A Short Essay on Oshii Mamoru

Mamoru Oshii and the Soteriology of Cyborg

Why Japanese animation? First of all, one reason why Japanese animation deserves intellectual explication is its revealing "the marriage of heaven and hell"(this is originally the title of a book written by William Blake). According to Susan J. Napier who asks herself "why anime?", all aspects of society and culture for its material, not only the most contemporary and transient of trends but also the "deeper levels of history, religion, philosophy, and politics" are mined by Japanese animation. In this sense, it could be said that animation in general-and perhaps Japanese animation in particular-is the "ideal artistic vehicle for expressing the hopes and nightmares of our uneasy contemporary world", or the "perfect medium to capture what is the overriding issues of our day, the shifting nature of identity in a constantly changing society". For instance, Japanese animation pays much attention to the increasing fluidity of "gender identity" in contemporary popular culture in which women's roles are drastically transforming.
Japanese animation can be roughly classified into two groups; one is the Studio Ghibli line represented by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and the other is the cyberpunk animation represented by Katsuhiro Ōtomo and Mamoru Oshii. While the former has been in pursuit of the humanistic family films, the latter has an orientation toward SF mania films with full use of computer graphics and digital technology. Among them, this paper is intended to review the films of Mamoru Oshii in terms of the issues of identity and border especially with relation to the religious implications. However, it does not cover every film he has directed, but focuses instead on some masterpieces such as Angel's Egg(1985), Ghost in the Shell(1995), Avalon(2001), and Innocence(2004).
Oshii, born in Tokyo in 1951, is well known primarily as an animation director not only in Japan but also in the world. He is said to be a pioneer who suggested a new direction to Japanese animation in early 1980s, and is often called 'a warrior of cyberpunk', 'a philosopher of anime(Japanese animation)', and even 'the founder of anime as a religion' among the animation maniacs. Probably he is worth while to be considered as one of the next generation leaders of Japanese animation in post-Miyazaki era together with Satoshi Gon. Actually, Oshii's animations have influenced world film creators over the world. In addition to working in film, Oshii has written for manga(Japanese comics), video games, and even two novels. Oshii is indeed talented in many ways and has multifaceted career as a director, script writer, concept ideator and producer as well. However, unlike his contemporaries such as Hayao Miyazaki or Hideaki Anno, Oshii is rather an outsider who has been known to refer to himself as a 'stray dog'.

What is at stake in the fundamental narrative structures of Oshii's films, is the component of complicated philosophical and psychological weaving from reality and fiction. Thereby, we are apt to feel confused at an emotional clash between reality and fiction in his films. And the moment when the boundary between reality and fiction becomes vague, we come to doubt if what is real and who really I am. Besides, his films have a specific artistic style that reflects his psychological states. For instance, in high school, he autistically used to daydream the ruined future, while denying to attend the school. Maybe that's why images of ruins and decaying cities, from the abandoned city of Angel's Egg to the run down grit of Avalon, are a common element in Oshii's films.
In addition to this, dogs, birds, fishes, water, angel are also the visual elements characteristic of Oshii's films. Notably, Oshii is a great lover of animals, and they are a recurring motif in many of his films; the fishes and birds are perhaps symbolic of a sense of freedom from the mundane. And dogs, especially Oshii's beloved basset hounds, appear in a number of his later films and represent the director himself. For instance, the dog is a genuinely pivotal character and the world is perceived largely through his eyes in Innocence. Yet above all, Oshii's films are rich with religious mood and symbolism.
Nearly all of Oshii's films have allusions to or make use of elements of religion and mythology. Religious references in Japanese animation are often superficial and used to impart an exotic and mysterious flavor. Oshii, on the other hand, utilizes his religious motifs "in a much more meaningful way". In effect, Oshii's films abound with images and symbols drawn from diverse religious traditions, including Shinto, Buddhism, and especially Christianity. Christianity is the religion Oshii most often uses and alludes to in his films such as Angel's Egg, the two Patlabor films, Ghost in the Shell, and Innocence. For instance, a genius hacker Hoba Eiichi, a hidden but the most important character in Mobile Police Patlabor(1989), represents God(E. Hoba, an English abbreviation, stands for Yahwee).
More remarkable are the metaphorical meanings involving religion and myth in Angel's Egg. For instance, the Christian imagery and the symbolic motifs(e.g. the gigantic shadow fish, the Tree of Life, the dove, the cathedral's stained-glass windows, the cross-shaped weapon, the warrior as Christ, the references to Noah's Ark and to the Flood, etc.) can be diversely interpreted. In particular, the egg might be interpreted as a symbol not only of rebirth and resurrection but also of cosmic creation. The destruction of the egg by the soldier also shows multidimensional religious meanings. It may constitute a denial of innocence and hope on one level, and at the same time, it could also be interpreted as a positive choice in association with the Buddhist notion of emptiness, on another level. And the fishermen's zealous pursuit of a non-existent prey could be said to symbolize the blind faith of religion(their belief that they will catch the fish, in spite of their constant and consistent failure), but religion's fatalism as well.
It should be also noted that Innocence presents the animistic and pantheistic landscape of Etorofu, designed as a new 'information center' metropolis, where headquarters of the Locus Solus Corporation is located. Everything becomes god in that landscape; whatever it may be, the gothic skyscrapers, Chinese grotesque figures, statues of gods, dragons, gigantic elephant wagons, carnival-like rituals, burning puppets, including humans and cyborgs. And there incarnated Kusanagi comes down at last.
In the same manner, Ghost in the Shell alludes to many varieties of religion, including Buddhism, Shinto, and Christianity. Typically, the lyrics for the main theme song of the film were composed in the ancient Yamato language and speak of a god descending from the heavens. Hence the song displays a strong Shinto influence and can be seen as alluding to the descent of the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu, who is the mythological source of Japanese civilization. Another religious metaphor is the use of imagery involving Kusanagi's falling, alluding to mankind's initial fall from grace as depicted in the Bible. Susan J. Napier has detailed these falls in Ghost in the Shell; they include the fall from the skyscraper at the beginning of the film, the metaphorical fall involved in diving into the harbor, and finally Kusanagi's fall into the mind of the Puppet Master at the climax of the film.
Here, the name of Kusanagi itself has to do with some mythological sources. That is, Kusanagi is the name of a sword counted among the three imperial regalia in Japanese myth. According to a Shinto myth, Susanō, a younger brother of Amaterasu, discovered the sword from within the great serpent that he killed. And the serpent called Yamatano-orochi has been interpreted as the mythic Hii River itself or the spirit of that river. In this respect, Kusanagi can be said to be deeply related with the symbolism of water as a source of life.
Additionally, Kusanagi's birth scene at the prologue of the film reminds us of an embryo in the uterus. At this point, Kusanagi's dive into the ocean can be also interpreted as a sort of cosmogonic longing to reintegrate the primeval unity, as Mircea Eliade repeatedly suggested. Then, the fusion of Kusanagi and the Puppet Master may be regarded as a digital actualization of such fundamental religious principles as "coincidentia oppositorum"(a paradoxical unity of the opposites) or a return to the primordial androgynous totality. That fusion clearly evokes the "marriage of opposites", "marriage of heaven and hell" or "collaboration between the woman and the man in the mind".
And Kusanagi is just a cyborg(human-machine hybrid), the fusion of the body and technology in both real and conceptual ways. Beginning with Donna Haraway's seminal essay "A Cyborg Manifesto"(1985), the idea of the cyborg as a potentially liberating force has aroused much debate in some modern academic thought. Haraway's Manifesto interrogates or collapses the differences between the sentient and the non-sentient, the human and the non-human; it engages and undoes a wide range of binary oppositions from Cartesian dualism to culturally coded distinctions of gender, class, and race; and it exemplifies the breaching of boundaries and frontiers in social, ethical, legal and technological issues. Haraway argues that the cyborg can be a model for re-imagining liberation, "in the traditions of western science and politics...the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination." It can be further explained that the borders concerned are those between animal and human, human and machine, physical and non-physical and presumably male and female. The cyborg is held to challenge these divisions.
In addition, Haraway's cyborg body alludes to an escape from the bounded individual body into a network of genetic or electronic language or information. Haraway's Manifesto figures this as the ability and opportunity to build new kinds of networks across lines of culture, language, race, and gender, rejecting the dichotomies of natural versus artificial and body versus language, i.e., to pursue the ultimate transgressed boundary, as Claudia Springer pointed out:
A human-centered universe rests on a system of dualities: real/artificial, natural/cultural, male/female, young/old, analytic/emotional, past/present. and alive/dead, as well as human/technological. When the boundary between human and artificial collapses, all of the other dualities also dissolve, and their two parts become indistinguishable, displacing humans from the unique and privileged position they maintained in Enlightenment philosophy. Transgressed boundaries, in fact, are a central feature of postmodernism, and the cyborg is the ultimate transgressed boundary.
In Haraway's view, the cyborg's transgressive combination of the organic and the mechanical will challenge the dichotomy between natural and artificial, promising to free the subject from imposed categories of biology, gender, and race.: "Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia."
The concept of the cyborg like this as a radical method to find freedom from domination is one that resonates throughout Ghost in the Shell. Because Kusanagi and the Puppet Master are trying to create something akin to the "powerful infidel heteroglossia" through the diversity of life created by the merge of the two. We might call it "soteriology of cyborg", which will reach the peak of a shell's ontology: "A creature that hides and withdraws into its shell, is preparing a 'way out' by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosion, not to say whirlwinds of being." The "shell" in Ghost in the Shell stands for an isolated and autistic inanimate world, while the "ghost" reveals something animate. But both of the two will be embraced by water symbolism. When Kusanagi spends her spare time diving into the ocean(the ocean of information which Hong Kong urban space symbolizes), she tells us that "I feel fear, cold, alone, sometimes down there I even feel hope." What is indeed the hope? Maybe a hope of "whatever is falling down shall have wings some day." (Park. chat0113@paran.com)