ABSTRACT
Tokyo Jungle (Tōkyō Janguru) is a survival-based adventure game published by PlayStation CAMP Studio for the PlayStation 3 in the summer of 2012. In Tokyo Jungle, the player can assume the roles of a variety of animals roaming the streets of a Tokyo devoid of human life. At the end of the game, the player must decide whether to allow human beings to return to Tokyo or to fade quietly into oblivion. Tokyo Jungle’s story and gameplay features encourage the player to develop an antagonistic attitude toward humanity and its failed stewardship of the environment, a view that reflects the theories of posthuman philosophers such as Nick Bostrom and John A. Leslie. The ideology of Tokyo Jungle demonstrates an emerging awareness and acceptance of philosophical posthumanism and a literally posthuman world. Fears concerning disaster and the resulting annihilation of humanity are often assuaged by a representation of nonhuman harbingers of the post-apocalyptic world as small, furry, and adorable. This link between cuteness and the nonhuman is tied to a broader connection between apocalypse and the feminine in contemporary Japanese media, in which adolescent female sexuality is often imbued with anxiety over the reproduction and possible extinction of the human species.
