Recently, I was invited as a guest speaker to the graduation exhibition “Me!” for the Media Arts course at Tama Art University. The speakers included video artist Ryotaro Sato, artist/animator Shu Yonezawa, and media artist Akihiko Taniguchi. The overarching theme was “Characters.” We followed a talk-show format inspired by “Lion no Gokigenyou”—a classic Japanese TV show where guests roll a dice and talk about the theme it lands on. Seeing how Sato-san, Yonezawa-san, and Taniguchi-san each engaged with characters and their own works was incredibly fascinating; the session was packed with so much information that it ended in a flash. Above all, the graduates’ works were massive in scale and high in quality, each crafted from a truly unique perspective. It was breathtakingly impressive. Here, I want to record some thoughts I had regarding the theme “Character”—specifically, what I felt like discussing when that topic came up. This isn’t about character design from the perspective of narratology (I don’t know anything about that!).
Characters: An Interface for Pseudo-interaction with a Chaotic World
When I think of the “original” characters, beings like yokai (monsters) or gods come to mind. I started wondering how these superhuman entities were born. From my experience farming a small rice paddy and field in Nagano, dealing with an uncontrollable environment is a hassle. The heat of summer requires constant water adjustment, typhoons knock down the rice stalks, and deer come to eat the crops. Unpredictable and uncontrollable things happen constantly. It’s a real problem. Hunting is likely the same. Even if you can predict things to some extent through experience, you can never control everything. These factors are directly linked to survival. Facing an unpredictable and incomprehensible nature without any means of coping is unbearable. So, what do we do? We give it a name and a body to make it seem “interactable.” It’s about giving a “voice” to things that have no voice. Giving them a voice brings about a story (narrative), which generates cause and effect, making it possible to address the problem. If you have a way to cope, you can make the future predictable and controllable. Isn’t this the very origin of the “character”? That’s what I’ve been thinking.
I say “seem interactable” because that voice is merely a human imagination centered around human perspectives. However, since humans cannot escape being human, the act of reflecting on things other than ourselves remains crucially important.
In Buddhism, the figures depicted as Buddhist statues are not gods. I see them as a crystallization of Buddhist teachings—like a “compressed file,” so to speak. In the Buddhism deep-dive episodes of Coten Radio, they mentioned that these statues serve as “model cases” for what one should strive to become. In Buddhism, characters function as incredibly efficient information compression devices. Even if you cannot read or haven’t memorized every sutra, that information can be “decompressed” at any time. They are intuitively designed so that anyone can easily perform that decompression.
A character is an interface that gives a voice to the voiceless, converting domains that humans cannot handle into a size that allows for interaction. It is a very clever tool for humans—who cannot accept the chaotic world in its raw, chaotic state—to survive. And at the same time, it is an ultra-high-efficiency information compression device.
The artists at the talk session each captured the world through their own unique lenses. I believe they were performing the task of molding those “visions visible only to them” into characters to give them a voice. In Shinya Senmatsu’s How to Walk on a Boar Road: Looking at Japan’s Nature through a Hunter’s Eyes, there is a story about how, as a hunter’s senses sharpen during the season, they can sense the presence of prey just by a slight difference in the angle of a single branch. Human cognition can become that acute. We are constantly living while overlooking things. But when someone discovers something, and that information is too complex or doesn’t fit into language, they can give it a “voice” through the form of a character. It is, of course, just one of many methods. And finding those things makes me happy. Perhaps it’s because a new perspective is born into our accustomed way of living in this world.