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  • “Always Exoticize!” Cyborg Identities and the Challenge of the Nonhuman in Full Metal Apache
  • Joshua Paul Dale (bio)
Takayuki Tatsumi. Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8223-3774-6.

As well as offering a fine comparative study of Japanese and American literary and cultural productions, Tatsumi Takayuki’s new book also intervenes in the critical debates surrounding orientalism and exoticism. This is especially relevant considering the recent international popularity of things Japanese, particularly anime and manga. Tatsumi’s book provides a valuable history of the cross-cultural interactions that first created and now nurture this sudden desire for contemporary Japanese cultural products, whose appeal is largely based on a perceived difference between stylish new Japanese products and the old and familiar “oriental” exotic stereotypes of, as Tatsumi succinctly puts it “Fujiyama-geisha-sushi-harakiri” (4).

Around a century ago, when these stereotypes seemed fresh and new, the United States and other Western countries were gripped by a craze for acquiring art and collectibles from the Far East. According to Thomas Kim, the boom in collecting these exotic products—from screens to fans, porcelain to scrolls—coincided with the development of consumerism: by bringing these objects into their homes, middle-class consumers from industrialized societies attempted to construct their identity as modern subjects, whose assumed superiority to Asian “others” did not preclude learning the art of aesthetic appreciation from ancient, exotic cultures. “Collectors seemed to imagine Japan emerging from a time capsule,” Kim writes, “and in large part the Oriental message from the past was conceived as an education in beauty and order.”1 Does the new millennial boom for high-tech Japanese exotica represent a message from a time capsule of the future rather than the past? Is it a call to become postmodern subjects with a new aesthetic, able to navigate the dizzying world of late-capitalist consumerism without falling into the condescending racism that characterized the past consumption of the exotic Orient?

To trace Tatsumi’s nuanced analysis of this question and give a taste of his eclectic and multilayered style, I follow his exegesis of the title Full Metal Apache. Tatsumi begins with Tsukamoto Shin’ya’s two recent films Tetsuo (1989) and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992), which describe the transformation of an ordinary Japanese salaryman, and later a group of skinheads, into metallicized cyborg bioweapons. While acknowledging the debt these films have to American cyberpunk science fiction, Tatsumi outlines the postwar Japanese cultural history that provides an additional antecedent to Tsukamoto’s theme of the outlaw bonding of metal and human. In the closing days of World War II, the Osaka munitions factory, the largest in Asia, was bombed to ruins. After the war, indigent people squatting in rough shacks across the river—Koreans, Okinawans, and Japanese [End Page 268] living on the fringes of society—realized the value of the metal scrap embedded in the ruins and began to forage for it. If they could evade police—not easy to do when weighted down with a hundred pounds of metal—they could sell the scrap for huge profits (158).

Earlier in the book, when Tatsumi analyzes Japan’s self-exoticizing literary tradition of the “deep North gothic,” he details the historically marginal status of people forced by circumstances to live on Japan’s flood-prone riverbanks. He also points out that even this indigenous literary form was influenced by the multicultural voice of Lafcadio Hearn. In a similar vein, the Osaka scrap-metal thieves were dubbed “Japanese Apaches” by the media. This sobriquet elevated them to a heroic status that appealed to Japanese film audiences, who romanticized the Apache Indian characters in Hollywood westerns directed by John Ford and others (159).

The untamed, outlaw spirit attached to this nickname inspired Komatsu Sakyō’s 1964 science fiction novel Nippon Apacchi-Zoku (The Japanese Apache). Komatsu seized on the metal scavengers’ description of themselves as people who “eat iron scrap,” when they turn junk into money for food (161). In The Japanese Apache, Komatsu creates a new species of “metallivorous” humans who literally eat iron and excrete high-quality steel. This is...

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