Platonic Eros, Ottonian Numinour and Spiritual Longing in Otaku Culture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17192/mjr.2010.15.3418Abstract
Less than a month ago I was in North Korea seeing the sights and engaging in some general research into the philosophical mood of its people. After exploring the desolate, zombie-like town of Kaesong, I happened upon a small shop selling such things as the North’s own brand of Coca-Cola, stamps with Kim Jung Il’s face on them, a myriad of different types of Chinese medicine and, of all things, a manhwa – the Korean name for manga – containing some of the most impressive art I had ever seen; indeed, to my utter surprise, the images in the North Korean manhwa filled me with a deep yearning for something quite inexplicable. Naturally, as a professor of philosophy, I felt obliged to investigate this phenomenon further.
And as I did so, I started to realize that certain manga and anime – arguably, the two most sacred objects of otaku culture – have been stirring in me these kinds of feelings ever since I could remember. As a result of this, I immediately came to see that it did not matter whether the culture producing the anime and manga was largely atheistic, like North Korea, Shinto-Buddhist, like Japan, or Christian, like the USA: otaku culture produced anywhere and by any type of believer or nonbeliever seemed to be capable of awakening in me what Plato calls eros and Rudolph Otto calls the numinous.
As I moved beyond my own personal reflections to see what scholars of otaku culture have already written on this subject, I found some precedent for my own ideas in the work of Teri Silvio, who has examined the relationship between religious icons and character toys in Taiwan, i Hiroshi Yamanaka, who has discussed “pop cultural spirituality” in the work of Hayao Miyazaki, ii and Susan Napier, who, influenced by Roger Aden’s book Popular Stories and Promised Land: Fan Cultures and Symbolic Pilgrimages, has written about western otaku making “pilgrimages to Akihabara” and has wisely labelled certain anime and manga chatrooms “sacred spaces.” iii Nevertheless, while I agreed with the insights of all these scholars, I felt they did not go far enough in linking their observations to larger philosophical issues. Thus, in this paper I would like to explore the idea of spiritual longing in otaku culture, firstly, by elucidating Plato’s eros and Otto’s numinous, and then, secondly, by examining a few examples from anime and manga which have instilled in me, or others I know, a deep desire for something that can only be described as mysterious, irreducible and spiritual.
References
Limits of the Human, edited by Frenchy Lunning, 200-220 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
ii. Hiroshi Yamanaka, “The Utopian ‘Power to Live’: The Significance of the Miyazaki Phenomenon,” in Japanese
Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, edited by Mark MacWilliams, 237-255 (Armok,
NY: M. E. Sharp, 2008), 237.
iii. Susan Napier, From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 151. Also see Roger Aden, Popular Stories and Promised Lands: Fan
Cultures and Symbolic Pilgrimages (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999).
iv. Plato Phaedrus 249-50.
v. Plato Symposium 199e.
vi. Ibid., 202a, 203b.
vii. Ibid., 204d.
viii. Ibid., 200e.
ix. Ibid., 204d.
x. See Ishida Hoyu, “Otto’s Theory of Religious Experience as Encounter with the Numinous and Its Application
to Buddhism,” Japanese Religions 15, no. 3 (January 1989): 19-33.
xi. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its
Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 6.
xii. Ibid., 7.
xiii. Ibid., 10.
xiv. Ibid., 25.
xv. Genesis 28:27.
xvi. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 8.
xvii. Ibid., 13-30.
xviii. Ibid., 12-13.
xix. For Kant, emotion is irrelevant to beauty, but not to the sublime. Moreover, while beauty has to do with quality,
the formed, the finite and the natural, the sublime has to do with quantity, the unformed, the infinite and the nonrational.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1961) [2.23]. It should
be noted that the division between the sublime and the beautiful did not originate with Kant, for Kant himself
derived this idea from Edmund Burke’s On the Sublime and Beautiful (not Longinus’ On the Sublime). However,
since Otto dealt with Kant and not Burke, I have restricted my comments to Kant. Cf. Edmund Burke, On the
Sublime and Beautiful (New York, P. F. Collier & Son, 1937), 101 [3.27].
xx. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 40.
xxi. Ibid., 122.
xxii. Ibid., 41.
xxiii. Ibid., 29.
xxiv. Otto said that Numen or “the Holy” is analogous to, but not synonymous with, Beauty and the Good. Ibid., 51.
xxv. See Naoki Chiba and Hiroko Chiba, “Words of Alienation, Words of Flight: Loanwords in Science Fiction
Anime,” in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, edited by
Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, 148-171 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007), 160.
xxvi. Patrick Drazen, Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! Of Japanese Animation (Berkeley: Stone Bridge
Press, 2003), 15.
xxvii. Hayao Miyazaki, Shuppatsu Ten 1979-1996 (Tokyo: Sutajio Jiburi, 1996), 490.
xxviii. Tonari no Totoro, directed by Hayao Miyazaki (1988); translated as My Neighbor Totoro, subtitled DVD
(Disney, 2006).
xxix. Thomas Kasulis, Shinto: The Way Home (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 16.
xxx. Ibid., 17.
xxxi. Hiroki Azuma, “The Animalization of Otaku Culture,” in Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire, edited by Frenchy
Lunning, 175-188 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 183.
xxxii. Hiroki Azuma, “SF as Hamlet: Science Fiction and Philosophy,” in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese
Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, edited by Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki
Tatsumi, 75-82 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 77.
xxxiii. Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg, The Science of Anime: Mecha-Noids and Ai-Super-Bots (New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005).
xxxiv. Richard Gardner, “Aum Shinrikyō and a Panic about Manga and Anime,” in Japanese Visual Culture:
Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, edited by Mark MacWilliams, 200-218 (Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe, 2008), 202.
xxxv. Frederik Schodt, Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1996), 48.
xxxvi. Napier, From Impressionism to Anime, 103-123.
xxxvii.Annalee Newitz, “Magical Girls and Atomic Bomb Sperm: Japanese Animation in America,” Film Quarterly 49,
no. 1 (Fall 1995): 5.
xxxviii.Mark MacWilliams, introduction to Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime,
edited by Mark MacWilliams, 3-25 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008), 5.
xxxix. Drazen, Anime Explosion! Viii.
xl. Napier, From Impressionism to Anime, 123.
xli. Ibid., 190.
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