Representations of Architecture in Japanese Animé and Manga
Introduction
The first half of .hack Liminality: In The Case of Mai Minase shuttles the viewer back and forth from the streets of suburban Tokyo to a cemetery in Germany to a virtual computer-created world and back to a small home in Japan. .hack Liminality is an OVA (オリジナル ヴィデオ アニメーション, transliteration: Orijinaru video animēshon) within the broader .hack franchise of animé and computer games. As the Liminality films appeared after the inception of several other .hack titles — including .hack//sign, the best known example of the series — Liminality was able to fill in some of the backstory of events that had transpired in the series already. Most of .hack//sign is set in a virtual computer-created role-playing environment known as “The World” while the events in Liminality take place in the real, present-day, lives of those who play this The World. In both the “real world” and the virtual world of the computer game, physical environment is a key aspect of narrative device and the creation of setting and atmosphere for plot and character development. Expectedly, like many animé, the producers of .hack have taken astute care to ensure that physical details are nuanced and convincing. Architecture is certainly one of the foremost of such physical details and the development and treatment of architectural aesthetics in the .hack franchise is extensive and engrossing.
The fields of architectural history and theory have by convention expectedly focused on the evolution of built and paper architecture and the sociocultural interactions of physical culture with an emphasis on architecture and associated creative disciplines. For architectural history to examine the portrayal of architecture in various media is a novel concept to an extent, but one that extrapolates from the type of scholarly work architectural history has been engaged in for years. We live in a time where entertainment media is more present, more sophisticated, and more nuanced than ever before: books, films, television, video games, and animation are all parts of our contemporary lives and while the mechanisms and narrative trajectories these media apply to represent our lives in fiction have been investigated by cinema studies, language studies, and arts historical scholars their foci have mainly been the representation of society and culture with an emphasis on character development and plot. The built environment in a fictional work is not just represented, but in fact created. This is nowhere more true than with animé, manga, and other animation as every aspect of such works must be drawn and thereby all “sets” are directly created by animators.
This thesis paper investigates how architecture is represented in current Japanese animé and manga. The goals of this exploration are to examine animé and manga as unique forms of “world-building narrative” fictional discourse and then to examine how animé and manga apply architecture in the service of furthering the narrative at hand. Moreover, how do animé and manga from Japan portray the architectural and cultural landscape history of Japan and that of other cultures and nations when such are represented? In stories where futuristic or fantasy worlds exist, how are such portrayed? Is there a strong and commonplace difference or apparent disconnect between contemporary Japan and the West when it comes to how future worlds are considered in animé and manga or do these Japanese genre for the most part follow their Western counterparts in novels, film, and comics? The key premise here is, that as other scholars have established in general of the genre of animé and manga themselves, the application and representation of the built environment in these genre do differ from Western contemporary narrative forms.
When Western influences are apparent in animé and manga, most often they are literary ones and not contemporary film, television, or animation-based influences. While there is certainly cross-influence in both directions between animé and Western animation, as animé has become an international entertainment form, it has retained a large portion of its interest and character germane to Japanese culture and environment. To understand this trait, it is useful to explore the history of Japanese culture in general beyond the specific history of animé or Japanese film. The important distinction here is that in Japan, film was originally very much a modality that was technologically developed in-country but which received high degrees of aesthetic influence from the West. However, it did not take long for aspects of Japanese culture, literature, and visual arts to make their way into Japanese film. Animé evolved into a distinct style of animation over the 1980s with its formative origins in the 1970s, but has suffered to an extent from being not studied until rather recently alongside live-action Japanese film by scholars. For example, Hideaki Anno (庵野秀明) is often cited as a pioneering animé director and an important director in general for Japanese cinema due to his epic series Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン) but his inclusion in scholary works surveying film seems to be as much due to the press reaction and fiscal success of Neon Genesis Evangelion over its aesthetics.
While animé has over the course of the 1990s ascended to international popularity, the study of animé by academics has both been very deep in scope and detail and at once removed from film studies and further relationship to other Japanese arts and entertainment topics. This is mainly due to two aspects: the unique nature of animé and the fact that many cultural investigations of animé have focused more on its sociocultural role as a force in youth culture than its aesthetic, literary, and narrative attributes. Western scholars have by and large examined animé in tandem with its extended international viewership, as is evidenced by Mark McLelland’s article on yaoi in the Franco-African sociocultural journal Mots Pluriels. This approach as indicated the ”exotic” nature of animé as it was imported into Western consumption and also the insular nature of animé as a fandom — at least prior to the huge success of a variety of animé that were dubbed or redone for American and other English-language markets. In addition, animé is divided (as is manga) into a variety of essential sub-genre and a broader swath of the Japanese population consume animé than most likely consume American or Western cartoons: in example, there are animé primarily for boys and young men (Shōnen [少年]) and those mainly geared towards young girls (shoujo (少女]) while there are others targeted towards adults (seinen [青年]).
It should also be noted that the animé craze that has swept American and European youth culture has, to a degree, been viewed within Japan with some amusement and even disgust: While Japan consumes overall more animé and manga (especially in terms of adult viewers/readers) than international markets do, the term ”otaku (オタク)” in Japan is used as a derisive term to indicate a young man or teenage boy overly interested and involved in animé and manga to the point of exclusion of other age-appropriate interests, but in American popular usage the term has taken a positive denotative meaning. Many animé fans have dubbed themselves ”otaku” and it it appears in countless forums, screen-names for internet message boards, and other locations of animé/manga fan bases. The sci-fi writer William Gibson has expressed his own admiration for otaku, stating, ”the otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today’s interface of British and Japanese cultures” yet even this opinion betrays a Western vantage point on the topic. Despite Gibson’s acumen as a writer, his view here confounds the Japanese convention for order and aesthetic harmony with the otaku’s desire for escape from traditional Japanese society — surrounding himself with the fantasy-worlds of animé and manga.
In Japan, tradtionally the study of sociocultural aspects has been known as nihonbunkaron (日本文化論), a discipline that has no exact Western counterpart but encompasses efforts of the social sciences, literary, and arts historical investigations into cultural trajctories. The difference between nihonbunkaron and, say, Western sociology is that nihonbunkaron takes a philosophical approach formulated over thousands of years and is based in essential formative texts. Thus, nihonbunkaron is akin to a school of thought much like, in example, the Austrian School is one of a number of epistemological approaches to economics. In nihonbunkaron-based scholarship, the concept of shimaguni (島国) is key: shimaguni is the ideal that Japan, as an island nation, has a specific set of climatic and environmental factors that bring forth unique harmony between people and nature. This concept, as an aesthetic approach, extends to postulate that the best efforts in art, music, literature, architecture and even cuisine strive to emulate the balance and harmony of nature. The scholar and historian Tetsurō Watsuji’s work takes a pronounced focus on this aspect of Japanese aesthetic philosophy and extends these concepts towards the realm of moral philosophy: the concept of fūdo (風土) and the impact of climate on all aspects of life is central to Tetsuro’s extended concepts of morality and beauty. The entire discipline of shinfūdoron (新風土論) is based on the concept of fūdo and the relationship and dynamism of nature, man, and climate still occupy an important role in Japanese philosophy.
In Japan, the ideal of tsu (通), or beauty, is a very multi-form thing. While the creation of things of beauty even within the scope of the ordinary details and tasks of the day such as food preperation is a focus of Japanese beliefs about tsu and iki (いき) — the traditional approach to aesthetics in Japan — in general, the greater, immense, beauty of nature is the leading example for most Japanese artists and other creative persons in what they wish to emulate. In experiencing an environment at the most consummate level, one must be in that environment and if not within it, per se, as close to such an encompassing experience as possible.
The concept of mono no aware (物の哀れ) carries forth this need for experience of a thing of beauty from its interior but is, in fact, most often encountered in literary studies as something a reader may feel via literature. There is no exact translation of mono no aware in English, but it is akin to the neoclassical-era literary concept of the sublime excepting that instead of a thing of grandness or subtle beauty being viewed as awe-inspiring, it is viewed as a manifestation of such beauty that there is sadness — even pity — at the delicate nature of beauty in the world and how quickly such true beauty often vanishes. A related concept is that of yūgen (幽玄), or the sense of mysterious depth found in something that, once again, Western literary scholars might describe as sublime. A core premise related to both mono no aware and yūgen is that nothing, no matter how beautiful, exists forever. This premise in Japanese is known as mujyou (無常).
Why these aesthetic and literary concepts are so crucial to understanding architecture in its applications in animé and manga is that in the Japanese view, architecture is one art form that is best enabled to replicate the diversity and totality of aesthetic experience one finds in nature. In the aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi (侘寂), beauty is expressed via the concept that transience and evolution are natural to all things. The concepts of mujyou, wabi-sabi, and iki are sui generis concepts to Japanese aesthetics even as they have analogs in Western and other traditions; their origins are clearly Japanese and their manifestation is most embodied normally in Japanese creative output that allows for their best expression. Animé, being a time-based media and being able to reduce entire worlds into the concept of a narrative that is at once oftentimes very complex but also by defining traits of viewership and time limits — concise and simple — is a perfect media for a wabi-sabi approach to communication.
The import of nihonbunkaron to contemporary Japanese cultural studies is two-fold: firstly, the tradition of nihonbunkaron lives on in current cultural studies and in informing many aspects of Japanese academic life and secondly, nihonbunkaron displays a foil of sorts compared to the Western-influnced, fast-paced, nature of contemporary Japanese life. However, in the case of animé, manga, and other arts and entertainment cultural foci, the narratives, the settings, and the overall aesthetics of these genre often show strong influence of Japanese traditional mores and concepts over more modern ones. Likewise, it can be said that a further difference is extant between how Japanese of the current younger generation view their nation, their identity, and in relation to those who are artists, their artistic output. Architecture, literature, visual art and entertainment all have taken on Western influences but also have retained and often shifted Japanese traditional conceptions into new and novel trajectories.
Animé and manga are thereby not isolated within Japanese youth culture or pop culture in general, then, insofar as they look to traditional influences for aesthetics but also delight in exploring concepts and points of departure much further afield; moreover, the econocultural presence of animé and manga in a tough and often fickle international youth market reckons better chances at success by often borrowing patterns and programmatic trajectories from other media influences. The fact that animé and manga have now large, established, and loyal external (international) markets is one that Masatoshi Tominaga noted in his study of the impact of global market trends in animé. Japanese youth trends are, in media such as animé and manga, able to influence external markets because Japan is the primary base of new ideas in these media. As animation studios and producers know this, storylines that involve a good deal of Japanese cultural or historical influence present a complex equation: if these will be marketed externally, they may entice viewers via their portrayals of an exotic Asian world but the opposite may happen and they may seem too insular and distant for many international viewers to approach. To an extent, the latter seems to have been the case with the animé Harukanaru Toki no Naka de — Hachiyō Shō (遙かなる時空の中で — 八葉抄). This Heian-period fantasy/drama presented beautifully-rendered animation, a complex plot, and characters who should have appealed (and did, in Japan) to a shoujo viewership but it failed to garner the international popularity its markerters surely anticipated.
Animé and manga can be broken down into three primary directions of influence in the world entertainment market: the domestic (Japanese) market, the international market, and the broader influence on other forms of entertainment such as film (e.g., Kill Bill) Western animated productions (e.g., Avatar: The Last Air-Bender), and video games (e.g., Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy XII). When the successful manga Gravitation (グラビテーション, transliteration: Gurabitēshon) was first translated for international markets then made into an animé for Japanese and external markets, then the subject of a Western-style novel (as opposed to a bunkoban manga or graphic novel) it might be said that the process of evolution has come full circle for the franchise.
In the criticism and study of manga and animé, the same aspects have been considered by scholars as would be in other forms of cinema or literature (i.e., plot, narrative technique, character development) and the history and cultural leanings of traditional and contemporary Japan, as noted above, and the specific situation of animé and manga as unique genre are also interwoven into how animé and manga are viewed in a scholarly manner. Studies based in nihonbunkaron even when not directly concerned at all with animé or manga have nonetheless informed both the creative aspects of animé and manga and the study thereof because nihonbunkaron has pointed towards a specific, Japanese, outlook on the harmony of aesthetics that has no analog in Western arts historical studies in large part because it is much more than just an arts historical or even just a humanistic approach: nihonbunkaron instead encompasses most every field that would exist in a feudal or early modern society such as Japan during the Heian to Edo periods.
Animé, Manga, and their Relationship:
For purposes of this paper, most examples explored are those of animé — actual animated television shows or films — as opposed to manga or Japanese comics/comic books. However, the relationship between manga and animé is very worth noting in context: most animé are developed out of successful franchises that began as manga. An important aspect of this is that manga in many cases have details and plotlines either simplified or not explored at all in the following animé. In some cases, especially when an animé is designed for a large and/or international viewership, the nuances of the plot are brought into more simple terms to allow for faster flow of the narrative in a half-hour television slot. The Shaman King (シャーマンキング, transliteration: Shāman Kingu) animé would be a strong example of this approach versus the manga which preceeded its creation. For the exploration of architecture within manga and animé, the animé examples are often of greater interest because the narrative style of an animated feature allows for more of the architecture to be ”seen” or experienced by characters and viewer alike. However, the manga examples are noteworthy because in some cases, such as the aforementioned Shaman King, some very lovely and exacting art is furnished in support of large comic panels in manga.
In addition, in some cases architectural style is changed or simplified in animé from the orginal in manga — not surprising given the changes in general that result when a manga is converted for an animé. In the Shaman King manga, in example, the temple architecture displayed overt influences of the Yoshinogari (吉野ヶ里 遺跡, transliteration: Yoshinogari iseki) style of architecture dating from around the second century, C.E. whereas the animé of the same title renders temple architecture as a more generic pre-Heian period style but not one specific (as in the manga) to the Yayoi period (弥生時代, transliteration: Yayoi-jidai). An obvious question is: Is this purely an aesthetic difference or would it impact the plot? In the case of Shaman King, given that the storyline concerns a young boy and his friends who can see and communicate with ghosts and because many of these ghosts and their origins seem to hail from Chinese legends, the inclusion of Yayoi references — to a period of Japanese history greatly influenced by Korean and Chinese origins — would seem in fact very central to the plot. In instances of other manga and animé, such is expectedly less the case, but these details and the general transition between manga and animé and then from Japanese-language versions to international versions is very much worth studying.
Manga and animé are not as young as some would expect of these genre; in fact, manga has a long history going back to at least to around 1775 C.E. in the form of pictoral novels very much like today’s manga and Western graphic novels, known as Kibyōshi (黄表紙). Kibyōshi in turn developed out of traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques which had long been used to tell sequential, linear, narratives though normally of shorter length and rather simply plot-lines. Thus, manga has had a history that can be traced back at least to the Edo period and is a cultural force very much within the broad scope of contemporary and historical Japanese culture. Without a doubt, there are scholars who would consider manga outside of the realm of ”proper” Japanese studies and in contrast, many who would in fact consider it within that scope, but the social impact of manga transects a lengthy period of Japanese cultural history. Animé as we know it would not exist without manga, however, due to the popularity of film and television, the ability of animé to expand worldwide and garner greater sales revenue than manga is obvious and therefore major studios will place more funding in animé projects than manga.
Obviously manga is unique as a genre because it is drawn and therefore has close kin in Western comics and graphic novels and a history in Japanese culture tied to Kibyōshi : aside from Western comics, it is a genre that is neither directly an analog of literary evolution or of visual graphic or fine arts. Animé, then, we see as evolving from manga, from film, from animation in general but sourcing not only (in recent years) most of its narrative material but also its cultural and narrative conventions from manga with far less influence from other sources. Post-World War II introductions of American — especially Disney — animation certainly also helped forge a path of what animé would become, but developments were brewing in other parts of Asia also, with Korea and British Hong Kong making strides in the development of both comics and animation that would later influce — and in turn be influence by — manga and animé. While much scholarship of manga and animé draws attention to the fact that both genre apply a variety of traditionally Asian philosophical systems and aspects, such as elements of Taoism and (in many cases rather trite) cultural typologies such as ninja and ronin, the impact of traditional sociocultural norms and the interface between contemporary Japan and pre-war Japan is less examined in most cases.
Animé, Narrative, & Architecture:
Given that animé is a rather new medium that has extensive roots and sources of influence in manga, traditions in Japan preceeding manga, and Western cinematic influeces; animé is in a very unique position to develop its own novel and consummate approach to narrative. The wellspring of this thesis paper was repeated awareness of the nuanced detail and import given to architecture and a sense of place in general in animé. The first expected question was “does this same trend happen also in manga — is that its origins?” and the short answer to that is yes, manga also has a strong tradition of architectural representation. However, the manner in which such representations in manga and animé are formulated and the trajectories these take are markedly different in animé versus manga. Some of this difference is expectedly due to the varied narrative needs and operative constraints of the two media. The mere presence of a greater number of people working on an animé over a manga can certainly seem to dictate a fair amount of its detail and inclusion of great vantages of landscape. In contrast, some manga, such as Shaman King, display a constant attention to architecture seemingly brought about by the creator and principle artist of this franchise, Hiroyuki Takei (武井宏之). In the case of the animé adaptation of Shaman King, there was no analog to the large half-page (sometimes even larger) panels that Takei often drew in the manga to show an exploded-view of a house, temple, or other structure.
There are, of course, many other differences and alterations between the manga and animé of Shaman King and other cases where a manga was later adapted as an animé. However, some of these in the case of Shaman King are very illustrative of the narrative function of architecture as these other changes also demonstrate a change in narrative function. In example, the clan of shaman lead by Tao Ren (道 蓮) in the franchise are of Chinese origin and their magical powers, beliefs, weapons, and other traits are closely tied with Chinese mythology and expressed as such. This situation holds true in both the orginal manga and Japanese-language animé but slightly less true in the American version of the animé — most likely to avoid issues of confusion between Japanese and Chinese traditions on the part of American viewers. In the Japanese-language version both of the manga and animé the material culture surrounding Ren and his sister, Tao Jun (道 潤) — from costumes to weapons to architecture — constantly serves to identify them as Chinese; while slightly less true in the American manga version, this trend is still very evident (see Illustration-1: Ren Tao as rendered in the English-language manga of Shaman King; note the Chinese-style pants and slippers worn by Ren and the vauge Chinese style of the interior architecture seen behind him).
The situation of architecture in manga and animé both touches on the broader question of how the representation of the built environment is studied in fiction in general. A number of studies of film, novels, poetry, and other fictional forms have examined the natural and built environment in relation to narrative — often with a certain ideaological or methodological approach taken to such that makes the environment supportive to the scholar’s thesis on the author’s work or at least as a mechanism for fleshing out further metaphorical items tangent to the narrative. Some scholars such as Gábor Bezeczky have viewed most any (and thereby all) investigations of environment as tired both to narrative and grounded in metaphoric theory and Bezeczky’s analysis of the theories of Max Black and Mikhail Bakhtin are impressive, engrossive, and complete enough to form a strong basis for further investigation of metaphor and narrative in tandem. Marie-Laurie Ryan’s scholarship has taken a similar route but is inclusive of the concept that today’s “cyber” age (and in theory, the age or ages yet to come, which if anything barring a revolution of Luddities should be even more technologicalized) has changed the trajectory of relationship between character, technology, and place from traditional Western literature. Bakhtin was always interested in the use of dialog in the novel and it was from this — and in conference with the work of Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov — that Bezeczky started to contrast the imperative for dialog and language-use in these scholars’ works to the need for a theory of metaphor in Max Black’s scholarship.
Such relationships between narrative and setting may, in many ways, be compared to the dialogal relationship found in sung music betwen lyrics and music. However, just as there may be musical elements in a song that have no direct association with furthering the meaning of the lyrics at hand, there can be incidental representations of architecture and other elements of setting in a work of literature or film that do not directly communicate with narrative intent. Some scholars such as Bezeczky, have problems declaring that any element of a fictional narrative can be seperate from the main narrative trajectory yet it seems apparent that many authors do in fact include side-narratives and even plenty of incidental details that do not further plot. Film-makers, due to the ease of capturing any moment that literally walks by the camera’s gaze can pursue this oppurtunity for inclusion of details non-essential to plot even further; as many techniques and epistemologies of film have informed gaming production and animation alike, in these media also can this situation be located.
Manga and animé repeat long-standing patterns of narrative procedure going back to at least the founding efforts towards the novel, and these patterns have in fact very early Western roots in the Middle Ages as Julia Kristeva and other scholars have noted. This is due, of course, to the fact that while non-western and while postmodern, animé and manga are still linear narrative forms like novelistic fiction and film. Moreover, most animé and manga will attempt to present and resolve at least one major conflict in the span of an issue of the manga or episode of the animé — just as most television dramas and sitcoms follow this format. In the Middle Ages, as developments in feudal European lands and in the British Isles allowed for greater agency and communication between various courts, literature moved slowly away from its post-Roman origins of folk songs and poems and towards epic poetry that would lay the course for the modern novel.
Aside from narrative form in animé and manga there is the distinct issue of how manga and animé tend to engage their reader/viewer and of the presence of the reader/viewer as a user of the media — and not just a passive audience. The devotion of core audience demographics both in Japan and in the international market has in many senses shaped the trajectory not only of marketing animé and manga, but even the typologies of plot. Fan contributions in terms of homespun stories (which are often published by fans on the internet), drawings of characters and environments, and ”fan subs” or translations of non-translated Japanese animé (normally into English) by fans are all commonplace mechanisms for fans to be directly involved in their favorite animé and manga. Studios take note of this interest and very rarely discourage it as a copyright/intellectual property issue and instead in many cases encourage fan-art competitions and other means for fans to be a part of the process of creating animé and manga. In a society as stratafied and orderly as Japan this approach on the part of both fans and studios may seem surprising, but it has been reasoned that much of the cause for its success is that the narratives, characters, and encompassing situation of manga and animé are something fans feel they are part of as a community and that sense of community is a driving force behind the genre’s popularity.
The relationship between animé, manga, and the narrative therefore is a rather complex one where narrative trajectory is predicated on many diverse qualifiers. Given the fast pace of animé and manga and the short time/space (short weekly or monthly comics or television episodes of around half an hour in duration) the need to tell a story in a forward-moving and understandable manner is very high. Setting and enviroment are mechanisms towards this goal as they in both metaphoric and literal terms can place the characters within a substrate for the action of the plot and introduce the viewer to the progression of both ideas and action. The importance of approaching the application of environment, architecture, and setting in animé and manga via a metaphor-based vantage is that in literary studies the attention paid to enviroment — as stated above — too often has suffered from the interloping of a vested idea or critical idiom on the part of the scholar. It is fine to say that an author’s inclusion of a pastoral setting brings forth the female, motherly, feel of his narrative or that a film-maker has used a utopian, futuristic, environment to make comments on progress and technology, but this is overlooking the immediate import of the setting for its own merits. While this view seems to apply a standing metaphorical theory, it actually applies it in inverse, noting the setting as metaphor for other connotative ideals. While many manga and animé do not suffer for a lack of sophistication, these genre trace their history back to narratives mainly targeted towards young people where the interior worlds and their details are crucial over the morality or further agenda of the story.
Many scholars of literature for young people — and by extension film, television and video games for the same — interrogate the moral imperative in such narratives but often at the loss of the authors’ narrative intent. Not all stories impart a precise moral lesson: In a franchise such as Transformers, in example, the age-old tale of good versus evil is certainly apparent but looking for further, nuanced, morals could leave scholars searching far into the night. In much of animé and manga, the moral imperative is one as old as time and one found in epics going back to the Middle Ages: good versus evil, honesty versus deceit, courage stuggling against fear. Given the importance of hagakure (葉隱) in even contemporary Japanese traditional values, the fact these morals are held in high regard should not surprise anyone. The difference in contemporary Japanese mores and those of the West, especially in regard to child-rearing, is far beyond the scope of the present study however when the matter of morals, narrative, and the role of nihonbunkaron and nihonshakairon (日本社会論) are considered, the whole picture comes complete as one where despite the learnings from Western sources that animé and manga do display, these genre are very much their own creatures. Moreover, the cultural context they function within Japan is its own arena and one that alongside the evolution of animé and manga in the global market has been exported to that market.
Beyond the influence of traditional literary forms and contemporary entertainment media on animé and manga and the relationships with these other genre, animé and manga also belong to the emerging “new media” fine art tradition. This situation is because new media artwork often meets the same basic criteria that animé and manga as art/entertainment forms happen to meet: (1) new media tends to be more democratic than traditional fine arts, with street culture and other “outsider” art playing a vital role in the overall scope of identity of the genre; (2) new media art tends to make use of novel technologies including computer-generated graphics and non-conventional printing and animation techniques; (3) new media art also often entertains narratives in visual capacities much as conventional sequential art and animation would, instead of providing a static display as traditional painting and photography do in the fine arts convention. These traits are very much shared by animé and manga as art/entertainment media. Moreover, as Henry Jenkins notes in his book Convergence Culture, new media has leaked out of the gallery setting and into many varied mainfestations on the Internet and even to a degree on television. Our current media-saavy culture values forms of entertainment media that open up a large portion of control to the end-user beyond what traditional narrative films and television would allow and such is found in animé, video gaming, and other outlets.
These traits though, the concept of the user of an entertainment product having a proactive role in the direction of that product, have early origins in new media art. Part of the central core of work by artists such as Laurie Anderson in the 1980s was that they would blend narrative visions with novel technologies and oppurtunities for their audience to have a greater role in their art. Even as far back as the early 1970s, scholars were examining the role of narrative theory in postmodern artwork while artists were in turn looking at not only how to incorporate new materials but also new mechanisms, including electronic technologies, for working with those materials in a narrative capacity. For many artists, the aforementioned Laurie Anderson included, the concept of a cyborg or robot presence is directly included in the fusion of (wo)man and machine in performative or narrative art which also incorporates technological aspects to promote its visuals and/or narrative, and this aspect has not been lost on scholars, either. In his book The Dream of the Moving Statue, Ken Gross speculates on how art based around techno-performative mechanisms must also address in its actual narrative these same mechanisms: that is, while a traditional oil painting may be about a pastoral scene and not comment directly on the fact that oil paints and canvas are used in its physical composition, many new media artists deal with emerging technologies and the sociocultural meanings of such technologies within their art which is in turn enabled by such technologies. Anime and manga, even those that deal with non-modern or postmodern time periods and settings, very often address the capacity of technology to both affect the narrative and the telling of the same: that is, the very technologies which allow for the sophistication of today’s animé and manga are promoted or exalted in the stories presented in these animé and manga.
In Roy Ascott’s essay considering the application of digital technologies in communication of an artistic nature, he muses over the place of emotion within the scope of such communication. At what point does technology become something beyond just the mechanisms that enable technique and thus a core portion of an artistic or narrative trajectory? Ascott’s essay, however, was written in 1990 and reprinted as the introduction for a book published in 2003: a lot has changed since then, perhaps most of all in the fact that no longer is all the most important work in “new media” being created within the scope of fine art or street art but is in fact spreading into the arena of mass entertainment. As technology becomes both a means to enable the production of media and a leitmotif in such media, the very scope of what the term “technology” means becomes more obtuse: in Shaman King, in example, as in many manga, technologies may include those that are magical right beside those which are contemporary and realistic and those which are futuristic and have the trappings of traditional science fiction.
As in much science fiction including the Star Wars franchise and Star Trek: The Next Generation, the line between fantasy-genre type magic and high (digital) technology is oft blurred in animé and manga with some characters or races having what might be described as “super-powers” however these powers could also be considered as advanced, albeit unexplained, technologies. Some scholars have isolated a specific, Japanese, trend towards using robots and robust, quasi-magical, technologies in general in narrative formats though it also seems that the fact that animé and manga came of popularity at a time when electronic media was also becoming very popular probably is the main factor in bringing technology into narrative content.
In some ways, the nihonbunkaron traditions of genre such as Japanese puppet theatre, or ningyō jōruri (人形浄瑠璃), and kibyōshi woodblock prints might be able legacies for animé and manga to carry forward, and this concept has been investigated and serves as the basis for a fair amount of scholarship on the placement of animé and manga in the broader context of Japanese arts and entertainment. It is difficult to imagine that, given the prime place of aesthetic and narrative traditions in Japanese arts, we would not be able to locate a trajectory of continued use of classical concepts in novel media such as animé. However, many innovations in animé have come about independent of Japanese traditional influences, fine art influences, or Western film and entertainment influences. Some aspects of animé and manga have certainly sprung up on their own accord as the fusion of new ideas by young artists and writers have been merged with shifting sociocultural trends. In Anne Allison’s article on the effect of Pokémon on international animation and toy trends and how such represents Japan’s postcolonial role in a world marketplace, Allison examines Pokémon as a trend unique to Japan, however is it really? For many viewers and fans of Pokémon and the unrelated yet similar Digimon franchise, the point of the aesthetics and narrative is not specific to Japanese culture, despite most of the action being set in contemporary Japan. In the 1980s in the United States, the Disney film Tron presented a cute, computer-animated character called “Bit” that interacted with human chararcters and was generated as a life-form via technology. The “monster” concept of such characters though, the idea of taking something typically abject and making it cute, and the interrelationship between technology and its status as a life-form may however be all narrative concepts fairly specific to Japanese film and literature, as other authors have noted on the Pokémon craze.
To recap, the overwhelming narrative function of animé and manga in many instances appears to be one very similar to that of epic poetry and novels, the Japanese sense of morality and also of aesthetics can be traced via nihonbunkaron to a variety of unique Asian roots, and these traits are all manifest via plot, character, and setting in animé and manga. When manga and animé reached a point of high saturation in the international market, it brought with it a cultural construct of Japanese traditional and popular values and aspects and, in most cases, instead of broadening its cultural basis to encompass the external cultures it was attempting to garner as fan-bases, it retained its distinct character which in fact probably generated a larger international fan interest than would have any overt attempt to modify to these other cultures. While on occasion, an animé or manga for export will be less nuanced in its expression of Asian cultural aspects, in general, there is a high level of fidelity to original concepts in translations — including unofficial “fan-sub” translations, such as those for Last Exile, where the translators take great pains to explain possibly remote or arcane terms (whether or not these hailed from Japanese or elsewhere).
Tadao Ando and Wabi Architecture:
In Catherine Slessor’s book Concrete Regionalism, Slessor examines how concrete and other contemporary building materials play a role in the aesthetics of regional architecture and echo previous traditions in such aesthetics: Slessor looks at Tadao Ando, the well-known Japanese architect, and how wabi premises have influenced Ando and how his work, though spartan and modern, continues a convention of Japanese style going back centuries. Slessor cites minka (民家 : farmhouses, farm buildings and other rural structures) and sukiya (数寄屋造り : teahouse) design as core influences on Ando’s approach to design while she views his application of concrete, rebar, and other other modern materials most commonly found in industrial or commercial architecture as not only pragmatic but as providing a new means of obtaining the same wabi priniciples sought by rural creators of vernacular architecture. Therefore, Slessor sees Ando not as part of a post-International Style trajectory as much as an innovative architect concerned mainly with the interactions between native geography and architecture and, in respect to his native Japan, the history of architectural praxis where such has been primarily concerned with interactions with nature. When Ando designs buildings for locations outside of Japan, he retains his trademark style but looks with great care at the setting of such sites. In Japan, though, such nuanced attention is perhaps easier for him and more immediate.
Tadao Ando is certainly one of the best-known of contemporary Japanese architects but his association with his nation is not just one of origin but in fact one of design approach: unlike, in example, Zaha Hadid who is Iranian but London-trained and who has carried out most of her career in Europe, Ando’s work has had a strong impact in his native land and has, as Slessor notes, been highly influenced by Japanese tradtions in architecture and material design. Ando also works with explorations of typology and thereby the role of a building in society, something we find very much reflected in how architecture is applied in animé and manga. Typology, in Japan, touches on premises far beyond architecture and the function of space: minka architecture is closesly tied with the Edo period’s concept of shinōkōshō (士農工商), or “four divisions of society”. In minka construction, one finds the basal premises of rural, farm-based, life in contrast to the machiya (町屋/町家) of urban dwellers (known as chōnin, 町人). That Ando sought out inspiration from minka forms over machiya speaks volumes about his placement of aesthetics and tradition: historically, urban architecture would have held pride of place in society, but the relationship between minkya forms and nature are, expectedly, closer. Nature, and relationship to site as well as to history, have been prime concepts for Ando.
What Tadao Ando has attempted in praxis and what we find in the view of architecture represented in most animé and manga are much the same: a core desire to portray aspects of society via physical space. While Ando, the architect, designs such spaces for the real world, the writers and artists of animé and manga design such spaces to convey the visual keys to understanding society as they portray such in their media. Architecture is, of course, not alone in providing setting in animé and manga, but as most plots evolve in urban settings and to some extent within interior spaces, architecture is the main stage of these stories. Ando has spent much of his career designing public spaces, therefore ones that are also in effect stages for performances whether formal or informal.
With Ando, creating spaces is about creating, or replicating, collective memory of historical legacy while doing such indirectly and also creating a functional and pragmatic arena for given events. In working with typologies, Ando speaks to the notion of architecture representing pre-architectural aspects of society, defining such aspects and making them tangible. Visual media, especially those that are narrative, have the task of telling a story while also having the responsibility to define in some part how society currently views itself, even if the stories told are historical or futuristic or otherwise set outside contemporary location and time. None of this is to say that Ando planned a trajectory akin to that of animé and manga for his architecture but it is clear that he is an architect keenly interested in his culture’s approach to design aesthetics and includes the concept of memory and performativity in a nearly narrative respect in his work.
In contrast, Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, while having completed a number of high-profile projects in Japan appears much more influenced by currents in the worldwide International Style — especially as such was expressed by Le Corbusier. Part of this is the difference in ages and the decades where these two Japanese architects were most active but there is also an element certainly of gravitas towards the International Style and thereby towards broad global currents in architecture on the part of Tange in contrast to a desire to embody the local, national, and ethnocultural on the part of Ando. Still, the age of architecture most exactingly represented by the work of Tange is the age of architecture often portrayed in animé and manga: the large, strong, sweeping office towers and massive public structures of Tokyo and other leading cities. These are the buildings of Japan that say “city” and “contemporary”; these are the buildings that identify the bustle and growth of a massive urban area. Ando, in contrast, clearly sees himself as an architect of peace and solitude: he desires to provide a space that is calming in the midst of urban life. The city itself, it seems, is one of the main “problems” that Ando seeks to solve in his work beyond other immediate challenges specific to each site.
Building Post-Modern Worlds with Pre-Modern Influences:
How architecture is represented in manga and animé — the core of this study — is not a secondary matter to narrative but part and parcel of the narrative modalities applied in these genre. Moreover, the representation of architecture is a manifestation of yamato (大和), or the “spirit” or “unity” of all things Japanese and the concept of essence — or iki (いき) — of the aesthetics (visual, aural, and otherwise) of a situation or idea being refinded into a consummate representation. As iki is normally considered as a refined perfection of aesthetic traits, the tandem perfection of programmatic or performative traits — including the manner in which one approaches something of beauty — is known as tsū (通). Another means of looking at this concept is the ideal of sui (粋) which also relates to aesthetic perfection but moreso in regard to a real-time event or place than to a work of art or other static object. In architecture, there is the most immediate, obvious, and crucial aspect of human-designed improvement on the natural environment.
As Karsten Harries noted in his seminal work on ethics and architecture, architecture in any refined and developed society has, alongside other other arts and modalities of communication, an obligation to bring a sense of beauty and order to the general sitaution of that society. Much as Walter Benjamin has noted and is echoed in the work of a number of other theorists, Harries also references the need for order to be expressed in architecture on a level that will further the ethics and harmony of society but not always in a programmatic or directed manner. That is, as Benjamin observed in his Arcades Project (Passagenwerk) the natural situation of an urban space is often over time modeled via the specifc and evolving ethos of those who inhabit that space. It can be argued that the situation of human interaction mediated by the built environment developed over time that Benjamin describes in Arcades Project cannot really exist in an atmosphere such as the fictional ones of animé and manga but of course, as that atmosphere of evolved development is the goal of fiction in a realistic representation, efforts are made towards a replica that is convincing to viewers/readers.
If we contrast these aspects of animé and manga — the fact that fans play a highly-acute role in the trajectory of the narratives and other aspects of creativity, the role of traditional Japanese thought as manifest in nihonbunkaron and nihonshakairon and the role of yamato in aesthetics, coupled with the ability of animation to create consummate, total, environments, we find the exact locus of architecture to be one with high potential in these genre. How is that potential realized and how are narratives made integral with metaphoric and directive practices? From research in the history of the epic form and the novel in the West, we know that in fact there appears to be a high level of response between narrative and use of metaphor and this points to material aspects including setting as key in the formation of both connotative and denotative narrative. As Benjamin noted, there is a political language in seeing — there is a visual acuity in the environment and with the high degree of placement of contemporary entertainment media, that acuity may be located in fictional representations as much as ”real” ones. Indeed, what is a real representation? If we see a documentary on, in example, Venice, Italy, we may be viewing reality as recorded by a camera but still we are subject to the director’s point of view and his/her desire to be inclusive of certain content. How different is a representation of Venice — or at least a Venice-like city — found in an animé such as .Hack//Liminality (Illustration-2)?
At the core of the concept, as Bezeczky noted, is that metaphor can be as lucent as reality — at least in its association with greater narrative. Yet when we see an architectural representation in animé, how high can its non-metaphorical veracity be? That is, when a setting is devised for an animé by the show’s producers and animators, how much detail and real aspects can be — or at least will be — added to support the veracity of a certain architecture? Moreover, when dealing with everyday buildings, how will the viewer even know? If the building represented is well-known, there can be an expected comparison of details between the representation and the real structure, but when the building is somewhat generic, where is the real/true ontology of its form?
Two good examples of this situation come from .Hack//Liminality. In the first example, we have an external scene where a modern-looking office or apartment building displaying a motif of the international style as interperted circa 1980–1990 is demonstrated. While the shot of this structure is very clear, the movement of the camera (a fade and dissolve effect) into the building’s interior is rapid enough that we are not as viewers introduced to other external aspects of the building. Once inside the structure, we are confronted with a teenager apparently passed out before her computer with some type of virtual-reality headset on; the construction of this scene is to establish that the person in question is young, keeps a messy desk which is denotative of her engrossment in the game she was playing online, and despite her young age, she seems to be at work in an office rather than at home. Her cluttered desk contains some toy plastic animals and other personal items but also a number of folders, in/out boxes, and other devices of the contemporary office. The computer where she has been online, with its screen glowing a somber blue-green, is the focal point of the scene as much or even more so as the character herself (Illustration-3).
In both these examples — especially when taken together in context of the narrative — we locate an effort on the part of the creator of this narrative to present a great wealth of character information about this character via the environment around her. The external shot sets up her location in a small office building and this action helps define her work environment: she probably works for a smaller firm or freelance — an important distinction in contemporary Japan. She is not at a huge office tower of a major corporation. Also, the time appears to be evening so she’s working at night or else is using company resources to play the game, The World. Her untidy desk and work-area suggest that she’s highly engrossed in this game and gives little care to other matters, and when we see her slumped over her desk with the virtual-reality headset still on, we fear the worst for her rather than assume she’s simply fallen asleep. It is difficult to make out much about the character herself, aside from the fact she’s female (by clothing and hair) and appears fairly young. Everything we know about her at the onset of this episode is garnered via environmental details in context and yet these details really provide a wealth of information useful in furthering the plot.
In a scene further into this same episode we follow a young woman and her male friend through a school library where, between their classes, they are having a conversation. The use of the library stacks to at times obscure these two characters and add an aura of both mystery and implied intellectual gravitas to their conversation is a method employed by other films but which works very smartly in this application (Illustration-4). In other scences from this same episode, we encounter the same girl in her home, leaning back in a chair and reflecting on events that have transpired — and thus providing the viewer with needed backstory regarding these events — and an image of the streets of Tokyo’s suburbs at the start of a busy weekday (Illustration-5). This latter scene is especially astute in its evolving transition from a residential area to a more business-oriented district. In these two scenes, like the scenes mentioned above of the office and the library, the viewer is provided with powerful connotative information and also necessary denotative information.
In Max Black’s model of metaphor and narration, this procedure levels out the variants of the plot and focuses the viewer on the immediate action while also creating the illusion of reality in that these institutions, we may only presume, existed long before the characters who are currently associated with them. In this regard, the office does not only mandate the young lady as an office worker, the library does not only validate the characters in it our students, but these impose themselves on the viewer as institutions with bearing beyond those characters whose actions have taken the veiwer to visit them.
In the intricate, seminal, animé Last Exile an even more evident and continued version of this use of metaphor can be located. Last Exile is aesthetically considered to be a “steampunk” animé in that it embodies the steampunk aesthetic of altered Victorian-era styles in architecture, fashion, and engineering although the technological aspects of the society it represents, like most steampunk sci-fi novels and films is more advanced by far than the Victorians were. Beyond the overall leitmotif of steampunk styling in this animé, architecture is used to represent different political factions at nearly every turn. The opening credits make strong use of this trait and portray the main character, Claus Valca (クラウス ヴァルカ), standing on a cliff with a sprawling city laying below where he stands and surveys this land (Illustration-6). In addition, at the pre-credit opening of the Last Exile episode “Calculating Alex”, the estate of a prominent political leader in the animé is presented in a rapid sequence of scenes that establish which political faction (via the architecture, which by this ninth episode of the show is known to the viewer who has followed the animé to this point from its inception) is being represented and while the character is only shown in profile and by his hands resting in his lap, his association and identity are conveyed mainly via the architecture involved (Illustration-7).
The use of architecture in tandem with other aspects of setting is crucial to Last Exile, and .hack//SIGN. In these two franchises (Last Exile and the .hack franchise), the concept of uchronia — or the idea that real-world history could have evolved in very different trajectories or that an alternate world runs in tandem with the known one and echoes but does not duplicate outright the events of our world — is very central to construction of plot. Architecture, moreso than representations of the natural environment, allows for an association with collective cognition of places, things, and events. We all know that if we see Big Ben there is a connection to London; the White House, a connection to Washington, D.C. Through selecting specific architectural styles, a producer/animator may be able to interpolate a sense of difference between rival or non-associated groups in a narrative (various political factions, nations, or ethnic groups) plus, they may introduce a sense of the exotic to their narrative.
In actual architectural practice, we see something very similar happen in instances such as the importation of Asian-inspired garden design and architectural elements in nineteenth-century England, in Indo-Saracenic designs fusing Indian traditional influences and British Gothic-revival ideals together, and in the Scottish Baronial style. The anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo has noted at length that industrialized nations such as England, the United States, and Japan have long desired to import other cultural aspects as items of exotic aesthetics and sophistication and such can be seen in even how films and animation portray settings — including architecture. Certainly, in a James Bond film, we find our hero chasing the bad guys all around China, Caribbean islands, and French beaches . . . seemingly, the spies in James Bond movies never wind up in Columbus, Ohio or Odessa, Texas. The readership/viewership of action-adventure , sci-fi, and fantasy genre expect to be entertained with a degree of exoticism and intrigue and animé/magna is no different in this aspect but there is a difference in how such exoticism and intrigue work their way into manga and animé.
In animé and manga, foremost, the West — especially America — is also considered ”the other” and exotic. Moreover, anything rural can take on a metaphoric meaning of otherness as most Japanese young people have more association with urban or suburban environments. More so than in Western culture, demonstration of a rural environment can bring about metaphors of historical periods, nature, harmony, honor, and other ”valued” traits; In extension, aesthetics play a greater role in Japanese pedagogy for youth than in the West. The concept of Japan as an isolated, cloistered, island nation as expressed in the traditional philosophy of shimaguni (島国) brings about a higher acuity of metaphoric association with nature and natural elements and thereby, with aspects such as the environment and connections created by human intervention in the natural world — architecture most certainly included. Japanese traditional architecture has not only a metaphorical meaning but also a strong denotative presence in many animé and manga: conventions such as the traditional town-house, or machiya (町家) have historical legacies yet remain in modified form part of contemporary rural architecture.
The machiya is also a certral item in the metaphorical, collective, memory of Japanese history and culture. Much like the nostalgic and therefore not very accurate view of ”merry olde England” found in some variants of British history, the machiya and its position in the mythical history of the Heian and Edo periods of Japan history is more one of how literature and folk history have rendered the concept of this house-type than the reality of its application in history. As, alongside the rural home style of nōka (農家), or farm houses, the machiya are the pre-eminent typology of long-lasting domestic vernacular architecture in Japan and thus have established a place in the history and folk history of the nation. The concept of the rural Japanese family gathered around on a snowy winter’s eve at the irori (囲炉裏), or hearth, is not too distant from the image of the English or early American lady of the house cooking at her own hearth or the greeting card standard of a cat sleeping near a lit fireplace: the only applied difference really is an architectural one as the irori is an open hearth located in the center of a room versus the Western-style hearth with a fireplace and flue. In both cases — and all cases with folk history — there is a lot of truth in both renditions but there is also a good deal of romance.
When the above is considered in relation to how architecture is used in manga and animé, and to the situation of exporting views of Japanese culture to external markets, we find a legacy of mythos extant that architecture builds upon in manga and animé because this same mythos latently exists in society as a whole. An example of note is that in the manga/animé Bleach (ブリーチ, transliteration: Burīchi) the Soul Society (尸魂界) is — though not expressly Japanese as it is a ”spirit world” — depicted as having mainly a combination of traditional, modern, and post-modern contemporary architecture (Illustration-8). The center of this otherworldly community is the Seireitei (瀞霊廷) which, aside from the scale and materials of some of its architecture, more or less resembles a high-Edo city. The replication of Japanese traditional architecture in this application could indicate several things: first, the fact the primary viewership is Japanese so it would only be natural to use an architectural style that they would recognize. However, in such service, most any style of modern architecture could be employed. The second reasoning could be that a style with connotative meaning as refined and even holy would be in the best service of representing a divine city. This would be in keeping with shimaguni practices, certainly.
In numerous animé and manga we find the supernatural and the spirit world, especially, to be a popular theme. Certainly, Bleach, Shaman King, and Yu Yu Hakusho (ぼたん) all focus on interaction between the underworld/spiritworld and the living, human, realm. To further accredit this aspect of fantasy genre to its viewers, two things are done: the replication of traditional Japanese architecture, costume, and other material culture within depictions of the spirit world itself to further adhere this fictional universe with the known universe and secondly, the location of markers of real spiritual interaction both historical and contemporary within representations of the “real” world, such as butsudan (仏壇), or traditional Buddhist shrines found in private homes. As Margit Maria Nagy noted in her scholarship of Japanese women’s roles, the home was an epicenter for the woman’s further influence in family and community matters prior to and through World War II. After the war, women found greater social agency in the changing world of a Japanese society reforming itself from failed imperial ambitions, however, the discourse of home life remained strong in the conception of what womanhood meant in Japan. The focus on butsudan and other personal and familial shrines were tandem with the focus on women and family in the home. Where the church (as a building) in Christian, Western, societies played the leading physical role as a representation of God, the role of a temple was very much augmented in Japan due to differences in belief-systems by the home shrine.
This association with spirituality, women, and home may seem very broad, but in understanding the Japanese approach to all these concepts one can see that a connection between them would be useful in narrative construction for animé and manga and that by locating a gateway between the spirit-world and the real world at the home as much as a temple or other holy structure, a transfer of meaning takes place. The home, just as the butsudan shrine intones, is a locus of the holy and the departed spirits of the family and thus there is real, personal, tangible, connection between the spirit world and home world. If spirits were to cross over to the real world, they would find any home where they held a personal connection to serve for this gateway. On a more metaphorical level, young viewers could identify with the teens such as the lead character of Bleach, Ichigo Kurosaki (黒崎 一護), who lead normal lives until otherworldly beings invade their lives and the location of this invasion is, of course, the home.
When the young student Ichigo returns home from school one day he discovers an odd woman — a Shinigami (死神) which in the storyline of Bleach is a type of ”death god” — in his family’s home. As he confronts her, she is attacked by another otherworldly being — a type of ghost known as a horō (虚) — and she is wounded to the extent she is forced to transfer her supernatural powers over to Ichigo.
A continued leitmotif throughout this introduction to the story and later plot developments centers around Ichigo’s sense of duty because all these events transpired in his own home and the connections foster between him, his home, and these otherworldly beings. Ichigo’s home is in Karakura-chō (空座町) (Illustration-9), a fictional suburb of Tokyo. His high school friends live in this same district and most of the action of Bleach takes place here excepting scenes in the other-world of the Soul Society. The detail lavished upon Karakura, like that provided to the Soul Society as discussed above, spares few expenses and no less than twelve sub-divisions of Karakura are mentioned in Bleach. Every effort is taken to create this fictional district in keeping with real-life suburbs of Tokyo and to provide details that are not only convincing but that illuminate a veritas of place. In interviews and official artbooks related to Bleach, its creator/artist Tite Kubo (久保 宣章) has noted that his intent in providing this level of detail was to produce a world that seemed just like real-life excepting the presence of so many supernatural elements.
The concept of Karakura is the concept of a typical Tokyo suburb, an urban environment akin to that which many Japanese young people would inhabit. It also, through the level of detail furnished it and the fact that its own (fictional) evolution is back-chronicled over the course of the Bleach animé, revealed to be one of the formerly rural areas outside of Tokyo that grew into busy metro regions of the city’s outskirts in the post-war years. Such a situation of an actual town is noted in the book Toshié: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan and this portrayal in Bleach adds yet another facet of realism to an otherwise rather unreal narrative. In this sense, realism is offered in: a lead character that primary viewers can identify with, the connection between person and home, the extended connection between primary characters and their location, and the creation in the Soul Society of an alternate/foil world that contains both contrasting and similar aspects as the “real” world of the district of Karakura. By the time — a number of episodes into the animé — the characters find themselves in Soul Society, enough aspects of a realistic environment have already been established to encourage a very willing belief in this spirit world while the connections made on a metaphoric level between the spirit world and the actual world of contemporary Tokyo are also very strong.
Contrasting the above examples, we find that in .hack//SIGN architecture is provided in the context of real-world environment to denote places where action takes place but also to suggest via metaphor the import of such action and to give clues to character and plot development while in Bleach the metaphoric function is not to reveal information about characters as much as it is to expose the connections between core ideas in the narrative. This may seem very much like the function of architecture touched on already in Shaman King, but a crucial difference is found in that in Shaman King, architecture functions to associate characters with legacies and cultural meaning while in Bleach architecture is used to establish sociocultural loci but also to extend characters beyond those loci as how in the case of Ichigo the surroundings of Karakura position him as a typical Japanese schoolboy but the contrast in his newfound mission in life is foiled by this condition. Ichigo’s own disbelief at his new supernatural powers and mission is made more apparent via the fact his surroundings have not changed at all. Whereas, in Shaman King, the use of temple architecture and moreover the inclusion of Chinese motifs for Ren and his family work as forces of idenification much as a military uniform would function to identify those who wear it as not only military in profession but of what military they serve.
In her engrossingly deep study of À la recherche du temps perdu and Marcel Proust’s writing, Julia Kristeva examined how Proust interperted space — including the built environment — and translocated this into his approach to linguistic transmission of sensation. The senses, Kristeva argued, are central to À la recherche du temps perdu and the work is a tribute to sense and time (hence the title of Kristeva’s own book) as much as an exploration of character and plot. Metaphoric meaning is a central construct that Kristeva addresses in great detail and following her reasoning (and also that of Max Black) that metaphor is useful in a variety of ways in literature but is perhaps most tangent in that metaphor is one mechanism for bridging the divide between real and unreal and thus the difference between literature and other forms of writing.
Differing from the Western tradition of literature evolving from oral concepts into written ones, in Japan there was a more blended tradition of storytelling in ukiyo-e (浮世絵) or wood-block prints and especially with kibyoshi that allows for more of a free flow of visual and oral/textural narrative. Thus, the concept of metaphor is more present in the nuances of Japanese visual culture as noted by the scholar of Japanese fine arts, Gian Carlos Calza.
As Kristeva explains visual metaphor, she addresses it in context of the author’s interpolation of visual and material culture into the representation of altered meaning in a literary context, however, while this makes sense for textural narrative and also illuminates the difficult task of the author to ”make” his narrative ”real”, it avoids the condition of a graphic narrative such as manga or animé. Proust did not have film, much less animation, though he was in the heart of a virbant visual culture in Paris. Scholars such as Susan Sontag have certainly explored the impact of film on narrative and also the role of metaphor in such, but still this gaze is very much formulated by Western standards. Where Kristeva’s work on Proust is of note — despite being that of a Bulgarian/French scholar on a French author — is that it explicates the necessary function of environment in metaphor and due to Proust’s upper-class lifestyle and position in Paris, most of this environment is a built one.
Last Exile, in the context of the quest seemingly towards metaphor (and through metaphor) perhaps presents the most crucial use of architecture of any animé. The architecture, as already noted, in Last Exile serves as the primary mechanism for setting a steampunk tone and also is a very important means of identifying the many different factions involved in the story. Thus, the denotative and connotative worth of architecture is very high in Last Exile and the series also has, like the .hack franchise, to create and pro-offer greater exposition on environment than would most animé as it forces so much of its aesthetics and overall tone to be set on these qualifiers. Whereas Bleach, Shaman King, and other manga and animé have the natural advantage of representing environments that truly do exist, the environment — the very planetary system — in Last Exile is fictional. (In the .hack// franchise, the real-world environments are true-to-life while the environment of the computer-mediated The World is fictional, but a fiction that the franchise in plot admits openly.) While Bleach has the challenge of creating a suburb of Tokyo that is concurrent with real suburban districts but unique enough to bend to the plans and devices of the show’s writers (an important aspect for later plot developments), Last Exile has to create from scratch a world that viewers can believe in and care about.
What Last Exile does with architecture is a departure from the Japanese-centric issue of architecture found in Bleach and other manga and animé: instead, Last Exile creates typologies from multiform sources but with an eye towards Victorian England (expected, given the show’s overall steampunk aesthetics) and earlier periods of British and European architecture. Costume design for uniforms varies between steampunk-Victorian and what appears to be inspired by World War II-era military uniforms, but architecture by and large follows much earlier conventions. Why is this? In a drama where futuristic airships and a number of very advanced technologies are central to the plot, why not introduce more contemporary if not futuristic architectural forms? Illustration-10 is a composite of two scenes in Last Exile, the first showing one of the airship carriers in the show, the second showing two of the primary characters, Claus and Lavie. This illustration gives a good idea about the overall aesthetic design of the show while in Illustration-11 a vanship is depicted standing at bed-down before the country estate of one of the political leaders in the animé; his estate is rendered much in the style of a British manor house that would recall a larger version of Ashdown House or Coleshill (both in Berkshire, United Kingdom) or other structures of the same style.
What is the meaning of this? In actual real-world chronology at least, the Ashdown House and Coleshill both predate the Victorian era by several centuries. Why not exhibit a neoclassical house style closer to the Victorian age to add fuel to the steampunk aesthetic? The most rational reasoning is that the writers and illustrators of Last Exile were more concerned with creating a staged, evolved, sense of history in their fictional universe. Instead of placing everything from one era or vintage, it was far more realistic and intelligent to indicate an evolution of styles, tastes, technologies, and political factions. In doing this, when the steampunk vanship is contrasted with the stately home it is clear that while the vanship indicates both retro and futuristic technologies, the manor house indicates a longstanding seat of power and wealth.
Such was certainly also an intention of actual British country homes of the upper class — from the era in the seventeenth century onward to the Victorian age when British power was at its greatest. The designs of these homes displayed the wealth, advances in building technology, and agency for mid-level noblemen and untitled but wealthy families to show off their power via material means. Given the gravity of attention furnished to costume, techno-mechanical aesthetics, and other aspects that result in the overall steampunk look of Last Exile, it seems that the designers of the show did not in the least pluck out a manor house type in random. Moreover, the steampunk aesthetics of Last Exile are not just a visual approach, but an approach of sub-genre that places the animé firmly into a certain niche where aesthetic details are as expected and important as other mechanisms of plot and development.
The photographs of Henry W. Taunt of Coleshill (Illustration-12) and Hall Barn in Beconsfield (Illustration-13) indicate that these buildings, with their rather box-like foot-print and their imposing façades would serve well as models for the types of estates seen most often in Last Exile. The premise of metaphor is called into question in part here, recalling Max Black’s work on narrative, in that the ontological purpose of a manor house is in fact a display of wealth to some extent. Certainly, any governor’s mansion or other official home of a political leader is not only a metaphor of power secondary to its primary purpose as a dwelling but part of that primary purpose is in fact one of an official show of power. In the context of narrative, the metaphor is not simply in the application of architecture or architectural style but in the contrast between the vanship airship carriers, and other technologies to the stately homes that often appear.
These buildings are always in Last Exile associated with older, established leaders while the commanding officers of the military ships portrayed tend to be rather young and the lead characters, Claus and Lavie, even younger (probably in their mid to late teens in fact). With a fictional world, the goal appears here to be one of creating a realistic evolution of society and polity and the architecture involved both in directive means and metaphorical ones furthers the narrative in this manner. While in animé and manga it is not uncommon to portray central characters as younger than they would be in real life (e.g., the commanding military officers in their mid-twenties), Last Exile seems to take upon itself the mission of providing a world that is realistic in terms of a social/political reality and inclusive in this is the use of aesthetic ”props” such as the manor houses of the elite.
Victorian and Edwardian houses were often robust, solid, and imposing in their size and outfitted with the trappings of classical Greek and Roman architecture. In this approach, a statement of not only the wealth to build such large, complex, structures on the part of the owner but of taste and a background in the classics was also provided. Later Edwardian architects such as Sir Giles Gilbert Scott moved into the novel territory of industrial architecture and started to incorporate elements of mechanical design into such projects. For the steampunk world of Last Exile, which has its aesthetic roots in the Edwardian era, the influence of designs such as Scott’s are evident but just as in Scott’s own time the leading homes of scions of industry would still have been older, more conventional, houses along the lines of Victorian design, and the same approach is reflected in Last Exile.
Certainly, in the time of Giles Gilbert Scott there was a division in private and public space even within large British cities such as London and Manchester where homes would compose neat, traditional, neighborhoods whereas the new industrial architecture of the modern age would be found near the Thames, in docklands, in reaches of the city that had always been those of business and thus filled with wholesalers and warehouses. Only now, they also were the real estate of power plants and factories. Giles Gilbert Scott’s Battersea Power Station (Illustration-14) is a perfect example of this trend in terms both of location and style: its design is one of exalted mechanics and sympathy towards its function.
The modern, technological, trajectories of the power plant are denoted by its architecture — not hidden in the language of tradition but celebrated in the argot of progress. In Last Exile, we find much the same division between the traditional, domestic, world and the cutting-edge, military, industrial one. However, Last Exile takes matters a step further and positions the traditional on the firm ground of a planet and the modern in the clouds where military airships patrol. When Claus and Lavie have missions that take them to visit the impressive homes of political leaders, they must literally come down from the clouds to make these visits. Much like a sea captain of the nineteenth century returning home from the Royal Navy, these characters return to a place of origin that is still the seat of power yet is not where the real action takes place. Architecture, alongside other incidental details, makes this point clear to the viewer of Last Exile.
Later British architects such as Sir Basil Spence would, interestingly enough, take the origins of techno-mechanical reference in architectural aesthetics and take such a leap forward and incorporate more robust variations in design both looking forward to a space-race influence future and backwards to the classics. The British Embassy in Rome, designed by Spence, is an example of the latter approach while his building at 50 Queen Anne’s Gate displays the former trajectory (Illustration-15). In Last Exile, we can isolate this type of aesthetics in the design of the airships and vanships and overall steampunk approach. The previous generation of architects and their work is consigned to, expectedly, the previous generation of power.
If Bleach dealt with the creation of realism via replicating a suburb of Tokyo and the associated visual and spatial relations necessary for viewers to believe that the lead characters who are ordinary humans do in fact seem ordinary and people the viewer can feel empathy for, and if Last Exile through stunning aesthetics and saavy employment of detail and visual representations of power structures suggests reality in a fictional world, then .hack//SIGN takes up the challenge of creating a proxy world of a virtual environment. We have already seen how the special OVA, .hack//Liminality dealt with real-world architecture in the service of providing useful character exposition but where .hack//SIGN really takes off with its employment of architecture is in the virtual environment that in the animé is known as The World and represents a comprehensive multiplayer role-playing game. The opening sequence of .hack//SIGN focuses on the introduction of characters and their involvement — literally — in The World. Characters — both main and supporting — in The World portion of .hack//SIGN appear as manifestations of supposed ”real-world” players of these avatars in the online game and like many such (actual) online multiplayer games, they inhabit a psuedo-medieval world and express themselves concurrently as different character classes appropriate to such a world. The visual appearance of these characters is bright and distinctive but also in keeping with the medieval theme of the game (Illustration-16).
The landscape of the The World varies but normally replicates typical, subtropical, environs of no distinct origin. In some instances, though, bizzare manifestations of The World betray both its artifice and the fact that something may even be amiss in its programming as Alice in Wonderland-like landscapes of huge toadstools appear and energy storms appear throughout the computer-mediated landscape (Illustration-17). Given the medieval setting, most open countryside is very rural and aside from occassional battles, most action takes place in small towns and larger cities. The latter are of interest because while the open countryside appears subtropical yet influenced probably by England (in terms of appearance, rural interior and exterior architecture, and botany) the larger cities in The World appear to have taken Venice, Italy, as their main point of inspiration (Illustration-18). Like Venice, there is a cityscape of canals, bridges, community squares framed by grand churches and palazzi. In fact a central building in one un-named city has a spire — rather than square tower — at first suggesting it may be a church, but given its squat, square, form and the amount of space it takes up, moreso resembles a palazzo along the lines of the Palazzo Senatorio on the Paizza del Compidoglio. The manner in which the camera moves around the scenes of the cities, when action takes place in them, is such as to portray these cities as busy, even confusing places yet much of the architecture is clearly evident (Illustration-19).
The canals in this un-named city and in other, large, cities in .hack//SIGN tend to serve as broad waterways to transport a variety of watercraft around the cities and are also often the sites of personal introspection for characters (Illustration-20). While the streets and squares of the cities seem busy to the point of distraction, the areas around the canals seem to offer characters solace and the possibility to sit alone, talk with one and the other, and reflect on the strange world they are in. In addition, balconies and patios offer the advantage of a literal higher vantage point over the canals and the rest of the city — which allow characters to take to these positions and gain new perspectives over the landscape (Illustration-21). The late-medieval/early modern Italian aesthetics continue with catacombs much akin to those of the San Sebastiano fuori le mura of Rome; characters explore these spaces and often — as is something of a long-standing film and video-game tradition — encounter monsters and treasure in them (Illustration-21). Where .hack//SIGN goes beyond other conventions though is in interfacing these catacombs with other architectural and historical legacies in the cities involved; although the original purposes of the catacombs are not clearly defined the periods of history they date from — in the game of The World at least — are noted and characters comment on the fact they’ve been used for storage and other purposes over time, much like their real-world analogs.
The design of The World in .hack//SIGN does seem to share some traits with the design of Bleach and many other manga and animé in that there is a directive trajectory of literal representation planned to further the narrative via denotating what type of environment the characters explore and how these explorations take place. Also, this type of denotative representation of architecture is useful in explaining to viewers what relationship the characters and setting of the narrative have to real-life, present-day, experiences.
In all the animé/manga examples that have been explored in this study, there are some relationships at hand: in Shaman King it is one of a setting contemporary to the present-day but with the added aspect of supernatural powers and supernatural beings. In Bleach, the situation is much the same but while as in Shaman King, Tokyo is the epicenter of activity, in Bleach an even more nuanced portrait of Tokyo is provided complete with an entire fictional suburb. In Last Exile, a world totally seperated from the present day and Earth is offered, but with analogs to contemporary Earth that help the viewer understand the situation of the complex narrative. In an actual alien world, we could hardly expect important homes and other buildings to replicate anything akin to Earth’s architecture yet in such replication in Last Exile a sense of familarity is created and metaphorically, the viewer becomes accustomed to intricate plot developments in part because the architectural representations make it easier to associate certain characters, factions, and even basic ideas (i.e., seats of wealth and power) with each other.
.hack//SIGN and the other animé in the .hack// extended franchise provide the most sophisticated use of architecture in creating setting of all the animé and manga here considered. In .hack//SIGN, we find two different trajectories taking place: one is the creation of elaborate, consummate, representations of setting via architecture as found in The World whereas the other is the use of architecture in a denoative manner when the ”real-life” world of modern-day Tokyo and other locations is presented. In her study of Proust, Julia Kristeva took the path-finding route of insisting on the inter-related importance of time and sense in determinations of narrative. While tending to present these two concepts as the twin bastions of her thesis, Kristeva notes that to inter-relate the two together, another quality must be present: space. Sense, in Kristeva’s use thereof, is the experience of the invididual and he or she feels and realizes that experience whereas time, of course, is the duration of such experience. Both qualities are crucial to the fuctioning of anyone in any society and even, in fact, in any environment. However, space is quite literally the physical setting for such functions and is therefore also crucial in literary representations. As stated before, in an animé or manga the use of visual representation allows — demands, even — for a far greater acuity and presence of the visual and environmental than textural literature would allow.
Conclusions:
The great architect Louis I. Kahn once noted that architecture was, to him, like art you could walk around in and that it was this facet of architecture which lead the young Kahn as a college student to study architecture over visual art or music — both of which he was also very adept at and encouraged to pursue professionally. In animé and manga we find this concept carried out in another manner: by moving the world of architecture inside another world, the world(s) of fictional beings, fictional lands and some places that are in fact very real yet represented — as everything must be in animation and drawn comics — by pen and ink instead of film and camera. The oppurtunity provided by this stark situation of having to render all aspects of an environment more or less from scratch is an oppurtunity to present these in either loose detail or very nuanced form depending on the desire of the production’s creators. In the case of the Japanese tradition which we have here noted to have evolved from kibyoshi into manga into animé — all the time while carrying forth the core aesthetic values of clear and ordered presentation, beautiful detail, and refined use of space found at the heart of Japanese cultural views on fine and graphic arts.
As manga in a sense begat animé and although the two genre are in fact different animals, they still inter-influence one and the other greatly, there is no doubt that what we find in one we will most commonly find in the other. Manga, probably simply due to its closer ties to textural literature and therefore the association it has with literary studies has been investigated moreso than animé by scholars, but the findings from such scholarship also apply broadly to animé. In the present study, the role of animé is simply more nuanced due to its ability to present a varied view in motion of setting and architecture. However, without manga not only would animé not exist in its current form but it would lack many of the great stories and characters it has over time brought to the world of film and television.
In the representations of archtecture in animé and manga we find the duplicity of the real, actual, environment as known as such in contemporary Japan but also we locate expressions based on idealized variants of other historical periods and architectural forms, such as the use of cityscapes clearly inspired by Italian city-states from the early-modern period in .hack//SIGN. Architecture and material culture in general can inform how a viewer understands action in an animé and how that viewer gains their non-direct backstory on characters and entire plot trajectories. These are often-overlooked but very crucial aspects of the overall world-building situation of animé and science-fiction/fantasy genre in general.
While comprehensive studies of the use of architectural styles and details in film or even regulated to animation could be taken on and these would cover a far broader range than this study on animé, or, conversely, studies could focus on graphic novels and sequential art in general and not just manga, the limitations of the present study were not just based on genre as a mechanism of focusing scholarly attention. The unique combination of the history of manga and animé, their Japanese roots and the impact of traditional views of Japanese aesthetics on how they are interperted and the fact that animation is involved and thereby everything seen is in essence drawn — thus created — make animé and manga totally their own creatures. Architecture falls into a rare area where both Western and Asian precedents govern and guide the influence that architecture and the built environment have over how these conditions are portrayed in manga and animé.
Author’s Note:
This paper was originally written as part of coursework towards the BFA degree in architectural history in the Department of Architectural History at the Savannah College of Art and Design, under the mentorship and direction of Drs. Tom Gensheimer and Daves Rossell, with additional help from Dr. Robin B. Williams (departmental chair). A number of years have passed since this paper was written, and the world of animé and its inclusion of architecture in support of plot narratives has only increased in diversity, depth, and scope — the architecture of Attack on Titan in example would also be profound to study in the same context as this paper approaches such animé as Last Exile and Shamen King. However, in the intervening years, I have been contacted by a variety of scholars who have downloaded this paper from academia.edu and have—finding that others are interested in the topic—wished to make this study even more available, and to people outside the halls of academia, at that. I hope to do further research on newer animé and manga now to augment this paper, but decided to post the original paper in full with its original images here. While revision would on one hand be useful, on the other hand, those revisions would not have met with the same critical rigor as my supervising professors provided for the original project. Therefore, I elected to not revise nor include new material in this work as presented here.
The original academic paper had footnotes included which is a formatting issue that Medium.com does not support. Therefore, instead, the entire bibliography of works consulted in my research is listed below. I encourage interested readers to contact me via email ( mwalke22@student.scad.edu ) with any questions. The original paper with its footnotes can also be downloaded here: Research paper.
Bibliography of Works Consulted:
Note: Japanese names have been left within the standard for name articulation with the surname placed before the given name, therefore, the surname appears first in this bibliography as in the example “Kawamura Nozomu” where the surname is Kawamura. In the case of Japanese or Japanese-American authors with English-style given names, the surname is provided as the point of entry: example, “Wendy Siuyi Wong” is entered under “W” but as “Siuyi Wong, Wendy”. In addition, Japanese orthography is retained for original language publications with or without translation.
All translations from Japanese source material not cited as a translated work (i.e., one translated into English with that volume being consulted) have been translated by the author.
Akamatsu, Paul. 1972. Meiji 1868: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Japan. New York: Harper & Row.
Arata Isozaki. 2006. Japan-ness in Architecture. Translated by Sabu Kohs. Cambridge, MA: The MIT University Press.
Atsushi Ueda. 1992. The Inner Harmony of the Japanese House. Tokyo: Kodansha International.
Banks, Miranda. 2002. “Monumental Fictions: National Monument as a Science Fiction Space”, Journal of Popular Film and Television, (Fall 2002) : 87–93.
Barnes, Trevor J. & James S. Duncan, eds. 1992. Introduction in: Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text, and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. New York: Routledge.
Beauregard, Robert. 1993 “Representing Urban Decline: Postwar Cities as Narrative Objects.” Urban Affairs Quarterly 29; 2: 187- 202.
Befu, Harumi. 2001. Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron. Los Angeles & Tokyo: Trans-Pacific Press.
Benedict, Ruth. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Berndt, Jacqueline & Ricter Steffi. 2006. Reading Manga: Local and Global Perceptions of Japanese Comics. Leipzig: Leipziger UniversWitsverlag.
Bezeczky, Gábor. 1998. “Metaphor and Narrative” Neohelicon, (XXVII/2.) : 13–48.
Bezeczky, Gábor. 1993. “Literal Language” New Literary History, 22; 3: 603–611.
Black Max. 1962. Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Brophy, Philip. 2005. Introduction in: 100 Anime: BFI Screen Guide. London: British Film Institute.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Buckingham, D. & J. Sefton-Green. 2004. “Gotta Catch’em All: Structure, Agency, and Pedagogy in Children’s Media Culture”. In: J. Tobin (Ed.), The Rise and Fall of Pokemon. Durham: Duke University Press. 379–399.
Calza, Gian Carlos. 2007. Japan Style. London: Phaidon.
Casey, Roger. 1997. Textual Vehicles: The Automobile in American Literature. London: Garland.
Christensen, Ove. 2005. Nøgnebilleder: de Danske Dogmefilm. Holte, Denmark: Medusa.
Cuff, Dana. 1992. Architecture: The Story of Practice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Dessau, Adalbert. 1960. “L’idee de la trahison au moyen-age et son role dans la motivation de quelques chansons de geste”. CCM, 3: 23–26.
Eaton, Ruth. 2002. Ideal Cities. Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment. London: Th ames & Hudson.
Frampton, Kenneth. 2002. “The Volvo Case” in: Labour, Work, and Architecture: Collected Essays on Architecture and Design. London: Phaidon. 63–76.
Frantz, Douglas & Catherine Collins. 1999. Celebration, USA : Living in Disney’s Brave New Town. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Fumio Kakubayashi. 1980. A Study of the Historical Developments of the Yayoi Period: with Special Reference to Japanese-Korean Relations. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Queensland.
Gandelsonas, Mario. 1991. The Urban Text. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Gibson, David. 1998. “Rising Sun: Get Ready America, Japan’s J-PoP Has All Eyes Facing East” WeeklyWire, (2 November 1998). Viewed online on 3 October 2007 at URL: http://weeklywire.com/ww/11-02-98/fw_music.html
Gibson, William. 2001. “Modern Boys and Mobile Girls”, The Observer Magazine (special issue on Japan) (1 April 2001). Viewed online on 2 October 2007 at URL:
http:// observer.guardiarnco. uk/life/ story/O.6903A6639 ~OO.html
Godoy, Tiffany. 2007. Style Deficit Disorder: Harajuku Street Fashion. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Gravett, Paul. 2004. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. New York: Harper Design.
Griggs-Lawerence, Robyn. 2004. The Wabi-Sabi House: The Japanese Art of Imperfect Beauty. New York: Clarkson-Potter.
Gross, Kenneth. 1992. The Dream of the Moving Statue. State College: Penn State University Press.
Hanssen, Beatrice. 2006. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Hays, K. Michael. 1995. “Architecture Theory, Media, and the Question of Audience.” Assemblage, 27, Tulane Papers: The Politics of Contemporary Architectural Discourse, 41–46.
Hendry, Joy. 1995. Understanding Japanese Society. London: Routledge.
Howard, Deborah. 1975. Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Irwin, David. 1997. Neoclassicism. London: Phaidon.
Ito, Kinko. 2005. “A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society”. The Journal of Popular Culture, 38 (3) : 456–475
Jackson, Neil. 2002. California Modern: The Architecture of Craig Ellwood. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Janelli, Roger L. & Dawnhee Yim Janelli. 1982. Ancestor Woship and Korean Society. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press.
Judge, Roy. 1991. “May Day and Merrie England” Folklore, 102.2 : 131- 148.
Juniper, Andrew. 2003. Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing.
Harries, Karsten. 1998. The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Kawamura Nozomu. 1982. Nihonbunkaron no Shahen (The Ambiance of Japanese Culture Theory) Tokyo: Ningen no Kagakusha.
Kennedy, Barbara. 2000. Deleuze and Cinema. The Aesthetics of Sensation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kern, Adam. 2006. Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyoshi of Edo Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
Khan, Ridwan 2003. “.Hack//sign OST 1 Review”. AnimeFringe. (September, 2003). Accessed online on 2 October 2007 at URL: http:/ /www.anim.efriI1ge.com/lnagazin~/2003/Q9/:rev jgyvs/lQj
Kinder, Marsha. 1993. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press.
King, Anthony. 2004. Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity. New York: Routledge.
Kinko Ito. 2006. “Growing up Japanese Reading Manga”. International Journal of Comic Art, 6 : 392–401.
Kinsella, Sharon. 2000. Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Richmond: Curzon Press.
Kinsella, Sharon. 1998. “Japanese Subculture in the 1990s: Otaku and the Amateur Manga Movement”. Journal of Japanese Studies, 24 [2] : 289–316.
Kristea, Julia. 1996. Time and Sense: Proust and the Expience of Literature. Le temps sensible: Proust et l’experience littéraire; Tanslated by Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1974. La Revolution Du Langage Poetique: L ‘avant-Garde A La Fin Du Xixe Siecle, Lautreamont Et Mallarme. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Lamont, Clare. 1995. “Jane Austen’s Gothic Architecture” in: Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition. Edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani and Peter Davidson, with Jane Stevenson. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Lejeune, Rita. 1937. “Les theories relatives aux origines des chansons de geste”, in: Revue des Cours et Conferences, XXXVIIL (I, 1937) : 594–609 & 673- 683.
di Leonardo, Micaela. 2000. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, and “‘American Modernity”. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lucas, Paul 2002. “Parisian Dialectics: Review of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project”. Logos, 1.1, (Winter 2002)
Macias, Patrick. 2002. “The End of Evangelion” Animerica, 10.9 (September 2002): 40.
Maguire, Alison. 1992. “A Collection of Seventeenth-Century Architectural Plans” Architectural History, 35. : 140–182
Masatoshi Tominaga. 2002. Globalization and Japanese Animation: Ethnography of American College Students. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
McCarter, Robert. 2005. Louis I. Kahn. London: Phaidon..
McLelland, Mark 2001. “Local Meanings in Global Space: A Case Study of Women’s ‘Boy Love’ Web Sites in Japanese and English” Mots Pluriels, 19. (October 2001).
Mellen, Joan. 1976. The Waves At Genji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema. New York: Pantheon.
Nagy, Margit Maria. 1981. ‘How Shall We Live?’: Social Change, The Family Institution and Feminism in Prewar Japan. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington.
Nitobe Inazo. 1905. Bushido: The Soul of Japan. North Clarendon, VT: Charles Tuttle & Co.
Partner, Simon. 2004. Toshie: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pincus, Leslie. 2006. Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo and the Rise of National Aesthetics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pope, K.M. 1913. “Four chansons de geste. A Study in Old French Epic Versification”, MLR, VIII, : 352–67.
Richie, Donald. 2005. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos. New York: Kodansha America.
Richie, Donald. 2004. Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan. New York: Reaktion Books.
Roberts, Graham & Pam Morris. 1998. The Bakhtin Reader Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. New York: Hodder Arnold.
Ruh, B. 2006. “The Robots from Takkun’s pead: Cyborg Adolescence in FLCL”. In: S. Brown. Cinema Anime! : Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 139–157.
Rutten, Ellen. 2006. “Mikhail Nesterov and Aleksandr Blok: Feminizing Russian Landscape around 1900.” The Slavonic and East European Review, 84, (Number 2,1 April 2006). 237–255.
Ryan, Marie Laurie. 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Ryan, Maire Laurie. 1991. “Cyberage Narratology: Computers, Metaphor, and Narrative.” In: Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State UP. 113–141.
Saint Etienne (band). 2000. Finisterre. Mantra Records. Compact disc.
Sand, Jordan. 2005. House and Home in Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: The Harvard University Press.
Singer, Kurt. 1973. Mirror, Sword and Jewel. London: Croom Helm.
Slusser, George & Tom Shippey. 1992. Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Tatsumi Takayumi. 2006. Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Tetsurō Morimoto. 1985. Nihongo Omote to Ura. (Japanese Inside and Outside) Tokyo: Shinchosha.
Tite Kubo. 2006. Bleach Official Character Book SOULs. Tokyo: Shueisha.
Ugrankar, Prajakta A. 2002. The Use of Architectural Metaphors in Dynamic Model Representation. Masters thesis, M.Arch; University of Florida.
Walker, Michael. 2002. “Metaphor in Old French and Its Translation: Chretien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide”. The ATA Chronicle. 52–61.
Walters, Tim. 2004. “Reconsidering The Idiots: Dogme95, Lars von Trier, and the Cinema of Subversion”. The Velvet Light Trap, 53, (Spring 2004) : 40–54.
Watsuji Tetsurō. 1963. Watsuji Tetsurō Zenshu (Complete Works of Tetsurō Watsuji) 20 volumes. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. 1961–1963.
Whyte, William. 2006. “How Do Buildngs Mean? Some Issues of Interpertation in the History of Architecture” History and Theory, 45, 2 : 153–177.
Wohlfahrt, Irving. 2000. “Awakening from the Twentieth Century”, given at the International Walter Benjamin Society Conference held in Barcelona in September 25–28 .
Siuyi Wong, Wendy. 2002. Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo. 1979. Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai. Translated by William Scott Wilson. Tokyo: Kondansha International.
Mike Walker is a journalist and writer who has contributed to a variety of publications including InSerbia, Croatia Week, The Moscow Times, Porter Briggs, Top Soccer, CutBank, The Tottenville Review, Gently Read Literature, Untapped Cities, Slate, SEE: A Fortnight in Review, and The San Francisco Chronicle .
Mike is also deeply interested in manga, animé, and Japanese popular culture. He studied architectural history at the Savannah College of Art and Design and produced the work here within the scope of his studies in that program. Illustration at top of article by the author; all other illustrations credited to the animé or manga from which they were taken as noted.
