Apocalypse Dreams (What Demons Wander My Way)
How WWII shaped contemporary Japanese (and global) media...
Nothing is more unbearable for a New Yorker with somewhere to go than being trapped behind a Sunday driver—a lolly-gagging nowhere-lad oblivious to the cost of slow-moving in a city where time is absolutely money. Obviously this isn’t true exclusively of New York City. Rather, it’s the cadence of any metropolis which has inhabitants traffic its infrastructure the way electrons flow through the closed circuit of a wet-cell battery. Indeed, the city is a battery and the people its charge—and nothing is more disruptive than what halts the flow of that energy, the city’s native rhythm. Broadly speaking, any kind of stuckness we experience, whether behind someone in traffic, shambolic on the sidewalk, or waiting at a counter, is fertile soil for an existential crisis, grounded in one’s subject-position. So I confess this essay has its origins in my own experience of that ennui, in the sundry interactions I have with people on the street and as the owner of a brick-and-mortar bookstore in Flatbush. With what demons and lost souls wander my way.
It’s a post-apocalyptic dreamscape I surreptitiously imagine as at 8 pm on an icy road an SUV slams on its horn (itself impatient as the car ahead of it slows for a red light) and my own impatience with the girl chatting idly on her phone, monopolizing the sidewalk with her inconsequential slowness and wispy maundering. Demons, I think. The demons that possess shitty New York City drivers. The demon of impatience that possessed me trying to pass a person who, I am still convinced, was an NPC in the matrix designed to ruin my evening. Demons that wander into a shop, mouths wide, in search of attention or validation or a story. And I think of the handful of Japanese games that so capably represent what such a landscape, actually void of humanity, would look and feel like—games like the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series where Tokyo is overrun with demons or teeming with faceless masses, vaguely human in appearance, but hollow in every sense necessary for a proper character.
Because it’s the shape of our trauma that informs the color of our griefs that give language to the dark fantasy of our brief and terrified lives. In the case of late 20th century and contemporary Japanese media, the traumas of WWII loom large. Nuclear power and nuclear holocaust are recurring motifs in media of the 50s and onward. And it’s obviously not just Japan whose mid-century national representations are colored by the trauma of war. If, for Japan, the war gashed indelible scars in its self image and ravaged its sense of futurity, then for America WWII was a coming out party. It’s no coincidence that post-war American action and adventure films, whether they’re explicitly about the war or implicitly (ex. Avengers: End Game, Die Hard), see us playing the hero, the liberating force of a global or large-scale threat. We love it. We can’t get enough of it. We hide behind it as we continue to commit atrocities, plucking the nerve of nostalgia to galvanize citizens of fighting age to vanquish evil once more and for all time.
In 1950s Japan, we witness the birth of the kaiju, Gojira, and a rise in popularity of manga influenced by the allied occupation. We also get international/collaborative films like Hiroshima mon amour. By the 1980s we see a boom in animated films and shows (anime) and video games that, some forty+ years later, still bear profound traces of that historical wound. And in the 21st century, with a rapidly aging population and a country increasingly treated as little more than a tourist destination, representation seems to have shifted toward the uncanny of the (un)natural disaster (ex: Junji Ito’s Uzumaki).
To imagine oneself in a post-apocalyptic environ is to imagine oneself the lone survivor, the only one you can trust. It’s also, against the depersonalization that can happen in a bustling metropolis, a subcutaneous wish for quiet, for the selfishness of space in a place where it is not given freely. Home Alone is, in this sense, a quintessential 90s era American entry in the post-apocalyptic genre.
Representations of the apocalyptic can also signify the structural demise of ideology, the architecture of its promise in literal ruins. An afterlife distinctly other from paradise. Invariably, some form of limbo. Not necessarily an absolute inferno. There’s still the possibility of redemption, of rebirth, in the post-apocalyptic. You survived, after all. It’s not over.
Even last night I dreamt of a quasi-apocalyptic flood, fish fluttering behind an airtight window of the strange home I was bunkered inside of. And all my ghosts were there, behind me. All of them, I was happy to see, had an opinion on the end of the world. But not on the end of us.
1950s • Post War • Post Bomb
Apocalypse is more than just the total, eschatological end of a social order (as, obviously, one can survive an apocalypse—cf. trans-atlantic slave trade). Apocalypse is rather the revelation of an ending or truth which verges us always on the catastrophic. Divorce as a result of a partner’s emotional or physical infidelity is a form of apocalypse. From the Greek ἀποκάλυψις (apokalupsis), it is to uncover what has yet to be revealed and then live in that raw, irrevocable truth, forever changed. That’s the thing about apocalypses. Once they’ve happened, they cannot unhappen. Just as the truth, once it’s been uncovered, cannot properly be ignored.
The dropping of atomic bombs over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 was an unprecedented form of devastation. As Alice Sparkly Cat writes of the bombings:
“Truman created a new world—a post nuclear world. He didn’t have to use the atomic bomb in Hiroshima or Nagasaki but he chose to. The bombs weren’t dropped to end the war and had no strategic impact. Japan was already about to surrender. Truman did what he did because he knew that, to monopolize warfare and power in the new age, you had to leave an emotional impact. As Paul Virilio puts it, the bombs were not an act of war but an experiment.”
And so it was, and remains, a touchstone of the degree to which we can inflict world-ending harm on each other.
In 1950s Japan, three notable pieces of media arose from the rubble of a war the country decisively lost. Astroboy, a manga by Osamu Tezuka. Godzilla, the larger-than-life monster (kaiju) that emerged from the sea to wreak havoc on Japan by writer/film-maker Ishirō Honda. And Hiroshima mon amour, part film, part documentary, written by acclaimed French writer Marguerite Duras. Each of these bears, in some remarkably obvious way, the scars of war and the atomic bombings specifically.
Astro Boy, known in Japan as Mighty Atom, was created by Osamu Tezuka in the early 1950s. His story is similar to that of Pinocchio. Created by Dr. Tenma in absence of his own son, who died in a car accident, Astro Boy becomes a surrogate child. But unlike Dr. Tenma’s actual son, Astro Boy cannot age and has difficulty with basic human affect(ion). He’s eventually adopted by a professor, who becomes his surrogate father, and raises him to become a paragon of morality and justice.
Tezuka was said to have been inspired by Disney (and other) comics and cartoons. His father is often attributed as the source of his first exposure to films like Bambi and other Mickey Mouse productions. Though, in one fun telling of the story, it’s a black GI who gives Tezuka a wealth of American comics. Apocrypha aside, Tezuka’s cutesy form follows that of Disney’s with a unique awareness and appreciation from traditional Japanese characters and contexts. He remixed what so appealed to him about Disney properties. He also, in Astro Boy, finds a substrate for the loss of youth that would haunt Japan from the post-war years to the present. Astro Boy is an atomically-powered, manufactured boy, created to fill the void of a real son’s absence. But, Astro Boy, as an allegory for post-war Japanese media, pales in comparison to the King of Monsters, Gojira! (1954)
Expressly created by filmmaker Honda as a metaphor for the apocalyptic dangers of nuclear power, Godzilla spawned its own (Kaiju) genre and remains, as of this writing, the longest-running franchise in film history. More than just a dinosaur or dragon, Godzilla is a near-indestructible, quasi-nuclear force meant to simulate the devastation wrought by the bombs. Godzilla is, in this sense, similar to the Hulk—but, Godzilla remains distant, alien to us, in no way human (save a few moments where it demonstrates a kind of solicitude for earth and/or humanity in the presence of a greater threat). Godzilla is a titan, cinematically inspired by 1933’s King Kong (his mammalian Kaiju, pre-war American predecessor), who represents apocalyptic trauma so deftly. There’s nothing you can do against it. A monster that cannot be reasoned with.
But none a more explicit treatment of the aftermath of the bombings than Hiroshima mon amour (1959), a film written by Maguerite Duras and directed by Alain Resnais. The film begins with one of the most beautiful AND difficult-to-watch montages in modern film. In its uncensored version, two lovers embrace, at turns covered in ash or sweat, interspersed with shots of the devastation wrought by the bombs.
Ostensibly the story of lovers caught between worlds, Hiroshima mon amour sounded a trumpet for what would come to be known as the French New Wave while simultaneously calling out to ghosts of recent history. In retrospect, it’s everything we’ve come to mock French films (and the French) for—liberally ”insisting upon itself” and its Frenchness while approaching the devastation of nuclear fallout with documentarian lucidity (i.e. doing the most). But the film remains a brilliant experiment in representation of the aftermath of the bombings (and what such trauma does to memory and our capacity to love fully and intimately).
1980s • Suicide 90s • Present
What Hiroshima mon amour stylistically (fetishistically) alludes to is that, even a generation removed, the trauma site becomes less a historical fact one has direct access to and more a mood, an aesthetic, a scar one is born with, a condition one is trying to figure a way out of. This is, more or less, what I mean to express here. That we are haunted by the ghosts of the past, by the narrative ruptures we emerge out of, that visit us in apocalyptic dreams—the revelatory truths of the slaughter we’ve somehow managed to survive. The tragedy is not merely the fact of its having happened, but that you survived and must now, somehow, find a way and a reason to live in light of its truth (bomb).
We return and return to a source we cannot be sure of, to an ache increasingly difficult to place, to the vague shape of a thing we’d rather not (could not) possibly recall with absolute clarity—and it melds with the grief we carry. The national tragedy begins to look increasingly personal, private, open to interpretation, remembered and misremembered individually in a long, sad game of telephone. I wasn’t there, but my mother…she…
Akira (1988) the animated adaptation of the six volume manga by Katsuhiro Otomo (1982) looms large over modern animated cinema—and remains a potent representation of the atomic apocalypse, now through the lens of a new and disaffected generation.
I wanted to draw this story set in a Japan similar to how it was after the end of World War II—rebelling governmental factions; a rebuilding world; foreign political influence, an uncertain future; a bored and reckless younger generation racing each other on bikes. Akira is the story of my own teenage years, rewritten to take place in the future. I never thought too deeply about the two main characters as I made them; I just projected how I was like when I was younger. The ideas naturally flowed out from my own memories.
—Katsuhiro Otomo, on the birth of Akira
Otomo was, without trying, in conversation with his ghosts. Born in 1954, he was listening for the echoes of what preceded him to tell a story both personal and historical.
By the 90s, film and television gave way to a new form of media, the video game. The Megami Tensei series is a fascinating example of a Japanese role playing game marked by shadows of the apocalyptic. Making its debut in 1987 (and based on a series of novels by Aya Nishitani), the games in the series imagine a Tokyo that’s succumbed to some form of catastrophe (the details of which vary), leaving the city in ruins and overrun with demons from a variety of religious and spiritual traditions. You, as a post-apocalyptic survivor (often a high school student), must make your way through this world, battling demons, conversing with demons, and frequently recruiting demons to fight alongside you. Its game mechanics were/are not unlike Pokémon in the sense that one can “catch” a demon and add it to your wandering party. There’s so much to plumb from these games (which are older than I am), not least of which its deep fascination with and extensive cataloguing of Judeo-Christian lore and demonology. But, it’s this vision of a world teeming with demons (who often just want to chat before or after they intend to harm you) that captures my imagination.
Most of us learn how to share space, how to roll with the punches of being in a world with millions (billions) of others, each with their needs, anxieties, unpredictabilities. But how many times in the course of a day, especially in population dense places like a city, have you had to deal with a person whose myopic self-obsession, whose embarrassing need and vulnerability and desperation, spills into the barely-held-together entente of your churning psyches? In most cases, it’s nothing more than a mild nuisance, shelling out a dollar to a bum that knows to ask you or listening to a chronic over-sharer because, perhaps, they’re lonely and could use an ear. But sometimes, the demon of their animal need presents in genuinely dangerous ways. You learn to develop an edge, to try and distinguish who is mere nuisance from who and what poses a genuine threat—and stay ready for anything. This leaves us, clad from head to toe in the armor of God, never at ease. So much distrust.
And I imagine, despite being an incredibly safe city, that this also is a common feeling in Tokyo and other parts of Japan—of the world as a hollow place outside of our solipsistic knowledge of self and shrinking, quieter, more lonely, every day. What plagues us is an inability to set the terms of our own boundaries—and becomes the substance of both gameplay and our lives.
In 1996, a spin off of the Megami Tensei games was launched, spawning its own series. Arguably more popular now are the Persona series of games, which rely essentially on the gameplay of the Megami Tensei series (angels and demons galore!), but add fun life-sim aspects, playful story beats, and ditch the eschatological apocalypse in favor of social/secular apocalypse—meaning that it’s not about the end of the world so much as it is the uncovering of social/interpersonal truths (ex: a teacher who’s abusing his students, a politician who’s corrupt, etc)
The Persona games are also significantly more “populated” than the Megami Tensei games (where the world is desolate and often voided by Lucifer hisself). But what I find soooo fascinating (and honestly this is all I wanted to write about) is that the Persona games (especially the 5th installment) cleverly simulate how a city’s population density can also be the source of one’s depersonalization and loneliness.
The streets of a stylistically represented (quasi-authentic) Tokyo are filled with nameless, faceless NPCs, impossible to interact with. It creates the illusion of a bustling city at various times of day without taxing the games memory to create and keep track of individuals NPCs with backstories and dialogue trees. These figures lining the light-filled streets of Tokyo are just ghosts, flash burned shadows of an impossibility. You can even walk through them. You’ll never know them.
Cliché, for sure, but it’s the modern condition. Closer and more connected than ever—and somehow lonelier, lossier, bereft from day to day of any sense of meaning or conjunctive intimacy (because we’re afraid and getting scardier of the messy accident of getting to know another human-demon—what with all our sickening vulnerabilities and desperate needs).
Which I suppose makes every sincere connection, the trauma of another person’s happening to you, that much more precious. I don’t mean to sound hopeful. I’m not. But, on balance, in the balmer light of our bombed-out, post-apocalypse, you have to admit it was kind of wonderful—that we, perhaps by accident, perhaps by kismet, bothered to resuscitate the ghosts of ourselves into an all-t00-brief, sanguinary and heart-pulsing paradise?