By Susan Pointon
email: manifesto@xtra.co.nz
Website of The New Zealand Writers Guild: http://www.nzwritersguild.org.nz/
Fade up on a close -up of the US presidential seal. Off-screen, a woman is moaning rythmically. Panning across the familiar details of the seat of power, the camera eventually reveals the blonde-haired US president behind his desk, engaged in enthusiastic intercourse with his equally blonde secretary. They do not appear to be deterred by the presence of several dead secret service agents sprawled on the floor around them. The phone rings and the president answers it.
“The units of the fleet are standing by. What is our target?”
“Osaka.”
“Osaka, Japan?”
Cut to the darkened skyline of Osaka and the ancient Osaka castle bathed in a ghostly green glow.
“Correct. Two of my agents brought me proof that osaka was the source of the strike against us.”
“Mr. President, what are we going to do?”
“Order the fleet to open fire.” As the President replaces the receiver the blonde rises up, startled.
“John, it was you?”
“Yes, the chojin has been resurrected and no-one can stop the destruction he brings. I am nothing more than his agent. We’ll have one last fuck before the end.”
As the secretary draws back in horror, the president’s eyes begin to glow red. His head contorts, splits open and a snake-like, one-eyed monster emerges from it. His torso begins to pulse and expand. An enormous phallic-shaped mechanical drill bursts
from his groin. Long, writhing tentacles wrap and bind the woman, caressing her nipples and opening her thighs. As the monster rapes her violently, the action is inter-cut with images of the US fleet sailing towards Japan, their nuclear missiles bursting through open hatches. A Godzilla-like monster rises from the ocean and immolates the fleet with bursts of fire which spurt like ejaculate from his mouth. His tentacles wrap and encircle the hapless ships. Meanwhile, inside the green-glowing Osaka castle, a young Japanese woman named Akemi gives birth to the true chojin whose presence on earth signals the restoration of the balance between the human and the demon world.
-From, Urotsukidoji 2: The Birth of the Overfiend.
A graphic expression of adolescent sexual anxiety? A reflection of the traditional Japanese fear of miscegenation and cultural imperialism? A post-industrial homage to 1950s disaster classics like Godzilla and Mothra? A reflection of the cyber-punk desire for synthetic fusion? Or simply a case of sensory overload; a jazzed-up hard-core porn for the jaded American adolescent market? The above scene is taken from a 1992 feature-length animated video directed by Hideki Takayama and released in the USA by Central Park Media in New York. Although it has been for the most part unpublicized, marginally distributed and remains uncompromisingly challenging in its narrative structure, this single example of hentai, a sub-genre of Japanese animation that literally translates as perverted, has managed through word of mouth to achieve a cult status among young adolescent males on college campuses and internet sites across the USA. For audiences more accustomed to the saccharine sentiments of Sailor Moon, Urotsukidoji: The Legend of the Overfiend and its equally disturbing clones represent a new level of thematic intensity in the thriving Japanese animation industry, whose market penetration since the late 1980s, despite scarce mainstream exposure has reached epidemic proportions both domestically and abroad. This paper addresses the implications of this success by examining the themes and imagery of anime that have proved so attractive to American consumers previously resistant to the cultural products of Japan. While scholarship on anime is still relatively new, the medium of manga, or Japanese graphic novels and comic books has been documented extensively by San Francisco based scholar Frederik Schodt , who has also been instrumental in promoting the release of both manga and anime titles in the USA. In addition, Japanese culture scholars Constance Penley and Ian Buruma have contributed studies on the erotic sub-genres in both Japanese cinema and manga and, more recently Berkeley scholar Annalee Newitz has addressed the implications of a reverse cultural imperialism that she discerns in many anime texts.
The 1993 animated OVA (Original Video Animation) series Urotsukidoji: The Legend of the Overfiend is an NC17-rated, four-part horror/ pornography that has achieved an enthusiastic cult status here in the USA, particularly among young college undergraduates. On one level it fulfills the conventions of a typical fantasy-horror narrative by setting up the premise of the fulfillment of an ancient Japanese prophecy. 3000 years ago the Overfiend, or chojin created three parallel worlds - those of humans, demons or maikai and the jukinkai who are half human and half demon.
Now, on the modern day campus of Myojin University in Osaka, three of the jukinkai wait for the chojin to return and restore order to a world gone out of balance. Unfortunately, when the chojin does return he is reborn through the sexual activity of seemingly oblivious Japanese college students and his rebirth initiates not harmony but an orgy of apocalyptic destruction. When viewed in isolation, this sex/magic/horror/romance synthesis may seem as alien to western audiences as the image of the chojin himself, yet it follows the conventions of an established tradition of similar fantasy horror texts which have been present in Japanese culture since the late Edo period. It was, probably significantly, during this earlier period in Japanese history of social unrest and foreign intervention that popular cultural texts within the Kabuki theater and the Ukiyo-E woodblocks of such venerated artists as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Kuniyoshi became infused with images of transgression, mutation and catastrophie. It is obviously no accident that, in the years following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent evolution of the Japanese ‘economic miracle’ , Japanese cultural products, especially those produced on the fringes of society have become progressively focused on narratives of technological oppression and premonitions of disaster.
It was, probably significantly, during this earlier period in Japanese history of social unrest and foreign intervention that popular cultural texts within the Kabuki theater and the Ukiyo-E woodblocks of such venerated artists as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Kuniyoshi became infused with images of transgression, mutation and catastrophie. There are in fact at least two direct references to these artists in the imagery of The Overfiend. The tentacled demons which simultaneously bind and ravage the young women throughout the video have their precedent in Hokusai’s famous erotic print The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife in which a young woman is ravished by an octopus. The cyclop-like eye on the head of the demon’s penis/snake can be found in several late-Edo fantasy images of creatures from the demon world, and the narrative of the Overfiend itself is an interpretation of a traditional Japanese shinto myth.
It is obviously no accident that, in the years following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent evolution of the Japanese ‘economic miracle’ , Japanese cultural products, especially those produced on the fringes of society have become progressively focused on inarratives of technological oppression and premonitions of disaster.
What is perhaps most striking about anime compared with other imports is the lack of compromise in making these narratives palatable for American audiences. Typically, foreign media, even from English speaking countries of origin, does not translate well because of its slower pace and absence of surface stimulation. Usually it is heavily edited and revoiced before it is considered accessible to an American audience. The popular Japanese children’s series The Power Rangers , which ran for twenty five years in Japan before it was introduced in the USA has been so dramatically restructured and re-worked as to be hardly recognizable. In order to comply with current norms of political correctness, the originally exclusively male Power Ranger team became a multi-cultural microcosm of America’s ‘melting pot’, with one Asian, two women and of course an African American. It is probably significant that despite these earnest efforts at representational democracy, the blonde football-framed jock Ranger, the so-called “White Ranger” has continued to completely outstrip the others in terms of consumer recognition. The original story-lines, which were typical of Asian martial arts movies in that they were episodic, open-ended, intercut with highly stylized demonstrations of fighting prowess and spattered with Buddhist aphorisms about the impermanence of life were almost completely scrapped and replaced with standard resolved-in-three-acts morality plays. Even the costumes were adapted to comply with the glittering spandex body-suit mode that is associated with the science-fiction fantasy genre and the music was replaced with a catchy American-style English-language theme. This left only the original fight sequences which the American producers were unable to duplicate. They remain, spliced awkwardly and often completely incoherently into the reworked narrative.
On the other hand, the success of the OVA anime videos, despite their almost complete lack of commercial promotion or screening is largely due to lack of compromise. Researchers of the anime phenomenon have suggested that part of the reason for the success of this medium among young American audiences is in fact its mystifying difference. As Celeste Olalquiaga notes in Vulture Culture, her treatise on cultural appropriation, the products of the orient were once “integrated into mainstream culture as markers of difference and exoticism. In this process they lost their original meaning and were pre-emptively voided of any significance that could prove destabalizing to the receiving culture ( Olalquiaga, 86). This does not appear to be the case with anime, at least which have been received so entusiastically in the last ten years by one section of us consumers and with such tredipation by another. Jaded media consumers, saturated with predictable and shallow storylines, are drawn to the characteristic intensity and aesthetic power of the Japanese equivalents. The narrative structure of these animations is largely derived from manga, the extremely popular Japanese comic book tradition. Manga scholar Frederik Schodt reports that in 1995 comic books compromised forty per cent of all books and magazines sold in Japan which calculates out to fifteen for every member of the population. Within the medium of manga there are a dazzling variety of genres covering everything from politics and history to homosexual romance and hard core sado-masochism. Unlike American comic books which are compressed into a few graphic pages, some manga are thousands of pages long and run in series for decades with the same enthusiastic and faithful readership. Japanese enthusiasm for graphic novels and for their more recent animated equivalents can be traced as far back as the satirical comic strip scrolls of Buddhist monks in the 12th century but they rose to popular prominence in the late Edo period, in the second half of the 19th century. It was the famous woodblock artist Hokusai who first coined the term Manga or ‘whimsical sketches’ to describe the sequences which arose from his sketch book studies and were synthesized into narrative storylines. It is probably no coincidence that the Edo ukiyo-e artists were the first to employ the distortions and surreal representations that have become synonymous with anime to reflect the sweeping social conflicts which were occurring in their previously insular and ordered society. Forbidden to directly criticize the social order, artists created ghosts and monsters to represent foreigners and corrupt overlords and depicted scenes of natural and supernatural disasters as correlatives for the disintegration of the old feudal order. These same images and narratives are now being revived and updated during Japan’s rapid evolution into an international and technological super power. The other major influence on both the woodblock ukiyo-e and modern anime is the Kabuki theater, with its striking visual and graphic effects and its themes of highly stylized eroticism and violence.
Although the need for ritualized spectacles of violence and sexual transgression as a form of social release have long been an accepted part of Japanese society, Kabuki was discerned to be too ‘vulgar’ for export to the West. Yet despite its obvious homage to western pop culture, anime artists still adhere to the principles of Japanese theater and story-telling in their use of fast and slow action, symbolic gesture, a repertoire of classical audio cues and the use of correlatives between human emotions and the natural world. Japanese art historian Shuichi Kato believes that as the society, after a long period of national seclusion was co-opted by industrial technology and internationalism it was in the subconscious fantasy world that traditional culture retreated.
The current Japanese government policy of kokusaika or internationalism, although it is certainly represented in many anime multi-cultural characterizations and themes may have had some influence on the resurgence of this same imagery of distortion, grotesquery and dystopian landscapes in anime texts. Although Frederik Schodt views the role of anime as a successful “rosetta stone for mutual understanding…a mind meld among the peoples of industrialized nations who all inhabit a similar physical world of cars, computers, buildings and other man-made objects and systems” (Schodt, 339). Yet he tempers this enthusiasm by questioning what it means when “the primary information in a culture is expressed through distortion and exaggeration” ( Schodt, 72).
From a theoretical point of view, the study of a media phenomenon like anime exposes the difficulty of containing contemporary cultural texts within strict national borders. It is impossible to ignore the constant cross-pollination and popular cultural borrowings that complicate and enrich these anime texts. The creators, for the most part are young Japanese artists in their twenties and thirties who have been exposed since birth to western influences. Despite their Japnese overlay, many of these videos pay generous and obsessively scrupulous homage to sources as diverse as 70s American t.v.cop shows, 80s European GlamRock fashions and French New Wave cinema from the 1960s. Despite these familiar references however the texts often remain esoterically impenetrable by even the most fanatical western viewer and it is precisely this quality that seems to contribute to their appeal. The average American anime fan is no casual consumer but a fanatically dedicated devotee who will demonstrate their allegiance by tattooing the names or images of their favorite characters on their bodies, write their own versions of the texts or even study Japanese so that they can watch the videos in their original undubbed form.
It is this fanaticism that has disturbed some observers who wonder why a generation should forgo the politically correct texts of its own culture to engage so passionately in foreign imprts with an inordinately high content of sexual sado-masochism and graphic violence. To some extent the answer is obvious. Compared to American animation which is characteristically saccharine and slap-stick, anime texts are smart, sophisticated and graphically stunning, demonstrating an obsessive attention to detail and a rich use of the medium to envisage the landscape of both dreams and nightmares. Similarly, it seems plausable that it is the very political incorrectness of the texts that provides a fantasy escape and source of identification for the prime audience of young adolescent males who find in the ‘kick arse babes’ and ‘vengeful loser geeks’ of anime powerful markers for their emerging identities.
It is somewhat ironic that the term ‘cultural imperialism’ , at least as I have experienced it as evoked in media studies in the USA, is generally associated with the one-way flow of American cultural products to off-shore nations. The recent success of imported Japanese animated videos into the USA provides a striking contrast to that model and allows the opportunity to examine a counter-cultural phenomenon at close hand. It is significant that the emergence of Japanese animation, or anime (as it is known) as an identity marker for disaffected American youth co-incided with the definition of a cyber-punk culture based on a world view that both celebrated and feared the immersion of modern society by computer technology. Following the lead of young Japanese animators and computer wizards who were expressing their relationship with Japan’s rapidly evolving cyber culture, young Americans found, in anime an instant and intense form of expression for their own cultural anxieties.
In a 1994 article in the literary journal Bad Subjects , Berkeley scholar Annalee Newitz addresses the recent phenomenal success of Japanese animated videos in the United States. In analyzing the attraction of these ‘oriental’ texts which are often loaded with esoteric and complex cultural references, she suggests that what she perceives as the encoded critique of American domination of Japanese culture and the unqualified acceptance of this message by young American fans is, in fact, a form of reverse cultural imperialism. Noting that the videos often contain derogatory references to American militarism and the detrimental social effects of American pop culture on modern Japanese society, she suggests that the American fans are willingly collaborating with the videos’ producers in a critique of their own culture. Furthermore, in embracing without qualification the alien mores and traditions of a culture that has up until this time been characterized by its impenetrable ‘otherness’, they are truly fulfilling their borrowed title of otaku, a bastardized term that in Japan denotes blind fanaticism. Therefore, by choosing anime as an identity marker, Newitz argues that American fans are indulging in self-discrimination and uniting in a cult of self deprecation. While she acknowledges that in some cases US anime fans, by re-interpreting these texts through their own readings and by providing their own translations and subtitles for Japanese originals are engaging in what Dick Hebdige and John Fiske identified as ‘cultural appropriation’, her final analysis seems to suggest a more sinister transaction in which Japanese producers are encouraging American youth to trash their own cultural heritage. In addition, she believes that a large part of the attraction of these texts to young American males is their representation of pre-politically correct gender roles that would not be tolerated in this society, incorporating scenes in which women are presented as willing and uncomplicated objects for scrutiny and sexual humiliation. These provocative charges can perhaps be best addressed by a close semiotic analysis of the text in question.
In attempting a textual analysis of anime, the first consideration is the medium of animation itself. Unlike live action film and television, animation demands an obsessive self-consciousness in the construction of its encoded images. One can be assured that because of the meticulous, time-consuming and demanding challenges of animation production, we are receiving a text that is as close to the original conception as humanly possible. Whether this text contains unconscious systems of meaning is another matter. Animation is rarely the work of a single author and in the case of anime, although the design and direction may be attributed to one artist, the final product is inevitably influenced by the collaboration of a large production team. The self-consciousness of the aesthetics of these texts is also inevitably influenced by the political economy of their production; their makers are by now well aware of the extremely lucrative rewards of their success in the USA and are surely to some degree tailoring their content for American consumption. The proliferation of references to American popular culture suggests that even if the producers are not exploiting these elements, they are acutely aware of American culture and eager to pay homage to its artifacts.
The study of the production and reception of a global media phenomenon such as Japanese animation through the application of traditional ethnographic research methods has become problematized by what Dwight Conquergood so articulately identifies as the inability to contain cultural products within any fixed boundaries. “Borders bleed, as much as they contain. Instead of dividing lines to be patrolled or transgressed, boundaries are now understood as criss-crossing sites inside the postmodern subject.
Difference is resituated within, instead of beyond, the self” (Conquergood, 1992). Although this has probably always been true, the constructs of cultural imperialism facilitated a coding system of binary opposition which has only been radically challenged in the last twenty five years of postcolonial re-identification. Rather than restricting the field of cultural research, this change of perception has opened up the study of cultural relations to a more active, vital discourse of oppositions and relationships in which “meaning is contested and struggled for in the interstices, in between structures” (Conquergood, 1992). Therefore, when approaching contemporary media cultures, it is more relevant to focus research on what Rosaldo calls “zones of difference” and “busy intersections” of cultures where “many identities and interests articulate with multiple others” (Rosaldo, 1989).
Japanese animation, a relatively modern commercial art form which yet has strong and definite ties to traditional Japanese semiotic systems is perhaps one of the most successful recent cross-cultural exports. Encoding Japanese aesthetics with fluid Disney animation that became influential in Japan during the American occupation, it graphically demonstrates the complex web of textual relations and influences that characterize postmodern cultural production. While there is no one fixed interpretation of the themes and narratives of the videos that are now being widely screened internationally, it is easy to identify certain overcoded sites of semiosis. Perhaps most striking is the repeated depiction of the nuclear blasts that devastated both Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Although the creators of these animations are primarily young men who are also consumers of popular culture, they are possibly reflecting a continuing state of national trauma that may have been present in other texts - films, novels, music - but is now being widely disseminated to a global audience. Other themes - the fear of American cultural and economic imperialism, the deeply embedded Japanese fear of miscegenation, the anxiety over the ‘Economic Miracle’ and rapid technological growth expressed in nostalgia for the agrarian feudalism of Imperial Japan, are embedded in narratives which, decoded via Western sign systems, are simply punctuated with representations of extreme psycho-sexual violence, military oppression, and dazzling dystopian visions of the fusion of gender with gender, man with machine. Japanese animation provides a rich source of study primarily because it straddles the border between commercial production and counter-culture resistance.
For American consumers, perhaps part of the fascination of these new imports is that they largely deconstruct the popular media images of modern Japan as a clean, ordered and somewhat sterile society in which the inhabitants forgo individual freedom and individuality in favor of hard work and corporate loyalty. In stark contrast, the characters of anime texts are typically placed in dystopian landscapes and engage in highly stylized sexual and violent encounters with partners from both the human and spirit world. At one extreme is the saccharine genre of adolescent female romance, while at the other a convention of hard core pornography in which anime women travel from planet to planet by space-ship, engaging in highly original sexual encounters of the third kind with a series of suitably equipped aliens and monsters. Anime can provide a forum for serious political analysis and equally so the opportunity for fringe artists and consumers to indulge in escapist fantasies of torture, rape, cannibalism and dismemberment.The Overfiend, despite its often dazzlingly original and shocking imagery, fits quite neatly into a middle-ground ouvre of contemporary dystopian texts which include titles such as Doomed Megalopolis, Wicked City, Genocyber and Demon City Shinjuku.
Unlike in America, where animation is almost exclusively a children’s entertainment medium, Japanese audiences for anime include small children, women and adults of all socio-economic groups who swear allegiance to a variety of distinct genres; romance, science fiction, horror, pornography, homosexuality, comedy and even serious studies in history and politics. Nowhere though is the landscape of unease and cultural anxiety more evident than in the genre of mecha , the genre of the Overfiend, which is the anime equivalent of western dystopian science fiction and fantasy. These texts are typically constructed around a story-line in which human and machine are co-joined in some way to produce an entirely new order of human beings. While this has obvious references to the increasing fusion of technology and humanity in contemporary Japanese life, Newitz also suggests that it could equally refer to the traditional Japanese policy of isolationism and the fear of miscegenation.
She notes that, rather than acknowledging and celebrating the global inevitability of multi-culturalism, the Japanese still remain one of the most homogenous races in the world and still practice discrimination within their borders towards other Asian races. Manga and anime scholar Fredrik Schodt , however, does see evidence that the officially sanctioned government policy of internationalism that was instituted during the 1980s is taking effect in the imagery of modern manga texts.
Considering Japan’s history, it is hard to completely dismiss Newitz’s assertion that the imagery in fantasy horror anime texts suggests a preoccupation with the disruptive effect of race mixing and cross cultural penetration. She is able to conclusively prove that in many of these narratives the imbalance of the social order is instigated by a racial transgression , whether by the union of demon, vampire and human or human and machine. There is also the implication that in several cases this disruptive and destructive force is clothed in unmistakably American colors and cultural codes.
For Newitz, The Overfiend reaches new levels of transgression in what Japanese cinema scholar David Desser has identified as the convention of Eros Plus Massacre. The series is characterized by long episodic sequences in which conventional dorm-room adolescent sexual encounters evolve into nightmare orgies of rape and murder. The youthful, almost innocent Japanese college students who find themselves host to the Overfiend’s horrible power are literally torn apart as he metamorphosizes through them, his body towering over his doomed victims, his penis expanding to achieve the spectacular dimensions of a respectable sky scraper. In one climatic scene, he literally causes his partner to explode through orgasm and then proceeds to launch his sperm like an atomic blast on the city, setting in motion an orgy of sexual transgression and nuclear-style destruction.
Quite understandably, Newitz sees this imagery as referring directly to the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For her, the Overfiend is a symbol of the American occupation and the continuing influence of American economic and cultural power in Japan, especially among the younger generation. Although American films about the bomb and the subsequent occupation of Japan have tended towards saccharine, wistful accounts of sensitive GIs forming liaisons with demure and grateful Japanese women, the Japanese equivalents have been almost exclusively focused on the trauma of wholescale massacre, oppression, humiliation and rape. Newitz suggests that, in its graphic depiction of rape and murder the Overfiend is creating a binary between the monster America and the victim, a feminized and humiliated Japan. While this was certainly true in many post-war Japanese films, it is harder to acsribe such altruistic motives to the producers of a video text which continually positions the spectator as a voyeur to images of fragmented and depersonalized, raped and restrained female bodies. Yet it is undeniable that atom bomb imagery reoccurs obsessively in almost every anime text I have studied, whether originated by a firebreathing dragon, an uncontrolled technology or a sinister, generic world government.Or a penis, for that matter.
Before jumping to any fixed conclusions as to the allegorical meaning of The Overfiend, there are several other tempering factors that should be taken into account. Its deliberate references to the 1950s genre of Godzilla-type disaster films and creature features seems to suggest that The Overfiend is less concerned with cultural imperialism than with the familiar theme of the insubstantiality of Japan’s geography that has perhaps contributed to the Buddhist sensibility of the inevitably fleeting transitoriness of human existence and endeavor. For is The Overfiend not just a postmodern reworking of an old modernist icon; the emminently transcultural Godzilla? “Wholesale urban demolition has long been a staple elements in anime and fans of kaiju eiga (disaster movies). Japanese live-action monster movies have seen Tokyo reduced to rubble so many times that the city must be permanently associated in their minds with scenes of destruction.” (Ken Hollings, Tokyo Must Be Destroyed Ctheory.) Perhaps the Japanese animators simply felt that it was time that Godzilla, who had been overshadowed by the products of American special effects technology in the 1970s and 80s and largely reduced in stature to a buffoon or a cheap kitsch icon, needed to be re-invented. Whether the instability and anxiety that most anime texts reveal is due to an untrust-worthy geography or a threatening imperial power is another issue. Hollings suggests that the modern imagery of Tokyo’s demise suggests a force of internal dematerialization rather than external physical destruction. As such, this implies a society that will implode from the pressure of its own excesses and failings rather than explode as a result of external aggression.
For American consumers, perhaps part of the fascination of these new imports is that they largely deconstruct the popular media images of modern Japan as a clean, ordered and somewhat sterile society in which the inhabitants forgo individual freedom and individuality in favor of hard work and corporate loyalty. In stark contrast, the characters of anime texts are typically placed in dystopian landscapes and engage in highly stylized sexual and violent encounters with partners from both the human and spirit world. At one extreme is the saccharine genre of adolescent female romance, while at the other a convention of hard core pornography in which anime women travel from planet to planet by space-ship, engaging in highly original sexual encounters of the third kind with a series of suitably equipped aliens and monsters. Anime can provide a forum for serious political analysis and equally so the opportunity for fringe artists and consumers to indulge in escapist fantasies of torture, rape, cannibalism and dismemberment.The Overfiend, despite its often dazzlingly original and shocking imagery, fits quite neatly into a middle-ground ouvre of contemporary dystopian texts which include titles such as Doomed Megalopolis, Wicked City, Genocyber and Demon City Shinjuku.
Unlike in America, where animation is almost exclusively a children’s entertainment medium, Japanese audiences for anime include small children, women and adults of all socio-economic groups who swear allegiance to a variety of distinct genres; romance, science fiction, horror, pornography, homosexuality, comedy and even serious studies in history and politics. Nowhere though is the landscape of unease and cultural anxiety more evident than in the genre of mecha , the genre of the Overfiend, which is the anime equivalent of western dystopian science fiction and fantasy. These texts are typically constructed around a story-line in which human and machine are co-joined in some way to produce an entirely new order of human beings. While this has obvious references to the increasing fusion of technology and humanity in contemporary Japanese life, Newitz also suggests that it could equally refer to the traditional Japanese policy of isolationism and the fear of miscegenation. She notes that, rather than acknowledging and celebrating the global inevitability of multi-culturalism, the Japanese still remain one of the most homogenous races in the world and still practice discrimination within their borders towards other Asian races. Manga and anime scholar Fredrik Schodt , however, does see evidence that the officially sanctioned government policy of internationalism that was instituted during the 1980s is taking effect in the imagery of modern manga texts.
On one level, it tells a simple story of a monstrous force that manifests itself during episodes of sexual congress, growing increasingly powerful through each encounter until it spawns a race of half monsters that eventually dominate society. This is nothing new, although The Overfiend arguably reaches new levels of transgression in what Japanese cinema scholar David Desser has identified as the convention of Eros Plus Massacre. The series is characterized by long episodic sequences in which conventional dorm-room adolescent sexual encounters evolve into nightmare orgies of rape and murder. The youthful, almost innocent Japanese college students who find themselves host to the Overfiend’s horrible power are literally torn apart as he metamorphosizes through them, his body towering over his doomed victims, his penis expanding to achieve the spectacular dimensions of a respectable sky scraper. In one climatic scene, he literally causes his partner to explode through orgasm and then proceeds to launch his sperm like an atomic blast on the city, setting in motion an orgy of sexual transgression and nuclear-style destruction.
Quite understandably, Newitz sees this imagery as referring directly to the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For her, the Overfiend is a symbol of the American occupation and the continuing influence of American economic and cultural power in Japan, especially among the younger generation. Although American films about the bomb and the subsequent occupation of Japan have tended towards saccharine, wistful accounts of sensitive GIs forming liaisons with demure and grateful Japanese women, the Japanese equivalents have been almost exclusively focused on the trauma of wholescale massacre, oppression, humiliation and rape. Newitz suggests that, in its graphic depiction of rape and murder the Overfiend is creating a binary between the monster America and the victim, a feminized and humiliated Japan. While this was certainly true in many post-war Japanese films, it is harder to acsribe such altruistic motives to the producers of a video text which continually positions the spectator as a voyeur to images of fragmented and depersonalized, raped and restrained female bodies. Yet it is undeniable that atom bomb imagery reoccurs obsessively in almost every anime text I have studied, whether originated by a firebreathing dragon, an uncontrolled technology or a sinister, generic world government.Or a penis, for that matter.
Before jumping to any fixed conclusions as to the allegorical meaning of the Overfiend, there are several other tempering factors that should be taken into account. Its deliberate references to the 1950s genre of Godzilla-type disaster films and creature features seems to suggest that the Overfiend is less concerned with cultural imperialism than with the familiar theme of the insubstantiality of Japan’s geography that has perhaps contributed to the Buddhist sensibility of the inevitably fleeting transitoriness of human existence and endeavor. For is the Overfiend not just a postmodern reworking of an old modernist icon; the emminently transcultural Godzilla? “Wholesale urban demolition has long been a staple elements in anime and fans of kaiju eiga (disaster movies). Japanese live-action monster movies have seen Tokyo reduced to rubble so many times that the city must be permanently associated in their minds with scenes of destruction.” (Ken Hollings Tokyo Must Be Destroyed Ctheory.) Perhaps the Japanese animators simply felt that it was time that Godzilla, who had been overshadowed by the products of American special effects technology in the 1970s and 80s and largely reduced in stature to a buffoon or a cheap kitsch icon, needed to be re-invented. Whether the instability and anxiety that most anime texts reveal is due to an untrust-worthy geography or a threatening imperial power is another issue. Hollings suggests that the modern imagery of Tokyo’s demise suggests a force of internal dematerialization rather than external physical destruction. As such, this implies a society that will implode from the pressure of its own excesses and failings rather than explode as a result of external aggression.
Perhaps the most striking difference between anime texts and their western equivalents is the lack of the formal three part dramatic construction in which a clearly identifiable protagonist is introduced, placed in a situation of disequilibrium and forced to resolve the situation to some satisfying conclusion. In contrast, anime narratives often begin quite obliquely and may introduce a number of characters who, to the western observer, may not immediately be identifiable as heroes or villains. The storylines typically proceed in an episodic manner, often with no attempt to link or compress content. We may enter a scene in the middle of an action or, even more typically the narrative progression may be interrupted by sequences in which characters literally stare off into space for minutes on end to suggest philosophical speculation or spiritual realization. Most disturbing of all, despite their use of many elements from western dramatic traditions, the Japanese artists frequently do not allow the viewer a satisfying resolution. Monsters wreck havoc and are not destroyed. The heroine is just as likely to die somewhere towards the end as she is to get married. The hero often is forced to sacrifice his own mortality in the service of honor, adhering to the traditional Japanese notion of seishinshugi, the need for purification through physical suffering and deprivation. Story-lines revolve obsessively around issues of honor and kinship and the yearning for a pre-industrial rural village existence. Many anime characters are androgynous, descendants of a long tradition of bishonen or beautiful youths who are admired aesthetically for their resemblance to the fleeting beauty of the cherry blossom tree.
To add to this confusion, it is almost impossible to employ a coherent Proppian character analysis to the inhabitants of anime. The characters are rarely stable or fixed. They rarely represent single values or positions. In a typical western narrative the viewer is given at least one character who acts as the moral compass to lead the viewer through the story and provide the privileged point of view and responses to the internal events. However, in anime the hero is liable to suddenly exhibit very unheroic behavior that severely jeopardizes his chances to be employed as a coherent role model. These leaps of convention are likely to unseat even the most tolerant western viewer.
Where Newitz’s argument begins to weaken is her summation that in engaging so deeply in anime texts, young male American fans are identifying themselves with a feminized, colonized culture and rejecting their own masculine imperialist identy. This seems to imply that anime is Japan’s deliberate revenge on its prior colonizers through the process of subverting their youth. She sees parallels in the enthusiastic embracing of Japanese styles of cooperate management by their competitors here in the USA and the perception that Japanese products are superior to American equivalents. In my own interviews with American anime fans I have not discerned this kind of identification, but in order to test the validity of this theory I attempted a semiotic coding of the first Overfiend story in the series, the one in which the chojin returns to modern-day Osaka and searches for a human body through which to be re-born.
Scene #1
Denotative Sr/Sd Connotative Sr
Camera Angles Music Shot Content
CU ominous flames against black hell
CU-LS demons copulating with transgression/nightmare
humans
CU bright sign ‘Myojin University’ modern Japan
LS building under blue sky modern/clean/high tech
LS basketball game in progress America
MS college students on bleachers America
MS jock star in action America
CU small dark youth peering traditional Japanese through keyhole hero
CUs young women changing voyeurism
MS young man jerking off humiliation
LS young women in short America/Japan
skirts perform hoop routine
CU basketball hits hero’s face humiliation
LS young man falls to floor humiliation
MS jock laughing and pointing domination
at hero’s erection
CU jock licks blood from transgression
hero’s face
LS hero runs away humiliation
LS modern building under modern/western/clean
blue sky
LS Japanese woman leads high school
Caucasian girl into office
CU Teachers eyes glow red magic
MS Teacher’s face morphs horror
into long snake tongue
MS teacher rapes girl transgression
MS Hero and Cat Boy with voyeurism
blue hair and ears watch
through keyhole
CU penis/tongue develops eye magic
MS tentacles envelop girl rape and bind her
This is the opening scene of the Overfiend. In it, images of the daily routine of a typical modern Japanese university are de-familiarized through their juxtaposition with unexpected sexual transgressions. While the cheer-leading team, characterized by their fair skin, Caucasian hair and revealing western style clothing are changing in preparation for their hoop demonstration, the traditionally represented protagonist - short, swarthy, prominent eye-brows, flowing black hair is shown masturbating as he watches them through a key-hole. For western viewers, this, and his subsequent actions would render him highly unsuitable as a romantic hero.
This action is intercut with images of a very American-style basket-ball game, in which a tall, Caucasian-looking ‘jock’ star shows off his moves to the delight of the lettermen and sorority-type girls in the bleachers. Obviously this imagery is loaded with American cultural references - the clothing, the sport, the physical features of the college students - but there is no critical social commentary implied. It is a fact that young Japanese have embraced American pop culture, yet the choice to show the young women engage in a gymnastic display with hoops, rather than a classic American cheer , the deliberate display of the sign revealing a well-known Japanese university and the coding of the protagonist with the distinctive traditional characteristics of a Japanese youth-hero locates the culture firmly as Japanese.
What is more significant is the representation of adolescent sexual anxiety and guilt. The protagonist, Ngumo is excluded from the social activity by his short and ‘unattractive’ stature and by his lack of social grace. Furtively he observes his object of desire, Akemi, as she changes with her classmates. This results in his being caught masturbating and humiliated by the popular jock. This is a common enough scenario in adolescent texts - the only outstanding feature is the close-up of the jock, Osaki, licking the blood from his face - not the sort of gesture you would identify with an American jock but in this context probably a theatrical device pre-figuring of his subsequent role as the monster’s host body.
In America we are used to having our heroes and villains neatly packaged in black or white hats but in anime this is not generally the case. Perhaps these representations of conflicted humanity that produce remarkably well-rounded characterizations for animated figures comprise one of the qualities that attracts non-Japanese audiences but it can prove an obstacle in achieving a coherent rendering of a text. If he masturbates and peeks through key-holes, can he still be a hero? If she is sexually active, however unwillingly, can she still be a romantic heroine? If the jock is a bully, why are we being asked to care that he suffers a terrible fate? Equally confusing to western audiences is the following sequence in which an attractive and efficient Japanese teacher leads her student, the ‘heroine’ Akemi to her office, only to rape her violently in the guise of a monster. Ngumo’s passive witness to this activity allows both he and the audience another chance to watch Akemi being sexually assaulted from a voyeur’s point of view. While on one level, this juxtaposition of normalcy and decency with a hidden evil is the cloth from which scores of Hollywood horror films have been crafted, in this case the overtly American elements appear to be nothing more than window dressing in a graphic enactment of adolescent sexual anxiety and guilt. And if Ngumo is such a sensitive lover, why didn’t he go and help her?
This scene, in which Ngumo’s envied rival becomes possessed by the Overfiend during an after-game orgy seems to address both the desire for revenge by a powerless nerd and the guilty conscience that often accompanies teenage sexual fantasy rather than to imply any overt political critique of American society. Initially, in its repertoire of codes from classic pornography , it is simply a re-working of the common male sexual fantasy in which a man, or boy, finds himself surrounded by a roomful of eager and willing sexual partners. Although Osaka’s ability to attract ‘gorgeous babes’ through his prowess on the basketball court could be construed as an enviable quality by many of the anticipated adolescent male audience, it appears as though the underlying guilt for this excess must be acknowedged through the carnage that follows. This abrupt intercutting between scenes of sentimental college romance and those of graphic fornication and murder creates an uneasy texture that never achieves any kind of integration. Whereas the ethos of ‘pure love’ and ‘romance’ as represented by Ngumo and Akemi is repeatedly privileged through the text in the use of music, soft-focus close-ups Hallmark dialogue and swirling camera-work, these episodes of male-fantasy exploitative hard-core sex are consistently resolved in scenes of wholescale destruction. Therefore, it is hard to indulge in any uncomplicated erotic pleasure, not while we are being constantly reminded that our villains are really nice kids looking for love who happened to have stumbled on a bad situation. The consequences of their transgressions are swift and brutal. For a pornographic text, this is a remarkably conservative stance.
Scene #2
MS romantic Japanese boy and teenage romance
girl on park bench
LS dramatic monster girl appears to transgression/lust
tempt him
CU girlfriends angry reaction teen romance/true love
MS hero runs in panic innocence
MS hero is hit by truck guilt/ penance
MS hero dies on operating table penance
MS girlfriend grieving true love/decency
LS ominous morgue in darkness threatening
MS body under sheet horror/anticipation
LS young nurse passing by innocence/decency
CU hands from sheet grabs shock/fear
her leg
CU girl screams terror
LS hero rises and grapples with transgression
nurse
CU heroes hand on nurses breast voyeurism
CU pov nurses thigh revealed voyeurism
CU nurses terrified face terror
CU heros twisted features depravity
LS hero rapes nurse transgression
MS hero transforms into monster horror
CU monster body bursts out of horror
his chest - tentacles pin and
bind girl
LS monster rapes girl voyeurism
CU horrified elf watching innocence
MS monsters point of view of voyeurism
nurses body exploding orgasm
LS roof blows off building orgasm
MS tentacles penetrate windows rape
and snake over city
MS elf runs in fear hope?
LS lights go out in city apocalypse
MS monster rises above Osaka Godzilla?
LS lightning flashes behind him apocalypse
MS tidal wave comes over city apocalypse
LS buildings are destroyed by nuclear war
fire blasts from monsters penis orgasm
Cus monsters hatch from eggs new world and disperse order
Like their counter-parts all over the world, modern Japanese youth have adopted the outward trappings of American popular culture and these clothing codes are used in the Overfiend, presumably to appeal to its targeted hip Japanese audience. Whether this appropriation goes beneath the surface is another matter. Yet, the image of the Overfiend, as a symbol of a monolithic power that emerges through the bodies of his victims is obviously not simply an external threat but one that has literally been.
However, if the analogy to American Imperialism is temporarily set aside, it is just as viable to view the imagery of the Overfiend as a Freudian analysis of male adolescent sexual anxiety. What is interesting about this is that the Japanese have no history of internalized Christian-based shame and repression and in fact, most Japanese culture scholars believe that whatever surface social changes take place the essentially pantheistic tradition of Shinto is still the most cohesive social philosophy. Yet, the conflict between lust and love, the desire to experience romance and yet also enjoy the freedom of purely physical sex is common not just to young Americans and Japanese but to young men and women all over the world. The attraction of the forbidden, and the fear of the power of sex to transgress social boundaries and socially prescribed codes of behavior is enscribed even more deeply into historical Christian texts than in those of the Japanese who have traditionally been more at ease with their own sensual nature. However, the revenge fantasies of a socially challenged adolescent who is marginalized by his peers because of his short stature and awkward social skills is a condition that translates quite readily across most geographical and national borders. What is different is that the Japanese convention of playing out these fantasies through the safe mediums of theatre art, film and animation is well-established and so far studies have proven that it has no detrimental effect on the normally well-ordered and relatively crime-free Japanese social order. As Frederik Schodt has observed, this socially sanctioned expression of even the most extreme transgression of sexual and violent conduct may have even contributed to the high degree of personal safety and mental health of the Japanese.
Yet it is hard to easily dismiss the disturbing nature of these scenes. It is impossible to ignore the blatant exploitation and objectification of the young women characters who are forced to submit to repeated humiliation and rape. Perhaps most bewildering is the relentless and, for our eyes, unfamiliar juxtaposition between a horror narrative and a saccharine teen romance. While the spectacle of horror and sex and magic has an obvious audience appeal, especially when rendered in such exquisite and original detail, the potential for clarifying classifications of signs ultimately breaks down for me when, after repeatedly raping and abusing his girlfriend Akemi in his monster guise, Ngumo, restored to college youth humanity, politely asks her if he may make love to her and she agrees with passive gratitude. For me, this conflicted representation of the nature of adolescent sexuality over-rides any imagery of US domination and places the Overfiend squarely into the genre of seriously warped adolescent fantasy horror.
It is true that the Overfiend is saturated with, to coin the title of a Japanese New Wave film, Eros Plus Massacre, but the curious thing is that these scenes are strangely unstimulating. If the function of pornography is arousal, then the Overfiend provides little opportunity for the viewer to rest or identify with its male protagonists. In twentieth century pornography, as defined by Randolph Trumbach, there are typically two kinds of sexual representation. The first is the depiction of the human sexual organs, particularly the erect penis, which are intended to stimulate arousal. Secondly the repeated representation of the act of sexual intercourse itself is represented in a manner that Trumball refers to as ‘a level seriousness’ (259) intended to present the bodies and the acts as worthy in themselves. This serious tone is probably adopted because it maximizes sexual arousal, whereas humor or satire tend to limit it.”
The celebrated series of ukiyo-e shunga or erotic prints that Hokusai completed in the early 1800s were notable for their meticulous and amplified representations of both the male and female genitalia. Sometimes referred to as ‘pillow books’ they were provided to newly wed couples on their wedding night and were believed to serve partially as tools for arousal, partly as instructional manuals. In contrast, the modern pornographic manga and anime are remarkable for their absence of the very elements that are used to fuel western pornographic texts.
Although the Overfiend adopts a traditional male point of view in its voyeuristic depiction of young women, the other elements at play in the text work actively to subvert this active gaze. Some of the recent accusations against anime as constituting child pornography may arise from a lack of knowledge of Japan’s censorship conventions. Until 1993, the ban against the graphic representation of both the male sex organ and female public hair was upheld by even the most hard core porn purveyors. In order to overcome this restriction, producers resorted to a highly creative level of suggestion, either by absence or implication through the substitution of phallic and vaginal substitutes. These objective correlative codes have become so ingrained into the public consciousness in Japan that producers were able to indicate them in an extremely abstract manner and still guarantee a response. Constance Penley describes her struggle to convince publishers who were unwilling to include examples of erotic manga in her articles even though the actual genitals were absent.
The suggestion was so strong that they were convinced they were seeing something that was not actually there. Although Schodt details the genre of rorikon or Lolita complex stories as a sub-genre of manga, it is easy to see how western viewers may ignore the evidence of the fully developed breasts of female characters in anime texts and read from their lack of public hair that they are in fact pre-pubescent, an deduction that is reinforced by their high-pitched voices, a social convention for young Japanese women in subservient positions.
The re-working of the Godzilla legend in Urotsudojki allows a poetic license within the restrictions of the censorship laws. For the producers of the Overfiend, the tentacles of the monster provided a convenient substitute for those more conventional organs that had to remain hidden. Tentacles have become such a common phallic substitute in pornographic anime that the genre itself is often named for them. In fact, this highly creative use of numerous tentacled beasts, both for bondage and penetration, is a direct homage to Hokusai’s most famous shunga, the reportedly self-referential Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, which depicts a naked female pearl diver being penetrated in every orifice by a pair of octupai. It is interesting that the eroticism of Hokusai’s nineteenth century print becomes subverted by the intimations of violence in its twentieth century incarnation. Whether this denotes a national change of consciousness or the necessity for an increased level of stimulation is another issue.
It is indisputable that modern Japanese anime and manga have taken social transgression to new levels of intensity. In her studies of Japanese erotic manga, Constance Penley remarks on the increasingly proliferation of sado-masochistic texts which are predominantly authored by women artists. The unsettling content is compensated for by the stunning beauty and sophistication of their graphic aesthetic. It seems that anime and manga have, at least in some part, become the most potent and innovative Japanese cultural products.
Constance Penley traces the history of the use of phallic substitutes in Japanese graphic art and notes that the only difference now is that, rather than being fashioned from wood or fibre they have become high-tech, in accordance with the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy. (One wonders whether this convention, born of necessity, has encouraged the wide-spread practice of fetishism.) Penley sees a broader implication in the conspicuous absence of genitalia in Japanese pornography. “This is a graphics of representation through non-representation. The pornographic meaning of a scene is never in the image; it is produced in that inter-active space between the image/text and the reader “(186) This undoubtedly allows for the possibility of a semiotic code that is less fixed and anchored though whether this enhances or decreases the arousal function is a matter of conjecture. Ian Buruma, who has written extensively on Japanese culture, cautions the western reader not to apply a moral framework to Japanese texts.
He outlines the concept of ‘asobi’ or acting out, wherein violence is celebrated as spectacle in a number of ritualized forms. He remarks on “the perverse kind of beauty in the way that violence is choreographed” in the popular genre of yazuka or gangster films which are often referred to as ‘blood festivals’. “It is the kind of violence that builds up in heavily repressed people, suddenly let loose without any restraints, like soldiers in a war going on a rampage” (190). This spectacle of violence, which pervades almost the entire text of the Overfiend, becomes elevated through its obsessive scrutiny to the realm of art - blood gushes, organs spill, skeletons are revealed, the screen turns red or perhaps one single red drop runs down the naked breast of a hapless victim - but the graphic beauty once again serves to remove the viewer emotionally from the action and to objectify the victims and perpetrators alike.
The traditional quest and romantic narratives of the Overfiend are punctuated with sexual encounters and completely saturated with phallic substitutes but even if the viewer may be initially stimulated by the sight of naked women being subdued by flailing tentacles, it is hard to imagine that even the most jaded consumer could achieve satisfaction from seeing the same subject literally explode in a visceral shower of organs and skeletal remains. Likewise, the perpetrators of this violence, young college men who have become unwillingly transformed into monsters through the act of intercourse are then ritually torn apart in an orgy of destruction. Their guilt and fear and pain, the repeated message of orgasm as apocalypse provides an unsettling surface to The Overfiend’s essentially disaster movie heritage. Typically, after one of these mammoth orgies of destruction, the narrative shifts abruptly to the normal everyday college romance situations of the protagonists in their human form and we are left to wonder how someone who just impaled a young woman on a ten foot serpentine penis with an eye on the end can be having so much difficulty asking her out on a date.
Therefore, although the narrative is structured with episodic sexual situations in the classic arousal and fulfillment pattern of a standard pornography, the viewer is to all intents and purposes robbed of the opportunity for arousal by the interjection of both the horror and romantic elements. Similarly, the anticipated sequence of temporal succession does not apply - despite their transgressions there is no predictable causality in the lives of the heroes and heroines. They continue to operate on two parallel planes and we are asked to view them discreetly in their opposite modes.
This would leave one to assume that, rather than attracting western viewers with its kinky sexuality, the Overfiend connects on a deeper level of adolescent sexual guilt and anxiety. Despite its otherness, there are obviously enough areas of commonality to make references translate across cultures. Ian Buruma believes that the prolonged and indulged childhood of Japanese men and their strong identification with their mothers contributes to a sexual anxiety that is akin to the mechanizations of Christian guilt. Despite their non-Christian shinto heritage, many Japanese texts still reflect the male fear of women’s sexual power and a similar dichotomy between the mother/goddess temptress/whore binaries which view the female as a corruption of purity. As in the Hindu religion, the female goddess Izanami represents both life and death.
Which leaves us with the arousal properties of violence. Ian Buruma reminds us that Japanese culture has always prized ritual spectacle as a purifying social rite. He cites the example of the matsuri celebratory rituals which are by western standards very violent and sexual in nature. Shinto texts have always contained representations of the grotesque and provide a balance to the aristocratic aesthetic of restraint and perfection. He believes that Japanese traditions of violent entertainment and grotesque erotica are reactions by the society to the excessive orderliness and the restraint of the late Edo period.The western viewer can excuse all of this because of the dazzling aesthetic compensations. It is quite typical for the young male western viewer to sit quite happily through two hours of an animated text only to remark at the end that he had no idea what happened but it was sure amazing.
Ultimately, it is this quality of anime, the manic intensity of its textual surface and the elegant, powerful construction of its graphic aesthetic which elevates the Overfiend beyond the conventions of any of its genres. If the goal of pornography is stimulation, then Urotsukidoji achieves its end not through a standard repertoire of pornographic codes but through the dazzling spectacle of its aesthetic surface. If there is a ‘money shot’ in the Overfiend it has to be the moment when, energized by a violent orgasm the Overfiend is literally born through the body of his hapless human surrogate parent. Particularly in its prolonged sequences of destruction, of flesh exploding, of tentacles penetrating and snaking through the walls of skyscrapers, of tidal waves sweeping through doomed cities, of fibre-optic tracers immolating hapless citizens, and finally with the image of the phallic monolith of the Overfiend rising above the city of Osaka against a black sky streaked with lightning, the Overfiend delivers, not with a well-aimed stream of sperm on an eager woman’s face but in a vision of Armageddon that owes more to Hieronymous Bosch than Larry Flynt.
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