{"id":1451,"date":"2024-11-29T12:52:33","date_gmt":"2024-11-29T12:52:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/?p=1451"},"modified":"2024-11-29T12:57:27","modified_gmt":"2024-11-29T12:57:27","slug":"actually-existing-dystopia-imagining-japan-through-science-fiction-under-late-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/2024\/11\/actually-existing-dystopia-imagining-japan-through-science-fiction-under-late-capitalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Actually existing dystopia: imagining Japan through science fiction under late capitalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Japanese science fiction has become a global cultural phenomenon since the Second World War, evident in the popularity of novels like Sakyo Komatsu\u2019s Japan Sinks<\/em> (1973) and kaiju <\/em>films such as Godzilla<\/em> (1954). Yet, as these examples highlight, the Japanese science fiction genre has been dominated by dystopian \u201cimaginations of disaster\u201d1<\/a><\/sup>. Postwar Japanese science fiction and cyberpunk genres at once both reflect long-standing anxieties of the demise of Japanese cultural exceptionality in the confrontation with Western (capitalist) modernity since the 1910s, most famously articulated by Kyoto School debates about \u2018overcoming modernity\u2019 in the 1940s,2<\/a><\/sup> yet also indicate a reimagining of Japan, from the Western perspective, as exemplifying \u201cthe postmodern present and near-future of the West\u201d3<\/a><\/sup>, a \u201ctechno-Orientalist\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> imagination that has nevertheless been appropriated and rearticulated in Japanese science fiction itself.<\/p>\n

Sato has argued that the fusion of American cyberpunk ideas with Japanese modernization has facilitated the reconstruction of an imagined Japanese unique identity (or, Japanism) that associates Japan with technology and correlates its technological modernization to a reclamation of its past.5<\/a><\/sup> However, the uniqueness of Japan comes from its own monstrosity, its representativeness of a world falling apart. Mark Fisher, the British critical theorist, conceptualised the idea of \u2018capitalist realism\u2019, where, under contemporary late capitalism, \u201cit is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism\u201d6<\/a><\/sup>. Imagining disaster through science fiction becomes a cultural reproduction of a resurgent, techno-capitalist Japan from the 1980s where Japan itself was reimagined as the \u2018terminator\u2019, the monster, of world capitalism.7<\/a><\/sup> Dystopia was thus \u201cboth frightening and exciting\u201d8<\/a><\/sup>; Japanese science fiction epitomises what Walter Benjamin noted in 1936 where humanity\u2019s \u201cself-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure\u201d.9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Just as Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse described the \u2018end of utopia\u2019, where society could now actually achieve \u2018utopian\u2019 social transformation and thus negate utopia\u2019s inherent impossibility,10<\/a><\/sup> Japanese science fiction represents an \u2018end of dystopia\u2019. Now, dystopia is no longer imaginative but instead \u201can extrapolation or exacerbation of [reality] rather than an alternative to it\u201d.11<\/a><\/sup> In relating Japanese identity to science fiction themes of hyper-capitalism and technology, through techno-Orientalist tropes, Japan becomes an \u2018actually existing dystopia\u2019 where science fiction is no longer an imagination, but merely an extension of reality. In this way, postwar Japanese science fiction, in its imaginations of disaster, paradoxically both reflects the fears and anxieties of the realities of contemporary Japan, where Japanese culture and national essence is eroded by the onset of the ahistorical and culturally detached society of late capitalism and postmodernity, and simultaneously appropriates such dystopia by historically and culturally locating techno-capitalism in Japan in a rearticulation of Japanism as a unique \u2018actually existing dystopia\u2019. As Kawamura Takeshi, a contemporary Japanese playwright who gained notoriety in the 1980s for his dystopian and postmodern themes, has argued, \u201cit is absolutely necessary for an age of monsters to put in an appearance\u201d because \u201csuch an age has already come very close to us\u201d.12<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

  1. Susan J. Napier, \u2018Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira\u2019, The Journal of Japanese Studies<\/em> 19:2 (1993), pp.327-351. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. Kumiko Sato, \u2018How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context\u2019, Comparative Literature Studies<\/em>, 41:3 (2004), pp.343-344. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  3. Ibid<\/em>., p.347. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  4. David Roh, Betsy Huang and Greta Niu (eds), Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History and Media <\/em>(New Brunswick, 2015). [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  5. Sato, \u2018How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism\u2019, p.353. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  6. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?<\/em> (Winchester, 2009), p.17. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  7. Napier, \u2018Panic Sites\u2019, p.349. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  8. Ibid<\/em>. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  9. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections<\/em>, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), p.242. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  10. Herbert Marcuse, \u2018The End of Utopia\u2019, lecture delivered at the Free University of West Berlin, July 1967. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  11. Fisher, Capitalist Realism<\/em>, p.17. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  12. Peter Eckersall, \u2018Japan as Dystopia: Kawamura Takeshi\u2019s Daisan Erotica\u2019, TDR<\/em> 44:1 (2000), p.107. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Japanese science fiction has become a global cultural phenomenon since the Second World War, evident in the popularity of novels like Sakyo Komatsu\u2019s Japan Sinks (1973) and kaiju films such as Godzilla (1954). Yet, as these examples highlight, the Japanese science fiction genre has been dominated by dystopian \u201cimaginations of disaster\u201d1. Postwar Japanese science fiction … Continue reading “Actually existing dystopia: imagining Japan through science fiction under late capitalism”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[120,25,117],"class_list":["post-1451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dystopian","tag-japan","tag-science-fiction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1452,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451\/revisions\/1452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}