The Repressed Spirit of a Modern Monster: Understanding Horror in Japan

Modern Japan’s association, and deep involvement with, popular culture in general, and a very specific horror culture in particular, is as immediate as it is uncontroversial. To a degree, Japanese horror, especially in the context of film and video games, has already developed its own tropes and clichés, which have become intertwined with those of American horror due to the frequent American remakes of Japanese horror films. Most fatally for Japanese horror culture, the modern iterations of genres such as anime and manga, with their pornographic, gory, and unimaginative narratives, have led to the almost total exclusion of Japanese horror from any sophisticated critical examination. If Western horror has some residual veneer of respectability due to figures such as Shelley, Stoker, and Walpole, the term “J-horror’’ sounds disturbing, and to many, it is an invitation to derision, not to curiosity or admiration.

This regrettable association with mass culture, however, obscures what is a unique, and in many ways, profound cultural phenomenon replete with introspection and creative attempts to understand, and deal with, the damage caused by late modernity. If Western horror came into existence as a romantic response to Enlightenment universalism, Whig science, and industrialization in cultures that were at least residually Christian, Japanese horror inhabits an entirely different universe. Though some themes overlap with the Western experience (the crisis of science and technology most especially), much more prominent in Japanese horror are subjects such as repressed war guilt, the cultural trauma of Japanese imperialism, life’s meaninglessness in the modern high-tech city and subjugation to Western hyper-consumerism, alienation of a specifically Japanese sort, and aspirations to posthumanism among others. In response to these problems, Japanese horror culture invokes the spirits and demons of Japanese folklore, Buddhist and Shinto themes, as well as Western influences (predominantly Lovecraftian).

The critical essay collection Japanese Horror Culture proves to be an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the complexity of Japanese horror. No stone is left unturned as the book not only addresses the underlying themes and origins of Japanese horror, but also provides an astute analysis of some of the best examples of the different expressions of the genre-films (including cinematographic techniques specifically employed by J-horror), literature, video games, and of course, manga and anime. There are also fascinating essays about female monsters, cinematography and Japanese horror as an Orientalist preoccupation of the West, though these will not be addressed in this review as they relate more to Western perceptions of Japanese horror or different filming techniques; rather, we shall concentrate on the themes and subjects which make Japanese horror unique and worthy of serious cultural and intellectual analysis.

Japan, one of the most industrialized societies in the world, where technology dominates everyday life, is also one of the most obvious victims of technology, being the only country in the world to have been subject to a nuclear strike. Godzilla, as we know, has embodied nuclear annihilation from its inception, being a creature of the Cold War and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is notable that, after a period of conspicuous absence, the monster has re-appeared in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear incident. As Barbara Greene shows in her essay on Godzilla, Shin-Godzilla is a story not just about nuclear trauma, but also of how Japanese society views itself and its ability to deal with such disasters. Placing the film in its historical and cultural context, Greene explains how Japan has always perceived itself as being at “risk of a variety of natural disasters, from yearly typhoons and unpredictable earthquakes, but also from regional rivals.” This is a curious position for an island country, though one that is historically justified. In trying to defeat Godzilla, the Japanese government proves to be inflexible and incompetent. Japan is not sufficiently self-reliant, but rather, has to count on support from the United States, which is portrayed as pursuing, above all, its own self-interest. The Abe government, urging a Japanese rebirth after the Fukushima disaster, more or less promised to resolve all the issues plaguing Japanese society as exposed by Shin-Godzilla. It is, however, difficult to see how the deeper trauma of technological destruction will be resolved, thus ensuring the eventual return of Godzilla and American help to counter the monster.

An additional trauma to the nuclear one, inflicted by technology from within and without, is the deep-seated, though repressed, reality of the misdeeds of Japanese militarism. Japan, though formally acknowledging the crimes of its imperialist government, has chosen to be avoidant on the subject of their impact on itself and also on its victims (mainly Chinese civilians). Japanese horror addresses these subjects by means of the onryo tradition of storytelling that “focuses on exposing the hidden yet unhealed wounds inflicted upon the nation and, thereby, the psyche of the population.”

The essay The Ghost of Imperialism deals with this subject rather intelligently, pointing out elements within the well-known horror films Evil Dead Trap and the Ring, which appear to have been subconsciously included, but which harken back, in surprising detail, to crimes committed by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War:

Taking into account the horrifying images that have survived from the period, including those of imperial soldiers using bound Chinese citizens for bayonet practice, it is telling that the first murder we see in Evil Dead Trap is a young woman who is impaled, multiple times… to argue that Sadako (the female killer-ghost from the Ring) does not also represent this concept of repressed evil, forcing contemporary, young Japan-generations of youth raised in the specter of misinformation and denial-to face the facts about a more traumatic period is difficult to accept.

As it is noted, both films are framed by “plots that progress via investigative research… whilst this research begins with the respective protagonists expressing cynicism about the ‘truth,’ it is eventually established that such doubts are misplaced, even foolish, and rumour becomes reality.”

The Ring adds a further layer of complexity to this, given that the repressed evil, exacting revenge on those who choose to remain ignorant of it, in the form of Sadako, cannot be extinguished due to the powers of modern technology.  The specter cannot be banished, for it replicates itself via copied video cassettes, haunting and killing any curious modern consumer. This amounts to a “troubled yet oddly expectant vision of a future in which the great collective psychotronic apparatus of contemporary information technology ceaselessly reconstitutes individual identity.” Problematically, at least for the future of late modern society, this individual identity is that of the monster.

The manga series The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service deliver a fascinating story that pays homage to the Japanese storytelling tradition, and attempts to offer an old-fashioned, folklorically and religiously traditional explanation of, and remedy to, the grotesque perversity of modern society. The Kurosagi stories serve “as a modern horror anthology…and serves as an exploration of the continuing role of ghost stories in modern society, in which the living and life itself are often much more horrific than the spirits that haunt them.” The kaidan stories of Japanese folklore, used to great effect here, are informed by religious concepts found in Buddhism and Shinto, and are primarily concerned that the “restless dead could visit misfortune on the living…these ghosts stories focus on spirits who cannot move due to improper or absent funerary rites, those caught in repetitive cycles of suffering at the location of their death, those who die with unfulfilled obligations or wishes, or in gruesome and violent ways away from home.”

The main character, Kuro Karatsu, is a student Buddhist monk who hears the voices of the dead and takes it upon himself to help them, fulfilling their wishes and obligations, or providing them with a proper burial, so they can finally find peace. It is only then that the gruesome vengeance, visited upon the living in various horrific ways, can cease. The antagonists in these stories are not only those who have wronged and killed the dead, but also scientists and technocrats who seeks to desecrate the bodies of the dead for their experiments, whether for profit or “the greater good.” The representatives of the new scientific-industrial class have adopted a purely utilitarian approach towards the bodies of the dead and, as “enlightened individuals,” they have little time for traditions and last rites.

There stories are also a metaphor for the repressed returning to punish the guilty and the indifferent; the unacknowledged crimes of the past guarantee the horrific nature of our future. Karatsu seeks to break the cycle of punishment by traditional means for it is “the job of the living to provide the proper ritualized order in which the dead may rest, the living may prosper, and the community (for the time being) will be safe.” Japanese horror, unlike the zombie hordes and psychotic killers of the West, finds what is truly horrific in what caused these things to be. It “comes from how the ghosts are created in the first place, the lack of proper acknowledgement and treatment of the dead that empowers these yurei to negatively affect the living around them, drawing everyone to repeated tragedy until they are properly laid to rest.”

The Human Chair is a story that builds on this uneasy relationship between modern society and the repressed, though the horror here comes from how consumerism suppresses our desires, only to commodify and divert them to itself; it is a story of “commodity animism,” or the infusion of an object with life. In an atomized, consumerist, society where relationships have become impossible, only incessant consumption can sufficiently distract us from our fate. In this instance the infused object is a chair—whose creator sees himself as ugly, poor, and unable to attract a woman—which becomes his lover, accomplice, and creation. Once the chair is transferred to the lobby of a luxurious hotel, the narrator is not only satisfied by the fact his creation is appreciated by the rich and powerful, but also because he is able to hide inside the chair due to its hollow interior and is sexually gratified “by the knowledge women are sitting on his knees.” Being starved of human relations, due to his “humble finances…and physical ugliness,” tortures the narrator’s soul. This is in contrast with his much-admired luxury creation; it represents a “gulf between his ability to create beautiful things and his physical ugliness…demonstrates his aesthetic inferiority to his chairs, which are more complementary to luxurious surroundings than he is.” This amounts to a critique of a society that values “on a national scale, of things other than the innate self, such as money, beauty and sex.” The woman with whom he eventually falls in love, Yoshiko, is representative of the perfect consumer. She purchases the chair because of the promise of eternal comfort. Yoshiko, a writer, is quite clear that her work as a writer is far more important to her than her husband, which leads her to be as infatuated by the chair as its creator.

The story ends with the narrator exiting the chair to murder Yoshiko’s husband and then proceeding to imprison her inside the chair, thus becoming part of his eternal living object of comfort. This story is as horrific as it is sad. It is also an indictment on modern industrialized society, which has turned people into commodities and has thus made it impossible for meaningful relationships to be formed. Instead, it has sought to replace these burning desires with incessant consumption and, “it is in this climate that commodity animism, marketed as a balm to the human condition, thrives.”

In addition to the themes already discussed, there are essays dedicated to the theological background of Japanese horror, primarily when discussing the Uzumaki trilogy and the anime & manga series Devilman.

Unlike the Christian understanding of life and death, Japanese horror tends to adopt a Buddhist perspective. The teaching of the spiral of Samsara is instructive here: “everyone is stuck within the death spiral of Samsara, for we all live a life of suffering and die one day, only to return back again into this life of suffering.” Rebirth is “no miracle but the natural cycle of life and death.” This could explain why Japanese horror is more readily influenced by Lovecraft and the cosmic horror genre than most other examples of Western horror. Though Lovecraft does not promote any notion of reincarnation in his works, Japanese horror can easily relate to the idea of this life amounting to nothing but suffering, with no hope of redemption in the end. Horror is not merely a part of life—it is life. Horror ends only when we are no more. Death is the only escape since, in death, we no longer experience the horror of existence.

In the Buddhist understanding, salvation is the end of the cycle, or rather, our ceasing to exist. In this sense, Lovecraft’s offer of a bloody death with nothing else to follow is a salvation of sorts—an escape from the grisly (horror) existence. Within the Uzumaki corpus, the modern Japanese cult of working oneself to death and endless consumption are the true sources of horror. We are warned that by doing so we merely “distance ourselves from reality and are dragged into the machinery of attraction and repulsion that is kept relentlessly in motion by our mental projections.” From the Buddhist point of view, “all is projections…we see what we think we see.”

To expand on the Buddhist/Shinto background of Japanese horror, the essay Controlling the Inner Demon, dedicated to Devilman, explores the Japanese understanding of demons. The oni are somewhat different from the Christian understanding of demons; though they too are evil, they have more in common with natural phenomena that cause destruction. The oni are associated with “lightning, one of the most powerful forces of nature…highlighting the threat of potential, instantaneous destruction.” This is reflected in the stories in Devilman, with monsters battling the (anti)hero being linked with natural phenomena and disasters. In terms of appearance, the oni are “gigantic and shapeless…posthuman in nature as they basically steal from the human their superior element regarding all other beings.’’ They are, however, morally ambiguous. Devilman himself is an oni who takes possession of a human, but then, by falling in love with Miki and turning against the other oni in their plan to destroy humanity, reveals his moral ambiguity (he is not intrinsically, and only, evil). Thus, there is no black-and-white distinction between good and evil. What distinguished Devilman from the other oni is self-control in the use of force. At the forefront of this is the Buddhist philosophy of “the taming of the demons and a complex relationship with violence.”

Where does all of this Buddhist thought ultimately lead? To posthumanism, understood as the end of “man-centric” discourse. The oni are shapeless and can mix with everything; man is the real problem in the world, for there is a schism between him and all other life forms. The demons are trapped in the Himalayas and, thanks to global warming, they have been released from their icy prison to conquer the world. This metaphor for man’s self-destruction has also been described as “dark ecology…the awareness that we are living in a dying world, slowly killed by our own hands.” Man is no longer the measurement of all things; indeed, he is the one that needs to get used to the idea that there will be a world without him. If Buddhism teaches that everything has equal value, its logical conclusion seems to be well-stated and extrapolated in Devilman: by refusing to accept this equality, man has turned into a virus for the world, a sickness. Humanity must be destroyed and transcended, to be replaced by higher forms. It is instructive that Devilman fails to save humanity, though, given the Buddhist foundation of the story, this is treated as a positive in the context of the Buddhist dark ecology (which is also an accurate description of the ideology of the proponents of climate alarmism).

Japanese Horror Culture is a collection of essays which should become an essential reading for anyone interested in Japanese horror, society, history, and culture in general. It establishes the profound and pertinent nature of Japanese horror culture for the modern Western reader. The sudden pertinence of this genre, however, should lead us to ask: does Japanese horror feel relevant to us merely because it has become so commercially successful and popular, or is it because we too are about to be visited by the anger and vengeance of the repressed in our fool’s paradise?

Japanese Horror Culture: Critical Essays on Film, Literature, Anime, Video Games
Edited by Fernando Gabriel, Pagnoni Berns, Subashish Bhattacharjee, and Ananya Saha
Lexington Books, 2021; 235 pp

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