The above video serves as the introduction for the Japanese anime series Mobile Suit Gundam Wing.  The series takes place in a distant future in which humans have colonized space, and it follows five protagonists who pilot robotic combat suits in a battle against the oppressive rule of Earth’s united governments.  It is a standout in Japanese anime’s mecha genre, which has developed from the “technologized body” first seen in Astro Boy in 1963 to the more common dynamic of a human guiding a powerful robot (Napier 2001: 87). 

Gundam Wing and other mecha series underscore the spread of Techno-Orientalism in Japanese animation (or Japanimation).  If the concept of the Orient is understood as the West’s means of determining its own cultural identity by labeling what is “Other,” the Techno-Orient can be best defined as a standard by which the West gauges the arc of its own identity through the information age.  This Western perspective has, in many ways, been absorbed by Japanese animators.  Shinto shrines, samurai figures, and traditional Japanese architecture still lend a sense of lingering Orientalism to Japanimation, but humans in each series either fight alongside or are completely replaced by cyborgs in the central conflict (Ueno 1999).  Techno-Orientalism thus stereotypes the Asian landscape with post-Fordist images, crystalizing an aesthetic futurism of the globalized information economy, one which is a hybrid of traditional Japanese culture and technological symbols of modernization.    

This hybridity may cast Japan as the societal future of the information age, but it does not do so without highlighting the identity crisis that comes with this ultramodern ideal.  The visuals in mecha are strongly technological, with robot-to-robot combat dominating the imagery throughout each episode, but the narratives are primarily driven by the tension between the vulnerable youth in the cockpit and the incredible amount of power that he or she wields via the cold, faceless machine that requires his or her input to function (Tanner 1995).  In a remarkably self-aware critique, the Techno-Orientalism in mecha brings to light the sacrifice of individualism that youth must make as they take their place as the producers of a globalizing information economy.  They do not simply amputate their commodifiable selves from their true selves, but rather must appropriate machine-like characteristics, at the cost of their individual identities, in order to drive this new era of capitalist production.  This hybridity of traditional Japan and modern Japan seen in mecha is an animated exhibit of the “lifeless mechanism” of capitalism and the young bodies who are “incorporated into it as its living appendages” (Marx 1867: 548).        

References

Napier, Susan J. Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Ueno, Toshiya. “Techno-Orientalism and Media-Tribalism: On Japanese Animation and Rave Culture.” Third Text 13:47 (1999), pp. 95-106.

Tanner, Ron. “Mr. Atomic, Mr. Mercury, and Chime Trooper: Japan’s Answer to the American Dream.” Asian Popular Culture. Ed. John Lent. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

Marx, Karl. Ed. Friedrich Engels. Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy. 1867. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2011.