Urusei Yatsura and "1968"

A few days ago I visited an activist in Sapporo, a central member of a group - Hokke no kai - that had become famous in the late 80's for its protests against the Tomari Nuclear Power Plant. I was charmed by house – a huge grey structure made of concrete and filled on the inside with flags, old toys, instruments and other quite quotidian things that for some mysterious reason appeared like wonderful and beautiful decorations. In particular I remember an enormous palm tree whose green leaves together with the light from big windows and the sound of water from upstairs lent the room where we sat a sunken, submarine quality.

But what I want to write about today is neither the house nor anti-nuclear power activism. The members of his group, my host told me, often used to watch anime together, and today I want to write about the anime which we watched together in the evening – Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984, directed by Oshii Mamoru, below Beautiful Dreamer).

First a brief synopsis. It starts off with Ataru’s and Lum’s highschool, where everyone is busy preparing for the school festival. Everything quickly takes an uncanny turn. The overworked teacher Onsen-mark breaks down in a neurosis the day before the festival and deliriously laments to the school nurse (and miko) Sakura that people have always said "until tomorrow", as far back as he can remember. What if time is standing still? What if they are all damned to live like this forever, caught in a time trap, like Urashima Tarô? Soon other strange things start to happen. In the evening they are unable to leave school since all streets lead back to it. A taxi chauffeur suddenly starts to sound like a demon, talking about being a turtle taking his passenger (Sakura) to the Dragon Palace. A terrific scene is when Ataru and a few others are riding through what appears to be completely deserted streets late at night and suddenly hear the eerie sound of flutes and drums, and see some weird musicians parading through one of the streets. “E-he-he, seems the chindonya have started 24 hour service”, Ataru suggests nervously. In a desperate escape attempt involving a jet fighter, they discover that the entire neighborhood around the school is travelling through space on the back of a gigantic turtle, apparently torn away from the rest of the earth.

Life now changes: they relax, drive around in the empty town on a big truck, play and have fun all day. In the background we see that the school has fallen into ruins and sunk into a lake. New life starts in the ruins of the empty city. Time stands still. The convenience store alone is a cornucopia forever filled with new goods. Apart from Sakura, Mendô is the only one who continues to search for a way to get back to ordinary life. Lum feels sorry for him and, carrying a big melon, comes to invite him to play with the others. The only thing she cares for, she says, is to have fun with her friends every day for ever and ever. Finally, however, this world is revealed as a dream created by the comical Kansaiben-speaking demon Mujaki. When Sakura manages to capture him, the dream (after some breathtaking scenes) collapses back into reality, the normal everyday routine of the school.

Who, by the way, is the demon? He is hardly Satan, as Sakura insinuates. His name, Mujaki, is spelled with the signs for dream, evil and devil, but the word is homonymous with the word for innocent. To be sure, he admits that it was he who made Caesar’s and Hitler’s dreams come true, but how the dream develops depends on the human being he happens to possess. Tired of all megalomaniacs he’d encountered through history he actually wanted to retire, but then one day in an aquarium (another allusion to the Dragon’s Palace?) he finally met someone who was different and utterly innocent – Lum, who only dreamed of having fun together with Ataru and the other friends.

How should we interpret the film? We can recall that it was released in 1984. Miyadai Shinji famously claims that popular culture in the 80’s was characterized by two competing eschatologies or visions of the world’s final destiny. One was the “neverending everyday” (owari naki nichijô), which was suffused by the sentiment that “the future will not be different from the present”. Since the future will bring neither “brilliant progress” nor any “terrible collapse”, there is nothing left to do but to take it easy and play about endlessly, as in everyday life in a school or in a junior college. Apocalyptic visions are explicitly and mercilessly poked fun at in manga such as Takahashi Rumiko’s Urusei yatsura. A second eschatological vision was the “post-nuclear war community” (kakusensôgo no kyôdôtai). Its violent message of “redemption through Armageddon” was expressed in smash hits such as Ôtomo Katsuhiro’s Akira or Miyazaki Hayao’s Nausicaa (Miyadai 1995:86ff).

If we try to situate Beautiful Dreamer in relation to Miyadai’s two eschatologies, we find that neither fits very well. It is true that it no longer has much in common with the “neverending everyday” or the original light and innocent playfulness of the manga Urusei yatsura on which it was based. Takahashi Rumiko acknowledged as much when she unenthusiastically commented that the anime was Oshii’s work, not hers. To some extent, one could perhaps claim that Oshii – famous for anime hits like Ghost in the Shell that belong rather unambiguously in the second strand of eschatology – transformed the work into its opposite, into a “post-nuclear war” work.

Still, this diagnosis is insufficient. The Armageddon-like struggles of the “post-nuclear war” are usually characterized by a paranoiac feel that comes out very well in films like Matrix. In these films, it is taken for granted that the task of the main protagonist is to break out of the “fake” world of simulacra and return to “reality”. The “illusion” or “dream” must be denied. If we look at Beautiful Dreamer, we feel at once that “dream” or “illusion” plays an entirely different role. The Dragon Palace in the sea, which Urashima Tarô visited, wasn’t a prison. It was a place of lost happiness. That’s why time seemed to stand still there. Sure, there are some characters in the film – like Mendô or Sakura, or, finally, Ataru himself – who try to break out of the dream. But these attempts are portrayed as somewhat ridiculous. Especially Mendô, who likes to drive around with a tank, is portrayed as a self-important wanna-be hero and besserwisser who is very much a bother (mendô) to the others. Neither is the demon who created the dream really evil. I feel a lot of sympathy for his attempt to make Lum’s dream come true.

What characterizes the anime’s relation to dream or illusion is neither a whole-hearted affirmation of it, nor a desperate and paranoid attempt to combat it, but rather a form of love for a dream that is not only beautiful, but above all fragile, ephemeral and rare. Time stands still, yet at the same time one knows that the dream may soon be over. One lives in it with all one’s heart, because one knows that life is so rarely visited by moments like this.

Let me return to the film: to the scenes when the young friends drive around lazily in the empty town and the school lies in ruins in a lake. There is a strange bliss in these scenes. A new life starts among the ruins, where everything is for free. Time stands still. Parents and teachers and all authority are gone. There’s freedom in the air. To me this is a fine image of a town that has turned into a no-man’s-land, a commons. There was a memorable monologue here by Megane-san, which was too long for me to memorate, but as I recall it, it blended effortlessly into the lyrical descriptions of the liberated zones behinds the barricades in Paris in May 68.

Behind the demonstrations and riots, the clashes with the police, the wildcat strikes and factory occupations in May 1968, a new everyday unfolded behind the barricades, a life in which ”the uncommon became the everyday”, as Viénet writes (Viénet 1992:72). Participants write enthusiastically about how they experienced this everyday separated from the rest of society: time stopped, as did the metro, the trains, the cars and the workplaces. ”People strolled, dreamed, learned how to live. Desires began to become, little by little, reality.” (ibid 77). Cars were burned. People got used to the disappearance of money, instead they helped each other.

The hierarchical pyramid had melted like a lump of sugar in the May sun. People conversed and were understood in half a word. There were no more intellectuals or workers, but simply revolutionaries engaged in dialogue.... (Viénet 1992:76f)

No one worked. No planes, trains, mail. No gas. No trash collection. Neighbors, who had lived within ten feet of each other for twenty years, became acquainted, strolling and talking in the empty streets. So this is a revolution, they said – not bad. (Feenberg & Freedman 2001: 43)

Life in the occupied parts of town was more or less like a dream. Sadie Plant has described it as “surrealism on the streets” (Plant 1992:101). Lacking newspapers, people chatted with each other. Alain Jouffroy recalled “the great joy that we experienced for the first time in the streets of Paris during May 1968, that joy in the eyes and on the lips of all those who for the first time were talking to each other.” (cit. i Plant 1992:101).

As I have already mentioned (here), this is a state that can be described with Turner’s term "communitas". In contrast to the alienated being of everyday urban life stand the intoxicating moments when the atomized masses seem to melt together in an undifferentiated feeling of universal brother- or sisterhood, when borders dissolve and everything seems possible. The experience of alienation seems, if only temporarily, to be suspended and to revert itself into a feeling of spontaneous belonging together. ”Revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society.” (Vaneigem 2001: 110).

Conversely, the waking up from the dream is the dismal return to order, the retour à la normale, the defeat of the revolutionary movement which the Situationists depicted as a herd of sheep heading back to the fold. As in Beautiful Dreamer, the students return to the school bench, the festival is over, the clocks start ticking again.

"What a master-piece!" (“Kessaku deshô!”), my host said when the film was over.

References:

Feenberg, Andrew & Freedman, Jim (2001) When Poetry Ruled The Streets: The French May Events of 1968, Albany: State University of New York Press

Miyadai, Shinji (1995) Owarinaki nichijô o ikiro (Live the never-ending everyday), Tokyo: Chikuma shobô

Plant, Sadie (1992) The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, London and New York: Routledge

Vaneigem, Raoul (2001) The Revolution of Everyday Life, London: Rebel Press.

Viénet, René (1992) Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68, New York: Autonomedia, London: Rebel Press.

Homage to great wanderers & restless minds

"Only those thoughts that come when you are walking have any value” (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

”Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. Then, signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre. Paris taught me this art of straying...” (Benjamin, One-Way Street)

"In middle age Bob became increasingly eccentric. He dressed strangely, often slept with his clothes on and started to wander around on the streets all alone. He liked to explore socially backward parts of the city, especially ethnic areas where he wouldn't necessarily be recognized. He also prowled around in the wealthy areas of Los Angeles not far from where he was living. One day when Ted Perlman came back home to his house in San Fernando Valley he caught sight of what he thought was a bum sitting on the pavement. Perlman was about to ask him to leave when he realized it was Bob. 'I thought I should drop by and see you and Peggi.’ 'How long have you been sitting here?' Perlman asked. 'An hour and a half maybe. I've been looking around at the area', Bob replied" (Howard Sounes' Dylan biography)

“The world must be known through the legs and the genitals. Friends and lovers are the best media for learning about the world, something money cannot buy. It’s something you create with your lower half.” (Shimada Masahiko)

“It’s good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.” (Anatole France)


Here's to Cisco an' Sonny an' Leadbelly too,
An' to all the good people that traveled with you.
Walter Benjamin, Bob Dylan, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Murakami Haruki, Louis Aragon, Guy Debord, Charles Baudelaire, Jack Kerouac, Rimbaud, Socrates, and Chaplin.
The wanderer as media, the isôrô artist, the marebito, the outsider, the visiting stranger, the disappearing holy man. Yes, here's to your hearts and hands...
All ye who come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

Credits to the owners of the images & thanx to Eva (from whose refrigerator door I stole one of the quotations). And apologies to all you other great wonders & wanderers. I’m sorry for only mentioning celebrities. My homage goes via them to you.

The start of a leisurely voyage

I read or (re-read) a few texts by Dame-ren yesterday as part of my preparations for my trip to Tokyo in September. I would like to jot down a few thoughts that caught hold of me while reading (and which refused to let me go).

Dame-ren (”the league of good for nothings”) was a group that became famous in the 90’s for rejecting the Japanese work ethic and affirming the life-style of so-called losers in Japanese society: jobless, poor, or unpopular young men and women – usually freeters (”free Arbeiter” or people lacking a regular job), unemployed, dropouts from school or university, homeless, NEET (Not in Employment, Education, or Training), social withdrawers or mentally disabled. The lifestyle of dropouts, they affirmed, could much more fun and rewarding than that of being a ”respected” citizen or regular employee, worrying about his or her career, income or status. Their main activity was talking and having fun together without spending much money. Despite the flippant attitude, Dame-ren also had a serious aspect, helping the ”losers” in society to regain confidence, restoring their will to associate with other people and generally providing areas in society where the pursuit of alternative life-styles were possible. They also served as pioneers of the precarity movement (or anti-poverty movement), one of the most vibrant and interesting social movements in contemporary Japan.

Here are a few quotes from the book Dame! (Good for nothing!) from 1999. First an enthusiastic 1992 poem by the young Kaminaga Kôichi:

"Hey, you, why are you working so hard?
with just a single day off a week
overtime until late at night every day
hardly able to get enough sleep
the only time for yourself you get is in a crowded train
And the work you do is totally meaningless
Just inflaming people’s desires
At the work place no one cares about you as a person
The way you spend the money you earn is as worthless as your work
Who knows when you’ll collapse from stress and overwork?
Is there really anything good in your life?
Despite all this, why do you work? [...]
'Those who don’t work are good for nothing'
'Dropouts from society are the losers in the competition'
All you who care for nothing but what others think, here’s our reply:
'You’re the ones who are wasting your life'!"

Here Kaminaga recalls reciting some lines from Terayama Shuji's "Sho o sutete machi ni deyou" (Throw away your books and go out in the streets):

"What resounded most within me while reciting were the words of the 'stuttering man': 'Have you seen it! That while the words of order and subjugation are smooth, the sun stutters, the heart stutters, all forms of resistance stutter, stutter, and scream while stuttering...'. Reading these words, I felt I should be more angry. The reason people aren’t angry is absolutely not that that the state of the world or life is wonderful. Isn’t it that they lack sufficient imagination?"

Finally, here he gets serious about what is so good about talking and associating:

"To show up and disappear inconstantly at other’s events without having been invited, or distribute leaflets and suddenly addressing strangers and getting involved in deep talk, or casually join parties meant to be private – all that has to do with the pride of the nomadic warrior. I like acts that turn the city into a place for encounters. It’s a hackneyed phrase, but it’s more rewarding to associate with a single person that to read a book. To bite into a person and talk about life – there is narrative and poetry, and above all that’s where you can find the quiet (or hot) anger calling for a struggle against the state of affairs"

In statements like these one gets a glimpse of why talking and associating and having fun had political import to Dame-ren. It meant going beyond capitalist society, since it implied treating others as more than mere convenient means, and since it yielded up pleasures one could't find on the market.

The quotes are not exactly representative of Dame-ren. They are probably all a bit more “serious” and sober than the usual or average Dame-ren statement. In fact, what made them catch my attention is that they seemed to contain something a little bit different from what I already knew about Dame-ren from other sources.

A blog, I think, should be a medium för ideas in motion, snapshots of thinking, mental notes during a leisurely dérive through empty moonlit streets or maybe a playful adventure rather than a retrospective assessment. Lukács defined the mood of the essay as a longing for an idea not yet born. There is something in these quotes that hint at such an idea. To some people, Dame-ren’s advocacy of dropping out may seem passé, having lost much of its relevance as irregular or precarious employment has become the default option for young Japanese. But nothing that arrests thinking is passé. If you hear a nice sound, you stop and listen. If you notice a delicious scent, why not follow it? This is not the place for me to state what I think that idea is. To search for it will be my pleasure. Conclusions are a way of blinding oneself to clues. Some time in the near future I will try to get my hands on the Terashima Shûji book. That will be the clue I will follow. We will see where it leads. And then we shall see what we shall see.

Puritans and ranters

Salman Rushdie says in an interview I read today that puritans are people who suspect that someone somewhere is having a good time. Today I also happen to be reading Christopher Hill's book on radical ideas during the English revolution. It's stunning to see this flora of rebellious ideas, often millenaristic and pantheistic, affirmative of life and earthly desires – and totally alien to the ascetic puritanism that went victorious out of the civil war and paved the way and provided the legitimation for the profits of a misantropic and intolerant bourgeoisie. I find a wonderful quote by Abiezer Coppe, a ”ranter” who after having handed over all the money he was carrying to a beggar - not much, he was poor himself - rides away with joy and amazement, and on the spur of a sudden impulse decides to ride back to ”the poor wretch” and exclaims: ”Because I am a King I did this...”!

I hate to draw lessons, but here is one anyway: You won't live for ever. Be kind while you can.