Introduction

Two origin myths have long founded the history of film as a new medium—one from France, and the other from Japan. Legend has it that when the Lumière brothers first screened the film Arrival of a Train at Ciotat Station (L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat) in 1895, the Parisian audience panicked because it seemed to them that the train threatened to burst through the screen.1 In another tale, when businessman Inabata Katsutarō first brought the Lumière brothers’ motion pictures to Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo in 1897, audiences sat down in front of both the screen at stage right and the cinematograph camera-cum-projector at stage left; so rather than hiding the magic of the technology behind a wall at the back of the theater, early Japanese screeners supposedly displayed the projection and the projecting simultaneously.2 In the first story, the new technology makes a spectacle because the audience confuses the representation for reality as the apparatus is screened from view; in the second, the reality of the new technology itself is staged as a spectacle of equal importance to the representation. These two spurious, yet foundational narratives about the dawn of film reveal a fundamental desire about the advent of new media: people want new media to produce new spectacles; but these expectations are continually disappointed by what is delivered by the media, even as the media themselves remain desired spectacles.

This book examines the shared core of these two stories of film’s introduction as a new medium through consideration of the promotion, use, and presence of various forms of new media over the course of 150 years in Japan. It articulates a commonality between the desire for a heightened sense of reality to be found in productions of new media and the mundane ways in which the world is actually transformed by them. The New Real juxtaposes the sensational claim that accompanies every new medium that comes along—that it can deliver more direct and intense access to reality, that it creates “immediacy”—with the perpetual desire to develop, acquire, and consume new technologies for such delivery.3 Newspapers, translations, photographs, phonographs, televisions, video games, mobile phones, and even emoji: whenever new media appear, they are accompanied by a discourse about unprecedented access to (and often a counterintuitive and equally disquieting disconnection from) the real world. Since this discourse appears cyclically with the advent of each new medium, claims for newness on these grounds are themselves quite old. The situation described by these advertised advances is a recurring, well-marketed, mythical desire in which users of a new medium are captivated, but only until the new becomes old and settles into the comfortable routine of ordinary life. “The new real” names both the marketing hype about media’s transformation of the world through closer connection and higher fidelity (representation) and the actual everyday transformations of human behavior realized by the presence of media (mimicry).

Beyond the marketing rhetoric, new media are accompanied by another (often concurrent) narrative of such technological cultural products. This narrative posits a “new normal” of living with the new medium. This quieter, alternative discourse is particularly evident in moments of “hypermediacy,” when media present images of themselves or of other media.4 For instance, in 1904, the photographer Enami Nobukuni included a stereoscopic image of three geisha looking through a Holmes stereoscope viewer in the set of five hundred images he sold to the Keystone View Company and later to Sears, Roebuck and Company for their “Views of Japan” series. In 1940, prima donna Miura Tamaki, known worldwide as the embodiment of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, composed and recorded her own song about the tragic heroine in order to avoid copyright fees for using Puccini’s music. In 1958, the Moonlight Mask (Gekkō kamen) television superhero series included fictional newscasts reporting threats to the nation that only the masked hero of justice could prevent. In 2009, when the main character in the video game Steins;Gate stares at the fictional Alpacaman video game, he also stares out at the players of the game he inhabits. Such moments, spotlighting their own mediation, are not merely representations that reflect “intermedia consciousness” of the producers.5 They do not simply snap the audience out of their “suspension of disbelief,” weakening the sense of realism by drawing attention to the scene of their own user-level consumption. Nor are they simply instances of gazing into a constructed abyss, as theories of representation through a mise en abyme would have it.6 Rather, they are origin points for an inverted or reverse mimesis that jumps the divide between the mediated world and the media in the world. Instead of the medium acting to reflect our world (as does the mirror of traditional mimesis), hypermediacy around new media, like mirrors reflecting mirrors, provides us with alternative self-reflective discourses on our new media and fundamentally alters what media are and can be.

Such self-reflexive discourse contradicts the mainstream marketing that hypes better representations, closer connections, and more immediate delivery. In moments when mediated images show consumers how to behave with and use a new medium, media impact and change the world through their presence in it. In each of these cases, it is not solely the operation of the new medium (its mediation) that brings about this reimagination of its place in the everyday world but rather the mediated “content” that reshapes the image of media and mediation. This suggests an important characteristic of media: that media themselves are always already mediated and remediated by the content they transmit. Even before media begin to function as conduits, discourse around the work of mediation prefigures the reception of a new medium. Just as no content arrives unmediated, no medium can be perceived independent of such content or of the mediation of media.

Media theory has shown the necessity of questioning the relation between the media and the mediated, between the system of a message transfer and the content of the message.7 In information and communication studies, a strictly definable border between communicated content or a message and the system that carries it is cast in doubt.8 But this doubt placed on distinguishing the message from the communication system—not so much the signal from the noise, but the canvas, frame, and wall from the painting itself—is bracketed by the problem of the message-communication system’s relation to everything else: namely, to the real world. If post-structural and media-ecological troubling of the border between the picture and frame extends our thinking outward so that we must talk also about a border between the picture–frame amalgam and the real or the picture–frame–world divisions, then what is new about a new medium is not actually its degree of transparency or the clarity of its mediation of the world but rather the way it mediates this question of immediacy or transparency itself.9 When a new medium has become quotidian and unremarkable, even boring, and we are ready for yet another “next new thing,” the new real arrives, our lives having been transformed through the social absorption of the no-longer-new medium.

Even if technological innovation and growth of digital cultures allow the transmission of reality in a manner that feels fundamentally different from older analog methods, the concepts with which those differences have been assessed remain unchanged.10 Derived from seventeenth-century Cartesian mathematics and proliferating in gadgets of the nineteenth century, graphical perspective continues to organize principles in popular media such as virtual reality and multiplanar formats like animation.11 Similarly, with digital music reproduction and simulation, questions of mimicry and simulation return through terms like sampling and synthesization. Today’s mass online shooter games raise fears of normalizing violence through interactivity, but real-world violence resulting from televisual representation has been a concern since the dawn of that medium. Video games restage a mode of passive relation with our media in relation to visions of the apocalypse that began perhaps with masks and the invocation of gods. And emoji simply mark the latest version of pictographic communication as old as cave paintings. Despite the change in modes of expression, capture, storage, and transmission, representation and mimicry persist as key factors in the sale and evaluation of new cultural forms and technologies.

Furthermore, it is remarkable how marketing rhetoric and academic talk about media change parallel one another: for one of the most recent versions of this, compare the following claim by media theorist Neil Postman in 1993 to the pithier marketing slogan touted by Steve Jobs on the advent of the iPhone in 2007. Postman wrote: “Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. . . . One significant change generates total change. . . . It changes everything.”12 Jobs quipped: “This changes everything.” But the fact that Jobs was back at it again (in 2010 with the release of iPhone 4 and its slogan “This changes everything. Again.”) as much as admits the rhetoric was empty. Despite such bombastic claims ricocheting through the echo chamber of media ecology that includes marketers and media scholars, there are no great rifts separating the media of the old and that of the new that withstand historical inquiry.13

This book questions the subtle but stubborn penetration of the marketing rhetoric of “new” into technical, semantic, aesthetic, ethical, and academic discussions of media. Japanese cultural and technological products provide an ultimate test case for this rhetoric of the “new” not only because the idea of the “new release” (shinhatsubai, a phenomenon whereby new products enjoy a phantasmagorically deceptive sales pitch, akin to the “new and improved” marketing label in the United States) pervades advertising in Japan today but also because the nation has figured so prominently in the arguments that founded new media studies historically and globally. Since Marshall McLuhan argued that the “medium is the message” in 1964, Japan has consistently been one of the small handful of countries to be considered a leader, with many “firsts” in new media ideas, technologies of circulation, and cultures that thrive on and within them.14 And, as Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro persuasively argues, Japan has been used as a test case to prove the supposed universal applicability of media theory.15 Part of the reason for this has to do with Japan’s history as a leader in the fields of communication and information technologies. Japan, then, is not so much a test case for the new as a compelling place for evaluating the efficacy of the concept.

While discussing the self-projected images of innovation and newness embedded in Japanese new media, this book also recognizes a perceived threat of a technological Japan from the outside (techno-orientalism), arising as early as 1897 with the introduction of the Arisaka rifle, the design of which was emulated by the British navy until 1921, and perhaps even earlier with Jonathan Swift’s spoof of European images of Japan in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift portrays a partly real but highly fictionalized Japan (based on scant factual sources) as a politically and technologically superior nation in order to ground the even more fanciful places to which he sends his roving protagonist and connect them to the real world of readers. This tendency to muse about Japan as a real place in the present through which to philosophize and fantasize about other possible worlds and futures is echoed in much more recent cyberpunk visions, the locus classicus of which is William Gibson’s Neuromancer. In that 1984 English-language novel, Gibson imagines an information-connected center in futuristic Ono-Sendai, Japan, where one could “jack in” to an information hub that he names “cyberspace.” From Swift to Gibson, Japan has been represented and constructed as a kind of virtual space or heterotopia that is both here in the world and elsewhere, a conduit through which to imagine other places, as well as an exceptional other place itself.16 That is to say, a medium.

This book shows that, although many recent innovations in media technology have come from Japan, the role of Japanese industry is entirely contingent and historicizable: little about these innovations is specific to Japan or inherently Japanese. Though nothing essential about Japan or Japanese culture warrants a special position as a center of “new media” discourse, it has often been placed there by culture creators, media scholars, pundits, and marketers both within and outside of Japan. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japan was a temporal medium for connecting a modernizing present with a premodern past. During the Cold War, Japan became more of a spatial medium that bridged the divide between East and West, communist and capitalist regimes, acting as a node for U.S. hegemony in Asia.17 Japan’s role as a medium was not simply thrust upon it from the outside but carefully maintained and cultivated from within.

This book directly intervenes in two major, reinforcing discourses around Japan’s role in media studies. On the one hand, the techno-orientalist discourse fetishizes Japan in terms of technology (for instance, in representations from the fictional worlds of Gibson to those of Kon Satoshi, in sensationalist news coverage of Japanese robot animal companions, and through viral videos of synthetic humanoid vocalization robots as the pinnacle of innovation).18 On the other hand, self-exoticizing “theories of Japaneseness” consider Japanese technology—especially Japanese-developed consumer technologies, like Sony VAIO netbooks (the world’s first mass-marketed computers with fingerprint security), Canon digital 3D cameras, and Capcom’s fighting video games like Street Fighter and Sengoku Basara—as uniquely positioned to dominate the global techno- and mediascapes.19 These two discourses depict Japan as a real place that, even as it exists in the present day, somehow also represents a future not yet realized in the rest of the world. Beyond its own borders, Japan’s mythical status as a tech nation appears real because consumers continue to prize “made in Japan” as a label indicating precise, well-designed, cutting-edge technology. As such, the case of Japan is essential to the study of new media. If new media are not new in the supposedly futuristic Japan, then they were never new at all.

Chapter 1 explains the main argument and interventions in media studies and theories of mimesis. The following chapters present case studies of four particular “new” media. Each case highlights different keywords in the recent glorification of “new media” as a radical break from the past. And each navigates seemingly different notions of mimesis. By connecting the histories of analog and digital “new media,” this approach ultimately reveals the limits and value of the continued use of the term new media. The book identifies both what is specific to our current moment and what is shared across time in our contemporary usage of jargon like virtuality, immersive, intellectual property, copycat violence, and embodiment.

Chapter 2, on stereomimesis, contrasts Japan’s role in the global stereoscopic trade of the early twentieth century with recent claims about the connections between high-tech Japanese televisions (widescreen, high-definition, or 3D) and superflat animation. Echoing the production of stereoscopy, which produces its 3D effect by pairing two nearly identical two-dimensional images, this chapter juxtaposes “what was represented” with “the presentation of the apparatus.”20 This history of stereoscopy and its relation to the visual exhibits (misemono) that were popular in the Meiji period connects recent multiplanar criticism of cel animation to a longer history of philosophical notions of parallax and stereographic viewing. Rather than toggling between two perspectives to enhance a worldview, the products of three-dimensional photography project themselves into and thereby transform our world, whether through images that seem to grant better perspectives, machines that provide views of those images, or 3D-printed statues manufactured from those images.

Chapter 3 examines the lasting impact of the collision between expanding international copyright regulations and the new media of records and radio in Japan of the 1930s. The interactions and litigation between Miura Tamaki, who played Madame Butterfly in over two thousand performances around the globe, and Wilhelm Plage, the notorious copyright hound advocating for European copyright conglomerates throughout Asia, led to the promulgation of a new series of Japanese copyright laws that established the current system for rights-holding. The recording history of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in Japan provides a stark example of the ways in which new media are caught up in long-standing issues of cultural production and appropriation, originality and copying, and body and identity, or what Steven Feld terms, in reference to recorded music, “schizophonic mimesis.”21

Chapter 4 considers the role of the television in Japanese homes through examples of copycat play and copycat violence, focusing on one case that resulted in the cancellation of the first Japanese superhero program in the 1950s. This case study reveals how forms of violent mimicry relate to the contemporary practice of cosplay (costume play) and to the ongoing discourse on education and moral panic around new media. Restaging René Girard’s notion of “mimetic rivalry,” this chapter explains why masked television superheroes became a genre in Japan and illuminates the reception of that specific genre and of television as a medium. Girard’s mimetic theories, though couched as ahistorical truths about Judeo-Christian culture, are products of the television age. Thus, the idea that television promotes violent mimetic rivalries explains as much about the medium as it exhibits the very symptoms of the rivalry it purports to find there.

Chapter 5 examines the hopes and fears around video games as either bringing families together or driving society apart. The chapter begins with a deep history of early gaming theory through the remediation of video games in the older media of films and novels. It then focuses on a case study of a particularly Japanese form of video gaming known as the “visual novel game.” In Steins;Gate (2009), the place of the player in the game and the game in the player’s world is revealed through the insertion of metagame effects into the gameplay. Between the end-of-the-world games that were popular in the last years of the Cold War and the connected disconnect of post–web 2.0 (post–social media) gaming, this medium built a world of fan communities and connections, best captured in the recent trend of posting video playthroughs of games online. Contemporary ideas of ecomimesis inform the description of the world-building and world-destroying power of games.

Chapter 6 turns to the question of the body that is present in all the chapters through an archaeology, genealogy, and mimetology of emoji. Japanese digital youth cultures transcend the marketing and consumption of mobile phone novels, light novels, visual novel games, and alternate history fiction through appeals to the seemingly universal body. If mimesis marks a kind of real-world metaphor (standing in for others and becoming others), it is in the body that we can see how copying, substitution, and emerging mimesis function. For this reason, every chapter begins with an external medium (stereoscopy, records, television, video games, emoji) but ends with the body. From a standard smiley face to the strangely cute poop emoji, the pictogram characters attempt to reinsert the body into linguistic communication, but their failure to do so reveals a different form of embodied connection beyond the screen.

The concluding reprise brings back several themes of the case studies to think again about Japan as a medium, stereotyped as a copycat nation, prized for its technological products and carefully cultivated media contents.

Though the case studies of the chapters are arranged roughly chronologically, each covering about four decades of media history in Japan, the movement through the chapters should not suggest a narrative of historical progress. The Marxian notion (from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) that history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce contains his familiar three-part dialectic tension. But it gives us no guide to know within which moment of history we might happen to be dwelling: the original, the second (farce), or the third (tragedy). Recognizing that even Napoleon I (whom Marx positioned as the first) was not an original, this book assumes that the first movement presents simply the myth of origins and that, rather, we dwell in a world in which copies toggle between the farcical and tragic. This is not to suggest a faith in cyclical history or ahistorical truths but rather to recognize that our contingent use of particular media (in this case, the medium of language and its concepts of media) ground and imply the use of other terms such as mimesis.

Rather than telling media history through failed projects, as does Siegfried Zielinski, or arcana, as does Friedrich Kittler, this book provides a series of media archaeologies and genealogies through mainstream and popular Japanese new media in order to suggest that concepts of media themselves are imbricated with the multifarious concepts of mimesis.22 Following the lead of media historians such as Charles R. Acland, Lisa Gitelman, and Wendy Chun, the chapters successively contextualize major current keywords of media studies within earlier modes of representation. Rather than a teleology of technological progress or even a widespread historical arc of the development or cultivation of mimesis over time (from, say, representation to mimicry), readers will find repeating patterns revealing how new media teach their users how to be used through a dialectic tension between representation and mimicry: the stories mime one another, echoing themes with differences and variations that speak to the distinct historical circumstances and conceptual frameworks of the case studies. This repetition displays in structure what is argued through the content—that is, that re-presentation and copying are only one aspect of mediation. Therefore, the repetitions can be read as the patterns we are programmed to see in history, as well as the transhistorical nature of change. This cyclical expansion of what we had before differs from progress; though it will create something new through mimicry, it is not necessarily radically new. Any claims for the radical newness of media have been greatly exaggerated: Welcome to the new real; same as the old real.