Chapter 6

Neon Genesis Evangelion


It seems to be East Asia’s unique historical destiny to be the exception to late 
capitalism which nevertheless proves the rule. Caught between the hammer of US 
corporate competition and the anvil of Communist insurrection, East Asia broke every 
rule in the neoliberal playbook to become one of the titans of the world economy, but the 
price of its success has been its ever-increasing entanglement in the world-market it so 
fiercely (and effectively) resisted. Economic analysts such as Alice Amsden, Michael 
Gerlach and Robert Wade have described in vivid detail how East Asia’s canny 
developmental states and feisty corporate networks (Japan’s keiretsu, South Korea’s 
chaebol, and China’s business groups) transformed war-blasted societies wrecked by 
imperialism, WW II and bloody civil wars into thriving high-tech economies.1 What has 
not yet been written, however, is the cultural side of this story: how some of the oldest 
cultures on the planet innovated some of the newest technology; how rigidly hierarchical 
societies developed astonishingly free-wheeling business cultures; and most of all, how 
anime films and karaoke clubs, Hong Kong epics and Nintendo videogames erupted out 
of East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s like the incandescent plasma of some vast rift 
nebula, overturning all our star-charts and cultural cosmologies.
East Asia offers far more, however, than just another belated variation on 
processes of mediatization and consumerism long taken for granted in the US and the 
EU. Above all, the region is a geopolitical scandal, whose very existence is proof that 
Wall Street reigns, but no longer rules, over the world economy.2 As late as 1970, US 
firms were broadly hegemonic in almost every economic sector one could name; by the 
1990s, EU and East Asian firms caught up with and in certain cases even surpassed their 
US competitors in industries ranging from automobiles to electronics, banking to 
telecommunications. While Wall Street has continued to wage the Cold War with other 
means, deploying IMF and World Bank sado-monetarism in lieu of the direct military 
interventions of the past, the EU and Japan have quietly seized the high ground in the 21st 
century world-economy, by bailing out their Eastern European and Southeast Asian semi-
peripheries, the former via the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the latter via the 
Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC).3
East Asian culture thus emerged at the site of a unique double contradiction: not 
only did it have to answer for the historical erasure or displacement of the nation-state 
(i.e. a politically subaltern Japan, the two Koreas, the two Vietnams, and the three 
Chinas), but it also had to fend off the depradations of neoliberalism and neocolonialism 
without the heavy artillery of the EU’s powerful social democratic states, thriving 
Euroculture and common currency. Put another way, even though East Asia has a world-
class production base equal to that of Central Europe, its geopolitical status is more like 
that of post-Soviet, semi-peripheral Eastern Europe. But where Eastern Europe was 
forced to hitch its cart to the nascent Eurostate, East Asia is in the enviable position of 
having the financial, economic and technological resources to bail itself out. The 
contradiction is probably most obvious in the long-running Japanese banking crisis, 
where the world’s largest creditor nation, sitting on vast trade surpluses and a trillion euro 
mountain of rock-solid liquidity, took almost a decade to muster the political will to write 
off the bad debts of the 1980s Bubble economy. In a nutshell, East Asia has the economic 
muscle of a superpower, but is just beginning to develop cultural and political 
superstructures characteristic of such.
As we shall see, these contradictions go to the heart of Hideaki Anno’s Neon 
Genesis Evangelion, a weekly animated series which ran on Tokyo television from 
October 1995 to April 1996 and became a smash hit, inspiring two spin-off movies, 
countless fan clubs, and endless Web shrines, while raising Anno himself to the level of a 
superstar. It’s important to note the field of anime (pronounced “ah-nee-may”; the word 
comes from the French term for animation) did not emerge in Japan until the 1960s, when 
Americanization, the Ikeda economic boom, and rising levels of TV ownership spurred 
the creation of television shows based on Japanese “manga” or printed comic books. 
Even today, anime borrow extensively from the typographical and literary conventions of 
manga, in much the same way that Hollywood continues to borrow tropes and narrative 
conventions patented by the pulp sci-fi and comic strip periodicals of the 1930s. 
What distinguishes Evangelion from the run-of-the-mill mecha or giant robot 
cartoon is not simply its ground-breaking animation, sparkling editing, and world-class 
action sequences; rather, Anno sublated the mecha as a form, transforming the latter into 
the basis for a new kind of multinational aesthetics, in much the same way that 
McGoohan’s The Prisoner created the basic vocabulary of video out of the 1960s spy 
thriller and 1950s theatrical modernism, or indeed that Kieslowski’s Decalogue 
transformed Western European auteur cinema and Eastern European theatrical and 
musical forms into the field of Eurovideo. By cutting and splicing narrative forms 
ranging from the Godzilla movies and the American sci-fi blockbuster to John Woo’s 
Hong Kong action thrillers, as well as artfully borrowing from the rich traditions of 
Japanese anime itself (especially Akira Toriyama’s Dragonball Z), Anno created a 13-
hour masterpiece with the narrative heft and density of a triple-decker Victorian novel, 
the epic sweep of a Hollywood blockbuster, and the breakneck visual energy of the 3D 
videogame.4 
Strange as it sounds, there is a curious sense in which Evangelion’s closest 
narrative predescessor is not a recent work of art, but the serialized novel of Victorian 
Britain. Like the latter, the anime is a highly commercialized form of art, written for a 
metropolitan audience, and tied to a sophisticated set of written and social conventions. 
The vast majority of anime are domestic comedies, a genre which, at its best, playfully 
mocks Japanese social conventions with slapstick humor, kinetic comic action sequences, 
and guerilla street theater in much the same way that the US sitcom satirizes the no less 
ritualistic social conventions of US consumerism. In Rumiko Takashi’s uproarious 
Ranma½ series, for example, the characters are magically cursed to change gender, shape 
or form in certain conditions, resulting in episodes of truly priceless pandemonium. Just 
as the sheer length and prolixity of the Victorian novel was the unintentional result of a 
literary marketplace where authors were paid by the word, so too are many of the most 
characteristic features of manga and anime – exaggerated, saucer-shaped eyes, the use of 
typographical symbols to connote surprise or shame, the creative use of framing and 
visual counterpoint, and of course wildly multicolored hair – merely the logical response 
of artists to the commercial limitations of the form, i.e. the necessity to convey complex 
social situations using a medium which does not have live actors at its disposal. 
What Evangelion did which was truly new, however, was to combine world-class 
mecha designs and action sequences with cinema-level scriptwriting and scorching 
emotional conflicts worthy of one of John Woo’s Hong Kong blockbusters. The Achilles 
heel of the mecha was always its lack of character development, which was admittedly 
not a problem when the point was to portray giant robots crashing into each other. The 
characters of Evangelion, however, are the furthest thing from cardboard cutouts 
imaginable, and Anno will utterly demolish the stereotypes of the mecha jock and the 
kimono bimbo alike in favor of sensitive, complex male characters, and a series of 
powerful and self-aware women without precedent in the history of anime. This is 
actually the culmination of a tendency which began in the mid-1980s, when anime such 
as Bubble Gum Crisis (1987) and Dirty Pair (1985) introduced strong female characters 
capable of taking on state-of-the-art action roles. Whereas Dirty Pair sparkled with 
irreverent dialogue and shotgun one-liners between fellow police agents Yuri and Kei 
(pronounced “Kay”), Bubble Gum engaged in some fairly racy gender-bending of a cast 
of characters borrowed wholesale from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (e.g. Priss, the 
leader of the Knight Sabers, is cast in the mold of the butch biker; Leon, the macho police 
officer, is not only pushed to the margins of the story by the all-girl Knight Sabers, but 
has an openly gay sidekick, Daley).5 That said, neither series departed significantly from 
the deeply patriarchal gender roles of 1980s Japan; Bubble Gum’s Nene, supposedly a 
computer hacker, still acts very much like a glorified OL, the Japanese neologism for 
“office lady” or low-level clerical staff. 
By contrast, Evangelion’s female characters are powerful, self-motivated 
professionals who have no truck with medieval-era gender roles or the men who believe 
in them. As we shall see, this gender revolution is matched by a host of other 
micropolitical transformations, all tied to East Asia’s irresistible rise to the economic 
coeval of the US and the EU. Arguably, where Melville rewrote the Victorian ocean-
faring swashbuckler into Moby Dick, that adventurous summit of a progressive 19th 
century American nationalism, Evangelion rewrites the mecha narrative into the Moby 
Dick of the Information Age, with the crucial difference that whereas the allegorical crew 
of the Pequod quested for the White Whale, the no less allegorical inhabitants of Tokyo-3 
battle a mysterious alien species (called “angels”) from another dimension. 
The reference to a third Tokyo is less futuristic than one might think. The reason 
is that Japan’s capital city was levelled by the horrific Kanto earthquake in 1923, 
painstakingly rebuilt, and then incinerated by US bombing raids during 1944-45. There is 
a similar transcription of the past into the future in the basic storyline of Evangelion, 
which takes place in the year 2015, fifteen years after a giant asteroid supposedly crashes 
into Antarctica, creating massive floods and sparking terrible wars, until the survivors 
finally band together to rebuild – an event christened the “Second Impact” (the English 
words are used). Such apocalyptic scenarios are a standard feature in the anime genre, 
where the atomic flash-photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are frequently cited next to 
baroque fantasies of sprawling super-metropolises and technological subsystems (these 
latter, in turn, regularly spawn demonic or cybernetic life-forms, as well as Blade 
Runner-style agencies designed to police or control those life-forms). Given that the 
Second Impact is a fairly transparent cover fiction for the destruction and territorial 
dismemberment of the Japanese Empire during WW II, one could be forgiven for 
immediately suspecting Evangelion to be just another deeply reactionary and politically 
obnoxious tale of mecha jocks qua kamikaze pilots who, in the infamous words of 
Rambo, finally get to win.
	Nothing could be further from the truth. Anno quotes national culture not to praise 
it but to bury it, by systematically hacking into, hijacking and disrupting almost every 
single proto-national and neo-national mediation available in the field of anime. In fact, 
Evangelion will provide the crucial bridge between the best anime productions of the 
1980s and the 1990s, by setting the pacifist and theological registers of Hiroyuki 
Yamaga’s sterling space drama, Wings of Honneamise (1987), in motion towards the 
progressive micropolitics and ecological insurgencies of Hayao Miyazaki’s magnificent 
Princess Mononoke (1997). One of the little-known historical developments which made 
this possible was the rise of independent studios for Japanese TV and video markets in 
the 1980s; both Honneamise and Evangelion, for example, were produced by Gainax 
Studios, while Mononoke was produced under the aegis of Ghibli Studios. These studios 
had relatively few ties to the existing production houses, entertainment conglomerates or 
auteur traditions of national cinema, but powerful and enduring links to Japanese manga, 
US science fiction and early video culture. These studios become veritable hothouses of 
aesthetic innovation, transforming anime into a truly global art-form in much the same 
way that small-scale producers powered the rise of early hip hop music and home 
computer software in the US, or indeed the way that McGoohan and Kieslowki both 
assembled teams of extraordinarily talented scriptwriters, cinematographers and actors 
for their respective video masterpieces. 
The history of Gainax, Anno’s own production firm, is especially revealing in this 
regard. The origins of the company go back to 1981, when Anno, Hiroyuki Yamaga, and 
Takami Akai were all film students at the same Osaka art college, and decided to plunge, 
willy-nilly, into the world of anime. Their breakthrough project was the opening 
animation for Osaka’s DAICON 4 science-fiction convention in 1983, which bowled 
over the audience and earned them the commercial support they needed to produce 
Honneamise (Gainax was officially founded in December of 1984, in order to produce 
the film). While Anno worked as an animator on a number of anime projects, most 
notably the theatrical films of Macross and Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind as well as on 
Honneamise itself, his first stint as a director came in 1989 in the form of an above-
average mecha called Gunbuster: Aim for the Top!. Though fairly conventional in terms 
of its aliens-vs.-space-soldiers plot, Gunbuster offered impressive visual designs, 
effective action sequences and even cast a young girl in the role of the heroic mecha 
pilot. The following year, Anno directed Nadia: Secret of the Blue Waters, a fast-paced, 
witty and occasionally quite moving adventure serial loosely based on Jules Verne’s 
20,000 Leagues under the Sea.6 Not only was Nadia Gainax’s first major commercial 
success, but many of its artists would make crucial contributions to Evangelion, most 
notably character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (who worked on Honneamise and 
Nadia), and mechanical designer Ikuto Yamashita (whose previous credits included 
Gunbuster and Nadia). 
Nothing in Anno’s track record quite prepared viewers, though, for the supernova 
of Evangelion. One of the reasons is that Anno and his coworkers wrote the story as they 
went along, resulting in an unusually complex and subtle script. Indeed, it is not until we 
are midway through the series that we begin to realize that almost everything we assumed 
about the storyline is drastically wrong, i.e. that the Second Impact was no accident after 
all; that the angels are not really the demonic creatures they seem to be; that Nerv is not 
quite the heroic defender of humanity it advertises itself as being, etc. Most of all, Anno 
concluded the series with a mind-bending finale which sparked a genuine national 
scandal, very much as the final episode of McGoohan’s The Prisoner instigated a near-
riot at BBC headquarters almost three decades earlier. Visually speaking, the Gainax 
production team set new standards for animation, shot design and editing, deftly 
integrating CGI (computer-generated imagery) with hand-drawn cel animation, while 
employing a wealth of framing techniques equal to anything in the canon of Kieslowski’s 
Decalogue or Trois Coleurs. In narrative terms, the series exhibits an almost nanometric 
formal precision: there are no extraneous details or gratuitous images; each episode flows 
irresistibly into the next; and even the most minute visual, aural and scripted details turn 
out to represent vast, glittering constellations, which coil and uncoil like shifting bands of 
neon DNA. Even the sound-track, often the least developed element of the anime genre, 
is positively riveting, thanks to excellent voice acting and Shiroh Sagisu’s inventive and 
stylish musical score. The action scenes frequently cite the horn-and-drum sequence of 
the helicopter battle in the 1967 Bond thriller You Only Live Twice, for example, the first 
Bond movie to be set in Japan (which makes sense, considering that Blofeldt’s 
underground base is very much the model for Nerv’s geofront). More subtly, the song 
which accompanies the credits after each episode – Bart Howard’s Fly Me To the Moon – 
is not only repeated in at least fifteen recognizably different 1990s musical styles over the 
course of the series, ranging from Japan-pop and techno to jungle, but contains a clever 
karaoke reference: most of the versions are sung by British pop singer Claire (she goes by 
her first name only) while a few versions are done by various other voice actors of the 
series (e.g. the end of episodes 5 and 6, as well as 24, 25 and 26).
	We get our first taste of this complexity in the opening credits or tag of the series. 
Whereas The Prisoner’s tag parodied the Bond thriller, and whereas the opening 
sequences of the Decalogue sampled and pastiched a wide variety of mediatic forms (e.g. 
the Solidarity thriller in “Decalogue 1”; the Christmas movie in “Decalogue 3”; the 
courtroom melodrama in “Decalogue 5”; the late 1970s music video in “Decalogue 10”), 
Evangelion’s tag will cycle through an intriguing admixture of sci-fi, fantasy and action-
adventure motifs. We first see a tiny pulse of light at the center of the screen, which 
expands into a globular shockwave. Next, a red nebula materializes in the background, 
while a strange medieval glyph (vaguely reminiscent of a coiled dragon) gleams fitfully 
in the distance, to be replaced by the logo of the Gainax Studio. Finally, this latter 
dissolves into the familiar sci-fi trope of a forwards zoom through neon-blue stars, while 
a glowing blue close-up of a magical diagram (the Systema Sepharoticum, penned in 
1653 by a German priest named Athanasius Kirchner, and loosely based on the 
Kabbalah) scrolls downwards, before fading into a flickering blue fire, like the reflection 
of a flame in a pool of water. This mysterious array of cosmological and mystical images 
then fades to the title sequence proper, which displays the Japanese characters for 
“shinseiki” (literally, “new century”) against the English-language word “Evangelion” 
(from the Greek term for gospel). The title literally means “New Century Evangelion” or 
“Gospel for a New Century”, but Gainax had an explicitly secular target in mind: the 
English title they chose was “Neon Genesis: Evangelion”. This is an explicit reference to 
one of the greatest lines of William Burroughs’ 1964 Nova Express (“Explosive bio 
advance out of space to neon…”), suggesting that the gospel of the information age is at 
stake.7
	Needless to say, all this is a shocking contrast to all previous anime tags, which 
generally featured action footage, close-ups of the characters, and video tropes tied to 
recording devices or simple consumer electronics; the classic example is the opening tag 
of Dirty Pair, which concludes with the blinking red recording light of a futuristic 
videocamera. Evangelion’s tag proceeds to a video pan of Shinji Ikari, the youthful 
protagonist of the story, his hair blowing realistically in the wind, framed against the 
backdrop of a blue sky dotted with cumulus clouds. A shot of his lightless silhouette 
appears to the right; later, this fades away, and his face is then framed by the shadowy 
silhouettes of two female bodies, which scroll vertically to either side of the screen (slow-
motion replay reveals them to be two of the other mecha pilots, Asuka Langley and Rei 
Ayanami, to the left and right, respectively). Next, we see a luminous orange-yellow sky, 
and a close-up of someone’s outstretched hand, silhouetted against another shot of the 
intertwining branches of the Sephiroticum, scrolling upwards across the screen. The hand 
belongs to Misato Katsuragi, operations director of the Nerv organisation, and we are 
treated here to a gorgeous multiple juxtaposition of Misato’s face in the foreground, then 
her silhouette backlit by a dazzling sun, and then a close-up of Shinji’s face to the upper 
right (one superimposed image cycles in just as another cycles out). 
	It requires a number of viewings to properly appreciate the extraordinary 
compositional subtlety of the sequence. Not only does every single moving object or 
frame offset an object or frame moving in a different direction, but these frames are 
counterpointed by extraordinarily precise color combinations and shot pacing. Thus the 
glyph of the Sephiroticum moves down, while a later version moves up; the precisely-
balanced vertical silhouettes of Asuka (pronounced “ah-ska”) and Rei (pronounced “ray”) 
move up and down across the same screen, before acceding to the counterpoised 
horizontal silhouettes of Misato; shadows are framed against light-sources, panes of light 
against shadows, etc. This aesthetics of framing or windowing is explicitly named by a 
medium shot of Rei standing behind a window, followed by an ultra-close shot of her eye 
(so realistically drawn that we glimpse the multiple refractions of light in her pupil). This 
extreme close-up of the eye, one of the most frequently-cited tropes of the series, 
performs much the same function as the extreme close-ups of eyes in Kieslowski’s Blue. 
Whereas the latter served as the index of Julie’s video subjectivity, finally able to see 
itself in the eyes of another (Olivier), Evangelion sets this subjectivity in motion towards 
the giant robots who suddenly look up at us with almost human intelligence. Meanwhile 
the next shot of Shinji shows him piloting the mecha with his eyes closed, almost as if he 
were listening to the theme song of the series (The Cruel Angel’s Thesis, a surprisingly 
winning Japan-pop tune which manages to avoid most of the cliches of the genre by 
beginning and ending in a minor key and avoiding cliched choruses). 
The last and most crucial innovation of the tag, however, are the brief cut-scenes 
of capitalized words or terms in English (e.g. “Test type”, “EVA-01”, “Angels”, “Tokyo-
3” and so forth). English neologisms are an enduring feature of Japanese consumer 
culture, and Japanese ads frequently city wildly incongruous English catch-phrases with 
the same carefree abandon that luxury fashion goods quote French and Italian terms. 
Anno, however, will confront viewers with an ocean of non-Japanese scientific, 
technological and conceptual terms, some drawn from the marketing and information 
culture of North America and others from the scientific and engineering culture of the 
European Union. The introductory titles for each episode, for example, alternate between 
Japanese and English, and the meanings often subtly differ (e.g. “Evangelion 18”’s 
Japanese title is “The Judgement of Life”, while the English is simply, “Ambivalence”). 
We also glimpse handmade pencil drawings or sketches of various characters, the mass 
mediatic equivalent of the artisan’s signature, whose true significance will not be 
revealed until the very end of the series. For now, it’s sufficient to note that the tag links 
Shinji directly to the subjective body of the mecha, while Misato, Asuka and Ritsuko are 
linked to the objective registers of visual frames and corporeal tactilities appended to this 
body.
Intriguingly, our first glimpse of this body is not the Evangelions (hereafter 
referred to as “Evas”) themselves, but the bodies of their mysterious antagonists, the 
angels. The first of these is a strangely abstract, gilled creature, embossed with a sigil 
vaguely reminiscent of a skull. Like some a neo-Expressionistic Godzilla, the angel rises 
out of the sea to assail Tokyo-3, its carapace invulnerable to the UN’s most advanced 
conventional weapons, including the apocalyptic fury of an N2 mine, a kind of super-
hydrogen bomb. But where the Godzilla movies tapped into the social history of the 
American monster film and the natural history of the komodo dragons indigenous to the 
South Pacific, respectively, Evangelion will draw upon two rather different sources of 
narrative material. The first is relayed by the airborne shot from a helicopter skimming 
the surface of ocean, gleaming with gorgeous, computer-enhanced reflections: the space 
of multinational or informatic forms. The second is the cancelled-out space of neo-
national or monopoly-national forms, subtly rendered by the blocky, abandoned office 
towers of a largely submerged Tokyo-2 (and more obviously, by the UN’s obsolescent 
military technology).8
The humming factories and modular office towers of Tokyo-3, by contrast, are 
tied to multinational categories of image-production and consumption: thus when Misato 
drives off to pick up Shinji, she has his classified security photo in her hand, 
counterpointing her own autographed color snapshot, which he holds in his hand (the first 
in a series of video stills). Probably the single most striking expression of this is the 
central viewing-screen at the heart of Nerv’s intercept center, its vast central view-screen 
superimposing sliding yellow grids, green radarscopes and orange 3D terrain maps. One 
perspective even frames the command center from behind this wall screen, contrasting 
the luminous maps in the foreground against the smooth, metallic surfaces of the conning 
towers to the left and right, and the central command station to the center. The effect is a 
teeming density of video images, which fill in the abstract data-space first glimpsed by 
Fredric Jameson in the dizzying reaches of the Bonaventura Hotel with informatic 
content. 
Nerv is the acronym for the elite scientific research unit of Tokyo-3 charged with 
defending humanity against the angels; it is also the first of several significant German 
puns in the series (the word means “nerve”). Headed by Gendou Ikari, Shinji’s distant, 
mysterious father, Nerv is nominally under the control of the UN, but in reality answers 
only to an ultra-secret committee of global power-brokers known only as Seele (German 
for “soul”). This immediately suggests that Nerv and Seele are the executive management 
and power-elites of yet another Japanese state-industrial body or juridical apparatus, a 
suspicion which seems to be confirmed when we learn that Ikari is the head of another 
project, running concurrently with Nerv but carefully separated and hidden away from 
the latter, called the Human Development Project (“jinrui hokan keikaku”, with the 
connotation of perfection or completion) or, more simply, Instrumentality. 
However, things are more complicated than this, mostly because the bodies of the 
Evas are not really the neo-national symbols of robot samurai they seem to be. One of the 
most intriguing features of Evangelion is its steadfast and honorable stance of non-
participation vis-à-vis Japan’s one-party state and entrenched keiretsu elites. By rubbing 
the immanent registers of the former against the transcendental grain of the latter, Anno 
scandalously contradicts the single most prevalent form of identity-politics of East Asian 
monopoly capitalism, namely an export-platform industrialism keyed to a heavily 
American-accented multinational consumerism. Anno will satirize this global 
industrialism with a planetary range of mythological references and theological 
quotations, ranging from the Sepharoticum and the Marduk Institute (referring to the 
Kabbalah and the Babylonian pantheon) to the Lance of Longinus (the mythical spear a 
Roman centurion dipped in the blood of Christ), and from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the 
Egyptian pyramids. Intriguingly, while the Evas themselves are referred to with the 
English word, “evangelions”, the angels are referred as “shito”, which means “apostle” 
(i.e. the apostles of Christ, with the additional connotation of faithful servants; “angel” 
does, however, convey the necessary subtext of being a messenger or avatar of some 
higher power). 
This heady brew of mythopoetic and theological signifiers is tied to a range of 
multinational and geopolitical tropes, all related to Tokyo-3’s status as a new kind of 
global city or multinational urban space. Even Nerv’s eye-catching logo – a red fig leaf 
outlined by a tongue-in-cheek quote from Robert Browning (“God’s In His Heaven, All’s 
Right With The World”) – is a complex geopolitical pun, combining a British poet, a red 
leaf somehow reminiscent of the Canadian maple-leaf, and a German noun.9 In fact, the 
city’s surface buildings are for the most part camouflage and delivery-systems for the 
vast underground cavern of Nerv’s “geofront” (yet another English neologism, referring 
to an underground living space). Shinji’s first view of the geofront through the window of 
a bullet train is awe-inspiring: washed in golden light from some artificial light-source, 
Tokyo-3’s retractable skyscrapers hang down from the ceiling like vast roots, while a vast 
lake shimmers below (a sonorous trumpet even echoes in the background, very much like 
the opening tag of the Deep Space 9 TV series). Nerv’s central facility is located at the 
bottom of the geofront, and consists of a curious kind of double pyramid: a vast 
depression, shaped like an inverted pyramid, directly adjacent to a smaller, raised 
pyramid. Finally, there is a giant raised structure to the far right, suggesting nothing so 
much as an outdoor drive-in movie screen or the base of an early 1990s cellphone. 
Over and over again, Anno will strike just the right balance between Yamashita’s 
people-moving platforms, giant conveyor belts and Eva-related equipment, and 
Sadamoto’s crisp, emotive character designs. During an early scene of “Evangelion 1”, 
for example, Ritsuko (the head of Nerv’s science team), Misato and Shinji are silhouetted 
in an elevator against a glowing pink background, gloomily discussing the near-
impossibility of ever getting the Eva to work properly; suddenly the vast humanoid hand 
of Eva 1 materializes in the storage tank behind them. A similar technique is used when 
Shinji first confronts the gaze of Eva 1, whose segmented, eyeless face glares like a 
stylized demon out of Japan’s storied theatrical tradition: distant objects look near, and 
near objects look distant. All this culminates in the moment when Shinji is asked to pilot 
the Eva by his father, Gendou Ikari, who he has not seen for three years: Gendou’s face is 
shot against serried banks of video monitors, displaying multiple images of Shinji 
(ingeniously echoed by a close shot of Gendou’s semi-transparent glasses, which reflect 
these video images; these glasses will be a recurrent symbol throughout the series). 
It is here that Anno transgresses against one of the fundamental features of the 
mecha narrative, by disrupting both its patriarchal gender codes and crude technological 
determinism. Unlike so many other anime, where the point is to show the son or daughter 
of the genius inventor dutifully carrying on the family lineage, Shinji actually thinks 
about his decision, and starts shaking with rage at the thought of being treated as cannon 
fodder for an untried, experimental technology. Though Misato remonstrates with him, 
saying “You must confront your father, and you must confront yourself,” he cannot bring 
himself to pilot the Eva. Finally Gendou has to call on Rei to pilot the mecha; she is 
wheeled in on a stretcher, still badly wounded from a previous testing accident, 
accompanied by a haunting piano theme which will reappear at key moments later in the 
series. At this point one of the angel’s power-bolts tears loose debris from the roof of 
Tokyo-3, but just as a detached section of the roof threatens to crush Shinji, Eva 1 lifts up 
its massive armored hand by itself to protect him, batting the debris away in the direction 
of Gendou Ikari – who smiles grimly behind a shockproof glass wall, as if he had 
expected this turn of events all along. When Shinji finally agrees to pilot the Eva, it is out 
of compassion for Rei, who is obviously in bad shape, and not his father’s wishes. 
This is nothing, however, compared to the scandalous transposition of the battle 
sequence from the very beginning of “Evangelion 2” to the closing moments of the 
episode: we see the angel fighting with the Eva, and apparently getting the upper hand by 
crushing the latter’s left arm, when suddenly Anno cuts to Shinji waking up in the 
hospital. We only very gradually figure out he somehow won the battle, though at terrible 
cost. This transgresses against a general feature of East Asian media culture in the 1980s, 
namely the video-boosted glorification of the physical bravery, dexterity or athleticism of 
the martial arts hero or mecha pilot; something usually conjoined to the repressive 
micropolitics of the national police force, mythic warrior code or state-developmental 
bureaucracy charged with battling comic book gangsters, rogue samurai or corporate 
thugs. The battles with the angels are not contests of physical strength, however, but 
subjective and psychological tests of concentration and willpower. Eventually, they will 
become a kind of objective recorder or seismographic sensor, by which Anno will map 
out the fault-lines of a post-Bubble Japan, slowly and painfully coming to grips with its 
past and present traumas.10 
One of the most significant of these traumas is Japan’s epic transformation from a 
predominantly agrarian society to an urbanized and industrial one. Whereas Britain took 
over a century to become an urban society, and where the US and Western Europe 
accomplished the same feat in about seventy years, Japan did so in less than thirty years 
(1945-75). This tremendous achievement came at the price of enormous cultural 
dislocation, intergenerational conflict and psychological stress, as ordinary Japanese had 
to cope with not just one or two but several cultural revolutions, all at once. It’s no 
accident that the two leading cultural exports of Japanese cinema in the 1950s and 1960s 
– the Godzilla movies and the Kurosawa films – both put their finger on this precise 
contradiction. Toho’s wildly successful monster epics deftly set the trauma of WW II and 
the utopia of Americanization in motion towards the monsters of humanity’s 
thermonuclear Id, while Kurosawa’s samurai thrillers and detective dramas did 
something similar with the antinomies of rapid urbanization and upwards class mobility. 
At their outer limit, each paved the way for the multinational East Asian media culture of 
the future, in much the same way that the social tensions and conflicts of Japan’s postwar 
boom anticipated those of other rapidly modernizing East Asian nations, most notably 
Taiwan and South Korea in the 1970s, and coastal China since the late 1980s; certainly, 
one could argue that John Woo’s Hong Kong blockbusters are the postmodern synthesis 
of the visual energies of the Godzilla spectacular and the scripting innovations of the 
Kurosawa film.
Evangelion records the generational aspect of this process in an unusually direct 
fashion: the “old men” of Seele represent the deeply conservative, immediate postwar 
generation; Gendou Ikari and Fuyutski hail from the technocratic generation of the 1970s; 
Misato and the other Nerv staffers represent the consumer-oriented 1980s; while the 
children themselves incarnate the informatic 1990s (only fourteen-year-old children have 
the neural flexibility to pilot the Evas, a canny reference to the ability of the Nintendo 
kids to meld with a given technology far faster than any adult). The clash of generations 
is also the crucial issue during Shinji’s first face-to-face meeting with his father after the 
battle, when they run into each other in one of Nerv’s elevators. A low-angle shot frames 
Gendou to the left of the screen and Shinji to the right; but neither can yet forgive the 
other, and after a tense moment of silence, like a stand-off in some rural village, the door 
closes without either one saying a word. Anno will show us a range of similar scenes in 
the elevators, bullet trains, and skywalks of Tokyo-3, often using excruciatingly long 
shots to highlight the inner conflicts of the characters. Later, Misato takes Shinji to a 
scenic overlook, where they watch the skyscrapers of Tokyo-3 rise majestically from the 
ground at sunset, seconded by the same sweeping horn motifs which signaled Shinji’s 
first glimpse of the geofront. The effect is like viewing a time-lapse photograph of 
postwar Tokyo, as one office tower after another rises up out of a sea of tenements and 
apartment buildings; Misato will complete the gesture, by taking Shinji to one such 
apartment building, a new flat on the outskirts of town, in order to give him a home he 
can call his own. 
	This domestic space will allow Anno to quote a number of anime conventions, 
ranging from the registers of slapstick and domestic comedy, to the institution of the 
“service shot” (still shots of anime characters in vaguely suggestive or risque positions), 
all the way to the exaggeratedly kawaii (the Japanese word for “cute”) series mascot or 
pet animal. Evangelion’s mascot is Pen-pen, a warm-water penguin with near-human 
intelligence which has its own living quarters and even reads the newspaper. The penguin 
has been a significant mass-cultural symbol since Opus in Berke Breathed’s classic 1980s 
comic strip, Bloom County; in the 1990s, the penguin became the icon of Linus Torvald’s 
freeware PC operating system, Linux. Most of all, Anno inverts the usual gender 
stereotypes here. Not only is Misato a complete slob, but she has a habit of yelling out a 
war-whoop after drinking a can of beer, i.e. is the completely antithesis of the docile 
Japanese housewife – in fact, Shinji ends up doing the cooking in the household. In 
“Evangelion 2”, the obligatory service shots of Misato are even matched by a service shot 
of Shinji about to take a bath, when he discovers Pen-pen in the bathroom and runs 
screaming to Misato, totally naked, a beer can on the table strategically placed between 
our point of view and the lower part of his body; when Misato picks up the can of beer, a 
jar of toothpicks turns out to be in the way. 
What does not quite ring true is Misato’s latent aggression towards Shinji; in fact, 
later on in the series, Misato will become much more of a guardian-figure, while Asuka 
will take on the role of the provocative, in-your-face tomboy. Interestingly, it is only in 
the solitude and quiet of his new home that Shinji begins to recall the shocking details of 
the battle sequence. After an extremely realistic close-up of Shinji’s eye, brimming with 
multiple reflections on the cornea, Anno deploys a series of extremely fast cuts, each 
keyed to a crashing sound, which culminate in a full-scale flashback of the battle. The 
pilots of the Eva are enclosed in a shockproof “entry plug” (yet another English 
neologism) which looks like a guided missile, inserted manually into the Eva. This is the 
first in a series of quotations from William Gibson’s sci-fi classic Neuromancer; the 
entry-plug is very much the fusion of the “coffin” hotel Case stays at in Tokyo (the actual 
term is “capsule hotels”, and though they really are the size of a coffin, many have built-
in TVs and alarm clocks), with the cyberspace deck (the Eva pilots wear trodes which 
enable them to synch their brainwaves to the Eva).
The action scenes are superbly animated, conveying a sense of thermonuclear-
strength battles with world-class editing, sound-effects and tracking shots. Anno not only 
borrows many of the stunt techniques of the Hong Kong thrillers, but intersperses close 
shots of the awed faces of Nerv personnel, watching the action from their video monitors. 
After taking a terrible pounding, the Eva seems to sense the danger to Shinji’s life and 
miraculously springs into action, howling like some primeval monster. The angel 
broadcasts an “AT field” or force-field of mental energy to block it (keynoted by a high 
ringing chime, a standard anime sound-effect connoting surprise or shock), but the Eva 
proceeds to regenerate its own arm and neutralize the angel’s AT field with its own field, 
before closing in for the kill. After the battle, Shinji is looking outside at the Eva’s blank, 
featureless eye-socket, when suddenly, tissue around the socket boils into existence, and 
a giant green eye slides into view. Shinji’s blue-grey eye freezes, as he realizes the Eva is 
looking at him: he screams in horror, as the screen fades to black (a quotation of one the 
first great video tropes, namely the close shots of Sally’s quivering eye in Tobe Hooper’s 
1973 horror classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). 
What sharply distinguishes the Evas from the cyborgs, androids, and genetically 
engineered bodies endemic to the anime genre, however, is the fact that they are not 
really autonomous entities or a separate species. Rather, like Stanislaw Lem’s biologized 
aliens, the vanished Krell of Forbidden Planet, or Gibson’s curiously splintered AIs, they 
constitute the borderline or boundary between the human and the non-human, or put more 
concretely still, between the realms of social history and natural history. In the earliest 
episodes of Evangelion, the social and natural history in question is clearly that of 
postwar Japan: thus in “Evangelion 3” Shinji experiences the joys and sorrows of 
notoriety when his high school classmates discover he is an Eva pilot; in “Evangelion 4” 
we see the bullet trains, half-empty streets and gorgeous natural scenery around Tokyo-3; 
in “Evangelion 5” the spaces in question are the grey-in-grey concrete wasteland of 
postwar housing projects (identified with Rei) and the high-tech laboratory (identified 
with Ritsuko); “Evangelion 6” illustrates the Japanese national power-grid via a satellite 
shot of Japan from outer space; while “Evangelion 7” satirizes the arrogance of Japan’s 
nuclear power lobby and keiretsu business elites. Anno never allows these objective 
spaces to overshadow the human drama of the characters involved; rather, the specific 
tropes of the former are used to highlight the irreplaceable individuality of the latter. 
The very first of these dramas is Shinji’s slow, painful process of adjustment to 
his new home, well worth describing in detail. While Shinji’s classmates, Hikari, Touji 
and Kensuke, are modeled on the duty-conscious class monitor, the well-meaning but 
impulse student athlete, and the bespectacled science geek, all are complex, rounded 
characters in their own right.11 In “Evangelion 3”, for example, Touji punches Shinji to 
the ground in revenge for his sister, who was critically injured in the battle with the angel 
(an act Touji will later regret terribly, when Shinji saves both him and Kensuke from the 
attack of the second angel). After being chewed out by Misato for disobeying orders, 
Shinji runs away from his new home, riding the rails of Tokyo-3, sleeping on benches 
and in a movie theater (ironically playing a grade-B sci-fi movie based on the Second 
Impact), and dispiritedly wandering through the countryside, oblivious to the lush green 
fields, blue skies, terraced hills and fog-shrouded valleys on every side. At last Shinji 
accidentally runs into Kensuke, who is camping out in the wilds in full camouflage gear 
and acting out the parts of the heroic, wounded captain and loyal lieutenant in a 
hackneyed war movie.12 Shinji gradually warms to Kensuke when the latter reveals that 
he lost his mother at a young age, too, and they strike up a friendship. 
The next day, Nerv security agents take him in, and present him with an 
ultimatum, to either resign or return to full-time duty as a pilot. He opts to resign, in just 
one of several references to The Prisoner (there is even a McGoohanesque shot of his 
Nerv ID card with his photo, stamped “resigned”). But before he leaves, Kensuke and 
Touji arrive, and Touji not only formally apologizes to Shinji, but insists that the latter 
has to punch him back to make sure they’re even. After Shinji does so, they are 
reconciled, and they both praise him for his courage in piloting the Eva. This kindness 
completely unnerves Shinji, who is already deeply ambivalent about his status as a pilot 
and beginning to realize he will be leaving behind his newfound friends. At roughly the 
same time, Misato realizes that Shinji’s flight is not a thought-out decision, it’s the only 
way he knows of reaching out to others. This is capped by a significant scene at the 
railway station, when Misato roars up in her car, thinking she just missed him, before 
realizing he is still at the station. They stare at each other in silence, while the 
announcements of arriving and departing trains echo in background, in a static shot 
lasting a full 48 seconds (“I… I’m home,” says Shinji at last; Misato smiles, and says, 
“Welcome home”).
After this wealth of character development, the next episode proceeds to introduce 
Shinji’s first key counter-player, fellow pilot Rei Ayanami. Rei lives in a nondescript row 
of cement apartments, in a room overflowing with bandages and assorted junk; in fact, 
her only real personal possession is a broken pair of Gendou’s glasses, still in their 
original case. Interestingly, Shinji’s first visit to Rei is an explicit parody of the service 
shot: not realizing Rei is home, Shinji puts on the glasses, and is surprised by Rei, who 
emerges stark naked from the shower. Embarrassed, he tries to explain, while she 
unexpectedly reaches for the glasses, causing them to inadvertently fall on top of each 
other. If this was a normal service shot, Shinji would be physically slapped or otherwise 
called to account for his temerity; here, however, Rei simply says quietly, “Will you get 
off” and gets dressed. Rei’s general air of unearthliness is highlighted by her trademark 
blue hair, hardly an unusual sight in an anime series, but a color which certainly meshes 
with the deeply introverted tenor of her personality. Rei is, however, capable of powerful 
emotional reactions, most notably in a later conversation with Shinji, when the latter 
angrily denounces his father; Rei steps forwards and slaps him, telling him he should 
have faith in his father. 
Rei’s appearance also coincides with the first explicit citation of neo-national or 
Cold War technological tropes, ranging from the positronic rifle Nerv requisitions from 
the weapons labs of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, to the alloy hull of a space shuttle 
Ritsuko uses as an improvised heat-shield (Gendou’s broken glasses also return in one 
crucial shot, showing the glistening white screens of four computers piled up Rei’s room, 
an intriguing reference to information technology). The enemy angel itself is a mirror-
like hypercube with an irresistible particle-weapon beam, which knocks Eva 1 out of 
action with a single shot and begins drilling past the geofront’s armor shields. Faced with 
an enemy which cannot be attacked directly, Misato improvises the clever strategy of 
downing the angel with a sniper shot, and Nerv proceeds to mobilize the entire national 
power grid of Japan to power the rifle. The sniper sequence begins with a magnificent 
series of shots of Tokyo-3 going dark, and then a vertical shot of Pen-pen staring into the 
night sky, followed by a satellite image of the entire Japanese archipelago blacking out, 
framed by the glowing arc of the Korean peninsula and coastal China. This geopolitical 
reference to East Asia accedes to a conversation between Shinji and Rei, highlighted by a 
brilliant sequence of frames:


Shinji: framed against eye of Eva 1: “Ayanami, just why do you pilot this thing?”
Rei: framed against her own Eva, thinks for a moment: “Because I’m bonded to it.”
Shinji: “You’re bonded to it?”
Rei: “Yes. It’s a bond.” 
Shinji: “You mean, to my father?”
Rei: “To all people.” Slow pan from Shinji to Rei against the darkened valley, stars in 
background.
Shinji: “You’re very strong, Rei.”
Rei: “I have nothing else.”
Shinji: framed against Rei: “What do you mean, you have nothing else?”
Rei: getting up: “It’s time. Let’s go.” She is silhouetted against an enormous close-up of 
the full moon. “Goodbye, Shinji.”
 

Powered by the entire energy-grid of Japan, Shinji prepares to fire, but the angel senses 
their presence and launches its own energy-pulse, throwing the shot off-course; Rei then 
holds up the improvised heat-shield against the withering blast of the angel, her Eva 
sustaining terrible damage in the process, until his second shot finally hits home. 
Afterwards, he wrests open the superheated entry plug of her battered Eva with his own 
hands, echoing a previous scene when his father opened Rei’s superheated plug in the test 
chamber with his bare hands, badly burning himself: 

Shinji: crying tears of relief: “Don’t ever say that. Just don’t say that you have nothing 
else. Just don’t say that. And don’t say goodbye when we launch. It’s just too sad.” Cut to 
shot of half-melted entry plug in half-melted hand of Eva-01; medium shot of the two 
Evas reclining, their skins battered and seared by the angel’s assault, almost as if they 
are talking.
Rei: “Why are you crying… I’m sorry… I’m sorry, I don’t know what to feel at times 
like this.” 
Shinji: “Just smile.” Close shot of her eyes, Shinji’s reflection in her pupils; suddenly she 
draws in her breath, struck by his resemblance to Gendou Ikari. Slowly, hesitantly, she 
smiles. 


This is just the first of many such extraordinary moments, where eye-popping visuals and 
gargantuan battles artfully embellish, rather than overwhelm, the subtlest of character 
interactions. Though Rei’s inverted, rotating silhouette is the central motif of the series’ 
closing tag, this is the first time she is explicitly identified with an extreme close-up of 
the moon, whose glowing circle is curiously replicated by the banks of outdoor 
floodlights which accompany several scenes in “Evangelion 4”. 
	It’s interesting that the last moment of the traditional mecha narrative 
(“Evangelion 7”) marks Anno’s first open critique of Japan’s nuclear power lobby and 
keiretsu business elites. Misato and Ritsuko are called to attend a demonstration of an 
Eva-style robot by the Japan Heavy Chemical Industrial Cooperative – the difference 
being that this robot has its own internal nuclear power supply and is piloted by an 
onboard computer, not by a human pilot. Meanwhile the corporate stooge in charge of the 
demonstration insults Nerv and its science team in the most obnoxious and sexist terms 
(“It’s [the Eva] like a hysterical woman, completely out of control”). Predictably, the 
supposedly failsafe robot goes haywire during its activation test and threatens to melt 
down in a populated region, forcing Misato to launch an emergency mission to stop it. 
There is one priceless scene of a corporate executive out on a golf course, trying to 
weasel out of responsibility for handing over the robot’s password (“hope”, a three-
character kanji in Japanese) to Nerv. Though Shinji manages to catch up to the robot 
amidst the rubble of Tokyo-2, Misato finds that the password doesn’t work. In 
desperation she starts pushing in the neutron-absorbing safety rods manually, but at the 
last second the program finally activates, shutting down the reactor. This accident was, in 
short, no accident at all: in a later scene, Ritsuko reports to Gendou, saying everything 
went according to plan, except for Captain Katsuragi’s operation – strongly hinting they 
either aided or abetted the sabotage. 
	This pungent satire of the legendary turf battles between Japan’s developmental 
state and its fiercely-competitive corporations highlights one of the key weaknesses of the 
robot narrative and cybernetic technologies generally, namely its reliance on electronic 
control and communications subsystems, a.k.a. software. As befitting its status as an 
industrial semi-periphery, Japanese firms specialized for decades in medium-technology 
electronics and automotive goods, and did not start diversifying into high-end software, 
services and broadcasting markets until the late 1980s (Sony’s trajectory from a purveyor 
of cheap radios, to high-quality stereo and video equipment, and finally to videogame 
platforms and media content is emblematic in this respect). The software industry is also 
marked by a quite striking multinational division of labor, such that the US leads the 
world in PC software, the EU excels in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, 
while Japan exports vast quantities of videogame-related software. 
Two new characters – the third pilot, Asuka Langley, and the intelligence 
operative, Kaji Ryouji – will mark the arrival of explicitly multinational and informatic 
signifiers in “Evangelion 8”, by means of that oldest narrative of globalization of them 
all, the sea-faring adventure. Not only does this episode manage to pastiche all the classic 
ocean adventures from Moby Dick up to Jaws, it slyly alludes to Anno’s own previous 
sea-faring tale, Nadia (in the form of the crusty admiral, the spitting image of Captain 
Nemo). The bulk of the episode takes place on a supercarrier of the UN Pacific fleet, 
mobilized to protect the third Evangelion unit on its journey from Germany to Japan, a 
seemingly unlikely backdrop for the riotous physical comedy associated with Asuka, and 
the emotional complications signaled by the smooth, suave Kaji (Misato’s long-lost ex-
boyfriend). Despite years of separation, Kaji still knows how to get Misato’s goat: in one 
dinner scene, he playfully asks Shinji if Misato is still wild in bed, causing the children to 
gasp in shock and Misato to turn purple. What makes this especially funny is the 
incidental sound-track of a B-grade, lurid soap opera running on the TV in the 
background, a technique Anno will repeat a number of times in the future. 
In contrast to the self-abnegating Rei, Asuka is self-assertive, capricious, and that 
rarest of all things in anime, a female character with genuine emotional depth. She is also 
of mixed German and Japanese descent, frequently using choice German phrases in crisis 
situations, but displays a thoroughly Americanized individualism when piloting her Eva. 
When a sea-based angel suddenly attacks, sending ship after ship to the bottom of the sea 
with the unremitting fury of the White Whale itself, Asuka drags Shinji off to the cockpit 
of Eva 2 and launches without Misato’s authorization. In one gorgeous sequence, Eva 2 
leaps from ship to ship like so many stepping stones, before landing on the deck of the 
supercarrier as if it were a giant surfboard. Though they successfully repulse the attack of 
the angel, the beast traps Eva 2 in its maw and drags them out to sea, reeling out the 
Eva’s power-cable behind it. This gives Misato the sudden inspiration to use the reel as a 
weapon, by sinking two battleships and using them as giant depth charges to blow up the 
angel from within; after fighting like cats and dogs, Asuka and Shinji manage to work 
together to make the plan succeed. 
	No episode of Evangelion would be complete without a devious plot twist to send 
a chill down our spine, and “Evangelion 8” does not disappoint: after the battle Kaji 
delivers a mysterious package to Gendou back at Nerv. It is an embryonic life-form of 
some kind, encased in plastic, which Gendou calls Adam, “the first human being”, the 
keynote of the mysterious Instrumentality project, and most likely the real provocation 
for the angel attack. This is actually the culmination of two earlier scenes: in “Evangelion 
5”, Ritsuko tells Misato and Shinji that the energy-patterns of the angels are a 99.89% 
match to human DNA, while in “Evangelion 7” she reveals additional details of the 
Second Impact, saying that the catastrophe was caused not by an asteroid, but by human 
contact with an angel.13 This suggests that the Second and (potential) Third Impact are 
not really metaphors for WW II and a potential thermonuclear WW III, but refer to 
something specific to the post-Cold War era, which we still need to identify.
	The fundamental innovation Asuka brings to the storyline is the element of 
subjective initiative and contingency, both in terms of her role as the popular foreign 
exchange girl, overwhelmed with attention from her classmates, as well as her status as a 
true psychological counter-player for Shinji, i.e. someone who motivates him to break out 
of his Rei-like introversion. Put another way, Asuka’s arrival marks the point at which 
the adults of Evangelion start acting like adults, and the children start acting like children 
– or more accurately, the moment when we begin to see how childlike adults can be, and 
how children wrestle with adult issues. One of the real achievements of Anno’s 
scriptwriting here is its ability to balance Asuka’s tempestuous friendship with Shinji – 
equal parts competition, friction, and growing empathy – with Misato’s own stormy 
relationship with Kaji. There is one great moment, for instance, when Asuka is 
sleepwalking and almost kisses Shinji; he leans forwards, but she says “Mama” in her 
sleep and he turns away, embarrassed; elsewhere in Tokyo-3, Kaji is kissing Misato, as 
their old romance flares up again despite her protests to the contrary – “Which should I 
trust, your lips or your words?” he asks, devilish as ever. The upshot of all this is to add 
fresh layers of complexity to the various character interrelationships, most notably 
between Misato and Ritsuko (e.g. hanging out in a Tokyo-3 bar one night, Ritsuko 
suddenly asks, “So… still in love, huh?” as only an old friend can, causing Misato to 
choke on her coffee). “Evangelion 9” is also the most explicit comic parody of the 
mecha, reveling in the chaos which erupts when Asuka and Shinji face off against what 
can best be described as the angel of karaoke, i.e. a creature which can replicate itself 
indefinitely, and which can only be defeated by precisely-timed choreography between 
Evas 1 and 2. Shinji and Asuka eventually learn to set aside their differences and 
cooperate, but not before treating us to their very own music video – a gorgeously 
choreographed one-minute videorecording of the battle, which manages to float 
effortlessly above the mecha genre, by citing the shot techniques of the televised sports 
event and Olympic gymnastics routine.
	“Evangelion 10”, on the other hand, is concerned not with the space of extended 
cultural consumption but with the space of production, relayed here by an embryonic 
angel found floating in the lava of a Japanese volcano. Though the volcano is one of the 
oldest metaphors for industrialization around, Anno manages to impart a fresh spin on the 
idea, by showing Nerv’s attempt to capture the angel intact, in what amounts to the 
rewriting of J.R.R. Tolkien’s military-industrial Mount Doom in a biological turn. Anno 
also subtly weaves the corporeal register of diving and the scientific one of 
thermodynamics into the story: thus the high school class goes on a diving trip; Asuka 
shops for a swimsuit and goes diving in a pool at one point; the defeat of the angel is 
made possible by a creative application of a basic lesson of thermodynamics; while the 
episode ends with an appropriately comic moment at a volcanic hot springs (on cue, Pen-
pen shows up by package delivery). All this is overshadowed by an unsettling moment, 
when Asuka and Misato are sitting by the hot springs and watching the sun set; Asuka 
notices Misato’s scar, a legacy of the Second Impact, and correctly surmises that Misato 
knows all about her past (“It’s my job”, Misato reminds her gently). 
The motif of the fading sun is not an accident. This moment of relative 
equilibrium, where the various registers of comedy and tragedy, childhood and 
adulthood, society and technology all seem to coexist in relative harmony, will slowly 
disintegrate in future episodes, as Evangelion moves decisively beyond the mecha as a 
form and probes deeper and deeper into the terrible traumas of the past, not out of any 
desire to humiliate or punish its characters, but as the deepest and most necessary sort of 
healing. In the process, the neo-national or Japanese motifs of the earlier episodes will 
gradually be rewritten into multinational and East Asian ones. Anno’s first step is to 
mobilize the radical discontents of a post-Cold War generation deeply dissatisfied with 
the asphyxiating monotony of the LDP one-party state, its xenophobic micropolitics, and 
its repressive gender roles, but unable, as yet, to formulate a coherent political or social 
project of resistance. This is signaled by “Evangelion 11”, whose English subtitle, The 
Day Tokyo-3 Stood Still, refers to the touchstone sci-fi movie of dissent from the Cold 
War, The Day The Earth Stood Still. Here, it is not the urban centers of the Earth but the 
multinational urban space of Tokyo-3 which has been immobilized, only not by inimical 
aliens, but by human beings themselves (“I can’t believe the first havoc wreaked upon 
our headquarters wasn’t caused by some angel, but by another member of our own 
species,” frets Fuyutski, and Gendou responds philosophically, “Humanity is its own 
worst enemy.”) 
The airing of the dirty laundry of the developmental state begins, appropriately 
enough, at a futuristic laundromat, where several Nerv staffers are picking up their 
laundry on their way to work. Hopping aboard the train, they meet their boss, Fuyutski, 
who is reading the morning newspaper:

Ritsuko: “You’re quite early today.”
Fuyutski: “Well, I have to go uptown as Ikari’s representative.”
Ritsuko: “I see, isn’t today the City Council’s regular meeting?”
Fuyutski: “It’s a boring job. He always forces the most tedious work on me. Without the 
Magi’s help, I couldn’t do it.”
Ritsuko: “Speaking of which, election day is coming up, isn’t it?”
Fuyutski: “The City Council has no authority at all. Actually, the Magi run everything 
now.”
Maya: “The Magi? You mean the three supercomputers?”
Fuyutski: “Government by the majority decision of three different computers. It’s a sort 
of democratic system.”
Maya: “And the council just obeys their decisions?”
Fuyutski: ironic: “It’s a most effective form of government.”
Maya: wide-eyed: “This truly is a City of Science. We’re lucky to live in an era when 
Science reigns supreme.”
Shigeru: rolls eyes to himself: “That’s so old-fashioned.”


Maya’s comment is less outdated than one might think; simply substitute “Bill Gates, 
Larry Ellison, Andy Grove” for the three Magi and “Silicon Valley” for the City of 
Science and one could easily imagine some young US tech professional of the Bubble 
1990s, dazzled by their inflated stock options, voicing the same opinion. What is 
interesting, though, is that Shigeru is not immediately identified with his most obvious 
US counterpart, namely the hippie programmer or freeware guru. This is not, as one 
might assume, due to the belated development of the PC market in Japan (in fact, one of 
Gainax’ main product lines in the early 1990s was made-for-PC software), but is meant 
to highlight the fact that Nerv is a kind of global frontier zone of free spirits, innovators 
and visionaries, who would never fit into a buttoned-down corporate research program or 
official Government lab.
	More importantly, “Evangelion 11” shows Rei, Asuka and Shinji interacting with 
one another for the first time. Finding that their subway cards have ceased functioning 
thanks to the blackout, Asuka leads them in the general direction of Nerv headquarters, 
only to end up practically running into the new angel in the process (a giant spider with a 
central, acidic eye). The angel’s form is no accident, but perfectly complements a jaw-
dropping shot involving the mechanical eye of a subway card reader: we see a huge blob 
trailing across the screen, which turns out to be Asuka’s thumb rubbing the scanner, as if 
filmed from the perspective of a spider located behind the scanner-plate! The angel’s 
crawling method of locomotion is also replicated by the children, who have to crawl 
through underground service ducts to get to their Evangelions, and then crawl through yet 
more ducts to get to the scene of the battle. Along the way, Asuka and Rei repeatedly 
clash, displaying a mutual antagonism which makes Asuka’s run-ins with Shinji look like 
purest harmony, if not indeed a romantically-tinged jealousy (Asuka whispers to Shinji, 
in a true case of the pot calling the kettle black: “This First Child [Rei] isn’t someone to 
mess with. She’ll do anything to accomplish her objectives. She’s a real self-righteous 
bitch.”) Working for the first time as a trio of equals, they finally defeat the angel, 
leading to this intriguing post-battle meditation: 


They stare up into the Milky Way, the night sky perfectly clear thanks to the blackout.
Shinji: “It’s ironic… without electricity and artificial light, the sky can look so beautiful.”
Asuka: “But without the lights, it’s as if there weren’t any people there.” Lights come 
back on in city, block by block. “See? I feel so much better this way.”
Rei: poetically: “Human beings fear the Darkness, and drive it away with Flame, in order 
to survive.” 
Asuka: dismissively: “Philosophy!” 
Shinji: “Is that what makes humankind a special species? Is that why the angels keep 
attacking us?”
Asuka: “What are you, stupid? Who knows what they think?”


Here at last Evangelion finds the ultimate narrative synthesis between Rei’s lyric neo-
national interiority and Asuka’s pragmatic multinational exteriority: this is the global 
frame of Shinji’s explicitly aesthetic cognition. The extraordinary power of this move 
will become apparent only in “Evangelion 12”, when Anno begins to provide this global 
frame with content. The episode begins with a flashback to the year 2000; we see the blue 
marble of the Earth rise above the cratered surface of the moon, and then a bright light 
flashes near the South Pole. The next shot is of the blasted ruins and howling winds of the 
Second Impact, punctuated by a brief shot of the very first angel (Adam) radiating in the 
background like thermal pulse of an A-bomb; Misato’s father, badly wounded, is carrying 
his unconscious daughter to a safety capsule (an interesting early version of the entry 
plug). She awakens briefly when a drop of his blood falls on her cheek, saying “father” 
just as the capsule closes. Safely out at sea, Misato’s capsule opens and she stares at the 
Apocalypse: a high, electronic sound resounds, like the whinny of an angel, whilst a 
terrible pair of stylized double wings rises far off, as some unknown energy-source blasts 
Antarctica into nothingness. The scene cuts to 2015, when Misato is getting dressed, and 
we finally see a frontal shot of the scar across her chest. This is more than just the 
negation of the sexist service shot; it is also the savage repudiation of that Cold War sex 
symbol par excellence, the bikini (named after Bikini Atoll, the Pacific reef vaporized by 
an H-bomb), as well as the ingenious rewriting of the signature atomic mushroom cloud 
into a planetary or ecological register. 
As if to second this, Fuyutski and Gendou Ikari carry on the following quasi-
theological conversation during a secret mission at the tip of the South Pole, on board an 
aircraft carrier making its way through a poisoned, radioactive sea, sprinkled with 
residual ice or rock formations poking out of the luminous pink water:

Fuyutski: “Nothing alive can exist in this world of death, Antarctica… or should we just 
call it Hell?”
Gendou: “And yet we human beings stand here, as living beings.”
Fuyutski: “Because we’re protected by science.”
Gendou: “Science is the power of humanity.”
Fuyutski: “That arrogance caused the tragedy of the Second Impact 15 years ago. This is 
the result. The punishment is too harsh, considering what we’ve done… It’s like the Dead 
Sea.”
Gendou: “And yet it’s a purified world, washed clean of sin.”
Fuyutski: “I prefer worlds where human beings can live, regardless of how steeped in 
sin.”
 

The next angel, a weirdly bulbous creature with a vast central eye, chooses this 
inopportune moment to attack. Satellite recon photos show its first two blasts landed 
harmlessly in the Pacific ocean, while the next hits land (it is unclear whether southern 
Japan, the Korean peninsula, or elsewhere in Southeast Asia). Whereas the satellite image 
in “Evangelion 6” conveyed a primordial East Asian form, via the identical power-grids 
of China, South Korea and Japan, these images hint at a nascent East Asian identity: that 
of fellow victims, as the A-bombs and atmospheric H-bomb tests uncannily converge 
with the airborne devastation of Korea and Vietnam during the Cold War. Misato’s off-
the-cuff plan is for the children to literally catch the angel as it falls from the skies, using 
their AT fields like giant nets. She bluntly tells them their chances aren’t good, and even 
asks them if they want to write a will (“I have no intention of dying”, shoots back 
Asuka). The references to the era of the H-bomb continue to multiply when, at one point, 
she promises them a steak dinner if they succeed, and they pretend to jump for joy. Once 
she’s gone, Asuka delivers the great line: “Does she really think that children nowadays 
care about a steak dinner? Second Generation people are so cheap” and starts thumbing 
through a tourist guide, trying to find the most expensive steak house in town. Even more 
interesting is a moment when Shinji, waiting in Eva 1 to engage the angel, thinks back to 
his conversation the previous day with Misato. They were standing at the edge of Tokyo-
3, watching the sun set behind the buildings, when suddenly she began to talk about her 
past: 

Misato: “Shinji, yesterday you asked me why I joined Nerv. My father was a man who 
put everything into his research, into his dreams. I’ve never been able to forgive him for 
that, and in fact I even hated him.”
Shinji: “Just like my father.” 
Misato: “He never took care of me, my mother or the family. People said he was very 
sensitive and delicate, but the truth was that he was just a weak person who didn’t want to 
face reality, the reality called his family. He was like a little kid… so I agreed with my 
mother when she decided to divorce him, because she was always crying. He was 
depressed about it, but I laughed at him because he deserved what he got.” Close shot of 
the cross hanging from her neck. “But he sacrificed himself to save my life during the 
Second Impact. I didn’t know whether I hated him or loved him. The only thing that was 
clear to me was that I wanted to destroy the angels who had caused the Second Impact. 
That’s why I joined Nerv. It could be I’m trying to take revenge for my father, in order to 
finally become free of him.” Montage in Shinji’s mind of childhood themes of 
abandonment, news headlines, Eva-1, finally the thought: I mustn’t run away, I mustn’t 
run away, I mustn’t run away. He returns to consciousness in the entry plug of Eva-1.
Shinji: to himself: “I must not run away.”


In yet another eye-popping sequence, scored to a Spanish aria reminiscent of Leone’s 
spaghetti Westerns, Shinji manages to intercept the angel with his own AT field, thus 
enabling Asuka and Rei to arrive just in time to neutralize the angel’s AT field and knock 
out its core. Misato’s powerful meditation on gender, the first moment of a revolutionary 
micropolitics, is seconded by the post-battle briefing, when Ikari praises his son in front 
of the others for the first time (an unusual moment in a culture which, even today, tends 
to recognize group achievement rather than individual merit). 
It is only now that a genuinely informatic politics will take wing, as Anno 
decisively moves away from the cybernetic and nuclear tropes of the Cold War era and 
towards the biological and silicon tropes of the Information Age. The plot of “Evangelion 
13” turns on the invasion of the informatic space of the Magi system, rather than the 
physical invasion of Tokyo-3 and the geofront; one early scene shows banks of computer 
screens, and various semi-transparent computer screens projected onto the windows of 
the water-filled test chamber. This is perhaps the place to emphasize the extraordinary 
aesthetic beauty of Nerv’s instrument panels, which exhibit an inexhaustible wealth of 
richly-detailed graphical displays, warning decals, logos and symbols, each with its own 
subtle visual stylization and sound-effect. The invading angel is not a Godzilla-sized 
monster but a kind of biological microprocessor or nanomachine, which at first appears to 
be some harmless corrosion near a “protein wall”, which quickly spreads to the vicinity 
of the test chamber and then eats into the “Pribnow box” surrounding headquarters, 
before hacking into the Magi directly. All these terms are drawn, by the way, from real 
life genetics research (the Pribnow box, for example, is a DNA sequence which repeats in 
a certain way), and one could argue that “Evangelion 13” is to that extent the biological 
reappropriation of silicon cleanroom technology. The scene where Nerv plots its counter-
strategy is surely one of the transcendental moments of late 20th century science fiction, 
perfectly balancing the objective discourses of nanotechnology, programming, ecological 
niches and evolution against the subjective motivations of its characters:

Ritsuko: “This angel must be composed of ‘micro-machines’ [in English], each the size 
of viruses. In a very short period of time, they have exponentially evolved to form a 
sophisticated intelligence circuit.” 
Fuyutski: “Evolved!”
Ritsuko: “Exactly. They’re continuously changing to form the best system to cope with 
any environment.”
Fuyutski: “It’s this angel’s survival mechanism.”
Misato: determinedly: “Against an enemy that constantly evolves to overcome its 
weaknesses, the only effective countermeasure is to eliminate the host and let the parasite 
die with it. The only option is to order the Magi to self-destruct. I propose the physical 
elimination of the Magi.”
Ritsuko: parries: “Impossible. Destroying the Magi means destroying headquarters 
itself.”
Misato: heatedly: “Then I’m officially requesting it on behalf of the Operations 
Division.”
Ritsuko: “Rejected. This situation is the responsibility of the Technology Department.”
Misato: “Why are you being so mule-headed?” 
Ritsuko: “This situation is the result of my carelessness.”
Misato: “Why do you always have to be like this? You’re always taking all the 
responsibility on your own shoulders to avoid depending on anyone else.”
Ritsuko: thinking furiously: “As long as this angel keeps evolving, we still have a 
chance.”
Ikari: with sudden insight: “Expedite its evolution?”
Ritsuko: “Yes, sir.”
Ikari: “The end of evolution is self-destruction: death itself.”
Fuyutski: “Thus we just need to accelerate its evolution.”
Ritsuko: “If the angel considers it the only practical means of survival, it may choose to 
coexist with the Magi system.”
Makoto: “But how do we do that?”
Ritsuko: “If the angel is a computer itself, we can do a reverse hack by connecting Caspar 
to the angel and upload a self-destruct program. However…”
Maya: finishes thought: “…at the same time we’ll be turning off the barrier to the angel.”
Ikari: “So either Caspar or the angel, whichever is faster, will win.”
Ritsuko: “Yes.”
Misato: “Can this program be ready in time? If Caspar is taken over, it’ll be all over.”
Ritsuko: glances at her, looks away: “I keep my promises.”


Ritsuko’s stubbornness is not due to any technocratic arrogance, but to her deeply 
ambivalent relationship to her mother, the late Naoko Akagi, a brilliant scientist who 
created the Magi years ago and wrote its basic programming. The interior of the Magi 
system turns out to be a massive cube of tightly coiled, bulbous data-pipes, looking eerily 
like biological organs. Deep in an access hatch, they discover the scrawled developers’ 
notes left by Naoko and the original Magi team (one even says “Ikari, you idiot!”), which 
will enable them to utilize the Magi’s backdoor systems to launch their counterattack. 
When the faceplate of the Magi system is removed, we see the folds of what looks like a 
human brain, but which is really an electronic recording mechanism: the core of the Magi 
system, as Ritsuko explains to Misato while she works, is a personality transplant 
operating system similar to the one which powers the Evas. The three Magi are each 
semi-autonomous AIs, constantly battling for dominance, each one based on the three 
aspects of her personality as a scientist, as a mother, and as a woman – a clever gender-
bend of the patriarchal trinity of the Father, the Son and Holy Ghost. Ritsuko eventually 
succeeds in launching the program, and with one second to spare they defeat the angel. In 
the aftermath, Ritsuko finally reveals her feelings about her mother to Misato, “As a 
scientist I respected her. As a woman, I hated her.” Though she omits the precise reason 
for that hatred, we do learn that Caspar was the AI implanted with the program of her as a 
woman; it was this AI which resisted the angel to the bitter end (“How totally like my 
mother,” concludes Ritsuko). 
It’s no accident that many of the themes of “Evangelion 13” are borrowed 
wholesale from Neuromancer, ranging from recorded personality constructs (e.g. the 
Dixie Flatline) and AIs all the way to Naoko herself, who is clearly modeled after 
Neuromancer’s Marie Tessier-Ashpool. Marie was the enigmatic programmer who 
created the AIs, only to be murdered by her megalomaniac husband, Ashpool, in an 
internal power-struggle within the Tessier-Ashpool corporation; we will see later how 
Anno ingeniously rewrites Gibson’s straightforward allegory of global rentiers usurping 
the rule of developmental engineers into the much more disturbing set of circumstances 
surrounding Naoko’s tragic death in “Evangelion 21”.
	The multinational subjectivities of “Evangelion 12” and the informatino society of 
“Evangelion 13” finally converge in “Evangelion 14”, the narrative hinge and turning-
point of the series, wherein Evangelion finally breaks free from its neo-national moorings 
and floats, ever so gently, into the multinational reaches of cyberspace. This is signaled 
by Gendou’s secret report to Seele recapitulating each of the battles to date, which creates 
an uproar when he baldly states that the invasion of the informatic angel never happened. 
The committee threatens and blusters, but since they cannot afford to do without Gendou 
as head of the project, they have little choice but to accept his version of events for the 
time being. At the same time, an subsequent activation test with Rei radically departs 
from any Eva sequence we have heretofore seen, suggesting that not only is Nerv 
growing restive under the thumb of Seele, but that the Evas are beginning to develop a 
mind of their own, too. When Rei pilots Shinji’s Eva, Unit 1, for the first time, feedback 
from the Eva suddenly filters into Rei’s consciousness. The result is an astonishingly 
beautiful dream-sequence, scored to a haunting sound-track halfway between a vocal 
chorale and a string instrumental, which rewrites all the known rules of video in the 
course in two minutes. Due to the extreme complexity of the sequence, Rei’s musings are 
collected in the left-hand column, while the images cycling through the dialogue are on 
the right:


Voiceover					Image  

Mountains. Heavy are the mountains.	Misty mountain ravine.
Things that change over time. 
Sky. Blue sky. Which your eyes			Blue summer sky, 
can’t see.						framed by two clouds.
Which your eyes can see. 	Green ricefields in the sun.
Sun. That which is only one. 	Shot of valley, then blinding shot into 
sun. 
Water. That which is comforting. 	Lake illuminated by sunlight.
Commander Ikari? 
Flowers. So many are alike. 		Field of radiant sunflowers, against
So many are useless. 	a glowing, yellow sky.
Sky. Red, red sky. 					Purple sky turns red.
The color red. I don’t like red.	Vertical pan of Eva 1 in bright pink 
storage fluid.
Flowing water.					Glass beaker. 
Blood. 							Hand smeared with blood. 
The smell of blood. A woman who			Field of red neon stars 
never bleeds. Human beings are 			rushes past us.
created from the red earth. Human 
beings are created by man and woman.
City. A human creation.				Tokyo-3 at night. 
Eva, a human creation as well.	Close shot of Eva Unit 1’s faceplate. 
What are humans? A creation of 			Enormous moon, rendered 
God. A human creation. The things 			in photographic detail, 
I have are my life and soul. 				over surface of water.
‘Entry Plug’ [in English], the 
throne of a soul. 
Who is that? That’s me.	Close-up of Rei’s eye, which blinks.
Who is this me? What am I? 				Long pan across a long 
What am I? What am I… 				line of identical images
[question reverberates]				of Rei, extending into a 
night sky filled with stars.
This physical body is me. This 			Orange sky, Rei’s 
is the form which creates me. 			inverted silhouette 
Yet it feels as if this is not 				scrolls downwards.
myself.
Strange… I feel as if my body 			Sun shines from behind 
is melting. 	 					silhouette.
I can no longer see myself. My 
shape is fading. I feel the 
presence of someone who is not 
me. 
Who is there, beyond me here? 			Another close-up of her eye. 
Shinji?	Blurred shot resolves into close-up 
of Shinji.
I know this person. She is 				Blur-and-resolve on 
Captain Katsuragi. 					Misato.
Doctor Akagi. 	Normal close-up of Ritsuko.
Other people. 	Close-up of Kensuke and Touji.
Classmates. 						Close-up of Hikari.
The pilot of Unit 2. 					Close-up of Asuka.
Commander Ikari?	Close-up of Ikari’s glasses.
Who are you?						Shot of Rei herself. 
Who are you?	Eva with faceplate removed, one of 
its green eyes staring at us.
Who are you?						Close-up of Eva’s eye.
Who are you?	False-color image of a human eye.


“Who is No. 1” was the refrain of The Prisoner, and “Who am I” is the key line of Heiner 
Müller’s magnificent 1973 play, Germania Death in Berlin, which chronicled the 
irresistible decay of the Eastern bloc nomenklatura into just another Eurobourgeoisie; 
here, though, Rei asks the objective “What am I”, followed by the subtly plural “who are 
you”.14 The multiple images of Rei are certainly reminiscent of the clones and androids 
endemic to 1970s sci-fi, while the entry plug is called the throne of the soul, the ironic 
negation of the soulless machinations of Seele. The images suggest a spectrum from 
classic East Asian mythology, i.e. the creation of Monkey in Journey to the West by the 
union of Heaven and Earth (sky and mountains), to a series of photographic and painted 
surfaces (the sun, rippling reflections in the water, a field of flowers radiating Van Gogh-
like intensity), and thence to tropes of bodily circulation (red sky, red earth, water and 
blood), and finally spaces of corporeal production (the human creations of cities, Evas 
and of course the children themselves). 
Although Rei seems capable of interfacing with Eva 1 to some degree, Shinji is 
not compatible with Unit 0, and the attempt to interface between the two causes Eva 0 to 
run amok, forcing an immediate shut-down. We already know Asuka and Rei are 
diametric opposites, but it’s interesting that Anno deftly avoids the logical third 
possibility here, i.e. what might happen when Asuka and Shinji switch Evas? That, of 
course, is precisely what will happen at the conclusion of Evangelion, but to understand 
why this is so, we first need to look more closely at the Evas and their relation to a certain 
micropolitics of the body.


Footnotes to Chapter 6

1. Alice Amsden. Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization. New York: 
Oxford UP, 1989. Robert Wade. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role 
of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. Michael 
Gerlach, Alliance Capitalism. UC Berkeley Press: Berkeley, 1992. The classic text on 
Japan’s developmental state is: Chalmers Johnson’s MITI and the Japanese Miracle: the 
Growth of Japanese Industrial Policy 1925-75. Stanford UP: 1982. For an excellent 
restatement and critique of the developmental state thesis, see: Meredith Woo-Cumings, 
ed. The Developmental State. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1999.

2. Federal Reserve statistics show that the United States has become the biggest debtor 
country in the world, is running vast trade and current account deficits (i.e. must import 
capital from abroad to finance its economy), and consequently owes Japan and Europe $2 
trillion on its net international investment account. 

3. Here are the figures for Japan’s total financial assistance to southeast Asia from July of 
1997 through the end of 1998, the worst period of the Asian crisis, courtesy of the Japan 
Bank for International Cooperation (at an exchange rate of 110 yen = $1 US):
				
		Assistance as %
Country		Total Assistance	of country GDP
Thailand		$10.2 billion		6.2%
South Korea		$6.01 billion		1.3%
Indonesia		$5.89 billion		3.2%
Malaysia		$2.90 billion		3.6%
Philippines		$2.73 billion		4.9%
Singapore		$1.67 billion		2.1%

4. Note that one should not confuse the Evangelion TV series itself with the theatrical 
films by the same name (End of Evangelion and Evangelion: Death and Rebirth) 
produced after the series. The films are visually stunning but aesthetically deficient 
works, which Gainax created mostly as a way of cashing in on Evangelion’s runaway 
success (this is somewhat comparable to the two full-length films Kieslowski created 
based on episodes five and six of The Decalogue, which were also not quite as good as 
the originals).

5. Note that these are the original versions of the series, not the later, less interesting 
sequels of such (e.g. Dirty Pair: Flash and Bubble Gum Crash). Currently the best 
English-language source of anime information, links and analyses on the Web is the 
Anime Web Turnpike at <http://www.anipike.com>. 

6. Though fairly conventional in terms of its plot – it is essentially a sea-based version of 
the American TV show Wild, Wild West, featuring a late 19th century setting saturated 
with improbably advanced technology – the visual designs of Nadia do show intriguing 
hints of what was to come. For one thing, Nadia herself is a moody, complex character, 
who looks and acts distinctively Southeast Asian, pointing to a powerful undercurrent of 
multi-culturalism. She is also the spitting image of Misato Katsuragi; likewise, her 
compatriot, Jean, will later reappear as Evangelion’s tech geek, Kensuke; the vain, 
supercilious Grandis is clearly a protomorphic Asuka; and the curiously reserved First 
Officer of the Nautilus, Electra, is an embryonic Ritsuko. Nadia also features 
wonderfully literate scriptwriting, e.g. the America ship which hunts the Nautilus is 
named Abraham (as in Lincoln) while its captain is Meville (in reference to Herman 
Melville). One could also point to the scenes of the underground Atlantis midway 
through the series as the prescient model for the Nerv geofront. 

7. William S. Burroughs. Nova Express. Grove Press: NY 1964 (132).

8. In fact, the opening sequence is constructed almost completely from extended 
quotations of the Godzilla movies: the more noteworthy examples include Shinji’s 
instantaneous, dreamlike vision of Rei in the distance (reminiscent of the miniature twin 
sisters from Monster Island); the white flash of an explosion annihilating a streetcar (a 
Hiroshima trope); the explicit destruction of UN tanks and helicopters (read: US military 
forces) by the angel; and of course the spectacular atomic shockwave of the N2 mine.

9. The quote is from Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes, a poetic drama written in 1841. At 
one point Pippa, the main character, sings the following song: 

The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!

Robert Browning. “Pippa Passes”, Part I. In: Complete Works of Robert Browning. NY: 
AMS Press, 1966 (114). 

10. Shinji’s painful struggle to grow up will reprise one of the most fundamental tropes of 
Japanese aesthetic modernism, as evinced by this extraordinary passage from Natsume 
Soseki, which set the modernist anti-hero in motion towards an alien mass-culture all the 
way back in the 1910s: “Ichizo’s disposition is one that coils inwardly whenever he 
comes in contact with the world. Whenever he receives an impulse, it turns round and 
round, driving itself in more and more deeply and carving itself more and more finely 
into the recesses of his mind. And it distresses him that this encroachment upon his mind 
continues, knowing no bounds. He’s so worried about it that he prays for any escape 
whatever from this inner activity, but he’s dragged on by it as though it were a curse 
beyond his power to drive out. The time is going to come when he’ll inevitably collapse, 
totally alone, under his own mental exertion. He’s going to come to dread that moment. 
When it happens, he’ll be exhausted, like a madman. This is the great misfortune lying at 
the very core of his life. In order to turn it into a blessing, there’s no other way except to 
reverse the direction of his life and to make it uncoil outward. We must get him to use his 
eyes so that instead of carrying outside things into his head, he can look with his mind at 
things as they exist outside. He should find one thing under heaven – and a single thing is 
enough – which is so great or beautiful or gentle that it will engross his entire being. In a 
word, he has to become frivolous.” Natsume Soseki. To the Spring Equinox and Beyond. 
Trans. By Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein. Charles Tuttle: Rutland, Vermont and 
Tokyo, Japan © 1985. 

11. Unlike US high schools, where at the end of each class each student goes to a 
different class, in Japan it is the individual teachers who typically walk from classroom to 
classroom, while the students remain together as a group for most of the day. The 
Japanese school year is also longer than its US equivalent, resulting in a much deeper 
sense of class camaraderie. The class monitor typically has the task of calling for order at 
the beginning of each class, taking attendance, and organizing after-school clean-up 
activities. The notorious “exam hell” many Japanese students endure is not a product of 
high school per se, but is the result of after-school cram schools and the entrance 
examination system for universities. The high schools themselves have done a 
commendable job of creating one of the most literate and highly skilled workforces in the 
world, thanks to plentiful funding, a deep-seated cultural respect for learning and 
education of all kinds, and highly trained, capable and motivated teachers. 

12. It should be noted that this has nothing to do with any lingering militarism in 
Japanese culture, but is part of a general tendency in postwar Japan to reproduce certain 
aspects of US culture in extremely precise detail, ranging from baseball to Hollywood 
movies, and from country-and-western bars to pop songs.

13. Ritsuko: “Fifteen years ago, in Antarctica, humanity discovered the being known as 
the first angel. In the middle of the investigation, however, for unknown reasons, the 
angel exploded.” Blast of air ruffles Misato’s hair. “This is the real truth behind the 
Second Impact.”
Shinji: “Then the things we’re doing here are to…”
Ritsuko: “To prevent a probable Third Impact from happening. That is the purpose of 
Nerv and the Evangelions.” [“Evangelion 7”]

14. One minor point: ADV’s subtitled version of this sequence slightly skews part of 
Rei’s dialogue, i.e. at one point the titles don’t quite match up to the Japanese words 
being spoken. The above transcript is the correct, original version, i.e. the images on the 
left appear precisely when the dialogue on the right is being uttered.
 




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