Martin de la Iglesia and Lars Schmeink

Up until the late 1980s, Japanese anime had gone mostly unnoticed in the west and it fell to cyberpunk film, specifically Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira (1988) and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995), to change the western perception of animated films forever.

Seen in the west mainly as children’s films, adult animated films were not unheard of but never had the same success or ‘coolness’ that Akira brought to western viewers. As Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell note: “Akira was fundamental in changing audience perceptions of what animation was and, importantly, what it had the potential to be” (9). And while Akira introduced western audiences to adult anime, followed by a wave of controversies regarding violence and overt sexual content, by the time Ghost in the Shell hit the screens, audiences worldwide had become appreciative of Japanese anime. Christopher Bolton argues that Akira “marks the beginning of a Japanese renaissance in long-form theatrical anime for more adult audiences […as well as] the beginning of the latest and largest anime boom in North America” (17). Ghost in the Shell, on the other hand, is a “popular and critical phenomenon,” that takes the genre to the next step, engaging not only fans but also academics as an “evocative, provocative text” (Bolton 62, 95), pushing for critical discussions of the overall medium. In fact, the films lend themselves to be seen as a virtual double feature, marking the mainstream introduction and critical consolidation of cyberpunk anime as a respected and acclaimed visual form in the west and constituting an important contribution to cyberpunk culture.

Interestingly, even though both Akira and Ghost in the Shell count among the greatest anime films ever made and their affiliation with cyberpunk is accepted by audiences and many critics, Kumiko Saito points out in her contribution to this collection that they are not typical anime which usually had rather cheap production values. Rather, Saito argues, Akira and Ghost in the Shell’s departure from the form is “evident in smoothly animated action sequences filmed with Hollywood-oriented realism, principles of continuity editing and depth staging, and thoroughly-planned philosophically inspiring messages coupled with exceptionally high budgets for anime” (xx). At the same time, they aren’t prototypical of cyberpunk, as described in Sterling’s dictum of the “classic one-two combination of lowlife and high tech” (Preface to Burning Chrome xii). Instead, each of the films adjusts the formula to one side of the spectrum, highlighting their respective unique contribution—Akira foregrounding an indebtedness to punk subculture and Japanese cyberpunk’s connection with body horror, while Ghost in the Shell plays into Japan’s perception in the west as technological forerunner, especially in regards to cybertechnology and cyborgian constructions of life.  

Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s anime Akira is an adaptation of his manga of the same name, which was serialized from 1982 to 1990. And even though the manga has been retrospectively highlighted as a foundational cyberpunk text, it has never been prototypical in its generic conventions, instead also referencing “supernatural powers from the ‘science fantasy’ genre” or a “post-apocalyptic fiction” setting, thus resisting the purity of the cyberpunk generic moniker (de la Iglesia 9).1 The film takes place in the near-future setting of 2019, thirty-one years after an unknown event triggered World War III and Tokyo was destroyed in a massive explosion, only to be rebuilt in the post-War years as Neo-Tokyo. The story follows a group of teenage bikers, led by Kaneda and including his best friend, Tetsuo, who become entangled in a web of political conspiracy, a revolt against authority, and illegal government experimentation. After an accident involving a young boy with strange psychic powers and the face of an old man, Tetsuo is sequestered by a secret governmental agency. The accident triggers the potential development of paranormal abilities in the boy and the agency wants to add him to their ranks of experimental subjects, in which they create psychic and psychokinetic powers through drug inducement. Meanwhile, Kaneda joins an underground revolutionary group attempting to mount a rescue, stop the experiments, and use the test subjects for their own gain. However, Tetsuo’s induced abilities grow out of control and he escapes the hospital, causing violence and bloodshed in the process. During the chaos, the psychic children warn of the second coming of a prodigy named Akira, once a powerful test subject himself—so powerful in fact, that he caused the event that destroyed Tokyo and caused WWIII. Tetsuo realizes that he is linked to Akira and sets out to release him, while Kaneda still wants to rescue his childhood friend, this time from himself and the corrupting power growing inside of him. When Tetsuo releases Akira from the cryogenic chamber in which he was imprisoned, he realizes that Akira is long dead and his body preserved in the form of organ and tissue specimens. The military tries to reign in Tetsuo but cannot stop his ever-increasing power until he loses control over his body: he transforms into a monstrous giant baby, absorbing the debris and technology around him, before finally becoming an amorphous mass that threatens to destroy the city once again. In a last-ditch effort to stop the rampaging Tetsuo, Akira is resurrected, turning into a sphere of light that swallows up Tetsuo and the other children.

If one takes seriously Bruce Sterling’s characterization of cyberpunk as “[a]n unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent—the underground world of pop culture, visionary fluidity, and street-level anarchy” (Preface to Mirrorshades xii), Akira clearly veers to the side of anarchy, dissent, and ‘punk,’ using the technical world as mere window-dressing for its story about abuses of power and youth-cultural revolt. In Akira, it seems obvious that Sterling’s “crazed and possibly dangerous” (xi) outlaw figures find their representation in Kaneda and his gang. Public discourse in Japan calls these biker gangs bōsōzoku (roughly translated as ‘running out of control tribe’ or ‘violent speed tribe’) and has originally seen them as a defiant subculture, “nothing more than night-time rebels” (Edwards 126). Andreas Riessland explains that bōsōzoku are “adolescents who engage in disruptive and dangerous conduct in traffic,” and have existed since the 1950s, but their behavior became more aggressive, posing a “threat of physical violence” as a reaction against heavy-handed police action against street racing in the early 1970s (“Public Perception” 202–03).

In the film, we areintroduced to the protagonists and their internal power dynamics via an early appearance of the iconic red motorcycle (present on the movie posters) belonging to Kaneda, when low-ranking member Tetsuo attempts to hot-wire the bike. Tetsuo sits on Kaneda’s bike and recites its horsepower and impressive technical specifications, which sets up the bike as a central technological tool for empowerment and as a focal point of resistance against social expectations. Matthew Edwards suggests adolescents joined bōsōzoku as an “outlet to escape their personal and family problems,” (128) and with both Kaneda and Tetsuo being orphans in a restrictive foster system that does not expect them to amount to much, the membership in the gang seems to produce a counternarrative, “a loud call to arms against the well-ordered daily life” (Riessland, “Bōsōzoku” 212). Further, the bike itself can be understood as “an agent of change, a symbol of subversive flexibility against a monolithic and indifferent state” (Napier 41) in that it allows Kaneda and his gang to escape the stifling structures of social expectations set up by the school and foster system with literal movement. Early scenes show the bikes as kinetic, a force ripping through the city with colored, blurred energy lines following their swift motion through the “unmoving structure of power and authority, represented by the enormous massed buildings” (Napier 41).

For cyberpunk in the west, ‘punk’ was an attitude infusing the engagement with high-tech displayed in fiction, specifically the practice of hacking and appropriation of technology to counter its hegemonic use, but the original punk music scene was not intentionally included. Bruce Bethke famously coined the term because he was looking for a word combination that described technology and “socially misdirected youth,” ending up with ‘punk,’ even though “bōsōzoku got really close to my concept—but there’s no way to turn that into an English-language expression without making it sound silly. ‘Cyberbozos?’” Instead, Bethke used ‘punk’ because “how the word sounded was extremely important” (emphasis in original). In Japan, though, the connection was not merely phonetic, but rather culturally relevant, connecting bōsōzoku, punk, and cyberpunk subcultures through the key influential films of Sogo Ishii. Ishii’s Crazy Thunder Road (1980) and especially Burst City (1982) which encapsulate biker gangs and punk bands “in an eclectic mix of punk, industrialization and post-apocalyptic wasteland imagery,” where the rabble eke out an existence in the refuse of the city, the films showing “Tokyo as little more than a concrete slum” (Player). In Burst City, the punks see their lifestyle threatened by a nuclear power plant and protest its construction through music performance as much as through fighting with the police as symbols of hegemony and industry. The juxtaposition of technological promise (nuclear power) and the reality of devastation in the city’s wasteland opens the film to punk interpretation, or what cultural critic Dick Hebdige, building on Claude Lévi-Strauss, refers to as bricolage (102).

In the context of punk aesthetics, bricolage refers to the intentional crossing of two layers of meaning, which Hebdige sees as an “anarchic mode” meant to “disrupt and reorganize meaning” (106). In Burst City as much as in Akira, the gloss and promise of technology stands in stark contrast to the realities of the inhabitants of the city. Akira opens to the destruction of Tokyo, only to then show a shiny, reconstructed Neo-Tokyo as the pinnacle of high-tech, full of potential and prosperity while the city prepares for the upcoming Olympics. For Kaneda and his crew running the old streets, however, most of Neo-Tokyo remains a wasteland and fails to fulfill its high-tech promise. As Le Blanc and Odell point out: “The holographic advertising hoardings are hollow representations of a thriving economy. This is superficial reconstruction” (31). The film’s settings, the dirty alleyways, the shuttered shops, the run-down bar, the trash-littered school, and the continued construction around the destroyed crater signal bricolage, a shift in meaning that juxtaposes high tech with low life.

For Kaneda, success means taking what he needs and making it his own, appropriating it—a concept that is highlighted in the film, from his warping of the resistance fighter’s plans to accommodate his own rescue mission to the stolen bike that he customizes. Kaneda makes his own street-use of anything he finds, especially prominent in his unblinking ability to commandeer weaponry and turn it against his attackers—either the small one-man aircraft in the tunnels of the government facility, or the battery-powered beam weapon he uses to defend against Tetsuo after conventional means have failed. When the batteries die during the first confrontation, he jury-rigs a motorcycle battery to recharge the weapon and use it again.

Moreover, the bricolage of punk and its destabilizing of meaning becomes even more prominent in Tetsuo, whose transformation towards the end of the film clearly evokes the cyborg’s fusion of flesh and technology, man and machine. Tetsuo’s transformation, though, is horrific and violent, akin to body horror’s invasions and dismantling of the human body. His right arm is replaced after it has been bloodily severed by a laser blast; pieces of scrap, such as cables, screws, and other metal parts, levitate towards his shoulder and assemble into a shape resembling a human arm, albeit with a metallic, grey look with some junk and debris parts still identifiable. Through the violent absorption of the surrounding debris, Tetsuo’s body becomes a “prosthetic and cyborgian body” (Tatsumi), over which he has little control. According to Zach Gottesman, this loss of control over his machinic body metaphorically represents the “chaotic capitalism” that Japan has engaged in and that the film symbolically destroys in its final scenes, as it cannot imagine an alternative to rampant capitalism, instead opting to showcase “its complete destruction and the apocalypse” (110).

This both contrasts with and is similar to popular western imaginings. On the one hand, the cyborg there is also a product of late-capitalist strivings by corporations or the military, whose existence threatens and ultimately slips from their control. On the other hand, western cyberpunk sees the cyborg deliberately and strategically constructed by the capitalist entities themselves, mechanical and electronic prosthesis fitted to replace limbs and provide enhanced functions, and metal chassis or imitation-skin obscuring the interior workings, as with Officer Murphy in RoboCop (Verhoeven 1987), Detective Spooner’s arm in I, Robot (Proyas 2004), or Luke Skywalker’s hand in The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner 1980).

As Player has argued for live-action film—using Akira as an animated precursor—Japanese cyberpunk owes a greater debt to body horror than to traditional science fiction (sf). The form is a “collision between flesh and metal, […] an explosion of sex, violence, concrete and machinery; […] post-human nightmares and teratological fetishes, powered by a boundaryless sense of invasiveness and violation.” In this light, Tetsuo’s transformation can be understood as a punkish bricolage reimagination of the cyborgian fantasy that technology represents the accumulation of power and control. Instead of helping Tetsuo to regain his human integrity (replacing a lost limb) and control his drug-induced psychic powers, the technology takes over, causing a feedback loop and sending his body into uncontrollable mutation. Napier sees the transformation as rebirth, “from ordinary human boy to monstrous creature to, perhaps, a new universe; in other words, from impotence to total power” (44), but it can also easily be read as “bodily mutation through technological intervention,” which Player identifies as a major theme in Japanese cyberpunk. Thus, the transformation reveals Tetsuo as powerless to control the technology that threatens not just his bodily integrity but all of Neo-Tokyo. In the end, Akira evokes the cyberpunk trope of the cyborg, but reworks important characteristics common to western cyberpunk, such as the connected technological empowerment fantasy and its relation to high-tech capitalism, to conform with a uniquely Japanese imaginary. Considering Akira an entry in the cyberpunk mode, one thus has to rely on its embrace of punk in both its bricolage shifting of meaning (towards technology dismantling the human) and its aesthetics tending towards the discarded and disused.

Thus, what connects Akira with Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (Kōkaku Kidōtai, literally ‘armored mobile strike force’), aside from their important role in promoting Japanese anime in the west, is their “fundamental concern or even unease with the body and thus, implicitly, with identity itself,” or more specifically with cyberpunk’s “attempts to escape the body and thus the constraints of human identity” (Napier 115). But where Akira promotes the idea of a destructive invasion of the body through technology, Ghost in the Shell focuses on the potential inherent in cyborg technology and its posthuman reproduction.2

Oshii’s adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s manga of the same name (1989–91) focuses on Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg assassin who works for the government agency Section 9, especially tasked with cybercriminality. Most of Section 9 (and many other people in the world of Ghost in the Shell) are cybernetically enhanced, most commonly with a ‘cyberbrain,’ an enhancement of the human brain that allows Internet-like data access and communications. Kusanagi is more extensively enhanced, though, as her entire body, with the exception of parts of her brain, is artificial, granting her superhuman reflexes and strength. Briefly, the plot revolves around Kusanagi’s pursuit of the criminal ‘Puppet Master’ who hacks into people’s cyberbrains to control their minds and bodies. For example, the Puppet Master can physically interact with the world through such human proxies as a garbage man or a petty criminal, hijacking their bodies and having them enact his will. When Section 9 finally gets hold of him, the Puppet Master turns out not to be a human at all but a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) created by Section 6, another branch of government developing the AI as part of a political scheme. The Puppet Master claims to have developed a consciousness—a ‘ghost’ or the equivalent of a human soul—which has escaped its creators through the data network and downloaded itself into a cybernetic body similar to Kusanagi’s. When Section 6 reclaims their project, Kusanagi chases it down to secure the AI and confirm the existence of its ghost. The Puppet Master’s ultimate goal, however, is to fuse with Kusanagi’s mind—whom it sees as a kindred being­­—in order to develop into a higher form of being, both human and artificial. The film concludes with Kusanagi in a new body, declaring her new hybrid subjectivity (after merging with the Puppet Master) and expressing wonder as to what the future might hold.

In its depiction of a technologically enhanced posthuman society, Ghost in the Shell clearly comments on questions of subjectivity, negotiated through issues of embodiment, biological and technological, and thus on what Donna J. Haraway has called a “cyborg identity,” complicating the “statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of race, individual entity, or body” (174; 178). Aside from its common language use—the cyborg as hybrid being of both machinic and organic parts—Sharalyn Orbaugh articulates the philosophical potential of Haraway’s vision: “Speaking less literally, ‘the cyborg‘ is a concept intended to represent a new paradigm of subjectivity, a new way for humans to understand themselves and their relationship to others and to their environment in the postmodern, post-industrial world of transnational capital” (“Genealogy” 55). She continues that cyborgs function to negotiate how “human subjectivity” becomes “‘posthuman’” and, in Japanese anime especially, where “the limits of human subjectivity” lie (“Genealogy” 56; 58).

Major Kusanagi functions as the central cyborg figure undermining existing embodied categories—laid bare (pun intended) in the credit scene at the beginning which reveals Kusanagi’s body as a constructed shell, crafted from both machinic and organic parts, neither merely born nor made, and neither coded as fully male or female. Even though the film highlights her body as “bare-breasted and big chested,” as Joseph Christopher Schaub explains, the cyborg construction reveals “ambivalence towards the boundaries which separate masculinity and femininity” (90–91).3 Kusanagi is cyborg in that, though superficially sexualized, both her body’s capabilities and her function within the narrative frame her as male, as Orbaugh explains: “this body is under perfect control” and “the sexed body as reproductive body has no meaning in her cyborg state” (183–84). Kusanagi has no genitalia that would define her sexuality, she displays no intimacy and is solely defined by her cunning and ruthless precision at her job—killing people. She fully controls the actions of her body in minute detail because of its status as cyborg. Further, she is willing and able to discard her body, risking its destruction to ensure success—her cyborg status allowing her to be reborn in a new body, a variation on reproduction that foregoes “the interplay of repetition/sameness with diversity” of human childbirth and instead decouples cyborg subjectivity from embodiment: “The mechanical body […] is replicable, but what is (re)produced is a facsimile of the previous one and has no reference to an organic ‘original’” (Orbaugh, “Sex” 186).

One could thus argue that Kusanagi’s (post)human subjectivity is her ‘ghost,’ which the film locates in the biological brain which controls the mechanical bodies. But Kusanagi questions her own subjectivity, wondering what constitutes it. She concludes that

there’s a remarkable number of things needed to make an individual what they are. A face to distinguish yourself from others. […] The memories of childhood, the feelings for the future. That’s not all. There’s the expanse of the data net my cyber-brain can access. All of that goes into making me what I am. Giving rise to a consciousness that I call ‘me.’ And simultaneously confining ‘me’ within set limits.

Fixed identity through a specific embodiment seems limiting to Kusanagi, which is especially true as her body is constructed as a commodity, produced to specification by Section 9 and thus limited to its functionality as agent/assassin. Schaub argues that this capitalist commodification is central to Kusanagi’s cyborg subjectivity as it “has completely eliminated [Kusanagi’s] organic body and replaced it with a more dependable and manageable mechanical one. Yet her ghost expresses a humanistic desire for liberation” (93). This desire would require her to forego her cyborg identity, throwing into question an embodied subjectivity as she would “need to give the government back our cyborg shells… and all the memories they hold.”

Complicating this desire is the fact that ghosts are not reliable indicators of subjectivity either. As the main storyline makes clear, the crime of the Puppet Master is his ability to hack into people’s ghosts and implant memories and desires in order to create specific actions—eminently shown in the scene with the garbage man who remembers his little daughter vividly and would do anything for her, even though she is a ‘virtual experience.’ Realizing the implications of artificial ghosts, Kusanagi questions her own subjectivity further: “perhaps the real me died a long time ago… and I’m a replicant made with a cyborg body and computer brain. Or maybe there never was a real ‘me’ to begin with. […] And what if a computer brain could generate a ghost… and harbor a soul? On what basis then do I believe in myself?”

The film’s central argument, then, follows from its ending and the offer for Kusanagi to join the Puppet Master in order to reach full existence as a lifeform, including death and reproduction—a limitation that is currently placed on both Kusanagi and the Puppet Master due to their cyborg embodiment. Kusanagi’s and the Puppet Master’s merging would mean posthuman reproduction, instead of mere replication/duplication, as well as death: “A mere copy doesn’t offer variety or individuality. To exist, to reach equilibrium, life seeks to multiply… and vary constantly, at times giving up its life.” In order for Kusanagi and the Puppet Master to create this “more satisfying form of identity and a new version of ‘life’” (Napier 113), both old forms cease to exist. When Kusanagi later awakens in the body of a little girl, the transformation into a new ‘life’ is complete, her morphology signaling once more how cyborg identity subverts our expectations of embodiment in that she has clearly “left the ‘childhood’ of her cyborg subjectivity behind and achieved full subjectivity in the next stage of evolution” (Orbaugh, “Sex” 187). In Kusanagi’s acceptance of the merging, the film realizes a truly posthuman form of subjectivity, thus rejecting the humanist individualism that stubbornly lingers in much of western cyberpunk. As Napier argues, “Ghost simply repudiates the constraints of the contemporary industrialized world to suggest that a union of technology and the spirit can ultimately succeed” (114). In evoking this union of technology and spirit, Ghost in the Shell provides a uniquely Japanese perspective on cyborg identity, one that embraces the possibility of hybrid existence, of giving up a tenuous self in order to be integrated into a larger network.  

What has become clear, then, is that both Akira and Ghost in the Shell are indeed cyberpunk explorations of the relation of human and machine, but neither fully conforms to the standards and conventions of western cyberpunk. Instead, both films add a distinctly Japanese perspective to the discourse on posthuman subjectivities. Akira embraces Japanese cyberpunk’s heritage in punk, anarchy, and body horror, ultimately rejecting technology as destructive and corrosive. By contrast, Ghost in the Shell argues for technology as another option for creating the necessary conditions for life and sees a cyborg identity as potential for a uniquely posthuman subjectivity. It thus becomes clear that both are important cyberpunk interventions into posthuman discourse and should be seen as Japanese key contributions to the mode.   

Notes

1. For more on Japanese manga in cyberpunk, see Shige (CJ) Suzuki’s entry in this collection.

2. See, for example, Orbaugh’s “Sex and the Single Cyborg,” notably pgs. 183–89. 

3. Ghost in the Shell’s gender representations are controversial among critics. While Kusanagi may be able to transcend her mechanical shell, she is mostly shown in a sexualized, naked female form. Further, these female cyborg bodies are often destroyed and the film’s gaze lingers on the shattered female form. Carl Silvio, for example, sees in the film’s politics and story the potential for a liberatory reading of the cyborg, but argues this is hampered by the cinematography and adherence to the male gaze. Similarly, Ryan J. Cox draws attention to the film’s reliance upon the male gaze and its predilection to use “repeated images of naked and broken female cyborg bodies that collectively signal a looming threat of discorporation” (132). For more detail of this reading see Cox; Silvio.

Works Cited

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  • —. Preface. Burning Chrome, by William Gibson, Ace,  1986, pp. ix–xii.
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