SPACES OF IDENTITY

Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and

Cultural Boundaries

David Morley and Kevin Robins

London and New York

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TECHNO-ORIENTALISM
Japan panic

Every western politician has either actual or cinematic experience of

the brutalities Japan inflicted on its prisoners-of-war. No one, whether
in Asia or beyond, has fond memories of Japanese expansionism.
Which is why, as Japan’s economic power expands anew, the Japanese
would do better to face up to the darker aspects of their past.
(Leader article in The Economist, 24 August 1991)

Today, the modern era is in its terminal phase. An awareness of its

imminent demise has made Americans, the most powerful Caucasians
since World War II, increasingly emotional, almost hysterical, about Japan.
(Shintaro Ishihara, 1991)

Our concern in this chapter is with what has been called ‘the problem of Japan’,
that is to say Japan as a problem for the West. Our interest here is in tracing
a set of discursive correspondences that have been, and are still being,
developed in the West between ‘Japan’, the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Other’. More
specifically, we want to explore why, at this historical moment, this particular
Other should occupy such a threatening position in the Western imagination.
The former French prime minister, Edith Cresson, publicly declared her belief
that ‘the Japanese have a strategy of world conquest’. The Japanese, she said,
are ‘little yellow men’ who ‘stay up all night thinking about ways to screw
the Americans and Europeans. They are our common enemy’. Most tellingly,
Mme Cresson likened the Japanese to ‘ants’. Her fear was that those ‘ants’
were colonising the world and taking possession of the future. What are these
fears and anxieties that Japan arouses in the Western psyche?

THE JAPAN THAT IS SAYING NO

For nearly five centuries now, Japan has been among the West’s Others. It
has been seen as the exotic culture (zen, kabuki, tea-ceremonies, geishas) of
aesthetic Japonisme. And it has been seen as an alien culture, a dehumanised

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TECHNO-ORIENTALISM AND THE FUTURE OF

MODERNITY
In one sense, then, the West’s ‘Japan problem’ is about the confrontation
between cultural narcissisms. But to leave it at that would be too easy. There
is something that is even reassuring about the possibility that Japan’s
phenomenal economic and technological success is attributable to ‘the
Japanese mind’. To invoke Oriental conformity, stealth and ruthless
dedication is to suggest that Japan does not play by the rules. The
comparative lack of success of the European and North American economies
must then be a consequence of abiding by universal principles and moral
codes. Through such reasoning, it is possible, even in the face of
competitive failure, to reaffirm the essential (that is, civilisational)
supremacy of Western culture.
Differentness is functional: it cannot be willingly or easily relinquished.
Through the manic assertion of difference, the identity of Western culture
and identity can be sustained. And if the encounter with difference is painful,
what it averts—what it represses, denies or disavows—is something that is
more painful still. What it defers is the encounter with Western self-identity
and self-interest, as well as the recognition of what is common in both the
Japanese and Western experiences of modernity.
The functioning and the significance of technology in Western identity is
crucial to understanding what this means. What would the West be without
its vaunted technological supremacy? Technology has been central to the
potency of its modernity. And now, it fears, the loss of its technological
hegemony may be associated with its cultural ‘emasculation’. Technology is
held to be the key to the future, and Japan now has a growing lead in key
areas of technological development. Symbolically, American military capacity
is increasingly dependent on Japanese high-tech components. This Japanese
rise to power has been a perfectly conscious strategy. From the nineteenth
century, ‘Japan’s leaders knew the country would be colonised, like Malaya
or China, if it did not haul itself into the modern age’; and, following defeat
in the Second World War, ‘Japan’s tattered postwar leadership understood
that technology and industry were the only means of recovering independence
of any kind’ (Fallows, 1991b: 34). Akio Morita has described how he
deliberately set out to make Sony’s image synonymous with ‘technical
quality’. This was necessary in order to avoid the negative connotations of
products being perceived as ‘Japanese’, given the level of anti-Japanese
feeling in the immediate post-war period. In a BBC interview in the mid-
1980s, Morita recalled the task that faced him:

When I first visited Europe in 1953, I discovered that Japan had a

very bad image in Europe because of the war…and I thought ‘unless
we make a real high technical quality product we cannot sell

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anything here’. So we have been trying to change our image, to

concentrate on quality in technical standards.

Through its strategies of technological innovation, Japan has more than

recovered its independence, and has now hauled itself perhaps even beyond
the modern age.
Lummis (1984) has argued that this is the society where technology
and rationalisation have fused perfectly. Technological prowess has become
associated with Japanese enterprise (Sony, Nissan, Matsushita, Panasonic,
Toshiba, Toyota…). In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jack Gladney’s
daughter utters two clearly audible and haunting words in her sleep,
‘Toyota Celica’:

How could these near-nonsense words, murmured in a child’s restless

sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating
some TV voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida.
Supranational names, computer-generated, more or less universally
pronounceable. Part of every child’s brain noise, the substatic regions
too deep to probe.
(DeLillo, 1985:155)

High-technology has become associated with Japaneseness. Out of this a

new techno-mythology is being spun. Japan can be projected as ‘the
greatest “machine-loving” nation of the world’, a culture in which
‘machines are priceless friends’ (Kato, 1991). Japan has become
synonymous with the technologies of the future—with screens, networks,
cybernetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, simulation. What are these
Japanese technologies doing to us? The techno-mythology is centred
around the idea of some kind of postmodern mutation of human
experience. ‘The Japanese are not altering the way we see the real world,
they are doing something far more radical’, writes Charlie Leadbeater
(1991): ‘They are taking us further and further into a different world of
electronic images and sounds…. In future, the line between the real and
the electronic will probably blur even further to the extent that it may
not be fully recognisable’. The Japanese are creating a new domain of
artificial reality. Karaoke, pachinko, computer games, virtual reality.
Japanese technologies are ‘blurring the line between the real and the
simulated…producing the sensation that reality is only part of a world of
simulation’ (Isozaki, 1991).
If the future is technological, and if technology has become
‘Japanised’, then the syllogism would suggest that the future is now
Japanese too. The postmodern era will be the Pacific era. Japan is the
future, and it is a future that seems to be transcending and displacing
Western modernity. In so far as a nation’s sense of identity has become

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confused with its technological capability, these developments have, of

course, had profoundly disturbing and destabilising consequences in
Europe and the United States. The West has had to try to come to terms
with everything that this technological ‘emasculation’ entails. As the
dynamism of technological innovation has appeared to move eastwards,
so have these postmodern technologies become structured into the
discourse of Orientalism. Through these new technologies, the
contradictory stereotypes of Japaneseness have assumed new forms; the
new technologies have become associated with the sense of Japanese
identity and ethnicity.
One response is to see pachinko and computer games simply as the
postmodern equivalents of zen and kabuki. Like ‘traditional’ forms of
Japanese culture, they too embody the exotic, enigmatic and mysterious
essence of Japanese particularism. This is apparent in the postmodern
romanticisation of Japan as a space somewhere between the real and the
imaginary. Tokyo is the centre for a new phenomenon of ‘postmodern
tourism’: ‘the paradigm of the modern decentred metropolis. It’s not so much
that [it] disorientates you—rather that you never get orientated in the first
place’ (Thackara, 1989:35). In cyberpunk fiction this aestheticism and
exoticism become quite apparent. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, as
Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro (1989:18) observes, combines ‘futuristic high-tech
images of contemporary Japan and anachronistic images of feudal Japan still
widely circulating in the popular American imagination’. The same can be
said of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Stephen Beard describes this as ‘the
re-invention of Japan as a land of high-tech enchantment’:

manga, techno-porn, high-density urbanism, mobile fashion, hyper-

violent movies, video-phones, fax cameras, hand-held televisions,
video-games, disposable buildings, even a new breed of ‘radically
bored’ teen information junkies, otaku, who shun body contact and
spend all their waking hours gathering data on the most trivial bit
of media.
(1991:25)

Through the projection of exotic (and erotic) fantasies onto this high-tech
delirium, anxieties about the ‘importance’ of Western culture can be,
momentarily, screened out. High-tech Orientalism makes possible ‘cultural
amnesia, ecstatic alienation, serial self-erasure’ (ibid.).
But there is another, more resentful and more aggresively racist, side to
this tecnno-orientalism. The association of technology and Japaneseness now
serves to reinforce the image of a culture that is cold, impersonal and
machine-like, an authoritarian culture lacking emotional connection to the
rest of the world. The otaku generation—kids ‘lost to everyday life’ by their
immersion in computer reality—provides a good symbol of this. These

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children of the media ‘despise physical contact and love media, technical
communication, and the realm of reproduction and simulation in general’
(Grassmuck, 1991:201); they are characterised by a kind of ‘vacuousness’
and by ‘self-dissociation in hyper-reality’ (ibid.: 207):

In the age of cyber-medialism with its emphasis on simulation, the

hi-tech media become the condition for survival…. The media
cyborgs in their electronic womb are also called aliens…it’s an
empty, content-less joy of technology that drives them.
(ibid.: 213)

These kids are imagined as people mutating into machines; they represent a
kind of cybernetic mode of being for the future. This creates the image of
the Japanese as inhuman. Within the political and cultural unconscious of
the West, Japan has come to exist as the figure of empty and dehumanised
technological power. It represents the alienated and dystopian image of
capitalist progress. This provokes both resentment and envy. The Japanese
are unfeeling aliens; they are cyborgs and replicants. But there is also the
sense that these mutants are now better adapted to survive in the future. The
otaku are the postmodern people. To use Baudrillard’s phrase, the future
seems to have shifted towards artificial satellites.
There is something profoundly disturbing in this techno-orientalism.
Following Castoriadis, we have suggested that Western xenophobia and racism
are motivated by the apparent incapacity of a culture to constitute itself
without excluding, devaluing and then hating the Other. That the Others must
be instituted as inferior, Castoriadis (1992) describes as the ‘natural
inclination’ of human societies. This is the logic of a kind of self-love that
constructs itself in terms of a cultural and national narcissism. But there is
something more, something deeper, something we might even describe as
‘unnatural’ in this logic of techno-orientalism. As Castoriadis goes on to
suggest, hatred of the Other can also be seen as the ‘other side of an
unconscious self-hatred’; a hatred that is ‘usually for obvious reasons
intolerable under its overt form, that nourishes the most driven forms of the
hatred of the other’ (ibid.: 9). To explore this possibility speculatively, and
perhaps only metaphorically, we might suggest that the resentment expressed
against Japanese technology (rationality, development, progress) reflects an
unconscious and primal hatred of this aspect of Western maturity. There is
perhaps a (delirious) refusal, rejection, detestation of that modernity into
which our own culture has been transformed; of that (totalitarian) element
of modernity that threatens some deep-seated aspect (or cultural monad) in
Western society.
Perhaps Japan is just a mirror of our own modernity and of its discontents.
Maybe Japan simply reflects back to us the ‘deformities’ in our own culture.
As it asserts its claims on modernity, and as it refuses the investment of

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Western Orientalist fantasies, there might just be the possibility really to ‘learn
from Japan’. We shall increasingly be compelled to take seriously this Japan
that can say no. Perhaps we should be less concerned with what we think
it reveals about ‘them’, and more attentive to what it could help us to learn
about ourselves and our own culture. Japanese no-saying is important because
of the radical challenge it currently presents to our understanding of
modernity and of the cultural and ethnic conditions of its existence until now.
Japan is significant because of its complexity: because it is non-Western, yet
refuses any longer to be our Orient; because it insists on being modern, yet
calls our kind of modernity into question. Because of this Japan offers
possibilities. It potentially offers us a way beyond that simple binary logic
that differentiates modern and traditional, and then superimposes this on the
distinction between Occident and Orient. In so far as Japan complicates and
confuses this impoverished kind of categorisation it challenges us to rethink
our white modernity.
This kind of intellectual and imaginative challenge cannot, and will not,
obviate conflicts between Europe and America and Japan, but it could make
it possible to handle real differences of interest in more complex ways. What
Japan tells us is that we have to move beyond a worldview that confronts
Western modernity with its (pre-modern) Other. Contrary to Ishihara’s
argument, the modern era has not entered its terminal phase with the
displacement of ‘Caucasian’ modernity. Modernity is now, more than ever,
the condition of all cultures in this world. The issue is on what terms they
are inserted into that modernity, and on what terms they will co-exist. Japan’s
achievement is that it is now no different from Europe or the United States
in terms of its modernity. What is significant about Japan is its ethnicity,
and the fact that it is the first non-white country to have inserted itself into
modernity on its own terms. In so doing it has exposed the racist foundations
of modernity as it has hitherto been constructed.

JAPAN PANIC
The West resents what it sees as the inscrutable, the remote and the
ambiguous nature of Japanese culture. What disturbs it most of all is that
this alien culture has now become ‘Number One’, the model of economic
and technological progress. In the United States and in Europe there is a
powerful sense of Japanese otherness and a growing fear of the might and
power of that ‘Other’.
It is in this context that we can situate the Japan Festival, held in Britain
in 1991, described as ‘a nationwide celebration of Japanese culture and
society’. As Mark Holborn wrote in the catalogue for the Barbican’s Beyond
Japan exhibition, ‘the dialogue between Japan and the West is frequently
described in terms of Japan’s absorption of the West…. In contrast, the West’s
absorption of Japan is inconclusive and rarely described’. With this festival

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