Manga Dreaming

The ‘irresponsible images’ of cyberpunk in Japanese Animation and Comics

Craig Norris, PhD. University of South Australia. 1996.

Norris, C. (1996). Manga Dreaming: The ‘irresponsible images’ of cyberpunk in Japanese Animation and Comics. Honours Thesis, University of South Australia, Adelaide.

2025 note: This thesis was originally submitted in December 1995 for my Communication Studies honours program (awarded in 1996). In 2025 I have made simple edits to improve grammar, expression, and comprehension while preserving the original content and insights. These updates aim to enhance readability and ensure the work remains accessible to a broader audience. No changes have been made to the arguments or research as they were presented in 1996.

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Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Part 1: Blueprints on the Destruction of the World
• 1.1 What is Anime and Manga?
• 1.2 Animating the World’s Worst Nightmare
• 1.3 The Guilty Text
• 1.4 Sanctified Misunderstanding
• 1.5 The Early History of Japanese Manga and Anime
• 1.6 The Dance and Dream of Images
• 1.7 ‘Manga as Air’
• Part 2: ‘Manga’s Take on Contemporary Identity’
• 2.1 Electro Blood
• 2.2 Heart Core
• 2.3 Ultimate Questions
• 2.4 ‘More Human than Human’
• 2.5 Cultural Differences
• 2.6 Religious High-Tech
• 2.7 ‘Time to Die’
• 2.8 Ghost in the Shell
• 2.9 Disconnect
• Conclusion: Cyborg Language
• Appendices
• References

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Part 1: Blueprints on the Destruction of the World

1.1 What is Anime and Manga?

What sets anime and manga apart are their unique narratives. A mysterious force can transform a teenager into a devil creature of immense power, who then graphically slaughters a massing legion of evil spirits and monsters attempting to invade human reality. A young girl is found in a junkyard, rebuilt by a kindly doctor and begins her journey to discover her identity and soul in a dangerous and deadly environment. A cyborg attains consciousness and attempts to create a new world order of perfection, thereby allowing its rule over the inadequate humanity. A high school student’s gender shifts when they come into contact with hot or cold water. Unknown forces torture and consume people, grant them immense powers and transform them into monsters, cyborgs, animals, ghosts, anything.

The stories above represent a small fraction of the vast Japanese phenomenon known as manga (literally translated as ‘irresponsible images’) and anime (the Japanese word for animation). These two media are more than comic books and animation as we have known them in Australia. They have been a crucial part of Japanese culture since at least the end of World War Two, yet have, until recently, received only scant attention from the Western media. However, recently, around Australia, Japanese animation and comics have slowly been developing a small but growing fan base in comic book stores, fan clubs, and on various commercial and social Internet sites. Thanks to a growing marketing drive from American and British companies, they are rapidly becoming a mainstream part of the Australian cultural scene.

So recent is this appropriation of forms that discussion of anime and manga in popular Western magazines (both fan and academic publications) reveals an interesting, if not entirely productive, attempt to understand and explain this strange new form. On the theoretical side, there is an unfortunate and sizeable lack of diverse and rigorous inquiry. Most articles and publications focused on Japanese animation and popular culture that are available to English-speaking audiences are, unsurprisingly, written by Westerners for Western readers. While they may include translated works by Japanese authors, these are often targeted at a largely uninformed or confused Western audience. There is a significant shortage of translated writings from Japanese authors in this field for those wishing to go deeper.

More earnest and public dialogue has been established online between Western and Eastern fans of this genre. Online groups, such as rec.arts.anime and rec.arts.manga, on the newsgroup listing and individual subscriber addresses, like that for the translation project of Video Girl Ai (1992), display the importance of the internet for this genre. It is a significant emerging area that is often overlooked in discussions of anime and manga.

The phenomenon of fan culture on the internet and in clubs and societies is diverse and dynamic. For instance, one strong group within the anima and manga ‘community’ comprises what could loosely be labelled ‘purists’: those who believe dubbing English or American voices over anime is blasphemy and that no alteration should be made to the original Japanese work apart from subtitling. These purists have formed a stable and powerful force in maintaining a recognised subculture centred on Japanese pop culture, specifically manga and anime, influencing the growing merchandising and appropriation of anime in the West and serving as an important source of information.

Fan subcultures play a crucial role in circulating and localising anime and manga. There is growing academic interest in how these communities appropriate and shape manga and anime to fit their local contexts. For instance, Andrew Leonard’s (1995) article, “Heads Up, Mickey,” in Wired, and Philip Brophy’s (1995) “Osamu Tezuka: Glimpses of a Fantastic World” in Film News raises interesting questions. Brophy, for example, explores why many Westerners mistakenly believe that the popular anime series Astro Boy was produced in the United States when, in fact, it was made in Japan. Brophy (1995) suggests that

“how readily an American dialogue track can cast any production in the shadow of its accent” may contribute to this misconception (p. 7).

For further exploration, consider Chapter 8, “Anime in Britain,” from Helen McCarthy’s (1993) book Anime! A Beginner’s Guide to Japanese Animation, as well as Jeff Yang’s (1992) article “Anime Rising”. Other helpful works include Adams and Hill Jr.’s (1991) article “Protest and Rebellion: Fantasy Themes in Japanese Comics” and Kinko Ito’s (1994) sociological paper “Images of Women in Weekly Male Comic Magazines in Japan”.

As is well established by academic theory, texts are not ideologically neutral. Animated films like Akira did not emerge in a vacuum; they are products of a culture that possesses distinct and unique aesthetic values, as well as specific methods of creating images and narratives. To reference Walter Benjamin (1973), they are shaped by the production processes of their time. A considerable amount of literature has explored the visual aspects of Japanese culture and the impact that a ‘comic-obsessed culture’ like Japan’s can have on perception and consciousness.

Annette Roman (1995), the editor of Manga Vizion, a recent manga anthology published in the United States, asks:

Want to know why manga take up nearly a third of all Japanese publishing? Why Japan uses more wood pulp for manga than it does toilet paper? Why one Japanese neurophsyiologist speculated that the nonlinear logic used to read words and pictures together could be a factor in Japan’s affinity for computers … and why Mitsubishi engineers claimed their favourite manga helped them produce better plastics? (I did not make this up!) (p. 2)

The editor pleads, “I did not make this up!” in a tongue-in-cheek jibe. With these words, the editor presents the unbelievable strangeness of anime and manga to a foreigner. Anime and manga captivate Western audiences with their distinctive graphic and textual style, which thrives on what is not present. To a first-time reader or viewer, meaning may occur through evocation and suggestion rather than through explicit revelations. For the new fan, watching anime or reading manga becomes an experience of grasping words and images while constantly yearning for something more beyond them. It’s an act of actively theorising and guessing what the image represents and diving deeper into the layers of meaning it holds.

The lack of a guidebook and this yearning for something more reflects the experience of suddenly discovering Japanese animation and comic books. There’s an awareness that a rich history lies behind it, but accessing that history is elusive. While some references resonate and the basic shapes and stories seem familiar, much remains different and strange. These anime and manga are not like the cartoons typically shown on Saturday mornings; they can be adult, violent, and are not intended for children.

As Peter Bishop (1992) says, “(images) are not the same as “optical pictures, even if they operate like pictures … We do not literally see images or hear metaphors; we perform an operation of insight which is a seeing-through or hearing into” (p. 13).

In this context, a ‘Westerner’ with no prior experience of the Japanese ‘condition’ or language often constructs meaning and appropriates images and text for personal purposes and desires. Readers feel that they are never ‘provided with a definitive statement like, “This is the meaning of the manga.” Instead, as will be developed in Part 2 of this thesis, understanding manga and anime from a Western, Anglo-Australian perspective involves ‘exploring the desires, resistance, and pathways presented by anime and manga for this audience. This exploration reveals the diverse and dynamic qualities that manga and anime offer, which can reshape our ideas of identity and subjectivity. As Peter Bishop (1992, p. 18) suggests:

To denaturalise images is not to unmask them, but to don death masks ourselves and to join in the dance and dream of images; to see ourselves as an image among images. The task is therefore not to reveal the hidden, but to follow the trace of the visible to where it seems to become invisible.

However, some academic writing (see Adams & Hill 1991; Ito 1994; Ledden, Sean & Fejes 1987) on manga still relies on the totalising discourse of psychoanalytic theory, drawing mainly upon Freudian theory with its gender theories with scant attention to issues of transgressed gender shifts or subversions of the body through technology.  Articles as Adams & Lester Hill Jr.’s (1991) Protest and Rebellion: Fantasy Themes in Japanese Comics, Kinko Ito’s (1994) Images of Women in Weekly Male Comic Magazines in Japan, and Sean Ledden & Fred Fejes’s (1987) Female Gender Role Patterns in Japanese Comic Magazines mainly dwell on depictions of women and the oppressive and totalising ‘male’ gaze, trapping any possibility of radical or subversive potential within the closed boundaries of male/female binaries and patriarchal oppressiveness. Such positions overshadow the playfulness that often occurs within the text (see my discussion of this in part 2) and come at the expense of a more inclusive and open-ended understanding that emphasises issues of access, freedom and playfulness rather than command, control and information.

Fan discourse and fan communities are rich with themes of access, freedom, and playfulness, many of which remain under-theorised. Fans regularly contribute articles to popular computer and arcade game magazines. For instance, Janice Tong writes articles for Gamestar, an Australian computer gaming magazine published by ACP Publisher in Sydney. Other notable publications include the British magazine Super Play, dedicated to the Super Nintendo.

There was also some cross-over in demographics between tabletop role-playing games and manga and anime as seen in White Wolf mainly known for its games like Vampire: The Masquerade and its publishing arm that distributed the Canadian based anime and manag magazine Protoculture Addicts. Additionally, there are magazines entirely devoted to anime and manga. In Australia, two commercial fanzines are produced by major distributors of anime: Mangazine, published by British Manga Entertainment, and Kiseki Fanzine, released by Kiseki Films.

There are also several international publications focused specifically on manga and anime that one can find in some specialty comic book stores in Australia, including Animage, published by Tokuma Shoten; Animedia, published by Gakken Shoten; Animerica, issued by Viz Communications in San Francisco, USA; Anime UK, published by Anime UK Press in London, England; Anime V, published by Gakken Shonen; the Japanese-language magazine Newtype, published by Kadokawa Shoten; and Protoculture Addicts, published by Ianus Publications in Canada.

Many of these efforts aim to legitimise the significance of mature animation and comics, challenging the traditional perception in mainstream Western media that they are only for children. While there are some introductory discussions about manga and anime, in-depth analysis is scarce regarding how these foreign forms are being integrated into Western culture, including Australian culture. Additionally, there is a need to explore the opportunities created by the unique elements that anime and manga bring to the comic and animation formats, particularly emerging digital editing technologies. For instance, an interview with Buichi Terasawa in Multi-Media (1995) touches on these themes.

On a more commercial note, interactive computer role-playing games, many of which were spin-offs from anime or manga series, or even inspired some anime, such as Dragon Knight.  Some discussion has occurred in this regard, such as Alan Cholodenko’s work, as well as the Illusion of Life and Life of Illusion conferences held in 1988 and 1995. The Life of Illusion conference, in particular, focused on post-World War II animation in the United States and, more importantly, Japan. The conference highlighted the need for new ways of interpreting and experiencing the complex heterogeneous possibilities of the animated form. The theoretical base used must be able to shift between the boundaries often crossed by anime and manga to examine the possibilities of the word, sound, and image, as well as the longing for more than the word, sound, and image can convey.  As Alan Cholodenko (1991) says of the study of animation:

To theorise about animation implies seeking out animation itself, speaks of an order in between the multifaceted mobile sign that critical theory, high and low culture, liberal studies, film studies, psychoanalytic film study link together in an attempt to probe the very idea of animation itself and its … relation with animation style, animation theory, animation form and the televisual.  To think about animation as film and as television and as an idea suggests that all are complexly intertwined with each other. (p. XX).

          Although the cultural subtleties of some anime/manga may not be fully appreciated, the unique and provocative style of much of this media certainly elicits a strong reaction, for, ‘in essence, it’s not only the way characters are drawn that is unique, but the whole perception of what cartoons should or should not be.’ (Tong, Janice 1994, p.19). The issue of control and command is crucial (‘what cartoons should or should not be’). It becomes important to engage with and challenge any theory or model that attempts to restrict the diversity of a medium or applies totalising ideals to regulate and control this medium, whether this be the concerns of a right-wing Christian lobby group concerned with the effects of violent and pornographic material will have on children, or academic research searching for a causal link between violence portrayed in the media and aggressive behaviour in ‘real life’.  It becomes vital in an environment that threatens to be dominated by reductive, simplistic causal models for academics to pursue pluralistic and wide-ranging research in these areas. Stuart Cunningham (1992) details the issues surrounding violence and the media as they relate to academic paradigms, community and industry interests and concerns, and policy decisions in Australia. Notably, he focuses on the importance of cultural studies to ‘articulate alternative conceptualisations of violence in accessible terms [to the general public and other interested parties]’ (p. 160). Thus, the issue of sex and violence becomes the manifestation of the tensions and sliding boundaries between text, image and viewer in the manga/anime genre.  As Shaviro (1993) suggests:

In the realm of visual fascination, sex and violence have a much more intense and disturbing impact than they do in literature or any other medium; they affect the viewer in a shockingly direct way.  Violent and pornographic films anchor desire and perception in the agitated and fragmented body.  These “tactile convergences” are at once the formal means of expression and the thematic content of a film (p. 55)

Although Shaviro is discussing film theory in relation to specific film texts, the alternative film theory he aspires towards is well-suited to a study of manga and anime, exploring new ways of looking at the emergence of something that does not quite conform to traditional, structured approaches.  I am advocating for a cross-disciplinary approach to unpack my relationship with manga and anime. This approach draws from established theories, including mythopoeic, literary, and psychoanalytic theories, while also incorporating emerging perspectives from alternative film theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Before discussing a brief history of anime and manga, I will outline some broader debates that intersect with any attempt to theorise the imagery found in anime and manga. These debates fall into the following three sections: firstly, animating the world’s worst nightmare, which details the relationship between the fictional manga/anime text and the ‘real world’ focusing on the tenuous and constantly sliding nature of this relationship; the guilty text and sanctified misunderstandings will detail the problematic relationship which confronts my readings of anime and manga as a Western, Anglo-Australian reader.  I do this to foreground the idea that, as Rosemary Jackson (1981, p. 36) suggests,

… the fantastic is a mode of writing which enters a dialogue with the “real” and incorporates that dialogue as part of its essential structure.

This ‘real’ lived experience exists both for the ‘original’ Japanese audience and the ‘appropriating’ Australian audience.

1.2 Animating the World’s Worst Nightmare

“The ego of antiquity and its consciousness of itself was different from our own, less exclusive, less sharply defined.  It was, as it were, opened behind; it received much from the past and by repeating it gave it presentness again.”

(Thomas Mann, 1947)

Phillip Brophy made a revealing observation during the 1995 Life Of Illusion conference, commenting that the Japanese have a particular way of using new techniques to reveal something from the past or to give a new twist to something very old, and likewise, the inverse capacity to use old techniques to reveal something very new and different.  While watching Japanese animation, one may experience a distinctly unsettling feeling that Baudrillard’s (1983) simulacra is at play, as specific images and events resonate with a historical intensity that appears to shift the context of representation.  Brophy points to the example of the magical growth of a tree during the anime My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki, 1988), which blooms and expands in its billowing form, suggesting the distinct characteristic of a mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion.  Brophy (1995a) goes on to say that ‘Events are no longer fixed and temporal as they may once have seemed, such as the use of historical images, [which] in different contexts represent something different.’ 

This subtle but effective challenge to the representation of power, time and reality cannot be left at the simple stage of images no longer referring to a reality that was prior to and independent of the image, as this idea becomes inadequate when the flesh itself becomes penetrated and violated by the image.  A new perspective on the body emerges, reflecting our modern anxieties and our attempts to exert control over it (for a more detailed and comprehensive discussion of this idea, see my discussion of the cyborg body in Part 2).

One of the most notorious and groundbreaking anime series, Chojin Densetsu Urotsukidoji (1987), also known as Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend or The Wandering Kid, tells the story of the coming of ‘the Overfiend,’ who will unite the three worlds of humanity, demons, and spirits.  It is a violent and sexually charged work that pushes the boundaries of graphic depictions of violence and horror. However, it is not just a collection of images depicting the apocalypse and demonic possession. Urotsukidoji is a dense and complex narrative that explores the personal destruction of the soul, examining its implications for human morality, religion, and philosophy.  McCarthy (1993) relates this eroticism and violence to Japanese folklore and postwar trauma, highlighting how this type of horror in anime represents an aesthetic overload and symbolic disruption reflecting technological anxieties and fear of identity dissolution.

The body itself is the landscape and manifestation of violence and desire in anime. As a teenager becomes the legendary destructive Overfiend and struggles with a body in constant flux and transition from human to non-human, the significance of the body in this context becomes intense and profound.  Similar motifs of bodily transgression and anthropomorphism cling to the cyborg machine/flesh, body/identity confusion of the young girl who has immense psychic powers and becomes an organic machine beast in GenoCyber (1994) or the young student who accidentally becomes infected with a parasitical element that is an alien form of advanced combat technology known as ‘bio-booster armour’ in The Guyver (1989), and the unstable cyborgs in AD-Police (1990) such as the RoboCop style character Billy.  The images, especially those based in cyberspace or those depicting monstrous or mechanical penetrations within the body, point to a critical shift in the relationship between the image and the body.

Anime, such as Urotsukidoji, visually and thematically blur the boundaries between body, image and identity. As Shaviro (1993, p. 138) says: “Media images no longer refer to a real world that would be (in principle) prior to and independent of them, for they penetrate, volatize, and thereby (re)constitute the real.”

1.3 The Guilty Text

What happens when Western readers try to understand Japanese animation and comics?  Manga and anime offer pleasures that go beyond mere escapism from cultural or social constraints and cannot be reduced to a historical survey of the forces driving cultural cross-fertilisation. What if the forms contained within manga and anime are resistant towards Western academic classifications of identity, empowerment, false consciousness, and critical understanding? I have chosen these particular issues because they represent the most common areas associated with ‘fantasy’ by academics. As Andrew Ross (1989, p. 193) suggests,

“To read these conventional narratives as if they directly contributed to “harmful effects” in the lived patriarchal world is not only to directly equate the work of fantasy with a notion of “false consciousness,” but also to patronise their readers as mindlessly self-destructive.”

How far am I trying to possess something that has already possessed me, a medium based on imparting life and evoking the soul, the medium of animation, and an appreciation of another culture, another place, Japan?  Brophy’s suggestion of a new twist on an old idea offers the possibility of a subversive reading of dominant Western myths, ranging from identification to epistemological issues of the body, image and identity.

William Routt presented the concept of the ‘soul’ and ‘life’ of animation in his 1995 paper, De Anima, at the ‘Life of Illusion Conference’. Routt’s paper focused on the manga and anime Battle Angel Alita and traces the meaning of the word animation from “the action of imparting life, vitality, or (as the sign of life) motion” to its Latin roots of “air, breath, life, soul, mind”. As Routt suggests,

“This sense of “animation” is metaphorical, and metaphors are interesting partly because of how they preserve original sense at the same time that they make new meanings. Metaphorical usage makes almost any phrase of contemporary language a vehicle of history, representing the past inescapably in all speaking and writing. No matter how many times or in how many contexts we use “animation” to mean “cartoons”, the sense of imparting life or being alive continues to be evoked. Moreover, of course, the reverse is also true. The word confuses literal and figural meanings, presentation and representation.”

It is with similar sentiments that I also evoke the ‘life’ and ‘soul’ of animation, in this case, to display the rich history of the word’s meaning and the profound and fundamental questions of ‘life’ and the ‘soul’ that animation hints at.

Identification is one of the central issues I will discuss in greater detail in Part 2: Manga’s Take on Contemporary Identity. However, briefly, here I intend to show that anime and manga expand the possibilities for multiple identifications.  Here, my definition of identification rests on a far broader interpretation than simple empathy and association. I am referring to how we weave different threads that represent a complex mixture of self and other, showing that both are related and part of the same system of a never-quite-stable identity.  In the manga Ghost in the Shell, the character of Major Kusanagi must ‘cross over’ and fuse with the Artificial Intelligence entity known as The Puppeteer.

As the director of the anime, Mamoru Oshii (1995), noted, the central theme lies in the crossing over from one consciousness to another. This thesis charts the ‘cross-over’ point from West to East as I explore the possibilities and resistance provoked by the anime/manga text, highlighting the ‘excruciatingly unresolvable ambivalence’ (Shaviro, p. ix) that characterises my relationship with the text and image. Here, I am interested in the point where the reader or viewer leaves the text or walks out of the cinema and challenges the private imagination with the politics of the public, similarly the way feminism redefined notions of the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ with the idea that “the personal is the political” (Ross, p. 176).  Just as Joseph Campbell poetically rallied for a call to arms by the modern hero at the end of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), it is necessary for those researching the area of manga to challenge established institutions, models and prejudices of the community at large on behalf of the ‘gun dreaming’ Cyborg who, as Campbell has said of the heroic archetype, ‘cannot, indeed must not, wait for his (sic) community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalised avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding’. Although this notion rests on a rather romantic ideal of the individual’s ability for progressive change, I believe Campbell’s infectious optimism and enthusiasm for his subject, as well as his ability to recognise the flow of change, are important aspects of this topic. 

I use the term “Gun Dreaming” to capture the slightly surreal and unusual naming strategy employed in some manga titles. “Gun Dreaming” adapts the popular manga and anime series “Battle Angel Alita,” originally titled “Gunnm” (Gun Dreams) in Japanese. Those interested in this title change and the marketing strategies behind it see Fred Burke’s justification for this decision in Battling with Angelic Alita! Animerica 1.8, October 1993.

Campbell’s (1949) concept of “sanctified misunderstanding” serves as a valuable framework for examining the representations of anime and manga. It allows us to explore how and why these forms of media gained prominence while also addressing and correcting some common misconceptions. For instance, it is important to dispel the idea that the Japanese ‘stole’ the art of comics from America or that all manga, as suggested by the literal translation of the term (which means “irresponsible pictures”), are inherently pornographic, violent, and offensive forms of expression. Many in the West tend to associate this genre solely with children’s entertainment (Staros, 1995). See, for instance, Peter Hadfeld’s comment in More Strip than Comic from Punch (1988, pp. 36-37), where he writes, ‘Comics are yet another borrowed idea that the Japanese have managed to adapt and refine to their idiosyncratic tastes.’ He goes on to compare the ‘combination of lesbian sex, sado-masochism, rape, bondage, blood and violence’ (p. 37) in Japanese comics to the classic ‘archetypes’ of British comics Dan Dare and Eagle with the wholesome, youthful, clean approach to action and adventure.

1.4 Sanctified Misunderstanding {#section-1-4}

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1.5 The Early History of Japanese Manga and Anime {#section-1-5}

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1.6 The Dance and Dream of Images {#section-1-6}

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1.7 ‘Manga as Air’ {#section-1-7}

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Part 2: ‘Manga’s Take on Contemporary Identity’ {#part-2}

2.1 Electro Blood {#section-2-1}

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2.2 Heart Core {#section-2-2}

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2.3 Ultimate Questions {#section-2-3}

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2.4 ‘More Human than Human’ {#section-2-4}

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2.5 Cultural Differences {#section-2-5}

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2.6 Religious High-Tech {#section-2-6}

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2.7 ‘Time to Die’ {#section-2-7}

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2.8 Ghost in the Shell {#section-2-8}

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2.9 Disconnect {#section-2-9}

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Conclusion: Cyborg Language {#conclusion}

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Appendices {#appendices}

Appendix A

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Appendix B

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References {#references}

Anime Cited

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Manga Cited

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Bibliography

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