Virtual Ephemeralities: Idoru and Evangelion, Popular Visual Cultures in Japan Leonard Sanders

It has been recognized that visual culture remains at present a discourse of the West about the West and furthermore, the success or failure of visual culture may well depend on its ability to think transculturally, oriented to the future ... (Mirzoeff, 10). This essay examines some of the implications of this recognition through text and image interactions from the realm of J apanese popular culture, in particular idoru (pop idols) and the SF animation series, Evangelion} Specifically, my interest is how the interpenetration of text in different languages (English and Japanese) together with visual images function as sites for new, multicultural interactions. These, in turn, introduce instabilities (old and new) into conventional Japan/West distinctions and across word and image paradigms. This has consequences for the methodologies that support visual culture as a field of inquiry in its move to become a polycentric, globalized field of study (Mirzoeff, 11). The challenges encountered when we attempt to think transculturally are particularly evident in connection with Japan, the tendency to interpret Japan through categories based on Western discourses having been well-established.2 It is most often cited as a place where contemporary society and the technologies of visual culture converge to form the context for new alignments: a technicized society, according to Roland Barthes (The Grain of the Voice, 83); the imaginary of futuretech (Case, 635). Filmmaker Wim Wenders sudden insight, on the streets of Tokyo, was that a valid image of this city might well be an electronic one (88). Morley and Robins maintain Japan has become synonymous with the technologies of the future - with screens, networks ... simulation (168), giving rise to the postmodern romanticisation of Japan as a space somewhere between the real and the imaginary (169). As a writer who in previous novels has enjoyed the signifier of Japanese language like Chiba City or Gomi no Sensei as its semiotic ghost (Tatsumi, 367), William Gibson provides

13 8

Leonard Sanders

such as Blade Runner (238); in effect, what Gibson presents novelistically is a new spatial multiplicity (250). Gibsons conception of the world of Japanese idol-singers in his recent novel Idoru, especially their manifestation as virtual idols, is particularly illuminating for exploring Japan/West interactions. Sue-Ellen Case finds Idoru, with its links to hypertext and Internet fiction, to be a work which opens up further possibilities for narrativizing digital flow: from within an assemblage of postnational identities, all converging in Japan the novel relates how, in the construction of celebrity, a new form of subjectivity may be inscribed within data flow (63536). In particular, Idoru presents an interesting example of how cultural instabilities can occur through an intermedial interaction, that is the book and its cover (a similar relation to that of photographs and their captions, poems and their titles, texts and illustrations, etc.). Another example, taken from actually existing technoculture... where the new cultural technologies have penetrated deepest (Penley and Ross xii, emphasis in original) especially among the younger generation in Japan, is the phenomenally popular animation series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Here my concern is how specifically Western religious references are recontextualized for this animation, their large number, rapid proliferation and randomness. Director Hideaki Anno has stated: I borrowed from everywhere. Even names that have no bearing on anything.... It might be fun if someone with free time could research them (Sakamoto, 171). Important to note is the wide freedom of interpretation offered by the director to the receivers of the work. Moreover, this invitation to research the references in more detail is integral to the continuation of the animation project itself, albeit via Web pages. Notable, too, is the visual surface of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which encapsulates a data flow, a continual streaming of image-and-text across the screen (including hundreds of explanatory titles in English and Japanese). The amalgamation and high speed transmittance of Eastern and Western cultural references in this animation series opens up an entire network of transcultural intertextuality, permeated with polyglot words, maps, diagrams, visual images, kanji (Chinese characters), bits of text borrowed from everywhere.5 In such a context, there is the chance that meaning itself may become semi-transparent, semi-permanent, in a sense, ephemeral.

Virtual Ephemeralities

139

and disintegrated ... analysis loses the possibility of a grammar, a rhetoric, a sociality of images, and with it the sociality of people (70). If so, it might be more profitable to look for a way of thinking about visual culture which does not so much rest on fragmentation, but is directed towards multicultural coincidences (Tatsumi, 368) and multiplicities. The methodological difficulties for such an undertaking are apparent when we consider recent critical discourse concerned to invent new forms of interpretative inquiry. Heywood and Sandywell outline four levels or orders of visual phenomena, ranging from the routine visual categories of practical experience, through to a more meta-theoretical level.6 Such an approach, the authors claim, helps redirect research away from visuality narrowly conceived and focuses attention upon textual and ideological analysis of vision in contemporary culture. Pointing out the need to differentiate between different ways of seeing ... and cultural forms (xi), they ask: Have other cultures approached the world of objects and events as spectacles? (xiii). Yet the very notion of orders or levels or layers of visual phenomena may set limits to what can be excavated when dealing with other cultures, at the same time ensuring an analysis that can only further proceed along the lines of Western discourse. Irit Rogoff wonders whether we can actually participate in the pleasure and identify with the images produced by culturally specific groups to which we do not belong? (The Visual Culture Readery 16). It may even need to take into account that the uncritical consumption of visual images for pleasure may constitute a cultural practice in itself. Rethinking the visual, then, requires a thoroughly interactive approach, with an acceptance of greater levels of uncertainty and arbitrariness: thus, to ask new and alternative questions is to accept that cultures are not visual in the same sense. This requires not only thinking transculturally, but also Derridas letter Jacques Derrida, in a letter dated 10 July 1983, responded to a request by a Japanese professor for help with translating the word deconstruction into Japanese.7 Derridas advice to Professor Izutsu, which stretches to many pages, concludes as follows:

140

Leonard Sanders Ido not believe that translation is a secondary and derived event in relation to an original language or text. And as deconstruction is a word, as I have just said, that is essentially replaceable in a chain of substitution, then that can also be done from one language to another. The chance, fi rst of all the chance of (the) deconstruction, would be that another word (the same word and an other) can be found in Japanese to say the same thing (the same and an other), to speak of deconstruction, and to lead elsewhere .... (5)

Translation, then, in Derridas words, is not a secondary and derived event, but one which involves an element of risk and chance. The controversy that greeted the translation of the word cyberspace into the Japanese language provides a case in point. Takayuki Tatsumi recounts how William Gibsons translator had to use frequent and adventurous juxtapositions of Chinese characters and Japanese alphabets for cyberspatial terms (368). For instance, when the word cyberspace is written in kanji, the Chinese characters are read as den-noukuukan (meaning electricity-brain-space), whereas the literal reading is saibaa-supeesu if katakana> the Japanese syllabary for foreign loan words, is used. He observes that the Japanese typographical convention requires a reading of two kinds of representations of one word simultaneously (368). Furthermore, taking the idea of translation into a wider context (and citing Gibsons invention of Chiba City as an example), Tatsumi concludes that translation is another name for misperception (372), but adds, a little ingeniously, it was Gibsons original misperception of Japan that allowed Japanese readers to correctly perceive postmodernist Japan. In a chapter entitled The Emporium of Signs, Nick Perry considers how instabilities arise from the exoticizing use of Western images within Japan. He argues that cultural work might none the less still get done through signifiers that have all but floated free of their conventional signifieds, as, for example, in the Japanese use of English (86). He provides an example from Japanese advertising, where the letter A is inverted in the word BLACK, creating a commercial which is invested with a purely formal visual appeal (86). But can we therefore claim this has cultural significance when compared with, say, the Western pop group KORN and their trademark reversed R, or the popular movie SE7EN, where a numeral is inserted in the title? Perry further notes that in terms of content there are rapidly proliferating, multiple overlapping features as between Japan and the West (but)... it generates novelty in accordance with a

Virtual Ephemeralities

14 1

Figure 1. Yuki Terai, a virtual idol. Copyright Frog Entertainment.

in relation to Gibsons Idoru and the Evangelion animation, in a move toward an open-ended, flexible understanding of how the visible or visualizable components of visual culture are perhaps best understood as contingent, transient, continuously reproduced and therefore open to every kind of realignment, misperception or misreading, especially through translation. DK-96: Virtual Idoru A recent development in the field of popular visual culture in Japan has been the emergence of virtual idols. Yui Haga was the first, with large, luminous eyes, a phantom comprised of different bodies and different voices (Greenfeld, 273). This entity sings, dances, and has released a CD and a photo book. At concerts her voice is pre-recorded, her image is animated for television; Karl Greenfeld relates how, at a book signing party, three girls were seated at the autograph table and fans could choose from whichever model most closely resembled their interpretation of their idol. The next generation virtual idol Kyoko Date (dk-96) has been given extensive media coverage. The code name dk stands for digital kids and is also her stage name. Computer game technology was used to capture and convert expressions and lip movement into data to synchronize her singing and talking. This

142

Leonard Sanders

Figure 2. The cover of W. Gibsons

images and virtual reality are clear in that it took a half-year to produce images of her smiling.) A large number of questions addressed to her from fans on the Internet continue the project. The latest incarnation is Yuki Terai (fig. 1) created by manga writer Kenichi Kutsugi, who has expressed the hope that the cuteness of this virtual idol will have wide appeal, not only among the otaku (see note 11) but also to his wife and mother. The white dress is her trademark, she likes Billie Holiday (which explains the microphone in the illustration) and to date she has released a CD, and a photobook entitled Shangri-La. In the middle of Gibsons novel Idoru, the protagonist Colin Laney finally comes face to face with Rei Toei, a virtual idol adored by all Japan:
If hed anticipated her at all, it had been as an industrialstrength synthesis of Japans last three dozen top female media faces .... She was nothing like that. Her black hair, rough-cut and shining, brushed pale bare shoulders as she turned her head. She had no eyebrows, and both her lids and lashes seemed to have been dusted with something white, leaving her dark pupils in stark contrast. And now her eyes met his. He seemed to cross a line. (229-30)

Subsequently he finds the eyes of the idoru, envoy of some imaginary country (230), that she is a sort of hologram,

Virtual Ephemeralities

143

Figure 3. The Asian Billboard scene from Blade Runner.

ates the idoru in a space that generates high tech enchantment for the reader, and then moves to a wider concern, namely placing celebrity at the center of how cultural production and intellectual property will survive within the electronic (Case, 638).8 Interesting as this may be, this position is somewhat destabilized by the cover of the book (fig. 2), which is not only implicated in the reading process (we read the book through the cover), but is also part of the production and reception of the book as a cultural artefact. On the cover the title idoru is placed directly over the eye of an Asian womans face, set against a background of colourful high tech data streams. The placement of the title resembles an eye patch, but, more significantly, the pronunciation in English (the [ai] sound of idoru suggesting eye) produces an instance of visual onomatopoeia, or a misperception, if we compare the original Japanese form written in katakana, which would not have that connotation. Coincidentally, this particular visual image perhaps has a genealogy that can be traced to another image and archived. The angle, positioning of the womans face (cf. Gibson as she turned her head), and high tech landscape brings to mind a scene from Blade Runner, a chance connection that situates Gibsons book within a more conventional Japan/West opposition.9 Paul Sam- mon describes the genesis of the Asian Billboard scene (fig. 3) in his book Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner as follows. Displayed on one side of a skyscraper is an enormous media screen on which is projected the smiling face of a traditional geisha girl (240). She periodically holds up a pill and swallows it. Sammon recounts how the casting department had been asked to select two Oriental

144

Leonard Sanders

The Friendly Ghost Neon Genesis Evangelion is an animated SF series consisting of twenty-six episodes originally broadcast on TV Tokyo from October 1995 to March 1996. Two follow-up feature film treatments directed by Hideaki Anno were released in 1997.10 The series is famous for its many unexplained mysteries and soon became extremely popular among the otaku, who posted innumerable home pages on the Internet.11 In response to this phenomenon, KK Longsellers hired a team of young experts to unravel the many riddles generated by the animation and published their results. The first of these books, Shinseiki Evangelion no Nazo, wh ich sold hundreds of thousands of copies, looks in to the references in excruciating detail. Subsequent volumes have tended to complicate rather than clarify matters, to the ongoing enjoyment of fans. The narrative, briefly, is as follows: the setting is New Tokyo No. 3, the year 2015, a number of years after a mysterious explosion referred to as the Second Impact has decimated the

Figure 4. An entity nailed on the cross in Evangelion. Copyright gainax/ Project Eva. tv Tokyo.

mission, together with other like-minded teenagers, such as Rei Ayanami (who turns out to be a clone of Shinjis mother), is to pilot giant robots bearing the name Evangelion. They fight hostile entities called shito, which take on various guises and dimensions. Sadly neglected by his father, Shinji fortunately finds friendship in the person of one of his fathers subordinates, and eventually moves in with her and her pet penguin. From here the plot lines radiate in all directions. In an interview (17 July 1995) the director Hideaki Anno described the overall project of Evangelion as depicting a world where the people have gotten used to the resurrection - yet still

Virtual Ephemeralities

14 5

.... A world where some completely unknown enemy called the Angels comes to ravage the cities. ... And in that world, a fourteen-year-old boy shrinks from human contact (Sadamoto, 170). It is hard not to be struck by the numerous instances of religious and metaphysical terminology and references occurring in unusual contexts, for example, angels posited as enemies. The title itself, Evangelion, is a hybrid with a range of possible meanings and associations: Eve, Eva, Evangel. Translation also presents special challenges, the literal

Figure 5. Victorious computer operators in Evangelion. Copyright gainax/Project Eva.TV Tokyo.

ing to Evangelion web sites. Other references abound, everything from the Horizon of Eternity (the sephirothic system of ten divine names) to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Tree of Life, the biblical Adam, Longinus spear. There is a startling reinvention of the crucifixion in one of the follow up films, where a giant entity with seven eyes is nailed onto a cross (fig. 4). The image for the design concept of the robot Evangelion was taken from Gullivers Travels. The Human Instrumentality Project is a collocation used in its English form throughout Evangelion. Of particular interest for the purposes of this paper are the names of the three components of the super-computer MAGI which controls all aspects of human life within Tokyo-3. The names are biblical in origin, presented as Melchior-1, Balthasar2 and Casper-3. In the Evangelion narrative they represent the three personalities of their creator, Dr Naoki Akagi, whose daughter Ritsuko is now in charge of the computer (fig. 5). Collectively these names are familiar from Christian discourse as the Magi (The Three Kings, or The Wise Men of the East). They are depicted in a diagrammatic form throughout the

146

Leonard Sanders

lesser extent Caspar), the name first mentioned in the sixth century. The variant spelling of Casper used in this animation is rare, especially when compared to the interchangeable s/z of Balthasar. What is interesting here, beyond a possible typographical error, is the possibility of an Evangelion web

Fig. 6. The super-computer MAGI in Evangelion. Copyright GAINAX/Project Eva. TV Tokyo.

Casper refers to the friendly ghost from the Disney animation. In her article Penguin in Bondage Sandra Buckley observes that reading manga (comics) in Japan is a highly interactive reading process in which the reader scans the pages of the image/text (in an) average speed per page of 3.2 seconds (188).12 She argues that it is a small step from this to interactive game software. A similar adjustment is required to be able to absorb new animation in the form of Evangelion, where the speed and fluidity of the image and text flow, the transformation of the one into the other, accelerates the process of recuperation of meaning. In this context, meaning can no longer be said to lie in the one or the other Conclusion One of the characters in Gibsons Idoru, upon arriving in Japan and seeing an unusual English phrase printed on the back of a mans jacket, comments that it was one of those slogans the Japanese made up in English, the ones that almost seemed to mean something but didnt (80). Herein is a good description of the peculiar difficulty faced in trying to think transculturally, for to be effective by means of writing and narration it is necessary to take into account this domain of almost-seemed-

Virtual Ephemeralities

147

of visual image/text interactions which involve different languages (such as Japanese and English) are especially revealing. As in the field of translation and electronic communication, there are frequent slippages, misperceptions, multicultural coincidences and adventurous juxtapositions; in consequence, precise binary evaluations are difficult to realize. Thus Gibsons widoru can be intermedially linked to a cultural stereotype, a direct result of media reproduction, yet at the same time it can function as a space for a sustained meditation on virtual celebrity. Furthermore, with the onset of accelerated viewing practices as evident in Evangelion, as well as the emergence of different groups (like the otaku) with varying competencies for connecting what is seen and making it mean something, it has become increasingly difficult to assign or situate or set meaning in any one, fixed place. Derrida, then, with his paradigm on translation, provides a useful way of thinking about the visual , as an endless chain of possible substitutions; and new animation in the form of Evangelion, is a provocative starting

NOTES

1The title Evangelion here refers generally to the television series Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shinseiki Evangelion) and the two films (see note 10). 2Barthes suggestion that the Imperial Palace marks the empty center of Tokyo (.Empire of Signs, 30), for example, has found wide application as a popular trope, especially in its current form of a black hole. See Gibson (161): From a tall building, at night, the Imperial Palace is a black hole; Perry (77); and Pfeiffer The Black Hole of Culture: Japan, Radical Otherness, and the Disappearance of Difference, Budick and Iser, (186-203, especially 198). 3Takayuki Tatsumi, The Japanese Reflection ofMirrorshades, McCaffery (366- 73). 4I am grateful to Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe for introducing me to John Johnstons book. 5The Visuals Systema Sephiroticum, drawn by the German priest Athanasius Kircher in 1653 appears in Evangelion, for example. 6See Heywood and Sandywell (x). 7Letter to a Japanese Friend, trans. David Wood and Andrew Benjamin, Wood and Bernasconi (1-5). 8Although Gibson is familiar with the culture surrounding pop idols in Japan (see The Salon Interview, http//www.salon.com/weekly/gibson396l0114.html), the name of the idoru, Rei Toei (Toei is the name of a famous Japanese film

148

Leonard Sanders

9On the connection between Japan and this film, it is not unusual to find comments such as the following: Its a known fact that a lot of people head out to Japan after seeing Blade Runner. Kaori Shoji, rev. of Nirvana, in The Japan Times, 31 October 1998. Greenfeld comments that Japan has come to resemble Total Recall more than the oft-cited Blade Runner (271). 10Both Evangelion: Death and Rebirth and The End of Evangelion: Air/ Magokoro o Kimi ni (From the Bottom of My Heart to You) were directed by Hideaki Anno and released in 1997 by Toei. 11The idoru and evangelion cultures attract a specific social group in Japanese society, called the otaku, who are immersed in the world of computers. See Greenfeld (271 ff.) 12Sandra Buckley, Penguin in Bondage, Penley and Ross (168-95).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: The Noonday Press, 1982. . The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Trans. Linda Coverdale. Originally published by Hill and Wang, 1985. Budick, Sanford and Wolfgang Iser, eds. The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Case, Sue-Ellen. Eves Apple, or Womens Narrative Bytes. Modern Fiction Studies, XLIII/ 3(1997), 631-50. (Special Issue: Technocriticism and Hypernarrative.) Cubitt, Sean. Digital Aesthetics. London: Sage Publications, 1998. Gibson, William. Idoru. New York: Berkley Books, 1997. Greenfeld, Karl Taro. Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japans Next Generation. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. Heywood, Ian and Barry Sandywell, eds. Interpreting Visual Cultures: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual. London: Routledge, 1999. Johnston, John. Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, 1998. Morley, David and Kevin Robins. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London: Routledge, 1995. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Newtype Film Book. Vol. V. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, Gainax, 1996. Penley, Constance and Andrew Ross, eds. Technoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Perry, Nick. Hyperreality and Global Culture. London: Routledge, 1998.

Virtual Ephemeralities Sadamoto, Yoshiyuki. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Vol. I. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, Gainax, 1995. Sammon, Paul M. Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. New York: HarperPrism, 1996. Shangri-La. Tokyo: Frog Entertainment, 1999.

14 9

Wenders, Wim. The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations. Trans. Michael Hofmann. London: Faber and Faber, 1997.