Gothic Politics: Oshii, War, and Life without Death

Abstract

Even before the recent Gulf wars brought on talk of a new kind of war without end, war has been a common, even ubiquitous theme in anime and manga. With this perhaps in mind, an interviewer asked an artist involved with the 2005 "Gundam: Generating Futures" exhibition at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum in Ueno Park how the "Gundam generation" could talk about war with "no actual experience of war." The reply was that, simply, "each of us has experienced' virtual war in a variety of ways/'1 It could be interesting to pursue the importance of virtual war (as opposed to "actual" war) in social life, or perhaps of the experience of war within video games (a question, at least in part, of technology). Certainly Oshii Mamoru, the anime director, filmmaker, artist, and novelist, works with each of these themes at different points in his own, typically war-centered, oeuvre. This article, however, takes up a far more generalized statement on how to think about war. In Oshii' s novel Blood: The Last Vampire; Night of the Beasts (2000, Kemonotachi no yoru ), war as it now is configured is presented as part of a foundational logic of contemporary political and social life.2 This is not to say that "war" is merely figurative (or fictional) for Oshii. Blood: The Last Vampire; Night of the Beasts is centered in part on the Vietnam