Nationalism in Anime

(Like Sexism in Anime, only with Nationalism.)

A sad truth is that political beliefs and fiction do not always stay separate, and anime as a medium is no exception. Perhaps it has been always like this, but in the New Tens it appears to be even pronounced, what with success of works like Mahouka Koukou No Rettousei, Kantai Collection, and Gate.

I'm really torn about if one should worry about this kind of trend and if so, how much?

Any other thoughts or comments on this topic?

OUR NATION SHALL RISE FROM THE WAVES AND CONQUER EAST ASIA NIPPON BEST NATION

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaCpbwkNR0w

Nationalism has been a huge element in the Gundam series, both for and against it depending on the series. Point is, it's not a recent thing.

A guy elsewhere also highlighted how the classic Space Battleship Yamato is apparently the biggest love letter to Imperial Japanese nationalism ever.

I did say "Perhaps it was always like this."

The only Gundam work I've finished are Mobile Suit Gundam and Gundam Build Fighters and its (unworthy) sequel.. The first one is very clearly against nationalism, so I'm not quite certain if that one should be called a nationalistic anime, while the latter two are...well.

That actually made me thought for a second; what are some mecha animes that can be considered nationalistic, and Code Geass might count? I haven't watched that one so I'm not going to make a hasty judgement. From what I've seen of the first few episodes, though, it could be accused as one. -shrugs-

Code Geass actually kind of makes a good job of showing both Japanese and foreigners as quite fallible and flawed people.

Ah.

It's a valid topic, but it's unlikely to prosper as the other thread has. The medium caters to a narrow national audience in a very isolationist country; so while portrayals of foreigners can be bad, it usually doesn't acknowledge the outside world enough to be nationalistic. Whereas sexism permeates from pandering to a sexually frustrated male audience. This thread might work better expanded to how outsiders are seen (Koreans in particular). Here is an earlier thread that talked of this.

Gundam has been quite good in this respect. Tomino's shows in particular are the most multi-cultural you'll find in the medium. Though the villainous Zeon are given a lot of Nazi imagery with no hint of Imperial Japan. The one Gundam entry that has genuine pro-Japan sentiment is Gundam SEED, see here. G Gundam has silly stereotypes, but takes pains to make Japan as flawed as the rest.

Kantai Collection is very telling, but I don't think it's an example of this sort of nationalism. Know Fawlty Towers and "Whatever you do don't mention the war"? It was like that. I can't speak for the game, but as televised it tried to be as inoffensive as possible with what they had. Had the game included ships from all sides they could have made it more like Girls und Panzer (a sports tournament with national teams) or Strike Witches (a cross-national fighting team). As it was they focused on the characters (the real point of the game), comedy and a fight that never had any national tinge until the finale, when they tried (and failed) to frame it as putting memories to rest but still had bad implications.

Basically they avoided pandering directly to the Japan-did-nothing-wrong nationalists, but without risking alienating them either. If it offended, it was more ineptness than anything else. The whole show was as safe and marketable as they come.

A better example would be the early episodes of Guilty Crown. It drips with Japan-as-victim and occupying soldiers as the enemy. It's interesting to compare with American nationalism, which more often emphasises exceptionalism and the need to fix the rest of the world, or France, where sophisticated native culture is paramount, or Britain, where it's about pluckiness in the face of adversity, and Russia, with also has a victim complex but is far more aggressive about it.

I would like to be able to talk about Italian nationalism but... it doesn't exist to the same extent. They have no love for their country.

I guess since I'm limited in knowledge in this regard, but I know one hilarious example that comes to mind is the Baseball episode from Samurai Champloo.

I wonder if some Japanese creators are still under impression that they were the victims during WW II.

Actually, do people even know Pearl Harbor attack happened?

From what I've read, they're taught that Pearl Harbor was the regrettable but unavoidable response to the United States hostile actions towards Japan, such as freezing their assets, blocking vital trade, etc. that was hurting Japan's economy and creating friction between them and the Might Whitey racist Westerners.

They conveniently leave out that all that was in response to Japan's blatant imperialism and brutality against China. Or that their Co-Prosperity Sphere with the rest of Asia was such a farce that even people who would have happily fought alongside Japan against the US, UK, or whoever ended up turning against them and cheering on the Allies.

Kancolle is a funny thing because as it got popular, the production team seemed to change the nature of the villain characters. They've always been pretty nebulous and have pretty much no characterization of which to speak of, but some things about them - besides being the enemy of IJN ships that is -implied that they really were the evil incarnations of Allied ships. A lot of fan comics that place the characters in the actual WWII scenarios they were in just flat out use them as the Allies. Over time though, newer villains were deliberately made to have some sort of resemblance to the good characters, leading to the theory that the bad guys are actually IJN ships that somehow turned evil. This is the theory that the anime strongly implied in it's ending.

I'm not a mind reader, so I don't know what was going through the developers' heads when they started working with that angle. Maybe the developers just liked that concept better. But it's also possible they didn't want to portray Allies ships, all of which are from nations Japan is currently on friendly terms with, as bad guys for no reason. The anime's horribly under-utilized theme of battling that malevolent force called destiny could even work into this, the characters fight to keep history from repeating itself and don't want to be forced to repeat their battle against the Allies anymore.

Or I dunno, maybe Japan just likes the US Navy. Even the bizarrely Japanese right-wing High School of the Dead had American ships defending Japan from a missile attack. In Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 there's a passing mention of the US Navy coming to help the earthquake victims.

From what I heard, in Kancolle anime the main characters actually won that universe's equivalent of the Battle of Midway, aka the battle that shifted the Pacific War towards America for certain.

That's adorable.

Highschool of the Dead is right wing? I thought it was just about tits and ass and more tits.

The only Italian person I know (as in actual person from Italy; practically everyone I know has some ancestry) swears up and down that she feels no need to return to her country, since Italy conquered the rest of the world years ago. "The moment foreigners first ate our food, we had won."

Anyway, on topic, High School Of The Dead is of course extremely right-wing, though it is buried under fanservice. Zombie apocalypses in general tend to be right-wing, since it's the perfect genre for individuals to literally prove themselves better than the mindless hordes, not to mention that if governments were even the tiniest bit competent, it would be over before it started.

edited 5th Sep '15 9:49:44 PM by Discar

There are apparently ultra right wing nationalists portrayed very positively later on. I dunno for sure, since I stopped at the loli omorashi scene.

edited 5th Sep '15 9:48:29 PM by majoraoftime

dRoy: It does. That ties back to the Screw Destiny thing I mentioned, since one character is shown having nightmares of the first time they fought at Midway and how she and her friends all died.

I get the feeling that a lot of Japanese media concerning WWII is set post-Midway. When the tide turned, it's easier for them to be portrayed as the underdog and victims when faced with the industrial might and sheer numbers the Allies were able to send into the fight and all the conquests and invasions before are just ignored.

edited 5th Sep '15 9:51:19 PM by Parable

Meh this was off-topic.

edited 5th Sep '15 10:14:12 PM by Nikkolas

My funposting aside, Yuki Yuna is a Hero (spoilers ahead, btw) has an interesting view on nationalism. Mimori Togo is depicted as a pretty die-hard nationalist, to the point where she won't eat Western food or use English loanwords. It helps that in the anime's setting Japan's Shikoku Island is the only place that exists after an apocalyptic event 300 years ago, and her nationalism is mostly Played for Laughs.

It's a Magical Girl Warrior show, and the premise is that her and her friends fight off otherworldly invaders on behalf of a theocratic government to protect their home. However, halfway through the series it turns out that they're essentially sacrificing themselves to their god in the process and will eventually suffer a Fate Worse than Death, all for the sake of a Hopeless War. Togo, of all people, decides that her friends being sacrificed isn't worth it and basically tries to destroy whats left of the world in a mass Mercy Kill.

The show has a lot of parallels to WWII and in a time where we're seeing more pro-nationalist works like Mahouka or Kancolle its nice to see a more nuanced view.

edited 6th Sep '15 12:16:11 AM by MoreThanBored

@whoever said Mobile Suit Gundam has Zeon as a Nazi Germany stand-in: As it happens, the Gundam thread in this very forum has seen the topic come up many times in the past, and I believe the consensus is that Germany is in fact supposed to be commentary on imperial Japan. I was mostly an observer for those conversations, so you might wanna stop by the thread itself if you want more details. :P

On Gundam,

0079 Zeon was very much a Nazi By Any Other Name, there weren't many imperial Japan analogs in it aside from a few little minor things. It gets really telling in IGLOO which takes place on a Zeon ship and how they get things like a loyalty officer and such which was a feature on German uboats.

Seed, umm Orb wasn't Japan at first. It wasn't until Destiny that they brought things more political with orb being clearly Japan and the White House makes an appearance and such, very out of place considering the first series.

00, Japan was just another country in the Union, which was lead by the US. Its called 'Special Economic Jurisdiction' which is never explained but is probably the trade hub between the Union and the Human Reform League which consists of China, Russia and India.

I see what you mean, that Zeon / Federation represented Imperial Japan / Postwar Japan, taking aim at its all-controlling bureaucracy and ruling elite that kept getting elected. And Zeon's motivation ("We're throwing off the oppressors!") as well as power structure and tactics are closer to Japan than Germany. It should have occurred to me earlier, it certainly puts UC in a more Japanese light.

On that note, I suspected the Zentradi in Macross were Japanese militarism cast as aliens.

Yes, the shipgirls win Midway. It's meant to represent breaking out of a cycle of reliving the war, but... the last two episodes were very clumsy. I could just about hear the writing team scrabbling together undeveloped ideas at the last minute.

Zombie apocalypses are often tinged with right-wing survivalism and love for guns. While other post-apocalypse stuff like Mad Max are more left-wing because armed militias are the problem rather than the solution, and it's often caused by war or environmental collapse in the backstory.

I wonder why animes have to take place in WWII to begin with. It's not something funny. It's a war involving pretty much the whole world, creating frightening new means of warfare and causing massive casualties for everyone. It's not something that people would want to cherish as a nostalgic memory, except as a lesson in history. Just think about all the news you get about protests in Japan over expanding the scope of JSDF. I've heard before that the Japanese public at large is not very active in political participation relative to an average democracy. So when they take it to streets over Article 9, it goes to show how much they care about not wanting a war.

Of course it's fine if you want to make a serious documentary-type show (see: Megumi, a manga/anime based on a real life Japanese national abducted by North Koreans). You can do what, say, the Schindler's List did: portray the individuals that are just trying to survive and to do what's right in the given situation, regardless of nationalities.

Yeah, I mean if you watch (borderline documentary) shows like Series/The Pacific, it was a tough time even to the winners.

I think the only anime I've seen that takes place in WWII Japan AND acknowledges the horrible things that Japan did during that time is Barefoot Gen.

There was an ANN Answerman that I'm too lazy to look up where someone asked about WWII and anime, and one of the things he pointed out was that pretty much the only "safe" depictions you can do in anime is that of Japanese kids suffering horribly. It's something everyone can look at and say "Yup, that's pretty fucked up." Depicting either a sanitized or unsanitized version of Japan's military expeditions is bound to get someone angry at you.

Also, a horrible, horrible thought just struck me: Hentai featuring comfort women. That probably exists. Fuck.

There's a subtle reference to Japan's military abuses in Keroro Gunsō of all things. The invading Keronian alien protagonists call Earth Pokopen, which is the same derogative name the Japanese army used towards China. As a matter of fact, for the anime version the name had to be changed to 'Pekopon', not that it makes that much better.

Then there's also Axis Power Hetalia and the casual way it treats the Japan/Italy/Germany WWII Axis as the lovable protagonists.

I wonder why animes have to take place in WWII to begin with. It's not something funny.

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, contrary to what you have just seen, war is neither glamorous nor fun. There are no winners, only losers. There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: The American Revolution, World War II, and The Star Wars Trilogy. If you'd like to learn more about war, there's lots of books in your local library, many of them with cool gory pictures. See you next week. Peace, man!"

edited 6th Sep '15 12:28:26 PM by NapoleonDeCheese