Manga Dreaming

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

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

The recognition of Japan’s role in exporting its animation and, to a lesser degree, comics to the West has been, until recently, an almost unnoticeable trend.  One of the reasons for this may have been cultural appropriation, which removed or localised many foreign elements of anime series, most noticeably by dubbing English dialogue over the original Japanese and removing culturally foreign peculiarities.  Marketing looms as the largest guiding hand in this decision and has created a hotly disputed view of what precisely anime is.  Has the decision to dub instead of subtitle irrevocably altered the artistic and cultural uniqueness of anime, or has it opened up the field to greater access for people who may never have encountered anime?  One consequence of the marketing decisions in the U.S. and the U.K. has been to reduce the multifaceted nature of manga and anime, which, in Japan, stretches across every genre: science fiction, drama, comedy, detective, horror, action, historical, educational and much more; and represent it instead as a single, sensationalist genre that is easy to sell on a ‘novelty’ ticket as an ‘adult’ cartoon.  As Anthony Haden-Guest (1996) writes

“Most anime that hit the export market, though, are of a specific genre.  They feature superpowered humans, lethal bimbos, robots, monsters, energetic sex, explicit death, and mass annihilation” (p. 44).

The main focus of my thesis is on a genre that has been particularly effective for this marketing strategy: the cyberpunk genre. The promotion of this genre, and anime and manga more broadly, appears to centre on its adult themes of sex and violence. However, it is crucial to challenge this emerging misconception promoted by marketing practices that this represents all anime and manga. In reality, anime and manga encompass a much broader range of themes and ideas.  It would be more appropriate to think of the anime and manga industry as equivalent to the Hollywood movie industry both in their breadth of genres and potential for individual creative style and direction.

There have always been various media to tell both old and new stories, including film, radio, novels, and more.  For Japan, it appears that animation, comics, and graphic novels have captured the imaginative quest for escape, understanding, and entertainment at this point.  The popularity of this medium for sheer storytelling power can be seen in the statistics with a steady ‘rise in the number of manga books and magazines published annually, from 1 billion 1980 to 2.27 billion in 1994,’ (Kondo, 1995, p. 3) which lends an element of truth to the often quoted fact that ‘Japan now uses more paper for its comics than it does for its toilet paper’ (Schodt, 1983, p. 14). So, how did this popularity of comics and animation occur? What changes for the future are in store with increased international interest? How does the productive process of anime and manga that exists within the social, political and historical systems of Japan affect the ability of a Western audience to identify with anime and manga characters and narrative and stylistic forms?

Indeed, how much of my own relationship with the image in manga and anime is based on a desire to escape into the exotic world of another popular culture without having to experience the social hardships and constraints that exist within that society?  Is it the ultimate luxury of the voyeur to indulge in this form of sanctioned, sympathetic (mis)understanding?  These questions pose a problem, revealing the anxiety that exists within the pleasures I find in anime/manga.  These questions threaten to coagulate my inquiry into an undesirable relativism of cross-cultural ignorance.  These unanswered questions form an uneasy backdrop to the conventional history of anime and manga that follows.  The point is that definitive and totalising claims cannot be made of the emerging and dynamic medium of anime and manga.  However, a possible line of inquiry that may illuminate this dense, inquisitive section is the issue of language as it relates to avoiding the Japanese original and understanding the subtitled or dubbed Western version.

The use of language within anime English dubs or maintaining the original Japanese spoken language with English subtitles is a constant source of debate among fans, revealing much about the marketing strategy of Western companies towards anime, as well as a fundamental shift in how an audience is perceived to relate to a text.  A knowledge of the Japanese language is possibly the most significant difficulty in understanding amine and manga.  As Adams & Hill Jr. (1991) state in their study of Japanese comics, ‘Japanese is a language characterised by indeterminateness’ (p. 102), made even more complex by the emphasis on slang and regional differences used in some anime and manga, such as the linguistic differences between rural and urban Japanese in the anime I can hear the sea (ocean) produced by Studio Ghibli. These make subtitling a nightmare of uncertainty and approximation, placing many Western fans at the mercy of dubious fan subs or the alternative of garish English dubs. The challenges of translation became clearer to me when I subscribed to the Video Girl Ai translation project on the internet, one of the many fan-initiated translation efforts currently being sweated over, where fans attempt to translate their favourite manga or anime and, in this case, set up a community centred around this exhausting task. Numerous flame wars erupt between these fans as they constantly revise translations to capture the flavour of the original text and honour the author’s intentions. In Rumiko Takahashi’s works, such as Urusei Yatsura [Those Obnoxious Aliens], Ranma 1/2, and Maison Ikkoku, readers encounter numerous translation difficulties due to puns in Japanese names and slang, as well as cultural references that are difficult to appreciate. As Takahashi (Princess of the Manga, 1989) said of the popularity of her work in the West:

“If it’s really true, then I’m truly happy.  But I must also confess as to being rather puzzled as to why my work should be so well received.  It’s my intention to be putting in a lot of Japanese references, Japanese lifestyle and feelings … even concepts such as a subtle awareness of the four seasons.  I really have to wonder if foreign readers can understand all this, and if so, how?”

How do foreign readers attempt to understand this?  Are there, in a Jungian (1964) sense, ‘universal themes’ and archetypal images played out in Takahashi’s stories that transgress language and cultural particulars?  Or is the attraction in the experience of exploring an area that is both familiar to us and at the same time noticeably different from and ‘other’ to anything popular culture can provide in the West?

To discuss Japanese anime and manga is to understand areas of difference and ‘otherness’ that threaten to descend into notions of ‘us’ as Westerners versus ‘the other’ of the Orient with all the associative themes of culture, race, nationalism, the exotic, exploited past of colonial history and the cultural consumption of ‘otherness’ in non-Western images and ideas.  Under the influence of post-colonial authors such as Edward W. Said I am aware of the tense positioning I am creating between myself as a white Australian male and my study of a popular form of Japanese culture.  I deliberately use the clumsy term ‘white Australian male’ to raise the issue of race and gender as it relates to my relationship with the text.  Raising these issues begs the questions, should these terms be important?  Is it even productive to attempt to frame anime and manga in such a reductive environment?  How do these terms fit into a multicultural society of Australia that attempts to praise diversity whilst never quite wanting to deal with the dominant Anglo myths that still cling to my perceptions of Japan? Consider, for instance, the recent advertising and general media coverage given to the 50th anniversary of the Victory in the Pacific in the Second World War, with all its notions of a victory for democracy and a dominant culture still resting, if somewhat frayed, in the ideals of a white British colonial empire.

Contemplating these questions emphasises the importance of appreciating the cultural, historical, social, and political backgrounds, as well as a knowledge of (or lack of) the Japanese language, that influence both the production of, and my understanding of, comics and animation. Kinko Ito (1994) emphasises a similar point with their call for a methodology resting on a visual sociology and content analysis of manga as “a way to systematically organise and summarise both manifest and latent content of communication.” (Light & Keller, as cited in Ito, 1994, p. 83).

The one issue that brings these questions to the fore is identity, both at a national and global level, with notions of East/West, Japan/Australia, and a more local notion of identity at an individual level, examining fan culture and individual reader/viewer responses.   To achieve this, we need to explore new ways of understanding how anime and manga function, as they present unique possibilities that challenge and dismantle traditional binaries and perceptions of East/West, Male/Female, civilised/primitive, and us/other.

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

Leo Loveday and Satomi Chiba (1986) are amongst the many authors who have traced the historical origins of manga as far back as the picture scrolls of the 9th century. This era is widely recognised as an important time of development in Japanese art.  Some mythopoeic critics (Campbell, 1962) have referred explicitly to these scrolls and their uniqueness.  As Professor Langdon Warner (1962) points out, ‘…almost suddenly, and certainly without debt to foreign schools of painting, the Japanese were producing long horizontal scrolls of such narrative as the world had never seen’ (p. 488). Warner (1962) compares the Japanese scrolls to those existing in China and India, commenting that

‘… the Japanese showed peopled narratives beyond compare … The main difference is that the Chinese were largely interested in matters of philosophy, while the Japanese emphasised Man and what happened in the material world at a particular time’ (p. 488).

The themes of these scrolls (known as emaki-mono) ranged from epics, novels, and folk tales to religious themes and were drawn in a style that ranged from simple, clean lines to complex, colourful scenes inlaid with gold flakes (Loveday & Chiba, 1986, p. 162).

Loveday and Chiba (1968) go on to note that the

‘The most famous picture-scroll which is often cited as the “first” Japanese comic is Chojugiga (Frolicking Birds and Animals) which in a Walt Disney-like style has monkeys, rabbits and frogs impersonating the actions of human beings in one part and the antics of fantastic beasts such as dragons and unicorns in another. It dates back to the 11th century.’ (p. 170)

Frederik Schodt (1983, pp. 28–68) further developed claims, noticing that these scrolls were almost ‘animated’ as they were drawn on a long piece of paper and rolled along to read.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, woodblock printing became a popular and dominant art platform.  Not only was this technology used to provide greater access to traditional folk tales and legends to children, the illiterate, and those ignorant of Japan’s classic culture, but it also developed a growing popularity amongst adults. By the 18th century, a sophisticated political literature (Kusazoshi) had developed. This development is even more interesting if one considers the similar development of manga in Japan, which initially began as material only targeted at children but quickly became popular amongst adults. See Loveday & Chiba’s (1986) discussion on aspects of the development of a visual culture with respect to comics: Japan.

Stylistically, these political commentaries consisted of pictures with text appearing next to them.  Hokusai (1769-1849) emerged as the central figure of this time, developing a striking and effective line-drawing technique that has influenced the style of modern comic artists (Loveday & Chiba, 1986, p. 162). Haden-Guest (1995) also see a strong connection between the style of the 18th and 19th-century woodblock artists and the art of the modernist period. The term manga was first coined during this period, suiting the irresponsible pictures of Hokusai’s imaginative and weird drawings so appropriately.

During the late 19th century, with the introduction of European satirical caricatures and comic strips for expat Westerners in Japan, we see the development of cartoons along more familiar Western lines.  Japan Punch, published in 1861, marked the first significant western-style publication, leading to the establishment of daily newspapers during the Meiji Restoration. From 1868, the appearance of local comics and caricatures increased along with the employment of Japanese comic artists. The first Japanese satirical magazine devoted to cartoons, Tokyo Puck, appeared in 1906.  Japanese artists also became increasingly influenced by Western artists, such as the 19th-century Western satirical graphic art and political and social caricatures, and the cartoons imported from the United States, such as Felix the Cat, Betty Boop and Popeye.  However, from the 1930s until the end of World War II, the Japanese government increasingly used these publications in fascist propaganda (Schodt, 1983, pp. 55-60).

Often overlooked during this time was the beginning of the Japanese animation industry, which screened its first celluloid Japanese animated film in 1930.  Before this, Japanese animators employed a paper/origami style that produced complicated patterns through a silhouette effect shot in a silent black-and-white film (Ono, 1995).  From the 1930s onwards, animation, as a form of entertainment, began to be seen as an educational tool, especially during the war years.  Despite this, the war years were not productive for animation and comics. The paper shortages reduced comic production, Japan banned U.S. animation and comics, and few people attended the cinema. After the war, manga and anime artists saw improvements as demand rapidly increased. The Japanese writer and critic Kosei Ono (1995) believes this may be due to parents wishing to provide more for their children than they had during the war.

The most popular artist at the time was Osamu Tezuka.  Tezuka, referred to as the grandfather of Japanese manga and Japan’s Walt Disney, has been seen by many as the single most important factor in shaping Japan’s post-war manga culture (Temple of Manga, 1995). The Temple of Manga (1995) piece goes on to mention a tribute for Tezuka on the day after his death on February 10 1989, in Japan’s Asahi newspaper, which reads:

“Foreign visitors to Japan often find it difficult to understand why Japanese people like comics so much. For example, they often find it odd to see grown men and women engrossed in weekly comic magazines on the trains during commuter hours. One explanation for the popularity of comics in Japan, however, is that Japan had Osamu Tezuka, whereas other nations did not. Without Dr Tezuka, the postwar explosion in comics in Japan would not have been conceivable.” (p.26)

In the West, we mainly know of Tezuka through the popular children’s cartoons Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. The current controversy surrounds this particular anime series, as many have noticed direct similarities to the big-budget Disney animated movie The Lion King. For those interested in this topic, I suggest Fred Pattern’s (1995) paper Simba versus Kimba: Parallels Between ‘Kimba, the White Lion’ and ‘The Lion King’, presented at Australia’s Second International Conference on Animation.

Tezuka’s presentation of the body with its hyper-cute, childlike features and the dense, involved plot that often contained spiritual and humanistic overtones set the pace for nearly all that was to follow.  As Haden-Guest (1995) remarked:

“Look at Japanese anime, from bubblegum operas through to the darkest fantasies of destruction and weird sex, and everywhere you find the Tezuka touch, which is to say a merging of Yankee cuteness with astounding graphic sophistication, and both used to advance turbulently lapel-grabbing narratives” (p. 45).

Figure 2. The kawaii cyborg body. Gally (Eng. Alita) from Gunnm (Eng. Battle Angel Alita) (Yukito Kishiro, Eng. trans. 1994).

Cuteness, or kawaii, as it is termed in Japan, threatened to become a dominant aesthetic within manga and anime. Bodies became dominated by curves and circles, round and lithe little figures with eyes large enough to consume any viewer’s gaze. Japanese manga artists took to extremes the cute animal figures of Disney and the childish proportions of the Western Kewpie doll to revolutionise the body’s appearance in children’s entertainment. 

For a fascinating look at the influence of European and American notions of cuteness on Japanese anime and manga, see Philip Brophy’s Ocular excess – a semiotic morphology of cartoon eyes in Kaboom: Explosive Animation from America and Japan Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1994. Also, Pauline Moore’s Cuteness (Kawaii) in Japanese Animation: When Velvet Gloves Meet Iron Fists. Paper presented at Australia’s Second International Conference on Animation. Japan Cultural Centre, Sydney, March 3, & Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, March 4-5. 1995. She presents a fascinating look at the notion of infantile narcissism as it relates to the Japanese fixation on cuteness, the pre-adolescent teenage female body, the exploitation and violation of this body through marketing, and the conflict that the cute body encounters with the violent environment it so often lives in.

Fans have developed special terms to describe these characterisations, including ‘CB’ (Child Body), which refers to a character with a large head and the chubby body of a child, often used as a prefix, such as CB Astro Boy.  ‘SD’ (Super Deformed) is often a parody technique that takes existing characters that are depicted realistically and squashes them into deformed midgets.  Often these are incorporated within ‘realistic’ manga and anime to provide lampoon comedy, as in the manga Appleseed, or to parody the explanation of the ‘moral of the story’ or a complex and technical term, used effectively in the series Tenchi-Muyo.  Often, these work to subvert or send up the heavy-handedness of issues. 

Fans also actively use general Japanese terms, such as the suffix -chan, which means ‘darling or little one.’ People usually reserve this term of affection for small animals, children, romantic partners, or young female friends. Terms such as chan or chibi have been used in anime in the eighties to describe ‘squashed ‘versions of characters with enlarged heads and infantile bodies’ (McCarthy, 1993, pp. 6-7). The possible reason for this form and style could be an extension of the Japanese fascination with ‘doll women’ (Buruma, 1984, p. 67). These women train to control their motions in stilted, mechanical ways and speak in a high pitch, predominantly working as female elevator operators.

Phillip Brophy’s (1994) article Ocular excess – a semiotic morphology of cartoon eyes suggests that the attraction of the cute body in post-war Japan may be related to the traumatic experiences Japan experienced at the end of World War Two.  As Brophy (1994) suggests, ‘… “cute” signified an idealised social world in which people, animals and things were infinitely happy and kind to each other’ (p. 48).   However, as Brophy argues, in the Japanese context, the eyes of these cute bodies are kept violently open to the violence of Japan’s post-apocalyptic culture. Brophy suggests that the Japanese have created a unique spin on the notion of cute as defined in the West:

‘I would argue that the Japanese have in a confounding way appeared to embrace this particular Americanised therapeutically-designed version of Euro-cute; that they have been attracted to the hyper-iconic status of these grotesque figures which ‘cry out’ in sad-eyed silence; and that the Japanese have been able to imbue these postwar signs with a mystical resonance which remembers the past precisely by appropriating images designed to aid in forgetting it.’ (p. 49)

1.6 The Dance and Dream of Images

During the 1960s, two significant developments occurred within manga: the appearance of comics marketed towards young girls called shojo manga and the arrival of the gekiga (dramatic pictures) genre.  Before the Second World War, the market mainly catered for boys with the dominant genre known as shonen manga (young boys’ comics).  It was not until after the war that the market began to diversify and cater to both sexes, adults, children, and teens.  However, these categories are not fixed and stable.  Many adult women will read shojo manga, and many men will continue with shonen titles from their boyhood, as well as the cross-readership between titles and genres by men and women, boys and girls.

We can make some general observations about shojo and shonen manga. Shonen manga is the broadest of the categories, and many of the themes covered in anime and manga can be said to cater for this audience. Typically, shonen manga concentrate on sports or action fields.

Shojo manga caters to the interests of girls and young women. While the shojo genre has faced conservative criticism for its reliance on ‘simplistic romance plots’, it also possesses the potential for some of the most artistic and literary achievements in manga and anime. For example, the Mania Muki style concentrates on the extreme occult and science-fiction genre (Page, 1994, pp. 107-109).  During the 1980s, shojo manga and anime evolved into sophisticated romance, occult, and dramatic titles.  Shojo manga had been developing since the 1970s with the genre’s first major female artist, Riyoko Ikeda, whose The Rose of Versailles detailed a fictional account of Oscar, a noblewoman forced to live disguised as a man in the court of Marie Antoinette, which went on to become a best seller.

Currently, the best-known artist in this field is Rumiko Takahashi, known as ‘the manga princess’ by fans.  Her best-known titles include the misadventures of an alien princess on Earth in Urusei Yatsura (Those Obnoxious Aliens); a struggling school student swatting for exams in Maison Ikkoku, and the gender/animal bender Ranma 1/2, where the main characters become transformed into male, female or Panda Bears.  Shojo manga and anime involve several female artists working in the most radical and controversial areas of manga and anime.  Shungiku Uchida’s adult manga have been described by one critic as tough on controversial topics such as sex between unmarried couples and extra-marital affairs, in the process blatantly going against the unquestioned moral order that Japanese women should be untainted and demure.  Her openness to traditionally taboo issues explains why the Japanese media have labelled her “scandalous” (Matsubara, 1994, p. 70).

The bishonen subgenre showcases a “pretty boys” animation style, featuring male characters with delicate, thin features, wide eyes, and a highly feminine appearance. Another mini-genre is Shonen Ai, which focuses on romantic stories between men. Recent discussions in the rec.arts.anime newsgroup, particularly under the title “Homosexuality in Anime,” have explored the prevalence of sexually ambiguous characters in anime. For example, these discussions often cite the character Subaru from the anime “Tokyo Babylon” by Clamp. Strong storyline narrative dominates the work of the CLAMP artists, a group of four women whose works include the occult thriller Tokyo Babylon, Campus Guard Duklyon, and Rayearth.  Their stories always have an unexpected twist at the end.  The four alien girls in Rayearth are summoned to Earth to defend their host, only to discover their true mission is to kill him (Kondo, 1995, p. 4).  Other controversial shojo artists include Minami Ozaki, known for Bizarre Love 1989 and Bronze, whose work offers an intensity of style and unconventional use of symbols, such as the depiction of swastika earrings worn by bishonen gay men (Page, 1994, p. 108).  Natsumi Itsuki’s and Yasuko Aoike’s gay and lesbian love stories are equally open and brazen about their subject matter.

In addition to these general ‘gender and age’ categories, several specific genres are important in understanding the social saturation manga and anime have achieved in Japan.  Manga and anime are far more than the simple hero adventures that dominate most, if not all, of the comics in mainstream American and British stores.

I realise this is a broad generalisation and does not take into account the important underground graphic artists of the 60s and 70s in America such as Ralph Bakshi and Robert Crumb, the comics in MAD magazine, the Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1930s through to the late 1950s, and the current unconventional cartoons such as John Kricfalusi’s Ren and Stimpy and Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head.  However, these are only notable exceptions in a field still strongly dominated by notions that animation and comics are only for children and teenagers, restrictions on depicting violence or death during cartoons, and the aesthetic of the politically conservative Disney stable of animation, which lacks the diversity and radical edge of much anime and manga.  For a further discussion of this, see Chris Staros (1995, pp. 18-22) and the interviews with American artists in Kaboom (1994).

The legitimate status of manga and anime as valid forms of art in Japan elevates their cultural significance, fueled by the industry’s diversity and dynamism, attributes that Anglo readers may find more challenging to appreciate fully. To generalise, Europe is the only other area that has placed animation and graphic novels on a valid artistic level, which directly conflicts with the approach taken by many in the US and the UK.

One of Japan’s first important styles to emerge during the 1960s was gekiga or ‘drama-pictures’.  This style directly challenged the ‘Tezuka school’ of cute characters with big, round eyes.  Geikiga artists favoured a more realistic rendering, which suited historical works. However, they were equally effective in depicting modern settings, concentrating on political or social themes. Cyberpunk anime like the grim, Blade Runner-esque AD Police have also utilised these themes. This style had a hard-edged ‘reality’ that, combined with the pure fantastic, would push the limits of how animation and graphic novels could depict ‘life’.  For instance, the controversial anime Urotsukidoji redefined the depictions of sex and violence in a dense, apocalyptic and spiritual storyline.  The geikiga style was also adapted to Samurai and sports stories, which became the two biggest genres during this period.  Working on themes of honour and endurance, these genres, especially samurai, contained philosophical elements and captured the harsh tone of gekiga realism with adventure/action themes.  The early 1960s were a dramatic time for Japanese society.  Japan hosted the Olympic Games in 1964; the 1960s were the decade in which Japan’s economy began to flourish.  These events caused dramatic changes in Japanese society and directly affected the manga and anime industry.  The buildup towards the Olympic Games caused increased building development, business opportunities, and cultural and social publicity involving increased interaction with the world community.  This push towards rapid post-war development and economic boom would be a continuing theme in many anime and manga stories, such as the developing “Neo-Tokyo” in Akira; indeed, the notion of ‘new birth’ and cyclic patterns of destruction and renewal form a dominant theme in many post-apocalyptic stories such as Fist of the North Star and Urotsukidoji.

The economic boom resulted from increased disposable income; people were more than willing to spend on manga and anime products.  The commercial viability of comics and animation made them cheap and accessible.  A typical manga would be about 1 to 2 inches thick and about 150-200 pages long, about the same size as a telephone book.  Comics and animation rivalled all other forms of popular culture.  As Kosei Ono remarked at the Life of Illusion Conference in Sydney, 1995, when he left Japan to attend the conference, the top two films at that moment were a Japanese animated movie and a Godzilla film.  The acceptability and popularity of anime and manga have placed them within a privileged position in Japanese culture, going far beyond their popular origins and spreading outwards into politics, advertising, and education.  It is an act of communication that resonates with a unique ability to capture areas of the fantastic, social, and political.  As Anthony Haden-Guest (1995) suggests, of the power of the animated fantasy over live-action cinema:

With Akira and Legend of the Overfiend, as with most of this genre of anime, you are suddenly aware that animation has powers not given to live-action movies, regardless of the money spent on special effects.  An animator can take you inside an atom, can control a flame, analyse destruction, hold the universe in the hollow of his or her hand.  It’s beyond burning buildings and exploding cars.  The animator can recreate and exert some psychological control over one of the world’s worst nightmares. (p. 47)

The ability of artists working within the manga and anime form to express complex and sophisticated story lines and offer escapist fantasy is at the heart of their popularity.  Manga and anime have assumed the position of the novels and live-action movies of the West:  they have become the dominant and most influential popular art form in Japan, offering a fertile ground of sounds, images, themes and ideas that rival, if not surpass, the fantasy offered by mainstream live-action cinema.  As Hisashi Kondo (1995, p. 8) comments,

Some observers say that the manga is about to replace other genres, especially the novel, in performing the storytelling function.  Others maintain that young writers are beginning to write novels in a ‘manga style.’ 

How is it possible for animation and graphic novels to assume such a status in Japan?  Some, such as Masaru Akutsu of Kodansha’s International Division, a distributor of manga and anime, say that this is due to the accessibility of manga in Japan and the creative possibilities offered within manga and anime:

 I still believe the reason manga developed to such an extent in Japan is their low cost.  In the early days, manga could be produced far more easily than movies, then the king of entertainment in Japan.  So, if a cartoonist had talent, he could easily express himself in any way he wished. … This ease of expression gave manga a considerable degree of freedom, enabling the creators to experiment with all modes of expression. (in Kondo, 1995, p. 9)

One significant event that redefined the anime market was the explosion of OVAs (Original Video Animations). This category refers to anime released directly to the market through VHS rather than first broadcast on television or in the cinema. The most significant advantage of this approach was, as Andrew Leonard describes, that:

Anime creators benefited, especially those working within the tight production schedules imposed by television.  Not only did a longer production cycle lead to improved production values, but bypassing television restrictions on content allowed animators to indulge themselves in creating scenes filled with graphic violence or explicit sexual content (Leonard, 1995, p. 182).

Animators gained the freedom to produce a wider variety of titles and explore more risqué subject matter, as they no longer faced the tight content control of television regulations, sponsor pressure, or the costly and labour-intensive process of creating animated movies.  Some hentai (perverted) titles released in the West include Manga Corps Ujin Brand, Angel of Darkness, and Go Nagi’s The Adventures of Kekkou Kamen, released by East2West Films.  Notably, the last two titles portray a high school that has become the location for sadistic and evil acts by the teaching staff upon the young, innocent students. Anime artist Takashi Oshiguchi suggests that this freedom created an environment of experimentation that increased the stylisation of speed and dynamic movement offered by OVAs:

With OVAs, the authors and artists can concentrate on what they want to do.  They have more artistic freedom and more time to produce.  Such conditions might influence this increase in sophisticated movement in animation. (Oshiguchi Interview:  Philip talks to Takashi Oshiguchi in Kaboom, 1994, p. 154)

By the mid-1980s, animators produced more content than ever, with many exploring extreme and provocative themes. This period saw a significant surge in the hentai genre, often referred to as “juicy manga,” which primarily consisted of soft-core pornography. Despite this development, publishers continued to release traditional titles in science fiction, fantasy, detective stories, the occult, and romance. However, the growth of the hentai category became the most significant trend during the 1980s and early 1990s, challenging the government’s liberal attitude toward anime and manga.

                The depiction of sex in manga and anime has been an area often criticised by the Western press; however, this reporting is often exaggerated and rife with cultural assumptions.  The Japanese have a long history of erotic drawings, and much of this work exhibits a sensuous and culturally open-minded attitude towards sex that differs from the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitude of many Westerners.  As Helen McCarthy (1993, p. 48) writes:

“In Japan, people freely embrace a wide range of sexual preferences and fantasies, thanks to a long tradition of liberal thought that cultivates an atmosphere where anything is permissible in the privacy of one’s own imagination.  Anime provides a wide range of choices, from the mildly erotic to the frankly pornographic.”

One author estimated that in 1992, a quarter of all manga contained sexual content (Sabin, 1993, p. 208). However, most of this is not explicit, with laws against the depiction of genitals, the sexual act and pubic hair, which are often digitised or blacked out. As Roger Sabin (1993, p. 285) points out on the legal issue of pornography in Japanese popular culture:

“The main legal barrier to this kind of subject matter (explicit sexual references) is Article 175 of the Penal Code.  There is one loophole, however: children’s genitals are allowed to be shown.  This has led to a thriving industry in child pornography, or ‘Lolita comics’ as they are known.  In the 1990s, a protest lobby has emerged, and there is now a possibility of new laws being passed.”

Generally, there appears to be a far broader acceptance of nudity and sexuality in Japan than in the U.S., Britain, or Australia (Stockbridge, 1994, pp. 86-92).  As for the reasoning behind this cultural difference and the impact it has on the issue of censorship, Masuo Ueda of the Japanese Sunrise company claims that,

“We have no censor groups.  But there aren’t real censorship bodies here in Japan, no official organisation to check violent scenes or sexual scenes.  We therefore have to rely on government policy relating to broadcast.  And on the ethics of the Japanese people, because if we hide violent scenes, children have to get used to unnatural depictions of things.  For example, we have much sex and violence in society.  We can hide it but this is not natural; this is not reality.  So we Japanese people have thought it better for a long time not to hide anything.  From a business view, it’s also better for us to do more stimulating scenes, and those scenes have been supported by children.” (Ueda Interview: Philip Brophy talks to Masuo Ueda in Kaboom, 1994, p. 150)

Although this betrays an attitude of ‘the readers want it’ which would require further research and study to explain, it does display a unique attitude towards an unnatural depiction of things, which is of refreshing contrast to the attitude of many western children’s programmers, with no or little incorporation of violence and its consequences of death and pain.  Japanese children’s animation has always provided a contrast to the usual Western fare, with imported shows into Australia like Robotech offering a vast difference to the stock Western cartoons, as one fan reminisces

“‘Robotech was always the talk of the classroom,’ says Mike Tatsugawa, 24, … ‘It didn’t have a kiddie storyline, it covered relationships, it had drinking and violence; it was like an animated soap opera.  I remember Robotech was at 4:30, the Smurfs at 3:30.  The dichotomy was really frightening’.” (Yang, 1992, p. 56)

Another reason behind Japan’s liberal approach to censorship could be that ‘Japanese officialdom sees fictional violence, sexual or otherwise, as a safety valve’ (Sabin, 1993, p. 208).  In order to maintain social order and conformity, Sabin suggests the government tacitly condones vicarious violence through manga and anime.  As Ian Buruma (1984, p. 224) in his study of Japanese popular culture observes:  ‘Encouraging people to act out their violent impulses in fantasy, while suppressing them in real life, is an effective way of preserving order.’ Although researchers have yet to establish a direct causal link between the violence depicted in anime and manga and aggressive behaviour, they often rely heavily on personal opinions and speculation when discussing the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The distinction between these two categories is not always clear-cut. However, this does not imply that opposing the media’s portrayal of violence and sexual content is ineffective; quite the contrary.

In 1990, activists launched the first major protest against sexual depictions in comics, uniting an intriguing alliance of anti-pornography feminists and right-wing conservatives. Their collaboration primarily revolves around concerns about the portrayal of women in mainstream media, which has shaped the evolving political landscape in Britain, the USA, and Australia. For a more detailed examination of the relationship between censorship and pornography, refer to Andrew Ross’s work (1989, pp. 171-208). For a comprehensive analysis of pornography in contemporary society, see Linda Williams’s book, “Hard Core,” published by Pandora in London in 1990.

The depiction of women in pornography is a highly political issue that revolves around media regulation and control (Nightingale & Turner, 1990, p. 291). As a result, scholars have written numerous academic articles, and the Japanese parliament has made significant policy shifts. In 1991, the Council of Ethics on Publications made a significant policy decision, which mandated that all seinen manga (adult comics) be marked with a red sticker indicating that they contain adult material. This decision had ethical and political ramifications, leading many publishers to choose not to publish manga requiring this red sticker. The Metropolitan Police Board in Tokyo went on to propose four steps that should be taken to improve local legislation towards the accessibility of some manga.  These include:

1. the designation of harmful material immediately following publication
2. stipulation of a regulation that allows residents to inform the authority
3. prohibition of the sale of harmful material by vending machines, and
4. increasingly severe punishment for those convicted.
   (Asahi Shimbum in Ito, 1994, pp. 92-93.)

Many academic articles have savaged Japanese popular culture, including those that strongly endorse the regulation and control of manga and anime, especially when it comes to audiences that are deemed vulnerable to violent and pornographic scenes, such as children. As Kinko Ito (1994, p. 92) argues:

As agents of socialisation, these comic magazines play a very important role in transmitting cultural values, beliefs, norms, and rules.  Sexual behaviour, just like any other social behaviour, is not necessarily instinctive but socially patterned and socially learned.  Thus, sexually explicit, adult material comic magazines that degrade women must be kept away from young readers who cannot read them critically; they may not be able to tell ‘fantasy’ from reality.

The article goes on to attack the deeply entrenched problem of sexism still prevalent in Japan, and cites the fantasising qualities of men’s manga as providing ‘…a sort of haven for Japanese men who want to keep the present male power hierarchy’ (Ito, 1994, p. 93).  Ito argues that the ongoing repression of women in Japanese society is perpetuated by sexual crimes, violence, abuse, and perversions found in some male fantasies depicted in manga. These elements reinforce men’s institutional power and resist any form of change. However, it is important to recognise that this interpretation represents just one perspective on manga and anime. Part 2 will delve deeper into the issue of male institutionalised power, focusing specifically on the anime AD Police and the conservative and chaotic spaces it reveals.

Other academics such as Sean Leddens and Fred Fejes in Female Gender Role Patterns in Japanese Comic Magazines point toward the wider social conditions working upon manga and cite the tension which is developing between gender determined roles in society and the notion of the ‘economic family unit’ against the emotional closeness of the term ‘family’ romanticised within some manga, concluding that, ‘The existence of these potentially conflicting trends in two popular media products points to their presence in Japanese society at large’ (Ledden & Fejes, 1987, p. 174).’

What is important about both articles, and indeed media reporting on manga and anime in the West as a whole, with their concentration on the most violent and erotic segments of manga and anime (Yang, 1992, pp. 59-60), is the vexed relationship they are setting up between sexual and violent performances and real sexual and violent conduct.  As Andrew Ross (1989, p. 175) points out, this relationship rests upon ‘… often abstract questions about representation, its distance from the real, its place in and its effect upon the real, and its relation to fantasy and the construction of sexuality.’

Kinko Ito (1994, p. 83) discusses the relationship between Japan’s private and public spheres, noting that “foreign observers and journalists, as well as social scientists, have observed that these magazines portray male violence against women and their maltreatment.” Despite the extreme popularity of these magazines, Japan has one of the lowest rates of rape and other violent crimes among industrialised countries. However, Ito points out that many women are too embarrassed to report rape due to the potential shame it could bring to their families. Additionally, the definition of rape can be ambiguous; there is often a thin line separating consensual sex from rape. Additionally, Ito points out that “cases involving drunken men and family members are often dismissed in Japan” (1994, p. 83). Peter Hadfield discusses manga and anime’s clichéd portrayal of sexually active women with Western features and the impact this has on real life. “Western women who live in Japan know only too well the dangers of the stereotype into which they have been cast, and complain constantly of the unwelcome attentions from lecherous men on crowded trains. In the comic books, wide-eyed, blonde females are popular characters, lustily sating their enormous sexual appetites and begging to be whipped for their immoral lifestyle. The distinction between this and real life is not always apparent to the average Japanese male” (Hadfield, 1988, p.37).

The feminist assertion that “the personal is political” establishes a crucial framework that connects private freedom with public inquiry. This concept is a central issue in the academic debate about fantasy media and its societal effects. A prominent example of this debate is the discussion surrounding violent television programs and their relationship to aggressive behaviour. This topic is complex and encompasses fundamental questions about pornography, art, and censorship, as well as the challenges of proving a direct causal link between media violence and aggressive behaviour.

The danger that this debate represents is the possible policing of the private to avoid the many possible ‘contagions’ of popular culture (Ross, 1989, p. 176).  My point here is not to discuss the academic involvement in the complex and vexed area of censorship, pornography and violence as it affects both Western and Eastern cultures, but only to voice the necessity of a broader and more pluralistic approach to issues of violence and pornography as different viewers perceive them.  Drawing on Ross (1989, p. 193), I will aim to avoid a vanguardist approach that emphasises rhetoric surrounding ‘harmful effects’ and ‘false consciousness’ that characterises those seen as subservient to media portrayals of violence and the female body.  Instead, I seek to consider an approach that emphasises understanding rather than explaining these issues as they relate to manga and anime.  This would involve a fundamental shift away from the reductive cause-and-effect approach, which dominated the post-war outlook on media research and focused on establishing a testable hypothesis about the media, specifically the ‘direct’ effects of television violence on viewers, especially children.

Important policy documents from the United States which have sought to resolve the issue of media violence and aggressive behaviour in real life along ‘effects model’ lines include the Payne Fund Studies (1928-33), the US Congressional Inquiries especially those between 1952 and 1964, the establishment of the National Commission of the causes and Prevention of Violence in 1968 and the series of Surgeon-General’s inquiries. Within Australia the main policy decisions which have focused on the issue of media violence include the 1988 Commonwealth Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Video Material, the 1989 Victorian Inquiry: Strategies to Deal with the Issue of Community Violence, the 1989 National Committee on Violence inquiry, the 1990 Australian Broadcasting Tribunal inquiry into violence on television which rejected ‘effects school’ findings, the 1990 Federal Government National Committee on violence, and the 1993 Report on Video and Computer Games and Classification Issues. After all these studies and research, no causal link has yet been established between media violence and aggressive behaviour (Cunningham, 1992 and Ross, 1989).

This ’cause and effect’ approach suffered from its generalisations on a mass audience characterised as ‘mindlessly self destructive’, and has been challenged by a broader, more inclusive cultural studies approach concentrating on issues such as the subversive and reflexive subcultural viewer (Ang, 1991), the intersection of global academic paradigms, government policies and multinational industrial shifts within local issues of identity and culture, and a fundamental rethinking of the relationship of the intellectual with popular texts and audiences (Jenkins, 1992). All these issues apply directly to this study of Japanese manga and anime, and will form the substantial part of the second half of this thesis.  I will be specifically asking what new frameworks are needed for the highly visceral and fantastic imaginings that are engaged with in manga and anime, especially within the cyberpunk genre portrayed in AD Police and Ghost in the Shell.

1.7 ‘Manga as Air’

Despite these concerns over the depictions of sex in manga and anime, these forms have achieved a legitimate and acceptable status within Japanese society. The continued popularity of anime and manga in Japan and its spread throughout Asia and many Western countries has led to the legitimisation of the manga and anime artist as a profession to which to aspire. The very best in this field have become among the wealthiest and most famous people living in Japan. There were, of course, some voices of dissent, people who feared that Japan would become increasingly illiterate and infantile. However, unlike the dominant view in the West, especially in America and Britain, and also here in Australia, the Japanese have generally escaped the stigma attached to comic books and cartoons (or, to offer a subtle, yet important, shift in the language, graphic novels and animation) and have developed a highly diversified and sophisticated popular art form. This diversity and sophistication of the art form is a testament to its depth and complexity.

Two areas currently dominate the manga and anime industries. The first is the immense saturation these forms have achieved in Japan, both commercially and through extensive cross-marketing, with anime and manga appearing on nearly every imaginable product. The second is the impact of the prolonged recession in Japan, which began in 1991, forcing many producers to seek financing abroad and ushering in a new phase of cross-fertilisation and collaboration between Western and Eastern markets. This economic challenge underscores the urgency of the situation.

Osamu Tezuka captures the current status of manga in Japan today, commenting that “we have reached the point of ‘manga as air’” (in Sabin, 1993, p. 209). Indeed, as Ross Harley (1988, p. 74) comments:

“The world of Japanese comics stretches far beyond printed books and animated cartoons, reaching into the centres of everyday life – from advertisements to public service announcements, billboards, posters, card games and food menus. The images proliferated by comic culture are so predominant that in Japan one no longer has to pause to ingest a manga-meal. One simply needs to breathe.”

One of the main reasons for this saturation of manga has been the breadth of cross-merchandising campaigns surrounding the most successful manga and anime series. Series such as Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball have spawned a diverse range of products, including related series, movies, toys, model kits, video games, and other merchandise. As Hisashi Kondo (1995, pp. 5-6) points out in the context of Sailor Moon’s merchandising cycle:

“Today, the story does not end when you finish reading a comic book: There’s much more to it. The magnificence of today’s manga world will elude anyone who approaches a manga book with yesterday’s notions. With a manga serialised in a magazine serving as the basic text, today the original mode of expression may have been altered and elaborated on by all sorts of media, each generating a different reality.”

Each ‘different reality’ can become a lucrative ‘cash cow’ for any organisation or producer that invests in it. Many Western companies have already adopted this strategy, selling anime and manga products in Australia, the United Kingdom, America, and across Europe. As John O’Donnell (in Brophy 1994, p. 112) of Central Park Media, which is the company that distributes programs under the Central Park Media, US Manga Corp, and Anime 18 labels, commented on their release of the popular anime and manga series Project A-KO,

“I am not just investing in the A-KO, B-KO, C-KO character universe of Project A-KO. I’m investing my money in making Americans know who A-KO is, who her friends are. I’m investing in a video, a video disk, a comic book series, T-shirts, posters, role-playing games, screen savers, model kits. We are building the A-KO universe. Selling a video is only part of building the universe. That makes us very different from other video companies.”

It is not difficult to imagine a Japan where you can casually pause and look around to see manga, breathe in the atmosphere of manga and anime. However, as to whether this could occur in Australia, recall the furore over whether the children’s cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was, in fact, a programme or a blatant platform to sell toys, T-shirts, pencil cases, cups, and anything else that could have a logo or resemblance stamped on it. Ian Buruma (1984, p. 220) points out that the West might apply the “successful” vicarious cruelty Japanese popular culture uses to create a safer society.:

“.. what works in Japan would not necessarily be effective elsewhere, in different circumstances. (Even if Western factory workers could be induced to sing company songs every morning, Japanese style, this would not necessarily herald an Economic Miracle.)”

However, marketing has become a global concern. As Ben Crawford (1995) argues, cultural studies need to consider the disciplines of marketing and business strategies. Not only would this approach acknowledge the importance of ‘product’ like anime and manga as commodities in contemporary society, but it could also challenge notions of ‘false consciousness’ and ‘servitude to the media’ often associated with marketing and business strategies. However, there is still a wide gap between the icon status and commercial power of anime and manga characters in Japan and that of the West, such as the huge industry geared to promoting the voice actors of some characters and even launching the short-lived careers of pop singers based around the songs of their anime characters. However, the most significant difference is that most of these popular icons are strong female characters, such as Sailor Moon, Battle Angel Alita, the Night Sabres from Bubblegum Crisis, and Nausicaä, the leading character in Hayao Miyazaki’s film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). As Rosemary Dean (1994, p. 74) comments on the popularity of anime characters in Japan:

“Another reason that animation is so popular is the magnetic charm of the female characters. Girls want to be their voices, and fans idolise them. The marketing of these animated characters is over-the-top, and the publicity surrounding them is feverish. Their popularity is phenomenal. It’s not just the fans who think that the animation characters are more than just illustrations: the promoters also treat them like stars. These characters have been permitted to transcend their inorganic state and have now come to life.”

Even the popularity of the Disney and Warner Bros. stable of cartoon characters lacks the contemporary ‘lifestyle’ edge that makes them as effective today as the Westernised Asian-style spin-offs, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, currently, the live-action Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Japanese animation offers a distinct form of engagement compared to Western animation. It appeals to a broader audience, including both adults and children and it portrays strong female characters. As John O’Donnell (in Brophy 1994, p. 111), an American distributor of Japanese anime, complained:

“The Superman, Batman, style of comic aimed at the twelve to fourteen year old male, where the good guy always won, was acceptable but anything else, anything too scary, too adult, anything suggesting an anti-hero could win, was banned. It wasn’t until the late sixties, that American comic books began to mature along the lines we have seen in Japan for the last thirty or forty years. We have a prejudice in America that cartoons must be for children; if not for children, something is wrong.”

Surprisingly, despite the saturation of manga and anime in Japanese society, the animation industry is struggling. Many view past highlights, such as the cinematic quality of Akira, as a thing of the past due to the increased costs of producing animated movies, as well as the effects of the global recession on Japan’s economy. These circumstances have caused a shift towards international funding, with Western companies now investing in Japanese animation for global release. Examples include Manga Entertainment UK’s funding of the new Street Fighter OVA, based on the popular video game, and the recent international backing for the anime Ghost in the Shell. This increasing Western investment marks a new phase in Japanese animation, as the industry seeks greater international recognition and financial support. However, the success of this push remains uncertain. See, for instance, Gainax, a successful group of Japanese animators responsible for the classic Wings of Honneamise, their initial attempt to break into the American market (Leonard, 1995, p. 143). Many people in mainstream culture still see animation and graphic novels as cartoons and comics meant only for children, and they treat comics for adults as a novelty instead of recognising them as a serious cultural art form. As Andrew Leonard (1995, p. unknown) asks: “Will [anime and manga] remain a cult of the otaku, an obsession of online geeks, or will it be the next Sega?” Western audiences have promising opportunities to engage with new and different perceptions; however, political and business leaders may also act in ways that reduce cultural differences and challenge the values promoted by this alternative view of contemporary identity.

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Part 2: ‘Manga’s Take on Contemporary Identity’

The chrome belonged to the flesh, and the body was open and desiring to belong. The straps restraining the arms and legs tightened slightly as the uncertainty and fear of what was happening, or seemed to be happening, were realised by … the subject? the audience?
‘Where did I stop and this other begin? Who am I? Why doesn’t someone kill me?’

2.1 Electro Blood

There is a scene in the anime’ AD Police’ where the cyborg police officer Billy endures a drug-induced hallucination where organic tendons burst through the metal/electronic circuitry of his body, quiver for a few seconds in front of his face, and then plunge into his brain, forcing out Billy’s eyes through his forehead/visor. I watch these eyes, and their bloody tendons ooze and slop onto the floor as the rhythmic pulsing of Billy’s cyborg system intensifies. I try to remind myself that this is only an animation, only a fantasy, but it is never quite as reassuring and comforting as it should be.

This fear of the body exists in fantasy and reality. I feel it physically: my heartbeat increases, my eyes become transfixed on the screen, my palms sweat, my stomach clenches into a tight ball of tension, and I might attempt to cover my eyes or place my hand over my mouth in reaction to what I see. This is a common enough reaction to experience when watching an explicitly violent or suspenseful scene, the most powerful and immediate effect the animated body can have on the viewer. This reaction to ‘bodies in motion’ (Pyle, Forest Making Cyborgs, Making Humans: Of Terminators and Blade Runners in Collins, Jim & Radner, Hilary & Collins, Ava Preacher (eds.) Film Theory goes to the movies. Routledge: New York, London, 1993. p. 227) occurs most often in erotic or violent scenes, and is common to many film genres, from suspense-horror, to action-adventure, to the Western, to hard-core pornography. All these genres offer an immediacy of image that reveals aspects of the body in one guise or another, whether it be the tough macho karate fighter who has trained his mind and body into a powerful weapon, or the violation and penetration of the body from weapons, or attempts to ‘reveal’ the body in pornography. Linda Williams (1990) explains pornography by emphasising the importance it places on the female body rather than the male “phallic” body, aiming to show what is hidden in the female body and to reveal the inside rather than the outside. However, what happens when this body is already ‘penetrated’ and revealed to be a cyborg – a hybrid human and machine? What happens when the safety and intimacy of the flesh is replaced with something alien, something digital? What happens to the depiction of the ‘outside’ of the body, which may look all too human, and the ‘inside’ of electronics and metal, which reveals what is all too non-human? What happens to the body that offers the familiar – human features and characteristics of skin and emotion – whilst at the same time threatening to introduce its subject to ‘dark areas, of something completely other and unseen, the spaces outside the limiting frame of the “human” and “real”, outside the control of the “word” and of the “look?”[ Jackson, R. op. cit. p. 179] It is this ‘introduction’ of the human to the non-human, or, as the director of the anime Ghost in the Shell terms it, the ‘crossing-over’ from one state of consciousness to another,[ Oshii, Mamoru Wired Japan Oshii Mamoru interview/Ghost in the Shell in Wired Japan, November 1995, pp. 58-63. Downloaded from: Newsgroup: rec.arts.anime. Date downloaded: 27 Oct. 1995. p. 9.] that is the significant point for this thesis. As Mamoru Oshii, the director of the anime version of Ghost in the Shell, comments on the relationship between humans and machines:

“I feel that if there aren’t any humans who cross over, and take drastic measures like her (Ghost in the Shell’s main character: Kusanagi Motoko), then nothing will change. Thus, I have a hunch that at first, in ones and twos, and before long, suddenly, everyone will proceed to cross over. Then, if one says might that be connected to the upper structure of one’s senses as in the film, that I wouldn’t understand. Maybe one would only fall into hell. That’s because the party concerned never understands……. For the time being, I tried to draw the place where one crosses over. But as to what can one see on the other side that one crosses over to, I still don’t know.” (Oshii, M., 1995, p. 9)

This section also attempts to map crossover points between the human and non-human in the cyberpunk manga Ghost in the Shell, written and drawn by Masamune Shirow, and the anime AD Police, written by Noboru Akikawa and directed by Kazushige Takano. These crossover points are often marked within both texts by bodies which have either become the sites of repressed sexuality and aggression (the cyborg police officer Billy in AD-Police), or bodies which have become saturated with the excesses of violence and erotica (the body and sexuality of Major Kusanagi – Ghost in the Shell). These scenes offer an ideal site of further academic interest. They provide a powerful articulation and manifestation of the sliding, porous nature of attempting to define the human and the non-human, while simultaneously displaying and enforcing, to excess, the ideals of masculine and feminine characteristics. At one level, the cyborg presents a radical articulation of the sliding boundaries between human and non-human. However, AD-Police and Ghost in the Shell continually code the cyborg body along gender lines. In AD-Police, the narrative turns the male cyborg Billy into a “killing zombie,” physically embodying the fascist killing machine. At the same time, it presents the female domestic cyborgs and Major Kusanagi as temples of the highly eroticised female form. There is even a specialised term in Japanese for a male artist who portrays the powerful and highly sexual woman, feminisuto, meaning a worshipper of women (Buruma, I 1984 p. 33-34). These bodies reinforce ideas about how men and women should behave, dictate that humans should control machines, and, as this analysis will show, desperately attempt to reassert the hegemony of humanist and patriarchal values.

2.2 Heart Core

It is the very excess of male pleasure in killing and destruction, and the excess of sexuality and eroticism embodied in the female form that threaten to spill out from the restraints of an enforced identity of what it ‘means’ to be male or female. As Shaviro (1993, p. 156) suggests:

“It is the excess of male fantasy, and not a critical reduction of it, that leads to its destruction, just as it is from deep within postmodern technologies of domination, and not at a utopian remove from them, that an irrecuperable (sic) other to power can be affirmed.”

The cyborgs of AD-Police and Ghost in the Shell are coded in highly gendered ways. Although there is a general collapse of ‘meaning’ when it comes to terms such as ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, the issue becomes unavoidably problematised along gender issues. Male fantasy (the authors and creative teams responsible for Ghost in the Shell and AD-Police are all male) saturates the physical representation of cyborg characters, especially in the female form. There is an unresolvable ambivalence at the conclusion of the AD-Police episodes and Ghost in the Shell, where, on one hand, there are attempts made towards mastery, closure, and self-possession occurring at a structural sense by narrative attempts at closure (the ‘deviant’ cyborgs are all finally killed by the ‘hero’ police, and a sense of ‘normality’ is imposed). Still, there are also “unresolvable tensions of vulnerability, ambivalence, and fear” (Shaviro, 1993, p. 156).

Shaviro (1993, p. 156) argues that this is where the audience’s most intense pleasure lies because the “cinematic gaze is violently embedded in the flesh.” manifested in ambiguous audience identification (see section 2.6). It is a tension that has become grafted onto the cyborg’s very body. On the one hand, the cyborg offers the freedom to reinvent notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. However, at the same time, systems of control and ‘normality’ still force the text to operate within these parameters as they violently reassert themselves. The tension centres on the body, which, in cyberpunk texts, becomes a site of policing and control. Drawing on Foucault’s theories of disciplinary power (1978/1984, pp. 301–329), the body becomes the locus through which anxieties surrounding identity, difference, gender, sexuality, and technology are made manifest. It is at the point in the body where the cyberpunk text articulates the border between the human and the non-human, and the frailty of that difference.

2.3 Ultimate Questions

This study also examines my personal responses to these images and how those responses emerge from what Jackson (1981) characterises as the “oppressive and insufficient” nature of lived reality (p. 180). If reality appears frustratingly finite, fantasy is saturated with possibility: with uncertainty, transgression, and the freedom to imagine alternatives. It is this freedom that permits what Bakhtin describes as the exploration of “ultimate questions” concerning social order and the purpose of life:

“[Fantasy] tells of descents into the underworlds of brothels, prisons, orgies, graves; it has no fear of the criminal, erotic, mad, or dead” (Bakhtin, 1981, as cited in Jackson, 1981, p. 151).

The cyborg body provokes two ‘ultimate questions’ of the body: first, what is the relationship between the body’s inside and its outside? Moreover, how is identity defined or significantly altered by the body, or how do we define the ‘human’? Both questions provoke ‘an ambivalent and highly erotic compound of attraction and repulsion’ (Neale, 1989, p. 222). It is this ‘attraction and repulsion’ that lies at the heart of my relationship with the image of the cyborg body. I am attracted to the possible liberation the cyborg appears to offer. Cyborgs speak to very old myths of origin and violently assault the perceived safety and comfort they offer. This is a study that intersects with many paradigms that seek ownership of the questions of reproduction, life, death, and myths of origin. Creationist myths of religion, superstition, and philosophy are constantly woven into the epistemological fabric of the cyborg in Ghost in the Shell and AD-Police. The Cartesian mind-body duality is shattered, its powerful assumptions of a split between mind and body drowned in the very new high-tech. By morphing animal and human, organism and machine, male and female, colliding – and colluding – the human with the non-human (Pyle, 1993, p. 277), binary oppositions are seen to have collapsed and the possibility of ‘something new’ emerges. In the final episode of Ghost in the Shell’ the Puppeteer’, an Artificial Intelligence program, has become ‘self-aware’ and made a proposition to the cyborg Major Kusanagi that they ‘fuse’ together to enable a further step in the ‘evolution’ of both the Puppeteer and Kusanagi. As the Puppeteer explains,

The solution to this ‘slack’ is the fusion of Puppeteer and Kusanagi to unify machine and human. Hopefully, this would create not a multiple personality or symbiosis of these two ‘entities’ but a unification of the two where, as the Puppeteer argues, ‘it should be impossible for us [the Puppeteer and Kusanagi] to recognise each other’ (Shirow, 1995, p. 16). One of the most significant consequences of this is the potential collapse of the categories of the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human’, marking the possibility of an important transition point in how we ‘define’ ourselves.

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


L. Nurse preparing cyborg (Ghost in the Shell, 1995)
AD Police and Ghost in the Shell offer not only the idea and the image of a future world where notions of ‘humanity’ are threatened, but where the very classification of the ‘human’ has reached the limit of its relevancy. To use the term ‘human’ or ‘non-human’ is inadequate to explain the confusion and ambiguity of what the cyborg represents. The term ‘human’ has become ‘laced with irony’[ Helen (Charles) ‘Queer Nigger’: Theorizing “White” Activism in Joseph Bristow and Angelia R. Wilson (eds.), Activating Theory: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Politics. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993, p. 97]. We are on the precipice of a new language to ‘explain its multiple meanings, its history, its future possible death.’[ Ibid. p. 97] In AD-Police and Ghost in the Shell there is a significant dialogue which unfolds when attempts to distinguish between humans (irrational, emotional) and machines (programming, software, information) occur. The dialogue that appears in the text becomes further problematised by the process by which the original Japanese language is appropriated into English. This dialogue is fascinating for more than what it says. It simultaneously offers a glance into the production processes which frame this dialogue. There are two versions of AD-Police distributed in the West, one the subtitled (‘sub’) version which was translated and released in 1993 by the American company AnimeEigo, the second dubbed into English (‘dub’) by the British company, Manga Entertainment in 1994. There are radical and problematic differences between the two, and as I speak no Japanese I am placed at the mercy of the translators of both dub and sub. However, both texts provide an opportunity to experience the different cultural framings which are grafted onto the Japanese original.

Figure 4. The typical woman, from ‘AD Police (1993/1994)

In the second AD Police episode, ‘The Slasher’ in the sub, or ‘Paradise Loop’ in the dub, Caroline Evers has become a murderer after replacing a significant number of her body organs with cyborg parts. The motivation for her killings and for the replacement of her internal organs with cybernetic ones remains the same in both sub and dub. She was denied a position within Green Corporation after a male
competitor argued that she behaved irrationally during her menstrual cycle. Embittered by this experience she has decided on cybernetic transplants, then gone on to become the president of Green Corporation and marry the person who originally challenged her corporate position. Gender plays a crucial role in Caroline’s decision to become a cyborg, for she wishes to assume the power traditionally granted only to men. However, the cyborg ‘consciousness’ does not conform to socially imposed expectations of what it means to be ‘female’. Caroline claims for instance that her new cyborg body should have given her husband the best sex of his life because of the heightened dexterity and stamina of her cyborg parts, however her husband instead seeks the attention of prostitutes along the notorious subway route known as “the Paradise Loop.” As Caroline claims in the dub:

“He (Caroline’s husband) told me a real woman was better than the cybernetic monster I’d become.”

The sub version offers an equally clear definition of the cyborg along gender lines. Caroline claims that her husband enjoyed having sex with prostitutes rather than her because

“Real women really are better, after all!”

Driven insanely jealous by this betrayal she murders her husband and begins a savage murder spree, killing prostitutes who frequent the Paradise Loop by severing their internal sexual organs. Her murders, however, are not a simple act of jealousy. Her very body becomes the site of confused loyalties and motivations. Is she human or Boomer (cyborg)? In response to police officer Iris’ question about why she murders she responds (in the dub):

‘[It is] as though my body were paying me back for the outrage I inflicted upon it. When it’s over I’m always holding a knife, and my body is on fire and only an act of violence leads to relief.’

In the sub Caroline further explains that:

‘A change inside the body brings out a change of consciousness you see. Hey tell me! Am I human or Boomer?!’

The police officer Iris responds:

Iris: ‘Boomers kill when their program goes wrong, but only humans kill because they’re angry or jealous.’

Caroline: ‘Really, I’m human am I? If murder is wrong then kill the woman inside of me, the OTHER side of me!’

Caroline’s past existence as a ‘human’ woman is not effaced by her cyborg ‘consciousness’. It remains in her motives of hate and jealousy towards prostitutes: these are seen to be emotions that Boomers cannot experience. It remains in the ‘lack’ she experiences within her body, a lack of the female menstrual cycle. Internally she no longer has ‘human’ organs but cybernetic ones, while externally she is still very much a woman with an attractive and highly sexual body (see figure 2). Caroline has not been translated from one state of being to another, from one category of life deemed to be ‘human’ to another deemed to be ‘non-human’. Instead she has been displaced from the ‘fixed’ human identity of being a physically ‘normal’ woman who menstruates and because of this is restricted in her ability to attain power within a male dominated institution, to a state of perpetual flux. Oscillating between patriarchal control strategies – she still has the emotions and body of a female which ‘restrict’ her ability to attain power within a male dominated institution – and the asexual technology and liberating power of the cyborg. Her problem is the contextualisation of her ‘out-of-place’ drive to attain male executive power whilst still being coded as ‘female’, subsequently threatening patriarchal hegemony, and so punished.
Caroline does not know whether she is human or non-human: a woman or an ‘inhuman monster’. This flux is experienced at the greatest point of intimacy, within her own body, and it is here that the greatest efforts are made to control and command the ambiguity of the cyborg.
It is later revealed that Caroline has become the test case for a new revision in ‘Boomer Law’: a new law which classifies human or non-human by the percentage of critical cybernetic organs within the body. As Caroline has over 70% cybernetic organs, she’s classified by the police as a Boomer – to which Iris responds:

Iris – ‘What’s 70% got to do with it when her mind’s still got 100% human feeling. There’s a whole lot more to being a human than just bits of flesh and bones.’

Constant attempts are made to attain control and command over the terms ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, categories that are constantly sliding and transforming themselves. The emphasis shifts to the body without human organs[ Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 158, in Shaviro, S. op. cit., 1993, p. 79.] with the consequence that it is necessary to ‘look’ inside the body to determine its human or non-human status. The necessity to police the internal structure and organisation of the internal human body is clearly articulated by Deleauze and Guattari where they argue that:

The Body without Organs is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism … to the organic organization of the organs.[ Ibid., 1993, p. 79]

The body without organs creates multiple potentialities of flight away from the constraints of a hierarchical organisation of organs and the organism. To return to the example of the cyborg Caroline Evers in AD-Police; she makes the following statement to the police officer Iris:

‘A change inside the body brings out a change of consciousness you see. Hey tell me! Am I human or Boomer?’

Caroline then proceeds to slice open the back of her hand to reveal the metal tendons and sinews which constitute her internal skeletal frame. Iris appeals to a ‘human spirit’ that cannot be placed within statistics, a ‘spirit’ that is intangible and not confined to the body and thus not open to surveillance[ It is paradoxical then that this ‘essence’ is called forth by a police officer – the symbol of surveillance in AD Police, however Police Officer Iris is both female and from the N Police (Normal Police).]. On the one hand meaning is placed firmly within the body, and on the other hand the body is discarded in favour of an indefinable ‘essence’ that becomes transferred to vague technological terms such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) or ‘the soul.’ The consequence is that, as Forest Pyle comments on the landmark cyberpunk movie Blade Runner, there is an attempt to ‘search for the most essential differences and distinctions – self-consciousness, emotion, memory – that would preserve the integrity of the human.’[ Pyle, F. op. cit., p. 236] This ‘integrity’ of the human, while coded into the flesh, has become all too vulnerable, all too open to the penetrations of the electronic and mechanical. The surface of the body is now deceiving: Lacan’s ‘citadel of the self,’ the safely categorisable exo-skeleton of the observable, stable subject, has been breached[ See Lacan, Jacques Ecrits: A selection Tavistock Publications Limited, London, Eng. Trans. 1977 (1966); and also Easthope, Anthony What a Man’s Gotta do: the Masculine Myth in Popular Culture. New York, London, Routledge, 1992 (1990).]. Any deviations from the ‘human’ become intolerable and must be erased so that the surface of the skin becomes smooth, and unbroken.

Figure 5. AD Police (Screenplay: Noburu Aikawa, Art Director: Kazushige Takano, 1993/1994)

It is notable that the articulation of ‘difference’ in the cyborg text often manifests itself with the collapse of the outside, the shell that houses the inside, to 

reveal an interior that is alien, non-human, and which subsequently provokes the policing strategies that are discussed here – often culminating in the death of the ‘exposed’ cyborg. Consequently, these cyberpunk texts often become the site for conservative – even reactionary – paradigms. It is a trademark of many cyberpunk texts that there is an inward gaze, a gaze that wishes to expose the insides of the body – whether this be the surreal cyberspace depiction of the mind on a journey inside the virtual computer landscape of cyberspace, or the more physical and visceral example of the flesh and skin being ruptured to expose the ‘other’ that was hidden from the gaze of the police, public and spectator. This motif occurs again and again in manga, anime, movies, novels. The cyborg terminator from the movie Terminator 2 is revealed to be non-human by slicing open its forearm to reveal the metal components of its skeleton infra-structure (a motif repeated by Caroline in AD Police). The cyborg Major Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell is revealed to be non-human in the middle of an orgy when her arm disjoints itself to reveal its mechanical infrastructure (see Appendix A). Inspection of the picture of the naked female torso from AD-Police (Fig. 3) reveals the protrusion of a small, round metallic object which appears to have penetrated the skin. Blood drips from this ‘exposed wound’ to construct a disconcerting image of a metal/electronic display which has ruptured a point of the flesh, from which blood flows, just above her right breast. Her head is also a tangle of tendon like chords which appear to be ‘jacked in’ to her brain. This image resonates with the motif of the gorgon snake clad head of the Medusa, the ancient Greek monster who could turn her enemies to stone as they gazed at her. In this case however, the viewer’s gaze is firmly projected towards her and it is her eyes that have been replaced by round metallic (stone) discs that appear to allow no sight at all.
Iris’ appeals to a human ‘spirit/essence’ in AD-Police go unheeded by the police, and the actual point at which one stops being a human and becomes a cyborg is left unresolved. Despite the very human qualities exhibited by the female murderer and the collision of these with the problematic hybridisation of human and machine occurring within her, the theme of this, and every other episode in AD-Police, is clearly to reassert notions of human control and mastery over the machine[ Pyle, F. op. cit., p. 233]. No deviancy is allowed within the rigid categorisation of human and non-human, and any possibility the cyborg may present to collapse the boundary between socially imposed masculine and feminine behaviour is ‘re-worked, re-written and re-covered to serve rather than to subvert the dominant ideology.’[ Jackson, R. op. cit., p. 175] Caroline’s voyage into the ‘cyborg flesh’ may have begun with her conscious, calculated decision to remove her female reproductive organs to succeed in the business world but her attempts to control and command the consequences of her action prove futile. In one scene she confronts the medical scientists who replaced her female organs with cybernetic ones demanding that her original organs be replaced, but this process is impossible. As Shaviro comments of the transition of Seth Brundle into the mutant Brundlefly in the movie The Fly,

Such a voyage into the flesh cannot be actively willed, for it approaches precisely that condition in which the will no longer commands.[ Shaviro, S. op. cit., p. 147]

Caroline cannot ‘rehumanise’ herself. For her to ‘will’ anything is finally reduced to her denial of any life-affirming actions and replaced with her active drive towards her own death. As Caroline comments to the police officer Iris, ‘If murder is wrong then kill the woman inside of me, the OTHER side of me!’ Again the binary between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ is desperately maintained, however, now the point of view has changed to the cyborg Caroline, and the other within her body is the woman. In an attempt to impose a stable single identity she walks into the compartment of a subway cart where a group of seedy cyborg men are seated. She stands there panting at the door for a few seconds and then removes her jacket to reveal her blouse. There is a cut to the men licking their lips in excited expectation. In the dub the emphasis is placed on Caroline’s attempts to reaffirm her female identity by ‘proving’ she can ‘suffer as a woman’ and not as an ‘unfeeling’ cyborg. Carolyn says to herself “I’m a human being, a woman.” One of the men in the compartment says “Give us what you got baby.” The voice-over then returns to Caroline who prompts herself, “Come on prove it!” In the sub version the only words are Caroline’s, as she confronts the cyborg men and simply says, ‘It’s OK … Help yourself.’
The difference between the two is radical. The dub focuses on the emotional crisis and tension which have led Caroline to this point. She must retain the integrity of her ‘womanhood’ by the acts of submission and sacrifice. The sub displays the cool, harsh, detached attitude of the cyborg disowning her womanhood in an ultimate act of detached pain and suffering. What follows in both cases is a stark black and white strobe-like scene as the subway passes through a dimly lit section of its travel. We see men’s faces in close shot, and one or two scenes alluding to the ‘normal’ sex she previously experienced with her husband. The AD Police halt the subway carriage and we see the dead bloodied body of Caroline covered by a white sheet. This tragic, desperate attempt to preserve her identity from the transformation into a cyborg is ‘also a ludicrously literal endeavour to conform to social norms.’[ Ibid., p. 147] Caroline’s body, instead of being the site of freedom and liberation through cyborg ‘empowerment’, becomes re-appropriated to serve the technologies of control[ Jackson, R. op. cit., p. 175]. Her body becomes the test case for a new ‘Boomer Law’, and in finally killing herself Caroline displays that she cannot reconcile her ‘monstrous empowerment’ from her ‘subjection to socially imposed definitions of what it means to be ‘human,’ to be ‘(female)’.’[ Ibid., p. 147] Caroline submits herself to a cyborg identity because she is a woman, and the problems she faces when she becomes a cyborg are because she was a woman. The tension created between Caroline’s past ‘stable’ gendered identity and her present state of flux between gender and genderlessness displays how the cyborg is as prone to the ‘normalising’ technologies and institutions of society as anyone else. As Lyotard suggests of the relationship between the ‘thinking machine’ and desire, the cyborg is nourished not only on radiation but also on ‘irremediable gender difference.’[ Lyotard, in Springer, Claudia The Pleasure of the Interface in Screen. Society of Education in Film and Television, London, England. Iss.32 No. 3, Autumn, 1991. p 319.] Caroline becomes a cyborg in an attempt to escape from the restrictions imposed upon women in patriarchal society, and, briefly she does, becoming the president of Green Corporation and marrying the man who originally won the position within Green corporation from her. However, the sexual act becomes the point at which ‘the boundary between what is human and what is technological is represented.’[ Springer, op. cit., p. 307.] Caroline’s husband rejects her to have sex with ‘human’ prostitutes because it is ‘better’ than having sex with his cyborg wife. Caroline as a woman and a cyborg has become highly successful in a male dominated profession. She has achieved this through technology, a technology which has the potential to collapse patriarchal strongholds of power, for no longer is a woman reduced to a purely biological status: the creator of life, ‘irrational’ because of her menstrual cycle. Her cyborg body readdresses this balance and threatens to enforce an equality because gender has ceased to become an issue. It is by no coincidence then that the female cyborg body has become highly eroticised, as twin fears of patriarchal society emerge: an overpowering technology and an active female sexuality. As Andreas Huyssen suggests of the Modernist tendency to equate machinery with women, this is ‘displacing and projecting fears of overpowering technology onto patriarchal fears of female sexuality.’[ Huyssen Andrea The vamp and the machine: technology and sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, New German Critique Nos 24-5 (1981-2) pp. 221-37, in Springer op. cit., p. 305] However, this is an imposed female sexuality and it ruptures and compromises the cyborg form which claims to make ‘sexuality, gender, even humankind itself, anachronistic.’[ Springer op. cit., p. 322]
The tension between sexuality and technology is one of the fundamental premises of the first episode of AD-Police, ‘The Phantom Woman’ (Moboroshi no Onna) in the sub, or ‘Boomer Madness’ in the dub. This episode details the history of the first cyborgs released into the commercial market. They originally had domestic and sexual capabilities but the ‘clients’ quickly became frustrated with the ‘too human’ emotions and demands being placed upon them by their cyborg ‘partners’. The next version simply had domestic capabilities but then the clients became dissatisfied with the lack of sexual enjoyment being provided. So, some technicians illegally grafted the first model’s more intelligent brain onto the domestic version’s body – so clients could gain both a sexual intensity and an uncomplaining worker. However these cyborgs became unstable because of the discontinuity of their experiences: intense sexual pleasure repressed within the slavery of domestic consciousness. It is at this point, as Springer suggests, that the collapse between human and non-human is most tangible because of what the cyborg is. As Haraway argues:

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.[ Haraway, op. cit., p. 150]

However, this is not happening in the representation of cyborgs in AD-Police, where the spaces which are opened by the cyborg are continually collapsed by the weight of patriarchy. I am seduced by the liberating appeal of the cyborg, which, as Haraway suggests makes possible the notion of equality through making gender and oppression obsolete[ Ibid.]. But it is an ironic, empty seduction, like a futuristic siren on a rocky outcrop seducing sailors to their death. The image of Kusanagi on one of the covers of Ghost in the Shell (figure 5) resonates with exactly this seductive siren on her technological rocky outcrop, but the overt sado-masochistic elements, tight leather body outfit, wrist and ankle straps draw it closer to the idea of a sacrifice; the sacrifice of stability and difference on the alter of a dream of the liberatory ‘Haraway’ cyborg.

Figure 6. ‘Ghost in the Shell’ Cover Iss. 5. (1995)

The two themes of liberation and maintaining the status-quo establish strained discontinuities between the subtitled and the dubbed versions of AD-Police.  In the final scenes of episode 2 the subway carriage has been stopped by the AD-Police and Caroline’s bloodied body is shown on the side of the pavement under a white sheet.  The two main characters, Jeena Malso and Leon McNichol, reply to the investigating police officer Iris in the dub:

Jeena: ‘She (Caroline) should have died happy. She died as a woman, not a Boomer.’
Leon: ‘But the trouble is every day it’s becoming harder to tell the difference and pretty soon there won’t be one.’

In the sub the conversation goes:

Jeena: ‘She died as a woman. Hope you’re satisfied.’
Leon: ‘In this town whether you’re Boomer or human … it’s all the same in the end.’

The differences between the two are subtle. In both Caroline must in the end actively seek out her own death to reconcile the inextricably intertwined forces of personal identity and the forces of social control and domination. It is at those moments which exceed Caroline’s desires, such as her husband’s rejection of her body in favour of ‘normal’ human prostitutes, that a violation within the integrity of the body occurs. As she describes it (from the sub):

‘… sometimes in that part of my body, I get cramps. My period, supposedly long since gone returns to torment me. Each time, before I realise it, I was holding a knife in my hand.’

These moments which lead her to kill prostitutes display the greatest moments of compromise to her sense of personal identity and conversely, the greatest control of normalising power. Whether her ‘biological’ feelings are psychological or physical they are the site of intense power relations. Establishing the hierarchical binary oppositions of gender[ Shaviro, op. cit., p. 21], where women must submit themselves to the normalising power of patriarchal society. The cyborg body in AD-Police has not become the ungendered ideal promised by Haraway[ Haraway., op. cit., 1991]. Instead it is an extreme manifestation of gender and sexuality and has become the site of political conflict, a new limit point at which to expose the ruptures and tensions of gender, technologies and ideology. As Springer suggests:

What is really being debated in the discourses surrounding a cyborg future are contemporary disputes concerning gender and sexuality, with the future providing a clean slate, or a blank screen, onto which we can project our fascinations and fears. … It is perhaps ironic, though, that a debate over gender and sexuality finds expression in the context of the cyborg, an entity that makes sexuality, gender, even humankind itself, anachronistic.[ Springer, C. op. cit., p. 322]

The cyborg body may be the subject for contemporary concerns over gender and sexuality but what role does culture play in the framing of these concerns? How much of a liberty can be taken with the anime and manga text by Western, readers and critics? Cross-cultural readership plays a vital and significant role in the creative impact of anime and manga. Questions such as how Australian readers ‘read’ the manga and anime text are important questions yet to be answered in any significant way[ Indeed while writing this thesis important research is being done by Australian academics on the reading of the anime and manga text, such as the soon to be published book on The life of Illusion Conference op. cit., and Virginia Nightingale’s major research project on Australian TV/Japanese TV: Viewer perspectives currently in progress at the University of Western Sydney.]. Research underway will go some of the way to explaining and appreciating the increasing popularity of manga and anime in Australia and the West generally, and hopefully contribute to answers left unresolved in this thesis. It is necessary to explore the pleasures associated with anime and manga which, however complicit they may be with patriarchal logic as has been suggested in my discussion of AD-Police, as viewer readings may still prove to offer resistance to a conservative, patriarchal agenda[ Andrew Ross op. cit., asks a similar question with regards to the popularity of pornography and romance texts.].

2.5 Cultural Differences {#section-2-5}


M. Major Kusanagi 3 (Ghost in the Shell, 1995)
It must be stressed however that the portrayal of sexuality, violence, and other thematic concerns in anime and manga have been produced within a distinct cultural and historical context (see part 1) that differs most notably in the regulation and classification of violent and sexual scenes. I raise this point not to discuss it in any great depth but to problematise an already complex topic. I also raise it to hint at the cultural bias and relativism which occurs in any work attempting to appropriate images created in a different culture and society, and this is certainly true of my understanding of Japanese anima and manga. The most sensitive areas of concern in Australian acceptance and regulation of anime and manga centre around violence and sex, especially rape scenes[ Senate Select Committee on Community Standards Relevant to the Supply of Services Utilising Electronic Technologies Report on Video and Computer Games and Classification Issues, Commonwealth of Australia, October 1993. p. 18. Paragraph 2.48 of this report states: ‘The Committee is also aware of some important developments in Japan, source of much of the material of concern to the Committee. The Australian Embassy in Tokyo passed to the Committee through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade translations of newspaper articles dealing with censorship of violent or sexually explicit video games. Most importantly was the announcement in December 1992 that software manufacturers had founded a self-regulatory body, the Computer Software Ethics Organisation, which would require manufacturers to submit adult software for screening for violent and sexually explicit and nudity scenes. The initiative was taken after Kyoto Police arrested four games manufacturers under the obscenity provision of the Penal Code.’ (p. 18) It should be noted that many anime and manga titles are derived from video games or provide the background for many video games. See also Stockbridge, Sally Sexual Violence and Hong Kong Films: Regulation and Cultural Difference in Media Information Australia. No. 74, November 1994, pp. 86-9 for a brief outline of some of the issues affecting Australian regulation and classification of Asian cinema, especially Hong Kong and Japanese films.]. Ideologically the difficulty over rape centres around the influence of gender studies and feminism within Australia and a strong public concern with the depiction and representation of women in cinema[ For academic articles written about the representation of women within cinema see Ross, Andrew op. cit., 1984; Mulvey, Laura, op. cit., 1985; Clover, C.J. op. cit., 1989; Williams, Linda op. cit., 1990. For a discussion of portrayal of women within Japanese popular culture see Ledden, Sean & Fejes, Fred op. cit., 1987; Ito Kink, op. cit., 1994; and Buruma, Ian, op. cit., 1995. For a discussion of Australian policy perspectives concerning the portrayal of women in cinema see Aisbett, Herd & Borthwick Community Views on Broadcasting Regulation, Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, NSW, 1991; The Australian Institute of Criminology (Tammy Pope and Paul Wilson) and the Attorney-General’s Department (Terry Brooks, David Fox and Stephen Nugent) Video Viewing Behaviour and Attitudes Towards Explicit Material: A Preliminary Investigation. The Australian Institute of Criminology, ACT, Australia, April 1987; The Australian Institute of Criminology (Stephen Nugent and Paul Wilson) and the Attorney-General’s Department (Terry Brooks and David Fox) Sex, Violence and ‘Family’ Entertainment: An Analysis of Popular Videos. The Australian Institute of Criminology, ACT, Australia, October 1987; O’Neill, John Sex and violence and the new censors in The Independent Monthly May, 1995. pp. 60-66; and Stockbridge, Sally op. cit., 1994, pp. 86-92.]. However, although feminist and gender studies groups exist in Japan, public policy decisions have yet to be significantly altered to reflect these concerns[ It appears the media within Japan operate in a largely self regulatory way (see my discussion of this in part 1).]. It is not my position here to debate the necessity, or even the wisdom of imposing ‘Western style’ regulation on the Japanese media industry. I raise the point to question the validity of any study attempting to appreciate a genre which has been imported from another culture and the problems this raises for contextualising certain scenes, especially those of my thesis focus; on sex and violence. I cannot be thoroughly familiar with the cultural conventions which frame the production and reading processes of Japan, let alone Asian, popular culture, I am unavoidably reduced to relativism and contextualism within my personal experiences of manga and anime as a Western educated white Australian. I can only hint at the differences which appear to exist in Asian cultures from my readings of other authors. As Chris Berry suggests of the different cinematic conventions operating in China,

the Chinese convention [of camera] constitutes part of an anti-individualistic aesthetic, contrary to the Western paradigm … a concern with the group [that] suggests that understanding this aesthetic may also go some way to enabling us to understand the absence of a discourse centring on gender in the Chinese discussions of [such] films.[ Berry, C. Sexual Difference and the Viewing Subject in Li Shuangshuang and the In-Laws in Chris Berry (ed.) Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, BFI, London, 1991, in Stockbridge, Sally op. cit., 1994, p. 90.]

E. Ann Kaplan questions reader subjectivity in China and Australia:

Would a Chinese audience read the sex scene in Girl from Hunan as a rape? How is it conceptualised in China? Does the definition of rape vary from culture to culture? Is rape acceptable as a representation but not socially? And, are we driven to an undesirable relativism in such cross-cultural comparisons?[ Kaplan, E Ann Problematising Cross-Cultural Analysis: The Case of Women in the Recent Chinese Cinema in Chris Berry (ed.) Perspectives on Chinese Cinema BFI, London, in Stockbridge, S. op. cit., 1994, p. 91.]

These same questions could be asked of the problematic episode The Slasher (aka Paradise Loop) from AD-Police. How is the final rape scene contextualised by Australian and Japanese readers? And how do these readings relate to the power relations I identified earlier in this chapter with regard to The Slasher and gender construction? If reader engagement can have any possible influence on this study it would be to foreground the social construction which grounds my interpretation of the anime and manga text and image. As Shaviro suggests:

…gender isn’t a social construction rather than a state of the body; it is precisely a social construction of the body. To separate desire from the body, or the Symbolic from the Real, is to perpetuate (in inverted form) the myth that sees the body as an essence, outside of history. Power does not work merely on the level of image and ideologies; it directly invents the flesh.[ Shaviro, S. op. cit., p. 143]

The power to ‘directly invent the flesh’ takes on a new and appropriate meaning when it is applied to the cyborg, for here we have the body that is created by artificial simulation and replication. It is a body ‘drowned in high tech’[ Grace, Sharon Codes of Privilege: Arthur Kroker. (Interview with Arthur Kroker) in Mondo 2000 p. 60-67.]and created by humans for human ends. As the female scientist who has ‘created’ the cyborg cop Billy (Episode 3 ‘The man who bites his tongue’ Shita o Kamu Otoko in the sub, or ‘I want Medicine…’ in the dub AD-Police) says as she engages in a very one sided sexual act with the cyborg Billy:

‘That beautiful body that can give me so much pleasure, even if you yourself can feel none.’

Billy’s cyborg body is created to work within the system of surveillance and oppression of a police officer in the AD Police force. He is robed in military hardware and displayed as the ultimate masculine killing device in the service of the state, to be desired and fetishised by the female doctor who created him, and praised by citizens as a defender of the state. As Haraway suggests:

The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.[ Haraway, op. cit., p. 151]

Billy, in the end, does revolt against his ‘masters’, kills the female scientist who created him and embarks upon a savage, indiscriminate killing of all those around him. However, Billy allows himself to be killed to end the ‘mindless killing zombie’ he has become. The State’s power to ‘invent the flesh’ animated, for a brief while, the dream of the fascist soldier – total in his obedience and defence of the state[ Springer, C. op. cit., pp. 303 – 323.].

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


N. Batou 2 (Ghost in the Shell, 1995)
The power to ‘directly invent the flesh’, when it is placed within its Japanese context as Buruma suggests in his book The Japanese Mirror, is modulated by the State Religion of Japan, Shintoism, which places a great emphasis on cleanliness and is very concerned to ward off pollution, especially a pollution of the body. Buruma suggests that this idea of ‘pollution’ is felt acutely by women in traditional Japanese society as they are deemed to be more ‘polluted’ than men because of their menstrual cycle[ Buruma, Ian op. cit., p. 5.]. This is especially significant for ‘the Slasher’ episode from AD-Police where Caroline represents two main ‘fears’ of Shintoism, the pollutant, and the sexually active female. Although sex is not a ‘sin’ as it is regarded in Western Christianity with its unspoken association with ‘original sin’, there is within Shintoism a ‘strong fear of (the) destructive forces sexual passion can unleash, especially in women.’[ Ibid., p. 5] This is made true for Caroline as she embarks on a savage killing spree of prostitutes after her husband cheats on her, and also true for the female cyborg in the first episode of AD-Police ‘The Phantom Woman’ (aka ‘Voomer Madness’ in the dub version) who stalks and attempts to kill the main character, Leon after he does not kill her (read here ‘satisfy’ her) at the beginning of the episode. Sexual passion – the jealousy of Caroline, and sexual desire – the repressed sexuality of the ‘phantom woman’ cyborg who can only express her sexuality through violence, are both constructed as ‘deviations’ aggravated and manifested by their cyborg, yet also female, identity. Both ‘cases’ articulate a tangled relationship between sexuality and violence, as Shaviro suggests:

… cravings for intimacy and sexual obsession can find an outlet only in acts of gratuitous violence.[ Shaviro, S., op. cit., p. 1]

Although Caroline attempts to resist the power inequality imposed on her because of her ‘menstrual pollution’ by becoming a cyborg the principle of power inequalities still exists.  It simply removes all pretences of statistical ‘proof’ and religious ‘common sense’ and reveals itself for what it is: patriarchal, sexist ideology.  And this, ultimately, is concerned with ensuring that the patriarchal hierarchy remains unchanged.  Caroline must struggle with a personal identity that is in a constant state of flux and yet also experience the forces of domination and social control which are inextricably intertwined with the construction of her identity.  Continuing the ‘Shintoist’ reading of this scene, Caroline’s ‘inherent impurity’ manifests itself when she acknowledges that her body is still slave to the biological processes she wished to escape:

‘My period, supposedly long since gone returns to torment me. Each time, before I realise it, I was holding a knife in my hand.’

and,

‘Really, I’m human am I? If murder is wrong then kill the woman inside of me, the OTHER side of me’

Both these examples display how Caroline feels trapped within the restrictions she feels are still imposed upon her because of her ‘female’ identity. A ‘Shinto’ reading of the final rape scene where Caroline actively seeks to end her life, might make it not so much an act of resignation to the forces controlling and categorising her life, but an act of ‘purification’. As Buruma suggests: ‘Before sexuality can be purified it must first manifest itself. In Japanese pornography this usually means rape.’[ Ibid., p. 59] Thus, Caroline manifests her innate female sexuality by enduring a cruel and violent death by being raped. The ‘purity’ of the scene may lie in the aesthetics of the bodies. The female body of Caroline in those last frames before her death is portrayed as an object of desirable beauty to the gloating men of the carriage (and audience). This may seem strange at first, but the Japanese have a long tradition of rendering the cruel and violent aesthetic. As the Kabuki actor Bando Mitsugoro once said:

Kabuki is the art of presenting cruelty as a thing of beauty, as cruelty that doesn’t feel like cruelty.[ Mitsugoro, Bando in Buruma, I. op. cit., p. 194]

Buruma adds, ‘Beauty, in other words, purifies it [cruelty], and presumably, by doing so, purifies us [the audience] too.’ The beauty of anime and manga, the idea that: ‘The pollution of violent death can only be purified by beauty,’[ Buruma, I. op. cit., p. 195] may go some of the way to explaining the appearance of the beautiful, or more often cute or kawaii female character in the cyborg anime or manga text. There is a range of styles, from the womanly beauty of Caroline and Jeena in AD-Police (see figs. 2 and 3), to the highly sexual form of Major Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell and Deunan Knute from Appleseed to the younger, more kawaii form of Alita from Battle Angel Alita (see fig. 1), the female vigilante group, the Night Sabers, from Bubblegum Crisis, or the leather clad Armitage from the recent anime Armitage III. All these females share one thing in common: they all exist in highly aggressive and violent environments[ For a further discussion on the concept of kawaii as it relates to the female and male form in anime and manga see Moore, Pauline Cuteness (Kawaii) in Japanese Animation: When Velvet Gloves Meet Iron Fists. Paper presented to Australia’s Second International Conference on Animation. Japan Cultural Centre, Sydney, March 3, & Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, March 4-5. 1995. This paper should be available in the soon to be published The Life of Illusion book which includes many of the presentations held during this conference.]. Thematically these titles also share, as William Routt suggests in his study on Battle Angel Alita,

… a complex interplay of innocence and decadence, technology and spiritualism, eroticism and gore, in which ideas originally posited as opposites come to be represented as the same.[ Routt, William D. De Anime. Unpublished paper presented at the ‘Life of Illusion Conference’ Japan Cultural Centre, Sydney, March 3, & Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, March 4-5. 1995. p. 2]

The underlying concern of AD-Police is not how to allow these oppositions to collapse but how to maintain the stability and conformity of an increasingly non-conformist and unstable identity, the identity of the cyborg. Japan is often perceived to be less tolerant of non-conformist behaviour than the West, and there appears to be far more outward pressure to confirm to social norms and fixed rules of conduct in Japan than is found in the West[ Buruma, I. op. cit., p. 124]. As the old Japanese proverb says, ‘a nail that sticks out must be hammered in.’

2.7 ‘Time to Die’ {#section-2-7}


O. Batou 3 (Ghost in the Shell, 1995)
There is a constant attempt in the AD-Police episodes to achieve some form of closure by their end. This closure usually revolves around the death of the cyborg being investigated by the AD-Police. These deaths operate in two ways. Structurally they both signify the closure of the episodes and try to reassert some sense of stability or survival as a consequence of their death. As Buruma suggests,

Self-destructing heroes and heroines are … like safety valves in a closed society. They put up a last stand of individual feelings and will, but by destroying themselves, as aesthetically and ceremoniously as possible, they ensure that order is always restored in the end.[ Ibid., p. 86]

This is certainly a valid reading for the closure which is attempted at the end of all three -AD-Police episodes with the ‘criminal’ cyborg characters in each case destroying themselves in what could be interpreted as an effort to ‘guarantee the survival and stability of society.’[ Morris, Ivan in Buruma, I. op. cit., p. 134] However, it is a somewhat tenuous and fragile stability. As Leon comments at the end of the first episode of AD-Police:

‘When it looked like that Boomer was about to kill me I was thinking things like … maybe Boomers, seemingly mere mechanical dolls were better suited than humans to this crazy town.’

The future stability of society appears to lie in the realisation of what the cyborg is and what it represents about us and our future. As Haraway suggests,

…the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival.[ Haraway, D. op. cit., p. 150]

This ‘different logic of repression’ brings me to my second point, which is that the deaths portrayed of the cyborgs in AD-Police are all extremely masochistic. This is significant because the active desire to sustain a pain/pleasure structure establishes a significant and unique narrative trend. I am using the term ‘masochism’ in a way similar to Gaylyn Studlar’s Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema[ Studlar, Gaylyn Masochism and the perverse pleasure of the cinema in Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods Vol.2, University of California Press, Berkely, USA, 1985.], where she defines masochism as more than a perverse sexual practice but as an ‘arena of artistic form, language, and production of pleasure through the text.’[ Ibid., p. 604] This paradigm is also important in that it shifts the focus away from the male controlling gaze which constructs the female form as a passive object to be-looked-at[ Mulvey was one of the principlal authors to outline this approach, see Mulvey, Laura op. cit. See also John Docker’s critique of the widespread influence of her article, in Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History. Cambridge University Press. UK. 1994] towards a subversive model of the female as an active and ‘idealized, powerful figure, both dangerous and comforting.’[ Studlar, G. op. cit., p. 605]
When Caroline walks into the subway compartment she has actively decided to place herself in this position, to die in this fashion. She initiates the male gaze by ripping open her blouse and the dialogue of both the sub and dub are highly focused to show the deliberate calculation and desire at the heart of her action. In the dub she says to herself, ‘I’m a human being a woman … come on prove it!’, whilst the sub is far more direct: ‘It’s OK .. Help yourself.’ She is almost provoking the motley group of cyborg males to behave as she wants them to, for her own ends. As Studlar suggests, ‘The female in the masochistic aesthetic is more than a passive object of the male’s desire for possession.’[ Idib., p. 610] This is not a ‘passive’ and submissive scene but is highly active and complex. In one scene during this sequence we see the faces of the cyborg men licking their lips in expectation of what will happen. Not only is this establishing Caroline as the object of the male gaze but she is also the initiator and holder of that gaze. In this scene the male faces themselves become the object to-be-looked-at. This potentially self-reflexive moment threatens to question whether the male gaze, and by an act of complicity the gaze of the audience itself, ‘contains passive elements [that] can signify submission to rather than possession of the female.’[ Ibid., p. 611] Identification also may threaten to become fluid and multiple in a way similar way to Clover’s suggestion that a male audience may identify with the ‘final girl’ in the slasher movie[ Clover, C.J. op. cit., pp.91-133.]. Without any audience research one can only presume that possibly a similar moment may occur in this rape scene, as the audience identifies with both the ‘male’ gaze of the rapists and the ‘female’ gaze of Caroline. The graphic framing in this case certainly presents both points of view. The excess associated with the ‘male’ gaze as it ‘consumes’ the body of Caroline is subverted by the point of view shot which displays what Caroline sees of the men she is actively inciting to rape her. It is a moment which opens the possibility of ‘gender mobility through identification.’[ Studlar, G. op. cit., p. 615] This simultaneous moment of ‘male excess of pleasure’ and ‘gender mobility through identification’ becomes even clearer in the case of the three censored pages from issue 2 of Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell (see Appendix A).

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


P. Ghost in the Shell Cover Iss. 5. (1995)
In Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell the cyborg body is subversive and resistant not ‘in spite of but because of being a necessary relay, target, and support for power.’[ Shaviro, S. op. cit., p. 144] The highly sexual depiction of the female in Ghost in the Shell, instead of being characterised for the pleasures of the male gaze only, becomes the active source of its destruction. It offers the potential for a more fluid and multiple male identification with the female and even an identification with a ‘feminised’, bishonen, masculine character which so often features in anime and manga[ Recall for instance the character of Lancer from the anime children’s series Robotech.]. Take as an example the three pages censored (see Appendix A) from issue two of Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell. In the frame before the censored section the chief of Section 9, Aramaki has ordered Batou to contact Major Kusanagi who is on vacation to recall her back to base. Batou does this through using his cyberbrain telepathic powers which allow them to not only communicate with each other but, in this case, to experience the physical sensations of the person they contact. In the censored version Major Kusanagi is simply asleep on a sofa with two girl friends. Strangely, this appears to cause the tough, macho Batou to experience intense disgust at what appears to be the weather: he comments about how hot and sticky the heat is. Maybe, however, it has something to do with the sex scenes that were censored.
The uncensored version which includes two extra pages[ Which also explains why all the footnotes in this issue are two pages out.] displays a graphic and explicit lesbian sex scene between Kusanagi and her two female friends, witnessed by the intruding Batou. The reason for the sex page is explained by Shirow in the footnote to page 53 where he explains that Kusanagi’s other job is the making of the illegal porno ‘Endorno’, which, Shirow explains, is the product name for a Virtual-sensual software line for cyborgs. Kusanagi does this work because of the ‘high performance [capabilities] of her body’ and because it makes her a lot of money on the side. At first the most interesting thing about both dialogue[ The translation of the censored pages from Ghost in the Shell were by Kazunori Kushida, downloaded from Steven Rhyners GITS Page, address: http://sharkie.psych.indiana.edu/rynersw/manga/gits/gits.html on 22/11/95.] and images is the incongruity it establishes. There is none of the heavy moaning one would expect from the sexual intensity shown within these pages. As one manga fan pointed out, ‘The entire episode given the translation is very amusing! The women talk about technical details as if they were ham operators at a swap meet…’[ Rhyner, Steven downloaded from Steven Rhyners GITS Page address: http://sharkie.psych.indiana.edu/rynersw/manga/gits/gits.html on 22/11/95.](see Appendix B for the translated dialogue from this section of Ghost in the Shell). The images display both female sexual pleasure and specific references to the internal cyborg parts of Kusanagi. In one scene the pornographic content becomes quite literally within Baudrillard’s[ Baudrillard, J. The ecstacy of Communication in Foster, H. (ed.) Postmodern Culture, London, Pluto Press, pp. 126-134.] definition, where the pornographic is the ‘exposure’ of everything: the internal, the secret, the unknown, all become exposed. In two frames during the frenzy of sexual desire and aggression the arm of Kusanagi actually fractures and opens to reveal the cathodes and digital inner workings; to reveal and expose not only the female body but the cyborg body. The reaction of Batou to his witness of this experience becomes quite revealing. In the censored pages during the communication he is doubled over, clenching his stomach, and responds:

‘Jeez, it’s so hot in there … gimme a break Major!’ ‘Good thing there’s no men involved …’ ‘All those fluids … I feel nauseous … this is too much …’

He then involuntarily punches himself in the eye, blinding himself (possibly under the influence of a suggestion sent by Kusanagi as a reaction to his voyeurism). Shaviro’s comments appear well suited to this scene:

We live in a world of ubiquitous, commodified images of sexuality, but one in which the shocks of tactile contact and (in an age of AIDS) of the mingling or transmission of bodily fluids are all the more denied. New electronic technologies, with their clean bits of binarized information, claim to volatize the flesh.[ Shaviro, S. op. cit., p. 126]

In Ghost in the Shell it seems cyborgs can be ‘dirty’[ In Julia Kristeva’s sense of the female body as abject and chaotic. Seeher two books Desire in Language. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, Great Britain, 1980 and Revolution in Poetic Language. Columbia University Press, New York, 1984.]. The cyborg body does not always mean an escape from the fluids, tactile contact, and intimacy which characterise the all too physical act of sex. In fact as Batou displays the female cyborg body can reassert the terrifying intimacy of sexuality. Batou provides a literal interpretation of Studlar’s ‘gender mobility through identification.’[ Studlar, G. op. cit., p. 615] As Shirow explains:

The reason Batou felt so sick was because he was receiving signals for organs he doesn’t have (female sex organs). Although some of you thought Slug sex = gay, its sensual beauty is maybe something to look into …[ Shirow, M. op. cit., footnote p. 55. in Kushida, Kazunori op. cit., p. 2]

Batou originally is so overcome by the feelings he experiences when he jacks into Kusanagi’s ‘mind’ that he thinks it is either drugs or was so ‘slimy’ that he quips it was ‘slug sex’[ Ibid., footnote p. 54 & frame 3 p. 55, in Kushida, op. cit., p. 2]. The fear and nausea that can be evoked by the archetypal role of soldier (Batou) towards the sexually active woman (Kusanagi), with her openness, perceived otherness, and sexual freedom threatens to disrupt patriarchal power structures to, in fact, become the pre-Oedipal which Haraway claims cyborgs are beyond. For instance, we can only imagine the alternatives of Batou’s relief that ‘Good thing there’s no men involved,’ which reveals another level of power play going on in these sexually charged images. Batou is aware of the importance of policing and enforcing his ‘normalised’ heterosexual, male identity, but these control strategies[ See Lacan’s discussion of “the citedel of the self” in Lacan, op. cit., 1977 (1966) and Easthope, Anthony op. cit., 1992 (1990).] are made unstable by the multiple perspectives of identification provoked by the cyborg body and ‘consciousness’. Batou’s reactions display, as Shaviro suggests, that ‘the public sphere of heterosexual “normality” can enforce its standards and perpetuate itself, only in so far as it is doubled by an inner world of fear, isolation, secrecy, and guilt.’[ Ibid., p. 74] And here the comment at the end of ‘Paradise Loop’ is revealed for all its empty, lonely aggression, ‘She should have died happy. She died as a woman, not a Boomer.’ The parallels to gay and lesbian discrimination and fear expressed by a ‘normalised’ masculine, heterosexual identity are all too clear. To take a similar line to Haraway, the cyborg is a potentially libratory identity which refuses to conform to socially imposed definitions of what it means to be ‘human’, ‘male’ or ‘female.’ It threatens to collapse these boundaries through the simple excessive nature of the bodies that are draped over its form: bodies which are extremely sexual and seductive and which therefore demand the powerful disciplining control which Foucault details[ Foucault op. cit., 1977 (1975) and Foucault op. cit., 1984 (1978)], and which most of the manga and anime series centre their narratives around.

2.9 Disconnect {#section-2-9}


Q. One of the Puma sisters from Dominion (1987) in Ghost in the Shell (1995)
The primary desire of the cyborg is not to collapse patriarchal society, create multiple, fluid perspectives of identification, or reshape gender identity, sexual difference and power. These are consequences and symptoms of its one overriding desire, the aspiration for something more than is offered within the confines of the ‘human’ body and gendered identity. In only one case does this ‘fusion’ with a ‘higher’ cyborg ‘consciousness’ occur, and that is in the final issue of Ghost in the Shell, but even this act requires the ‘death’ of Kusanagi’s body in Issue 7. In each of the episodes of AD-Police the cyborg who revolts against society or attempts to attain something ‘new’ or ‘different’ dies. Death plays a central role in the ‘solution’ which the cyborg characters aspire to. This solution should not be mistaken for the pre-oedipal unification with the mother promised by Studlar’s masochistic interpretation, but instead as Haraway argues cyborgs are without a sense of ‘original unity’ and thus search for a wholeness based on notions of abstract individualisation, ‘an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man (sic) in space.’[ Haraway, op. cit., p. 151]
However, the cyborgs in AD-Police display again and again the inescapable embodiment they represent of a stable gendered identity they are said to have once possessed and a fluid ‘other’ cyborg identity that is in direct conflict with the normalising forces of domination and social control. The sheer weight and discontinuity between these multiple identities and forces acting upon the body are best represented by the cyborg characters’ slow descent into the intolerable merging of machinery and the flesh. In episode 3 of AD-Police, appropriately titled Shita o Kamu Otoko ‘The man Who Bites His Tongue’ in the sub version, Billy, a fit, young police officer is nearly killed by a Boomer and, as in Robocop, is transformed into a cyborg, the Experimental Anti-Boomer Battle-Cyborg Unit No. 1. His duty is to eliminate the Boomers that are too powerful for the other AD-Police squads. Billy’s body is transformed into the familiar cyborg ‘killing zombie’ that has become a familiar motif in the cyborg genre with Terminator, Robocop, and so on. Billy cannot experience any sensations of pleasure and relies on a powerful drug to stimulate his brain. As he says in the opening dialogue:

My body cannot feel pain, or anything else either. Everything gets input directly into my brain as simple information. When I start feeling light headed, I bite my tongue … my one and only piece of flesh. The pain is the only thing I have that proves I am still human.

Violence becomes the only outlet in this crazed drive towards personal meaning and physical experience. Violence forcefully grafts the new identity which Billy’s overdependency on a rigid masculine paradigm reveals. At the beginning we are shown clips of Billy’s sporting prowess as a boxer, and his sexual prowess with Jeena. For Billy the story has yielded but one ending: ‘death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of [his] heart with the passing of the forms that [he] .. loved.’[ Campbell, Joseph op. cit., 1949, p. 29]
By the end he is reduced to a mindless, wandering image of agony and death as he embarks upon a killing rampage in the AD Police building, repeating to himself:

What am I doing? Who am I? Can’t remember. Who are these people? Why don’t they stop me? Are they too weak? Somebody kill me! KILL ME!

For Billy death has become the only release, and finally the agony of his cyborg embodiment cannot be distinguished from those same pleasures. In a scene that echoes the death of another mass of sensory and corporeal overload, Brundlefly in the movie The Fly, Billy confronts his once girlfriend Jeena who holds a gun in her hand. He pleads:

Yes kill me … Kill me Jeena, please. Shoot me in the brain, it doesn’t understand anything anymore. I don’t know what I’m doing but somehow I know you … Let me feel pain before I die. Let my mind feel pain, remind me I’m human. My tongue, that’s all I have left, shoot my tongue.

Finally, the extremities of agony, pain and suffering cannot be distinguished from those of pleasure. This is echoed in the final words of the female cyborg in the first episode of AD-Police, ‘The Phantom Woman’, where she confronts Leon and proceeds to blur the boundaries between masochistic sexual desire and death:

Now shoot! … Shoot me more! Rip my skin apart … tear my flesh … and splatter my organs all over! If you don’t, I’ll kill you …

Billy, Caroline and the ‘phantom woman’ all actively create the death which is the fulfilment and release of the ‘contaminating alterity [that] cannot be assumed or possessed.’[ Shaviro, S. op. cit., p. 148.] Attempts to define a binary difference between human and non-human through imposing clear gender identities became untenable when the body is saturated in high tech. The cyborg ‘flesh’ cannot be possessed by the State, the Police, or medical science, or even personal will and ‘identity’. The cyborg becomes multiple and fluid. It denies simplification. Pain becomes indistinguishable from pleasure; gender identity and sexual difference threaten to be subverted. The kawaii body aestheticises violence and death. ‘Bodily intensity is in this sense an other to power, an excess that disturbs it, a surplus that it cannot ever control or appropriate.’[ Ibid., p. 148]

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Conclusion: Cyborg Language {#conclusion}

Cyborg Language

And the body became vulnerable. The flesh was re-arranged, the inside became the outside, the aggressor became the victim, male became female, the aesthetics of sex and violence became tattooed on the flesh, expanded memory was acquired, and the prophet spoke:
‘Jack into my personal dream.”


R. Major Kusanagi 4 (Ghost in the Shell, 1995)
Unlike the constant attempts to impose difference in AD-Police a slightly different approach is provided by Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell. Compare the attempts to reassert control over what is ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ in AD Police with this example from issue 7 of Ghost in the Shell. The main character, Major Kusanagi (a highly advanced cyborg) has been placed on trial for the murder of a suspected terrorist. In this scene she has just been questioned by the prosecutor about why she decided to kill the terrorist.

In this example (Fig. 6) the notions of ‘human’ and ‘machine’ become utterly blurred as Kusanagi argues the futility of judging the epistemology of her actions by questioning the very basis of assuming origins. Origins have become uncertain and unstable. The terrorist’s actions may derive from many sources, both human and non-human. They derive not only from the education, economics, political and social discourses which surround the terrorist, but also a ‘cyborg culture’ where identity and the classifications and boundaries centred around notions of human and non-human become increasingly unstable and intangible. The terrorist appears to be very much a human in the frames portraying him, yet his actions are described in the terms of computer programming. Whether it is important or not to make the distinction between human and cyborg becomes irrelevant. What becomes important is that when ‘we’[ I am referring here to both myself and the potential audience of this text who are involved, by an act of complicity, in the structuring of meaning and experience within this text. For a similar idea see Pyle, F. op. cit., p. 288.] ‘make’ cyborgs ‘we make and, on occasion, unmake our conceptions of ourselves.’[ Ibid., p. 288] To paraphrase, in an unlikely combination, Donna Haraway and Steven King, in a scene where distinctions between human and non-human become ambiguous we find that the face looking out of the animated screen or drawn page is also the face looking in[ King, Stephen Dance Macabre, Warners Books, London, 1981. p. 291.]. AD Police and Ghost in the Shell suggest that we need cyberpunk stories at this point in time because we, in fact, are the cyborgs.[ Donna Haraway op. cit., p. 150, expressed a similar sentiment when she wrote: ‘I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. … By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.’ (p. 150)] The viewer/reader is forced to consider what is the ‘self in relation to (the) dominant notion of reality.’[ Jackson, R. op. cit., p. 52] How is the policing of the identity and of the body in cyberpunk fiction engaged with ‘real’ problems and fears of contemporary society? Who ‘owns’ the body; who controls the discourses within which we can discuss the body? Medical/scientific discourse, the law, police and other dominant institutions all express claims over this control[ Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish are classic examples of the relationship between the meaning making institutions of a society and the understanding and meaning given to notions of sex, the body, crime, and diversions from the dominant meaning of the time.]. The cyborg, and by an act of complicity, my own academic concerns, offer a possible language within which these concerns are being articulated. Just as the cyberpunk text often concerns itself with uncovering and exposing the hidden, it is very much the ‘hidden’ agenda of this thesis to explore the possibilities offered by cyborg discourse for a different language that is relevant and accessible to those in need of a motif of contemporary problems and issues[ Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980’s in Socialist Review 10, March-April, 1988, pp. 65-109, is the clearest articulation of a political manifesto engaging with contemporary problems and issues through the motif of cyborg identity.]. Despite where the power lies, in medical, legal, police, institutions etc., cyborgs offer the potential destruction and collapse of the ‘systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations.’[ Haraway, D. op. cit., p. 163] The police, law, and medical sciences in AD Police attempt to control the cyborg body, but to be a cyborg is to be other than human, to be beyond and offer more than can be defined by being ‘human’. To be a cyborg is to be stronger than humans, to be more intelligent, to be unemotional; to be beyond the parameters and boundaries of lived experience which frame ‘humanity’; and yet at the same time to be judged within the dominant systems of authority created by humans, so that the ‘inhuman’ mechanical otherness is simultaneously felt to be a human projection.[ Pyle, F. p. 325] The fear projected towards what is non-human manifests itself in the attempts by legal and police institutions to classify the cyborg as ‘other’. This, however, rapidly degenerates into an ironic testimony to the power of the dominant meaning-making institutions to ‘transform its enemies into its own mirror image.’[ Culler, J. Literary Fantasy, p. 33 in Jackson, R. op. cit., p. 175] The cyborg becomes not the cause of social, political and economic instability but a symptom of these very factors. And yet the cyborg is more than a symptom which is artificially created within the over-active imagination of a Japanese artist. The cyborg of the anime and manga text cannot be contained within the page or projected screen of its origin. The fears and dilemmas of contemporary society are irrevocably and powerfully grafted onto the very body of the cyborg itself. Problems which exist within the lived reality of people and societies, of assimilation, segregation, identity, gender, sexuality, technology, AIDS, the ‘New World Order’, etc., intersect with the fears and concerns manifested towards the cyborg body in the anime and manga text. The cyborg as portrayed in Ghost in the Shell and AD-Police promises the realisation/illusion of an accessible, pluralistic, anti-totalising discourse. This notion is best articulated by Haraway where she writes:

Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusion of animal and machine. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of ‘Western’ identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind.[ Haraway, D. op. cit., p. 176]

The cyberpunk genre in manga and anime excites the possibilities of a new language, a language which occurs principally because of the context and landscape it is used within. Ghost in the Shell and AD-Police detail a landscape of the apocalypse and cyberspace colonised by erotica, violence and religion. However, the erotica, violence and pseudo-religion of the cyberpunk text have been pirated for its own ends. The scenes involving these elements offer new formulations and depictions of the human body, new technologies implanted within the human flesh. These new formations create a dynamics of motion and image of the body which blurs notions of human and non-human, reality and fantasy, past, present and future. AD-Police and Ghost in the Shell portray alternative conceptualisations of violence and sexuality that demand to be engaged with by academics, to articulate the pleasure, resistance and politics offered by these conceptualisations of violence and sexuality. The cyborg elements in Ghost in the Shell and AD-Police force us to come to it, after a while, on its own terms. The cyborg body requires new methodological considerations, as suggested by Shaviro at the conclusion of his book The Cinematic Body:

We are at the point of a momentous paradigm shift. We need a new politics and aesthetics of culture, a new kinetics and economics of power and resistance, of pleasure and pain, one oriented toward the multiple perceptions, affects, and subjectivity effects intrinsic to cyborgs and simulacra, to our deorganicized, hyper-sexualized, technologized bodies.[ Shaviro, Steven op. cit., p. 165]

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Appendices {#appendices}

Appendix A

Note: The following includes the three censored pages (pp. 53 & 54 were withdrawn, p. 52 was retouched) from Issue 2 of Masamune Shirow’s manga Ghost in the Shell. For further information on the reason behind the decision to censor these pages for their Western release see Toren Smith’s ‘Why manga translations are censored for the US market.’ from Steven Rhyners GITS Page http://sharkie.psych.indiana.edu/rynersw/manga/gits/gits.html downloaded on 22/11/95.

Appendix B

Kazunori Kushida’s translation of the two censored pages from Ghost in the Shell.
Downloaded from Steven Rhyners GITS Page http://sharkie.psych.indiana.edu/rynersw/manga/gits/gits.html
Specific site: http://sharkie.psych.indiana.edu/rynersw/manga/gits/gitsh.txt
on 22/11/95.

From: [email protected] (Kazunori Kushida)

P.53

Top Footnote:
“Endorno” is the product name for a Virtual-sensual software for Cyborgs. It is also a illegal porno which can channel homosexual-pleasure through several lines at the same time (“Multi” refers to taking all of their body senses and channelling it through one line). Although there are some dangers, it exists on the underground network. It is also “Kushanagi’s” other job, because she has such a high performance body . She makes a bundle off of this.
(if does not work for opposite sexes…do you know why?)

1st frame (top R)
brunet: Oh! what about Farankusu?
long hair: got caught in Endorno’s inspection device BOOO~~~~~

2nd Frame (top L)
brunet: It’s time to raise the price
Long hair: I feel the adrenalin!

3rd frame (middle R)
brunet: Since Motoko’s 16^2 /cm2 skin receptors we can make it (I’m assuming its adreanlin) direct, and that helps alot (sic)! Plus there’s no line noise because we’re using fiber (sic) optics!

side note:
Normal Humans have 10^2 – 14^2 pain receptors, 25 pressure
receptors, 6-23 cold receptors and 0-3 warmth receptors in 1 square cm.

4th frame (middle L)
Brunet: I’m shifting to multi and starting to record.

5th frame
Long hair: By the way, where did you get that 5x sesory (sic) equalizer (sic)?
brunet : I made it! its an MS (Micro-Slave) application device.

p.54

footnote:
The reason why Bado [Batou] thought “drugs” was because he synchronized (sic) with all the endorphine in Motoko’s brain. “Virtual Sex” does not have to be this basic, you can do a lot more specialized things by using special programs, but I took the easy way out and drew it
simply. The blue liquid going into Motoko’s arm is a sense/sensual increasing program.

p.55
3rd frame: (middle R)
Bado: ugh….ah…in my stomach…Uh..I feel sick! I’m lucky it didn’t have any terminals…Uha.. that was slimey (sic).. what was that Slug sex? you——-

5th frame: (bottom R) :
Bado: emergency code flat-17
Motoko: Tell’em ETA 20 minutes!

6th frame: (bottom mid):
Brunet: I’m sick of this! your always doing this! you told me that you would give me your time off!
Motoko: The drug(program) wore off… And my vacation just got canceled (sic) …

7th frame: (bottom L)
Brunet: Mou! (argh!) give me back my equalizer!!!
Motoko: When you go home please close the door with the seal … I’ll call you later!

Footnote: Not just limited to Kusanagi, their homes are located in many places. It is because if you keep your whereabouts secret you are less likely to be found out. When they’re in Virtual Sex they cut themselves from the net, to prevent hackers from hacking, however if
you have a key to the brain (like Bado did) you can get in direct contact. The reason why Bado felt so sick was because he was receiving signals for organs which he doesn’t have (female sex organs). Although some of you thought Slug sex = gay, its sensual beauty is maybe
something to look into..

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References {#references}

Anime Cited

Features:

Akira English Dub vers., dir: Otomo Katsuhiro. Akira Committee. Aust. release 1991 on Island World Corporation. 1989.

My Neighbour Totoro Jap: Tonari No Totoro Dir: Miyazaki Hayao. Nibariki/Tokuma Shoten. 1989.

Patlabor Jap.: Kido Keisatsu Patlabor (Mobile Police Patlabor), dir: Oshii Mamoru, Aust. release 1990, Tokuma Shoten/Bandai. 1988.

OVA Series:

AD Police, Noboru Aikawa (Screenplay), Kazushige Takano(Art Director), Jap. release: 1990: Artmic, Bandai Visual & Youmex. English sub. vers., Anime Ego, 1993. English dub. vers. Manga Entertainment, 1994.

Armitage III English Subtitled vers., dir: Hiroyuki Ochi, Pioneer. 1994

Bubblegum Crisis English Subtitle, AIC/Artmic/Network. 1987-

Cyber City Oedo Japan Home Video, Aust. release 1994, English dub. ver., Manga Entertainment Ltd. 1990

Geno Cyber Koichi Ohata (Director), Kenji Kamiyama (Art Director), Noboru Aikawa & Koichi Ohata (Script). 1st release Artmic/Plex (1991). English dub. release Manga Entertainment Ltd. 1995.

Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend Jap: Chojin Densetsu Urotsikidoji (Legend of the Superbeing – The Wandering kid. aka: The Wandering Kid) Dir: Takayama Hideki. Maede I/Javn. Aust. release 1992, English dub. vers., Manga Video. 1987.

Television Series:

Astro Boy Jap: Tetsuwan Atom (Iron Arm-Atom). Mushi. 1963.

Manga Cited

Kishiro, Yukito (Story & Art) Battle Angel Alita. 1st published as Gunnm by Shueisha Inc. (English Translation: Fred Burk, Sterling Bell & Matt Thorn), Viz Communication, San Francisco CA, 1994.

Shirow, Masamune Appleseed Books 1-4, 2nd. Edition, Orig. pub: Harumichi Aoki, Jap., (1985) (English Translation: Studio Proteus [Dana Lewis & Toren Smith]), Dark Horse Comics, Milwaukie OR., 1995.

Shirow, Masamune Dominion: Tank Police, Orig. pub: Harumichi Aoki, Jap.(1986?), (English Translation: Studio Proteus), Dark Horse Comics, Milwaukie OR., 1995.

Shirow, Masamune Orion, Orig. pub: Harumichi Aoki, Jap., (English Translation: Studio Proteus), Dark Horse Comics, Milwaukie OR., 1995.

Shirow, Masamune (Story & Art) Ghost in the Shell Iss. 1-8 Orig. pub: Kodansha Ltd., Jap., (1991) (English Translation: Studio Proteus [Fred Schodt & Toren Smith]), Dark Horse Comics, Milwaukie OR., 1995.

Takada, Yuzo (Story & Art) 3×3 eyes First pub by Kodansha Jap. (1983). (English Translation: Studio Proteus [Toren Smith & Toshifumi Yoshida]) Dark Horse Comics, Milwaukie OR., 1995.

Takezaki, Tony (Art), Suzuki, Toshimichi (Story) AD Police (English Translation: Matt Thorn). Artmic/Viz Communications Inc., San Francisco CA., 1994.

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