Prepared for the IIPS Symposium on

Upcoming Changes in Japanese Society and theFuture Shape of the Nation
Wednesday, 7 December 2005TokyoSession 3

The Sovereignty of Post-Otaku Culture

Thomas D. Looser
Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Studies
New York University

The Sovereignty of Post-Otaku Culture
Tom Looser
Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Studies
New York University
Our world has undergone remarkable changes in the past 15 years. By 1990, the forcesof a transnationalist globalization were already with us—an increasingly allencompassing globalization was already an assumed structural condition of the world.
Yet the last 15 years have also seen a collapse of earlier balances and equilibriums in
the world. The result has been an ongoing uncertainty; like all times of uncertainty, thisperiod has therefore been a time of possibility for change.
The conditions of globalization that I am referring to can be thought of at nearly
all levels of social action: the changes we are now undergoing are eminently politicaland economic, but they also are tied to technologies such as the internet, and new flowsof popular culture that, in part, are made possible by these new technologies.
All of these different realms of social action (the political, economic,technological, and cultural) are of course connected. But in this paper, I want to focus
specifically on the cultural conditions—that is, I want to consider some of the changes
and effects of the last 15 years, in terms of some examples from popular culture.
Of the many elements of social and cultural life that have been brought intoquestion in the last few years, one of the most important is the concept of sovereignty. I
would like, therefore, to use the problem of sovereignty, or what has become ofsovereignty, as a central question of this paper. However, although sovereignty is
usually thought of as a matter of politics, I do not want to refer to it in that way. Instead
I will use it only as a general idea. It will allow me to ask what happens to the idea of
the individual in popular culture in recent years, but also what happens to the idea of
the nation as a sovereign being, too. So, to bring all this together, I would like to outline
some possibilities for thinking about changes in the idea of the individual person, andthe individual nation, that have emerged in popular culture over the last 15 years.
I should make clear that these are ideas that I have not yet studied in very muchdetail, and that I will only give a simple view of here. Also, the conditions, forces, andproblems I am talking about are truly global, and not limited to Japan or the West or
anywhere else. Nonetheless, Japan has been a centrally important location as a place
where many of these conditions and trends come together most visibly, and so myexamples come mostly from Japan.
In Japan, 1990 was a time of possibility, both because of the remarkable successof the postwar economy, and because of its collapse. Since that time, there are threesets of cultural developments that I want to comment on, in order to make some generalcomments about where I think we are today. The first is anime, as a global cultural
product that nonetheless is an expression of “Japanese” culture. The second is therelatively new cultural category of “otaku” identity, that is part of this newly globalizedculture. And the third is the “Superflat” art of Murakami Takashi and others, that is alsopart of global culture. In conclusion, I want to just suggest some ideas about what thepost-otaku identity (sometimes referred to by the term “moe” in Japan) means both forthe individual and for national identity.
Already by 1990, anime was marketed globally as a uniquely “Japanese”
product, even though it was becoming an ideal example of a new, transnational culture.
Anime is of course in many ways truly a product of Japan. But it was only after
Japanese producers saw a surge of interest in Japanese animation in a large, amateur1

science fiction convention in Los Angeles that they decided there might be a market foranime, and they only then provided the investments that allowed anime to survive anddevelop, both in Japan and worldwide. Furthermore, with anime groups in places like
Ann Arbor, Michigan (U.S.) influencing the market as much as consumers in Tokyo, ina sense, the production of “Japanese” culture is happening outside the borders of Japanas much as inside. The same can be said of the production of anime. A now classic film
like Ghost in the Shell was actually created in part by American producers, and the art
work was done in Korea as well as Japan, with files electronically transferred back andforth. Lastly, within anime, there is a thematization of different ways of representing
the world. In Gasaraki, for example, live-action type film is spliced into the animation,with film and animation each indicating two different world views, and two different
histories.
Anime, therefore, in the global conditions of its production, is a very good
example of a new transnational cultural form. Furthermore, in its technical means ofrepresentation, combining analog and digital formats, anime creates multiple views of
the world—or rather, creates a world that itself is multiple. So in very broad terms, thecultural identity of anime is both a global, transnational identity, and multiple.
Nonetheless, out of this global and multiple form, consumers still find a specifically“Japanese” national product. The consumer thus takes on the position of sovereignty—
the consumer is the point at which identity is located and identified. So out of these
global and transnational conditions, in this first example, the independent boundaries of
the nation are preserved and even reinforced. But it’s important to remember that if theconsumer is the ruling sovereign, the consumer/sovereign remains very much part oftransnational flows.
My second example—the category of the otaku—is in some ways just a carrythrough of the conditions of anime. In fact in the United States, otaku fan clubs haverecently begun to replace anime fan clubs. In Japan, the background of the otaku
includes a kind of privatized identity—an alienated person, who mostly stays at home,
and is too interested in violent video games; instead of subcultural, they are more
simply anti-social. This background is important, and I will return to it, but for themoment I just want to focus on the otaku as a person who playfully, and perhaps withsome mania, identifies with a variety of consumer products. In the U.S., Japan, Europe,and elsewhere, this has been connected with the idea of costume play (cos-play).
Otaku-types may identify with certain characters, or styles, from anime and elsewhere.
This, in turn, is related to the idea that new subcultural identities are best described astribes. The new tribes are temporary groups, attached to styles (such as styles of music);
people may be members of these groups, but they are not exclusively members of any
particular group. You might be associating with a particular cos-play group in theafternoon, and maybe a techno-music group in the evening. Those groups, furthermore,are global. A particular kind of techno-music group, for example, may have members inTokyo, Berlin, Montreal, and elsewhere. Under these conditions, identity consists oflittle more than a set of networked connections, or nodes. These points of connection,furthermore, are constantly shifting. Accordingly, perhaps even more than in the anime
example, identity and sovereignty are globally dispersed and constantly changing andshifting. Sovereignty itself, in other words, becomes dispersed and uncertain.
The “Superflat” art of Murakami Takashi and others is, I think, one of the moreinteresting art movements to have developed in the 1990’s. It is closely connected withanime and with otaku culture. It has also become a huge, multi-billion dollar (U.S.)
global industry. Although it is a global industry, and although Murakami explicitly says
he went to New York to develop it as a kind of global art, he nonetheless also says thatout of this global art, he can locate something specifically and historically Japanese.
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The early Superflat work created a view of the world similar to that of the anime,
Gasaraki. Like Gasaraki, the Superflat art worked with both analog and digital
methods of representation, and claimed that because we now use both, we now see theworld in differing ways at once—we live in different relations to the world, all at thesame time. Furthermore, a digital representation of the world works by first breaking
things down into a code, and then re-encoding them to produce an image (or sound).
Because the original code can in fact be re-encoded in any number of ways, there is nostable or unmediated connection between the origin of an image (or sound), and theactual production of an image. There is still a real-world origin to a digital photograph,for instance, but technically speaking, that origin can be reproduced as any number ofdifferent possibilities. In this Superflat model of the world, the database replaces theold ideas of memory and history; a database idea of memory or of history still acts as apoint of origin, but only an origin of multiple possible identities. In the same way, aSuperflat idea of both consumer identities, or of (Japanese) national identity implies acomplex, multi-layered being. Japanese identity can still have real historical sources,
but ones that find expression only within complex layers of contemporary globalconnections. This would imply a very complex form of sovereignty. One that stillallows for the importance of the nation, but in a new way.
The cumulative view of the sovereign identity that these examples indicate is insome ways the promise that people spoke about 15 or so years ago. It includes anemphasis given to consumers as themselves somehow sovereign producers; it offers aview of the individual as a relatively stable identity (not a postmodern empty subject),though also an identity that is flexible and multi-layered; and it allows for the ongoing
importance of the nation as a frame of identity.
However, for better or for worse, these possibilities have not entirely been
fulfilled. The Superflat artist Murakami Takashi no longer talks much about the idea ofmultilayered identities, and instead has recently been describing clear narrative
histories of postwar Japan, in which Japan has been an infantilized nation in relation tothe U.S. He thus is returning to old, very modernist (almost cold war) notions of nationand history. A similar trajectory can be seen in the recent claims that otaku identities
have been replaced by the moe generation. In these accounts, otaku people were alreadya generation beyond the classic subcultures that still persisted in the 1980’s. Subculturalidentities remained political, while otaku were a non-political and in some ways
alienated culture. By these terms, otaku were self-indulgent, and living with fantasies,
often of a sexual nature. This gets carried further with the new moe generation. This is ageneration—especially of men—that may have certain manias and may still have a kindof sexual desire, but it no longer has any connection with actual human relationships. In
some ways there is a conscious and happy rejection of actual human relationships. This
could be considered a rejection of the consumerist desire for objects, but there is little
sense of that kind of opposition to anything. Infantilism tends to be embraced, and there
is little overlapping of different group identities. The result therefore is an almost
entirely alienated individual. It is therefore a resurgence of a kind of hyper-modern
alienated individual. Thus, the new flows of global culture in a sense return sovereignty
to the individual, and to the individual as a national identity. There is no more idea ofmultiple “tribes,” or of multilayering. To the extent that global flows return sovereignty
to the individual, it is an individual as an isolate—an isolated being. Both at the level ofthe individual and of the image of the nation, the result is a new form of closure.

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