SPEED

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[Lectures]

• Bosozoku: Speed Tribes
  • Postwar Youth Tribes
  • Who and Why?
  • Deviance and Fun
• Speed Racer
  • Fantasy Thrills and Chills
  • Obedience and Resistance
  • Brotherhood
• Akira
  • Fantasy Thrills and Chills
  • Resistance: Against What?
  • Friendship
• While We're Young

   

  Youth Tribes...

• Taiyo-zoku (Sun Tribe, 1956)
• Kaminari-zoku (Thunder Tribe, 1959)
• Miyuki-zoku (Miyuki Tribe, 1964)
• Ereki-zoku (Electric Guitar Tribe, 1965)
• Hippie-zoku (Hippies, 1967)
• Bosozoku (Wild Speed Tribe, 1970s)
• Annon-zoku (Annon Tribe, 1977)
• Crystal-zoku (Crystal Tribe, 1980)

   

  What do bosozoku do?

• Ride around in groups late at night making as much noise as possible
• Slow down traffic on major thoroughfares
• Smoking, drinking and drugs
• Yakuza affiliations and affectations

  Criminological View

• 1973-83: number of bosozoku climbed from 12,500 to 39,000, while related arrests rose from 28,000 to 54,819
• Strain theory: deviance is a behavioral expression of frustrated wants and needs resulting from gap between aspirations and social access
• Cultural deviance theory: deviant behavior as conformity to a set of subcultural standards not accepted by society at large
• Social control theory: deviant behavior result of balance between motive forces for deviance and the pressure of social-control mechanisms

  Who and Why?

  "Tats: The Speed Tribes"

• Karl Greenfeld gives account colored by sense of inevitability and tragedy
  • Lack of options for higher education and steady work opportunities
  • Broken homes
• Sees bosozoku to yakuza as natural progression

  Who and Why?

  Kamikaze Biker

• Ikuya Sato argues that bosozoku come from range of backgrounds, from lower class to upper middle class
• Commonality: lack of interest or respect for higher education, generally in lowest brackets of academic performance
• Participation as rebellious phase, with most members going on to steady jobs afterwards
• From interviews: riding in pursuit of play (asobi) rather than as expression of frustration

  Deviance as Fun

• Attraction theory of delinquency: "the fun in evil"
  • Participants in youth gangs not just reacting to social forces but enjoying manipulation and control of their social situation
  • Turning the tables and getting others to react
  • Appropriating meaning to one's life when none is forthcoming from ordinary quarters

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

  The Experience of "Flow"

• "In the flow state, action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor."
• Flow: merging of action and awareness; centering of attention on limited stimulus field; loss of ego; feeling of competence and control; unambiguous goals and immediate feedback; autotelic nature

  Speed Racer

• Artist: Yoshida Tatsuo
  • Head of Tatsunoko Productions
  • "Space Ace," "Insect Legend Honeybee Hutch", etc.
• Animation: 1967-68 on Fuji TV, broadcast in US early 1970s, rebroadcast MTV 1993

  Speed Racer

• How is speed represented?
  • The action
  • The machine
  • The man
• How are Speed Racer's relations with
  • His father
  • Racer X
• How do obedience and rebellion figure in the story?

  Akira

• Artist: Otomo Katsuhiro
  • Domu: A Child's Dreams won SF Grand Prix '83
  • Directed "Rôjin Z," "Memories," "World Apartment Horror"
• Manga:
  • Serial from 1982 for almost a decade in Young
  • Global popularity: Asia, the Americas, Europe
• Animation: 1988

  Akira

• How is speed represented?
  • Who? Why? Where?
  • Does it have "meaning"?
• What kind of world do we see in the clip?
  • What kinds of resistance to the estab. do we see?
• What kind of relationship do Kaneda & Tetsuo have?
• Comparisons & contrasts with "Speed Racer"?
  • What might these stories reflect of their times?

  While We're Young...

• Adolescence
  • Time of confusion and frustration while caught between two codes of behavior and while coming to terms with changes within self
  • Time of freedom to push the envelope while possessing "adult" bodies without adult responsibilities (job, children, etc.)
• Speed and dangers as pleasures associated with the particular time and space of adolescence
  • "Fun" in play v. "thrills" as a career
• Postwar orthodoxies produce particular forms of postwar rebellions