In the World That Is Infinitely Inclusive: Four Theses on Voices of a Distant Star and The Wings of Honneamise

There is a word, "world" [sekai]. Until about the time I was in a middle school, I thought the world meant the area where the signals of my cell phone would reach. But why is it? My cell phone doesn't reach anyone.

-Voices of a Distant Star

There is not "subject" and "object," but, rather, there are sites and places, distances: a possible world that is already a world.

-Jean-Luc Nancy, "Touching," in The Sense of the World

How does the acknowledgment of the immanent spatiality of a relationship, such as the physical distance between people, shape one's ethical as well as aesthetic sense of the "world" (sekai) as such? This essay detours from the predominant cultural habits that demarcate the world as a representation of abstract values. To understand the world as the representation of something other than the world itself may cause the loss of the world, because the subject who interprets the world forgets or even resists being part of the spatial world, which is always already inclusive. However, we are often driven to interpretations and thus to losing touch with the world. Being in "touch" with the things in the world or the world itself means to experience one's spatial existence, for example, the fact that one occupies a certain space that continuously connects to other occupied or unoccupied spaces or one's movement in space produces a spatial experience that is not reducible to a meaning. Why is this so important? Such an affirmation of spatial and tangible experience should not be simply taken as a naive return to the immanent body. The experience of the spatiality of existence and relationship is important because that is the source of one's sense of connectedness and hope.

What this essay wants to prove is that distances inspire and connect us. This statement may sound absurd right now. How can a distance that separates us be something positive? But I hope that the following analyses of Shinkai Makoto's Voices of a Distant Star (2002, Hoshi no koe) and Yamaga Hiroyuki's Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise (1987, Oneamisu no tsubasa) will make this statement compelling in the end.¹ The worlds presented in these Japanese anime are not peaceful. Mikako, the protagonist of Voices of a Distant Star, is a young elite soldier who has been selected for a mission to exterminate Tarsians, aliens threatening the human race. Mikako is an excellent fighter, and we can see in the film her marvelous combat skills. The setting of The Wings of Honneamise is a planet that resembles earth. Countries have fought over borderlines, and there is still political tension between them. Shirotsugh (an alternate romanization of the Japanese name Shirotsugu), the protagonist, as a child dreamed of becoming an elite soldier but could not join the military because of his poor grades. Instead, Shirotsugh signs up for the military that does not fight, that is, the Royal Space Force, a laughingstock among other military men. Mikako fights and Shirotsugh does not, but both are caught up in politics and wars that they did not begin. These two anime are by no means pacifist films. Like many other Japanese anime characters, Mikako and Shirotsugh discover truths through the experiences of war, and the fighting scenes, like many action video games, are meant to be entertaining. The underlying moral message of these movies seems bleak; both seem to imply that as long as human history lasts, there will be no end of wars. While such a moral message can be taken as nihilistic, the visual compositions of Voices of a Distant Star and The Wings of Honneamise invite the audience to a slightly optimistic perspective. These two Japanese animations refigure relationships injured by historical incidents into spatial continuities, which are still part of the world, but possess the potentiality of either suspending ultimate annihilation or penetrating the designated historical or anthropological limit. This is not the denial of history but the empathetic move to...