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The space of Japanese science fiction: illustration, subculture, and the body in SF Magazine

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The space of Japanese science fiction: illustration, subculture, and the body in SF Magazine

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Content THE SPACE OF JAPANESE SCIENCE FICTION: ILLUSTRATION, SUBCULTURE, AND THE BODY IN SF MAGAZINE by Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES) August 2016 ii Abstract The Space of Japanese Science Fiction: Illustration, Subculture, and the Body in SF Magazine Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer This is a study of the rise of science fiction as a subculture in the 1960s through an analysis of the first and longest-running commercial science fiction magazine in Japan: SF Magazine. Much of the research on science fiction in Japan focuses on the boom in the 1980s or on the very first science fictional texts created in the early years of the twentieth century, glossing over this pivotal decade. From 1959-1969, SF Magazine’s covers created a visual legacy of the relationship of the human body to space that reveals larger concerns about technology, science, and humanity. This legacy centers around the mediation of human existence through technology (called the posthuman), which also transforms our understanding of gender and space in contemporary works. I examine the constellation of Japanese conceptions of the body in science fiction, its manifestations and limits, exploring how the representation of this Japanese, posthuman, and often cyborgian body is figured as an absence in the space of science fiction landscapes. SF Magazine was used by consumers to construct meanings of self, social identity, and social relations. Science fiction illustration complemented and supported the centrality of SF Magazine, making these illustrations integral to the production the of science fiction subculture and to the place of the body within Japanese science fiction. Their representation of space, and then in the later part of the 1960s the return of the body to these covers, mirrors the theoretical and emotional concerns of not just science fiction writers and readers in the 1960s, but the larger social and historical concerns present in the country at large. The horrifying and painful mutability of bodies that came to light after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki manifests, in the latter years of the 1960s in science fiction, as the iii fantastically powerful mutating bodies of super heroes and cyborgs within the science fictional world. The bombed spaces of the postwar (largely ignored in mainstream 1960s media) were reimagined in productive ways on the covers of SF Magazine, mirroring the fiction and nonfictional contents. It is through this publication that a recognizable community emerges, a particular type of identity becomes associated with the science fiction fan that coalesced when the magazine began to offer different points of articulation, both through the covers and through the magazine’s contents. That notion of the science fiction fan as a particular subjectivity, as a particular way to navigate the world, created a space to articulate trauma and to investigate ways out of that trauma not available in mainstream works. My work seeks to build on literary scholarship that considers the role commercial and pulp genres fiction play in negotiating and constructing community. I contribute to recent scholarship in art history that investigates the close relationship of Surrealism to mass culture movements in postwar Japan, although these art historians largely center their work on advertising in the pre-war context. Furthermore, my project reconsiders the importance of the visual to a definition of science fiction: it is only when the visual and textual are blended that a recognizable version of science fiction emerges – in the same way the magazine featuring the work of fans blurred the boundary between professional and fan. Hence, although the context of my study is 1960s Japan, my research is inseparable from larger investigations of the visual and the textual, the global understanding of science fiction, the relationship between high art and commercial culture, and contemporary media studies. This work is therefore of interest not only to literary science fiction scholars, but also to researchers in critical theory, visual studies, fan studies, and contemporary Japanese culture. iv Acknowledgements For five years Professor Akira Lippit has served as not just my dissertation committee chair, but as my mentor, advisor, and my inspiration. I always left our meetings filled with confidence, new insights, and the knowledge that I was fully supported in this endeavor. I am also grateful for the feedback, encouragement, and advice of an incredible committee. Professor Henry Jenkins tirelessly offered transformative comments and his perpetual engagement continually inspired me to work harder. Professor Satoko Shimazaki challenged my thinking about the project’s scope and place, and her encouragement gave me conviction to believe in my own analysis. While at USC I also received a great deal of informal support. I am extraordinarily thankful to Professors Anne McKnight and Kirsten Cather who, despite no longer being my formal advisors, continued to offer mentoring, encouragement, and critical interventions throughout this journey. They gave me foundational tools, and I hope my own work reflects in small part their intellectual rigor and commitment to scholarly excellence. Moreover, I am grateful for the mentorship of Professors Miya Mizuta, David Bialock, Sunyoung Park, Vanessa Schwartz, and Laura Serna. Miya encouraged me to do the preliminary research for this dissertation in her Art History class, and her comments on early drafts were invaluable to a scholar trying to find her voice. Without David I do not think my qualifying exams would have properly prepared me for the work you will read in these pages. Sunyoung’s timely comments on my prospectus made me rethink this project into manageable proportions. Vanessa tirelessly created a community of interdisciplinary scholars that made it possible for me to receive critical feedback. And Laura directed the Visual Studies writing group in that community – it it was her insightful feedback that propelled me forward from one chapter to the next. v The project took on intelligent shape through the feedback of countless scholars and friends in writing groups, associations, and at conferences. In Japan, my dinnertime conversations with Tatsumi Takayuki and Kotani Mari helped me think through the present day implications of my project. The thoughtful commentary of members of the USC Graduates Studying East Asia (GSEA) ensured my work was coherent and engaged with the larger discourses of Asian Studies. Some members of the GSEA have been there from the infancy of this project, and I really appreciate the fact that Melissa Chan, Amanda Kennell, Li-Ping Chen, Yunwen Gao, Chad Walker, and Haiwei Liu were willing to think through my work with me time and time again. I particularly want to thank the Visual Studies writing group: Umayyah Cable, Luci Marzola, Joshua Mitchell, Feng-Mei Herberer, Lara Bradshaw, Alison Kozberg, Kevin Driscoll, and Roxanne Samer. These dedicated and kind scholars were not only generous with their comments, they provided shining examples of the kind of intellectual work I hope this project displays. A chapter of this dissertation was presented at the Visual Studies Research Institute’s “Objects of Knowledge” series, where I am deeply grateful Brian Bernards was my respondent because he gave me further insight in how I would like to speak to multiple audiences. Other chapters were presented at conferences for the Association for Asian Studies, the Science Fiction Research Association, and the American Comparative Literature Association. The project benefited not just from the audience members’ questions and suggestions but from fellow panelists’ unstinting encouragement and feedback. This dissertation was generously funded primarily by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the support of Endowed Fellowships organized through the Graduate School at the University of Southern California. Preliminary training and research was supported in part through the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship coordinated by the vi Center for East Asian Studies at USC, and in part through the Nippon Foundation Fellows Scholarship coordinated through the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan. The research for this dissertation was conducted at the National Diet Library in Tokyo, the Harvard-Yenching Library, the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, and the East Asian Library (part of the Doheny Memorial Library) at the University of Southern California. Over the course of this journey I gathered a group of people from whom I hope I never stop learning. They offered unstinting support in ways too numerous to adequately acknowledge here. But I will try. Helen Page is more than a mother, she is an inspiration and a shining light, and I worked through so many of my fears and my intellectual tangles with her that this work is almost a joint endeavor. Ingrid Levinthal has been my comrade and my confidant: her insights reassured me when I thought everything was going wrong, and her willingness to spend three days a week on my couch writing meant I actually wrote it. Jon and Judy Lippsmeyer may never have become Japanese literature experts, but they also never wavered in their unstinting parental care and bountiful faith in me that made all of this possible. Sam Timinsky, little brother I never knew I needed, offered thoughts on everything from sentence structure to housemate wrangling. Christine Shaw has been my guide through the labyrinth of academic requirements and my cheerleader, always ready to remind me to celebrate life even while she offered line-by-line edits on funding applications. Lola Shehu watched over me and mother-henned me, and kept me on track. Tyler Wilson reminded me when to be sane and when not to be, and made sure I never forgot the wider world out there. And last, but not the least, Elizabeth Barrows kept the light on for me, listened patiently to all my worries and fears, and gave me hope that I could do this and held my hand when I worried I couldn’t. And look, I really did! vii Table of Contents ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................................... II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................................ IV TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................................................. VII LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................................... IX INTRODUCTION: ON SCIENCE FICTION AND FAN CULTURES .................................................1 READING SCI FI AS A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VISUAL AND TEXTUAL DISCOURSES ......................................3 THE RISE OF THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS AND A NEW CONSUMER SUBJECT ........................................................6 CONTRIBUTING TO THE HISTORY OF FAN CULTURES .................................................................................... 11 HISTORICAL SHIFT AND THE SHAPING OF POST 50S FAN CULTURE ...............................................................17 FROM CONTENT TO CONCEPT: CHAPTER OVERVIEW ....................................................................................23 CHAPTER ONE: THE ANATOMY AND CONTEXT OF SF MAGAZINE .......................................27 DISTINGUISHING SF MAGAZINE FROM OTHER SF WORKS .............................................................................36 JOY, FEAR, AND THE BODY IN THE 1960S .....................................................................................................41 SCIENCE AND SCIENCE FICTION BEYOND SF MAGAZINE ..............................................................................53 CHAPTER TWO: THE VISUAL LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE FICTION .........................................54 THEORIZING SCIENCE FICTION ILLUSTRATION .............................................................................................58 DEFINING SCIENCE FICTION: TATSUMI AND DELANY ..................................................................................65 OVERDETERMINATION: READING THE ARCHIVE ..........................................................................................72 WHIMSICAL ROBOTS AND THEIR RADIOACTIVE PLAY ..................................................................................79 THE COLLAPSE OF BOUNDARIES IN ATOMIC LIGHT ......................................................................................85 TRANSLATION AS PRACTICE AND PRODUCTION IN SCIENCE FICTION ...........................................................88 CHAPTER THREE: SURREAL LANDSCAPES ..................................................................................93 LANDSCAPES OF THE FUTURE ......................................................................................................................97 viii SURREALISM’S PAST AND PRESENT IN JAPAN .............................................................................................102 SYMBOLIC NEW STYLE: SF MAGAZINE’S VISUAL RHETORIC ...................................................................... 112 MASS REPRESENTATION: THREE MODELS OF COVER ILLUSTRATION IN THE 1960S ................................... 115 CONSUMING THE OBJECT: FETISHIZING WOMEN AS CRIMINAL MYSTERIES ...............................................122 UTOPIAN CONSUMER SUBJECTS: BOY’S MAGAZINES, EARLY SF, AND THE FUTURE ...................................127 ACTIVE BODIES & ACTIVE SPACE: JAPANESE AND AMERICAN SF ILLUSTRATION ......................................133 CHAPTER FOUR: EMBODYING FANS IN IMAGE AND WORD .................................................139 LOCATING READERSHIP IN MAGAZINE TEXTS ............................................................................................144 THE FACTS OF “THE MAGAZINE OF SCIENCE FICTION & FACT” ...............................................................152 DEFINING THE TERMS IN “SF DICTIONARY” ..............................................................................................157 GIVING VOICE TO READERS IN “LETTERS TO THE EDITOR” AND ON COMMENT CARDS .............................162 AUTHOR CONTESTS AND OTHER SOLICITATIONS FOR FICTION ...................................................................168 ROUNDTABLES AND REPORTING ON THE OUTSIDE – FAN CONVENTIONS, ART EXHIBITIONS, FILM FESTS ..172 MAKING MEANING AND BECOMING FANS ..................................................................................................177 CONCLUSION: SPECTACLE AS EMBODIMENT IN JAPANESE SCIENCE FICTION ...........182 PERSONAL HISTORIES AND SELF-FICTIONS .................................................................................................188 PHYSICAL AND NON-PHYSICAL: AMBIGUITIES OF DESIRE ..........................................................................195 BETWEEN ORGANIC AND MACHINE: THE SPECTACLE OF BIRTH AND REBIRTH ...........................................200 NO LONGER SURFACES ...............................................................................................................................203 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................................206 ix List of figures figure 1: August 1966 SF Magazine 1 figure 2: Index of December 1959 SF Magazine 29 figure 3: Note on the origins of the term science fiction 34 figure 4: April 1959 F/SF Magazine 62 figure 5: April 1960 F/SF Magazine 62 figure 6: November 1959 F/SF Magazine 63 figure 7: November 1960 F/SF Magazine 63 figure 8: October 1962 SF Magazine 73 figure 9: July 1957 F/SF Magazine 81 figure 10: August 1961 F/SF Magazine 81 figure 11: May 1960 F/SF Magazine 82 figure 12: August 1962 SF Magazine 83 figure 13: January 1965 SF Magazine 93 figure 14: Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanegawa 94 figure 15: Inaugural 1959 Issue SF Magazine 99 figure 16: October 1960 SF Magazine 99 figure 17: November 1962 SF Magazine 100 figure 18: August 1960 SF Magazine 100 figure 19: November 1956 EQMM 110 figure 20: January 1958 EQMM 110 figure 21: August 1953 Edogawa Rampo’s Jewel 112 figure 22: March 1958 Edogawa Rampo’s Jewel 112 figure 23: March 1960 SF Magazine 114 figure 24: 1959 Culture (Bunka) 117 figure 25: 1958 Ladies’ Own (Jousei Jishin) 117 figure 26: 1960 Weekly Foreign & Domestic True Stories (Shukan Naigai Jitsuwa) 117 x figure 27: 1964 German Expressionism (Doitsu Hyougenshi) 117 figure 28: 1959 Asahi Journal 120 figure 29: 1959 Mademoiselle First Issue 120 figure 30: May 1959 Modern Japan Weekly (Shukan Modan Nihon) 125 figure 31: April 1959 Special Jewel 125 figure 32: October 1959 Special Jewel 125 figure 33: 1960 Boy’s Illustrated 128 figure 34: 1968 Weekly Shōnen Jump (first issue) 128 figure 35: May 1960 SF Magazinefigure 132 figure 36: 1954 Nebula 135 figure 37: January 1960 F/SF Magazine 135 figure 38: August 1960 F/SF Magazine 136 figure 39: January 1962 SF Magazine 136 figure 40: “Jump into Space (America)” article and illustration. 155 figure 41: July 1960 SF Magazine 158 figure 42: November 1960. SF Magazine 162 figure 43: June 1962 SF Magazine 171 figure 44: April through September 1969 SF Magazine covers 175 figure 45: May 1962 SF Magazine 179 Introduction: On Science Fiction and Fan Cultures The strange, blob-like aliens on the August 1966 cover of Japanese SF Magazine (figure 1) evoke a colonial discourse as they rail against the absolute power of the humans controlling the sharply delineated black-bodied spaceship. 1 The primitive nature of the aliens is underscored by the abstract style and absence of differentiated physical characteristics; they are bodies without the civilization of eyes, mouths, or ears. The white-hot jet of flame from the spaceship’s take off blast sets the alien vista, and the aliens themselves, on fire. However, fire does not touch the more meticulously drawn spaceship or the figures of the humans within. Compositionally, the lurid, bold, easily printable colors that create distinct segmentation of the image along with the rough brush strokes and the representational (but not realist) style encourage the eye of the viewer both to rest on the more realistically rendered humans and to (uneasily) identify with these oppressors. Aliens with their arms writhing in pain from the fiery destruction raining from the sky, their legs curling in contorted dance, indict the conquering humans even as the image promotes identification with them. It recalls (and inverts the politics of) Frank Paul’s 1926 Amazing Stories cover illustration for H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. In that cover (and Wells’ story) Martians with round 1 Nakajima Seikan. “Cover of Space Opera Special Issue.” SF Magazine (SF Magajin). Fukushima Masami, editor. Tokyo: Hayakawa Shobo. August, 1966. Houghton Library collection, Harvard University. figure 1: August 1966 SF Magazine 2 bodies attack London, destroying both humans and buildings with deadly heat-rays and long, wiry tentacles. In this SF Magazine cover, the aliens have gone from attacker to attacked, their tentacles now writhing in fear rather than causing destruction. Parsing this image requires understanding the distinct set of practices and the complex series of codes that have emerged through the production and consumption of science fiction 2 over time. To catch the homage requires knowing that historical colonial narratives have been displaced onto alien worlds in countless science fictions and films; registering the play of iconography and style from earlier illustrations; even being familiar with the history of science itself from country to country. Yet each illustration also deploys these practices in conversation with its own historical context and the larger world around it, melding high art techniques, propaganda styles, comic book sensibilities, and fantastic subjects together in ways instantly recognizable as sf. There are additional features that demand a discursive reading of this image as science fiction. The para-textual markings all place this image in the space of a printed magazine. From the giant yellow SF, the cool katakana lettering spelling out Magazine (magajin), the kanji in smaller font above the title that reads fantastic science fictional magazine (kusou kagaku kagaku shōsetsu shi), the announcement in white on black signaling this is the “space opera special issue”, to the list of authors from Edgar Rice Burroughs to C.L. Moore. There are rules for reading magazine covers: name recognition, signaling content genre through tag lines, and enunciating specific contents (in this case, fictions by well-known authors) that must already be known to be fully recognizable. The sum of the image, including its subject and its ephemera, along with the size, weight, and cheap pulp paper of the magazine, which tell us how this 2 Throughout this work I will use the phrase “science fiction” or abbreviate it to the more colloquial “sf” in order to visually differentiate it from the capitalized “SF” in SF Magazine, although all three terms could be used interchangeably. My translations and citations will use the capitalized “SF” to reflect original sources. 3 illustration should be read: as science fiction that both introduces content and interrogates tropes of excessive power deployed in exploration and alien-encounter narratives. Each magazine cover illustration signals it is in conversation with a past series of images and production histories because it draws on them to create new images. I call this the discourse of science fiction illustration – it is established not through a single image but through the network of connections, both aesthetic and paratextual, that allow the image to be read. In other words, the image can only be identified as science fiction because we, the viewers, have already encountered other illustrations, other films, other fictions, and other visions of science fiction that help us understand this one – other black ships, other roving aliens, other red-sky planets, other colonial relationships, other space operas – other things that are labeled “SF.” The science fiction magazine reader, as they read the magazine, becomes conversant with the codes that make up some of that discourse. Learning authors’ names, investigating other words, seeing films with similar labels, reading other magazines that also have similar stories: all of these activities provide context, and within that context, allow understanding. It is important to note that this series of actions is not restricted to science fiction consumers but includes the illustrator Nakajima Seikan, who created the image, and the editor of the magazine Fukushima Masami, who collaborated with Nakajima to design each cover. The ability to create a coherent image that is both recognizable and recognizably science fiction comes from the illustrator, author, and editor’s abilities to engage with and deploy recognizable codes in the proper space. Reading sci fi as a relationship between visual and textual discourses The August 1996 cover is just one example of the intertwined relationship between the visual and the textual in science fiction. These two distinct types of production have been 4 conceptualized and studied as separate subjects because they fit into two different categories of media. My project demonstrates the intertwined nature of word and image, and how these together constitute what we mean when we invoke the term “science fiction.” Of course, I am focusing on a particular media, a particular culture, and a particular moment in science fiction because it allows me to unpack some of the nuances of the relationship between word and image which become startlingly clear in the particular iteration. My project centers on the Japanese SF Magazine because it is the first commercial magazine of science fiction in Japan, and as such represents a transitional moment for science fiction as a genre both within and outside of Japan. Prior to its production, science fiction in postwar Japan was largely the province of children. While there were adult fans, an organized fan culture was not clearly established. Because SF Magazine was the first commercially successful magazine of science fiction geared towards adults, it took pains to craft and debate the definition of science fiction in its pages. The magazine established links with, but differentiated itself from, the world of Anglophone science fiction. Moreover, editors, artists, writers, and fans created definitions of science fiction in Japan that persist to the present moment, including a specific engagement with space and the body. In this introduction, I locate the magazine in the history of mass culture in Japan, particularly in its relationship to literature. I articulate the rise of the new consumer subject in postwar Japan and how this relates to the expansion of mass culture. The 1960s in Japan was a period of social change, particularly as rapid economic growth contrasted sharply with social protests, and changes in consumer status were complimented by the uneven transformation of the physical landscape of Japan in rebuilding from the war. Japanese navigated within these tumultuous social spheres. The transformation of consumer culture, particularly the social and 5 political events that are an explicit part of the construction of the magazine’s content, are critical not just to my reconceptualization of science fiction as a visually textual discourse, but also to the broader relationship of fiction to both its visual and historical moment. My discussion of fan studies in this introductory chapter situates my own work and periodizes my intervention. I conclude with an overview of the subsequent chapters. My work reconsiders the importance of the visual to a definition of science fiction: it is only when the visual and textual are blended that a recognizable version of science fiction emerges – in the same way the magazine featuring the work of fans blurred the boundary between professional and fan. On the one hand, this dissertation contributes to scholarship investigating loss, social transformation, and trauma as it relates to postwar Japan. This includes the work of historian Igarashi Yoshikuni, whose critical historical intervention Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture 1945-1970 argues the body is the sight upon which Japanese postwar society played out its struggle to understand national loss and trauma in popular culture. I am inspired by Mark Williams and David Shahl’s Imag(In)ing the War in Japan : Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film collection, which takes up a variety of texts in order to resituate literary, film, and artistic practice to “fill in the ‘gaps’ in our historical knowledge and understanding of the traumas of the Asia Pacific War.” 3 On the other, my project contributes to recent scholarship in art history that investigates the close relationship of Surrealism to mass culture movements in postwar Japan. This includes Gennifer Weisenfeld’s work on advertising in the pre-war and trans-war context, as 3 Williams, Mark, and David Shahl, eds. Imag(In)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film. Boston, MA, USA: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010. 5. 6 well as the work of Miryam Sas and Alexandra Munroe on avant-garde art, performance, and highbrow manifestations in the postwar. 4 Moreover, I situate this project along with other emerging work on genre literatures in Japan. My work considers the important role of science fiction in influencing the relationship of fiction and technology in postwar Japan, much like Sari Kawana, in Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture, articulated the close relationship between detective fiction and definitions of the modern. Just as Christine Marran’s Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture considers the poison woman (or dokufu) as their narratives move through time through time, the shifting meanings of these women, and the dokufu’ s influence on defining women’s sexuality and place in Japan, my own work studies the ways science fiction, and more specifically, SF Magazine, reflected cultural concerns. Concerns about the relationship of humans and technology, the definitions of the self and place within a technologic world order, as well as the relationship between image and text. Hence, although the context of my study is 1960s Japan, my research is inseparable from larger investigations of the visual and the textual, the global understanding of science fiction, the relationship between high art and commercial culture, and contemporary media studies. The rise of the new middle class and a new consumer subject The new consumer subject in the Japanese postwar is related to the rise of a new middle class. However, the evolution of the Japanese middle class has historically been associated with 4 Weisenfeld, Gennifer. MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; Munroe, Alexandra, ed. Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky. New York: Harry N. Abrams / Yokohama Museum of Art, 1996; and Sas, Miryam. Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011. 7 new textual and reading strategies. Although there was a new construction of middle class in the postwar, the notion of a middle class – and middle class consumers – can be recognized in earlier periods in Japan’s history. This section outlines some of the interconnections of the middle class and consumer culture to ground my discussion of the postwar middle class in a larger historical context. Though literary scholars studying the widespread distribution of texts in Japan point first to the vibrant popular culture that flourished in major metropolises during the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), historian Carol Gluck argues the first rise of the middle class in Japan went hand in hand with the rise of industrial capitalism in the Meiji period (1868-1912). 5 It was in the following Taisho period (1910s and 1920s) that the apparatus for large-scale distribution of texts as part of a commerical and ideological project were firmly established. The rise in mass media included the widespread consumption of magazines by both genders and a prolifieration of print materials ostensibly targeted at consumers along gendered lines. 6 The articulations of these consumer-subjects were produced in various sites: magazine layouts, theater costumes, language, literature, department stores, and cinema spectacles. However, the consumer-subject was not only the middle-class worker who had enough money to purchase the material goods, but also included those who consumed the spectacle of those goods. As Silverberg argues, “the consumption of images of objects rather than the objects themselves was central to Japanese 5 There were multiple waves of rising middle class in Japan. The first in the Meiji period, the second in the interwar years in early the early Showa period, and finally in the postwar beginning in the 1960s. Gluck, Carol. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton University Press, 1985. 6 For more information on magazine culture of the prewar period see Maeda Ai. “The Development of Popular fiction in the Late Taisho Era: Increasing Readership of Women’s Magazines” Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity. Duke University Press, 2004. 163-221 and Frederick, Sarah. Turning Pages: Reading And Writing Women’ s Magazines in Interwar Japan. Honolulu: Univ of Hawaii Press, 2006. 8 modern culture.” 7 To consume a magazine was to consume the social class, social standing, and cosmopotitan identity associated with the goods depicted in the magazine, to ‘buy into’ the system. Although the media apparatus and instutions were increasingly coopted by the Japanese government in the lead-up to the war, they were not eradicated, but rather placedin the service of heavy-handed state ideology during the interwar years, and continued to fuel the wartime state until resources became scarce near the end of the war. Even so, Marily Ivy argues in her article “Formations of Mass Culture” that to suggest there was no discontinuity in what constituted mass culture from pre- to post-war is to do a disservice to our understandings of both periods, as in the postwar there arose “different technologies of dissemination, logics of production, patterns of consumption, and circuits of control” 8 that included the American regulation and censorship of media in the early postwar period, a shift in individual identification, and transformation in the thrust of mass culture publications. Rebuilt from the devastation of war through manufacturing, Japan in the postwar also underwent a transformation in the structure of large corporations that sourced workers from an increasingly educated populace; white-collar work grew hand in hand with the ability to work outside of one’s town because of the new infrastructure (trains and concrete) put in place as part of national rebuilding efforts. Daily lives of Japanese were transforming during this period as well, because, as Simon Partner notes, “Japan during the 1950s and 1960s embarked on what was at that time perhaps the biggest orgy of technology importation in history.” 9 The 1960s 7 Silverberg, Miriam. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009. 23. 8 Ivy, Marilyn. "Formations of Mass Culture," Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon. University of California Press, 1993. 244. 9 Partner, Simon. Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer. 1ST edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 107. 9 might also be termed the age of the consumer in Japan, as it was the first time the importance of the consuming power was taken into account by government and industrial production alike, with new laws and guidelines put in place to encourage and regulate this new economic force. Alongside these technological and legal changes, anthropological studies chart the building in the 1950s of a “new middle-class” as popular aspirations, the shape of institutions, and even the psychology of society were increasinly influenced by large companies and their white-collar employees. 10 Changes occurred not only in labor, but also in the social and political institutions, organization of population, and in lifestyle for a number of Japanese, that related to the rise in white-collar employees and the shift away from what Ezra V ogel termed the “old middle class” of shopkeepers, small business people, and government professionals. 11 The move from “old” to “new” middle class was more than a transition of the flow of weath. V ogel argued that it was the ability to draw a regular salary under stable conditions that came to be expressed in specific lifestyle standards and aspirations embedded in communities and social institutions. By the mid 1950s the job of salaryman became not just a position one held but also a lifestyle one lived (or aspired to live). The pervasiveness of this aspirational ideal was also linked to the increasing numbers of those who transitioned from working in the family business to working at a corportation. Gordon notes that “[t]he proportion of family workers in the labor force dropped from two-thirds of all in the late 1950s to under half by the end of the 10 Moreover, due to this widespread dissemination of a flattened identity, according to political scientist Inoguchi Kuniko, more than 90% of Japanese in the 1980s identified themselves as occupying the “middle” when asked about their social circumstances. Inoguchi Kuniko, "Chūryū to wa shōhi no kategori datta no ka," Chōu keron, July 1985, 86. 11 Vogel, Ezra F . Japan’s New Middle Class. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013. 10 1960s.” 12 Others, including Robert Smith, Theodore Bester, Dorrine Kondo, and Jennifer Robertson have expanded on V ogel’s work to complicate and nuance this notion of a “new middle class,” but few contest the notion that it was during this period that lifestyles were becoming regularized, reflecting affluence, and drawing ever closer to a single idealized mainstream norm. 13 It was through a variety of media, particularly mass market magazines, that these regularizations took place. Magazines were part of a media industry focused on selling models of status. As Marilyn Ivy notes, “[t]hese new mass-market magazines and (later) television, along with the older media of radio and newspapers, showed the consumers what they should be, what they should aspire to, what they should consume in order to confirm their middle-class status.” 14 She argues that in Japan there exists, when the Japanese word “mass” or masu is invoked, a leveling of consciousness concerning class distinctions; thus, by the 1960s, there were “strikingly uniform and standardized taste groupings” 15 differentiated more by gender and generation than by class or regional affiliation. But this flattening also meant the aspirational lifestyle included owning specific technologies like the refrigerator, the television, and the washing machine. .Later in the 12 Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. 3 edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 256. 13 Imamura, Anne E. Urban Japanese Housewives: At Home and in the Community. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987; Theodore C. Bestor. Neighborhood Tokyo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989; Kondo, Dorinne Kay. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990; Robertson, Jennifer, "A Dialectic of Native and Newcomer: The Kodaira Citizens' Festival in Suburban Tokyo," Anthropological Quarterly 60, no. 3 1987: 124-36 and "FurusatoJapan: The Culture and Politics of Nostalgia," Politics, Culture, and Society 1, no. 4 1988: 494-518; Skinner, Kenneth, "Conflict and Command in a Public Corporation in Japan," Journal of Japanese Studies 6, no. 2 1980: 301 -29; Noguchi, Paul. Delayed Departures, Overdue Arrivals: Industrial Familism and the Japanese National Railways. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990; and Rohlen, Thomas. Japan's High Schools.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983, and Kelly, William. “Finding a Place in Metropolitan Japan: Ideologies, Institutions, and Everyday Life” Postwar Japan as History. Ed. Gordon, Andrew. Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1993. 189-238. 14 Ivy, Marilyn. "Formations of Mass Culture," 246. 15 Ibid., 241. 11 1960s, this included the three C’s: car, cooler (air conditioner), and color television; dressing in power suits and Paris-fashion inspired dresses; and frequenting the department store because it was a purveyor not just of goods but of culture as well. The imbrication of Japanese imperial control and mass production ostensibly ended with American occupation and the transformation of Japan to a free electorate. Censorship and state control, however, explicitly persisted under American rule. Even after the newly elected Japanese government officially proclaimed the post-war period over in 1952, state-controlled censorship continued, though it began to shift from the ideological control of speech in the press to the newly instituted laws on indecency. 16 My invocation of the notion of consumer-subject is intended to articulate a consumer who is simultaneously the subject of production as well as a subject with agency, less bound up or constricted by explicit state involvement or control than those who lived in the Taisho and early Showa periods. Contributing to the history of fan cultures My work contributes to the conversation about the rise of the “fan” in general and the rise of Japanese “fans” in particular. I consider fans and their relationship to science fiction and more broadly to texts through this magazine. This is a history that began in prewar Japan. Most Japanese literary scholars, including Karatani Kojin, associate the Meiji period with the upsurge in attempts to define, create, and produce a modern literature (including a modern vernacular language and realism as a literary technique) in Japan and to separate “pure literature” from “popular literature” (junbungaku and taishūbungaku). The ideological work surrounding these 16 Allison, Anne. Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan. University of California Press, 1999. Print. 12 productions and divisions is the beginning of where we see fans who claimed a separate identity for themselves related to their consumption of particular products or texts. This dissertation fits into a broader conversation within literary studies that contributes to this notion of fans being constantly bound up with texts. While many scholars I cite below discuss non-commercial fan culture in the contemporary moment, their notion of a fan as someone who is an active participant in the fictions they consume (and go onto produce) is key to my own analysis of the operations at work in SF Magazine. On one side of the current conversation about Japanese fan culture, fans are imagined as the ultimate consumers whose power comes from their intense desire to purchase all of the many and varied pieces of a transmedia property (book, film, anime series, manga, toys, character goods, etc); 17 mass media companies in this model exert time and money attempting to create texts that will appeal to this collector fascination in order to meet or exploit those needs. On the other is the discussions of fans as simultaneous producers, raising questions of fan respect to the “original” writer-creator or their copyright, vision, intention. Media scholars and fans themselves are critically exploring the production and consumption of fan works as reimagination or at times expansion of the original texts (or in some conservative Japanese views as “perversions”) that destabilize the notion of individual authorship. 18 Like Jenkins in Textual Poachers when he describes fans via de Certeau as “nomads” (in particular nomadic readers), 19 I see the investigation of fans as an investigation of a reader/producer that has a multiplicity of practices – the fan as a nexus of consumption. That includes high and low, and works that do not 17 see work by Anne Allison, Azuma Hiroki, Mimi Ito, and Marc Steinberg 18 see work by Azuma Hiroki, Ian Condry, Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, Henry Jenkins, and John Fiske 19 Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 2012. 36. 13 exclusively live in one sphere or the other. Fans are knowledgeable about consuming and even creating the products of mass culture, as well as the products of high culture. When I speak about fans, I am defining them in a constellation of theory that is engaged with thinking about reading and writing practices, and which is influenced in many ways by Roland Barthes and his notions of the reader as the producer of the text they are reading (most commonly referenced in his essay Death of the Author but mentioned also in his (post)structuralist reading of Sarrasine, S/Z). 20 Barthes suggests common conception of authorship as a single inviolate subjectivity that creates a work (be it fiction, music, photography, or any other text consumed by another) is a misunderstanding of the operations at work. Rather, at the moment of writing, the author is simultaneously an act of individual destruction and the beginning of the performance of a variety of narrative codes – as Barthes puts it, “it is the language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality, to reach the point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me.’” 21 Put simply, the text that is produced is a blend of everything that has come before it: cultural codes, conventions, conglomerations of everything read and heard before writing, a kind of text he calls the “writerly” text. This in turn results in a different kind of reader, one who does not simply decipher the authorial meaning in a text, but rather produces meanings while reading that are contingent and unauthorized. Hellekenson and Busse, in thinking about American internet fandom, suggest that we define fan as someone who produces new texts in a “writerly” mode of reading. 22 They propose that fans, when they create their own fanworks, are in fact engaging 20 Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. 21 Ibid., 144. 22 Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse, eds. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2006. 14 with the source text over and over again in pleasurable enjoyment of it, and that this engagement is a kind of agency that allows them not simply to uncritically consume (and be manufactured by) mass culture, but also to transform the products of mass culture into popular culture that serves their individual needs. Azuma Hiroki suggests a periodization of a specific type of Japanese fan who is labeled with a Japanese name: otaku in his book Otaku: Database Animals. For Azuma, an otaku is someone who “indulge[s] in forms of subculture strongly linked to anime, video games, computers, science fiction, special-effects films, anime figurines, and so on.” 23 He argues these people are the inhabitants of a distinct subculture, the “otaku subculture.” This subculture’s history begins not at the end of World War II (when other scholars including Slaymaker and Allison place it), but rather with a cultural break at the end of the 1950s. At that time, Japan was no longer under America’s occupation and the country was economically succeeding; this was also when the Japanese government re-ratified the “Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan” (originally signed in 1952) that declared the United States would act to maintain peace in East Asia on the behalf of Japan and maintain military bases in Japanese soil. In 1959, there were massive protests by student groups, labor unions, and everyday Japanese who gathered in the hundreds of thousands in front of the National Diet Building, the seat of postwar Japanese government. 24 This, for Azuma, was the end of one kind of history and the beginning of another: Azuma theorizes otaku are themselves posthistorical, and that in order to understand fannish consumption and production we must restructure our 23 Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. English ed. edition. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2009. 3. 24 This treaty is being weakened by the current Prime Minister Abe. He has proposed modifying the Treaty to allow Japanese military to send soldiers to foreign conflicts, and this has incurred similarly widespread protests, this time against the perceived re-militarization of Japan. 15 understanding of how they consume narratives. 25 I will return to this move from “fan” to “otaku” later in the chapter, but I think it is useful to follow these arguments about postmodernism and mass culture in part because of what they can tell us about the shifts in cultural production, particularly a breakdown of the lines between junbungaku and taishūbungaku. On that order, Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction interrogates the notion of art as original, and attempts to work through a methodology that acknowledges mass production where the “aura” of an object (the historical grounding, the tradition, the presence of authenticity) is detached from it by the plurality of copies that are substituted for a unique existence. Benjamin suggests that this transition, from a mode of consumption that was hierarchical and based on a singular work (the person standing in front of the unique work of art, or the people who were allowed into churches to see art but whose relative proximity was determined by their social standing), to a mode where multiple copies can be consumed in personalized circumstances (the reproduction of a work you hang on your living room wall) is also a transition in mode of perception. Benjamin is discussing the industrialization of Europe and America, not Japan. But his work can be read as echoing 25 Before I move onto this, however, I want to address Azuma’s central argument. He is critical of Fiske-inspired notions that that culture (and the process of making culture) is a social process, and argues against the notion that popular culture comes into being as the individual uses the tools of mass culture to make meaning of daily life. Instead, via Kojeve’s notions of the database, he theorizes that in the postmodern moment there is no meaning that is possible to be made by otaku - rather desire is structured around “consumer needs [that] are satisfied immediately and mechanically, without the intervention of the other.”(Azuma, 87) While Fiske argues the rise in the study of culture, and subcultures, and fan studies like this one, have the potential to illuminate the very individuals who are adept at using the tools of mass culture to create their own meanings, Azuma theorizes this new kind of consumption by fans is “depthless” and that “otaku have abandoned the substance of sociality but still maintain its form.” (Azuma, 93) Azuma suggests fans do not create, but instead have a subjectivity “motivated by ‘the need for small narratives’ at the level of simulacra and ‘the desire for a grand nonnarrative’ at the level of database;…a new view of humanity [as] a database animal.” (Azuma, 95) Fans only break up larger narratives into smaller ones, and the only work that they do is to find ways to further consume. This rather grim view of fans and fan practices is predicated on the otaku’s being only partially satisfied by simulacra, and so they are caught up in an endless cycle of consumption that is never sated. Azuma Hiroki. Database Animals. 16 alongside the developments of mass culture in Japanese history. To do so we have to look for a transition in modes of perception in the Edo period, again in Meiji, and finally in postwar Showa. There is evidence that of the simultaneous changes. The rise of print culture in Edo made a variety of different products available to and targeted for new classes of people (including samurai and merchant): popular fiction, woodblock prints of a variety of subjects including famous places (but also advertisements), and new shorter kinds of poetry. It is change of an order of magnitude when we look at the rise of newspapers and magazines in Meiji and Taisho that went hand in hand with the reforms on education that spread literacy further than in the Tokugawa period, and the self-conscious production by the Japanese government of Japan as a modern nation-state and its citizens as a modern public. Another rapid change occurred (again) in Japan’s postwar period - the widespread destruction during the Pacific war changed attitudes towards the technological, including the technologies of mass textual distribution. 26 The status of fans are extremely different depending on the period. The consumption practices of fans who were collecting prints of Kabuki actors in the Edo period distinct from those of the women reading magazines or train fans who were collecting in the Taisho period. These women readers’ practices are different than the otaku who are consuming science fiction today. One of the things that distinguishes the mass culture in the Edo and the Meiji periods is the industrialization occurring at the time – while there was certainly the production of many texts we associate with mass culture, the industrialized subject whose life is impacted by machines, factories, and the organization of labor becomes truly visible only in the Meiji period with the rise of a middle-class. 26 Again see Chapter 3 for a discussion of the mass publishing boom in the late 1950s, 1960s, where publishing went from 400 magazines to 2000 magazines in the space of about 15 years. 17 Historical shift and the shaping of post 50s fan culture Rather than attempting to locate an origin point for fans, I want to bring up a constellation of practices that occurred in the Meiji and Taisho periods during those times that relate to fan practice today. For instance, Christine Marran examines the way popular poison- women narratives in Meiji were consumed as the “other” to the modernizing male subject. These narratives were works of popular fiction, and Marran is careful to note that the sensationalizing aspects of these fictions in the Meiji were part of the pleasure of their consumption. I will further discuss the consumption of the other as part of self-identity formation in my later chapter on mass publishing in the 1960s. Yet Marran also describes women in the Taisho period who adapted these narratives and began creating “confessions” of their own moral depravity in testimonials that both revealed their sexuality and repudiated their actions. Although I would not categorize these women as fans as they were not the primary readership, their adaptive strategy is considered one of the markers of fan activity. Fiske notes that fans often adapt the tools of mass media for their own ends: in this case taking as models women who murdered their husbands and using the style of this revelatory confessional for their own ends. 27 Jennifer Robertson, in her work on the Takarazuka Review, notes the term “fan” (fuan) actually entered into Japanese language in the 1910s. 28 She, along with Maeda Ai, points to evidence of discussion in newspapers and magazines about the proper conduct and legislation of ‘new women’ who were entering the public sphere to consume a variety of mass culture. Robertson points to a 1935 issue of a popular women’s magazine that contained images of the 27 See my discussion of John Fiske in Chapter 4. 28 The Takarazuka Review is a Japanese all-female musical theater troupe based in Takarazuka, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. Women play every role in the lavish theatre productions. These include Western-style musicals, stories adapted from Japanese folktales, and shōjo manga. 18 five different types of Takakarazuka fan (courtesan, early bird, poetic, copy cat, bodyguard), and also references an editorial in a newspaper that rants against Japanese women being unruly at public performances (unlike a mythical Western female counterpart, who is invoked as a model of control). We see here the importance not only of the consumer as someone who reads magazines, but also of the way the magazines themselves construct narratives about these subjects, attempting to simultaneously describe and legislate these definitions while also confirming their existence and their power in a system of consumption. Maeda Ai’s work on the development of popular fiction in the Taisho era reminds us that it was in 1926 that the first magazine on popular fiction (called Taishu Bungei/Literary arts for the masses) was launched. Maeda suggests that the rise of popular literature in the 1920s is due to the establishment of a middle class that emphasized education for women, and the prevalence of women’s magazines and journals aimed at this emerging readership. The magazines do not simply contain popular fiction written for women and about them (although there were certainly stories like these in the pages), but also include works by Tanizaki and other junbungaku writers. Maeda notes that many of the junbungaku writers who published in these pages did so because the magazines allowed them different opportunities than the literary magazines of the day – they published longer works there as the magazines were less conservative than newspapers, so much so that some cultural critics concluded women’s magazines were one of the main outlets for literary publication. We see here that the distinction between high literature and popular literature is not as clearly marked as subsequent literary scholars would make it. Additionally, Maeda quotes Suekichi Aono (who in 1925 was analyzing differences between pure literature and popular fiction readers) as saying the readers of popular literature were mostly women and 19 they were part of the intelligentsia! This problematizes a notion of popular fiction reader as uncritical, as someone who is not male and not familiar with high literature. However, I do not want to be too grand in my proposition – I do believe we have to acknowledge the breaking of many aspects of mass culture during the Pacific War. As Anne Allison notes in Millennial Monsters, not only were many industries (like the film industry) co- opted during the war for the ideological purposes of the state, but widespread shortages during the war lead to the scarcity of many of the materials of mass production, including paper to print. The wartime state ideology imposed a variety of restrictions on mass culture production, including but not limited to censorship. The American occupation, while it also brought the first of the materials needed to rebuild cities and even paper stock to help reestablish the press, reinforced strict controls. Even if the occupation’s ideological aims were different (as film censors wanted to purge the industry of ideological films and have the industry focus on escapist pleasure, while magazines and newspapers were enlisted to tout the miracles of democracy), there was a great deal of control and restriction until the 1950s. I mark the postwar period as different because people had a very different relationship to technology. In the Meiji period, we see the expansion of a variety of technologies into daily life, including trains, electricity, telephonic service and the like – these were seen as having enormous potential to transform life. Even though this industrialization was not always seen as beneficial, as massive transformation brought anxieties about the modern subject reflected in works like Soseki’s Kokoro and Tanizaki’s Chijin no ai, the concentration of fears was about losing a specific cultural identity based on an influx of cultural products (films, education, literature). Unfortunately, the war itself provided a terrible demonstration of the absolute worst uses of the most advanced technologies in the deployment of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 20 and it caused a certain kind of widespread distrust of technology on a scale never seen before. It was in the resulting occupation period that Japan was in some ways forcefully integrated into the cultural logic of late capitalism, illustrated by Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, as the American occupation sought to instill liberal democratic “ideals” in the occupied Japanese populace that included a celebration of technological advancement. This paradoxical and complex relationship to technology is constantly negotiated in exploration of science in science fiction in Japan. The term otaku emerged in this postwar context. Toshio Okada, unlike Azuma, suggests that the word came into play when fans of emerging anime culture began describing themselves in the 1970s, and was then picked up by newspapers and magazines in the early 1980s. Azuma retroactively separates otaku culture in historical or generational periods. He has three foundational sets: the first were those in the 1960s who consumed (science fiction) products, whereas the second set in the 1970s had more choices of product but consumed texts which themselves remained part of the older type of narrative. In the 1980s, he suggests, there is a break: the prosperity of the 80s in Japan frees both the country and anime from the constraints of history in a Jamesonian notion of postmodernism, and the otaku begin to take on the characteristics of the consumers in the latter generations. But Tsuji Izumi, in his chapter on trains in Fandom Unbound, suggests that Train otaku have their foundations in the late Taisho period (1912-1926), while Mizuko Ito, in her introduction to the same volume, proposes that “otaku culture” emerged in the 1980s as a marginalized geek subculture. The term became particularly associated with pejorative meanings in 1989 when a man named Tsutomu Miyazaki, who had abducted, murdered and mutilated four girls, was revealed to be a fan of manga and anime, particularly of the pornographic kind. Otaku as a term 21 was then pathologized, associated with obsessive deviant behavior that could ultimately lead to violence by someone withdrawn from regular social life, who inhabited a fantasy worlds of video games and manga novels. Yet over the next twenty years the term has been rehabilitated in some respects, culminating in the popular Densha Otoko story of an otaku whose attempt to save a girl from being harassed on a train rehabilitates him as a functioning, romantically engaged member of society. In many ways, Azuma’s periodization is the most nuanced because it leaves room for the practices of otaku culture to be located in the postwar production of mass culture industry in the 1950s and 1960s. It is in these decades that we begin to again see the spread of magazines as the arbiters of both mass and literary culture, much the same as they did in late Meiji and early Taisho, but with much broader reach. Here too is when the publisher Hayakawa Press began their domination of the science fiction and fantasy market. Tsuji Izumi suggests this is also the moment when there is a shift from consumers who are focused on militaristic education/imagination to imagining the “society of future.” Azuma’s characterization of the 1960s otaku as being primarily consumers of goods must be modified to take into account the ways in which science fiction fans interacted with SF Magazine during this period and the way they were part of this movement away from militaristic imagination and into the future. Reflecting in some sense the Benjaminian trajectory, Tsuji’s discussion of ‘train otaku’ is helpful because he notes the shift from putting together single trains to elaborate train sets: a transition he describes as a move from individual models to an emphasis on world building. His analysis starts in the mid-1920s, with fans who were engaged in making miniature versions of the trains that began populating the country. These were handcrafted pieces that mimicked the trains ridden everywhere in urban daily life, and the emphasis was placed on individual 22 (re)production of scale models. He notes the Railway Club established in 1954 shifted production (of handcrafted individual trains) to collection (of plastic models that were mass produced as promotional items by train companies in the postwar). The Train-fan was now intent on collecting all of the different models, rather than on creating their own. They began to build train sets instead of individual trains. This is a shift that seems a reversal of the relationship I outlined in my introduction of fans as simultaneous consumers and producers, yet Tsuji argues the shift from free-form models into plastic models also included a shift from single reproductions into kits that allowed the mimicking of an entire landscape of trains. Instead of building the individual car, the Train-fan built the environment (including tracks) to run his pre- fabricated train on. Even the scale shifted so that the focus now hinged not on individual locomotives but on the interlocking of a variety of electric cars together with the rails and the railroad scenery. Fans now could create entire villages and purchase trackside accessories, moving beyond the trains themselves and into the land the trains passed through: the world of the train. Tsuji links this expanding play space to the rise in science fiction being published in the period. The importance of Tsuji’s contribution to my argument is that his case study articulates a history of fans in Japan that is much longer than Azuma’s, and articulates fans as both consumers and producers. I am in no way suggesting that fans began creating communities only in the 1960s. Nor am I arguing that science fiction in Japan started in the 1960s either. Instead, this section is meant to broadly outline the number of histories that precede my own work. People interacting with media as fans also has a long practice, and Tsuji’s case study is a particularly compelling one that reflects this history and the agency of fans within that history. What my work does is consider how these two different strains (science fiction being produced prior to this 23 point, and fans organizing themselves around communal interests prior to this point) coalesced around this particular magazine. In the 1960s adults consuming science fiction created a more structured and recognizable community. They had previous models of fan practice, previous histories of media consumption, and previous texts of science fiction to build on. Tsuji’s identification of the movement from individual trains into an emphasis on world building supports my contention that the operations within fan communities were during this time very interested in creating spaces separate and distinct groups within the larger culture, the very definition of the word subculture. His work also reveals that what constitutes fan practice, even within a singular fandom, is constantly changing. It is not enough to consider the organization of fans into communities, their interactions with media products, and the media products they are reacting to. We must also consider the interactions of fans with the larger cultural and social constructions of their time. From content to concept: chapter overview In my first chapter, I present the magazine and its context. I first describe the anatomy of the first issue in order to delineate the unique space in which fictional, nonfictional, and visual content was presented. SF Magazine joined a history of science fiction in Japan that stretches from the beginning of the modern era to the present moment, and this chapter outlines both this history and discuss the environment in which these subject circulated in the 1960s, particularly underscoring the events cited by the magazine itself. In my next chapter I propose a reading of science fiction not as a genre, but as a form of translation – not translation of one written or spoken language to another, but rather from the visible discourse to the written discourse and back. This theoretical provocation is informed by 24 Akira Lippit’s arguments that it was atomic light that destroyed the boundary between outside and inside that had been troubled by both x-ray and cinema. In this blast of atomic light the difference between text and illustration is also exploded. My theories of science fiction illustration in this second chapter contribute to the relatively small field of American theorizations about science fiction art and aesthetics, but also articulate the differences between American and Japanese illustration. To do so, I first draw on the body of critical work conceiving of science fiction as a distinct entity as proposed by Samuel Delany and Tatsumi Takayuki. I engage with the theorization of science fiction art by George Slusser, who insists science fiction centers on the human amidst technology. Finally through a close reading of Benjamin and Derrida’s work on translation, I explicate the creation of science fiction as a continual act of translation to underscore how sense is made through this process of translating between the written and visual language. By comparing covers from the Japanese magazine that predominately focus on landscape with covers from American and Japanese magazines that feature the body in my third chapter, I establish the discursive field through which I am reading postwar Japanese sci fi. I argue SF Magazine and science fiction in the 1960s were concerned with “space” as distance, as gap, as differentiation, and as landscape in order to work through the trauma of the war. SF Magazine’s illustrations stood at a distance from both American science fiction and other mass magazine styles in the 1950s in Japan. The magazine covers continually articulated landscapes and astral phenomena – making visually concrete their remove from other genres, cultural forms, and ways of considering loss. These landscapes were markedly absent bodies (icons that were the preoccupation of both mass Japanese publishing and American and British science fiction magazines). Moreover, the style of illustration was a new form of popular surrealism, invoked to 25 lend the magazine an air of the adult, the serious, and the highbrow as well as to adapt a style of representing the psychological to the evocation of the visual, elevating science fiction from its place as part of children’s fiction. I chart the development of the magazine, which went hand in hand with the establishment of a more organized science fiction community, from 1960 through 1970, in my fourth chapter. This solidification is reflected in the representation of bodies on the covers of the magazine, beginning with their appearance as insubstantial shadows. These bodily shapes, in their very mutability, are continually reworking the bombed and misshapen Japanese bodies in the postwar. Over the course of ten years, these shadows gained shape and solidity just as the community took shape outside of the pages in newly formed writer’s groups and the first Japanese conference on science fiction. The definition of science fiction writer/fan/reader was explored, defined, and redefined in the pages of SF Magazine, and became a clear kind of identification with modes of thinking and viewing the world. This commercial market was not divided, as other markets like journalism are, into producers and consumers; instead, the magazine itself had distinct ways of blurring the boundaries between science fiction writer, fan, and consumer in both the fictional and nonfictional content. As a result of understanding science fiction as both the visual and the textual, as well as an iconography of the body (even when absent), I conclude by considering the way this melding of the visual and the textual on the body has developed in later works. I address Japanese science fiction subjects and the Japanese science fiction subculture in a study of fictional posthuman characters in two science fiction works – Kurahashi Yumiko’s Extraterrestrial (Uchujin), and Ōhara Mariko’s Girl (Garu). Because Kurahashi was part of the literary establishment, her extraterrestrial stands apart from the science fictional world, and the alien posthuman in her story 26 acts as a metaphor for the alien nature of sf fandom to the literary. Ōhara is a writer produced within the world created by SF Magazine, and her posthuman characters are marked by her entrenchment in this world. Both create fantasies of mutable posthuman bodies in flux, transitioning in a variety of ways. These transitions are precisely why I situate my project in this particular time with a focus on SF Magazine; the magazine is part of a rich and important period in defining what sf means as an adult genre in Japan, whereas the Ōhara story is evidence of the legacy left behind by the magazine and the fandom created by it. What constitutes the boundary of this culture may be in flux, but moments of vast expansion or particularly fervent creation and participation that the practices that inform the contemporary moment become clear. 27 Chapter One: The Anatomy and Context of SF Magazine Just as the structure of an argument both supports and creates the knowledge conveyed, SF Magazine’ s structure was built to support multiple tasks: entertainment, education, and community. SF Magazine expanded the notion of science fiction so that it became its own socially and commercially successful adult genre. Additionally, the magazine legitimated science fiction as serious endeavor, separating it from its roots in juvenile fiction by consistently combining science fact and non-fiction with socially, politically, and ideologically critical fictions. In creating a sense of community, SF Magazine had many small features that prompted reader engagement and investment. This chapter presents the contents of the first magazine in detail to delineate how the structures of each issue complemented the magazine’s project. The scope widens to present a history of science fiction publishing in Japan and how the magazine fits into that history. The last section situates the magazine and science fiction more broadly within the major historical moments of the 1960s, particularly those that reverberated in the pages of the magazine itself. With a first issue totaling 144 pages, the magazine was a standard five-inch by seven-inch size, printed on pulp paper and dominated by black-and-white text and images. However, many issues included glossy two-color inserts for special sections, and the index was always two-color as well. After the first two years, the binding was modified from staple to glue and began to accommodate text on the spine. The magazine expanded page year by year count until, by 1969, the magazine often had more than three-hundred pages per issue. The cover illustrations, unlike those for American science fiction magazines published at the same time, illustrated some facet of science fiction itself, rather than illustrating a particular 28 fiction published in the issue. These graphics were designed by the cover illustrator in consultation with editor-in-chief Fukushima Masami. Occasionally, for special issues (like the robot special issue of SF Magazine May 1960, or the Last World War issue of SF Magazine May 1963), the cover served as an aesthetic take on a monthly theme also reflected in its contents. However, this was not an illustration of a particular story, but rather a way to take up the theme of the issue visually. The index, which contained two-color graphics as well as textual listings of the contents, was always preceded by the editor’s introduction, a single page with a few paragraphs that both offered editorial musing on the contemporary moment and highlighted specific content in the magazine. For the first three issues, this introduction offered a definition of the science fictional contents in the magazine as well as a greeting to the readers. 29 The index lists the fictional stories in large bold fonts, with both author and translator in smaller text. In 1963, SF Magazine featured two fictions by a Japanese author in each issue of the year, while most of the other Japanese commentators contributed non-fiction articles. For the first five years, at least seventy percent of the fiction published by SF Magazine was fiction-in-translation from primarily American, British, and occasionally Soviet authors. It is only in the latter half of the 1960s that the magazine began to feature more Japanese fiction authors. Through the end of the 1970s, the magazine kept a mix of sixty-percent translation to forty-percent Japanese fiction. 29 The first of these notes is cited in its entirety in Chapter 2. 29 figure 2: Index of December 1959 SF Magazine The table of contents of the first issue (figure 2) shows the dynamic interplay of the visual and the textual at work inside the magazine. The mechanical turquoise gears are mimicked by the graphic elements of the textual listings – the color blocks that highlight the titles of certain fictions and nonfiction content. The copyright permission printed in green ink serves as both a round curve leading into the corner graphic and an informational text. The two-color printing of the index allowed colorful graphics to surround the text listings. These images that often took up an element from the magazine’s cover illustration and reproduced or modified it to create the sense that the cover image was linked explicitly with the contents of the magazine. In this first table of contents, there is a clear division between fictional 30 and non-fictional content (fictional on the left, non-fiction articles and notes on the right), though in later issues this division was not maintained. The size of the fiction title text makes it clear that these are the featured pieces. Over the years, the table of contents would adopt a variety of layouts, but the larger text for important articles or fiction was always preserved. In this issue, the use of the turquoise blue to highlight the text separates Arthur C. Clark, Robert Sheckley, and Isaac Asimov’s fictions from the others, and links them with the non-fictional sections on Space Rockets and an article on man-made weather control. The color-coded linking of nonfictional content with fictional content is one other way clear boundaries are continually crossed in the pages of SF Magazine. Readers might pick up a magazine because they wanted to read new fictional stories. However, they might also be drawn to the nonfictional content that was grounded in scientific perspective even when it occasionally veered towards the highly speculative. 30 The fictions included here are not generic space exploration stories, but instead show the range of science fiction from the cerebral to the comedic. The index is a Who’s Who of authors who were not only popular but also considered the standard bearers for writing new and exciting science fiction in the late 1950s: Robert Sheckley, Phillip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Issac Asimov, Lester del Rey and Arthur C. Clarke. 31 These works, primarily written in the five years before SF 30 In some ways this is the reverse of American sf magazine history, where the early magazines began as popular science magazines with just a few fictional stories per issue. 31 This first issue contained translations of Robert Sheckley’s “The Prize of Peril” (about a man who goes on a TV show in which he must evade people out to kill him for a cash prize); Phillip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (about a lost mission to Mars and the resulting alien invasion) published in F&SF Jan 1959; Richard Matheson’s “The Edge” (where a man slips into an alternate dimension that is just like, and yet unlike, his own) published in F&SF August 1958; Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” (where a child in school on Venus tries to explain her experience of the sun to other children who have never seen it) published in F&SF March 1954; Robert Bloch’s “That Hell- BoundTrain” (a young man trades his soul in service to a hell-bound train for the ability to stop time when he finds his perfect moment) published in F&SF September 1958; Isaac Asimov’s “The Dying Night” (a murder mystery hinging on the murderer from Mercury expecting the night to last forever) published in F&SF July 1956; A. Bertram 31 Magazine was published, were only newly translated into Japanese. The magazine prided itself on the rapid translation, and readers were excited to encounter these fictions for the first time in Japanese. They were also works that sought to explore both individual and social subjectivity embedded within technological innovation. Through these choices, even in this first issue, there is a continual construction of science fiction as both an abstract and a realist endeavor. Beyond the fiction, it is the non-fictional content that defines science fiction as something that can inform, almost as a kind of newspaper offering science discoveries. Two nationally-respected scientists, Japan’s first rocket scientist Hokawa Higeo and Japan’s first meteorologist Arakawa Hideoshi, contribute articles that speculate on the present and future of technology. Their respective pieces, “Space Rocket” (which considers the technological requirements for extant space programs) and “Man-made Weather Control” (focusing on the possibility of man exerting technological control over the environment) do not seek to tell an explicitly fictional story with unreal characters, and yet they both describe imagined events based on extant scientific evidence. Additionally featured are the translation of Asimov’s nonfiction speculative essay the “Dust of Ages,” and the first part of a three-year series by science critic Kusaka Jitsuo on the history of the earth from our understandings of atoms to the end of the universe called, somewhat prosaically, “Earth’s Story.” Asimov’s article begins with up to date scientific knowledge about the movement of dust from one part of the universe to the other, and somewhat romantically considers how this dust is wiped up by housewives all over America. Kusaka’s work, which summarizes what the atomic Chandler’s “A Critical Angle” F&SF Nov 1958. Copyright uncredited but just as important, the issue also included Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rescue Party” (aliens arrive on Earth to save the people from our sun dying and find humans have already created rescue ships with rocket technology) published in Astounding May 1946 and Lester Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” (where Dave and Phil create the perfect female robot, Helen, who both men love), published in Astounding 1938. 32 structure is and how all stars are made out of specific atoms, reads much like a modern day scientific textbook couched in easily readable language and addressed to lay people. Separate from its educational or instructional value, the magazine included a component that is quite common in entertainment magazines, but essential in forming a collective canon for readers: the critical review. This issue featured the first of many discussions of science fiction in other media. Film critic Okashu On contributed an article titled “The turn to science fiction film” in worldwide filmmaking, in which he argued major interest in science fiction film began with the 1950 Destination Moon produced by George Pal. He goes on to discuss sf film as it was being created in the American film industry. Later issues would include summaries of science fiction film screenings, art exhibitions, and summaries of sf conventions both within and outside Japan. Inside the offset box, the index lists other recurring special non-fiction sections that continue the blending of the educational and the entertaining: science topics (short summaries of new scientific discoveries) and science fiction library (discussion of particularly interesting or foundational authors and texts, which later became reviews of new books), as well as listing the short notes embedded within the texts of the fictional stories. These short notes are editorial glosses that informed a reader who is presumed to not be particularly embedded in the history of science fiction of the meaning of certain terms or the significance of a particular word or translation. This first issue included three notes: a note on the use of the term “Space Station” in fiction that explains how its meaning had come to symbolize a particular city in space as well as describe satellites; a note on the “Crab Nebula” accompanied by a small black and white photograph of this particular celestial configuration of stars, and finally, a note on “SF fiction – The name’s origins”. 33 The drawings, designs, and black-and-white photographs that accompany the text portion of the magazine is particularly noticeable compared to other magazines of the time in both Japan and the United States. For example, SF Magazine’ s American counterpart The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F/SF Magazine) was barren by contrast. While every single segment of SF Magazine is introduced with a title that contains an element of graphic design, and most of the fictions have a half-page or full page illustration as part of their introduction, F/SF Magazine’ s November 1958 issue contains only two images: the stylized F/SF logo at the close of stories and, at the end of the “Science” section that presents Assimov’s “Dust of Ages” essay, a single two-inch drawing of a beaker amidst a starry universe. This holds true for other magazines published by Hayakawa Press, including Ellery Queen’ s Mystery Magazine (Erari ku’inzu misuteri magajin) whose abstract covers were the inspiration (in part) of the cover style of SF Magazine. While EQMM’ s contents have some of the same dynamic insets and column breaks, only sketches of simple square-lined patterns introduce the translated fictions. SF Magazine’ s illustrations continually create visual splashes that supplement the written text. The first editor’s note embedded in the text on the origins of science fiction provides us with one genealogy of science fiction styles to follow, and clearly shows the variety of words used to describe production of this kind of fantastic fiction in Japan. A doodle of a thorny spiraling branch in the corner of the border articulates visually the complexity of this history. However, in these very same magazine pages the term science fiction was standardized (opposed to, as you will see below, any number of names including fantastic science fiction, science romance, and older Japanese literary terms): 34 figure 3: Note on the origins of the term science fiction Already there are hardly any people who don't know the word 'science fiction' [katakana: saiensu fikushon]. Yet it’s possible that there are surprisingly few people who know the beginning of the term's usage isn't very old. The christening of this type of fiction "science fiction" [English] was done by that most elder statesman Hugo Gernsback thirty years ago in 1929, printed in Science Wonder Stories. Before this name was in use there were many varieties. First, the founding father of fantastic science fiction [kanji: kusōkagakushōsetsu] Jules Verne who wrote the first work of scientific fantasy adventure [kanji: kagakuteki kusōbōken] "Five Weeks in a Balloon," that appeared in the French world newspapers as a "V oyages Extraordinares" [French] -- and it was called in English a "Scientific Romance" [English] or scientific romance [kanji: kagaku katakana: romansu]. Subsequently, H.G. Wells' works used the name "Science Fantasy". In the 1900s there were many new terms that appeared: “off trail stories” “different stories” “impossible stories” [English] and others were used, roughly translating to “derailed” “different” “absurdity” [kanji: dassenshita, kawatta, kōtōmukei]. But the interesting name suggested by the sellers and receivers of SF [roman letters] in those days that became popularized was “pseudoscientific stories,” [English] even though it wasn’t a comfortable term. But Gernsback wasn’t satisfied with that term, and he was a man who was a scientist himself who had the belief that fantastic science fiction [kanji: kusōkagakushōsetsu] must have the truth as its scientific foundation. Therefore he created “scientification” [English]…. 32 32 Fukushima Masami. “The origins of the term science fiction,” SF Magazine. December 1959, 17. (see Introduction, n. 1) This and all subsequent translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 35 While I mentioned above that most of the editor’s introductions in the first few years of publication also defined science fiction over and over again, the term is slippery enough that Fukushima devoted the first editorial note of the first issue to the term’s history. Naming is part of the process that calls an entity into being, and this terminology was critical to the new magazine and the audience it was attempting to develop. This passage presents but a few of the myriad names being used by writers both international and Japanese, using both English and French words untranslated into Japanese as well as translations into katakana (used for foreign loan words) and kanji. I have tried to indicate through brackets just how many languages are being evoked here, and how even when rendered in Japanese these terms are all variations indicating the slippery nature of the object that being created, sold, and consumed by readers. This first note creates not just a trajectory of the name, but a genealogy of the “great luminaries” of the genre. These are not just writers but also editors, and this narrative links the shift in terminology to their actions within the community. This is a list of individuals who create worlds, beginning with Jules Verne, who was a particularly popular author in the 1920s and 30s in Japan. 33 The mention of H.G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback next shows the importance of a single author and then the emphasis moving from author to editor. There is already a transnational pathway charted here, from France to England to the United States, and then to Japan. I’ve used an image rather than retyping the text because style and context are just as important as the words themselves. In this single entry, there are twenty different names for this genre presented – some in Romanized English, some in Japanese kanji, one in Japanese katakana, and some in mixed Japanese kanji and katakana. The science fiction reader can clearly 33 Nagayama Yasuo. Japanese SF Intellectual History: From End of Edo/Meiji to Postwar (Nihon SF seishinshi: bakumatsu, meiji kara sengo made). Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2009. 36 read comfortably enough in English and French to understand the name of the genre in each language, and yet is also presented with a timeline and important figures that require knowing and knowingness – the “father” of science fiction of course came first, and the “elder statesman” of science fiction performed the work after. And it was in the pages of this magazine that the term “science fiction” and the shorthand “SF” pronounced “esu fu” in Japanese came to be routinized through constant use, and invocation, and discussion by writers and fans alike. Distinguishing SF Magazine from other sf works Science fictional works that speculated on future events and the integration of technology into daily life were produced in conjunction with the increasing industrialization in Japan during the Meiji and into Taisho periods, 34 and those interests never entirely died out through either war. However, during the rise of these types of writing, the boundaries between science fiction, detective fiction, and horror and macabre stories were unclear – devices like ghosts and dreams were mixed with speculations on the future or revisions of the past. Novels themselves were not necessarily grouped into their own genre – rather, genres like the Meiji period political novel used science fictional devices like visiting other worlds to perform sharp social and political criticism on the present moment. The term “science fiction” (kagaku shōsetsu), along with the romanized “SF,” came into widespread use through the popularization of the terms by SF Magazine, as I noted above. Until that point novels with what we might consider science fictional content, when identified in a genre, were called any number of names including “imaginative science novels,” “science novels,” “science romance,” and the like. Additionally, 34 See Nagayama Yasuo’s Japanese SF Intellectual History, Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicery-Ronay Jr. and Takayuki Tatsumi, eds. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese science fiction from origins to anime. 37 throughout the pre-war period shorter format science fiction was often found in the pages of other types of genre magazines, like Ellery Queen’ s Mystery Magazine, Jewel, 35 and children’s magazines like New Youth (Shinseinen). 36 Additionally, the 1930s “consumer-subjects” (a term coined by Mirriam Silverberg in Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense) survived and transformed through the postwar to emerge as a newly invigorated consumer class who voraciously consumed the products of a rebuilt magazine publishing industry. 37 The 1950s are not only an ideological break discussed by many mass culture scholars, including Frederic Jameson and Marilyn Ivy, who propose a fundamental change in the way mass culture operates that has to do with the rise of reproductive technologies. 38 There was also a material, physical break where the country was decimated by war and mass media were censored, first by the Japanese authorities, then American Occupation. Only in the 1950s were factories rebuilt, changing people’s relationship to technology– and it was only then that presses started up again in part to support the postwar American occupation rhetoric of democratization. It is into this environment in the 1950s that an increasing number of publishers began offering translations of American and English science fiction novels, a tradition that had begun in at the turn of the 20 th century with the incredibly popular translations of Jules Verne novels. During the 1950s, the Hayakawa Press, along with now defunct Gengensha, entered into the science fiction publishing field by putting out translations of American and Soviet works in 35 For instance, the mystery magazine Jewel (Hōseki) featured a “World Science Fiction” special issue in 1958 even though the regular contents of the magazine were a mix of mystery, fantastic, and weird stories. 36 I discuss the way in which editor Fukushima Masami sought to distance SF Magazine from these other publications in Chapter 2. 37 Silverberg, Miriam. Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense. (see Introduction, n. 7) 38 Ivy, Marilyn. “Formations of Mass Culture” (see Introduction, n. 8) 38 paperback form. In 1956, Gengensha released a First Science Fiction Collection in novel form that contained works by Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Sheckley. Prior to the development of SF Magazine, Hayakawa too had organized several different book series including the Juvenile SF Series in 1950 and Hayakwa Fantasy in 1956. Kodansha put out their own SF Series in 1958. 39 All of these publishers were meeting a growing interest from the public and a growing market for science fictional stories, and while the interest in translated foreign works was high, none of these book series created a sense of community and engagement in the way SF Magazine was able to achieve. SF Magazine isn’t the first magazine that exclusively published science fiction in Japan. The American sf magazine Amazing Stories published a Japanese-language version of its own magazine in conjunction with publisher Siebundō Shinkō in 1950, but the magazine stopped publication halfway through the same year. The title of “first Japanese science fiction magazine” has generally been awarded to a publication from 1954 called Seuin (Nebula). It was published through the auspices of the Japanese Science Fiction Association, a short-lived association of writers, editors, and publishers established by Ōta Chidzuo in order to promote the magazine. Ōta served as the editor in conjunction with publisher Mori no Mishisha. The magazine bore the subtitle kagaku shosetsu (lit: science fiction), as well as the same words in English. Unlike SF Magazine, which is still publishing new issues today, Seuin was only a single issue that collected translations of American and Soviet detective and science fiction. Even though Seiun became the title of the yearly award given to the best science fiction, this name is largely its only legacy as Ōta Chidzuo did not contribute further to the field. 39 Fukushima Masami. Time of Origins: A Man’ s Memoirs of Building Japanese SF (Mitou no jidai: Nihon SF wo kizuita otoko no kaisouroku). Tokyo: Hayakawa Paperback JA, 2009. 39 Additionally, in 1957 the dōjinshi (reader-produced non-commercial) magazine Stardust (Uchūjin), edited by translator Shibano Takumi, began as a magazine for alien/UFO-enthusiasts. Early issues included translations of global science fiction, and later published Japanese authors. While this magazine continued to publish these through 2013, it was released irregularly 40 and the scale of distribution could not match the commercial reach of SF Magazine. The two did maintain a fairly close relationship. As Tatsumi Takayuki notes, “promising fan-writers were discovered in Uchujin, then promoted as professionals in Hayakawa’s SF Magazine.” 41 I’ll explore the tight relationship between professional and non-professional further in Chapter Three. SF Magazine, originally published in 1959 and continuing today, has a far greater impact on the field of sf because of its sustained history, its focus on an adult audience, and its creation of a community. Science fiction as a genre worth publishing in an adult magazine was not taken seriously until the entry of SF Magazine in 1959. From the first issue, through cover artwork, editors introductions and notes, essays, and even iconography within the pages, SF Magazine separated itself from both the juvenile and the overly technical. Moreover, the first ten years of SF Magazine are often heralded as the Golden Age of Japanese science fiction because of its intersection with the formation of a community. During this period from 1960 to 1970s, the growth of a whole host of activities beyond the publishing of Japanese language and translated novels shows how science fiction came to be considered a separate genre. The first Japanese science fiction convention was held in 1962, the writers 40 Sometimes only one or two Uchūjin were published a year. 41 Tatsumi, Takayuki. “Generations and Controversies: An Overview of Japanese Science Fiction, 1957-1997.” Science Fiction Studies 27, no. 1 (2000). 105. 40 association Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of Japan (SFWJ) was formed in 1963, and the Seunshō award for science fiction was created in 1970. In the 1970s, a larger public interest in science fiction was sparked by a variety of media works and the World’s Fair “Expo ‘70” held in Osaka; a number of prominent sf writers consulted on the fair. Komatsu’s Japan Sinks became a best seller in 1973, the incredibly popular anime Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam were aired on television in the late 1970s, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, Alien and even Superman were imported film hits that held a large place in the Japanese imagination during this decade. A number of new adult-oriented science fiction magazines sprang up, including the quarterly NW- SF (New Worlds of SF) in 1969, Bizzare in 1974, and SF Jewel in 1978. In 1975 Tsutsui Yasutaka named the theme of the 14 th annual Japanese SF Convention “Diffusion and Penetration of SF”, and Japanese science fiction writer and critic Morishita Katsuhiro suggests this title applies to the 1970s themselves. This proliferation of interest in science fiction, shown by the success of these publications, would not have been possible without the contributions of SF Magazine, which continued to be a force in the industry throughout this time period. The success of this flourishing subculture had its most prolific moment in the 1980s and the early part of the 1990s. Though Morishita points out, in his article on the history of Japanese science fiction, that while more contemporary authors began using science fictional elements in their literary works, the science fiction magazines one by one began to die out. By the beginning of the 1990s SF Magazine again stood alone as the only adult science fiction-specific magazine in Japanese publishing. While the proliferation of science fictional anime, manga, novels and films did not abate, after the 1990s their publication returned to multi-genre publications like Shonen Jump. 41 This chapter examined the infrastructure of this one magazine, not because it was the only structure that supported activity, but because it has been a constant one since its initial publication. The magazine became a focal point around which other formulations expanded their visual and written vocabulary and enjoyed a space of their own, be they the Pen Club of Science Fiction writers of Japan, or the contributors to the non-professional sf fiction dōjinishi Stardust, or even those who had read science fiction as children and wanted to continue as adults could. Those who were familiar with the discourses of science fiction had those discourses affected by their interactions with the magazine. Joy, fear, and the body in the 1960s Fukushima Masami’s introductory greeting to the readers of the January 1965 SF Magazine mixes social commentary and science fiction in processing contemporary events: 1964 has passed. And in that passage, the effects of the Chinese Communist Nuclear testing, the success of the first V oskhod 42 , and the effects Khrushchev’s downfall, still persist. Particularly the Soviet political upheaval reverberates with a lingering sound, a kind of bad aftertaste remains. The results of Khruschev’s loss, the communist style dogmatism, and with these Goldwater’s upset – I think there are many people who continually have floating around in their heads the button – the idea that the outbreak of small-scale nuclear war in Southeast Asia with Vietnam at the center could cause all-out nuclear war, and rain of missiles falling in the entire world. I think that for a while SF fans, if they are imaginative, are the people who can’t concentrate at all on just having fun because instead they’re thinking of a large number of SF that have pictured the possibility of the outcome of these kinds of events. 43 Fukushima’s editor’s introduction in 1965 messily encapsulates both the joys and the fears of the 1960s. Like any citizen who is affected by geopolitical events both in Japan and 42 The Voskhod was a spacecraft built by the Soviet Union's space program for human spaceflight as part of the Voskhod programme. It was a development of and a follow-on to the Vostok spacecraft. Voskhod capsules were only used for two manned space flights and were superseded by the Soyuz spacecrafts. 43 Fukushima Masami. “Editor’s Introduction,” SF Magazine, January 1965. 1. (see Introduction, n. 1) 42 outside of it, and who constructs daily life within an understanding of both scientific discovery and regional relations, his voice in this first paragraph reflects both personal and communal concerns. Moreover, however, he situates this within a conception of the way in which science fiction came to function as a means to process the events impacting readers’ lives. Fears of nuclear proliferation were only intensified by the first test of the Chinese nuclear program, 44 as well as the uncertainty of the removal of the man who had led the Soviet Union in the first part of the Cold War. Yet in the same sentence, Fukushima celebrates the V oskhod, intent on celebrating progress along with uncertainty in his summary of the last year. However, the fear of war, and specifically atomic war, is made clear when he suggests Vietnam may be the flashpoint for global war. This paragraph ends with Fukushima pointing out that sf fans were not simply reading science fiction for fun; instead, one of the ways they read science fiction was to think through the impact of global politics – particularly nuclear war. The implication here is that science fiction fans knew, perhaps better than others, what might happen if the Vietnam war sparked further conflicts, because they had been reading stories that imagined the consequences of this kind of technological warfare. The major events marked in the pages of SF Magazine are just one part of the cultural moment when SF Magazine was produced. Insistence that the country had recovered and that life could return to normal persisted as the dominant governmental discourse throughout the 1960s despite social unrest, union activism and mine strikes, the rise of the women’s movement, and the continuing intensification of the global Cold War. These ten years were a time of not only great technological and economic advance, but also social unrest and dissatisfaction. It is in this 44 The Chinese pure-fission U-235 implosion fission device named "596." This was the first of many tests that the Chinese would run until 1996. Although Fukushima could not know these tests would continue, this first test signaled the rise of China as hostile regional nuclear power. 43 context that the readers of SF Magazine dreamed of the possibilities and the dangers of technological imagination. Rather than completing a year by year accounting of the political, social, and economic events on the 1960s, this section contextualizes those events which reverberate from within the pages of SF Magazine itself over the 1960s. Just like the example above, these include events that occurred both within and outside the archipelago. The haunting spectre in the background of all of these is the Pacific war, and in particular the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first event of the ‘60s is the nation-wide protests over Japan’s renewal of its treaty with the United States in 1959 and went hand in hand, at least in the mind of Fukushima Masami, with both mine strike protests and the landing of an American U2 spy plane that disrupted the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States so much that the 1960 Four Powers Summit in Paris collapsed. These events served to create a sense of profound unrest, but were contrasted the scientific, technological, and economic developments in those same ten years. Unsurprisingly, the magazine and its readers followed closely the space race between the United States and the USSR, celebrating with the world the movement of first technology, then humankind, off planet. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the inauguration of the first bullet train that same year were a cause for national celebration, and Olympic themed-covers appear twice in SF Magazine. These events, combined with economic success in Japan that was being recognized worldwide, served to create a national fantasy of total recovery on every front: 44 economic, social, technological, and political. 45 In 1968, Japan surpassed West Germany to become the second largest economic power in the world. The latter years of the decade continued this discursive dissonance. 1968 also brought with it some of the first of the student protests that would culminate in 1969 in large-scale Japanese protests against both the Vietnam War and American use of military bases on Japanese soil. This was contrasted with the the World’s Fair in Osaka in 1970 46 or (called Expo ’70), a celebration of humankind’s advancement with the them “Progress and Harmony of Mankind” that was itself partially a science fictional endeavor. 47 Although the 1950s marked the start of the high-growth economy, 48 they also marked the time when the experience of the atomic bombs moved into explicit public discourse in a kind of uncanny return of the repressed. Until the end of the American Occupation 1952, Japanese media operated under strict censorship and control. While not explicitly listed in the “categories of deletions and suppressions” 49 censored by the American Civil Censorship Division, authors’ and survivors’ works on the bombs were cut or discouraged from publication; even scientific work was overtly or quietly suppressed. The practice of suppression extended into the visual record of destruction as well. Dower notes, “[a]s word spread that this was a taboo subject, a combination 45 It was a London newspaper that dubbed Japan’s economic success a “miracle” in 1962, even though national production was a third of what it would be by the 1970s. Chalmers, Johnson. MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975. 1 edition. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982. 46 Historians, this scholar, and laypeople alike, continue to include the 1960s in the term the “postwar” as the psychological struggles and trauma of the war had not abated despite the Japanese government officially proclaimed “it was no longer the postwar” (mobaya sengo de wa nai) in 1956 in an Economic Whitepaper to signify that the economy had returned to pre-wartime levels and was no longer oriented towards recovery. Igarashi Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970. Princeton University Press, 2012. 76 47 Japan SF Exhibition: SF Country. Setagaya Museum of Literature, Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan. July 19, 2014- September 28, 2014. 48 High-growth is a specific economic term relating to a more than 10% yearly growth of GDP. Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan, 245 (see Introduction, n. 12) 49 Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. 414. 45 of outright censorship and widespread self-censorship led to the virtual disappearance of writings about the atomic-bomb experience …” Since this was never an explicit policy of the American occupation’s Civil Censorship Division, public displays (including writing), remained uncommon even after the occupation ended in 1952. Many in the years after the occupation felt “less free to publicly discuss and debate” the bombs and their aftermath. 50 That all changed on March 1 st , 1954, when the Japanese tuna fishing boat S.S. Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Daigo Fukuryū Maru) was caught in an unexpectedly large hydrogen bomb blast from an American test in the Bikini Atol “Castle Bravo” nuclear test. The entire crew died as a result of their exposure to the fallout, and the news of their exposure and subsequent deaths broke the silence on nuclear weapons and their use. The eruption of monstrous destruction out of unrestricted testing reappears in Honda Ishiro’s 1954 monster film Godzilla, based directly on these events. 51 The flash of the new hydrogen light, which became synonymous with atomic light, occurred during the massive transformation of both the cityscape and the individual household beginning in the 1950s and culminating in the 1960s. The major cities which had been flattened by airstrikes and bombings during the war, especially Tokyo, were under constant construction for the following two decades. 52 Certain areas of the city were rebuilt in style in the immediate postwar at the direction of the American occupation, while in other areas Tokyoites struggled to secure basic housing and attempted to stave off starvation. 53 Once control was returned to the Japanese government in the early 1960s, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government organized a “Beautification of the Capital Movement” that included the mobilization of as many as a million 50 Ibid., 415. 51 There is even a scene in the original film (cut from the American version) where Tokyoites on a train complain about irradiated tuna just before their train car is destroyed by Godzilla’s monstrous rampage. 52 Igarashi Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory, 146. 53 Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan. (see Introduction, n. 12) 46 people to clean the streets of Tokyo on a single day in 1964. This was in part done to prepare for the 1964 Summer Olympic Games. The capital’s spaces were made ready to display national pride from the glistening facades of new skyscrapers to the ancient arts exhibition in the Tokyo National museum. 54 Yet even this massive investment in Tokyo infrastructure was largely focused on areas associated with the games themselves, with projects like the new sewer system only implemented in the Shibuya ward (where most of the Olympic facilities were located) and not evenly distributed to other residents of the city. 55 Not only public spaces, but also the homes where the public spent their time, were transforming in this decade. By 1964, small modern public apartments, called danshi, were so in demand that a single vacancy garnered on average more than 50 applications. 56 These apartments were filled with space-age electronic conveniences. The so-called “three imperial regalia” 57 of refrigerator, washing machine, and television that had been aspirational but not attainable by most in the 1950s had, by the mid-1960s, become affordable to most families. 58 Domestic sales of electronics fueled much of the economic growth in the decade in a neat feedback loop that allowed more and more consumers to purchase goods, and as the three regalia changed to the 54 Noriko Aso, "Sumptuous Re-past: the 1964 Tokyo Olympics Arts Festival." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 2002 10(1): 7-38. 55 Igarashi Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory, 150. 56 Ibid., 131. 57 Ironically based on the mythological three imperial regalia discussed in both the Nihongi and Kojiki, the sword of Kusanagi, the eight-hand mirror, and the Jewel of Yasaka, that represent the primary virtues of valor, wisdom, and benevolence brought to earth by the ancestor of the Japanese imperial line Nakatomi and were handed down to the Emperor as signs of the line’s divinity. William Theodore de Bary notes these mythological regalia probably came from north China and Korea and originally represented not native tradition but “prestigious items of a higher civilization, of which the dynasty was the proud bearer among culturally less advanced tribes.” De Bary, William Theodore. Sources of Japanese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600. Volume 1. Columbia University Press, 2001. 27. 58 Domestic sales of electronics fueled growth throughout the 50s and 60s. “By February 1965, 62 percent of Japanese households owned a refrigerator, while washing machines and television sets were in 73 percent and 90 percent of households, respectively.” Igarashi Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory, 131. “Television ownership had reached 55 percent of the urban population by 1960; by 1964 it was 95 percent.” Igarashi Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory, 140. 47 “three Cs” of cars, cooler (air conditioner) and color television. While the interior of the household was becoming mechanized, the exterior spaces too were filled with electricity, and light. The notion that the darkness of the war was being gradually banished by the light of economic production gave rise to the celebration of light in press and popular media. This rebuilding was in many ways a return to the “Bright Lights” of the Taisho period, when Tokyo’s cityscape was marked by a general “fascination with speed and motion” 59 that included not just the lights of cinema, cafes and bars, but also the perceived light of modernization via electricity. For example, the Asahi Shinbun, one of two major newspapers in postwar Japan, retitled its Sunday family section “The Bright Life” in April 1959. 60 These bright lives and bright cities were linked by new technologies of transportation, including the first high-speed “bullet train” that began service between Osaka and Tokyo in 1964 - the completion of a project proposed in the 1930s. 61 Bodies were also being regulated into the light by the nation, including the Ministry for Health promoting the National Exercises for Health Movement (Kokumin Hoken Taisō Undō) which became part of the exercise programs on the radio; these were ostensibly separate from those created during wartime as they were explicitly promoting peace. Even death and birth were brought into the institutional light as hospitalization in modern medical institutions gradually became the norm. 62 59 Silverberg, Miriam. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, 18. (see Introduction, n. 7) 60 Partner, Simon. Assembled in Japan, 141. (see Introduction, n. 9) 61 Igarashi Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory, 148. 62 Ibid., 131. Gordon also notes that “Hospitals became the almost universal sites for birth and death: [i]n 1955 82 percent of childbirths took place at home; in 1975 the proportion was a mere 1.2 percent.” Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan, 253. (see Introduction, n. 12) 48 Into these celebrations and transformations of the physical landscape in May and June 1960 came the greatest popular mass movement of the postwar: the protests against the re- ratification of the United States-Japan Security Treaty (called ANPO). The Treaty had originally been ratified by both countries in 1951 and had set up an unequal relationship where the United States had military latitude in Japan, but did not have to defend Japan against attack by a third party. Backed by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke attempted in 1960 to renegotiate a more equitable understanding through a revised Treaty of Cooperation where each nation agreed to act in concert with the other in case of an attack (though still with language that largely left Japan a strategic outpost of the United States). Liberals and leftists saw this as a return of a pre-1945 militarist attitude and fought against the revisions at all costs. Kishi also wanted to revise the Japanese constitution so that the country could legally maintain standing military forces, but the economic success of the sixties under the Security Treaty made this seem undesirable. 63 The Socialist and Communist parties of the Japanese Diet opposed ratifying Kishi’s agreement with President Eisenhower, suggesting it would bring Japan into a war with the rest of Asia, but he forced his plan through by having Socialist Party members removed by police,. This move that galvanized the left, including the Communist Party, Socialist Party, and General Council of Trade Unions, student unions, women’s rights groups and a host of small community organizations and unions, all to march on the Diet in Tokyo from May through June 1960. The bodily interventions of the parliament members who tried to physically stand in the way of the votes were mirrored by the hundreds of thousands of people who filled the streets 63 Igarashi Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory, 134. 49 in front of the Japanese Diet building. 64 These protests did not just take place in Tokyo, however; they were supported by regional strikes all over Japan in June. The newly beautiful and clean spaces were troubled by this mass gathering of people who sought to block the move to a more militaristic government both physically and intellectually. While these were by far the largest political protests in Japan, they were part of a legacy from the 1950s through the 1970s where the constitution of the social fabric of the nation, from family law and women’s rights, centralization of the school system and curricula, police powers and civil liberties, to the relationship of Japan with the United States, were all part of the clashes between conservative government and opposition groups that included Socialist and Communist Parties, women’s groups, students, unions, and intellectuals. What dominated print, film, and art media in Japan in the 1960s was the body. Literary historian Douglas Slaymaker’s work on the Flesh (Nikutai) writers served to highlight just one group who continually attempted to bring the body to light. 65 Moreover, historian Igarashi Yoshikuni suggests the ennui of the immediate postwar in literary and high art movements moved into mass culture by the 1950s and through the 1960s. The postwar body had a light shining on it – this body became the place where new ideological conflicts were worked out. 66 The rise of pink films (low-budget soft-core films) and Sun-Tribe films (the most famous in the US is Gate of Flesh, where postwar prostitutes engaged in sadomasochistic beatings when one prostitute abandoned the collective to sleep with a Japanese soldier) demonstrate a bodily turn in film of the time. Similarly, this sense of bodily investigation appeared in avant garde art. Shiraga 64 The largest strike on June 22 involved 6.2 million workers according to Sōhō (Japan’s General Council of Trade Unions) and was one of the largest strikes in Japanese history. Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan. (see Introduction, n. 12) 65 Slaymaker, Douglas. The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction. New York, N.Y: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. 66 Igarashi Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory. 50 Katsuo, in his 1955 Challenging Mud piece, immersed himself in concrete to reject the tools of modern art (including brushes) and replace them with the literally embodied form of creation. This shift is additionally demonstrated by the consistent use of bodies on the covers of flourishing mass media magazines, either as examples of the very consumers reading the magazines (as in the case of the covers of women’s magazines including Shufu No Tomo/Housewife’ s Friend that had smiling well-coifed young women on the cover, or the Asahi Journal magazine with a crowd of serious men reading the newspaper on its first issue), or bodies meant for the consumption of the reader, as in the salacious “true story” magazines (akin to modern-day tabloids) on whose covers women posed in bathing costumes and in pinup poses. 67 While some of the high-art practices mentioned above joined the voices of social protesters, predominately the mass media was more interested in ignoring the social unrest, and celebrating Japan’s reacceptance to the world community with events celebrated world wide like the Olympic games. The successful bid to host the 1964 Summer Olympic games was awarded in 1959 after almost twenty years of attempts on the part of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to host. 68 The games themselves were filled with new technologies: new computerized starter guns in swimming, new photo finish techniques to determine the results of sprints, and these were the first games to be broadcast not only in color, but also across the globe live via satellite. The whole world could experience the games and the results at the same time. This signaled the 67 A discussion of magazine covers in the 1960s is fully articulated in Chapter 3: Surreal Landscapes. 68 Tokyo had originally won the right in 1940, but relinquished due to rising geopolitical tension, aimed again for the bid in 1960 but that attempt failed because of concerns over Tokyo’s physical destruction following the war. Tokyo reapplied again for 1964 summer games in 1958 and was officially awarded the games in 1959. Droubie, Paul. “Phoenix Arisen: Japan as Peaceful Internationalist at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 16 (November 1, 2011): 2309–22. 51 success not only of Japanese technology, but also demonstrated that Japan was an equal member of the first world. These efforts were joined by a continued celebration by the Japanese government and the press not just of the nation, but of the merging of technological fantasy and reality that culminated in the 1970 world’s fair, the Osaka Expo, held in Suita, Osaka, between March 15 and September 13, 1970. The expo, whose theme, “Progress and Harmony for Mankind” points towards the utopian goals of its committee, is considered by art historians including curator Nakai Yasuyuki as a turning point in Japanese art, architecture, and design as well as a benchmark in Japanese history commemorating Japan’s rebuilding after the war. Those who mistrusted the event considered it an effort on the part of the Japanese government to distract the Japanese people from the automatic 10-year renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security treaty that had galvanized social mobilization just ten years prior. However, as William Gardner notes, the expo “projected Japan as a simulation-site for a future society.” 69 This included the participation of manga science fiction writer and artist Tezuka Osamu producing the Fujipan Robot Pavilion, a multi-screen sf film created by writer Abe Kōbō and filmmaker Teshigahara Hiroshi, and the Mitsubishi Future Pavilion that was authored by a team of science fiction special effects professionals, writers, and illustrators. That then-journalist and radio scriptwriter Komatsu Sakyō participated in the study group “Thinking the Expo,” founded in July 1964. Gardner suggests the group’s articles, published in the journal Broadcast Asahi (Hōsō Asahi), were pivotal in informing the Expo’s thematic embrace of the future, including the importance placed on “information” and “information society.” Although 69 Gardner, William. “The 1970 Osaka Expo And/as Science Fiction.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society Vol. XXIII, no. Expo ’70 and Japanese Art: Dissonant Voices (December 2011): 26–43. 52 originally not affiliated with the Osaka officials working on the Expo, members of this group were eventually called in to consult with the Expo planners and contribute to the emerging theme. Celebrating exploration and future development of space, the corporate and national pavilions merged real scientific exploration with speculative achievements. The two most popular national pavilions were the American and Soviet Pavilions: Americans displayed NASA technology and a “moon rock” collected by the Apollo astronauts in 1969. The Soviet Pavilion had a life sized model of a Soyuz-4. The Japanese Pavilions developed the speculative nature of science by presenting Japan as it would be developed in the 21 st century, including an underwater city, space stations, and weather monitoring control in the sky. In some ways conforming to outside criticism of the event, government officials actively suppressed exhibits that tried to complicate this celebration of science and technology moving into a glorious future, including removing a “Wall of Contradictions” by Kawazoe that discussed negative advances including nuclear war, the destruction of the environment, racial discrimination through photomontage. The Osaka Expo cemented the status of sf in Japanese culture as much as the 1939 World’s Fair “World of Tomorrow” did in America. It was a moment when the fantastic, the national, and the real merged, standing as a kind of end-cap event that combined with the rise of the consumer subject to lead into the 1970s and the future. But its glossy celebration of the utopian futures, the mythologies of the 21 st century on display in the Japanese pavilion, would have been slightly out of place in SF Magazine and the community around it, as the way science fiction had emerged in the 1960s in Japan addressed both the dark and the light of technological change. 53 Science and Science fiction beyond SF Magazine The combination and promotion of science and science fiction was not specific to SF Magazine in the 1960s. It was part of the social fabric of Japan. The Japanese government as well as “…the Japanese people [who] eagerly turned their attention away from contentious political and economic issues to focus on happier pursuits closer to home.” 70 These pursuits included the celebration of technological advances around the world that culminated in Expo ’70. The governmental direction to present an uncomplicated picture of technological innovation relied on utopian narratives of advancement to do so. The success of the ’64 Tokyo Olympic Games also emerged from new technologies that enabled people to reach the games faster (including the shinkansen), see them in color simultaneously around the globe, and determine more impartially who won the competitions. All of these successes occurred not just in the physical world, but centered on new, postwar bodies that appeared, but also in the visual realm on television and in huge displays. These successes were hailed at the same time social unrest, including geopolitical unrest, was cast into shadow, downplayed, and sometimes erased entirely out of the public narrative. It wasn’t that science fiction had never been part of the cultural conversation prior to the 1960s, simply that during this time it was part of the cultural conversation in both the visual and textual sphere. And the structure of SF Magazine both supported this and reflected it by continually blending the visual and the textual on all fronts, by invoking expert scientists as well as presenting exploratory fictions; by situating the Japanese science fiction reader in a conversation with the world of science and science fiction through translation. 70 Bullock, Julia C. The Other Women’s Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction. Honolulu: Univ of Hawaii Pr, 2010. 4. 54 Chapter Two: The visual language of science fiction [T]he act of translation in a larger sense has always required at once the digestion and vomiting of former culture. Tatsumi Takayuki, "Afterward: A Soft Time Machine: From Translation to Transfiguration" From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Donna Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto What embodiment secures is not the distinction between male and female or between humans who can think and machines which cannot. Rather, embodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman Embodied thought, visuality, posthuman, translation – these concepts are intimately intertwined. Narrowly, thought is defined by who is doing the thinking; and Kathryn Hayles convincingly argues, in her introduction to her book How We Became Posthuman, that the Turing test, which is supposed to ostensibly reveal the moment when an artificial intelligence can function exactly as if it were human intelligence, "to pose the question of 'what can think' inevitably also changes, in a reverse feedback loop, the terms of 'who can think.'" 71 This reciprocal relationship of who and what leads us to posthuman bodies, bodies that are made up of 71 Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 2008. xiv. 55 an ecstatic joining of what (the technological) and who (the biological). As Donna Haraway points out, though, this ecstasy is not without its own history that includes more than a utopian future with an unmarked past. "The main trouble with cyborgs," she notes, "is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential." 72 This deliberate insurrection is found in the relationship between Japanese science fiction illustration and written science fiction. Cyborgs in this case that are deeply embedded in the particular historical and intellectual moment of the 1960s, utterly entrenched in and often entirely fascinated by the mechanisms of capitalism, combined with technology imagined at the limits, in love with the science fiction writer who has mastered an imagined territory of the future that is created by, and yet always available to be perverted or broken in opposition to, the nation state and corporate interests. Yet they are never imagined outside of language or history, these scenarios of the future that more often reflect a tight coupling with the fears of the present. Authors, filmmakers, artists and musicians that created science fiction works often used a special kind of vernacular of the hyper-real, a language that attempts to speed forward at the same time that it reproduces gendered, race, class relationships. Like Friz Lang's silent machine-woman copy of Maria in Metropolis, or the ostensibly unintelligible howls of Honda Ishiro’s monstrous Godzilla, the illustration-as-text is always speaking even when voiceless or language-less, transforming the visual into vernacular and back. Utterances, speech, and images are not precisely translation, but to define the one demands some reflection on the other. Translation is deeply embedded in 72 Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 2nd ed., New York: Routledge, 1999. p. 273 56 language, in the notion that one is moving something from one language into another. But translation also constantly occurs between image and text. Benjamin suggests translation is a mode, and "translatability must be an essential feature of certain works" 73 . Thus translatability is embedded in the original, in the body (always made up of language) of the text. And a translation is not only related to the original, but is part of the "continued life", the afterlife, of a text. Translation configured this way becomes incredibly concrete, and in one sense fairly narrow, as it posits a single original text that can be translated, a point of origin from which to spring into other languages. Returning to Hayles' contention that the utterance of "what can think" transforms the speaker as well as the addressee, translation transforms not only the translated text, but also the original. Derrida points towards this in Des Tours de Babel when he discusses the ways in which the original language grows through translation. The translation will truly be a moment in the growth of the original, which will complete itself in enlarging itself. …and the liberation [of pure language] that it operates, eventually in transgressing the limits of the translating language, in transforming it in turn, must extend, enlarge, and make language grow. As this growth comes also to complete, as it is symbolon, it does not reproduce: it adjoins in adding. 74 It is no accident that this relationship between the growth of language and the translation mirrors the growth of the posthuman in Hayles' paradigm, in that it is through translation that the translated language grows. The two are entirely related, because it is through language that the posthuman has been constituted. Hayles locates the origins of the posthuman in the transformation of not of the body, but of the discourse around the body. In specific, she contends 73 Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. Random House, 1968. 69-82. 71. 74 Derrida, Jacques. "Des tours de Babel." Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Nouv. ed. Augmentée. Paris: Galilée, pp. 203–35. English edition: Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007–2008. 189. 57 that it was at the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics held from 1943 to 1954 when the discourse transformed from describing thoughts as organic into thoughts as technological process. "Henceforth, humans were to be seen primarily as information-processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines." 75 Furthermore, through language, including the language of the visual and how language frames the subject (be it scientific language or literary), the posthuman and the cyborg are born. And it is only when we look at the ways in which the body has been created in science fiction that we see how we can be caught in the specificities of the embodied form, and the ways in which translation perhaps allows us affect those specificities – not to get outside them, but to problematize them. Enter the illustrations of SF Magazine, and of science fiction illustration more broadly. They speak, using symbols instead of text, in conversation across time and across nation. They constantly announce the textual, sometimes shouting in lurid colors, sometimes whispering in delicate and draftsman-like detail. Below, I'll elucidate how the relationship between image and text pushes on the boundaries of language, complicates our notion of translation, and criticizes utopian post-gender/post-racial/post-human standpoints. Unlike theorists who seek to justify science fiction illustration as a genre of its own, in part because this articulates a single standpoint and a single corpus, I consider illustration as the sister-speaker to their brother the written word, and to their cousin the film, who, because they speak to each other, renegotiate the relationship between media not as a divide, but as a fluid and negotiable space of productivity. To achieve this, I first I lay out the ways in which science fiction illustration has been theorized in the past, using examples from the American Magazine of Fantasy and Science 75 Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman, 7. 58 Fiction as an enunciation of one set of ontological principles. I next situate my theoretical methodology amidst Tatsumi Takayuki and Samuel Delany’s considerations of science fiction as another set of laws as principle. Finally, I chart the operations of translation that have emerged not just in a movement from the visual to the textual but within the textual – I consider the traces of the visual in the covers of SF Magazine. I use these works as a test case and an extraordinarily singular enunciation of the act of translation. This chapter then seeks to move between the visual and the written as acts of overdetermination, in part to consider how the creation of the two is never as separate as they seem. Theorizing science fiction illustration The field of writing on the aesthetics of science fiction illustration is a small one. There is an underlying assumption that the consumers of these illustrations are already embedded within a discourse; consumers are already science fiction fans who understand all of the codes being deployed. Most of the critical works produced in both Japan and the United States are compilations of images from a particular period or publication, or biographies of a particular artist without extended commentaries. In works like Vincent Di Fate’s popular Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art, a well-regarded collection of over seven hundred rich and colorful science fiction illustrations, the images are presented without any textual discussion. They create a variety of visual statements, but the text of the book primarily consists of image credits to specific artists. Independent scholar Ōhashi Hiroyuki’s Age of Illustrators (Sashieigaka no jidai) is a two-hundred page compilation of the biographies of every Japanese science fiction illustrator in the modern age, but the entirety of the work is four-to-five page biographies with no theories or additional analysis of trends. Early SF Magazine illustrator 59 Manabe Hiroshi’s Original Illustrations of Hiroshi Manabe (Manabe Hiroshi no sen no gashū) similarly contains pages and pages of his whimsical line drawings from SF Magazine and other Hayakawa publications, but nary a textual discussion of what constituted science fiction art. Fantastic science-fiction art, 1926-1954 edited by American author and publisher Lester del Rey, offers forty poster-sized reproductions of science fiction magazine covers, and includes an introduction on the history of science fiction writing, but offers neither a definition of nor a speculation about science fiction illustration. On the one hand, the compilation of these images without textual discussion of their meaning, or even how they fit into trends, suggests that they need no further elucidation – they are easily and quickly identified and understood, and need no explication. On the other, these books wordlessly presume that these images operate on no rhetoric of their own, or that the rhetoric is so identifiable it requires no discussion; they imply science fiction artworks are intended only to create desire and demand for the literary words of science fiction they wrap around and often represent, and have only a commercial purpose intended to attract purchase. Often, a version of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s threshold test for obscenity is deployed in defining science fiction art: “I know it when I see it!” This appears to be the case for Jane Frank’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists of the Twentieth Century: a Biographical Dictionary. The book is a republication and updating of Robert Weinberg’s 1988 work by the same name. The volume also republishes Robert Weinberg’s introductory essay on the material history of science fiction publishing and its relationship to science fiction artwork. While Weinberg offers a narrative history of illustration beginning with French magazine illustrations and continuing to the rise of the American and British pulp magazines, he tries neither to define science fiction art nor to describe painting in terms of a science fiction tradition. This leads to 60 interesting omissions in biographies on artists including H.R. Giger (although surely his work on the Alien series alone had a profound impact on the science fiction imaginary), and underscores the notion that science fiction art is transparent and easily understood. Just as science fiction authors struggle to define themselves against or in conversation with more well regarded forms of literature, in an essay titled “The Impact of Astronautics and Science Fiction on My Work,” science fiction painter David Hardy proposes a separation of his own artwork as expressing the scientific in either high or lowbrow art by employing two different styles: “space age painting” and “science fiction painting.” The former takes into account the most current scientific information available to render as “scientifically consistent” as possible spaceships, moonscapes, and other astronomical phenomena. He considers the latter to be entirely comprised of “fantasies” that do not require a consistent application of scientific principle or realistic rendering of perspective, shadow, etc. These works then neatly fall into a high/low divide as well – his “space age paintings” are featured in collections of fine art works, while the “science fiction paintings” are used as magazine and book covers, occasionally even on the wrong book. At the heart of Hardy’s essay is the suggestion that science fiction illustration is dependent on its imaginary aspect, and is in contrast to predictive (and possibly more legitimate, or certainly for Hardy more valuable) “space age painting.” But even he notes this divide does not hold, as some of his fine art works have been used as the covers for science fiction magazines. Still, this theorization that science fiction artwork has something to do with painting or illustrating “science” mirrors golden age science fiction writer and theorist Isaac Asimov’s 61 contention science fiction is “[t] hat branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings.” 76 This centrality of human beings is also at the heart of George Slusser’s introduction to the most comprehensive scholarly attempt to date at theorizing science fiction art, Unearthly Visions: Approaches to SF and Fantasy Art. Slusser declares science fiction/fantasy art "bring[s] forth the basic icons of human visual experience from the formal debris of cubism, surrealism, and other schools of art." Thus, the science fiction aesthetic purposefully situates the human and human experience at the center of representation. The artist’s purpose is "to revision a human face or form in this dark canvas of modern science." 77 Despite his clear disdain for what he calls the "formal debris" of canonical art, when viewing the covers of American science fiction magazines it is quite clear that Slusser is not entirely incorrect to suggest the human is the organizing visual subject of these images. The American covers are illustrations of the stories found inside the magazine. This was the trend of most American magazines - illustrating the tight coupling of image to word, and affixing the cover to a one particular author’s view of science fiction as they are producing it. In turns funny or sad, bizarre or technical, the American covers visually herald the stories that center on the human experience interacting with technology readers would find inside. In most F/SF Magazine covers, bodies are clearly the object and grounding symbols, 76 Asimov, Isaac. “Social Science Fiction” Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future. Ed. Reginald Bretnor. New York, Coward-McCann, 1953. p 158. Assmiov suggested science fiction should be classified as the genre where authors consider the effect of science on humans or the human condition. This places the human and human condition at the center of the discussion –this definition is not limited, but perhaps too broad – could we not argue any work of fiction that addresses the impact of technology on the human condition – under this rubric the works written by Hibakusha, (atomic bomb survivors who went on to write both non-fiction and fictional works based on their experiences during and after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) – could these not also be considered science fiction under this rubric? Considering they are very much invested in the effects of science on human and human nature? 77 Westfahl, Gary, George Edgar Slusser, and Kathleen Church Plummer. Unearthly Visions: Approaches to Science Fiction and Fantasy Art. Greenwood Press, 2002. 5. 62 regardless of shifting styles of representation. The figures below center on human or humanoid bodies, 78 whether they are abstract paintings (figure 4 and 5), renderings of astronauts on alien worlds (figure 6, below), or women and their advanced cars (figure 7). Visually this constructs narratives that pivots on both the reader as human and an articulation of the relationship between humans and American myths of technology. figure 4: April 1959 F/SF Magazine figure 5: April 1960 F/SF Magazine For example, the April 1959 Emishwiller cover (figure 4) is an illustration of Daniel Keyes’ short story “Flowers for Algernon.” The main character, Charlie, undergoes an experimental operation to increase his intelligence, and becomes like Algernon, the white mouse who had already undergone the procedure; both are caught in a maze of intelligence that peaks 78 Emishwiller, Ed. Covers of April 1959, April, June, and November 1960 Issues. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Joseph W. Ferman, editor. Cornwall, Conn: Mercury Press, 1960. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Archive, The Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art (VISCO). Web. 15 Apr. 2012. 63 and wanes. The fiction critiqued advances in biological technology that literally catch humanity in a dangerous maze of choices. Emishwiller illustrated a second Keyes fiction on the April 1960 cover “Crazy Maro” (figure 5), a story of a young boy’s multi-sensory perception, by envisioning a surrealist liberation of the human subject through synesthesia. Emishwiller’s illustration of Robert Heinlein’s“Starship Soldier” (which would later be expanded to the book Starship Troopers) for the November 1959 cover (figure 6) shows infantry troops of the future dominating figure 6: November 1959 F/SF Magazine figure 7: November 1960 F/SF Magazine a landscape in their enhanced battle suits. Emshweller’s cover reproduces the domination of land through human military might as the human figures control the foreground, midground, and sky. 79 In “Romance in a Twenty-First Century Used-Car Lot” by Robert F. Young, cars have 79 Tatsumi Takayuki suggests the distinctive visuals of the mechanized suits in the Gundam series developed out of Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” (the novelization of the short story pictured above). Christopher Bolton, in an essay in the journal Mechademia suggests this is an ironic historicization as the Heinlein story is particularly wordy, but Tatsumi comments just as much on the effect of the image of the translation’s Japanese cover as he is on the text 64 become so closely entwined with personal identity they are like clothes. The November 1960 cover (figure 7) places women at the visual center of that narrative, and evokes the advances in postwar technology that reinforced gender roles. This continual embodiment makes those covers where it is absent all the more remarkable. Yet an analysis of these covers as constantly centering on the human because these figures dominate the space continues to operate at the level of icon. Even in the case of the F/SF Magazine, there are covers that do not fit this mold – if we proceed with this definition, those covers must be thrown out of the discussion as no longer science fictional. Furthermore, a brief examination of the Japanese SF Magazine’s covers immediately suggests we must expand on Slusser’s assertion. The covers of SF Magazine were never based on a particular fiction featured in the issue, though often they reflected the themes of a special issue. Freed from the constraints of focusing on one particular author’s narrative, these images then speak to, and are spoken of, as pieces of the larger narrative – the discourse of science fiction. This discourse is no longer based around a specific iconography, but is rather intent on building a dialectic discourse. Indeed, their organizing principle is not instantly recognizable as human or human endeavors. The existence of these covers requires that we reconsider Slusser’s definition of a science fiction aesthetic to address why science fiction illustrators draw not only on formal composition techniques, but also on high and pop art styles, to express the inexpressible in a way that is recognizable as science fiction. Japanese science fiction artists deployed these styles to open up a space that not only invited but also encouraged new members to enter and establish a sense of community. These artists illustrated a place that was outside of mainstream culture and itself. That cover depicts, by Naoyuki Katō, shows a single man in a powered suit based directly off of the Emishwiller cover above. Tatsumi, Takayuki, and Christopher Bolton. “‘Gundam’ and the Future of Japanoid Art.” Mechademia 3 (2008): 191–98. 65 so could express fears and anxieties about the contemporary moment in a way mainstream works could not and did not. To understand how and why these works can be considered science fictional, we have to return to definitions of science fiction that incorporates more than either Slusser’s or Asimov’s theorizations. Defining science fiction: Tatsumi and Delany The more versatile definition of literary science fiction as a discourse, proposed by Samuel Delany and Takayuki Tatsumi, offers a way to begin to understand science fiction illustration as part of a set of practices that exceed visual representation. More than a single particularized aesthetic, or even a set of aesthetics, illustration becomes one facet of the larger discourse, one more subset of the larger archive, one more set of operations the reader continually negotiates as they consume and create new texts both visual and literary. In The Rhetorics of Contemporary Science Fiction, Tatsumi Takayuki argues contemporary strategies of reading science fiction are different from those employed to read sf classics by Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, and this change in reading strategy is evidence that we must understand science fiction at the level of reader. He illustrates this process through the colorful and absurd 1976 space opera The Garments of Caean by Barrington J. Bayley. The hero, sartorial cynic Peder Farbarth, acquires a sentient suit that eventually gains control of his mind and turns him into a “clothes-robot” intent on saving an entire race of sentient clothes from exploitation by their human wearers. Tatsumi argues there is a “contextual dislocation” when reading this work in the 1990s based on the way in which we currently interact with technology. The linked intelligence of the sentient suits cannot help but call to mind contemporary global networks that also structure and control our thinking, though he cautions we, like the hero of the 66 story, are relatively unaware of the way in which these networks act as our “clothes.” In this way, we become aware that science fictional reading has become naturalized in the contemporary moment – even in the case of the news beamed from one side of the world to the other in via satellites, which does not explicitly acknowledge the technological structures that make such an event possible (rather, it suppresses them). 80 Considering these reading strategies of the subject through a structuralist lens, Tatsumi locates this change in science fiction rhetoric as a transformation from conceiving of “science as the embodiment of objectivity,” to the understanding that even science is a “narratological project called scientific discourse.” Though he does not explicitly identify a moment of change, his constant references to New Wave science fiction authors indicates he sees this transformation occurring in the 1960s and 1970s. New Wave authors emphasized stylistic experimentation and literary merit over scientific accuracy or painstaking prediction, recalling the binary illustrator David Hardy proposed: they created “science fictional” works rather than “space age” works. However, Hardy’s value of this binary is inverted for Tatsumi – the science fictional work is closer to literature, and the New Wave authors sought to explicitly distance themselves from “space age” works which they saw as trite or banal. Rather than attempting to escape hackneyed plots or themes, SF Magazine illustrators differentiated themselves from American magazine illustrations. Tatsumi argues those engaged with that thing called “science fiction” (be they authors, illustrators, and/or readers) were very much aware that it was a form of meta-fiction, and his argument throughout the book is a series of case studies of science fictional works that he reads as meta-fiction reflecting the emotional, social, and political issues of the authors’ lives. 80 Tatsumi Takayuki. The Rhetoric of Contemporary Science Fiction. (Gendai esuefu no retorikku) Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 1992. 67 From its very first issue, SF Magazine began as a publication intent on expanding the readership of science fiction in Japan by straddling the line between high-brow and mass literature and culture. In his editor’s introduction in that first issue, Fukushima Masami offers a definition of the science fiction to be found within the pages of the magazine: This magazine is the first earnest attempt to transplant foreign science fiction to our country’s soil, and at the same time, be worthy of our country’s particular science fiction market. Here let me point out that the magazine’s definition of science fiction is not just your everyday space adventure story. Of course, it goes without saying that space stories based on scientific data are included here, but other than that there are rich “future novels” that are developed cultural criticism guided by the intellect, science fiction suspense stories that cause chills and thrills, beautiful fantastic fiction that follows in the tradition of Poe, etc. This magazine’s mission is to introduce Modern Science Fiction’s mainstream, or masterpieces of the genre, as one new literary form. 81 Echoes of Hardy’s differentiation between “space age” and “science fiction” painting occur in this introduction with references to both “everyday adventure stories” and “developed cultural criticism,” clearly illustrating Fukushima’s awareness of the multiple places from which the codes of science fiction are drawn. The first sentence clearly acknowledges the links between Japanese sf and foreign fiction, but also self-consciously creates a difference in these markets: a difference foreign works must strive to be “worthy” of. The listing of the different styles of science fiction is already a meta-commentary on the fact that science fiction has multiple definitions and Tatsumi’s science fictional rhetoric has been deployed in a variety of genres, like the strange fiction by Poe, which were not explicitly identified as science fiction when they were published. Finally, this is an attempt to define science fiction for a discerning reader, who can recognize a masterpiece and will be pleased that Fukushima has chosen to publish them. 81 Editor’s introduction, SF Magazine Inaugural issue, December, 1959, inside cover. (see Introduction, n. 1) 68 Tatsumi’s notion that contemporary readers employ a mode of reading that is already science fictional mirrors Hayle’s argument about the site of origin for thinking about the posthuman. Hayles, by locating the origins of the posthuman in the transformation of discourse around the body ultimately argues we are all already posthuman when we discuss thinking as “processing” or describe the operations of memory as a kind of data recall. Hayles, comparing the use of language to the mode of reading (which, of course, is always itself achieved through language), contends the contemporary subject is already posthuman and a science fictional reader. While I do not disagree with either Tatsumi or Hayles’ arguments, one of the issues I find with them both is the question of penetration: when are either of these ideas disseminated widely enough to escape from the boundaries of genre? Hayles contends the language of computers has penetrated so extensively into contemporary parlance – after all, we refer to thought “processes” – that we are all already posthuman. Tatsumi’s contention is not that one has to be a reader of science fiction in order to read science fictionally, but rather that the process of reading science fictionally is instead part of the contemporary moment. When we examine the history of science fiction in Japan, particularly considering the constant debates on the merits and definitions of science fiction that SF Magazine featured in its pages in the first ten years of publication, it becomes clear this approach is what Fukushima intended with the content of the publication. Yet while Fukushima’s introduction in the first issue of SF Magazine acknowledges the multiple histories and writing/reading modes of science fiction, can we assume the first readers of the magazine were entirely conversant with these as well? When Abe Kobo writes in 1966 in Science Fiction, the Unnamable, “seeing how frequently the readers' page of SF Magazine features heated debates on such questions as ‘What is science fiction?,’ one may conclude that the true 69 nature of the beast is still largely unknown,” it becomes clear that the naturalization of the posthuman and the science fictional reader had not yet spread within the community of self- proclaimed science fiction fans. To put it plainly, through the 1960s, the penetration of the rhetoric and the discourse of science fiction was part of a process. The classification of literature, film, and illustration as science fiction, distinct from other fictional forms, is hotly debated even today. If what both scholars suggest is entirely true, then the form of science fiction would no longer be separate, but instead integrated into every literary and visual production; there would be no need for a separate definition of science fiction, as all contemporary works would have elements of the science fictional. Nonetheless, Tatsumi’s strategy of recognizing science not as an objective fact but rather as a narrative strategy and as a lens for analysis of science fictional works is worth considering, particularly as he takes his inspiration from Samuel Delany’s theorization of the operations of written science fiction: “[W]e must think of literature and science fiction not as two different sets of labeled texts, but as two different sets of values, two different ways of response, two different ways of making texts make sense, two different ways of reading—or what one academic tradition would call two different discourses." 82 Influenced by Saussure, Delany proposes science fiction is not a genre, but rather has a "distinct level of subjunctivity" from other forms of fiction and is instead a divergent kind of discourse. 83 Thus the dividing line between science fiction and what he terms mundane fiction (or psychological fiction, or naturalistic fiction, or mainstream 82 Delany, Samuel R. "Science Fiction and 'Literature' – or, The Conscience of the King," Speculation on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Ed. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria. 102. 83 Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Rev. ed. Middletown: Wesleyan UP , 2009. 10. 70 fiction in his other writings) is not the content or the style of writing, but rather that the operations required by the reader to understand a single sentence are different in a science fictional text than in other texts. Delany suggests that science fiction changes the level of subjuncitivity by arguing "[t]hese objects [ray guns, space ships, etc], these convocations of objects into situations and events, are blanketly[sic] defined by: have not happened." ” 84 The reader of science fiction thus has the opportunity to interpret a sentence like "Her world exploded" (one of Delany's most famous examples) in a manner that is not available to a reader of mainstream fiction. The focus of the sentence, for Delany, is no longer on the psychological subject, but on the object. Thus the science fiction reader understands “her” world literally exploded into grains of dust; alternatively the mainstream reader has access to only the metaphorical meaning. Inherent then, at a sentence level, is a challenge to the formal relationship between subject and object that dominates mainstream literature. I suggest there is, in these sentences and in this illustration style, rather, a dual subjunctivity: the science fiction reader must understand the sentence in the context of their knowledge of the discourse of science fiction, of course, but they also must hold contingent the meaning. There are two potential meanings to Delany’s sentence: one, the psychological, the other, the material. It is only through reading further that the reader discovers whether the woman in the story felt emotionally bereft, or lost her planet, and in a science fiction story the meaning could be either. Meaning is determined not just at the level of the sentence, but remains contingent until the reader engages with the next sentence as well. The effect of this dual 84 Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, 11. 71 subjunctivity not only allows for the possibility of two meanings, it also suggests the writer of science fiction, in the very act of writing these kinds of sentences, is not only aware of this possibility, but can operate in a space of play where the psychological reading is invoked as often as the material. The spaces created by SF Magazine’s covers have not happened – and may never happen. The viewer has the opportunity to see them as both metaphoric, relating to an abstract rendering of present day, and as literal, reading an imagined ‘new’ or ‘alternative’ world. That sense of play within the covers is achieved by using the formal artistic styles to represent space in a distinctive way. Tatsumi, despite using Delany’s definition of science fiction as a discourse in order to complicate a contemporary definition of science fiction as the “literature of the future,” 85 does not focus on the dual possibilities of the science fictional sentence. Instead, he argues Delany’s theorization is about the realistic effects of a sentence – about a “physical reading” (butsuriteki ni yomukoto). He suggests this is only one aspect of science fiction, and it must be combined with understanding that science fiction also functions like poetry. He uses W.H. Auden definition of poetry’s function in the sentence, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” For Tatsumi, this sentence implies poetry does not function on a syntactic level, but rather on the level of single sounds or words. More plainly, the meaning of a poem must be understood not through its grammar, but through grasping its individual (visual) characters. In this way poetry is untranslatable, as the same characters simply do not exist in the same way in other languages. Instead, what is 85 Tatsumi Takayuki. The Rhetoric of Contemporary Science Fiction, 2. 72 translated is an “allegory of the reading of a poem.” 86 For Tatsumi, the act of reading science fiction then calls for both a contextual, physical, and allegorical reading at the same time. By proposing that science fiction is an act of translation between the textual and the visual, I assert the illustrator engages in the very operations outlined by both Delany and Tatsumi. The reader and viewer must also perform them understand science fiction texts as much as they understand illustration. Illustrators consciously make critical choices as they engage with the discourse of science, and in doing so are always in the process of defining science fiction as they illustrate. Of course, this process occurs within a specific cultural context, particularly a history of images and words of all the works that came before – of all the works that might be considered science fiction in Japan, and of the individuals who read them. Overdetermination: reading the archive At times, we have understood science fiction illustration as a kind of adaptation: the movement of a story from fiction text to visual depiction. To use the word "adapt" allows a sense of transformation, even a change in mode or genre. In describing an adaptation, we have to call on much of the same language that is used when speaking about translation: original and source, ideal and actual, production and reproduction, reception and intent. Both contain a sense of afterlife, in that the source work lives in the adaptation/translation, and this new reworking 87 (adaptation/translation) does not prohibit a return to, or supercede, the original. Above, I noted Benjamin suggests that translatability is "an essential" quality of works. So too we can say that 86 Ibid., 5. 87 As part of my argument is that adaptation and translation are closer than we think, I will attempt use the somewhat awkward "reworking" to stand in for either the adaptation or the translation (when compared to the idea of the original) 73 adaptability is an essential quality of every work (no matter if the adaptation succeeds or not). There are two paths to take in this conversation. One is to further explore the difference between translation and adaptation; and the second is to look at the way adaptation is embedded within a translation of image to text. The October 1962 cover 88 is both an adaptation and a translation. The artist pays homage to surrealism’s fascination with mathematical structures, particularly a celebration of the Mobius strip. This icon dominates the frame, dwarfing the small sea- shell like figures dancing on the horizon line. The tiny figures are ambiguous – they have legs, and bumpy irregular shapes, but no other distinguishing characteristics. They manifest as imperfect and chance aspects of the unconscious set against a mathematical musing figure 8: October 1962 SF Magazine on infinity – compared to the smooth-edged figure of time, they are bumpy, irregular, and out of place. However, because of the para-textual markings, we are encouraged – possibly even required – to marshal our understanding of science fiction’s archive, including both narrative and visual vocabulary. Within that context, the tiny figures become aliens, the looming Mobius a monument, building, or ship around which they dance. The banner that announces this is the 88 Nakajima Seikan. Cover of Time Travel Special Issue. SF Magazine. October, 1962. (see Introduction, n. 1) 74 Time Travel Special Issue! translates the Mobius from mathematical play into a mediation of one of the oldest paradoxes in time travel fiction, the “grandfather paradox.” 89 The dominance of the figure that represents the oldest paradox of time also underscores the operations of illustration itself. This is a reworking of the symbol of infinite time, situating it within an alien landscape, adapting math to fiction, translating equation to vision. What we rely on to imagine this alternative reality is excessive – excessive imagination. These readings are overdeterminations of the image. This is in part because all interpretations operate in excess of the image, and meaning is attributed to the image because of the perceived importance of the collection of shapes within it, but that perceived importance is always in excess of the image itself. Overdetermination, Delany suggests in Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics, is fundamental to the act of reading in general, to the act of encountering signs. Delany employs this term, first used by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, to signal an act that makes meaning not through one single effect, but through the recognition of multiple causes at once. In the case of science fiction illustration, we overdetermine not just because of iconography, but because of para-textual elements: because of use of color, because of the history of the shapes, because of styles, because we recognize something from both visual and textual science fiction we have encountered before. All of these codes are marshalled together at once in an illustration, and it is this operation – of marshalling codes as reader and as illustrator to be able to recognize and view an image, that is critical to the 89 One of the earliest proposed paradoxes of time travel, first described by science fiction writer Rene Barjavel in his 1943 book Le Voyageur Imprudent. The paradox asks: if a man travels back in time to kill his grandfather before the latter meets his grandmother, and as a result is one of the time traveler’s parents never conceived? Then would the time traveler himself not be born? But if he was not born, he would not be able to travel back in time at all, and the grandfather would be alive, thus the parent, and then traveler/child, would also be conceived. And so the possibility of one seems to imply its own negation in the ultimate tautological question 75 act of viewing in general. But specific codes become associated over time with specific languages. The codes that are marshaled constitute the archive of science fiction in the Derridian sense. In Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” the universal Library is both every book ever written and the possibility of those yet to be written, the ultimate collection of every possibility and every expression within language. But Akira Lippit points out that Derrida formulates psychoanalysis as another, secret archive, “an alternate archive split against itself, against the very law of the archive, a shadow archive in the distance and alterity of the other.” 90 This observation that there are alternative archives to Borges’ ultimate archive, in particular an archive of the unconscious, point toward both the simultaneous desires to collect all things into one world view and the difficulty of doing so. Multiple archives exist because of and despite the all-encompassing nature of Borges’ universe-as-Library because that library is constructed in language. The psychological exceeds language. Moreover, there is the possibility for little archives of potential amidst the all-encompassing universal of the larger metaphor. By this I mean while each science fiction text can, and in many ways must, be read as an overdetermination of all the previous texts in the total archive that organizes science fiction, the process can never end because the archive is always in the process of being constituted by everything that has come before it and will come after it, that exists or is used as part of the discourse. We cannot ever fully see the where the archive ends. The science fiction archive when theorized can furthermore, like the unconscious, be recalled at the same time that it is repressed. 90 Lippit, Akira. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005. 11. 76 By this I mean that theories of science fiction seek to function like psychoanalysis in that theories, via Derrida, “aspire to be a general science of the archive, of everything that can happen to the economy of memory and to its substrates, traces, documents, in their supposedly psychical or tecnoprosthetic forms.” 91 The endeavors of those theorizing continually seek to define the forms, the traces, the structures and the technologies of expression and form. Derrida argues that the archive coordinates two principles: the physical, historical, or ontological principle, and the principle according to the law. In the first we “gather together signs” – collecting and further categorizing signs into sets and subsets. Science fiction histories include lists of fictions and films divided and categorized: Aliens became B.E.M (bug-eyed-monsters), Martians, human-like and inhumanly bodied; machines were sub-divided into rockets, spaceships, transport, submarines, spacesuits, robots and androids. 92 The other principle, however, was expressed in the theorizations of the laws, the rules that guide the building of borders, the structures that allow for permutation of elements but consistency of form. From Darko Suvin’s articulation of science fiction as the literature of “cognitive estrangement” to Abe Kobo’s investment in science fiction as the literature of “hypothesis,” sf is simultaneously defined by the operations of its texts over time as well as by its similarities in form, style, or subject matter. The October 1962 cover (figure 8) above estranges our notions of time (the law) and shape (the physical) by using the Mobius figure to stand for both. The Mobius operates within the textual realm of narrative possibility (continual narrative repetition, play with time, etc). Yet the Mobius operates in the visual realm as mathematical topology. It’s only through the 91 Derrida, Jacques. "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression." Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 9- 63. 92 For examples of this kind of categorization (and more) see Holdstock, Robert, and Isaac Asimov. Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London, England: Cathay / Octopus Books, 1983. 77 operation of overdetermined reading and the interaction of visibility with already established codes that I can draw these interpretations together. Benjamin notes "…a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life." 93 Suddenly (or perhaps not quite suddenly), time has become a truly important marker of the difference between a translation and its original. It is afterlife not only because it is part of the life of the text, but because there must be both a beginning and an after. But cause and effect are not so clear within the cover illustration. In fact they are on a literal continuum of the mobius strip, available only via inference and not explicit depiction. Yet the representation of this continuum does not provoke a crisis – it still maintains a relationship between a variety of sources (math, seashells, surrealism, time), and reworking (alien vistas and ships). By creating a relationship between so many sources and so many realities, the illustration blurs the boundaries between media and confuses the time between original/rework so that it is no longer quite recognizable as an adaptation. This collapse of time and boundaries between media suggest that we are no longer dealing with either an adaptation or a translation, but something that is entirely new, that reacts instantaneously to the other versions of itself. I propose that we accept for the most part Benjamin's proposal that texts have both a life and something else that happens if the text is iterated outward, but instead of that iteration being principally dependent on iterations in time and into other languages, we must see it as related to iterations across time and across media. Life through time, then, is just one of many factors in the continued life of a text. 93 Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator,” 71. 78 To return to my earlier proposition that adaptation is not so very far from translation, there is one principal and inescapable difference that remains. Adaptation (even if we consider the Mobius in the cover above as an adaptation) most often occurs across media. Translation, however, is a movement between languages, not media. Yet what is the image but a manifestation of visual language? This is particularly clear in the case of these Japanese covers, whose multiple written registers include kanji, those logographic characters who serve both a written and visual purpose. Tatsumi refers to them in his discussion of the translation of poetry. And the choices the translator makes moving from one language to another, particularly from a Romanized to a logographic language, are the same kinds of operations illustrators and adaptors make when moving from one media to another. The direct and indirect selections the adapter has to make are the same choices of the translator. On the one hand, we earlier dismissed the need to evaluate the relative merits of a translation in order to assess a text's translatability. Is insisting on a separation between the two categories simply a more deeply rooted type of evaluation? I think it is. Even Benjamin notes that the afterlife "could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living – the original undergoes a change. Even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process." 94 His principle point here is to discuss the effect translation has on the original, noting that "no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original." 95 There must be a change, and that change occurs in both works – both the original and the translation. Then, as I hinted above when pointing toward the way metaphor 94 Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator,” 71. 95 Ibid., 73 79 works, translation would be possible even across media because media are transformed by the movement across them. I am not suggesting that we entirely dispense of the separation between translation and adaptation. However, in order to account in some way for the possibilities raised by science fiction illustration, I propose we consider a new category we might call posthuman translation. This is not necessarily fixed to the translation of a text between two languages, as it is an acknowledgement that these boundaries are blurring, shifting, and not limited to language. It is here that I again return to Hayles' definition of the posthuman subject: "[it] is an amalgam, a collection of heterogenous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction." 96 Posthuman translation is a collection of practices, a mode, that is inherent in any science fictional text, but is neither dependent on the temporal separation between the text and the reworked product nor on the change from one language to another. It instead relies on the process of shifting itself – across media, across realities. We have to consider what effect proposing this category this will have on the notion of pure language and on the idea of the afterlife of the text. To take up the former, I now turn to Paul de Man; for the latter, I draw on Donna Haraway in the final section of this paper. Whimsical robots and their radioactive play I want to momentarily return to Benjamin to clearly capture his definition of the kinship of languages. The only similarity between two languages, the "kinship" is the: intention underlying each language as a whole – an intention, however which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions 96 Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman, 3. 80 supplementing each other: pure language. While all individual elements of a foreign language – words, sentences, structure – are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions….In translation the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air, as it were. It cannot live there permanently….Yet, in a singularly impressive manner, at least it points the way to this region: the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages. The transfer can never be total, but what reaches this region is that element in a translation which goes beyond transmittal of subject matter. 97 Benjamin elevates translation in part because he is attempting to gesture towards the notion of pure language, this language that can convey (perfectly) something beyond the subject matter of its words. Pure language cannot ever be entirely accessed, but can instead be understood only in the supplement, space where one language meets another. The repetition of certain visual phrases reveals a kind of pure image language in the following F/SF Magazine and SF Magazine covers (figures 9 – 12) 98 : 97 Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator” 98 Mel Hunter. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1957, August 1961, May 1960. And Nakajima Seikan. SF Magazine. August, 1962. (see Introduction, n. 1). 81 figure 9: July 1957 F/SF Magazine figure 10: August 1961 F/SF Magazine 82 figure 11: May 1960 F/SF Magazine 83 figure 12: August 1962 SF Magazine 84 Out of all of the covers of the American F/SF Magazine, one of the few series that was not based on a particular story were a series of covers by Mel Hunter known prosaically as the Robot Series. Featured on the cover of the F/SF Magazine periodically between 1955 and 1971, the robot series depicted the adventures of the last survivor, a robot, on an Earth destroyed by atomic war. The robot encountered and comically played with everyday objects left behind from a nuclear explosion. I have collected just a few covers from 1954 – 1963. Drawn with an engineering precision of joints and clean lines, the July 1957 cover robot displays emotional reactions to the world around him in his physical poses. The tilt of the head and hand to the jaw can be read as either confusion or interest, but overall the image presents a certain link to humanity with the very pose of the robot’s body. In the August 1961 cover (figure 10), he is frightened by a looming Salvatore Bali sculpture found amidst other artworks in an abandoned museum; the illustration itself plays a meta-history of robotics that references surrealism not through technique, but through parody. Finally, the May 1960 image (figure 11) is of the Robot enjoying a little music amidst devastation. In the lower left hand corner of the cover, smoke rises from the damaged city to create a haze across the sun. Our robot sits relaxed in a chair, surrounded by two speakers with a record player in the foreground, listening to perhaps a melody of destruction. Again, the precision with which this image is rendered is mixed with its fantastic subject matter. The robot body uses gestures to evoke human experience, and yet also continually resides in the realm of the fantastic. This cover is then translated to the August 1962 cover of SF Magazine (figure 12) by Nakajima Seikan (figure 12). Here we have a seeming Japanese duplicate - except the robot stands, no longer relaxed. The sun takes up a greater portion of the frame, suggesting he is walking into destruction. The 85 fractured and jutting city on the horizon line is no longer clearly identifiable as either destroyed or being rebuilt. Even the edges of the robot’s body are frayed by the sunlight. The rhetoric of the image has shifted from a conquering hero to an aimless robot who is perhaps even walking into the sun, his own destruction. The artist is clearly showing an awareness of the rhetorics of American science fiction, but also calling them into question, interrogating them by repositioning this iconic figure such that it is nearly invisible in the harsh light of the sun. The borders between robot and space are no longer clearly marked; the borders of the robot himself are no longer clearly drawn. A robotic body which owes its existence to science also recalls the body in postwar Japan as one that was absolutely in flux. The relationship between the robot and apocalypse is also restructured in the 1962 illustration: while the American version seems to be relaxing post-bomb, this robot’s shoulders are hunched, his hands dropped at its side, almost leaning towards the source of light. He is also engaging with his world differently: the American robot is master of his environment, while the Japanese one is in stasis, caught and molded by his surroundings. Although Japanese economic and even emotional recovery was underway by the 1960s, the body when it is represented, is always a body newly aware of not of just its fragility, but of its own permeability on an atomic level that was heretofore never part of a national consciousness. The collapse of boundaries in atomic light The robot’s body deteriorates in the rays of the possibly poisonous light: while the source in the image is the light of the sun, it recalls the atomic bomb – that flash of incandescence which created cataclysmic change and left behind, as its secret trace, invisible and deadly poisons of radioactivity to live under the skin. The atomic event was the ultimate visual spectacle, though a 86 spectacle that no one could see at first, as those who were witnesses at ground zero did not survive. Later, it became the spectacle that could not be represented - not because of the trauma, but because of governmental control; the American occupation suppressed references to the bomb and its effects during their tenure in Japan. It wasn’t until 1954, and the Bikini Atol testing, that the light from the bombs returned, violently destroying the Lucky Dragon No. 5 ship and leaving visible the the fishermen’s deteriorating bodies. These bodies were presented to the Japanese public along with photographic and televisual images of the hydrogen bombs via newspapers and news programs. 99 In the realm of the imaginary, Honda Ishiro and Tezuka Osamu both reacted to this return of the repressed with science fiction characters reworking the trauma: the titanic creature Godzilla both created by science and destroyed through the proper application of Dr. Serizawa’s research; the android Astro Boy, animated to be a copy of a lost son, who both deploys his technological advantages to save humanity and exceeds his own robotic limitations to experience human emotions. Lippit points out that the late nineteenth century, three technologies restructured the understanding of interiority: the x-ray, cinema, and psychology. He figures the advent of these technologies as the origin of the crisis in postwar Japan, which has haunted Japanese visual culture. These three technologies in combined provided a language in multiple registers that “visualize[ed] the inside, for imagining interiority; but they also transformed the conditions of visuality as such.” 100 In part because they were a new way to see, and provided ways to see inside and beyond what manifested to the visible eye, they revealed a secret visibility of the body 99 For example, see NHK archives “Lucky Dragon No. 5 Radiation Explosion at Bikini (Daigo Fukuryū Maru Bikini de Hibaku” NHK archival video, 2:38, from 10 Major News Stories from 1954 broadcast televised by NHK in 1954, http://cgi2.nhk.or.jp/archives/tv60bin/detail/index.cgi?das_id=D0009030006_00000. 100 Lippit, Akira. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), 30. 87 at the same time that they were avisual, alien technologies that structured human conception. This recalls Hayles’ proposition that language restructures human existence – these three simultaneously constitute language, mode, technique, and technology. This adds to our archive, as it is “formed here in the other senses; an archive of the visible that remains secret, a visible secret, a secret of the visible. Supplemental, the archive of secret visuality appears in the other senses, everywhere but in visuality.” But the radical moment of development is hidden; it is naturalized so that the restructuring of visuality is no more than another utterance. That is, until the collapse of the archive in the atomic blasts. At the moment the bombs dropped, the secret collapsed into the revelation: walls between outside and inside buckled. “The atomic assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States unleashed the heat and light of atoms, which threatened not only the Japanese archive but the ‘mansion called literature,’ the literary archive. It threatened to destroy the trace, to destroy even the shadows.” 101 In the cataclysmic light, darkness is eradicated and yet simultaneously eradicates all of literature with it. Quoting Derrida, Lippit points out that nuclear war is catastrophe; it is the “total and remainderless destruction of the archive” because it is the obliteration of future histories. The nuclear catastrophe destroys the body and in doing so destroys all bodies, destroys all possibilities of bodies. Yet, Derrida points out, the act of dropping the bombs ended the Pacific war but did not set off nuclear war. In the ending of one kind of archive (and one way of constructing visuality) “the mansion [of literature] remained, remains, manêre, still stands and stands still in the 101 Lippit, Akira. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), 25. 88 smoldering embers of the archive.” 102 But it stands as embers, as the trace of the trace of the annihilation of the bodies that will themselves disappear without leaving a trace. What remains are the atomic, “microscopic, deconstructed, splitting incessantly into near imperceptibility” 103 divisions of language. The new archive, the atomic archive, created in division, that emerges out of the cinders of fiction. Out of the cinders of the separation between the visible and the textual. This is the “archive of surfaces” that emerges when language is no longer about the penetration of light into the interiority of the body, but instead about its emission from the surface itself. Translation as practice and production in science fiction A science fiction is fiction where words are defamiliarized. Words are, in the terms of Darko Suvin, estranged. Each word may be intelligible to the reader because the author (re)uses or (re)names things known to come before. The basic structure of these fictions is the structure not of the single word, but of the sentence. This we know from Delany: that fiction creates meaning not at the level of words, but rather arrives out of the words in context, the words used in a sentence; the use of familiar words in a new relationship and new network of meaning, which provides us with the ability to articulate notions of ‘not yet’ or ‘not as yet.’ His articulation stands in opposition to the psychological reality of other types of fiction. By understanding science fiction this way, we understand it as a mode of reading and writing that both trains its readers/writers and is continually produced by them. This definition, then, is reliant neither on the appearance of particular tropes nor on particular icons: a science fiction can include robots and spaceships, but is no longer defined solely by them. Science fiction film, too, is a visual 102 Ibid., 26. 103 Ibid., 27. 89 defamiliarization of film taking the known and reshaping it for the purposes of the unknown. Sobacheck’s analysis of the landscape of SF film articulates the specifics of this defamiliarziation. In this vein, science fiction art is also a form of language. It is a visual discourse embedded within a network of signs, with particularities that require continually considering the relationship of words to visual language. Benjamin argues: There is a language of sculpture, of painting, of poetry. Just as the language of poetry is partly, if not solely, founded on the name language of man, it is very conceivable that the language of sculpture or painting is founded on certain kinds of thing-languages, that in them we find a translation of the language of things into an infinitely higher language, which may still be of the same sphere…. For an understanding of artistic forms, it is of value to attempt to grasp them all as languages… 104 Benjamin’s contention that to understand artistic forms it is valuable to grasp them all as languages requires that we in part ask what comprises a “language”? Especially if language can be separated into thing-language and the language of man. For Benjamin, clearly language is defined by its communicative function. This communication is not that of of the mental being (the subject) through language, but rather the reality that the mental being (subject) “communicates itself in language.” In other words, the subject is constituted in language, not through it. Thus, language is always also bound up in the human relationship to it, and the language of man is the language we used not only to communicate from one to another but also to communicate the world. However, Derrida articulates the relations between language and community as the “language contract: that which guarantees the institution of one language, the 104 Benjamin, Walter. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2004, 62–74. 90 unity of its system, and the social contract which binds a community in this regard.” 105 Thus, one language communicates a community as the use of that language in a community is simultaneously the promise of a coherent group, one bound together. Language contains this promise within it. The promise of this contract offers one way to understand a group or a subculture: by its utterances. Because we have multiple languages that structure groups, however, Derrida goes on to suggest that languages as a whole are stand-ins for proper names; languages become proper names for the new collectives or unities that are formed (that we call nations.) Nation is constituted in language, and language in nation. This is how languages become like proper names insofar as they are the languages of a people. This relationship of language to nation becomes critical because when Benjamin states that the languages of sculpture or painting (or in this case, the language of science fiction illustration) are founded on certain kinds of thing-languages, he is referring not to the subject, but to the object: the “thing” that exists outside of the self. This object, then, is also constituted not through language, but in language. The visual language of science fiction illustration constitutes the object in representation. This is not to be confused with specific objects like rockets or robots, but rather the constitution of object-as-world, as ontology, as networks of meaning that are produced: as a translation. This chapter has developed two theoretical propositions based on this notion that science fiction is not ever defined by its icons, but instead by the operations of reading and viewing – the operations of consumption as well as the operations of production. The focus on object and the construction of the object in representation is what marks science fiction as so different and yet 105 Derrida, Jacques. "Des tours de Babel," 185. 91 so easily recognizable. The first is that there is a thing called posthuman language based not just on particular uses of words, but on a relationship to spectacle that requires we understand science fiction itself as an entity that is, even when written, bound up in blurring the lines between the visual and the textual. This is built around the second proposition: that science fiction illustration is itself a visual language – the visual language of science fiction aesthetics. Benjamin and Derrida propose not only that language be defined as I noted above, but also that it is within translation that we can access a sense of pure language; the limits of any language’s border and crossing into another language we can see the sense of pure language’s existence. It is only through an analysis of science fiction illustration as a translation (from written to illustrated, from American to Japanese, from image to image) that we see how this system of visual understanding creates a sense of the pure language of science fiction aesthetics in the movement from one visual language to the other, that is inherent to a definition of science fiction as both a written and illustrated genre. The translation of things (in the Benjaminian sense) in sf illustration renews them at the same time that the translation of sf illustration constructs, constitutes, the language of things. These things (objects) become become visible, emerging clearly when science fiction illustration moves from one language to another (and from one nation to another; in this case from America to Japan). In the individual language, “meaning is never found in relative independence, as in individual words or sentences; rather, it is in a constant state of flux – until it is able to emerge as pure language from the harmony of all the various modes of intention [through translation].” 106 Pure language, for Benjamin, can never be fully accessed; its edges can only be hinted at in the 106 Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator,” 74. 92 operations of translation. In the same way we see a single totalizing definition of science fiction illustration will never be found in a single utterance/image, or even through an assembly of images from one particular community (the assembly of cover illustrations of a single magazine). It is because science fiction is in a constant state of flux, responding both to the fluctuations in the network of words and networks of images, of sounds, of the movement between these different languages. Meaning is never fixed, and we can only gesture towards it – it is only in translation when the edges of each language (Japanese/American, visual/thing) are taken up by the translator (artist), that science fiction takes shape. 93 Chapter Three: Surreal Landscapes (Or, How SF Magazine Illustrations Rejected American Embodiment And Japanese Consumer Models in Order to Grow Up) figure 13: January 1965 SF Magazine The January 1965 cover (figure 13) 107 is SF Magazine illustrator Nakajima Seikan’s homage to Hokusai’s internationally renowned work. This wave is both a citation of Hokusai’s woodblock print and an adaptation of the image into a science fiction apocalypse with unearthly brooding red sky. Mount Fuji, the national icon of Japanese history and the symbol of the endurance of the nation state, has been translocated to a world with two moons. Moreover, Fuji is skewed into an elongated point and the waves are also stretched, perhaps by the unnatural force that darkened the sky, hung the two moons, and changed the shape of the mountain. The fishermen Hokusai so carefully placed on the waves in their fishing boats are no longer caught in a struggle on the water. This homage, which so carefully reproduces the dots of spray, has intentionally left the bodies out. The image captures all of the threat of the earlier 107 Nakajima, SF Magazine. January, 1965 (see Introduction, n. 1.) 94 Hokusai wave, but displaces people as if they have already been drowned and dragged away. This is the aftermath of destruction instead of impending apocalypse. Nakajima has used familiar iconography and stylistic technique in order to juxtapose the recognizable with the recognizably alien. He has made the human bodies that once centered earlier artworks invisible, emphasizing the connection of science fiction to landscape and simultaneously creating an eerie distance that estranges familiar iconography - making the familiar surreal. The original (figure 14), 108 is the most recognizable image created by Japanese artist Hokusai Katsushika. Hokusai’s 1830 Great Wave off Kanegawa, printed as part of a series called the Thirty-six views of Fuji (Fugaku Sanjurokkei) is itself a vision of apocalypse. figure 14: Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanegawa In many ways, the image is ripe for appropriation into an apocalyptic fictional discourse: the threatening nature of the wave in the original already suggests man will be wiped out by an indifferent but powerful natural force. The frame is dominated by the detailed rendering of the wave, ready to crash over not just the fishermen clinging to their boats but also the iconic Mt. Fuji, covering all in a watery darkness. Hokusai has captured the moment before apocalypse strikes, when boats filled with fishermen wait to be consumed. Although this image is quite iconic now, it was quite revolutionary at the time since Hokusai was one of the first artists to 108 Hokusai Katsushika, The Great Wave at Kanagawa (from a Series of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji) ca. 1830-2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (JP1847) 95 incorporate waves into his woodblock landscapes; he was also an early adopter of perspectives inspired by European painting, and massively popular because of his use of the new European blue inks popularized in the era. According to Julyan Cartwright and Hisami Nakamura’s discussion of this image, the presence and position of the three fishing boats are critical in determining the direction of the wave as well as its power –the juxtaposition of bodies to water creates a sense of perspective and of looming destruction. These images encapsulate two of the trends that occur over and over on the covers of the first ten years of SF Magazine. First, Nakajima has used familiar (and in this case Japanese) iconography and stylistic technique in order to create a space both recognizable and recognizably alien. Second, that he has made all traces of the human invisible, as if the bodies were no longer even a possibility in this new apocalypse. This invisibility emphasizes the connection of science fiction to space and to landscape as space. When merging high art styles and subjects with the fascinations and obsessions of science fiction (and in this case, the translation of an iconic image into a science fiction landscape), the covers illustrators of SF Magazine deliberately crafted landscapes that figured the body as an absence. In so doing, they created a space of science fiction at the beginning of the transition of science fiction from a genre to a subculture in Japan. Developing spaces like this began with the tools of Surrealism, already widely recognized in Japan’s popular culture. Just like Hokusai’s apocalyptic image, Surrealism’s goals were ready-made to fit with the aims of the fledgling magazine and the notion of science fiction that would eventually dominate Japan. The history of Surrealism in Japan was a history of exploring both the textual and the visual. Those who identified with the movement or adopted the theories often sought to confuse the boundary between high and low. Additionally, Surrealism offered an intellectual way to explore consciousness, subjectivity, and dream with an 96 emphasis on the hypperreal. Although surrealists and other abstract artists sought to mix high and low, abstract art was not properly part of the realm of capital (neither consumption nor consumer, neither subject nor object). SF Magazine illustrators abandoned/dismissed/resisted/made the body absent in order to create a break from both American sf-style illustration and from other Japanese magazine cover illustration, to arrest and disrupt the gaze of the reader. These artists revealed a new, bodiless (but always situated within a discourse of the body), perspective. In doing so, they critiqued dominant visual discourses that either produced utopic bodies or promoted the consumption of fetishized ones. Using visual styles linked with highbrow art meant SF Magazine illustrators could escape being constantly labeled juvenile (or only directed at children). Additionally, adapting this high art style carved out a specific visual space away from other popular and mass media publications intent on offering either models of consumers or consumable bodies-as-objects on their covers. After I discuss Surrealist practice in Japan, and argue Japanese science fiction in these early years was a manifestation of popular Surrealism, I articulate the conceptual space of the mass magazine (children’s magazines, women’s magazines, news magazines and mystery magazines) and the relationship between viewer and viewed, between subject and object, and of course between these publications and SF Magazine. I consider weekly news magazines and women’s magazines in part due to their focus on appealing to the postwar “new middle class.” In the 1960s, the bodies appearing on these magazine was the utopic consumer body, a consumer- subject that was meant to be both modeled and consumed. By eschewing bodies but pushing Surrealist style, SF Magazine illustration also separated itself from American science fiction magazine illustration while remaining a recognizable part of the visual world fashioned by American and British illustrators in the 1950s and 1960s. In my 97 final section, I compare the two styles to show the way SF Magazine illustrators created a visual language of science fiction that continually created distance – that imagined landscapes - that defined science fiction in Japan. Landscapes of the future Nakajima and the other illustrators in the 1960s challenged the firmly established science fiction iconography that placed the human at the center of technological change/space exploration. In the earliest series of covers Nakajima created an aesthetic of space that envisioned future or other worlds made provocative and haunting, not explicitly terrifying. Formally, these landscape covers contained a horizon line. Moreover, the most active elements were not the objects in the foreground of these covers, but rather the environment they existed in. This environment is a colorful interplay of light and dark, with darker shadows dominating the frame. Decayed buildings, flora and fauna, and even mountain ranges or other recognizable natural features are often drawn with jagged lines. Fukushima articulates one source of inspiration: the French-Armenian artist Jean Carzou: 109 I came across a high-art magazine frontispiece by the French modern artist Carzou. At a glance it is an extremely realistic style, factories and petrochemical complexes, and machines, but in the background of the scene there was a deeply colored atmosphere of a strange ruin. He wasn’t just drawing simply factories and machines, this was the moment 109 Carzou was a contemporary of Dali, and Picasso. He studied art and architecture, and the structural training is clear in many of his oil paintings that have draftsman like lines through buildings and bodies. He worked in a variety of media including line drawings and engravings that illustrated the novels of Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus. His work in became increasingly abstract in the 1980s, and and his master work the “Apocalypse of Saint Joan” in the Chapel at Manosque in Vacluse, France combines the passion of the saint and the ravages of war. He received a number of prizes for his paintings, and in 1976 became the first living artist to have his work appear on a French postage stamp. “Biographie.” The Carzou Foundation (La Fondation Carzou). Accessed April 12, 2016. http://www.fondationcarzou.fr/index.php/fr/biographie/carzou. 98 where science and technology (technique) taking humans into themselves whether they liked it or not, futile emptiness, decadence (or decay). When I saw these, I thought they were closely wrapped together with my own image of the future. Nakajima Seikan (son of Magaka Nakajima Kikuo, who did “Hi no maru … “ manga), who took charge of the cover art work) and I had countless talks about it, and he was able to produce the image I had in my head. In this way the first cover’s illustration was influenced by Carzou. Fukushima’s description of his attraction to Carzou’s work is built not just on what he calls the “realist” style, but also on the “atmosphere of strange ruin” in each work. The relationship between technology and the human, then, is colored, and even haunted, by this sense. This characterization of the future as both advanced and empty becomes the primer on which all new landscapes are based. Nakajima, out of his conversations with Fukushima, chose to depict a variety of objects that are not easily identifiable and have no clear rhetoric: they are often surrealist enough that they do not articulate a clear relationship of the effect of technology on man, but instead explicitly complicate that relationship. Often, these images do not have a clear relationship to a past or future history. For example, Nakajima's first and tenth covers 110 for SF Magazine are of scaffolded structures (figure 15 and 16, below) that could either be building or rebuilding, reconstruction or deconstruction. They are not located in a recognizable metropolis, and so do not fit within a clear technological narrative. The structures in the inaugural cover are crisscrossed with lines that evoke a cubist effect, but also call to mind broken and cracked stonework. Combined with the mottled color of the sky and ground, the lines create a recognizable division between land and sky. Yet the color of the buildings as well as the cloud- like shape in the upper right of the frame suggests apocalyptic reflection and inversion of the light – the buildings are the dark spaces, and the clouds are black. The structures in the foreground of the tenth cover could be missiles or rocket ships, and their juxtaposition with 110 Nakajima Seikan. Cover of Inaugural Issue and Cover of Issue 10. SF Magazine. 1960 (see Introduction, n. 1) 99 figure 15: Inaugural 1959 Issue SF Magazine figure 16: October 1960 SF Magazine the mountain range in the background is not glaring enough to suggest this is an ironic evocation of technology versus nature. What, then, was Nakajima's guiding aesthetic principle? It was certainly not to reproduce the practices of American science fiction. Fukushima named his memoirs, where he details his work in science fiction in the 1960s, as the time of origins (mitō no jidai). 111 While there is no perfect translation of "mitō", it can be used to evoke not simply origin, but also the unexplored, unknown, untrodden, untouched, or untrampled. Unsurprisingly, this phrase evokes space– a space one can visit, and more particularly walk through, but also a space which has not yet been occupied or corrupted. Although not every SF Magazine cover expresses this notion, it is present 111 Fukushima Masami. Time of Origins. (see ch. 1, n. 39) 100 in many issues that are not clear landscapes of destruction (figures 17 and 18 below). 112 Not marked by man-made (or recognizably constructed) structures, these alien vistas frame the phenomena appearing in the sky. Dynamic green clouds shred the sky in the November 1962 cover, while the August 1960 cover has a strange ring whose colors match the stone of the spires in the background amidst tumultuous reds and blues. The multicolored skies and the objects in them create dramatic motions; they are even pierced by the spiny leaves of the plant and the strange stabbing outcroppings of the November 1962 cover. figure 17: November 1962 SF Magazine figure 18: August 1960 SF Magazine Although the horizontal spires in either might be read as destroyed or decaying structures, the alien fauna and the colors of both land and sky - almost unimaginable in mimetic 112 Nakajima Seikan. Covers of November 1962 and August 1960. SF Magazine. (see Introduction, n. 1) 101 representation - suggesting a fantastic location. Even the shadows in this image do not properly construct themselves – the plant's shadow is spread along the ground as if the sun were behind the viewer. This creates a sense of dislocation. It is an aesthetic of untrodden space. In depicting this time of origins (or this unexplored era), Nakajima has created a different type of space to engage with trauma of the postwar. This illustration style not only explicitly marked itself as separate from the emphasis on the human of American science fiction illustration, but also separated itself from the representational strategies of the postwar. In a roundtable discussion on science fiction art in SF Adventure, art historian Takashina Shūji proposed that models for science fiction art were found in the fusion of human and animal in Heronomous Bosch’s paintings, in the surreal elements of Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s landscapes, and in the fantasies of Hokusai and Leonardo da Vinci. But, he notes, “it is an emphasis on inorganic things (mukiteki mono) that makes SF recognizable and distinct.” Author Komatsu Saikyo responded, “Surrealism and Dali connected with psychoanalysis make up the tools that are widely known, but of course these are based on traditional things, they draw their lines in clearly a deeply psychological world, the feeling of a period of extreme shock. But there’s no marketability…they produce vague fears (sokuosoroshii). SF art is better at investigating the strange appeal of something one can’t experience in an image we can experience.” 113 Komatsu points to the illogic of the science fictional logic: just as the surrealist artists transformed everyday objects in order to plumb the unconscious, science fiction artists investigated the unexperienced in order to create a new subjectivity – to create a new expereince, not just for Komatsu or Fukushima, but for all who adopt the discourse to write and create. At 113 Komatsu Saikyo, Takashina Shūji,. “Roundtable Report: SF Art and Fantasy Painting (Zadankai repotto: SF Atto to gennsou kaiga” SF Fantasia (SF Fanntajia). No. 2, 1977. 102 the heart of that process is estrangement of perspective: taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar again, situating the recognizable and the unrecognizable together. This images are the enunciation of science fiction as a discourse that draws on realist and surrealist styles, expressionist techniques, and modernist conceits, drawing them all together in the realm of the fantastic to create a sense of the unreal. This is science fiction which is neither part of the utopian child’s fantasy nor an easily fixed and consumable commodity, but a serious style that is fascinating because of its engagement with the unconscious trauma of the war. This is science fiction that grew up. Surrealism’s past and present in Japan My idea was to have images of a number of people (that is to say, fantasy artists)’s works. Klee, Chagal, Chiroico, Tanguy, Miró [I Ferrà], Dali, Ernst. I thought these Surrealists had a fantastical method that captured a new reality, SF that was seeking in imagination, reality, well that was just perfectly suitable, at least that’s what I thought. This quote comes from the journal of Fukushima Masami, Editor in chief of SF Magazine. As he describes his influences, he lists a who’s who of the influential artists of Surrealism. In fact, works of the artists mentioned above were part of the 1937 Surrealist Works from Overseas exhibition in Tokyo (which later traveled to Ōsaka, Kyōto, and Nagoya). Sponsored by Mizue and organized by art critics Takiguchi Shūzō and Yamanaka Chirūand, it consisted of 377 Surrealist works including prints, watercolors, and drawings by Girogio Di Chirico, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró I Ferrà, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, and René Magritte. While it was not the earliest exhibition of surrealism in Japan, it was one of the best known and was seen by large numbers of public and professional artists alike. It included exposition of Dali’s visions of war, and coincided with the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese 103 War in 1937. In my discussion of the avant-garde movements, I will highlight some points at which the language or expression of these practices (or their philosophical constructions by the artists who created them) that resonated for those like Nakajima Seikan – people who wanted to engage with technology, with human existence, with the future, and with the present in new and expansive ways. Art historian Annika Culver describes Fukuzawa’s art as “exhibit[ing] an uncanny emptiness showing town squares built along classical lines that communicate the loss of the grandeur of ancient Rome while echoing the hollow nature of Italian fascism itself… [t]he same feeling of hollowness…can be seen in Fukuzawa’s 1936 work…” 114 It is this sense of the uncanny emptiness which resonates into the 1960s and onto SF Magazine covers – and it was created in part because the techniques and strategies of surrealist art as imagined in Japan were in many ways a perfect set of tools to be picked up by the illustrators of the magazine. What made Surrealist practice so attractive to the creators of science fiction was the emphasis in Surrealist literary and artistic practice on bringing the real and the unreal together to access a notion of “actuality” that was separate from reality. This was achieved through multiple practices and multiple groups. As literary and art historian Miryam Sas argues, Surrealism in Japan is distinguished by “the impossibility of its coalescing into a single, ideological force, a clarity that would appear singular, true, authentic.” 115 Itabashi-Ku Museum of Art curator Ozaki Shinjin suggests that there was no clear cohesion of a single Surrealism because Surrealism in Japan had to draw its practices in opposition to other avant-garde groups and the movement in 114 Culver, Annika A. “‘Between Distant Realities’: The Japanese Avant-Garde, Surrealism, and the Colonies, 1924-- 1943.” Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 2007. 115 Sas, Miryam. Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 1. 104 France. Surrealism, Ozaki notes, “had to establish a sense of estrangement” and did so by “creating a space of quasi-‘depaysement’” in order to depict the “space of fantasy.” 116 This estrangement was achieved with a variety of techniques, from formal structures such as using scientific drawing and montage to more ideological ones like trying to break down the barriers between high art and mass culture. Hyper-realistic color and style emphasized not realistic portrayal of the world, but instead dream-like qualities of everyday objects. These attributes made it attractive to struggling Fukushima and those who worked to create his visions for the cover of SF Magazine. Although Surrealism’s high-art methods and conceits had been successfully adopted and adapted to mass culture beginning in 1930s, they still retained a kind of legitimacy as high-art. I see Surrealism, or chōgenjitsushugi, as one set of practices or approaches in a larger movement called the avant-garde in Japan. Unlike many other aesthetic movements in Japan, or the Surrealist movement as it developed in Europe, Japanese Surrealism was initially a literary (mainly poetic) practice and only subsequently taken up by artists. A number of art historians suggest that Surrealist writers were persecuted by the Japanese government due to the government’s belief that Andre Breton was a Communist, and so Surrealist practice moved from the literary into the art world. Surrealism was roughly being explored as a practice by Japanese writers in the late 1920s, although ideological divisions fractured some of the movement in 1927 and again in 1930 for writers and around 1937 and 1941 for artists. Moreover, people who went on to use surrealism as a technique were initially linked to both Dadaism and Futurism, whose ur-text is probably F. T. Marinetti’s “Initial Manifesto of 116 Ozaki Shinjin, “Japanese Surrealism in the Late 1930s: The ‘Space of Formless Matter’ and the ‘Space of Macroscopi Creatures’” Japanese Modern Art: Painting from 1910 to 1970. Irmtraud Schaarschmidt-Richter, ed. Zurich, Stemmle Publishers, 2000. P. 63. 105 Futurism,” the oft-cited “starting point” for those associated with movements that would come to be called Dadaism, surrealism, and the avant-garde. This manifesto was translated into Japanese in May 1909 in the literary journal Subaru. 117 Art historian John Solt notes, however, that it took ten years for Hirato Renkichi to write “Nihon miraiha undo dai ikkai no sengen” (First Manifesto of Japanese Futurism, 1921), and that was a year after Dadism had been introduced in the newspaper Yorozuchōhō. Thus, Dadism should be considered both a precursor and a companion to Surrealism in Japan. Japanese Dadism, much like European, was a constant practice of throwing down old institutions and questioning old methodologies. Rather than criticizing the artistic styles that came before, however, Dadists were concerned with criticizing art as an institution and the course of its development in bourgeois society. 118 There were differences, though, in Dadaist practice in Japan and in Europe, partly because of the way World War I affected artists in each location. European Dadaists had a sense of political urgency after the war to destroy old ways of thinking about art, institutions, and politics. Solt argues that it wasn’t until after the natural disasters of 1918, the rice riots and subsequent recession of that same year, and the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1, 1923 that created such a major trauma “major economic, political, and social ills surfaced and pushed the nation to the toward the brink of chaos” 119 that new cultural forms were embraced by Japanese artists. Dadaism, with its emphasis on the destruction of tradition bound up in the technological advances of war in Europe, was particularly attractive as a way to challenge the old. 117 Solt, John. Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902-1978). Harvard Univ Asia Center, 1999. 23. 118 Peter Burger. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. p. 22. 119 Solt, John. Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning, 24. 106 Dadaism contained certain types of language that continually embraced the machine- made and the mechanical. Nogawa Ryū, editor of the first Dadaist journal, Ge.Gjmgjgam.Prr.Gjmgem, explained in his editorial manifesto that the title of the journal is intentionally meant to frustrate intelligibility: “It is sufficient to understand it with a musical sensitivity. ‘To add feet to a snake,’ for the machine-made, human-like animal dolls who move the quarters within the city, the oscillation frequency and the wave shape of G are appealing.’” 120 Note the juxtaposition of scientific terminology “oscillation frequency” and “wave shape” to the reclassification of those within the city as “machine-made, human-like animal dolls.” Nogawa combines the technological with the aesthetic, the nonhuman with the landscape. Solt suggests this imagery comes from scientific earthquake language in order to break with Japanese literary traditions of describing nature. This scientific language is also a break with European Dadaists who wanted an “empty” name for their movement, because it does have meaning related to sound. Solt links it explicitly to trauma, but I think we also need to pay particular attention to Nogawa’s rethinking of human social relationships in the wake of trauma. Humans are constructed as automatons, dolls that are produced by machines. This is not only a political calling out of the unthinking masses, it is also a discourse attractive to an artist thinking through the human relationship to technology in postwar Japan. This “Dadaist impulse to destroy,” 121 characteristic of both European and Japanese movements, attempted to smash not only the form of the poem but also the very notion of art. This meant, too, that the human form was disappearing from the painted canvas, destroying the 120 Ibid., 28. 121 Ibid., 33. 107 centrality of the human in naturalist and romantic art. 122 Painters turned to “nonfigural, abstract subjects and to the processes and materials of the medium itself.” 123 One after another, fauvism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, and Dadaism rose in European art circles. But Dadaism was a kind of intellectual dead end at a certain point: because it was continually destructive and attempted to overthrow previous logics of political and social meaning, those practicing also eventually attempted to overthrow Dadaism itself. It was rejected by the very people who practiced it, including Nogawa. Surrealism was the way out of the Dadist rejection of everything, as surrealism “promised genuinely dialectical and non-self-destructing foundations.” 124 The movements in France and Japan were different – French surrealism was both a rejection of logo-centric tradition and an outgrowth of it. In Japan, the movement grappled with the logo-centric tradition while at the same time grappling with other avant-garde trends. In Europe, surrealism began in literature and shifted to painting; however, “Japanese surrealists from the start [were] as influenced by painting as by writing.” 125 Politically, French surrealists were aligned with Communists in the beginning; Japanese surrealists cut their ties to proletarian literature. Although Solt has suggested that there was no widespread engagement with Freud or psychoanalysis during this time, Miryam Sas and Magella Monroe argue Surrealists were interested in the visual “exploration of dreams, sexuality, and the uncanny through imagery.” 126 Exploration was articulated in the consideration with what Mirriam Sas calls the two poles: “the 122 Melzer, Annabelle Henkin. Dada and Surrealist Performance. 1St Edition edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 123 Solt, John. Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning, 35. 124 Ibid., 38. 125 Ibid., 46. 126 Sas, Miryam. Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism, 405. 108 limitations of human subjectivity and the aspiration to the objective, the boundaries of human consciousness and the refusal to accept these limits” 127 In other words, Surrealists in Japan were more interested in juxtaposing subjectivity and objectivity than they were in a particular construction of either – they were not the ardent followers of Freud that Breton in France was, but that did not mean they were not interested in exploring different modes of consciousness. In order to explore, those who practiced Surrealism did use words and symbols that were common or quotidian, but not considered elements of the same set (like the words Rose.Magic.Theory, proposed in Kitasono’s editorial for the first issue of the surrealist journal SMG). 128 (54) These images or words did not point to one meaning or deny meaning all together. Instead, they played against each other, their oddity and combination allowing meaning to move back and forth between them to suggest multiple meanings. After avant-garde artists began experimenting with surrealism in the 1920s, surrealist advertisements and marketing in interwar mass publication became so popular that even surrealists artist complained about their movement being diluted through over-use. 129 Gennifer Weisnefeld places the 1920s MA VO group squarely in the center of this expansion from fine art to consumer culture. Over its relatively brief active period (1923-1926), Mavo brought art to the masses via a wide range of publications and performances: through magazine production and book illustration, cartoons and graphic design, dance and theatrical performance, and even architecture and stage design. “By linking commercial design and avant-garde, Mavo members dissolved the boundaries between fine art, mass circulation print culture, commercial design, and 127 Ibid., 34. 128 Ibid., 54. 129 Weisenfeld, Gennifer. MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde. (see Introduction, n. 4) 109 Japan's new consumer spaces like the cafes and department stores.” 130 Although MA VO was not explicitly a Surrealist group, because their members promoted machine aesthetics into mass communication the group’s works gave rise to any number of border crossings. Thus, advertisers in the 1930s evoked modernist and machine aesthetics to closely relate their products to “the modern, the new, [and] the scientific.” 131 Weisenfeld charts how fine art combined with products and “spaces integral to daily life, resulting in work that was more ‘practical’ and invested with the ‘social nature.’” 132 In this way machine aesthetics survived the war and moved into mass market magazines, and in particular in genre magazines. The most popular, longest running, and most high-brow of the mystery magazine genre was an offshoot of an American publication titled Ellery Queen’ s Mystery Magazine (EQMM). In June 1956 Hayakawa Press (the same company that would go on to publish SF Magazine) published the first Japanese edition of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in Japan. The artwork of Suguro Tadashi made the covers absolutely unique compared to other mystery or weird story magazines during the time, as they were entirely abstract. Suguro, a founding member of the Modern Art Association, was not enmeshed in the visual discourses created by other mass magazines. Instead, his work was in conversation avant-garde movements. Many of these in the postwar took their tools from Taisho and early Showa modernism, but also began again from 130 Weisenfeld, Gennifer. MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde. (see Introduction, n. 4) 131 Weisenfeld, Gennifer. “Publicity and Propaganda in 1930s Japan: Modernism as Method.” Design Issues 25.4 (2009): 13–28. MIT Press Journals. Web. 3 Dec. 2014. 132 Weisenfeld, Gennifer. MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde. (see Introduction, n. 4) 110 absolute nothingness. 133 As you can see from these two early covers (figures 19 and 20 below), 134 the direct relationship, the model of reader to body, is entirely absent. figure 19: November 1956 EQMM figure 20: January 1958 EQMM As Fukushima reflected in the quote with which I opened this chapter, he wanted something more concrete than the entirely abstract, though striking, style. I think it is because this style, while politically engaged, had nothing to do with the contents of the magazine. It was a citation of high art, not a transformation from mystery into high art. There was at one mystery magazine, however, that did attempt to bridge the gap. Edogawa Rampo’ s Jewel (ERJ), edited by the most famous Japanese mystery writer, Edogawa Rampo, presented covers recalling the erotic contract between true story readers and the women- 133 Munroe, Alexandra. “Avant-Garde Art in Postwar Japan: The Culture and Politics of Radical Critique, 1951-- 1970.” Ph.D. New York University, 2004. 134 Suguro Tadashi. Covers. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (Erari kuinzu misuteri magajin). Tokyo: Hayakawa Shobo, November 1956 and January 1958. 111 as-objects on their covers. Yet while bodies remained on the covers, even female bodies, they were abstracted to become bodies whose mystery, rather than sexuality, was the object to consume. This abstraction comes from the presentation of the stories that tried to straddle two conversations: they were supposed to be scientifically interesting, and also their own distinct genre that that struggled for legitimacy. The move to distance ERJ from the erotic Special Jewel covers, along with the invocation of high art styles, was a move for legitimation that recognized that contents and the cover must be linked by more than proximity. The following two covers (figures 21 and 22) illustrate this adoption of high art styles – and the preservation of the links between mystery magazines and the body of mystery. The August 1953 cover (figure 21, below) 135 reproduces the instantly recognizable body of the Venus de Milo, the armless statue promoted by the French as the world’s epitome of feminine grace and beauty. 136 Her body is being gradually enveloped by the tendrils of poppy flowers as she stands in a field – again, the elements of the landscape return as the artwork becomes less a literal (or literary) consumption of the body of Japanese women, and instead represents the “natural” consumption of the iconic and international ideals of feminine grace. Even the 1958 cover (figure 22, below) 137 , although surreal, preserves the body. 135 Cover. Edogawa Rampo’s Jewel (Edogawa Rampo Houseki). Tokyo: Iwaya Shoten, August 1953. 136 Curtis, Gregory. Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012. Print. 137 Cover. Edogawa Rampo’s Jewel (Edogawa Rampo Houseki). Tokyo: Iwaya Shoten, March 1958 112 figure 21: August 1953 Edogawa Rampo’s Jewel figure 22: March 1958 Edogawa Rampo’s Jewel Symbolic new style: SF Magazine’s visual rhetoric At this time there was one more thing that was on my mind: the cover. [EQMM] Suguro Tadashi’s modern art-like, shocking abstract art that were used as covers had received a very favorable reputation. Or, at least, in my own opinion they’d done so. I wanted a symbolic new style of art that was slightly more concrete. 138 This comment comes from SF Magazine Editor-In-Chief Fukushima Masami’s recollections on the first issue of SF Magazine. Artist Suguro Tadashi – known more as one of the founding members of Japan’s Modern Art Association than for his illustration work for mystery magazines – created entirely abstract covers for the first years of EQMM’ s publication. His formal compositions played with shape and color absent any figural element; they made 138 Fukushima Masami. Time of Origins, 17 (see ch. 1, n. 39) 113 statements, certainly, but not about the nature of the magazine’s contents. 139 What is clear from Fukushima’s citation of those covers, however, is that he wanted something like, but unlike, Suguro’s style. His desire was for representation, he notes, that was more concrete, more symbolic: a new style. In developing this “concrete symbolic new style,” SF Magazine artists made both the future and the past visible. They mobilized the surreal to create a visual economy of landscapes that achieved two goals: one commercial and the other theoretical. Using the techniques of high art legitimized and made the genre of science fiction ‘adult’ through the adoption of that “more concrete, abstract style,” expanding and legitimating adult readership. In order to construct a new subjectivity, a new perspective, that reflected present political and social concerns, the magazine illustrators had to set their covers apart. They created distinct visual differences from mass magazines that provided either models of consumer-subjects inhabiting a rebuilt consumer society or criminally sexualized female consumer-objects that failed to sufficiently liberate their masculine readership. SF Magazine cover artists used the tools of surrealism to create science fiction landscapes absent of bodies and yet haunted by them. They developed images of other worlds troubled by the destruction that persisted in their own. These images were absent the politicized bodies of those participating in the ANPO (that failed to stop the reratification of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960). In other words, science fiction illustrations grew up not through the explicit evocation of a science fiction consumer subject, but through the enunciation of fantasy spaces constantly haunted by the issues dominating the political sphere in the 1960s. 139 Although his covers did receive the Mystery Writers of America Art Award in 1958, they did so not because they reflected the deep nature of the mystery or detective genre, but because they were considered particularly evocative works of modern art. Bijutsu Kenkyūjo (Japan), Kokusai Renmei Kyōkai (Japan), and National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. The Yearbook of Japanese Art (Nihon Bijutsu Nenkan). Heisei 23 Nenban. Tokyo: National committee of Japan on intellectual co-operation (Tōkyō, Ōkurashō Insatsukyoku, 1936), 2013. P 430-431. 114 The visual discourse created by this commercial enterprise in order to achieve these goals, invoked standards of taste and the tools of fine art to mobilize a theoretical perspective, trouble the emerging middle class, and problematize the utopian notions of childhood even as they evoked a sense of the future possibilities. figure 23: March 1960 SF Magazine In the cover of the second issue of SF Magazine (figure 23) 140 , Nakajima manipulates the viewpoint via the horizon line: we see the sky from from an estranged angle and a new perspective. Nebulae like those on the cover cannot be seen by the naked eye in our earthly sky, yet they hang over the grey mountains as red- ringed and possibly spinning objects in this illustration. Relative scale is impossible to establish; the gray shapes could be tiny boulders or vast mountains. Their proximity to the sky is also difficult to determine as the red trails recede behind them. There are no shadows to fix or establish distance. By their very absence they become a presence. The perspective of the viewer both bound up in the logic of the image at the same time as it is denied due to Nakajima’s messily illustrated perspective. The descending scale hints at a receding perspective line, as if the viewer is standing on the surface of a planet with the horizon gently curving - but there is no shape or form of the viewer within the image to confirm this architecture. The view absent 140 Nakajima Seikan. SF Magazine. 1960. (see Introduction, n. 1) 115 viewer is a rejection of mass magazines’ continual production of their commercial, consumer subject as the organizing logic of their illustrations. This cover imagines a different type of subject position, placed in an unreal space, embedded in the landscape of science fiction that does not exist. And so, even when no bodies are depicted, it is this simultaneous rejection and grounding of perspective in the architecture of the image that constantly recalls the body by its very absence. Mass representation: three models of cover illustration in the 1960s Before the entrée of SF Magazine onto the scene, science fiction translations – these early science fiction stories – were marketed almost exclusively to juvenile readers. The art style of the covers of boy’s magazines, like Shōnen Jump and Shōnen Gahō, centered on young boys engaging with technology against a backdrop of technological elements, making youth the figure of a recovered, bright, utopian Japan. This mirrored the figure of the young woman as she was created as a consumer-subject in mass market women’s magazines like Mademoiselle and Ladies’ Own, and the male reader as he was modeled in mass market weekly magazines like Asahi Journal. Set alongside these representations of model consumers were pulp magazines like Weekly Foreign & Domestic True Stories (Shukan Naigai Jitsuwa), which sold sexualized women’s bodies as objects to be consumed. These specialized adult magazines reversed the order of identification: normalizing the consumer through a gendered relationship where the ‘normal’ male reader viewed and consumed the ‘radical’ female object of the story. The rapid proliferation of printed materials in the postwar cannot be underscored. In their analysis of Japanese Reader's Digest, Barak Kushner and Sato Masaharu point out the 116 production of magazines exploded in the immediate postwar. 141 This rapid expansion occurred through the midst of ideological feuds among publishers, writers, and the government over the complicity of wartime media, and promotion of American magazines by the US occupation. In 1945 there were 1,831 published magazine titles. But two years later, in 1947, there was a massive spike with 7,000 distinct publications as restrictions on pulp paper were removed. Weekly magazines dominated the market through the 1960s. While the publication numbers dropped in 1950 to 1,500, by 1959 the trend turned upward again to approximately 1,900 titles. 142 As I noted above, magazines in the postwar were a flourishing space in which, alongside television, film, literary, and high art mediums, the new postwar consumer-subject was modeled as a particular type of body. At the same time, there were a variety of representational styles among mass market magazines, and marked differentiation depending on both content and ideology. The following four covers (figures 24 - 27) typify four major styles of cover illustrations: 1) the textual, 2) the embodied consumer-subject, 3) the objectified female-as- object, and 4) the abstract. 143 Social criticism, philosophy, political, literary, and other intellectual journals often had a stylized textual logo but no images in order to underscore the gravitas of their contents (figure 141 Kushner, Barak and Sato Masaharu. "Digesting Postwar Japanese Media" Diplomatic History. Vol 29, Issue 1, January 2005. 27-48, 40. 142 Books and Magazine Published (1945-2005). Shuppan News Co., Ltd. Web. 15 Mar. 2015. Publication Yearbook. 143 Finally, along with advances in camera technology that made photography interesting to professional and amateur alike came the rise of weekly photography magazines. Of course these magazines featured photographs reflecting the theme of the magazine or the week on their covers. For more on photography’s place in the magazine industry, see In addition to these four types of illustration, many magazines, particularly the increasingly popular genre of photo magazines, featured photographs on their covers. Many of the photographers adopted and reproduced the machine aesthetics Gennifer Weisenfeld identified being used in advertising photograph in the prewar era. 117 figure 24: 1959 Culture (Bunka) figure 25: 1958 Ladies’ Own (Jousei Jishin) figure 26: 1960 Weekly Foreign & Domestic True Stories (Shukan Naigai Jitsuwa) figure 27: 1964 German Expressionism (Doitsu Hyougenshi) 118 24). 144 Women’s magazines like Ladies’ Own (Jousei Jishin, figure 25), 145 and Housewife’ s Friend (Shufu no tomo) 146 featured smiling, well-coifed, and smartly dressed women on the covers to both appeal to their female audience and model a particular image of worldly middle- class femininity that was distinctly foreign (and directly used American iconography, including using blond and Caucasian models). Moving from the domestic to the salacious, the genre of weekly true stories (shukan jitsuwa), of which Weekly Foreign & Domestic True News (figure 26) is only a sample, featured photographs and illustrations of semi-nude women that reflected scandalous sexual stories which were ostensibly true journalistic tales of daily life. Unsurprisingly, art magazines like Symbol or German Expressionism (figure 27) and coterie advertising magazines like Design all had covers that employed the same artistic techniques as the artists in the pages (who sometimes designed the covers). 147 The association of the serious, thoughtful, and scholarly primarily with text (figure 24) is a lineage that can be traced back to the Edo period. During this time woodblock prints illustrated vulgar activities (including kabuki performances), and text became the province of serious intellectual pursuits. 148 From the philosophical to the scientific, a preponderance of scholarly journals announced their presence and their contents in the postwar through text alone. 144 January 1959 cover of Culture (Bunka). Takahashi Shintaro Bunko Collection, Gakushuin Women’s College. 145 December 12, 1958 issue of Ladies’ Own (Jousei Jishin). Takahashi Shintaro Bunko Collection, Gakushuin Women’s College. 146 “Among the hundreds of images of the princess carried by the “big four” women’s magazines (Shufu no Tomo, Fujin Kurabu, Fujin Seikatsu, and Shufu to Seikatsu) whose combined circulation topped 2 million, were a wide range of consumer tie-ins …” “A Complex Fit: The Remaking of Japanese Femininity and Fashion , 1945-65” Furmanovsky, Michael. Academia.edu. Web. 25 July 2014. 147 July 15, 1960 cover of Weekly Foreign & Domestic True Stories. 1959 cover of Culture (Bunka). 1958 cover of Ladies’ Own (Josei Jishin). 1964 cover of German Expressionism (Doitsu hyougenshi). Takahashi Shintaro Bunko Collection, Gakushuin Women’s College. 148 See Hayakawa, Monta, and C. Andrew Gerstle. “Who Were the Audiences for ‘Shunga?.’” Japan Review 26 (2013): 17–36. 119 The woman on the cover of Ladies’ Own (figure 5) is embedded in a postwar discourse of machine-age montage, liberation and consumption that I will explore further in this section. 149 She stands in a jaunty, legs-splayed pose, fully in control of her body and willing to display it. She faces the camera directly in order to create a sense of her idependance. Her European- inspired fashionable grey dress and gloves set in front of a modern painting suggest she is cultured in a global, modern, educated sense because she would fit in anywhere in the world. The pin-up photorealistic style of the true stories and mystery magazines have their roots in the sexualization of women in prewar media, reproducing a discourse of women as objects to be consumed. 150 Art and design magazines explored their own aesthetics, and while they occasionally displayed the human body, these bodies were often embedded in a controversial political and social engagement through which the art itself was being read. Raymond Williams wrote in 1961, “cultural tradition can be seen as a continual selection and re-selection…” If we consider his use of the word ‘tradition’ quite loosely, these images reflect not just the foundation of new traditions in magazine illustration, but the reproduction and reinterpretation of discourses of intellectual discussion, femininity, and masculinity. The covers of SF Magazine at this point 149 “The first issue of Josei Jishin (published by Kobun-sha) in 1958 became a symbol for the new era of women's magazines. It aimed at a completely new type of magazine, targeting the growing population of young and single working women, concentrated in the cities, who were known then by the term BG (business girl)…. the golden age of women's weekly magazines had arrived, falling exactly into step with Japan's high rate of economic growth. During the same period, men's weekly magazines for the urban male salaried worker were established one after another. These included such magazines as Heibon Punch (1964) and Playboy (1966) which were aimed at young readers. The sexuality of women during the high economic growth period was shaped on the stage of weekly magazines in the form of women's internalization of the male gaze of desire." Ochiai, Emiko. “Decent Housewives and Sensual White Women – Representations of Women in Postwar Japanese Magazines” Japan Review 9 (1997): 151–169. For an analysis of the rise of department stores and the conflation of the middle-class women as high art consumers see Oh, Younjung. “Art into Everyday Life: Department Stores as Purveyors of Culture in Modern Japan.” Ph.D. University of Southern California, 2012. For more on the place of women’s magazines in the construction of gender in prewar Japan see Frederick, Sarah. Turning Pages. (see Introduction, n. 6). For interwar Japan see Sato, Barbara. The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press Books, 2003. 150 Further discussed in the end of this chapter with discussing Christine Marran’s Poison Women, mystery and the feminine. 120 had more in common with the coterie art journals than with popular magazines modeling new consumer subjects. figure 28: 1959 Asahi Journal figure 29: 1959 Mademoiselle First Issue Covers representing the consumer-subject created a relationship with the viewer that presented strategies for viewing/reading while simultaneously inviting the viewer to consume the bodies on the cover. Additionally, these identifications were with figures who are sources of freedom because of the moral choices they make – and the actions they take – not simply because of their physical embodiment. Take, for example, first issue of Asahi Journal. This publication was a popular left-wing weekly opinion journal, founded the same year as SF Magazine in 1959. 151 The inaugural cover (figure 28) 152 announces its politics via the somber 151 Ryan Holmburg writes: “A strong leftwing perspective shaped the content of the Asahi Journal…Many of the most prominent individuals associated with the New Left published tracts in the Asahi Journal, with no comparable space provided those on the right. The magazine was also known for its coverage of contemporary fashion trends, 121 clothing and seriousness faces in the image and the dark brown color of the center panel. It is the figures’ presence on the cover that makes the connection between politics and the body inescapable. The gray-clad man in the background clutching his shirt and the hollow-eyed man in the middle of the frame both evince a sense of resignation. Hope is, however reflected in the young man’s unlined face, and the concentration of the central figure on the newspaper (presumably Asahi Shinbun) in his hands reflects a liberal ideal of an informed, and thus politically engaged, reader. He and the others in the image are ready to discuss, and re-consume, the contents of the Journal, which moves beyond the newspaper illustrated on its first cover. Doubling this visible act of reading the newspaper that produced the magazine, they are mirrored by the (male) viewer/reader who picks up the magazine to read, takes seriously its articles and its commentary, and reads/discusses that information with others. In other words, the reader of the daily weekly magazine Asashi Shukan, by reading, becomes part of these models of moral freedom. This style of representation abounded in women’s magazines; from the most fashion forward to the most conservative, cover artists constantly articulated the “modern” feminine. The inagural 1960 cover of the Japanese Mademoiselle (figure 29) 153 provides another example of unrestrained, modern, and stylish feminity. Like the cover of Ladies’ Own from that same year, the young Japanese woman on this cover faces the reader/viewer, confident and proud. While she is wearing a loose kimono, her hair is softly styled and the kimono itself is not overwhelmingly music and film, and later in the sixties, for its support of progressive art practice, particularly in the medium of manga and photomotage.” (24) 152 Asahi Journal (Asahi Jyanaru). Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun Corporation, 1959. Takahashi Shintaro Bunko Collection, Gakushuin Women’s College. 153 Madmoiselle. Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1960. Takahashi Shintaro Bunko Collection, Gakushuin Women’s College. 122 complex: the absence of a rigorous coif and the relaxation of her pose suggests the vivacious, ready-for-action woman. She is a model of demure freedom. Consuming the object: fetishizing women as criminal mysteries While boy’s magazines were the adolescence from which SF Magazine editor and illustrators drew apart from, the genre of mystery magazines, including the pulp true crime and true story magazines, functioned as the older sibling SF Magazine wanted so desperately to simultaneously emulate and reject. On the one hand, mystery magazines and “true stories” magazines sold extremely well, had adult audiences, and were popular enough to support a variety of publications. On the other, many portrayed sexualized bodies: women dressed in scanty clothes or not at all, bodies to be consumed and then thrown away. This neither fit with the ideological rhetoric Fukushima sought to establish nor reflected a model of the science fiction reader. SF Magazine’ s illustrations navigated a middle path between the sexual body and those few mystery magazines which used abstract illustrations as their covers. This section considers the embodied, sexualized female and the way in which mystery magazine covers included these bodies as objects to be consumed. The contents of mystery or true story magazines varied from week to week and publication to publication, and while not every mystery story consisted of a dead victim whose murder must be unraveled, they consistently featured stories of love, lust, and exposure. In contrast to the weekly magazines above, these cover illustrations were not models of the ideal reader. The person reading the magazine was not supposed to see himself on the cover (and their presumed readers were predominately male). Instead, they were illustrations of sexualized female bodies in coquettish display – creating pleasure in the reader that was then reflected in the 123 pleasure of reading mysterious, voyeuristic, and strange stories to be found in their pages. Christine Marran, in Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture, 154 argues that in the genre of true news stories, the serialized poison woman story (dokufumono) best characterizes this relationship of reader/spectator to sexualized female object. Poison woman stories, first popular in the 1870s, sought to “illuminate intoxicating elements that might lead to social and political bedlam.” 155 These stories of real women who had committed crimes, often murder of a lover, were moral warnings - lessons for the constructed (and then presumed) “good” reader. Instead of models to emulate, these were bodies to simultaneously be titillated by and rejected for their perceived liminality, their perverseness, and their open desire. As soon as their stories and faces and films were enjoyed, reintegrating them into the hegemonic system via textual exploration, their transgressive power was contained. In other words, the perceived transgression of women upending the male-dominated social order never come to pass. The genre grew hand in hand with the rise of the newspaper serial in the Meiji and Taisho eras, and while it was based on the lives of real women, it consisted of fictionalized stories that appeared in a variety of mass culture forms (kabuki, mass novels, poems, medicalization literature, etc.) primarily written by men. Marran stresses the poison woman was an object because she "illuminate[s] not only the emerging social, sexual, and political mores but also the fundamental drive to read and consume the other in order to define the self." This inverts the consumption practice discussed earlier in the chapter: the consumer-subject’s consumption of multiple iterations of the utopian middle class self. Moreover, for the reader, these poison women 154 Marran, Christine L. Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Previous scholars including Maeda Ai, Asakura Kyōji, Hirata Yumi, Matthew Strecher, and Mark Silver, to name a few) have also written on these poison woman stories. 155 Ibid., 12. 124 as objects functioned in opposition to the women on the cover of women’s magazines, who function as fantasy subjects for the women reading the magazine. Instead, the relationship here is oppositional. The person on the cover, the object, is both the opposite gender (woman) and is an object of abnormal morality. The readers’ sense of self is defined as normal in comparison to/with her, and through reading about her. This relationship begins with the transgressive woman’s body-as-text, woman’s body-as-abnormal, body-as-imagined body, body-as-image. The image of the transgressive woman’s body is continually consumed in order to define the normative masculine self. Most importantly, she is threatening and infamous not because of her murderous impulses but because of her voracious and excessive sexuality, which she never controls even in terms of her own narrative. Stories of the poison woman were continually reiterated through the interwar and postwar years, though the sexualized female body in the 1960s became the site of ideological freedom - not for the women themselves, but for the men who wrote about, illustrated, and filmed them. 156 Douglas Slaymaker’s work on the nikkutai (flesh) writers in the immediate postwar maintains that postwar fiction writers employed the sexualized female body to articulate their own hopes. The female body was used as an object upon which to achieve connection with human beings and liberation from current ideological oppression. 157 Marran builds on this work, arguing the poison woman in the postwar “represented a hopeful possibility for a break from the past repressive strictures of prewar and wartime morality….[that] appealed to a new postwar sensibility or spirit that posited the body and sensation as the basis for meaning” for men. The 156 Marran charts how, in 1920s and 30s, a rise in sciences of sexology and criminology as scientific knowledge was used to illustrate "crime as a potential in every woman," thus the poison woman was potentially, and scientifically proven to be, part of every woman, even housewives. 157 Slaymaker, Douglas. Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction. (see ch. 1, n. 65) 125 focus on female desire in the 1960s in turn meant every woman was “a potentially fetishizable object and delinquent citizen,” in part because they represented transgression against socially oppressive wartime social strictures and publishing censorship. Literary critic Kono Kensuke points to the government’s complicity in this project through the promotion of these stories by the Yoshida cabinet in cooperation with the postwar government to create the “3-S” strategy promoting sports, screen, and sex. 158 figure 30: May 1959 Modern Japan Weekly (Shukan Modan Nihon) figure 31: April 1959 Special Jewel figure 32: October 1959 Special Jewel Thus, the poison woman trope was continually constructed on the covers of true stories and mystery magazines in the 1960s. The sexualized woman is available for lascivious consumption, as seen in the first issue of Modern Japan Weekly (figure 30) 159 - again published the same year as the first issue of SF Magazine. In contrast to the cover of Ladies’ Own (figure 158 Marran, Christine L. Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture. 159 Modern Japan Weekly (Shukan Modan Nihon). Tokyo: Bungeishunju, May 1959. Takahashi Shintaro Bunko Collection, Gakushuin Women’s College. 126 25), this woman is not embedded either a pastoral or an artistic landscape. Instead, like the young woman on the cover of cover of Mademoiselle, she exists in a space that has no clear background – leaning against a latticed awning tells us nothing about her environment because her environment is not essential to the offering of and potential consumption of her body. In sharp contrast to the Mademoiselle cover, this woman is dressed in strapless clothing, a modern top or bathing suit, yes, but one designed to reveal her body in the most provocative way as the swell of her breasts are centered in the lower half of the frame. While she gazes at the viewer, the turn of her chin transforms her gaze from a direct challenge into an invitation. The tilted chin, sidelong glance, and open and inviting bodily posture or pose meant to offer breasts to the viewer are constantly repeated in the covers of these magazines (see figures 30-32). 160 The image of the woman is not, then, a subject to be identified with and emulated as free (in contrast to women’s magazines), but is instead an object to be continually and endlessly consumed. The mystery of her body is aligned with the mystery of crime, as well as the disruptive, the erotic, and the other that is always safely contained by consumption. This modeling is even more prominent in the boy’s magazines of the time, which presented the bodies on their covers as simultaneous consumers and as model subjects - though just like the figures on the Asahi cover, they are consumers of media as well as the objects to be consumed. Both cover styles create a relationship where identification between the human body on the cover and the viewer is the desired and expected outcome of viewing. The magazine viewer, even before opening the magazine’s pages, can identify with the reading/watching actions of the figures on the cover. 160 Erotic Mystery Special Jewel (Erotiku Misuturi tokubetsu hoseki). Tokyo: Bungeishunju, April and October 1959. Takahashi Shintaro Bunko Collection, Gakushuin Women’s College. 127 Utopian consumer subjects: boy’s magazines, early sf, and the future In a discussion of his and Abe Kobo's work, author Komatsu Saikyo notes: "After all, sf was regarded as children's literature; there was a prejudice that these novels weren't serious works of fiction." Playful, young, not serious. For children. This was the definition of science fiction in the late 1950s, which had grown out of a tradition of boy’s magazines featuring adventure stories – be they about travelling the world or into space. Genre fiction scholar Nogura Kouhei argues that there was a craze from 1945 to 1955 for both science fiction and what he calls “SF Shonen” or science fiction boys, found in a variety of media from television to manga. While there was a proliferation of these texts, the genre of sf had yet to become distinct from other forms of boy’s literature. 161 The postwar boy’s magazine presented utopic bodies that could take advantage of the recovering country: they were physical models of the ideal future. Grinning young men embedded in the newly flourishing consumer culture appeared on the covers driving fast cars or playing with toy ray-guns. They were models to identify with, youths whose vigor both supported and represented the recovered nation; the perfect young citizen- subjects. 162 These subjects were always young and either untouched by war or entirely recovered from any trauma, fearless, and most importantly, a consumer. SF Magazine artists created a stark contrast to the young boys of the previous decade’s sf by hiding bodies and concealing the human in favor of depicting the surreal. This move also distanced SF Magazine from the joyful 161 Ōhashi, Hiroyuki. Boy’s and Girl’s Showa SF Museum: The world of Juvenile SF from the perspective of art/covers. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2013. Print. 12 162 For more on the rise of children’s literature and boy’s literature, see Piel, L. Halliday. “Loyal Dogs and Meiji Boys: The Controversy Over Japan’s First Children’s Story, Koganemaru (1891).” Children’s Literature 38.1 (2010): 207–222. P Hayashi, Michiyo, and Ariko Kawabata. “Children’s Literature Research in Japan.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 28.4 (2003): 241–246. Project MUSE. Web. 14 Nov. 2014. And Holmberg, Ryan. “Manga Shōnen: Katō Ken’ichi and the Manga Boys.” Mechademia 8.1 (2013). P 176. 128 and uncritical celebration of technology and consumer culture in juvenile magazines; instead, its covers engaged with high-art discourses of representation, the psychological, and the repressed, reflecting a more critical view of culture and science. The December 1960 cover of Boy’ s Illustrated (figure 33) 163 is a fantasy of speed and transportation. The techniques of modernist aesthetics are deployed to center the new, utopian youth consumer-subject, the image of a recovered nation reflected in his bright eyes and glowing smile. This montage of color and icon are all centered on the young man dressed in a Speed- Racer costume, toy gun pointed to the left, his grin inviting the reader/viewer to join in his play figure 33: 1960 Boy’s Illustrated figure 34: 1968 Weekly Shōnen Jump (first issue) as he is embedded in a realistic future world. The blurred background is a mix of photograph and illustration, and evokes a city of marvels, the shape of the future. The flying saucers dangling 163 Boy’s Illustrated (Shonen Gahō). Tokyo: Shonengahosha, December, 1960. Takahashi Shintaro Bunko Collection, Gakushuin Women’s College. 129 behind his head, although they fly on different trajectories, all coexist within the same frame as the drawing of the hot air balloon and the airplane in the upper left hand corner. The gloves, goggles, helmet, costume, and toy gun are all part of the toy industry that Anne Allison, in Millenial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, noted was one of the first industries in the postwar period to be approved by the American occupation administration (SCAP) to begin production. The frenetic mix of technology and play are satisfyingly relaxing and entertaining – a celebration. From the earliest stage, these magazines centered on bildungsroman narratives, constructing the figure of the child and the boy in particular. This boy was simultaneously in need of education into specific social values and the purest embodiment of those social values. Because of this dual property these boys embodied a kind of precociousness that allowed them to interact more or less as equals with adults. Ryan Holmburg details the different models of young men offered in one of the earliest boy’s magazines Shonen Club (1914): “[t]he competitive “superior student” (yūtōsei), risshin shusse (“making it in the world”), and chūkun aikoku (“loyalty to the emperor, love of nation”)— all first advanced during the rise of the Japanese Empire under the Meiji state— became the leitmotifs of [Shonen] Club’s prose.” 164 Thus the ideological and political projects of the state were conveyed, encapsulated, and reproduced in the figure of the child both on the covers and in the stories inside. Boy’s magazines including Shonen Club (whose print run went from 1914-62), Shonen (1946-68), Youth Pictorial (Shonen 164 Holmberg, Ryan. “Manga Shōnen: Katō Ken’ichi and the Manga Boys.” Mechademia 8.1 (2013): 173–193. 178. 130 Gaho) (1948-71), Manga Jewel (Manga Tama 1952-71), and Adventure Jewel (Boken Tama 1949-83) all featured science fictional stories directed at a youth audience. 165 The body of youth in the postwar became the utopian shape of the future. Unlike adults, who were haunted by the memories of war deprivation and privation, youthful bodies were full of life, promise, and enjoyment. 166 They were the newest consumer subjects in mass market publications, new beacons of hope that carried with them a vision of the future and erased the recent past. 167 It is the figure of the young man who is able to achieve this utopic future, a child who never experienced the war; or who has moved beyond war’s dark legacy into the future; saved and reborn into sparkling consumer culture that persisted through the 1960s, exemplified in the first cover of 1968 Weekly Shonen Jump (figure 34). 168 The goggles and helmet of the young man in Boy’ s Illustrated return in this cover, situated in another montage with the racecar of the future, its elongated blue shape echoing the space ships of the earlier magazine. The bodies of both the boy on the right and the man on the left dominate and control their environment; both are larger-than life and ready to take the proverbial “jump” into mass culture. This melding of new technologies with adventure stories, the combination of advanced mechanization with increasing urbanization of youth, all reflected the way in which the fictional 165 Harie Akiko. Showa Shonen SF Illustrated Encyclopedia. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2009. 166 Raine, Michael John. “Youth, Body, and Subjectivity in the Japanese Cinema, 1955--1960.” Ph.D. The University of Iowa, 2002. 11. 167 These covers contribute to the discourse on the present and the future by Tezuka Osamu’s Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), the robot child who became a sensation in Japanese comics and television of the 1950’s. Tetsuwan is described by Anne Allison as “captured[ing] the tenor of the moment: the tentativeness of the times laced with not only the pains of defeat and atomic injury but also the anticipation of an unknown future . . . Tetsuwan Atomu writes the future utopically in an upbeat fable about national rebirth, reconstruction, and reindustrialization.” Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Pg 56-57. 168 Weekly Shonen Jump (Shukan Shonen Jyanpu). Tokyo: Sueisha, 1968. Takahashi Shintaro Bunko Collection, Gakushuin Women’s College. 131 dreams of science had been embedded in the youth market in the immediate postwar. 169 Boys were considered the audience for science fiction. Even early printed anthologies of science fiction, which Fukushima oversaw, were all directed at these youth markets. Yayoi Museum curator Harie Akiko notes: “[I]n the opening pages of the magazines, there were colorful bright frontispieces, and in there, were drawn countless fantasy images forecasting the scientifically developed future. The strengths of these cover designers were the way they were able to depict these covers as real, and their power to produce dreams of the future in so many young boys.” 170 The melding of the real and the fantastic was one of the most identifiable characteristics of the science fiction art aimed at children. A vision of the future is simultaneously produced for young men and produced because of them – their bodies are the colorful renditions that give them dreams of the future. 171 Fukushima is just one of the numerous members of the science fiction community who acknowledge science fiction had to ‘grow up’ and move away from the bodily representation of youth-as-future. Graphic representation that continued to situate the boy at the center signaled the youth future. Those who wanted to trouble that utopian future did so by removing the boy, quite literally, from the iconography of the image. The contrast between boy’s magazine and SF Magazine covers is dramatic. Take, for example, the May 1960 cover of SF Magazine (figure 35) 169 This is reflected also in a move away from text-based magazines and into graphic reproduction. Mark Steinberg notes, “[b]y the late 1950s, manga gained primacy over these other media types in the monthly and then weekly magazines that became one of the main sources for children’s culture, leading, by the 1960s, to the dominance of manga that continues to this day.” Steinberg, Marc. Anime's Media Mix : Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 27. 170 Ibid., 96. 171 In addition, 1959 publisher Hayakawa Shobo released their Hayakawa Fantasy Series and International SF, both series that were aimed at the domestic children’s market even though they contained translations from American authors like Issac Assimov and Phillip K. Dick whose work was primarily written for an adult audience in the U.S. Fukushima describes a number of the publishers who released science fiction were originally founded to publish for children. Fukushima Masami. Time of Origins, 12. (see ch. 1, n. 39) 132 figure 35: May 1960 SF Magazinefigure which also portrays a city – including towers and flying ships (objects that appear in the Shonen Gaho cover). 172 The image contains alien architecture, alien ships flying in the sky, yet no clear conflict. The practically pastoral scene includes the long bodies of animals in front of the city. Yet, all of these shapes are estranged. Towers stretch in impossible organic ways, with webbing and curved shapes acting as buttresses and girders, as if they were grown and not built. Again, the image enunciates the notion of space more clearly than any other representation – a city-like mass shadowed on the distant, darker horizon line, cloud-like white shapes in the sky, and foreground with lighter colors are used to create a recognizable and recognizably alien image. This is no utopia of consumer youth where children play with toys of the future. It is a series of receding shapes, a city primarily clothed in shadow, whose only aspects of light are the techno-organic spires lit as if one beam of an alien sun caught them, and the flying shape that lifted off from the towers, in a dying gasp. 172 Nakajima Seikan. SF Magazine. May 1960. (see Introduction, n. 1) 133 Active bodies & active space: Japanese and American sf illustration The prevalence of American pulp science fiction in Japan 173 makes American science fiction aesthetics one of the other sets of visual tools adopted and modified in Japanese science fiction. At the heart of American science fiction magazines are the fictions within the pages, and artists rendered a scene from the stories for most covers. For American science fiction, and the covers of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the representation of science fiction was primarily structured around the depiction of both words and bodies. SF Magazine took its fictional content from the American magazine in its first years by introducing translations of the American fiction to Japanese audiences. Yet the artists who illustrated the covers of SF Magazine were not copying the American covers. They did not directly reproduce styles or iconography from The Magazine of F&SF or any of the other science fiction publications circulated in postwar Japan by American soldiers. 174 Instead, they entered into a dialogue with this body of work much in the same way they did with Surrealism and earlier types of youth fiction illustration. The artists deployed, but also modified, elements found in American covers by engaging in a sense of play rather than direct reproduction. The work of the SF Magazine cover artists is simultaneously similar to American pulp magazine covers and distinct from them: they were attempting to challenge the very terms of science fiction representation as a whole as they were in the process of defining them for Japan. 173 Larry McCaffrey's forward to Full Metal Apache is but one of the sources that acknowledges this in brief history of SF in Japan, where he discusses the relative scarcity of specifically self-identified SF in mass literature of the 30s and 40s, however "[t]his began to change during the late forties and early fifties, when thousands of cheap SF paperbacks left behind by American servicemen began to circulate among Japanese youths via the black markets operating in Tokyo and other major cities." Tatsumi Takayuki. Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Xix. 174 Both Takayuki and Bolton note American service men threw away or left behind their paper back copies of SF while in Japan, and it is one of the ways in which these fictions entered Japan. (Robot Ghosts, xi) 134 Moreover, despite the fantastic (or science-fantastic) subject matter, the representation of science fiction in Japan prior to the covers of SF Magazine not only foregrounded humans, but also framed those humans with other objects that are realistically rendered. The rocket, space ship, alien, and robot in many ways exist only in the imagination, but in both American science fiction covers and pre-1960 Japanese book covers they are rendered in a mimetic manner, including the shading, pose, and perspective. In a discussion of the early iconography of science fiction, scholar Gary Westfahl argues the proliferation of the rocket as a symbol goes hand in hand with the definition of science fiction as "evolving into a literature about space travel." 175 The inaugural issue of Nebula (Seiun) 176 (figure 36, below) drew directly on this iconography with its sleek rocket ship, rendered in bright colors, powering into a black sky. The implication here is that the fiction inside Nebula would be entirely in line with American aesthetics, and indeed most of the stories were translations of American works. This iconography, however fantastic, also evokes the real. This magazine only published one issue. While Nebula is now the name for one of the most prestigious awards in Japanese science fiction writing, part of the reason the magazine did not succeed was that it did not attempt to differentiate itself from American science fiction, which could be found in a variety of other media. These same strategies appear in American science fiction illustration. 175 Westfahl, Gary. "Wanted: A Symbol for Science Fiction" Science Fiction Studies. Vol. 22, No. 1, Mar. 1995, pp. 1-21, p. 9. 176 Ray. Inaugural Issue. Nebula (Seiun): Science Fiction. Tokyo: Morinomichisha, 1954. Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M University. 135 figure 36: 1954 Nebula figure 37: January 1960 F/SF Magazine While there is both a cyborg and a robot on the January 1960 Magazine of F&SF cover (figure 37), 177 they are engaged in the recognizably realist (and nostalgic) tasks of trimming Christmas tree as a traditional family. This simultaneous evocation of nostalgia and advanced technology is a utopic move to domesticate technological advances – reflecting American technological fears and desires. The August 1960 cover 178 of Magazine of F&SF by Ed Emshwiller (figure 38, below) is of two robots, one clutching a pen and scissors and the other attempting to plug itself into a socket as a woman walks between them. While composed of robotic fantastic elements, they are also posed in a recognizably realistic space that has red 177 Emshwiller, Ed. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Joseph W. Ferman, editor. Cornwall, Conn: Mercury Press, January 1960. 178 Emishwiller, Ed. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Joseph W. Ferman, editor. Cornwall, Conn: Mercury Press, 1960. 136 figure 38: August 1960 F/SF Magazine figure 39: January 1962 SF Magazine carpet, bookcases, and electricity. The image establishes Cartesian perspective with the scale of the robot in the foreground relative to the smaller robot in the background, but also mimics realistic shadows for all objects, even the woman's leg. Additionally the robots are clutching at quotidian objects. Although the size of the woman indicates the perspective of the viewer is being equated with the robot instead of the human, it is still her leg and the bottom of her dress that anchor the image and center understanding – we know these robots are tiny relative not just to the objects they carry, but to her. Even this "fantastic" element does not explicitly challenge or confuse the viewer. Instead, these techniques combine the fantastic and the realistic to establish a sense of "ironic imagination" that still centers on the human experience. 137 The difference in aesthetic approach quite dramatic: compare the Nebula rocket ship with the January 1962 SF Magazine cover 179 rocket ships (figure 10). Nakajima inverts the presumptions of American science fiction art by making the most active element the space surrounding the object. While the Nebula rocket has a blast trail shooting behind, indicating movement without concealing the image of the rocket, SF Magazine’s rocket is obscured by a multi-colored cloud of smoke. While the lines of the Nebula rocket are straight, with realist shading to indicate mass, the Nakajima rocket, with swooping lines and wing shape, is recognizable only by its pointed nose. The brightest colors on the Nebula cover are the rocket itself, creating an energetic image of space exploration. The lively colors in the Nakajima cover come from the entirely abstract sky. Both certainly evoke elements of the fantastic, but Nakajima's cover moves further away from the real. The realistic style of the American artist in many ways reflects Tatsumi’s reading of Delany – the proposal that the science fiction sentence reflects a literalization of the physical. It is only by considering Nakajima’s cover in conjunction with American covers that we see a move away from the physical and into what Tatsumi calls the allegorical. I took up two predominate strategies of bodily representation in this chapter. On the one hand arguing mass media covers continually provided examples of bodies simultaneously meant to reflect a new consumer subject and act as idealized models of that subjectivity. On the other, the chapter articulated the way other sexualized bodies on mass media covers were consumed in order to create a sense of self out of the dichotomy of self/other. Science fiction illustration on the covers of SF Magazine, by deploying the surreal landscape, navigated a path between these 179 Nakajima Seikan. SF Magazine. January 1962. (see Introduction, n. 1) 138 two strategies. It developed a subjectivity not in opposition to its objects, and not through bodies to emulate, but through an estranged perspective that drew on both. SF Magazine illustrators politicized the fantastic as object to emulate (or aspire to). They created perspectives that were dependent on the viewer’s consumption of estranged landscapes and which spoke to the visible trauma of daily life – the city spaces that were not yet rebuilt. SF Magazine illustrators created a visual language that spoke in ways not featured in other mass media – the language of space instead of the language of bodies. 139 Chapter Four: Embodying Fans in Image and Word ‘Whap’ goes the sound of the pantograph, throwing sparks into the dark outside the streetcar, where pallid blueish-white light flickers. Without knowing where I’m walking, I wander aimlessly. I slowly pass in front of railroad cars. Of course there’s only one city car, but involuntarily struck by the strangeness of the many-car formation I peeked at something that looks like an ordinary conductor’s compartment. The small space opened onto a secondhand bookstore, and in the carbide lights, I pulled the first issue of SF Magazine from a mountain of magazines, while smiling complacently opened the page….and, right there, I woke up. So began science fiction writer and critic Takahashi Ryōhei’s 1979 article on Japanese science fiction magazine history, where he describes SF Magazine as the crown jewel of pulp magazines. 180 In his dream, the magazine stands in for science fiction as a whole. But science fiction is no spaceship-filled panorama. Instead, it is the concrete, train-filled yard that houses everyday objects. Science fiction is the physical magazines, instantly recognizable because of their covers, piled one on top of each other to build a mountain. Science fiction is not just the consumption of these texts, but also the dream of the consumer. Takahashi’s introduction presents just one of the ways in which SF Magazine readers not only consumed these texts, but also memorialized their consumption, marking their own participation as fans while simultaneously contributing to the very definitions of science fiction in Japan. This chapter answers some of the questions raised by Takahashi’s experiences as a science fiction fan. What kinds of materials were signaled as important by the magazine? How were those signals achieved? What were the limits, the boundaries, the cross overs, and the exchanges between different actors – be they authors recognized by the magazine, editor’s notes pointing to a wider conversation, inclusions of certain texts or certain types of information; how were these 180 Takahashi Ryōhei. “Japanese SF Postwar Publishing History: SF Magazine’s part in the struggles of the era” Book of Magazines (Hon no zasshi) Tokyo: Honnozasshi sha. November, 2006. 140 negotiated? This chapter shows that there is no one stable definition of science fiction in Japan, but that even within this magazine there were rejections and inclusions, enunciations and omissions that contributed to the definition of science fiction, and to the definition of who was reading science fiction, in Japan. Takahashi’s dream of magazine collection articulates one vision of what it means to be a reader, and also how the texts have embedded themselves into reader (un)consciousness via particular structures, be they physical or economic. His dream space gathers together places that one could purchase these magazines: in railway stations, at newsstands, and also, as Takahashi goes on to recall, in the second-hand bookstores so critical to the recirculation of texts in contemporary Japan. Moreover, these magazines are part of a commercial system: “[I] have collected more than sixty of SF Magazine’s back issues for around 100 yen a piece – SF Magazine’s value now is 200 yen, while Manhunt with its nude pinups is just 150 yen, EQMM and Houseki and Hitchcock Magazine are all 100 yen used…” By mentioning the prices of these magazines Takahashi not only locates them within consumer culture but also notes that they are, ten years after the first publication of SF Magazine, more valuable than either the mystery magazines that first published translations of science fiction in their pages or SF Magazine’ s contemporaries (EQMM and Manhunt, Houseki and Hitchcock Magazine). Regular train cars that are simultaneously beautiful and utilitarian, carbide lights that glow and pop, musty bookstores with delightful finds: Takahashi’s dream is filled with technologies of the everyday. While SF Magazine presented fantastic stories, its contents were also part of the everyday life of its readers, and the readers themselves emerge through the articulation of the everyday in the magazine. Through analysis of SF Magazine’s contents over the first ten years, the picture of the sf magazine reader as a science fiction fan emerges. I take up 141 the contents of the magazine over the first ten years in order to understand what kind of readers were being constructed through and by the magazine, and how they in turn helped construct SF Magazine, and sf more broadly, in Japan. The culture that developed through SF Magazine was not simply one that mimicked American sf culture, nor did SF Magazine mimic American science fiction magazines. Even though both had active letter columns, fiction contests, reviews, and reader surveys that were important parts of their magazine cultures. SF Magazine also incorporated Japanese intellectual practices, including round-table discussions whose transcripts were published in the magazine. Moreover, in SF Magazine there was a greater emphasis on the visual embedded not only on the covers but in the science-news and scientific discussion features. The magazine’s content reflected these practices by offering both science and science fiction to be critically consumed by readers, and it is the critical investment also marked the readers as science fiction fans. Those readers were interested in, but wary of, an uncritical celebration of scientific achievement. Japanese SF Magazine artists created a space visual that not only invited but also encouraged new members to enter and establish a sense of community. It wasn’t just the images that created this shared sense, however; it was the contents of the magazine. In order to understand the emergence of these science fiction fans, I deploy the vocabulary of thinking through consumers and subcultures developed by John Fiske, and the adaptations suggested by John Hartley to understand readership. Combining these theories allows me to explain how the structure of the magazine supported and produced a distinct subcultural identity, and put it into context with other types of fan and fan practice in Japan. There are many scholars who have contributed profound insights into the relationship between individuals and mass culture. One of the foundational thinkers in this field is Fiske, whose perspective on consumers and subcultures 142 informs my own view of SF Magazine readers as more than passive consumers. For Fiske, the consumer is the person who creates popular culture out of the products created for them by producers. John Hartley’s work builds on Fiske’s theories by considering the relationships between readerships, modernity, politics, and journalism. While Fiske’s work is invaluable to my argument because he articulates the ways in which consumers resist dominant culture through consumption, it is Hartley’s work that gives me a method to identify large-scale readership, some of which I’ve already articulated in my introduction above. Media scholar John Hartley defines readership as “the reading public” that emerges hand in hand with publishing as an industry. Readership is constituted by the audience engaging in “an active, literate encounter with semiotic materials – not only via traditional print forms but also in relation to audio-visual media like television and film.” 181 Those who gather to read are produced by their reading and linked together not in an imagined community, but “a real one, reading the same books and papers at the same time. These readerships could be mobilized to act as a public.” The conversation between SF Magazine editors, readers, writers, and artists forms the community of science fiction. This ‘public’ is reflected in the articulation of bodies on the covers of the magazine over these ten years. My analysis in this chapter moves between visual representations of bodies on the covers and the magazine’s non fictional content. The bodies begin as insubstantial shapes, reflecting the contested meanings of the place of fans within science fiction. I juxtapose this with the nonfictional content because it is in this content that the strongest dialogue between magazine editor and readers manifests. This chapter begins with a full discussion of Hartley’s methodology 181 Hartley, John. Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2012. p 222. 143 to articulate how I consider the development of the readership of SF Magazine as the constitution of a separate fan subjectivity. My second section explores the content that emphasized the scientifically critical – features where the science of science fiction was continually articulated in both visual and textual exploration. Fact-based speculation was generated by features that were dominated not by the voices of fans, but rather those of scientists, science writers, and editors assembling scientific news. Next, I consider the very earliest visual and textual definitions offered by the magazine, examining regular features like “SF Dictionary” alongside the first cover with bodies on it. I argue the very nature of science fiction is being defined in both spaces. Fan voices were incorporated into the magazine via surveys, and fiction contests, and their own letters. In the following section, I compare these letters with the emergence of communities of bodies on the covers of the magazine. These conversations, although typical of early sf magazines, constantly blurred the line between professional and enthusiast while continually valorizing a mode of science fiction that was based quite heavily in fact, even as it prized a literary-dimension. Illustrated bodies began as shadowy and amorphous shapes in the early covers, and solidified hand in hand with the readership itself until 1969 when a series of six covers demonstrated a clear articulation of a science fictional subject. This turn in illustration was also a turn outwards by the magazine, and in my last section I compare these images with events occurring beyond the magazine’s pages - in particular, the magazine’s sponsorship of the first Japanese Science Fiction Convention and the participation of science fiction fans in the Osaka Expo ’70. After this series debuted, the fandom was largely constituted and firmly anchored by the magazine. As the illustration style began regularly featuring bodies on the covers all the time, science fiction moved out of the shadows and into the mainstream. At the center of the movement from subculture to mainstream culture now stood SF Magazine. 144 Locating readership in magazine texts SF Magazine is a system out of which subjectivities are produced. This system includes the fiction stories in the magazine, but is equally determined by nonfictional content, the practices that nonfictional content supported, and the visual representations it exhibited. John Hartley considers a different textual system in Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, and Popular Culture: journalism. He argues that the textual system of journalism is both the “phenomenal form it takes for the readers, viewer and listener” and its “mode of production and distribution, and the institutions and practices that sustain it” 182 If we consider science fiction as being continually constituted in much the same way, both via the phenomenal form and by the modes of production, distribution, intuitions and practices that are simultaneously producing and produced by the discourse, it centers institutions like SF Magazine as sites of continual formation. Additionally, there is a feedback loop since the institution of SF Magazine does not simply produce science fiction and science fiction fans, but is simultaneously produced by them as they contribute and manifest as readers. The fictions are consumed, and in turn generate new forms that are also published. The nonfiction content negotiates terminology, participation, and boundaries, mobilizing the production and consumption of more texts. The illustrations reflect not just the fictional contents of the magazine, but also the new constructions of readership that emerge from the collection of these practices. Together, these phenomena articulate a relationship of both interest and critical attention to existing social, political, technological, and fantastical ways of looking at the world. 182 Hartley, John. Popular Reality: Journalism and Popular Culture. London: Arnold, 1996. 35. 145 Unlike Hartley’s discussion of the most important textual feature of journalism being “the fact that it counts as true,” the most important textual feature of science fiction is the fact that it counts as both true and not true (which is different than counting as false, and rather invokes the speculative). This definition determines the nonfictional content of the magazine as well as the fiction. he magazine included nonfictional content in order to construct a notion of science fiction blurs the line between fictional and real. The continual negotiation between fantasy and fact is reflected in the magazine’s subtitling: in 1962, the magazine’s English subheading changed from “Fantasy and Science Fiction” to “Magazine of Science Fiction and Fact,” 183 articulating an explicit relationship of its fiction and nonfiction contents alike to both the imagined and the real. In 1966, author Abe Kobo’s essay on science fiction notes, “[S]eeing how frequently the readers' page of SF Magazine features heated debates on such questions as "What is science fiction?," one may conclude that the true nature of the beast is still largely unknown...” 184 This constant negotiation, which in 1969 also considered if Japanese sf was original or not, occurred so often that Tatsumi Takayuki considered these arguments the heart of Japanese science fiction. 185 In 1969, Yamano Koichi suggested, “SF is, on the one hand, concerned with scientific truth, but on the other hand, it also needs a literary truth, which can reflect the ideological truth of the human society associated with the history of science since ancient Egypt. The same thing can be said when sf tries to sketch society, human beings, and 183 Fukushima Masami. Time of Origins. (see ch. 1, n. 39) 184 Abe Kobo. "Two Essays on Science Fiction: The Boom in Science Fiction (1962) and Science Fiction, the Unnamable (1966)" Trans. Christopher Bolton, Thomas Schnellbacher. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3, Japanese Science Fiction (Nov., 2002). 340-350. 185 Tatsumi, Takayuki. “Generations and Controversies,” 105–14. (see ch. 1, n. 41) 146 space.” 186 This again points to the continual articulation of science fiction as related to the world even at its most fantastic. The practice, then, is the critical phenomenal form science fiction takes within its system. For Fiske, "[a] text that is to be made into popular culture must, then, contain both the forces of domination and the opportunities to speak against them, the opportunities to oppose or evade them from subordinated, but not totally disempowered, positions. Popular culture is made by the people at the interface between the products of the culture industries and everyday life." 187 He makes these arguments in part because they can account for the habits and shifts in consumers desires in a far more sophisticated way than the top-down view of mass culture can. Fiske situates the consumer as a producer, not of products, but of "meanings and pleasures," and suggests these cannot be commodified or consumed, but are instead "produced, reproduced, and circulated only in that constant process that we call culture." 188 Fiske is making a distinction between meaning and product, in part because within the American media world the production of a property is far divorced from the consumption of it. When considering the system of media and media consumption, though, the most important component is the “creation of readers as publics, and the connection of these readerships to other systems, such as those of politics, economics and social control.” 189 The most important component of SF Magazine’s system is the creation of readers as fans, and the connection of this fan readership to science, to the visual representation on the covers, and to other systems of fiction, technology, and media. This is why I opened this chapter with a passage 186 Yamano Koichi. "Japanese SF, Its Originality and Orientation (1969)" trans. Kazuko Behrens, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (March, 1994). 67-80. 187 Fiske, John. Understanding popular culture. Boston: Routledge, 1989. 21. 188 Ibid., 22. 189 Hartley, John. Popular Reality: Journalism and Popular Culture, 35. 147 written by a science fiction fan and critic in an article describing science fiction magazine history. Takahashi’s own account begins with a dream of readership, simultaneously true and not true, exposing links to other systems of fiction, technology, and media. Takahashi is just one example of the visible readership of SF Magazine. Even though his account is an individual one, it is not “[a] solitary, individualist, consumptive, supplementary act of silent subjection to a series of imperial graphic impressions.” 190 It is, instead reflective of a communal act. “On the contrary reading is a social, communal, productive, act of writing, a dialogic process which is fundamental to (and may even be) popular culture.” 191 Takahashi is one part of the larger community, and one method of reading as processing is revealed through his memorialization of personally consuming SF Magazine. As I move through the materials of the magazine, my discussion of fan letters, feature columns, and surveys will further illustrate the structures of the community Takahashi was part of. The fictional texts, visible covers, and nonfictional elements are part of the mediasphere inhabited by and supported through SF Magazine. For Hartley, this mediasphere is the socio- political realm where readership functions; the mediasphere is the sum total of the discourses and images, the political and social actors that make the reading of power legible. 192 But Hartley suggests that there can be smaller mediaspheres than the totalizing one that informs journalistic 190 Ibid., 52. 191 Ibid., 52-53. 192 Hartley’s founding premise in Popular Reality maintains journalism is "caught up in all the institutions, struggles and practices of modernity; contemporary politics is unthinkable without it, as is contemporary consumer society, to such an extent that in the end it is difficult to decide whether journalism is a product of modernity, or modernity a product of journalism" (33-34). For Hartley journalism is “the textual system of modernity” (3) - it is the very frame by which modern people make sense of and structure reality all together. He combines “theory shopping” with “text browsing” (or bringing together a variety of theories from Gramsci and Foucault to Williams and Barthes) with historical research and abstract semiotics in order to make his case about journalism. Relying on Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman’s notions of media Hartley argues that “politics, media and culture are contained within each other,” and this “journalistic mediation of the public sphere has determinate effects on how political questions are acted out and realized socially.” (79) 148 readership, including those created by specific publications. It is in this sense that I am attempting to build an understanding of sf readers from the representations of them within SF Magazine. Readership can be understood through surveys, through texts like Takahashi’s which write about the act of reading, or, as Hartley’s analysis of the painting Waiting for the Times by B.R. Haydon and the photograph Sunday funnies 1991 by Sally Mann shows clearly, through the representations of readers in the newspaper. Hartley’s analysis puts the significance of readership (ie: who is reading) front and center in creating renown for particular images. 193 Through an analysis of varied images of newspaper readers, Hartley not only articulates the historical construction of journalism’s readers at different spaces and times, but also argues that media (be they newspapers or magazines) are constantly seeking to construct not only strategies for reading but models for readers. Rather than focusing on audience reception theory, he argues via Klancher that an audience must always be understood in history, and must be grasped as a “textual, socio-cultural, statistical, [and] conceptual” entity. Echoing Fiske, he notes that popular culture can be understood “as the ideological field within the social formation where 193 Waiting for the Times shows two “Very Important Personages” (as Hartley calls them) sitting at the breakfast table, one whose torso is entirely obscured by the open newspaper he is perusing, the other man impatiently waiting his turn. Hartley observes “The ‘consciousness’ on display is not so much ‘power’ as ‘impatience’ ….the painting captures the longing and desire for participation via textuality … just as it captures both the plenitude of information for those in possession of the appropriate technology,” (14) which is, of course, the newspaper. Readership is constructed via class status and access, but also in the way the articles themselves would reflect those same concerns and would report only on “events which are deemed newsworthy” by these very same readers. He contrasts this to the photograph Sunday funnies 1991 to not only show the way readership has changed from 1835 to 1991, but also to show how readership can be understood not just in terms of mainstream journalism, but also extended to mass – popular - journalism. The photograph is of three children (two young women) lounging on a bed in various states of undress reading the Sunday funnies: the formal breakfast table of the 1835 Times reader has become the private and informal space of the bedroom, and the readers themselves have gone from male to female, from old to young, from law-making to, as Hartley puts it, “identity-forming”. That is to say in this movement from newspaper readership to 1990s popular media readership shows the way popular readerships have been transformed within the American and British context from public Figures of Importance to “the privatized, feminized, postmodern public.” Moving away from Hartley’s (well-founded) critique of the overly critical narratives constructed around readership (that the disdain for the contemporary reader as childlike and suburban and female), his notion that readership can be understood through an analysis of images of readers that is useful when we consider SF Magazine and its relationship to its readers. 149 subjectivities are produced, on the site of persons, in ideological conformity with the productive requirements of capitalism.” 194 Within the world of science fiction, however, this space between meaning and product is far reduced. Science fiction author Komatsu Sakyo is perhaps the best example of this closeness. His prolific career originated in his participation as a both fan and writer in the first fiction contest, but continued through his life since he consumed as much as he created – even his round table discussions in his own magazine reflect his thinking both as a fan of science fiction and as a producer of it. While he is perhaps the best-recognized science fiction author in Japan today, and famous internationally for his disaster fiction Japan Sinks, in the 1960s he was a man with a degree in Italian literature from Kyoto University who took on any number of middle-class jobs. He read science fiction for fun. As a fan, he saw the advertisement for the first “Hayakawa Science Fiction Contest,” run through SF Magazine in 1961. This first contest for new science fiction writers had been discussed in the magazine’s editor’s notes and introductions for months. Fukushima Masami worked with Tohoku Studios to put on the contest, and half of the judges (Director Tsuburaya Eiji, Producer Tanaka Tomoyuki, and Producer Fujimoto Sanezumi) were interested in works that might translate into film. 195 Komatsu Sakyo’s entry “Peace on Earth” received only an honorary mention in this first contest. (The Tohoku Studios judges did not find 194 Ibid., 48. 195 The rules were relatively simple. New fictions, or fictions by new authors, of between 50-70 pages, accompanied by a short bio, needed to be sent to the SF Magazine offices by December 31, 1960. The top three fictions would receive cash awards, and be published in SF Magazine. Tohoku Studios might later consider using one for the basis of a film script. “SF Magazine Fantastic Science Fiction Contest” SF Magazine. February, 1961. 85. (see Introduction, n. 1) 150 it particularly cinematic, though the fiction-focused judges Fukushima Masami and literary author Abe Kobo both bestowed a great deal of praise on Komatsu’s fiction). 196 After that first modest success, Komatsu went on to enter and receive first t prize in the second Hayakawa Science Fiction Contest for “The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice,” 197 which appeared in the January 1963 issue. From that moment on, he was a recurring authorial voice both within the science fiction community and in the pages of the magazine, and was specifically mentioned as one of the prestigious authors to attend Japan’s first sf Convention. 198 Over the course of his career, he published more than eighty fiction books (most science fiction), a similar number of nonfiction works, and six manga. He also wrote for seven television series, created five films, and started his own science fiction magazine SF Adventure with Ishikawa Takashi in 1977. 199 Moreover, he was one of the consultants during Expo ’70 who helped develop the theme that so closely linked this world fair with a speculative project of imagining the future. His personal narrative is just one of the many that show the close ties between acts of consumption and the production of meaning for SF Magazine’s readers who, like their counterparts in American science fiction fandom, created both meanings and consumable products because of their unique status as both fans and writers/artists. 200 196 The fiction was later published in the sixty-third issue of the fan-run non-commercial dojinshi Stardust (Uchūjin) in 1963. In short a young man decides to sacrifice himself in a 1945 battle with American troops, and just before he dies a strange man comes to him to tell him that history has gotten off course, and that Japan was never supposed to be in the war. The stranger goes back in time to fix the situation (by usurping power from those in the Emperor’s council who were pro-war) and the young man wakes in the postwar future to find he is on a picnic with his family. 197 Komatsu Saikyo. “The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Ochazuke no aji)” SF Magazine. January 1963. 198 Komatsu Saikyo.”Special Report: 1 st Japanese SF Convention” SF Magazine. August, 1962. 6. 199 Komatsu Saikyo, editor. SF Fantasia. March 1977. 200 To name just a few others who began as fans and went on to become professionals: Ishihara Fujio ( 石原藤夫) who went on to preside over the “Hard SF Labratory” that helped fix hard sf as a distinct category in Japan began as a Tamagawa University Professor of Engineering and started his career with an honorable mention in the first Hayakawa SF Contest. Kanbayashi Chōhei ( 神林長平) debuted in 1979 in the 5 th Hayakawa SF Contest, went on to win the Seiun Award eight times, and was chosen in the 2006 “Hayakawa’s SF Magazine’s All-Time Best SF” poll 151 It is possible to read these movements of Komatsu and Takahashi being subsumed into the commercial enterprise, and in particular that commercial binary which puts consumers on one side of an equation and producers on the other. Using science fiction as an oppositional act to make do in their daily lives is then subsumed into what Fiske calls the "colonizing organization" of production. But just as Fiske complicated our understanding of a consumer by pointing out that consumers are constantly in the process of making meaning out of a wide range of media tools, so too is it far more interesting to consider Komatsu as he was – someone who embodied both an active and publicly acknowledged “pro” and representative “fan.” The notion that the production is intent on a kind of colonial organization suggests that producers consider themselves not simply part of the larger media sphere, but in control of it. Yet this is belied by the place science fiction, and SF Magazine, held within the larger sphere of popular media in Japan in the 1960s. While SF Magazine was the first and longest running commercial magazine in Japan, it remained a specialized magazine, or senmonshi, whose distribution and readership was considerably smaller than more general and popular weekly or monthly magazines consumed by the populace at large. 201 Komatsu and others like him are represented by the bodies on SF Magazine’ s covers. These amorphous images stand in for images of readers, in part because of the larger strategies of representation mass media magazines employed in Japan (previously discussed in the chapter on as the third most important SF writer. Toyota Aritsune ( 豊田有恒), who started writing fiction in middle school, but who moved into writing science fiction after he was given the first issue of SF Magazine by a friend, went on to win the first Hayakawa Fiction Contest in 1961, write half a dozen SF books, edited dozens more, wrote a dozen nonfiction books, collaborated with Tezuka Osamu and others on television programs, and served as the President of the SF Author’s Pen Club for several years. Hanmura Ryō (半村良) also had his first writing debut in the 34rd Hayakawa SF Contest, where he placed third, helped found the Japanese SF Writer’s Club, and was rated as the 7 th most important SF writer in Japan in the same 2006 survey. 201 Books and Magazine Published (1945-2005). Shuppan News Co., Ltd. Web. 15 Mar. 2015. Publication Yearbook. 152 Surreal Landscapes). During the 1960s, the reader was constantly articulated on the cover of mass media publications. When we consider the shapes in the illustrations of SF Magazine, just as the covers themselves related to a definition of science fiction as a whole (rather than one fiction), the bodies on the covers articulate over and over again more of the sf reading public The inhabitants are the very community consuming the magazines. The facts of “The Magazine of Science Fiction & Fact” Fukushima put the “science” into “science fiction” with regular features that were more science news and scholarly article than speculation. This section considers the ways in which this was not a continual celebration of utopian science, but rather an extended critical engagement with both the codes of science fiction as they existed outside of Japan and the facts of science that were conveyed by leading Japanese scientists and science writers. Reading practices of SF Magazine readers were products of not only their interest in the fictions, but also the particular ways of seeing fact and fiction together in the same magazine. Part of the appeal of any particular issue was this dual purpose: entertainment and education. And so fan practice, the practice of understanding science fiction, is the result, the product, of not only participation but also a particular way of seeing that constantly moved between the fictional and the real. That particular way of seeing is informed just as much by the scientific facts presented in the magazine as it is constructed by the scientific fictions. Fukushima painstakingly introduced every author with a short biographical note that not only presented birthplace and schooling, but also characterized the type of science fiction for which the writer was known. Many of these notes on authors began with the words, “True SF Fans will already know…” creating a sense that even if the reader did not know of the author, 153 they should. These notes also served to establish a common ground as they explained histories of elements within the stories (like the history of teleportation in sf), the prominence of a certain author, or tropes that were connected to scientific inquiry. In the April 1960 issue, Fukushima’s note on the Robert Heinlein story “We Also Walk Dogs” explains there is a type of story called “Heinleinesque” (hainrainesuku) that means “grand, but also minutely detailed; that is to say it has a Gothic like Heinlein-styled space-fiction meaning…it wonderfully uses paradoxes.” 202 This little passage not only valorizes Heinlein himself, but also defines his style. In much the same way that Hugo Gernsback insisted the science fiction stories he published in Amazing must be based on science fact, the fictions in SF Magazine were explicitly linked by a variety of features with the scientific progress occurring in the 1960s. Rather than fictionalizing these scientific advances, these articles read much like science textbooks for the amateur reader. Among them were the three-year long Kusaka Jitusuo series “Earths’ Story,” the first segment of which appeared in the first issue of SF Magazine, 203 the continual translations of Issac Asimov’s nonfiction science essays, and hard sf writer and science scholar Ishihara Fujio’s “SF Physics Primer” - a twelve part series explaining relativity to readers from 1968 through 1969. The content of the recurring column 21 st Century Dreams featured a rotating roster of scientists who speculated on how life would be lived in the future based on new technology. These sections all included scientific diagrams, from the rendering of wormholes to the depiction of star charts. 202 Fukushima Masami. Note. SF Magazine. July, 1960. 37. (see Introduction, n. 1) 203 Written by science critic Kusaka Jitsuo on the history of the earth from our understandings of atoms to the end of the universe, Kusaka’s work reads much like a modern day scientific textbook. The feature summarizes what the atomic structure is and how all stars are made out of specific atoms couched in an easily readable language addressed to lay people. 154 The recurring “Science Topics” (saiensu topikusu) section, a two- or three-page spread printed on glossy while paper (instead of the pulp of the rest of the pages) in every issue in the 1960s, featured short descriptions with photographs of new inventions and developed technologies from around the world. Although only a paragraph or two long, these items were bulletins on the most up to date scientific research in the world, and included entries on soviet submarines and satellites, 204 moon rockets, new information on the sun, the digging of the French-England tunnel 205 the development of new wings for the Japanese anti-submarine aircraft, and new Soviet methods for detecting earthquakes. 206 These sections stand apart from the fictional contents due to their colorful production. Like the other scientific content, they are a delight to peruse in part because they mix the graphic and the textual. They also ground the scientific facts presented in each paragraph with a photographic image. While Roland Barthes’ probing of the nature and essence of photography in Camera Lucida suggests there is both an emotional and a cultural or political interpretation of a photograph, the way the photographs are used here is, as Barthes articulates, “a certificate of presence” - specifically, of scientific presence. 207 The photographs are the concrete visual manifestation of the scientifically speculative, anchoring the magazine in the factual development of science around the world. For example, the entry titled “Jump into Space (America)” (figure 40) from the August 1969 SF Magazine “Science Topics” column details the newest methods developed to test how to get man, not satellites, into orbit. The photograph at the left is one of the test devices that 204 Fukushima Masami. Science Topics. SF Magazine. No. 14. March, 1961. (see Introduction, n. 1) 205 Fukushima Masami. Science Topics. SF Magazine. No. 31. July, 1962. (see Introduction, n. 1) 206 Fukushima Masami. Science Topics. SF Magazine. No. 102. December, 1967. (see Introduction, n. 1) 207 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. Reprint edition. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. 87. 155 figure 40: “Jump into Space (America)” article and illustration. helped scientists learn to navigate the space environment. The image caption reads “jump that locked up space,” as this is part of the testing apparatus that is helping astronauts achieve manned flights further and further out into orbit around the earth. More important than the particulars of the news item, the green-tone photograph shows the mechanical apparatus which has a physicality not necessarily seen in the surreal imagery of the covers and interior illustrations of fiction. Barthes points out, “[f]rom a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.” 208 In contrast to the surreal evocation of the cover imagery, the photograph of the space capsule lends weight to the news contained in this section. Its very nuanced representation and shading articulate a 208 Ibid., 89. 156 relationship to the real not just for the photograph itself, but for the news item that is part of the larger mediasphere in which science fiction operates. The science fictional content did, however, occasionally blur boundaries. A column called “Fantastic World” (sekaifantasutiku), which began in 1961 and ran through 1969, featured weird tales from news reports about everything from telepathy and real-life alien abduction to body transfer and the reason Egypt was doomed. This served to not only contribute funny stories but also incorporate an element of the supernatural amidst all of the emphasis on science fact. These stories, however, are almost never illustrated with diagrams or photographs. Jenkins notes, Fan culture muddies those boundaries [between high and low, between good taste and bad], treating popular texts as if they merited the same degree of attention and appreciation as canonical texts. Reading practices (close scrutiny, elaborate exegesis, repeated and prolonged reading, etc.) acceptable in confronting a work of “serious merit” seem perversely misapplied to the more “disposable” texts of mass culture. 209 SF Magazine’ s Fantastic World feature was engaged not in muddying high and low boundaries, but rather in blurring the line between science fact and science fantasy. Fantastic fictions were side by side with fantastic discoveries, the absurd given as much attention as the crackpot. Jenkins goes on to say, “Fan interpretive practice differs from that fostered by the educational system and preferred by bourgeois culture not simply in its object choices or in the degree of its intensity, but often in the types of reading skills it employs, in the ways that fans approach texts.” Japanese science fiction fans were taught to approach texts through Fukushima’s editorial notes and introductions, through Isaac Asmov’s essays on science and the 209 Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers, 17. (see Introduction, n. 19) 157 writing of science fiction, through the notes of the Hayakawa SF Contest judges, and through the continual insistence on science as the primary backbone of these stories. The criteria for a good story were not the same as the criteria for a more popular fiction. The emphasis was on original, exciting, new ways of thinking that incorporated specific scientific ways of knowing. Defining the terms in “SF Dictionary” The importance of defining terms visually and textually cannot be overstated. In the same way the spotlight on the July 1960 cover (figure 41, below) gives weight to the dark humanoid forms, a host of new words word structured the written conversation of science fiction. A common language particular to this community was continually articulated in these first years in notes on each fiction, editor’s introductions to fiction, the editor’s introduction to the magazine, and two additional features: “SF Dictionary” and “Space Fancyclopedia.” These features introduced katakana 210 words based on both the scientific and science fictional vocabulary that had become common or emerged from English-language science fiction. At the same time, familiar Japanese words written in kanji 211 were rearticulated in a science fictional context. Old kanji were moreover employed in new compounds, much like the blends and portmanteaus of words in the English language that are so popular in English-language sf. These textual and 210 Katakana is the Japanese syllabary that is primarily used for translation of foreign language words into Japanese, particularly writing loan words or gairaigo, and technical and scientific terms; although it is also similar to italics in English in that it is used for emphasis, and to textually represent onomatopoeia. 211 Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in modern Japanese writing along with hiragana and katakana. Because they were adapted from Chinese writing systems to reflect Japanese language a single kanji may be used to write one more words, and most kanji have at least two pronunciations based on either the on’yomi or sound reading, which is the Japanese approximation of the Chinese pronunciation; or the kun’yomi or native reading, which is the pronunciation of the Japanese word that closely approximated the meaning of the Chinese character when it was introduced. 158 visual articulations show the emergence, and also the productive instability, of this new discourse. Readership and the science fiction public were initially ill-defined, which was reflected on the cover of the seventh issue 212 of SF Magazine (figure 41, right) - the first cover that has bodies of any kind. These are not realistic bodies; they are shadows that flicker in the distance, shapes which become insubstantial, readers who do not yet know which way they are going or who they are. The bright light of the central yellow panel shines on them like a spotlight, lending some definition to the amorphous shapes. figure 41: July 1960 SF Magazine This highlight suggests that these shapes can come into focus, and the magazine can be the instrument of that focus. Although the bodies are black, they become insubstantial in the background of the image; their cursory gestures towards humanoid shape are reduced to the briefest of lines. They do not rest on a single plane, suggesting a receding perspective, but the divide between ground and background is undefined. Bodies in the foreground are tangible but fade away into abstraction. Though the image centers on these bodies, their very slim and elongated nature suggests they are in the process of becoming. They are on the edge of emergence – the edge of concrete appearance. 212 Nakajima Seikan. SF Magazine. July, 1960. (see Introduction, n. 1) 159 These figures are in the process of being defined just as the words being used within the fictional texts were in the process of being defined. In March of 1960, the very last page of the magazine’s second issue introduced the “SF Dictionary” regular feature. Each issue announced only three or four words - this was in no way a comprehensive dictionary of all of the new words being introduced in the translated fictions or being produced in Japanese to describe new imaginary forms. Nevertheless, each of these definitions reflected a variety of histories of these terms. From android (andoroido アンドロイド) and astrogation (asutorogaishon アストロガイション) in the March 1960 issue, 213 to time travel (taimu toraberu タイム・トラベル) and teleportation (terepōteishon テレポーテイション) in the July 1960 issue, the words are primarily introduced in katakana with their English equivalent in quotes after the katakana word is spelled out. The definitions of these terms contained references not only to the fictions where they appeared in the magazine, but also to general knowledge about the terms themselves and their histories in translated novels that either had been read or should be read by the good science fiction reader. These dictionary columns also transformed the use of Japanese words. For example, the phrase idō harō 移動歩廊 is glossed in English with four different translations: sidebelt, express way, Way, and rolling road. The kanji taken all together convey the sense of a moving walkway, as idō is the word used for movement; its common use is as a verb rather than a noun. Harō, on the other hand, is a word often used to end a compound; its two kanji are separately the words for 213 Some of the other terms spelled out in katakana: hydroponic plant, BEM (for bug-eyed monster), blaster, time travel, teleportation, gravity belt, Armageddon, and space warp. Fukushima Masami “SF Dictionary” SF Magazine. March-October, 1960. (see Introduction, n. 1) 160 walking and corridor. This is not a compound that is part of common or everyday Japanese speech or writing. It is, instead, a new and unusual usage. In these early dictionaries, the largest change is visible in the words that are familiar but redefined. Most interesting is the entry on “immortality” or fushi 不死: In the SF idea of the term, there are many ways of thinking that come from fantastic and bizarre literary concepts prior to SF. There is no single “immortality.” Consequently, among SF fans, there are those who are prejudiced because they have a specific way of thinking about the idea of immortality....For example, in SF you really aren’t able to have the idea of having the power of immortality through supernatural means. When examples of the phenomenon of immortality that aren’t supernatural are found, there is always an SF reason for why they have it. In SF immortality, usually there’s some explanation for the nature of this kind of life, and there are two kinds of examples. In the first, the essence of life is explained as an electrical thing, and so consequently it can be recharged. In the other type, it is understood as a combination of chemical compositions, and similarly through the administration of chemicals they’re able to manipulate rejuvenation for eternal life. In this issue’s “SF Library” we introduce Robert Sheckly’s “Immortality, Inc.” where there are services for an electrical process of life. But in Sheckly’s case, the particular characteristic of the story is that life achieves an independence separated from the flesh. 214 The entry begins by separating out the use of the term in sf from it’s use in other spaces, even though this sentence also acknowledges this new usage has a history in fantasy. The definition reflects readership and exemplifies educational practices while at the same time rearticulating the definition of a recognizable Japanese word – estranging it to have a particular 214 SF のアイデアには SF 以前の幻想怪奇小説的な概念に発想の場を求めているものがたくさんあります。不死もまたその一つです。したがって SF ファンの中には、不死という概念が出てくるともう毛嫌いしてその作品を棄ててしまう人もあるようですが、SF 的仮設とするかぎりにおいて、これもまた、一応の合理的説明を持っているのです。例えば、超自然の力で不死の能力を与えるとかいったアイデアは SF には出てきません。不死を超自然でない現象として説明するところに、SF たる所以があるのです。SF における不死はふつう、生命そのものの性質の解釈に発して、二通りに説明されます。その一つは、生命を本質を電気的なものと解釈し、したがって再充電しうるというわけ。もう一つは、生命を化学的組成のある組合せと解し、同様にして、化学薬品の投薬によって、回春操作 rejuvenation manipulation し得ると、まあこういったことによります。本誌四月号の SF らいぶらりいで紹介したロバート・シェクリイの「不死販売株式会社」”Immortality, Inc.” もたしか、生命を電気的なものとして扱いっていたようでした。ただ、その場合は生命を肉体と離して独立して存在するものとしていたのが特長でした。Fukushima Masami. “SF Dictionary” SF Magazine. October 1960. (see Introduction, n. 1) 161 science fictional meaning. Fukushima’s history of the term in other types of genre publications begins with other textual definitions, then enunciates fan opinions by pointing out that fans don’t particularly like the notion of the immortal. That fan voices are represented so close to the beginning of the definition tells us how important they are to these definitions. Fukushima then outlines the scientific imaginary behind the usage in two examples, and points readers to the column where the Sheckley is discussed, making the magazine part of the particular encounter with Sheckley’s vision. The term is recast in both a singular usage – the Sheckley example – as well as the more generalized examples of the biological or the electrical. These same kinds of practices are repeatedly articulated in these definitional segments and throughout the magazine, and while the “SF Dictionary” was only a regular feature in ten issues, a new feature written by science journalist Kusaka Hideaki and called “Space Fancyklopedia (supesu fansaikuropedeia)” 215 ran for another thirty issues (until 1963). Although Kusaka’s feature tended to focus more on explicitly scientific vocabulary, particularly the vocabulary of the cosmos, he still used the same style of definition set out by Fukushima, relating the term to science fiction trends and stories, and providing a literal definition. The title of the feature itself tells signals the audience it was seeking both to define and to inform the fan. 215 Kusaka Hideaki. “Space Fancyclopedia” SF Magazine. No.20 - No.31 July, 1962. (see Introduction, n. 1) 162 Giving voice to readers in “Letters to the Editor” and on comment cards figure 42: November 1960. SF Magazine Emerging fan voices went hand in hand with the trend of emerging fan bodies, as seen on the cover illustration of the November 1960 issue of SF Magazine. 216 In the first year of publication, this is the only other cover that that contained bodies. The humanoid shapes are malformed, abstracted and stand on the edge of cracking; they are elongated and extended, missing arms and even heads. But they are bodies, and they take up space and capture the eye in the foreground of a landscape cracking apart. Their grouping, with two figures standing together and a third separate but possibly moving toward them (especially as the two right-most figures share similar coloring despite their relative lack of proximity), suggests the beginning of an alliance – the beginning of a group coming together. The magazine bearing this cover is the second issue that explicitly incorporates reader voices – it is the second issue with a “letters” section. Five readers occupy space in the magazine, just as three new bodies occupy space on the cover. In color and shape, they are set apart from the craquelure pattern of the ground and the decaying and cracked walls of the tower before which they stand in, modeling a group coming together amidst ruins. 216 Nakajima Seikan. SF Magazine. November, 1960. (see Introduction, n. 1) 163 These three bodies are not precisely the consumer-subjects of other mass magazines, nor are they quite sexualized objects to be consumed. They are, however, figures at home in this imagined landscape; they are estranged bodies to be consumed along with the estranged landscape itself – a strangeness that can be read as a citation of the real-life survivors of atomic and military bomb blasts, people whose bodies were violently transformed by the viciousness of war. These limbless and headless bodies are upright, moving through a cracked and broken world. Had these bodies been taken out of the context of the background, they would have become postmodern sculpture. But they are not context-less. They are only viewed within this landscape, where bodies are morphing in a disintegrating world. There are no clear indications that these figures are victims of specific war-like violence – but they are haunted by it, shadowed by the building behind them as the building is a shadow of the real-life broken landscapes of Japan. Even the soft pastel colors soften, but don’t erase, the sense of lurking decay evinced by the cracking ground and disintegrating structure, in particular the shadowy lines along the bottom. They are the first group to come together in this post-apocalyptic world, just as SF Magazine used a number of features to display the first voices of its readership. SF Magazine enabling readers to communicate with the magazine editor and other readers, creating a conversation within the pages, in a number of features. The most explicit of these were the “letters” section and mail-in comment cards that asked readers to choose their favorite fictions from earlier issues and send them in along with their comments. These are not particularly original or new methods of featuring reader voices; neither would have been out of place in American sf magazines. Yet they are part of the integral practice of not just building readership, but building fandom. Sam Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom points to the letters section as pivotal in defining American fandom as well: 164 The appearance of readers’ letters in the ‘Discussions’ column of Amazing Stories marked the beginning of science fiction fandom as we know it today….And in the old Amazing fans were ready and willing to discuss anything. The eagerness with which they prattled scientific talk was directly traceable to some scientific fact which had aroused their interest in its extrapolated counterpart in fiction. 217 These letter sections gave American fans the opportunity to connect with each other across distances, collapsing the space between readers onto a single page - a page where their own interest in and excitement about a scientific fact, along with a discussion of the implications of that fact, were made clear. More than praise for the magazine, though, what’s so important about these letters (in both the Japanese and the American context) is that the writers were encouraged to speak to each other. The letter sections of SF Magazine show Japanese readers were concerned more with exploring the definition of science fiction than with the specific science facts that so concerned the American readers. 218 SF Magazine began featuring letters to the editor in a feature titled “Teleport” (terepōto てれぽーと) in the first year of publication. The first few letters were hardly longer than a few sentences, and featured compliments on fiction from the last issue, favorite features, and mentions of fictions in other magazines that might also be considered science fiction. Each of these early letters also had postscripts written by the editor – one or two lines responding directly to the question, concern, or opinion offered by the letter writer. This back and forth points to the small community, but also the emphasis on reciprocal communication. As readership grew, the letters lengthened to entire columns and editor responses dropped off. Although the section never expanded beyond a single page, the letter 217 Moskowitz, Sam. Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom. Westport, Conn: Hyperion Pr, 1974. 5. 218 The emphasis and discussion of science fact occurred in other features of the magazine discussed later. In particular the “Science Corner” and “Science Topics” regular features and the “21 st Century Imagination” regular features. 165 writers began responding to each other. In 1965, letter writer “30 year old guy” (sanjyū otoko) 219 suggests that the teenage reader trying to define what was and wasn’t science fiction in the previous month’s column should understand that “while the term SF is a new one, it has existed for 2000 years. Plato, Aristophanies, Ovid’s writings were all outstanding SF…” 220 What was and wasn’t allowed in science fiction was not simply being legislated by Fukushima Masami as the editor of the magazine, but also appears in these letters and voices. Fans were setting boundaries for themselves. This particular fan’s boundaries are incredibly broad, as he also argues later in his letter that there are many fictions that should be considered sf even if their author did not intend to write sf, and that young people should not be so quick to judge by the narrow categories that began with Asimov and Heinlein. This is just one definition of the many that can be found even as late as the December 1967 issue letters section, where Kakinomoto Yoshiyuki argues the fictions of Tsutsui Yasutaka in the last couple of issues mark the sign of a new trend of sf, one with more mysterious elements than dark humor. 221 What’s important about the movement from these early letters to the ones at the end of the 1960s is that while the letter in the 1965 issue wasn’t particularly unusual for focusing on non-Japanese writers and their place in science fiction, the letters in the late 1960s, including the one cited above, not only mention but actively argue for their own view of a sf grounded by Japanese writers. While Kakinomoto’s full letter does mention foreign works, it’s only after discussing Tstusui along with two other Japanese authors: Komatsu Saikyo, and Ishihara Fujio (a hard-sf writer and advocate). 219 In this particular month’s letters, as well as the previous month, there were some who chose to go by monikers or title rather than use their own names. However, this practice was not particularly common, and most letter writers not only signed their names but responded to previous letters using each other’s names. 220 30 year-old guy. Teleport letter. SF Magazine. No. 64. January, 1965. (see Introduction, n. 1) 221 Kakinomoto Yoshiyuki. Teleport letter. SF Magazine. December, 1967. 202 (see Introduction, n. 1) 166 These voices, and the transition recognizing the “best” sf as written outside Japan to seeing it as written by Japanese authors by the end of the 1960s, is also reflected in the published results of the comment cards. Each magazine had a pull-out card that readers could fill out and mail into the magazine with their opinions. 222 Beginning in the third April 1960 issue, a small feature called “Subscriber Card Report” (aidokusha kādo no hōkoku) contained the results, though later it came to be called “Popularity Counter” (ninki kauntā). It was here that Fukushima Masami insisted, in 1961, “SF Magazine is your magazine. With regards to the plans of the magazine, if you have requests, please without hesitation let the editorial department know.” 223 On the one hand this is savvy marketing, and on the other it is a sign of how much the readers could not only influence but also determine content. Perpetually beginning with an exhortation that readers please mail in their responses, this column identified the most popular fiction from the previous issue, then listed the names of subscribers who won a raffle for the newest edition of Hayakawa Fantasy (a paperback book series also published by Hayakawa Press). The favorite from the first issue of publication was Arthur C. Clark’s “Rescue Party,” with Sheckly’s “The Prize of Peril” coming in second, then Asimov’s “The Dying Night,” Bloch’s “The Hellbound Train,” and finally Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy.” 224 Throughout the decade, fan favorites continue to be foreign works including those by Arthur C. Clark, Stanislaw Lem, Alfred Bester, and others, but by 1965 these top five lists also 222 Each comment card asked for name, address, pseudonym, where the reader heard about the magazine from (shop, new magazine, another magazine, person/friend, or other), gave them space to detail which story they thought was best in the last issue and to give at least a couple of sentences explaining why, and then asked them to number their top five favorite stories. Those who returned their cards would be entered into a raffle to receive either a new Hayakawa Mystery or Hayakawa Fantasy pocket paperback, with the winners announced monthly by name in the magazine. 223 SF マガジンは皆様の雑誌です。企画に関するご要望がありましたらどしどし編集部にお聞かせ下さい。 Fukushima Masami. Notice. SF Magazine. January, 1961. (see Introduction, n. 1) 224 Fukushima Masami. Subscriber Card Report. SF Magazine. April, 1960. 43. (see Introduction, n. 1) 167 begin to include Japanese authors. The most popular stories were by Komatsu Saikyo, whose works beat out Abe Kobo’s literary and Marxist-leaning sf, Ishihara Fujio’s hard sf, Mayumura Taku’s imaginative new worlds, and Hoshi Shinichi’s short humorous joking sf (all of which made the lists at one time or another). Komatsu’s works who repeatedly took first, second, or third place in the monthly polls. Halfway through the decade, then, readers voting on their favorite stories began to articulate a belief that Japanese authors had something particularly compelling to say, with Komatsu’s stories at the top. From the publishing of reader names to the SF Magazine Reader’s Award, the readers had a textual presence in the magazine that reflected their critical contributions in defining the boundaries of the sf community. In 1961 the magazine began publishing the names of three readers who completed comment cards. Often these readers were given a free issue of another Hayakawa Press publication as a thank you. More to the point, this is the first time (though in no way the last) that readers were openly acknowledged in the magazine – their names take up space, they are being identified as contributors. Their contributions, though primarily identifying favorite and least favorite authors, were taken into account by Fukushima and later editors, and appeared in every issue for the first four years of publication. The recognition of reader favorites had a more formal expression in 1989 in the Hakakawa’s SF Magazine Reader’s Award. For these awards readers voted on best foreign short story, best Japanese story, and best illustrator. By establishing this award the magazine formally recognized the taste-making power of its readers. 168 Author contests and other solicitations for fiction Every issue of SF Magazine contained a plea to its readers to contribute content. These pleas were, in Fiske’s words, attempting to assure "the very success of the bureaucratic commercial order [in order to] paradoxically, [create] the means of its own subversion." 225 In other words, Fukushima Masami’s editorial notes continually extended the means of the magazine’s own subversion by his very insistence on fan participation. Over and over, Fukushima not only suggested fans send in their thoughts via fan letters and comment cards, but also energized the imaginations of those reading by asking them to produce their own fictions. One of the ways SF Magazine also adopted particularly sf-tactics in the magazine was to solicit readers to write their own stories – hosting amateur fiction beside the professionally translated. For example, in the very first issue the following request appears: Moon Themes are requested For future space stories, we’ve already chosen a theme: the moon. It’s probably a fantasy but we somehow or other think we’ll get many tens of stories of conquest or exploration. Few are experienced with writing these kinds of stories, and these days, the moon theme has become a bit clichéd, and sadly hasn’t really been dealt with outside of children’s literature. Also, for us earthlings we haven’t been able to see the shape of the far side of the moon. However, we have just now acquired a photograph from the Soviet space station, and would like to ask that you please write works that take up our new moon theme using this new data. According to the Soviet science academy, the moon’s craters and large fissures wrap the surface of the moon. It seems like there’s really trash there too, and the moon’s fissures may break apart after practically no time. Maybe this is one thread that could be taken up in a fiction! Also through happy chance published in this issue is Asimov’s “Dust of 50 hundred million years” and if you give it a second read it will become even more interesting, we think. 226 There are three different critical operations performed in this tiny editorial note on page 23 of the first issue of SF Magazine. At the outset, future fictions within this magazine are 225 Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture, 34. (see ch. 4, n. 187) 226 Fukushima Masami. SF Magazine. December 1959. 30. (see Introduction, n. 1) 169 explicitly being set apart from "clichéd” children’s fiction. Next, there is the repeated call for reader participation in magazine content – Fukushima is calling not on specific sf authors, but instead on his entire audience to submit their own stories. Finally, these fictions are supposed to take up new scientific information as their themes. Instead of speculating or recycling overworked fantasies, readers were to use the data provided by Soviet satellites. Or they could draw from Asimov’s nonfictional article Science: Dust of Ages 227 (translated in the Japanese as “Dust of 50 hundred million years”) that discusses how much space dust enters into Earth’s atmosphere (and also, at the end, is dropped onto the moon) and itself was based on an article in the journal Nature by scientist Hands Pettterson. This is the first of many calls to SF Magazine readers to submit their own work – to consider themselves both producers and consumers. While it does come from a top-down request, it sets the stage for new voices who will eventually be featured in the magazine in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most famous and most clearly articulated call for fiction was the Hakawaka SF Contest, which ran intermittently from the 1960s through the 1990s and became the showplace of new authors, launching their science fiction writing careers. The first three contests were held in 1961, 1962, and 1964. Strangely, that no ultimate winner was chosen in these first three contests. A number of honorable mentions were handed out, and these writers became the defacto winners for each contest. The judges were so strict that these initial contests did not have stories that they all agreed on. Part of the inability to declare a winner may have been because the Toho Studio-affiliated judges were quite clearly interested in short stories that could be quickly turned into films. But Abe Kobo, who also served as one of the judges for the first three 227 Asimov, Isaac. “Science: Dust of Ages” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1958. 35-38. 170 contests, also noted that it was because the fictions submitted needed to have “more than just new raw materials and new subjects” and additionally needed to “construct logic.” For Abe, science fiction was more than just the contents. His notes on the first contest articulate his definition: SF is essentially about constructing logic, and this is the pleasure of both the process and the result. One can say it’s an extreme thing, but “logic” is really a logical lie. And so the logic of this lie, above some pretention to a seeming truth, is the investigation to the limit of the interesting characteristic of the lie. And so once we’ve reached this point, this becomes the highest form of literature. In the minds of SF authors, if they have at least this ambition, have to take on this kind of severe but appropriate attitude. It’s because of this meaning that there isn’t a winner in this particular contest, although this should not necessarily bring a feeling of despair. There is plenty of potential that has been recognized here. 228 The first, second, and third place stories should have received a cash award, with first prize promised 30,000 yen (approximately three-hundred dollars) at the outset. 229 The first contests were advertised in the magazine as both a way to get your own science fiction story published and a recruitment tool for film scripts, as three of the judges were from Toho Studios, the film company made famous world-wide for the Godzilla films in 1954. 230 The magazine 228 詮衞をおわって痛感したことは、SF を書こうとする人たちに、SF が、たんに素材・内容の新しさだけでなく表現の新しさをも必要とする、という自覚が足りないということだった。そのため、全体にふるめかしい感じがつきまとうばかりでなく、SF が求める現実感ーー現実の手ざわりが、非常に類型的で、弱いものになっている。これは、SF にとって、致命的な欠陥ではなかろうか。 SF は本質的に、論理を組み立て、そのプロセスと結果を娯しむものでなければならない。極端なことをいえば、論理はウソの論理でもいいのだ。そしてそのウソの論理を、本当らしく見せかけるより、ウソ独自の面白さを極限までつきつめるーーそこまで到達すれば、文学としても最高のものになり得る。すくなくとも SF 作家の精神には、それだけの野心と、それにふさわしい厳しい態度とが、なければならない。今度のコンテストで入選作が出なかったのは、こうした意味で、かならずしも失望するには当たらないと思う。可能性は、充分にみとめられたのである。 229 Cash awards are not uncommon in Japanese literary and pulp magazines. Prizes go from a million yen (roughly $10,000) for the most prestigious literary award for new short fiction, the Akutagawa Prize, to a couple of hundred yen for poetry and short fiction contests. In 1974, the 4 th contest awarded 75,000 yen ($750) for first prize, and went up to 200,000 yen ($2,000) in 1979 for the 5 th contest. 230 Judges for the first contest were literary star Abe Kobo, Asahi Shinbun science writer Hanazawa Sakuichiro, Toho Studio executives Tanaka Tomoyuki and Masumi Mujimoto; Tsuburaya Eiji, a Japanese special effects 171 solicited new fiction from readers, and made connections to the wider world. There were 580 entries to the first contest, and from the twelve finalists, eight authors and their stories received SF Award mentions: Komatsu Saikyo was awarded the “effort” award for “Peace on Earth”, Toyota Aritsune’s “Time Cannon” won 3 rd place Honorable Mention, Mayumura Taku’s “Junior Idea Man” won 2 nd place, and Yamada Yoshio’s “Earth Egoism” won 1 st place. However, these placements were not the grand prize – they were honorable mention awards. Although Abe praised Yamada Yoshi’s fiction in the same notes I quoted above, and supported it in first place, he still felt authors needed to further explore the intellectual potential of science fiction. The June 1962 cover 231 suggests the gathering crowds beginning to form into sf fandom during this time. They linger at the edge of the frame of the futuristic city. The city clearly inspired by American artists like Paul Malon, whose 1950s “cities of tomorrow” cityscapes were featured in Amazing and Wonder Stories. But unlike Malon and other American and Russsian futurists, Manabe’s city is populated by shadows that, once again, hang at the edge of the foreground in the bottom of the frame, almost figure 43: June 1962 SF Magazine director; the founder of Hayakawa Press, Hayakawa Kiyoshi; and the SF Magazine Editorial Department. It’s also possible that Fukushima sought out Toho Studios to partner on the contest in order to bolster the prize money, which is fairly generous for a small magazine just getting underway. 231 Manabe Hiroshi. SF Magazine. June 1962. (see Introduction, n. 1) 172 entirely obscured by the magazine’s subheading. They have grown from just a few in earlier covers to the many. Still not clearly articulated or realistically rendered, they are nevertheless multiple bodies on the roads to the future. Roundtables and reporting on the outside – fan conventions, art exhibitions, film fests Readers were invited to consume casual conversations about science fiction, giving them a sense that they were part of a spontaneous discussion. The December 1961 issue hosted the first of hundreds of round-table discussions (zadankai) where authors and critics gathered to discuss what the potential of sf film would be. 232 Japanese authors featured in the magazine were also invited to round table discussions about the meaning and use of science fiction, and these conversations and debates were featured in the magazine’s pages. The format of these conversations was casual, and often featured a photograph of the discussants gathered around a table at a restaurant or bar, cigarettes or drinks in hand. These articles were not a narrative write up, but rather a transcript of the conversation, with the speaker’s name in bold before a faithful write up of their remarks. Reading these one has the sense of sitting at the same table as the discussants, turning from person to person as they contribute their own opinions and move from topic to topic (or off topic). While one speaker often acted as moderator, posing questions to the group, the other participants ranged in expertise. Some were the writers featured in the magazine, others were fans, editors, producers, filmmakers: the audience and the creators of science fiction. 232 “Round Table: What can we expect in SF Film?” SF Magazine. December 1963. 119-132. (see Introduction, n. 1) 173 Moreover, the roundtables were complimented by constant review features, from the first segment discussing sf film in Issue #1 through the SF Skanner monthly feature, developed in the mid 1960s, which listed good deals on great books - and where they could be purchased – as well as promoting new translations or different themes. Readers’ sense of participation was solidified not just through reviews and recommendations of what to read, but with the first Japanese sf convention held in 1962 and co- sponsored by SF Magazine and Uchujin (the dojinchi or fanzine). The first convention was attended by two-hundred people altogether, with authors, critics, filmmakers, publishers, dojinshi creators, reporters, and regular fans in attendance. SF Magazine also sponsored a series of sf movie screenings in Tokyo which were then written up in the magazine in a six-page spread. Those participating in these events, including the author’s groups, round table discussions, fan conferences, and the like, were predominately male. One simply has to look at the photographs of the discussions, and even the profiles of authors, to get the sense of gender disparity. This is not to say there wasn’t some attempt at inclusivity, but these attempts were often clearly and sometimes awkwardly marked. For example, in the first few paragraphs of Fukushima Masami’s report in SF Magazine on the first Japanese sf convention, he points out that fans had been so excited about the manga sketching workshop that they were willing to wait for a long time to be able to see the sketches. He notes, “Even the shapes of women fans could be seen.” 233 They could be seen, but their names were not associated with the magazine. The next page features a photograph of a reporter speaking with a young woman with the caption “Female fan being interviewed” without mentioning her name at all. 233 Fukushima Masami. “Special Report: First Japanese SF Convention (tokubetsu repotto: daiichikai nihon SF taikai)” SF Magazine. August, 1961. 6. (see Introduction, n. 1) 174 As reader participation in the community supported by SF Magazine solidified, so too did the images on the covers present more and more mimetically rendered bodies. Finally, in 1969, a series of covers indicated the space taken by the science fiction fan was complete. All six are by Hayakawa Shōbo staff illustrator Iwabuchi Keizō. Iwabuchi also produced a number of Ray Bradbury stories for SF Magazine. The bodies on the April through September 1969 SF Magazine series are remarkable in part because these covers are the only multi-cover series in the magazine’s first ten-year span that portrays bodies one after another. The series articulates the birth (or rebirth) of the body onto the pages and into the community of SF Magazine. These covers blur the boundary between space and body, suggesting a kind of evolution not from child to adult but rather from perception to articulation – and also suggests the performance of gender can shift and develop from outside to inside. Each image taken by itself puts the human body (a micro element) on the same plane as the macro elements of outer space, which fits into Tatsumi Takayuki’s construction of the 1960s as the age of science fiction in Japan most concerned with outer space. But coming one after another (without a fixed affiliation to a particular story), we must read them as a visually striking six-month long event that reveals the disunity of the body and of gendered performance. These are the organs of perception - the sense organs - beginning with the haptic, moving to the visual, aural, proceeding to the oral (either suggesting taste or possibly speech), head/mind, and finally muscle/physical – and only the latter three are specifically gendered. The last illustration is not the end, however, of this strange grouping, but rather another stage – the man is rendered not via his external display but rather by the outline of his muscles. The external has been turned inward at the same time that gender has transformed. 175 figure 44: April through September 1969 SF Magazine covers This series of six image comprises the visual representation of a stable fan identity found within the pages of the magazine. 234 By constructing pieces of bodies via illustrations of outer space, Iwabuchi illustrates the birth of desire out of the universe. Iwabuchi’s cover illustrations 234 Iwabuchi Keizō. SF Magazine. April – September, 1969. (see Introduction, n. 1) 176 articulate desire via sense organs – the fingers of the April cover both reach out to touch the star in outer space and remind the viewer of haptic sense itself. By articulating the impossible (the ability to touch a star), the cover simultaneously grounds and destabilizes the senses – the hand is both physically present and physically separate from the body in a way that hands can never be. The eye on the May cover is simultaneously looking at the viewer and a softly-lashed image to be looked at; the many shades of purple create both a sense of deep space and the depth of regard. The eyeball’s role as a planet surrounded by stars emphasizes both the materiality of the eye and its immaterial existence by linking the tiny sensory organ to massive interstellar phenomena that can only be consumed through that visual sense. Moreover, the transition to July’s cover is rendered in vibrant reds, outlining a mouth whose lips are made plump by the white stars (and clouds of stars) running through them, lips pursed to kiss. This is again an image where looking is an act of both desire and being desired; the lips invite a fetishistic appreciation for themselves not only as painted and touchable organs but also as a display of sexual excitement by their very plump redness. The most significant feature of the August cover is the swirling tresses of the woman. I discussed this image earlier as part of the realm of the sense/perception relating to the mind, supported by the fact that the woman’s features are almost entirely in shadow, including her eyes, and obscured by the textual ephemera (something Iwabuchi has no problems working around in his other covers). Yet her ability to use eyes, mouth, and ears is not what the artist is articulating here. Rather, it is the physical presence of her long hair that dominates the frame; the silky strands individually drawn with round texture that implies her hair is moving, swirling. The sensuousness of her hair is both sexually provocative and also sexually desirable. The final transformation, however, is where desire 177 originating from beneath the skin is shifted outward as we see the muscles of the man’s body straining upward. While there is not an explicitly articulated relationship of self to other in each panel, the transitions from fragment to fragment are constantly articulated with a readership (viewership) in mind. The series encapsulates the entirety of viewership. Moving from part to part the panels eventually create a whole. The emerging entity, however, is not presented at the end with the muscles of the mans body as the most complete articulation of reader, because that man is still incomplete. Instead, the emerging entity is the combination of reader parts, just as the emerging entity of science fiction fandom is a combination of all of the different people involved in it: readers, editors, writers, artists. Making meaning and becoming fans I opened this chapter with the vignette by Takahashi, who is clearly a collector as well as a reader. His article, “Japanese SF Magazine History,” was published in 1979 in an annual book summarizing magazine culture, The Magazine Book. 235 This article is filled with a mix of personal reflection and descriptions of the commercial market. Takahashi details his own relationship with the magazine, noting that when SF Magazine came out he was in high school and did not immediately recognize the importance of the magazine as he played with his friends, even as he was reading it. The inclusion of this kind of personal consumption in a historical 235 The full text of his comment: I’ve travelled to that secondhand bookstore countless times in dreams, and this time, in my hand was the extraordinary cover of the first issue. I’m such a slave of habit that I continually frequent secondhand bookstores and have collected more than sixty of SF Magazine’s back issues for around 100 yen a piece – SF Magazine’s value now is 200 yen, while Manhunt with its nude pinups is just 150 yen, and EQMM and Houseki and Hitchcock Magazine are all 100 yen used – in a few issues my collection will be complete, and so I had this dream for the first time about the first issue. 178 article, and the unknowingness of his consumption, suggests he only understood himself as a science fiction fan after he could reflect on his own history. What does it mean to suggest that fans have a different subjectivity from the mainstream? What does it mean to suggest they are simultaneously using and producing their own kind of culture? The call for submissions of fan-written stories, along with the active letter pages, are a few of the characteristics SF Magazine borrowed from American science fiction magazines to create a similar kind of investment and community feeling. Andrew Ross’ chapter on the development of the phrase “science fiction” in Strange weather: culture, science, and technology in the age of limits articulates the close community that arose from American science fiction in the 1920s. Editor Hugo Gernsback, in one of the first American magazines on science fiction Amazing Stories, developed active and invested science fiction fandom by allowing fans their say in the pages of the magazine: he published their letters, centered the fictions around a very tight relationship between science and the science fictional, and held contests that included fans writing their own stories in order to be published. In other words, Gernsback began the feedback loop between published materials, authors, and fans that we now recognize as characteristic of science fiction fandom in the American context. Indeed, it was fans whose letters were published in the magazine that coined the term “science fiction” (Gernsback had originally offered “scientification”). 236 Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture, suggests that we consider these readers not as passive consumers, but as readers who are both consuming and participating as fans. Jenkins states that “[h]istorically, science fiction fandom may be traced back to the letter columns of 236 Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits. London ; New York: Verso, 1991. 140. 179 Hugo Gernsbeck’s Amazing Stories, which provided a public forum by which fans could communicate with each other and with the writers their reactions to published stories…it was the rich interplay of writers, editors, and fans which allowed science fiction to emerge as a distinctive literary genre.” 237 Fans could talk directly to each other; these small circles became local clubs, later regional conventions, and by 1939 resulted in a world science fiction convention. In the American science fiction community, there has always been a component of audience participation: the convention. It’s a space where writers and producers spoke directly with readers, present awards, etc. Fiske discusses the way in which the politics of popular culture is not radical – it is not trying to overthrow the system that distributes power in the first place. Instead, popular culture is a micropolitics that has a pleasure of "producing meanings that are both relevant and functional" 238 since there is both resistance and relevance to the forms of domination. Those meanings are useable in everyday life, not entirely disruptive to it. The meanings again are produced from a text, not by a text. This is precisely the operation figure 45: May 1962 SF Magazine 237 Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers, 47. (see Introduction, n. 19) See also Ross 1991, Del Rey 1979, Warner 1969, Moskowitz 1954, and Carter 1977. 238 Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture, 46. 180 Fukushima asks of the magazine audience. It is also precisely why I suggest the science fiction fan is a specific type of subcultural identity – not politically resistant, but someone who is searching for a way to integrate technological change into daily life in a productive and non-disruptive way. It is a reader who is absolutely conscious of geopolitical stakes, especially an awareness of the Cold War, in a country filled with people who are all too aware of the risks of technology. Thus, the notion that there can be a micropolitics of pleasure explains why, even when SF Magazine’ s contents are at their most controversial - for instance, in the “Last World War!” March 1962 issue (see figure 45) - it did not seek to disrupt the readership from their pleasure like more formal surreal art. Instead, it created a space to negotiate pleasure in trauma – a space that prompted readers to discover pleasure in the atomic cloud as a rainbow. SF Magazine’ s structure supported the creation of a community beyond the presentation of translated works of fiction. Participation was encouraged and welcomed only in conjunction with interpretation – taking science and speculating on it. Production was not limited to a small circle of recognized authors, but extended to anyone who responded to the editor’s notes. The reader was already presumed to be a writer capable of taking up this challenge. Editorial notes, film, and fiction reviews presented author histories for each story, creating a sense of a small community. The language, the very terms of science fiction, were set out as part of the nonfictional content via multiple dictionary segments; these dictionaries defined the terms of sf even as they set forth a critical scientific and fantastic vocabulary. Beyond letters to the editor that featured the voices of magazine readers, monthly survey cards gathered reader opinions about both favorite fictions in each issue and future themes, with these results reported in subsequent issues. The first three Hayakawa Science Fiction contests not only introduced new 181 fiction solicited from readers, but also made connections to film and the literary world through the judges and their commentary. Finally, the frequent printing of transcripts from round table discussions, a particular favorite of Japanese intellectual discourse, legitimated science fiction as a serious subject of inquiry while also inviting readers into a conversation. Conclusion The magazine consistently elevated technological advances while continually acknowledging that technological change contained dangers. At times these changes intersected with Japan’s geopolitical relations with the world – these two were acknowledged and discussed in the pages of the magazine. These exchanges took place in editor’s notes, review columns, and even magazine introductions. But more often the most productive and revealing conversations occurred in the places of exchange where readers were not just acknowledged, but when their voices were featured: in the letters columns; in round table discussions; in reports on events sponsored by the magazine occurring in Tokyo itself. 182 Conclusion: Spectacle as embodiment in Japanese science fiction Throughout this project, I’ve argued the visual representations in science fiction have just as much to do with defining sf as the textual, although I’ve primarily concentrated on non- fictional structures found in SF Magazine. While working through theoretical concerns, I focused on the interplay both between cultures and between visuality and textuality as acts of adaptation and translation. I argued that landscape, as the dominant method of SF Magazine cover illustration in the 1960s, created an ideological space apart from other representational strategies. While this space was one of freedom from certain ideological constraints, it was also haunted by a kind of darkness that I read as the fictionalized representation of destruction. While the 1960s were certainly considered a time of booming economic and social ‘light’ for Japan, the pace of rebuilding was uneven and seen at the time as unstable, not inevitable. As I charted the non-fictional structures and content of SF Magazine, I articulated how they helped fans create a community whose solidity went hand in hand with the shadowy emergence of bodies on the covers. I ended with a discussion of the emergence of the posthuman fan (recalling my suggestion that science fiction is a kind of posthuman translation) with a series of six covers by Iwabuchi in 1969. The fandom emerged, as these bodies emerged, in a glorious spectacle – the effects of which this conclusion will consider. I write this conclusion in part to rehabilitate spectacle from its pejorative sense and value the notion of a visually striking performance and display. An event or scene defined in terms of its visual impact can and does have an effect on the viewer. Foucault is anti-spectacle. He argued in 1975’s Discipline and Punish that the fundamental change in social arrangements that occurred in the 1800s, that is the ending of public executions, marked the “decline of the 183 spectacle.” Instead, modern social relations are “the exact reverse of the spectacle” and “our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance.” He’s set up a contrast where in the past, the many saw the few, and in the modern era the few see the many. While this certainly tells us something about modern surveillance practices, it overlooks the proliferation not only of the image in day to day life, but also of the way in which media has saturated - perhaps even oversaturated and come to determine - experience, enabling hundreds of millions of people to see and admire the few. The panoptic cannot stand alone in determining power relationships, but rather stands in contrast to spectacle, which has not at all disappeared. Marxist Guy Debord’s 1967 The Society of the Spectacle is perhaps the best example of the way in which the term itself has been defined pejoratively, and his assessment of capitalism and modern society is perhaps the most violent critique of spectacle as show, display, pageant, exhibition: it is “not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” 239 Debord seeks to critically intervene and disrupt this mediation of life, which he finds ubiquitous in the farthest reach of capital. He objects because spectacle is not just the visual excess of mass-media technologies; it is instead “the dominant model of life.” 240 By adding gender into this mix via Judith Butler I propose that spectacle, in particular spectacle as the dominant model of life, as a space of agency, as set of images that, can and should be read. Reading this visual model of life critically expands our understanding of life in general. For Butler, spectacle, or performance, is the key to understanding how we work through the three contingent dimensions of significant corporality “anatomical sex, gender identity, and 239 Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. London: Rebel Press, 2000. Article 4. 240 Ibid., Article 6. 184 gender performance.” 241 Feminist and queer poststructuralist theory ground my discussion within the framework of sex, gender, sexuality and desire, as they focus on the performative nature of the subject. I draw heavily on Judith Butler's works, particularly her 1990 Gender Trouble, both to explain those theories that inform my perspective as well as situate and define some of the terminology I use. Conventionally discussions like these begin with a definition of "sex" as both the physical act of intercourse, but also the physical body distinguished by "male" or "female" genitalia. "Gender," in relation to sex, designates the social, historical, and cultural "conventions of deportment, costume, voice, gesture, and so on attributed and ascribed to females and males." 242 Finally, "sexuality" refers to the wide variety of desires and erotic pleasures of the subject. Butler, however, convincingly argues that by differentiating sex and gender in this way we imply gender is somehow outside of identity formation; she suggests, rather, that sex and gender are inextricably bound and both are constitutative of the individual subject. When discussing drag Butler points out that this performance has a dual operation: to both create a unified picture of “woman” and reveal the way certain aspects of gendered experience are “falsely naturalized as a unity.” “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency…Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender.” 243 In other words, there is great pleasure in performance and that 241 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1 edition. New York: Routledge, 2006. 187. 242 Robertson, Jennifer. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 17. 243 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble,187. 185 pleasure does have a meaning and an operation: to continually announce a discontinuity, a disunity. This disunity is precisely what Debord rails at, but I find it productive and provocative. Delany suggests science fiction has the potential, because it is always aware that "natural/moral/unquestionable" behaviors have a history and an origin, to undermine those origins. 244 Within a science fiction text, or texts, authors have the ability to question the unquestionable, critique the naturalized, and develop strategies of difference that underscore the constructed nature of gender, sexuality, and humanity's relationship to technology. Japanese scholar Kotani Mari argues, in her theoretical work on the feminine in science fiction, that technology that is permeated with femininity can expose the repressions of patriarchal domination, serving as a resistance towards male-dominated conceptions of technology. This concept, “techno-gynesis” is the “political unconsciousness of the feminine”; Kotani mobilizes Alice Jardine’s valorization of the feminine, “gynesis” in order to argue embodiment should not be rejected, but rather embraced (and that it is embraced by those who write in this style). 245 Although many (white, male, middle-class) cyberpunk writers fantasize about escaping the flesh and leaving the meat suit behind, for Kotani writers who explore embodied technological change are doing so in the techno-gynesis vein. Gender and racial difference are constituted through the play of technological images, rather than escaping outside of them. 244 "[T]he science fiction model which holds that the origin both of ideas and social behavior – especially when the author is free to peculate and invent what she cannot know – is of equal interest with the ideas and behavior itself. This concept, that ideas and behavior, however natural/moral/unquestionable, have affective social histories, is one of the indubitably significant messages that informs science fiction's inchoate textus." (Samuel Delany, 133-4) 245 Kotani Mari. TechnoGynesis, the political unconscious of feminist science fiction (Joseijō muishiki: tekuno gaineshisu: josei SF ron josestu). Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 2007. 186 In this conclusion, I take up three bodies and articulate their capacity to reveal – by considering the bodies as having elements of spectacle, then, the fractured concern represented by two hermaphroditic characters in two works by Japanese science fiction authors and this last series of images from 1969 SF Magazine as they become productive sites to consider historical constructions of difference, gender, desire, and power. Both Kurahashi Yumiko's 1964 story The Extraterrestrial (Uchujin) and Ōhara Mariko's 1985 work Girl (Garu) are tell us something beyond their plot – they are examples of the relationship of the reader/author to science fiction. I read them as three points on a spectrum of readership. Ostensibly Kurahashi’s story explores family dynamics when a brother and sister care for an alien, Iwabuchi’s covers mediate on the human body in outer space, while Ōhara presents a seemingly simple heterosexual romance story between a pop-star and a prostitute. At the same time, all three works are perverse readings of gender and sexual relations that undermine heteronormative desire and the constructions of identity that are tied to those desires. They are critiquing not the history and discourse around intersex individuals, but instead the history and discourse around gender and sexuality as a whole. I use the word intersex (ryosei) to describe bodies that have both male and female characteristics and/or sexual organs, in part because intersex allows for a much wider variation. However, Kurahashi specifically uses the word hermaphrodite. Generally, this term in Japanese refers to bodies that contain specifically male and female genitals in the same body, while intersex incorporates a spectrum, or variety of combinations. Intersex is also the term that includes a notion beyond the medical content: an experience of gender and/or political 187 identity. 246 What is significant in the history of this word is its use as a descriptor for a variety of conditions: sexual preference, bodily difference from the norm, and performances and behaviors. This span of meaning reflects the way in which intersex imagery is deployed in myriad ways within these two texts. 247 In this way not only the imagery of intersex, but the Japanese word itself, encompasses many of the dualisms Haraway is certain the cyborg complicates. 248 Inspired in part by Foucault (although she interrogates his History of Sexuality in a middle chapter), Butler sees gender and sex as inextricably linked and constantly culturally configured, and "identity" not as some authentic inner core but instead as a "dramatic effect" of gender performance. Gender is a secondary set of narrative effects that is internalized, imposed on the body from both within and without. Butler takes up the notion of intersex representation in her interrogation of Foucault's somewhat contradictory stances on intersex as presented in The 246 Additionally, intersex more adequately reflects the Japanese word ryōsei (deployed along with the katakana hermaphrodite to describe the alien in Kurahashi's story) that is one of two words Jennifer Robertson identifies as "the most frequently encountered Japanese terms" (Robertson, 51). Robertson goes on to note that ryōsei first appeared in newspaper articles in the early twentieth century on homosexuality and "abnormal sexual desire". “Ryōsei was and is most generally used to label either someone with both female and male genitalia or something with both feminine and masculine characteristics. Consequently, ryōsei has been used to refer to intersexed bodies as well as to persons who behave as if they were at once masculine and feminine….Ryōsei emphasizes the juxtaposition or combination of sex or gender differences.” (Robertson, 52) 247 Robertson, because her discussion is focused on the all-female Takarazuka review, is most interested in the way in which the female Takarazukaennes enact, display, confirm and resist notions of masculine. Robertson is careful to note that historically, "as attested in part by Kabuki and Takarazuka, neither femininty nor masculinity has been deemed the exclusive province of either female or male bodies." (51) 248 She suggests that cyborgs, who are creatures "simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted" directly challenge the fiction of "women's experience". I am suggesting here that much of what Haraway claims about cyborgs are concepts that, in both Kurahashi's and Ōhara's works, the intersex character achieves, sometimes better than the representations of cyborgs. While there are certainly many representations of cyborg that do fulfill Haraway's claims, Claudia Springer's Electronic eros: bodies and desire in the postindustrial age sheds light on the "techno-erotic imagery" of the cyborg as it appears in films, fiction, television and virtual reality that often reproduces or even reinforces the heteronormative and patriarchal notions of gender and sexuality. Also, the intersex imagery avoids Haraway's claims that the cyborg heralds a post-gender world, that it escapes history. Her Manifesto makes grand claims that are, in some sense, unlivable – and I propose that the intersexual character can, in many ways, provide a tenable solution to the unlivable problems. We do not have to abandon history entirely, nor move beyond gender, but instead we can move into a space that, utilizes the constructedness of gender as a form of expression rather than an imposed reality. 188 History of Sexuality and his introduction to the journals of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth- century French hermaphrodite. While his introduction is clearly "trying to show how an hermaphroditic or intersexed body implicitly exposes and refutes the regulative strategies of sexual categorization." 249 Butler calls it a "sentimental indulgence in the very emanicpatory discourse his analysis in The History of Sexuality was meant to displace." 250 Returning to the personal reflections in Barbin's memoir, she contests Foucault's reading of Barbin as a representative of "sexual nonidentity" and instead suggests that even the intersex body does not remain outside of the law of gender identification. Barbin struggled their entire life with their feelings of difference. Butler suggests that subversion is possibly not through escaping sexual identity, but: from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its "natural" past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities. 251 It is this notion of subversion from within that Kurahashi's, Iwabuchi’s, and Ōhara's texts explore. Rather than imagining worlds where gender difference is no longer marked, the worlds created by these authors present a variety of permutations of sexual identities, subverting conventional relationships and notions of rebirth from within. Personal histories and self-fictions Writing twenty years apart, these two authors interrogate gender, sexuality, and desire in remarkably similar ways. In between them stands Iwabuchi’s art, inspired by the first SF 249 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble, 130. 250 Ibid., 131. 251 Ibid., 127. 189 Magazine covers by Nakajima Seikan. Both authors blur the lines between animal and human, physical and non-physical desire, in order to point out the constructed nature of gendered performance and heterosexual unity. Iwabuchi blurs the lines between human and space in similar ways. Kurahashi is not concerned with the relationship between human and machine, but instead makes human sexual desire a literal desire for the alien "other." Ōhara also intermingles human and technology with characters who have surgically altered and engineered bodies, although these alterations are often dangerous and tragic. There are differences between the two, however. One of these is, in part, explained by the effect of the visual spectacle of SF Magazine’s covers. While the magazine was just beginning to consolidate readership in 1964, Kurahashi existed outside the magazine’s sphere of influence. Ōhara, like Iwabuchi, is deeply embedded in the discourses of sf; they were her first training ground, and her writing reflects this through a profusion of fractured spectacles. By juxtaposing these two works, consider the negotiations each strategy proposes with image. Although Kurahashi Yumiko is a widely recognized literary author in Japan, her work has been both acclaimed and contested from her first fiction. She was awarded the second place in the Meiji University President's Prize for her first story, but then cautioned not to publish because the story itself was too satirical. Influenced by modern French and German literature, existentialist philosophy and postmodern ideas of pastiche, she was criticized by other members of the Japanese literary establishment, or bundan, after receiving this popular support. Most famously, she defended her writing style in conversations with literary critic Etō Jun and Nobel- prize winning novelist Ōe Kenzaburō, who were intent on defining the role of the author as the person who reveals their "inner reality" as prose in a serious, moral, political stance that is original in form. Scholar Atsuko Sakaki suggests that, for Kurahashi, all written words are 190 fiction, and all "demonstrate the fictionality of all anthropocentric views of the world within discourse." 252 Kurahashi, in the tradition of many postmodernist writers in the 1960s, is interested in the way in which the unusual, the extreme, and the excessive result not in "the authentic representation of truth, but a conscious manipulation of discursive perceptions." 253 Her 1964 story The Extraterrestrial interrupts the stagnant stability of a family and heterosexually binary relationships through an alien, hermaphrodite character. From the moment the narrator K wakes to find an alien egg in his room, the boundaries of human, animal and alien are confused. He and his sister L decide to crack the shell, and are surprised when an alien emerges from the overwhelming darkness inside it. While bathing the alien, they discover the alien not only has breasts, but also both a penis and a vagina. 254 Although the alien is hairless and white, their eyes, mouth and nipples are not present but are holes that contain a vast emptiness. Brother and sister play out their own desires on the alien's body; first treating them like a pet, then a doll, and last as a sex toy. The brother begins to express desire for his sister instead of the alien between them while L is in the process of getting married. The brother arrives late to his sister's wedding and presents the alien to his sister and her new husband in an inappropriate speech of congratulation. He returns to the family home, and his sister arrives shortly thereafter. Implying that they can consummate their relationship once they escape, she climbs into a vast universe through the vagina of the alien. The hermaphrodite body of the alien is then a literal form of escape from the world for L and K, an "other world". 252 Sakaki, Atsuko. “Introduction” The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories. Armonk, N.Y: Routledge, 1997. 13. 253 Ibid. 254 In the original Japanese the alien is either referred to as "uchujin," indirectly inferred, or omitted entirely. Unfortunately, the English language constrains the use of either one of these tactics, does not accommodate intersex gendered pronouns, and "it" is a pejorative term. 191 While Kurahashi's sensibilities are deeply embedded in literary discourse that plays with science fictional elements, both Iwabuchi Keizo and Ōhara Mariko's concerns arise through their participation in the science fiction community. Iwabuchi is famous for not only his SF Magazine covers, but his illustrations for a number of novel cover illustrations including Ray Bradbury’s Frost and Fire, Mayumura Taku’s Expo ’87, Philip Jose Farmer’s The Green Odyssey and covers of Mystery Magazine (another Hayakawa Press title). Although Iwabuchi began painting in childhood, and took art classes in junior high and high school, he graduated with a degree in business from Asia University. He began his professional career in the advertising world, picking up cover-work part time while he attempted to freelance. After he realized his name was left off of some artwork for a poster campaign, he attempted to get a job at Hayakawa Press to do covers for Mystery Magazine. This seems far removed from an sf fan, and yet, when he was introduced to Minamiyama Hiroshi, one of Fukushima Masami’s editors, in the hallways at Hayakawa, he was quite excited to realized this magazine was part of Hayakawa press as well. His excitement came from the fact that “I had been a reader since the first issue of SF Magazine. Since I’d come to Tokyo [for college] I hadn’t been able to read them.” 255 His graphics were snapped up on the spot by Minamiyama, and as he did both magazine and book covers through the 1960s, Iwabuchi’s style continually used avant-garde coloring that clearly took inspiration from the covers that came before his work in SF Magazine. These include harsh and experimental color pallets that are both surreal and verging on psychedelic. He was able to successfully merge his fan-reader-eye with his profession for many years, just as Ōhara Mariko did as she emerged through her participation in science fiction fandom. 255 Ōhashi Hiroyuki. The Age of SF Illustrators (SF sashiegaka no jidai). Tokyo: Honnozasshisha, 2012. 220. 192 Ōhara’s works have received numerous Japanese science fiction awards, and she was the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan for several years. Furthermore, she notes that when she was younger she wrote Kirk-Spock yaoi (male-male romance centered Japanese fan fiction) and wrote her first science fiction story at age sixteen. In an interview with Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory, Mari Kotani and Takayuki Tatsumi, she notes, "I started writing fiction because I was strongly conscious of myself being a natural born liar. I incorporated my lies into the form of novels; otherwise fiction would have always invaded my life…" 256 This moment of self-mythologizing obscures as much as it reveals, as Ōhara is deeply invested in interrogating postmodernist concerns about contingency and subjectivity in her work. The notion she is a liar, and by implication that her science fiction is all lies, is both perfectly true and a kind of way to escape any discussion. Some of the charges leveled at Kurahashi by the literary bundan had to do with her ability to be authentic and truthful, and the way in which she would not reveal herself properly in her fiction. Ōhara is speaking across time to these kinds of accusations. Although Ōhara approaches science fiction as a genre writer, whereas Kurahashi approaches it from outside, using science fiction as another kind of literary effect, both are unconcerned with traditional notions of authenticity. They are far more interested in the ways science fiction texts are not bound to conventional norms but instead have, as Ōhara notes, "possibility in which we enjoy limitless freedom." 257 Her short story, originally published in SF Magazine, is set in a decadent futuristic city that is rotten to the core. 256 McCaffery, Larry, Sinda Gregory, Mari Kotani and Takayuki Tatsumi. The twister of imagination: An interview with Mariko Ōhara. Transcribed by Reiko Tochigi and Hisayo Ogushi; translated by Takayuki Tatsumi. Review of Contemporary Fiction; Summer 2002; Volume 22, Issue 2: New Japanese Fiction. 129. 257 Ibid., 128. 193 While it might appear that Ōhara's 1985 story Girl (Shōjo), is moral tale attempting to reassert the heterosexual paradigm amid rotten splendor, the consumerist decadent decay is the backdrop for the dissolution of conventional notions of romance. Dissipated stage star Gil's romantic involvement with prostitute Kisa is less a heteronormative love story and more an exploration of shifting types of desire. Gil, though he self-identifies as male, displays surgically implanted breasts, long white hair, a lizard-like tongue, cinched waist and a fur covered penis. His body is the focus of a great deal of sexual attention that he simultaneously demands and is annoyed by (or blasé about). Conversely, his attraction to Kisa is first an attraction to her body because it is hidden from his view, clothed in black. He idealizes pieces of her as beyond pure, focusing on her white skin, while constantly reiterating his suspicion she is a prostitute. They go to her apartment and speak at cross purposes with each other, although both focus on Kisa’s status as a transient from offworld. Eventually, Kisa orders Gil to leave. He is jealous, especially when she reveals her next guest is her lesbian roommate, but he returns to his own home. Gil engages in sex with his own roommate / lover Remora, a man who has his left hand altered into five small penises, while explaining he is depressed but fascinated with Kisa. Gil wakes to find Remora gone. Feeling entirely abandoned, Gil sinks even further into dissolution by sleeping with a series of indistinguishable women. In the climax of the story, while Gil is onstage performing a grotesque birth scene, he sees Kisa in the audience and kills the actor acting as a womb for his stage character to emerge in his haste to reach her. They take refuge in an unfinished church, where Gil exposes himself to a statue of the Virgin Mary. The narrative turns to summary, suggesting that bombs later destroyed the city, long after Gil and Kisa parted ways. In between these two fictions stands SF Magazine’s rise to prominence. In many ways Iwabuchi Keizō’s 1969 series, that is the only multi-cover series in this ten-year span, visually 194 inserts itself between the two fictions. It is a series articulating the birth (or rebirth) of the body onto the pages and into the community of SF Magazine. The cover series begins on the April 1969 issue with a single hand closing on a star, as if the hand itself were made out of constellations and existed in outer space. The May cover is of a long-lashed eye whose pupil could double for a planet, and whose eyelids also evoke comet trails. The June issue is of an ear whose outlines are blurring into stardust. In July’s cover a woman’s red mouth is outlined by a spray of white stars. August of 1969 zoomed out from the lips to the face of a woman surrounded by masses of falling hair in which is caught all the starry universe. Finally, however, the perspective zooms out again in the September 1969 cover where a man’s body – or more precisely the muscles of his body - are outlined in orange against a white-on-purple nebulae. His arm reaches up, extending beyond the frame of the image. This series represents both the emergence of the human and the simultaneous transformation of that humanity – not just from one gender to another but from outside to inside, ending with the musculature of masculinist science fiction. Before I move forward, I do want to note that all three of these texts (I’m grouping the magazine covers as a single series) are outliers of their own genre. I’ve pointed out that Kurahashi, while enjoying some success, was also viciously critiqued for her writing style, and in this story she is adapting science fiction tropes to her own needs. Iwabuchi’s works are recognized for their use of color and impressionist design, but this series does not fit in neatly with his other works – the combination of subject matter and style is unique even among his other works for SF Magazine. Ōhara, for all that she is deeply embedded in the science fiction community and part of its governing structure, is also an idiosyncratic writer – I cite her work because of her wild and unusual narratives. Moreover, although Japanese science fiction during 195 the 1980s reflected a more gender-diverse readership, in the ‘60s and ‘70s this community was largely composed of male readers and fans; their fiction often reproduced the power imbalance of gender relationships in Japan more broadly. This changed in the 1980s in mainstream literature, girl’s manga, and science fiction literature, perhaps as a result of the women’s movement in the 1970s demanding greater freedom and access for women in all areas of Japanese society. I’ve chosen these three works precisely because they are outliers, because it is at the borders (the borders of language, the borders of texts, and the borders of gender) that we can have a clear view of the structures of transformation. Physical and non-physical: ambiguities of desire Consider not only that the ambiguities and incoherencies within and among heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual practices are suppressed and redescribed within the reified framework of the disjunctive and asymmetrical binary of masculine/feminine, but that these cultural configurations of gender confusion operate as sites for intervention, exposure, and displacement of these reifications. In other words, the "unity" of gender is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render gender identity uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality. 258 Kurahashi, Iwabuchi, and Ōhara all create textually what Butler suggests is difficult: opening up the body as a site for intervention, exposing and displacing the binary of masculine/feminine. They are not bound by the constrictions of the reified framework of heterosexuality, but can instead escape it through the representation of the hermaphrodite body which occupies the space of both male and female, human and nonhuman. It is only through 258 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble, 42. 196 science fiction that it is possible to attempt to "escape the matrix of power and discursive relations that effectively produce and regulate the intelligibility of those concepts…." 259 While at first it might seem as if Ōhara's narrative only flirts with this kind of destabilization, and through the union of Gil who identifies as male and Kisa who is constantly identified as female reasserts a kind of compulsory heterosexuality, the execution is far more complex. I have discussed Gil's body as a matrix of both male and female, animal and human. This section describes the way his desires shift throughout the narrative, and how his libidinal attraction is sparked not just by the possibility of the opposite gender identity, but through a whole host of moments. Gil's desire is aroused constantly, and by a multitude of triggers. There is no uniformity, but instead a multiplicity that never distinguishes between the physical and non-physical catalyst for desire. First by the touch of a stranger: he is in a bar when a “john” trips him, stroking his genitals, and he attempts not to react to that stroking. "[H]ow many times had he surrendered to the momentary rapture of being touched there?" 260 The desire of an anonymous male stranger, outside the economy of established relations, purely touch, is first introduced. He is also attracted by Kisa's "soft and creamy white" skin, then to her "angelic" looks in profile. However, he qualifies, "weren't angels boys? A girl, the image of a boy." 261 This is just the first of many moments that articulate Kisa’s appearance as both a performance and as a spectacle that blurs female and male attributes and again problematizes a strictly heterosexual paradigm. Gil is also aroused by the city. As the couple walk past "hundred-storied buildings glimmered like glitzy 259 Ibid., 44. 260 Ōhara Mariko. "Girl" Trans. Alfred Birnbaum. Speculative Japan: Outstanding Tales of Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Gene van Troyer, and Grania Davis. Kurodahan Press, 2007. 155. 261 Ibid., 156. 197 chandeliers" Gil feels love provoked not by Kisa or her body, but by the place through which they are strolling. Kisa laughs "enchantingly," and he is reminded of his mother, "which explained his attraction to the girl," 262 – suggesting the desire for Oedipal substitution. When he returns to his own home, he is aroused by a "half-dismembered corpse" floating in space from a space-wreck on the television, only to "tumble deep into the cosmic sea" 263 with Remora when his roommate notices his erection. The myriad triggers that spark Gil's desire point to the variety of practices, the mutability of lived relationships. Although he is seemingly reborn into the heterosexual matrix with Kisa, in his last moments with her the heterosexual system based on the Oedipal rejection of the mother is utterly disrupted. The two flee their lives and take refuge in the unfinished M/F On-Call Network Church (The Mothers and Fathers Church). Again, it seems as if the two children are entering into the domain of the parents, to be reinstated into both Church and the law of the father, ready to take their first Oedipal steps, until: Gil left Kisa, made his way over to the unfinished statue of Mary, and bared his chest. A face – the girl's face – burrowed into the fullness of Gil's breasts. He heard Kisa's voice asking, could he really give milk? He didn't know. Why didn't she just suck? 264 It is Gil’s body here that is possibly providing milk to the statue of Mary. Again, Gil's body stands at the border of conflicting impulses. Although the couple flee the stage (where the border between performance and lived existence is confused alongside the animal and the human), and in one sense return to the shelter of the "parents," the church building that stands in for the structure of parental guidance is literally unfinished. The two are not reinscribed into the heterosexual economy, but rather pass through it. Gil leaves his heterosexual partner to bare his 262 Ibid., 159. 263 Ibid., 161. 264 Ibid., 168. 198 body to the mother (instead of seeing the mother's body in the traditional Freudian play). Instead of rejection, so that his sexual identity can be formed by loss, Kisa's disembodied voice asks if he can perform a physically impossible (and "motherly") act. Gil does not have to play out the Oedipal schema by desiring his mother and challenging his father to maintain a fixed libidinal economy. It is Gil's modified body that sets him apart from this economy. This is a universe where entering the domain of the parent does not require the son to perform the same actions as the parents, nor to maintain the same relationships. The closing paragraph of the story notes that Gil and Kisa parted ways before the bombs destroyed the city – and in this Ōhara provides us with not only a spectrum of desire but a way in which heterosexual relationships do not have to maintain coherence or clarity. They are part of a spectrum of choices. Even though Gil spent most of the story desiring and searching for Kisa, and killed his stage-mother in order to reach her, their relationship does not have to last forever or reach a storybook ending. This spectrum is perhaps influenced by Iwabuchi’s cover series, which themselves are a spectrum. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Iwabuchi’s illustrations articulate shifting desires over time. Each cover itself is a captured moment that also speaks to the next month’s visual representation. The sense organs (fingers, eyes, mouth, ear, face/head, and finally body) are different constellations of sense, literally. Moving from one to the next does not eradicate or dismiss the previous month, but rather puts them into a larger (bodily) context. Though this series of covers was unique in its continual articulation of bodies, we can also understand Iwabuchi’s series as one example of the continual visual articulation of science fiction at work on all of the covers. 199 While Ōhara seems intent on unequivocally undermining the bonds of family that help to legislate and regiment sexual desire, and Iwabuchi on troubling the external/internal, Kurahashi's use of incestuous desire is a more ambiguous move when read alongside Butler. Certainly Kurahashi presents the brother's desire for his sister as a type of perversity that is contrasted with L's impending marriage. This desire grows from the two of them using the alien's body for their own sexual pleasure. K is rejected by his girlfriend, who stops him at a kiss because she wants marriage before they go any further. Frustrated, he kisses the alien, and they "made love like two men" and then "made love like a man and a woman." 265 Rejected by the heteronormative partner, K turns to the alien body to find sexual satisfaction, in some ways reproducing the idea that homosexuality is simply a way for those who are rejected by appropriate partners to feel sexual gratification. And yet, once the brother uses the alien body this way, his sister also begins to sexualize the alien. "We looked over its shoulders into each other's eyes, sharing it; I used its feminine part, L the masculine. Between me and L lay the nothingness enclosed by the fake flesh, our universe, so to speak." 266 Again this is a particularly ambivalent move on Kurahashi's part – while there appears to be some perversity in the attraction between brother and sister, and perversity in their use of the alien, they actually reproduce the male/female binary. The brother uses only the "feminine" aspect of the alien and the sister only the "masculine." Even their desire for each other can be read as a substitution that operates under the laws of the ideal – their desire is still structured as the desire for opposites: male and female, and it still is part of the 265 Kurahashi Yumiko. “Extraterrestrial (Uchujin),” Scorpions (Sasoritachi). Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1968. 110. 266 Ibid., 111. 200 institutionalization of desire, because behind the incest taboo is always the looming structure of the family (which must be maintained, but never recovered). Between organic and machine: the spectacle of birth and rebirth Haraway argued that late twentieth-century machines made “thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.” 267 In these three texts, however, it is not machines that make these distinctions ambiguous – rather, it is the visual performance of the intersex body that does so. In the previous sections, I have explored the way both authors problematize the division between animal and human, between mind's desire and body's desire. While neither Kurahashi nor Ōhara is intent on troubling the difference between organism and machine, both are deeply interested in the mechanisms and process of rebirth as a site for contestation. It is here that the covers of SF Magazine must also return. In The Extraterrestrial, the alien exists only as a device for the brother and sister; contained in the alien's body is the possibility for rebirth, but the alien has no agency of their own. The cover illustrations, however, end with the muscled shape striving, reaching off screen, the process of transformation not complete but still an act of will. Gil is the fractured and indecisive product of a rotting, overripe city, and yet is reborn into a new existence through the death throes of another transformed body. The intersex alien of Extraterrestrial is literally the embodiment of an entirely different universe. L is able to escape directly into the body of the alien. When L appears to him after the 267 Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto,” 152. (see ch. 2, n. 72) 201 wedding, her brother K notes, "I felt the long-awaited consummation [of their sexual desire for each other] was at last at hand." 268 Yet L first escapes her conventional marriage as well as familial bonds and her brother's bonds of desire. After L has been swallowed into the alien's vagina, the brother "saw innumerable tiny stars and nebulae scattered in the dark space – and, among them, a tiny naked figure falling headlong like a comet and its tail." 269 The narrative ends here, with K left as an observer of the alien’s incorporation of his sister into their body. The universe is contained within the body of the alien, eerily anticipating Butler's declaration that "the body" is not "a ready surface awaiting signification, but [is] a set of boundaries, individual and social, politically signified and maintained." 270 Those boundaries can be expanded to contain whole universes. The body of the alien marks both the limit and the gateway to a different way of thinking about human relations and desire. While the final passage indicates the ultimate escape of L from not only her marriage but also her brother's desires, literally allowing her to enter into another galaxy, they first play with the alien body and attempt to integrate the alien into their own lives and understanding; and it is only after those boundaries are penetrated that L can escape entirely. In contradiction to the reinstatement of male/female desire I suggested above, this final paragraph suggests lesbianism might be the only escape from the heteronormative paradigm. L escapes her husband and brother by engaging in homosexual interaction, yet her brother who engaged in such interaction earlier does not escape from his own web of social constraints. 268 Kurahashi Yumiko. “Extraterrestrial (Uchujin),” 117. 269 Ibid., 118. 270 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble, 46. 202 By constructing pieces of bodies via illustrations of outer space, Iwabuchi illustrates the birth of desire out of the universe. These whole universes are equated to individual perception in Iwabuchi’s covers, making the argument that our entire sense of the universe, including outer space, is born out of our ability to sense it. And that simultaneously our ability to sense is born from the universe. This rebirth passes through multiple gender performances, never privileging one or the other, but also never articulating a single narrative of human relations and desire either. Desire is present both in the actions of the fragmented bodies, and also at work in our perception of them. They are not escaping into outer space, but rather are coevolving from it as space is evolving from the body. Gil’s intersex body is not the path of escape. Instead, Gil is the subject who escapes the relationship with the mother, albeit violently. Unlike the reverse birth scene (where the daughter returns to the womb) in the The Extraterrestrial, Gil's rebirth is filled with screaming and rage. This section begins with Gil’s performance (as he is an actor) in a theater: Smeared with emulsion, Gil's golden plumage glistens. The insect suffers. It rages, beating Gil, the cause of its suffering, against the ground with primitive spite…Gil and the insect explode with equal fury, bolts of pure hatred arc and collide. Writhing and squirming, his torso freed at last, hands flat upon the slime-plastered stage, Gil saw her [Kisa]. His heart forced its way up into his throat…Gil extracts his legs from the insect womb. Too quickly, in fact, for huge quantities of blood spill out over the stage. The insect writhes and spreads its paraffin wings. The wires that hold them in place begin to cut into the thorax. On stage, the mother insect, body severed in two, losing cascades of blue plasma, screams in its last throes of death. 271 In the beginning of this birth scene, when Gil is ostensibly performing without knowledge of Kisa in the audience, the combat between the insect mother and Gil is of "equal fury", and made up of "pure hatred". And yet, even after Gil sees Kisa and removes his legs, the 271 Ōhara Mariko. "Girl," 166. 203 stakes of performance are not hollow – performed violence leads to death. The text begins to call attention to the performance by shifting from "ground" to constantly referencing "stage", and the description changes slightly from naturalistic descriptions of the insect to the "wires" that hold it in place and the "paraffin" that make up its wings. Yet the body of the mother is indelibly marked as a constructed, frightening, animalistic and grotesque body just as it begins to fall apart. 272 In this case, birth is only possible through the violent destruction of the mother-as-foe. While the violence of rebirth and mother-as-foe is one of Ōhara’s favorite themes, the blurring of stage and ground, the mixing of technology via wires and paraffin wax, and (disgusting) corporeality with the death of the insect-performer have a history in the embodied spectacle of SF Magazine’s series. Perhaps her story is not a literal link. Instead it mirrors the fractured mix of the organs of perception on the covers. Moreover, Ōhara’s messy and deadly revolution might be seen as the logical outgrowth of Iwabuchi’s series as a provocation that mixes external and internal. No longer surfaces For these three texts the intersex functions like the cyborg Donna Haraway prophesied: the possibility, the very existence, of intersex destabilizes and removes gender performance from a binary. By introducing intersexed bodies, all three allow an interplay of seemingly unlimited desire. Brother and sister can desire each other because of the (literally) alien presence. Lesbian does not mean cut off from desiring a body with a penis. 272 Ōhara, in her interview with McCaffery et. al. defines mother as, "really nightmarish, a kind of destroyer silently invading others with a weapon called love, rather than kindness and generosity." While she is speaking of the mother in her most famous story, Hybrid Child, the notion of the mother-as-destroyer is certainly underscored here. 204 For Kurahashi and Iwabuchi, furthermore, the seeming excess in the intersex body is procreative: all openings, not just vagina, open onto another world. The possibility of birth and rebirth is within a body that is not constrained by the male/female system. While the literal "alien" in Kurahashi's text denaturalizes these roles, the alien does so by entering from outside of the system. It is an alien, and is always referred to as such even as it enters into the domestic space of the family, into the room of the brother and sister. While it does allow for desire to become unfixed and for gendered roles to be confused, the brother and sister's bodies themselves are not changed. The transforming body of SF Magazine’ s covers, however, is not only part of the universe, but is literally constituted out of stars. Gendered performance moves from one side of the spectrum to the other in the fluid womb of outer space, never in conflict or via trauma. The breakdown of categories includes the breakdown of boundaries, the movement of lines, and from the confusion of the external and the internal via the depiction of the “outer” hair to the “inner” musculature of the last two covers. Conversely, in Ōhara's Girl, Gil's body does not solve problems by entering from the outside and challenging the character's own notions of sexual desire. Sexual markers are not on an outsider's body, but instead on the body of the narrator / protagonist Gil. Both Gil's genitalia and his desire are on display from the opening of the story. Instead of Gil confronting his own gender performance, Kisa's response to Gil is what challenges the reader to unwork their own assumptions. Directly after Kisa asks Gil about his humanity, she asks, "Well, then, you're…male?" and his body is described again as having both breasts "much bigger than the girl's own budding breasts" and male genitalia. Gil "answer[s] honestly" that he is a man, and 205 Kisa's only response is the slightly amused "Looks more like a tail." 273 Unlike the alien's body, Gil's intersex body is not procreative. Yet, also unlike the alien, Gil has both agency and desire. In the end, no reading of these narratives completely articulates complex interweaving of the intersex dynamic because it has so many possible variations and permutations. Using the methodology I outlined in earlier chapters, we can think of these intersex individuals as representations of science fiction itself. Kurahashi’s hermaphrodite is an alien, coming into the family from the outside (just as she uses science fictional tropes from outside of the literary establishment), and working a catalyst that denaturalizes the relationship between animal and human in L (and the relationship between high-brow and low-brow literature). The alien offers a different body for L’s brother to desire, and then a kind of escape into another world for L. Liberation exists within the alien's body, but the alien has to be first introduced to disrupt the family unity. On the other hand, Ōhara gives us Gil, the desiring subject, whose body and desire are eclectic and shifting, and which can be configured in multiple ways. While Gil identifies as male, he refuses identification as human (the story may identify as science fiction, but refuses identification as science). Haraway suggests the cyborg resists totalizing theory, and in this way it is a particularly potent metaphor for reality that cannot ever be fully articulated. Reading science fiction via Kurahashi and Ōhara offers the intersex body as a similar metaphor, one that does not depend on grand narratives but instead interferes with, and asks the reader to reexamine, the assumptions and practices of daily life. 273 Ōhara Mariko. "Girl," 157. 206 Bibliography Abe Kobo. 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Creator Page-Lippsmeyer, Kathryn (author)

Core Title The space of Japanese science fiction: illustration, subculture, and the body in SF Magazine

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Publication Date 07/08/2016

Defense Date 07/08/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1960s,illustration,Japan,Japanese literature,magazines,OAI-PMH Harvest,postwar,Science fiction

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira (committee chair), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), Shimazaki, Satoko (committee member)

Creator Email kpagelippsmeyer@gmail.com,pagelipp@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-266018

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Identifier etd-PageLippsm-4531.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-266018 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-PageLippsm-4531.pdf

Dmrecord 266018

Document Type Dissertation

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Rights Page-Lippsmeyer, Kathryn

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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