This essay was a prizewinner at the Rags Drum 2021 Eve Festival; it originally appeared on Bilibili.
This essay was first published in the Spring 2020 issue of the doujin journal Touhou Culture Journal (《东方文化学刊》); the Bilibili edition adds extra illustrations.
Introduction
In every age and every land, in refined art and popular art, among mortals and saints alike, the “animal” has been a wellspring of material for human creation—something like a cure-all elixir. From the bronzes of the Shang and Zhou to the murals of ancient Egypt, from Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West to Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa, from Fujiko Fujio’s Doraemon to Hypergryph’s Arknights, humanity has conquered and enslaved “animals” while at the same time admiring them—even growing infatuated with them, worshipping them.
Beginning with the cave paintings, humanity’s “derivative creation” of animals has branched into many postures, yet it can be reduced to two basic types: “the animalization of the human” and “the humanization of the animal.” Journey to the West is a thoroughly typical case of the former: the pilgrimage to the West is in truth a “rite of passage” in which master and disciples, guided by the Buddha’s teaching, purge themselves of their own “animality.” But “animality” does not always carry only a negative sense. The folk legend of “Kōga Saburō”1 from Japan’s Suwa region belongs to “the animalization of the human”: Kōga Saburō turns from man into serpent, and thereby gains the serpent’s “divinity.”
The shaman-priests of high antiquity opened the road to heaven by playing the animal; under the drive of modern capital, animal-play has awakened a strange disposition of its own: cat ears have become the secret weapon by which women on both sides of the screen capture otaku hearts, and lately you can even “order a rabbit” at a café. Without question, “animality” has entered the grand “database” of contemporary popular culture, hybridizing with its various elements into “new-old” cultural commodities that circulate busily in today’s symbolic exchange.
Seen from this angle, there has never been a pure “animal” in humanity’s “derivative creation” of animals, for once a thing passes through human imagination and human distinction-drawing, whatever evolves out the other end has inevitably taken on a human shape—which is one reason some speak of “the animal that therefore I am.”2 In our mental life, scientific research aside, “human” and “animal” have always been a pair of existences that project onto and mirror one another; we tend to measure and second-guess animals by human standards and human states of mind—whether animals have feelings, whether animals have rights, and so on. Contemporary philosophy’s greatest rediscovery of the “animal” is this: the distinction between human and animal is often no mere practice of scientific inquiry but the construction of a cultural order charged with intense political meaning. Researchers attuned to the construction of power relations—scholars of cultural studies—point out that from the moment the boundary was drawn, human and animal have not been equals but have been set into a hierarchical structure of rights; and that the human–animal boundary is nothing like scientific classification, strict and difficult to revise, but floating and changeable. On the one hand, humanity calls for animal rights and grants animals (a measure of) “human rights”; on the other, in certain special circumstances (war, natural disaster), humans too can be stripped of their “human rights” and reduced to “animals” to be enslaved and slaughtered. Some hold, further, that the myths of superior and inferior peoples so widespread in the modern era, propelled by an Industrial Revolution bent on “the human conquest of nature,” can all trace their social-psychological roots to the ancient “yin-yang diagram” of human (soul) and animal (flesh); so-called Western-centrism, or China’s Hua–Yi thinking of civilized center and barbarian margin, are but variants of “man is the spirit of all things.” Yet even now that “anthropological machines”3 like the Nazis, built upon superiority and the lust to dominate, have been destroyed by the “righteous way,” the stubborn diseases that mock the ideal of equality—iron-curtain politics, patriarchal society, racial discrimination, environmental crisis, religious strife—keep pressing forward wave upon wave, and idealists and artists can only interpellate avenging titans like “Godzilla” to make landfall on the metropolis in print and on screen, fire their beams of destruction, smash evil clean away at a single stroke, and then vest their hopes in the “friendship” that humanity ought to have been capable of all along.
The “animal question” is no idle hand-wringing by animal-protection advocates. Without animals, humanity could hardly have stepped into agricultural society, and learning how to deal with our “companion species” is bound up with humanity’s own fate—the coronavirus that raged in the Year of the Rat, for instance, had to do with human arrogance toward animals, and the infected, in a cold-blooded modern society, themselves became animalized “bare life.”
We who grew up at the turn of the millennium are a generation raised within the acculturation of Heisei Japan, and the creators of Heisei never lacked deep reflection on the “animal question.” The bibulous Jun’ya Ōta has taken for his motto “curse another and you dig two graves,” a Japanese proverb whose sense resembles “perishing by one’s own sorcery” or “spinning the cocoon that binds oneself.” In the many “animal” stories of Heisei we shall see that the “animal” is indeed a funhouse mirror reflecting human destiny: how humans regard animals is tied to their own fate. This is also why Derrida held that “we gaze at animals, and animals gaze back at us.” Let us look, then, at how the manga and anime artists of the Heisei era handled this question.
The Sea of Corruption and the Ohmu: An Artificial Ecosystem for Purifying the Human Race
The anime and manga artists who reflected most deeply on the “animal question” were surely the Shōwa generation (December 1926 – January 1989), baptized by war before Heisei (1989–2019) began. Having witnessed with their own eyes how human beings are reduced to “animals” inside the war machine, they became the mentors and the conscience of postwar Japanese animation and manga. Hayao Miyazaki (1941–) began his long manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind—the story of a girl’s friendship with vast alien creatures—at the end of Shōwa (1982) and laid down his pen at the beginning of Heisei (1994); it stands as one of that generation’s representative reflections on the “animal question.”
The “animal protagonists” of Nausicaä are the insect swarms and the fungi. After the “Seven Days of Fire,” the world war that destroyed human civilization, the Sea of Corruption—the ecosystem they compose—expands relentlessly across the earth, eating away at the space in which humans can live; humanity clings to survival at the edges of the insect kingdom while slaughtering itself over the land that remains.
The “human–animal spectrum” of Nausicaä, ordered from “human” down to “nonhuman,” is remarkably crowded: Torumekians, Doroks, Wormhandlers, the Forest People, the Heedra,5 the God Warriors, the Ohmu, the slime molds, the insect-fodder trees, and more. What is more, in Nausicaä’s wasteland world there exists no “pure,” “authentic” humanity at all: the humans who survived the Seven Days of Fire had, through bioengineering, remade their own bodies to suit the wasteland environment, designed the environment-transforming artificial ecosystem called the “Sea of Corruption,” and launched an unprecedented project to purify the earth. In this sense, every being who appears in Nausicaä—up to and including the “winged” savior Nausicaä herself—is a “nonhuman,” an “animalized life.”
Interestingly, the Sea of Corruption project was never a mere scientific undertaking to purify the environment; it was also a vast political program to purify the human race.
Under the arrangements of the purification project’s designers, every species outside the Crypt of Shuwa exists to serve the project: the insect tribes so “noble” in Nausicaä’s eyes; the descendants of the old humanity—Torumekians, Doroks, the people of the Valley of the Wind, the Wormhandlers, the Forest People who withdrew into the Sea of Corruption’s depths to live alongside the insects; and the artificial life-forms called “Heedra,” endowed with superhuman strength or immense intelligence. All of them are “bare life,”6 stripped of “political life” (of the “right to exist,” for example). In the finale, Nausicaä demands of the intelligent Heedra that forms the Crypt’s nerve center (the “Master of the Crypt”): “Do you really mean to deceive those already slated for destruction? For however much knowledge and technology you supply, the world’s resurrection will still require slaves, will it not?” The Crypt of Shuwa, administered by a colossal biological artificial intelligence, is the “general headquarters” of the entire purification plan. Wielding the lost old civilization’s technologies (above all biotechnology) as its bargaining chips, the Master of the Crypt (the artificial intelligence) intervenes in politics, manipulates wars, and seeks out and grooms its own agents so as to control the whole of wasteland human society, “remaking” the surviving old humans into fleshly “machine-slaves” as obedient to the purification plan as the Heedra. The indestructible Crypt, crystallization of the old civilization’s technology, is not only the administrator of the Sea of Corruption’s biotechnical system; it is also the womb of the “new humanity.” Preserved within it are the embryos of the “new humans” designed by the purification plan’s founders. Remade in “body” (in gene), the new humans will not only be adapted to the earth’s environment once the plan is complete; they will be a race more “intelligent” and more “docile” than the ignorant, brutal, rapacious old humanity. The plan’s completion will mark the extinction of the old race and the birth of the new: unable to adapt to the new terrestrial environment, the old humans will simply vomit blood and die upon the “pure blue land” at the Sea of Corruption’s end, concluding their instrumental mission together with the Sea itself. Seen from this angle, the Sea of Corruption ecosystem is, in the most literal sense, a gigantic organic “anthropological machine” for purifying the race.
Viewed through humanist eyes, what a magnificent “Human Instrumentality Project” this is: the designers of the purification plan were themselves part of the old humanity that polluted the world and quarreled without end; in an age of despair and chaos they gathered an elite of intellect and designed for the old humanity a “road of atonement” thick with tribulation, planning, at its far end, to summon the dawn of a newborn race with the twilight of their own. Yet Nausicaä flatly rejected this “road of light and hope” that the Master of the Crypt held out, because she saw through the arrogance behind the so-called plan of atonement. Old humanity or new, the purifiers of the old civilization were still proclaiming humanity’s standing as the central subject of the world; styling themselves creators, they treated life (subjects) as implements (objects) to be remade or abolished at will. The Master of the Crypt’s technologies of artificial life became the war-accelerants of the wasteland age—Heedra super-soldiers, infant-Ohmu decoys, the all-devouring giant venomous slime mold and other biological weapons were taken up by wasteland humanity to repay grievance with grievance, and the ceaseless wars of the old humanity’s descendants were themselves a preordained stage of the “road of atonement,” for they greatly accelerated the Sea of Corruption’s expansion and the old race’s extinction.
The purifiers also sought, through the technologies of life, to forge a “perfect new race” possessing one essential attribute that would set it apart from animals, artificial organisms, machines, old humans, and every other nonhuman existence: a “humanity” composed of intelligence, benevolence, and kindred qualities—what the Master of the Crypt calls the “light of life.” Nausicaä punctured the emptiness of this “perfect life,” because the warmth that cares for the other and the wisdom to coexist with the other—“humanity”—was never a natural attribute determined by genes; it is constructed in interaction with the other, just as Nausicaä comes to understand through her dealings with the insects: “the Ohmu’s compassion and friendship were born from the abyss of nothingness.” The designers of a purification plan meant to exterminate the old humans could not possibly have designed the insects who guard the Sea of Corruption as a species able to coexist with humanity; and yet across their long evolution the Ohmu of Nausicaä’s day showed a warmth that accepted human beings, and the Sea’s ecosystem even took in human residents, the swarms sharing their eggs as food with these “Forest People.” By contrast, the old humans in their endless campaigns could not achieve “friendship” even with their own kind—yet in the thousand-year collision of the Sea of Corruption with the human world, the Ohmu, chieftains of the Sea, formed a friendship with a human girl, and from the swarm’s once-empty instrumental shell there welled up friendship toward humans: the Levinasian “welcome of the infinitely alien other” (Emmanuel Lévinas, 1906–1995). Humans cannot pity one another, yet “animals” can pity humans. For purifiers who defame human “stupidity,” “greed,” “cruelty,” and “belligerence” as animality (bestiality) to be liquidated from “humanity,” and who on that basis manufacture nonhumans within the human race, this is irony aimed straight at the mark.
But facing a world sliding toward extinction, if the purifiers’ “road of atonement” will not serve, where is humanity to turn? Nausicaä’s answer lies in “companion species.” To put it plainly, the root of human civilization’s crisis in Nausicaä is that humanity “doesn’t know how to make friends”—it cannot, as an equal or even from below, welcome the alien existences (the others) within humanity and in the natural world; and the root of that lies in the anthropocentric worldview: humanity, ever gazing down from on high, uses the “anthropological machine” to produce the human and the nonhuman (the animal), splitting the world in two by “the measure of man.”
In the post-structuralist scholarship on the “animal question,” Donna Jeanne Haraway (1944–) deconstructed the anthropocentric dichotomy of human and nonhuman and reconstructed it as the pluralist relation of “companion species” between species and species. In The Companion Species Manifesto,8 setting out from a case study of one of the animals closest to humankind—the dog—Haraway reveals the two-way relation in which human and dog (“animal”) are each other’s companion species, mutually shaping and jointly evolving. In Haraway’s eyes, the relation between humans and “animals” is not the oppositional, one-way relation of subject and object—gazing and gazed upon, taming and tamed, enslaving and enslaved—but a friend-like relation of “dialogue” between species on equal footing. The world does not contain merely the two species “human” and “nonhuman”; humanity is one small member among the universe’s myriad species, interwoven with the others in complex relations, living together and evolving together—we “gaze” at animals, and animals “gaze” back at us.
In Nausicaä, the creatures of the Sea of Corruption are at once the apocalyptic envoys who devour human civilization and the “companion species” who bring humanity hope, as Nausicaä says in refuting the Master of the Crypt: “Living things change! The Ohmu, the slime molds, the grasses and trees, human beings—all of them change! We too can achieve symbiosis with the Sea of Corruption”; “We are birds who, though we may vomit blood again and again, will yet fly on beyond that day.” Though the road of coexistence is steep with peril, humanity and the Sea of Corruption will, across a long dialogue, constitute one another and evolve together—from the abyssal emptiness in the hearts of the Ohmu, instrumental lives, there welled up a kindness that pities humans; and humanity, once it breaks the human-centered humanist spell, can likewise learn, in its dealings with the Sea of Corruption’s creatures, the true “friendship” that welcomes the “absolutely alien.”
The showdown between the Master of the Crypt and Nausicaä at the end of Nausicaä may be called a brilliant clash between humanism and posthumanism—“strive and refine, exalt design” against “stay humble, allow the hybrid.” At the crossroads of human destiny Nausicaä chose “companion species”; which is to say, Miyazaki chose posthumanism. Yet the insect swarm that engulfs human civilization is only one of the many posthumanist “great tsunamis” Miyazaki has imagined. From the phosphorescent giant of Princess Mononoke to the deluge of Ponyo, Miyazaki on the one hand prostrates himself in worship before the “animal other,” and on the other strikes glancing blows at the unilateralist arrogance of human self-centeredness. Nausicaä may be called a product of the Cold War’s shadow: the “Seven Days of Fire” that destroys human civilization alludes to thermonuclear war in its ultimate form, and the wasteland’s politics likewise divides into two camps, the Western-styled Torumekia and the Eastern-styled Dorok, while the Valley of the Wind—a small state on the Sea of Corruption’s border, in vassalage to Torumekia—is the mirror image of Japan under American occupation. In the two camps’ never-ending conflict, humanity’s mutual slaughter stands in stark contrast with the insects’ friendship. War, annihilator of humanity, is the highest form of the “anthropological machine”: in war, everyone is demoted to a nonhuman existence—either a tool in the service of the war machine or an “animal” butchered by it.
Modern society gave birth to the two most terrifying “anthropological machines” in human history—Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan—shattering Western society’s humanist myth of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and prompting many scholars to rethink “modernity,” that engine of humanism, from the standpoint of the “animal question.” But once the reflection was done, what new program could be offered?
It was against this Cold War background that Derrida set the “animal” and the “friend” on humanity’s politico-philosophical agenda, and that the generation of Japanese manga-and-anime masters who had witnessed the “anthropological machine” during the Second World War brought forth their own animal protagonists and had them carry the banner of posthumanism—Miyazaki’s Nausicaä and Porco Rosso, Osamu Tezuka’s The Jungle Emperor and Phoenix, Fujiko F. Fujio’s many Doraemon short stories and feature-length adventures.9 These “animal friend” works of the Cold War and its final years mostly took their stand on the relation between human and animal, exposing—in drama plainspoken yet rich in imagination—human conceit and arrogance amid hot and cold wars and environmental pollution, and offering as their answer a “friendship” that, however fragile, deserves wholehearted nurture, though it is hard to say how far it could ever be realized in this world.
By comparison, the “animal friend” works of our post–Cold War present, such as Yurikuma Arashi and Kemono Friends, have lost that tension of thermonuclear war forever on the verge of breaking out, and write the story of humans and animals instead in a gentler, more parable-like form.
The Girl Who Turns into a Bear and “Love for the Other”
Kunihiko Ikuhara (1964–), trained in the stage arts, crossed over into animation from another field, as Miyazaki did, and secured his place in the industry with the learning of his original discipline. His career as an anime director unfolded in earnest only with the coming of Heisei; his directed works are few but fine, intensely personal in style, and nearly all of them became representative works of Heisei animation. Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997), which he directed, is regarded alongside Neon Genesis Evangelion (1998) as the twin pillars of anime in the bubble economy’s fin de siècle. A close buddy of Hideaki Anno, father of Eva, he may fairly be counted among the anime artists who represent mid-Heisei. Yurikuma Arashi (2015) was the second time, after Mawaru Penguindrum (2011), that he turned his gaze toward the “animal.”
The theme of Yurikuma Arashi is a familiar literary armature: love across species against a background of opposing camps. The black bear Ginko, with the help of the brown bear Lulu, crosses the “Wall of Severance,” transforms into a human, and pursues the “kiss of true love” from her childhood human playmate Kureha; and the opposition of bear and human, predator and prey, makes the love of Ginko and Kureha the focal conflict of the whole series.10 Ikuhara depicts two types of “love” in the series: one founded on “sameness,” the other founded on “alterity.” The former essentially maps the Western “friendship” Derrida deconstructs in The Politics of Friendship11—starting from the “self,” it recognizes those who resemble me as friends while excluding those alien to me as enemies. In the series, this friendship of “fellows” is contracted and maintained by an “anthropological machine” called the “Exclusion Ceremony”:
“Friends are the most important thing. It is for friends that we gather here. Those who deny our friendship are the vilest of all. Those who leave us are not friends. Those who do not keep in step with us are troublemakers. Those who cannot read the room are villains. And now is the moment to exclude the evil ones.”
The alien-excluding “oath of friendship” (above), the standardized equipment (uniforms, hunting rifles, and phones), an electronic “ostracism,”12 and a bureaucratic hierarchy of class president, ordinary students, and “bad students” (evildoers) make the Arashigaoka (“Wuthering Heights”) Girls’ Academy resemble a miniature modern regime purging its heretics, turning the school’s “misfits” into objects disciplined and dominated by a discourse of “friendship” that pursues “sameness” (of race, sex, thought, and the rest).
In sharp contrast with this “fellow” friendship built upon exteriority (an institution for excluding the alien) stand the love “across alterity” between Kureha’s mother Reia and the golden bear Yuriika (Kureha’s teacher), and between Kureha and Ginko, as well as the resistance to the “Exclusion Ceremony” (also called, in the series, the “Invisible Storm”) mounted by Sumika (Kureha’s classmate), the human avatar of the bear Kumaria. As the transcendent being of the series, Kumaria is at once the point of origin of the human–bear opposition—she made the bears evolve into intelligent creatures and granted some of them the power to take human form—and the spiritual leader who preaches coexistence and mutual love between human and bear across their difference. Her avatar Sumika became the second bosom friend of Kureha’s life, after Kureha’s childhood parting from Ginko in her bear form. When Sumika learned that Kureha, through Yuriika’s scheming, had been designated the next victim of the “Exclusion Ceremony,” she made herself the “heretic,” shielded Kureha with her own life from the “muzzle” of political persecution, and guided Kureha toward her true “friend,” Ginko. Through her ursine avatar—the presiding judge of the Severance Court—Kumaria “interrogates” Ginko, Kureha, and the others again and again: “Have you understood what real love is?” (あなたの好きは本物？). What, then, is the “real love” of which Kumaria speaks?
Kumaria interprets true “friendship” through “The Moon Girl and the Forest Girl,” the fairy tale that Reia—her agent in the human world—wrote for her daughter Kureha. In the tale, forest and moon stand respectively for the world of bears and the world of humans; the two girls, sealed off in opposing camps, must pass the test of God (Kumaria)—only by shattering the “I” in the mirror can they finally meet and seal a true friendship. “Shattering the mirror,” of course, is a metaphor, like “moon” and “forest”: what the girl shatters is no mere physical reflection but a Lacanian narcissistic “ego.” Human beings construct the concept of self in the process of reflexivity (“looking in the mirror”), and the reflexivity of the “ego” gives rise to a “for-me” subject that conquers and possesses the other. Not only am I determined by this subject-reflection called “I”; other people and other things are likewise determined according to it—in the reflexive process, the “sameness” of “I” with myself is extended into the “sameness” of the “other” with me.
For Levinas, the “sameness” of the “other” with me means that the “other” is a mutation of me—an “alter ego” separated from me—and the “alter ego” must in the end return to me, which issues in the subject’s conquest, control, and possession of the “other.” It was precisely under Levinas’s inspiration that Derrida deconstructed the master–slave relation of exploitation implicit in Western “friendship.” In Yurikuma Arashi, the other’s regression into “sameness” with the self is displayed through the transformation of bodies. Kureha, the “Moon Girl” of reality, did not at first dare to shatter the “self in the mirror”: as a child she suffered “political persecution” (bullying by her peers) for her companionship with a black bear, and so she wished to Kumaria that the black bear Ginko be turned into a human like herself. But she formed no true friendship with Ginko for it; instead she forgot Ginko completely—because, quite plainly, a self-centered “love” in pursuit of “sameness” is not the answer Kumaria hopes for: the exploitative relation of “self” to “other” does not lead to true “friendship.” The “Forest Girl” Ginko, by contrast, conquered her own “body” (the desire to devour humans), renounced her identity as a bear, and with a human “face” pursued Kureha’s “kiss of true love”—and so Kumaria, through the Severance Court, affirmed Ginko’s “love” time and again.
In the finale of Yurikuma Arashi, Kureha, as a human, admits before the Severance Court her own “self-centered” arrogance—that by turning Ginko into her own kind she had “controlled” and “possessed” her. She makes her wish to Kumaria once more, and this time the “Moon Girl” at last shatters the “self” in the mirror, breaks the solipsism of “fellow friendship,” and becomes able to “face the other”: at the ceremony in which humans exclude bears (the human trial of Ginko), Kureha turns from human into bear and seals the “kiss of true love” with Ginko, who has taken human form, realizing what Kumaria calls true “friendship”—the Levinasian “love for the other.” By becoming a bear, Kureha deconstructs her own subjectivity and renounces the self’s possession of and dominion over Ginko; in a gesture of “ceding place,” she turns friendship from “centered on the human (self)” toward “centered on the bear (other),” making herself the other’s “hostage.” Kureha steps forward before the human muzzle trained on Ginko and, with an infinite “sense of responsibility,” makes her unhesitating “response” to Ginko’s love, completing together with the humanized Ginko an immanent “friendship” built upon the two-way deconstruction of “self” by human and bear alike.
In the “love for the other” between Kureha and Ginko, and between Ginko and Lulu, the subjectivity of human and bear is made manifest not in mutual domination between subjects—the possession of one’s own kind, the exclusion of the alien (Ginko leaving Sumika to die without aid; Lulu attempting to exclude Kureha, her “rival in love”)—but in mutual giving between others (Kureha becoming a bear; Lulu taking a bullet for Ginko). For Levinas, only by giving for the other can I become a true “self.” The friendship produced by the “Exclusion Ceremony” loves the “fellow,” which is really to love “oneself”; the essence of “fellow friendship” is human narcissism. Ginko’s becoming human and Kureha’s becoming bear tear down the “Wall of Severance” between “self” and “other,” turn the “self” into the “other,” and join “loving oneself” with “loving another”—only thus is true “friendship” sealed.13
From “Animal Girls in the Zoo” to “Animal Friends”
Tatsuki (Tatsuki Omoto; birth year not made public), famous for “animals,” belongs to the millennial cohort of Heisei anime creators and is one of those who represent Heisei’s final years. “Decadence” and “animal” are a pair of intertextual keywords for late Heisei, echoing the two elements that dominate today’s Japan—a bureaucratic establishment bowing and scraping to America, and an economy stagnant as a dead pond—and presenting a corporate-drone culture overgrown with weeds.
For the millennials of mid-to-late Heisei, the last century’s war of aggression is no more than a distant, blurry historical memory. Just as Miyazaki’s mentality shifted subtly from Shōwa to Heisei—from “left” to “drawing a clear line against the left”—the hot blood of postwar Shōwa’s student-movement youth, who raised Mao Zedong’s banner high, fought the Anpo struggles, and occupied the University of Tokyo, had long since ebbed away. For Heisei’s corporate drones and drones-in-waiting, modern society is wretched and beyond resisting; but at least it lets me pass through the screen into another world’s harem of tender comfort and form bonds with animal wives unbound by the strictures of the world—on those terms, an “animal life” enslaved and domesticated by “society” is still just about livable. Amid this shift of social mentality from the “men of Shōwa” to the “washed-up otaku of Heisei,” the awe-inspiring, noble, gigantic alien creatures of Miyazaki’s early-Heisei apocalyptic epic became, in the casual mobile games of Heisei’s end, pint-sized, dim-witted, adorable animal girls kept for the corporate drone’s amusement. Such was the background of the age against which Tatsuki created the anime Kemono Friends.
Kemono Friends, embraced with wild enthusiasm by the young in 2017, made Tatsuki’s name at a stroke; and yet neither “animal girl” nor “zoo” was an especially presentable word in Heisei culture. The “animal girl” is an existence stitched together from the features of human women and the features of animals, with the human female features predominant, so that viewers still recognize the “animal girl” as a kind of human woman. The Bunny Girl, the representative form of the “animal girl,” has become almost a byword for the erotic culture that caters to men; the deep structure behind most “animal girls” written by male culture is the animalization and pet-ification of women—that is, a mentality of enslaving and dominating them. As for the “zoo,” that ceremonial arch of anthropocentrism, as early as Foucault’s Discipline and Punish it had already become a metaphor for the hidden power structure of human society. Kemono Friends, however, stands opposed to all of this—for its zoo is already broken walls and rubble beneath the human apocalypse.
Levinas, whom we met above, criticized the hegemony of subjectivity that had reigned since Descartes—“the world revolves around me”—and constructed a new ethical subject that is “responsible for the other,” opening a road toward the dissolution of anthropocentrism. Levinas’s theory of the other converts the “animal question” of how to dissolve anthropocentrism into the question of how to construct the “animal other.” Yet on the “animal question” itself, Levinas did not believe the animal could be an other, because animals are “present” around human needs—they are merely tools for human use, objects for human pleasure, or objects of human aesthetic appreciation. Levinas’s view of animals may be taken as an epitome of humanity’s “self”-centered discursive system of animal philosophy.14 In The Animal That Therefore I Am, setting out from a personal experience—“meeting his cat in the bathroom”—Derrida attempts to deconstruct the anthropocentrism of the traditional discursive system by constructing the animal as a Levinasian “other” of absolute difference.15
Seen from this angle, the “animal friends” depicted in Japanese popular culture reflect precisely the construction of the “animal other,” and Nausicaä, Yurikuma Arashi, and Kemono Friends each construct a different mode of bodily discourse for that “animal other.” In Miyazaki’s eyes, the animal’s body is the very vehicle of its nobility, and so the animal others of his pen are animal forms wholly heterogeneous to the human. Ikuhara deconstructs the narcissistic “mirror-self” in the bodily “exchange” between human and bear, and so his animal others acquire a purely human “face.” The “animal girls” of Kemono Friends, by contrast, are a “mixture,” a “hybrid,” of human and animal bodies—and this intermediate, half-human-half-beast bodily discourse of the “animal other” is among the most fashionable cultural modes in Japanese popular culture today.
The animal girl’s two-facedness—human and beast—determines the multiple possibilities of her discourse analysis. On the one hand, the “animal girl” is “the same” as the human: the overwhelming majority of viewers identify the essence of the “animal girl” as “a cute girl,” her animal features becoming instead “moe elements” upon her. Are we, then, wallowing in the image of the human body reflected back at us from the “animal girl”—like Kureha wishing to turn Ginko human—accomplishing “dominion” over the other through the other’s return to the “self”? On the other hand, the “animal girl” is “different” from the human: every “animal girl” in Kemono Friends springs from a different species, and each animal seems to have exactly one “animal girl” individual, so that every “animal girl” preserves her own singularity. Like Derrida’s coinage “animot,”16 they are not the “individual”-less animals of the dinner table and the slaughterhouse but, like the people around us, each one a unique living subject.
Levinas’s ethical subject is a subject determined by the “other”—the other is a being higher than I; I exist because of the other; my subjectivity is made manifest in my belonging to the other. For the human protagonist Kaban (“Kaban-chan”), “the animals she meets and interacts with on her journey are all keys to helping Kaban-chan learn ‘what animal she herself is.’”17 Japari Park is a society of others that “gladly receives the alien”: skills such as swimming, flying, burrowing, and hunting set the various “animal girls” apart from one another, and at the same time become the ground of their cooperation and of their appreciation of each other. They never shut out Kaban for having no specialty of her own; on the contrary, it is precisely in her dealings with these many skilled “animal others” that Kaban constructs her own being—the “world-forming” human of whom Heidegger speaks.
In this sense there exist no “animal girls” in any “zoo” in Kemono Friends, for both the Foucauldian “zoo” (the machine of power) with which human society manufactures nonhumans and disciplines and punishes bodies,18 and the Lacanian “animal girl” (the narcissistic projection) that humanity erects in its mirror, were long ago buried by Tatsuki, together with anthropocentrism, beneath the ruins of the apocalypse. Just as the idiom of the Japari ruins’ inhabitants contains no “animal girl,” only the single word “Friend,” so Kemono Friends holds only “animal others” who, precisely in humanity’s absence, call out again and again for love for the other.19
Artificial-Intelligence Idols and the “Heisei Character” of the “Animal Question”
ZUN (1977–) reads omnivorously and dearly loves allusion as a creative method, and the Touhou Project series has accordingly taken on the cultural function of period retrospect and summation—it may be regarded as a weathervane of Japanese Heisei popular culture. “Heisei” has ended, and we have greeted the new era of “Reiwa”; Touhou Kikeijuu ~ Wily Beast and Weakest Creature, which appeared in Reiwa’s first year, inevitably carries something of a “spirit of the age,” looking back on Heisei and ahead to Reiwa. Its story turns on the entanglements of three great powers in Hell—the “animal (spirits),” the “human (spirits),” and the “clay figures”—unfolding before us an ingeniously conceived period mirror of the Heisei “animal question.”
As said above, the “animal question” is one that humanity has pondered from antiquity to the present; the “animal” theories that reflect on modernity—the anthropological machine, love of the other—were proposed well before Heisei, bear the strong historical stamp of early industrial society, and were criticized and inherited by postindustrial Heisei culture. We have found a “Shōwa character” in some of Heisei’s “animal” works; does a “Heisei character” of the “animal question” exist, and if it does, where is it?
In Heisei, humanity entered the “screen society”: nearly everyone can connect to the network anytime, anywhere, through a screen carried on their person, and the ubiquity of screens and sensors created big data, which in turn drove the development of artificial intelligence. What today’s artificial intelligence can accomplish remains quite limited, but AlphaGo’s rout of the world’s go players forced humanity to admit that even inorganic electronic circuits can, in certain respects, erupt with a “creativity” surpassing the human. What, then, does artificial intelligence have to do with the “animal question”?
Artificial intelligence and the animal: two topics seemingly a hundred thousand miles apart, yet in fact intimately related. For the development of artificial intelligence has shaken the foundations of anthropocentrism and blurred the boundary between the human and the “animal.” Where exactly does the difference between human and animal lie? Pascal said, “Man is a thinking reed”; Engels said, “Labor created man.” In other words, the human is a living being able freely to create artificial systems (thinking and laboring both belong to this process), and “creativity” is humanity’s most distinctive “intelligence” within the bounds of the earth. Termites build “cities,” apes make “tools,” wolf packs have their own “society”—but these seemingly non-natural systems are static, wanting in creativity; their designs are already encoded complete in these species’ genetic sequences, difficult to alter, and in the end they cannot escape elimination by natural selection. On earth, only human cities, tools, and societies have gone on developing and evolving of their own accord—until the appearance of artificial intelligence. “The ability to create idols (artificial systems), to a certain degree” (so runs the profile of Keiki Haniyasushin in the documentation bundled with Wily Beast): this is precisely the kind of human intelligence that “artificial intelligence” imitates, and the wellspring of the “spirit” in “the spirit of all things.” Compared with jackals, wolves, tigers, and leopards, humans of limited physique conquered the other species and became masters of the earth by virtue of just “this degree of ability.”
Artificial intelligence is a self-organizing system of human creation endowed with a measure of creativity. Granted, the notion of today’s “Ai-chan” (Kizuna AI) replacing humanity would only provoke laughter; but that some strong artificial intelligence will one day thoroughly shake humanity’s position of hegemony is perhaps no idle fantasy—it is a thought experiment that countless works of science fiction have already run again and again. When the human status of “spirit of all things” comes crashing down, ought human beings to stoop before artificial intelligence and become the slaves of intelligent machines? Obviously, no one would consent—and yet here is the ethical dilemma of anthropocentrism: if humanity’s conquest of “animals” is legitimate, then the conquest of humanity by a higher-ranking artificial intelligence is naturally legitimate too; if humans may trample the dignity of “animals” at will, then what complaint can we make when artificial intelligence tramples humanity?
Touhou Kikeijuu ~ Wily Beast and Weakest Creature is exactly such a “funhouse mirror,” inverting the present power configuration of anthropocentrism. Ingeniously adapting the Buddhist worldview of the ten realms, ZUN sets the game’s stage in the Animal Realm on the fringes of Hell, and casts the Animal Realm’s “animal (spirits),” “human (spirits),” and the idols interred alongside humans (the clay figures) as the story’s protagonists behind the scenes. In Wily Beast, the true cause of the animal spirits’ incident-provoking invasion is a “machine-intelligence crisis” that has erupted in the Animal Realm: the animal spirits, holding every inborn advantage, dominated the human spirits, who had nothing else to their name, and shut them into the “Primate Spirit Garden” for their own idle amusement. But the human spirits gathered there produced a marvelous “chemical reaction”: they created a new religion and called down an idol god of creation. The idol god protected the human spirits, created a legion of clay figures “possessing neither flesh nor soul,” drove out the animal spirits, and became the new ruler of the Animal Realm.
By this point in the story, the triangular configuration of animal, human, and artificial intelligence has essentially broken the surface, and the “Animal Realm” bordering the Buddhist Hell is no more than a clever piece of misdirection on ZUN’s part. The animal spirits and human spirits evidently correspond to “animals” and “humans”; to throw his audience off, ZUN deliberately inverted the two sides’ real-world status and situation completely. And the metaphor of the “Primate Spirit Garden” is plainly not confined to the zoo: it extends to every place where others and alien peoples are toyed with and imprisoned—the Roman arena, the Nazi concentration camps. The “idols,” meanwhile, allude to the clay figurines of Japan’s Jōmon period used for burial and ritual—artificial things dispatched to the world after death. The inspired stroke is that the clay figurine and artificial intelligence are built upon one and the same material foundation—silicon. The element silicon crosses time and space, a character-design thread that joins antiquity to the present.
“The strong devour the weak” is a keyword that surfaces repeatedly in Wily Beast. In the game’s Music Room, for instance, ZUN comments as follows on “Beast Metropolis,” the theme of the Stage 5 boss, the clay-figure soldier Mayumi: “In the Animal Realm, the law that the strong devour the weak is the only truth. Economic success matters above all; the individual’s thought commands no respect. In a rationalized society, the individual’s feelings become nothing but an obstacle.” This also speaks the operating principle of those two terrifying anthropological machines for manufacturing “nonhumans” back in the day, the Nazi regime and the imperial state: for “inferior peoples” to be ruled by “superior peoples,” even exterminated, is economical, efficient, and rational for humanity as a whole; the victory of the emperor’s clique is what matters most, and the individual lives of the lowly may be sacrificed.
“The strong devour the weak” is a “cage of rationality” that anthropocentrism has clamped upon humanity itself—plausible on its face, yet narrow and unsustainable. Just as artificial intelligence is beginning to challenge human intelligence, the strong are forever one-sided, and the throne of the “spirit of all things” is not eternal. With one-sided strength alone, we cannot pass through every predicament (this too is one of the lessons Kemono Friends teaches); and if we blindly pursue one-sided strength while trampling the so-called “weak,” we will only sink into the bottomless abyss of enslaving and being enslaved, preying and being preyed upon. This is precisely the “picture of hell” that Wily Beast paints: the animal spirits locked the human spirits into the “Primate Spirit Garden,” only to be driven from their own homeland by the runaway “machine legion” inside it—and those animal spirits, tasting the bitter fruit of their own deeds, are none other than humanity itself, reflected in the funhouse mirror.
Conclusion
The philosophical meaning of the “animal” is humanity’s absolute other: living existence different from the human. Thinking about the animal other also provokes us to think about further othernesses—how we treat people different from ourselves, different peoples, different cultures, different ideologies, and how we build with them harmonious, mutually beneficial relations: that is, “friendship.” Yet human friendship, whether toward animals or toward humanity itself, is at once a beautiful ideal and a vaporous illusion—neither the God Warrior of violent judgment nor Keiki, friendly and tolerant of difference; not even the deity that humans themselves have made (artificial intelligence) has supplied an answer.
The friendship of Yurikuma Arashi rises, turns, and resolves in the manner of a fairy tale, ascribing friendship in the end to the grace of a god (Kumaria). That the animal girls’ friendship in the Japari ruins is founded upon humanity’s apocalypse is already irony enough; and whether removing the Cerulean—that “safety valve” regulating the park’s ecology—would transform the zoo’s political ecology at a stroke, we likewise have no way of knowing.
Just as Wily Beast opens with war and closes with war, Heisei’s “animal” stories either paint a pie in the sky named friendship or leave behind a bewildering mess for the audience to sort out; only Miyazaki let the “winged savior” Nausicaä demolish the established structure of power, as if to show that his youthful blood had not cooled. Miyazaki, in real life, slunk away from the student movement’s struggles with his tail between his legs, and ZUN, as ever, leaves the story for the players to continue—yet we cannot reproach these Heisei creators for cravenly “entrusting the world to an idol,” letting God answer our questions, letting heroes lead us toward the future, because the “animal” question truly is a hard one to answer. It is a question God does not know, nor artificial intelligence either; only in our “mutual gaze” with the animals, perhaps, can we slowly come to grasp it.
Journal Information
The Autumn 2020 issue of the game-culture research journal Touhou Culture Journal will soon go on sale; you are warmly invited to follow the journal’s column.
