Return to the 90s: Melancholy, Crime and Subculture in Fukushima Japan

• In Event: Japanese Narratives of Legibility

Abstract

Five years after March 2011 we are still trying to figure out how this planetary event has impacted our sense of time. Recent scholarship has shown how the catastrophe has made visible the hidden structures of postwar Japanese society built on developmentalism and the denial of the past. In this presentation, I will however discuss another past of Fukushima Japan, the closer time of the lost decade. Starting with a discussion of the early 90’s TV drama Nighthead, I examine how 90’s Melancholia has come to inform a particular ethical attitude characteristic of mainstream subcultural productions in the present time of Fukushima Japan. Melancholia is conventionally understood as a pathological mood defined by the refusal to let go of the lost object of desire. As Nighthead, the 2012-14 TV animation series Psycho-pass questions how neoliberal policies have criminalized this melancholic desire by simultaneously advocating a return to the idealized national family and embracing neoliberal globalization. Building on queer theories that argue for a more progressive understanding of melancholy, I discuss how both texts portray the urban subject as a queer criminal trying to find in the present a possibility of repair and/as social change. In conclusion, I argue that Psycho-pass intensifies and displaces the 90’s subculture embrace of a never-ending everyday onto an ongoing state of civil war, where it becomes possible to imagine another future to come.

Author

• Christophe Thouny, University of Tokyo