Techtopia: Speculative Fictions of Japan's Future

Techtopia Speculative Fictions of Japan’s Future

Essay 1B MPhil Architecture and Urban Design University of Cambridge Ryan Myers

Daidō Moriyama, untitled

Introduction This essay unearths a narrative of the unconscious and invisible embeddedness of technology in Japan and its culture through analysis of selected fictions: film, animation, and art. In order to explore the prospective direction of technology and the relationship with nature, the compatibility or disparity of the totally artificial and the natural. The contemplated fictions depict the speculative future of Japan, projected environments in the country that can be perceived as dystopian, and utopian yet provocative and profound in tradition. Collectively they form narratives of alternative realities akin to our own.

To trace the persisting themes of past fictional future depictions of Japan, two contrasting visions emerge to form a thematic spectrum. Despite this contrast in portrayal, the exploration of the relationship between man, machine, and nature is persistent.

The future trajectory of Japan is first often depicted through the notion of a vastly imaginative urban environment infused with a hyper-technological culture, often portrayed in parallel to a disenfranchised society and political machination. 1 Followed by the opposing idea of a future indistinguishable to that of the past. A rural landscape inhabited by the vernacular, coexisting with artefacts of remnant technology of a past civilisation. Alluding to the image of a future situated in a state of anachronism.

In reality the country’s destiny remains unknown, with the daunting advancements of technology, the unnerving stagnation of the economy and declining birth-rate. The society perceived as the technological frontrunner in the contemporary digital world, is in fact internally conflicted with this relationship.2

Roh, David S., Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, 2015 Hayashi, and Hayashi, Takeshi, The Japanese Experience in Technology: from Transfer to Self-Reliance (Tokyo, Japan: United Nations University Press, 1990) 1 2

Utagawa Hiroshige III, A print depicting the start of Japan’s first rail service, from Tokyo’s Shinbashi to Yokohama (1872)

Techno-nationalism – The Pursuit of the Technological Since the Meiji Restoration period in 1868, Japan has commenced a continual pursuit to become technologically affluent as its Western counterparts, a techno-nationalism incorporating the state with heavy subsidisation for science and technology sectors.3 Throughout the early twentieth century, disputes over the implications of technological advancements dominated the political discourse. With many industries transitioning, right-wing ideologies perceived the aspiration of technological advancement as a threat, a cultural corrosion to Japan’s distinctive way of life. Whereas the remainder of the spectrum, saw technology as a solution to the nation’s systemic, economic, and societal issues.4 This discourse continues today, Japanese artists, filmmakers and animators use their mediums as artistic vehicles to illustrate and explore these issues with technological advancements in the world wide web, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence in order to speculate and explore the future possibilities and conditions presented by such advancements.

3 4

Wittner, David G., Technology and the Culture of Progress in Meiji Japan (London; New York: Routledge, 2008) Moore, Aaron Stephen, Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945, 2020

Paprika (2006) bleeding of dreams and reality In Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, a near future based on Yasutaka Tsutsui's 1993 novel of the same name, a revolutionary device called the “DC Mini” exposes reality's fragility, the influence of memory, technology, and the human subconscious have upon that reality, by allowing users to enter the dreams of others. To illustrate the potential psychosis that can arise from dreams, it offers departures from and interrogations of reality and the territory of the subconscious, dreams, and nightmares. Just as though to say that dreams, in despite of their alluring characteristics, are just as perilous as they are essential to reality.5 Dreams are expressed as “sacred”, spaces in which one can imagine, be vulnerable and anonymous. In which is comparable to cyberspace, as poised by protagonist and heroine Paprika “don’t you think that dreams and the internet are similar?”. Cyberspace provides an alternative realm to reality, where it is possible to evade imperatives and impositions, for an individual to create a persona that can be divorced from the self. One’s identity is more and more substituted by traceability, one’s thoughts and actions, are observed, sensed and recorded by the technological.

Paprika (2006) dismantling the persona As dreams and cyberspace alike begin to bleed into reality, and the thin line between the conscious and the subconscious begin to blur. As imagined by Paul Virilio, the coexistence of two societies materializes: “One is a society of ‘cocoons’ . . . where people hide away at home, linked into communication networks, inert . . . The other is a society of the ultra-crowded megalopolis and of urban nomadism. . . Some people, those in the virtual community, will live in the real time of the world-city, but others will live in deferred time, in other words, in the actual city, in the streets.”6 The notion of “virtual empowerment is a solipsistic affair, encouraging a sense of self-containment and self-sufficiency, and involving the denial of the need for the external”. 7 Alluding to the ramifications of a highly integrated technological culture, evident in Paprika’s symbolism of Japan’s societal technophilia and the transgressive nature of technology. 8

5

6

Mønster, Louise. Dream Poems. The Surreal Conditions of Modernism. Humanities 7.4 (2018): 112.

Virilio, Paul,Marginal Groups, Daidalos, 50, 75, 1993

Robins, Kevin. Cyberspace and the World We Live In.” Body & Society, vol. 1, no. 3–4, Nov. 1995, pp. 135–155.

8 Abe, Kiyoshi. The Myth of Media Interactivity: Technology, Communications and Surveillance in Japan. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 26, no.

2–3, Mar. 2009, pp. 73–88.

7

Mariko Mori, Wave UFO (2003) capsule Japanese artist Mariko Mori’s architectural sculpture, Wave UFO produces “computer manipulated crafts and videos that aim at a constant redefinition of the boundary between reality and illusion”.9 To enter the sculpture one must ascend the lily pad staircase and set foot in the metallic bio-amorphous capsule of whale-like proportions through the translucent elliptical door. Upon entry visitors are connected to a series of electronic devices and reclined into seats.10 These devices access and gather data of the visitors’ brainwaves and activity, this data is then interpreted and formulated into a series of visualisations forming an interactive biofeedback loop. These visualisations are then projected onto screens, with every individual brainwave uniquely represented.11A glimpse into the future of posthumanism, where man, machine and nature are one, a techno-enlightenment.

Mariko Mori, Wave UFO (2003) bio-feedback loop “Interestingly, considerations of another reality that vaguely flow out of Buddhist philosophy lead, for Mori, to considerations of the virtual. For Mori, this approach is very consistent as she explains: “The Japanese artistic talent seems to evolve along two currents, one of which is linked to virtual space, to the attempt of finding a passage from virtual space to real space”. 12 It is this embedded and deep-rooted tradition and philosophy, that forms the synonymy between Japan and technology. Furthermore, it is here where the collective imagination, and the influences that form this techno-enlightenment surface. With “the images and world she creates and inhabits carry the sense of an uncanny psychic projection fashioned not merely from her own individual subjectivity, but one created from her fusion with technology, science fiction myths, and the euphoria of late capitalist culture (what Frederic Jameson terms the hysterical sublime.)”13

Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten, Virtual Reality: the Last Human Narrative? 2016 pp. 153–181 Wave UFO - 21st Century Digital Art http://www.digiart21.org/art/wave-ufo [accessed 02/01/2021] 11 Mondloch, Kate, A Capsule Aesthetic : Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art, 2018 12 Botz-Bornstein, pp. 173 13 Goodeve, Thyrza Nichols: Mariko Mori's Cyborg Surrealism. From: Parkett, No.54, 1998/1999, p.100 9

10

Manifestations of the Metropolis Tokyo is a city familiar with disaster, reform, and reconstruction. The representation and identity of Tokyo has been constantly reimagined, dissociated from the complexity and gravity of reality. Future depictions of the metropolis blend “the potential of information technologies with night-town visions of urban life and a hard-driving rock-and-roll sensibility”14. In these projections new, alternative realities are created where giant mechs are entangled with behemoths, political regimes are colluding to control the population with technology, cyborgs and humans alike are struggling with their identities and existence, urbanism of the city is dominated and mutated by highly densified skylines of skyscrapers and megastructures. People do not just simply inhabit and access the networks of the city, but have become intrinsic parts of those networks, and this change has become involuntary as city, technology and body have evolved together.15

Katsuhiro Otomo, AKIRA (1988) satellite image of Neo Tokyo In Katsuhiro Otomo’s AKIRA, evocative of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States. Tokyo has been obliterated in a catastrophic explosion, as a result of the corrupt administration’s parapsychology project attempting to weaponize supernatural children. Materializing from the dusk of the explosion Neo-Tokyo is born. Resembling Kenzo Tange’s City of Ten Million, the violently dense metropolis sprawls outward from an artificial island situated in Tokyo Bay. The cityscape of Neo-Tokyo is permeated both visibly and invisibly by technology, with strong emphasis on the vertical organisation and distribution of the city.

The underbelly of the city is overwhelming, rife with neon-illuminated advertisements, holographic projections, congestion, and bōsōzoku gangs.

Katsuhiro Otomo, AKIRA (1988) illuminated underbelly of Neo Tokyo

Abbott, Carl. Cyberpunk Cities: Science Fiction Meets Urban Theory. Journal of Planning Education and Research, vol. 27, no. 2, Dec. 2007 Orbaugh, Sharalyn, ‘Frankenstein and the Cyborg Metropolis: The Evolution of Body and City in Science Fiction Narratives’, in Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation, ed. by Steven T. Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2006), pp. 81–111 14 15

Katsuhiro Otomo, AKIRA (1988) roofscape of Neo Tokyo Whilst above inter-connecting roofscapes are implanted with traditional landscape gardens, water features and a tranquil environment. The futuristic city is built upon the historic complexities of Japan’s post-war reconstructions, from the rapid economic growth of Tokyo to the resulting social unrest and inequality.

In a chaotic motorcycle chase, the neon megastructures of Neo-Tokyo are left behind and replaced with the remnants of the old Tokyo. The remains of Old Tokyo are a haunting reminder to the new metropolis of its plagued past. As the chase climaxes, biker Tetsuo is involved in a near collision with Takashi, a psychic fleeing from the government’s parapsychology project. As a result, Tetsuo’s motorcycle bursts into flames, awaking his psychic capabilities. It is here where Neo-Tokyo descends into chaos, Tetsuo begins experiencing psychological agony. He becomes enraged destroying the city as he is determined to find fellow psychic AKIRA. He exposes the corruption of the totalitarian regime inciting martial law and riots, as the homeless youth, unemployed and political demonstrators of the city’s underbelly demand change, reminiscent of the The Todai Riots in the late sixties. NeoTokyo’s and “Tetsuo’s transformations meld organic matter with inorganic materials such as wires, concrete, and detritus, producing a mass that challenges the preconceptions” 16 of the division between the natural and the technological. The city is bound by the continuous cycle of life and death, forced to witness a future that grows over its ruins and destroys itself over and over again.

Mitsunori Chigita, Todai Riots (1967)

Katsuhiro Otomo, AKIRA (1988) rioting streets

Ristola, Jacqueline. Embodying the Future: Akira and the Technological Science Fiction https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=2030 [accessed 03/01/2020] 16

Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) Shinji and Misato overlooking Tokyo-3 Similarly, Tokyo in Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion has been destroyed. The “Second Impact”, an Antarctic expedition resulting in half of humanity being wiped from the Earth. Caused a change in the Earth’s axial tilt accelerating global climate change, plunging the entire planet into a period of turmoil and war. Subsequent of the rising geopolitical tension, Tokyo was decimated by a nuclear bomb. The rebuilt city bares significant resemblance to that of the original Tokyo. However, Tokyo-3 is located above the Geofront, the "Black Moon" of the Angel Lilith. “The rebirth of the Evangelion ushers in a profound mutation of urban space—the displacement of the downtown office towers (a reference to Japan’s busted real estate Bubble) and the technologies of the Japanese keiretsu by vast gouts of biological material.”17

Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) Tokyo-3 retracted into the Geofront With the “Angels” in pursuit of Adam, the city has become a battleground, an arena for the “Angels” and the “Evas”. When attacked, the technological metropolis Tokyo-3 can be withdrawn into the vast cavern of the below Geofront. It is a completely retractable structure, built out of fear, for survival, for nostalgia of the old Tokyo. As described by Misato, Tokyo-3 is “key to rebuilding our world...A fortress for all mankind”.

17

Redmond, Dennis, ‘Anime and East Asian Culture: Neon Genesis Evangelion’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24.2 (2007), 183–88

Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) Shinji contemplating his existence In this universe technology has become fundamental to the survival of the human race, evident by the proliferation and the consistent noise pollution of technological apparatus.18 “This merging hybridity of seemingly authentic matter and technology gaps the unknown world with the familiar. For Shinji, this integration with technology is much more immediate and pervasive in his otherwise free life. Starting off, the only reason Shinji is remotely involved…is because he is compatible with, and therefore capable of piloting, Eva Unit 01: a driving fact he is well aware of. Shadowing his daily grind is the knowledge that without technology— or the impending end of the world, for that matter—his life is meaningless.”19 The contradiction between relentless development of technology and the free will of the individual diffuses. Anno strives to define “what it is to be human in relation to the machine, a machine that increasingly seems to dominate, to construct, and ultimately to interfere with the reality of human nature.” 20

Hoffer, Heike, Aesthetics of Destruction: Music and the Worldview of Ikari Shinji in Neon Genesis Evangelion, 2012 Savoy, Katherine. The Artificial Restoration of Agency through Sex and Technology in Neon Genesis Evangelion, University of Victoria, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Volume 14, Issue 3, 2014 20 Napier, Susan J, When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain, Science Fiction Studies 29.3, 2002, pg. 418-35.

18 19

Jiji Press, Mishima’s speech (1970) Given the overshadowing of Japan and its culture by the modern capital and globalisation of Tokyo, many have yearned for the return of an irretrievable past.21 On Wednesday Nov. 25, 1970, acclaimed author turned right wing extremist Kimitake Hiraoka, generally known under the pseudonym of Yukio Mishima attempted a coup. Mishima and four members of his self-styled militia, the Shield Society took captive their commandment at Japan’s military headquarters at Ichigaya in central Tokyo. 22 Capitalizing on a prearranged meeting with General Kanetoshi Mashita, “Mishima began innocently enough by showing the general his prized Seki no Magoroku sword, but then, without warning, Mishima’s men suddenly took the general hostage.”23 Mishima demanded all present at the military headquarters to assemble in front of the commandment’s office. Mishima delivered a valiant speech from the general’s balcony, he advocated for the restoration of the emperor’s and the Japanese military’s political power. Mishima rejected Japan’s passive acceptance of a constitution and American occupation that denied their existence, “Japan had lost sight of its fundamental principles. The entire nation had sold its soul for money. Hypocrisy was everywhere. Politics and business were infested with greed and corruption. The people had forsaken their own history and traditions. All that lay ahead was spiritual emptiness. Mishima’s final question… “Where has the spirit of the samurai gone to?”24

Time Magazine, Scene of seppuku (ritual suicide) of Mishima (1970) Despite Mishima’s passionate outcry, he was unable to rally the respect or support of his fellow servicemen. Mishima retreated from the balcony, back inside the general’s office, where with the assistance of his militia, slicing across his abdominal wall whilst being beheaded he committed seppuku (ritual suicide). “Mishima is not just an embodiment of the psychological trauma Japan has lived through in the modern age, but representative of something with which people are… always struggling: knowing how far to stay in communion with the past and how thoroughly to reinvent oneself for the future.” 25

Brumann, Christoph., and Evelyn Schulz, Urban Spaces in Japan Cultural and Social Perspectives, London; New York: Routledge, 2012 Rankin, Andrew, Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait, 2018 23 Flanagan, Damian, Yukio Mishima, 2014 24 Rankin, pg.171 25 Flanagan, pg. 242 21 22

Hayao Miyazaki, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) The Sea of Decay In the cinematic world of celebrated animator Hayao Miyazaki, most notably in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the future is not a reinvention but a retreat from the modern. Miyazaki projects a “strange and ambivalent future for human society; thousands of years earlier, a great war unleashed the Fire Giants, now-mythical superbeings created by man to wreak apocalyptic destruction, creating a world in which mutants and cyborgs are best adapted for survival.”26 The metropolis is left behind, humanity has returned to the rural, the few survivors of the great war are now fragmented due to the unpredictable nature of environment, within what has become the Sea of Decay. Miyazaki illustrates nature’s resilience, the mutated insects and plants are flourishing in the postapocalyptic landscape, attempting to purify the soil that human civilization has tainted. Under threat of this environmental crisis, is the Valley of the Wind, a utopia reminiscent of a medieval village. It is here where Nausicaä, the young princess of the valley, studies the deadly wildlife and, hopes to discover how both the sea of the decay and humanity can coexist. The sea’s continual sprawl threatens the few remaining inhabitable lands on the planet and incites territorial war. The opposing state of the Tolmekians occupy the valley whilst retrieving the embryo of the Fire Giant from the nearby wreckage of an aircraft. The Tolmekians grow and use the Fire Giant to deal a devastating blow to the mutated landscape, in aspiration of reclaiming the land. The resulting explosion has little effect and enrages the landscape and the inhabiting mutant insects, conveying Japan’s historic traumas of the second world war and the origin that caused this climatic conflict.

Hayao Miyazaki, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) Fire Giant explosion Miyazaki illustrates that the natural will survive and return, even if it takes thousands of years to recover. It is mankind’s responsibility to learn to live in harmony alongside the forces of nature. The film symbolises Miyazaki’s criticism and fear of mankind’s irrational use of technology without truly understanding its ramifications. 27 That mankind cannot be trusted, and that nature must be shown the respect it deserves, a belief that has slowly been degraded by global and modernisation.

Hoad, J. N, Finding a Queer Touch of the Future in Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 2018 Guitron, Steven, Messages from Japan’s Most Famous Animator: Feminist and Environmentalist Themes in Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Spirited Away, 2013 26 27

Aya Takano, The World in Two Hundred Years (2017 oil on canvas, 130.3 x 194 cm) Aya Takano’s painting, The World in Two Hundred Years depicts a future where the urban is left behind, and the rural is in frame. A journey from the contemporary machine civilization of Japan to the euphoric “Jelly Civilization” 28. In which all forms of life connect, communicate, and coexist in a strange, distorted but utopian realm. A glimpse of what mankind is capable of conceiving if only we were to free ourselves of the shackles of the binding societal, technological, and political systems. The incapsulated moment in the painting evokes a fascination for the primordial, creating paradox in which the ancient coexists with the futuristic.

Takano’s evocation of utopian realities and interconnectivity are the product of psychological escapism, uncensored thoughts amidst a culture inundated by preconception, censorship, and two-dimensionality. Takano rejects a deliberate, pre-conceived attempt to play into popular culture: “What everyone sees as young girls in my work are really the liberated, vibrant beings that exists within us all. I do not believe that I am attempting to emphasise sexuality. What I am showing is a state where we hold on to nothing and yet are one with everything. It is a form of ecstasy.” 29 For Takano, imagination is the key to understanding reality, a reality which contains no constraints, constructs or conventions. Where “everything is made of a jelly-like soft substance which will eventually dissolve into the soil.”30

Takano, Aya, The Jelly Civilization Chronicle, 2017 Manifesto, It's My Utopia: Aya Takano, 2013 https://www.manifesto.asia/post/468/Its-My-Utopia-Aya-Takano [accessed 09/01/2020] 30 Tsui, Denise, Aya Takano on Manifesting a Utopia in the Imaginary World of Art https://www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/aya-takano-onmanifesting-a-utopia-in-the-imaginary-world-of-art/ [accessed 09/01/2020] 28 29

Conclusion The works of Otomo and Anno, portray the entanglement of technology with the death and evolution of the metropolis. Mori and Kon, expose the fragility and reality of Japan’s technophilia and pursuit of technological enlightenment. Whilst Miyazaki and Takano, critic Japan’s diminishing values as a result of the adoption of the modern and technological. Despite the fictional nature of these speculations, they reflect the reality, the contemporary, and historic experiences of Japan and its desire of escapism. This cultural crisis in Japan can not only been seen in the conflicting attitudes towards the interface between humans and technology.

But also, through the complexity of identity in relation to the technological. “This problematization of human identity in the context of technology seems to be leading in increasingly apocalyptic directions…an object of aesthetic and ideological interest” 31 in the space of fictional speculation. It is clear that this apocalyptic mindset has been nourished by the country’s historic traumas, the resulting fear, paranoia, and scepticism permeate these fictions. They depict the decaying relationship with the technological, the once fruitful economic esteem of the nation, which has led to this increasingly complex interface. Ultimately, this essay does not provide a blueprint for the idealist projection of the rural or urban, it highlights the ambiguity of the utopian and dystopian, evoking an idea of Japan's collective imagination of the future, the immediate experience of technology and the relevance of thereof.

Sachiko Kazama, Nonhuman Crossing 2013 (1972)

31

Napier, pg. 423