Kohki Watabe | University of Tsukuba (original) (raw)

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Papers by Kohki Watabe

Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies Yearbook Kohki Watabe, 2024

This study examines the mechanism of immersion in Breath of the Wild (2017) and Tears of Kingdom ... more This study examines the mechanism of immersion in Breath of the Wild (2017) and Tears of Kingdom (2023), which have won various video-game awards and have been both commercially and critically successful, and it compares them to visually immersive media such as panorama and film. First, this study categorizes visual immersion in the modern era into two types: cinematic virtual reality (VR), from panoramas and cinema to 360-degree camera-based video expression using optical reproduction techniques with camera obscura; and three-dimensional computer graphics (3DCG), which has been developing rapidly since the late twentieth century and uses computers rather than optical devices to create virtual spaces. The two games belong to the latter 3DCG. However, they also have the characteristics of realistic films in the former cinematic VR tradition: the characteristics that André Bazin noted about Neorealismo (New Realism) and Orson Welles films, such as location shooting, the use of amateurs, long takes, and deep focus. The fact that Breath of the Wild and Tears of Kingdom have a realist tendency means that they reflect the issues of time and space pointed out by realist film theory. Bazin noted a mummy complex in the history of plastic arts, a human desire for protection against the passage of time. The two games embody the desire in three ways: the storyline in which the contemporary problems are solved by revealing the past events; the ruins embodying the Romantic aesthetics of the sublime are reproduced in the un-temporal 3DCG space; and the player’s ability to manipulate time and space by controlling the avatar. In these three respects, the two games are immersive realist media in which players can virtually resist the flow of time.

国際日本研究, 2024

本稿は『劇場版ポケットモンスターミュウツーの逆襲』（湯山邦彦監督、1998年）をアニマル・スタディーズならびにキャラクター論の二つの観点から検討する。『ミュウツーの逆襲』はアニマル・スタディー... more 本稿は『劇場版ポケットモンスターミュウツーの逆襲』（湯山邦彦監督、1998年）をアニマル・スタディーズならびにキャラクター論の二つの観点から検討する。『ミュウツーの逆襲』はアニマル・スタディーズにおける問題意識や論点と呼応するテクストであり、他者としてのポケモンは人間と自然との媒介として機能し自発的に人間に服従することで人間の自然の利用を正当化する動物の形象として機能している。さらにアニメ・マンガ研究におけるキャラクター論から考えると、同作におけるアニマル・スタディーズ的問題系が、図像的キャラの複製性という前提のもとで「主権者」としての単一性を上演しようとするものだと解釈できる。人間かポケモンかを問わず図像的キャラがメディア・フランチャイズの中に拡散することで、作品の主題として提起されるポケモンと人間の対等な関係の可能性についての問いが、単にギミックとして使われていることが明らかになる。

日本研究, 2024

『刀剣乱舞』（二〇一五年―）は現代日本において人気を誇るメディア・フランチャイズであるが、恋闕（れんけつ）という感情の形式や審神者（さにわ）といった意匠を用いている点で世界設定が一九六〇年代の三... more 『刀剣乱舞』（二〇一五年―）は現代日本において人気を誇るメディア・フランチャイズであるが、恋闕（れんけつ）という感情の形式や審神者（さにわ）といった意匠を用いている点で世界設定が一九六〇年代の三島由紀夫の作品群の影響下にある。本稿は、映画研究におけるローラ・マルヴィの「男性のまなざし（male gaze）」論を一般化して援用し、さまざまなメディア上で発表された『刀剣乱舞』ならびに三島作品群を比較検討するものである。
『刀剣乱舞』は女性が男性身体を対象化する「女性のまなざし」を持っているが、マルヴィの理論と異なり作品世界内で観客が同一化する人格的表象が最小限に設定されている。一方、三島の小説「英霊の聲」と小説ならびに映画「憂国」をまなざしという観点で検討すると、性的対象化の機構であるまなざしよりも、そのまなざしへのまなざし返しが重視されていることがわかる。三島の評論「文化防衛論」における「文化概念としての天皇」を補助線として利用することで、天皇との君臣合一という三島の美的理想にとっては、天皇という超越的な存在によってまなざし返されることが必要である。この理想は「英霊の聲」においては盲目の川崎青年がまなざし返すことができない否定形として、「憂国」においては天皇を代理し武山をまなざす麗子とのエロース的合一として表現されている。特に映画「憂国」に注目すると、『刀剣乱舞』同様、作品世界へ没入するための同一化の対象となるアヴァターの表象が最小化されていることがわかり、従って『刀剣乱舞』は三島作品から意匠を借りているというだけではなく、快楽の契機としての受動性を共有していると言える。
しかし、これは両者が同じ方向性を持っていることを意味しない。三島作品が現実の天皇制と向き合って彼の理想の不可能性を理解していたのに対して、『刀剣乱舞』は資本主義社会における商品として、死を永遠に先延ばしにした無時間的な空間の中での至福をプレイヤーの数だけ生産するメカニズムとして機能している。

F1000Research

Anime and manga characters are so ubiquitous in Japan that people see them anywhere, regardless o... more Anime and manga characters are so ubiquitous in Japan that people see them anywhere, regardless of public or private. The two-dimensional flatness of line drawing allows the character images to straddle the boundaries of the worlds of works and media. The analysis of individual artworks needs to be revised to understand the transmedia spreadability of characters and our living conditions. This paper, thus, overviews the preceding discussions of anime and manga scholars on human-character relations and compares them with the theory of subject formation in film studies, whose realist tendency once emphasized the three-dimensional space and time. While psychoanalysis-influenced theories such as suture and male gaze model after one-point perspective and subordinate two-dimensionality, Thomas Lamarre formulates a de-unified perspective in relation to the multilayered image field of Japanese anime. In conjunction with the orientation of cultural and fan studies to emphasize audience agenc...

表象, 2021

Many critics and scholars discuss the depiction of landscape in Makoto Shinkai’s works as central... more Many critics and scholars discuss the depiction of landscape in Makoto Shinkai’s works as central to his auhotrship, referring to Kojin Karatani’s “Discovery of Landscape” (fūkei) and the new materialist directions in contemporary thoughts. This essay first examines discourses on Shinkai’s landscape in terms of Karatani's Cartesian dualism and post-Cartesian attempts to overcome it, and then argues that Shinkai's Your Name is characterized by semi-transparency, in which the transparent virtual lens of live-action films and opaque characters produced by animation stand co-exist. By analyzing Your Name in terms of this semi-transparency, this essay describes the nuanced relationship between the film and the Great East Japan Earthquake; the film does not directly depict the disaster, it but deals with the issue of forgetting the event by placing the opaque characters in a transparent realist landscape. As the beautiful view of the Tiamat comet preoccupies two protagonists with the feeling of loss at the beginning of the film, the depiction of the world in Your Name is not Karatani’s landscape (fūkei) where the two protagonists communicate with the world as modern subject. On the contrary, the microscopic mobility given to the depiction of the world in Your Name by Shinkai sculpts the subjects as nothingness. This essay calls the process a “scenery” (kōkei) in contrast to Karatani’s landscape (fūkei). From this point of view, while the film superficially presenting the theme of “musubi” (connection) and a happy ending, Your Name represents the apocalyptic situation in which we forget that we are already always exposed to the crisis of forgetting disasters.

The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus , 2021

This essay analyses the Japanese sword boom in popular media in the 21st century, situating Touke... more This essay analyses the Japanese sword boom in popular media in the 21st century, situating Touken Ranbu, an online video game franchise, within its wider political and historical context. In the first two decades of the 21st century, government, commercial, and semi-public institutions, such as museums, extensively deployed positive depictions of Japanese swords in popular media, including anime, manga, TV, and films in public relations campaigns. As a historical ideological icon, swords have been used to signify class in the Edo period (1603-1868) and to justify the Japanese Empire's expansion into Asia during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945). By emphasizing the object's symbolism and aestheticism, the sword boom of the 21st century is following a similar trajectory. Popular representations of swords in media culture selectively feature historical episodes that are deemed politically uncontroversial and beneficial for promoting a sense of national pride. This practice systematically ignores the shadow of modern Japanese history in which swords played a central role, such as the controversial wartime "contest to kill one hundred people using a sword" (hyakunin giri kyoso) in China in 1937. The recent notable rise of this idealized symbolism exemplifies the mechanism through which historical revisionism-serving neo-nationalist/right-wing interests-infiltrates Japanese society through popular culture. The sword has been mobilized in contemporary Japanese media as a symbolic cultural commodity to influence consumers' knowledge and consciousness and to condition their views of modern Japanese history.

Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, 2019

The Changelings is a classic work of traditional Japanese literature. In the modern era, it has b... more The Changelings is a classic work of traditional Japanese literature. In the modern era, it has been adapted into Japanese comics repeatedly. This article examines three sho-jo manga, or girls’ comics, adaptations of The Changelings published between 1984 and 2018. Taken together, the three manga evidence the different situations in which women were embedded in the 1980s and the 2010s and provide different interpretative alternatives to female readers. Manga adaptations of The Changelings crystallized gender norms in Japanese society and women’s responses to and struggles with those norms by taking advantage of the gender-switching plot that originated in the twelfth century.

International Panorama Council Journal, 2017

This paper discusses subject formation in today's panorama-like digital moving images by contrast... more This paper discusses subject formation in today's panorama-like digital moving images by contrasting the idea of suture in film theory with stitching process necessary in digital 360-degree photographic image production. Derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, suture refers to the complicated mechanism of signification in classical narrative cinema: by integrating multiple points of view of movie camera, audience, and character in film into a syntagmatic entity, films successfully hide the " Absent One, " an inevitably assumed absence of ownership of shots, and place spectators on a particular subject position in the diegetic world. Compared to the complicated suturing mechanism in the temporal medium, today's VR movies seem to choose a simpler solution for audience's immersion and their omnipotent all-encompassing view: the camera position always corresponds with the viewer's as viewing platforms were placed in the center in panorama buildings in the nineteenth century. However, the immersive images require a process called "stitching" in order to assure the audience's all-seeing power. Each image captured by multiple cameras needs digitally fixed to make the overlaps between them seamless. Based on the contrast of cinematic suture and panoramic stitch, this paper discusses contemporary panoramic immersive media as case studies of subject formation.

Electric Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2016

This study is among the first to examine pixiv, an online platform for amateur anime and manga ar... more This study is among the first to examine pixiv, an online platform for amateur anime and manga artists in Japan, as a key global network and to explore the platform from cultural, historical and politico-economic perspectives. These perspectives suggest ways in which pixiv users communicate with one another to constitute its service through visual media. This paper starts by examining pixiv from cultural perspectives, through which the first section draws on the concept of participatory culture and views pixiv’s specific function as a resource for cultural practice. We argue how pixiv users express their collaborative creativity beyond the level expected by the service company. We then investigate pixiv from historical perspectives and examine dōjin-shi culture, or fanzine culture in Japan, as a pre-digital era version of cultural participation in pixiv. By introducing the concept of gift economy, we put users’ participation on pixiv in the history of dōjin culture. Finally, we look at pixiv from politico-economic perspectives and illustrate the activity of Chaos Lounge, a young visual artist group in Japan, and pixiv users’ movement against the. We argue that the conflicts and negotiations between Chaos Lounge and pixiv users exemplify fundamental contradiction between gift and commercial economies.