Japanimation, or the animation of the two-dimensional manga world, is a universe of fantastic escape, bizarre or torturous sexual pleasure, magical monsters, romantic immaturity, pederasty, transformer warriors, alternative universes and futures, heroes and ghosts. If your previous world changes forever, if you experience your own extinction, maybe this kind of escape is inevitable. Japanimation is now reproduced for and sold to foreign audiences with binaries of beauty and violence that exceed Benedict’s contradictions. Even when the presentations are asexual and plastic, the commodification is not. For example, when performance artist Denise Uyehara created the show Hello (Sex) Kitty: Mad Asian Bitch on Wheels, I tried (though not very hard) to procure a Hello Kitty dildo for her in Tokyo, an item I was told certainly existed. While we were buying Sanrio’s Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Little Twin Stars in every rendition from erasers to watches (and maybe dildos), our counterparts in Tokyo became living dolls in extravagant costuming from Lolitas to gyarus. The last time I bought a Japanese music CD, it was produced by the girl band AKB48 (for Akihabara with forty-eight singing/dancing girls). If you look closely, they might be girls, but most likely they are young women in their twenties dressed in pink fluff with anklet socks in pink patent-leather Mary Janes. Then come to find out that a principal singer, Aimi Eguchi, wasn’t just a virgin but a CGI composite. My friend told me that Aimi Eguchi, despite not being a real person, appeared on television to apologize to her fandom for not being real.
A fake person apologizes. You might wonder about this. At least I do, since I’m always insinuating to my students that they need to be responsible for their writing, even though they can always plead fiction. The author is never dead, and even when you’re dead, some critic will come around and say you were a sexist techno-orientalist. O.K., they might say the writing was sexist techno-orientalist, but it’s still your dead writing. Can you get off the hook if your character apologizes?
Sometime post 9/11, after the turn of the century, when Sailor Moon turned into a live-action television show (that is, from a cartoon to a show with real actors), I drive my mother, Asako, to San Jose Japantown for the summer Obon/Nisei Week festivities. This is supposed to be a Japanese American festival celebrated in August in all Japantowns, Nihonmachis, Little Tokyos, and Japanese American cultural centers, churches, and temples across the country. When we get there, it’s afternoon, and Asako is a bit irritated at me for arriving late, and probably we’ve missed stuff, like the parade and dances. I get her seated at a table near Fifth and Jackson, in front of a stage set up across from the Buddhist temple. Maybe there’ll be a karate or kendo demonstration or enka singing or a bonsai class or taiko drums, anything to make Asako think this rare trip out of hippy Santa Cruz to our culture is worth it. I go foraging for food, skipping from booth to booth, and I can’t believe it. No Japanese food. No nigiri, no teriyaki sticks, no tempura udon, no unagi donburi, not even Spam musubi. O.K., there are snow cones and strawberry shortcake, but no manjū. I return with plates of chashu bao, pizza, German sausage, and spaghetti, and she looks at me like, What? She reminds me for the fifth time, “We came too late.” Like you have to get there early (nisei time) for the real stuff; they only make so much, then close down. Kaput. Owari.
I look up at the stage, and there are two high school girls there. One is Latina, the other white. The Latina has on a blond wig, but the hakujin girl has real hair up in long pigtails. Both are dressed like baby dolls, dancing and singing into the mic.
Asako leans over and asks, “What language are they singing?”
I answer, “Japanese.”
“No, that’s not Japanese.” She smirks.
I protest, “No, really, it is. It’s from the cartoons.”
She shakes her head and chomps on pizza, cheese glutamate coagulating onto her chin.
I look around for taiko drums, but there’s nothing in the wings to save me. Instead, a stream of little girls in Sailor Moon outfits, maybe between the ages of three and seven, are being persuaded to climb up on the stage. The MC turns out to be the hakujin high school girl in pigtails, who sings in Japanese and speaks in English with a cute Japanese accent: Haro boysu and garus, eve-ri-budy, comu and joinu usu on stage and retsu dansu togetha. I want my mother to ask me what language she’s speaking now, but Asako’s become disinterested. If only those little girls were wearing kimono. The music comes on, and it’s the Sailor Moon intro, and apparently there’s a special dance routine they’ve all been practicing, sort of. I haven’t felt this feeling in years; it’s the same feeling I felt when I entered an L.A. sushi bar and discovered all the Japanese clients had turned into white people. Well, that was a long, long time ago. This must be the other end of the end, how everything finally gets swallowed up in a parallel world. When I wasn’t paying attention, I’d been erased. I look at Asako for reassurance, but she’s never going to be erased. We are just plain late. This is some irrelevant aftershow.
The cute hakujin blathers on in accented English. I listen carefully. Her syntax is perfect. I think it’s a fake accent. I’m thinking, if it’s fake, this is an outrage. An entire generation of valiant protesting sansei didn’t fight for our ethnic rights to be Asian American and the continuation of Japantown for you to pretend to be Japanese. My head goes cloudy, and I imagine my sister, Jane Tomi, there next to us, listening and going cross-eyed. This is f’d up, she’d sneer. Yeah, I think, we might be old sansei. We might be post-Asian, but we ain’t faking it. Jane Tomi and I would instantly become dynamic sansei, back to defend the old ways. Make up! We’d meet that cute pigtailed girl backstage and push her against the chain-linked fence of the Buddhist temple playground and make her speak real English. You wanna fight, Sailor Moon, huh? Try Sansei Moon! That’s right. I want an apology.
But obviously, it’s all over. Sailor Moon. AKB48. Hello Kitty. I apologize to Asako for getting to Nisei Week late and for staging an imaginary fight with a Japanimation fan with a Japanese accent. Years ago, I tried turning Japanese, but some things are only possible for another generation, or maybe robots.
The Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori theorized something called the “uncanny valley,” in which he described the moment in which a computer-generated or humanoid robot, as it becomes more humanlike, conjures the sense of the uncanny, which sparks revulsion in real humans. Mori calls it “uncanny,” which seems to be a polite way of saying repulsive or perverse. O.K., we real humans would prefer not to engage with unreal mechanical humans. Preferable would be R2-D2 or C-3PO, but then maybe not, since the Japanese are making and selling these very real-looking sex dolls for intimate pleasure. Plus, there’s AKB48 and Aimi Eguchi. Or, say you surgically remold the contours of your face: Botox, rhinoplasty (the nose job), and blepharoplasty (double eyelids). Or, perhaps, you go topical and do it with makeup: yellowface. Are you beautiful or uncanny?
But how about the Turing Test, proposed by the computer theorist Alan Turing to evaluate whether a machine might exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human’s? The Turing Test was in a recent movie, Ex Machina, in which the protagonist can’t, in fact, tell real humans from robots, cutting into his own flesh to see if he himself might not also be a robot. What surprises, or rather disgusts, the viewer (me) of Ex Machina is that all the women, in what turns out to be a Bluebeard’s digital castle paradise, are robots, even the mute but dancing Japanese housekeeper/concubine, Kyoko.
Of course, Ex Machina’s Kyoko is hardly the first to star as an Asian robot. I would say Star Trek’s Mr. Spock and Data are Asian versions of the uncanny logical robot. How about the replicant Rachel in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, whose father is supposedly Chinese? Then there’s “Cylon number eight” and her many copies in Battlestar Galactica, played by Grace Park. And in the television series Humans, check out Gemma Chan as domestic synth Anita. You can read articles about synth actors having to go to uncanny boot camp to act robotic. Or you can visit Hiroshi Ishiguro’s website and see his humanoids, who have participated
as actors in dramatic plays by Oriza Hirata. Asian cyborgs and clones abound in our media and literature. What happened to Mori’s uncanny? It’s not just that the robots in movies are human actors. It’s now our assumption that humans can, like the cultivation of the chrysanthemum, be perfect. As I depart ANA flight 0172 from Narita, all the matching flight attendants bow with exactly the same gestures, exactly the same smile, the same voices. I could freak out, but it all seems really real. The uncanny valley, like Ex Machina’s digital paradise, is hidden. The Turing Test is unnecessary.
In his book The Future of the Mind, Michio Kaku writes that Japanese “are steeped in Shinto religion, which believes spirits live in all things, even mechanical robots.” And Masahiro Mori of “uncanny valley” fame wrote the book Buddha in the Robot, proposing that robots have the potential to attain Buddhahood. Come to think of it, you can visit Hello Kitty in Sanrio Puroland, where she stands in an altar, a blessing bodhisattva. What would Ruth Benedict say?
What would Bob Hashima say? Searching for Hashima, who could have been my dad’s buddy, I find a dead island fortress of ghosts. The next generation of laborers on such an island could be uncanny robots. Will they be programmed with duty, obligation, and shame? Will they apologize for not being real? Will they die when the sword splits their skulls? Will they attain Buddhahood? I’m not sure what this means, except that I feel uncanny. Just uncanny.
Indian Summer
On 9/11, I flew out of JFK on a 6:00 a.m. flight headed for SFO, ignorant of danger and spared the consequences of the disaster in my wake. Though preoccupied for months later by my narrow escape and devastated by any bad news of friends and old acquaintances, I had long resolved to leave New York for a new start in the central coastal town of Santa Cruz on the northern peninsula of Monterey Bay. Upon arrival, I turned selfishly to unpacking and situating myself in a comfortably clean and furnished rental, bathed in warm, dry winds and swirling heat, hot days interspersed with cool, the fall season intervening in fits and starts. We call these days Indian summer, supposing the Indians had long ago marked our calendar with their climate wisdom. By contrast, having just traveled in Europe from August to September, I was surprised to note, while in Fiesole, the autumn coolness trade away the summer heat, as if on schedule from August 31 to September 1, which made me think the parsing of seasons is a European expectation of time passing.
I had been offered a lectureship in art history on the subject of American architecture and the Arts and Crafts movement. My focus was the design of Frank Lloyd Wright and the architects of his Taliesin Fellowship, and the turn toward and uses of a Japanese aesthetic. On arrival in California, I thought I knew little of this coastal town, but this assumption of ignorance was eventually reversed. My previous forays to California had been brief and directed: for example, a tour of works by Julia Morgan, including Hearst Castle in San Simeon, Asilomar in Pacific Grove, and various YWCA centers and gracious homes in San Francisco and on the East Bay—Oakland and Berkeley. While quaint Victorians, trolleys running beneath bay windows of pastel painted ladies, were charming, I focused on the modern—the use of concrete and natural stone, exposed beams of giant redwood and extended garden landscapes, seaside cypress, crooked and windswept, reaching beyond glass open to natural light, wavering through sunset and fog. I was thus pleased to discover in Santa Cruz examples of the architecture of Aaron G. Green, protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright. In the fifties, Aaron Green had established himself independently in San Francisco and was the West Coast representative of Wright himself. I happened upon a building by Green somewhat by accident, a combination of fortune and misfortune—fortunate for my research and misfortunate in view of my health.
Soon after arriving in Santa Cruz, I was plagued by dizzy spells, and while walking to class across the wooden bridges spanning long gullies that cut through the redwood campus, I experienced a curious sense of vertigo. I would stumble into my lectures, grip the podium for several moments to regain my balance, trying with difficulty to assure myself and any students who bothered to notice my distress that I had control of the situation. I learned that if I directed my concerns quickly to technology, in those years the use of a Kodak carousel projector, I would soon forget my dis-ease and turn to the subject of my lecture that day, whether interior design and craftsman furniture or perhaps the use of water as natural falls, pools, and flowing sound. So it was: I sought medical advice and was directed to a laboratory for a series of blood tests. The laboratory was in a medical plaza of low-roofed structures. As I walked into the waiting room, I immediately recognized the architectural style: the latticed windows just above the seats, built-in couches facing a brick fireplace. While the narrow windows, stained amber, afforded very low light, light tumbled into the waiting room through a central Japanese garden atrium enclosed in glass. Such a waiting room for a medical laboratory seemed entirely out of character, but it was, as I knew, the architectural design of Aaron Green, influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1964. I would come to frequent this waiting room numerous times and would note over the years subtle changes that remade and distorted the original intentions of design and aesthetic, but these were changes of time and age and inevitable forgetting.
You walk around the architectural model placed at the center of the large conference table and smile. You note the location of your future office with the insertion of a Japanese garden atrium. From above, you can see an open square in the low roof encasing a miniature maple, stones, and a pond embedded in moss. At the plaza center, a pharmacy is placed strategically in a pagoda, buildings graced with low eaves and convenient circling parking. You’ve driven to San Francisco with your colleagues in your maroon Rolls-Royce, enjoying the day and the pleasant ride along the coast up Highway 1. You exude a sweet confidence, your dress casual yet smart, a red-and-gold silk scarf tied jauntily around your neck—your signature stylishness. Perhaps you, your doctor colleagues, the builder contractor, and the architect will dine in nearby Chinatown. You order for the group: Chinese chicken salad, roast duck, pork tofu, gai lan, bowls of steamed rice, beer for your companions, tea for you. Red lacquer and circling dragons swirl through the dining hall. You see yourself reflected infinitely in the surrounding mirrors, seated next to the architect as you discreetly suggest you may be acquiring a mountainside acreage; would he be interested in visiting the site?
Initially I was put off by the laboratory phlebotomist in charge, a commanding woman who seemed to bark orders from behind the desk, ensconced behind a half door, that served as a check-in station. Insurance card? Medicare? No doctor’s orders; who is your doctor? Are you fasting? Drink some water before you leave. What, no urine sample? Can’t pee today? Take this home, and bring me back some pee. Passing through the half door, I realized she was a one-phlebotomist show—intake, paperwork, and phlebotomy all in one draw. That she managed this operation with efficiency and accuracy was a tribute to the job. She could slap my arm, tighten the rubber strap above the elbow, locate the vein, stick in the needle, and suck out my blood in five tubes in a matter of minutes. And despite all this, she remembered all her victims by name and likely our blood types and disorders, and when, in her infrequent absences, I truly missed her, those replacing her would commiserate with me. Ah yes, the General is on vacation.
Despite the General’s efficiency, I found myself on that first day sitting for perhaps forty-five minutes in the waiting room with a pile of student papers, which I intended to grade in spare moments. Losing interest in student responses, I drew the parameters of the space. The fireplace had ceased use, a potted plant in its altar, dark traces of smoke and ashes clearly smearing the brick within and above. The cubby designed to hold firewood was empty. I walked to the tall slabs of glass panes that served as the transparent wall to the garden and peered in. There was a pond with a small fall of flowing water and goldfish surrounded by grass and moss and flowering azaleas. A small maple shaded the area. And to one side was a bronze plaque set over a cement block imprinted with
five names. Presumably the garden was a memorial to these names. Studying them, I felt an uncanny awakening, a sudden sense of familiarity. I returned to my seat, pressing a nervous palm into a slippery stack of papers and waited for the General to bark out my name.
You hike up an uneven path, the architect behind you. You point out trees and markers that designate the perimeters of the ten-acre hillside you’ve recently purchased. At some point in your trek, you turn around and look toward the town below and the bay beyond. The view is spectacular that day, sunlight glinting off blue waves, the outline of the bay sweeping with lush clarity across the horizon. The architect nods with sympathetic pleasure, notes the southern-facing direction, and agrees that this is the perfect open vista; no trees need to be cut or removed from this clearing. You will require a survey and structural engineering evaluations, but the architect imagines that retaining walls and foundation pylons to secure the structure to bedrock will pose no problems. The architect understands your intentions to create a home in concert with the living site, low to the ground and unobtrusive, bringing the natural outside into the gracious space of the home. You trade thoughts about your admiration of Frank Lloyd Wright. While living near Chicago, you’d admired examples of Wright’s homes; you admit your fascination for his architecture, bicycling through Oak Park and viewing the houses from the street, one by one. But you were a medical student and an intern in those days, and practical matters set you on a course away from your artistic pursuits. Your hobby has been furniture, following a Craftsman aesthetic. Included in the plans, you’d like a carpenter’s studio separate from the house, a place to which you can retreat. You and the architect trade thoughts about the work of Isamu Noguchi and George Nakashima, but you’re demure; of course, yours is a hobby, something to pass the time away from your busy practice, your boisterous family.
Sansei and Sensibility Page 8