An Amateur Utopia

A few weeks ago I attended a talk by Kinoshita Chigaya, Matsumoto Hajime, and Higuchi Takuro, about young people’s alternative politics in Japan. They spoke about their experiences and a loose group of young people around Matsumoto known as “Amateur’s revolt” (shirōto no ran) in particular, which gathers people in pursuit of an alternative lifestyle in the area around Kōenji station in West-Tokyo. Known for their spectacular events for quite some time, the group became internationally acknowledged for its involvement in organizing large-scale anti-nuclear demonstrations in Japan after 3/11. Matsumoto and Higuchi compared their experience with Japanese demonstrations to contemporary activism in other countries like the “occupy” movement in the U.S. (they had spent 10 days in a tent in Zuccotti park last autumn) or Taiwan. Here and there, they hinted at the possibility of an “amateurs’ utopia.”
Shirōto no ran was one of the key groups involved in the planning of the “Stop Nuclear Power Plants” demonstrations of 4/10, 6/11, 9/11 in Japan. According to Matsumoto, their suspected leading position (in fact, they were by far not the only actor) also made them target for the police, and after the 9/11 demonstration led to several arrests, they decided to take a step back and quit being majorly involved in organizing large-scale demonstrations. Of course, demonstrations did not cease but rather were organized all over the country more locally and on a smaller scale.
In their actions, they reshaped the image and maybe the idea of political protest in Japan variously. First, there seems to be no shared ideological agenda beyond the accumulation of personal interests and a general wish to live and act freely as equal human beings. Second, they don’t seem to be interested in convincing people about their ideas or in gaining more influence in society, for example by building a stronger organization. Listening to Matsumoto and Higuchi, one almost had the impression that their goal, at least to some extent, was to win a game against the authorities and their methods to repress demonstrations. By constantly inventing new crazy ideas nobody would expect, they turned the demonstrations into a kind of game of which they defined the rules each time anew and are still changing them in quite creative ways. In one of the demonstrations in Shinjuku, one of Tokyo’s most frequented railway stations, they bypassed the problem that the demonstration was only permitted until a certain time by borrowing campaign cars of politicians, which are permitted to park on the street in front of the station for giving speeches, thereby preventing the arrest of demonstrators who now could be considered as people listening to the “politicians” at the microphone.
Their descriptions of their own as well as other and foreign demonstrations express amazement and joy about the “carnivalesque” atmosphere and the craziness and mixture of the participants more than the political success they may have. Furthermore, they do not expect commitment from anybody. In a strange sense, this indifference, combined with their creative activism, not only suggests a rethinking of the concept of political protest, but it also poses the question of participation and subjective beliefs to each individual from a new angle.
In a sense very democratic, their approach seems to propose accepting a wide range of opinions articulated in discussions. Matsumoto talked about small-scale demonstrations organized by local residents not experienced in organizing demonstrations or political protest in general, for which members of “Shirōto no ran” acted as advisors. With great pleasure he related how everybody from housewife to retired shopowner was allowed to state their opinion on all topics at hand (with opinions for example ranging from “no more nuclear power” to “better standards in nuclear power plants”) and the process of agreeing on a central statement took for hours. Matsumoto ended the account by pointing out that after the meetings, he was not sure if the title “Shirōto no Ran” not really should go to these people, thereby expressing respect for their engagement and the way in which they handled individual differences.
As a community of young people who choose an alternative life not dominated by money or reputation, but rather by the desire to do what they want, Shirōto no Ran provides a creative alternative to the life most people in Japan and elsewhere are used to. Ignore the people in power, Shirōto no Ran aims to create a “mysterious space where anything is possible for anybody who enters.” (Matsumoto) Yet, there still is some kind of ideological basis for all this. Asked about the problem that demonstrations might annoy other people, both Matsumoto and Higuchi argued that life in society is necessarily a burden on other people, and urged the audience to start to cause other people more trouble and communicate individual ideas and desires more openly. Here, I wonder what happens if this turns into the dominant ideology and what happens if such individual expression/lifestyle causes others harm.
At this point, I think Shirōto no ran has had a valuable influence on the Japanese political landscape and the demographics of its actors, at least of variety of age and opinions is the measure. Part of their appeal and potential stems from the fact that they show others that an alternative life and public expressions of political opinions are possible. In their refusal to force their ideas on other people, they at least seem to accept a position as one way among many and do neither claim superiority over other ideological positions, nor demand recognition of their knowledge and expertise. Could they be heading towards a kind of amateur utopia close to that envisioned by Adam Roberts in his New Model Army?

Dissociative Identity Artists

After resisting the temptation for quite some time, I finally decided to give it a try. AKB48. Artists of the year at the 26th Japan Gold Disk Awards in January 2012. On stage every day. Even more present in all kinds of TV commercials. A planned, exploitive and devastating blow against Japanese music culture, according to David Morris and his comparison of the group with the Wu-Tang Clan. Although I agree with David in many ways, I have to admit that I almost admire the producer Akimoto for creating something far too forceful to ignore.
As David says, AKB goes one step further. As far as I can tell, Akimoto has created his own charts within J-Pop, a self-contained world staged as an internal, never ceasing adaptation of “Popstars.” Because the group can draw on 48 carefully selected girls who, in combination with their various outfits, are able to answer to a wide variety of female and male, old and young preferences and desires, AKB48 never fails to stay novel and attractive, at least for those who conceive of these terms as a set which is based on appearance. No question, there are many victims of this production, and, mocking such sacrifices, they are incorporated into a narrative that depicts the group as heroines who overcame many tough struggles in the past, as the lately released second “documentary” of their making, “Show must go on”, with the Japanese subtitle saying something like “while getting hurt, the girls withstand the pain and hold on to (or pursue) their dream” shows. (See) But this kind of exploitation, in combination with a large pool of dreaming girls, also allows Akimoto to create a kind of on-going game, in which the front girl is repeatedly selected in various ways. The two most striking examples of this I know of are the general election in June, in which fans could vote to determine the leading member for the next single, and the second “rock paper scissors tournament” in September 2011, where the members competed against each other for the pole position in the next single. To me it seems quite cynical that, with many 100000 votes in the election, and, if I remember correctly from the many TV news reports about the event, between 10000 and 15000 fans visiting the tournament, AKB48 may be said to draw more participation than the anti-nuclear protests in Tokyo, most of which were reported to draw together some 10000 demonstrators. Combining “the people's voice” and “luck” in this way and making both huge media events, to me seems like an intriguing new way of producing idols, that goes way beyond “old-fashioned” TV formats like Popstars and other similar shows.
In his observations on television, Adorno somewhere said that creating statistically “average” idols is the most sophisticated way the culture industry employs to uphold the belief that everybody can be a star, which, inquired with the same statistical methods, turns out to be no more than an illusory, minimal chance. The production of AKB48 adds to this initial selection process two new elements I am in my cynicism tempted to call participatory culture and explicit randomness, which seem to contradict each other but both share the intension to replace the common “experts” selecting the winners by some universal criteria. The winner of the latter event, shortly afterwards, had a TV commercial advertising a candy of some kind as the secret to her success in the tournament, with the ad ending with herself crying „lier!“ It might be interesting, maybe crucial, to ask what the intentional strategy behind this ad was. But not now. I'd rather finish this section with a toast to Akimoto, who seems to have taken the culture industry to a new level, and managed to develop a group mostly known among Japanese otaku or extreme fans of manga, anime, idols, etc., into a country-wide popular brand. Is this the dawn of participatory culture-industrial randomness?
This is not the only interesting thing about AKB48 and their sister groups (lately, JKB48 was born as an Indonesian copy of AKB, also produced by Akimoto). Although I do not think that there is anything to say about the music, I would like to mention two of the various interesting effects and side-effects of the concept. First, AKB48 can be anywhere. That is, since neither TV appearances nor live performances have to include all members (or are capable of holding them all, for example in the case of small TV studios, etc.) they technically are able to appear in different places at the same time. Furthermore, if for example 6 members have contracts for TV commercials (I haven't counted, but there are a lot of spots with AKB 48), you might end up seeing them ten, twenty times within 1 or 2 hours. This practice is, of course, not limited to media appearance, but may also be applied to stage performances. Arguably, AKB48 bends the limits of time and space.
But this is only possible, because they do away with any (traditional? Old-fashioned?) notion of the “group” or “band” as one more or less coherent unit of artists with some kind of “image” shared by the fans. In order to address many different audiences, AKB 48 members not only represent very different types of “girl,” they also are placed into very different contexts. Thus, AKB at more or less the same time promotes a chain of convenience stores, a chain of lunchbox stores (at both of which you can buy lunch), a chain of real-estate agencies, but they also advertise insulting web-services like AKBabywhere members of the AKB web-services (1480 Yen or 15 Euro per month) can create “virtual babies” with the AKB members by uploading a picture of themselves, in an even more ridiculous ad. This clip, in my view, seems to nurish associations with sex ads (“Would you like to make a baby with me?”), but the idea also mocks all those who really want to have children but are unable to do so. While drastic expression has always been an important part of literary fiction and its critical potential, and is particularly vivid in Japanese anime and manga, this clip is so disturbing because it depicts real people, namely an AKB member and a real child which she pseudo-breastfeeds smiling into the camera. I may be very old-fashioned, but I do believe that there is a line which many people are not willing to cross, but which is crossed here. But I'd be happy to hear other opinions on this clip.
To return to the earlier discussion, it seems as if AKB48 has many faces and very differing appearances according to the respective context. They could even be called dissociative identity artists. In times of “patch-work identity, contemporary psychologists emphasize the importance of the work the individual puts into making this patchwork coherent as crucial for her or his well-being. At the moment, the seeming incoherence of AKB48 may be met by a similar incoherence of the fans and of their distinct media consumption patterns. But in the age of the internet and youtube, it will be for the fans to decide how long AKB48 (and other similar groups) can manage to maintain this coherence in incoherence. Or maybe the fans have already reacted to this problem by developing not only preferences of specific members, but also consumption patterns by which they are able to ignore the unlikable aspects and focus on the likable ones, something like an art of dissociative consumption.

Lounging in CHAOS

Some time ago, I had the chance to visit the art exhibition CHAOS*EXILE in Akihabara (Tokyo), which was part of the FESTIVAL/TOKYO, a performing arts festival organized in various Japanese cities.

CHAOS*EXILE is described by it's creators, the artist group CHAOS*LOUNGE, as a collection of deliberate efforts to create new art style in our postmodern, animalistic times—a reference to Azuma Hiroki's 2001 book on the otaku culture in Japan. The artists of CHAOS*LOUNGE acknowledge that they cannot but draw on their own, contemporary culture, which is strongly influenced by the otaku culture with its manga, anime, figures, concentrated in places like the electric town around Akihabara station. At the same time, CHAOS*LOUNGE explicitly aims at inquiring the critical potential of this same subculture, which they criticize for its partly apolitical, apathetic reaction to the the events of March 11. “After 3.11 what has become clear is that there are aspects of the otaku that will not change even after the catastrophe, a rather regretful part of digital Japan where an indigenous system becomes simply peer pressure. […] We must make inquiries. What are the possibilities for art after the era of “animalization”? In the midst of this “animalized” world, the opportunity for constructing relations between society and the individual, and chief of all for the function seemingly possessed by “art”, can only be discovered in subcultures.” (http://chaosxlounge.com/chaosexile/chaosexile.html)

The exhibition consisted of two stages, the first of which was publicly accessible and free of charge. Here, the visitor was confronted with a room full of ufo catchers, which she could play endlessly. Instead of the usual prices (plush toys, etc), these cases were filled with various items equipped with a wire loop to grab, which could be exchanged for a ticket to the second stage. Whoever didn't have time to play or failed to catch one of the wires could also buy a ticket for 500 yen (about 5 euro). The second stage was located on two floors of a small building in a side street, almost hidden from the eyes, and could only be found with the help of a map printed on the back of the ticket.

Although I was not able to make any photographs, I will try to describe the exhibition a little. The first stage, with its ufo catchers, helium filled balloons, and a great variety of distorted figures known from anime and manga, which were attached to the walls and—together with stacks of books—filled the inside of the ufo catchers, could be read as an apocalyptic environment ruled by chaos. While there were no direct references to any specific manga or anime, the whole idea of free play might refer to “playfulness” as a way of entering (exile?) today. But it could as well be understood as an allegory on the mechanism through which effort or skill can be short-circuited with money, which granted equal access to the second stage.

The second stage consisted of three rooms on two floors. All walls consisted of wooden boards, all surfaces in the first room were filled with collages of different styles. The website may give an impression of parts of this room. The second room was dark and only contained a monitor which showed a video art work, containing of an endless walk through a labyrinth of website screenshots. The third room had a plastic tent in it, with all kinds of tools and entertainment goods scattered on the floor. The impression was chaotic and reminded of the video footage from the refugee camps after March 11. Without this element, to be honest, I wouldn't have found any explicit reference to March 11 or the situation afterwards.
With it, however, in particular through the combination of all three rooms, the second stage seemed to express and criticize the chaos in the aftermath of 3/11, and the impossibility and inability to cope with the situation. The aimless run through the labyrinth in the video art work at least did not suggest any direction, neither gave hope for finding a way out. Maybe the artists have not yet found, what they are inquiring for. Or maybe I couldn't detect it. Speculating a bit further, the pop cultural collage in the first room, read from the chaos in the tend, might even be read as a critique towards the apolitical disorder of Japanese popular culture in general.

Yet, maybe it is my own pessimism that prevented me from detecting much hope in the second stage—or maybe my ignorance towards the field of contemporary art. If anybody who had the chance to visit the exhibition or is familiar with other works of CHAOS*LOUNGE, I would be very interested in other impressions In any case, the activities of CHAOS*LOUNGE are rather sincere and might be worth following in the future.

Learning Taiwan

About a month ago I attended the East Asia Popular Culture Association conference in Taipei, Taiwan, which was actually my first ever academic conference. While I don't intend to go into particulars about what the EAPCA itself was like, I do want to say that I finally understand what my colleagues and supervisors mean when they say that conferences are a good place to get in contact with people working in the same areas. Long story short, the EAPCA was fun and informative.

What I really want to talk about is my own ignorance. Thanks to staying in Taipei and being around a great number of scholars who work on Taiwanese culture, I realized just how little I knew about Taiwan.

Prior to my trip, I had no idea the extent to which Taiwan's history was tied to Japan. I did not know that Taiwan was at one point a Japanese colony. I did not know that there was a generation of Taiwanese who were more literate in Japanese than Chinese (which caused enormous problems when China banned use of the Japanese language after Japan seceded). I knew that anime and manga were popular in Taiwan, but I was not aware that the dynamics of Japanese popular culture in Taiwan was so utterly complex.

It's a little difficult to wrap my head around. While the United States has its own history with Japan, and the popularity of anime and manga in the US has resulted in people speculating about the influence of the former onto the latter, it is nowhere near the same as the relationships in history and culture that exist between Taiwan and Japan.

As it's not my specialty though, I'll refrain for now from positing any hypotheses of my own. In the mean time, I'll be glad to read what other scholars have to say.

A Sushi Typhoon?

A few days ago I had the pleasure of listening to Sten-Kristian Saluveer from the Department of Asian Studies at Estonian Institute of Humanities (Tallinn University/Tokyo University), who presented his Monbukagakusho research project titled "Contemporary Japanese film in distribution: between imagination, globalization and gaze".
In recent years, Sten argues, Japanese cinema has become an increasingly global phenomenon, not only in the sense that A-movies have gained international popularity, but also with respect to an increasing number of B-class movies produced specifically for the international market. Arguing that both tendencies are strongly connected to discourses of exoticism, techno-orientalism, Japanization, or Asianization, and lastly Americanization not only via content, but also on the level of distribution, he hopes to work out a vocabulary to analyze and understand the international distribution of Japanese cinema in the age of globalization—a field which, according to Sten, has been widely neglected in (Western) research on Japanese cinema. Sten's project sounds very interesting and I'm eager to read the findings. In the meanwhile, I'd like to write about some thoughts that came up in a discussion we had afterwards, mostly concerning the label "Sushi Typhoon" (Nikkatsu) and "Japaneseness", in hope this may trigger further discussion.

Sushi Typhoon is, according to Sten, a film label exclusively launched less than two years ago with the aim of creating "Japanese" films for the overseas market. With excessively violent and "Japanese" films like "Yakuza Weapon" ("Machine gun arm. Rocket launcher leg. And a bad attitude to match. [...]"), "Alien vs Ninja", "Helldriver" ("Ash from space has divided Japan into two halves, and a schoolgirl with an artificial heart and chainsaw sword must travel to the zombie-infected north... to kill her undead mother."), or "Karate-Robo Zaborgar" ("A modern-day update of the classic Japanese sci-fi television show!"), Sushi Typhoon is dedicated to trash of a very specific, “Japanese” kind.
But what exactly does that mean? Looking at these descriptions, what interests me most is why and with what exactly Sushi Typhoon might, as their trailer promises, “blow your mind wide open”—nice phrase, by the way.

[If you have a few seconds, please watch the trailer for yourself.]

The self-recognition of Sushi Typhoon reads: "Connoisseurs of dangerous and wild Japanese cinema need look no further to satisfy their hunger for comedy, action, horror, splatter and raucous cult entertainment: The Sushi Typhoon is headed for America’s shores, ready to fill your belly with the raw entertainment you’ve been craving!" (http://www.sushi-typhoon.com/about-sushi-typhoon, emphasis mine)
My initial reaction was to label this as yet another example of (successfully) selling "Japaneseness" (or "Orientalism")—notice by the way who is targeted here—which, as far as I am concerned, would to some extent mean that they use the idea that there is something called "Japan", and it might also imply that the images of this "Japan" re-presented by Sushi Typhoon are somehow "wrong". However, refusing to believe that fans identify these images with something like a "real" Japan per se—not only because I don't believe such thing exists—I would like to think about how the notion of "Japan" or the exotism behind it works here, what kind of "Japan" is sold and consumed.

A first observation from the website of Sushi Typhoon is that, while something vaguely recognizable as "Japanese" (Ninja, Yakuza, etc.) is present here, it is present in a strongly twisted form that seems to generate a fictional world fairly distant from "reality". This does, however, not imply that the idea of "Japan" has nothing to do with this fiction and the popularity these films, according to Sten, enjoy since the label was launched. Rather, I would argue that it has everything to do with it, in the sense that this "Japan" in Sushi Typhoon films is the password to an "imaginary space", here understood with Phillip Wegner (2002: xvi-xvii) as a space that is nowhere (utopian) "precisely to the degree that [it makes] somewhere possible, offering a mechanism by which people will invent anew the communities as well as the places they inhabit."
This imaginary space of "Japan" is a symbolic space, stretched out by the symbolic traces of various images of Japan but reaching beyond them, is produced by fans and directors and functions as a cross-genre label and a space of expectation and expressive possibility beyond existing categories. Undeniably, this is only possible because of these traces of a "Japaneseness" (as a specific "Otherness"). But my feeling is that for the fans, this Japaneseness has its meaning not in its "information value" (in the sense that they would expect insights into any "real" Japan), but rather in its function as a distancing device that exoticizes the imaginary space named "Japan" and thus equips it with a sense of alternativeness to their own everyday life (e.g., the films they are used to). A space that makes you expect the unexpected.
Although, at this point, a closer look at the contents of the films is required (they are out and running since last weekend in Tokyo's cinemas), this could suggest that this imaginary space of "Japanese" B-class films has a deconstructive political potential. If this imaginary "Japan" is, in any way, related to what is thought to be the "real" Japan, this relation would be a disruptive one in the sense that "Japan" hosts alternatives to the common images of Japan. "Ninja-robots" and "machinegun-arms" instead of "sushi" could (intentionally or not) be, in a sense, a pretty radical engagement with the idea of a "Japanese reality" itself, thus making the title "sushi typhoon" and the advertisement-like message about blowing minds a quite adequate description. On the other side, one could argue that the fans are not interested in establishing a connection to (Japanese) reality at all. Maybe the attractiveness of Sushi Typhoon films rather origins in the collective engagement with this space of "Japan" and its "Othering" itself.

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Phillip Wegner (2002): Imaginary Communities. Berkley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Experimenting with “New Model Army”

Some time ago, I had the pleasure to listen to a vivid, passionate and very entertaining talk Adam Roberts gave on ignorance, giants, and democracy, at the Leiden University College in The Hague. In contemporary democracies, says Roberts, the basic structure is that representatives (the head) are performatively elected by the necessarily ignorant people (the body) to make informed decisions. While the latter are informed and thus can always turn out wrong, Roberts claims that performative statements are acts and thus cannot be right or wrong. From this starting point, his book “New Model Army” is an attempt to conceive of a “total” democracy within a “headless” army (the giant) based on performance.
The book itself tries to convey that such a democratic giant without a head is much more effective than state-bound, hierarchical armies that exist today, because it facilitates a truly democratic mode of knowledge aggregation and decision-making. Roberts' “playful collective headlessness” that is the democratic army “Pantegral” is hired by the Scottish government to fight for the liberation of Scotland against the English army.
While the book surely is mind-blowing and highly recommended, because it outlines a very radical and profound form of democracy in one of the most violent situations imaginable (maybe it is this combination, that makes the project so fascinating) it also threw up some questions concerning the central role of technology in Roberts' concept, which I would like to address here.
In order to facilitate the democratic distribution of knowledge and decision making, Roberts introduces a multifunctional online network consistent of a “wiki” and a “wifi”, which are used by the soldiers to communicate, find information, and to vote on strategic decisions. The wiki is updated constantly by all soldiers who have updates and everybody is heard—at least, if the majority of listeners think the comment is relevant. It is guarded against enemy attacks by semi-intelligent protection software and connects the soldiers without demanding for any physical presence. This communication network further influences the ways in which the army acts and moves, and enables it to gather its forces or disperse, to form units of variable size and with different objectives all at once, with decisions made by all soldiers via vote. It is also the wiki, which serves as a platform for all necessary information accessible to all soldiers any time and, for Roberts, it follows that specialization (like medics, etc.) is not necessary any more, since everybody takes care of their gear and body themselves, and may ask for help via the wiki any time.

The human vs. the machine
The idea of a headless democracy is very appealing and seems to me somehow “more democratic” than its alternative. But given the description above, I am wondering whether the computed network system Roberts army relies on, might not have to be considered as another kind of head, although not one that takes direct action by deciding, but rather in the sense that this system serves as the central organ—the nervous system, without which everything breaks dow–of the giant and is limited by the information it contains through its databases or its members. These members of the army, it might be added, at some point have to make more or less informed decisions, and my guess would be that, as a tendency, “better” decisions keep the individual soldier alive longer. Leaving this last point aside, the question I would like to ask is, whether the “wiki” system is not itself an organizational principle that dictates interpersonal relationships via rationality of algorithms. Doesn't this make the giant somewhat techno-democratic? Exaggerating a little, one could say that the soldiers submit their “humanity” to the dictum of measurability. The book itself, where it describes the formations of small units of soldiers, or the love the narrator feels for one of his comrades whose death disturbs him considerably may hint at this tension and even serve as a counterargument. But this implies that true equality (in love, friendship, work) on a personal level may only be achieved, if the “human factor” is first short-circuited with the machine. But even with such measures taken, I would argue that, as long as discussion and interaction relies on oral or written language, such equality can never be achieved—precisely because it does not abandon all human-human interaction.

Science Fantasy?
The second question is more concerned with the genre of Science Fiction itself. Roberts novel draws on (social, political, and computer) science in its imagination of a (future) society, and thus is rightly called Science Fiction. But at the same time, I couldn't help wondering how the “wired-up” soldiers can update the wiki, talk to their comrades, kill several enemies while bombed from above, and make decisions on votes more or less at once. While aware of the potential science fiction has precisely due to its fictional, not yet scientific character, I admittedly kept asking myself, how alien a technology has to seem in order to be perceived as “super-human” or “magic”. That is, if the gap between the present and the fictional world is expressed through one or several unknown elements or artifacts and their effects on a society or an individual, my question would be, whether the label of technology is enough to make something “science” fictional as opposed to “fantastic”. In his “Short History of Photography”, Walter Benjamin (2002: 303) claimed that photography, because it can show what was hitherto hidden from the view by means of slow-motion and zoom, reveals the difference between technology and magic as profoundly historical variable. Turned around, I would argue that in fictional works, this variable represents a gap to the present—some kind of simulation gap “between the rule-based representation of a source system and a user’s subjectivity”, as game scholar Ian Bogost (2006: 107) conceptualizes it—that always opens a space for imagination and may be interpreted differently, thus leaving the decision between science fiction and fantasy to the reader, who may either work it out cognitively, or simply solve this question performatively without having to stick to what the majority has decided.


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Benjamin, W. (2002). Kleine Geschichte der Photographie. In D. Schöttker (Ed.), Walter Benjamin - Medienästhetische Schriften(pp. 300-324). Frankfurt (Main): Suhrkamp.
Bogost, I. (2006). Unit operations: an approach to videogame criticism. Cambridge/London: The MIT Press.
Roberts, Adam (2010). New Model Army. Gollancz.

Final Fantasy: Advent Children & Character Camera

Final Fantasy: Advent Children is a sequel to the 1990s role-playing video game Final Fantasy VII, though it is less a sequel in the sense that it continues the story VII (which it does), and more that it is a return to a previous work, a film akin to the nostalgia of meeting up with an old friend. Final Fantasy VII was an enormously influential game. It showed off the power of the then-cutting-edge PlayStation video game console with its elaborate 3-D graphics, and through those visuals it was one of the first (if not the first) Role Playing Game to expand to a much wider audience. For many people, Final Fantasy VII was their first great game, the first to move them to tears, to engross them in its story, to make them fall in love with its characters. Having never played Final Fantasy VII for any extended period of time, I was not one of those people, but I knew quite a few who practically grew up on Final Fantasy VII. In many cases, they saw and still do see Final Fantasy VII as the epitome of not only the Final Fantasy franchise itself, but of storytelling in video games in general.

Still, despite my lack of personal experience with the original game, I had decided to watch Final Fantasy: Advent Children because just by being around so many people who played and loved Final Fantasy VII, I knew a lot about it. This viewing for the Vistas blog is not my first time seeing it either. But upon the second viewing of the film, I noticed a detail that had escaped me the last time around. As the film opened and the credits began to roll, I saw “Director: Tetsuya Nomura,” and upon being conscious of his enormous influence on this movie, I could not ignore it.


Tetsuya Nomura had worked on Final Fantasy VII, but it wasn’t in the capacity of director or producer. Nomura was the character designer, and Advent Children feels like a movie directed by a character designer. Not only are each of the characters themselves re-designed with greater attention to detail and updated fashions—compare the heroes of the story with the plain designs of the children around them—but the shots are framed in a way that glorifies some aspect of the characters in them. The movie often lingers on the characters for extended periods, most noticeably in the slow-motion sequences during action scenes, as if the overall shot itself is less important than the character in it, or perhaps, in terms of Advent Children, that the character is the shot.

I do not believe that Nomura could not have possibly done otherwise, or that all character designers-turned-directors will create the same type of movie. However, I do believe that Nomura’s past with Final Fantasy VII as a character designer influenced Advent Children’s visuals profoundly, and that he would have had to make a much more conscious effort to go against his artistic instincts. I think that Nomura had his own nostalgia for the characters, or that he understood well the number of people who saw Advent Children as a fated reunion. As someone who was not part of that nostalgia but knew its effects, perhaps this is how such a movie comes across for me.

Though I never did play it myself, Final Fantasy VII actually still did influence my life in a certain sense. I remember when the game first came out back in the late 1990s, when discussions about it raged across the video game-loving section of the internet, back when people used the term “Information Super-Highway” seriously. Some fans who self-identified as “gamers,” including those who had enthusiastically followed the Final Fantasy since the beginning, saw Final Fantasy VII as the advent of the “new school” of gamers, the end of the golden age, where the doors of the RPG kingdom and video games in general had been flung open. For years, this was my image of how Final Fantasy VII was perceived. Then one day, I saw a post on a video game forum decrying the state of the Final Fantasy franchise and the role-playing genre. In it, the poster wishes a return to the great, “old-school” RPGs like Final Fantasy VII. I had actually seen a video game go from new-fangled tool of the whippersnapper to a symbol of the old days. In that respect, Final Fantasy: Advent Children says a lot about where video games have gone in the years since.