Anime and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  This super-strength is balanced by Al’s naïveté and gentle disposition, the yin aspect of his nature. Ed, too, is a kind of super-strong boy, though he has far more human limitations than his brother. Ed’s auto-mail compensates for his body’s weaknesses and allows him to compete with the big boys, but it is his knowledge of alchemy, his student hero nature, that truly sets him above the adults around him. Al is a much more precise application of the super-strong boy heroic archetype.

  Ironically, Al is also connected to the shōjo tradition described by Susan Napier in “Vampires, Psychic Girls, Flying Women, and Sailor Scouts: Four Faces of the Young Female in Japanese popular culture.” The shōjo is an idealized young girl who never grows up. She is seen as non-threatening because she is essentially sexless. Al is definitely not a young girl, but he is a young boy who has had his soul attached to a suit of armor, which means he has no sexual organs and is therefore sexless. The fact that the shōjo is also sexless allows for a male version of this archetype.

  Equivalent Exchange

  Being alchemic in nature, and keeping in line with the law of equivalent exchange, something must be lost in the formation of an alchemic hero. Certain attributes relating to the individual component heroic archetypes must be forfeited in order to create this new type of hero, the alchemic hero. This is particularly true when those types, like the young boy seeking acceptance, the super-strong boy, and the shōjo, are so intricately linked. Al is accepted by the older people around him, but in being accepted he must bear an adult’s share of responsibility. He also loses the protection his age might otherwise grant him; his age becomes a non-factor when Al deals with dangerous people.

  This is also one of the things Al sacrifices from his male shōjo character archetype. The shōjo, being essentially harmless, often inspires feelings of protectiveness in others. Though it is true that certain characters, such as Izumi and Major Armstrong, feel the need to protect the Elric brothers, there’s a sense running throughout the series that they can largely fend for themselves. It’s worth noting that, in Episode 16 when Major Armstrong treats the boys like children by offering to protect them, Al has had half of his body disintegrated, and Ed has lost his auto-mail arm. Without his arm, Ed loses the only tools that allow him to stand up to the grown ups around him—he cannot fight or perform alchemy—and Al’s loss of the right side of his body means that he, too, is incapable of defending himself. It is only when they are completely helpless that others step in to protect them. At other times, they handle things on their own.

  In being bound to a suit of armor, Al must sacrifice all sensation. He cannot taste, smell or feel anything, though he can apparently see and hear. Why he is able to use some of his senses and not others is never made clear, but part of the reason the Elric brothers are so intent on restoring Al’s body is so that he can regain the senses he has lost. Although the brothers are trying to restore both their bodies, Ed never expresses much of a desire to replace his own lost limbs. There is a sense that he is doing this for Al, whose loss is far greater than his own. While enduring the pain of having his limbs replaced, Ed comments that Al’s pain is far worse, as he has given up all sensation. As the second half of the dual-hero, Al wants to restore Ed’s body first.

  Al also loses the benefits he might have gained through the struggles involved with puberty. In not going through that developmental process, he doesn’t really mature, remaining an immortal adolescent. This immortality also puts him at the mercy of Greed, one of the villains of Fullmetal Alchemist. Greed is a homunculus, an artificial human being, who longs for true immortality and believes he can gain it by copying the process that attached Al’s soul to the armor. This makes Al one of Greed’s targets, and Al is kidnapped in Episode 33 so that Greed can learn how he achieved his immortality. This process involves something called a blood-seal, an alchemic seal of blood that binds Al’s soul to the armor. The seal provides Al with his only weakness, his fatal flaw, as it is the only thing keeping him tethered to the mortal world. If the blood-seal is destroyed, Al dies. This is proved in Episode 21 when another armor-bound soul destroys itself by crushing its own seal. This fatal flaw sets Al apart from other Japanese super-strong boys and aligns him more closely with Western comic book superheroes like Superman, who is rendered defenseless when exposed to kryptonite.

  Alchemic Heroism

  The Elric brothers, as alchemic heroes, fuse together a number of disparate heroic archetypes and meld them into a single, coherent whole. And this new type of hero reflects something of the nature of Japanese culture. Japan has a long history of drawing together disparate external elements and somehow incorporating them into its own cultural integrity. When Buddhism was incorporated into Japan, it became bukkyō, a Japanese form of Buddhism that melded Indian and Japanese Shinto beliefs. The same process of assimilation can be seen in the way Chinese beliefs, such as Confucianism and the philosophy of the yin and yang, were incorporated into the Japanese culture. This alchemic process is reflected in the Japanese narrative tradition. When Confucianism and Buddhism were introduced via mainland China around the fifth and sixth centuries, Japan did not import the narratives of China and India wholesale and complete. Instead, they retold these foreign narratives in their own way, changing the settings and characters into Japanese ones while retaining something of the original themes. Aspects were lost; sacrifices were made in the fusion, but somehow Japan managed to retain its own individual, homogenous national identity.

  The element of sacrifice in the alchemic hero also has its roots in the nature of Japanese heroism, and it tells us a lot about the underlying traits that influence the development of Japanese heroes. The samurai, Japan’s warrior class, form the basis of Japanese heroic literature. The term “samurai” refers to a class of people who serve the nobility. They adhere to the Bushido Code, which demands that they be always ready for death, to sacrifice their own lives in service to their lord. No matter what they are doing, the samurai are always ready to die for someone else. This willingness to sacrifice themselves is as inherent in Japanese culture as it is embedded in the composition of the alchemic hero. We can see at work in the composition of the Elric brothers the Japanese tendencies of assimilation and sacrifice.

  By examining the combination of functional, psychological, and archetypal elements at work in the formulation of the Elric Brothers as “alchemic hero” in Fullmetal Alchemist, a compositional analysis gives us the opportunity to gain a deeper insight into Japanese cultural traditions as they relate to heroism and the hero in anime. But more importantly, this compositional approach allows us to better understand who our heroes are, and how they might represent us.

  14

  Astro Boy and the Atomic Age

  ALICIA GIBSON

  Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.

  —MARTIN HEIDEGGER

  . . . the sign that remains—in the form of a literal being-there, an externalization and an exhibition—in the aftermath of a process of sacrifice, whether or not the sacrifice has been witnessed or apprehended as such. Mimesis is the (visibly or sensorially available) substitute that follows, that bears the effects of (an invisible or illegible) sacrifice.

  —REY CHOW

  Originating as a Japanese manga series from 1951, the television program Astro Boy was broadcast in Japan between 1963 and 1966. The original Japanese title, Mighty Atom (Tetsuwan atomu), illustrates more clearly than its English counterpart the central role played by atomic power in the cartoon series. The hero Atomu (Atom), a young robot created in the form of a human boy, is powered by nuclear energy. The animated series gained widespread international popularity throughout the Cold War period and was remade in the 1980s (when it was given its En
glish title), and again in 2003. Atomu, with his peaceful use of atomic power, embodies the latent utopic possibilities of the atomic age—nuclear power can be used to save rather than to destroy. Yet in order to turn this technology into a life-saving power, humanity, here represented by a precocious Atomu, must learn to wisely manage the tremendous power it has discovered. Humanity must likewise first make it through the painful “baby steps” of the atomic age and learn how to use the power for “good” before unwittingly destroying that which it would save.

  Atomu is both the one who must learn to control his atomic powers, and he is also that power itself. Much of the drama of the television series centers on this ambivalent position. Atomu is after all not human. He is a robot built in the exact likeness of another child, one who dies as the show begins. Although he has the external structure of a child, he is a machine. And despite his good intentions and willingness to sacrifice himself to save others, he is continually cast away. Beginning with the show’s first episode, the robot-boy finds it impossible to live up to the expectations of the human subjects who create and manage him: his desire to do good cannot wholly overcome a world predicated upon the instrumentalization of his power.

  Atomu’s ambivalent positioning as both subject and object provides most of the series’ narrative drive. The concept of mimesis allows us to examine the ways in which, despite its utopic longings, Astro Boy re-enacts the violence of the atomic age and exposes the sacrificial logic of the nuclear order. Mimesis refers generally to the act of imitation and has long been used to describe the relationship between art and life: the power of aesthetic representation lies in its ability to reflect (or imitate) the conditions of human existence. As such, mimesis is the generative source of artistic creativity. However, in an age in which destruction has “gone global,” and humankind’s greatest achievements are measured by kill-power, we must confront the possibility that artistic reproduction of the conditions of human life is now marked by destructive, rather than productive, forces.

  From Horsepower to the Power of a Thousand Suns

  Due to a complex integration of atomic, mechanical, electrical, and (in later releases of the show) digital technologies, Atomu flies with supersonic speed and battles forces of destruction with strength the equivalent of a “one hundred-thousand-horsepower” engine. In the early 1950s when Osamu Tezuka first created Astro Boy, the robot’s famed “one hundred thousand horsepower” was meant to represent an order of power at the limit of human imagination. Yet, given the actual power unleashed in an atomic explosion, and its escalating potential power in the Cold War Era—measured by reference to the power of the sun itself—Atomu’s “one hundred thousand horsepower” was oddly obsolete even at the time of his inception. This slippage highlights the difficulty audiences had integrating the terrifying reality of a world gone nuclear with previous conceptions of technological power. A bomb described rhetorically as comparable to the energy of a thousand suns was dropped over Hiroshima. The forces unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki exponentially outpaced the projections of even the scientists who created the bomb. This magnitude was simply too frightening to confront. Designed for an audience of children facing a future where entire cities could be destroyed in seconds, Atomu’s “hundred thousand horsepower” served as a representation of atomic power that provided a more manageable reference for a new audience of children whose utopic dreams of nuclear power might just as easily turn to nightmare.

  In keeping with this more benign reference for atomic power, one wrapped in a cuddly package, Astro Boy also offers a positive example of atomic power’s possible uses. Although technically a weaponized robot (powered by nuclear fission, he has laser beams and machine guns that shoot out of his rear-end), Atomu is not used for the destruction of the world’s cities, but rather their salvation. As he awkwardly discovers his new capabilities, he represents not only atomic technologies, he also represents humanity itself as we learn to properly use this new power. Just as a troubled humanity struggles with a new form of power and its attendant ethical dilemmas, Atomu’s control over his capacities is not complete: he has the strength of a superhuman, but only a boy’s control of his awesome powers. In the manga and anime series, his foibles largely play to comic effect. When asked to clean the robot tigers until they shine, he scrubs off even their stripes, leaving them gleaming white; when left alone in an airship cabin, he accidentally rips pipes from the walls, breaks the legs off chairs, and generally embarrasses his handler’s attempts to integrate him into “normal” society. The boy’s overwhelming strength becomes his liability and exposes his imperfection. Behind the comedy lies a serious message: we must learn to control the atomic power we have awakened.

  The Death of Tobio—The Birth of Atomu

  As aesthetic device, the robot serves as a figure in which the mimetic impulse found in artistic practices and technological advancement converge. The robot is a copy of the human, one that is not subject to the same laws of mortality and one that allows the human to project the fantasy of eternal life. This fantastical construction is also the dream of the technological supplement of divine or natural law: from the construction of the machinic form of life, human beings go beyond mere reproduction of the species and become Creators in their own right. Yet from his very inception, Atomu illustrates the ways in which the mimetic impulse that characterizes the atomic age is fraught with disillusionment.

  According to the storyline presented in the first episode, “The Birth of Astro Boy,” the robot-boy is meant to mask the death of another. In the episode’s opening scenes the audience confronts the “original” Atomu, Dr. Tenma’s son Tobio, who dies in a violent accident. The death scene and subsequent moments of remorse quickly transform into a “birthing” scene as Dr. Tenma decides to tempt fate and replicate the divine mysteries of life and death by creating an exact replica of his dead child, this time in the form of a new robotic weapon: Atomu. Shadowed in darkness and secrecy, a distraught Dr. Tenma pushes forward with his scientific experiment, which is laid out in its monstrous steel shell on an operating table. In a puddle at his feet lies the robot’s outer covering, a bio-mechanical breakthrough that camouflages the steel that lies just below the surface and makes it possible for Tenma to achieve his vision. Tenma delicately pulls the suit over the unrecognizable machine. As he reaches its head, he moves his hand across what appears now to be the face of Tobio, gently smoothing away the flesh-like wrinkles of the suit as though comforting a child to sleep. Here the line between creation and destruction blurs. Tenma “clothes” the robot in silence, bringing to life his new “son.” And yet the scene also takes on the tone of funeral rite. Above all, the body lying on the table symbolizes a grieving father’s inability to face the absolute law of mortality; he cannot say goodbye.

  What are we to make of this melancholic beginning of a children’s cartoon series? Within the very first minutes of the show as we are introduced to the larger story-arc and foundational narrative, we encounter the death of a child and the birth of a machine. The life of the robot-boy is forever tied to the life of this first child, the “real” boy. As an inert and lifeless carcass awaiting Tenma’s life-giving touch, Atomu must first re-enact the boy’s death before coming to life—the father acknowledges as much in the silent gesture made in the darkness of the laboratory. While the family dog (named Jump) does finally accept him as the young master returned from the grave, his “father” eventually does not. Atomu faithfully studies the relationship between words and things, and earnestly embarks upon the project of becoming Tobio. However, he is forever trapped within the steel cage of Tenma’s making: he cannot grow. With every passing year his now too-faithful replication of the “original” son as he was serves only to remind Tenma of his ultimate failure. Moreover, his internal nuclear reactor makes him much more powerful than the human Tobio could ever be.

  Imitating the Power of the Universe

  The confused mixture of emotion Atomu encounters in the humans among whom he
lives reenacts the ancient anxiety over “original” and “copy,” “life” and “art,” “master” and “disciple” first problematized by Plato in the Republic. Plato’s suspicion of mimesis stems from a fear of the rhetorical power embedded in art practices that not only reflect the world “as it is,” but also shape that very world. Mimetic practices—the act of mimicking, imitating, copying, aping, and parody—create an impassable rupture for any concept of Truth as an absolute, and unsettle the corresponding insistence on the perfect correlation between reality as a concrete material world and as a set of ideas about that world. If the purely fictional does not act passively as mirror but also as a crucible for the new, there emerges a radical opening to possibility that brings with it also a terror. This terror is not unlike that encountered at the dawn of the atomic age in the images of destruction from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in Harry Truman’s claim of mastery over “the basic power of the universe” (Papers of the Presidents, p, 197). In this moment the possibility of radical potential meets that of radical end.

  Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described this phenomena in philosophical terms as the dialectic of enlightenment: technological mastery over nature—what we call progress—gives way to destruction in the increasing rationalization and abstraction of all that is. When all things (including human subjects) are assigned a numerical equivalence or treated as items of exchange in the name of utility and efficiency, then their elimination becomes a mere keystroke or final step in an equation. Writing after the genocide in Europe and a war that threatened to turn the entire world against itself, they wrote of a lingering anxiety prevalent in everyday attitudes:The noonday panic fear in which nature suddenly appeared to humans as an all-encompassing power has found its counterpart in the panic which is ready to break out at any moment today: human beings expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are powerless. (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 29)