The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan by Paul Roquet (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan by Paul Roquet
• Nicholaus Gutierrez (bio)

Paul Roquet, The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022, 254 pp.

Paul Roquet’s The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan begins with a simple question about the cultural politics of virtual reality (VR): “What calls people to hand over almost all their spatial cues about their physical place in the world to a computer?” (2). In the Anglophone world, answers to that question have often been framed through the problematic but enduring tendency to treat the technology as uniquely American, given the head-mounted display’s origins in US military research and the oft-repeated narrative of cyberspace as a virtual frontier. This understanding of VR is ultimately predicated less on the technology itself than on the cultural fantasies of its immersive potential, which mobilize Western tropes of medium transparency and physical transcendence into the space of representation. But VR’s reach has exceeded the Anglophone world for more than four decades, and, as Roquet points out, the VR headset is not a metaphysical gateway—it is literally a perceptual enclosure. The reason people willingly hand over their spatial cues to a computer is as much about what is bracketed out in discussions on VR as what is included, and perhaps there is no more glaring omission in Anglophone scholarship on VR’s history than the development and reception of VR in Japan. The Immersive Enclosure remediates that omission, offering a much-needed contribution to VR studies that focuses on the cultural specificities and historical contingencies that have shaped the cultural politics of the perceptual enclosure in Japanese culture.

The first two chapters deal primarily with VR’s historical genealogies. Chapter 1, “Acoustics of the One-Person Space,” describes how the intersection between sound, space, and the built environment established the conditions for the popular acceptance of VR’s perceptual enclosure in Japan. Roquet links the normalization of headphone use to the postwar shift from multigenerational to single-family homes and an increase in urban, denser housing. As Roquet notes, “record numbers of Japanese relocated to urban environments at this time, often to live in wooden housing with notoriously thin walls and in close proximity to neighboring homes” (40–41). It was in these spaces that headphone use came to be seen as fun, “in part because it allowed for late-night listening where speaker playback would otherwise be bothersome (meiwaku) for neighbors and family members in adjoining rooms” (40). By the 1970s, the emergence of the one-room apartment—notably represented by photojournalist Tsuzuki Kyōichi as a kind of domestic cockpit—marked an emphasis on individual space that intersected with the rise of individual media use over the same period. From the mid ’70s to the late ’80s, “this personalized cockpit might have been furnished with a television, a stereo, and perhaps later in the decade a video cassette deck or video game console” (42). The space of the built environment helped to normalize personal [End Page 317] listening practices, with technologies like the Sony Walkman in turn normalizing the practice of wearing the enclosure of an immersive audio display on one’s head, a precursor to the head-mounted display of VR.

Chapter 2, “Translating the Virtual into Japanese,” seeks to reframe VR’s development history, from one that springs exclusively from American research to one that has been part of a transnational conversation between the US and Japan going back at least to the 1980s. Here, Roquet notes that the development of VR and related immersive technologies in Japan emerged not from a military but a telecommunications context. Roquet points to earlier work on teleoperators by Ishii Takemochi, who in the 1950s left a career in medicine to pursue computing after encountering Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (54). He also discusses two prominent members of the research community in the ’80s and ’90s: Hirose Michitaka, who helped organize what would become the International Conference on Artificial Reality and Tele-Existence (ICAT), and Tachi Susumu, who coined the term “tele-existence” to describe the experience of using immersive technologies. Beginning in the 1980s, researchers like Hirose...