Machines Without Instructions

Another model launched this week. OpenAI released GPT-6, code-named Astra, and some people even claim that it is the first version of AGI. And then Meta introduced Muse, its first personal AI agent, just days later. Neither is the first to arrive this year and we know neither will be the last. Each release nudges the same question further along: how close to human minds are these tools going to become, and what is eventually going to happen as the result?

Asian cinema has been exploring these unknowns for quite some time, well before this year's headlines. Filmmakers across Japan, Korea, and China have built entire stories around what happens when a machine starts to think for itself, and what's left of a person once their mind can be copied. This issue's Film section goes back to where some of that thinking started.

Closer to home, Soundgarden reunited for the Seahawks' season opener here in Seattle this week, with Mike McCready (from Pearl Jam) and Taylor Momsen joining for the halftime set. Watching it got me thinking about the city's own music scene beyond its grunge legacy, and specifically about the Asian-American artists who've built careers here and in Asia quietly. This issue's Music section is for them.

— Yubin

Before The Matrix made its bullet-time scene famous, before "what is real" became a genre of its own in American blockbusters, Mamoru Oshii had already made the definitive version of that question. The Wachowskis (who directed The Matrix) have talked about screening Ghost in the Shell for their own visual effects team while working on their own movie. The influence is not subtle once you start to realize.

The film follows Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg operative whose body is almost entirely artificial and whose mind may or may not still be her own. She works for a counter-cyberterrorism unit in a future Japan where consciousness can be hacked, copied, and networked like any other file. The case she's assigned, tracking a hacker known as the Puppet Master, turns into something closer to an existential examination of her own identity. If a mind can be edited, backed up, and rewritten, what part of it was ever her own to begin with?

Oshii is not interested in answering these questions explicitly, and the film moves at a pace that requires some patience. Many scenes pass with no dialogue at all, and Kenji Kawai's score, built around a wordless female chant in an invented ancient dialect, does the emotional work instead. This is a demanding watch by the standards of most action anime, closer in spirit to a philosophy lecture. 

The animation itself was expensive and slow to produce by mid-1990s standards, mixing hand-drawn cels with early digital compositing to get the level of detail Oshii wanted in every frame. That investment shows most in the opening sequence, a wordless build of Kusanagi's synthetic body from the inside out, which set a visual template that other anime and live-action productions have been borrowing from ever since, well beyond The Matrix.

What makes it worth returning to three decades later is how little the central question has aged. Ghost in the Shell was asking what separates a person's consciousness from that of a machine well before ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini became household names.

Stream free on YouTube, Prime Video and Tubi (Trailer)

Jung_E (정이) — Yeon Sang-ho (Korea, 2023)

In a future where humanity has fled to space stations after Earth becomes uninhabitable, a brilliant military captain named Jung Yi-hyun is left brain-dead after a failed mission. Her daughter, now a scientist at a research lab decades later, has spent her career cloning her mother's brain into combat AI prototypes, running the same consciousness through thousands of simulated deaths to perfect a weapon. The film's real tension isn't the war outside. It's what happens when the daughter begins to wonder whether the thing she's been building and testing still deserves to be called her mother.

Jung_E hit number one on Netflix's global chart and held it for three days after its release, though it never built the wider buzz that it should have gotten. Kang Soo-yeon, one of Korean cinema's most decorated actresses, plays Jung Yi-hyun in what turned out to be her final film role before her death.

Stream on Netflix (Trailer)

The Wandering Earth II (流浪地球 2) — Frant Gwo (China, 2023)

A prequel to 2019's The Wandering Earth, this one rewinds to the early days of the plan to relocate the entire planet using giant thrusters, before the first film's disaster ever hits. Buried inside the spectacle is a quieter, stranger story: a supercomputer named MOSS, built to help coordinate humanity's survival, and a program uploading human consciousness into digital form so that people can survive even after their bodies fail. 

The film grossed more than $600 million worldwide, making it one of the highest-grossing Chinese films ever released, and its space-elevator and lunar sequences were built with visual effects handled entirely by domestic Chinese studios, a first for the franchise. Andy Lau plays the scientist behind the Digital Life Project, one of Hong Kong's most decorated actors taking on a rare hard-sci-fi role.

Stream free on YouTube, Pluto and Tubi (Trailer)

Sam Kim grew up in the Seattle area before moving to Korea as a teenager to compete on K-Pop Star 3, a reality competition where he placed second and caught the attention of judge You Hee-yeol, who signed him to his label. Sun and Moon, released a few years later, remains his only full-length album to date. His other project under his own name, I Am Sam, is a three-track EP rather than a full record, which makes Sun and Moon the fuller picture of the type of music he does.

Eight tracks built around his soulful voice and skillful guitar playing, the album peaked at number 23 on Korea's Gaon Albums Chart, and is an absolute joy to listen to. It was released in two stages, an October EP called Sun and Moon Pt. 1 followed a month later by the full record, and brought in Zico and Crush as features on "It's You" and "Make Up," pulling two of Korean hip-hop and R&B's more recognizable names onto what is otherwise a quiet, largely self-written project.

The rest of the album moves through soft jazz and '70s-leaning folk without settling into any single lane, a wider range than his earlier, more straightforwardly pop-leaning singles had suggested. It is a mature, well-made recording of a teenager who grew up in the Seattle suburbs and then established himself as one of the most promising young musicians in the Korean music industry.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Bayani — Blue Scholars (USA, 2007)

Blue Scholars formed when George Quibuyen and Alexei Saba Mohajerjasbi met as students at the University of Washington, both active in the campus hip-hop community. Quibuyen raps under the name Geologic, or sometimes Prometheus Brown for his solo work; Mohajerjasbi produces as Sabzi and has since built a second career doing the same job for the duo Common Market. Bayani, released in 2007, was their proper debut, and its title does something deliberate before the music even starts: it fuses a Tagalog word for hero with a Persian one for the same idea, a nod to Quibuyen's Filipino and Mohajerjasbi's Iranian heritage sitting side by side in a single word.

The album's best-known track, "50K Deep," documents the 1999 WTO protests that shut down downtown Seattle, when roughly fifty thousand demonstrators overwhelmed the city and delayed the opening of the World Trade Organization's ministerial conference. It's one of the more specific pieces of hip-hop written about an American protest movement, tied to a single event in a single city rather than gesturing at politics in the abstract. Bayani was recorded and released independently, and it built the duo's reputation almost entirely through word of mouth and college radio in the Pacific Northwest before spreading further. Nearly two decades on, it is still listening to, both musically and lyrically.

Stream on Spotify

Ocean — Tomo Nakayama (Japan/USA, 2025)

Tomo Nakayama moved from Japan to the Seattle area at eight years old. He spent the early 2000s in a band called Asahi, then fronted the more expansive Grand Hallway through the later half of that decade, before going solo in 2013. Ocean, out this past November, is his fourth album under his own name and a deliberate return to full-band arrangements after 2020's more electronic, synth-forward Melonday.

He recorded it with a small team of musicians borrowed from other well-regarded bands: Yuuki Matthews of The Shins on keys, Abbey Blackwell of Alvvays on bass, Christopher Icasiano of Fleet Foxes on drums. The resulting sound leans toward dream pop and orchestral folk, more layered and relaxed than anything on his earlier records. KEXP (Seattle’s own radio station) called it tender, poetic, and reflective on release. Ocean imagery runs through the album as a way of talking about grief and human connection, hence the fitting title.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Rinko Kawauchi arrived in the Japanese photography scene almost fully ready. In 2001, she released three photobooks at once, Utatane, Hanabi, and Hanako, and the trio became an overnight event in a scene that doesn't usually make room for newcomers that quickly. The following year she won the Kimura Ihei Award, one of Japanese photography's most significant prizes, and by the time Cui Cui appeared in 2005 she already had a recognizable visual language: soft light, slight overexposure, a way of looking at ordinary objects that made them feel new and strange.

What sets Cui Cui apart from the rest of her catalog is where she pointed her camera. Kawauchi spent thirteen years photographing her own family, and the book is a collection of what she found: New Year's gatherings, her older brother's wedding, the births of nieces and nephews, her grandfather's slow decline and eventual passing. The same soft, high-key style she used elsewhere for insects and light through glass lands on people she has known her entire life.

The title comes from the sound of sparrows chirping, a small, constant, easy-to-miss noise standing in for how most of a family's real history actually gets recorded in subtle ways. Nothing in Cui Cui is staged for drama. A meal, a hallway, a hospital visit sit next to each other with the same visual weight, and her grandfather's death arrives through the sequencing of the book rather than through a single image. However many photographs it took to get there, the effect of this book is closer to what a family actually remembers than what a family album usually shows.

Follow her work on her website and IG @rinkokawauchi

Japan's Fair Trade Commission spent 2025 surveying the anime industry it regulates, and the numbers it came back with were bad enough to draw international attention. Nearly half of major studios didn't receive a written contract until after production had already started. Only about a third of freelancers got contracts up front at all. When studios were asked to do extra work mid-project, most were paid partially or not at all for it, and in the vast majority of cases studios signed away all copyright to their own work, folded quietly into the base production fee rather than paid for separately. A UN report on exploitation in the industry added outside pressure, and by June, the JFTC and the Cabinet Office's Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters had new guidelines ready: written contracts up front, fair pay for added work, clearer rules on who owns what gets made.

To promote those guidelines, the agencies put out an informational pamphlet. The illustrations in it turned out to be AI-generated.

An illustrator at a subcontracted firm had used AI tools "to improve efficiency," officials later confirmed, and the images made it through review and into public circulation before anyone caught it. Japanese creators picked them apart in detail, pointing to details like an upside-down drawing tablet that no human artist would have drawn that way. The JFTC admitted it lacked the design expertise to catch the error before publishing, and said it would "take appropriate action" for future materials, though it declined to take the existing pamphlet down. The guidelines themselves are a real response to what the survey found about protecting creators. The pamphlet explaining them ran into the same shortcut the guidelines were written to address.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com