Even More Otaku Autoethnography: Belated Awakening

So I'm getting a little bit personal in this final Japan-America Society of Fukuoka talk for this Saturday (assuming the typhoon bearing down on us doesn't cancel it! it's due to hit at 6 am that day) and tracing my growing awareness of a dialogue of sorts between certain American images of Japan and Japanese popular culture.

A key turning point in my awareness of Japan as relevant to these concerns was reading and discussing William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer with my closest friends in graduate school. In making sense of it, we were led into considerations of its sequels and spinoffs, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, movie phenomena like Blade Runner and Akira, and particularly the 1996 release of Ghost in the Shell in American theaters. In part, we were interested in the ways these works picked up on, played with, and projected what I would later learn to call Pacific Rim discourse’s identification of Japan with the future. In part, we were interested in the ways they expressed what I would soon learn to call a kind of high-tech or techno-orientalism in the different styles and moods in which imaged and imagined a Japan-dominated future. But we were more interested in their connections to the critical and cultural theory we were reading on the human and the post-human, postmodernism and late capitalism, cyborgs and information technology.

For me, however, these were side interests during my graduate school years--my main focus was on American, not transnational discourses of race--so the way I was exposed to Japan was mainly through the U.S. literatures I was reading and teaching. It was through the lenses of Korean-American writers Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Nora Okja Keller, Chinese-American writers Maxine Hong Kingston and Gish Jen, American Indian writer Leslie Marmon Silko, and African American writer Ishmael Reed that I continued being exposed to Japan, out of the corner of my eye, so to speak, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as I completed my dissertation and got my first full-time tenure track teaching job.

In fact, what brought American images of Japan out of my peripheral vision was visual culture. As I returned to my childhood “fan” mode in my first few years back in New York state--this time of Cartoon Network animation blocks like Toonami and Adult Swim--I began to reflect on how much I had changed, along with American culture and Japanese animation, since the early 1980s. For one thing, new American-made cartoons were clearly indebted to Japanese animation. Through Powerpuff Girls, particularly its episodes that referenced manga and anime and other elements of Japanese popular culture, and South Park, especially the 1999 “Chinpokomon” episode that parodied both Pokemon and American stereotyping of Japan, I started thinking about American borrowings from, homages to, and parodies of both Japanese popular culture. But it was the overwhelming popular response to the American-made movie trilogy The Matrix that was released between 1999 and 2003, that really focused my attention. Here were Hollywood filmmakers who openly acknowledged their borrowings from American and Japanese cyberpunk, who made science fiction appealing to new audiences around the world, and who worked with Japanese and Korean artists to produce Animatrix, a series of short animated films that often rivaled the movies themselves in inventiveness and creativity. During that same span of years, popular Japanese anime like Dragonball Z, Cowboy Bebop, and InuYasha began airing in translation on cable television in the U.S. and I followed them closely, drawn to their plots, characters, themes, visual artistry, and music.