Suicide, Otaku, and Bullshit
Kamichika Rio
It occurred to me while reading Harry G. Frankurt’s “On Bullshit” that quite a few of the scenes we see in anime necessarily rest on a distinctly anti-realist skepticism of the truth of the world. In such anime, we see illustrations of anything from the most mundane aspects of our lives to what we can consider our most important experiences as holding no actual meaning, and this is the conception quite a few individuals have come to. Admittedly, this problem stretches beyond anime, and it constitutes, I believe, a far more pervasive trend in postmodernity than we may sometimes think.
First of all, it would only be fair if I warned the readers that this is primarily a philosophical exercise, one that may involve modes of interpretation and analysis very foreign to readers that are not trained in the field. In other words, it may seem really friggen boring to some of you. However, the topics I touch upon in this article are hot areas in today’s debates on ethics, science, and the mind/body. Of course, this article does not cover all of these areas, but it draws from engagement with some of them. Now, without further ado, let us continue.
This particular idea came to me while I was watching the second episode of one of this season’s most well-received anime, Durarara!!, in which a girl named Kamichika Rio discovers that, underneath the warmth of her family situation, there lies a darker secret. Her father is cheating on her mother with another woman. Rio soon develops cynicism towards her family life, and towards many things in general – she eventually arrives at the conclusion to kill herself.
Durarara!! isn’t the only anime to portray themes of suicide, or touch upon topics much darker, but I think there is something to take from this scene: bullshit. What Frankfurt talked about in his paper was a distinctly philosophical analysis of this idea, and what constituted it. A large part of his reason for writing his paper is to ultimately ask the questions: “Just how much bullshit is there in the world?” and “What are we doing when we become cynical of life?” Of course, I doubt Frankfurt has knowledge of contemporary Japanese subculture, or the phenomenal increase and subsequent media exposure of the beings we call otaku, but his work is just as accurate in painting a picture of our lives as Azuma Hiroki’s seminal work Otaku, Japan’s Database Animals was. Let me explain why.
Bullshit is, first and foremost, different from lying. So when we say that our lives are a lie, or society paints a lie for us, it is, to an extent, relatively misleading. Why? Frankfurt, citing earlier work before him, argues that lying is necessarily concerned with truth-values. For those of you unfamiliar with analytic philosophy, or philosophy in general, this is to say that a proposition, ‘x is red’, has a value of either true or false. Thus, a lie is the intentional desire to mislead someone when it comes to the truth value of a sentence. Bullshit, on the other hand, is something far more complicated. To quote Frankfurt:
What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive about is his enterprise (Frankfurt, 130).
Bullshit isn’t about making people believe something as being true or false. Actions, words, things, anything that essentially does not track anything about the world, but is simply there for no purpose at all; that is what bullshit is. And what Kamichika Rio has essentially realized in Durarara!! is that her faith in the reality of her family – that it functions as every other family does, that the family unit provides care, warmth, and support, etc. – was utterly betrayed. In other words, her family life was bullshit.
The Emptiness of the Family Dinner
If we apply this notion of bullshit to other things, it soon becomes clear why so many things can be considered fake. When you think of the college grind, the stress over grades, it’s quite easy to come to the conclusion that neither you, your family and friends, colleges, or even society itself cares about how well you do. How much of this important, yet stressful part of the lives of the average teenager actually tracks a true aspect of reality? It could all very well be bullshit. Or what about finding a job, falling in love, getting married? Is this all bullshit? It is here, I think, that otaku have revealed to us the consequences of losing faith in the reality that we so often find ourselves taking for granted. And, as such, this is why I say that the problem at hand is ultimately one of skepticism and anti-realism.
I’m sure we’re all familiar with the phrase: “2-D characters will never betray me” or some version of it. Other than being either 1.) incredibly hilarious because the person saying it is a freak, or 2.) incredibly unsettling because the person saying it needs psychiatric help, it reveals a notion that otaku hold about what constitutes as deserving of their faith and dedication. What they are doing, in essence, is shifting the belief that their lives are real to their belief that the elements comprising of the 2-D world are more worthy of ontological commitment. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to postulate this. Japanese philosopher Hiroki Azuma argued that otaku are engaged with a grand non-narrative, a database that stores the objects they draw and refer to when engaging with the 2-D world. An example of this database in action is the recycling of simulacra: many of the moe characters we see in anime are constructed from pre-fabricated elements, ranging from antennae hair to priestess outfits to pre-designed personalities (tsundere, yandere, kuudere). Much of the reason for this is that otaku have lost touch with previously critical anchors in their lives, and, instead, necessarily rely on a dedication to the “real” attractiveness of these made up things. What is lost ranges from political ideologies to family to companies. This shift, I argue, is a two-fold process, one which first involves the realization that the previous aspects of one’s life is total and utter bullshit, and then requiring a re-commitment of what we consider to be real or not real.
When we’re born into the world, we tend to believe that much of what we see must be reality; this is almost taken for granted when we engage with the picture society paints for us. But for all we know, our lives could be very well within the matrix. Everything could be conceived by some set of rules which hold no real meaning. It seems that modern day individuals are far more inclined to come to the conclusion that everything is relative, few things track an external reality, and that life ultimately lacks sincerity. And I believe there will be two possible ways of dealing with this question: the decision that life is meaningless, and the search for truth or satisfaction in obtaining some truthful way for living is moot (This can be construed as apathy or other, almost surreal interpretations of life. A prime example of this can be seen in the anime Shigofumi.), or a (often self-centered) dedication to something else that one believes is not made of bullshit. The latter is exactly what otaku have become committed to.
In summary, I have made the central claim that ontological commitment is absolutely necessary to survival in a postmodern world, one in which the individual may find no true objective reality to latch themselves on to. This is, essentially, the claim that otaku have decidedly incorporated elements of the 2-D world they regularly engage with into not only their daily routines, but their very lives. They are committed to the existence of character types (such as tsundere) and the attractiveness of certain physical qualities (antennae hair, non-naturally colored hair, etc.) and will, inevitably, incorporate it into their perception of what constitutes real or unreal. Previously supportive structures in society – the family unit, for instance – have seen a decline in their importance, and this has led to other types of social phenomenon in conjunction with otakuism such as suicide. The picture I paint here is a distinctly anti-realist one, which draws from a distinctly philosophical analysis of postmodern thought.
Very nice.
Some of the contentions you’ve made are somewhat dangerous in the hands more impressionable people, but I believe your arguments are valid. Living in a fantasy world can be more fulfilling than in the real one, and one doesn’t have to worry about sudden change, deceit or betrayal.
Actually, I wonder if this is why 90% of all anime end in some Evangelion-esque introspection where the protagonist rejects a false Eden to grasp reality since the anime viewing Japanese really need to come back to it.
Is relativism a consequence of the death of God? This, from what I can tell, is a commonly held opinion. I have no problem with either relativism (relativism isn’t amorality as some wish to imply) or the death of God, but it seems to manifest itself commonly as nihilism, which leads to the sort of cynicism and skepticism about real life that you were talking about. There’s this idea that otaku (or, more extremely, hikikomori) aren’t so much rejecting society as society has rejected them. I wouldn’t say it’s too much different (though not so extreme) in the West. I’ve read arguments that the reason why Generation Y is so cynical is because we were made all sorts of amazing promises by our parents about how easy life would be (“stay in school, study hard, and life will give you endless opportunities”) that obviously haven’t turned out, and a lot of people feel betrayed by that. Maybe this is why otaku have turned their backs on society (or why they feel society has turned their back on them). Could it be, in part, a generational thing?
Sorrow: in part this cynicism is a generational thing, but it is a generational effect only in that there has been a shift in technology and the accessibility of certain technologies–in developed countries. It would be absurd to search for natives of a developing country who have this “nihilist” mentality (though not impossible, I admit). It is strange to consider how when physical necessities are not met (starvation, disease, thirst), as is in the case in developing countries, that a human being fights for every second of life. And yet when physical needs are met but mental needs are not, the opposite is true. This is not to say that there are less suicides in developing countries (there is limited data on this aspect, unfortunately), but that suicides in developing countries are more likely caused by physical suffering than mental/emotional suffering.
Good article, Kylaran, but I wonder if what you’re talking about with otaku and anime–which is essentially escapism–has very unique circumstances or characteristics that other forms of escapism do not?
Great article, Ky. Though, I wonder if the root cause of simulacra recycling (which is undoubtedly true) arises more from a capitalist motivation to quick profits, a general lack of innovation and creativity, or something deeper and more philosophical in nature.
Sorrow: According to several studies published on Hikikomori (Ogino, Kawakita, et al), the entire trend began more as individual rejections of society as opposed to societal rejections of individuals. Many first-generation hikikomori (1980-1990) thought of their own isolation and lack of contact with the outside world as a way to “live life on one’s own terms” without societal pressures bearing down upon them.
Thanks everyone for the comments!
@Shadowmage
I would hate to be too impressionable, but, in truth, I was going for a somewhat forceful tone with the use of bullshit. As for your question about whether anime directors/scriptwriters choose to put in ultimately realist conclusions about life in anime, I do think that what the consumers of the anime take from it are not necessarily the direct result of what the makers intend. Azuma made the claim in his book that even if the messages are there, the otaku mindset only extracts out from the anime distinctly non-narrative related features, such as the moe elements or character types. I’ll grant you that some series have Evangelion-esque endings, so to say, but even Evangelion itself was marketed in a way that revolved around taking advantage of the otaku mindset. Selling simulacra of the characters, etc. Cell phones. Mahjong games. Azuma covers much of this in his book, and I think there is a lot of merit in analyzing otaku consumption rather in just the messages being told in the anime itself.
@Sorrow-kun
First and foremost, relativism is a major player here. Relativism is distinctly anti-realist in the sense that it makes the claim that no one point of view necessarily tracks anything true about the world as a whole. Individual cultures, societies, or people may posit some potentially true claims, but none of it has any superiority over another. This is part of the anti-realism I think that is at play in postmodernity, and part of the root of how otaku behave. What I wanted to do in this article was take Azuma’s claim that the otaku mindset is instinctively about self-fulfillment, and take it one step further by claiming that otaku are searching for a “reality” in their anti-realist perspective of the world. This is a much stronger claim than Azuma’s original one.
It is, distinctly, a generational thing. Again, Azuma refers to the growth of the otaku generation in Japan coinciding with the collapse of the economic bubble in the 80s, which had a decisive impact on the mindset of people during the time. It shook people’s faith in the real life institutions – banks, real estate, money, high culture – that were so critical to both social/political ideology and a personal sense of material fulfillment. Using otaku as a case study, it becomes evident that their behavior is distinctly postmodern, and somewhat relatively unexplored.
I did want to talk about hikikomori at first, rather than otaku in general, but I came to the conclusion that hikikomori are too extreme to make general claims about. I do think that hikikomori choose to lock themselves out: there are examples of hikikomori that don’t turn otaku until after they’ve actually locked themselves in. However, hikikomori may also be the result of other things, such as inept social functioning as a result of upbringing, or unknown psychiatric problems that are basically exacerbated by social pressure. For now, I will agree with you that hikikomori do choose to reject the reality society has given them, but, at the moment, it is a somewhat behaviorally different phenomenon from otaku consumption.
@Tamashii
Escapism is, first and foremost, necessarily rooted in a realist perspective of the world. In the social sciences, the term “escapism” seems to stem from sociological or anthropological notions of explaining the rejection of society. The escapist argument, in my opinion, would require a claim to the reality of the society that otaku are escaping. Part of the reason is that if society did not rest in something distinctly real, sociologists and anthropologists would lose any claim they have to an objective reality. It’s similar to how scientists are often realists, otherwise scientific progress would markedly lack meaning if we took an instrumentalist view of it. In my article, I wanted to propose an instrumentalist-kind of view in relation to otaku; that is, otaku are not “escaping” from reality, but they are simply switching their notion of reality to something else. There was no reality to escape from in the first place. The reason for this is that society fails to track any real truth about the world, so no matter what, our experience lacks any attachment to the previously important societal structure we had in decades past.
@Akira
I admit that accounts of simulacra recycling much necessarily involve the consideration of the companies themselves. There remain questions unanswered: How does the otaku mindset take root in individuals? When does this shift in thinking occur? Is the mindset a general population problem or the result of societal acceptance of new marketing strategies? I think these will be important questions to answer. However, the fact that otaku carve out their existence in this relationship, which involves fan-based feedback and both consumer-generated and institution/company-generated products, while other members of society don’t seem to behave in such a hyper-capitalist (or in Azuma’s term, animalistic) way, must account for some part of behavior. Here is where I think the postmodern conception of meaning plays a role. The ongoing crisis in the high rate of suicides in Japan seems to me to be rooted in the same reasons, which I have outlined above.
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Excellent article. Thank you for giving me something intelligent to read during my RHET course. Much appreciated, I look forward to your next post, whatever it may be on I am sure it will be thoroughly interesting.
Wah! Way too much philosophy going to my head haha. Never took the course, but I think it’s interesting how you linked it to otakus and their idea of realism. However, since I don’t actually know any otakus… or anyone that would admit to being one =X, I really have no opinion of my own on how they fathom the world around them or why they’re so attached to 2D characters on a screen. On the otherhand, I do agree that they’re different from hikikomori in the sense that a lot of them might not be antisocial or withdrawn. I just think that they choosen to live in their own bubble that fabricates from something they want to believe in.
Although, I think everyone (to an extent) lives in their own world full of bs. It just varies how often we’re willing to open up and see the world from another person’s POV. Which is why I also agree that everything is relative.
Woops… I ended up typing more than I thought I would. I actually just wanted to point out that your post made me want to start watching Durarara now haha =) I will eventually.
“How” is easily answered: because they let it. The question should be “why”. I’m guessing it has a lot to do with a sense of simplicity. Cartoons / anime are not complex as most shows are aimed at children. We also all have watched these shows or shows like them when we were kids, so we remember our sense of wonder. There may be some nostalgia attachment to it.
Analyzing myself, my honest answer is “because I thought it was cool.” Back when I started seriously hitting anime, I was a junior high schooler looking for something more mature. I had my first “real” exposure to anime at a local con. I remember it quite well. When I was a kid I was a huge fan of Robotech, which I had learned eventually was three seperate anime series from Japan, the first being, of course, the legendary Macross. Well, at the con was a showing of the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie and I was excited to go see it. I remember blushing like… well like a pubescant male… when exposed to my first scene of anime nudity (Minmay’s shower scene). I remember looking around the room at other people wondering if I was supposed to be watching this! It’s not that my parents were overly strict, but they did frown upon my going to “adult” movies and the like. But I found that nobody said anything. Nobody in that room thought it was weird that a 12 year old boy was sitting there watching adult material with them.
I was fascinated. Afterwards I was treated to episode four of Tenchi Muyo! (the hot springs episode). And it just went from there. So, for me, it was a chance to explore adult things without being an adult. Eventually it just became something that I enjoyed.
I’m guessing this happens after high school age. People get pretty weird during their puberty years. They’re confused and unsure and hormonal and everything seems kind of overwhelming. Somewhere after that, though, the hormones kick off and we’re left in transitive state. No longer are we children, but adults, and no longer are things taken care of for us, we have to take care of ourselves. This is when reality hits.
As such, I go on sites like 4chan and see the proverbial “2D womens are superior!” crap and I scoff. I would bet even money that 99% of those faggots are just teenage morons cracking jokes because they think it’s funny. It’s not a reality for them, just part of the meme spewing groupthink that dominates what they see as “their society”. The other 1%, however, are, as Trapeze would so eloquently put it, “mentally deranged”.
Both.
@Kurier
Glad you liked it. Unless, you’re being totally and completely sarcastic (I hope not XD). It’s hard to tell over the interwebs.
@Buttercup
Living in your own bubble is colloquial for many possible interpretations. Here, I have chosen to take a particularly controversial stance regarding just what it means to live in a “bubble”. You’re right in that all of us do to a certain extent, and you’re also right to bring up relativism. However, if you think about it, relativism does mean that it’s very hard to find a definite reality, or a truth to the world. We often say lying is bad, but there are times where we don’t mind lying. You could extend this to almost anything propositional (aka with a truth-value). How do we deal with this?
Living in a world of BS is okay. But that doesn’t mean everyone can live in a world of BS. And when they can’t, we see some very different behavior.
@The Typical Idiot Fan
Postmodernity isn’t necessarily something you “let happen” to you. Just as when you’re born, you don’t make the decision to believe that the world is real or not. You automatically assume it, and it becomes part of your ontology. The same goes for your nationality, and for how you learn to acquire the same beliefs as society. It happens to you, but no where is it required that this happens to you out of your own volition. Hence, “letting it happen” implies something different from what I believe is at play. The change between generations, the habits of the younger crowd — these are not things that we simply allow to happen. Otaku in Japan grow up exposed to far more anime than you would here. They get started on it like we do Disney, and they grow up on it without the same transient shift in consumption that would be necessary of a non-Japanese otaku living outside Japan. The way that otaku buy simulacra and character goods like mad simply can’t be explained by a “it’s nostalgic” sort of interpretation.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever been to Japan, but I think anime is taken for granted there often by virtue that it’s a native product, where as here, it is introduced as a foreign one. Sure, most people don’t really watch anime outside of Ghibli and stuff, but the access is much easier. That’s fine and all, but that does mean that when you analyze your own personal reasons for liking anime, you have to take into account multiple things.
1.) You grew up in a culture with distinctly different values. American culture does tend to emphasize a sense of directness and pragmatism that is the very thing that serves as targets of insult from cultures with longer histories than ourselves.
2.) Establishing that your background values are different, you also made a specific choice to check out anime at a con, etc. I would argue that Japanese middle schoolers (and even elementary schoolers), if they had a conscious choice, would most likely not choose anime because, as I described earlier, it is a native product that also has certain cultural stigmas attached. Nowadays, in the U.S., you do see a similar sort of awareness of otakuism, but the situation simply does not apply to Japanese otaku, especially the kind that develop the behavior I refer to.
Part of this confusion is my fault, since I didn’t make the distinction clear in the article. However, Rio’s family in Durarara!! is set in Japan, and much of this postmodernity I refer to applies to the same otaku that Azuma Hiroki studies in his book. Branching out to the non-Japanese fanbase requires an extra set of underlying notions that is critical for assessment.
I do think you’re right in that there are cases like yours. However, it seems to me that it is far more prevalent for a student to become slowly detached with the monotony of everyday life, school, meaningless friendships, insane advertising, societal pressure overall, and then shift toward otakuism. Much of this is probably rooted to the prevalence of previous otaku in the Japanese blogosphere and on 2ch, which could easily expose individuals who are simply seeking escape from reality into the deeper, darker abyss that is the otaku lifestyle, even if they had no intention of it in the first place. None of this necessarily requires a sudden epiphany that one has to face reality. In fact, I would argue the opposite — “reality” as constituted in the phrase “reality hit” is meaningless to these individuals, and part of the reason is the postmodern conception of what reality is.
While I agree that quite a number of these phrases are simply said out of humor, my use of it specifically refers to otaku who behave in the animalistic way that Azuma Hiroki outlined in his book. That is, the otaku who relentlessly pursue simulacra, that buy tens and hundreds of anime related products, and take capitalism to the extreme.
You’re free to consider these individuals mentally deranged, but I think the opposite. Otaku reveal a latent form of thinking about the world that could very well take root in all (developed) societies, if postmodern engagement with the world continues in the way it has. In the mean time, I only have this to say: Just because you yourself are ontologically committed to a reality rooted in what we colloquially term “real life” does not necessarily mean that these guys feel the same way. We shouldn’t take the idea of “reality” for granted, and it’s not safe to simply assume that a problem with self-understanding and growing up during puberty is a direct cause of these individuals behaving differently.
Umm… in english plz? I know what ur trying to say and it’s very interesting and all.. I just think that this could have been more appealing and all if well… you used less jargon of sophisticated people. Good job though.
I always felt that the type of escapism (in our view of the “real” world) that people associate with video games and anime was a relatively new phenomenon. Yes, stuff like escapist literature has been around for a very long time, but it’s the growing ability of today’s technology to come closer and closer to verisimilitude that presents alternatives to reality on such a large scale. So really, it’s the BS itself that is providing these outlets.
Is it really BS that’s pushing otaku though? I can agree with the fact that postmodernism has shifted today’s society into looking at things relatively, but it’s also possible that some otaku picked up the “reality” of anime, manga and the like as their reality without having to accept the terms of the real world first. In this way, they’re indirectly rejecting the world not by claiming it’s BS because they never really encountered that BS in the first place. That way, the only reality they create from their knowledge is the otaku world, completely disregarding the real world that could be BS.
Maybe that epistemological bent on the ontological question is a bit of an extreme case :X
On the recycling of simulacra: it’s really a self propagating cycle. Otakus enjoy so and so, which causes companies to cater in order to maximize profit, and this causes the same things to appear over and over again, fueled even more by the fact that derivative works are made in order to rearrange these moe traits. The real question in this vein should be “why these traits or signifier? Why not something else?”
@Elineas
Maybe it’s because moe (or in general, anime) is a mostly fictional intepretation of the “real world”. If there are people who hate the realism of the actual world, but there’s an alternate representation of that world, we just think they are better off in the latter “world”.
I think there’s more to it than that, AC, which is what Kylaran is trying to say. It’s not just accepting a different take on the old world, it’s accepting a completely FALSE take on the real world.
I think moral relativism is much weaker than antirealism. It’s one thing to deny that moral statements lack truth value, which is an inevitability of contact with multiple cultures. It’s an entirely different thing to claim that there is no reality outside of our own perception, which challenges a much more fundamental notion. I think that most people are still realists, at least in practice. For example, I don’t know any mathematician who refuses to argue by contradiction on the basis that it is grounded in realism.
I also take issue with a few of your examples. For instance, I would also say that finding a job has a very tangible purpose. We all need to eat. Taking it a little further, I’m a bit unsure of defining bullshit with respect to purpose, because certain schools of thought would say that purpose is not a property of objects or notions, but rather something that we endow upon them. Maybe I misunderstand your meaning.
Interesting read though. I am honestly not well versed enough with Japanese culture or psychology to make any sort of credible claim about the rest of the article though. Honestly, I feel like psychology is half bullshit anyway =)
tl;dr
“I have made the central claim that ontological commitment is absolutely necessary to survival in a postmodern world”
Not just the postmodern world, right? Essentially what religion did for thousands of years (and still does for some) is provide the framework for people to be ontologically committed to their lives (or specific aspects thereof.)
I think this is a great analytical article you’ve written here. However, all the themes you talk about here and the exeriences of an otaku have been incorporated into human nature for thousand’s of years before anime. As Morithel pointed out, religion has acted as an escape from reality for many throughout its’ existence. People have always shown the ability to comform with an alternate reality that brings more pleasant results.
whats the name of this anime ?