and nations. So now, a role resembling that of the Jew is being played more and more by the Japanese. Of course it is vain to link the Jew and the Japanese actually and essentially. Rather the Jews and the Japanese function as the effective figures of the information capitalism.
The Japanoid Automaton
I think that the stereotype of the Japanese -- which I would like to call Japanoid (for "not actually Japanese") -- exists neither inside nor outside Japan. This image functions as the surface or rather the interface controlling the relation between Japan and the other. Techno-Orientalism is a kind of mirror stage or an image-machine whose effect influences Japanese as well as other people. This mirror in fact is a semi-transparent or two way mirror. It is through this mirror stage and its cultural apparatus that Western and other peoples misunderstand and fail to recognize an always-illusory Japanese culture. It also is the mechanism through which Japanese misunderstand themselves. Different from the Lacanian mirror stage, a complete solution for this structure of disavowal, through which a real Japan could be properly recognized, is impossible.
It is interesting that in GHOST IN THE SHELL, the metaphor of the mirror is very used often in a particular way. The Puppet Master has whispered a passage to from the Bible to Motoko when he has tried to approach her through cyber-hacking. In the end of the film, the Puppet Master says to Motoko, "We resemble each other's essence, mirror images of one anothers psyche." And after she merges with the Puppet Master, Motoko cites the Bible:
"What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror... Then we shall see face to face. When I was child, my speech, feelings and thinking were all those of a child. Now that I am a man, I have no more use for childish ways."
There are two mirror stages in this context of Techno-Orientalism. One is about the encounter between the human and the machine, the human and the net. And another is about the relation between Japan and others (Western, other Asian, etc.). These two mirror images constitute the Japanoid as object of envy and hate. I have already mentioned that the Japanese have often been laughed at because of their automatic robot-like gesture. Of course as Freud has observed there is very close relationship between automatic action and humor and laughing. But here one should be think about why androids or robots are ridiculed and why the person laughed at becomes like an android. Rey Chow has an interesting analysis of this point.
"In Chaplin's assembly line worker, visuality works toward an automatization of an oppressed figure whose bodily movements become excessive and comical. Being "automatized" means being subjected to social exploitation whose origins are beyond one's individual grasp, but it also means becoming a spectacle whose 'aesthetic' power increases with one's increasing awkwardness and helplessness."
"Postmodern Automatons" in Writing Diaspora, Rey Chow, Indiana University Press, 1993
To affirm the culture and the industry of the modern world is to summon the automated other by introducing the rhythm of technology and machine of each age into ordinary life. As far as workers, women, and the ethnic other experience a radical change in work conditions because of high technology, the image of the automated doll is imposed on them. This image also is imposed on nation-people who over-adapt to the mutation of technological conditions. Needless to say the Japanese are being seen as the automated other. Japanimation, which organizes the image of automatization and animation (giving it a life form), constructs and presents Japan as an automaton culture and as the Japanoid of Postmodern Times.
It is worth returning to the Puppet Master in this film, because the Puppet Master reminds us of the control of the automaton. The one controlled does not think he is a puppet, but in fact, he behaves as a puppet controlled by a master. It is the same with the relation of an ideology to a human being. Motoko, as a woman cyborg, thinks of herself as an animated automaton. In order to supplement her void (as cyborg, as woman, as minority), she agrees to the proposal to merge with the Puppet Master. She as a minority abandons her ghost to a huge system and net. In turn the Puppet Master as system finds death and a so-called life cycle.
Rey Chow has already defined the strategy of the cyborg feminist as rejecting the binary opposition of masculine-human-subject versus feminized-automaton. Chow argues that, this strategy "retains the notion of the automaton -- the mechanical doll -- but changes its fate by giving it life with another look. This is the look of the feminist critic. Does her power of animation take us back to the language of God, a superior being who bestows life upon an inferior?" Chow asks. This is the task of the cyborg as part machine, part animal, and part transgressive being. Conversely, when a subject takes up that tactics of transgression, it becomes like a cyborg unconsciously. So for the cyborg feminist, this strategy should be extended further than "animating the oppressed minority". Cyborg feminists have to make the automatized and animated situation of their own voices the conscious point of departure in their intervention. By abandoning and sacrificing her own identity and ghost to the Puppet Master, Motoko takes up the strategy of cyborg feminism.
The Japanoid Automaton could be rejected in this way, but this rejection and resistance has always broken down in Japanese subculture. The a-national (non-national) culture of Japan and Japanese (Japanoid) are animated and automatized as being non-Western and non-Asian. In this cultural climate, a Japan that is imaginarily separated from both West and East is reproduced again and again in the political unconsciousness of Japanimation (subculture). Though Japanimation has often emphasized the landscape of Asia and Japan in the near-future, it is the operation of forgetting and conceals the real situation of Asia and Japan. In certain sense, Japanimation is an ideological apparatus at the same time that it is also (virtually?) a weapon of criticism.
Why do Asian landscapes excite the cyberpunk imagination? Certainly it would be possible to reduce the problem to the influence of the film Blade Runner and Chiba City in Neuromancer. But it should be considered that Japanimation has illustrated the mutation of global capitalism itself by appropriating the illusion of Asia or Japan. By choosing Hong Kong as the setting of this film, and trying to visualize the information net and capitalism, the director of this film, Oshii Mamoru also unconsciously criticizes the sub-imperialism of Japan (and other Asian nations).
Through a cultural diaspora, Japanimation is spreading all over the world. It is translated, communicated, and misunderstood. The following passage from Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto:
"There is no way to read the following list from a standpoint of "identification", of a unitary self. The issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora."
If the image of shell and suit in cyborg has been moving, it is not vain to discover the automated other in various expressions and in global information capitalism itself. It is another way to animate the other and the minority.