Japanese animation cyborg bodies

Cyborgbodies

Identity, the Body, and the Cyborg three strands of enquiry which interrelate closely, for the figure of the Cyborg is precisely where questions of the embodiment of identity are thrown most sharply into focus. To establish whether or not there is an affect upon identity wrought by the technological modification of the body, we must first establish the nature of the relationship between the body and identity.

It is the hope of this research to establish that, on the theoretical level, it is the mind/body split of the humanist era, brought over into the post-humanist present, that has spawned the Cyborg, but that the embodiment of identity, the mind/body unity of a more holistic conceptualisation of human being, is supported by the actual experiences of those whose bodies have been modified, and those who are exploring the Cyborg from a non-scientific standpoint. Prostheticians and geneticists currently at work in the academic-medical-scientific world are clearly of especial interest to this enquiry, as are the military research and development projects funding such work. The non-science based individuals most directly involved with the cyborg phenomenon are cyberpunk fiction writers, disabled performers exploring the disabled identity, and performance artists exploring cyborgism through their performance work.( Jeff Adams,70)

Frankenstein And The Cyborg Metropolis

The "God of Manga" did not have to be an animator. During the war, the young medical student Osamu Tezuka had no other outlet for his pent-up creativity than four-panel gag strips drawn in secret on toilet paper and posted in the munitions factory lavatory. When 1946 saw the end of the wartime ban on "frivolous" publications, the floodgate opened and the characters he had sketched since childhood became dozens, later hundreds of stories which he poured out with a speed and diversity no other comics artist has ever matched. The manga market (Japanese comics) was more than ready for him. Traumatized and malnourished child readers, who came out of the war hungry for hope and distraction, latched at once onto the "red books" (akahon) whose bright covers and escapist adventure stories transported them, however briefly, out of the ashes and starvation which dominated their post-war reality. Hiroshima-survivor Keiji Nakazawa is one of hundreds who remember sitting amid the rubble, reading and re-reading Tezuka's New Treasure Island (Shin Takarajima, 1946) and its successors, which offered not only fantastic entertainment but two kinds of hope: societal hope that the nuclear technology which had so devastated Japan might now build a better future, one of flying cars and robot heroes; individual hope that, after suffering so much, a child might still have something exciting to aspire to, to become a manga-ka (manga artist).( Jeff Adams, 74)

Tezuka's famous statement that, if manga was his bride, animation was his mistress does little to explain why he chose to divert such massive energies into the affair. Certainly there is a natural alliance between the sequential drawings which populate comics and those which form animation's illusory motion. Certainly too there is fame and fortune to be made from film ...