Paul Roquet. The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 264 pp. $140.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-20534-4; $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-20535-1.
Reviewed by Yulia Frumer (Johns Hopkins University)
Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (October, 2022)
Commissioned by Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Medium as Technology
Historians of technology have long benefited from media studies. For many of us, Marshall McLuhan’s work is canonical; Jonathan Stern and Lisa Gitelman have a firm place on our syllabi; and recent works, such as Jeremy Greene’s work on telemedicine, continue a solid tradition of history of science, technology, and medicine scholarship that views medium as technology.[1] Paul Roquet’s The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan joins the body of media technology scholarship that offers a bounty of insights for historians of technology.
Exploring the history of virtual reality (VR) in Japan, Immersive Enclosure reveals that the power of VR to shape social politics lies not in the worlds it creates but in what it is blocking out. Roquet calls this ability of VR to bracket out undesirable parts of reality a “perceptual enclosure,” and he argues that in Japan the capability of VR to diminish reality is treated as a feature, not a bug. Perceptual enclosure, Roquet shows, offers an escape from situatedness (p. 14). By rendering messy and unwelcome social and historical contexts imperceptible, VR makes space for realities that can sustain a desired self.
The first three chapters of the book are particularly relevant to an H-Sci-Med-Tech crowd. In these chapters Roquet delves into the histories of technologies that led to the emergence of current VR platforms.
Chapter 1 focuses on the prehistory of VR, and explores the acoustics of one-person space. The chapter sketches the developments of sound technologies from speakers through headphones to the Walkman. While headphones were a revolutionary technology that reproduced three-dimensional virtual space by isolating left and right ears, Sony’s Walkman (introduced in 1979) added portability and individuation. Situating the emergence of the Walkman in the broader historical context of a growing emphasis on individual space, such as the emergence of single-occupant apartments, Roquet shows that the Walkman allowed the user to sever auditory contact with the outside world in favor of a private zone of listening.
The second chapter discusses the emergence of VR technology in the United States and the translation of this technology into the Japanese socio-linguistic reality. VR technology was originally developed in the United States for the purpose of operating in radioactive environments, but when it was imported to Japan decades later, it was incorporated into the world of telecommunication. Mostly used for video games, VR became most closely associated with the fantasy worlds that served as backgrounds for videogames rendered into 3D.
Chapter 3 turns to a different headset-based technology intended to help the user navigate a virtual environment—remotely operated, or “telepresence” robots. The original idea behind VR—to be able to remotely manipulate objects in a radioactive environment—was reenvisioned in Japan as an employment platform, which would allow businesses to tap into the un- or underemployed population as a potential workforce. Remotely operating a robot was portrayed as a path to personal freedom for retirees and people with disabilities, exploiting a socially reinforced tendency to see work as the only path toward a meaningful social existence. And when labor shortages continued, promoters of telepresence suggested hiring overseas workers to do service work in Japan without having to be physically present on Japanese soil. As Roquet brilliantly points out, the medium's function as perceptual enclosure conceals this ethically dubious technological function from the users. The users, who interface with the machine, are oblivious to reality of the human worker behind the robotic face; they do not need to confront the fact that this worker is a foreigner, is likely underpaid, and is not receiving the benefits that Japanese social security would grant domestic workers.
While the last two chapters focus on VR representation in media, Roquet’s treatments of VR as technology allows him to intervene in ongoing media studies debates. Chapter 4 explores VR-related fiction to show how the medium encourages seeking other worlds, isekai, in Japanese. By flattening historical pasts, building medieval fantasies, painting post-racial futures, and offering new virtual frontiers seemingly open for colonization, VR allowed users to escape existing Japanese contexts. Here, too, Roquet pays attention to what is not brought from the real world into the imaginary ones, and shows how the medium allows the denial of history and even of the very idea of historicity.
In chapter 5, Roquet weighs in an ongoing debate on whether Japanese animation is sexist. Feminist media scholars have long pointed to the over-the-top sexualization, infantilization, and violence in portrayal of female anime characters.[2] On the other hand, defenders of otaku culture, which consumes such media, claim that animation is fantasy; that everybody involved understands the difference between fantasy and the real world; and that the consumption of anime may even be regarded as an expression of queer sexuality.[3] Roquet’s focus on medium as technology allows him to look beyond the two-dimensional contents that appear on the screen, and instead analyze the gendered valences of VR use.
Central to Roquet’s point are questions of access and platform control. Roquet points out that the overwhelming majority of Japanese VR designers and users are adult men, while almost all VR characters are girls. Sexism is built into the virtual materiality of the platform—it hides male bodies while accentuating female ones; it directs and reinforces a male gaze while eliminating the possibility of the female one. This “spatial reorganization of gender” is not accidental but is a quiet backlash—what Roquet calls an “ambient power play”—in response to the gender equality movement to Japan (p. 159). The sexist VR platform recenters men’s importance by technologically recreating a world in which women are infantilized, undressed, and subordinated. The perceptual enclosure, in this case, serves to insulate users from growing gender equality and to sustain a form of indirect masculinity. But VR technology does not have to be masculine or sexist. By discussing the few female-designed VR worlds, Roquet shows how different objectives, identities, and needs informed designers’ choices and produced egalitarian alternative worlds.
Together, the chapters of Immersive Enclosure show how VR functions as a perceptual enclosure to occlude undesirable elements in one’s life. The occluded reality is the reality of uncomfortable history, of social alienation and lack of recognition, of other people’s expectations, of women who demand gender equality, and of foreign workers whose presence is necessary but also perceived as disagreeable. VR technology and its technological relatives—headphones and remotely operated robots—sever perceptual access to unwanted information in the surrounding world, which one would otherwise be forced to confront.
In addition to the perceptual enclosure, Roquet introduces us to several other useful concepts. Particularly worthy of attention is Roquet’s use of “ambience” as an analytic—something that is present in the background but nevertheless has a powerful function. In chapter 1, we learn about “detached ambience” created by the engulfing acoustics, and which serves the user as a means to disassociate from sensory input rich in undesired information. In chapter 5, we encounter “ambient power play”—an attempt to reassert control without a direct intervention in one’s social reality. As Roquet shows, even though the ambient is presented as an insignificant aside, it nevertheless bleeds into the social reality. In relation to the latter point, Roquet also draws our attention to the ways that historicity and situatedness threaten conservative and reactionary sentiments. The flattening or denial of history is neither the result of ignorance nor mere escapism, but rather a political tool for regaining dominance, or at least an experience of it. Finally, Roquet notes the “perceptual privatization imposed by VR telework platforms” and urges us to consider who controls the platforms we use, or “who is the virtual landlord of digital transit work” (pp. 81-82).
It is difficult not to read Immersive Enclosure through the lens of pandemic experience. Will VR telework become the next step after Zooming? Will the spatial reorganization of virtual worlds employ similar techniques of emotional manipulation as today’s social networks? There is no way to know. What we do know—and what Paul Roquet makes abundantly clear—is that we cannot treat (the VR) medium as value-neutral.
Notes
[1]. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1st MIT Press ed (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Jeremy A. Greene, The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
[2]. See, for example, Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society, ConsumAsiaN Book Series (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000).
[3]. The most recent example of such claims is Patrick Galbraith, The Ethics of Affect: Lines and Life in a Tokyo Neighborhood (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2021).
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Citation:
Yulia Frumer. Review of Roquet, Paul, The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57794
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