Popular culture as ideological manifest, aging as social contemplation
It is common knowledge, by now, that the anime‘s (Japanese animation) breakthrough in the West took place after the release of the anime film Akira (1988, director: Ōtomo Katsuhiro) – in Japan, however, registered as an absolute flop at the box-office due to the distorsion of the traditional anime framework. Three years after Akira‘s brutal dystopia – the main character Shima Tetsuo stays for the disturbed boy in late modernity who cannot regain his identity, be it within an alienating, achievement-oriented system, or in a liberating outsider position –, the Akira’s director Ōtomo Katsuhiro returns with The Old Man Z (Rōjin Z, 1991), an anime film in which he tackles two of Japan’s main problems at the second turn of the millennium, threatening the archipelago both from outside and from inside:
- the internationally increasing militarization
- the uncontrollably aging population.
Rōjin Z’s plot is simple: the trainee-nurse Mitsuhashi Haruko is informed upon the problem of the population aging, but a practical solution seems to appear as one of her patients, Takazawa Kiyūrō, is selected as guinea pig for a government-founded experiment, in which he is incorporated into a fully automatic bed. This fully automatic bed is programmed to do everything a patient “needs”, from bathing the patient up to casual conversation. However, Haruko and her friends feel the urge to save the old patient when it is revealed that the artificial intelligence of the bed is part of a secret military project – and when the bed’s AI sets itself free from previous programming, in the belief to be the old patient’s deceased wife. Obeying to the old patient’s innermost longings, the bed’s AI attempts to reach the great Buddha statue in Kamakura which had been admired by the freshly united couple during its first dates a long, long while ago.
There is a deep-going, heartbreaking contrast between the nostalgic revival of decades-old, partly idealized youth memories as well as the well-meant enthusiasm of simple people – hospital staff and aged computer hackers – and the raw, highly developed violence of military forces, which throws a sobering light upon the meaninglessness of technological solutions to the human needs of togetherness. Taking into account three fundamental, partly contradictory, partly overlapping emotional channels in the examination of aging as cool endeavor in Rōjin Z which are extensively analyzed further below, this article focuses on Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s construction of a dynamic historical universe, in which aging doesn’t appear as ideologically emotional-social recycling of the concerned individuals, but as a future-oriented endeavor to refresh, fulfill and transcend the human self.
Aging and the challenge of heroism
Contrary to classic live cinema, the anime depends generally on its complex expression channels fusing technology and art, profoundly plunging into the main issues of contemporaneity via its rapid variations of the narrative levels, its permanently shifting symbolisms and its focus on characters’ development and metamorphosis as basic construction techniques – thus revealing the slithery structure of identity patterns in a world continuously on the run as a symptom and simultaneously as a metaphor for the obssession with radical, spectacular challenges and overwhelming information flows. Within this transformation process from ethics to aesthetics and from message to media, the anime gains a proteic structure to be pinned down in three expression modes: apocalypse (the vision of the end of the world), festival (not matsuri, but carnival in Bakhtin’s sense: the pathos of radical change, of death and renewal) and elegia (pain, loss, absence as well as nostalgia). Rōjin Z incorporates within its representation of aging three emotional channels:
- apocalypse appears in the character of the weak, dying widower Takazawa Kiyūrō, where aging is the definite, irreversible end of all possible – personal as well as historical – futures.
- aging can be a chance to regain the community sense and to revive moral beliefs – as it is obvious in the characters of the aged computer hackers.
- the nostalgic dimension of aging – visible in the leitmotivic picture of the married couple Takazawa taken in the times before the wife’s death –, which can mediate the return to a space of hope and fulfillment, strongly contrasting to the late modern age dominated by hedonism and superficiality.
The director Ōtomo Katsuhiro constructs the plot of Rōjin Z actively underlining the power of ordinary facts as capable to trigger extraordinary feelings in conventional social actors as legitimation for their own existence: as such, it is an artistic process which could easily lead to an effacement of the often arbitrary demarcation line between mass and elite, young and old, rich and poor. Seriously taking into account the challenges posed by the uncontrollable aging to the political, economic and social life, means accepting society as a dynamic, heterogeneous entity, so that changes ‘from within’ become possible both on collective and on individual level. Ōtomo Katsuhiro reflects upon ideology – in this case, the ideology of aging – as an alternative, cool existential attitude, incorporating apocalypse, festival and nostalgia as chances to a worthwhile existence in the midst of crumbling historical structures. Thus, ideology becomes part of the subjects who are not only possessing it, but also internalizing it as a part of their own self, as Louis Althusser had famously put it decades ago. Rather than metamorphosing life into a constant adjourned fantasy, a consumption-stimulated desire, an eternal promise never to be attained, so that the escape from reality becomes possible only as and/or in fantasy, Rōjin Z calls for a pragmatic worldview to facilitate the awareness of actively living by own standards while still accepting and respecting the others in their own singularity.
Aging as individual apocalypse
The dying patient Takazawa Kiyūrō is a prototype for the isolation and desperation of life as a doll kept alive by means of technology, but lacking human warmth and company. Mitsuhashi Harukos character – her efforts to rescue and care for the patient in spite of all her problems, including coping with her own everyday challenges – stands for a dynamic, sincere ‘I’ in the midst of an increasingly indifferent society. The representation of aging as hopeless fall in Rōjin Z is generally the practical reflection of the postmodern discussions on fragmented identities and the necessary rewriting of historical events: on one hand, there is the disappearance of the social bond, experienced as familiar and necessary for a long while in the past; on the other hand, there is the increasingly accelerated transition from social communities constructed and ‘imagined’ as naturally homogeneous to individual societies, as well constructed and ‘imagined’ as naturally heterogeneous and free. Individual aging is in common perception a preparation for death – and death is the apocalypse of the individual, that ‘point of no return’ no one could ever avoid. Nevertheless, death and its function as individual apocalypse doesn’t appear in Rōjin Z as the end of the individual life, but rather as a rite of passage, implying both those directly concerned (like Takazawa Kiyūrō) and their immediate environment, as the total collapse of the world “as we know it” refers both to the individual and to social rebirth following apocalyptical cataclysms. However, comparable to reason and love, apocalypse – the third great legitimating narrative of the modern age – seems keep its ideological validity despite disenchanting statements within the happy end aesthetics. Rōjin Z summarizes, thus, the characteristics of the fundamentally apocalyptic works by condensating them – narration tangibility, myth negotiation, prophecy credibility, crusade heroism, therapeutical effect – in a vision of the society as radically transformed by chaos and by the imminent denial of the status quo to revolve into total liberation, resulting into eternal peace and harmony. It is indeed a world in which more intensively than ever human beings became accustomed to the idea of resurrection, while simultaneously still feeling fearful at the idea of death and apocalypse. There are not only few children and generally little hope, but the aging population in specific poor quarters of metropoles – like the Arakawa urban district in Rōjin Z, one of the poorest areas of Tokyo – is ignored, driven into despair or exploited as guinea pigs for highly dubious experiments. It is basically the artistic visualization of the intrinsically binar nature of apocalyptic teleology: renewal and rebirth emerge from destruction and chaos, but only through the conscious, active intervention of a saviour existing outside of time and space, usually accompanied by a small group of chosen ones, taking over the responsibility for the fate of the world in times of major crisis: the character of Mitsuhashi Haruko.
On a more individual level, through the representation of aging as individual apocalypse, Rōjin Z addresses the idea of popular culture as being a barometer for social mental conditions. If the liberation of the individual from historical obligations is unavoidably accompanied by his isolation, then the directly experienced feeling(s) of loneliness within the social group is a basic condition for alienation and identity confusion or even loss: exactly like the isolated aging computer hackers or the four alienated students – Haruko and her friends – striving to rescue the patient captive to the technologically highly developed bed, there seems to be an emergence of increasingly marginalised groups unable to relate to other groups – and gradually unable to relate within the group, either, always at the border to ‘normality’, never within prevalent standards, longing for the right to express themselves. This is where the power of an author of popular-cultural products like Ōtomo Katsuhiro intervenes and takes over the task to “speak for the voiceless”: Rōjin Z is a document in Foucault’s parlance, to be understood rather as a symbol of the many “silenced voices”, and less as a cultural artifact to reflect the efforts to reconstruct human endeavors and histories, at a certain point in time and at a specific place. In fact, it is an attempt to revive entities, structures, individualities and relations within the social fabric, as Foucault had put it. In Rōjin Z, history is dissociated from the picture to which it had belonged self-sufficiently for a long while and whereby it had found its anthropological justification, as it is the picture of a thousand-years old collective memory relying on material conditions and longing to regain fresh inputs. Thus, from a desperate endeavor against individual apocalypse, aging becomes a possibility to acknowledge the self in its undeniable singularity throughout times and spaces.
The festival of aging
Rōjin Z highlights the interlocking of ordinary quotidian facts with fantastic universes, bluntly displaying the brutal, inescapable ‘either-or’ of today’s world at large. Its main characters – Mitsuhashi Haruko and her friends Ōe Nobuko, Satō Tomoe and Maeda Mitsuru, the project manager Terada Taku as well as the bed programmer Hasegawa Yoshihiko – are ambiguous individuals, striving to demarcate themselves in the course of action from historical instances perpetuated via taboos, prohibitions and hierarchies, and supported by a strict educational system. This intricate game with traditional values enwombs, however, the illusion and the promise of other spaces allowing for individual freedom, a progressive way of life and for social appreciation. Gradually, the characters as individuals become active presences within the collective discourse, a phenomenon to have been historically observed in the development of the de-sexualised good citizens of the late Meiji era (1868-1912) into the self-confident and charismatic Japanese individuals of late modernity; in its course, the process touched upon the ‘new humans’ of the 1910s, the Modern Girl (moga) and Modern Boy (mobo) of the 1920s and the energetic population of the postwar period. While modern Japanese individuals, enlightened by various romantic and/or subcultural emancipation movements identify themselves with the characters configured upon real-existing common citizens, and they absorb them as behavior and thinking models, they metamorphose into faithful, still deeply dialectically modifying ‘copies’ of this permanently negotiated identity stylization. In this train of thoughts, Rōjin Z as anime production becomes a tool to proactively design the fresh Japanese consciousness, sacrosanct in its fascinating singularity and exemplary in its individualizing power.
Like McDonalds or Rock’n’Roll, the modern high-quality anime as a genre is a child of the postwar era, recording the imagination, but not necessarily the voice, of the radically eccentric life in one of the most industrialized nations. In Rōjin Z, the most extreme, most individualistic and distinctly most uncontrollable expression and visual styles flow – particularly visible in the characters of the aging computer hackers and of the young students, communicating such feelings and attitudes as euphoria, desire, disappointment, longing, fatigue, ambition, depression, isolation, weirdness, banality, satire, sometimes in a more open, sometimes in a more concealed manner. It filters their emotions and introduces them into an historical context to convey them with the spark of life. Rōjin Z’s characters carry along the story their hopes and frustrations, plunge into adventures, exaggerate their physical features, over-react to stimuli, enjoy their tribulations; they faint, sweat, bleed, are visibly excited, dismayed, shocked, embarassed, amused, as in a attempt to challenge the contemporary Japanese environment with its, still, superhuman self-disciplining mechanisms and strictly controlled mimic reactions. In a geographic space in which media, society and intellectuals focus on the integrity of national ideology, the success of corporational organization, the technological awareness and the aesthetics of history, genuine individuals in the immediate reality seem to be completely over-flooded, together with their creativity. In Rōjin Z, this general political project is deliberately questioned, with the simulataneous disclosure of a separate channel to transmit new existential attitudes emerging from the courage to face subjective beginnings. The humanistic value won in the process encompasses tremendous potential for change and progress in a positive, balanced manner.
In late modernity, human togetherness takes on a different shape, as, admittedly, the aging computer hackers in Rōjin Z communicate with the highly developed bed on the basis of an indirect relationship: the Internet, which has evolved in the last quarter of the 20th century from an obscure technology without practical application beyond the secluded world of the computer specialists, hackers and counter-cultural groupings, to the status of a ‘factory of human existences’, accompanying and influencing historical events. In a slightly sarcastic, still somehow ritualistic, tone, Rōjin Z speaks of the advantages of the ‘old’ human togetherness, where direct, face-to-face communication as the essence of human existence has not yet been replaced by the Internet as the new communication environment and the new social form, the so called ‘network society’, developing around the planet. Rōjin Z’s consistent message refers to the oldest fear of mankind – fear of its technological, own-manufactured monsters –, and undermines the ambivalence towards the Internet as a life-conditioning element. Isolating oneself outside the network society is not an alternative, as one is at any rate ‘being’ integrated within the network system; in fact, from the other end of the world, the bottom-line in Rōjin Z is that direct communication is a basic human need, no matter how lonely someone might enjoy being. From the sincere, open communication emerges historical awareness gradually dispersing the fear to face the ‘other’ in its radical alterity – and to accept it as such.
Aging and nostalgic katharsis
Etymologically originating from nostos [Greek for ‘to return home’] and algos [Greek for ‘painful circumstance’], nostalgia refers in the age of the universal disenchantment and liquefied identities to the painful longing for an original home, whereby this ‘home’ is frequently conceptualized as, basically, an invention of the self. In Rōjin Z, different stages of nostalgic aging are brought to the foreground by the old picture of the young couple Takazawa: starting with the plain nostalgia for a time in which things were ‘better, healthier, happier’, the next level is the reflexive nostalgia in its painful sentimentalization of past facts, leading to the ultimate dimension of the intellectual nostalgia as the analytic revival of the past. The on-going dialectic quest for continuity in the middle of discontinuous realities recontructs the ‘I’ as a pragmatic entity searching for solutions and ideals to overcome the typical feeling of the aging individual: “There is simply no place left to go.” The old picture of the young couple Takazawa is a refreshing moment in time, including the famous Buddha statue in Kamakura, in itself a symbol of durability and stability, ignoring that false sense of nostalgia as emotional solution to current shortcomings.
Through the direct reference to the Buddha-statue in Kamakura, Rōjin Z designs an alternative furusato [homeland] challenging the usual nostalgic framework. While the ‘nostalgia orgy’ of the 1970s meant in the West the return to ‘the safe space’ of the early modernity, in Japan, nostalgia meant the return to premodern times. As historical ‘sporty loser’, Japan grasped early enough the advantage to accept inevitable facts, treat them accordingly and learn the best lessons out of them: thus, the agricultural communities in which full-time farmers worked in pastoral peace, functioned for a long while as necessary ideological reserves for the metropolitan modern and contemporary Japan. The celebration of the imaginary furusato as contrary to the concrete nōson [farmer village] appeared as a direct consequence of the 1966 – the zero-year of the ‘my car’ era in the Japanese media. Nowadays conceptualized as ‘homeland’ or ‘home’ in the sense of a familiar place where one was born and/or grew up, the term ‘furusato’ is currently one of the most popular notions and symbols employed by Japanese politicians, town planners and mass media advisors: the ubiquity of the furusato itself derives from the various contexts highlighting belonging and security, in opposition with the alienating realities of Japan’s urban areas. In Rōjin Z, furusato as furusato zukuri [homeland creation/construction] provides a basis for the political project of the systematization of common memories and social reproduction actions; it is infused with the yearning for the past and the discontent with the present to legitimate an unfullfiling future. The Buddha-statue in Kamakura as a palpable furusato zukuri integrates quotidian activities into the permanent pursuit of the human being for a healthy work-life balance and authentic happiness.
Though primarly one more Japanese cultural commodity such as technology or cars, anime and thus Rōjin Z mediates, beyond (techno-)orientalistic clichés, a worldview in which classical rapports between production and consumption, self and other, free speech and political correctness, ontology and axiology are frontally challenged, subtly undermined and, potentially, brutally disrupted. While being a provocation to the Western hegemony without basically questioning it because it exists as such only in the Western hierarchy, the anime techno-orientalizes Japan within a self-referred legitimation process. Thus, aging appears in Rōjin Z as the result of nostalgic reviews and dissapointed expectations. The hybrid realities of today’s Japan with its multiple transnational exchanges in commerce, culture, science, technology are incorporated within the prevalent political discourses on national purity and homogeneity, nostalgically drawing their arguments from premodern remembrances, while the simple fact that this disturbing cultural reconfiguration is an ideological attempt to deny and suppress national fears through rationalizing technologies, individualizing practices and totalizing machineries is furtively ignored. Aging is a vital dialectics in Rōjin Z, reminding that reproductive nostalgia and neo-nostalgia cannot completely eliminate passive longings of many Japanese individuals for the revival of a past long-gone. Obssessed to catch up with Western standards of power and development, the Meiji technocrats imported in a record time-frame not only technologies and institutions of Western capitalism, but also centuries of aesthetic theories, literary forms and social representation modes; not only railways, but also Descartes; not only financial capital, but also Renaissance perspective; not only Prussian militarism, but also Ibsen dramatism. It was an unbalanced relationship penetrated by strong undercurrents of seduction, resistance and assimilation, though the fundamental point of the early Meiji era had consisted in the constitution of a modern nation-state capable to successfully compete with comparable political structures in the West: idealistic as it might have felt, it was indeed an all-encompassing process leading only decades later to the activation of the effective semiotic constellation of the pre-Meiji Japan.
Aging and common sense
In its ambiguous representation of aging, Rōjin Z takes over the task to produce and send warning signals on sensitive, though ignored topics, by means of popular-cultural elements. If the power of the anime consists in its abstract form and its practical contents, Rōjin Z belongs to the category of disenchanting works suggesting direct solutions without unnecessary lecturing. This occurs while re-dimensionalising aging not as a lost area of the history and the society, but as a threefold phenomenon including visions and solutions.
On a first level, Rōjin Z overcomes the optimism of the 1980s in Japan: apocalypse seen as an end of the world as “we know it” leads to an identity constitution process as a lonely, alienating endeavor in a disappearing universe. Rōjin Z and its embittered representation of aging is continued in Neon Genesis Evangelion by mid-1990s, proving that the liberation of the individual from historical compulsions only means his direct isolation: like the four main figures of the Evangelion series – the three alienated teenagers and their 29-years old supervisor –, the largest part of the mankind seems to be in an unequal relationship power to a superior force, known as an increasingly abstract elite. Later anime productions will address even more intensively this large issue of myth and illusion destruction, preserving in their troubling effect the refusal to univoquely seize the human being as a binar structure consisting of a good and an evil side or a rational and a animal half. In particular, anime series such as Serial Experiment Lain (same title in Japanese, 1998, direction: Nakamura Ryūtarō) or Death Note (Dêsu nōto, 2006-2007, direction: Araki Tetsurō) celebrate the evil in humans: their tone swears on the failure of the culture, on the incompatability of human impulses to cultural requirements, reminding of a dark worldview reminiscent of Arthur Schopenhauer.
On a second level, Rōjin Z takes over as a celebration work the positive tones from Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise (Ōritsu Uchūgun: Oneamisu no Tsubasa, 1987, direction: Yamaga Hiroyuki) and announces later masterpieces such as Princess Mononoke (Mononoke hime, 1997, direction: Miyazaki Hayao) which would describe the necessity of persistent dreams and of the belief in gods in a crumbling world; in its visual representation of epic fights between gods and humans, beyond the surface of an ideological glorification of pure nature in opposition to the insanity of humans, there is a dramatic hymn to life and love as the best things one could possess. The climax of this celebrating development in anime works is Hōhokekyo: My Neighbours, the Yamadas (Hōhokekyo tonari no Yamada kun, 1999, direction: Takahata Isao) which transmits in short sketches the subtle message that life can be eventless and a man might be mocked by his own children, neglected by his own wife, overseen at work by his peers, but he still has his dreams of an heroic existence where he might not be able to save the whole world, but at least his own family from quotidian senselessness. Not only young Japanese in post-recession Japan can extract fresh life projects and models to follow from such works, but also Western youngsters in a supersaturated society. In spite its economic failure at the box-office, this bright, cheerful family comedy tells of family values and inter-generational interdependence, of social conformism and personal fulfillment, of everyday love in the life of average actors and of individual solutions to social compulsions.
On a third level, Rōjin Z is a source of inspiration as a nostalgic work in the trajectory of bright humanism initiated by Kiki’s delivery service and prepares the way ahead for such anime films like Ghost in the Shell (Kōkaku kidōtai, literally: The mobile employment troop against chaos attacks, 1996, direction: Oshii Mamoru), which tell of human longings in a world populated by cyborgs and robots, or for such anime series like Cowboy Bebop (Kaubōi Bibappu, 1998, direction: Watanabe Shin’ichirō): the adventures and concerns of the main characters in Cowboy Bebop are those of quotidian social actors, even if they live in an era in which the entire universe had been transformed into a human habitat. They do not admit it, but they long for love and security as well as for clear guidelines against the background of a frequently dark or unresolved past. It is the quest for one’s profound self as driven by individuals belonging to a generation who often feels left alone at crossroads without any clear directions sings. The old models vanished in intellectual treatises on humanity, reason and progress, while those supposed to use them as existential and spiritual models drowned into confusion and isolation. The climax of this development is the anime film Five centimeter per second (Byōsoku go senchimētoru, 2008, direction: Shinkai Makoto), evoking the perishability and evanescence of the human existence and describing in heartbreaking tones the loss, regain and renewed loss of love in an everyday life where too many things happen at once.
Rōjin Z’s representation of aging basically highlights the – maybe sometimes forgotten – fact that old persons are similar to young people in their pursuit for happiness, singular individualities striving to overcome the difficulties of life by assuming cool aplomb and fresh joy. Through the warm humanism of this positive message, Rōjin Z aligns itself in the tradition of optimistic art works describing the human being as a fascinating, however incomplete, entity to be admired and celebrated, instead of being indoctrinated and condemned.
