Jellyfish drift through Tokyo. I had been spending the summer evening watching hundreds of them float down the Sumida River on their way back out to sea. Returning home to my apartment on the other side of the city, I put on an ambient jellyfish DVD I discovered recently in the background video section of a nearby record store. The screen glows blue, and slowly the semitransparent creatures drift into view. They are all breath, floating like disembodied lungs as they quietly push backward across the television.

The jellies’ translucent skins begin to glow. Some appear in close-up, some from a distance. Sometimes, multiple jellyfish float by together, a syncopated rhythm emerging between them. At moments a jellyfish will shine with the burst of an electrical charge. Postproduction visual effects add ripples of color across their translucent skin.

Downtempo electronic music emanates from the television speakers, matching the visual shimmer and drift with a pulsing aural flow. The soft textures and gentle throb of the soundtrack provide a rhythmic context for the jellies’ periodic contractions. The video is programmed to loop endlessly, so the jellies will drift as long as the DVD continues to spin (Figure 1).

Exhausted from the summer heat, I lie down on the tatami and let the mood continue to grow. I glance over once in a while at the cool shades and transparent forms sliding past. Even without turning to face the screen directly, I feel the blue light as it spreads throughout the room. I absorb the sounds seeping quietly from the television speakers. I get up, work on other things, leave the room, and come back. All the while, I sense the jellies’ presence. Without conscious effort my own physical rhythms slowly but steadily attune to their pulse and flow. I am not attending to the video, but it is attending to me.

The DVD is Jellyfish: Healing Kurage, a Victor Entertainment release from 2006 (kurage is Japanese for jellyfish).1 These digital jellies may not summon the awe I felt watching hundreds of live jellyfish head down the Sumida, but they can be brought home with no damp, no river stink, and no risk of being stung. What Jellyfish presents is not the objective documentation of jellies in the wild but a distillation of the subjective drift they afford to the humans who encounter them. The DVD edits the jellyfish experience down to a more portable format and a more specific mood.

Being with the jellies sends my thoughts drifting. The scene at the river had reminded me of Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s 2003 film Bright Future (Akarui mirai), where poisonous jellyfish begin to spread throughout Tokyo’s waterways after the main character releases one into the sewer system. I think of a recent news item about a giant jellyfish overturning a Japanese fishing boat in the Pacific and reports of rising numbers of stinging jellyfish lurking in the San Francisco Bay. I wonder about the metaphoric relevance of jellyfish in the twenty-first century: is there something about their transparency, amorphousness, drift, and latent danger that makes them a fitting monster for an age of atmospheric threats like radiation, global warming, and cyberwarfare? My thoughts continue to wander, influenced by the contemplative atmosphere now spread throughout the apartment. I am relaxed, despite these potentially discomforting thoughts. I am not responding to the DVD so much as resonating with it.

My time with Jellyfish is an experience of being together with a work of ambient media, of tuning myself through the ambience it provides. The DVD sets a mood, and those within its orbit begin to attune. This focus on mood allows a work of ambient media to afford emotional attunement even when perceived largely through indirect attention, as in the case of ambient music and video. Encountered in isolation, the relaxing stimuli provided by Jellyfish—flowing music, soft lighting and colors, gentle movement, slow-paced editing, etc.—may not be sufficient to effectively and dependably produce the promised mood of “healing.” Through the repetition and overdetermination of similar affective cues in different aesthetic and sensory registers, however, a strong mood can be established even if audiences are only partially attentive to the on-screen drift. Once cultivated, a mood helps to steer future perceptual orientations, priming the brain to favor sensory cues reinforcing already established feelings.2 Attuning to ambient media like Jellyfish orients the self toward a mix of uncertain calm and drifting reflections, relaxation and wandering thoughts.

Ambient Subjectivation

The idea of ambient media goes back to Isaac Newton, who in his 1704 Opticks describes an amorphous and omnipresent “ambient medium” surrounding the human body, coming between it and other objects and serving as a “conveyor of attractive forces” between them. Newton is talking about the air.3 Air is what makes up the atmosphere, in its original meaning of the band of oxygen and nitrogen surrounding the surface of the earth. But air is also the medium through which waves of sound and light travel in order to pass from a perceptible object to a sensing body.4

Over the next three centuries, the meaning of these words would transform. In an English-language context, the definition of atmosphere expanded to refer not just to a pocket of air but to the subjectively felt feeling and tone of a place. The Japanese term for atmosphere, funiki, underwent a similar transformation.5 Meanwhile, medium came to refer less to omnipresent substances like air and water and more to “conveyors of attractive forces” invented by humans, from oil on canvas to magnetic discs. While their origins lie close together, atmosphere and media gradually drifted apart. Only in the past half century have they once again come together as the newer media of human invention began to merge with the air itself, filling it with light, sound, and waves of many other frequencies.

In everyday English, ambience is a synonym for atmosphere, the dispersed and overall tone or feeling of a place. But unlike its more objective sibling, ambience always implies a more subjective element of mediation at work: some kind of agency behind the production of mood and a focus on the human body attuning to it. The Latin prefix ambi- means “to surround on both sides (left and right).” Ambience shares this root with words like ambivalent, ambiguous, ambidextrous, and ambitious, words that want to have it both ways, to go in two directions at once. Karen Pinkus proposes the “both sides” of ambience refers to the binary organization of human hearing and vision.6 For an ambience to effectively serve as a medium between a human and objects in the surrounding world, it must wrap the eyes and/or ears on both sides of the head. Unlike the more general “in the round” meaning of atmosphere (as well as words like environment [kankyō]), ambience emphasizes the mediating role of human sense perception in a person’s relationship to the surrounding world. Timothy Morton suggestively notes how the ambient emphasis on embodied perception undermines the Cartesian illusion of a preexisting environment offering itself up to objective and unmediated human perception. Ambience serves to “make strange the idea of environment” by stressing its subjective quality, refusing to equate it with a natural world existing independent of human agency.7

The contemporary idea of ambient media as tools of atmospheric self-mediation emerged with British musician and record producer Brian Eno’s liner notes to his Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978). In this brief but influential text, Eno proposes “ambient music” as a genre that “provides calm, and a space to think” while maintaining the emotional freedom and subjective interest earlier forms of background music had often sought to erase. Building on the ideas of Erik Satie and John Cage, Eno envisions an ambient style “as ignorable as it is interesting,” serving as a tool of atmospheric mood regulation while providing compelling material for open-ended reflection. His idea was quickly taken up in Japan, where by the early 1980s a range of Japanese artists were engaged with producing ambient works in a wide variety of media. As I discuss in the first chapter, while early Japanese accounts of Eno’s new genre translated it simply as “environmental music” (kankyō ongaku), placing it squarely in the lineage of 1960s environmental art, as the ambient style spread artists and critics began referring to it with a transliterated version of the English term, anbiento, more clearly marking out the style from the objective valence of terms like atmosphere and environment. In this book I use ambient to refer to this more specific understanding of atmosphere as something mediated by and for the human senses.

I call this emergence of self with and through ambient media ambient subjectivation. As this book explores, ambient subjectivation has become an increasingly common component of everyday life in Japan and other postindustrial societies since the 1970s, emerging as a key technique of contemporary self-care. Earlier twentieth-century modes of atmospheric media focused more explicitly on collective mood manipulation—the “stimulus progression” of Muzak being the most famous example. But the neoliberal emphasis on self-determination demanded more individualistic and autonomous moods. The self, now tasked more than ever with creating a life from scratch, needed an ambience appearing to hand the techniques of atmospheric mood regulation over to the individual, to use as they saw fit.8

The notion that new media have become integral to lived experience is now something of a cliché, repeated ad nauseam from the early pronouncements of Marshall McLuhan on the “media environment” to more recent exponents of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence.9 But how did we come to understand atmosphere as a vital component of self-care? The increasing pervasiveness of electronic media certainly has something to do with it, but this is only part of the story. There is more driving the spread of ambient media than simply the push for more immersive, convenient, and integrated technologies. I suggest the rise of ambience is best understood as the neoliberal phase in a shifting relationship between the self and the surrounding air.

My argument builds from Michel Foucault’s later work tracing the long and shifting genealogy of techniques of the self, practices that “permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”10 In the historical shift from impersonal Newtonian air to the personalized atmospheres of contemporary media, people began to incorporate ambience as a central technique of self-creation and self-maintenance. In this book I follow Foucault in focusing on subjectivation and not on subjectivity in order not to forget that what later becomes recognized as a “subject” (a Japanese subject, a gendered subject, etc.) is first and foremost a product of particular practices and habits. Foucault ties this back to the two ancient Greek principles of “know thyself” (gnōthi seauton) and “care of the self” (epimeleia heautou). He notes how somewhere around the “Cartesian moment” of the seventeenth century philosophy began focusing on intellectual cognition alone and for a long time stopped considering issues of embodied practice and habit, at least until phenomenology and twentieth-century thinkers began bringing them back.11

Martin Heidegger played an important early role in the return to a more embodied understanding of self, drawing particular attention to the role of atmosphere and mood. Just as Taylorist researchers in the United States were discovering how to improve worker productivity through prerecorded background music, Being and Time (1927) set out an argument for the primacy of mood in the shaping of being. Heidegger bases his argument around the German term Stimmung. Usually translated into English as attunement or mood, Stimmung also carries overtones of “climate” and “the audition of music and sound.” As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht points out, all of these things involve the experience of being immersed in and influenced by the surrounding world, tuning to the atmosphere whether or not it is consciously attended to.12 Pushing back against the overintellectualization of being after the Cartesian moment, Heidegger argues Stimmung is prior to reflective awareness and a necessary prerequisite to conscious attention: “Mood has always already disclosed being-in-the-world as a whole and first makes possible directing oneself toward something.” Mood is “disclosed to itself before cognition” and becomes the essential and always present ground of self-awareness. All we can do is substitute one mood for another: “We never master a mood by being free of a mood, but always through a counter mood.”13

Gumbrecht, drawing on the work of David Wellbery, notes how by asserting Stimmung as omnipresent and inescapable, Heidegger was departing from the word’s earlier, more limited scope. In Goethe’s “Falconet” (1776) and Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), Stimmung refers to the pleasant sensation of an “all-encompassing unity and harmony often experienced in altogether commonplace settings.” By the end of the century, when Friedrich Hölderlin takes up the concept, it has developed a more romantic tinge, pointing to a harmonious atmosphere lost to the present and available only in retrospect. Heidegger expands the term to serve as a broader and more fundamental determinant of being, incorporating not only joyful and pleasant moods but anxious ones as well.14

While helping to establish atmosphere as a fundamental part of subjectivation, Heidegger’s conception of Stimmung tends to associate it with a preexisting, primordial landscape rather than understanding it as the product of intentional human design. Because of this, readings of atmospheric subjectivation based on his model have tended to fall back into an abstract notion of atmosphere as the total expression of a given time or place. This is true of the work of Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, who was among the first to pick up a copy of Being and Time when it reached German bookstores in the summer of 1927.15 Watsuji’s own subsequent and still most famous work, Climate and Culture (Fūdo, 1931), draws heavily on Being and Time while arguing against what Watsuji saw as an overemphasis on temporality in Heidegger’s text. Seeking to ground Heidegger’s notion of a foundational Stimmung in specific national spaces, Watsuji’s notion of “climate” blends weather and mood with aspects of the social environment like the family, community organizations, and communication technologies.16

As with Heidegger’s Stimmung, Watsuji identifies climate/atmosphere as the medium through which humans come to understand themselves vis-à-vis the surrounding world: “Climatic phenomena show man how to discover himself as ‘standing outside’ (i.e., ex-sistere). . . . We discover ourselves, that is, in the atmosphere.”17 Watsuji notes how self-understanding is routed through an affective relationship with the larger climate. When people greet each other with “Isn’t it a lovely morning?” they locate the source of their own refreshed feelings in the weather by confirming those around them have been similarly affected. Because everyone is shaped by the weather together, Watsuji argues, and (he implies) all shaped in the same way, atmosphere can be understood as the original force that ties a nation together. Building on the homogenizing force of Heidegger’s Stimmung, Watsuji seeks to identify climate as a foundation for the assertion of absolute cultural difference, grounded in nothing less than the weather itself. For Watsuji, being Japanese is not an accident of birth or the result of a historical formation; rather, it is a unilateral collective process of atmospheric subjectivation. Through reference to this totalizing understanding of atmosphere, Climate and Culture presents a highly reductive model of environmental determinism, dividing human civilizations into “Monsoon,” “Desert,” and “Meadow” types and positioning Japan against the “West,” China, and India. The seemingly “natural” process of climatic attunement serves as a feint for establishing the authority of the nationalist self.18

Watsuji’s strategy of locating Japaneseness in the atmosphere went on to become a central pillar of postwar Japanese attempts to secure a unified national character in something other than the vagaries of history.19 His atmospheric essentialism meshed with a larger cultural emphasis on “reading the air” (kūki o yomu) to determine correct behavior. Reading the air was espoused as essential to maintaining a harmonious social mood, what Watsuji describes as the nakayoshi (on good terms) imperative foundational to the structure of Japanese society. As Naoki Sakai argues, the way the nakayoshi imperative works to govern behavior while disguising the power relations involved makes it an ideology par excellence.20 Imagining these behavioral imperatives to emerge from the “air” itself naturalizes them even further.

The most famous postwar Japanese critique of the use of air discourse to naturalize social norms is Yamamoto Shichihei’s “Kūki” no kenkyū (Research on “air,” 1977). Yamamoto argues that “reading the air“ has been used in Japan since at least World War II as a rhetorical strategy for authority figures to indirectly persuade underlings to acquiesce to the status quo, diverting attention from vertical power structures by shifting blame to the atmosphere instead. The “air” served as a convenient scapegoat when rationalizing objectionable behaviors, explaining them as a response to an invisible and anonymous (and therefore unassailable) climatic influence. In discussions of war crimes, for example, it was much easier to attribute unethical behavior to the wartime atmosphere rather than to name names or assign personal responsibility.21

The social imperative to attune to the “air of a place” (ba no kūki) has remained prominent in recent decades. A person who misses implicit social cues and expectations is now often labeled someone who “cannot read the air” (kūki ga yomenai). The phrase experienced a surge of popularity early in the twenty-first century with an abbreviated version of the term, KY, nominated as one of the most important terms of 2007 in U-Can’s widely publicized New Buzzword Competition (Shingo-ryūkōgo taishō). As noted in a number of recent self-help books promising to help readers become “air literate,” the problem with being KY is that one quickly becomes an annoyance (meiwaku) to others, another common Japanese euphemism for those who refuse to bow to the implicit nakayoshi norms governing social life.22

While these discussions usually assume a proper Japanese subject must avoid being KY at all costs, the prevalence of guidelines on how to properly “read the air” reveals how in recent decades atmospheric cues have gradually come to be recognized as less a “natural” phenomenon than a product of social forces. From around the time of Yamamoto’s book, the idea of a collective “Japanese” atmosphere governing all social behavior began to appear less and less convincing, despite continued assertions to the contrary. As the emergence of self-help books for the KY indicate, atmospheric attunement was shifting from a collective imposition to a technology of the self, something people could learn to do on their own. Beginning in the late 1970s, a wide range of artists, designers, journalists, and public intellectuals began pulling atmosphere from the shadows of preordained, primordial weather patterns and approaching it instead as something more personal and open to manipulation. In other words, atmosphere was becoming ambient.

Techniques of the Neoliberal Self

The proliferation of new techniques of ambient subjectivation in the 1970s reflected a shifting understanding of the person: away from forms of collective self-understanding and toward a model rooted in a liberal ideal of autonomy and self-determination.

While the Heidegerrian reading of atmosphere partially broke from Cartesian abstractions by asserting the primacy of mood, the Stimmung approach failed to account for how moods themselves are often the product of human involvement and intention and, thus, shaped by the same behavioral norms and inequalities found elsewhere in society.23 Both Heidegger and Watsuji’s emphasis on mood as a “primordial kind of being” too easily falls into imagining the state or nation as an atmospheric social totality, as if a general social atmosphere attuned everyone in the exact same way. There is no room in these atmospheres for the unevenness of social interaction, how the ability to both determine and make use of atmosphere is unevenly distributed across populations, and how moods are increasingly designed and deployed to produce particular kinds of behavior.24 As I explore in the first chapter, this intentional deployment of mood-regulating media was already happening from early in the twentieth century, though it was not until the 1970s that the practice became more reflexive and personally mediated.

Foucault’s work on subjectivation, also emerging in the late 1970s, offers a valuable framework for understanding the environments and practices that come before and shape subjects well below the threshold of self-awareness. Unlike Heidegger’s vaguely nostalgic emphasis on “dwelling” and authenticity in relation to Stimmung, Foucault’s focus on subjectivation emphasizes how people, in their coming into being, are always working through a set of subjective technologies specific to their time and place and deeply entwined with the governance of self and others. Nikolas Rose, one of the chief interpreters of Foucault’s “techniques of the self,” notes the need to locate beliefs concerning the self not in the “diffuse field of ‘culture,’ but as embodied in institutional and technical practices—spiritual, medical, political, economic—through which forms of individuality are specified and governed.”25 Following Rose, I work here from the premise that the best way to avoid falling back into vague notions of “culture” (especially, in the present context, “Japanese culture”) is to focus on the rise and fall of specific techniques of subjectivation.

As Foucault argued in the late 1970s, the advent of liberalism introduced a key problematic: how could a state effectively govern the behavior of its population while allowing for greater degrees of personal freedom? The solution demanded new forms of governmentality, Foucault’s term for the way behaviors important for the continued functioning of the state become reimagined as practices of self-care, so much that people often believe they are acting out of their own self-interest rather than in accordance with external social demands. In order for these liberal forms of self-governance to develop, human behavior needed to be mediated by new forms of self-understanding: ways to imagine the self as the product of personal choices, downplaying social influence and collective identities. Rose notes two key forms this new understanding of the self would take: the psychological and the somatic. While the former imagines the self as an interiority governed by unconscious attachments, habitual beliefs, and repressed memories, the latter understands the self as tied more directly into the surface vitality of the physical body, placing more emphasis on health, physical and sensory disciplines, and preconscious affective responses. The psychological self took hold of popular consciousness over the course of the twentieth century, first in the United States and the United Kingdom and then gradually spreading around the world. The somatic self, meanwhile, is part of the turn to understanding the body as an assemblage of diverse, largely preconscious systems. In recent years the somatic turn has been felt most powerfully in the spread of new biological, information, and surveillance technologies operating at a preconscious, affective, “molecular” level. While psychology envisions a singular consciousness reflecting back upon itself, the somatic self is far more ambient, variable, and dispersed. As Foucault describes in one of his final 1979 lectures on “the birth of biopolitics,” this somatic emphasis leads to a “society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals.”26 As part of this biopolitical turn, ambient subjectivation works to tune people indirectly, via the atmosphere, rather than more directly demanding the adoption of social norms. At the same time, it lets people feel they are the ones in control of their own somatic fluctuations. The turn from the psychological to the somatic allows more room for self-determination while turning the atmosphere into a site of ever-increasing control and regulation.

This turn toward biopolitics and the somatic self took place in Japan over the course of the twentieth century, intersecting with and in many ways supplanting earlier, often more relational forms of self-understanding. The full story of this complex transition is beyond the scope of this book, but generally speaking, early efforts to govern the population through somatic self-discipline were aligned more directly to the state, such as the Lifestyle Reform Movement (Seikatsu kaizen undō) of the 1930s.27 Meanwhile, the psychological self entered Japanese medical discourse around the start of the twentieth century and spread widely through the popular imagination in the context of the “national character studies” popularized by American government researchers after World War II.28 A more liberal understanding of the self also began to emerge, with nascent attempts to assert the value of personal autonomy in and of itself. In this context political philosopher Maruyama Masao was an important midcentury voice, arguing that to build a truly democratic state Japan must learn from the liberal European tradition, particularly John Locke’s assertion that in a democracy “the state is mediated through the inner freedom of the individual.” While Maruyama still ultimately promoted an understanding of Japan as a harmonious totality (with the emperor system at its center), he sought to carve out, often via reference to Meiji-period thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi, a space for personal autonomy alongside and complementary to this national frame. 29

During the high economic growth of the 1960s and early 1970s, somatic self-discipline was still largely aligned with the national good, often through the local intermediary of the corporation (for men) and the family (for women). The early stages of postwar consumerism did begin emphasizing more personal comforts as a reward for industriousness (particularly in advertising), but the larger orientation was still to the collective effort for national prosperity.30 Only after the downturn in the economy (following the 1973 oil shock) and the implosion of the radical politics of the 1960s (especially following the Asama-Sansō hostage incident in 1972) did the wider population begin seeking out more autonomy in governing their lives, often drawing on psychological and somatic techniques of self in the process. As in the United States and elsewhere, this was spurred on in large part by the rapidly expanding consumer culture.

Japanese sociologists identify a large-scale shift from the mass culture (taishū bunka) of the 1950s and 1960s to the “micromasses” emerging in the late 1970s, the latter oriented toward a wide range of individual pursuits (a mix of consumerism, health, and more personal and experiential brands of spirituality). From this point on a lifestyle-oriented “therapy culture” based on the American model became more and more prevalent, with an ever-expanding array of techniques of the self on offer.31 As with discussion surrounding KY, psychological and somatic forms of self-discipline were often presented by journalists, social critics, politicians, and other public figures as personal solutions to social problems. By the end of the century, clinical psychologists turned public intellectuals like Saitō Tamaki and Kayama Rika came to play a leading role, publishing trade paperbacks and often appearing on television to offer advice and commentary. As sociologist Ueno Chizuko famously noted in the late 1980s, the new Japanese pastime was the search for a new “me.”32

Japanese media producers were in step with these developments, offering personal media as technologies of self-care. With the emergence of the portable audio player, portable video equipment, and other environmental media technologies in the 1970s and 1980s, personal media use could now become a routine accompaniment to everyday life, and background mood regulation could now function as an extension of self-care. As Hosokawa Shūhei recalls, when the Sony Walkman debuted in the spring of 1980 it seemed to announce the arrival of a new era of personal autonomy.33 In the 1980s consumer electronics companies like Sony, Sharp, and Matsushita (Panasonic) led the world in developing new media formats and new consumer technologies suited to high-density urban living and long train commutes. Financed by the rapid economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s and buttressed by government support, Japan became the leading developer and primary market for new media formats like cassette tape, VHS, laserdisc, CD, VCD, MD, and DVD. These technologies allowed people to choose what media might accompany them through the day. As these media became more affordable, customizable, and portable, the possibilities for their use as ambient media increased accordingly. As Rose puts it, technological developments like these served to “make new areas of life practicable.”34

Attention to these techniques of the self provides a more grounded way of understanding the transformation of mass culture in postindustrial Japan. Influenced by Jean-François Lyotard and other theorists of the postmodern, critical approaches to contemporary Japan have often focused on the collapse of grand narratives and the turn from “reality” toward mediated simulacra. The increasing focus on background forms of attention, in this context, merely represents an alternative way to reach diverse audiences who no longer have any interest in a unified narrative vision.35 The problem with these arguments is that narrative has never really gone away, and in recent years even the “grand narratives” of Japanese nationalism have shown themselves highly resilient. I argue the social and cultural shifts beginning in the late 1970s have less to do with the collapse of grand narratives and much more to do with emerging techniques of self-care, somatic techniques that run prior to and in some ways are independent of narrative or even political identification.

There are hints of the somatic turn even among those emphasizing the rise of simulacra. For example, sociologist Miyadai Shinji describes a rising number of “those who used fiction for the homeostasis of the self” in 1980s Japan, as people began using a wide range of media with the specific aim of mood regulation. It is not that fiction has replaced reality but that the reality/fiction distinction ceases to matter in the context of somatic self-discipline: “Reality and fiction have come to be thought of as equivalent insofar as they are material to be utilized for the homeostasis of the self.”36 As this book explores, the turn to somatic self-regulation became a guiding principle for the use and development of personal media around this time, whether focused on “reality” or not. Or to put it another way, a person’s somatic condition is reality within this new understanding of self.

The significance of this new somatic reality becomes clear within the larger context of postindustrial Japanese biopolitics. Asada Akira famously argued in the 1980s that Japan now constituted a “safe” space where increasingly infantile Japanese could play freely in fictional fantasy worlds, protected by and dependent on a maternal government operating in the shadows.37 This notion of free play, however, misses the way neoliberal biopolitics pairs personal “freedoms” with intensifying demands for self-discipline and self-restraint (jishuku). The emerging private practices of personal mood regulation often, if not always, lined up with larger social demands for healthy, active, emotionally in-control citizens. As Rose writes, the new techniques of governmentality operate “not through the crushing of subjectivity in the interests of control and profit, but by seeking to align political, social, and institutional goals with individual pleasures and desires, and with the happiness and fulfillment of the self. . . . They are, precisely, therapies of freedom.”38 When Japanese turned to media with the aim of regulating their emotional ups and downs, this was never simply a retreat into the “free play” of fictional worlds. In search of the freedom of self-determination, media users sought to manage their own somatic potentials in relation to an intensifying set of biopolitical pressures and demands.

Michael Bull’s anthropological study of the use of iPod playlists in the United Kingdom provides a compelling example of how governmentality functions on a day-to-day level. Rather than depend on preset radio or television programs, Bull notes how iPod listeners are free to design playlists to help get themselves though the workday: upbeat music for the morning, a newscast on the way to work, something energizing for the midafternoon, an audiobook for the commute home, and something relaxing for the evening and before bed. Yet the rhythms freely chosen to make life easier largely match the energetic demands of the workday: “Just as users wish to liberate themselves from the oppressive rhythms of daily life, so they appear to sink deeper into them.”39 Personal media use holds out the promise of self-determination, but the technologies also serve as ways for governments and other social institutions to offload more and more of the labor of subjective maintenance onto an increasingly isolated subject. In Japan, as elsewhere, demands placed on the individual to preserve and develop their own health and social utility rose in direct proportion to the dismantling of social services and welfare programs.40 People were “free” to adjust to these new forms of insecurity, and the new technologies of self served as crucial tools for doing so.

How to Read the Air

As many critics have pointed out, neoliberalism as an ideology often depends on sustaining the illusion of an autonomous self—independent of social, environmental, and technological influence—in order to draw attention away from structural inequities and render a person solely responsible for their own successes and failures. What is often overlooked, however, is how atmospheric attunement has come to serve as the necessary background correlate to this foregrounding of the self. As forms of social subjectivation become affectively dispersed into the surrounding environment, they are shielded from critique, naturalized into the air, and cleansed of any association with existing social actors. As film theorist Matsuda Masao proposed in the early 1970s, power was no longer manifesting as a clear struggle between two opposing forces but was increasingly becoming dispersed into the landscape itself, part of the anonymous background infrastructure of everyday life.41

As the flip side of this promise of autonomy, neoliberal capitalism also cultivates a desire to merge with the atmosphere: subtracting markers of identity and dissolving the self into a stream of sense impressions, letting go of personal responsibility and becoming one with the larger landscape (and in so doing covertly aligning oneself with the power to be found there). This ambient dream of self-dispersal surfaces again and again in the works I examine here. The fantasy of a totally autonomous self and the fantasy of merging with the atmosphere are both essential to neoliberal biopolitics, working to obscure the everyday back-and-forth of ambient subjectivation. This book argues we—neoliberal subjects inside and outside Japan—need to stop disavowing the atmospheric determinations of self and look more closely at how ambient subjectivation does its work. In other words, we need to learn to read the air in a way that better recognizes the forces moving through it.

Whereas KY discourse often places the burden of conformity squarely on the shoulders of the person who cannot or will not adapt, reading the air in the sense I pursue here places a large share of the responsibility on those who create, curate, and design a given atmosphere, as well as those who use and sustain it. This more reflexive engagement with ambient subjectivation is the focus and method of this book. While I suggest that the self is far more a product of atmospheric influence than is commonly recognized, I also follow Foucault’s later work in focusing on how a person never is simply the passive product of a given environment but can play an active role in shaping her or his own experience of environmental subjectivation. Reading the air means more carefully attending to the ambient determinants of self and realizing there are times when disrupting the given ambience, becoming meiwaku, can serve as an important way out from one mood to another.

For helping me learn how to read in this way, I am deeply indebted to the work of feminist and queer theorists of mood, affect, and emotion, including Sara Ahmed, Eve Sedgwick, Lauren Berlant, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Sianne Ngai, and Kathleen Stewart.42 These writers explore how behavioral and subjective norms operating just below conscious reflection serve to govern and regulate affective encounters and how these norms are embodied and reproduced through materially inscribed forms of social behavior. From this perspective we can see how the label of KY or meiwaku marks not just people who fail to pick up atmospheric cues but also those who inhabit the position of an “affect alien,” to borrow Ahmed’s term for someone who cannot, or will not, go with the prevailing mood.43 Every atmosphere includes a largely imperceptible border demarcating who can move seamlessly within it and who is made to feel uncomfortable, out of place, abject. Learning to trace out these transparent lines is a crucial part of making the air legible.44

As the focus shifted to governing the somatic self, media creators also began engaging with a new form of politics—what geographer Nigel Thrift has called the “spatial politics of affect.”45 The politics of affect recognizes that the sensing body doesn’t discriminate nearly as much as the rational mind. Everything sensible is affecting, whether consciously attended or not, and all of it plays a role in subjectivation. These affective powers are increasingly instrumentalized, strategically deployed by artistic, business, and political interests alike. As Félix Guattari argues, this impersonal aesthetics of subjectivation is central to contemporary forms of social control, and it is precisely at this level—what he calls the “ethico-aesthetic”—where we must search if we are going to find an alternative.46

Learning to read these atmospheres means letting go of the resistance toward mood found in much twentieth-century modernism. As Gumbrecht points out, when twentieth-century avant-garde movements tried to eliminate the mediations of mood and approach “life” more directly, they often paradoxically ended up producing incredibly moody and atmospheric works.47 Rather than continue to disavow the continuity between a critical aesthetics and the seemingly more compromised, everyday media of personal mood regulation, I suggest we need to more fully attend to the foundational role of mood in shaping the patterns and potentials of subjectivation both inside and outside traditional aesthetic contexts. It is important to emphasize, again following Foucault, that there is no escape from environmental subjectivation, no personal freedom that exists independently of wider techniques of social control. As with mood, the only way out of subjectivation is into another form of subjectivation. But this in itself is reason for hope. Instead of attempting to flee atmospheric influence, we might seek out new forms of agency via atmospheric mediation and think through the ethics of atmospheric design.48

Gernot Böhme describes how contemporary life increasingly plays out on a series of specially designed “stages,” atmospheric backgrounds for desired lifestyles and their attendant feelings: “Staging has become a basic feature of our society: the staging of politics, of sporting events, of cities, of commodities, of personalities, of ourselves. . . . In general, it can be said that atmospheres are involved whenever something is being staged, wherever design is a factor—and that now means: almost everywhere.”49 This staging of lifestyle is reflected in a growing body of social science research focusing on the use of both public and personal media to design environments for everyday life.50 While I draw on much of this work in what follows, to note how media are spreading throughout the lived environment is to see only half the picture; we must also attend to how media are becoming more atmospheric at a formal level. The demand for self-care has shifted not just media use but media aesthetics. Here, the humanities have the upper hand, and I follow close readers like Gumbrecht, Ngai, Elaine Scarry, and Angus Fletcher in seeking out an understanding of the increasingly environmental and atmospheric dimensions of aesthetic form.51

Gumbrecht notes how a reading that tunes itself to the working of atmosphere must pay special attention to matters of nonrepresentational form: “Tones, atmospheres, and Stimmungen never exist wholly independent of the material components of works—above all, their prosody. . . . ‘Reading for Stimmung’ always means paying attention to the textual dimensions of the forms that catalyze inner feelings without matters of representation necessarily being involved.” The goal of reading the “air” of a text is not to figure out what it means but to highlight what it affords as a technology of self: “An essay that concentrates on atmospheres and moods will never arrive at the truth located within a text; instead, it seizes the work as a part of life in the present.” Gumbrecht proposes, correctly I think, that this orientation toward mood and atmosphere in aesthetic experience is common among general audiences, whether or not they are conscious of the fact.52 This is all the more true in the era of ambient media, when tuning the self to a mediated mood has increasingly become a reflexive and deliberate form of self-care.

As I explore in this book, the ambient shift in media aesthetics is concentrated at the intersection of therapy culture and more recognizably aesthetic pursuits (music, literature, film, etc.). Inverting the rejection of mood regulation in modern art, proponents of “healing” media often avoid acknowledging the influence of aesthetic form, positioning therapeutic technologies instead as neutral tools for the self-determining subject. Self-help literature, for example, is often at pains to remind readers of their power to determine their own destiny, drawing attention away from the fact that they have just purchased a book to instruct them on how to do so.53

The ambient works I present here issue a direct challenge to the notion that aesthetic experience, even at its most challenging, can ever be set apart from more basic processes of subjectivation and self-care. Ambient media fulfill the therapy culture imperative for calming affect, providing a sense of restfulness and relaxation for the humans spending time with them. Unlike more purely utilitarian forms of “healing” media, however, ambient works open up spaces within the overall calm to register a wider range of emotional uncertainty, even anxiety.54 By affording a calm both effective and indeterminate, ambient media set up the possibility for an equanimous reflection on larger and potentially threatening externalities. At the same time, by pointing toward these unknown horizons, they implicitly cast doubt upon the veracity of their own calming moods. Breaking from more straightforward “new age” or “healing” genres, ambient media hint that therapy culture’s mediated provision of calm may ultimately be a fragile cover for larger social landscapes that are anything but relaxing. Yet crucially, they refuse to disavow the importance of affective experience, providing for peaceful moods even amid the encroaching instability of contemporary life.

One of my central conclusions in the following chapters is that the ultimate mood to emerge with ambient media is one of ambivalent calm, a form of provisional comfort that nonetheless registers the presence of external threats. In the case of ambient music and video, this often means mixing in unstable, ungrounded, and inharmonic materials that introduce an air of uncertainty into an otherwise relaxing and soporific mix. In other cases, particularly with more narrative media like film and literature, this ambivalence emerges through stories exploring how mediated calm intersects with interpersonal relationships, the search for identity, and the larger sociopolitical realities of life inside neoliberal capitalism. This inclusion of uncertainty allows ambient media to pass as “artistic” in the modernist sense and pay respect to the liberal ideal of emotional autonomy, disavowing their role as utilitarian tools of personal mood regulation. At the same time, there is something undeniably practical about ambivalent calm as a functional mood for venturing out into an uncertain and high-risk future.

Each chapter of the book looks at a specific way music, video, film, and literature from the 1970s onward has incorporated forms of ambient subjectivation. Chapter 1 traces how the ambient emphasis on private, reflective moods developed from the unexpected alignment of postwar Japanese background music and the environmental art of the 1960s avant-garde, converging in the “Erik Satie boom” of the late 1970s and the emergence of ambient music as a genre.

Chapter 2 presents an aesthetic history of how ambient music has sought to enable feelings of ontological security by indirectly situating the self against imaginary acoustic horizons. I trace how the landscapes made sensible by ambient music became increasingly abstract and anonymous moving from the 1980s to the 1990s to the 2000s, in time with shifting social attitudes and new sound reproduction technologies. In the process, I listen closely to key ambient tracks from Hosono Haruomi, Tetsu Inoue, and Hatakeyama Chihei.

Chapter 3 maps out how the atmospheric attunements of ambient video intersect with the spatial rhythms of everyday life in contemporary urban Japan. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s method of rhythmanalysis, I explore how ambient video positions itself as an intermediary between the impersonal rhythms of Tokyo and the somatic rhythms of the self.

Chapter 4 examines how ambient video stages its own spaces of shallow depth between the software layers of image compositing and the aleatory discoveries of found footage, affording both attention restoration and subjective dispersal. Focusing on Ise Shōko’s Swimming in Qualia (2007), the analysis here builds on the concept of soft fascination from environmental psychology, demonstrating how an aesthetic emphasis on mystery and uncertainty may help rather than hinder a work’s ability to cultivate a “healing” mood.

Chapter 5 examines the emergence of a “subtractivist” ambience in postindustrial Japan and its implications for interpersonal life. My focus here is on the solitary moods of Tony Takitani (2004), a film by Ichikawa Jun based on a short story by Murakami Haruki. I examine the atmospheres generated by Sakamoto Ryūichi’s Satie-esque score and the film’s ambivalent reflection on the role of aesthetic objects in covering over the sadness of self and others. Considering Tia DeNora’s distinction between intersubjectivity and cosubjectivity and the rise of subtractivist lifestyle brand Mujirushi ryōhin (Muji), I explore how Tony’s low-affect lifestyle may be well suited to an age of muted fashions and mood-regulating media.

Chapter 6 moves further into Japanese debates over therapy culture and healing media while tracing how literature too can function as a technology of ambient subjectivation. I focus on Kurita Yuki’s ambient novel Hôtel Mole (2005), a story about what it means to provide affective labor at a hotel designed for the deepest sleep possible. Focusing on the novel’s exploration of the aesthetics of calm and the labor involved in providing it, I argue against critiques of mood regulation that see it only as a straightforward form of social pacification. I show how ambient media can lead not only to restful moods but also to a reflection on weakness, care, and healing as core components of self.

By shifting between works of music, video art, film, and literature, I aim to give a sense of how far ambient aesthetics have spread across Japan. Moving between media also allows me to consider a wide range of reception contexts, from private moments of headphone listening and reading on the train to the communal refuges of the art gallery and the movie theater. In order to encompass this breadth of materials, I only briefly touch on the broader history of atmospheric styles in each medium, though I hope this book will prove useful for further research in each of these areas. Similarly, I have largely set aside the many powerfully atmospheric works produced by Japanese artists in ages past, from the delicate soundscapes and wafting scents of The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, circa 1021) to the finely tuned moods of nō theater to the self-consciously exotic atmospheres of Kawabata Yasunari’s later novels and Mizoguchi Kenji’s period films. Some of the concepts I develop here might be useful for approaching these earlier works but would need to be articulated through their very different social, political, and subjective contexts. I have avoided drawing any easy comparisons to earlier moments in Japanese aesthetics, as tempting as this may be, to avoid courting false intimations of an unchanging national character. As we have already seen with Watsuji, atmosphere’s appearance of being outside history serves as one of its most powerful obfuscations. This is surely part of why atmosphere and exoticism often run together, whether in Japanese works embraced overseas or foreign works embraced in Japan. To counteract this tendency, this book situates the emergence of ambient media in Japan less as the continuation of an imaginary cultural heritage and more as the historical result of social transformations shared with many other parts of the world.55

Many of the musicians, video makers, filmmakers, and writers I consider in this book directly reference ambience and atmosphere in conceptualizing their practice. I also sometimes locate their works’ engagement with mood regulation through reviews and other records of the way they have been received. Ultimately, however, I am less interested in following Eno to assert “ambient” as a discreet genre than in developing an understanding of how ambience functions in a wide range of contemporary media environments, whether or not the term is ever used. Rather than seeking to be exhaustive, in building this book’s ambient archive I have favored works that best reveal the aesthetic strategies, historical development, and cultural politics of ambient subjectivation.

While mood-regulating media can often simply be coping mechanisms for life under neoliberal capitalism, I nonetheless see hope in the more reflexive understanding of “air” they usher in. While often used simply to ensure productivity, efficiency, docility, and profitability, atmospheric media can just as easily be put to other ends. I am inspired by the wonderfully eclectic uses of background music I have encountered while wandering around Tokyo: the psychedelic guitar rock accompanying the biryani at a local Nepali restaurant, the jaunty noir theme from The Third Man (also used in Ebisu beer commercials) that warns of closing train doors at Ebisu Station, the instrumental version of the B-52s’ “Rock Lobster” that loops on a small boom box perched above the frozen seafood section of the local grocery. Rather than deploy atmosphere only to increase sales and avoid meiwaku, or simply decry it as a threat to the autonomous self, Japanese artists, environmental designers, and shop managers alike have often approached background music as an open-ended experiment in environmental subjectivation. There are plenty of soul-crushing uses of recorded sound in Japan, too, of course, as Nakajima Yoshimichi brilliantly cataloged in his classic polemic Urusai Nihon no Watashi (Japan, the noisy, and myself). But these, too, I suggest, should push us not to retreat into fantasies of a quieter, less mediated world—perhaps, ironically, by investing in a pair of noise-canceling headphones—but rather to take a more active role in building the kind of atmospheres we want to live within, alongside, and through.56

This is as much a collective question as a personal one. About 70 percent of people living in Japan currently live in cities, and I propose the emphasis on “reading the air” is also in some ways a product of this environment. For city dwellers spending their days surrounded by strangers, often at close proximity, the ambivalent calm and sensory autonomy afforded by ambient media become important personal resources for navigating the information-dense and somatically taxing spaces of urban Japan. At the same time, by smoothing over the rougher edges of everyday life, ambient media often help sustain the same social stressors they set out to soothe. In the chapters that follow, I seek to attune readers to both sides of this predicament and, in the process, imagine other possibilities for the ambient self.