An excerpt

This is what I have written so far for this paper, for which we must choose a theme present in two of the manga works we have read for the course (non-curriculum manga must be approved by the professor) and.. uh.. discuss it, I guess. I didn't read the sheet with the assignment instructions. Someone told me, I think. Maybe it's different and I'll get a zero! Ha ha.

Mine is about technology being presented as something to be wary of in Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind and Masamune Shirow's Ghost In The Shell. (Something to be wary of... Hm. I'll think of a better way to phrase that later.) [Edit: How about this for a title: "Cautionary Tales: Technology as a threat to humanity in Miyazaki and Shirow"? I'm writing this with more of a prose style than a BS-ese one. It's coming out a lot easier and more satisfying than my usual "padded language" crap.]

Note: This is about the two manga (books), not their anime (film) adaptations. I haven't seen the film version of Nausicaa, so I can't speak for the differences between the two, but given the fact that the book took 12 years to write, I'd venture to guess that the screenwriters left a lot out. As for Ghost, the manga and anime are quite different.

Note 2: If the first paragraph reads strange, it's because I started in the middle. I'll get into the morality stuff in the first half.

A very important point that Shirow and Miyazaki take care to point out is that not only are the technologies of the future potentially hazardous to our existence due to our own flawed human attitudes, but are themselves imperfect, unlike what you see in a lot of the “soft” science fiction from both the 20^th century and today. The USS Enterprise of Star Trek: The Next Generation was always immaculately clean and running at 100%, provided it wasn’t in the middle of a space battle, in which case most problems were generally restricted to the engine room. George Jetson’s meals all came out of a conveniently-placed wall slot, and those people-mover conveyor belts ran 24/7. We see none of this in Miyazaki’s and Shirow’s visions of the future. Much of the believability in these stories is owed to the problems the characters face with their various machines, not unlike the snags we run into in our own world.

This is quite clear in Nausicaa – Dorok priests manufacture various monstrosities that they themselves cannot control, including the massive, out-of-control mold that dominates the plot in the second half of the series. The God-Warrior is not an effective weapon upon first activation – its initial infantile behavior makes it nearly as much of a danger to Nausicaa and her friends as it is to those who want her dead. It also emits radiation (“poisonous light”) from its body that nearly proves fatal to the heroine as it carries her to the Crypt of Shuwa.

In fact, the only advanced technology that proves to be consistently reliable is the engines that power the airships. (Nausicaa’s escorting castle men point out that one of the airships they encounter while rendezvousing with the Torumekian fleet has been in service for in excess of a century!) With this one exception, the tools and inventions whose performance warrants the most trust from humanity are those that would be considered obsolete in our day and age. Their windmills don’t grind up inferior flour, simple grenades don’t detonate at random, and rudimentary gas masks effectively protect them from all but the most potent miasma. As in our universe, the best way to minimize occupational risk appears to be to work with a shovel and dirt instead of a test tube and a walk-in refrigerator.

This is an even more apparent element in Ghost, where Shirow goes out of his way to demonstrate the limits of communication, prosthetic, and military technology. While the wireless networking and data transfer capabilities of the day prove to be so convenient that few people with the capability choose to opt out of access, it seems that network security has not kept up with the pace of progress. Indeed, the prevalent use of ghost-hacking by various characters suggests that the average Joe is no safer from having their sensory organs (artificial or biological), muscles, or even their very consciousnesses manipulated than they are from being mugged on the way home from work.

While human mortality has not been “cured,” per se, scientists are able to create artificial near-immortality by replacing everything except the brain with machine parts. However, there are compatibility issues that arise when these constructed organs have to interact with those that humans are born with. He specifically mentions complications in reproducing the endocrine system and marrow, among others. In an amusing diagram featuring Batou, he shows that a powerful prosthetic arm can only bear loads as great as the shoulder which it is mounted to can without breaking off. A crane can’t well lift a steel girder 30 stories high if the span is supported by a mound of Play-Doh.

There is a sort of dialogue running through the series involving the strengths and weaknesses of various forms of weaponry and other military hardware. (It is here that Shirow shows off some of the research and theory that I find strangest for him to have come by – how many civilians outside the arms industry, let alone manga writers, have pondered the particulars of spent casing disposal?) This first shows up as a conversation where Kusanagi berates Togusa for using an underpowered shotgun as his primary weapon, and suggests a different gun better suited for their line of work – “human hunting.” Conversations such as this one likely appear in other narrative works (certainly in other Shirow works), but a notable detail in this one is the mention that revolvers are prone to jamming in a fight (as they are now), and that despite the fact that Section 9 is comfortably well-funded, Togusa is still using a Chinese copy of a Korean assault rifle design. At this time, there is still no perfect gun. Later, Shirow ruminates on the pros and cons of using HV shell ammunition (increased piercing ability at the cost of less stopping power against humans).