Let's Die Together, the David Samuels essay published in the May 2007 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
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David Samuels wrote:
"... III Neon Genesis Evangelion
The most influential Japanese cultural product of the last decade is an animated cartoon series called Neon Genesis Evangelion, originally broadcast on national television during 1995 and 1996; it has shaped the psyches of Japanese under 40 like nothing in recent Western cultural experience except perhaps the Beatles and the first Star Wars movies. The series, produced by a collective called Gainax and directed by the cult animator Hideaki Anno, is a dark, fractured narrative of the postapocalyptic adventures of four badly damaged young kids who join with powerful new technologies to save what remains of the Earth from the Angels, 17 heavenly immortals who spread terror and destruction and seek to bring about the end of humankind.
...continued...
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"Let's Die Together"
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"Let's Die Together"
by Typhoon » Sat May 05, 2007 12:41 pm
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by Taro Toporific » Sat May 05, 2007 2:28 pm
Let's Die Together, the David Samuels essay published in the May 2007 issue of The Atlantic Monthly
...continued...
Distinguished less by the quality of its animation than by its dark subject matter, nonlinear storytelling, and heavy, depressive stoner vibe, the series is regularly praised by animators, novelists, cultural theorists, and visual artists as the flower of Japanese pop culture. It has been credited with defining gender roles, influencing attitudes toward the environment, and spawning the madly obsessive—and immensely profitable—otaku subculture embraced by tens of thousands of geeky fans who spend their lives unraveling the larger message of the show and collecting pornographic comic books featuring the show’s female characters.
In person, Hideaki Anno, dressed in a military-green jumpsuit and black boots, slouches deep in his battered office couch and glowers. In a country where conformity is still a virtue, Anno stands out on account of his curly black hair and large, cauliflower-shaped ears, which, in combination with his jumpsuit, give him the appearance of an angry hobbit in black-rimmed glasses. Before creating his famous anime, Anno went through a four-year-long depression, during which he did no work and spent most of his time alone in his room. In 2003, Gainax sold the live-action rights to Neon Genesis Evangelion to a film producer that is collaborating with Weta Workshop, a company whose principals include Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. I am particularly interested in talking to Anno about the character of Rei, a depressive, suicidal girl whose big eyes, girlish body, and blank expression have been the model for the central female characters in Japanese anime for the past decade.
“Rei is someone who is aware of the fact that even if she dies, there’ll be another to replace her, so she doesn’t value her life very highly,” Anno explains, slouching ever-deeper into the couch. “Her presence, her existence—ostensible existence—is ephemeral. She’s a very sad girl. She only has the barest minimum of what she needs to have. She’s damaged in some way; she hurts herself. She doesn’t need friends.”
Anno understands the Japanese national attraction to characters like Rei as the product of a stunted imaginative landscape born of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. “Japan lost the war to the Americans,” he explains, seeming interested in his own words for the first time during our interview. “Since that time, the education we received is not one that creates adults. Even for us, people in their 40s, and for the generation older than me, in their 50s and 60s, there’s no reasonable model of what an adult should be like.” The theory that Japan’s defeat stripped the country of its independence and led to the creation of a nation of permanent children, weaklings forced to live under the protection of the American Big Daddy, is widely shared by artists and intellectuals in Japan. It is also a staple of popular cartoons, many of which feature a well-meaning government that turns out to be a facade concealing sinister and more powerful forces.
Anno pauses for a moment, and gives a dark-browed stare out the window. “I don’t see any adults here in Japan,” he says, with a shrug. “The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn’t have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that’s what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children.”
The children of Anno’s generation meet in places like Loft Plus One, a basement party space in Shinjuku that is decorated like an East Village dive and smells of chlorine. The occasion in this case is a book party for Karin Amamiya, a beautiful, right-wing punk-rock singer turned cultural gadfly who has recently written a memoir about wrist cutting, a behavior that is currently trendy among young girls. The scene in the basement is a flower-power nightmare version of the daytime variety shows on Japanese television. A singer named Akira, decked out in a lizard-skin suit, tan buckskin jacket, and straw hat, strums a guitar and sings, “Yes, this life is difficult to live.” Below the stage, a high-school girl is smoking a joint alone. She is dressed in a dark, romantic costume of bustled black skirts and a lace bonnet, a popular style known as Gothic Lolita.
The host for this section of the evening is a writer whose pen name, Con Isshow, means “the endless now.” A chain-smoker, dressed in a grubby green corduroy jacket and John Lennon−style glasses, he is a heavy drinker as well as the country’s leading expert on the social behavior of Japanese youth, even though, or perhaps because, he never graduated from college. His personal hygiene is terrible. Sweating under the lights, he surveys the room.
“Wrist-cutters, raise your hands. Pill freaks, raise your hands. Those who were hikikomori—acutely withdrawn—“and did not leave your rooms, raise your hands,” Con Isshow intones, and the kids politely obey his instructions.
“Those who have tried shudan jisatsu—group suicide—“raise your hands.” In the far corner of the dark club, a lone guy in a tan sweater raises his hand, then ducks as if to avoid the spotlight.
Takaya Shiomi looks on from the stage in disapproval. Now in his 60s, with salt-and-pepper hair and the benevolent-seeming, steely gaze of a proletarian dictator, Shiomi is the former commander of the Red Army Faction, a terrorist group that styled itself as the Japanese arm of the worldwide Marxist revolution. In 1970, under Shiomi’s leadership, members of the group hijacked a plane to North Korea; later they taught the art of airplane hijacking to followers of the Palestinian terrorist George Habash. (In 1972, three members of the Red Army Faction, under the direction of Habash, killed 26 tourists and wounded dozens more at Israel’s Lod Airport.) Having spent two decades in jail, Shiomi lives quietly in the outer suburbs of Tokyo. He rests his chin on his knuckles, as the counterculture speakers address their favorite themes of self-mutilation and suicide.
“Who the hell are you people?” Shiomi finally spits out, grabbing the microphone. “I know that life is hard. I was young once, too. It’s easy to become a nihilist, and to care about nothing, and to think that everything is shit. The ultimate answer to that kind of thinking is jail. If you want to feel good about your life, you need to do something real! Understand the world! Study ideology!”
Amamiya, who traveled with Shiomi to North Korea a few years back, a journey that the right-wing Japanese media called a deliberate act of provocation, has heard enough. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know all that,” she says, dismissing the aging terrorist with a smirk.
As the party winds down, I exit the club with the guy in the tan sweater. He is almost 30, his name is Toji, and he lives in Shizuoka, Moon’s hometown. We wander together through the scruffy underside of Shinjuku, a warren of strip clubs and bars and noodle counters, and wind up at a Chinese restaurant, favored by Taiwanese gangsters, that serves excellent dumplings. We take a table in the back room.
. . . "
...continued...
Distinguished less by the quality of its animation than by its dark subject matter, nonlinear storytelling, and heavy, depressive stoner vibe, the series is regularly praised by animators, novelists, cultural theorists, and visual artists as the flower of Japanese pop culture. It has been credited with defining gender roles, influencing attitudes toward the environment, and spawning the madly obsessive—and immensely profitable—otaku subculture embraced by tens of thousands of geeky fans who spend their lives unraveling the larger message of the show and collecting pornographic comic books featuring the show’s female characters.
In person, Hideaki Anno, dressed in a military-green jumpsuit and black boots, slouches deep in his battered office couch and glowers. In a country where conformity is still a virtue, Anno stands out on account of his curly black hair and large, cauliflower-shaped ears, which, in combination with his jumpsuit, give him the appearance of an angry hobbit in black-rimmed glasses. Before creating his famous anime, Anno went through a four-year-long depression, during which he did no work and spent most of his time alone in his room. In 2003, Gainax sold the live-action rights to Neon Genesis Evangelion to a film producer that is collaborating with Weta Workshop, a company whose principals include Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. I am particularly interested in talking to Anno about the character of Rei, a depressive, suicidal girl whose big eyes, girlish body, and blank expression have been the model for the central female characters in Japanese anime for the past decade.
“Rei is someone who is aware of the fact that even if she dies, there’ll be another to replace her, so she doesn’t value her life very highly,” Anno explains, slouching ever-deeper into the couch. “Her presence, her existence—ostensible existence—is ephemeral. She’s a very sad girl. She only has the barest minimum of what she needs to have. She’s damaged in some way; she hurts herself. She doesn’t need friends.”
Anno understands the Japanese national attraction to characters like Rei as the product of a stunted imaginative landscape born of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. “Japan lost the war to the Americans,” he explains, seeming interested in his own words for the first time during our interview. “Since that time, the education we received is not one that creates adults. Even for us, people in their 40s, and for the generation older than me, in their 50s and 60s, there’s no reasonable model of what an adult should be like.” The theory that Japan’s defeat stripped the country of its independence and led to the creation of a nation of permanent children, weaklings forced to live under the protection of the American Big Daddy, is widely shared by artists and intellectuals in Japan. It is also a staple of popular cartoons, many of which feature a well-meaning government that turns out to be a facade concealing sinister and more powerful forces.
Anno pauses for a moment, and gives a dark-browed stare out the window. “I don’t see any adults here in Japan,” he says, with a shrug. “The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn’t have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that’s what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children.”
The children of Anno’s generation meet in places like Loft Plus One, a basement party space in Shinjuku that is decorated like an East Village dive and smells of chlorine. The occasion in this case is a book party for Karin Amamiya, a beautiful, right-wing punk-rock singer turned cultural gadfly who has recently written a memoir about wrist cutting, a behavior that is currently trendy among young girls. The scene in the basement is a flower-power nightmare version of the daytime variety shows on Japanese television. A singer named Akira, decked out in a lizard-skin suit, tan buckskin jacket, and straw hat, strums a guitar and sings, “Yes, this life is difficult to live.” Below the stage, a high-school girl is smoking a joint alone. She is dressed in a dark, romantic costume of bustled black skirts and a lace bonnet, a popular style known as Gothic Lolita.
The host for this section of the evening is a writer whose pen name, Con Isshow, means “the endless now.” A chain-smoker, dressed in a grubby green corduroy jacket and John Lennon−style glasses, he is a heavy drinker as well as the country’s leading expert on the social behavior of Japanese youth, even though, or perhaps because, he never graduated from college. His personal hygiene is terrible. Sweating under the lights, he surveys the room.
“Wrist-cutters, raise your hands. Pill freaks, raise your hands. Those who were hikikomori—acutely withdrawn—“and did not leave your rooms, raise your hands,” Con Isshow intones, and the kids politely obey his instructions.
“Those who have tried shudan jisatsu—group suicide—“raise your hands.” In the far corner of the dark club, a lone guy in a tan sweater raises his hand, then ducks as if to avoid the spotlight.
Takaya Shiomi looks on from the stage in disapproval. Now in his 60s, with salt-and-pepper hair and the benevolent-seeming, steely gaze of a proletarian dictator, Shiomi is the former commander of the Red Army Faction, a terrorist group that styled itself as the Japanese arm of the worldwide Marxist revolution. In 1970, under Shiomi’s leadership, members of the group hijacked a plane to North Korea; later they taught the art of airplane hijacking to followers of the Palestinian terrorist George Habash. (In 1972, three members of the Red Army Faction, under the direction of Habash, killed 26 tourists and wounded dozens more at Israel’s Lod Airport.) Having spent two decades in jail, Shiomi lives quietly in the outer suburbs of Tokyo. He rests his chin on his knuckles, as the counterculture speakers address their favorite themes of self-mutilation and suicide.
“Who the hell are you people?” Shiomi finally spits out, grabbing the microphone. “I know that life is hard. I was young once, too. It’s easy to become a nihilist, and to care about nothing, and to think that everything is shit. The ultimate answer to that kind of thinking is jail. If you want to feel good about your life, you need to do something real! Understand the world! Study ideology!”
Amamiya, who traveled with Shiomi to North Korea a few years back, a journey that the right-wing Japanese media called a deliberate act of provocation, has heard enough. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know all that,” she says, dismissing the aging terrorist with a smirk.
As the party winds down, I exit the club with the guy in the tan sweater. He is almost 30, his name is Toji, and he lives in Shizuoka, Moon’s hometown. We wander together through the scruffy underside of Shinjuku, a warren of strip clubs and bars and noodle counters, and wind up at a Chinese restaurant, favored by Taiwanese gangsters, that serves excellent dumplings. We take a table in the back room.
. . . "
_________
FUCK THE 2020 OLYMPICS!
FUCK THE 2020 OLYMPICS!
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by Kuang_Grade » Sat May 05, 2007 2:55 pm
Typhoon wrote: The series, produced by a collective called Gainax and directed by the cult animator Hideaki Anno, is a dark, fractured narrative of the postapocalyptic adventures of four badly damaged young kids who join with powerful new technologies to save what remains of the Earth from the Angels, 17 heavenly immortals who spread terror and destruction and seek to bring about the end of humankind.
. . . "
The fact that he doesn't get something simple like the number of young major characters in Evangelion right doesn't bode well for the rest of the piece...Rei, Shinji, and Asuka are the major young characters/EVA pilots....The fourth EVA pilot, Toji doesn't do much except get himself mangled when his EVA (unit 03) is taken over by the 13th Angel...His on-screen time is probably 1/400th of that of the other three characters. Nor is Toji 'badly damaged' beyond being upset that Shinji, when battling with an angel, badly injures his sister. Nor are the angels imortal since they get killed off at the end of each battle.
The Enrichment Center reminds you that the weighted companion cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak.
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by Samurai_Jerk » Sat May 05, 2007 3:21 pm
Kuang_Grade wrote:The fact that he doesn't get something simple like the number of young major characters in Evangelion right doesn't bode well for the rest of the piece...Rei, Shinji, and Asuka are the major young characters/EVA pilots....The fourth EVA pilot, Toji doesn't do much except get himself mangled when his EVA (unit 03) is taken over by the 13th Angel...His on-screen time is probably 1/400th of that of the other three characters. Nor is Toji 'badly damaged' beyond being upset that Shinji, when battling with an angel, badly injures his sister. Nor are the angels imortal since they get killed off at the end of each battle.
NERD ALERT!
Faith is believing what you know ain't so. -- Mark Twain
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by American Oyaji » Sun May 06, 2007 1:13 am
Samurai_Jerk wrote:NERD ALERT!
Not really. Anyone who has watched the series knows those basic facts.
I will not abide ignorant intolerance just for the sake of getting along.
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by Mote2 » Sun May 06, 2007 12:06 pm
Kuang_Grade wrote:The fact that he doesn't get something simple like the number of young major characters in Evangelion right doesn't bode well for the rest of the piece...Rei, Shinji, and Asuka are the major young characters/EVA pilots....The fourth EVA pilot, Toji doesn't do much except get himself mangled when his EVA (unit 03) is taken over by the 13th Angel...His on-screen time is probably 1/400th of that of the other three characters. Nor is Toji 'badly damaged' beyond being upset that Shinji, when battling with an angel, badly injures his sister. Nor are the angels imortal since they get killed off at the end of each battle.
You don't understand the point of the post or the concepts behind the characters and situations in Evangelion.
Say what you will, but I have a strong feeling you didn't read the writing past the point you quoted.
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It is nerdy
by Mennon » Sun May 06, 2007 1:21 pm
Robots, Short skirts, Shy people, a penguin(?) blah blah. Usual rubbish. I get that the Japanese like it, it has robots, short skirts, shy people, and a penguin, but gaijin? Come on dude. If a Japanese guy tells me he loves Star Wars, I dismiss that too. Who do they identify with? R2D2 maybe. Who do you gaijin otaku identify with in these manga?
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by Mulboyne » Sun May 06, 2007 4:20 pm
I'm still surprised by this:
Karin Amemiya first came to view in the 1999 documentary Atarashii Kamisama (The New God) which is well worth seeing. I think the DVD has English subtitles.
Below the stage, a high-school girl is smoking a joint alone.
Karin Amemiya first came to view in the 1999 documentary Atarashii Kamisama (The New God) which is well worth seeing. I think the DVD has English subtitles.
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by Kuang_Grade » Mon May 07, 2007 11:23 am
Golly, I thought I even turned down the nerd level by not even bring up Kawaru:p
While the article snip is only a part of the essay, I think author is trying to pull pieces together and Evangelion isn't a good fit on trying to explain why group suicide is growing trend in Japan. While Evangelion certainly has some nihilistic elements, it actually ends on "positive" note that while life is painful, it is worth living.
While the article snip is only a part of the essay, I think author is trying to pull pieces together and Evangelion isn't a good fit on trying to explain why group suicide is growing trend in Japan. While Evangelion certainly has some nihilistic elements, it actually ends on "positive" note that while life is painful, it is worth living.
The Enrichment Center reminds you that the weighted companion cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak.
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by Greji » Mon May 07, 2007 12:07 pm
Mulboyne wrote:I'm still surprised by this:
Quote:
Below the stage, a high-school girl is smoking a joint alone.
That was probably just thrown in there so AK would pay attention~
"There are those that learn by reading. Then a few who learn by observation. The rest have to piss on an electric fence and find out for themselves!"- Will Rogers
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