Contemporary urban style is empowering to the subordinate for it asserts their right to manipulate the signifiers of the dominant ideology in a way that frees them from that ideological practice and opens them up to the subcultural and oppositional uses.
– John Fiske (1991: 253)
This essay is concerned with a textual analysis of Akira (1988),1 the highly successful cyberpunk film created by Otomo Katsuhiro. This analysis is an exploration of the complex systems of codes and practices employed by the film and the spectator2 in the creation of meaning; however its main emphasis will be on the perspective of the spectator. As with most commercial films produced by the Japanese studio system, Akira (Tôhô Studios) is aimed at a specific audience: adolescent males who are fully conversant with the codes and cultural systems employed in the film.3 Therefore, to reach an understanding of how a Japanese adolescent male creates meaning (and so derives pleasure) from Akira involves not only an understanding of the uses the film makes of other textual systems, but also an understanding of the position occupied by some adolescent males in Japanese society.
The aim of this essay; then, is twofold: first, to come to an understanding of Akira from the point of view of its intertextuality; and second, to present an interpretation of the film as a point of convergence of the spectator-film-culture nexus. To this end, I intend to discuss two categories of textual systems developed by Allen and Gomery (1985): first, the ‘nonfilmic intertexts’ which involve the film’s use of conventions and codes from other systems of representations, such as the bôsôzoku4 subculture and the Akira manga (comic) series; and second, the ‘filmic intertext’, that is, the film’s use of conventions drawn from the nagare-mono or ‘drifter’ films of the 1950s and 1960s, the science fiction/horror genre and other films, in particular the American film Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982).5
Through an examination of the bôsôzoku sub-culture as a cultural expression of a section of Japanese youth, the first part of this essay will demonstrate how Akira uses bôsôzoku style to reflect a youth culture of resistance which exists alongside mainstream contemporary Japanese society. This raises many questions in relation to the myths of Japanese social and cultural homogeneity and the supposed classless nature of Japanese society.6 For ethnographic detail I shall be largely drawing on Satô’s (1991) study of the bôsôzoku and yankî (punk) youths. I shall then proceed with a structural analysis of Akira as a text which draws on a postmodernist pastiche of conventions to create a mise-en-scène which denotes chaos and corruption.
It should be noted that while Satô provides a useful ethnographic account of bôsôzoku, he fails to present the sub-culture adequately within its larger social, political and economic contexts and as a result he fails to answer the following questions which are crucial to understanding the underlying causes of the development and attraction of the subculture. First, why is the membership of bôsôzoku gangs predominantly made up of youths from manual working-class backgrounds? Second, why is their behavior in opposition to the norms and standards of Japanese society? On the other hand, Satô does refute the psychological ‘strain theory’ which he states was the most common explanation cited by Japanese academics and the media during the 1970s for the occurrence of bôsôzoku activities and which he defines as
a behavioral expression of frustrated wants and needs, resulting from an incongruity between culturally induced aspirations and socially distributed legitimate means (1991: 3).
Satô argues instead that bôsôzoku behavior is an expression of asobi (play) which forms part of a rite of passage marking the change from childhood to maturity.
Asobi is an important factor, but it is only one in a multiplicity of factors which are related to the occurrence of bôsôzoku activities. By emphasising asobi, Satô fails to explain adequately the social and historical causes which lie behind the manifestation of this particular form of delinquent behavior. Therefore I intend to broaden the discussion by taking up these issues and by suggesting that at the social level, the factors listed below have contributed to the emergence of a generational consciousness which, despite myths of the classless nature of Japanese society, is linked to a post-war polarisation based on occupational status. The development of the youth sub-cultures in the post-war period should be viewed as one of the expressions of this generational consciousness through its manifestation of style and behavior. The factors we need to consider are: (i) post-war changes in the Japanese sys-tems of education and work, part of which was a shift to a meritocracy and achievement-oriented social status; (ii) changes in the structure of the family, especially the gradual decline of the extended family; (iii) the proliferation of the mass media. Television was first broadcast in Japan in 1953. At that time there were 866 television sets, but by 1959 this number had jumped to two million and was increasing at a rate of 150,000 a month (Anderson and Richie 1959: 254); (iv) the changes in the comparative ranking of work and leisure. Material affluence has also increased the importance of leisure and recreation in the lives of all Japanese. Tech-nological innovations in industrial production and the demands of unions for fewer working hours have, since the early 1970s, reduced working time (Satô 1991: 184); (v) the emergence of adolescence as a socially constructed category which accompanied the increase in the spending power of Japanese youth and the growth of a market designed to exploit this surplus spending power.
Bôsôzoku sub-culture, seen as an outward manifestation of a new generational consciousness poses a direct challenge to the traditional ‘work ethic’ and achievement-oriented ideology of the previous generation. Bôsôzoku have adapted and inverted images, styles and ideologies to construct an alternative identity, an otherness, which challenges the ideals of Japanese social and cultural homogeneity. Hence, the moral panic7 which followed media reports of bôsôzoku activities in the mid-1980s may be explained in part as the fear of difference, ‘otherness’.
Satô states that ‘the majority of those who participate in gang activities are from middle-class families’ (1991: 2). There is a problem here as most Japanese define themselves as middle-class, despite economic and occupational differences. Thus Satô goes on to state that the majority of bôsôzoku youths come from ‘blue-collar’ backgrounds, a point supported by DeVos in his psycho-cultural study of deviancy in Japanese society (1973).8 Therefore, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that most bôsôzoku youths do not come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, such as in the UK and the USA where academic studies have made the link between delinquency and economic deprivation, but from lower status groups who do not fit in with the Japanese ideal of the white-collar salaryman and his family. So despite the fact that the majority of Japanese consider themselves to be middle-class, it is clear that there is a polarity of occupational status in society which can be said to be divided along the lines of blue-collar/low status workers, and the salaryman/white-collar/high status workers. The polarity of occupation is determined by education and is reflected in the emergence of distinct youth cultures divided along these lines.
Traditional explanations of the classless nature of Japanese society are by and large dependent on the linking of income to class and do not take into account the status attached to certain occupations and denied to others.9 They also tend to ignore the fact that social standards and norms are determined by dominant elites, filtering down through society to become the consensual view. A person’s ability to achieve status depends upon the criteria of status applied by other people in the society (seken) in accordance with the consensual view (seken-nami), that is, the standards and norms individuals use in evaluating other people (Cohen 1955: 140).10 This raises ‘status problems’ for those who fail to achieve in a highly competitive education and employment system. Hence, the desire of the bôsôzoku youths to establish a set of status criteria outside the consensual view, in terms of which they can more easily succeed. Bôsôzoku discontent with mainstream society reflects the polarisation between blue-collar and white-collar status groups whose position is determined by their children’s access to education. The emergence of two distinct youth cultures divided along these same lines, the manual working-class youth, bôsôzoku, and the college students’ dokushin kizoku (literally, unmarried aristocrats) youth culture reflects this contraposition. It is also evident in the geographical division of Tokyo into the Yamanote region, mostly populated by salarymen, and the Shitamachi area where blue-collar workers tend to congregate.11
From this perspective of occupation-deter-mined status divisions, the reason for the emergence of bôsôzoku can be explained in Cohen’s (1955) terms of ‘the compensatory function of juvenile gangs’. He suggests that working-class youths who under-achieve at school and who are unable to conform to ‘respectable’ society, often resort to deviant behavior as a solution to their problems:
It is a plausible assumption … that the working-class boy whose status is low in middle-class terms cares about that status [and] that this status confronts him with a genuine problem of adjustment. To this problem of adjustment there are a variety of conceivable responses, of which participation in the creation and main-tenance of the delinquent subculture is one. Each mode of response entails costs and yields gratifications of its own … The hallmark of the delinquent subculture is the explicit and wholesale repudiation of middle-class standards and the adoption of their very antithesis (Cohen 1955: 128–9).
This point is further supported by Satô when he states that
while they may be faceless unskilled labourers or not very promising high school students in their everyday lives, they can become ‘somebody’ with definite status through their universe of discourse (1991: 69).
This ‘compensatory function’ is crucial to an understanding of Akira and the bôsôzoku subculture as a whole. In the analysis of Akira which follows, it will be demonstrated how, by drawing on the imagery of kôha (hard type) as a defining feature of masculinity, the narrative performs Cohen’s ‘compensatory function’ which, I believe, is one of the reasons for Akira’s huge box-office success.
The meaning of bôsôzoku style
Having placed the occurrence of bôsôzoku behavior within the context of the emergence of a generational consciousness and the status divisions of labour in Japanese society, and linked this to Cohen’s ‘compensatory function’, it is possible to argue that bôsôzoku style is a form of resistance, which Fiske defines as ‘the refusal to accept the social identity proposed by the dominant ideology and the social control that goes with it’ (1991: 241). From a reading of the imagery and symbols which make up the bôsôzoku style, it becomes evident that the bôsôzoku members are attempting to negotiate a ‘meaningful intermediate space’ within the dominant work ethic and achievement-oriented ideology of modern Japanese society. This they have achieved through their particular behavior, such as the outright challenging of police authority, and through the creation of a unique style.
Bôsôzoku youths have appropriated historical and cultural objects and signs which are made to carry new, covert meanings. This violation of taken-for-granted meanings became a form of resistance to the dominant order: for example, the bôsôzoku phonetic use of Chinese characters, which are often complex, to express the names of their gangs. These work at two levels, the meanings created by the phonetic usage and the meanings inherent in the Chinese characters. For their clothing, they often wear tokkôfuku, the uniforms worn by the kamikaze pilots of World War Two, or sentôfuku, military combat uniforms. They often wear hachimaki (head bands) with the rising sun or the imperial chrysanthemum crest in the centre. These are all symbols usually associated with extreme right-wing political movements, including the yakuza (gangsters). Satô states that there is no real evidence to suggest that bôsôzoku youths are affiliated in any way with these organizations.12 I would suggest that the right-wing symbols employed by the bôsôzoku have been inverted into threatening symbols of group solidarity as well as referring to the traditional ‘tragic hero’ who has dominated Japanese popular culture since the Chûshingura (Forty-seven Rônin) story. These objects and symbols had already been imbued with new post-war meanings in warretro films.13 They have been re-positioned further within a bôsôzoku subcultural context, and part of their appeal and value is derived from their potential to shock. As Hebdige states, ‘violations of the authorised codes through which the social world is organised and experienced have considerable power to provoke and disturb’ (1991: 91).
Fiske has argued that the pleasure ‘style’ affords is its ability to empower the creator. He tells us that:
… it is a pleasure of control or empowerment, a carnivalesque concentration on the materiality of the signifiers and the consequent evasion of the subjectivity constructed by the more ideologically determined signifieds (1991: 250).
He then goes on to demonstrtate how Madonna, through style, ‘turns herself into a spectacle’ (253) and in so doing denies the spectator the position of voyeur. She does this by ‘controlling the look’, thereby inverting the normal power relations of looking just as in a carnival. It is interesting that in a questionnaire on pleasure and bôsô (mass vehicle rallies) activities, Satô found that ‘medatsu koto (being seen) was ranked as important as the ‘activity itself’ among the reasons of one’s enjoyment’ (27).
This pleasure in medatsu koto is further evidenced by bôsôzoku’s deliberate courting of the media, the staging of bôsô drives for the cameras and the writing of articles for magazines. Through the desire for medalsu koto, whether it is media coverage or inadvertent pedestrian spectators, it is the bôsôzoku youth who is in control of the look. A journalist clearly stated his sense of powerlessness when confronted by bôsôzoku youths:
Bôsôzoku from all of Japan cooperate with our efforts to gather data. It is more than cooperation. They are almost aggressive. They phone the publisher night and day and demand to be interviewed. Some even come to the publisher’s office driving motorbikes … I am so overwhelmed by their medachilagari seishin [medatsu, spirit: desire to show off] that I feel like a subcontractor who is working under orders for a magazine which might be called, say, Monthly Bôsôzoku (quoted in Satô 1991: 93).
By creating a spectacle, in Fiske’s ‘carnivalesque’ sense of the word,14 they are inverting the ‘look’ as an expression of control and it is from this process of control that their pleasure derives, hence, the centrality of medatsu koto to that pleasure.
In summation, bôsôzoku youths have, through their style, sought control over their social identity in contemporary Japanese culture where, in a post-industrial consumer society, image and identity are no longer fixed, but open to be played with.15 They have taken right-wing political symbolism out of its traditional political and historical discourse (the rise of ultra nationalistic right-wing movements and World War Two), and have asserted their right to use it as a signifier of group identity and for the ‘tragic hero’ of the Chûshingura tradition. They have created a ‘spectacular construction’ of their own image which defines their ‘otherness’ and, by extension, their resistance to the dominant culture. How did the film Akira fit into bôsôzoku culture?
Akira and postmodernism
Having discussed the bôsôzoku as a sub-culture apart from, and in opposition to, mainstream Japanese society, I shall now analyse the role of Akira as part of the patois of bôsôzoku sub-cultural language. Akira is a film which legitimates and mythologises the position of bôsôzoku youth on the periphery of Japanese society and so becomes a sharp critique of contemporary corporate Japanese society.16
Akira is a text which simultaneously displays the two distinct characteristics of the postmodern which Fredric Jameson (1983) discussed: an effacement of boundaries, for instance between previously defined stylistic norms (Eastern and Western) and between past and present, resulting in pastiche and parody; and a schizophrenic treatment of time as ‘perpetual present’. In Akira, this effacement of the boundaries between stylistic norms and between past and present does not manifest in an appeal to ‘nostalgia’ as Jameson has argued it does in Western postmodernist films. For example, Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), although set in a futuristic Los Angeles/Tokyo17 cityscape in the year 2019, simultaneously plays on 1950s’ conventions of film noir. The Raymond Chandler image of the hero detective (Harrison Ford), the emphasis on faded sepia family photographs and memories, establish a nostalgic humanness which is contrasted with the alien cyborgs who also inhabit the film’s space. Akira similarly draws on the 1950s and 1960s conventions of a specific male genre based on the drifter film (nagare-mono)18 in the construction of the character called Kaneda. Kaneda displays all the positive attributes of the outsider as represented by the actors Ishihara Yujirô and Takakura Ken, all of whose films are still widely available. The outsider is physically strong, but, above all else, he remains loyal to the code of brotherhood, regardless of personal cost. He is thus brought into direct opposition with the establishment, represented in the films by the scheming, self-interested politicians and the moguls of the military-industrial complex. As an archetypal outsider, Kaneda is not bound by any of the conventions of the ‘legitimate’ society which, as the following discussion makes clear, is portrayed as corrupt and degenerate. Akira thus conforms to a central theme that runs through the films of the nagare-mono and the yakuza genres, that is, the clash between male codes of brotherhood and the constraints imposed on male freedom by the law and social institutions, such as the family. Hence the nagare-mono always exists on the margins of society, for it is only there that he can remain true to his moral code.19
Akira, while set in a futuristic present, takes four historical signifiers which are juxtaposed to underscore the corruption and degeneration of contemporary Japanese society, creating an historical ‘pastiche’. The first historical signifier derives from the kurai tani (dark valley) period (1931–41) of pre-war Japan when right-wing military factions combined with zaibatsu (industrialists) and vied with politicians for political control of the country. In Akira, the Colonel is symbolic of this sort of military faction. The film’s representation of the Colonel is so constructed that he is easily identified with the portrayal of General Anami, the War Minister in Prime Minister Suzuki’s cabinet of 1945, in the highly successful film Japan’s Longest Day (Nihon no ichiban nagai hi, directed by Okamoto Kihachi, 1967).20 The industrialists, with whom the Colonel is in collusion, are shown to have connections with the terrorists, while the politicians are depicted as weakened through internal conflicts.
The second historical signifier relates to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The opening credit sequence of the film is dominated by a silent white flash which destroys the cityscape leaving only the impact crater over which the title Akira appears in red letters. When they lose control of their power, Akira, the most powerful of the mutant children, and Tetsuo become metaphorical nuclear weapons. Takeshi, Kyoko and Masaru, the spectral children, are haunting images of post-nuclear mutants. They are the result of the obsession of the military scientists’ research into the psyche and, at the end of the film, they will destroy the corrupt world as it is depicted in the first part of the film.
The third signifier relates to the Tokyo Olympics (1964) and the fourth to the political unrest and student demonstrations against the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) in the 1960s. Kaneda and his bôsôzoku friends exist in a quintessential postmodern city, Neo Tokyo 2019, where the ‘evils’ of each modern historical period coalesce into a post-atomic world-war futuristic present. The havoc and destruction of the past is being simultaneously criticised and contrasted with a future utopian society that will come about after the film.
Akira is, above all else, concerned with the esthetics of movement and destruction, subordinating any sense of narrative sequence to images of the spectacular; a point which was partially determined by the serial nature of the manga (comic) series from which Akira the film was derived. Akira the comic first appeared in Young Magazine in December 1982. The long-running serial structure of the manga narrative directly influenced the structure of the film version. Serial forms are influenced by several factors; first, serials are resistant to narrative closure and they have an extended middle. Traditional Hollywood realist narratives are generally constructed in the Todorovian sense, that is, the narrative begins with a stable situation which is disturbed by some force and, finally, there is a re-establishment of a second, but different equilibrium. The serial structure of a long-running manga is naturally resistant to the re-establishment of a final equilibrium.
Secondly, the serial form has multiple characters and sub-plots. Hence, the compression of this long-running manga serial into a feature-length film curtailed the development of the multiplicity of sub-plots which developed individual characterisations, enhancing the film’s sense of fragmentation and disruption of narrative flow. For in Akira, there is no one central character; there are multiple characters who interact within a given set of circumstances, reducing the film to a montage of multiple patterns of action. The bôsôzoku youths, Tetsuo and Kaneda, form the catalyst around which these multiple patterns of action coalesce.
The fast editing, the dislocation of narrative sequence and the disruption of the diegesis produce the sensation of fragmentation of images where meanings are disjointed and referential. This emphasises the sense of movement and the physical experience of ‘flow’ and the sensuality of destruction. Satô links the concept of ‘flow’ which refers to the ‘holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement’, to the physical sense of pleasure that bôsôzoku experience when they hold mass bike and car rallies. Satô quotes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
In the flow state, action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor. He experiences it as a unified flowing from one movement to the next, in which he is in control of actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present and future (1991: 18).
In fact, the whole structure of Akira is similar to that of a bôsô drive where there are periods of dare-devil driving which involve extreme concentration followed by rest periods at prearranged meeting places. These rest periods allow for stragglers to catch up with the main group and for the release of tension. In the film, there are periods of intense violence, destruction and physical movement punctuated by quiet periods when, for example, Kaneda is involved with his terrorist girlfriend Kei, or when the three mutant children converse. These quiet periods in the film allow the spectator to relax before the next sequence of violent and destructive images.
Through the techniques of fast editing and others listed above, the film reproduces the sense of ‘flow’ in, for example, the bike chase at the beginning of the film when Kaneda and his gang have cornered the Clown gang on the freeway and are in pursuit. The animation is that of a camera following the chase, sometimes from aerial shots which highlight the bike’s headlamps as they pierce the empty night sky, and at others from low-angle shots which emphasise the size and power of the bikes as the wheels rotate with a whirring sound. When the gang members do engage in combat, the camera speed changes to slow motion as a biker is thrown over the handle-bars, and as soon as he hits the tarmac, the camera reverts to normal speed, maximising the sensation of the bike’s movement as it speeds away leaving the victim instantly miles behind. These images, by emphasising the sensual experience of movement, are not in any sense representations of the ‘real’; they are images of what Baudrillard (1988) has called the ‘hyperreal’. The ‘hyperreal’ effaces the ‘contradictions between the real and the imaginary’; the ‘sensuous imperative’ of these images becomes our experience of the event depicted and our site of pleasure (Baudrillard 1988: 143–7). The sequence of the bike chase replicates, in the sensation of hallucinatory and hyperreal images, the ‘flow’ as experienced by actual bôsôzoku and described by Satô. The soundtrack further enhances the ‘sensual imperative’ of the images as the low key mechanical ‘post-rock’ music pulsates in time with the bike engines throughout the chase, complementing the metallic sparks that fly forth as bike hits tarmac and bodies fall to the ground with a thud. Satô noted the elaborate modifications bôsôzoku made to their vehicle exhaust systems and the importance of massed engine sounds to their pleasure in a bôsô drive. This pleasure is reproduced in the film through the soundtrack.
Baudrillard’s concept of the ‘hyperreal’ also applies to the historical signifiers listed above. As stated earlier, Akira was targeted at a particular audience: adolescent males, who could relate to the bôsôzoku sub-cultural images and styles which pervade the film. These targeted spectators are at least one generation removed from the actual experiences of the historical events and so their knowledge of the ‘dark valley’ period and the political unrest of the 1960s is already indirect and fragmentary, a point the film exploits in its structuring of the images of demonstrations and the violence and degeneration of this cybernatised society.
The film reproduces futuristic images of a city in the age of simulation, where signs now bear no relationship to reality and the definition of the real becomes, in Baudrillard’s words, ‘that for which it is possible to provide an equivalent representation … the real becomes not only that which can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: the hyperreal’ (his emphasis; 1988: 145–6). As already noted, the Neo Tokyo cityscapes that punctuate the film are drawing on the iconography of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles/Tokyo in the year 2019, which has become a metaphor for urban decay. The warm orange colours which Otomo uses in the night scenes are taken directly from the polluted haze of Blade Runner. Akira’s Neo Tokyo is a ‘critical dystopia’ in that it projects images of a futuristic city which perpetuates the worst features of advanced corporate capitalism: urban decay, commodification and authoritarian policing. High-rise buildings representing corporate wealth exist alongside the dark decaying streets of the old town, highlighting the divisive nature of the society. Colored neon signs and holographs dominate the skyline, signifying commercialisation. They also provide the dominant source of light for the night scenes, complementing the motorcycle headlights of the bôsôzoku.
The cityscapes thus represent an aesthetic of postmodern decay, as well as revealing the dark side of scientific experimentation and technology. The uniqueness of architecture to a specific place, culture and time has been lost in Neo Tokyo. These images of a cityscape could be taken from any late capitalist city, such as New York, London. There is nothing in the scenes to link these images specifically to Tokyo.
As also has been noted, the film makes no attempt to place the images of violence and destruction within any logical form of cause-and-effect narrative. The images exist alone, relying on the shared cultural knowledge of the audience to produce meaning. The only assistance the audience is given is through a double mediation of news reports, which are either distorted background voice-over, as in the opening sequence, or television news flashes, complete with commercials, that echo forth from multiple video monitors in shop windows during riot scenes. The effect of this technique is to encourage the spectator to identify with Kaneda whose knowledge of the causes of the chaotic world in which he exists is at best fragmentary. It also works to foreground Kaneda and the Colonel who are, apart from Tetsuo and the three mutant children, the only characters given a semblance of a narrative flow in the film.
Both Kaneda and the Colonel are kôha types, the embodiment of a hard masculinity to which actual bôsôzoku youths aspire. Satô defines kôha as ‘the hard type [that] is a traditional image of adolescent masculinity which combines violence, valour and bravado with stoicism and chivalry’ (1991: 86). The kôha type of masculinity is contrasted with the nanpa, or soft type: ‘a skirt chaser or ladies’ man’ (Satô 1991: 86). The college student/dokushin kizoku belong to this latter group. The kôha school of masculinity also carries with it connotations of makoto (purity of motive) which is very much evident in the characters of Kaneda and the Colonel. Neither have been taken in by the corruption that characterises the degenerate society in which they live. Their use of violence is legitimated by their purity of motive and so, despite his extremely violent behavior, Kaneda is the real hero of the film.21
In Japanese popular culture, makoto takes precedence over efficiency as an esteemed cultural value, hence the Japanese predilection for the ‘tragic hero’ who proves his purity of spirit in death. However, Kaneda is also ‘efficient’. He is loyal as well, another highly valued characteristic in Japanese Confucian-based society. The flashbacks to the orphanage, where he first met Tetsuo, reinforce these characteristics while simultaneously exposing Tetsuo’s deepening dependence on him. These flashbacks have two functions: first, they are constructed to arouse a sense of sympathy in the spectator for Kaneda and Tetsuo; and thereby they reinforce the simplistic media-perpetuated view that the breakdown of the traditional family is to blame for adolescent delinquent behavior. But more importantly for their young audience, the flashbacks are liberating, picking up on the conventions of the nagare-mono22 and reflecting a trend in recent films targeted at the young, for example Kitchin and Kimi wa boku o suki ni naru (You Are Going to Fall in Love with Me), in which young adults (dokushin kizoku) are portrayed as being without the emotional clutter of the traditional extended family.
Kaneda’s qualities of makoto, efficiency and loyalty are continually compared to the bumbling of the other ‘bad’ characters in the film, particularly with Tetsuo, his one-time friend who, through his own personal weakness and as a result of experiments carried out on him by a scientist, metamorphoses into a destructive mass of protoplasm and metal.23 Tetsuo’s character is carefully structured in one of the multiple character sub-plots (fully developed in the manga series, but only hinted at in the film through flashbacks) to provide a foil for Kaneda. As children they lived in the same orphanage and Tetsuo came to rely on Kaneda’s superior strength. But Tetsuo’s envy of Kaneda was the weakness which inadvertently led him to become a test case for scientific experiments, after which his nascent psychic powers make him go on the rampage, killing the barman from the gang’s local haunt and Yamagata, another gang member. These incidents provide Kaneda with the legitimation necessary to confront the power that Tetsuo has become in the final climactic half of the film, for Tetsuo is no longer himself. As Yamagata asks just before his death, ‘Are you really Tetsuo?’
Kaneda, a bôsôzoku youth, through his academic failure, has been placed on the margins of this corrupt and emotionally empty society. His qualities of efficiency and loyalty, combined with his failure at school and his ignorance, make him the film’s embodiment of innocence and purity. Therefore he is qualified to become the founder of a new utopian society that will be formed after the old society has been purged through cataclysmic destruction.24 In the final scenes, Akira and the other three mutant children, the gods of the post-atomic war age, sacrifice themselves (as would have the traditional ‘tragic hero’) so that a new society can come into being with Kaneda as its progenitor. Apart from Kaneda, his girlfriend Kei and one other junior gang member, the Colonel is the only other survivor. He has also shown attributes of efficiency and sincerity of purpose, but more importantly, he is in control of artifacts, such as helicopters, advanced scientific weapons, etc. As Sontag states, in science fiction films things
are the locus of values because we exper-ience them, rather than people, as the sources of power. According to science fiction films, man is naked without his artifacts (1979: 494).
Since the Colonel and Kaneda are both representations of the kôha school and are shown to be efficient, loyal and competent in their use and control of artifacts, they are obvious survivors in a film which seeks to promote this image of masculinity.
The core values of makoto and loyalty which the film promotes give the characters (particularly Kaneda and the Colonel) a sense of historical continuity, as these are themes which, as I have already argued, go back through yakuza, nagare-mono and war-retro films to the jidai-geki (period/historical films) and Chûshingura story. This historical continuity is brought into sharp contrast with the fragmented time-frame and postmodernist mise-en-scène of the film. These values of the kôha hero are seen to override the postmodern social conditions which, according to the film, will self-destruct. Only those few, the bôsôzoku, who refuse to conform to the values of the corrupt world and who were forced to live on the margins of society, will survive to form a new and – by definition – a better world. The characters in Akira are spared the psychological struggle that Deckard experiences in Blade Runner over questions of how humanness is defined in a world of ‘simulacrum’. It is the bôsôzoku’s ignorance which shields them. Kaneda has no doubt about his basic humanness, his core values of makoto and loyalty, his ‘morality’, are never questioned in the film. As Harvey explains:
The depressing side of the film [Blade Runner] is precisely that, in the end, the difference between the replicant [cyborgs] and the human becomes so unrecognisable that they indeed fall in love … The power of the simulacrum is everywhere (1992: 313).
Akira, on the other hand, becomes a reaffirmation of recognised core values of traditional Confucian society and so provides a continuity of ‘morality’ which is felt to be lacking in the outside ‘de-industrialising’ world where traditional values are threatening to disintegrate.
Conclusion
Through an analysis of the meanings of the bôsôzoku sub-culture of style, the conventions of the nagare-mono film, and an examination of the determining role of the manga series on the narrative structure of the film, as well as a discussion of the adoption of images of a postmodern society inspired by Blade Runner, this chapter has attempted to demonstrate the importance of intertextual signifying systems in the creation of meaning in Akira. It has also sought to demonstrate how Akira, as a science fiction/horror film, ‘is [primarily] concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess’ (Sontag 1979: 491). Moreover, through the fragmentation of images and lack of narrative flow, the film makes disjointed references to politically unstable historical periods to create a view of a dystopic future.
Existing on the margins of this society are the bôsôzoku youths whose self-esteem is enhanced through the mythologising of their role in opposition to mainstream society, which is portrayed as corrupt and degenerate. This aspect of the film brings us back full circle to Cohen’s ‘compensatory function’ and explains in part the tremendous success in Japan, first of the manga series and subsequently of the film. Yet what of its popularity with youths from high occupational status groups who presumably do not need this emotional ‘compensation’? I would suggest that the film’s appeal lies in part in its ‘nostalgic’ portrayal of the outsider, free from the social constraints which force individuals to compromise. This is certainly the case with the nagare-mono films of the 1950s and 1960s, whose principal audiences were salarymen, those Japanese who Tayama describes as ‘being enmeshed in society’ and ‘living secure lives’ (1966).
Notes
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