By Jo Norwood
Throughout the back half of 2016, YouTuber PauseandSelect hosted a series titled “Understanding Disaster”. This series puts a close lens on Japanese media and its connection to explaining and in turn “understanding” what disaster is and how it impacts the affected communities. The series is split off into four parts, the first part analyzes Tsugumi Ohba’s “Death Note”, moving on to Katsuhiro Otomo & Izo Hashimoto’s blockbuster anime & manga “Akira” for part two, then focusing Hideaki Anno’s “Neon Genesis Evangelion” for part three and finally, in part four, ending with a focus on Hitoshi Ashinano’s “Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko”.
Beginning with part one, Pauseandselect’s Joe, starts with a small overview of apocalypticism in Japanese media, mentioning the most famous versions of this in Godzilla & Akira. Joe starts to look towards the themes within Ohba’s “Death Note”, showing the “war between good and evil” or a massive allegory to clinical depression throughout the show. Much of what “Death Note” shows throughout its run as both a Manga and Anime highlights its juxtaposition with western media’s sense of Christo-Judea apocalyptic and how Ohba’s “hands-off” symbolism is used to combat this narrative in “Death Note” (PauseandSelect 2016).
The other main point of this entire first video essay is on cyclicality. In terms of the ending of “Death Note” which shows all these themes of Christo-Judea apocalypticism throughout the entire run only to end in a way that highlights the themes of traditional eastern religious apocalypticism. This part ends with this analysis on cyclicality and how apocalypticism doesn’t end nor begin here and decides to move farther back into the past where much of western understanding of Japanese apocalypticism comes from, the mass death of World War II from the Holocaust to atomic bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki (PauseandSelect 2016).
Part two begins with a bit of an overview on “Japanese disaster discourse” as our narrator, Joe, calls it. Joe mentions the ages of idealism (riso no jidai) & fiction (kyoko no jidai) in Japan, which sprang up mostly during the 1960s and 1970s throughout the country. Joe talks about the politically charged 1960s in Japan with much political & ideological taking place moving forward to the 1970s where much of the disaster media that we in the west would know is being formed. Joe moves forward giving examples of some Japanese disaster media of these two decades like Shiro Moritani & Sakyo Komatsu’s “Nihon Chinbotsu” (Submersion of Japan), Hayao Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa of Valley of The Wind” and the main focus of this part in the series, Oromo & Hashimoto’s “Akira”.
In the case of “Akira”, much of the apocalyptic themes mentioned by narrator Joe, fall under the ideas of pastiche, the imitation of another style of work, and schizophrenia or referents, or just something that a word or phrase stands for. The amount of referents within “Akira” just develop over time, with several factors heeding this ideology from the explosion in Tokyo caused by WWIII, the floods from the “sinking of Japan”, the influence of other works from Otomo like “Domu”, The schizophrenia ideology in “Akira” states that chronology means nothing and that even without the interconnectedness and with the inclusion of an overall inconsistency everything in “Akira” still matters. The main point of this is to say that “Akira” as a postmodern apocalyptic story is and was made for the generation of people who have no personal memories attached to the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki unlike say, Ishiro Honda, Tomoyuki Tanaka & Eiji Tsuburaya’s Godzilla movies (PauseandSelect 2016).
Lunging forward to part three, it begins with the death of the fictional age and the question of what issues are around for Japanese apocalyptic media to draw from? Narrator Joe begins by answering with three simple statements, the Asset Bubble Burst, which lead to a huge drop in wages and the introduction of temporary workers and “erosion in confidence of the middle ground”, the Great Hanshin Earthquake, also known as the Kobe earthquake, was the most devastating earthquake in Japan in over seventy years and caused a slight break in the traditional imaginative psyche of Japanese media creators and finally Joe mentions the beginning of the age of impossibility (fukano no jidai).
The discussion here focuses on Hideaki Anno’s “Neon Genesis Evangelion” , one of the most well praised manga and anime of all time. With a quick synopsis on the show, Joe quickly moves towards speaking on the themes of Lacanian psychoanalysis throughout the show which around the sixteen episode begins to heavily lean into this ideology. Lacanian psychoanalysis is a theoretical system which explains the mind, its behaviors and the culture of it all through a wide lense of extensive scturalist and post-structuralist classical psychoanalysis. The symbolism here comes from what one sees as themselves and what others see these people as.
The reason for this intense analysis by narrator Joe is because much of Japan’s 1990’s apocalyptic media needs these explanations to completely understand the true meaning behind all the symbolism used throughout the media itself. Joe explains that Neon Genesis Evangelion as a whole is symbolic of the concepts of right and wrong, saying that although the media itself is not being blunt about its meaning, through several analyses of the media it becomes clear that the deeper meaning has been in our faces all along. In terms of this apocalyptic mindset we see the main character in Neon Genesis Evangelion eventually become extremely self aware stating in the finale of the show and manga that the only way for one to be seen by other people is for them to be seen by themselves, a sort of existential apocalypticism (PauseandSelect 2016).
Finally, we begin part four. Another large proponent of the 1990s age of impossibility in Japanese disaster media, enter “Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko” by Hitoshi Ashinano. A depiction of the peaceful apocalypse, a heideggerian apocalypse. This is shown most prominently in the sunken city of Yokohama and its overall deconstruction throughout the series. When bad things happen throughout the series the people just continue to adapt, a house is destroyed, they build, someone is killed, they pay their respects, etc.
“Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko” is described as a peaceful apocalypse. Narrator Joe explains the contrast between “Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko” & “Neon Genesis Evangelion”. The peaceful death versus the violent cycle of life. The framing of the endless everyday (nichijo). The endless everyday leads closer and closer to change only to result in the end result showing that nothing has changed (PauseandSelect 2016).
In conclusion this thoughtful and intriguing analysis from PauseandSelect gives a clear overview into the mind of Japanese disaster cinematographers over the years. Narrator Joe does a great analysis of “Death Note” and its traditional Eastern ways of apocalypticism. He continues with a thorough analysis of the conservative western ways of apocalypticism. He moves along with an analysis on the impossible age and its cohorts with a focus on “Neon Genesis Evangelion”. Joe finally ends on the analysis of “Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko”. The PauseandSelect will be a great addition to the film studies research guide in the endless quest to understand disaster in Japanese film (PauseandSelect 2016).
Works Cited:
Anno, Hideaki. “Neon Genesis Evangelion”. 1995; 26ep.
Anno, Takeshita. “Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko”. 1998; 2ep.
Araki, Tetsuro. “Death Note”. 2006; 37ep.
Ashinano, Hitoshi. “Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko”. Tokyo, Japan; Kodansha; 1994.
Mochizuki, Tomomi. “Quiet Country Cafe”. 2002; 2ep.
Ohba, Tsugumi. “Death Note”. Tokyo, Japan; Shuiesha; 2003.
Otomo, Katsuhiro. “Akira”. 1988; 2:04:00.
Otomo, Katsuhiro. “Akira”. Tokyo, Japan; Kodansha; 1982.
Pause And Select. “Understanding Disaster, Part 1: Death Note and the Cyclical Apocalypse”. May 23rd, 2016; 9:16.
Pause And Select. “Understanding Disaster, Part 2: Akira and the Postmodern Apocalypse”. June 7th, 2016; 17:25.
Pause And Select. “Understanding Disaster, Part 3: Evangelion and the World Apocalypse”. August 8th, 2016; 25:12.
Pause And Select. “Understanding Disaster, Part 4: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou and the Harmonious Apocalypse”. December 18th, 2016; 19:52.
Sadamoto, Yoshiyuki. “Neon Genesis Evangelion”. Tokyo, Japan; Kadokawa Shoten Publishing; 1994.
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