This book has examined various histories of mediation to expose, develop, and project the ways in which media both represent and transform our world. If the entanglement of media and mimesis occurs within a singular modernity that has been largely (though not exclusively) defined by the West, then Japan is a useful place to see how well the concept works. Such a positioning of Japan as a pivotal test case has been problematic in media studies.1 So we need to caution here that focus on Japanese media does not imply that Japan is the only place possible for tracking the relationship between media and mimesis. To argue otherwise would be to participate in a techno-orientalist stance that has been mentioned in previous chapters without prolonged discussion. This book has assumed that there is nothing essentially Japanese about these media and, in fact, has demonstrated that the specific uses and developments of media in Japan examined here are contingent on particular producers in specific moments and cultures of consumption. However, just because the book takes the lack of any inherent Japaneseness as a given does not necessarily mean that the book does not participate in the continuation of a cycle that ties Japan with media or technology. It does not, therefore, obviate the necessity for a direct consideration of techno-orientalism.

Media and mimesis are made visible within and imbricated in modes of technological fetishization that do not transcend and can contribute to techno-orientalist views of media. Indeed, even studying something else (a nontechnological object) would not get us beyond or outside the vortex of the techno-orientalist critique, because, even by avoiding discussion of technology, its presence could be read in the absence. This is to say, that (given the pervasive context of techno-orientalism) to speak of anything Japanese is potentially to step into the power dynamics at play in techno-orientalist critique. And in understanding this, the critique of techno-orientalism still cannot ipso facto transcend the operations or politics of techno-orientalism. Further, techno-orientalist criticism is a mode of understanding or knowing and, therefore, is itself a powerful technique applied to Asian-related material that will potentially reproduce some of the problematic power plays that it critiques about techno-orientalism.

Techno-orientalism is intimately tied to ideas about the “progress” of nations through world history, such as modernization theory and conceptualizations of the end of history. Its premise, that the future is “Asian,” rests on a sense of history as geographically mappable, a notion visible in the work of Hegel or, more recently, Alexandre Kojève and Francis Fukuyama. The idea of the post–World War II decades as an “American Century,” for instance, is part of a strange but enduring concept that world history began in Ur or Greece and progressed northwest, toward England via France and Germany. Just as America was the future for France at the time of the revolution, Japan (and to some extent China) became the future for the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.2 But as a “latecomer” to (Western) modernity, Japan has also been seen as behind the times, a purportedly premodern, feudal, pagan culture that somehow still exists today as a high-tech, futuristic, postmodern wonderland.3 This notion of Japan as in between or on a threshold—both spatially (on the margin of Asia) and temporally (fluxing between premodernity and postmodernity without ever quite arriving in modernity)—also fundamentally positions Japan as a Hegelian medium that helps negotiate the spatial and temporal domains between such binary concepts as modern and premodern, contemporary and future, East and West, etc. In this sense, Japan as a concept is itself a philosophical lever that might open a path to understanding as much as block it.

Views of Japan as holding such a hybrid position arise from a particular attitude toward “oriental” objects, especially technologies and media. The grand historical narrative suggests that, like Turkey and other supposedly belated outliers to a Western model of modernization, Japan’s alternative modernity managed to hold on to its traditions while incorporating aspects of Western culture.4 However, this displays a tendency in Western civilization theory to conceive of Japanese modernity as a kind of mimetic and, therefore, secondary and derivative modernity, a strange funhouse mirror distortion of Western modernity, which is presumed to be an original, undistorted, and evenly distributed example of social, scientific, economic, and political transition.

One way to resist this view of copycat modernity is to recognize that innovation always relies on creative borrowing, sampling, citation, repurposing, reusing, reprocessing, or rendering of available data. As modernism has taught us, we are all eternal copiers or incremental modifiers; there never has been an identifiable original.5 In this way, modernity can be seen as an aesthetic discursive formation that has been constructed through the constant negotiation and the perpetual identifying and repositioning of new “others.” Japan has long been front and center in this respect, both as an other (to the West) and as a self that finds other others (on continental Asia and in the West).

This suggests the power dynamics within modernity are always at least ambivalent—just as the colonial situation gives power to the colonist, it also confers (albeit limited and circumscribed) powers to the colonized via something like Homi Bhabha’s “colonial mimicry” to resist and push back. This acknowledgment of multiple agencies under the general conditions of hegemony at least partially undoes any notion of a completely hegemonic center.6 In her study of piracy as mimetic of the behavior of colonists, Barbara Fuchs’s concept of “imperial mimesis” emphasizes sameness or identity over difference. In this sense, imperial mimesis might be another name for techno-orientalism, revealing not only the way fetishization of an Asian technology distorts the world and human relations within it but also the modes of wily innovation (like Bhabha’s “sly civility”) that can be produced in places that are thoroughly techno-orientalized like Akihabara. And imperial mimesis can be helpful for thinking about the historically key (yet strategically liminal) position of Japan in media studies. Fuchs conceives of imperial mimesis as crucially redefining mimesis in general to include “non-literary phenomena, . . . [and to designate] imitation of a model, whether by subjects, polities, or texts.” To Fuchs’s list of possible nonliterary mimetic phenomena, this book adds media as a “bridge” (as Fuchs puts it), the frame or system between the content of culture and the world in which the media exist.7 So even as reverse orientalism (Occidentalism) and techno-orientalism are themselves forms of mimesis, as copies or (mis)representations, the media through which such behaviors are accomplished act as concrete bridges between constructed worlds and the given world.

A concrete example can be found in the discussion of computer graphics (CG) in chapter 1. Significantly, Azuma Hiroki and Saitō Tamaki, in their elaboration of cyberspace as a new medium, miss a particular aspect of CG: there is no such thing as pure digitization, just as there is no such thing as sign without referent. In fact, despite the feeling of a new digitized world in cyberspace, the digital realm is constantly pointing to and dependent on the realm outside it. One of the great “Japanese” film sagas conjures such digital bodies in our minds’ eyes. The Hollywood chambara (swordplay) films known as the Star Wars saga have, in their twenty-first-century techno-orientalist prequels and spin-offs, created “completely digital” animated characters. Think, for instance, of Jar Jar Binks, the digital resurrection of Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin, or the return of a young Princess Leia decades after Carrie Fisher played the character. Jar Jar was seemingly created out of thin air, while Leia and Tarkin were created by using images of the actors captured on film at a given time. But in spite of this apparent difference, both types of imaging are grounded in the real world. The Jar Jar animation relied on the motion-captured embodied movements of actor Ahmed Best, and the portrayal was criticized for the racist stereotypes in the character’s patterns of speech, which evoked Black minstrelsy figures such as Stepin Fetchit and Butterfly McQueen. This was not simply a case of audiences bringing their baggage into the reception of a cultural product but also of creators remediating their own cultural baggage into the production. Though no Jar Jar–shaped creature existed in the real world prior to his creation, the data from which his figure was rendered were very much of our world and, in that sense, not so dissimilar to the time-tripping computer-generated images of a young Carrie Fisher and death-defying ones of an aged Peter Cushing.8 Though the desire to realize the impossible feat of creating something from nothing may seem to be limited to worlds of fantasy (like a techno-orientalist Hollywood appropriating plots and aesthetics from samurai films), it can be repeated with significant differences, of course, around almost any moment of cultural production, including those within Japan itself. For example, the digitized musical sensation Hatsune Miku stars in viral concert videos featuring thousands of live fans cheering, dancing, and singing along with a projected 3D hologram of the beloved pop icon, who is promoted as “completely digital.”9 But the completeness of the digitization is a myth sustained by magical technological thinking. In fact, Hatsune Miku’s voice is simulated using Yamaha’s VOCALOID software, which itself was rendered by mixing, stretching, and distorting diphthongs and tones that were originally sung by humans and recorded and stored in a voicebank.10 Such examples, whether from Hollywood or Tokyo, suggest that no medium can overcome the structural limitations of signification that ground or embody even the most fictional, fantastic, and virtual simulacra in the real world. Creativity and imagination begin and end with the given world. It is magical thinking to suppose that something can be created from nothing.

And yet the spectacular desire to achieve the impossible creation of something from nothing persists. Today, social media seems to provide a potential space for such creation of identity. Our platforms in cyberspace seem to afford us freedom to be whoever we want to be in that world. And yet, as the anonymous spaces of chatrooms and bulletin boards of the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s gave way to named participation, such naming did not make the identities represented in cyberspace 2.0 any more real or make the former modes of participation any less real. In citizen’s band (CB) radio, video gaming, and early social media, anonymous participation (enabled by handles, initials, pseudonyms, and fictional avatars) rendered in more stark relief the performative aspects of personality, identity, and mimicry already present in older social media conventions. With the rise in Japanese use of Facebook and Twitter in the aftermath of the catastrophic triple disasters of March 11, 2011—the Great East Japan Earthquake, the ensuing tsunami, and the nuclear meltdown it caused at Fukushima—named social networks have become, to take a metaphor from bygone communication structures, today’s “bulletin boards” and “totem poles”: they stand at the center of our global village, transposing our identities and associating them not with traditional families and filiation but with alternative bubbled communities of affiliation (LINE being the key social medium for this). The implicit message behind the widespread acceptance of these metaphors for new media, which draw on older forms of meaning dissemination, either cuts against the mainstream notion that new media are fundamentally new or reveals just how new they may be. That we understand new forms through metaphors that remediate them in terms of older ones betrays a glimpse of the new real that undergirds the sheen of marketing. New media have provided not more immediate connections but simply more intense mediation. Social media does not create something out of nothing; it stands as our exemplar of a world ecomimetically built on and echoing another world of social relations.

Techno-orientalism works in a similar way. As both an aesthetic mode of representation and a set of practices that transforms the world, it is but one manifestation of such magical thinking predicated on a mode of ignorance to connections between cultural products and their production in the world. The broader term orientalism is generally understood as an aesthetic cultivated from a simultaneous desire for and fear of the other. This aesthetic enables and perpetuates exploitation of historical inequalities or uneven distributions of power—i.e., the context and means of its production. One aspect of orientalism that is often missing from this standard narrative but is specifically relevant to Japan is the situation in which nonmetropole places were both demonized as derivative copiers in terms of degree of civilization and modernization and simultaneously associated with a technologized future that outstrips the center. Recognizing that images of uncontainable Asian technologies promote racism and fear of the Asian other while also critiquing desire for an unattainable Asian future, scholarship on techno-orientalism shows that, in some cases, the products of Asia have been seen paradoxically both as inferior, derivative copies and as desired technological innovations that the West itself might pilfer and copy. This technological fetishism is a reversal of a basic tendency of orientalism, in which the mimicry of the colonizer by the colonized creates an image of the other that is comfortably familiar yet different enough to remain separate.11 In techno-orientalism, while this dynamic may continue to hold true as the non-Asian confronts familiar, yet different (putatively Asian) technology, it is also reversed as the non-Asian tries to copy, consume, and be transformed by the Asian technology. In short, mimesis, whether as representation or mimicry, is at the heart of techno-orientalism, but copying is not a unilateral, bottom-up phenomenon; it is at least a two-way street.

Studies of techno-orientalism have tended to be more concerned with one way more than the other, with identity critique more than with technology or media critique per se, and with North American cultural studies more than Asian studies.12 In an effort to address the political, ethical, and moral wrongs endured through years of inequality, hegemony from elsewhere, and blatant racism against real human beings, and to think about the ways such wrongs manifest as violence to real bodies, such studies rightly focus on the representation of bodies: bodies of Asians, of cyborgs, and of transgender people, nations as bodies, bodies as others.13 This book started from the premise that new media also provide a fertile ground for examining techno-orientalist tendencies. But it also shows that a broad definition of such media (extended to include the medium of the body, both those bodies represented by and those affected by these techno-orientalist representations) might draw this approach closer to identity critique than it might otherwise seem at first glance.

Examining the gadgets, networks, information flows, and media ecologies so integral to techno-orientalism’s formation adds a new means of understanding techno-orientalism’s root causes and pervasive tendrils.14 Here it is important to repeat Ueno Toshiya’s recognition that techno-orientalism is the result of the historical advent of information capitalism.15 As a leader in the fields of communication and information technologies, Japan’s entanglement in the wires of electronic informationization has deep roots. In 1967, futurologist Hayashi Yūjirō coined the phrase information society to describe an emerging state of computerized knowledge consumption.16 Two years later, engineer Tonuma Kōichi mapped information flows as networks of pathways, resembling organic neural webs and imagining an early biotechnical view of the spread of electronic media. The Metabolist movement, which had earlier emerged from the same biotech sensibility, showed how information saturation was affecting daily life in the 1960s and continues to inform the global organic conception of the internet as a “web” today.17 As a result of Japan’s place, we might say techno-orientalism is at the heart of our contemporary understanding of media and our sense that new media reveal the possibility of making new worlds and making in the world.

Assuming that claims about the superiority or inferiority of media formats and cultural objects are themselves always culturally, historically, and socially inflected or premediated and, therefore, subjective, ideological arguments, it is clear that techno-orientalism (in relation to Japan) moves in at least two directions: on one hand, it is created by fears of a technological other, and on the other, it is evident in Japanese pride in the uniqueness and exceptionalism of the Japanese technological brand. Or to put it more broadly: “Stretching beyond Orientalism’s premise of a hegemonic West’s representational authority over the East, techno-orientalism’s scope is much more expansive and bidirectional, its discourses mutually constituted by the flow of trade and capital across hemispheres.”18 In short, techno-orientalism is manifest by unequal power distribution, as well as in the production and circulation of things in a particular style.

Like the cultivation of colonial aesthetics explained by Karatani Kōjin, the exoticism of techno-orientalist style is a willful ignorance that brackets off other concerns to focus on one particular aspect, to cultivate a desire for or an interest in a Japanese or “Asian” technological object (often as a stand-in for the subject or person, as we have seen with the Madame Butterfly window).19 What tends to be bracketed off in or ignored by techno-orientalism is a care for the actual cultural and geostrategic logics of Asia that have produced its circumstances for such presumably technological innovation or mediation. That is, exoticist consumers of techno-orientalist goods cultivate mystery and misunderstandings around the objects of their interest. And the twist is that this is equally true for many Japanese consumers of Japanese technological products as for many non-Japanese consumers.20

Such willful ignorance is not limited to those of patently orientalist inclinations but rather has become part of the lived realities of Japan. The work of orientalizing the other is not simply and unilaterally translated or transferred in Japan to elsewhere; it has become an active orientalizing of the self within Japanese culture. For example, the Japanese-language translations of those masterpieces of techno-orientalism Neuromancer and Gulliver’s Travels do not translate the proper name of the nation “Japan” into a different space of alternative modernity, such as Turkey, India, Somalia, or Bolivia, but instead maintain the specific uniqueness of “Japan” for Japanese-language audiences. And “Japan” remains Japan in Japan, even in translations of the absurdist truism declared by Oscar Wilde’s whimsical boy Vivian in “The Decay of Lying.” Arguing that art should not be based on reality and, indeed, that nature copies art, Vivian takes the position that the presentation of Japanese people through Japanese art does not tell us a thing about Japanese people in reality; the country as seen through its art, he declares, does not exist.21 In other words, Japanese translators and cosmopolitans have themselves become mediums channeling and re-creating the modern Western stereotypes about and desires for a virtual Japan that, if not quite Vivian’s “pure invention,” is at least partially reinvented through such musings. In this sense, “Japan” (the discursive formation) has been a new medium (or cyberspace) for channeling the other time of the future and the other space of fiction, even for the Japanese. Meanwhile, such an aesthetic works to erase Japan the place.

The techno-orientalist tendencies of literary fantasies from science fiction to aesthetic treatises are connected to their worldly offshoot, the tech industry. In other words, it is not only that the textual association of Japaneseness with technology or media can be read on the surface in the contents of culture but also that such fetishizing occurs around and through the technological products that emerge from that nation. In short, occasionally latent and periodically overt, techno-orientalism can be seen both in the Yoshiwara nightclub of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and in the nondescript black, hard plastic of a Nikon camera. This is not simply a case of aesthetic standards being applied differently to techno-orientalist cultural products than to technological and media machines. What seems common is the more subtle version wherein Japanese media are so normalized globally that they no longer signify as Japanese. The precision of a Seiko or Casio watch as transformative of time, the Sony Walkman as a producer of private space in public, and the crisp clarity of a Canon camera rendering visions of sports anew are all examples of discourses around Japanese technologies that have deep penetration beyond the Japanese market but tend no longer to redound back to Japan in terms of soft power.

Their techno-orientalist positioning in the market nevertheless is perpetuated. Globalization is not always about the homogenization of local cultures under the hegemonic capitalist, imperial, or franchise cultures like those of the United States; it can move in other directions that allow powerful innovations developed in nonhegemonic cultures to rise and gain market share (at times through transparently hiding their national or cultural origins and at times by overtly flouting the homogenizing paradigms of globalization).22 Indeed, what is true for goods on the global market is doubly so for media: they are supposed to be transparent. Numerous examples of Japanese forms of seemingly transparent media silently adopted around the world include the development of the VHS format by Japan Victor Company (JVC), the success of 8chan and 4chan (copies of Japan’s 2chan) as global platforms for broadcasting right-wing anger, and NTT DoCoMo’s development of emoji.23 The world has become so saturated with Japanese media innovations that people using Japanese media do not necessarily think about them as Japanese. As a result, “Japan” is often erased from Japanese media, due as much to the dominant norm of homogenization through globalization as to strategic marketing of “culturally odorless” products at historical moments when overtly Japanese products were viewed negatively, cultivating a quality of national ambiguity or statelessness (mukokuseki).24 From the standpoint of ethics around essentialization, this is a net good (since nationalism of cultures has historically led to so much violence and racism). It may even be more accurate to a globalized world in which the geographical origin of technological goods and innovations has largely lost meaning (Nikon lenses are now made in Thailand). But such erasure of origin and identity that homogenization perpetrates is also obviously problematic, especially because (in its Asian versions) techno-orientalism is far from dead. Today the marker of Japanese style—as evidenced, for example, in the nondescript Uniqlo clothing (except perhaps for their T-shirt line that inserts kitsch over-the-top Japaneseness into the generic staples of global pop art)—is what Kōichi Iwabuchi calls “odorlessness” but with a catch: the odorlessness itself has become the aroma of the new aesthetic regime. In other words, the new globalization is not an erasure (even if it might have begun that way) but rather an assertion of a minimalist style and chic.

The aesthetics of erasure have become a hallmark of techno-orientalism as a style. That is, even as traces of Asia are erased, that erasure itself becomes an aesthetic to be prized. Witness the global success of minimalist brands from Murakami Haruki and David Mitchell novels to Huawei, TaoTronics, LG, and Samsung products; today, Japanese style does not have to be Japanese. Yet even as they homogenize and erase local cultural markers from products, marketers of Japanese exports and promoters of the pop cultural industry of video games and anime continue to cultivate a self-techno-orientalizing national image as technological and futuristic. While of course the dominant narrative of globalization as homogenizing is accurate, there are significant exceptions. Japanese products have “gone global” because of erasure, while others pose an overt challenge to homogenization under a global norm (Uniqlo T-shirts with images of Hokusai prints or video games steeped in the rich history of the Warring States period). Some cases combine both erasure and a challenge to homogenization: for instance, although Sony founder Akio Morita originally chose the company name in the 1950s as one that would not sound Japanese, he later insisted on the brand name “Walkman” for the groundbreaking device, despite the marketing advice of experts at the time, who argued that the name was oddly agrammatical in English.25 In the first case, Morita homogenized to fit in; in the second case, he conformed to the global standard of English only in part. Similarly, the emoji character set still bears the marks of its Japanese origins in 1960s internationalization movements and 1990s pagers (pokeberu), even as the homogenizing Unicode has been slowly weeding out and contextualizing through augmentation culturally specific Japanese icons. The early awkwardness of the then still strange word Walkman or the continued presence of Himeji Castle and love hotels in the Unicode emoji set are exceptions to the rule of a homogenizing globalization. These are cases that at once can provoke warnings about threats to the apparent global hegemony of English-language civilization and stand as omens of the degradation as well as penetration of the Japanese language.26 All of these mediated transformations of our daily experience mark the groundwork for the new real, which is defined by those everyday moments when media have so transformed reality itself that we can no longer understand the world without reference to our media.

The new real, then, is not simply a reverse mimesis or an instance of the content of cultural products changing the world. Rather, it marks how we live with and in media. Popular media remediate our usage of new media; at the same time, we behave in ways that mimic that mediated content. In moments of media shift, examples of hypermediation abound. When a medium mediates its own mediation (“homomediation” or “automediation”), we can see the emergence of the new real. It is not only that we copy the world and its mediated images and that that behavior is then itself mediated (ad nauseam) but also that our behaviors are always already thoroughly mediated. As we have seen throughout this book, the body is simply the clearest manifestation of how any mediation (even homo- or automediation) is somehow already premediated. Though the discussion of the “Haruhi” dancers in the previous chapter deals most explicitly with the question of the body, it has been implicit throughout this book. We began with the confusion of the animal body with the machine and human body as part of a Nipper–media nexus. Enami Nobukuni, Morioka Isao, and Rokudenashiko sought to control the mediation of their own bodies in increasingly biomimetical ways in order to stand out against a background. Miura Tamaki embodied the role of Madame Butterfly in a quest to fit into the background of the predefined role and creatively capitalize on her position through embrace of a schizoasthenic mimesis. Mimetic rivalry around Gekkō kamen showed how donning the medium of the mask repeated the work of media and related copycat violence to real bodies of youth. And the social relations ecomimetically constructed within a video game world revealed the limits of attempts to remake the world of social relations outside of the game—in which saving bodies can only be accomplished through giving up on media. The skin tone modifiers of emoji, too, remediate questions about a universal, human-embodied condition.

These microhistories of media reveal how media unceasingly fail to live up to their grandest hype. Despite claims that they can transport us across time and space, materialize figures before our eyes, conjure voices from the past or from our imagination, provide justice where there is none, make us violent or happy, create families or dissolve them, transcend linguistic limitations, and, thereby, connect us all, media highlight that our social disconnects lie beyond mediation. These multiple stories of mediation reveal that even though we may all have a body that shares features with other bodies, “the body” and its multiple mediations can never be the same for everyone in every instance. Therefore, we must question breathless utopian claims about media. And yet, we cannot help but see the world as different because of its inclusion of these media. We can no longer communicate without emoji; we conjure them in our speech even when no scripting is necessary. This behavior builds the new real, even as it necessarily always already feels a bit dated.