Table of Contents

Introduction: The Ambient Power Play
1. Acoustics of the One-Person Space
2. Translating the Virtual Into Japanese
3. VR Telework and the Privatization of Presence
4. Immersive Anxieties in the VR Isekai
5. VR as a Technology of Masculinity
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Paul Roquet is associate professor of media studies and Japan studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (2016).

Reviews

The Immersive Enclosure is timely in the most profound sense: it offers a glimpse of a future that we need to act upon now in order to address its potential pitfalls, which include the wholesale commercial mediation of experience. Paul Roquet does a brilliant job of drawing on the culturally specific case of Japan's uptake of VR to provide insights of universal relevance and urgent importance as we confront the prospect that reality itself is becoming the next frontier of the surveillance economy.
*Mark Andrejevic, author of Automated Media*

Paul Roquet’s timely book offers a refreshing new take on VR as a consumer technology. Situating the development of VR within Japan’s robust media networks of anime, manga, visual novels, and video games, he deftly illuminates the ways VR is also seen as a panacea to the country’s shrinking labor force.
*Yuriko Furuhata, author of Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control*

This book is a must-read for scholars in media studies and general readers alike fascinated by the flawed revolutionary potential of VR. Roquet makes a powerful case for attending to the cultural and aesthetic conditions of possibility necessary for embracing virtual reality.
*James J. Hodge, author of Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art*

Immersive Enclosure tells a startlingly different story about VR. Working expertly across discourses, technologies, and fantasies about virtual reality in Japan, Roquet reveals a homology between the structuring of perceptual space and social space that utterly challenges our understanding of the past and future of VR media. The urgent question emerges with breathtaking clarity: what to make of a collective desire for one-person space?
*Thomas Lamarre, author of The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media*

An intriguing analysis of virtual reality as a new vessel for a contaminated kind of individualism, the product of people retreating deeper into personal devices instead of the larger, collective world.
*Kotaku*

[This book] offers a bounty of insights for historians of technology.
*H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews*

The Immersive Enclosure offers an antidote to Western-focused, and especially American-focused, studies of VR, while also underscoring the universal promises and perils that VR holds for contemporary, globalized societies everywhere. . . Highly recommended.
*Choice Reviews*

Roquet successfully demonstrates how virtual reality in Japan emerges from a uniquely cultural and historical perspective, inspiring others to address the local specificity of their virtual reality. The Immersive Enclosure can be their guide.
*Japan Review*

Readers willing to enclose themselves in the pages of The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan can expect to perceive with greater clarity the relationship between perception and bias, especially regarding virtual reality (VR) technologies. Paul Roquet’s account of the development of VR helps uncover implications of the media ecological intersections between a medium, its name, its environment, and its relationship to cultural and political biases.
*Explorations in Media Ecology*

The Immersive Enclosure sets a high bar for research quality, clarity of writing, and insightful arguments. It is strongly recommended for apprehending the history, development, and significance of a technology in Japan that is poised to shape our collective media future in new and potentially unforeseen ways.
*Journal of Japanese Studies*

Roquet’s insights offer a fresh perspective on how the history and development of emerging technologies could shape the future of digital governance, labor markets, and interpersonal relationships.
*Convergence*

The Immersive Enclosure should be required reading for anyone studying VR, in any culture.
*Configurations*