Imaginary Worlds - Ghost in the Shell

Episode Date: July 14, 2016

Ghost in the Shell was groundbreaking, visually and thematically. The 1995 Japanese animated film (or anime) was unapologetically for adults. The story focuses on a cyborg cop whose body is synthetic but her brain is organic. As she chases down a mysterious hacker, Major Motoko Kusanagi grapples with what it means to be alive. When Scarlett Johansson was cast as The Major in the live-action remake, there was an outcry over whitewashing. But the reaction in Japan has been different. Roland Kelts (author of "Japanamerica"), journalist Emily Yoshida and Tufts University professor Susan Napier discuss the racial politics of anime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. So earlier this year, I talked about how I first came across Godzilla on Channel 56 in Boston. Now, if you're too young to have experienced the TV landscape before cable, there used to be only four networks, including PBS, but there was this extra dial of channels that you could surf through, UHF channels. And most of them were literally static. But then every so often, you'd come across a channel that had something on it. And very often, it was unusual stuff that you couldn't find on regular networks. And that is how I discovered the cartoon Star Blazers. Or at least, that was the American name of the show.

In Japan, it was called Space Battleship Yamato. Now, I barely remember what was going on in my life back then because I was in second grade. But I remember that show vividly. Each season had a huge story arc like a TV show today. It was set in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Humanity's last hope was an old battleship sent into space. And, well, actually the whole backstory was sung in the opening credits. Searching for a distant star, heading off to Iskandar,

leaving all we love behind, who knows what dangers we'll find. This cartoon dealt with very serious issues like war, sacrifice, honor. Characters died. The action sequences were great. But I was also fascinated by the look of the show. I remember knowing it was Japanese, even though it was dubbed. And every character had the same basic face with really big eyes. I, of course, had no idea that show was a big breakthrough for Japanese animation or anime. And the art form only got more sophisticated. When I was in high school,

the first critically acclaimed Japanese animated feature films came out. The cyberpunk thriller Akira and Hayao Miyazaki's first masterpiece, My Neighbor Totoro. But the movie that really stuck with me was Ghost in the Shell from 1995. Until that point, most anime was about kids or for kids. This movie was unapologetically adult. It was rated R for nudity and violence.

was unapologetically adult. It was rated R for nudity and violence. Ghost in the Shell is about an elite squad of cops that are cyborgs. Their bodies are synthetic, but their brains are human, organic. And while they're chasing down bad guys and searching for a mysterious hacker, the main character, a cyborg named Motoko Kusanagi,

grapples with the existential question of what it means to be alive. In Japan, the movie was so popular it spawned sequels and a TV show. And now there's going to be a live-action Hollywood remake starring Scarlett Johansson. You've probably seen articles about this. It's been pretty controversial. The movie's in production, and the studio released the first image of her wearing a black wig.

According to IMDb, she still has the character's Japanese name, but in that image, she's just credited as the Major. That's Kusanagi's rank on the force. The backlash in the internet has been fierce. This was another example of whitewashing, where Hollywood casts white actors in roles that should have gone to Asians or Asian Americans. And the studio execs, when they're being blunt, will say, well, you know, we can't

cast an unknown Asian American actress in a huge blockbuster movie. Which is bullshit because they cast unknown white actors all the time as the leads in big-budget fantasy movies. And if they don't cast Asian actors enough in any kind of movie, they can't become movie stars to begin with. Then I came across this video posted by a Japanese vlogger called Yuta. He just went up to people on the streets in Japan, showed them the image of Scarlett Johansson from Ghost in the Shell, said this was very controversial in the U.S. Can you guess why? The people in Japan were baffled. They asked things like, did the Americans not like her haircut? Did they want a better actress? The whole whitewashing issue that has raised hackles online, and especially in the

United States, is a virtual non-issue here in Japan. I asked Roland Keltz about this. He's the author of Japan America. He's half Japanese and lives in Tokyo. He says for a lot of Japanese people, the idea of whitewashing is completely foreign to them because they have a thriving film industry with Japanese movie stars. There are some people here I've spoken to in the anime industry who laugh it off and say, well, they're going to make a mess out of it anyway, so who cares? You know, the original is still going to be around. And on a deeper level, I think the reaction is it's anime. You know, I mean, in some ways, the tradition of anime is characters who are devoid of any specific racial background.

When it comes to anime, race is the elephant in the room. Susan Napier teaches Japanese animation at Tufts University. And without doubt, the single most asked question that I get whenever I give a general lecture is why are the characters in Japanese anime white or Caucasian? Even now, you think I've been used to this because I've only been talking about this

for 20 years now, but I'm still a little surprised because I don't see them as Caucasian per se. I see them as anime. But how did that happen? I mean, Japan is a fairly homogenous society. So why does anime exist in a racial limbo? To figure that out, we need to go back to the beginning, or the beginning of most modern stories about Japan. The end of the war. That is just after the break. Most anime films and TV shows are adapted from Japanese comic books, or manga.

Manga became really popular after World War II. It's really fun and action-packed. But Roland Kelt says that it's also influenced by Japanese art. The traditional Japanese scroll paintings, you unfurl each side of the scroll and you open it up. And when it opens up before you, you read it right to left, just like manga today. You read it right to left.

In the early 1960s, one of the first manga books to be adapted to animation was Mighty Adam, or as he was known in the English-speaking world, Astro Boy. Astro Boy was a good-natured little robot who fought bad guys and flew around with blasters coming out of his feet. His creator, Osamu Tezuka, was one of the first Japanese animators to realize that anime could be a global brand. He was a big fan of Disney's work, especially Bambi, but the early Disney work. And he felt that his characters should look either racially indistinct or Caucasian because that was the only way to reach a global audience.

It worked. His other shows, like Kim of the White Lion, were also hits. Japanese animators copied him, and his style became the norm. In many ways, the Asian style or the anime style is a riff on a Caucasian face and a Western style of animation. This is the journalist Emily Yoshida. She says before World War II, cartoon characters in Japan typically looked Asian. After the war, there is a kind of, and I don't want to diagnose it too specifically,

but there is a kind of self-effacement of not having that image in the kind of images that anacement of not having that image in the kind of images that an average Japanese person would see every day a lot of that is because their toys and their products and stuff that they're exporting couldn't feature a face like that because it had become so synonymous with this really stereotypical, sneaky, evil Asian caricature that, you know, you can see so much in really, really horrifying propaganda from the time that's from the States around the time of internment camps and everything. It's interesting to think that the Japanese are very aware of that. And then when exporting cultural products in the 40s and 50s saying, no, you can, we're,

you can trust us now. Like, we're not those people. Yeah, we, I mean, they couldn't, so the trust us now. We're not those people. I mean, they couldn't. So the US famously took away their army or they signed a treaty where they cannot have an army or any kind of military presence which still exists to this day. They had to kind of do a PR revamping at that time. So they made toys.

They made things for kids. They made things that were fun. And so in many ways, the development of the anime face is like the most benign style of representing a human. Now, of course, to any Japanese reader of manga or viewer of anime, as they were released in their originals in Japan, the characters all spoke Japanese.

They, in some cases, ate Japanese food. In other cases, behaved in a Japanese way. They would bow, etc. So it's not like the Japanese viewer or reader thought, oh, these characters aren't Japanese. But in terms of a racial identity, they were fairly indistinct. And that was partly a way, some might argue, of erasing the sense of constricted racial identity

in a nation that felt both ashamed and humiliated by the war. Anime is more popular than ever around the world, but the genre does have distinctly Japanese themes. For instance, the backgrounds are not just backgrounds that are there to support the main characters. Like manga, like traditional Japanese art, they're incredibly important in establishing a sense of place, a sense of atmosphere, even weather. If you've never watched an anime film, that might sound boring,

but it creates a sense of magic and really transports you to a certain place and time. And Roland Kelt says that anime is also deeply influenced by Shintoism, which imagines that every object in the natural world is inhabited by a spirit or a pagan god. So when inanimate objects come to life in anime, it's not a big deal, or something a character would need to hide, like the toys in Toy Story. The whole concept of the Transformers was created by a Japanese toy company in the 1980s. And the simple concept was that these cars, automobiles, and trucks have spirits. And that's very Shinto, because the tenet in Shintoism is animistic, and the notion is that usually it's every object in nature,

but by the 1980s, automobiles were part of the natural world in Japan, if you will. Or the cyborg cops in Ghost in the Shell. Again, Susan Napier. One of the most brilliant parts of Ghost in the Shell. Again, Susan Napier. One of the most brilliant parts of Ghost in the Shell is almost a five minute long, at least three to five minute long,

wordless sequence in which the heroine, Motoko Kusanagi, is riding a boat through the canal and looking at the people on the opposite shores. You can imagine that she's thinking about herself because she sees a mannequin and then she sees a woman who looks exactly like her on a bridge, and you realize that she's sort of trying to find out where her place is as a cyborg in this world

that is basically still a human world but is increasingly technologically permeated. That's a very distinctive aspect of Japanese culture, that a lot of things are unsaid. A lot of things are felt or seen or understood in ways that are not totally conscious, that are not necessarily verbal. Another thing about anime that's very Japanese, you don't see the same distrust of technology that you do in Hollywood films. The fear that Hal or the Terminator is going to take over. I mean, on one hand, anime is haunted by the atomic bomb, from Astro Boy's atomic heart to the weapons that wipe out Neo-Tokyo in the film Akira. But the blame is usually on human beings and their hubris. Technology itself is usually seen as benign because high-tech was literally a lifesaver

in Japan, pulling the country out of the rubble and turning it into an economic powerhouse and the envy of the world in the 1980s. A lot of anime from that time period takes place in a society where technology is changing very fast. The past is like a ghost. And this new high-tech city is The Shell. That's not a 100% wow, everything's awesome story. That's like a lot of alienation, a lot of self-alienation about, you know, not even recognizing yourself in some ways. Ghost in the Shell was based on a manga series from the 80s. But the film was made after the economy had crashed. And there is a sense of melancholy

lingering over the characters. Japan, by the mid-90s, was in a recession, a very bad recession. It's called the post-bubble decade, the lost decade. And so there is a real sense in part of the Japanese, which is still even more obvious today, a sense of loss. While this debate was going on about Scarlett Johansson playing Kusanagi, or The Major, as apparently they're calling her, a few people wrote that a Hollywood remake of Ghost in the Shell couldn't work because the themes are so specific to Japan.

But then other people argued that Ghost in the Shell was always meant to be a blending of East and West. The film was co-financed by a British company. The city in the movie is not Tokyo. It's based on Hong Kong with English signs everywhere. Susan Napier always thought that the director, Mamoru Oshii, had intended Ghost in the Shell to be an homage to Blade Runner. And when I met Oshii, I asked him very specifically if he was influenced by or inspired by Blade Runner. He said, well, of course, you know, that goes without saying. In turn, his movie was a big influence in the Wachowskis, who pitched The Matrix to Warner Brothers by showing them scenes of Ghost in the Shell and saying,

we want to do that. I mean, The Matrix is still a Hollywood movie where the computers are bad guys. But the green digital numbers in the opening credits are directly taken from Ghost in the Shell, along with the image of people plugging cables into the back of their necks. It's dealing with ideas of being alienated from yourself and your body because of technology and because of a network. Like, these characters physically plug into a network that allows them to do surveillance, to find criminals, that kind of thing,

in a way that predates our notion of the internet by years. In fact, Ghost in the Shell was so influential that if you see it today for the first time, you might feel like you've already seen it before. But Emily Yoshida is most interested in how Ghost in the Shell uses the racial ambiguity in anime. Take the main character herself. She's a Japanese person who's been living in these various optimized bodies. So she hasn't lived in her own body for what we can assume are years,

like at least all of her professional life. The movie cleverly plays with this idea by making the cyborgs look like typical anime characters with big blue eyes or blonde hair. In contrast, the humans are unmistakably Asian. And when a Caucasian-American character shows up, Kusanagi asks, who's the white guy? Emily's mother is Caucasian. Her father is Japanese. She was born in Japan and raised in the U.S. When she was in high school, she was thrilled to discover anime

because it was something she could claim as her own that the other kids thought was cool. Especially in the 90s you're not seeing any representation of Asian people in any other popular media so maybe if the anime characters don't necessarily they don't have the faces the actual physical faces of Asian people but they speak in Japanese and they have Japanese last names and that's something you know I always grew up thinking my last name was weird and now here's something where the entire credits are people with weird names like mine. That's why Emily wrote an article for the website The Verge on why Scarlett Johansson's casting is troublesome for her. And not just because of whitewashing.

I'm not unhappy with her casting because she's Caucasian. I think, like, you could probably cast anybody to play that role of any race and I think it would I think it would read thematically I think that what strikes me about Kusanagi is that she's supposed to be like huge she's supposed to be this super power like her body is created for the sole purpose of being good at like fighting crime and like chasing down criminals like she's a machine um and so i think of scarlett johansson like even though she stunt double does all of her her uh martial arts work for her or something in the avengers movies but i still think of her as being kind of petite or like not this sort of broad-shouldered amazon

of a woman that i think that you're supposed to understand um matoko to be well you said in the article at the end you said like i can't i could never imagine anyone playing her but me do you do you see yourself that way um well i always felt tall i always felt and i um my dad was tall for a japanese guy and my mom was caucasian so i like so it was like oh i, I'm half Asian, but I don't like none of the things that are stereotypically Asian. I do not embody any of them. I mean,

my mom used to coordinate a exchange group with high school students from Japan and, you know, set up all these host families and stuff. And so we, I would spend my summers with Asian teenagers and they were, it was all girls. So it was just like 40 Asian

high school girls and I just remember being a foot taller than all of them I'm feeling so awkward even though I was younger than them I was like oh my god I'm such a beast and then I don't know there was something about this character who was Japanese I guess but had this enormous body that was uh that resonated with me in some way. And you're like, I could totally chase criminals. Yeah, I should get good at running. Oh, wait, no, I'm not going to do that at all. And leaping off of buildings backwards.

Yes, yeah, get good at backflips. And I have a career. In the end, Scarlett Johansson could be really good in the role. I mean, this type of character is definitely in her wheelhouse. And at least this controversy has made people more aware of whitewashing. I hope it will make a difference. There are more live-action adaptations of anime films in the works, including a live-action version of Akira.

At one point, Chris Evans and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were going to play the leads. They are no longer attached to the project. One of the things that I like about anime is the back and forth cultural flow. When it's done well, it doesn't feel like cultural appropriation. It feels like a two-way street. And I love visiting a place where everything feels so familiar and so foreign at the same time. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Roman Keltz, Susan Napier, and Emily Yoshida.

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