Mediating Universal Mimetic Desire and Japanese Monomane at the Dawn of Television

Girard’s notions of mimetic desire and rivalry, as well as those of mediation, violence, and scapegoating, can be helpful for thinking about copycat behavior. For Girard, mimesis has a negative connotation—referring to mimicry of a dark variety, that in which imitation of another’s desires results in violence because of a presumed scarcity of the desired object.6 In his zero-sum schema, it is said that we learn to desire that which another desires or possesses by means of two modes—“internal mediation” and “external mediation.”7 An “internal mediation” of desires occurs when individuals admire or desire that which others (mediators) from within their community in their same social status have or desire. In this type, accrued rivalry leads to violence in the competition for the desired object. “External mediation” of mimetic desire is between individuals on differing social planes from different communities—for instance, when a fan desires what a celebrity enjoys. It is easy to see from this latter form how this theory becomes more powerful in the televisual age.8 This chapter focuses on a blended form of Girard’s mimetic desires involving both internal and external modes. Children imitate their external mediator (a superhero) who is himself mediated by a mask and by television; but they also imitate each other (internal mediators) imitating the superhero in a game of one-upmanship that can lead to “reciprocal violence.”9 Television encourages this mimicry, marketing hero-themed goods, such as toys, masks, and vitamins.

In Girard’s concept, “metaphysical desire” is the desire to become another person. In metaphysical desire, the mediator becomes despised, since the mediator’s existence means that emulation can never result in complete transformation or replacement. In other words, the continued existence of the mediator threatens the imitator so that the imitator feels animosity toward the mediator. To ensure that this system of desire continues, Girard posits that in the mimetic rivalry for the desired, some level of violence will be displaced onto a scapegoat, so that others refrain from mutual annihilation. The scapegoat provides a steam valve to ameliorate the intensity of the violence. Girard writes that the scapegoat eventually becomes sacred through its function as a peacemaker between the parties in the mimetic rivalry. It is, therefore, key to his understanding of Judeo-Christian religion and the societies deemed to be influenced by those ideologies.

Girard’s discussion of violence and scapegoating is further limited because he forgets the primary question of mediation beyond the mediation of the human body within the tribalism of his focus. Though he studies the human body as media(tor) in his work on mimetic possession in ancient rituals and on close body mimetic surrogates such as masks, he neglects examination of the ways such bodies themselves are mediated by other media (an odd oversight considering so many of his examples are mythical and fictional bodies).10 In doing so, he forgets to study the way media and mediation (rather than human mediators or their fictional/mythical representations) transform desires. The study of history of the mediation of culture on such desires would deflect his transhistorical universal humanism or at least qualify it. Just as he limits himself to the Western Judeo-Christian tradition and, thereby, gives up on the potential of his universalism, he ignores the historicity of mediation and how such mimetic rivalries must necessarily be transformed over time and place and, therefore, loses out on elaborating any nuanced specificity to his argument. Girardian thinking is a symptom. It articulates a world of human behaviors that could but does not necessarily exist. So rather than thinking of the theory as a brilliant, all-encompassing lens through which to understand the universal reality of social relations, we need to read it as a mode of thinking itself produced by the trauma of realizing or suppressing the realization that all desire is always already mediated and mimetic. Ultimately, such symptoms reveal the necessity for historicization, as well as broader, more abstract thinking. For instance, we should recognize Girard’s thought not just as postwar and post-Holocaust thinking but as television-age philosophy.

Copycat behaviors have been connected to the question of creativity and originality, representation and mediation. Too often over the course of Japan’s modern history, the nation has been seen as an egregious copycat, violating Western copyright and patents to produce a belated and imitative modernity.11 And yet this narrative presumes that there was ever a particular original modernity that sprang sui generis onto the world stage. It presumes that innovation and creativity (whether aesthetic, technical, or progressive) can ever be original, a notion at base contrary to an understanding of development as always achieved through response to the past. What this chapter hopes to expose is that copycatism is a question of framing, context, or media. The degree to which a person, a message, a work of art, or a nation is considered a copycat has to do with the level of attention to other such frames.

In modernity, originality was valued and imitation disparaged, even in Japan. For example, poet Hagiwara Sakutarō, who celebrated the surrealism of stereoscopy (as we have seen in chapter 2), was vehemently opposed to copycat artists. In the 1922 prose poem “Annoyed by Copiers/Mimes” (“Mohōsha ni yotte haradatashiku sareru”), he writes: “Oh, how my imitators make my thoughts, art, and special turns of phrases into boring everyday commonplaces.”12 Hagiwara takes a standard view of copying as an inferior version of an original, but this sort of rage against the human copying machine can be seen as an empty pose if cultural production is considered at base to be necessarily copied and modified—when culture is seen as an unceasing echo chamber with no original scream. In this light, it is global, singular modernity in all its varied possible forms that, with its myriad possibilities of machinic reproduction, produces the priority of the singular creative artist. When we recognize that there can be no production or creation without copying, we recognize (as did Walter Benjamin) the mimetic faculty as an innate tendency. In circumstances of scarcity, then, mimetic rivalry will necessarily arise. In fact, to copycat is not necessarily to degrade, but it must involve some change or difference from the putative original or model. Indeed, Hagiwara’s own creative poetry is a pastiche of others’ work. All of this suggests that Hagiwara’s complaint against copying at the level of content is balanced at the level of form by appropriation of modernist norms. He must be conscious of this, and, therefore, his work should be read as ironic. Just as Hagiwara’s rage emerged from a vibrant publishing world of print media innovations, which made reproduction cheaper, this issue of the moral value of copying becomes particularly clear through the lens of media and mediation and around crises of new media, especially television.

Hagiwara’s views arose from a combination of modern and native traditions of copying—theories of copying that prize creativity as well as mimicry.13 For instance, the aesthetics of the iterative arts in Japan extend through the salon tradition of storytelling that produced the retold Tales of Ise and Tale of Genji and the oral storytelling traditions of The Tale of the Heike,14 through the tutorial tradition of calligraphy, in which students learn by copying the works of their masters,15 and through the Noh theater tradition of monomane (the imitation/impersonation of things) where players are said to take on the characteristics of that which they imitate, distilling and refining the thing (object, plant, insect, animal, or person) in order to become it. The historical person Ariwara no Narihira was understood through tales on scrolls about previous legendary lovers even as he himself would become the inspiration for Tales of Ise and later Tale of Genji. The copybook method of calligraphic education is not just part of the tradition, it is the primary means for its transmission. And the Noh mask makes plain (or performs the opacity of) the face of mediation. And, therefore, such copying, whether in the various derivations of tales about the playboy and poet, the numbering of masters in calligraphy, or the mask of Noh was always already mediated. Indeed, at base, copies are mediations. And thinkers of the televisual age looked back to these traditions, and particularly to Noh, for insight about the new gadget increasingly penetrating Japanese homes.

According to Noh scholar Steven T. Brown, the practice of monomane “includes mimicry, miming, impersonation, and simulation as well as nonrepresentational forms of becoming-other.”16 The fourteenth-to-fifteenth-century Noh practitioner, playwright, and theorist Zeami Motokiyo saw the uses of monomane as a mode not simply of realism but of clarification.17 The Noh mask meant such “becoming other” through role-playing was never transparent but always layered with an opaque sense of the constructedness of any impersonation. Therefore, it should have been no surprise that, when televisions first were appearing in Japanese homes, a significant discourse theorizing copying and imitation returned to the fore in Japan. This theoretical discourse concerned with dramaturgy and media found an echo in more mainstream and direct concerns with how the new medium of television would affect society, particularly the children within it. Not only does twentieth-century monomane discourse begin to resolve a tension in the notion of applying a theory from the West (mimesis) to the cultural materials of the rest (not Western), it also served to domesticate, translate, and remediate the new medium of Japanese within more familiar terms.

During the broad context of the birth of television, three prominent public intellectuals—Abe Kōbō, Ōoka Shōhei, and Takahashi Yoshitaka—all wrote important essays struggling with monomane, touching on questions of the social importance of culture in a time of televisual mediation. The essays do not engage directly with television per se (indeed, if mentioned at all in these essays, television is but a side or passing point), but they formulate a state of the discourse in thinking about how actors copying onstage or otherwise in the public arena might, in turn, affect how audiences act in their daily lives. The thought of these three luminaries on the role of copying and monomane in the context of rising television ownership provides a nascent theory of the value and risks of such copycat behavior.

In a December 1957 essay titled “About Imitation” (“Monomane ni tsuite”), published in the magazine Film Arts (Eiga Geijutsu), world-renowned avant-garde novelist, absurdist playwright, and abstract multimedia artist Abe Kōbō laments the lack of quality role-playing monomane in Japanese film. In his short article, written just before the widespread proliferation of television, Abe surveys Japanese and Western aesthetic traditions of impersonation and concludes with a call for the return of monomane to the public arena. Citing Bertolt Brecht on the notion that it is a mistake to insist that the popular arts awaken by naturalizing feelings, Abe makes the case that performance is rooted in actions that simply and imitatively reproduce (subokuna mohō saigen) rather than through the objectification of self. After acknowledging many types of mimesis in Plato, Abe then quotes Aristotle, from chapter 4 of the Poetics, on the cathartic function of mimesis, discussed both in terms of mimos (mimosu) and mimesis (mimēshisu):

Tragedy . . . is an imitation through action rather than narration, of a serious, complete, and ample action, by means of language rendered pleasant . . . in which imitation there is also effected through pity and fear its catharsis of these and similar emotions.18

Abe places this Aristotelian notion into dialogue with Zeami’s idea about acting, that “the vernacular is what makes people laugh; what makes a fine actor is their possession of an innate sorrow or pathos.”19 Here Abe (in a contradiction to the contemporary “realist” film acting practice of becoming the role through method acting or the Stanislavski system) goes on to argue that the best kind of imitation (mohō) is not simple imitation but rather theatrical imitation, one that foregrounds something like the performativity of the mask in Noh. He connects this to the common belief that imitation is boring and opposed to creation and creativity: Abe mentions that the word to ape (sarumane, monkey see, monkey do) generally signifies that imitation is unfortunately treated as a boring or less than human activity. If simple copying is animalistic, Abe leans toward something higher. He then calls for a thorough reevaluation of imitation “no matter how big the scale of imitation, how fragmentary, impressionistic, or detailed imitation, which is to say that which is included in the domain of monomane.”20 In other words, he wants to foreground the constructedness of mediation; the frame or the mask must be exposed for imitation as monomane to be successful.

After quoting Marx on the role of reality’s mastery over mythology, Abe intimates how in the age when reality trumps myth, new imitations must be found.21 He then goes on to cite the biography of Charlie Chaplin by Peter Cotes and Thelma Niklaus on the relation of mimicry to humor. There, Chaplin’s satiric mimicry is admired for its ability to create empathy for the tragic downtrodden.22 Chaplin’s skills on film effect response in the audience; that is to say, representational mimesis through mimicry effect a mimicked response of the cinematic public. Ultimately, Abe argues that successful imitation is that which not only copies the external “physical” (butsuriteki) form of the object but also captures and performs something of its internal “physiological” (seiriteki) composition. This recognition—that acting that moves an audience (mimicry) is skillful in capturing not only an outward realism (representation) but also a metaphysical essence—is what Abe understands to be the goal of monomane. In other words, copying of acting is not a passive or transparent becoming of the role but rather a subjective activity that makes its own artifice opaque.

Abe ends the essay by tying his view of the meaninglessness of recent film musicals directly to this question of imitation. For him, musicals are superior to melodramas (and recent comedy) in which actors imitate imitation to achieve this opacity. The best vaudevillians, slapstick comedians, and musical players, he argues, have a way of creative imitation that can reinvigorate imitation globally in the way of filmmakers like Shinkichi Okada and Jules Dassin. Perhaps in reaction to the radio show genre called monomane in which comedians and singers impersonate the work of others, this essay anticipates that genre’s remediation on television. It should be no surprise that this short essay—which succinctly reviews a thousand years of mimetic thinking and deals with various media from film to radio drama, from parades and circuses to opera, and from song recordings to stage performances—never deals directly with the new medium of television because it would not become a widespread mainstream media until the following year. This praise for mimos or mime and monomane as a higher form of copying just prior to the advent of mass consumption of television in Japan simply sets the late 1950s mediascape as hungry for new approaches to questions of copying and impersonation.

About a year and a half later, novelist Ōoka Shōhei wrote an article titled “Enough Already with Imitative Arts,” which in some ways echoes Abe’s view but defines monomane in opposing terms not as opaque copying but rather as transparent aping.23 Ōoka rails against the globalized, derivative copycat culture already visible on early television and draws attention more directly to television by mentioning several media, from the supposedly unmediated performance arts of drama, ballet and opera to more obviously mediated ones of print literature, film, LP records, and television. Even as he recognizes the recent successes of an always already mediated Japan on the world stage (such as through the success of the film Rashomon in winning international attention and prizes), he critiques a perceived lack of Japanese cultural ingenuity in the face of what is now called globalization.

Simple copying of Western form and content, Ōoka argues, gives contemporary Japanese art an attenuated feel. On the one hand, his argument about the oddity of Western-style drama in Japan is similar to Abe’s. On the other hand, he says that the attempt to globalize Japanese traditions through Western stereotypes also falls short. On Western-style drama in Japan, Ōoka writes that Japanese actors who “wake up on tatami mats and, at most, move around the wooden flooring of a bungalow with slippers on” probably cannot imitate the movements of foreign actors “who usually walk into rooms with their shoes on, typically sit on chairs, and open doors to exit and enter.”24 In other words, the unnaturalness of daily life depicted in Western drama makes Japanese actors imitating the daily life of non-Japanese onstage appear strange or fake, such that the characters seem like “incomplete foreigners” (hanpa-na gaikokujin).

Unlike Abe, who might have seen thin fakeness as precisely what was needed, Ōoka praises the Stanislavski method and condemns that which misses the realism mark. Calling the recent Osaka Festival a miscalculation in terms of its potential appeal to a global audience, Ōoka makes the case for more contemporary mediated representations. At the same time, however, he critiques the recent television show Spectacular Japan, which was made for American television but also aired in Japan and starred the internationally famous Japanese actress Kyō Machiko. Despite the participation of the foremost global female star of the Japanese silver screen, Ōoka derides the show’s orientalism (without using the word).

They [Americans] are impressed with Kyō Machiko’s western dramatic performance as Japanese kabuki style. The questionable Japanese dance on Japan Spectacular as a kind of geisha waltz in a single layer kimono made many people indignant at the “national disgrace” [kokujoku], but there is nothing that can be done if the American observer thinks that geisha dances are that sort of thing.25

Even as he critiques the mishmash of Japanese stereotypes and the wrong and even scandalous choice of costume for a dance that itself was neither traditional nor Western, he recognizes the bind inherent in presenting Japan to spectators with particular stereotypical expectations already in place. In the end, Ōoka (whose novels are themselves often considered derivative copies of Stendhal’s) advocates not for a return to some pure premodern Japanese tradition but for a more thorough engagement between Japanese tradition and (Western) modernity. For models of such conscientious mixing, he cites the aesthetic rage in prewar Japanese modernism for mélange work by artists such as Masamune Hakuchō, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Mushanokōji Saneatsu, all of whom melded the contemporary with deep concerns about vanishing traditions to create thoughtful intermixings. Thus, advocating not a return to native Japanese arts but a turn away from the crass postwar globalization and back to the smarter cosmopolitanism of Taishō—when creativity and creative translation, adaptation, adoption, and originality coalesced—Ōoka rails against the simple copycat culture he saw at the time. For him, the monomane (imitation) he opposes names simple copying or animal-like aping rather than the careful digestion and reinterpretation of a previous generation’s work.

Literary critic Takahashi Yoshitaka is more squarely focused than either Abe or Ōoka on a comparison of the Japanese monomane and European mimesis traditions. After showing how Aristotle’s and Zeami’s views of impersonation are quite close in many respects, Takahashi argues that most stage acting differs from other forms of art as representation. He notes that with most forms of art, something other than the thing itself conveys the imitation (i.e., a medium): in literature, letters create a literary world; in painting, colors do so; in sculpture and architecture, it is wood and stone that provide the medium for world-building. But in dramatic performance, generally a human actor is the “same single human subject” (onaji hitotsu no ningen shutai) as the object of imitation.26 Of course, Takahashi slips in a false equivalence between the generally represented (fictional) human and the performing actual human. So in articulating a difference for drama, he then ignores how pivotal and foundational particularly insular works have been for understanding literature and the arts: the literary worlds created by words alone (such as the anomalous Finnegans Wake), paintings of paint (think Jackson Pollock), sculptures of trees made out of wood (such as John Grade’s work or bonsai). And yet Takahashi wants to preserve a particular place for drama because he conceives of a human actor playing a human character to be an unmediated form of art.

Here, Takahashi says Zeami fundamentally differs from Aristotle in his view on drama: for Zeami, actors do not need to deny or abandon personality—rather, he considers “personality as essential to imitation.”27 He then cites Zeami’s preference for a mixed form of representation and mimicry wherein an actor should both become the object to be imitated as well as let something of the actor’s own style and personality show through. For Zeami, this effect can best be achieved by older performers (over the age of fifty). Takahashi fixates on another mediated aspect of Noh theater—that there are traditionally no female actors so that male actors must become female characters—to get at the notion that one can never truly leave the self behind in acts of imitation. Ultimately, this for Takahashi suggests that all attempts at realism carry within them the notion that the thing represented is not the thing itself. Isomorphism is a contradiction in terms. Takahashi writes: “Even when a ‘young vivacious man’ takes a woman’s role, Europeans should not care. This is because Japanese mimesis is oriented towards something fundamentally different from European mimesis.”28 Here, Takahashi perhaps mistakes the variegated forms of mimesis in the Western tradition for the one literary form (representational) canonized by literary scholars of the twentieth century. But what he inadvertently identifies is a similarity between both traditions—namely, the tension between becoming other and remaining the same. He names this as a desire. What Takahashi ultimately sees as the Japanese difference in mimetic thinking—the desire to become things rather than humans and animism or an abandonment of anthropocentricism (ningenchūshinshugi)—is, in fact, rooted in a base similarity to the desire to become other than the self—the use of the nonpresent (demons, women, stones, heroes) in the becoming present of worlding—that the multifarious Western mimetic tradition of mimicry shares.29

This question of realism is an important point to raise again in the context of television. If Takahashi wants to foreground something like an opacity to mimicry of a native Japanese mimicry that reveals itself as artifice (that never calls for a complete suspension of disbelief) whether in age or gender of actors versus characters, then he also implicitly suggests that such opacity (a critique of transparency) could potentially inure television audiences from the threat of the media. Indeed, the potency or threat of all dramatic cultures from Noh through Kabuki to modern plays, films, and television to arouse audiences to action should be lessened by such violations of realism. And yet debate around who could not resist media and who would give themselves up entirely to that which they were mimicking would rage around television.

Abe, Ōoka, and Takahashi present a variegated yet coherent discourse on copying that coincided and spanned television mainstreaming. Abe is interested in monomane as more than simple copying that which gestures toward the artifice of copying itself. Though confusingly he calls aping “monomane” perhaps not so much after the Noh theater practice but after the radio (and later television) show genre in which contestants compete to imitate animals and impersonate famous people (wherein the more transparent the mimicry, the better), Ōoka also opposes aping. He calls for more opaque creativity (i.e., mimicry that can be read qua mimicry) in the inevitable adoption of Western culture concomitant with modernity. Takahashi sees the problem of mimesis—Western realist representation—as displaced by Zeami’s theorization of monomane as more than simple copying. It is precisely in the supposedly unmediated human form of drama with an obvious mediated mask that we can view Takahashi’s internal contradictions. Regardless of whether the opacity and transparency are both equally part of the Western tradition, all three thinkers prize some opacity of mediation as a mode of not only aesthetic but ethically responsible copying. And television becomes the media for this new mode of theatrically foregrounded copying.

Masking Justice from Elsewhere

Such opacity would be found in the mask of the television superhero Gekkō Kamen. In the mask we can find an instantiation of Girard’s concept of the “monstrous double,” wherein the subject recognizes their own mimicry as well as the behavior of their mimetic rival as monstrous, interpreting their own copying as coming from elsewhere (externally outside of themselves as though possessed). The monstrous reminder of our mimetic tendencies resembles concepts of haunted media and media possession. In the Girardian schema, masks, monstrous doubles, and media are effectively the same. In other words, we scapegoat masks, others, and media because we do not like how we ourselves copy the represented realities and positions brought to us by them.30

In addition to being media that bridge or communicate from one fictional or impossible world to another possible one, masks also cover the individuality of the face to create an iconic face behind which nearly any humanoid figure might lurk. In the case of Gekkō Kamen make-believe, Girard’s mimetic rivalry seems particularly apropos because the mystery behind the mask allows and encourages viewers to imagine themselves as the secret identity behind the hero. This question of who Gekkō Kamen is permeated the show, from the opening theme song to multiple plots, images, and promotional events.

Even those Japanese who were not among the show’s viewers during its late 1950s run would at least have heard the theme song, which sold over one hundred thousand copies and was frequently played in public spaces such as shopping streets. Its lyrics were among the most frequently quoted pieces of popular culture in 1958 and 1959.

Since the theme song introduced the hero at the start of every episode and played again during key scenes within the episodes, it can tell us much about his character and the reasons for his popularity in the late 1950s. First, the existence of the superhero is self-contradictory. Gekkō Kamen is known but not known, as his origins and true self are hidden. Second, the mysterious hero appears and disappears with a flash to mete out justice. These two points together suggest a sense that, like the hero, justice comes suddenly and sporadically (“like a gale force wind”) and that it is not something with a definite origin or associated with a particular nameable individual. It appears that justice is an outside, coming to Japan from somewhere else.32

The key to this mysterious (unspecifiable) identity is clearly the hero’s mask, which covers his face enough to keep secret the identity of the individual behind it. Echoes of the famed Lone Ranger tagline “Who was that masked man?” reverberate through the Gekkō Kamen theme song, but there are also important dissonances. Unlike The Lone Ranger series and many later masked heroes, whose alter egos are known to the audience and to a few close characters within the narrative, the Gekkō Kamen series does not openly reveal the true self behind the mask or depict scenes of transformation (henshin). Sasaki Mamoru suggests that the difference between early postwar Japanese heroes lies in their transformations: Ultraman is a human evolved or metamorphosed into an alien (a symbiote), and Kamen Rider also transforms his body, but Gekkō Kamen is only disguised, not physically transformed, and therefore, potentially, one of us, the viewers.33 The audience never knows Gekkō Kamen’s name or motivation. Typically American, British, and Japanese superhero stories (from the Lone Ranger and Batman, through Judge Dredd, Kamen Rider, and Sailor Moon) feature a dichotomy between private life as regular citizen and public life as hero as part of the narrative.34 Yet, reflecting postwar ambiguities about justice and the domestic capacity to mete it out, the identity and aims of both criminal and hero were masked in the Gekkō Kamen series, even to the viewing audience. Whereas the recent spate of Hollywood hero films seeks to provide origins in order “to provide a psychological rationale . . . so we see that the early lives of superheroes are marked by tragedy, which gives rise to a righteous thirst for justice and even revenge,” Gekkō Kamen gives no clear backstory to explain his past and justify his present actions.35 Instead, we are told anyone could be Gekkō Kamen; so, in a sense, the Japanese people are all potentially Gekkō Kamen. It is implied that the backstory is the national backstory; a recent war that ended with the imposition of a victor’s justice from which Japanese had felt alienated. In this context, donning the mask of justice could restore that from which any one of us in the viewing public might have been alienated.

Examining the creators of the series, Sasaki Mamoru states:

In the Japanese postwar way of life in the context of our experience of the end of the war as a defeat, this [sense of how to find justice] is the core challenge. What exactly was the war? What does the Japanese race mean? And the Emperor? What did the occupation mean? Was the democracy taught to us by the US a form of justice? Does gender equality and majority vote equal justice? . . . Here justice is always an uncertain thing.36

The uncertainty about justice was, according to Sasaki, never resolved in the real political struggles of postwar Japan. Rather, he implies that the series’ creators believed justice could only be resolved by the imagination and creativity of televisual production.

The producers of the series included elements within the narrative that encourage an allegorical reading. Critic Tzvetan Todorov defines allegory as follows: “First of all, allegory implies the existence of at least two meanings. . . . Secondly, this double meaning is indicated in the work in an explicit fashion: it does not proceed from the reader’s interpretation (whether arbitrary or not).”37 In order for the allegorical reading to be justified, there must be explicit references to the doubled allegorical meaning. According to Todorov, allegory arises when direct speech about a situation becomes impossible (for any reason from political or epistemological), but nevertheless there must be a flash of direct speaking to actualize the allegorical reading.

There are several points of direct speaking that would justify reading the series allegorically in Todorov’s terms. Takahashi Yasuo finds the “Ghost Party Strikes Back” (“Yūrei-tō no gyakushū”) episode to be a direct allegory of the Sunagawa Struggle of 1955 (a precursor to the 1960 demonstrations against the revision of the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty), in which the expansion of the Tachikawa Airfield in Tokyo was opposed by the local residents who were to be displaced by the construction.38 But it is probably the words of Kawauchi Kōhan (the series creator and writer) that best justify this mode of allegorical reading. In the opening introduction and closing afterword to the first volume of the initial novelization of the series, he writes:

Boys and girls!

The things written about in this book do not actually exist in the Japan of today. But incidents that fairly resemble them really do. In addition, there is the future possibility that some of them will come to fruition. So please believe that someone like Gekkō Kamen, who has the heart of a god and does good deeds without anyone knowing, fights to make the world a better place!

And:

As I wrote this novel a number of events have taken place all over the world.

In the area of the Middle East (battles in places like Lebanon, Iran, Jordan) are but one instance. But whatever the circumstances, military altercations are not laudable. However, from now on peace in this world will be more and more dependent on today’s young boys and girls.39

Recognizing that today’s youth inherit the problems created by the adults, Kawauchi implies that children today should believe in the possibility of justice even in world affairs. He states elsewhere that the particular justice of Gekkō Kamen resides in his slogan “Don’t hate, don’t kill, forgive!,” which we can read as a direct address to the televisual audience rather than solely to the characters within the narrative world.40

Perhaps the best articulation of the explicit doubling in Gekkō Kamen occurs in the final scene of the series, in which the superhero himself says, “If the peace of love and justice filled this world, a person like me would no longer be necessary.”41 This simple statement clarifies the allegory by making the fiction’s relation to reality explicit from within the story itself. This final scene makes the claim that only in a warring, unjust, and unloving world (that is to say, in our real world) do we desire the existence of a superhero. Within the world of the narrative, it means simply that, since the world is broken, we need a superhero to save it. But in the real world where peace, love, and justice are also considered lacking, where millions of viewers enjoy the story of a masked ally of justice on television, it means that we long for justice, even if only in the form of fantastical and fictional superheroes who mete out justice along with compassion, aiming for peace.

As we shall see, what was always an implicit allegorical message within the series itself (that the series with its fantastic and phantasmagoric depiction of justice represented or symbolized something displaced from the real) would itself become a root form for understanding justice in the world. The character Gekkō Kamen would become a primary metaphor or synecdoche for describing the need for justice in the real world. That is, his name would be invoked to name the lamentable state of justice in the real world while also maintaining a fantastic hope for future justice. This real-world function of Gekkō Kamen could be thought to be simply a figure of speech, but it in fact reflects a mode of thinking about justice itself. The mask is Todorov’s link between the allegoric and the actual or Lacan’s stitching point (point de capiton) that binds together the symbolic and the real and that brings together two layers of meaning, one diegetic and the other extradiegetic, one representative and the other mimicking. Gekkō Kamen’s mask is the medium that binds the world on television with the world affected by television.

Of Masks and Media: A True X-Man

Fans of the show are in general agreement that the masked avenger, a turbaned tornado, a motorcycling man of mystery must be the private eye Iwai Jūrō, who is somehow involved in all of Gekkō Kamen’s adventures and never appears in a scene with the superhero. However, there is a significant difference between this kind of latent understanding implied by circumstantial evidence and the kind of overt, diegetic on-screen connection revealed to audiences, for instance, when Clark Kent goes into a telephone booth and reappears as Superman. There are no equivalent phone booth transformation (henshin) scenes in the Gekkō Kamen series, so the audience’s hunch is never confirmed or disproved.

That this uncertainty was a deliberate part of the series is clear from the opening title sequence of the first episode in season two, when an overt mistake was made. As the opening credits role, while the theme song repeatedly asks, “Who is Moonlight Mask?,” the parts of both Iwai Jūrō and Moonlight Mask are listed together as being played by the single actor Ōse Kōichi. This fleeting slip in the titles listing the same actor as both the private investigator and the superhero reveals perhaps some truth of the extradiegetic world (a truth already presumed about the diegetic one by most viewers), but the evidence would be erased from the credits in the very next and all subsequent episodes, where the actor’s name in the dramatis personae for the character of Moonlight Mask is replaced simply with question marks. Within the story itself, since Iwai’s investigations overlap with Gekkō Kamen’s just causes, it is never clear whether Iwai is simply working on the same case as Gekkō Kamen, is in cahoots with him, or, in fact, is the hero himself.42

Given the narratological premium placed on the mystery of the superhero’s true private identity, it comes as no surprise that in the third season, the villains who Gekkō Kamen battles are inversions of himself—literal X-men (goons with huge X’s painted across their shirts) whose true identities are unnecessary to the functioning of the plot. And though these X-men are clear carryovers from the wartime kamishibai (paper theater) hero series Golden Bat (Ōgon batto), their resurrection in the new medium corroborates two distinct postwar ideas. First, it reinforces the notion that television is a kind of “denki kamishibai” (electronic paper theater). Second, it underlines postwar confusion between injustice and justice, criminals and law enforcers, and threats to social stability and their resolution.43

The hero’s mask connects the postwar situation with the wartime one. This is apparent in the final episode of season two, called “Justice Does Not Die,” in which a “Meton bomb” seems to kill Gekkō Kamen. The scene depicting his death is intense. We see the hero on his motorcycle chasing a carful of bad guys who throw the bomb at him. The explosion leaves behind nothing but a cloud of dust. The scene cuts to Detective Iwai’s house where the news has just been reported, and a crowd of friends gathers to mourn the loss of their hero. Then slowly the masked face of Gekkō Kamen is superimposed one by one on each member of the entire Iwai household, friends, and staff still sobbing from news of their hero’s demise.44 The otherworldly quality of Gekkō Kamen is grounded in the domestic space of a Japanese family. This grounding renders his superiority, superpower, and aura in this moment not lost but diffused out into the national family. Gekkō Kamen becomes part of the Japanese household, as his enemies are decidedly foreign. Finally, Gekkō Kamen appears, demonstrating that he is alive; but the audience now knows that it would not matter if the hero had died, because he tells us that justice will not die. As the ally of justice, Gekkō Kamen resides inside every one of us—hence the superimpositions; we each have the potential to inhabit the super position of the ally or protector of justice. The scene signifies both the perceived absence of justice and a deep desire for local jurors.

How can we describe this particular form of postwar Japanese justice? Rather than a blind justice that treats all who come before it equally, the show blinds its audience as to the origin of its justice. There is clarity of purpose to this justice. The criminals are known and obvious. But it takes a hero to hold them accountable. This raises questions that surround superhero tales from many cultures: Does superhero justice advocate vigilantism? Is justice or revenge in the name of the nation being pursued? Without a jury, vigilante justice relies on those with rare superpowers rather than on the public.

Of course, the series attempts to relieve anxiety about this tension by leaving open the possibility that we can all become Gekkō Kamen. This possibility of potentially becoming the superhero is what inspires mimetic rivalry. And the mimetic rivalry is itself at least doubled: first, we the audience members are supposed to desire justice so much that we might want to occupy the position of the superhero/judge here in the real world; second, the series itself represents that justice is foreign—they have justice over there (in the United States, in the West) and we Japanese do not; we need justice, they have it; we want what they have. What guarantees the mystery and the possibility that we can occupy the position of the hero through mimetic rivalry is the mask. Because the mask covers identity, it enables substitution and identification even as it reveals anxiety about absence. Frantz Fanon’s idea that “black people” need to wear a white mask in the world articulates the larger structure of a world of racial hierarchies at the global level of empire.45 And the Gekkō Kamen series reveals a particular postwar Japanese tinge to this desire for a literally white mask. The Japanese people who crave justice because they have seen it arrive “like a gale force wind” from elsewhere must have a white-masked justice. But the cosplay (dress-up) of the mask ends by revealing that the only possibility of justice is one that is forestalled, deferred, and removed from the here and now. Anyone can take the place of the ally of justice, but in practice it may be that no one will.

Moral Panic, Play, and the Media of Revealing Disguises

If mimicry, imitation, or impersonation (monomane) was a mode of thinking abstractly about media and the question of mimicry at the advent of television for Abe, Ōoka, and Takahashi, copycatism (mohō) became the term of anxiety that early theorists of the mass medium used in considering the sociological issues around television by the time a child dressed up in a Gekkō Kamen mask and jumped to his death. It was not the first time that media were made the scapegoats for the damage that resulted from mimetic rivalry.

In the early twentieth century, as the new science of psychology was gaining ground, there was already an understanding of the dangers of the then new media of newspapers and film in terms of copycat behaviors. For instance, Terada Seiichi’s landmark 1918 book on criminal psychology spends forty of its six-hundred-odd pages on the topic of imitation with section titles like “Imitation and Crime” and “The Essence of Imitation.”46 Terada sees imitation in terms of two roles: the subject or imitator (mohōsha) and the object or model. In considering the imitator, he argues that the essence or content and context differ for everyone. In predictably problematic ageist and sexist assertions of his time, he claims that children are more suggestible and open to influence than adults and that women are more susceptible to influence than men. He then categorizes the object of imitation into two subtypes: experiential (keikenteki) and external (gaiteki, where the object of mimicry lies outside of experience). After citing the mass media of the day (newspapers and magazines) as problematic, Terada suggests that boys are particularly susceptible to adventure novels, crime stories, and their attendant photographs in newspapers.47

Such concern for youth and copycat behavior in play or make-believe (gokko) have returned cyclically. To be sure, make-believe and new media had a long history going back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with war make-believe (sensō gokko), sword play (chanbara gokko), sumo play (sumo gokko), and Zigomar make-believe (Jigomaru gokko), in which children imitated the mediated images they saw in photographs of war and filmic stories of premodern samurai, as well as French films like Zigomar.48 Gekkō Kamen play is but one moment within this long connection between media and copycat make-believe, but it is emblematic of the specific ways in which television could intervene in that history. In the wake of the Gekkō Kamen incidents, concerns about imitation and impersonation would become crystalized in a discourse about the relationship between media and make-believe.

With the postwar advent of television, old fears and concerns surrounding new media took on renewed urgency with the growing presence of televisions in Japanese homes. Children leaping into harm’s way in their imaginative Gekkō Kamen play not only led to a stigma against the show but also gave credence to the notion that the media and mediated had changed our world. Skepticism toward the new medium resulted in new measures for self-regulation by television stations to proscribe violent content even prior to the cancellation of the show.49

The coincidence of violent, copycat, imaginative play and inadvertent or accidental violence prompted the search for scapegoats. Initially, pundits blamed the television, but blaming the new medium became increasingly untenable. This was because television was fast becoming a familiar and fundamental part of life for a growing portion of the Japanese population. Infrastructures, once built, quickly seem self-evident and inevitable parts of the world and unchangeable. So, in the search for a new scapegoat, the content (especially the hero at its center) was next to take the blame, ultimately resulting in the cancellation of the Gekkō Kamen series. We scapegoat media then the mediated to displace the rivalry we (critics, psychologists, criminologists, politicians, scholars, and parents) have with one another. It is a rivalry over influence (particularly around children and also over citizens).

The story of scapegoating the form and content of a new medium to atone for the tragic consequences of the mimetic rivalry between youth and the hero also suggests another rivalry—among those who seek to exert ideological influence. In placing blame on the medium (television) and the mediated (the show), educators, public officials, and cultural producers (of older media) reveal their desire to influence the nation’s youth and their fear of losing power to the new media. In their rivalry with television, they tried to scapegoat it, but ultimately the medium was spared and only the content sacrificed. It was not so much a displacement of ire toward media onto content (which would suggest that the original target was legitimate) as it was a fetishistic substitution, which led to a repetition of the content to be sacrificed. This substitution that overvalues the power of the content explains why so many masked riders continue the legacy on Japanese television in the wake of Gekkō Kamen.

Beyond the cancellation of the Gekkō Kamen series, fears of the pernicious influence of television had a lasting impact on how the networks functioned and the kinds of content they were willing to broadcast. In June and July of 1960, new controls on radio and television were announced, including a requirement to delete scenes of violence (bōryoku bamen) and flag any such alteration of content.50 But even after these measures were in place, a televised event once again crystalized fears around the new medium as a scapegoat: the inadvertent live broadcast of the assassination of socialist political leader Asanuma Inejirō on October 12.51

In the aftermath of the assassination, in which a seventeen-year-old right-wing terrorist rushed onto the stage during a televised political debate and lethally stabbed Asanuma, the Asahi hosted a discussion between prominent social theorist and women’s rights activist Ohama Hideko and playwright Uchimura Naoya on the subject of violence on television. Beginning the discussion with the recent instance of televised terrorism, Uchimura comments that the Asanuma incident was shocking and overstimulating (shigeki-sugimasu): “If children saw it, they probably thought it was heroic.” Then Uchimura expands out beyond the frame of the particular incident to the kind of realism being broadcast into the home, including the recent demonstrations against the renewal of the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty. In response, Ohama laments that there had not been better explanations of the news images for children, claiming that kids were becoming numb (mahi) to televisual violence. At this point, she conflates the news images with the sword and pistol play modeled on violent fictional shows (bōryoku bangumi), even mentioning the recent incidents of children getting hurt by jumping from rooftops in imitation of Gekkō Kamen. On the one hand, Ohama laments the flattening of the real and fictional images of violence, asking for better context and explanation; on the other hand, this lament about the conflation of the real and fictive acknowledges the means by which the medium acts as a transformative agent.

In thinking about television and its impact on the world, Ohama and Uchimura engage with a theory of the medium proposed as recently as November 1957 when Shimizu Ikutarō published one of the earliest media critiques of television in the journal Thought (Shisō). In “The Televisual Age,” Shimizu famously contrasts print and television. He argues that print actively engages the critical thinking skills of its readers to construct not only the real worlds of fiction in their imagination but indeed their own relation to fiction and, thereby, their identity and subjectivity. By contrast, passive watchers of television simply experience the preconstructed or given televisual world without the possibility of a critically aware self or subject to intervene:

The anguish, reflection, and study that can only be done in leisure time has become impossible due to television, and human beings are absorbed by reality in the daytime and knocked out by reality in the night, and the given human tendency to transcend reality has no chance to be born.52

This notion of the medium spoon-feeding a reality rather than determining what constitutes reality puts all viewers in the naive position of the mesmerized child. Indeed, Shimizu’s notion of reality here seems split, like the Lacanian notion of reality and the real, between the mediated reality and a larger objective reality wherein the infant becomes uncritically fascinated by the mirrors of mediation. That a mediating frontal lobe might be short-circuited by the medium itself makes television, for Shimizu, ultimately a reactionary medium that supports the status quo. Though such early ideas that posited television as basically conservative yet implicitly transformative of the world through the subtle ways in which the televisual gaze constructs subjects’ views of reality abounded at the level of theory, when Shimizu was publishing they had yet to be given concrete evidence.53

By 1960, this notion of the medium as transformative became the subject of a major series of surveys by the Ministry of Education (Monbushō). Using the survey results, children’s literature scholar Namekawa Michio wrote a popular sociological book titled Television and Children (Terebi to kodomo). Published in 1961, just two years after the Gekkō Kamen incident, the book focuses on the various ways in which the new medium might transform daily life, paying significant attention to the copycat phenomenon.54 In addition to raising perennial worries about the consequences of sitting too close to the screen and the impact of lengthy viewing on eyesight, school preparation, concentration, and sleep patterns, the book is most concerned with delinquent and violent behavior correlated to television viewing. From murders and robberies to mundane family arguments over channel selection, the book chronicles undesirable behavior associated with television. Concluding not that television itself is bad but that “watching too much” (misugiru koto) might be, Namekawa recognizes television as one medium among many that may have problematic impacts on the lives of young viewers. He writes, “I agree with the survey’s conclusion that ‘television alone cannot be considered the cause of delinquency,’ but I have to admit that, of all the many causes, ‘TV is one of them.’”55 Namekawa calls for a holistic view of the medium to understand the cause of its social impact, insisting that “it is necessary to consider clearly whether it is the ‘machine’ called the television, the functions that make it work, or the contents of the television shows, or all of these together.”56 In the end, he argues that it is not just the producers but also the receivers who share the blame for the social transformations around television. For Namekawa, the medium’s proximity to such acts means that it must at least be a factor. But, of course, defining what kind of factor and determining the degree of ethical culpability for the medium and for acts of violence to which it seems related remain unsolved problems.

Namekawa’s concern for the social impact of the new media at the center of many households is most evident in a chapter titled “Imitative Behaviors” (“Kōi no mohō”). Acknowledging that problems similarly accrue around learning from movies, plays, and even family members, Namekawa goes on to make the case that juvenile imitation of the dynamism and excitement on television is only natural. Agreeing with Ministry of Education reports that conclude that “television alone is not the sole cause,” Namekawa writes, “although not the sole cause, as a cultural material around the child, it forms part of a very influential ‘environment’ and thus affects the child’s developing mentality.”57 As proof of this impact, Namekawa focuses on behavior. He considers not only the proliferation of children imitating the ubiquitous kisses on television (kissu gokko) but also Gekkō Kamen’s popularity and the accompanying craze for “Gekkō Kamen make-believe.” He is, of course, particularly concerned with criminal acts and what he terms the “see it, copy it” (miyō mimane) mode of juvenile interaction with television. Even as he repeatedly acknowledges that copycatism may be for good or ill, Namekawa emphasizes the impressionable minds of youth, contrasting “the strength of children’s mimicry” with the “weakness” of their “mental capacity for resistance.”58 In this view, television is transformative of society, and especially so for children.

Noting that those juveniles already predisposed to delinquency are most likely to imitate criminal behavior seen on television, the book suggests that the majority of children will not simply carry out actions of the fantastic worlds depicted on television. Far more prevalent than copycat crime, copying television via make-believe is both prevalent and unpredictable. Tellingly, Namekawa mentions that in Gekkō Kamen pistol play, homemade pistols are preferred to the uncool (kakkō yokunai) mass-produced plastic toy pistols and other goods associated with the show.59 This sort of opting out of the consumerism overtly promoted by television advertising exemplifies both the inevitability of copycatism (everyone wants to play Gekkō Kamen) and its unpredictability (kids prefer their own homemade costumes to the advertised ones). Recognizing that “the old dream of television as the best media to educate and inform democratic people has never materialized,” Namekawa finds a new situation (or new real) in place of that old dream, wherein the effects of television on everyday activities are undeniable but have also become mundane.60

Soon after the Gekkō Kamen–play incidents, the Yomiuri ran an article titled “Children’s Play: Little ‘Gekkō Kamens’ Take Leaps Unwittingly.” Recounting a different incident, the article ponders “dangerous forms of play” in relation to television. Citing the series Superman, it suggests that children’s longing for heroes is the reason “why they imitate Gekkō Kamen and Akado Suzunosuke and leap off of things.” To correct this behavior, it continues, “simply scolding without taking the opportunity for explanation will have no effect.” Instead, it explains, the goal of parents and society at large should be to guide “children through bad environments and to bring them up to be obedient.” On the one hand, the article notes that it is natural and appropriate for the little Gekkō Kamens “with their furoshiki hanging from their shoulders [like capes] while holding pistols in their hands (of course, just toys), to pose with serious faces and say ‘I’m an ally of justice’”; after all, the reasoning went, Gekkō Kamen’s winning record over one bad guy after another makes him an admirable object of emulation. On the other hand, it cites the many examples of boys injured by tumbling from high places and recalls the story of a young body covered in a furoshiki cape being pulled out of an irrigation canal in the Adachi district and warns that such danger must not be overlooked. The article narrates childish mentality: “In the course of play, they get caught up in the dream and forget . . . , getting caught up in the illusion [sakkaku] that they themselves have become the real Gekkō Kamen [honmono no Gekkō Kamen] they go for it.” Widening the frame of analysis beyond just children, the article recognizes that even adults watch films and identify with the characters, crying or feeling happy, but “this tendency is stronger in immature children.”61 Explaining how the prevalence of this form of play cannot be stopped, it suggests mitigating the dangerous effects and bad influences of the medium by reminding children that the stunts of a fictional story cannot be performed in reality.62 Whether this was good and realistic advice or simply the human interest grist of a paper looking to address a common middle-class concern, what is clear from the piece is the ubiquity and intractability of such play.

Even though television viewers were unreliable consumers (who occasionally prefer homemade costumes of bath-towel turbans, improvised guns, and furoshiki capes to store-bought ones), the sale of series-related goods and advertising show that copycatism was at the heart of the capitalist media complex. The documentary photographer Hamaya Hiroshi’s striking photo of three skiing little Gekkō Kamens gives a sense of this.63

What is striking about the photograph is the fact that the three children are all playing at being Gekkō Kamen at the same time. With printed capes of the hero aflutter, they trudge up a hill, skis and poles in hand, to engage in sport while maintaining their make-believe world and realizing not only the wildest dreams of commodifiers of the Gekkō Kamen image but also the in-show message that, in some sense, we can all be Gekkō Kamen. And that message itself was good for sales: instead of one Gekkō Kamen at a time, meaning one mask for three kids, marketers could sell three.

For the ultimate realization of this surplus success of marketing, one need only look to in-character television commercial spots by the stars of Gekkō Kamen. For instance, Takeda Pharmaceutical, the sponsor of KRTV’s “Takeda Hour,” which featured Gekkō Kamen and other programs, sought not to merely sell the generic toy masks like those in Hamaya’s photo but to relate the hero to products that had little to do with the series by having the actors promote the company’s vitamin supplements. An instructive example is the television advertisement for Arinamin, a vitamin B1 supplement. In the advertisement, the actors Ōse Kōichi (in the guise of his character Iwai Jūrō on the show) and Tani Ken’ichi (in the guise of Iwai’s sidekick Fukuro Gorohachi) look directly into the camera and implore viewers to take Arinamin to grow strong like Gekkō Kamen, an obvious televised gesture encouraging copycatism.64 The fact that this vitamin supplement was initially developed for the Imperial army to combat beriberi in the colonial pursuits of an earlier era reflects the repurposing of wartime experiences toward marketing copycat behavior—that is, getting viewers to take action in the real world by going out and purchasing the supplement.65

In some related marketing gimmicks, the direct play to the mimetic desire through the televisual can be easily sensed. Another Takeda Pharmaceutical Gekkō Kamen tie-in advertised the multivitamin PanVitan Pere not only on television but also via a giveaway of Gekkō Kamen cardboard masks, complete with turban and blue-tinted cellophane sunglasses for children to wear while playing make-believe.66 The company was taking advantage of the fact that young fans were already engaged in dressing up as their hero. Obviously, having an army of striking-looking young kids running around with the masks on and “PanVitan” written in big red letters across the mask over their mouths would be useful advertising.

A print newspaper advertisement for PanVitan that appeared in the Yomiuri five days before the first death associated with the show cuts to the heart of this marketing of mimetic desires. The ad depicts a young boy staring wistfully into the sky with the tagline “Children dream of jumping like Gekkō Kamen” and a floating image of the hero jumping just above and to the right of the child’s head. That drives home the point: television had already transformed the dreams of children. The text of this ad promoting Takeda Pharmaceutical’s sponsorship would go on to implore parents to capitalize on those desires by purchasing PanVitan Pere to help their kids grow up strong and realize their dreams.67

This advertisement is no smoking gun proving a causal relationship between the marketing, the medium, and the tragedy just a few days later, but rather it should remind us of René Girard’s studies of mimetic desires. If we desire to be like our heroes, it may be that the ensuing rivalry destroys the trace of the hero or of our individuality. The quest to leap like the hero might have the result of injury. And injury has the result of scapegoating the marketing and media, rather than pointing a finger at individual responsibility.

The role of the mask in postwar Japan was of paramount importance in relation to not only television heroes but also larger issues of psychosocial identity. Critic and philosopher Hanada Kiyoteru writes of the clarity in identity that a mask can provide in this world where nothing is as it seems. Arguing that a mask might better reveal true expressions from its seeming to cover direct access to the face, the essay has been read as the philosophical counterpart to Hanada’s interpretation of Mishima Yukio’s Confessions of a Mask.68 But its thesis is applicable to the case of a pop cultural product that both depicts mask wearing and behaves like a mask in its stark caricatures and exaggerations. Even though Hanada makes explicit reference to the high culture of Noh theater in the essay, he attempts to show how a particular mode of masking in reaction to the influx of “Western things” (seiyōteki na mono) could lead to wartime attitudes.

What Hanada terms the “prototypical schizophrenia” of Japanese nationalism is characterized, he argues, by the attempt to grasp a true face that lies behind a mask. But as he acknowledges this split psychology that maintains a mask as well as a belief in a true face beneath it, Hanada maintains that the face itself is a mask beyond which one cannot penetrate. In other words, even as a face is discovered beneath a mask, the true face moves to a deeper level in a sort of infinite regress of the truth hiding beneath surfaces.69 Hanada decidedly emphasizes the surface appearance of the mask; the mask is a key medium that illuminates the connection not only between an allegorical fictional world and reality but also between “Japanese things” and “Western things.” Although to a certain degree Hanada’s choice of the traditional Noh mask fulfills this function, the masks of pop cultural superheroes make his case even starker. For the Gekkō Kamen series, the mask does not hide an inner face or truth of postwar justice but rather is itself the truth. The mask (re)presents the contemporary perception of justice—a masked justice that cannot be easily located, identified, or named.

Hanada’s thinking about masks as bridges between this surface and another hidden one and as powerful surfaces in and of themselves parallels the thinking of other important philosophers of masks, including Girard, as well as anthropologist Tanigawa Ken’ichi and media guru Matsumoto Toshio. For all of these later thinkers, masks bring god(s) and man together: they are connections between our world and the magical or spiritual one. So wearing a mask becomes a kind of evasion of responsibility—wearing it, the wearer is neither human nor god but somewhere in between. In miming possession from beyond our world, questions of responsibility fade. In rituals, masks inhabit the reclaiming of trauma or performance of a horror, the mimetic desire or copying that needs to be accomplished. In this sense, masks are similar to Girard’s monstrous double.70 For Tanigawa, the medium of the mask between the world of the dead and that of the living is precisely the space where free flow between the two worlds is established; through a kind of mask play, the bridge is maintained.71 Matsumoto sees the mask in these terms as the medium through which the other world can be performed but also as the means through which the wearer can be transformed.72 If these thinkers cast masks in terms of the magical and spiritual, it is not hard to see that justice itself was placed in this mystical and mythical position in postwar Japan by the Gekkō Kamen series.

The aspirational quality of the series—that it encouraged viewers to strive to be an ally of justice—can similarly exemplify Matsumoto’s vision of the transformational power of masks. Matsumoto writes:

When wearing a scary form of mask, a person unwittingly draws a scary expression inside of the mask. . . . In general, assimilation into a mask is manifested as a desire for transformation into others with great spiritual power, beyond the limits of oneself.73

Matsumoto was fascinated by Jean-Louis Bédouin’s notion that masks were “attached to supernatural spirits” and, therefore, were in some cultures thought to confer superhuman (chōningenteki) powers on their wearers. This understanding of the mask doubles the religiosity or transcendentalism of the media concept, insofar as it parallels the way the tangible (the mask, as a known or visible marker of the unknown, unknowable, or invisible) is connected to the intangible. Here, the notion is that the mask orders, renders, or makes the man and is parallel to the idea of media making content. This is ultimately why, for Matsumoto, masks are but another medium. In his thinking about masks, Matsumoto writes: “The mask [kamen] is not a veil [fukumen] but a medium of transformation [henbō no media]. It not only hides the real face [or bare face, sugao], but at the same time actively shows another face. . . . It is the face that you want to be projected into the eyes of others.”74 Matsumoto argues that the mask can ultimately transform its wearer, as well as those around it: “Masks, in that sense, are also media that transform the relationship between us and the world.”75 Here, Matsumoto’s idea that a mask is a medium for conveying the inner desires of the wearer and takes into account the gaze of those who witness the performer is similar to Gilbert Simondon’s idea of media as enabling a “transindividual”—namely, one who is able to embody more than one identity because of such mediation. This understanding of a mask as a medium of transformation that presents the desires of the masked rather than obscuring them is key to seeing the superhero mask, television series, and medium for what they are—technology or, rather, cultural material that both represents and constitutes reality.76 More than an allegorical interpretation, it allows us to read the mask for what it is (rather than for what lies beneath it or what it stands for). The mask is a blank screen upon which imagination from both sides (within the mask and outside it) has run amok. The mask, then, is of course but another television screen for broadcasting and receiving.

Unpredictability and the Mask

Writing about more recent television history, Thomas Lamarre brings to light the embodiment and unpredictability of mimetic actions around the medium. Lamarre argues that televisual anime mediation particularly lays bare the dispositif or mechanism of control at the center of television as a network medium. Though his book does not claim that what it describes begins with anime, it argues that with anime, and especially its attendant epileptiform seizure discourse around the Pokémon Shock of 1997, what is true of television writ large rises to the surface—namely, that it has the power to control society in direct and indirect ways that are nevertheless unpredictable. If the epileptic seizures purportedly induced by the flashing lights of Pokémon, the sensational reporting around the Pokémon Shock incident reflects a fear of media contagion around television, even though the root mechanism is a transmedial effect more cinematic (flicker and dark room related) than televisual. What creates the shocking sense of viral contagion or pandemic around “haunted media” is the combination of both forms, the cinematic transmitted across the national television network (a cinema all at once: if not one with a liveness, at least one with a togetherness).77

For Lamarre, television anime shows like Pokémon, Detective Conan, and Crayon Shin-chan reveal more clearly than nonanime the transformative and unpredictable role of television in our lives. For example, he discusses the young impish manga and anime character Crayon Shin-chan, who dances wildly in front of the television while watching his hero, Action Mask (Akushon Kamen), a masked rider in the Gekkō Kamen and Kamen Rider lineage. The Crayon Shin-chan series rehearses some of Plato’s and Aristotle’s greatest fears about the iniquities around mimesis. Lamarre writes:

The charged field in front of the TV becomes a zone for a particular kind of play—the kind Walter Benjamin evokes in his accounts of semblance and the mimetic faculty: the child mimicking the windmill or imitating the passage of clouds. So do the movements on the television screen course through Shin-chan’s body. He does not internalize its messages. He may not even hear them, and if he did, Shin-chan would not grant them any more authority than he grants any other figures of authority—parents, teachers, shop clerks, which is to say adults in general. Consequently, as a result of his general rejection of authority and hierarchy, Shin-chan introduces a tentative split within the one-to-many tendency of broadcast television, a split between a hierarchical tendency (centralized authority) and a unidirectional tendency. The result is a very different way of understanding (and performing) the effects of television.78

We see a copying or miming occurs, but whether the message or ideology behind the hero is internalized (whether the miming of movements corresponds to a faith in the hero’s principles or presents ironic critique of them) remains up for grabs. Here, Lamarre uncovers the inevitability, indeterminacy, and unpredictability of mimicry at the heart of the medium. The fact that this theorization of the mimetic tendencies of the Shin-chan/television nexus happens in manga is of significance for Lamarre because it reveals anime’s transmedial mix. It is not that anime alone does this but that anime’s remediation as manga presents a critique of anime and television. This notion can return us to Matsumoto Toshio’s notions of mediation through mask. Matsumoto ends with the notion that the mask bridges the visible and the invisible: the interior and exterior dichotomy is doubled by the mask and, therefore, exposed or put on display by the mask. This is a mediation of mediation already present in something like the body’s mediation of the mind. But that too presumes a mind–body split. What is clear in Lamarre’s understanding of the television as media is that there is no split. The mind is body. The body mind. Shin-chan, like the Pokémon-shocked children, just goes into his thing; without any frontal lobe thinking, television is simply embodied.

To understand this role of mimesis and mimicry, our return to the dawn of television heroes is useful. In 1958—the same year in which Lamarre makes a point of telling us that Usui Yoshito, the creator of Shin-chan, was born—the new technology of television created the need to produce content for broadcast. In Japan, at least in the short term, much of that content initially came from outside the country, where it was already being produced—specifically from Hollywood. Indeed, Gekkō Kamen was created using a transmedial method that emulated American shows like Laramie, Adventures of Superman, and The Lone Ranger. The new mixed media format was developed for the sole purpose of capturing American-style action stories, the “television film” (terebi eiga)—shot on film stock, edited in a film studio, and then broadcast on television. This brought filmic special effects and stunts into the medium of television, which was still largely dominated by live broadcasts. This transfer of 16-millimeter films to television (like anime taking on filmic and manga-like characteristics in Lamarre’s view) works against the idea that the essence of the televisual medium was its liveness; rather, this kind of remediation shows how one medium can amplify another.79 Indeed, the remediation of older forms is part of what makes new media seem new, because they can package and deliver the familiar in a different way. And because of the success of the Gekkō Kamen television series, six films featuring the hero were shot in 1958 and 1959 on one of the newest film formats: the wide-aspect-ratio proprietary medium TōeiScope, which like other “scopes” of the late 1950s used an anamorphic lens to give a panoramic experience during projection. The scope experience remade cinema in relation to television. Cinema became a distinct spectacular experience from the boxier 4:3 aspect ratio (formerly of film) seen as mundane and everyday with the entrance of the television into the home. Even in its early moments, television was, therefore, already justifying and affecting the film production world.

The unconscious, embodied, and unpredictable reverse mimesis characterizing the response to television that Lamarre exposes can be found even in this early moment of the media. The unconscious and unintended impact of the media on our world (such as those of the Pokémon Shock) can be found, for instance, in the media reports of fires caused by new electronics in the home. Long before the Pokémon Shock, not flashes but sparks caused a particular kind of anxiety about the new media. In those early years, the press conflated fears of new media as a gadget in the home with fears of the mediated. A case in point, in 1962 a newspaper reported that a fire in Tokyo’s Shiinamachi was caused by the new electric gadget overheating; the excitement around the cathode-ray tube was not only what it projected onto a screen but also the heat it generated behind it. To be sure, some of the “‘dangers’ of television” were not mimetic in the representational sense, but they did threaten households in real ways. The fact that the article puts quotation marks around “dangers,” as if to draw attention to this unexpected danger, suggests that readers had been aware of other dangers around the new medium. Indeed, the article presents itself as a public relations message to raise awareness because, while the dangers of propane gas and washing machines were well understood, “the average housewife cannot be expected to have a wariness of such things as television fires.”80 Beyond the overheating appliance fires that were the source of one kind of panic, the molding of how children and adults alike saw the world was the cause of a moral panic that scapegoated the media itself.

Gekkō Kamen represented mediation and its intervention in the world via in-story newscasts about crimes to the ever-present radio and telephone mediation linking characters with crimes and criminals. This was conspicuously clear in the television backdrop that included a structure actually being erected in Tokyo and captured in episode nine of the “Treasures of Baradai Kingdom” season and in episodes two and three of the “Dokuro Mask” season. The now-iconic Tokyo Tower was completed in 1958 to boost transmission of television signals across the Kantō region. Though television had been broadcast to mass audiences in Japan since 1953, it was not until the production of mass market units and payment schemes were developed that Nippon Denpatō NHK invested more to build a larger broadcasting hub in the megalopolis.81 The construction of the tower coincided with the shooting of these two seasons of Gekkō Kamen, and it was used as a backdrop in both. The appearance of the broadcasting tower within a television show itself is not so much a reflection or representation of the changed landscape that television brought to the city and nation as an instantiation of that change. By including the tower under construction, the show documented the arrival and captured the future of television, even as that future was being realized in the transitional remediated form of television film (terebi eiga).

In the above fire report and the depiction of the rise of the TV broadcast network tower caught in the backgrounds of Gekkō Kamen, the presence of television in daily life can be glimpsed. But the mimicry that happens in front of the screen or in the daily presence of television in the home with unexpected results dominated the early discourse on the new medium. The expectation was that people would mimic what they saw on television, but the discourse reflects a disappointment about the unpredictable results of such mimetic behaviors. Acts resembling Shin-chan’s unruly mimicry abound in the media reports around Gekkō Kamen. One variety was a kind of internal entertainment industry mimicry, including mundane attempts to capitalize on the success of the series through the spin-off show Harimao or Ōsei’s subsequent career on the Takeda Hour action shows. There are also less directly related examples, such as the 1959 Tōei thriller The Squirrel and the American (Risu to Amerika-jin), which tried to capitalize on the image of a man in a turban and white mask depicting a character in a white mask and head covering on all of the posters and promotional materials, leading a Yomiuri review to call it an “imitation [magai] Gekko kamen.”82 This discourse presents a slow rewiring of the understanding of the world through the series such that questions of justice eventually become synonymous with the hero, as well as evidence of a new real.

The debates around the role of television in transforming the home, society, and nation were certainly not limited to Gekkō Kamen, but the series brings into focus how the medium changed the environment. There were both negative and positive stories about mimetic behaviors that grew beyond simple make-believe. Though not exactly a copycat case, one reference to the Gekkō Kamen series appeared in nonentertainment news just days before the story associating the series with the death of a child, in an odd crime story of a gang robbing public telephones caught in a restaurant in Nagoya. One of the nineteen-year-old members of the gang was an actor who had played a policeman and been a stuntman in the Gekkō Kamen series. The news stories covering the story all headlined with this fact versus fiction reversal, the Yomiuri leading with “Gekkō Kamen Actor Arrested,” and the Japan Times echoing with “Young TV ‘Cop’ Turns Out to Be Crook in Real Life.”83 This surprise or thrill at the inversion between representation and reality was countered several months later with a story of an eighteen-year-old night watchman for a bank in Ikebukuro whom the papers would label Gekkō Kamen after he jumped down from a six-foot concrete wall to apprehend a knife-wielding bank robber.84 This night watchman and everyday hero in our real world stands in relation to the fictional superhero, whether he was inspired to take action by the television or was simply understood after the fact through the televisual metaphor. Both of these true crime stories are forms of a reverse mimesis, which mimes the mediated image or uses it to make sense of the real occurrence.

This was not a one-off event but can be seen in many real-life events that occurred during the run of the series. An example can be found in a July 1960 news reel that compared the striking Miike miners to Gekkō Kamen not only for wearing masks (to avoid the tear gas of police) but also for behaving like allies of justice by avoiding bloodshed in their strike.85 This sort of cultural embedding of the popularly mediated image can be seen again a few years later in a February 20, 1963, Asahi article titled “We Should Be Scared of Young Teens: What Creates Them?” The article answers its titular question with the simple assertion that the root cause of increasing adolescent violence is copycat behavior mimed from television and film. Mentioning a recent incident of delinquency in which middle schoolers stole money from their teacher in imitation of the Baby Gang series of films that debuted in 1961, the article cites psychology scholar Yamashita Toshio imploring producers of television and film content to consider this phenomenon of juvenile imitation in the creation of their work. The article also notes work being done by a research group within the National Police Agency (Keisatsuchō kagaku kenkyūjo kankyō kenkyūshitsu) that found that direct imitation (chokusetsu mohōsei) was prevalent among elementary to middle schoolers and indirect or mediated imitation (kansetsu mohōsei) was more common among middle school and older students. This meant that “early teens” partake in “adventure” play, mixing reality and fantasy such that excessive violence can easily transform “whatever-whatever make-believe” into “whatever-whatever crime” (OO-gokko ga OO-hanzai ni kawari yasui). The article concludes by referencing critic Ohama Hideko’s claim that children doing poorly at school fell into these types of crimes due to the high-pressured game of school advancement and a lack of guidance.86 This rewiring of our outlook on the world through the medium is what Heidegger means when he writes that it has become impossible to hear the raw sound of an engine—for such mediated technological material mediates our experience of the world.87

Second Wave: The Politics of Moonlight Mask

Seeing the world through the lens of the series would have profound effects on those who had grown up with it. The impact of the series can be seen everywhere. What is sacrificed in the belief in the hero is a sense that justice is here in normal, daily life. The superhero series shows how justice is not anything but mediated, fantastical, magical, or mythical. Conversely, when the dream of a superhero-style justice is relinquished, it is not just that youth dies but that maturity itself is sacrificed. Those who grow up believing that someone else (not from around here) will provide justice may never grow up to become responsible citizens to take over the real mantle of enforcement of justice.

After a nearly two-decade lull, Gekkō Kamen experienced a resurgence in its influence on popular culture in the late 1970s. But there was something different about the show’s renewed popularity. In the late 1950s, cultural references to the series cashed in by connecting to a new fad, but by the 1970s, it was the show’s retro cult status that made it useful for explaining nonmainstream culture. Decades after its airing, the show continued to have a lingering cultural cachet for those who had grown up with it, giving it an air of the avant-garde even as a new anime version would revive the character for a younger audience.88 In this transformation, we can see nostalgia for a time when pure justice seemed like a worthwhile fantasy.

In the 1950s, the series was evoked in mainstream culture often to justify nonstandard behaviors as just. Its pervasiveness can be seen in a brief flash in Ozu Yasujirō’s Ohayō (Good Morning, 1959), a film that depicts a story in which children pester their parents for a television set to watch sumo. This depiction of children’s culture would not be complete without at least a quick reference to the pop-culture television superhero: in a game of shiritori (a word-chain game), the schoolteacher calls for a word that begins with a final sound in the word kiku, ku. A young boy eagerly raises his hand to give the answer and he is called on. He stands, blurting out, “Gekkō Kamen!,” only to be told he has made a mistake by giving a word that begins with ge. This sort of passing reference evokes the buzz around the series without directly referencing its content. And it also shows how something like the actual Gekkō Kamen–themed iroha card games had helped to rewire young brains by illustrating the sounds of the Japanese syllabary with phrases connected to the show. In a version of the syllabary game marketed to coincide with one of the six Tōei Gekkō Kamen films, the card for the hiragana character mi, for instance, gives the phrase “Mina terebi de Gekkō Kamen” (Everyone watches Gekkō Kamen on television). Here, the goods sold to promote the spin-off movie of the remediated TV movie series announce the truth that television had superseded the older medium.89

New wave director Ōshima Nagisa’s film Street of Love and Hope (Ai to kibō no machi, 1959) referenced the show’s content to suggest the political naivete of a young woman. When the middle-class, Pollyanna-type character Kuhara Yoko is challenged by her brother to justify her behavior toward the working-class student Masao, who resells pigeons to make money, she claims that she is simply “an ally of justice, Gekkō Kamen.” The statement suggests her childlike view of the real world. This scene about the role of the superhero in the real world was then used by critic and philosopher Hanada Kiyoteru (who had a decade before connected masks to wartime schizophrenia) to explain the false sense of justice held by the still relatively obscure but up-and-coming director Ōshima himself in an article titled “An Ally of Justice: Theorizing Ōshima Nagisa.”90 Ōshima’s entire political project of pursuing justice in the real world through art that exposes inequalities, abuse, and corruption cuts against the childishness of the faceless justice meted out in the Gekkō Kamen series.

But for Hanada, even Ōshima’s staunch idealism seems childish and removed from reality precisely because it remains naive and impractical. He writes that a mask allows “A to be both A and not-A,” thus enabling a truth-telling about identity through erasure: we are all both ourselves and not ourselves alone.91 Ōshima’s critical film successes stemmed from his ability to mask critique with a sly appeal to the masses through sensual youth drama. But what Hanada’s critique of Ōshima’s and, implicitly, of our superhero’s mask reveals is that our own true selves are simply masks. To unmask Ōshima or Gekkō Kamen is to render them no longer who they are. Rather than revealing a buried identity, unmasking them would remove their identities altogether.

Ozu and Ōshima were not the only serious filmmakers who reflected interest in the pop phenomenon. Terayama Shūji’s cult classic Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1971) features an army of children dressed in shirts marked with an X as both a mark of negativity and as a satire of fascism through the Anpo demonstrations as well as paying homage to the kamishibai and Gekkō Kamen villains of decades before.92 Soon after, Terayama made direct reference to the early television series in a detailed explication titled “Tiny Colossus: Gekkō Kamen.” As precisely as Umberto Eco’s allegorical reading of The Amazing Adventures of Superman series homes in on the problems of identification and repetition in the protection of private property, Terayama focuses particularly on the issue of justice and vigilantism in the Gekkō Kamen series. The article is perhaps the most interpretive piece on the series from that later time period and is, therefore, worth quoting at length:

Beginning with World War II (when the true face of justice became perverted towards the true face of evil, and justice was lost), ethics had to hide its face. So we placed our hopes and despairs on a champion of justice who “appears like a whirlwind, and disappears like a whirlwind.” It wasn’t the champion of justice, but justice itself that we had begun to doubt. We came to think that the very criterion for determining justice did not exist. . . .

That is to say, Gekkō Kamen and young detectives cannot be mobilized during an international incident like the Vietnam War. There, things like justice and evil become confused and intermeshed; and both sides claim the mantle of just cause, so participants are forced to choose their justice. That guy Gekkō Kamen and the young detectives, who cannot hold views of justice that account for such things, work for an already pre-defined justice. . . .

The Japanese Red Army had their own laws and justice, their own executions and people’s trials for comrades. . . . If Gekkō Kamen were to suddenly appear, as a champion of justice, I wonder what actions he would take.

“The Law is the killy-loo bird of the sciences,” wrote Fred Rodel (Woe Unto You, Lawyers! 1939). A killy-loo is a bird that flies backwards. Law too is based on the principle of the past and adherence to precedent making “a vice of innovation and a virtue of hoariness.” . . . When Gekkō Kamen retreats behind his cape, I often wonder if he is flying progressively into the future or flying backwards.93

Part of the generation that grew up watching Gekkō Kamen, Terayama links the contemporary (tele)vision of justice directly to larger social ills, deftly weaving connections between seemingly disparate phenomena—the sense of justice lost after World War II and the contemporary issues of the Vietnam War and the Japanese Red Army—through the guise of the mysterious protector of an ambiguous justice. Terayama’s justice is either progressively flying toward some future place when its essence will always be clear and present or wildly flitting away like some backward-flying killy-loo (presumably a regression into aggressive and oppressive wartime imperial justice). When it is masked, Terayama seems to intimate, the possibilities for justice are open and ambivalent. What is ultimately hidden under Gekkō Kamen’s mask, then, is the fact that there is no universal justice. But the fact that Terayama uses Gekkō Kamen to explain what at the time seemed to the mass media as unexplainable (the televisual spectacles of the Vietnam War and the Red Army) should tell us that Gekkō Kamen had become a useful tool for understanding the mediated world. Terayama transformed a signifier of the childishness of unquestioned universal justice to a symbol that could explain the ambiguities and ambivalences of any justice.

The tendency to see the problems of postwar Japan in stark relief through the guise of Gekkō Kamen continues into the twenty-first century. For instance, economist Kaneko Masaru reads former prime minister Koizumi Junichirō’s deflationary-era policies of bailing out banks as an attempt to become a “Gekkō Kamen” who saves the economy by enabling those responsible for the bubble economy to get off the hook, but implicit in his Marxist critique is that only fundamental structural reform of the economy could rescue Japan.94 More recently, one of Terashima Jitsurō’s series of articles in the general interest magazine The World (Sekai) sees the latent passivity of postwar Japanese society prefigured in children’s television programming of the late 1950s; in his view, the long-running young swordsman series Akado Suzunosuke, whose hero magically waves his hands in the air, and Gekkō Kamen, who appeared out of thin air on a Honda motorcycle (an engine of the postwar economy) to mete out justice, contributed to the recent drift toward remilitarization and belligerent mindsets among those fifty- and sixty-year-olds who grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s and who run the country today.95 This sort of oneiric reading of the real world through the series is best seen in its use by a recent politician. By the 1980s, forty-year-old right-wing activist Tsujiyama Kiyoshi (a child at the time of the original television series) famously began dressing up as Gekkō Kamen to protest a number of things from scandals involving Aum Shinrikyō to the Kobe child murders (Kōbe renzoku jidō sasshō jiken) and what he felt had been poor treatment by the press.96 As his web profile stated, he saw himself as “Moonlight Mask, admirer of justice” (seigi wo ai suru Gekkō Kamen).97 He donned the cape and white turban, complete with crescent moon, to portray himself on the side of an imaginary justice that no longer seemed to him to exist in the real world, perhaps as the only way he saw as possible to bring that kind of justice into the real world. There is also a significant difference between the case of a child jumping to his own harm in the late 1950s and the cosplay of an aging activist through the 1980s and 1990s; if the child in the early postwar years was jumping out of respect and admiration for the hero’s sense of justice, the avant-garde activist in the 1990s wore the garb to grab attention and highlight frustration, hypocrisy, and a general lack of justice in the real world.

Regarding the dynamic that implicates violent representations and the cultures that accrue around them, it helps to consider our presentist notions of the content of the media (anime or video game sex and violence) and its supposed connection to such real-world behaviors. By rerouting such present interests today through a détournement into a similar historical concern around an early postwar version of a similar problem of supposed copycat accidents, crimes, and misdemeanors, this chapter has shown that the Gekkō Kamen series was neither the first nor the last in a long line of pop cultural icons that seemingly produced reprehensible actions. Our distance from it in time and space may make it seem less incendiary than consideration of the same issues around the real-world effects of cultural material from porn to horror, from video gaming to web 2.0 social media interactivity, and from online bullying to radicalization. The effects of mimetic rivalry can be seen not only in the viewer’s relation to the media’s creation of fictional worlds but also through the role of mediated information transforming our world.

In a February 1979 special issue of The Tide (Ushio) magazine dedicated to the issue of “Television and the Japanese people,” critic Akatsuka Yukio argues that television is transforming our desires in an article titled “The Topicalization of ‘Copycat Crime.’” For instance, Akatsuka cites how television advertising created the perceived necessity for an electric futon drier where there had previously been no such perception. This sort of creation of desire was all well and good, he claims, when it came to selling goods, but, in the wake of televised coverage of a high school prostitution scandal, he cautions that television was too powerful a factor on the impressionable minds of youth. Introducing the recently coined neologism copycat crime (mohō hanzai) as German in origin (presumably from Nachahmungstäter, which appears in 1978), Akatsuka discusses the rise of these kinds of crimes across Europe and the United States, finally pointing to the Japanese television coverage of the Klaxon Incident, in which a driver who excessively used his horn was killed in an act of road rage, as the cause for multiple subsequent road crimes. The article finally concludes with a sentiment that still resonates in the era of fake news transforming reality: more than reality or facts being recorded as information on the new media, Akatsuka claims that nowadays “there are many times when information creates reality.”98 While this view would gain force during the successive televised terrorist events, as well as the lone wolf otaku incidents of the 1970s to 2000s, at its base is the way reality and imagination or fiction could intertwine through the television.99 The slippage between the mediated reality of televisual coverage of the news and the creation of events designed for livestreamed news coverage overlaps and cyclically repeats to the point where distinguishing between origin and copy no longer makes sense, like some oneiric ouroboros.

Miyabe Miyuki’s crime novel Copycat Crime (Mohōhan, 1995), the film based on it (directed by Morita Yoshimitsu, 2002), and the recent TV Tokyo television miniseries (2016) based on the novel together portray copycat crime and true crime discourse in Japan over the past fifty years through the televisual lens. The multivolume novel foregrounds the media and features technologies of reproduction, capture, replication, and distortion from copying handwriting, to scanners and voice distorters, video recorders, photography, and faxes. And the episodic tale repeats itself, retelling or copying the story out in each successive volume of the paperback edition with increasing detail from various perspectives: from the point of view of the policeman, then the journalist, and later a suspect, dwelling at length on the perspective of the victims’ families, and finally taking the perpetrators’ vantage points.

Author Miyabe’s doppelgänger in the character of journalist Maehata Shigeko stages the infinite regress of copying. Maehata is trying to solve the murders, but at the same time, she is caught up in the ethics of collecting, copying, and circulating the grisly details of personal and private horrors and violence committed upon a group of young women and two men. Maehata’s character gives Miyabe the chance to comment on and theorize the primary social function of true crime stories as well as crime fiction. The journalist justifies her own prying into the private lives of the victims’ families knowing that her work of publishing (copying out and repeating) the details of the crimes in public can have a feminist cause—exposing the deep moral transgressions of the crimes, short-circuiting the twisted logic of the individuals perpetrating them, and hopefully causing a social shift that will begin from the recognition that something is deeply amiss with a society that produces violence against women on such a mass scale (of which the string of murders is but the tip of the iceberg). Here, Maehata believes strongly that her writing (just words) can have an impact if it exposes the facts. But her ultimate direct action in the world consists of a fiction (words of a different sort).

In her final confrontation on national television with the perpetrator, Maehata does her best to expose the truth by creating a fiction. With the goal of provoking a confession from the criminal mastermind inaptly named Peace, Maehata takes everything she knows about the truth of the case to create a fiction or lie. The perpetrator desires to be a mastermind, desires to control and manipulate, desires to be creative, desires in short to be the bohemian artiste born sui generis—that is, one who produces totally unique art, unlike anything before. Maehata asks a friend who is a crime fiction buff to borrow a very old and obscure American paperback that has not been translated: “I wonder if you could lend me one? The older the better. I don’t mind what it’s about—just as long as it’s a book that hardly anyone’s ever heard about.”100 She then holds the book up before Peace (the would-be mastermind) on television and says that everything we know about the serial crime spree was copied from this book. This lie, the fiction, or fake news has its desired effect and Peace is provoked to confess. This kind of mimesis, a mimetological view of mimesis, a metamimesis, or a reverse mimesis becomes obvious when our attention shifts from the contents or image being mimed to the form or media of its miming. This is the “perpetual allusion” elaborated by Derrida on Stéphane Mallarmé and Plato: mimesis without a mimed original. It is the problem noted by Erich Auerbach to have been of a Western concern, a desire for a reality and a fictional veneer over it.

In the 2002 film version, the perpetrator recognizes the journalist’s bluff and encourages television viewers to check the internet about the facts; and then, as though to add another piece of evidence to prove that the crimes were original, nevertheless confesses. The 2016 television miniseries version of the scene is more closely faithful to the novel. The confrontation is depicted amid intensifying music and frenetic cutting between the televised show and the televisual audience such that it becomes clear that what motivates the confession from the murderer is the thought that his audience might consider him to have copied. Here, the artist/murderer is insulted that his audience might think of him as a plagiarist criminal. And, indeed, since Maehata is lying to trap the egomaniac, we the audience of the television miniseries understand what the audience of the reality television show within it do not—namely, that the murderer is telling the truth when he claims to be an original and the journalist is lying. This is to say the titular copying of Copycat Crime is not a copy of a specific mediated crime per se. But we also know that Maehata’s lie in the story about a book representing a crime (like Miyabe’s real-world novel) itself is a fictional truth. That is, though Maehata’s story about the American book is false, as Miyabe’s story about it is a fiction, both are based on truth.

We know there are, of course, other mediated copycat crimes in reality, and even if this one is not a direct copy, it is iterative of others. Indeed, Miyabe’s book, which was originally serialized in the Weekly Post (Shūkan posuto) from November 1995 to October 1999, is to some degree a light fictionalization of the real-world crimes of otaku Miyazaki Tsutomu’s killing spree known as the Saitama-Tokyo kidnapping and murder incidents (1988–89) and the Kobe child serial murders (which played out during the serialization of Miyabe’s book in 1997). That Miyabe chooses these incidents and ones like it to replay in her fiction is a way for her to stage the media’s role in the spectacle and sensationalization of crime. In this way, the book and subsequent versions of Copycat Crime show in stark relief the kind of moral panic and real-world repercussions of mimetic rivalry that are ever present but somehow more salient in our hyper-media-saturated world today. Miyabe seems to recognize that copycat crime is both a “moral panic” and a possible reality that routes through media. That is, she shows us the power of journalistic narrative and fantastical stories for reality, as well as the power they cannot possess—namely, the power to be perfect predictors of future crime. This is because of both a mimetic fallacy (Brewer’s idea that a mediation can ever accurately portray reality) and the mimetic faculty (Benjamin’s notion that humans are inherently mimetic machines). We all copy, but we necessarily copy imperfectly.

Since worries about the corrupting effects of cultural material on the supple minds of youth have returned cyclically in recent years, promoted by pop psychologists, politicians, and television pundits, lamenting a seeming increase of violence in manga and video games and the seeming parallel increase in real violence among children, then it may be time once again to return to the question of the real-world repercussions of fictional representations. If individual responsibility must be assigned for such crimes, whether the 2008 Akihabara stabbing incident (Tōrima Jiken) or the 2019 Kyoto animation arson attack (Kyōto Animēshon hōka satsujin jiken), the cultural material environments in which these incidents appeared to be saturated must also be examined to assess the question of culpability. The following chapter examines this aspect of representation and mimicry in terms of environment through the concept of ecomimesis.