International Journal of Japanese Sociology 2011, Number 20

doi: 10.1111/j.1475-6781.2011.01148.x

Can Cool Japan save Post-Disaster Japan? On the Possibilities and Impossibilities of a Cool Japanology
JONATHAN E. ABEL

Abstract: This article considers Cool Japan in light of catastrophe, rst theoretically through a phenomenological analysis of Cool Japan and Cool Japanology, suggesting that the study of Cool Japan itself is way of uncooling the object of inquiry, itself a reaction to the apocalyptic realities of everyday life since the dawn of the modern world. The article nishes with a sociological reection on current events through a dtourner of the sekai kei genre in Summer Wars inclusion of two sociological types in its rendition of catastrophe. This article then is intended as a preliminary step to understanding the specicity and commonalities of Japanese cool power through an understanding of the phenomenon of cool and the contents to which cool often refers.
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Keywords: Cool Japan, hikikomori, Summer Wars

With jarring images of seemingly toy-like cars careening on tsunami, boats beached on rooftops, helicopters airlifting citizens to safety, and dogs dying from starvation and radiation poisoning, the decade-long phenomenon of Cool Japan may have come to an abrupt end on 11 March 2011. Or perhaps it just turned in a new direction.The lo-res images of a Cool Japan featured in manga and anime may henceforth be overlaid with a real Japan or at least the HiDef news stories of the hot, radioactive reality of a post-disaster Japan in the global imaginary. Though it is too early to proclaim with any certainty what cultural forms and interests may replace cool, it may be a good time to take stock of what this boom in excitement about a particular form of cultural production and global consumption might mean for the future.The discourse on a Cool Japan had been circulating for well over a

decade when the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crises hit in successive waves this year; and despite the length of time Cool Japan has been with us, it remained unclear if this particular form of globally traded Japanese soft power cultivated by cultural capitalists and government powerbrokers could be exchanged for real help. It is true that the buzz about a Cool Japan may have increased a sympathetic response amongst global otaku, making the Internet abuzz with information about the unfolding crises in Chinese, English, French, German, Korean, and Spanish, but how long will this interest last? Has global attention already faded with the next news cycle, caught up in images of Libyan civil war, or lost in conspiracy theories around the assassination of Osama bin Laden? Clearly Cool Japan had a role in motivating Hollywood celebrity charities, this time in the novel form of

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memorabilia auctions and the cool million dollars laid down by the Cool Japan exoticist Gwen Stefani. However, the problem is a little more difcult than simply drawing a line from the global fetish for a Cool Japan to global sympathy for a suffering Japan. In light of the jishuku (self-restraint) shown by the Japanese entertainment industry (including manga, anime, and video game production companies) in the aftermath of the triple disasters, it remains to be seen whether Cool Japan can or will save devastated Japan (Asahi Shimbun, 2011). Throughout the unfolding catastrophes, new media saturated the web with information and played a major role for Japanese digerati who took to the twitter-sphere, updating their locations and experiences faster than connections could be made via older media of telephones and television (Sasaki). Responses involving cool subcultures and new media might have been surprising even to many Japanese who had neither been aware of the close connections of doomsday scenarios and the content of those subcultures nor understood how the performance of apolitical spectacle in cool subculture functions politically.1 This is not to say that the pronounced eschatology seemingly inherent in the contents of postwar Japanese pop culture prepared the generations born after the war who had never experienced catastrophe and devastation rsthand. Apocalyptic stories did not prepare them to react immediately in the politically savvy modes of speaking truth to power, but rather it gave several generations the tools with which to narrativize the events as they unfolded. The relationship between catastrophe, the atomized individual, and anime has been theorized for quite some time (Napier, 1993; Murakami, 2005; Looser, 2006). And since the Kobe earthquake and Aum Shinrikyo Tokyo subway gas attacks, catastrophe has been given renewed energy visible in the rise of the sekai kei (end of world-type) genre of anime and manga (Miyadai, 2009). The future role of cool cul-

tures in the forms of anime, video games, new media, and web 2.0 connectivity in catastrophe response is perhaps never more clear than in a recent, twisted iteration of the sekai kei form, the 2009 lm Summer Wars by Mamoru Hosoda. This article considers Cool Japan in light of catastrophe, rst theoretically through a phenomenological analysis of Cool Japan and Cool Japanology, suggesting that the study of Cool Japan itself is a way of uncooling the object of inquiry, a reaction to the apocalyptic realities of everyday life since the dawn of the modern world.The article nishes with a sociological reection on current events through a dtourner of the sekai kei genre in Summer Wars inclusion of two sociological types in its rendition of catastrophe. This article, then, is intended as a preliminary step toward understanding the specicity and commonalities of Japanese cool power through an understanding of the phenomenon of cool and the contents to which cool often refers.

Dening Cool A Phenomenology of Cool

What does the globalization of Japanese pop culture mean? Does it differ from the globalization of Western pop culture? How is Cool Japan related to the real Japan? Although these questions have been around for at least a decade, they have not been resolved either inside or outside of Japan. Both in and out of Japan, scholarship tends either to categorize the products of otaku culture according to genre or style or to argue either that Japanese pop culture has been globalized or, alternatively, that global culture has been localized in Japanese pop culture. But these opposing frameworks (paying close attention to contents in formalistic readings and to circulation through macro-analysis of consumption and production) are either too reductive, focusing on

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the minutia of contents, or too abstract, zooming out too quickly to a global look at dissemination (Iwabuchi, 2002; Iwabuchi et al., 2004). By approaching the problem of globalization indirectly through an inquiry into the denitions of cool, we might more readily come to a conclusion that bridges the divide between inside and outside views, or close and distant readings. Despite the fact that Douglas McGray coined the term nearly 10 years ago, thinking about Japans Gross National Cool (McGray, 2002) and the Cool Japanology that has followed in its wake still lacks an explanation of cool. Whether we separate the Japanese otaku from global otaku or consider them in unison as some world republic of otaku (Casanova, 2004), the fact that individuals around the world see one type of cultural production as cool is an extremely important point of intersection that can easily be misconstrued by the otaku critics who argue from the position of singularity and determinacy and the globalist critics who argue from an unrestricted universalist position. Of course, there is the likelihood that even if that which is considered cool in different countries is the same object, there may be no shared transnational, transhistorical sense of coolness. In other words, just because an older fan in Tokyo and a younger fan in Paris think Hagio Moto and Tezuka Osamu stories are cool, it might not mean that both fans think it for the same reasons. But to explain this difference within seeming similarity, we need to attempt the impossible, to dene cool and understand its polysemic history and usage. Broadly, cool can be divided into two categories of meaning. First, there is the historical meaning of cool as form of cultural production, in which cool describes a style of art that maintains a particular stance towards society. And second, there is cool as affect in cultural reception, in which cool labels a mode of desire for that which resides at the limits of comprehension. Both

of these meanings of course circulate within a social system and are therefore oating, sociolectical meanings that will coalesce in particular examples. Nevertheless, it is useful to separate them in order to better understand how cool functions.

Cool as a Form
Beyond a lower temperature, Japanese dictionaries dene ku ru (the Japanized version of the English word) as transcendent, calm, and composed (cho zen toshita, reisei, and ochitsuite iru) (Ko jien). Generally the cool of Cool Japan is translated as kakko ii, stylish or awesome (lit. of good form). However, more than simply having good form, something cool can be thought of as a combination of these denitions: it is cool if the good form is relaxed and goes beyond that which has preceded it or transcends everyday reality providing the shock of the new or the sheen of the now. To understand the meaning of cool as a form that transcends everyday reality, it is necessary to consider the history of the word cool. Although the origins of the contemporary usage may have something to do with European colonizers sitting off under the shade of parasols, awnings, or gazebos in the sweltering heat of the far reaches of empire (Pountain and Robins, 2000), the origin of our contemporary usage is more likely directly connected to the meanings that took off in African-American culture. The pink-skinned colonizers sipping their gin-tonics indeed sat some remove from and likely in somewhat cooler environments than their sweaty, laboring colonial subjects, but they were not cool in our contemporary sense of stylish or desirable, awesome, funky and hip. For that we need to look elsewhere. That is to say, the concept of cool as we know it probably has a lot more to do with jazz.

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In contrast to the heat of red-hot jazz of the early 20th century, cool jazz arose as a mellow tone and tempo formed in the conuence when West Coast style entered New York. Bands were generally smaller and improvisation generally more intense and drawn out. It was characterized by a smoother and slower feel. As the jazz of Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, and Lester Young, cool jazz was closely related to drug culture. Consequently, as the jazz of the heroin addict, cool was associated with solitude and isolation, with an escape from the reality of the everyday world of the nuclear age. When we see the cool jazz musician archetypically with dark sunglasses on, standing apart from the band in mid-solo as Miles Davis appears on the cover of The Birth of Cool (1949), we see a rejection of identity-based group dynamics. Through the saliency of improvisation, this cool seems somehow to create a new space of individual freedom, removing players (and listeners) from the roles thrust upon them by society. This sort of contemporary detachment and self-imposed alienation from roles imposed by society at large for a subculture resembles the situation of hikikomori. As African-American musicians in the preCivil Rights Movement era of cool jazz rejected subordinate social positions, they crossed over to make new connections with the largely white Beat movement and later gave inspiration to the youth subcultures. So too, hikikomori shut out the blinding light of social stigma for the comforting light of their computer monitors and connections with like-minded individuals across the nation and around the world. Differing from Japans generation of shut-ins, the cool jazz turn toward the self was a rejection of identity constraints in order to gain a space for individual freedom that inadvertently ended in a reconnection with others. Whereas hikikomori may at rst be simply an escape from bullying at school or by parents, it seems to quickly result in connections. The more hikikomori nd a rich

virtual space for social interaction on the Internet, the further withdrawn from traditional social spaces of school and family they become (Saito , 1998). So it is not an inversion but a bending of some of the same inclinations of cool jazz. More than facing the self-alone in a room, in order to gain some freedom for the individual, jazz was a rejection of identity itself. Those who selfidentify as otaku to nd a community with other similar fans in virtual spaces, such as nico nico do ga, and real spaces, such as the comiket (Okada, 1996) are in many senses also represented through a twisting of this cool jazz that arose as a rejection of community. That is to say, establishing an identity as an otaku, if otaku can be said to form a community, is opposed to cool, which always strives to separate itself from community. To some extent, cool jazz musicians were similar to hikikomori, who sit alone in rooms of their own, surng the web. However, the solo virtuoso player is cool precisely because he stands alone apart from the band, community, and society in public performance. (This is not the social, family jazz of New Orleans, but the jazz of those at least performing as if in their own world.) Cool jazz musicians reject the world out in the world, whereas hikikomori withdraw from the world. So the cool of hikikomori is virtual, existing only online, if at all. And they are not part of Cool Japan, but must be ignored for Cool Japan to happen, since Cool Japan is based on objects out in the world and occurs historically at the moment when otaku can go mainstream precisely because hikikomori are pathologized.

Cool as Affect
At the root of the function and meaning of cool as affect, cool things are dened as mysterious, exotic things beyond understanding. Cool as affect is a concept that explains the desire to see more, read more, and buy more

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of that which resides in this state beyond comprehension, transcending common experience. We can see this in the previous historical example of the cool jazz musician who stands apart from reality in front of his band alone for an improvised solo. Cool jazz style is accompanied by a consumers longing for the unknown other, based on this separation and distance.That is to say, in cool jazz we can nd both meanings of jazz as a formal stance outside at the level of production and as the affect or the longing for the unknown at the level of reception. As is well known, these two concepts of cool moved from the jazz subculture, through the Beat subculture into mainstream pop culture, rst with Miles Daviss The Birth Of Cool (1949) and later with Jack Kerouacs On the Road (1957) and on to rocknroll. Cool jazz also happened the moment that white Californian jazz musicians hit the New York scene. The coolness of improvisation was not understood logically. From the point of view of mainstream pop culture, jazz was beyond comprehension. However, precisely because of its incomprehensibility, jazz seemed somehow new, very different from the familiar music playing on 1940s and 50 radios. Out of these views the desires to buy and listen to jazz records were born. With the recent phenomenon of a globally Cool Japan, we nd a similar logic: I havent seen this before; it is totally different; I dont get it, but that is why it is interesting; it is cool. The recent phenomenon of Cool Japan in America is born from the exoticism for Japan that began in the late 19th century and has continued in various guises through today. That is to say, it is precisely from the not-knowing, not having seen until now, not understanding, and inability to comprehend that Japan is deemed interesting and cool. This exoticization of Cool Japan can be maintained through either a conscious or an unconscious fetishization. Clearly there are those for whom Japan is never cool and those for whom it will always remain cool.

For example, consider the study of Japanese language abroad in recent years. Most fans of a Cool Japan do not study Japanese. They like anime but are not interested in the least in Japan. This is natural. There is no contradiction in not necessarily caring about the relationship of the products of their consumption to the culture in which they were produced. We can call these commodity fetishists conscious fetishists who want to turn the other cheek, want to maintain a distance and who know that studying Japan might make it lose its cool. Judging from the discrepancy between manga sales and numbers of students focusing on Japanese, most consume products irrespective of origins, without knowledge of the means of production. Most goods in the global market place are consumed this way; the exceptions are the cases where consumers want to know. Of course, among those who like anime, there are some who choose to learn about Japan. However, while this study of Japan may certainly be a start toward dissolving the fetish for a Cool Japan, it does not necessarily lead to a deeper or more thorough understanding of that which we call Japan. It can also lead to a Japanophilia, the unconscious fetishist position that denies its own fetishistic relation to the object of study (Japan) because it is based on more information. What is pernicious about this mode of inquiry is that because it is based on more information, it articulates itself through a privileged point of authority. But the authority of the position is false if it still contains an unquestioned preserved point for the coolness of Japan. The coolness of the Japan about which more and more is known then recedes further and further towards the horizon in the innite regress of the hermeneutic circle. This is as true for those coming at Japan from the outside as those approaching it from the inside. The parallel of students in Europe and America discovering Japanese language through anime are Japanese otaku claiming some

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continuum of Edo culture with contemporary Cool Japan culture or the theorists taking the position that Japanese practice and products require Japanese theory. These deniers of their own fetishist position assume there is some core unquestionable, unhistoricizable identity of cool that we might approach by studying its origins, by becoming otaku of Japanese culture, but that we can never fully capture. The problem then is Japan may remain cool. The unconscious fetishist is ambivalent, for their studying Japan may ll in the empty signier or may continue its empty signication. It is easy to call the Cool Japan dynamic a global fetish that has nothing to do with the Japanese culture from whence it came. We could argue for a radical historicization that nds difference at every point in every place on a mapping and time-lining of culture, but that would neglect the connections not only between the American otaku and the Japanese ones, but also between Japanese otaku of one generation or gender and those of another connections between say Evangelion otaku and Tetsuwan atomu otaku. In fact, there are much deeper connections between origin and derivation. For instance, the white bourgeois culture valued a particular kind of music and continued to enslave African-Americans through a system of sub-legal means of repression (long after the end of slavery). And this history and function of white cultures domination was precisely the context, or to use Luhmans term the environment, in which the system of cool jazz developed. If repression was not a determining ground for the superstructure known as jazz, it was at the least its context. Similarly, the Japanese Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere and the post-war American culture empire and their places in contemporary Japanese culture, it could be argued (and indeed has been argued by Otsuka Eiji, 1988; and Azuma Hiroki, 2001), are these contexts or environments for the possibility of a later cooling of Japan in the eyes of the world.

However, these historical connections are what must be masked for cool to accrue. In terms of this fetishization then, Japan is no different in considering its own subcultures incomprehensible or even an other to itself. In the Japanese case, the recent NHK TV show Cool Japan exemplies the similarities. According to its promotional website, the Japanese can watch to nd the cool aspects of their own Japanese culture drawing on the suggestions of foreigners: The catchphrase Cool Japan is ying around the world. It is all the rage for people from abroad to consider all sorts of Japanese culture that is right in front of us like fashion, anime, architecture, and cooking as awesome (kakko ii). Cool Japan: Excavating Awesome Nippon draws fully on the sensations of recently arrived foreigners. It is a program that seeks those secrets and charms that are dug up from Cool Japanese culture.2 Japanese can nd out what is so cool in the eyes of foreigners. That is to say, cool things are also things that mainstream Japanese cannot comprehend. Alternatively the things that are entirely known in daily life are not generally things that can be called cool, or are completely un-cool, until seen as otherwise through the eyes of the other, through foreign eyes. As Azuma has explained, because the culture of an animalized, postmodern people is entirely simulacra, meaning it cannot be constructed from ones own materials or things at the grand narrative level (that is to say the largest possible meaning), cultural products are incomprehensible (2009). But one feels they are interesting without concretely being able to understand them. So precisely because they are not known or understood they can be considered cool. Cool here cannot be seen as a new grand narrative with a teleological structure replacing those of the past, but some new global narrative without plot or backbone, or maybe not

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even a narrative but a global theme or feeling, a global sense of something, a eeting understanding that something whether a leather jacket worn by Brando or a wideeyed heroine carrying a sword twice her size has an allure. So the global Cool Japan is a fetish that distorts the real almost to the point of unrecognizability to those who are aware of the original fetish, but, in doing so, it mirrors the original fetish that is an overvaluation of the particular forms, particular narratives, particular character types, or particular moe elements (Otsuka, 2004; Saito , 2003; Azuma, 2009). So the difference between the fetishes within and outside is the point of their disavowal of their own origins. But in all cases, the cool of Cool Japan is premised on a not knowing, a willful ignorance of particular mechanisms.

Impossibilities of Cool Japanology

This nature of Cool Japan renders Cool Japanology an utter impossibility. Japanology, as the scholarly pursuit of knowledge and information about Japan, ts more closely with Marshall McLuhans denition of a hot media (one that provides more information) than a cool one (one that is form-heavy and content-light) (1967). And this hot Japanology itself died not long after the economic bubble burst when EuroAmerica no longer required expert explanations of Japans rapid growth and return to the international arena. As early as 1997, prior to the advent of Cool Japan, Karatani Ko jin warned Japanologists that Japanese Studies were doomed unless they engaged with Japanese Marxism (1997). Instead, Japanology followed a different path, the path of Cool Japanology. Karatani was reacting to Masao Miyoshis claim that Japan was not interesting by arguing Japan is interesting because it is not interesting (Karatani, 1997). And Japanologists today

might repeat this about Cool Japan: Japan is cool because it is not cool. That is, what is cool about Japan is that when we study it we nd nothing particularly cool a bunch of adult nerds watching cartoons, for instance. This inversion of cool is itself cool, but it is not a cool that can rub off on its study. The cooling of Japanology has meant a poaching and adopting of cultural studies by people trained primarily in other disciplines, disciplines that do not suit the materials. Chasing the chimera of edutainment, scholars of literature, for instance, tend to privilege content over institution, apparatus, and distribution in their explanations of Cool Japan. New Japanese studies thereby gain some temporary coolness measured in the number of bodies in our classrooms or numbers of books sold. As with the Heisenberg principle regarding jokes studying them strips them of their humor a cool phenomenon necessarily loses its cool when studied and explained. If cool allure is to be maintained, understanding must be kept at bay, otherwise the coolness will accrue to some other new unknown like the Chinese or Korean pop cultural object. And Japanology as the pursuit of knowledge (not the chase of market share) should not care if it does. What we nd in Cool Japan is precisely what we nd in all other forms of cool, that its cool is eeting and disappears when brought to focus. Years ago, Dick Hebdidge explained how quickly punk subcultures were recuperated by the mass media and either trivialized or naturalized (1979). Part of the popularization of subcultures is their study. So Hebdiges (1979) own work performed the very dynamic he was attributing to the mass media. The study of Cool Japan perhaps over emphasizes the importance of the Japanese object as it seeks to maintain it as unknown. And in so doing, Japan and its products should naturally lose their coolness. In the end, jazz too was uncooled. Now the cover-charge at most jazz clubs is too exorbitant to be connected to any urban

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subculture, and conversely signies that it is part of the bourgeois power structure. Now jazz is studied in universities. It is no longer African-American music or even music of the masses, but music of an elite, requiring inside knowledge acquired only through expenditures of capital and of cultural capital. Cool jazz has gone from a subcultural phenomenon rst mainstreamed, then uncooled, and nally canonized as tradition to be protected and cultivated. In this way it might be similar to Kabuki or even Noh theater in Japan, which historically were entertainment for the people and now exist only for the intellectual and upper middle class. And Cool Japan is, of course, poised to undergo the same development as it has been taken up by NHK and the Foreign Ministry. With the growing number of courses at universities around the world dedicated to the study of Cool Japan and the worlds largest archive of manga, anime, and video games set to open at Meiji University as the Tokyo International Manga Library in 2014, it will not be long before the terrain of Cool Japan will be frozen into a rigidly dened tradition that can never be cool. So if Cool Japan (uncool as it may become) is here to stay, Cool Japanology may be a completely impossible object. Though a paradox or an oxymoron, the term is not without meaning. The point of Japanology is to understand, to comprehend meanings in history and culture. The hope of studying and teaching pop culture, then, would be to transform the energy around Cool Japan into a dynamic for understanding or to transfer the energy to buy and collect cool products into a desire for understanding. The goal of a Cool Japanology, then, would not simply be to categorize Cool Japan like an animal or gure out a grand narrative underpinning it, but to sharpen critical acumen with the hope that this makes better inhabitants of the world. Cool Japan is so hot that we Japanologists can only try to step back from it, detach ourselves, and cool it down. From the stand-

point of the historical concept of cool, Cool Japanology needs to distance itself from Cool Japan. And this distance can have a chilling effect that can be described as cool. In other words, the ultimate role of a Cool Japanology would be to be cool towards Cool Japan. The aim of a potential Cool Japanology would be to uncool Cool Japan.

The Possibilities of Cool Japan: Hikikomori Save the Day or Hikikomori no Longer Exist
In some ways the plot of Summer Wars might be classed within the so-called sekaikei (or end-of-world-type narrative genre) or at least a reaction to the genre. In sekaikei, the wimpy young male protagonist falls for a powerful young female, and what seems to be a hermetic Me and You world is soon revealed as deeply connected to the survival of the entire real world (Kasai, 2008). In the end the world is saved or destroyed not simply in relation to the success of the love of the boy and girl, but specically by the powerful girls actions. In Summer Wars, the sekai-kei structure seems perfectly played out at least in broad strokes: the ineffectual, emasculated math nerd and computer geek named Koiso Kenji who stumbles into everything inadvertently is seen as the cause of Armageddon (at least temporally) while the hanafuda card game scene at the end positions the girl Shinohara Natsuki as the savior. Here it seems, as Miyadai Shinji has written about sekai-kei, the resolution of the personal mystery [why would she invite the nerd to her family home?] is directly linked to the resolution of the mystery of the world [who would create Love Machine?] (Miyadai, 2009). The explanation of these mysteries lies at the social level within the family and the web 2.0 social media space of OZ; at the

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social level, a conrmation and a transformation of the sekai-kei form that radically alters the possibility for a Cool Japan occurs. According to Kasai Kiyoshi, from their bifurcated worlds of the everyday, real, interior and the extraordinary, fantastic, exterior, we can posit Neon Genesis Evangelion and Boogiebop Dont Laugh as the pathblazing sekai kei world types. Creative work that continues to describe the pure love of the powerless boy and ghting girl is the worlds real reection of nothing more than the fact that the everyday is Armageddon and the Armageddon is everyday (Kasai, 2008).As Kasai presents it, the sekaikei form has a bi-layered structure with inner and outer worlds. But further analysis reveals the structure to be more complicated. Recently Azuma Hiroki (2010), Saito Tamaki (2011), and Maejima Satoshi (2010) have identied a middle intermediary layer to the structure of the genre. In this threevenue structural understanding of the sekaikei form, there is rst a personal/individual everyday (micro-situation), second, the world Armageddon (macro-situation), and last the intermediating social arena (midlevel situation). In the lm we get hints of all three levels, the micro relationship level of the individual in the relationship between Koiso Kenji and Shinohara Natsuki, the mid level of the (extended Shinohara) family, and the macro-level of the real world connected through the virtual one of OZ. These three areas (personal, social, and global) that appear in the schema of sekaikei have been said to correspond respectively with the terminology of either foreground, middle view, and background (according to playwright Becchaku Minorus schema) or imaginary, symbolic, and the real (according to Jacques Lacans schema). Becchaku writes that the distance felt by one another that is sensed tactilely is the near view. The middle view or landscape consists of the family and social areas that span communal interpersonal distance. Distance or background is connected to

belief in mystical divination. And Becchaku has argued further that recently the middle ground that ought to mediate the distant and the near view has gone missing, and they are suddenly connected through the network of distant and near views; namely, the Internet is precisely the medium that both connects us to the global world reality and alienates us from our local world reality (Becchaku, 2000). Azuma Hiroki has rewritten this in the Lacanian terms of the loss of the Symbolic. Where the near view is the imaginary, and distant is equivalent to the Lacanian real (Azuma, 2009). The everyday of school life of the protagonists indicates that the imaginary and the limitless real of the crisis of global destruction are inevitably tied to each other through the symbolic layer that in the lm is either OZ or the Family. But in the end OZ and the family are one. Typically the sekai-kei form deals with the middle level only tangentially in the form of mis en scene school club (Suzumiya Haruhi), school pool (Iriya no sora, UFO no natsu), or observatory (Saishu heiki kanojo). What complicates things in Summer Wars is where it separates from the sekai-kei narrative structure through the inclusion of so many well-crafted characters in the social spaces of the extended family and the superat articulation of OZ. A look at two supporting characters on the fringe of the family with important avatars in the virtual world gives a sense of what is at stake in the lm namely the recuperation of the pathologized hikikomori type and a concomitant stigmatization of the nampa-kei type. What is at stake in the fates of the two cousins and their virtual avatars (Jinnouchi Wabisuke aka Love Machine and Ikezawa Kazuma aka King Kazuma) is nothing less then the potential of Cool Japan to save disaster Japan. To understand the characters in the lm, it helps to recall some sociological classications of todays youth in relation to cultural products. Sociologist Miyadai Shinji has

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gone a long way toward explaining the ramications of identity types and their related genres in popular culture. Miyadais schema for the long period from 1975 to the present day breaks down male youth culture in Japan into two types, the nampa (womanizer/playboy) type and the otaku (nerd/geek) type. He argues that until 1996 these types were distinct. The womanizer positioned ction as inferior to reality and worked in compa group-dating and later enjo ko sai (compensated dating) to make reality into a ction. The otaku, on the other hand, enjoyed an ironic immersion in ction and tried to make ctions real by creating fan ction, meeting with other fans, and through costume play. After the Aum Shinrikyo Tokyo subway gas attacks and the Kobe earthquake, everyone became an otaku, or rather the otaku category opened up to include the nampa category. Nampa (picking up chicks) was seen as just another hobby on the same level as otaku collecting comic books. This happened between 1996 and 2000, the year of Train Man (Densha otoko) (Miyadai, 2009). What must be added to Miyadais understanding is that the stigmatization of a third type is what enabled otaku to go mainstream. In 1998 psychoanalyst Saito Tamaki published his book on hikikomori, thus pathologizing one segment of the population. In terms of Miyadais understanding, the useful function of the pathologization of the hikikomori type is that it acquired the asocial properties of the otaku, leaving otaku clean of stigma and ready for mainstream. I am an otaku, not a hikikomori, was a phrase really only possible in the mainstream after 1998. Summer Wars presents yet a later moment in this history, one that once again puries one type (now the hikikomori, victim of bullying) while stigmatizing yet another (the nampa type). The nampa type in the lm is the cousin Jinnouchi Wabisuke, the outcast who goes to America and creates the articial intelligence virus (part Stuxnet and part Watson)

called Love Machine. His cavalier attitude towards his creation, his denial of responsibility for the actions of the articial intelligence of his design, and pushing responsibility elsewhere (in this case onto the American military) is an example of what Miyadai calls the neocon tendencies of the nampa type who engage in a by any means necessary approach to life, exemplied for Miyadai by the Battle Royale story. Freud argued of neurotic logic that it draws near a primitive logic, when it projects hateful thoughts onto another whereas the primitive will project hateful deeds onto a totem (Freud, 1927). Wabisukes logic for evading responsibility similarly projects responsibility onto the virus that he created; the logic is simple, I didnt do it, the articial intelligence Love Machine did it. As in the case with all primitive/neurotics and their totem, Wabisukes sexual allure as the nampa-type is barred in the lm, just as the Love Machines potency ends up being curtailed; Wabisukes is barred by the incest taboo against relations with Natsuki, while the Love Machines virus ends up being barred by the family and Internet community unifying against it. Although there are many parallels between Wabisuke and the Love Machine, what is important here is the way the superat avatar accentuates the qualities inherent in the character type. These are signaled by Natsukis excitement at his return, despite the fact that he is the quintessential bad boy. The inversion of Wabisuke must be Ikezawa Kazuma in the real, traditionalstyled anime world of the lm or King Kazma of the virtual, superat-styled world of OZ. Kazuma is the classic hikikomori, bullied at school, he (and it should be noted that he is highly feminized to the point that fan ction and drawings circulate portraying him in subordinate homosocial and homosexual yayoi relations with the main male characters and sometimes as a woman) cloisters himself away in his own darkened space in the house, spending hours and

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hours perfecting his ghting skills (not only in OZ as it turns out but in real life with his grandfather). The battle then ends up being a battle between the Battle Royale type (nanpa-kei, tragic neocon) and the sekai-kei type (communicative, romantic, comedic types [in other words, everyone else in the family and around the world]). Though hikikomori have been satirized and attempted to be brought back into the fold from very early on in their pathologization, both this satirization (Welcome to the NHK, 2002) and the bringing back into the fold through such programs emphasizing cooperative living (kyo do seikatsu) (Borovoy, 2008) have always been predicated on the pathological difference. In Summer Wars, Kazuma is simply never pathological, but immediately considered part of the team lending his Internet connection and his skill to the ght. And here the real innovation of Summer Wars is its divergence from the sekai kei form; where sekai-kei is traditionally a breaking down of the hermetically sealed personal world of the individual protagonist by connecting him to the world, Summer War networks the individual struggle with other individual struggles such that the network is both the collective threat and solution. Kazumas role in the battle for control of the virtual world of OZ to save the real world is no less signicant than that of Shinohara Natsuki, the powerful girl gure who ends up defeating Love Machine in the hanafuda card game. Typically, the sekai-kei structure would have the girl be single-handedly responsible for saving or destroying the world; in Summer Wars the team includes the entire extended family and virtual friends who combine forces to defeat the virus. Kazuma is an integral part of both worlds. In Kazuma, we have an (eroticized?) reversal of the stigmatized position of the hikikomori. If shut-ins are notoriously cut off from society and incapable of human relationships, the lm not only reintegrates them within society

(Borovoy, 2008) but also inextricably binds the hikikomori to the sekai-kei narrative. So the hikikomori becomes a third wheel in the typical narrative of two, thus connecting the social world with the personal. The hikikomori character Kazuma saves the world along with the other two characters and joining forces with family, friends, and participants around the web. The hikikomori is in fact a composite of the two (he and she) extremes. Natsuki is bold and brash, taking advantage of the wimpy math nerd protagonist Koiso Kenji; she is strong both in this world and in the virtual one. Kenji is weak both here and there (just a math nerd/computer geek), and Kazuma is weak in this world and powerful in that world. He is the true henshin (or transformational) character that links the two worlds. And in the end, the message of the lm is that what happens in the virtual world does not stay in the virtual world but has real implications in this world and vice versa. So as Kazuma trains in martial arts in the real world presumably to ght back against real bullies, his power as a ghter in the virtual world grows. The virtual world is not virtual at all and Kazuma is the gure that lets us understand this. At the turn of the millennium, in order for otaku to become cool, global, and mainstream, the identity had to lose its stigma through a pathologization of hikikomori. And now a decade later we may be seeing this happening again as we see the hikikomori being brought into the fold and a consequent pathologization of the nampa kei. It is easy to view this recuperation of hikikomori as part of a long trend of imagining weaker, wimpier men as the modern Japanese male norm. In this context, it is no wonder why many men today self-identify as herbivore men (so shoku danshi) as a stark contrast to, even rejection of, the nampatype (Harney, 2009). There is nothing new about this most recent version of the dodge of gender inequalities in Japanese culture. It is surely tied to the long history of the

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rhetoric of a weak self rst articulated in I-novels (shi-sho setsu, in which indecisive narrators lament their inabilities to effect change and their generally castrated positions in life, in contradistinction to the European ich roman in which young men learn to become actors), taken up in the post-war period as the emasculated, immature demilitarized male (of Kojima Nobuo novels at the center of arguments by Eto Jun and later Ueno Chizuko) (Eto , 1975; Eto and Ueno, 1995; Ueno, 2009), reiterated in longrunning canonical lms (the Tora-san series Otoko wa tsurai [Its hard being a Man]), and now performed in albeit a new form through the gure of the herbivore man (Vincent, 2010). In all of these cases, we have weak self in denial of their own actual real-world power. With the gure of the hikikomori Kazuma in Summer Wars, however, we have a major difference a recognition that virtual power is real power. A weak realworld identity is strong in the virtual world, and this virtual strength is transferrable into real-world power to effect change. Rather than imagining a return to the consumption of grand narratives (as Maejima Satoshi imagines in his post-hikikomori scare comments about the primacy of communication through the sekai-kei narrative) (2010), what we have in Summer Wars is something radically different: we have the exposure of the point that grand narratives were never not consumed, that the real has always been a part of the ctionalized realities and realized ctions of the Cool Japan worlds, and that cool has simply ignored the real (been cool towards or detached from it). The lm exposes how those who fetishized aesthetic difference were just locked into a virtual superat world or lulled into the notion that they resided in a databasic world where grand narratives did not exist, even though they were clearly all around them all the time. The lm shows how despite surface aesthetic difference the real world and the virtual world are mutually interpenetrating, that they in the end have no ontological dif-

ference, and that they in fact are not different worlds but differing environments within a larger world. In fact grand narratives may be most with us when refused. Only in their return to the surface do they become legible and therefore resistible. From the submerged grand narratives of the early 2000s in Japan, we may now, because of Summer Wars, recognize the ones that were on the surface in 1950, 1960, and 1970 namely the reconguration of Japanese sovereignty vis a vis US-guaranteed security. If this had to go into hiding during the North Korea scares (the abduction scandals, nuclear tests, and missile tests) and in the shadow of the international war on terror during much of the rst decade of the new millennium, with its stigmatization of the neocon thinking and recuperation of hikikomori innovation, the fantasy of Summer Wars may hold a key for the future of Japan. On what does not happen in the fantasy lm Avatar, Slavoj Zizek writes, To choose between either accepting reality or choosing fantasy is wrong: if we really want to change or escape our social reality, the rst thing to do is change our fantasies that make us t this reality (Zizek, 2010). This is indeed what happens in the denouement of Summer Wars the virtual world of OZ has real-world consequences. But changing the fantastic world, policing it, and disciplining the Love Machine is also not really a solution. More than that, we need to atten the notion that the virtual fantasy is separate from the real, that the fantasy is not a transcendent wholly removed space, but only a transcendental, heterotopic threshold that allows us to fantasize about some impossible, entirely other space. And the lm itself does this. If the articially intelligent Love Machine virus is somewhere between Stuxnet and Watson, and the havoc it can wreak is somewhere between Armageddon and identity theft, then the virtual space of the lm is far more realistic and believable than the far-fetched social space of the family home where the best mathematician

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in Japan, the creator of the evil virus about to destroy the earth, and the best virtual ghter in OZ, all happen to meet up. In terms of logical truth, the cyber representation is far less surreal than the representation of the real world. There is, then, nothing cool or new about the connectivity and virtuality of Web 2.0 new media. The connected disconnectedness of people in Summer Wars was actually perfectly realized in the net activity following the triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear catastrophe). What the lm argues for (that the virtual matters) is in fact protected against within its plot. At the end of the lm, the heroes bar the articially intelligent virus from spilling out of the virtual into the real. This barrier between the worlds within the narrative saves the world and Japanese society in the lm, but within our world, it may be just the inverse that saves us. That is, in using the Internet to connect our disconnected selves as people have now been doing in the wake of multiple disasters, we have the potential for making some real change. It is too early in the post-disaster era to know whether Summer Wars is the proof or a symptom of the change. But the change it presents was realized in the story of the hikikomori who would not leave his house when the earthquake struck and was nally forced out when the tsunami crushed his protective shell. He survived to reunite with his mother in a shelter (MSN Sankei, 2011). If the radiation seeping from Fukushima makes everyone a hikikomori (to some extent wary of going outside), then disaster also forces a coming out, in the form of a coming together on the Internet for ethically sustainable congress. Coming together in reality now is impossible without the virtuality of new media, without what has become the new Cool Japan. This is being done at a broad social level often with academics at the fore, but this too is no cool Japanology but one of ideas radiating against the heat from Fukushima.

Notes
1 See for instance Project Fukushima! http:// www.pj-fukushima.jp/pro_otomo_eng.html, accessed 2 June 2011. 2 http://www.nhk.or.jp/cooljapan/about/ index.html, accessed 27 July 2011.

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Jonathan E. Abel PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, Burrows Hall, University Park, PA 16802 USA. Email: jonathan.abel@psu.edu Received 14 May 2011; accepted 22 June 2011.

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