Translator’s prologue
What follows is an essay written by Kiyoshi Kasai sometime between 2006 to 2008 (the exact date is not given anywhere in the essay collection I pulled the text from). While it does not directly concern mystery fiction, it concerns Kasai’s mass death theory more generally, and especially the context of science fiction and sekai-kei fiction. I hope you all enjoy reading it.
Even as we have addressed sekai-kei on this blog, I still thought it best to quickly clarify a translation decision I made in regards to the word “sekai.” The word sekai means “world” in Japanese, and is normally written with the kanji 世界. However, starting in the late 1990s and 2000s, the word sekai started to be used in a slightly different context. This use of the word still meant world, but was specifically associated with social context. The sekai in this sense meant the nebulous social situation that had emerged after the 1990s, and each individual’s relationship to their society. This use of the word sekai is written in katakana as セカイ, and is the sekai used in the phrase sekai-kei, which is written セカイ系. Throughout this essay, I have translated the original sekai (世界) as world and left this new use of the word sekai (セカイ) untranslated so as to maintain a distinction between the two.
Also anything contained within brackets like [this] is a translator note or context added by me.
Regardless, without further ado, here is Mass Death=Mass Life and the “Endless Everyday” by Kiyoshi Kasai:
Mass Death=Mass Life and the “Endless Everyday”, by Kiyoshi Kasai
My earlier essay, titled The Disintegration of Social Context and the Structure of the Sekai, concluded with a discussion on the shift in the rhetoric of Shinji Miyadai. At that point, I stated that “the works which feature the theme of true love between a fighting girl and helpless boy [sekai-kei] depict a kind of Armageddon. Importantly, this Armageddon is analogous to everyday life. This mindset is the reflection of a very ‘real’ sekai.” In this essay, I intend to demonstrate this same conclusion, but from a different angle.
Miyadai’s rhetoric shift was summarised by Akihiro Kitada in Laughing Japanese Nationalism in the following terms:
It is widely known that Miyadai relied on the symbol of the bloomer-clad high school girl, going about an everyday existence that does not aspire towards any concrete meaning (ideological content). Therein, he saw the potential to escape the absolutism of a world that was so fixated on meaning. However, after some time, Miyadai lost interest in attempting to agitate the discourse with calls to live an endless, meaningless life. Instead, he focused on sources of grand meaning, such as Emperorism and Pan-Asianism, as well as other Romantic subjects. This shift came about in the context of Miyadai’s groundbreaking diagnosis of those youths who were caught in such an endless, meaningless everyday existence. He identified a pervasive lack of meaning as the source of an ideological short-circuit, which led to a widespread fixation on sources of grand meaning that transcend everyday existence.
Shinji Miyadai’s Endless Everyday Existence, which was published in the immediate aftermath of the Tokyo subway sarin attacks, analysed these attacks, which took place over the course of 1994 to 1995, in the context of the 1993 burusera boom [a fetish for bloomers, sailor uniforms, and other school-girl paraphernalia] and the 1994 dating club boom [clubs that often facilitate a practice similar to compensated dating]. Miyadai contends that the timing of the sarin gas attacks carried a great deal of non-coincidental meaning, arguing that bloomers and sarin co-existed in the 1990s in the same manner as the endless everyday of the 1980s co-existed with fantasies of post-apocalyptic adventure. In turn, these relationships within both the 1980s and 1990s can be compared to the confrontation between the science fiction of the 1950s and the science fiction of the 1960s.
Miyadai explains the science fiction of the 1950s in terms of authors such as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. And, conversely, the 1960s is defined by the work of J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and Philip K. Dick. The former decade used motifs such as interstellar flight, time travel, and space battles to imply a future that would be defined by an extraordinary everyday. This was inverted in the science fiction of the 1960s, which depicted scientific development as the path towards a dystopia that enforces a dreary and endless everyday. By the 1980s, this new wave of science fiction transformed into the dark and polluted image of cyberpunk fiction. The confrontation between the 1950s and the 1960s in the West was mirrored in the development from the first-generation of Japanese science fiction, as embodied by writers such as Sakyou Komatsu, towards the new generation of writers, such as Chouhei Kanbayashi.
Let us focus in particular on a short story titled The Gernsback Continuum that was penned by William Gibson, the leading pioneer of cyberpunk fiction. The name Gernsback is a reference to Hugo Gernsback, the editor-in-chief of the immensely important science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. He was also, essentially, the father figure who raised the writers that led the 1950s science fiction movement. As for The Gernsback Continuum itself, it is the story of a photographer who travels in search of the architecture of the 1930s and 1940s that was built in the futuristic style. He does so in order to capture “segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present.” The protagonist recalls that:
The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car–no wings for it–and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal…
The science fiction of the 1950s, and its corresponding dream of an extraordinary everyday, is intentionally juxtaposed within The Gernsback Continuum against the reality of the endless everyday: Specifically, a bleak and polluted endless everyday, in line with the developments of the new-wave science fiction of the 1960s and the cyberpunk of the 1980s.
In the year following the publication of Endless Everyday Existence, Masachi Osawa published his own The End of the Age of Fiction: Aum Shinrikyou and the World’s Final War. Osawa labels postwar Japan during the 1960s as an Age of Ideals. Conversely, he marks Japan during the 1980s as an Age of Fiction. The Age of Ideals was brought to an end by the attacks of the United Red Army committed early in the 1970s, and the Age of Fiction was similarly brought to an end due to the sarin gas attacks committed by Aum Shinrikyou. Both the Age of Ideals and the Age of Fiction embody concepts that are opposed to reality: The distinction comes in their relationship to that reality. Ideals are nominally hypothesised to come about in the future, and are therefore seen as a possible reality. Fiction is instead a pure anti-reality, depicting a fantasy of something that is never expected to occur as a means of escape. These two opposed periods essentially correspond to the distinction between the science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s as discussed by Shinji Miyadai.
The question naturally arises as to why the 1960s embodied the Age of Ideals in the first place. Osawa explains it like so:
During this era, the proliferation of household appliances and consumer electronics, and the increasing demand for such goods, gave a material basis for such ideals … We should not be confused by the suggestion that these ideals arose as a simple product of economic growth and the advancement of science and technology. On the contrary, these ideals fuelled faith in the development of global society, which facilitated economic growth and technological advancement.
There is an obvious overlap between the Western 1950s catalogued by Miyadai and the Japanese 1960s studied by Osawa. The main difference, which is the chronological disconnect between the development of American and Japanese science fiction, can naturally be understood in the context of the distinct postwar historical conditions of the two nations. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the United States enjoyed its peak era of peace and prosperity. Japan only obtained such stability in the economic recovery of the 1960s; the same could not be said for that era’s United States, which was stuck in the chaos of civil unrest and the Vietnam War.
Beyond this asynchronicity, both decades were characterised by a zeitgeist driven by science, technology, and social progress. However, if we zoom out to a macro level perspective, we can capture a similar movement from ideals to fiction in the shift from the 19th century to the 20th century. In Osawa’s terms, the end of the Age of Ideals, which corresponds to the United Red Army attacks, can be reconfigured to a world-historical Age of Ideals that ended with the First World War. The science fiction that came from the era of Hugo Gernsback and Amazing Stories echoed the era of Jules Vern. In the same vein, the American 1950s and Japanese 1960s, with their shared faith in continuous scientific and social progress, were a repetition of the modernising spirit of the 19th century. Of course, history never truly repeats, it merely rhymes.
The transition into the 20th century, known as the Belle Époque, was in fact an extension of the nature of the 19th century even as it chronologically intruded into the 20th. The First World War resulted from causes that lie in the modernity of the 19th century, and at its conclusion the world found itself transformed into the modernity of the 20th century instead. The spirit of the 20th century, beginning with the First World War, was one defined by mass death. However, wars have resulted in mass scale death since as far back as the era described in the legends of the Trojan War. Indeed, one reasonable definition for ‘war’ is a conflict that results in mass death.
Even noting this, the casualties of the First World War were unprecedented compared to earlier conflicts. The trench warfare that spread across both the French and Russian fronts left behind a mountain of seven million dead in four quick years. More precisely, the young men who were forced to live through this trench warfare did not experience the adventure of an extraordinary everyday, as corresponds to the optimism of science fiction. They lived within a mechanical slaughter where the future was bleak and inescapable. The spirit of the 20th century, which could be found in the trenches, was the same spirit that we have discussed in relation to Shinji Miyadai’s Endless Everyday Existence and the Age of Fiction developed by Masachi Osawa.
As typified by Bildungsroman literature, the 19th century was a zeitgeist that sought to overlap the prose of the everyday with a development towards the spirit of an extraordinary everyday. The Romantics chose a destructive path, contrasting a bourgeois everyday with this extraordinary everyday. But the essence of a Bildungsroman lies in a harmonious depiction of both of these together. Therefore, the stories centre on the idealism of youth existing in conflict with the stagnant everyday of adulthood. However, through an act of symbolic patricide, they reconcile with their everyday life and become adults—these stories usually take on some variety of this form. Hegel’s idea of the absolute spirit, where human consciousness is iterated and perfected by labour and education, is a philosophical representation of the spirit that shaped the Bildungsroman. The socialism of the 19th century also typified this spirit, as it believed that a modern society would develop towards an ideal future as it confronted its own defects, such as economic inequality.
In other words, the 19th century was yet to discover the hell of the endless everyday. Even the mundane everyday life of bourgeois culture was thought to harmoniously develop towards an extraordinary everyday of revolution, war, love, and art. However, the last generation of the 19th century found an endless everyday with no exit in the trenches. Their endless everyday was filled with sludge and surrounded by the mass death of poison gas and machine gun fire; their life was thoroughly cleansed of the ideals of an extraordinary everyday. War, which was the very essence of the 19th century spirit of adventure and the extraordinary everyday as embodied by Fabrice del Dongo, had been unmasked as the source of a hellish endless everyday.
The ideologies of the 19th century were completely undercut by this new reality, and subsequently had to reconfigure themselves in line with the spirit of the 20th century. We can see this clearly in the transformation of 19th century socialism, which collapsed during the Second International, and was reborn as 20th century Bolshevism through the Russian Revolutions at the conclusion of the war.
However, it would be incomplete to view the 20th century spirit only through the experience of wars and mass death. Mass life is a natural companion to mass death. The 20th century was fundamentally an era of the endless everyday where mass death=mass life.
A synthesis of mass death and mass life was reproduced throughout the 20th century. For example, the mass death of the 1910s was naturally juxtaposed by the mass life of the 1920s. In a mimicry of the millions of anonymised corpses of the trenches, the 20s saw a horde of ‘sensualists without heart’ (Max Weber [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism]) flooding the streets of cities.
After the end of the First World War, there was never a return to the stratified civil society typical of the 19th century. Instead, José Ortega y Gasset identifies mass-man as the typical product of 20th century post-war society. In the 19th century, society was configured around the distinct lifestyles and traditions of various roles, such as peasants, workers, the bourgeoisie, and aristocracy. In the 20th century, these distinctions were flattened, and people anonymously appeared en masse in their place. Ortega’s mass-man parallels the anonymisation and banalisation of death of the soldiers in trench warfare, whose corpses became as indistinct as a mountain of industrial waste. The first half of the century produced mass death via the World Wars, and the latter half produced mass life via The Affluent Society (John Kenneth Galbraith). The structure of the 20th century on a global scale reproduced the microcosmic relationship between the war-torn 1910s and the affluent 1920s.
In fact, it was back in the 1920s that Hugo Gernsback’s magazine, Amazing Stories, first launched and laid the foundations for what would become the American science fiction of the 1950s. The fact that this idealistic science fiction of the 1950s has its foundation in the aftermath of the First World War is highly suggestive. While these eras of idealistic aspirations, such as the American 1950s and the Japanese 1960s, may on their surface seem to be simple reproductions of the peace and prosperity of the late 19th century and the Belle Époque, the impact of the 20th century imbues them with a very different character. Americanism, as reflected in the scientific idealism of its science fiction, is just as perversely rooted in ultramodern 19th century idealism as its competitors in Bolshevism and Nazism.
The dual existence of mass death=mass life was inescapable and essential to the character of the affluent society of the second half of the 20th century. The existence of an affluent society in the West was premised on continued peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, this peace was structured around a regime of nuclear confrontation and mutually assured destruction—the dagger of extinction was ever-present. This era of peace and prosperity in the West always coexisted with the idea of total nuclear war, which was the most thorough mass death imaginable. It is easy enough to understand the Cold War as the literal continuation of the earlier World Wars. But even more simply than this, the Cold War was the Third World War, just differentiated into a form based around the endless everyday.
In this manner, the notion of the endless everyday is simply defined as the reality that emerged out of mass death=mass life. Naturally, it was not 19th century ideologies that arose in order to confront this reality. Instead, new ideologies, particular to the 20th century, arose like zombies out of the mass death of the First World War. The three primary ones being Bolshevism, Nazism, and Americanism. If we align the first two under the heading of the full range of left-right 20th century socialism, we can characterise the fundamental historical trajectory of the 20th century as a long struggle between socialism and Americanism.
It should not need to be said at this point, but the dichotomy between the endless everyday and extraordinary everyday developed by Shinji Miyadai does not have its origins in bloomers and the particular culture of the 1990s. In his 1959 novel Our Times, Kenzaburou Ooe wrote:
For Japanese youth, there is no such thing as proactive hope. Hope for us is only an abstract concept. During my childhood, I was surrounded by the war. In those days of adventure and heroic battle, young people could have hope in their eyes and on their lips.Now in its place we are left with mistrust, suspicion, arrogance, and contempt all around us. An age of peace is when lonely men deceive and despise one another.
This portrait of a young man overcome by despair was created by Kenzaburou Ooe only three years after an economic white paper famously declared the end of the postwar era, and one year before the Ikeda administration announced its Income Doubling Plan. For Yasuo Minami (the narrator of Our Times) the era of the war was a time of hope that is now lost. Postwar peace and prosperity are seen as antithetical to hope, which is relegated to something which he merely remembers from his childhood.
These same ideas expressed in Our Times were echoed by the contemporaneous writings of Yukio Mishima. Mishima directed his criticism at Kenzaburou Ooe’s novel A Personal Matter, which represented Ooe’s shift from the denial of postwar society to an affirmation of it. After this confrontation with Ooe came Mishima’s ritual suicide incident. Therefore, the mantle of postwar social criticism passed to Ryuu Murakami. Murakami’s works, including Coin Locker Babies, Fascism of Love and Fantasy, Exodus of the Country of Hope, and From the Fatherland, with Love all reflect his tendency to juxtapose the heroics of the war next to the banality of postwar society. The writings of Ooe, Mishima, and Murakami all have an obvious resonance with the motives behind the sarin gas attacks: As Shinji Miyadai explained, the sarin gas attacks were an attempt to “voluntarily incite Armageddon by those who cannot tolerate their endless everyday.” Throughout the 1960s, the heroism of war was juxtaposed to the notion of an endless everyday in Japan, but the origins of this dialectic can be found in the literature and philosophy of Germany and France in the aftermath of the First World War. Ooe’s Our Times was itself inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason. This novel depicts the various fates of youths trapped in the endless everyday of the interwar period. The main character, Mathieu Delarue, a university student and high school teacher, wanders Paris in order to raise money for an abortion for his mistress. However, he soon becomes stuck in the sludge of this gloomy and inescapable endless everyday. He is only freed from this feeling once he is conscripted to serve in the Second World War, in the doomed fight against a vastly superior German military. This work clearly reflects the dichotomy between an endless everyday existence and the desire for an extraordinary everyday. Sartre, in his Being and Nothingness, refers to Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The subject of Heidegger’s work here is a critique of German society in the interwar period, which is depicted as a depraved and noisy endless everyday. Heidegger criticises this as the loss of substance, and says that facing the impossible possibility of death is essential for a human existence. The First World War thoroughly cleansed war of its illusion of heroism. Unlike the 19th century, the total war of the 20th century was not opposed to the concept of peace. Another way of saying that mass death=mass life in the 20th century is that war=peace. The reality experienced in the First World War was the first manifestation of this endless everyday. The Weimar-era urban sprawl of empty conversations and wasted time that repelled Heidegger was a natural flip side of the empty existence of mass deaths that filled the trenches of the First World War. The existential decay of decadent urban masses were no longer balanced by the heroics of those slain in war.
The philosophy on death developed in Being and Time is the antithesis of the endless everyday of 20th century reality where war=peace and mass death=mass life. This philosophy revolves around the ideological glorification of war as a space for existential awakening in the face of death. However, the ideal of a warrior who awakens in the defence of his community at the risk of death has shifted from being an ideal possibility into a mere hypothetical, and been transformed into unreality. It is now a fiction as in the Age of Fiction—a pure anti-reality. The same idea can be extracted from the work of György Lukács in History and Class Consciousness. Lukács, as ‘the 20th century’s greatest Marxist philosopher’, is a natural parallel to Heidegger as ‘the 20th century’s greatest conventional philosopher’; the dichotomy between the concepts of an endless everyday and extraordinary everyday can be found in the foundations of both the left-wing and right-wing 20th century philosophies that arose in response to the First World War.
Returning to Akihiro Kitada, who was quoted earlier when discussing Shinji Miyadai: After the quoted excerpt, Kitada further developed his theory on the shift of Miyadai, stating that Miyadai had “accurately sensed an oncoming shift throughout the 1990s, which rendered the endless everyday an invalid slogan. This shift resulted from a Romantic mentality that had short circuited the individual’s world and present identity.” But was Miyadai’s shift actually so effective? Kitada continues:
Miyadai’s prescription for society can be summarised as follows: Firstly, providing a superior object for Romantic affection. Secondly, showing that this object’s meaning comes from the decision to dare to commit to it. Put another way, the first step is infatuation with an object, and the latter step is the relativisation of that object. Miyadai presents this ironic tactic to counter Richard Rorty’s liberal ironist.
Richard Rorty was an ironist, and therefore did not see liberalism or democracy as being justified a priori. Neither did he reach them by the process of elimination after denying all other philosophical ideas. Although all ideas are relativised, Rorty’s liberal ironist recognises the causes behind the relativisation of the communal fantasy of liberal beliefs—such as a universal, secular human solidarity—apart from irony itself. Rorty says:
The traditional philosophical way of spelling out what we mean by ‘human solidarity’ is to say that there is something within each of us—our essential humanity—which resonates to the presence of this same thing in other human beings … For Kant, it is not because someone is a fellow Milanese or a fellow American that we should feel an obligation toward him or her, but because he or she is a rational being …
My position entails that feelings of solidarity are necessarily a matter of which similarities and dissimilarities strike us as salient, and that such salience is a function of a historically contingent final vocabulary … Consider, as a final example, the attitude of contemporary American liberals to the unending hopelessness and misery of the lives of the young blacks in American cities. Do we say that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human beings? We may, but it is much more persuasive, morally as well as politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans.
However, can we locate this communal fantasy of liberal solidarity, as analysed by Rorty’s ironism, within the geopolitical super magnet that is Japan? In Laughing Japanese Nationalism, Akihiro Kitada summarises the shifting modes of retrospection present in postwar Japanese society from the 1960s through the 1990s. Throughout the 1960s, there was an extreme fixation on looking backwards, as embodied by the United Red Army’s “review.” [This is a very deep cut reference to Japanese Marxism. Basically, the analysis of past actions was seen as a very formal and serious part of Japanese Marxist activities in the 1960s, and elaborate reviews were prepared and read within revolutionary circles.] By the 1970s, Shigesato Itoi adopted the posture of intentionally and subversively avoiding any retrospection (consumer society ironism) in order to avoid infinite self-reflection. By the 1980s, this zeitgeist had developed towards being simply incapable of reflection (consumer society cynicism), as typified by Yasuo Tanaka. This finally developed into the mindset of Romantic cynicism that was present by the 1990s and typified by the hyper-online reactionaries of 2channel (the titular laughing Japanese nationalists).
The question is whether Miyadai’s shift is effective in the new age of Romantic cynicism, as corresponds to these petite nationalists and online reactionaries. Kitada thinks not, analysing Miyadai as follows:
Japan used to be an ironical nation, but now it is just plain naïve. The spirit of irony, refined by snobbishness and denialism, has made a nation that is among the most naïve in the world. The opportunity to awaken America—an animalised empire—from a dogmatic stupor has been left behind in the dreams of the sleeping Japanese empire of snobbery. Miyadai’s efforts only confirm the structure of cynicism to be found in the status quo.
In order to properly understand Akihiro Kitada’s critique of Shinji Miyadai, it is necessary to review the structural changes that have taken place in the movement out of the 1900s. By ‘the movement out of the 1900s’ I of course mean the shift from the society of the 20th century to the society of the 21st century.
The 20th century, which dates from 1914, ended in 1989 with the successive collapse of the Eastern Bloc of socialist regimes. Americanism, which decisively overcame both Nazism in 1945 and Bolshevism in 1989, underwent a structural revolution in response to the new kind of globalism that corresponded to the 1990s. Before our eyes, a new world emerged, distinct from that of the 20th century.
In the context of the release of Toshiaki Tachibanaki’s Confronting Income Inequality in Japan (1998) and Toshiki Satou’s Japan’s Unequal Society: Goodbye, universal middle-class (2000), the issue of the transformation and polarisation of the so-called universal middle-class has risen to the foreground. Needless to say, this has intersected with this new world of the globalised 21st century.
We can also see the polarisation of Japanese society embedded in Masahiro Yamada’s concept of the gap-widening society. Yamada is most famous for his 1999 book The Age of Parasite Singles, in which he studies the phenomenon of the titular parasite singles, who are adults that advance through their twenties and thirties and beyond whilst living with their parents. Describing them like so:
This group takes it for granted that they always have a room at their parents’ home and can rely on their parents for food. Furthermore, they feel the right to use whatever money they earn to go on dates, and to buy cars, holidays, luxury clothing, or gifts for their boyfriend or girlfriend.
However, in The Future of Parasite Society, which was published in 2004 in concurrence with his theory of the gap-widening society, Yamada reassessed the context of this trend. As Yamada explains it, the content of The Age of Parasite Singles was based on survey data collected throughout the first half of the 1990s, but from the vantage point of the subsequent decade its relevance had expired. Throughout the last half of the 1990s, the number of parasite singles who obtained any affluence by relying on their parents for their basic needs declined sharply. As Yamada explains:
After the turn of the century, the youngest cohort of parasite singles, those in their twenties who live with their parents after completing their education, have increasingly taken up unstable part-time work instead of stable full-time work. As a result, their incomes have been unable to support an affluent lifestyle. They lack both the financial and psychological resources to enjoy the situation in the manner of previous parasite singles.
What, then, happened to those luxurious parasite singles described in Yamada’s earlier work? That is, those who postponed marriage around 1990 and took in the pleasures of an affluent lifestyle throughout their twenties. As Yamada describes it:
A significant proportion (I estimate around 30%) have entered their thirties without moving into marriage, and are totally overcome with anxiety and pessimism about the future. They no longer have the finances or psychological stability to enjoy their prior lifestyle of affluence.
Yamada’s contemporaneous book Gap-Widening Society is something of a sequel to the developments in The Age of Parasite Singles. In it, he concerns himself with the dreams and aspirations of freeters, which is an economic condition that slowly became mainstream for parasite singles. To explain this issue, Yamada fixates on the issue of the intergenerational distribution of assets, income, education, and social stratification. Around 1990, when parasite singles were at their apex of affluence, the concept of a freeter still emphasised the freedom aspect. Although freeters could find employment when they wanted, they still only worked part-time or occasionally so as to facilitate their dreams and lifestyle outside of work. However, during the Lost Decade, the number of unwilling, inconvenienced freeters continued to increase. During this era, the proportion of youths who became trapped in this lifestyle due to a lack of full-time employment and satisfying work increased rapidly. Of course, those who entered the lifestyle to chase their dreams and aspirations were still around. Yamada also explored their situation.
Most freeters are unskilled workers who subcontract in the service industry or simple professional work. Yamada explains that they are distinctly aware that “the reality of their everyday existence is not leading towards an ideal future.” What fills this psychological gap is their “dreams of fulfilling their potential by becoming a full-time employee, passing the civil service exam, and becoming an independent professional.” Basically, “the dream of one’s ideal job is what obscures and compensates for the reality of a situation where the individual’s efforts are without reward.” Yamada’s comparative survey data reveals that those who once described themselves as “free people who live happily by doing what they please, without the restrictions of any particular organisation” almost invariably later described themselves in terms of “those who are frightened by the uncertainty of the future, and who are clinging to their unmanifested dreams in order to hold back overwhelming anxiety.” The development of this mindset is, in short, the recognition of the hope-based gap-widening society. Yamada defines this term like so:
Japan is polarising between those who look to the future with hope and those that only see despair. I refer to this condition as a hope-based gap-widening society. On the surface, Japan may appear to be economically affluent and equal. Even freeters are able to afford cars and luxury clothing, after all. However, lurking behind this expansion of wealth is the expansion of despair.
The protagonist of Our Times identified the peace and stagnancy of postwar society with a lack of hope. In Gap-Widening Society, hope is equated with the psychological expectations of an eventual future of social equality, which is itself driven by economic growth. In this sense, the meaning of the word hope in the two titles could not be further apart.
In explaining himself, Masahiro Yamada quotes the following passage from Ryuu Murakami’s Exodus of the Country of Hope: “This is a country of abundance where anything is possible. Yet, the one thing we lack is hope.” However, this is a novel that does not necessarily align with the perspective of Gap-Widening Society. According to the boy depicted in the work, the “country of ruins that was left after the war” was filled with hope. In current society, people are said to have “everything necessary for survival” such as “food, water, medicine, cars, planes, and electrical appliances.” And yet “the one thing we lack is hope.”
Ryuu Murakami writing this novel in the year 2000 was in a sense the successor of Kenzaburou Ooe who wrote Our Times in 1959. From the perspective of the protagonist of Our Times, Masahiro Yamada’s claim that “Japanese society throughout the high growth postwar era right up until the Lost Decade of the 1990s was full of hope” is below contempt. In Our Times, it is precisely the “abundant housing, the development of new appliances, and increasing education” that stripped young people of their hope. Beyond the polarising and destabilising impacts of globalisation, the hope-based gap-widening society reveals how drastically the vision of hope has shifted over time. It has become possible to rely on such a shameless admiration of affluence and to unconditionally support postwar society. As a result, this work presents a worldview that is blind to incidents like Mishima’s suicide, the United Red Army, and Aum Shinrikyou. It misses the ideological basis for the dreams of an extraordinary everyday, or the despair of an endless everyday.
The 20th century, an era punctuated by multiple world wars for the right to redistribute colonial dominions, revealed its true colours after the collapse of socialism at the end of the Cold War. Basically, it was also an economic competition between various systems filtered through the concept of full employment. The capitalist system of the 19th century, maintained by the cornerstone of British power, developed a fissure that led to the First World War. As a result of this war, the sociological structures of the 19th century collapsed, and the system of class conflict between capitalists and the proletariat was flattened with the emergence of the society of the masses.
The systems that were in competition for world hegemony were Bolshevism, Nazism, and Americanism. All three sought to establish a society that could maintain stable full employment through a state-supervised economy. Americanism, with its combination of Keynesianism and Fordism, ultimately triumphed over Nazism (right-wing socialism) and then Bolshevism (left-wing socialism).
The general form of Americanism is a welfare state oriented towards maintaining a sophisticated consumer society. While socialists on both the left and right sought to deliver a society of full employment that allowed for “abundant housing, the development of new appliances, and increasing education” as symbols of affluence, they also had ulterior ideological intentions: The Autobahn was a sign of affluence under Nazi society, but also carried the intention of facilitating the logistics of blitzkrieg warfare. Nazism and Bolshevism sought to advance beyond the endless everyday towards an extraordinary everyday, as promised by ideological notions such as revolution, utopia, and the übermensch. By contrast, Americanism relied on automobiles, home appliances, and consumer luxuries to mobilise the masses. The final triumph of Americanism reveals that the glamour of consumerism was more powerful than bloody myths.
However, the 20th century and its competition between systems filtered through full employment is now over. Americanism, built on the welfare state and consumer society—Keynesianism and Fordism—and which replicated itself across the West since the 1960s, has since lost relevance. This is due to Americanism’s success over its competitors, or the decline of the opponents that justified its historical moment. The 20th century, driven by the endless everyday of mass death=mass life, was an inevitable breeding ground for perverted ideological outgrowths from the search for an extraordinary everyday. Nazism and Bolshevism are obvious examples. But Americanism was also a similar 20th century perversion of ideology. What distinguished it from its left-wing and right-wing opponents was its ideological roots in a particular strain of scientific idealism, as symbolised by American science fiction and the technological fixations of consumer culture. In this context, we can read György Lukács and Martin Heidegger as the two key philosophers who articulated distinct visions of an ideal of the extraordinary everyday. As a matter of lineage, Jean-Paul Sartre was influenced by Heidegger, and Kenzaburou Ooe was subsequently influenced by Sartre. The end of the 20th century corresponded to a rapidly polarised and disintegrating sense of the endless everyday. This endless everyday is the embodiment of Americanism; its welfare state and consumer society more or less corresponding to phenomena of The Affluent Society and universal middle class discussed previously. This is the social context that lies at the heart of the structural shift that occurred over the 1990s, and is consequently the cause of the change in the rhetoric of Shinji Miyadai.
The historian Yasushi Yamanouchi (and others) put forward the theory of a total war system, which posits that an affluent society (mass life) is a domestic system that exists to facilitate future world wars (mass death). However, the affluent society itself establishes an endless everyday that leads inescapably towards a hunger for meaning. Young people, driven by this hunger, were often seduced by an outdated, romantic ideal of the extraordinary everyday where they could find hope in the heroism of war.
Now that we are beyond the system of the 20th century, the contemporary vision of hope is to be found in the universal middle-class and the affluent society, which were precisely those things rejected by the youth of the 20th century in their search for the extraordinary everyday. That the vision of hope that exists in the sense of the hope-based gap-widening society is the inverse of the vision depicted in the 20th century is a simple proof that we have moved into a new era.
Masahiro Yamada articulated a concern that “the despair of the losers will tear Japan apart” in response to the unequal distribution of hope in contemporary society. Here, Yamada is fundamentally calling for the return to the 20th century and the society of postwar Japan. Needless to say, such a proposal solves nothing, but the key problem is that Shinji Miyadai’s change in rhetoric stems from a similar perception of the current circumstances.
The ideologies of Emperorism and Pan-Asianism, that were built with the total war system, were both 20th century attempts to craft an extraordinary everyday. Any attempt to save the bloomer-clad girl who has taken a shock to her mental stability will just be deflected; the two will remain indifferent. The kinds of social phenomena that we have discussed, such as freeters, NEETs, and shut-ins, are tied-up in the end of the 20th century and the end of endless everyday of mass death=mass life. However, Shinji Miyadai continued to be fixated on the dichotomy between the endless everyday and the extraordinary everyday.
Hiroki Azuma, in Ontological, Postal, widely applied the concept of negative theology—a term which was originally taken from Jacques Derrida. According to Azuma, “Derrida’s negative theology is a broad kind of mystical reasoning that at least affirms existence as much as is necessary to perceive the world. It chiefly refers to those things that cannot be expressed through a positivist or empiricist framework, and can therefore only be communicated through negative expressions.” As for examples of negative theology, Azuma lists Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derrida’s Gödel-like deconstruction, Koujin Karatani’s Architecture as Metaphor, and even Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Naturally, the interwar French thinkers that were of the same milieu as Jacques Lacan, with examples such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean Wahl, were all of the negative theology mode. The work of György Lukács in History and Class Consciousness was also built on negative theology as an approach to the issue of revolution and the absence of class consciousness.
In short, negative theology is a recurring feature of 20th century thought. Shinji MIyadai’s reliance on the dichotomy between the endless everyday and extraordinary everyday—which we have sketched as emerging from the lineage of Martin Heidegger to Jean-Paul Sartre to Kenzaburou Ooe—is structured in terms of negative theology. In other words, as 20th century thought.
According to Masachi Osawa, “Aum Shinrikyou seemed to exactly balance an ironical approach to fiction with a totally literal approach.” This kayfabe-like stratified structure [a completely different, thoroughly Japanese set of terms are used here, but I think this gets at the point better than explaining those terms would] is the essence of the 20th century, with its basis in negative theology. For example, 19th century socialism literally believed in the proletariat acting as agents of revolution. However, by the 20th century, socialism as characterised by works such as History and Class Consciousness relieved the proletariat of this role. And even beyond that, saw no revolutionary class to begin with; lacking this subject, revolution is impossible. From this perspective, György Lukács developed a negative theology of the proletariat, with the paradoxical conclusion that the possibility of revolution lay in its impossibility: A Marxist version of credo quia absurdum—I believe because it is absurd.
A kayfabe-like structure dares to believe in an extraordinary everyday that lies beyond the banality of the endless everyday. This same orientation can be found in both the ironism of Japanese Romanticism that was embodied in Yukio Mishima and in Bolshevism as embodied in the United Red Army. When Mishima committed ritual suicide by self-disembowelment, he forcibly penetrated his endless everyday with the extraordinary everyday. In a similar manner, the United Red Army committed a structural purge of itself via its preoccupation with its characteristic reviews. Both cases placed fiction atop reality in a kayfabe-like structure, and corresponded to 20th century negative theology.
As explained earlier by Akihiro Kitada, the United Red Army’s extreme fixation on looking backwards gave way to the posture of intentionally and subversively avoiding any retrospection (consumer society ironism) that was embodied by Shigesato Itoi in the 1970s. However, both Itoi’s acts of intentional subversion in the 1970s and Yasuo Tanaka’s acts of unintentional inversion in the 1980s were incomplete as critical responses to the United Red Army. Despite seeming to be a subversive act of consumer ironism that arrived at precisely the right moment, meeting excessive retrospection with the negation of retrospection still operates within the framework of negative theology. Both Itoi and Tanaka simply relaxed and redirected the instincts of negative theology that had driven the United Red Army incidents in postwar Japan.
A corresponding point can be made in regards to the general wave of Japanese postmodernism that was at its apex in the 1980s. More specifically, after the collapse of socialism and the emergence of the Gulf War at the close of that decade, the vast majority of Japanese postmodernists retreated to the rhetoric of postwar modernity and democracy without missing a beat. In this regard, it would be accurate to describe this kind of postmodernism as the deconstructed form of late modern (20th century modern) thinking.
However, Shigesato Itoi specifically refused to sign the Writers’ Open Letter against the Gulf War. [The Writers’ Open Letter against the Gulf War was an open letter organised by Koujin Karatani at the outbreak of the Gulf War to oppose the Japanese government’s financial support of the United Nations Gulf War Coalition. It contained two declarations: firstly, a specific renunciation of Japan’s involvement in the Gulf War; secondly, a general affirmation of Japanese neutrality and pacifism premised on horrors of the Second World War. For context, Kiyoshi Kasai himself was one of the more prominent writers who publicly refused to sign it.] In the dialogue between Genichiro Takahashi and Eiji Ootsuka titled History and Fantasy, Takahashi [a signatory of the Writers’ Open Letter against the Gulf War] said “what should really be up for review is the word ‘review’ itself.” [This is a pun in Japanese, I promise.] Basically, while Itoi and Takahashi shared an opposition to the United Red Army and its fixation on review, their attitudes on the Gulf War departed sharply.
My study of the concept of the phenomenology of terror [Kasai’s first political theory book was titled The Phenomenology of Terror and was released in 1984] considered the self-destructive negative theology of Yukio Mishima and the United Red Army, with an approach corresponding to Gödel-like deconstruction. However, the idea of overcoming negative theology through a more refined negative theology is a 20th century approach. I was focused on criticism of postmodernism in the 1980s, but in retrospect I now see that the era was simply a contest between hard and soft manifestations of negative theology. Even if the hardline approach is superior to the soft approach, they are still both constructed with a similar framework.
The era of negative theology nonetheless came to its conclusion. As for my own adherence to negative theology throughout the 1990s, the most direct explanation would be my involvement in the detective fiction movement that started in 1987 with The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji. Honkaku detective fiction, which mostly corresponds to the interwar period, was saturated by a baptism of formalism that reflected a structure of negative theology and Gödel-like deconstruction. As for the time-lag where the honkaku renaissance in Japan was occurring throughout the 1990s while the wider culture was already moving out of the 20th century, that is a conversation for another time.
There was no endless everyday in the 19th century. The bourgeois everyday attempted to capture Romantic transcendence through the pedagogical accumulation of life experience. The dialectic between the ideal of the extraordinary everyday and the reality of the endless everyday of mass death=mass life was a phenomenon that was isolated to the 20th century. Since the age of Cro-Magnons, human beings have been infected by the “disease of meaning” (Koujin Karatani). Whether it is premodernity, 19th century modernity, or 20th century modernity, human beings of every era have systemised their desire for transcendent meaning. However, the system that corresponded to negative theology has expired.
In terms of the evolution of modes of retrospection, Laughing Japanese Nationalism is an interesting and fresh critique. However, it lacked any awareness of the separation of the 1990s from the 20th century. Akihiro Kitada characterising the laughing Japanese nationalists that inhibit spaces like 2channel as being the strange synthesis of “ironism which has lost the edge of its criticality due to self-objectification, and Romanticism which carries authenticity to the point of naïveté.” But this characterisation reduces such 21st century phenomena to the 20th century of negative theology, as in the cases of the United Red Army or Aum Shinrikyou. Kitada concludes by saying:
Consumer social ironism moves to Romantic cynicism: Consumer society, filled with zombified snobbery, would never be satisfied by the ironical end of retrospection. Instead, another stage emerged to close out the dialectic—that is, Romantic cynicism. Enlightenment rhetoric is completely useless in the face of such zombies who are in search of their humanity.
Akihiro Kitada entrusts the future to those such as Nancy Seki, and her dialectical combination of “inheriting the spirit of the 1980s” with “outright hostility to the spirit of the 1980s.” However, in considering the spirit of the 1980s, for which we will include Shigesato Itoi’s subversive anti-retrospection, its essential character is dismantling negative theology through negation. Therefore, both the inheritance of the 1980s and outright hostility towards it lack much in the way of meaning.
Shinji Miyadai organised his thinking in terms of various parallel conflicts: Bloomer vs. sarin in the 1990s; the endless everyday vs fantasies of post-apocalyptic adventure in the 1980s; science fiction in the 1950s vs science fiction in the 1960s. However, these conflicts are not actually arranged with this kind of stratification. If bloomers and the endless everyday are 20th century ideas, sarin and fantasies of post-apocalyptic adventure correspond to the perverted ideological frameworks of the 20th century, such as Nazism and Bolshevism. More particularly, the idealism of sarin and fantasies of post-apocalyptic adventure correspond to Americanism and the affluent society, as their shallowness and emptiness cannot match the ideological intensity of Nazism and Bolshevism. However, they are all still of the same stock—which is to say constructed with the anti-reality secreted by the 20th century spirit. The character of sarin and fantasies of post-apocalyptic adventure is still negative theology, just diluted and spread about. While the ideals represented by sarin can only exist as kayfabe atop the reality of bloomers, Miyadai characterises them as conflicting forces that exist on the same layer. Furthermore, both sarin and bloomers are seen as being able to alternate dominance over each other in the dialectic of the extraordinary everyday vs. endless everyday structure without breaking it.
The meaning of sekai-kei is precisely that it has let the dichotomisation of sarin vs bloomer lapse. The sekai is the space that facilitates pure love between a beautiful fighting girl, engrossed in Armageddon, and a boy, who is entrenched in a mundane school life routine. It is a structure that emerges from the ruins of the conflict of bloomer vs sarin. In this case, is sekai-kei also a strange synthesis of “ironism which has lost the edge of its criticality due to self-objectification, and Romanticism which carries authenticity to the point of naïveté?”
However, in sekai-kei, the girl corresponds to sarin (Armageddeon) while the boy corresponds to bloomers. Boys, the primary target of sekai-kei media, are not in search of the extraordinary everyday of Armageddon or a final world war as embodied by the sarin subway attacks. They are not attracted to the Romantic appeal of such events. In other words, sekai-kei cannot be understood through the framework of a “shift [that] resulted from a Romantic mentality that had short circuited the individual’s world and present identity” in the same manner as hyper-online reactionaries and petite nationalists. The final world war, as an event embodying the extraordinary everyday, exists as a condition to structure the sekai-kei story of pure love by separating the girl and boy apart. Moreover, the boys, who relate to the role of the helpless protagonist who can do nothing except watch the girl take on Armageddon, seem to enjoy this role with sincerity rather than irony. Is this just self-harm as entertainment? However, the mental system of enjoying something like self-harm corresponds to negative theology in terms of the division between ‘me’ who is entertained (meta-level) and the ‘me’ who is harmed (object-level). Akihiro Kitada cites Super genius Takeshi’s energetic television!! and We Are the Fun Family as examples that typified consumer social cynicism throughout the 1980s. The same is true of the contrast between business professionals and ordinary people in classic TV dramas.
In the commentary for the paperback edition of Akira’s Chii-chan is Beyond Eternity, the essayist Saori Kumi harshly criticised the consumers of sekai-kei fiction, saying “no matter how you look at it, this mentality is self-centred and a cowardly abdication of responsibility.” Outarou Maijou’s Love Love Love You I Love You! echoes a similar criticism of the sekai-kei mentality.
Tamaki Saitou highlighted the ‘loser’s dogma’ that is typical of shut-ins and widespread among young people, saying “the certainty of their own defeat makes any victory an implicit denial of their own sanity. Therefore, losing becomes the goal.” The boys who enjoy sekai-kei media seem to have something in common with this loser’s religion. The key difference being that the former is amused by their own defeat in the realm of fiction.
Tamaki Saitou further describes the pessimism of this group, noting that “platitudes such as ‘you have not lost yet’, ‘this mentality is harming yourself’, or ‘that’s narcissistic’ seem to be of little help.” Of course, we cannot really criticise the attitude of enjoying one’s own defeat. As explained earlier, the stratified system of fiction involved here is not simple self-harm.
These boys who consume sekai-kei do not believe in the idealism that could transform mass death=mass life and the endless everyday into an extraordinary everyday. As observed by Shinji Miyadai in the case of bloomer-clad girls, if one had the necessary skills, they could “escape the absolutism of a world that was so fixated on meaning.” The same is true of these boys. By making emptiness and nothingness the objects of their consumption habits, these boys may just manage to navigate the end of the Age of Fiction.
