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‘Nothing dirty about turning on a machine’: Loving your Mechanoid in Contemporary Manga

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Abstract

Relationships between humans and humanoid machines, like robots, androids and physical embodiments of computer programs, render permeable the boundary between human and machine, nature and culture, born and made. Artificial intelligence entities are shown with a capacity for emotional development and on the other hand people become cyborged under social and familial pressures to perform the roles expected of them and basic communication is through the mediation of technology.
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If something not human has emotions … then it
would be considered sentient — alive — just like
a human. If it’s the same as a human, it wouldn’t
be wrong to love that thing.
(Chobits 8, p.93)
The relationships in contemporary manga and animé
between humans and humanoid machines robots,
androids and physical embodiments of computer
programs — render permeable the boundary between
human and machine, nature and culture, born and made.
The distinction between human and machine ceases to be
clear-cut as, on the one hand, artificial intelligence entities
are depicted with evolving sentience and a capacity for
emotional development and, beyond that, for subjective
agency, and, on the other hand, people become ‘cyborged’
under social and/or familial pressures to perform the roles
expected of them, and basic human communication is
mediated through technology1. In questioning assumptions
about the fixity of human nature, this body of work conforms
with what Elaine Graham has identified as a ‘scrutiny of
the basic assumptions on which matters such as personal
identity, the constitution of community, the grounds of
human uniqueness and the relationship between body and
mind are founded’ (Graham 2002, p. 2). Further, though,
romantic narratives about a boy and the female mechanoid
(‘mecha’) who comes into his life and transforms it
are used thematically not to predict visions of a golden
technological future, but to reassert a pattern of heterosexual
bonding grounded in love, nurture and monogamy2. Napier
(2000) argues that this conservative impulse is a reaction
against the increasing power of women in contemporary
Japanese society, whereas Kumiko Sato argues that the
maternal function attributed to the popularized form of
female cyborgs and androids who save a powerless male
hero is an aspect of the postwar Japanism which asserts
Japanese uniqueness in its blending of traditional culture
and new technology (Sato 2004, p.354). The reaffirmation
of traditional social values under threat is underpinned
by a more or less explicit dependence throughout boy-
meets-mecha stories on an ancient folktale motif, that
of the heavenly bride, or swan maiden,3 and hence the
stories can be seen as cyborg-age fairy tales. In this paper,
we explore these narrative and thematic elements with
particular reference to CLAMP’s Chobits manga series (8
volumes, 2001-2002)4, making some comparisons with Ken
Akamatsu’s manga A.I. Love You5, and Masakazu Katsura’s
Video Girl Ai manga series (13 volumes, 1990-1992)6. To
ground our discussion of the heavenly bride schema, we
will make some reference to Kōsuke Fujishima’s animé
Ah! My Goddess (2000), an eclectic articulation of Asian,
Norse and Christian mythologies into a representation of a
universe organized as a blend of mystic power and digital
programming. This film — an offshoot of a popular TV
animé series — does not strictly belong to the ‘boy meets
mecha’ narrative schema we are primarily concerned with,
but offers clear evidence for the currency of the heavenly
bride schema in contemporary manga and animé.
Ultimately, the schema is a redeployment for younger
audiences of a character configuration that, Kumiko Sato
(2004, pp.348-49) argues, originated in cyberpunk and was
thence taken up in manga: a Japanese female hero linked
with an inept male figure who is weaker and more human
than her. By the late-1990s, Sato notes, ‘female cyborgs
and androids have been safely domesticated and fetishized
into maternal and sexual protectors of the male hero’, and
their function ‘is usually reduced to either a maid or a
goddess obediently serving her beloved male master, the
sole reason for her militant nature’. Sato also argues that the
reduction of strong female cyborgs to maternal guardians
‘seems symptomatic of Japanese identity concerning
both race and gender’ (p.349). While this configuration
is clearly present in the texts we are concerned with, they
seem already to have moved to a more self-reflexive phase
and now interrogate and even satirise the convention,
especially its implications for gendering. For example, in
episode 31 (vol. 4) of Akamatsu’s A.I. Love You the cyborg
Saati decides that human Hitoshi misses his mother, and
attempts to play the role: Hitoshi is comically infantilised,
to the point that Saati resolves to attempt to breastfeed
him (and hence inadvertently to satisfy his sexual desire).
The circumvention of the possibility, however, connects
the incident with a more pervasive theme of rethinking
gender attitudes.
The manga which are the focus of this study are marketed
primarily for boys: Video Girl Ai, for example, targets an
audience of Junior High School age7, while the Chobits8
audience is more mid-teen and up. There is also a substantial
‘Nothing dirty about turning on a machine’:
Loving your Mechanoid in Contemporary
Manga
John Stephens and Mio Bryce
Papers 14: 2 2004 45
female readership, which displays two responses: one is
to dismiss such series as representing a typical male point
of view9, whereas the other is to find alignment with the
good-hearted innocence portrayed in the principal female
characters (as indicated by reader responses included in the
peritext of Video Girl Ai, vol. 12, p.182 and vol. 13, pp.
188-189). This reflects a dual perspective on the heavenly
bride schema, the re-emergence of which in manga and
animé high-tech fantasies is perhaps explained by the need
for a new Bildungsroman in Japan. As Jungian psychologist
Hayao Kawai suggests, a Japanese ego is symbolised by
female heroes as found in Japanese folktales, whereas
(following Neumann) male heroes reflect a modern
European ego (Kawai 1982, pp.25-26). The idea of the
‘perfect match’ implicit in the heavenly bride schema
exists as a powerful metanarrative, particularly in girls'/
women’s literature, although it seems to have increased
in prominence for the affluent younger generation, which
has grown up surrounded by the simulacra of information
technology and distanced from their own corporeality,
emotions and individual subjectivities. Love, as a profound
interaction with another integral, individual subjective
agent, is a remote ideal. Saitō (1996, pp.170-194) and
Murakami (1998, p.68) see Video Girl Ai as an example of
learning ‘love’ through simulation, much like a role-play
game. Ōhira, offering a psychiatrist’s perspective, argues
that young people suffer mental problems because of
their longing for an unrealistic ‘pure love’ (Ōhira 2000),
and Yokomori contends that manga are responsible for
imprinting readers with an unrealistic ideal of pure love
— the belief that the perfect match is both ‘real’ and
‘possible’ (Yokomori 1996).
The heavenly bride schema pivots on two characters: a
young man, who is usually poor, something of a social
outsider, but possessed of a good heart; and a divine
maiden (tennyo) who makes an unexpected appearance and
becomes the young man’s wife/partner. In some versions,
the maiden is effectively captured by the man, who steals
and hides her hagoromo (that is, a feathery/gossamer
robe), but in others she is drawn or sent to him because
of his need and worthiness. Usually, the relationship is
only temporary, as the maiden will eventually return to
the heavens10. Thus the TV series Ah! My Goddess relates
the adventures of a heavenly girl, the first class goddess
Belldandy, with a gentle, kind yet ordinary human boy,
Keiichi Morisato, a freshman at Nekomi University
of Technology. While attempting to order a fast food
delivery, Keiichi inadvertently dials the Relief Goddess
Office, leading to Belldandy’s sudden emergence from a
mirror into his dormitory room. When Belldandy offers
to grant him a wish, and he asks for a girlfriend just like
her to stay with him forever, she vows to stay with him as
long as he needs her. Keiichi is promptly expelled from
his dormitory room (where, needless to say, girls are not
allowed), but Belldandy uses her divine power to restore an
old, deserted temple, where they settle down and are joined
by Keiichi’s younger sister, Megumi Morisato, and later
by Belldandy’s elder sister Urd, and then younger sister
Skuld. The TV series focuses on the slow and tantalising
development of romance between the shy, innocent would-
be lovers, Belldandy and Keiichi, entangled with comic
incidents, often caused by the provocative, forceful Urd
and Keiichi’s various fellow students. The film takes this
situation as given, and deals instead with an attempt by
Belldandy’s former mentor, Celestin, to overthrow the
heavens by using Belldandy as a conduit to introduce a
powerful virus that will cause the computer network which
sustains the universe to crash. While he is clearly out of his
depth in the struggle for control of the universe, Keiichi’s
love for Belldandy is unwavering, and he is rewarded by
her decision at the close of the film to make her life with
him permanently.
A summary (or, better, travesty) version of this schema is
presented by the main character of Chobits: ‘A guy finds
a nice girl, takes her home… She’s always cute. Then it
turns out she’s got some sort of special powers … and
she’ll fall madly in love with the guy! She’ll do all sorts of
things cooking, cleaning and other stuff. Happens all
the time. I’ve seen it on TV!’ (1, pp.40-41). It takes a long
time for Hideki to recognise the missing component of the
schema: ‘I can’t assume that she’ll always be around’ (7,
p.61). As implied by this summary, the principal female
characters in the ‘boy meets mecha’ narratives share many
of Belldandy’s characteristics: they are beautiful, endowed
with superior powers, appear unexpectedly, and their stay
is possibly temporary. Although they are fully female, their
cuteness (with its associated purity, innocence, fragility
and childlike comicalness)11 is emphasised and there is a
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barrier against any consummated sexual relationship. In
the cases of Chii (Chobits) and Ai (Video Girl Ai) their
propensity for appearing clothed in floating dresses evokes
images of the hagoromo, and hence of their non-human
origin and always imminent departure, in that the hagoromo
has the power to erase the wearer’s memory of her life as
a human. Ai’s role is represented by her name, Ai Amano
(literally, ‘Love Heavenly-field’), both in her angelic role
in attempting to promote love between others, but also
because she is ultimately herself the representation of love
as a heavenly bride.
At the centre of these narratives is a machine which has
a human (female) appearance, an artificial intelligence,
and is programmed to learn human emotions. Above all,
unique subjectivities can be ascribed to, and claimed by,
these mechanoids, and this is a key component in attributing
humanity to them. The affirmation that ‘It doesn’t matter
if your programming is computer code or DNA — you
are unique’ (Chobits 7, p.22) is matched by equivalent
assertions in, for example, A.I. Love You. When Saati, an
embodied computer program, suggests she can be simply
reconstructed if erased, her creator (and would-be lover)
remonstrates, ‘No, Saati! There’ll only be one of you. Even
if the body and the face are the same…to me, you’re the
only real Saati out there!’ (A.I Love You 1, p.177). When, in
Video Girl Ai, Yōta is faced with the re-programmed Ai who
now mechanically performs the role of ‘perfect video girl’,
he grieves, thinking, ‘There is no Ai here. She has gone’
and tells her, ‘I lost the person I loved’ (13, p.134). The
blurring of the concepts ‘human’ and ‘cyborg/mechanoid’,
which is familiar in the contemporary world because
of our reliance on, and integration of, artificial parts in
human bodies, and the extension of human bodies by such
mechanical supplements as cars, phones, computers, and so
on, develops a new slant when subjectivity and narrative
point of view are attributed to a mechanoid character. In
the Chobitsworld, the materialistic border between human
bodies and persocoms (biocomputers in human shape and
modelled on organic processes) is clear and definite. Even
though Chii is close to human in terms of her emotions
and subjectivity and feels emotional pains in her chest, her
body remains mecha. She does not eat and has no bodily
senses/feelings, such as taste and temperature. The world
of Video Girl Ai is more whimsical. A video girl is created
by information technology, and endowed with a perfect,
sensory feminine body, but lacks emotions. Although they
exist only while the videotape is running, they are more
perfect materialisations of a human body than Chii. Thus
during the time Ai lives in a tent in a park (in order not to
disturb Yōta’s life, but simply to wait until her video runs
out and she disappears), she suffers hunger, fever, bodily
disorders and people’s laughter and suspicions when she
goes to a public bath. She deplores that she must endure
human-like physical conditions, although she is not
human and does not menstruate (10, p.132). Characters
which fit Gray’s (2002, p.2) description of a cyborg as ‘a
self-regulating organism that combines the natural and
artificial together in one system’, and which mixes ‘the
evolved and the made, the living and the inanimate’, thus
attract reader empathy (but not reader alignment, since the
audience is envisaged as occupying a young male subject
position). Viviane Casimir (1997, p.279) takes the argument
further by suggesting that the cyborg not only becomes a
metaphor of the blurring of any dichotomy, but also stands
for ‘the discursive space where a crisis occurs — a crisis
of postmodern thought, a crisis in the representation of
the “living” or what it means “to be alive”’. The Chobits
volumes engage with such issues explicitly by playing
on a version of the ‘stranger in a strange land’ motif, in
that its principal male character, Hideki Motosuwa, is an
ingenuous young man fresh from the countryside, who
has never even seen a persocom. His rural innocence is
more strongly accentuated in the animé version, in which
the establishing scene, instead of the postmodern city, is a
timeless but archaic countryside, where Hideki wears denim
overalls and tends cattle by hand. He is ‘honest and kind
… at once both simple and profound’ (Chobits 8, p.104),
poor, and absolutely computer illiterate. The postmodern
society of twenty-second century Tokyo thus impacts upon
him like an alien world.
The crisis in the representation of what it means ‘to be
alive’ confronts Hideki soon after his move to the city to
attend a cram school, when he finds a persocom apparently
thrown out with other rubbish. After much trial and error he
manages to activate ‘her’ and much is made of the shock
to his innocence and naivety when he finally works out that
the hard-to-find on-switch is her clitoris (unlike ordinary
persocoms, whose switches are usually in their ears). His
Again the need for critical analysis of the ways in which the strangeness is recuperated
into the commonest, most ‘universal’ contemporary belief of all – all you need is love.
Papers 14: 2 2004 47
attempt to rationalise the sexual joke over how to turn her
on is the first sign of the human/machine blurring: ‘What
am I doing? She’s just a machine, right? Nothing dirty
about turning on a machine. Everyone needs a computer’
(1, p.23). Chii, as he names her, is a mysterious mechanoid,
able to function without an operating system, but deprived of
memory, yet programmed with an extraordinary capability
to control other persocoms. Once activated, she immediately
begins to learn, and quickly develops her knowledge as
well as personality, while her affection towards Hideki,
intense from the moment he awakens her/switches her
on, likewise grows.
The story line is very elaborate, interlacing several
problematic relationships amongst the characters Hideki
encounters both in his day-to-day life and his quest to
understand the mystery of Chii, and embedding as an
extended mise en abyme a discrete retelling of the Hideki-
Chii story in a Dick Bruna style series of picture books
whose theme is the quest for ‘the someone just for you’ who
will erase the distinction between human and machine. The
capacity for forming intersubjective love relationships is a
central plank in defining an entity as human, and Chobits
effectively posits that here the distinction between computer
code programming and DNA programming dissolves: the
biologically human lack humanity if incapable of love. The
story’s various relationships function as commentary on the
emerging love between Hideki and Chii. They comprise:
a relationship between a student and his teacher, who has
been forgotten by her persocom-obsessed husband; the
love of a young girl for an older man, who had previously
‘married’ his persocom (subsequently ‘killed’ in a traffic
accident); a young boy’s familial relationship with a
persocom he has built in the image of his dead sister, and
programmed with aspects of her personality; and, finally,
the love between two persocoms especially built to prevent
the running of a mysterious program within Chii’s system,
but who overthrow their own programming to allow her to
reach full intersubjectivity, thereby changing the possible
futures of all persocoms by freeing them from the laws
governing robots and enabling them to share her quest for
love, individual being and subjective agency.
A motif which recurs across several boy-meets-mecha
narratives is the kidnap or capture of the mecha by a male
who is characteristically a warped genius so bonded with
technology (so cyborged, indeed) as to have no grasp of
human emotions. In Chobits this is foreshadowed by an
episode in which, early in her awakening, Chii goes in
search of paid work and is lured away to perform in a peep
show (Volume 2). She lacks the sexual knowledge and self-
awareness to perform the required strip tease, so the show
manager tries to teach her how to simulate masturbation.
Chii’s resistance to the attempt is dramatic, and in the
story’s first demonstration of the enormous power she is
endowed with all persocoms are temporarily shut down.
This complex episode is the first assertion of the theme of
monogamous love, since the only person who may touch
Chii intimately is the one who truly loves her (3, pp.145-
149). Moreover, in contrast to the sexploitation of the strip
show, it is further asserted that the decision will be Chii’s
and constitute an assertion of subjective agency.
A thematic development of this episode occurs when Chii is
kidnapped by technology whiz-kid Yoshiyuki, who thinks
such a machine is wasted on a computer illiterate like
Hideki. Yoshiyuki is the epitome of the human effectively
transformed into a cyborg (a persocom meshes with its
owner by being a mobile phone, calculator, computer, and
household servant), and lusting after Chii’s machineness,
he is ever oblivious to her human aspect. When Yoshiyuki
also attempts to insert a finger into Chii’s vagina, the scene
forcefully restates her quest: ‘You are not “the person just
for me”. So do not come inside me’ (5, pp.76-77). She
emits a force so powerful as to render him unconscious
and entangle him in the multiple leads he was using to
connect her to twenty-four other persocoms in an attempt
to decrypt her source code.
Chii’s uniqueness is grounded in her creation as a ‘chobit’,
a mechanoid so advanced as to have the potential to
evolve human subjectivity as the interactive product of a
self-learning program and environment — a trait shared
with Major Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell and Tima in
Tezuka’s Metropolis. Her forceful defence of her subjective
integrity, moreover, puts her into direct opposition to the
‘laws’ of robotics, though this involves a rather complex
dialogism. In both ‘kidnap’ incidents, it is implicit that
Chii must comply with what is asked of her or breach the
second ‘law’ (a robot must obey the orders given it by human
Papers 14: 2 2004 48
beings). Because the audience (for both manga and animé)
is positioned so as to be empathetic with Chii, the attacks
on her sexual integrity are readily interpreted as sexual
abuse of a human being. That her self-defence only partially
complies with the third ‘law’ (a robot must protect its own
existence — as long as such protection does not conflict
with the first or second law), since she refuses an order,
and that, in temporarily disabling Yoshiyuki, she breaches
a clause of the first ‘law’ (a robot may not injure a human
being), are important steps toward establishing her human
status: the ‘laws’ of robotics function to maintain human
superiority over mechanoids. Chobits is explicit in stating
that the creator of the persocoms ‘didn’t want them to be
bound by the three laws of robotics’ (8, p.127), a freedom
extended beyond Chii. Zima, the data bank designed to
obstruct Chii’s program, breaks the first two laws (a robot
may not injure a human being, or allow a human being
to come to harm; a robot must obey the orders given it
by human beings) in his refusal to intervene to prevent
Chii’s potentially dangerous program from running — a
program which could restore machines to the objective and
quasi-solipsistic state of machines we know, or enable the
accession of subjective agency by machines (as articulated
by Zima when he argues that endowing persocoms with a
capacity for love enables them to love each other).
Mechanoids freed from the laws of robotics and attributed
with subjective agency challenge our concepts of humanity
and posthumanity: if such an entity performs humanity,
and that performativity embodies subjective agency, why
is she/he/it not human? The attempts in the boy-meets-
mecha narratives to define a future version of humanity
accord better with an alternative view that the posthuman
does not necessitate either an evolution or devolution of
the human. Rather it means that difference and identity
are being redistributed. Ideas of humanity — that is, ‘the
human’ — naturalise and hierarchise difference within
the human (whether according to race, class, gender) and
make absolute distinction between human and nonhuman.
Ideas of the posthuman question what we consider to be
‘natural’, and create possibilities for the emergence of
new relationships between human and machine, biology
and technology.
Relating to and understanding a mechanoid thus pivots on
matters of ontology rather than epistemology, and Hideki
is therefore much better equipped to shape humanity’s
posthuman future than are the techno whiz-kids who
ultimately must learn from him. The model for such learning
is embodied in twelve-year-old techno genius Minoru, who
can build a persocom in the physical image of his dead
sister, and program her with his sister’s ‘data’, but only
learns the quality of human love when Hideki prompts
him to realize that he loves Yuzuki for herself, and not for
his sister implanted within her. When Yuzuki crashes and
loses that data from memory, Minoru has become ready
to decide not to input it again (7, pp.19-29).
Minoru’s brotherly love for Yuzuki reflects the ideology
driving the series: cathexis itself must be grounded
in ontology rather than epistemology. Chii has been
programmed to seek ‘Someone who will love me because
I am me’ (7, p.154), and if her quest proves unattainable
the world will become an unperceiving machine. Hideki
thus undergoes a classic folktale test: he does not recognise
the quest he is engaged in, and must reach its outcome
without knowing what the stakes are. When he first
acquires Chii, he thinks of her as an object. Her initial
behaviour after being awakened is to imitate physical
gestures and postures, and when Hideki finds her looking
at one of his porn magazines and imitating the poses of
the girls in the magazine, he becomes sexually aroused,
but immediately corrects himself: ‘It’s a machine. Like
a toaster or a microwave’ (1, p.39). The imbrication of
pornography and mechanoid in this early moment in the
series begins to define the issues that will unfold throughout.
Which image more strongly invokes desire — the naked
woman in the magazine, or the partly clothed mechanoid
imitating it? Which image is more intensely objectified?
Chii’s performance of a version of femininity constructed
for the male gaze both satirizes this pornographic tendency
in manga and glances at the negative interpellative effects
of particular discourses of femininity. Hideki, however, will
move on from this point to engage with deeper questions.
What is the place of physical desire in cathexis? What
takes priority, love or desire?
Like other contemporary boy-meets-mecha manga, the
Chobits series affirms the idea of a ‘perfect match’, but
Deconstructive critical work is just as significant as it ever was.
Papers 14: 2 2004 49
grounds this in intersubjective, trustworthy friendships.
Video Girl Aiespecially the manga version — offers
an instructive comparison. The male protagonist, Yōta
Moteuchi, is another warm, caring schoolboy lacking in
self-confidence. Having discovered that Moemi, the girl he
loves, is in love with his best friend, Yōta disconsolately
enters a mysterious video shop, Gokuraku (paradise), which
is only visible to a pure and caring boy with a broken heart.
He borrows what he thinks is a porn tape, ‘I will comfort
you: Amano Ai’. Normally when this tape is played, a
sensual young woman (Ai) materializes from the screen
and offers sexual solace to the viewer. But Yōta’s video
player is defective, and Ai materializes not as a feminine,
sexually attractive girl, who is also a skilful cook, but with
a thin, boyish body, rough, boyish speech and a propensity
for mischief (and is unable to cook). She is possessed
of genuine rather than simulated warmth, however, and
the two evolve a non-sexual friendship that eventually
develops into love. The crux of this elaborate narrative is
the question of whether ‘love’ truly exists. The creator of
the video girls (a humanoid from the future who grew up
without knowing human/parental love (12, p. 167) insists
love is only a narcissistic illusion, and the ultimate purpose
of the video girl system is not to help a young man with a
pure heart to recover the ability to love but to teach him,
through experiencing the ‘comfort’ offered by a physically
desirable, sexually skilful, yet unemotional video girl, that
(spiritual) love is fragile, transient and untrustworthy. As
in Chobits, the boy’s love for the programmed, non-human
girl is critically tested, with both having to overcome
memory erasure (and a video girl who experiences genuine
cathexis will be recalled and destroyed as defective), but the
manga ends happily when Yōta and Ai respectively fight to
regain their erased memories and affirm their love for one
another12. Video Girl Ai includes some explicit depictions
of Ai’s naked body — far more explicit than any images
in Chobits or A.I. Love You — and while these no doubt
do offer a certain frisson for the male gaze, their thematic
function is to privilege intersubjective love over physical
desire. It is clearly assumed that the warm yet non-sexual
touches (for example, hugging or holding hands) that
convey genuinely romantic and spiritual love, exist in
common with the essential element of familial love. Yuzuki
gives Minori a hug when he is sad. Yuzuki’s conservative
dress also indicates that her value is fundamentally different
from Minoru’s other persocoms, who are scantily clad
in overtly sexual costumes. As Kusaka asserts, although
abundant sexual references and displays occur in manga
and animé, sex with one’s true love (the perfect partner)
is taboo in love comedies (Kusaka 2000, pp.61-62). This
is also the key to Hideki’s quest in Chobits.
The conjunction of pornographic and mechanoid images
in these works functions as a sign for a society that, in
Yoneyama’s (1999) term, is ‘program-driven’, in which the
mechanoid or non-human is a metaphor for the generation
that has emerged since the early 1990s. A generation that
relies on manuals and instruction books is caricatured in
Video Girl Ai when Ai tricks Yōta into studying a manual in
preparation for love-making. A similar joke about manuals
underlies the scene from Chobits discussed above, in that
while Hideki is looking for his copy of Persocoms for
Dummies, Chii is engrossed in his porn magazine. The
conjunction, however, also becomes the field in which the
materialist society can be challenged by the unexpected.
This element of unexpectedness enables both humans and
mechas (persocoms, video girls, artificial intelligences) to
develop their own subjectivities and discover who they
really are. As Chii learns and develops, her secret past
begins to emerge. She was originally named Elda, and she
and her older sister Freya are ‘chobits’, persocoms with
almost legendary status in the domain of cyberspace. The
rumours about them are summed up by Minoru: ‘Chobits
are said to be artificial intelligences capable of thinking
and acting on their own’ (1, p.84). They were created
as surrogate children by a genius, Ichirō Mihara, for
his childless wife, Chitose Hibiya. Crucially, they were
programmed to love. Freya, however, tragically grows
to love her father/creator, Ichirō, and, in a mark of her
humanness, dies/breaks irrecoverably of a broken heart.
Just before Freya dies, Elda transfers her data/soul into
herself, then asks her parents to erase her data so that she
can be born again to find her own ‘someone just for you’,
but not remember her creator/father.
The process of naming here is something of a tease, but
may point to an observation made by Graham (2002,
p.9) that the construction of fiction by blending myth and
technology helps ‘to reinject the spiritual, the religious and
These manga have, for western readers, a double strangeness.
Papers 14: 2 2004 50
the “transcendent” into a materialist world’. This is more
obvious with the trio of goddesses in Ah! My Goddess: Urd,
Skuld and Belldandy are based on the (obscure) Nordic
fates (roughly, Fate, Future and Present, respectively)13
to whose power over time and process even the gods are
subject. The heavenly bride motif in these stories is another
blending of myth and technology, but is perhaps reinforced
in Chobits by naming the two unique persocoms Freya and
Elda: the purpose of the first seems obvious — the goddess
of fertility as a sign that the infertility of their ‘mother’,
Chitose Hibiya, has been overcome; the second is perhaps
an oblique case of eldi ‘something born’, whereby the
difference between the born and the made is collapsed. As
remarked previously, Chobits depicts cathexis as the force
which effects that erasure. It is presented quite explicitly
when Ms Hibiya recounts to Hideki her feelings of sorrow
and grief when an earlier form of humanoid computer
‘broke’ and her husband’s explanation: ‘It’s only natural.
Even if they aren’t alive, you are. You care because you
are alive — because you have a heart’ (7, p.105). A further
mythic element deployed in Chobits and A.I. Love You,
and which merits further investigation, is the Pygmalion
motif, whereby a love relationship develops between a male
creator and a female created object which becomes human.
The motif is most overtly handled in the romantic comedy
series A.I. Love You, in which the opening episode depicts
Hitoshi enacting the Pygmalion story as he talks with and
imagines adorning the perfect women he has created as
an A.I. program, and then she is embodied by means of
a lightning strike. A recurrent theme of the series is that
Hitoshi/Pygmalion has to rise above seeing Saati/Galatea
as a predominantly physical object — a lesson he re-learns
in numerous episodes.
The desire to recuperate transcendence is an overt response
to a sense that humanity has become misplaced, if Viviane
Casimir’s remark that ‘both machine and human are
information-processing systems’ is taken at face value
(Casimir 1997, p.282). Through the modern era, reason
has become entrenched as the predominant mode of
human social practice, and the rule of rational-technical
instrumentality has accordingly eroded the affective
realm of social action (see Graham 2002, p.6). Burfoot
argues that ‘posthumanism, especially as formulated in
technoscience, can be seen to reify the objectification of
the body in terms of denying its formative role and by
affirming it as irreducible atomic matter (2003, p.48).
The manga seek to redress this situation by configuring
three kinds of character.
First, the mecha herself is endowed with a formative role and
a capacity for learning. Chii is virtually a blank slate after
Hideki switches her on, ‘like a child …[who] knew nothing
of the world’ (7, p.113). As she accumulates information
through lived experience and discursive materials
(especially Ms Hibiya’s City with No People picture book
series about the nature of being in the world), rather than
through programming (she is, in fact, immune to digital
programming), she engages in increasingly sophisticated
modes of intersubjective relationship. Like Ai (Video Girl
Ai) and Saati (A. I. Love You), her humanity’ is constituted
by her capacity for cognitive processes, for experiencing
joy and sorrow, for experiencing deep emotion, especially
love, and for feeling and acting upon altruistic impulses.
In short, she can be attributed subjectivity. Ai and Saati,
however, need to temper high-level programming with a
learned innocence: Ai, by losing the sophisticated sexuality
metonymized by her voluptuous body (her breasts shrink
dramatically when she materializes); and Saati becomes
more human by becoming less rational. In Saati’s case this
is dramatized in Volume 3 (pp.129 ff.) in an incident with
a stray puppy. When she realizes that the puppy is not yet
weaned, her first confused action is to attempt to breastfeed
it. The depiction of her near-naked upper body, coupled
with Hitoshi’s exclamation, ‘You … you can’t breastfeed
a puppy!!’, shapes and registers the audience’s shock and
repulsion at her action, and shows that the audience is
already thinking of her in human terms. She dresses the
puppy in human baby clothes when she applies reason
and consults a manual, but subsequently, when she feels
unwillingness to return the puppy to his owners Hitoshi
explains, ‘You’ve become a little bit more human than
before’ (3, p.158).
The second kind of character that functions to interrogate the
rule of rational-technical instrumentality is the ingenuous
male such as Hideki and Yōta. Their basic incompetence
with technology, and their propensity to display a range
of more volatile emotions than other characters, privileges
human emotion over matter and reaffirms the force of
It produces ‘the rational subject, the subject of calculating mastery…’.
Papers 14: 2 2004 51
affective social action. The third type is exemplified by
Minoru (Chobits) and Hitoshi (A. I. Love You), who possess
both rational minds and a very high level of skill with
computers, but nevertheless remain sensitive to emotions
and capable of deep intersubjective relationships.
The mecha in these stories blur the distinction between
organism and machine. Since, as Casimir (1997, p.282)
suggests, ‘The question of the “living” is a question
of subjectivity’, the mechanoids represented here both
illustrate this and call into question the ‘humanity’ of
organic life forms. Each of the mechas is a bodily entity
who undergoes a childlike development of her own
presence in space and time. Each is depicted as a body
endowed with life, threatened with non-being, as each
experiences multiple crises which threaten to erase her.
Each is depicted as unique, a self existing in a network
of intersubjective relationships, and the difference from
others in that network which define them incorporate both
differences as persocoms and personal differences. Finally,
each of the mechas is represented as a thinking subject,
who conceives of herself as a unity, and whose childlike
innocence endows her with a potential for subjective agency
because it positions her outside of her society’s propensity
to represent itself as always already instituted, and therefore
denying the possibility of other versions of being. Once the
computer has acquired subjective agency, she has through
intersubjective relationships the capability for either self-
alteration or remaking the world. Such a transformation
of subjectivity has implications for those female readers
who align themselves with the warmth and innocence of
these protagonists, and perhaps in part explains why Ai
is so popular amongst visitors to Katsura’s website: from
2001 to 2003 they have consistently voted her number
two amongst the characters Katsura has devised. For the
predominant male readership, on the other hand, it models
a more emotionally considerate and less sensually driven
way of thinking about and relating to girls.
NOTES
1. For example the use of Poke-beru (Pocket bell/pagers)
then Keitai (mobile phones) became a phenomenon
amongst Japanese high school girls, and the technology
used to facilitate encounters with unknown people
through mobile phones. For the active roles of
information technologies in Japanese interpersonal
relationships, see Japanese Cyberculture, edited by
Gottlieb and McLelland, 2003.
2. From her survey (questionnaires) for high school
students in 1993 regarding the gender roles in manga,
Tanimoto concludes that the students’ perception of
desired images are conservative: desired male characters
are endowed with abilities, initiative and are able to do
things you cannot, whereas desired female characters
are amiable and friendly (Tanimoto 1998). Ōtsuka also
found in his interviews that postwar baby boomers’
children are not suspicious or cynical about ‘family’ and
accepted the ‘family image/illusion’ (Ōtsuka 1990).
3. Swan maiden tales, which are ancient and found in
many parts of the world (see Hatto 1961), reached
Japan in the third or fourth century, with the protagonist
imaged in one of two ways: as bird maidens (often
cranes), and as heavenly women dressed in white,
silky, long clothing like hiten (flying, music-playing
heavenly being/Buddhist deities on Hōryūji temple’s
wall paintings). The latter, the celestial maiden with
Hagoromo continuously evolved intertextually, creating
abundant stories, from Princess Kaguya’s Taketori
monogatari (“Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”) in the late
ninth century (Kanda 1963), Zeami’s famous Noh play
Hagoromo in the medieval period, and the folktale from
China, of Orihime (the Weaving Princess, Vega), who
was drawn back to the heavens against her will and
only allowed to meet with her husband on the night
of Tanabata (the Star festival), Vega and Altair.
Watase’s manga, Ayashi no Ceres (14 volumes 1996-
2000), is one of the most recent productions in this
stream. Napier (2000) has identified a “magic girl”
motif in manga/animé stories, but our argument is that
there is a more archaic metanarrative at work.
The constraints grow out of the cultural context and so are profoundly ideological.
Papers 14: 2 2004 52
4. CLAMP is a very successful team of four woman manga
artists (Ageha Ohkawa; Satsuki Igarashi; Tsubaki Nekoi
and Mokona Apapa), continuously producing stylish,
elaborate and entertaining works in a wide range of areas,
including Cardcaptor Sakura, X, Wish and xxxHolic.
5. The title of the Japanese original is AI ga tomaranai!
(Ai [Artificial Intelligence/Love] does not stop!), first
published in Shūkan Magazine (Weekly Magazine)
from 1994 to 1997.
6. The Japanese title is Den’ei Shōjo: Video Girl Ai (lit.
electronic shadow girl). There are two more volumes
of Den’ei Shōjo, which contain short stories not about
Ai. The English version of Video Girl Ai was published
by Viz Communications, Inc., from 1999.
7. Video Girl Ai first appeared in Shūkan Shōnen Jump
(Weekly Boys’ Jump, hereafter Jump) between 1989
and 1992. This magazine started in 1968 and has been
the most popular and successful weekly boys’ manga
magazine. It is said that the Jumps publication policy
is based on three keywords — friendship, effort and
winning — chosen by 10 and 11 years old boys. Its
original target readers were therefore boys. Although
the readership has extended to adults, Jump still targets
boys, which restricts it from depicting real sex, despite
its abundant provocative sexual references. Many girls
also read Jump. Its print-run had reached 5,000,000
copies by 1989, when Video Girl Ai started. Jump’s
publication practices are influenced by constant reader
rankings and if a manga cannot achieve popularity by the
10th week, it may be discontinued. Video Girl Ai contains
115 chapters, which demonstrates its popularity. For
Jump, see Saitō 1996; Schodt 1996, pp.87-91)
8. Chobits was originally published from 2000 to 2002, in
Kōdansha’s Shūkan (Weekly) Young Magazine, which
is categorised as “seinen-shi” (magazines for young
adult males).
9. Thus in an interview with Fujimoto’s interview, Nariko
Enomoto (manga artist) ponders whether Video Girl
promotes the idea that if becoming human depends
on being loved by a man, then a woman who is not
loved by a man/men is not a woman (Fujimoto 2000,
p.181).
10. In vol 7 of AI ga tomaranai, episodes 46-48 involve
a school play using a mermaid story (which, in Japan,
is known mostly through Hans Christian Anderson’s
Little Mermaid). In the play, Saati plays a mermaid and
is forced by Cindy (a human girl who likes Satoshi) to
promise that she will disappear if she fails to win the
love of the prince (acted by Satoshi). Saati relates her
situation as a non-human with the mermaid and when
Satoshi on the stage chooses a human girl, acted by
Cindy, she tries to disappear, by destroying her core
programs.
11. Cute images may be ambiguous, ambivalent and
complicated, because of the integration of adorable
innocence (fragile yet spiritual and sacred) with
prettiness in body and behaviours (either childlike/
childish, comical or possibly sexually attractive).
Although it can easily be stereotyped and commodified,
cuteness enriches a story by injecting light-heartedness
into the relationship, and by triggering the boy’s affection
as a protector/nurturer it eludes the more familiar pattern
of relationships modelled on mother-son relationship,
which has pervaded Japanese films (Satō T. 1982). A
passion for ‘cuteness’ is prevalent not only in manga
and animé but also in Japanese society, indicating deep-
seated, nostalgic desires for a dreamed childhood and
an implicit refusal of adulthood, which is often felt as
a heavy burden of responsibility and social conformity,
rather than offering the joy of independence (see, for
example, Ōtsuka 1991; Masubuchi 1994; Kinsella 1995;
Machizawa 1999).
12. Katsura states that his original intention was the unhappy
ending involving Ai’s disappearance, but he changed his
mind, partly because of readers’ requests not to erase
Ai (vol.13, p.191).
13. Belldandy is a version of the name of the third fate,
Verđandi (literally, ‘becoming’), apparently produced
by Japanese consonant substitutions (v→b, r→l).
Papers 14: 2 2004 53
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
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Akamatsu, Ken (2004) A.I. Love You, Los Angeles.
Tokyo and London, Tokyopop.
Burfoot, Annette (2003) ‘Human remains: Identity
politics in the face of biotechnology’,
Cultural Critique 53: 47-71.
Casimir, Viviane (1997) ‘Data and Dick’s
deckard: Cyborg as problematic signifier’,
Extrapolation 38, 4: 278-291.
CLAMP (2001-2002) Chobits (8 volumes), Tokyo,
Kōdansha; (2002-2003), Chobits (8 volumes).
Los Angeles, Tokyo and London, Tokyopop.
Fujimoto Yukari (2000) Shōjo manga damashii
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Fujishima, Kōsuke (2000) Ah! My Goddess: The
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Gray, Chris Hables (2002) Cyborg Citizen. New
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
John Stephens is professor in English at Macquarie
University. He is the author/coauthor of two books about
discourse analysis, two books about children’s literature,
and around sixty articles. Most recently he has edited Ways
of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children’s
Literature and Film (2002). Current research is focused on
the impact of ‘new world orders’ on children’s literature
since 1990.
Mio Bryce is Lecturer in Asian Languages at Macquarie
University, teaching Japanese language, literature and
‘Japan’s Contemporary Culture through Manga’. She
holds a PhD in Japanese classical literature (on The Tale
of Genji), from the University of Sydney.
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