2023.Jan.17

REPORTS

Report on the 13th B’AI Book Club
Paul Roquet, The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan (2022)

On July 26th, 2022, B’AI Book Club, a book review session by the members of the B’AI Global Forum, held its thirteenth meeting online. In the meeting, I, as the reviewer, first introduced The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan (Columbia University Press, 2022). This book reveals the cultural politics of VR, or the move of severing connections with the local environment (reality), referring to a variety of cases in Japan. After this introduction, participants discussed related topics.

The Immersive Enclosure argues that preceding research and discourse on VR has only focused on the worlds or representations made within headsets and overlooked the problem of how and why VR, or the binary division of the virtual and reality, became attractive in the first place. The book instead focuses on the VR hardware interface which brackets out the spatial, social, and historical context (in other words, reality) and isolates the users within controllable, manipulated virtual worlds. With this perspective, the author aims to clarify how such VR technology emerged out of a particular social context and how VR worlds intersects with broader social environments surrounding VR use. To answer these questions, The Immersive Enclosure conducts case study of Japan which has peculiar history and culture regarding VR but has been poorly analyzed in English-language VR studies. The first three chapters of the book discuss the historical context of VR development, such as the emergence of social desire for private perceptual space or the changing images of the concept of “the virtual.” The latter two analyze VR as a form of popular culture focusing on Japanese isekai (“other world”) narratives and masculinity within VR space.

Since VR is new, emerging research subject, some vocabularies and concepts used in this book are not familiar to the participants of this session. Therefore, in the discussion part, we spent a lot of time to gain a deeper understanding about the arguments of the book. For examples, a participant mentioned the validity of some concepts such as “enclosure” or “ambient” in the analysis of VR while another discussed the scope of this book, whether or not the framework of the book is applicable to the study of AR or metaverse. In addition, since one of the purposes of the author is introducing Japanese situations surrounding VR to English audiences, VR environments in English speaking countries are kind of background knowledge and scarcely explained in the book. It may be therefore difficult for some Japanese readers, as with the participants, to understand what is unique in the Japanese case and what is not.

Although theoretical, abstract discussion in the Introduction might be a challenge for those who are unfamiliar with this research field, it is interesting and enjoyable to read abundant illustrations of discourses and efforts regarding VR in Japan. Because VR attracts more and more attention in various fields and can become familiar technology in daily life in the near future, it seems necessary to facilitate more discussion, elaborate the frameworks to analyze this technology, and inspect its possible impact on society. This book raises some important issues on VR and is a must-read as the foundations of such discussions.