This study aims to analyze the articulation form of unconscious desires inherent in postwar Japanese society by focusing on the image of metamorphosis as a sign of obsessive-compulsive in the Japanese comic genre. In other words, this paper aims to de...
This study aims to analyze the articulation form of unconscious desires inherent in postwar Japanese society by focusing on the image of metamorphosis as a sign of obsessive-compulsive in the Japanese comic genre. In other words, this paper aims to demonstrate the juxtaposition of social psychology and political issues in the specific images found in Japanese comic, in order to suggest that the motivations and conditions that the images represent as fiction and fiction in comics are constructed in close interaction with the socio-political. In the process, the study aims to assert that the metamorphosis image is represented as an aesthetic struggle that unfolds epistemological deployment that are unspoken in reality.
This awareness of the problem was first propounded in <Dragon Ball> through a scene in which the main character, Son Goku, transforms into a Super Saiyan after encountering an enemy with enormous power and realizing his limitations. As the image of a flash of light changing from a typical Asian appearance to spiky blonde hair and green eyes being bandied about throughout society, fundamental suspect arose as to what the collective appeal that was enthusiastic about this came from. By analysing this process, the paper attempted to prove that the image represented a socio-political argument as an aesthetic struggle accompanying the collective psychological mechanism of postwar Japan, regardless of the production within the story. In the works <Attack on Titan> and <Tokyo Ghoul>, which appeared one after another, were able to discover signs of Japan's postwar obsession that can also be detected in <Dragon Ball>, and by organizing the three works as a chronology, the paper can see what kind of change the aesthetic ideology went through. The study sought to uncover the implications of whether it was a projection of postwar Japan's desires.
Of course, these images are manifestations that belong to the comic genre, which is separate from real socio-political events. However, Jacques Rancière's thesis that fiction, in a fictional realm distinct from reality, is capable of defining individual events of history in general, and Marcuse Gabriel's thesis that the concept of fiction, as a theoretical tool for understanding the overall situation in which we find ourselves as existential human beings, is capable of dealing effectively with reality, correspond to the hypothesis of this study.
In this context, this study aims to analyze how images project hidden desires through the medium of metamorphosis in the comic genre in postwar Japan, because it is believed that only by analyzing fictional images in parallel with social events such as regime change can get closer to the reality of the object and the desires it implies. In other words, fiction, constructed as a fictional story, is not simply a free territory drawn by the imagination, but a double-sided place where the struggle and existence of real subjects are repeatedly drawn as obvious cause and effect, providing objects of study that abhor the rationality of reality.
The reason for focusing on images that operate through the medium of metamorphosis in this study is that, first, it is strenuous to find and exemplify signs of images that relate directly to desire as much as displacing performances that are structured as another form of obsessive appearance in an existing fixed iconography; second, it is possible to seize traces of the orientation of heterogeneous desires in the constant tension that arises from the slippage of images; and third, by deconstructing the mythical nature of solidly constructed images, it is possible to comprehend the visual hegemony that is projected onto them. From this, the paper urge that transformative images can be read as a fictional device to argue with reality. In <Dragon Ball>, the unconscious desire to transform into a superhuman, which is concealed throughout the story and then momentarily revealed, indicates the function of transformation as a key content that exposes the obsessive traces of the collective psychology long imprinted on the minds of members of society in postwar Japan.
Based on this hypothesis, the aesthetic struggle of images reproduced in the post-war Japanese comic genre is due to the conflict between dependence on the United States and independence from the United States, the dual consciousness of being a perpetrator of the war and a victim of the atomic bombing, and the geographical location between the East and the West. The paper tried to understand that it was being used from a contortioned root divided by an ambivalent view that constantly questioned the subjectivity of the position. In order to understand these structural properties, this study broadly divides the foundations of post-war Japan into four elements: ‘Permanent Defeat’, ‘Bad Place’, ‘Detachment and Commitment’ and ‘Schizophrenic Itself’ did it.
The above elements, which serve as a framework for driving the collective psychology of postwar Japan, allow us to understand that the metamorphosis images of comics, which are based on the collective psychology and politics produced by the constraints and geopolitical positioning of the United States under the Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, leave clues everywhere as psychological traces that go beyond mere sculptural characteristics and extend to social and political ideas.
Thus, the ‘contortioned’ compulsion of postwar Japan as a defeated nation that could not establish itself as a single idealized self is represented as an aesthetic struggle through the fictionalization of comics, beyond realistic arguments, to achieve an imaginary ‘beautiful Japan’. Among them, the metamorphosis of the image reproduced in <Dragon Ball>, <Attack on Titan>, and <Tokyo Ghoul> goes through large and small events such as the Tokyo subway sarin attack and the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake, and postwar Japan intentionally It leaves an effective clue in that it mediates reflection on the origins that have been forgotten. Also, through the context of metamorphosis, it stands at the center of the argument as an image that actively projects the desires and ideologies lurking behind it. This study attempted to reconstruct each work into a fictional montage that argues for the psychological mechanisms of postwar Japan by classifying each work into imitative compulsions, aggressive compulsions, and receptive compulsions.
First, it can be seen that <Dragon Ball> projected an aesthetic ideology that identifies the enemy's appearance at an imitative level. As a result, it can be confirmed that visible results have been made in establishing a shape recognized as ‘beauty’ in the external appearance of the big other, the United States. This dimension confirms that <Dragon Ball> still fullfills desires in a one-dimensional aspect of imitation. <Attack on Titan> reverses this strategy of mimicry and reexamines the existing aesthetic struggle by transforming the shining subject of sanctity into a voyeuristic figure. The self-deprecating notion of the giant, presented as a kind of caricature, indicates the subject's split from the ‘Beautiful Japanese Me’ to the ‘Ambiguous Japanese Me.’ <Tokyo Ghoul> is perceived as a work that seeks harmony and coexistence in the world with the positivity of accepting the foundation of postwar Japan, where humans and ghouls were distorted into mixed beings. While <Dragon Ball> leaves behind meaningful images through signs of obsession with imitation, <Attack on Titan> actively asks itself who is the victim and who is the perpetrator through the boundary between the object of radiation exposure and the wall. It can be seen that <Tokyo Ghoul> sought to put an end to Japan's recurring postwar obsessive-compulsive disorder by limiting its setting to its own capital and asking fundamental questions about what is right and what is wrong.
As such, this study aims to compare and analyze the recurring symbolic traces incarnated in postwar Japanese society, along with socio-cultural context, based on the three works above. At this time, it can be seen that the image goes beyond the abstract scope of fiction and functions obsessively like a real organism that mediates psychological mechanisms shared in society. Based on these results, the paper attempted to reveal that the image of metamorphosis in comics was expressed as a historical perspective through which members of postwar Japan perceived and viewed the world.
Georges Didi-Wiebermann, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Walter Benjamin's aesthetic theories were used to verify this thesis. W.J.T. Mitchell's thought on what the image wants by giving life to the image as a mediating entity that can illuminate contemporary visual culture, and Didi-Wieberman's theoretical rationale for equating imagination and politics, describing the coexistence of political measures underlying the way we imagine, furthermore Benjamin's intellectual rationale for capturing images of flashes that disappear into the timelessness of history and calling for their salvation as archaeological artifacts that testify to the past, logically provide a valid theoretical foundation for analyzing images that project aesthetic hegemony in today's comics genre.
Through the results of these studies, this paper attempts to testify that the images appearing in each work are not merely for the sake of the author's amusement, but are represented as dynamics that detect the dangers arising in Japan's compulsive thinking and society after the war in advance. This is because the metamorphosis image in the comics can be sintered that it has effectively replaced the appearance and strategy that compensate for the helplessness caused by the lack of the times and has represented the aesthetic struggle through metamorphosis. It can be attested that the above image is appropriated as a kind of intellectual armament that entails the existential struggle facing Japan after the war at the center of the social crisis.
The study insist that capturing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the genre of fiction and hypothesizing them as research that are far from being found in a realistic chapter can present another new horizon for understanding neighboring Japan. Through these research, the paper attempts to derive the following achievements. First, images formed with a focus on metamorphosis are not material representations that are formed independently from the narrative of the work as well as the metamorphosis structure of everyday life. Second, the image in which society's specific ideas and consciousness are embedded functions as a form of representation of organic behavior that is constantly changing rather than a static images. Third, it establishes the status of aesthetics formed as a psychological mechanism of collective struggle, and the image is given as an obsessive-compulsive sign that includes comfort, emotion, and even the subject's reflective spheres. Through this, the paper endeavored to analyze that the image lurking under the code of metamorphosis in the comic genre is established as a stable subject of study that implies a symbolic style and representation structure.