Humanity According to the Fairies

• In Event: Evolutions and Diasporas of the Fantastic: Spirits, Supernatural Beings, and Fairies in the Imaginary of Japan

Abstract

Humanity Has Declined (Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, or Jintai), a 2012 Japanese TV anime based on Tanaka Romeo’s light novel (2007-2014), is set in a time when human civilization has already undergone “several centuries of slow decline.” The earth is now populated more numerously by the Fairies (yōsei-san), small, highly intelligent elf-like creatures whose social organization is largely a mystery to most humans. The story follows a U.N.-appointed arbiter (whose name is not disclosed in the story), a recent graduate of the last remaining “School,” and her efforts to mediate between the surviving humans (‘former-humans,’ kyū-jinrui) and the Fairies (‘present-humans,’ gen-jinrui). But she soon realizes the lofty-sounding task of arbitration has become an empty endeavor of little relevance to anyone, and instead grows increasingly intrigued by the Fairies’ strange science, culture, and ontology, leading her to ethnographic explorations. My primary focus in this paper is on how the Fairies index a temporal otherness at once posterior and parasitical to the historicity of the former-humans. I analyze chronotopic structures that emerge from the interpenetration of the figures of the Fairy and of the human, in order to explore multiple ‘senses of an ending’ entertained in popular cultural imagination during Japan’s long postwar. Jintai presents a curious eschatological feeling reducible neither to the endless everyday nor to post-apocalyptic solidarity (to borrow Miyadai Shinji’s apt phrases). Rather, the story draws on the strange ontology and sociality of the Fairies – the anti-angel of history – to decentralize the chronotope of rupture and progress.

Author

• Shunsuke Nozawa, Dartmouth College