This essay was a prize-winning submission to the Rags Drum 2021 Eve Festival and originally appeared on Bilibili.
This essay first appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of the fan journal Touhou Cultural Studies. The Bilibili edition includes additional illustrations.
Introduction
Ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign, high or low, profane or sacred: throughout human artistic creation, “animals” have been a seemingly miraculous source of material. From Shang- and Zhou-dynasty bronzes to ancient Egyptian murals, from Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West to Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa, from Fujiko Fujio’s Doraemon to Hypergryph’s Arknights, human beings have conquered and enslaved “animals” while admiring them, becoming obsessed with them, even worshipping them.
Since the first cave paintings, humanity’s creative “reworkings” of animals have assumed many forms, but they can be grouped into two basic types: “animalizing humans” and “humanizing animals.” Journey to the West is a particularly typical example of the former. The journey west to obtain the scriptures is really a coming-of-age rite—a rite of becoming human—in which the master and his three disciples shed their own “animality” under the guidance of Buddhist teaching. Yet “animality” does not always carry a negative meaning. The legend of Kōga Saburō1 from Japan’s Suwa region also belongs to the “animalizing humans” category: Saburō turns from a human into a snake and thereby acquires the snake’s “divinity.”
Ancient shamans opened a path to heaven by impersonating animals. Driven by modern capital, animal impersonation has awakened some peculiar new dispositions: cat ears have become a secret weapon with which women on either side of the screen capture otaku hearts, and these days you can even “order a rabbit” in a café. “Animality” has unquestionably entered contemporary popular culture’s vast “database,” crossbreeding with its various elements to produce “old-new” cultural commodities that circulate in today’s symbolic exchange.
Seen this way, humanity’s creative “reworkings” of animals have never contained any pure “animal.” Once animals pass through human imagination and categorization, whatever emerges inevitably takes on a human shape. This is one reason someone could say, “The Animal That Therefore I Am.”2 Outside scientific inquiry, “human” and “animal” have always been a pair of presences in our thought, projected onto and reflected in one another. We tend to measure and speculate about animals by human standards and ways of thinking: do animals have feelings? Do animals have rights? Contemporary philosophy’s greatest rediscovery of the “animal” is that the human–animal distinction is often not simply an exercise in scientific knowledge but the construction of a cultural order with intensely political implications. Researchers attentive to the construction of power relations, including cultural-studies scholars, point out that once humans and animals are divided, they are not equal: they are set within a hierarchy of rights. Unlike a scientific classification, the boundary between human and animal is neither strict nor difficult to alter. It shifts and fluctuates. On the one hand, humans advocate animal rights, granting animals a degree of “human rights”; on the other, under exceptional circumstances—war or natural disaster, for example—people may be stripped of their “human rights” and reduced to “animals,” to be enslaved or slaughtered. Some also argue that, propelled by the Industrial Revolution’s “human conquest of nature,” modern myths of superior and inferior peoples have their roots in the social mentality embodied by that ancient “yin–yang diagram” of human soul and animal body. So-called Western centrism and China’s distinction between the civilized Hua and the barbarian Yi are merely variations on “humanity as the most gifted of all beings.” Yet even after the forces of “righteousness” destroyed “anthropological machines”3 such as Nazism, built on superiority and the desire to dominate, the chronic afflictions that mock the ideal of equality kept coming: Iron Curtain politics, patriarchy, racial discrimination, environmental crises, religious conflict. Idealists and artists could only summon avenging giants like Godzilla to land in the metropolis, on the printed page or the screen, fire their destructive rays, and sweep away evil in one stroke—then place their hopes in the “friendship” of which humanity ought to have been capable.
The “animal question” is not just animal-protection advocates making a fuss over nothing. Without animals, humanity would probably have struggled to enter agricultural society, and learning how to deal with our “companion species” is intimately bound up with our own fate. The coronavirus raging in this Year of the Rat, for example, has to do with humanity’s arrogance toward animals, while those infected with it have themselves become animal-like “bare life” in a cold-blooded modern society.
Those of us who grew up around the turn of the millennium are a generation formed through immersion in the culture of Heisei Japan. Heisei’s creators have offered no shortage of profound reflections on the “animal question.” Ōta the boozehound—better known as ZUN—has a motto: “Curse someone, dig two graves.” The Japanese proverb means much the same as being destroyed by one’s own devices, or trapped in a cocoon of one’s own making. In many Heisei “animal” stories, we will see that “animals” really are a distorting mirror of human destiny: how humanity sees animals bears upon its own fate. This is also why Derrida holds that we look at animals, and animals look back at us. Let us see how Heisei’s manga and anime creators address the question.
The Sea of Corruption and the Ohmu: An Artificial Ecosystem for Purifying the Human Race
The anime and manga creators who reflected most deeply on the “animal question” were surely the Shōwa generation (December 1926–January 1989), who had passed through the fires of war before Heisei (1989–2019). Having witnessed people reduced to “animals” within the war machine, they became the mentors and conscience of postwar Japanese animation and manga. Hayao Miyazaki’s (1941–) long-form manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, about friendship between a girl and gigantic beings of another kind, began near the end of Shōwa, in 1982, and concluded early in Heisei, in 1994. It is one of the representative works of that generation’s reflections on the “animal question.”
The “animal protagonists” of Nausicaä are insects and fungi. After the Seven Days of Fire, the world war that destroys human civilization, the Sea of Corruption ecosystem they form continues to spread across the earth, steadily encroaching on the space where humans can live. Humanity ekes out an existence along the edges of the insect kingdom while killing one another over the land that remains.
Nausicaä arranges an enormously complex “human–animal spectrum” from “human” to “nonhuman”: Torumekians, Doroks, Worm Handlers, Forest People, Heedra,5 God Warriors, Ohmu, slime molds, trees that feed the insects, and so on. Nor are there any “pure,” “authentic” humans in its wasteland. The humans who survived the Seven Days of Fire used bioengineering to modify their bodies for the wasteland environment. They also designed the Sea of Corruption, an artificial ecosystem intended to transform that environment, launching an unprecedented project to purify the earth. In this sense, everyone who appears in Nausicaä—even the “winged” savior Nausicaä herself—is “nonhuman,” a form of “animal life.”
What is striking is that the Sea of Corruption project is not merely a scientific undertaking to purify the environment. It is also a vast political program to purify the human race.
By its designers’ plan, every species outside the Crypt of Shuwa serves the purification project: the insects Nausicaä sees as “noble”; the descendants of the old humanity, including the Torumekians, Doroks, inhabitants of the Valley of the Wind, Worm Handlers, and Forest People who have retreated deep into the Sea of Corruption to coexist with its insects; and the artificial Heedra, endowed with superhuman physical abilities or immense intelligence. All are “bare life,” stripped of “political life”—such as the “right to exist.”6 At the story’s end, Nausicaä challenges the intelligent Heedra forming the Crypt’s core, the “Master of the Crypt”: “Do you really intend to deceive those marked out for extinction? However much knowledge and technology you provide, you still need slaves to bring the world back to life, don’t you?” Managed by an enormous biological artificial intelligence, the Crypt of Shuwa is the “general headquarters” of the entire purification project. Using the lost technologies of the old civilization—chiefly biotechnology—as bargaining chips, the Master of the Crypt intervenes in politics and manipulates wars, finding and cultivating proxies through whom it can control the whole of human society in the wasteland. It “remakes” the surviving old humans into flesh-and-blood “slave-machines,” obedient to the purification project like the Heedra. The indestructible Crypt, the culmination of the old civilization’s technology, is not only the administrator of the Sea of Corruption’s biotechnological system. It also nurtures the “new humanity.” Inside are embryos of the “new humans” designed by the purification project’s founders. Through modifications to their “bodies”—their genes—these “new humans” can survive the earth’s environment once purification is complete; they are also a more “intelligent,” more “docile” race than the ignorant, brutal, predatory old humans. The project’s completion marks the extinction of the old human stock and the birth of the new. Unable to adapt to the earth’s new environment, the old humans will only cough up blood and die in the “blue, pure land” beyond the Sea of Corruption, bringing their service as instruments to an end along with the Sea itself. Seen this way, the Sea of Corruption ecosystem is, in a quite literal sense, an enormous organic “anthropological machine” for purifying the human race.
From a humanist perspective, what a magnificent “Human Instrumentality Project” this is. The purification project’s designers themselves belong to the old humanity that polluted the world and fought without end. In an age of despair and disorder, they gathered an intellectual elite to devise a “path of atonement” full of suffering for the old humans. At its end, they planned to summon the dawn of a new human stock through the twilight of their own. Yet Nausicaä categorically rejects this “path of light and hope” offered by the Master of the Crypt, because she sees through the arrogance behind the supposed “atonement.” Whether they speak of old humans or new, the old civilization’s purificationists still proclaim humanity the central subject of the world. Appointing themselves creators, they treat lives—subjects—as implements—objects—that can be altered or abolished at will. The Master’s technologies of artificial life become an accelerant for wasteland warfare: Heedra supersoldiers, infant Ohmu used as bait, gigantic, lethally toxic slime molds that devour everything—wasteland humans use these biological weapons to perpetuate their cycles of vengeance. The descendants’ incessant wars are themselves a planned stage of the “path of atonement,” greatly accelerating both the Sea’s expansion and the old human stock’s extinction.
The purificationists also seek to use biotechnology to produce a “perfect new human stock.” This stock possesses an essential attribute distinguishing it from other nonhuman beings—animals, artificial organisms, machines, and old humans: “human nature,” composed of intelligence, friendliness, and similar qualities, what the Master calls the “light of life.” But Nausicaä exposes the emptiness of this “perfect life.” The warmth that cares for others and the wisdom to coexist with them—“human nature”—have never been innate properties determined by genes. They are constructed through interaction with others. As Nausicaä realizes through her dealings with the insects, “The Ohmu’s warmth and friendship were born out of the abyss of nothingness.” Designers intent on exterminating the old humans could not possibly have designed the insects guarding the Sea to coexist with humanity. Yet over a long process of evolution, the Ohmu of Nausicaä’s time have developed a warmth that welcomes humans. The ecosystem has even incorporated human inhabitants: the insects share their eggs with these “Forest People” as food. By contrast, the old humans, perpetually at war, cannot even manage “friendship” with their own kind. Yet across a thousand years of collisions between the Sea and the human world, its leaders, the Ohmu, have formed a friendship with a human girl. Friendship toward humans has emerged within the insects’ originally hollow instrumental shells—an “acceptance of the infinitely alien other,” in the sense of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). Humans cannot show compassion to one another, yet “animals” can show compassion to humans. This is a pointed rebuke to the purificationists, who malign human “stupidity,” “greed,” “cruelty,” and “belligerence” as animality—as “brutishness”—purge them from “human nature,” and on that basis manufacture nonhumans within humanity itself.
But in a world heading toward extinction, if the purificationists’ “path of atonement” will not work, where is humanity to go? For Nausicaä, the way forward lies with “companion species.” Put plainly, the crisis of human civilization in Nausicaä begins with humanity’s inability to “make friends.” Humans cannot accept beings unlike themselves—others, whether within humanity or in nature—as equals, let alone approach them humbly. The root of this failure is an anthropocentric worldview: humanity always looks down from on high, producing humans and nonhumans—animals—through the “anthropological machine,” splitting the world in two by “the human measure.”
Within the postmodern and poststructuralist study of the “animal question,” Donna Jeanne Haraway (1944–) deconstructs the anthropocentric binary of human and nonhuman, replacing it with pluralistic relations among species: “companion species.” In The Companion Species Manifesto,8 Haraway begins with a case study of dogs, among the animals closest to humans, to reveal a two-way relationship in which humans and dogs—“animals”—are each other’s “companion species,” shaping one another and evolving together. For Haraway, the relation between humans and “animals” is not an oppositional, one-way relation of subject and object: looking and being looked at, domesticating and being domesticated, enslaving and being enslaved. It is a “dialogue” between species on an equal footing, as between friends. There are not just two species in the world, “human” and “nonhuman.” Humanity is one small member among the universe’s countless species, interwoven with others in complex relationships, living and evolving together. We “gaze” at animals, and animals “gaze” at us.
In Nausicaä, the beings of the Sea of Corruption are both messengers of an apocalypse that devours human civilization and “companion species” that bring humanity hope. As Nausicaä says in rejecting the Master of the Crypt: “Living things change! Ohmu, slime molds, plants, humans—they all change! We too can coexist with the Sea of Corruption.” “We are birds who will fly beyond that day, even if we cough up blood again and again.” However difficult and dangerous coexistence may be, humans and the Sea will constitute one another and evolve together through a long dialogue. In the abyss of nothingness within their hearts, the Ohmu—lives made as instruments—have developed a kindness that takes pity on humans. If humanity can break humanism’s anthropocentric spell, it too can learn, through encounters with the Sea’s creatures, a true “friendship” that accepts the “absolutely other.”
The final confrontation between Nausicaä and the Master of the Crypt is a brilliant encounter between humanism and posthumanism: “Pursue improvement relentlessly; exalt design”—or “Remain humble; make room for mixture.” At the crossroads of humanity’s destiny, Nausicaä chooses “companion species.” In other words, Miyazaki chooses posthumanism. Yet the insects engulfing human civilization are only one of his many imagined posthumanist “tsunamis.” From the luminous giant in Princess Mononoke to the deluge in Ponyo, Miyazaki worships the “animal other” while taking oblique shots at humanity’s self-centered, unilateral arrogance. Nausicaä can be called a product of the Cold War’s shadow. The Seven Days of Fire that destroy human civilization allude to the ultimate thermonuclear war. Wasteland politics divide into two blocs, Western-style Torumekia and Eastern-style Dorok, while the Valley of the Wind, a small border state beside the Sea of Corruption and a vassal of Torumekia, mirrors Japan under American occupation. In the endless conflict between the blocs, human slaughter of humans stands in stark contrast to the insects’ friendship. War that extinguishes our humanity is the highest form of the “anthropological machine.” In war, everyone is degraded into a nonhuman being: either an instrument serving the war machine or an “animal” it slaughters.
Modern society produced the two most terrifying “anthropological machines” in human history: Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire. They shattered Western society’s humanist myth of liberty, equality, and fraternity, leading many scholars to begin with the “animal question” in rethinking modernity, that engine of humanism. But after the reflection, what new proposal could they offer?
It was against this Cold War background that Derrida placed “animals” and “friends” on humanity’s political-philosophical agenda. The generation of Japanese manga and anime masters who had witnessed the “anthropological machine” during the Second World War likewise brought forward their own animal protagonists and made them carry the banner of posthumanism: Miyazaki’s Nausicaä and Porco Rosso, Osamu Tezuka’s The Jungle Emperor and Phoenix, and many of Fujiko F. Fujio’s short and long Doraemon stories.9 These “animal friends” works of the Cold War and its final years mostly take human–animal relations as their foundation. Through direct but richly imaginative drama, they expose humanity’s conceit and arrogance in hot and cold wars and environmental pollution, and propose “friendship”—however fragile, something to be sincerely nurtured—as an answer, though it is difficult to say how far it can be realized in this world.
By contrast, today’s post–Cold War “animal friends” works, such as Yurikuma Arashi and Kemono Friends, have less of the tension of an impending thermonuclear war. They tell their human–animal stories through gentler allegories.
The Girl Who Becomes a Bear and “Love for the Other”
Kunihiko Ikuhara (1964–), who trained in theater arts, entered animation from another field, as Miyazaki did, and established his place in the industry through the skills of his original discipline. His career as an anime director only properly began with Heisei. His directorial works are few but finely made, strongly personal in style, and almost all have become representative works of Heisei anime. The series he directed, Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997), is regarded alongside Neon Genesis Evangelion (1998) as one of the twin jewels of anime at the bubble economy’s fin de siècle. As a close buddy of Hideaki Anno, the father of Evangelion, Ikuhara can be counted among the representative anime creators of mid-Heisei. Yurikuma Arashi (2015) is his second turn toward “animals,” following Penguindrum (2011).
Yurikuma Arashi takes up a familiar literary structure: love across species lines between members of opposing camps. With the brown bear Lulu’s help, the black bear Ginko crosses the “Wall of Severance,” assumes human form, and seeks a “kiss of true love” from Kureha, her human childhood playmate. The antagonism between bear and human, predator and prey, makes Ginko and Kureha’s love the central conflict of the series.10 Ikuhara depicts two kinds of “love”: one founded on “sameness,” the other on “otherness.” The former essentially mirrors the Western “friendship” Derrida deconstructs in The Politics of Friendship:11 starting from the “self,” I recognize those like me as friends while excluding those alien to me as enemies. This friendship among “fellows” is instituted and maintained through an “anthropological machine” called the “Exclusion Ceremony”:
“Friends matter more than anything. We have gathered here because of our friends. Those who deny our friendship are the worst of people. Those who leave us are not friends. Those who will not stay in line with us are troublemakers. Those who cannot read the room are villains. Now is the time to expel the wicked.”
This “oath of friendship” that excludes those who are different, standardized equipment—school uniforms, hunting rifles, mobile phones—electronic “ostracism,”12 and a bureaucratic hierarchy of class president, ordinary pupils, and “bad pupils”—the wicked—make Arashigaoka Girls’ Academy resemble a miniature modern regime purging heretics. The school’s “misfits” become objects of discipline and domination under a discourse of “friendship” that pursues “sameness” in race, gender, thought, and so forth.
The love between Kureha’s mother Reia and the golden bear Yurika, Kureha’s teacher, and the love between Kureha and Ginko are loves between beings “other” to one another. They stand in sharp contrast to this friendship among “fellows,” maintained externally through an institution that excludes others. So does the resistance to the “Exclusion Ceremony,” also called the “Invisible Storm,” offered by Sumika, Kureha’s classmate and Bear Maria’s human incarnation. As the series’ transcendent presence, Bear Maria is both the origin of human–bear antagonism—she enabled bears to evolve into intelligent beings and granted some the ability to become human—and the spiritual leader advocating coexistence and mutual love between these unlike beings. Her incarnation Sumika becomes Kureha’s second intimate friend, after Kureha parts from Ginko in bear form during childhood. When Sumika discovers that Yurika’s plot has marked Kureha as the next victim of the “Exclusion Ceremony,” she makes herself a “heretic,” using her own life to shield Kureha from the “guns” of political persecution and guide her toward her true “friend,” Ginko. Through her bear incarnation, the presiding judge of the Severance Court, Bear Maria repeatedly “interrogates” Ginko, Kureha, and the others: “Have you understood what true love is?” (あなたの好きは本物？—“Is your love genuine?”). What, then, is this “true love” of which Bear Maria speaks?
Bear Maria explains true “friendship” through “The Moon Girl and the Forest Girl,” the fairy tale her representative in the human world, Reia, writes for her daughter Kureha. The forest and the moon symbolize the bear and human worlds. The two girls, separated into opposing camps, must pass a test set by the god, Bear Maria: only by shattering the “self” in the mirror can they finally meet and form a true friendship. Of course, “breaking the mirror,” like the “moon” and “forest,” is a metaphor. What the girls shatter is not merely a physical reflection but a Lacanian narcissistic “self.” Humans construct their concept of self through self-reflection—“looking in the mirror”—and the self’s reflexivity produces a subject that exists “for itself,” conquering and possessing others. Not only am I defined through this reflected subject, “I”; other people and things are also defined through it. In the process of self-reflection, the “sameness” between me and my “self” is extended into a “sameness” between me and the “other.”
For Levinas, the “sameness” of the other and myself means that the “other” is a variation of me, an alter ego separated from me that must ultimately return to me. This leads the subject to conquer, control, and possess the “other.” It was Levinas who inspired Derrida to deconstruct the exploitative master–slave relation implicit in Western “friendship.” In Yurikuma Arashi, the other’s return to the self through “sameness” is shown through bodily transformation. Kureha, the “Moon Girl” outside the fairy tale, initially does not dare break the “self in the mirror.” As a child, she suffers “political persecution”—bullying by her peers—because of her companionship with a black bear. She therefore asks Bear Maria to make Ginko human, like herself. Yet this does not establish true friendship between them. Instead, Kureha forgets Ginko altogether. Plainly, a self-centered “love” that pursues “sameness” is not the answer Bear Maria desires: the exploitative relation between “self” and “other” will not lead to true “friendship.” Ginko, the “Forest Girl,” by contrast, overcomes her own “body”—her desire to eat humans—relinquishes her bear identity, and seeks Kureha’s “kiss of true love” with a human “face.” Bear Maria therefore affirms Ginko’s “love” again and again through the Severance Court.
At the end of Yurikuma Arashi, the human Kureha acknowledges before the Severance Court her “self-centered” arrogance: seeking to “control” and “possess” Ginko by making her one of her own kind. She makes another wish to Bear Maria. This time, the “Moon Girl” finally shatters the “self” in the mirror, breaks through the solipsism of “friendship among one’s own kind,” and can “face the other.” During the ceremony in which humans exclude bears—the human trial of Ginko—Kureha changes from human to bear and shares a “kiss of true love” with Ginko, who has taken human form. She realizes Bear Maria’s true “friendship”: Levinasian “love for the other.” By becoming a bear, Kureha deconstructs her own subjectivity and relinquishes the self’s possession and domination of Ginko. In a gesture of “yielding her place,” she turns friendship away from a human—or self-centered—orientation toward a bear—or other-centered—one, making herself the other’s “hostage.” Kureha steps in front of the guns humans have trained on Ginko. With an infinite sense of “responsibility,” she “responds” to Ginko’s love without hesitation or retreat. Together with Ginko, who has become human, she realizes an inwardly grounded “friendship” founded on the two-way deconstruction of human and bear “selves.”
In the “love for the other” between Kureha and Ginko, and between Ginko and Lulu, human and bear subjectivity manifests itself not through mutual domination—possessing one’s own kind and excluding those unlike oneself, as when Ginko leaves Sumika to die or Lulu tries to eliminate her “romantic rival” Kureha—but through giving to one another, as when Kureha becomes a bear or Lulu takes a bullet for Ginko. Levinas holds that only by giving to the other can I become a true “self.” The friendship produced by the “Exclusion Ceremony” loves “one’s own kind,” which really means loving “oneself.” Such friendship is, at bottom, human narcissism. Ginko’s becoming human and Kureha’s becoming a bear dismantle the “Wall of Severance” between “self” and “other.” By turning the “self” into the “other,” they bring loving oneself and loving someone else together, and only then establish true “friendship.”13
From “Animal Girls in a Zoo” to “Animal Friends”
Tatsuki Omoto—birth year undisclosed—became famous through “animals.” A millennial among Heisei’s anime creators, he is one of the figures representative of the era’s closing years. “Decadence” and “animals” are an intertextual pair of late-Heisei keywords. They echo the two forces ruling contemporary Japan—a bureaucracy bowing and scraping before the United States, and an economy stagnant as dead water—and reveal a weed-choked culture of shachiku: wage slaves treated as corporate livestock.
For the millennials of mid-to-late Heisei, the previous century’s wars of aggression are only a distant, hazy historical memory. Just as Miyazaki’s outlook subtly shifted from Shōwa to Heisei, from being “on the left” to “drawing a line between himself and the left,” the youthful fervor of Shōwa’s postwar student movement—raising Mao Zedong’s banner, fighting the US–Japan Security Treaty, occupying the University of Tokyo—has long since ebbed. For Heisei’s corporate livestock and livestock-in-waiting, modern society is a miserable grind they cannot resist. But at least it lets me slip through a screen into the comforting harem of another world and form bonds with animal waifus free of worldly restraints. An “animal life,” enslaved and domesticated by “the world,” is still bearable that way. In this shift of social mentality from “Shōwa men” to “Heisei loser otaku,” the terrifying, noble, gigantic beings of another kind in Miyazaki’s early-Heisei apocalyptic epic have become the tiny, adorably dim animal girls offered for corporate livestock’s amusement in late-Heisei casual mobile games. This is the historical setting in which Tatsuki creates Kemono Friends.14
Kemono Friends, enthusiastically embraced by young viewers in 2017, made Tatsuki famous overnight. Yet neither “animal girls” nor “zoos” are particularly glorious terms in Heisei culture. An “animal girl” is a being assembled from human female and animal traits, with the human female traits predominating; viewers therefore continue to recognize her as a kind of human female. As a representative form of “animal girl,” the bunny girl has virtually become synonymous with erotic culture designed to please men. Beneath most “animal girls” produced by male culture lies a structure of animalizing women and turning them into pets: a mentality of enslaving and dominating women. The “zoo,” meanwhile, a monument to anthropocentrism, had already become a metaphor for hidden power structures in human society in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. But Kemono Friends stands against all of this, because its zoo already lies in ruins after humanity’s apocalypse.
Levinas, discussed above, criticizes the hegemony of the subject for whom “the world revolves around me,” inherited from Descartes, and constructs a new ethical subject “responsible for the other,” opening a path toward dismantling anthropocentrism. His theory of the other transforms the “animal question”—how to dismantle anthropocentrism—into a question of how to construct the “animal other.” Yet when it comes to the “animal question,” Levinas does not consider animals capable of being others, because their “presence” revolves around human needs: merely tools for our use, objects for our pleasure, or objects of human aesthetic appreciation. His view of animals epitomizes humanity’s self-centered philosophical discourse on animals.15 In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida begins with a personal experience, an “encounter with a cat in the bathroom,” and attempts to deconstruct the anthropocentrism of traditional discourse by constructing the animal as a Levinasian “other” possessed of absolute difference.16
From this perspective, the “animal friends” depicted in Japanese popular culture reflect the construction of the “animal other.” Nausicaä, Yurikuma Arashi, and Kemono Friends each construct a different mode of bodily discourse for that other. To Miyazaki, the animal’s body bears its nobility; his animal others therefore take animal forms wholly different from human beings. Ikuhara deconstructs the narcissistic “self in the mirror” through the “exchange” of human and bear bodies; his animal others thus acquire entirely human “faces.” The “animal girls” of Kemono Friends are “mixtures,” “hybrids” of human and animal bodies. This bodily discourse of the “animal other” as an intermediate, half-human, half-animal form is one of the most popular cultural patterns in contemporary Japanese popular culture.
The animal girl’s double human–animal character opens up multiple possibilities for discourse analysis. On the one hand, “animal girls” are “the same” as humans. Most viewers identify their essence as “cute girls,” with the animal traits reduced to the girls’ “moe elements.” Are we, then, becoming absorbed in the image of the human body reflected back to us by “animal girls”—just as Kureha wanted to make Ginko human—and achieving “domination” over the other through the other’s return to the “self”? On the other hand, “animal girls” are “different” from humans. Each one in Kemono Friends comes from a different species, and each species seems to have only one individual animal girl. Each therefore retains her own uniqueness, like Derrida’s coinage animot.17 They are not the animals without “individuality” on dinner tables or in slaughterhouses. Like the people around us, each is a unique living subject.
Levinas’s ethical subject is a subject constituted by the “other.” The other stands above me; I exist because of the other; my subjectivity manifests itself through my subordination to the other. For the human protagonist Kaban, “the animals she meets and interacts with on her journey are all crucial to helping Kaban-chan understand ‘what kind of animal she is.’”18 Japari Park is a society of others that “welcomes those unlike itself.” Swimming, flying, digging, hunting: such skills distinguish the animal girls from one another while also providing the basis for their cooperation and mutual appreciation. They do not exclude Kaban for lacking a “special skill.” On the contrary, it is precisely through her relations with these many differently skilled “animal others” that Kaban constitutes her own being—that of Heidegger’s “world-forming human.”
In this sense, Kemono Friends contains no “animal girls” in a “zoo.” Both the Foucauldian “zoo”—a power machine that manufactures nonhumans in human society and disciplines and punishes bodies19—and the Lacanian “animal girl,” humanity’s narcissistic projection constructed in the mirror, have long since been buried by Tatsuki in the apocalyptic ruins, along with anthropocentrism. Just as the vocabulary of Japari’s inhabitants contains no “animal girl,” only “friend,” Kemono Friends contains only “animal others,” continually calling for love for the other in humanity’s absence.20
Artificial-Intelligence Idols and What Makes the “Animal Question” Distinctively Heisei
ZUN (1977–), with his wide-ranging interests, loves creating through allusion. Touhou Project thus takes on a cultural function of looking back over and summing up its times, and can be regarded as a barometer of Japanese popular culture in Heisei. Heisei has ended, and we have entered the new Reiwa era. Released in Reiwa’s first year, Touhou: Wily Beast and Weakest Creature inevitably carries something of the “spirit of the age,” looking back at Heisei and ahead to Reiwa. Its plot revolves around the entanglements of three forces in hell—“animal spirits,” “human spirits,” and “clay figures”—offering an ingenious mirror of the Heisei “animal question.”
As noted above, humanity has been thinking about the “animal question” since ancient times. “Animal” theories that reflect critically on modernity, such as the anthropological machine and love for the other, were proposed before Heisei. They bear strong historical marks of early industrial society and are both criticized and inherited by postindustrial Heisei culture. We have found something “Shōwa” in some of Heisei’s “animal” works. Is there also something specifically “Heisei” about the “animal question”? If so, where is it?
During Heisei, humanity entered a “screen society.” Almost everyone can connect to the internet anytime and anywhere through the screen they carry with them. Ubiquitous screens and sensors generate big data, which in turn drives the development of artificial intelligence. Although the tasks today’s AI can accomplish remain quite limited, AlphaGo’s sweep through the world of Go forced humanity to admit that even inorganic electronic circuits can, in some respects, burst forth with “creativity” surpassing our own. What connection, then, does artificial intelligence have with the “animal question”?
Artificial intelligence and animals may seem worlds apart, but they are closely related. AI’s development shakes the foundations of anthropocentrism and blurs the boundary between humans and “animals.” Where exactly does the difference lie? Pascal said, “Man is a thinking reed”; Engels said, “Labor created humanity.” In other words, humans are living beings capable of freely creating artificial systems—thinking and labor are both part of this process—and “creativity” is the “intelligence” most distinctive of humanity on earth. Termites build “cities,” apes make “tools,” and wolves have their own “societies.” But these seemingly nonnatural systems lack creativity and remain static. Their designs are already encoded in their species’ genetic sequences, difficult to change, and ultimately cannot escape elimination by natural selection. On earth, only human cities, tools, and societies continually develop and evolve of their own accord—until artificial intelligence appears. “The ability to create idols (artificial systems),” as Keiki Haniyasushin’s profile in the supplementary text to Wily Beast and Weakest Creature puts it:21 this is the human intelligence that “artificial intelligence” imitates, the source of the special “gift” that makes humanity “the most gifted of all beings.” Physically limited compared with jackals, wolves, tigers, and leopards, humans have conquered other species and become masters of the earth through “an ability of just this kind.”
Artificial intelligence is a human-created, self-organizing system with a degree of creativity. The idea of today’s “Ai-chan,” Kizuna AI, replacing humanity would be laughable. Yet the prospect that a strong AI might one day fundamentally shake human supremacy may not be a fantasy: it is a thought experiment repeated in countless works of science fiction. When humanity loses its position as “the most gifted of all beings,” should humans bow before AI and become the slaves of intelligent machines? Plainly, no one would agree. Yet this creates an ethical dilemma for anthropocentrism. If humanity’s conquest of “animals” is legitimate, then the conquest of humanity by a still higher artificial intelligence must naturally be legitimate too. If humans may trample on the dignity of “animals” at will, what grounds will we have for complaint when AI tramples on us?
Wily Beast and Weakest Creature is precisely a distorting mirror that reverses today’s anthropocentric distribution of power. Ingeniously adapting the Buddhist cosmology of the Ten Worlds, ZUN sets the game in the Animal Realm on hell’s edge, making its “animal spirits,” “human spirits,” and idols—clay figures buried with humans—the protagonists behind the scenes. The true cause of the animal-spirit invasion incident is an “Omnic Crisis” that has erupted in the Animal Realm. Animal spirits with natural advantages dominate human spirits with no particular strengths of their own, confining them in the “Primate Garden” for their amusement. But bringing the human spirits together produces a peculiar “chemical reaction”: they create a new religion and summon an idol-god of creation. The idol-god protects them, creates an army of clay figures with “neither flesh nor soul,” drives out the animal spirits, and becomes the Animal Realm’s new ruler.
By this point, the triangular arrangement of animals, humans, and artificial intelligence has largely emerged. The “Animal Realm” bordering Buddhist hell is merely ZUN’s ingenious sleight of hand. Animal spirits and human spirits plainly correspond to “animals” and “humans.” To mislead the audience, ZUN deliberately reverses their real-world positions and circumstances. The metaphor of the “Primate Garden” plainly extends beyond the zoo to any place where others and alien peoples are toyed with or imprisoned: ancient Roman arenas, for instance, or Nazi concentration camps. The “idols,” meanwhile, allude to the clay figures used in burial and ritual in Japan’s Jōmon period—artifacts sent into the world of the dead.22 The masterstroke is that clay figures and artificial intelligence share the same material basis: silicon. Crossing space and time, silicon becomes a thread in the character design that joins antiquity to the present.
“The strong prey on the weak” is a recurring phrase in Wily Beast and Weakest Creature. In the game’s Music Room, for instance, ZUN comments on “Beast Metropolis,” the theme of the stage-five boss, the clay soldier Mayumi:23
“In the Animal Realm, there is only one truth: the strong prey on the weak. Economic success matters above all; individual thought is not respected. Individual feelings are nothing but an obstacle in a rationalized society.”
This also lays bare the operating logic of those two terrifying historical anthropological machines for manufacturing “nonhumans,” Nazi Germany and imperial Japan: rule by “superior peoples” over “inferior peoples,” even genocide, is economically efficient and rational for humanity as a whole; victory for the emperor’s ruling clique matters above all, and the individual lives of those at the bottom may be sacrificed.
“The strong prey on the weak” is the “cage of reason” anthropocentrism fits around humanity. It seems reasonable but is narrow and unsustainable. Just as AI is beginning to challenge human intelligence, the strong are never strong in every respect, and the throne of “the most gifted of all beings” is not eternal. Strength in one respect alone cannot carry us through every predicament—one of the lessons of Kemono Friends, too. If we blindly pursue one-sided superiority and trample the so-called “weak,” we will only sink into an endless abyss of enslaving and being enslaved, preying and being preyed upon. This is the “hellscape” depicted in Wily Beast and Weakest Creature: the animal spirits imprison human spirits in the “Primate Garden,” only to be driven from their own home by the Garden’s runaway “army of intelligent machines.” Those animal spirits tasting the bitter fruits of their own actions are humanity itself, reflected in the distorting mirror.
Conclusion
The philosophical meaning of the “animal” is humanity’s absolute other: a living being different from us. Thinking about animal others also prompts us to think about further forms of otherness: how we treat people, peoples, cultures, and ideologies different from our own, and how we establish harmonious, mutually beneficial relations with them—“friendship.” Yet human friendship, whether toward animals or toward ourselves, is both a beautiful ideal and an elusive illusion. From the God Warrior dispensing violent judgment to Keiki, friendly and accepting of difference, even the gods humanity makes—artificial intelligences—have supplied no answer.
Yurikuma Arashi unfolds its friendship in the manner of a fairy tale, ultimately attributing it to the grace of a god, Bear Maria. That the animal girls’ friendship in Japari’s ruins is built upon humanity’s apocalypse is already a tremendous irony. Yet if we removed the Ceruleans, that “safety valve” regulating the park’s ecology, would its political ecology change at a stroke? We do not know.
Just as Wily Beast and Weakest Creature begins with war and ends with war, Heisei’s “animal” stories either hold out an empty promise of friendship or dump a baffling mess in the audience’s lap. Only Miyazaki has his “winged savior” Nausicaä destroy the existing structure of power, as a sign that his youthful fire has not died. Miyazaki slunk away from real-world student protest with his tail between his legs; ZUN, as always, leaves the players to carry on the story. Yet we cannot accuse these Heisei creators of cowardice in “entrusting the world to idols”24—letting gods answer our questions and heroes lead us into the future—because the “animal question” really is difficult to answer. Neither gods nor artificial intelligence know the answer. Perhaps only by meeting animals’ gaze can we slowly come to understand.
Publication Information
The Autumn 2020 issue of the game-culture research journal Touhou Cultural Studies will soon be on sale. Follow the journal’s column for updates.
