Page - 10 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

3. Conclusions We see that when it comes to transplantations, the Japanese are against breaking bodily boundaries, whereas in anime, it happens very often – and not always in an utterly negative way. It needn't be such a contradiction after all: it is almost a cliché by now that if an anthropologist finds out about a strict rule, it often means that there is something dangerous to be taken care of. Ohnuki-Tierney (1994) for example writes that the boundary between monkeys and humans in Japan is not so strict which may be one of the reasons why the Japanese are careful about animal transplants. By contrast, in the West there is an insurmountable difference between humans and animals, wherefore an animal implant cannot endanger our (mostly psychological) identity. The anime thus show the possibilities and risks related to permeable bodies, that is: with bodily changes come also substantial changes in personal identity. Whereas in the West, consciousness is mostly seen as independent of the body and more or less constant. One of the approaches that can help, is the philosophy of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He sees the subject and the Self as fundamentally emerging from the body: the Self is the embodied subject. However, the felt body does not have to always be identical to the actual biological body – for example the white cane used by the visually impaired can work as a full replacement of a bodily part; on the other hand, people often experience the phenomenon of a phantom limb.1 (Merleau-Ponty 1945) But Merleau-Ponty still considered the body and the subject to be a compact entity. Yuasa Yasuo, a Japanese philosopher of the second half of the 20th century, took a very different approach. While making use of Western phenomenology and connecting it to the Japanese philosophical but also practical tradition, he inverted the argument: Westerners are quite used to taking the unity of body and soul and the compactness of the self in general for granted but rather than the point of departure, it can be the goal to achieve – by meditation, or other holistic exercises. (Yuasa 1987) Another approach is that proposed by Ichikawa Hiroshi: in his book The Body as Spirit (1975), he ultimately seeks to elevate the body to become spirit but rather than two entities that are or are not closely connected, he sees them as the two extremes of the same phenomenon. We should strive for harmony, but this does not mean that our bodily personhood has been one and indivisible since ever and will be so forever. He introduces many types of the body divided into two classes: The body as phenomenon – the body as itself, as object, subject, or as seen by me through the eyes of the other – and the body as structure – oriented towards the environment. Some types of the body (especially from the second class) reach beyond the skin. Through the integration of all (the) bodily versions, one can achieve unity – but not of the body and mind as separate entities but of the body as spirit. (Nagatomo 1986; Ozawa-De Silva 2002) Among Western scholars, among the closest one to these ways of thinking may be Annemarie Mol, who writes about the body multiple, that is – a body that is more than one but less than many (Mol 2002). Our usual problem is that we commonly think in the framework of either and or but some contemporary Western scholars – for example in the tradition of ANT – and Japanese scholars who try to integrate Japanese and Western philosophy show us that everything can change and that there could be lots of layers or versions of reality and also our bodies. The Japanese public may be more aware of it than the Western one and may need more time to 1 A phantom limb is the sensation that a missing limb is still attached. 10