Envisioning a Community of Survivors in Distance and Air Doll (Critical Essay‪)‬

Introduction All across the world today the sense of a national community has been eroded. This is especially true of Japan, which was cast into recession in the early 1990s and reacted to globalization with neoliberal policies that advocated an unregulated market as the means to increase economic growth, regardless of social consequences. Catastrophic incidents, such as the Hanshin earthquake and the Aura Shinrikyo sarin gas attack, which both occurred in 1995, attest to the crisis of what Michel Foucault calls "the apparatus of security," a governmental mechanism for regulating dangers that threaten the lives of citizens (4-23). The main disciplinary mechanisms, such as educational institutions, are also in crisis, given the frequent occurrence of male teenagers' violent crimes and female teenagers' prostitution. Indeed, nearly the entire population--a particularly vulnerable one--has been virtually abandoned by the government's market-driven policies and reduced to what Giorgio Agamben calls "bare lives"--those that are "situated at the intersection of a capacity to be killed and yet not sacrificed" (73). The kind of imagination of a national community that can elevate the killed into the sacrificed by mourning for them seems to have been lost. As a response to this decline in the imagined national community, neonationalism emerged, insisting on the restoration of the senses of the past communities such as the family or nation. And yet, this seemingly critical power of neonationalists turns out to co-opt the anxiety and fear provoked by neoliberal policies, thereby shutting down "domestic resistance against new economic and political configurations that are taking shape" (Yoda 28). (1)