Welcome to this Crunchyroll resource for fans of Scientific Romances in the Edo, Meiji and Taisho Eras!
Though Steampunk may be a more recent trend, Japan has a tradition of giant steam-powered robots dating back to the 19th century. Learn about Steampunk anime, Japanese history and Victorian Science Fiction in this crash course article. This article itself draws from the research I undertook for a panel of the same title that I will present at Calgary, Alberta, Canada's Otafest 2009, as well as from my weblog, Voyages Extraordinaires: Scientific Romances in a Bygone Age.
For the sake of convenience, those links in red indicate full licenced video content on Crunchyroll!
Introduction: Steampunk and Scientific Romances
Though gaining mainstream popularity in the last two years, Steampunk has a long tradition dating all the way back to the Victorian Era itself. The term itself was coined in 1987 by Cyberpunk author K.W. Jeter in a letter he wrote to the Sci-Fi magazine Locus. Speaking of fellow authors James Blaylock and Tim Powers, Jeter writes:
Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like ‘steampunks,’ perhaps...
Originally, the term referred to Science Fiction set in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras. However, 20 years later, it would be discovered by Goth-Punk alternative culture and be transformed into the style of fashion that has become so relatively well-known.
Of course, "Steampunk" is not what they called Science Fiction in the Victorian Era. It wasn't even called "Science Fiction"! The original term used to describe the works of such authors as Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edward S. Ellis, George Griffiths, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Allan Poe, W. Olaf Stapledon, Camille Flammarion, Mark Twain, and Garrett P. Serviss was "Scientific Romances", and it is this term that I shall be using for the remainder of this article.
Besides being more authentic to the era, the term Scientific Romances is more evocative of the duality at play in genre. It poetically denotes a combination of things: Science and Romanticism, Progress and Tradition, Industry and Beauty, “the marvellous energy of steam as well as the immemorial pride of horseflesh” (Jan Morris, Spectacle of Empire). Reporter R.H. Serard perfectly describes it in his 1894 interview with Jules Verne:
The windows on the Boulevard Longueville command a magnificent view of the picturesque, if misty, town of Amiens, with its old cathedral and other mediæval buildings. Right in front of the house, on the other side of the boulevard, is a railway cutting, which, just opposite Verne’s study window, disappears into a pleasure ground, where there is a large music kiosk, in which during the fine weather the regimental band plays. This combination is to my thinking a very emblem of the work of the great writer: the rushing tram, with the roar and the rattle of the ultra-modern, and the romance of the music. And is it not by a combination of science and industrialism with all that is most romantic in life that Verne’s novels possess an originality which can be found in the works of no other living writer, not even amongst those who count most in French literature?
For more on the history of Steampunk, please visit my own series of articles A History of Steampunk.
Japan in Transition: The Edo, Meiji and Taisho Periods
There are few settings as symbolic of this dynamic combination of progress and romance as Japan in the 19th century. The Edo Period began in 1603 when Ieyasu Tokugawa originated the Tokugawa Shogunate. It is this period, which lasted through the majority of the 19th century, that gave us what we think of as being most archetypally and traditionally Japanese: the samurai governed by the chivalric law of bushido (diligence, honesty, honor, loyalty, frugality), geisha strolling along amidst the cherry blossoms of the Sumida River and Gion district, the development of the sport of sumo and the arts of the kabuki and bunraku theatre, the "Floating World" of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, the gentility of the tea ceremony, and the emergence of Neo-Confucian political thought. Though Edo Japan was largely closed to foreign influence, much was learned through the Dutch enclave of Nagasaki - who were the only Europeans permitted in Japan after the 1640 prohibition on Christianity - including medical and physical sciences, chemistry, biology, optics, and technology. Among the many curious inventions adopted by these "Rangaku" scholars were clocks, hot air balloons, electrical generators called "Elikiters", and delicate spring-powered robots called "Karakuri" which were used for religious ceremonies, theatrical performances and as household novelties (tea serving).
This era began to draw to a close in 1853 when the American naval Commodore Perry and his Black Ships forced open the port of Yokohama to trade. Japan was made to participate in the world of 19th century imperialism, and the only question left open to them was how. Devistating new diseases arrived in Japan along with the humiliation of unfair, Eurocentric treaties. From 1863-65, Western powers involved themselves militarily in Japanese politics. The power of the shoguns began to rapidly deteriorate, finally ending in a violent and bloody civil war from 1866-1869, culminating in the Boshin War (3,500 of 120,000 dead). The Tokugawa Shogunate and Edo Period officially came to an end in 1867.
In that year, Emperor Meiji was restored as the ruler of Japan and with him, the country underwent a vast program of Westernization. All areas of public and political life were radically altered: the dominion of the samurai warlords was broken down, education and agriculture were reformed, unprecedented religious freedom was granted in 1873, a European-style constitution signed in 1889, Japan's first industrial exhibition was held in Ueno Park in 1877, and Tokyo's first skyscraper was built in Asakusa in 1890. The military was also reformed and expanded. In order to prove itself a serious power in the world community the Sino-Japanese War was fought in 1894-95 and the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05. Japan won both conflicts and gained newfound respect and suspicion from the West. Japanese pop-culture also emerged at this time. The first Japanese films were made in 1898: Jizo the Spook and Resurrection of a Corpse. Manga was invented in the Meiji Period, with first 4-panel comic strip being published in 1902.
After the death of Emperor Meiji and ascension of Emperor Taisho in 1912, political power shifted from the class of ruling oligarchs to the parliament and democratic parties. Japan fought against Germany in World War I and became a charter member of the League of Nations, though Western mistrust led inexorably towards World War II. Westernization continued in the arts as the modern Tokyo skyline was developed out of old Edo's collection of temples and villas. American architect Frank Lloyd Wright lived in Japan during this time, designing many buildings including the Imperial Hotel. Another new art form were the Kagekidan theatre troupes, which combined elements of traditional Japanese performance, Broadway musicals and Paris cabarets in the creation of a whole new variety of all-female musical revue. The era of Emperor Taisho came to an end in 1926.
There are a few Scientific Romance and historical anime that reflect this period of time, such as:
The giant Karakuri from Robot Carnival.
Japan Discovers the West: Scientific Romances Outside of Japan
With the sudden influx of new ideas and technologies during the Meiji Period, Japan was also exposed to Western literature. This included the works of the father of Science Fiction, Jules Verne. Like the rest of the world, the Japanese were captivated by his stories of fantastic inventions and far off lands. To this day, Verne remains the most widely translated and reprinted French author.
Many anime use Verne as a springboard for setting their stories of Scientific Romanticism in the exotic "Far West":
A few anime go later than the 19th and early 20th centuries, taking place in the 1930's and 40's or Film Noir, Pulp Fiction and Art Deco-inspired places much like them:
Japan in Conflict: Japanese Scientific Romances
Before long, Japanese authors took the inspiration of Western Scientific Romances and began to write their own tales of imperial expansion and mechanized warfare. The first of their own stories was Ryukei Yano's 1890 novel The Floating Battleship, originally an adult's novel that quickly became popular with children. Of it, Owen Griffiths in his essay Militarizing Japan says:
Considered by some to be the first work of science fiction in modern Japan, [The Floating Battleship] became a standard for later war and future war fiction: Young, male uber-patriots embark on a South Sea adventure to "open up a giant territory tens of times the size of Japan and offer it to the Emperor..."... Yano’s adventurers are motivated by a deep dissatisfaction with Japanese passivity in the face of overwhelming foreign power.
He cites the captain of said vessel, who states as much: "The Western race carries out its exploits throughout the entire earth while the Japanese people carry out their exploits within their own country. We shouldn’t put up with such a lamentable predicament... Indeed, we should take this entire earth as our stage and carry out a great enterprise of singular proportions. Why does Japan alone need to cower in fear and move stealthily about." Where this novel moves beyond a patriotic tome into a Scientific Romance is the devistating futuristic weaponry the titular ship carries. Ironically disturbing, one of these weapons is a terrible explosive that enables the crew to level whole islands.
Perhaps the most reknowned of these stories is The Submarine Battleship, written in 1900 by Shunro Oshikawa. Besides being popular in its own right, this eerie foretelling of the Russo-Japanese War a mere four years later spawned five more sequels, a 1963 Toho film known in English as Atragon and a 1995 anime OVA entitled Super Atragon. The image of the flying submarine with a violent-looking screw device on its nose is famous with fans of Godzilla and Kaiju fans the world over.
Griffiths summarizes Oshikawa's novel (known variously as "The Undersea Battleship," "The Undersea Warship," "Warships on the Bottom of the Sea," etc.):
Kaitei gunkan [the Japanese title] was actually part of a six-novel series published between 1900 and 1907, all of which took as their point of departure Japanese passivity in the face of predatory foreign imperialism. Kaitei gunkan traces the exploits of a disgruntled former naval officer Captain Sakuragi and his hardy band of patriots who build a new submarine battleship on a secret island. The ship, the denkopan is submersible, capable of flight and is armed with futuristic torpedoes and a new ramming technology. Throughout the series, Sakuragi and his men battle the Russians, the French and the English, destroying them all. They even fight on the side of Filipino "freedom fighters" against American imperialists. Written before, during and after the Russo-Japanese War, Oshikawa’s novels rode the rollercoaster of war fever and then disgruntlement over the treaty that followed. In the process, he introduced thousands of Japanese boys to adult concerns about Japan’s weakness vis-a-vis the great powers and apprehension over an increasingly enervated youth. In the process, Oshikawa ignored Japan’s own predatory impulses and re-channeled them into patriotic sacrifice for a people fighting to secure their destiny.
Later novels in the series are Heroic Japan (1902), The New Warship (1904), The Heroic Armada (1904), New Japan (1906), and The Orient Heroic Force (1907). The Russo-Japanese war also spawned Masaemon Harada's The Bitter Future Ten-Year War between Japan and Russia and Tetsuzo Kitahara's The Next War which, according to Robert Matthew in Japanese Science Fiction, "were concerned with what might happen if the Japanese navy were annhilated and the Empire overwhelmed."
While Oshikawa's work was nested within the struggles of the Russo-Japanese War, Ichiu Miyazaki's 1922 novel Future War Between Japan and America foretold what would become fact some 20 years later. Griffiths introduces his own paper with a chilling description of it:
The January 1922 issue of Shonen kurabu (Boy’s Club) carried the first episode of an exciting new "hot-blooded novel" (nekketsu shosetsu) drawn from the fertile imagination of noted children’s writer Miyazaki Ichiu. For fourteen consecutive issues Miyazaki enthralled Japanese children with depictions of Japanese valour and the Yamato spirit (Yamato damashii) locked in a titanic struggle against a duplicitous and rapacious foreign enemy. The fate of the navy and of the nation itself hung in the balance. The Imperial navy fought valiantly against a technologically superior foe but was ultimately destroyed. Then, in Japan’s darkest hour, the nation was saved by a group of true patriots, led by a child warrior commanding a powerful new technology. All Japan wept. This was the Future War Between Japan and America, "the greatest naval battle in history."
The imperial/counterimperial strain of Oshikawa's work is massaged out in its later adaptations, which were influenced by the outcome of the World War that Miyazaki predicted. Atragon, by Gojira's Ishiro Honda, takes place in the year of release, 1963, and ultimately repudiates Japanese militarism. In this version, the titular ship was built by a reclusive captain in the final days of the war, only to have been thought lost. It resurfaces 20 years later and saves the world from the invading armies of the lost continent of Mu, but only after the hardened captain can be convinced that it is a new world and one cannot apply one's genius only for Japan alone. The anime Super Atragon takes place in 1995, long after the Atragon was lost along with its American counterpart at the close of WWII.
Japan Discovers Itself: Steam Trains in Outer Space
Following Ichiu Miyazaki's novel, Science Fiction in the proper sense supplanted Scientific Romances about Japan's encounter with the West. 1927 saw the publication of Kagaku Gaho (Science Pictorial), the first Japanese pulp fiction magazine in the spirit of Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories. Authors published in its pages included Tora Kizu, Akinosuke Shima, Shinji Kitai, and the "Father of Japanese Science Fiction", Juza Unno.
This second generation of authors saw in Scientific Romances and Science Fiction an opportunity to look inwards rather than outwards. Where the previous authors we just discussed saw technology as a means to expand Japan's borders, these authors looked within and asked what it means to be Japanese in the modern, technological age. Kenji Miyazawa was at the forefront of them, with his posthumously published novel A Night on the Galactic Railroad, which marked a new trend in children's literature that promoted more Buddhist values of peace with others and tranquility within oneself, knowledge of the world and wisdom of its ways, ecological mindfulness and social conscientiousness.
This trend of introspective Science Fiction laid out the groundwork for our fourth variety of Scientific Romances in anime, being those franchises which use fantastic senarios as a means to comment on the human condition:
Studio Ghibli
These trends lead inexorably to Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki is often, and rightly, compared to Walt Disney. His films, and those produced by his collaborators at Studio Ghibli, have become beloved favorites around the world, charming children and adults alike in their homeland and beyond. Usually whimsical and sometimes grotesque, the films of Miyazaki and Ghibli are upheld by popular and professional audiences as pinnacles in animation art.
Miyazaki’s films feature several recurring themes that, sometimes ahead of their time, have helped his films to capture the imaginations of the theatregoing public. He is no stranger to the use of the Victorian aesthetic: early in his career, he developed a Jules Verne-inspired concept called Around the World Under the Sea which eventually evolved both into Nadia and Castle in the Sky. He also worked on several episodes of The Adventures of Sherlock Hound. One of the earliest treatments for the ill-fated Little Nemo feature film - based on the turn-of-the-century cartoons by Winsor McCay - was by some of the people who would become members of Studio Ghibli, including animator and director Yoshifumi Kondo, who became famous for Whisper of the Heart, and Kazuhide Tomonaga, who was a key animator for Castle of Cagliostro, Castle in the Sky and many other Ghibli films.
Growing up during and in the aftermath of WWII, the subject of warfare and its human costs have imprinted themselves on Miyazaki, his work, and that of Studio Ghibli. Having essentially instigated the conflict in the Pacific theatre and then losing it in dramatic and apocalyptic fashion, Japan has been given a unique voice in telling the story of war. War, then, figures highly in most of Miyazaki’s films. His pentultimate film, Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), based on the novel series by Diana Wynne Jones, deals with love and war as a young girl, Sophie, is transformed into a 90-year old hag by the wicked Witch of the Waste, in order to trap the master sorcerer Howl. Howl hangs his hat in the titular moving castle: a jumble of metal and machinery powered by the demonic fire of Calcifer, a shooting star whose life Howl saved and with whom he now shares a symbiotic relationship. Against the developing story (and affections) between Sophie and the vain, insensitive Howl is the background of war fought between two kingdoms of this alternate earth-like setting. Initially eschewing the violence, Howl is eventually sucked in. Fighting in the form of a giant, black bird-of-prey, he and Sophie fear that the price to his own soul may become so great that he can never change back to his human self.
Another dominant theme to be found in the works of Hayao Miyazaki is a holdover from Miyazaki’s youth, when his father and uncle were in business together as Miyazaki Airplane, building parts for the World War II Japanese airforce. Flight, airplanes and all manner of creative airships appealed to the younger Miyazaki from a very early age, and for the better part of his life, his technical skill at drawing machinery surpassed his ability to draw the more natural forms of the human body. That interest in aircraft led to Studio Ghibli productions like Porco Rosso and Castle in the Sky. It also led to a full-blown exhibit of an alternate history of flight to be found at Ghibli's own museum in Mitaka, Tokyo. This exhibit featured as its centrepiece the flying craft invented by one of the characters of Castle in the Sky... A full-blown, lifesize model! It also featured a great deal of concept art for fantastic ships and an animated short hosted by a Porco Rosso-like pigman. Unfortunately for those of us in the West, this 2002 short Imaginary Flying Machines was exclusive to the Studio Ghibli Museum and has never been made available on home video.
Ecology and environmentalism, as well as war and aircraft, figure prominently in maestro Hayao Miyazaki’s films. The encounter between humans and the environment is a subject of dear interest to him, and he explores both its positives and negatives throughout his body of work. In My Neighbor Totoro (1988), a modern-day Japanese family moves out to the country, where the two daughters meet the furry and rotund god of the forest, Totoro, his assistants, and the somewhat unsettling Catbus. In a very Lewis Carroll-inspired excursion down the rabbithole, the girls are ushered into the wonderland of the forest spirits and the simple value of intimacy with nature.
The three themes of airships, war and ecology unite in Miyazaki’s very first Ghibli production (actually a pre-Ghibli film) entitled Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and are exquisitely tied in their second film, 1986’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky. In what appears to be an alternate earth of the 19th century, humanity had long since achieved the age of heavy industry. Divorcing themselves from the earth and its environment, they fashioned all manner of aircraft, culminating in massive flying island fortresses. With great power came greater violence and destruction, bringing this society and its great flying islands crashing back to the ground. The only one to remain was the mighty Laputa – a massive weapon-fortress and heart of the aerial empire – and eventually its memory was forgotten… Relegated to myth and Jonathan Swift’s storytelling.
Iblard Jikan is a short animated film that almost perfectly distills the Studio Ghibli spirit in its brief 30 minute span. Directed by Naohisa Inoue, Iblard Jikan is devoid of story and is instead a vibrant piece of living art. Paintings of the magical world of Iblard are set, with minimal animation, against the orchestral and synthetic musical compositions of Kiyonori Matsuo as a tour into the heart of the Ghibli aesthetic.
Without a story to distract, Iblard Jikan draws the viewer into this world where Victorian and Art Moderne-influenced cityscapes teeming with characteristic airships and trolleys is wonderfully integrated with vivacious natural life. It is not without its outright fantastical scenes of floating mountains and multitiered lakes, but the real inspirational beauty of Iblard Jikan is in how it can just as well serve as concept art for our own world. This shows us a vision that does not eschew technology but does know its proper place, which is integrated with and in deference to life: human, animal and vegetable. In this is reflects, distills and crystalizes Ghibli themes that run through such films as Castle in the Sky and places as the Studio Ghibli Museum.
The Studio Ghibli Museum is itself a masterpiece of the Scientific Romantic aesthetic and themes of Miyazaki come to life. Many traditional architectural elements and materials are used, like ironwork railings along bridges spanning Victorian-like concourses build of hardwood. These, however, are blended with fluid, organic shapes and natural objects, like the rooftop garden overlooking the museum's smooth, abstractly-shaped exterior. Not only Ghibli themes, but Ghibli characters also come to life. The robot from Castle in the Sky occupies a place in the garden, and I previously mentioned the Imaginary Flying Machines exhibit. The Studio Ghibli Museum becomes a model of how to integrate these principles of Studio Ghibli and the entire Japanese tradition of Scientific Romances into our daily lives.
Stay Tuned! More to come!
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