Manga in the Anthropocene: Notes Toward a Cyberpunk Ecology 2

(SERAS) Southeast Review of Asian Studies
Volume 36 (2014): 112-123

Manga in the Anthropocene:
Notes Toward a Cyberpunk Ecology 2
KEITH LESLIE JOHNSON
Georgia Regents University

Focusing on depictions of apocalyptic destruction in the work of Ôtomo Katsuhiro
大友克洋 (b. 1954), Shirow Masamune 士郎正宗 (b. 1961), and Nihei Tsutomu
弐瓶勉 (b. 1971), this essay considers how our entry into the “Anthropocene” (a
term popularized by Nobel-laureate Paul Crutzen to designate the definitive impact
of human technologies on the global ecology) is redacted in manga.

Introduction

My remarks below will focus on the works of Ôtomo Katsuhiro, Shirow
Masamune, and Nihei Tsutomu, particularly in terms of how they reveal
transformations in Japan’s historical consciousness. This consciousness,
I’m proposing, is less apparent in its “backward-orientation” (e.g.
rekishi-monogatari of whatever stripe) than in its “forward-orientation”:
the science-fictional, even apocalyptic imagination. From Akira
(AKIRA,1982–90) to Ghost in the Shell (攻殻機動隊 Kôkaku kidôtai, 1989–
97) to Knights of Sidonia (シドニアの騎士 Shidonia no kishi, 2009–present)
we can see the visual vocabulary of this imagination subtly alter as the
traumas of WWII fade from living memory. Where Akira occurs in the
wake of a cataclysmic psychic detonations, Ghost in the Shell and Knights
of Sidonia occur in the wake of bio-technological singularities which
have irrevocably redefined life. The posthumanism they imagine is
quite different from the spiritual-psychic evolution embodied in
Ôtomo’s “Espers” and suggests a corresponding shift in how apocalypse
functions as a cultural signifier. These transformations are signaled
perhaps most stridently in terms of the ecological vision they present,
wherein we see the iconography of A-bombs recede before the
devastations wrought by or inherent to Nature itself. If Akira is largely
elegiac, and Ghost in the Shell despairing, Knights of Sidonia presents a
world without elegy or despair, because those conditions of life that may
have been missed are utterly lost to oblivion. Nihei’s transformations
are most radical for having been embraced by posthumans, who do not
spare us the slightest backward glance. To put it differently, if Akira

Manga in the Anthropocene 113

expresses a New Age spirituality; and if Ghost in the Shell preserves
spirituality only as metaphor (its invocations of spirit are only ever
ironic “ghosts”1); then Knights is strictly materialist. Visually and
thematically, then, Nihei’s work is less about apocalyptic fantasy as such
than a rigorous thinking-through of life under the most biologically-
diminished conditions—call it a cyberpunk ecology.2 Where traditional
ecology assumes Nature as an harmonious, self-sustaining system of
living and non-living matter, and where urban ecology assumes the City
as an inert material environment capable of mimicking and being
integrated into Nature, cyberpunk ecology assumes the Network as a
rhizomatic distribution of information, nothing more. Ultimately, the
goal of this essay is to bend the question of ecological vision back onto
the question of the historical consciousness from which it arises.

Not with a Whimper, but a Bang...

The         mushroom
cloud is a global icon
of      trauma,     an
obscene
superimposition of
aesthetic    splendor
and moral failure.
Ôtomo Katsuhiro’s
repeated invocations
of it seem to explore
all    the    equivocal
possibilities of that      FIGURE 1 Ōtomo Katsuhiro 大友克洋	
 (b. 1954). Panel
                           from Fireball (Action Deluxe, 1979).
superimposition. In
Fireball        (火炎球
Kaenkyû, 1979), an early unfinished work that prefigures many of the
themes in Akira, the eponymous detonation is not atomic, but psychic in
nature—a “little sun” unleashed upon the earth, the convulsive
telekinetic reaction of a character to his brother’s death. Ôtomo’s follow-
up, Domu: A Child’s Dream (童夢 Dômu, 1980-81), similarly features a
psychic explosion, though here more tellingly resulting from

     1
       Within the world of GitS, cyborgization (including various kinds of neural
interface) is common; “ghost” [ゴースト gōsuto] in this milieu stands in for “the
soul” or mental essence of a person, that which vouchsafes their authenticity as a
living being. The irony, of course, is that a ghost is a remnant or afterimage of
something that has died (perhaps traumatically).
     2
       For further elaboration of what I mean by “cyberpunk ecology,” see Johnson
2013, 198-202.

114 K. Johnson

intergenerational conflict between a senile pensioner with ESP (waging
an invisible campaign of terror on his apartment complex) and a
similarly gifted little girl (who alone sees him for what he is). The title,
literally “the dream of a child,” suggests at least one allegorical
interpretation: the fantasy of youth to combat and erase the sins of its
predecessors. But the child in question, Etsuko, leaves her own path of
destruction; her attempts to thwart the perverse designs of Old Man
Cho are not themselves without collateral damage.
     The question for Ôtomo, it would seem, is the same one that plagues
Walter Benjamin in his 1921 essay “Critique of Violence”: “Is any non-
violent resolution of conflict possible?” (2004, 243) For Benjamin the
answer is yes, within the “proper sphere of ‘understanding’” (ibid, 245),
that is to say, “language”; but it is precisely this possibility which seems
foreclosed in Ôtomo, because social and political conditions are
perpetually shrouded in mystery, conspiracy, secrecy—language itself is
silenced, whether it is the clandestine government project of Fireball
that will link man and machine, the unseen crimes of a nondescript old
man in Domu, or even the very name “Akira,” which is not to be uttered
and functions as a free-floating shibboleth. Language cannot conciliate
because it is itself violenced.
     If resolution cannot be achieved through language, through
dialogue, through reason, then it can only be achieved through a higher
violence, what Benjamin calls “divine violence” (ibid, 249), and it seems
to be this level of violence, a superhuman (if secular) violence, toward
which Ôtomo gestures through the discourse of ESP. The iconic or
mythic violence of A-bombs is not negated, but rather repeated, even
intensified in the series of psychic detonations culminating in Akira
(wherein Tokyo is all but destroyed), as if, in doubling down on the
traumas of history, Ôtomo might in the end achieve some partial
autonomy from them, a space wherein to conceive a future not wholly
determined by the past. For Ôtomo, as for Benjamin, “divine violence is
law-destroying”—unlike
“mythic violence” which
“sets boundaries,” divine
violence
“expiates...without
spilling blood” (ibid).
Clearly,     the     psychic

FIGURE 2 Ōtomo Katsuhiro
大友克洋	
  (b. 1954). Panel
from Akira, vol.6 (Kodansha,
1993 [1990]).

Manga in the Anthropocene 115

violence of Ôtomo is not bloodless, but we can see in Akira an attempt to
articulate a kind of transformative, salvific destruction.
     The titular fireball of his earlier work is in this sense redemptive,
born not just from pain but love.3 The flames of Fireball ultimately
consume their source, amounting to an ambiguous self-erasure or -
cancellation. Akira likewise annihilates himself in combat with Tetsuo,
but in the process achieves a synthesis, a deathless presence that ensures
the mistakes of the past will not be repeated: “Akira still lives among
us!” (6.422) Kaneda shouts at government forces intent on
reestablishing the old order. In its place Kaneda announces a new
polity, Akira’s fascistic “Great Tokyo Empire” reborn now as a radical
democratic commune for the dispossessed, administered by the very
bôsôzoku gangs who were earlier nihilistic agents of its destruction.
Further reinforcing this sense of futurity is an encounter with Colonel
Shikishima, now by his own admission a “lame old war horse who’s put
himself out to pasture” (6.424). The military is defanged, the bikers
civic-minded, and rebels vindicated; but the cost is an awful martydom,
of Akira, Tetsuo, and the other Esper children.
     All three of these manga try to imagine a future for Japan, but one
very much articulated in terms of its recent history: Ôtomo is
conscientiously working within the cultural coordinates of his era. David
Desser asserts that Akira in particular is “a direct outgrowth of war and
postwar experiences”—not just ideological tension between the
“Imperial” generation and children of the Occupation, nor distrust of
the government, etc (in short, all the humiliations that come of being on
the wrong side of history), but the subsequent economic and population
boom, which had its own fallout (2003, 190). Susan Napier makes a
similar argument regarding Japanese pop-culture as a whole.4 The image
of the A-bomb itself, which marked the definitive end of hostilities in
WWII, is nonetheless reconfigured in Akira into something with
generative possibilities; and as if to signal as much, Ôtomo tends to
depict the detonation less in its final, morbid form—the mushroom
cloud—than as a sphere of consuming and transforming energy. But
even this transformative potential, which could wipe clean the slate of

    3
       The unfinished plot follows two estranged brothers, the elder of whom works
as a metro-enforcer in a city-state run by a supercomputer (called ATOM), while the
younger brother is a freedom fighter. The elder brother, having modest telekinetic
powers, is recruited for a cybernetic experiment that will link him to ATOM, largely
dismantling his human body in the process. Learning of his younger brother’s death
during an assault on central administration, the older brother, in a fit of remorseful
rage, uses his ATOM-enhanced powers to destroy the building (including ATOM
and himself).
     4
       See Napier (2005), 197.

116 K. Johnson

history, is always already superimposed over the image of its dreadful
predecessor.

                                                                   F
                                                                 FIGURE        3
                                                                 Ōtomo Katsuhiro
                                                                 大友克洋	
       (b.
                                                                 1954).     Panel
                                                                 from      Akira,
                                                                 vol.1 (Kodansha,
                                                                 1984).

The Angel of History

Akira in this light might be seen on a continuum with (and as perhaps
the culmination of) Tezuka Osamu’s post-war work, especially
Ambassador Atom (アトム大使 Atomu Daishi, 1951–52), whose very name
suggests détente and diplomacy (Benjamin’s “sphere of proper
‘understanding’”) and even outright disarmament: the destructive
power of the atom now yoked to gentler modes of persuasion and
deterrence.5 Ôtomo, however, doesn’t share Tezuka’s faith in pacifism
and political transparency; he is borne into the future much like
Benjamin’s “angel of history”: ever facing backwards. This angel
represents an especially modernist conception of history, predicated on
loss and negation: “Where we see the appearance of a chain of events,”
Benjamin writes, “he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly
piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet” (2006, 392).
From such a vantage, the mushroom cloud becomes not only the image
of loss, but of a fallen ecology, of spoliation—even the articulation of
hope, for Ôtomo, must occur, as it were, under its shadow.
    While Shirô Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell (hereafter GitS) has a
similarly melancholic logic, it tends not to be backward-looking. New

    5
      Ôtsuka Eiji (2005) has in fact read this manga as a parable of the Japan-U.S.
Peace Treaty.

Manga in the Anthropocene 117

technologies have devastated parts of the world, but have also
engendered new, hybrid life-forms adapted to it. There is transcendence,
but it is the transcendence of the digital, not the noumenal, world—the
transcendence of information: a mode of transcendence, of immateriality
that, like the World Wide Web, still requires a material substrate: actual
cables and transformers and so on. It is disembodied, but still physical,
and in fact tends to moot the distinction between real and virtual. On
the surface—and GitS profoundly questions what might exist beyond
surfaces—Shirô’s world is ahistorical, with few recognizable markers.
Certainly, there is no icon of trauma like a mushroom cloud on the
horizon. Rather, it is a world quietly ravaged by ambient, perpetual
corporate war, what Giorgio Agamben would call a “state of exception.”6
Because orders of being seem so permeable—real, virtual, human,
posthuman, robotic, etc—the effect is of a flattening of ontological
categories. Things seem to exist on a more horizontal plane of being
rather than in strict hierarchies; the existential anxieties of the
characters, Major Kusanagi’s notably, are therefore registered less in
terms of identity politics (critics of the anime in particular have noted
how gender and sexuality are muted, if not mooted, by cyborgization7)
than basic ontology: they not only question what makes on properly
human, they question the reality of subjective existence. More and more,
we are approaching an ecological zero point, where life becomes
something rather abstract—creatures are conceived as ad hoc
organizations of matter, without inherent value, their identities

                                               FIGURE         4      Shirow
                                               Masamune      士郎正宗        (b.
                                               1961). Panel from Ghost in
                                               the Shell, vol. 1 (Kodansha,
                                               2009 [1991]).

      6
         Agamben dilates on Carl Schmitt’s notion of Ausnahmezustand—the
sovereign’s capacity to suspend law at will. For Agamben, this paradoxical “state,”
initially intended to handle crises more efficiently, more and more becomes the
permanent condition for governance. In the name of preserving the law,
governments semi-permanently suspend the law, often curtailing freedoms and
generating zones without rights (e.g. Guantánamo). See Agamben 2005, 1-31.
     7
        See Orbaugh (2007) and Silvio (1999).

118 K. Johnson

decoupled from the flesh in which they (only temporarily) reside.
Unlike Benjamin’s angel, who glides backwards into the future, its only
prospect an ever-lengthening path of ruin, the protagonist of GitS,
Major Kusanagi, ultimately ascends; the merger with her antagonist, a
self-aware artificial intelligence known as the Puppeteer, yields not
cancellation (as in Akira) but sublation—the angel of history now looks
down from above in a kind of absolute contemporaneity, a disembodied
consciousness, pure information. Erstwhile partner Batou refers to her
henceforth as his “guardian angel.”
     For Thomas Lamarre, the difference between the historical
paradigm of Akira and that of GitS is the difference between the
Freudian categories of melancholy and mourning: both involve affective
relations to a traumatic event in the past, but in the case of melancholy
this takes the form of “acting out”: “we repeat the traumatic event
without any sense of historical or critical distance from it, precisely
because the event remains incomprehensible” (2008, 132). Lamarre calls
this “constitutive repetition” and sees it as the defining formal feature of
Akira, though one that prepares the ground for the possibility of
“generative repetition,” which he associates with mourning. Mourning,
for Freud involves not so much an “acting out” as a “working through”
the traumatic event. The intensity of constitutive repetition in Akira, its
acting out, implies energies directed toward (but not finding) avenues of
generative repetition. GitS, I’m submitting, is a kind of generative
repetition without a constitutive precursor. There is a gap or blank spot
between our history and the one imagined for us by Shirow, but it is this
gap itself that is especially telling, that reveals something of the essence
of our historical consciousness, something amnesiac or disjointed. In his
own way, Shirow is working as absolutely within his cultural
coordinates as Ôtomo; whereas for the latter, the trauma that shaped our
historical consciousness was WWII, for Shirow the trauma that shapes
our historical consciousness is the very absence of historical
consciousness itself; he imagines a future that does not look back at us,
that has no connection to our present.
     Describing the transitional period of the 1980s, and the type of
Japanese urban experience that would inform both Akira and GitS, Jun
Tanaka tellingly draws on Benjamin’s notion of natural history, itself
derived from his analysis of the German Baroque and the figure of
melancholia so central to it. Tanaka writes, “In the saturnine,
melancholic vision of the Baroque, history is nothing but a ceaseless
downfall” (2011, 275). The overlapping of affective, aesthetic, historical,
and ecological categories is here rather dizzying. The melancholic is one
who, in effect, sees the “city” in “atrocity”—human culture is a hulking
ruin through which we shamble like derelicts; our history, then, is a

Manga in the Anthropocene 119

record of our ongoing reclamation by Nature, Nature as exemplified by
the swamp, a viscous interpenetration of plant and animal life, at once
fecund and foetid. The swamp is, for Benjamin, the very image of a flat
ontology, the liquefaction of hierarchies. For all its technical
sophistication, the world of GitS more closely resembles this
metaphorical swamp in which clear distinctions can no longer be made.
For Shirô, the rift created by biotechnology is more radical and more
primordial than that of atomic bombs; it does not disrupt ecology, it
fundamentally redefines ecology; it does not disrupt history, it ends it.
The generative potential glimpsed in Akira is realized in GitS, but
becomes in the process an uncanny terminus.

Megafauna
                                          FIGURE 5 Nihei Tsutomu
A terminus, however, is not merely a      弐瓶勉 (b. 1971). Panel from
dead-end, but also a waystation.          Knights of Sidonia, vol. 3
Things don’t simply end; they recur,      (Afternoon, 2010).
first as tragedy, as Marx famously
quips in The Eighteenth Brumaire, then as farce. In its own way, Nihei
Tsutomu’s Knights of Sidonia (hereafter KoS) is a tragico-farcical
retelling of Moby-Dick, a tale of monomaniacal (or mindless) pursuit and
revenge. The whale of KoS is not one creature, however, but many, an
enormous “mass union ship” (衆合船 shugafu-sen) consisting of countless
individual creatures called “gauna” (奇居子 ガウナ), an alien species that
exists as a polymorphous collective, a distributed organism. They blur
the distinction between animal, vegetable, and mineral, exhibiting at
times what Fred Keijzer and Paco Calvo Garzón, both philosophers of
biology, call “minimal cognition” (to designate a kind of intelligence
native to plants8) and at other times sophisticated forms of mimicry if
    8
      See Garzón & Keijzer (2011), “minimal cognition” is defined as among other
things “motility” and “dedicated sensorimotor organization”; this fascinating
branch of theoretical biology has its roots (no puns intended) in the work of, among
others, Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela (particularly their notion of
“autopoiesis” or the self-organization/self-maintenance of living systems) and, much

120 K. Johnson

not autonomy. They possess neither culture nor technology; rather they
are culture, in the literal, biological sense of tissues and cells, and are
technology, capable of spontaneously creating whatever structures are
needed for propulsion, defense, reconnaissance, and communication.
They have direct access, it would seem, to so-called “Higgs”/“Heigs”
particles (ヘイグス粒子 Heigusu ryûshi )—a ubiquitous, inexhaustible
energy source—and seem perfectly evolved for life in any and all
environments, which is a kind of indifference to environment.
    The narrative increasingly pivots on the question of what such
creatures could possible “want” from us humans. Having destroyed
Earth, apparently without provocation, the gauna now relentlessly
pursue the survivors, the last known remnants of humanity aboard the
seed-ship Sidonia. The most horrifying prospect, however, is that gauna
(which might literally be rendered “aberrant sub-beings”) don’t “want”
anything from us, that they are not in fact capable of “wanting” anything
in the first place, that they are simply acting out, wholly, unreflectively,
some biological drive or chemical mechanism. If that were the case,
whatever horrors they might visit on humanity, they would be about as
culpable as yeast reacting to sugar. The moral and ethical question of
violence that animates Akira—and finds its image in the mushroom
cloud—is therefore uncannily blunted in KoS.
    Despite the human crew’s repeated efforts to demonize gauna—and
most humans take their blind malevolence as a given—there remains
the troubling issue of how we can assign moral intention where there
seems no subjectivity. In fact, a pacifist contingent on Sidonia maintains

                                             FIGURE 6 Nihei Tsutomu 弐瓶勉 (b.
                                             1971). Panel from Knights of Sidonia,
                                             vol. 4 (Afternoon, 2010).

earlier in the 20th century, Jakob von Uexküll.

Manga in the Anthropocene 121

that gauna are simply attracted to the special spear-like weapons, called
“kabizashi” カビザシ (the name indicates their resemblance to rice germs),
created to destroy them. These kabizashi in fact utilize the same
polymorphic substance, called “ena” 胞衣 (lit. “placenta”), which
surrounds and protects the gauna, and are the only weapon capable of
piercing the “true body” 本体, resulting in “foam-disintegration.”9 So if
anything, the gauna’s pursuit of Sidonia may be an act of self-
preservation, an attempt to reintegrate lost material.
     An exception to all this moral hedging may be gauna 490, also
known as “Crimson Hawk Moth” (紅天蛾 ベニスズメ Benisuzume).
This gauna absorbed and replicated a human pilot, Hoshijiro Shizuka,
and its “Garde” (or giant mecha), and seems from time to time to extract
a cruel pleasure from mocking the Sidonia crew with Hoshijiro’s voice
and appearance. Having also absorbed the contents of Hoshijiro’s
mind—her knowledge, her memories—Crimson Hawk Moth becomes a
cunning and feared enemy, able to anticipate and counter human tactics.
While its torments seem calculated, Crimson Hawk Moth is often
depicted, even in the heat of battle, without any particular expression
whatever, as if its provocations had no content, but were simply the
parroting of moral affect. We are left to ponder whether its actions
reflect less its own character than the osmosis of humanity’s darker side.
Part of what makes the moral question of gauna so vexing for Sidonia’s
crew is the lack of historical perspective regarding it. Massive data loss
is a common feature in Nihei’s manga, and KoS is no exception. A
century earlier, we are told, most of Sidonia’s databanks were purged or
otherwise compromised in a desperate act of sabotage by a rogue
scientist, Ochiai, for reasons unknown. Mounting evidence, however,
suggests some uncanny connection between human and gauna life
which threatens to flatten the distinction upon with Sidonia’s moral
authority depends.
     So too does the ontological gap between the two species threaten to
collapse. The humans of Sidonia, among whom photosynthesis, cloning,
cyborgization, and genetic modification are commonplace (not to
mention manufactured consent, data control, and other modes of
ideological homogenization), are pursuing their own biological
directives, are in fact well on their way to reducing life to some
malleable essence. The distinction, seemingly so dear to the crew of

    9
      It is worth noting that, in a weird confluence of images, “foam” (Schäum) is
Peter Sloterdijk’s metaphor for the structure of radically pluralistic, globalized
culture, at once homogeneous, undifferentiated, and at the same time capable of
transient local deformations. Human cities, for Sloterdijk, are “schaumige
Agglomerationen” (2004, 47) or, we might say with only the slightest lexical shift,
“mass union ships.”

122 K. Johnson

Sidonia, between human and animal, human and plant, human and
machine is already so hazy that the slightest nudge might obliterate it. If
the Sidonia is to survive, it may involve an acknowledgment of this flat
ontology and the development of practices of rapport with creatures and
things once considered well down the totem pole of Being. Where there
is a flattening of ontology, then, there is an expansion of ecology, of
what is included in the system of nature, of what amounts to life, but
where this expansion is at its most extreme, what I’ve been calling
cyberpunk ecology, we often see a thinning or diminution of (the notion
or consciousness of) history. For Ôtomo, history is the nightmare from
which he can’t quite awaken, though he is thrashing heroically against
the bedclothes; both Shirow and Nihei attempt to work through the
equivocations opened up by Ôtomo, and if the traumas of history seem
less acute with them it is only because they face the more disturbing
prospect of history’s obsolescence.

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