Apocalypse Deferred by Girard & Japan

Author:Girard & Japan [Girard & Japan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780268100162
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Vexille as a Biopolitical Paradigm

In Vexille—a 2007 Japanese anime written and directed by Fumihiko Sori,14 with Haruka Handa as the co-author15—the audience is fast-forwarded to a future approximately seventy years distant from the movie’s release date. We are in the year 2077, and Japan presents itself as a country in “splendid isolation.” After the United Nations had declared a unilateral ban on all further robotic research in 2067, following a growing concern about the possibly adverse impacts of cybernetics, Japan, which was at the forefront of robotics and home of the mighty conglomerate Daiwa Heavy Industry,16 decided to opt out from the United Nations, to withdraw from international politics, to deport all foreigners, to prohibit immigration, and to establish the network R.A.C.E.––an energy grid comprising almost three hundred ocean-based antennas capable of neutralizing all communication with the outside, thus making electronic surveillance impossible. Otherwise stated, the anime suggests that in the near future Japan will decide once again to practice sakoku,17 to exist just for itself, to be its own law.

The story unfolds about ten years after the beginning of Japan’s effective isolationism, when the special military unit SWORD of the United Nations Navy is ordered to capture Saito, a Japanese informant working for Daiwa, following a mysterious tip-off by an anonymous source. Despite SWORD’s surprise incursion, Saito manages to avoid being captured by means of a spectacular escape, in the course of which he is forced to cut off one of his legs. As subsequent analyses of the limb reveal, Saito consists, at least in part, of biometal, which makes him a technologically enhanced posthuman android and, according to a United Nations officer’s evaluation, a “threat rivaling nuclear technology.”

As a matter of fact, SWORD was suspecting all along that Japan had silently continued its research on and development of banned biotechnology. In order to gather more reliable information on what is actually happening in Japan, an officially unauthorized mission to infiltrate the secluded country is launched with the goal “to expose the true face of Japan” by transmitting a special signal from the inside capable of disrupting the protective energy grid so that the United Nations may eventually monitor the situation. Even though the SWORD agents manage successfully to get beyond the R.A.C.E. grid, they are soon discovered by security forces and thus blocked from completely transmitting the disruptive signal. While the female agent Vexille, the leading character of the anime, manages to get away by jumping into the open sea, the rest of her team is killed in a massive shootout, apart from Leon, Vexille’s lover, who is arrested and brought to Daiwa’s headquarters as a prisoner.

What follows next brings us right into the heart of the story and back to the main concern of this essay. After being saved by Japanese locals, Vexille awakens in what turns out to be the “true face” of Tokyo in the year 2077. She awakens not in a prosperous, avant-garde megacity, but in a colossal slum that is surrounded by massive

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