The World and Japan: Animated Anxiety in a Global Age

Abstract

The spread of pop cultural productions out from one country across the world is the very expression of globalism. The significance of Japanese anime and manga in America is becoming increasingly apparent; that it is no longer simply a product for the Japanese market, for the exclusive consumption of its particular culture, means that it has placed itself within and recognized itself as part of that globalized world. On the one hand, the positioning of anime within the larger world has its advantages for its writers and the culture at large, by providing Japan a voice in that world. On the other hand, despite anime's spread across the world and the potential benefits of globalization, within the narratives of anime itself there persists a strain of anxiety and suspicion regarding the prospect of increased economic and cultural globalism. In anime's villainous multi-national corporations and its frequent depiction of a de-humanizing internet (Ghost in the Shell, Serial Experiments Lain), we see a fear that the integration of economy and the melding of culture threatens identity at the level of the individual and the nation. This essay analyzes the ambivalent representations (narratives and images) of globalism in literature (the novels of Haruki Murakami) and also more popular forms of culture such as anime; and it considers both in light of sociologist Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, in order to explore how these narratives articulate their anxiety about the impact of the global system on the individual and about the formation of identity in a global age.