Globalism, new media, and the inescapable Japanstate and an aesthetic realm of feeling. Any state action, including war, then simultaneously
becomes a naturally given aesthetic work. The circularity of this logic, which essentially treats
any action as already given, is in some sense an extension of the self-referentiality of the kokutai,
which defines itself only through itself by excluding the other, by denying the necessity of the
other. As Kang noted, this results in an empty conceptual circle. Such emptiness explains why
the kokutai is never fully defined; in some sense, the kokutai is indefinable; or indefinability itself
is the kokutai. Kang warned that this emptiness allows the concept to have considerable flexi-
bility, and one that, in our case, conceptually implies a nation with no outside, because all that is
other to it has been absorbed.
That may seem paranoid, but visions of inescapability in Japanese cinema, such as the exam-
ple from Barren Illusion, have often been tinted with paranoia. It suggests that these visions are
not exclusively a matter of the nation, either of its ideology or its institutions, but also crucially
involve issues of perception, discourse, and media. It is significant that Kurosawa Kiyoshi inserted
a scene into his 2013 film Real (Riaru) that echoes Barren Illusion, but without having a character
attempt to leave the nation. The hero Kōichi travels to the municipal office on an island and
asks questions of a clerk who, while first acknowledging Kōichi’s presence, then simply ignores
him in the same way the airline ignored Miki. There is the same paranoid image of power, but
what is different about this film is that what Kōichi needs to escape from is less the nation, than
a world, one likely of his own making. Real thus recalls a long series of films, especially anime,
that feature characters trapped in imaginary worlds. Oshii Mamoru’s Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful
Dreamer is a famous example from 1984, in which the gang from the Urusei Yatsura manga/
anime get stuck in a repeating and delimited world likely stemming from the character Lum’s
dream. Such loops, or recurring imaginary but confined worlds, can be found in several varia-
tions in such anime as Higurashi When They Cry (Higurashi no naku koro ni, 2002), The Melancholy
of Suzumiya Haruhi (Suzumiya Haruhi no yūutsu, 2006), Ergo Proxy (2006), The Girl Who Leapt
Through Time (Toki o kakeru shōjo, 2006), or Tatami Galaxy (Yo jōhan Shinwa Taikei, 2010). Oshii
himself produced another version in the live action film Avalon (2001).
It is common to offer a reading of these as statements on contemporary popular mentality,
particularly on a perceived avoidance of reality and a retreat to imaginary worlds within an
over-mediated environment. In some cases, as with Real, this is the result of trauma. The perhaps
facile solution, offered in Beautiful Dreamer or the 24th episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, is to
recognize the other and to call for what is external to that world. However, that desire to escape
such a fictional world is often undermined by repetition—one that is tied both to media and
life in contemporary capitalism. Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Pulse (Kairo, 2001), for instance, offers a
narrative of Death entering the world from the Internet, causing much of the population to die
off one by one (though, importantly, this is mostly through individual volition). One character,
Harue, however, declares her fear that death is just the eternal continuation or repetition of the
loneliness of life now, which is a statement that marks her eventual demise as both an attempt
to change that, and conversely, a recognition that she has essentially been dead all along. The
latter echoes the sociologist Miyadai Shinji’s argument that contemporary Japan to many young
people is nothing other than the horror of an “endless everyday” (owarinaki nichijō) where all is
empty and nothing changes (1995), yet Harue is also making a statement on media. Pointing to
the multiple computer screens showing the lonely souls on the Internet, she asks “What’s the
difference between them and ghosts?”, showing not only the ghostliness of the referent (some
of those shown are now in fact ghosts), but also the fact that mediated images themselves, being
both there and not there, the referent and not the referent, are inherently fantastic, in Tzvetan
Todorov’s sense of the term. In a mediated world, people and images, life and death, are trapped
in a ghostly equality.