Aaron GerowAlexander Zahlten (2014) linked these looped narratives to the contemporary media ecology,
particularly the proliferation of worlds fueled by a media mix strategy that not only reproduces
variations of the same narratives and characters across media platforms, but also enables vari-
ations within the same media text, in part because new media technologies have enabled users
to participate in the production, or to produce their own versions, of some of these works.
Popular culture critics such as Azuma Hiroki (2007) and Uno Tsunehiro (2008) have connected
these loops to an argument about generations and cultural periodization, particularly a debate
that focuses on otaku (hardcore fans of anime and manga) and how their tastes help indicate
when postmodernism began in Japan. Their focus was on how such looped narratives formed a
narrative called “sekai-kei” (or “world type”), in which the emotional relationship between the
protagonist and a love interest is directly connected to the fate of the world.
The problem with such broad historicist arguments is that they ignore how such narratives of
enclosure, repetition, and inability to escape, as I have suggested here, have a much longer history
that crosses any such proposed division between new and old media, modern and postmodern
generations. Closer analysis of these many examples can discern crucial differences that over
time connect with changing concrete historical conditions, but the length and extent of this
seemingly paranoid narrative of being trapped in a bordered, circumscribed, and often repeti-
tious world are itself significant, suggesting factors beyond the contemporary or the parochial
and reminding us that the new is rarely new.
Recalling what one character says in Miike Takashi’s Young Thugs: Nostalgia (Kishiwada shōnen
gurentai: Bōkyō, 1998)—“No matter where you go, it’s the same”—one factor is certainly
the homogenization produced by globalization, but as we have seen, many films still seem to
insist on a difference—albeit a tragic difference—to Japan. The issue may be less the unique-
ness of Japan than the inadequacy of globalism to fully explain this sense of being trapped. As
I have argued elsewhere, that tragedy is colored by the sad realization in Miike’s work that
such homo genization is magnified by the mediatization of reality, rendering all homeless in a
world where home is only an image (Gerow 2009). With one character stating in Rainy Dog
(Gokudō kuroshakai, 1996), “I’m afraid that even my dreams will go away if it’s the same wherever
you go,” his characters are not just trapped in Japan, they are caught in a double bind between
globalization and imagination (imaging/mediatization), in which globalization both enables and
undermines dreams. The ultimate factor may in fact be such limits to imagination, in particular
what Mark Fischer, following Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson, has called “capitalist realism”:
“the widespread sense, not only that capitalism is the only viable political and economic system,
but that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009, 3).
Tomita Katsuya’s 2011 film Saudade (Saudāji) bears this inability to imagine an alternative
to capitalism in its very film form. Presenting the often uneventful lives of Japanese manual
laborers and foreign immigrants from Brazil and Thailand in an economically depressed provin-
cial city, the film focuses on the character of Seiji, who dreams of moving to Thailand with his
Thai girlfriend. As with so many films before it, Saudade ultimately offers no such escape, but it
presents two scenes that emblematize the reasons for that. In a film in which a bland everyday
is presented through bland film form, these two moments stand out for their cinematic flair: the
first shows a rapper friend of Seiji stalking through the shuttered remains of a shopping arcade to
stab a Brazilian friend of his ex-girlfriend; the second offers Seiji strutting down the main street
as the local gang members display their cars. Both offer impressive long-take camera movements
in a film lacking such flourishes, but both simultaneously undermine their attractive images: the
first ends in racist violence; the second ends with the suspicion that this is only Seiji’s imagi-
nation, an imagination that leads only to a shot of him standing in front of the same shuttered
businesses and empty hopes. Imagination of an alternative is presented, but only to be denied.