The Representation of Japanese Politics in Manga: The Visual Literacy of Statecraft 9780367439965, 9781003007180

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The Representation of Japanese Politics in Manga

This edited volume explores political motives, discourses and agendas in Japanese manga and graphic art with the objective of highlighting the agency of Japanese and wider Asian storytelling traditions within the context of global political traditions. Highly illustrated chapters presented here investigate the multifaceted relationship between Japan’s political storytelling practices, media and bureaucratic discourse, as played out between both the visual arts and modern pop-­cultural authors. From pioneering cartoonist Tezuka Osamu, contemporary manga artists such as Kotobuki Shiriagari and Fumiyo Kōno, to videogames and everyday merchandise, a wealth of source material is analysed using cross-­genre techniques. Furthermore, the book resists claims that manga, unlike the bandes dessinées and American superhero comic traditions, is apolitical. On the contrary, contributors demonstrate that manga and the mediality of graphic arts have begun to actively incorporate political discourses, undermining hegemonic cultural constructs that support either the status quo, or emerging brands of neo-­nationalism in Japanese society. The Representation of Politics in Manga will be a dynamic resource for students and scholars of Japanese studies, media and popular cultural studies, as well as practitioners in the graphic arts. Roman Rosenbaum PhD is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, Australia. He specialises in Post-­War Japanese Literature and Popular Cultural Studies. He is the editor of Representation of Japanese History in Manga (Routledge, 2013) and Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature (Routledge, 2015).

Routledge/Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) East Asian Series Edited by Morris Low

Editorial Board: Geremie Barmé, Australian National University, Colin Mackerras, Griffith University, Vera Mackie, University of Wollongong and Sonia Ryang, University of Iowa.

This series represents a showcase for the latest cutting-­edge research in the field of East Asian studies, from both established scholars and rising academics. It will include studies from every part of the East Asian region (including China, Japan, North and South Korea and Taiwan) as well as comparative studies dealing with more than one country. Topics covered may be contemporary or historical, and relate to any of the humanities or social sciences. The series is an invaluable source of information and challenging perspectives for advanced students and researchers alike. 16 Chinese Stories of Drug Addiction Beyond the Opium Dens Guy Ramsay 17 Anti-­nuclear Protest in Post-­Fukushima Tokyo Power Struggles Alexander James Brown 18 Japan in Australia Culture, Context and Connection Edited by David Chapman and Carol Hayes 19 Reporting Mental Illness in China Guy Ramsay 20 The Representation of Japanese Politics in Manga The Visual Literacy of Statecraft Edited by Roman Rosenbaum For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-­Asian-Studies-­Association-of-­Australia-ASAA-­East-Asian-­Series/ book-­series/SE0467

The Representation of Japanese Politics in Manga The Visual Literacy of Statecraft

Edited by Roman Rosenbaum

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Roman Rosenbaum; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Roman Rosenbaum to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-43996-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00718-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of figures Notes on contributors Foreword Acknowledgements

  1 Introduction: the political potential of manga

vii x xiv xvi 1

R oman R osenbaum

  2 Re-­envisioning the Dark Valley and the decline of the peace state

27

B arbara G reene

  3 Kobayashi Yoshinori’s just war and unjust peace: Sensō ron, arrogant-­ism and selective memory

46

M ichael  L ewis

  4 Sexual politics in manga: Pan-­Pan Girls confronting the US occupation, Vietnam War and Japan’s Article 9 revision

62

M ichiko T akeuchi

  5 NEETs versus nuns: visualizing the moral panic of Japanese conservatives

86

S ean P atrick  W ebb

  6 The body political: women and war in Kantai Collection

103

R achael H utchinson

  7 Towards an unrestrained military: manga narratives of the self-­defence forces J effrey J .   H all

121

vi   Contents   8 The political representation of Hiroshima in the graphic art of Kōno Fumiyo

141

R oman R osenbaum

  9 What Tezuka would tell Trump: critiquing Japanese cultural nationalism in Gringo

162

B en W haley

10 Questioning the politics of popular culture: Tatsuta Kazuto’s manga 1F and the national discourse on 3/11

183

S tephan  K ö hn

11 Database nationalism: the disaggregation of nation, nationalism and symbol in pop culture

203

C hristopher  S mith

12 Envisioning nuclear futures: Shiriagari Kotobuki’s 3/11 manga from hope to despair

223

R achel D i N itto

13 Kokoro (心): civic epistemology of self-­knowledge in Japanese war-­themed manga

245

Y uka H asegawa

14 In conclusion: Abenomics, Trumpism and manga

265

R oman R osenbaum



Index

277

Figures

Doraemon: seiji no shikumi ga wakaru [understanding the political process]   1.2 Controversial pearl diver avatar: the Aoshima Megu (碧志摩メグ) moe character   1.3 Controversial distortion – Toshiko Hasumi’s Syrian refugee manga. The translation reads: ‘I want to go on living a safe and clean life, eat gourmet food, go out to play freely, wear pretty things, and live a luxurious life, without any hardship. At the expense of someone else. I have an idea. I’ll become a refugee.’   1.4 Politicised teenagers on the front cover of the Liberal Democratic Parties manga, Kuni ni todoke   2.1a and 2.1b  Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist. The State Alchemists Using Ishvalen Prisoners in Experiments   2.2a and 2.2b  Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist. General Armstrong Infiltrates and Subdues Human Military Conspirators   4.1 Endō Takeo, 1956   4.2 Ono Saseo, 1948. Illustration from Ikeda Michiko, “Yoru no Ueno: Sakka no shakai tanbō,” Gekkan Yomiuri (1948)   4.3 Matsushita Ichio, cover of Satadei Nyūsu (1948)   4.4 Tezuka Osamu, “Sukippara no burūsu” (1975)   4.5 Oriko, “Takoku no shihaika de ikinuku niwa?” (c.2004)   7.1 Aozakura characters decorate the front of a car belonging to NDA’s automobile club. This was part of a display of student club activities at the 2017 NDA school festival, a two-­day event in which the normally closed campus is open to the general public   7.2 Gate merchandise at a Tokyo shop in 2016. These included items decorated with JSDF camouflage patterns, dog tags containing the names of characters, and key chains shaped like Japanese military rifles   1.1

4 10

12 13 35 36 63 68 70 74 77

131

135

viii   Figures   8.1

‘Good-­bye Hiroshima’. The artist bids farewell to Hiroshima well before the fatal atomic bomb blast eventuates. It becomes the artist’s task to recreate Hiroshima from scratch via her drawings for a new generation of readers   8.2 ‘Right Hand … I wonder where you are and what you are doing’. Trompe l’oeil effects after the narrator loses her right (drawing) hand   8.3 An example of the narrator’s chūkanzu 虫瞰図 (worm’s-eye view)   8.4 An example of the narrator’s chōkanzu 鳥瞰図 or fukanzu 俯瞰図 (aerial bird’s-eye view)   8.5 The sacred school textbook showing the children’s doodles   9.1 Himoto greets his dinner guests in a traditional sumo mawashi   9.2 Himoto and his family stumble upon the torii gate and shrine that mark the entrance to Tokyo Village. Japanese Text: “You’re a …”/Box says “Offering”   9.3 Kondō stares in disbelief at the fake news articles in the village’s newspaper. Japanese Text: “Wh … What … is this? Where is this information from?”   9.4 The ability to stomach traditional food becomes a litmus test for Japanese identity. Japanese Text: “Hey! Miso soup and spinach salad with sesame dressing? With daikon radish in the soup …”   9.5 Himoto questions what it means to be “Japanese.” Japanese Text: “Are we not Japanese? Well then … who the hell are the Japanese?!”   9.6 An elderly Himoto unveils his plans to hold a world’s fair in “Gringo 2002.” Japanese Text: “That’s right! It’s a world’s fair!!” To which the board members reply, “Oh!” 11.1 Yamato from Kantai korekushon 11.2 GSDF Recruiting Poster featuring characters from Gēto 11.3 The witches with their “striker units” 12.1a and 12.1b  “Umibe no mura,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga. Shohan. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entā Burein, 2011) 12.2 “Furueru machi,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga. Shohan. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entā Burein, 2011) 12.3 “Furueru machi,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga. Shohan. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entā Burein, 2011) 12.4 “Purorōgu,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no yūutsu. Bīmu komikkusu (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2015) 12.5 “Umibe no mura,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga. Shohan. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entā Burein, 2011) 12.6 “Kyūjitsu,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Gerogero pūsuka: kodomo miraishi. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entaburein, 2012) 12.7 The Ferris Wheel in Pripyat. Tiia Monto

143 146 148 149 154 166 168 169

171 174 177 209 215 217 225 226 229 230 231 233 233

Figures   ix “Gerogero pūsuka,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Gerogero pūsuka: kodomo miraishi. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entaburein, 2012) 12.9 “Chisana matsuri,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no yūutsu. Bīmu komikkusu (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2015) 13.1a and 13.1b  Keiji Nakazawa, Barefoot Gen, Vol. 3 ‘Life After the Bomb’. Translated by Project Gen (San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2005) 13.2a and 13.2b  Shigeru Mizuki, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. Translated by Frederik L. Schodt (Montreal: Dawn and Quarterly, 2015 [2011]) 13.3a and 13.3b  Shigeru Mizuki, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. Translated by Frederik L. Schodt (Montreal: Dawn and Quarterly, 2015 [2011]) 13.4a and 13.4b  Osamu Tezuka, Message to Adolf, Vol. 2. Translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian (New York: Vertical, 2012) Kindle edition 13.5a and 13.5b  Osamu Tezuka, Message to Adolf, Vol. 2. Translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian (New York: Vertical, 2012) Kindle edition 14.1 Liberal Democratic Constitutional Reform Promotion Headquarters: ‘Honobono Ikka no Kenpo Kaisei tte Nani’. 12.8

235 236 253 255 256 257 259 271

Contributors

Rachel DiNitto is a Professor of modern and contemporary Japanese literary and cultural studies in University of Oregon’s East Asian Languages & Literatures department. Her current research focuses on the literary and cultural responses to the triple disaster of 11 March 2011 in Japan – earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns. In addition to her new book, Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), she has published on the film and manga of this disaster and post-­war Japan. See her recent work in The Japanese Cinema Book, The Asia-­Pacific Journal and Negotiating Disaster: ‘Fukushima’ and the Arts. Her research prior to this includes work on award-­winning author Kanehara Hitomi, cult film director Suzuki Seijun, manga artist Maruo Suehiro and a monograph on and translations of Uchida Hyakken’s pre-­war fiction. Barbara Greene recently received her PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona. Her research focuses primarily on the intersection of popular media, particularly manga, and the shifting perceptions of history and identity. She has previously published articles on the creation of pop-­cultural pilgrimage sites in the city of Sakaiminato, agrarian nationalism in the manga series Moyashimon, and the embodiment of war trauma in the horror manga series Gyo. She is currently teaching at Southwest University, People’s Republic of China. Jeffrey J. Hall is an adjunct lecturer at Hosei University (Japanese Politics), Meiji Gakuin University (Japanese Society & Global Political Issues), Tsukuba University (International Politics) and Japan’s National Defense Academy (English Communication). He has an MA and a PhD in International Relations from Waseda University, and a BA in History from the George Washington University. His research focuses on popular culture, the Self-­Defense Forces, and war memory in contemporary Japan. The author has recently written a chapter on the JSDF in the Godzilla film series: ‘Japan’s Anti-­Kaiju Fighting Force: Normalizing Japan’s Self-­Defense Forces through Postwar Monster Films’. In C.D.G. Mustachio and J. Barr (eds), Giant Creatures in Our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017).

Contributors   xi Yuka Hasegawa is a specially appointed lecturer at the Tokyo Gakugei University. She received her PhD in Anthropology with an area focus of Japan. Her research interests include art education, learning and self in the context of community development (machizukuri) and cultural (re)production in Japan. Rachael Hutchinson, DPhil. is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Delaware. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2000, and has published widely on representation and identity in ­Japanese literature, film, manga and videogames. Her publications include ­Japanese Culture Through Videogames (Routledge, 2019), Nagai Kafu’s Occidentalism: Defining the Japanese Self (State University of New York Press, 2011), Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan (ed., Routledge, 2013), The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature (edited with Leith Morton, Routledge 2016) and Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature (edited with Mark Williams, Routledge, 2007). Her work on Japanese film has appeared in Japan Forum, Japanese Studies, World Cinema’s Dialogues with Hollywood (2007) and Remapping World Cinema (2006). Her work on videogames appears in Games and Culture, Replaying Japan, and NMEDIAC: Journal of New Media and Culture, as well as various edited volumes. Stephan Köhn, Prof Dr is ordinary professor at the University of Cologne, Germany. He specialises in Japanese popular/media culture and book publishing in pre-­modern Japan. He received his PhD in Japanese Studies at the University of Frankfurt, and qualified as a professor of Japanese Studies (habilitation) at the University of Würzburg. He received several scholarships as a Visiting Researcher/Professor in Japan (1991–1993, 2000–2001, 2006, 2015–2016). He is editor of the series Studies in Japanese Culture (2005). He latest edited book is titled Outcasts In Pre-­Modern Japan: Mechanisms of Social Segregation in the Edo-­Period (2019). Michael Lewis, Emeritus Professor of History at Michigan State University and former Professor, Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Sydney, is a historian of modern Japan. His central research interests are in the intersections of cultural, social and scientific history. He has written major studies on modern Japanese local–national integration, Japanese–Korean relations, and the seminal English-­language study of the Japanese 1918 rice riots. His latest work has focused on intellectuals and ideologues active in the mainstream of Japanese pop-­culture. In monographs and essays, he has explored the politically ambivalent roles of manga artists (e.g. Kitazawa Rakuten), street singers (Soeda Azenbō), and satirical essayists (Miyatake Gaikotsu) in movements for greater economic and political equality in Japan. He is also researching the history of psychiatry in modern Japan by exploring the lives of medical professionals who introduced Western therapies from the late nineteenth century through the 1940s. At Michigan State University, he led the creation of a first All-­Asia National Research Center (Title VI). He was elected Fellow of Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2013.

xii   Contributors Roman Rosenbaum, PhD is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, Australia. He specialises in Post-­War Japanese Literature and Popular Cultural Studies. He received his PhD in Japanese Literature at the University of Sydney. In 2008, he received the Inoue Yasushi Award for best refereed journal article on Japanese literature in Australia. In 2010/11, he spent one year as a Visiting Research Professor at the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) to complete a monograph on the social activist Oda Makoto. His Japanese to English translations include: ‘A Translation of Oda Makoto’s “Aboji” wo fumu’, in Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia (JOSA) 36–37 (2004–2005): 86–103. He is the editor of Representation of Japanese History in Manga (Routledge, 2013). His latest edited book is titled Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature (Routledge, 2015). His latest translation is ISHIBUMI: A Memorial to the Atomic Annihilation of 321 Students of Hiroshima Second Middle School (2016). Christopher Smith is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Florida, Department of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. He received a PhD from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and an MA from the University of Virginia, and was previously a visiting researcher at the National Institute for Japanese Literature and a recipient of the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship. His research areas include post-­war literature, Edo-­ period literature, contemporary Japanese visual culture and pop culture, and postmodern theory. Michiko Takeuchi is Associate Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach. Her research focuses on women’s roles and sexual politics in the Japan–USA relationship. Dr Takeuchi received a PhD in Japanese history at University of California, Los Angeles. She has published several articles on prostitution during the US occupation period, based on interviews with Japanese women who associated with American GIs. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, ‘Trans-­Pacific Left Feminism: Japanese and American Old Left Women, from World War I to the US Occupation of Japan’. For this project, Dr Takeuchi was awarded 2018–2019 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan. Sean Patrick Webb, PhD is an independent scholar based in Tennessee. He received his PhD in history at Texas Tech University with concentrations in East Asian and transnational history. His research centres on the way that public memory informs how religion behaves as it crosses national and ethnic borders, with a special focus on the history of Christianity in modern Japan. Ben Whaley is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Calgary. His research examines discourses of race, ethnicity and national identity in post-­war Japanese manga, and representations of trauma and

Contributors   xiii recovery in Japanese videogames. Dr Whaley holds a BA in Japanese from Stanford University (2007; Departmental Honors and Distinction), and an MA (2012) and PhD (2016) in modern Japanese literature and popular culture from The University of British Columbia. His articles appear in the International Journal of Comic Art and Games and Culture.

Foreword John A. Lent

A common refrain heard during my recent interviews with cartoonists in Africa, Asia, and North and South America is that graphic political discourse is in trouble, especially on newspaper pages. Reasons usually given for this downturn are: it is less expensive to publish syndicated cartoons, avoiding payment of salary and fringe benefits to retain a staff cartoonist; there are far fewer chances of expensive libel and other legal cases when dealing with universal (not local) topics found in syndicated drawings, and with the sharp decrease in numbers of print media, there are fewer profitable venues for cartoonists. Of course, interviewed cartoonists also blame the Internet, ‘smart’ phones and other electronic gadgetry for digging deep into print media territory. The obvious consequences, besides losing a secure staff position, are the neglect of graphic critique of local powerbrokers and socio-­political elements and the provision of homogenised and often sanitised messages across the spectrum of the press, particularly those many media owned by conglomerates. But, not all is lost, as some cartoonists will tell you: that with some ingenuity, political cartooning has a chance. Seek out other venues such as websites, blogs, Facebook or animation, they say, at the same time, they lament the weakness of each of these alternatives – their inability to generate much income, their proneness to government censorship and their time-­consuming nature. And, there exist those artists and writers who deal with political issues in their comic books: openly, as in 1940s’ US comics that had superheroes slapping around Hitler and other Axis leaders; and much more subtly, as in Disney comics accused of espousing capitalism and imperialism. In Japan, manga have imparted political messages in both overt and covert ways nearly since their nineteenth-­ century origins. Deciphering the ‘politics of meaning’ in manga, stated as a purpose of this book, admittedly is a tricky proposition. A number of factors come into play: how finitely is ‘political’ defined? Was the author’s intention to impart a political message? Are hidden meanings embedded in the comic art (in its title, plot, language, symbols and characters) that are not identifiable by those unfamiliar with the events or persons obliquely referenced? Are those who analyse comic art prone to deem it political based solely on a subjective reading, rather than the use of more refined methodologies? If the creator of the comic is still alive, was

Foreword   xv his or her opinion sought? All of these questions are at least indirectly germane to this book’s purpose. Roman Rosenbaum and his collaborators demonstrate that, contrary to the belief in some quarters, manga are not apolitical or so entangled in allegory that they cannot be unravelled by non-­Japanese readers. Certainly, the Japanese government thought of manga as something more than ‘whimsical pictures’ consumed by children or salarymen riding home on commuter trains, when it stoked the power of manga as the rescuer of an endangered economy, labelled it as an ‘ambassador’ of Japanese culture, and, in Rosenbaum’s words, converted it into ‘an alternative platform for political and historical debate’. As exemplified in the papers in this book and a look at manga history, political and socio-­cultural discourse has peppered manga for a lengthy time. It has come from the right with the glorification of the Japanese military and the denial of its Second World War atrocities, by Kobayashi Yoshinori and the ‘hate Korea wave’ of Yamano Sharin, and from the left with political counter-­cultural manga of Akasegawa Genpei. Some of the politicised manga likely take on reportorial, protest and/or investigative elements, examples being, Keiji Nakazawa’s recalling the day that the atomic bomb turned his life into a nightmare, Oze Akira’s recounting of the conflict between the Japanese government and farmers during the construction of Narita Airport, Kōno Fumiyo’s political representation of Hiroshima, Tatsuta Kazuto’s relaying via manga of the national discourse of 3/11 (Japan’s triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant failure), or Hagio Moto’s evaluation of nuclear energy risks in Rape Blossom. The political discourse relayed in this volume is plentiful and varied, taking up politics related to race, gender, sex, national identity, ultra-­nationalism, military, religion and war. As newspaper political cartooning shrinks in importance in Japan, with about fifty newspapers depending solely on cartoons from six Kyodo News cartoonists, and with only Mainichi Shimbun of the big three dailies retaining a staff cartoonist, it is possible that manga will increasingly provide the political discourse, though it will not be timely.

Acknowledgements

The inspiration for this book was very much its companion volume, which appeared in 2013 on the kindred theme of Manga and the Representation of Japanese History. The book generated a lot of interest and several emails suggested that it was great in the classroom and students were inspired by the thorough research. What greater motivating factor for a follow-­up research project could there be? It took a simple Call for Papers in the global pantheon of networks that is Japanese research and the abstracts came flooding in. Yet, more than mere praise was needed to embark upon a journey as long and treacherous as a book on politics can be. What triggered the momentum to overcome the inertia of the quotidian, and provide the impetus needed for this book was much more earth-­shattering, precarious and overwhelming altogether. It took a philosophical shift in consciousness that materialised after a series of truly unfortunate socio-­political global events. First, there was the surprising election of Donald Trump signalling the disillusionment of the lower/middle classes with the status quo and resulting in political satire of unknown proportions. Then there was the populism of Boris Johnson and the megalomania of the great helmsman Xi Jinping, interspersed by the frequent missile launches of North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-­un. Not to be outdone, Vladimir Putin, the new Tsar, backed constitutional reforms that allowed him to remain in power as ‘president for life’ after twenty years in power. And whoever thought that politics could not be comic? As if this was not enough, at the end of the most devastating bushfire season in Australian history, the Covid-­19 pandemic struck and suddenly memento mori resumed centre stage once again. It was in this climate of uncertainty, where suddenly it was no longer a fait accompli that the world would keep on turning, that this book was written – and with some self-­isolating effort – completed. I can only thank all of the contributors and their spouses for being so patient with my foibles; my family: Louise my biggest fan for the lifelong companionship and my twin pillars Roman and Chris for keeping up with the ‘grumpy academic’. In the end, it is my enigmatic alma mater, the University of Sydney, that provided once again the security and stability needed for completing a complex work like this. Post Tenebras Lux

1 Introduction The political potential of manga Roman Rosenbaum

Manga and politics – the visual literacy of statecraft This book-­length study explores the multifaceted relationship between Japan’s political storytelling practices, the media and bureaucratic discourses as played out in the visual arts by looking at contemporary narratives of Japan’s modern pop-­cultural narratives. The authors pay particular attention to how contemporary notions of neoliberalism under the Abenomics agenda engender a brand of neo-­nationalism in Japanese popular culture and society. This collection investigates the recent emergence of a Zeitgeist of datsu-­shinjitsu no seiji (脱真 実の政治) or the ‘post-­truth political’ landscape, and considers the influence of gyogi hōdō (虚偽報道, fake news) and Japanese populism via the textual analysis of the socio-­political dimension of manga narrative in Japan. The papers presented in this collection examine how a variety of artists work through cross-­ fertilisation and genre-­breaking techniques in order to undermine hegemonic cultural constructs that support the status quo in Japanese society. Furthermore, it has been suggested that, unlike the bandes dessinées and American superhero comic traditions, contemporary manga are surprisingly apolitical and only engage with contentious subjects in allegorical ways that are often difficult to unravel by non-­Japanese readers. However, where well-­established manga narratives such as Keiji Nakazawa’s Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen, 1973), Tezuka Osamu’s Adorufu ni tsugu (Message to Adolf, 1983) and Kobayashi Yoshinori’s uncongenial narratives may wear their ideological hearts on their sleeves, many other contemporary narratives employ more subtle techniques to disseminate their political message. Each period in Japanese history has its own specific graphic diction and recent contemporary popular graphic narratives are imbued by a rhetoric of precarity arising out of the post-­3/11 triple catastrophe. Recent, more self-­reflective narratives are aware of their inherent potential to shape a diverse range of discourses via engaging a broad range of fields from media studies to anthropology, sociology and especially history in a search for their own social-­ political agencies. With a specific focus on the mediality of graphic art, the research presented demonstrates that quite on the contrary, manga and by extension graphic art have always actively incorporated political discourse in their narrative structures to appeal to a broad audience.

2   Roman Rosenbaum While the focus of the book is the political agenda of pop culture, the often subtle manoeuvrings and power struggles of contemporary manga are explored via the interaction of popular cultural and other media discourses that appear to interplay in a harmonic legato but often conceal the true intention of the narratives. To what extent do contemporary activist writers incorporate innovative use of language in provocative fictional what-­if scenarios to undermine the status quo? How do the storytelling practices of modern Japanese manga destabilise apathetic conformist society and challenge consumerist society, capitalism and Japan’s neoliberal agenda?

Prolegomenon: are manga political? From the political cartoons to the politics of graphic art Manga series were described as being more realistic than reality and more political than the politics debated in real life.1 The present volume explores both the representation of politics in manga as well as the politics of representation in manga. In fact, it is the indeterminable nature of this relationship between how manga display, enact and perform politics using graphic art (in short, ‘represent’ political agency) and how manga exploit and subvert the politics of representation (that is, how a particular subject is portrayed in space and time) that are the subject of this book. Graphic art has been in competition with many other forms of cultural production but after shedding its stigma of immature art, it has now transformed into several traditions. These include the United States superheroes tradition and the Franco-­Belgian tradition where comics are hailed as the ninth art and nowadays are on a par with other high-­cultural modes of expression that enact socio-­politically meaningful messages. This is where Japanese, and by extension Asian manga, have been hailed as expressing the nation’s softpower potential as one of the most globally competitive economic exports equal in importance with its cuisine and more traditional modes of cultural production. Yet, as the present volume will demonstrate, manga are much more than ‘whimsical pictures’; they tell a story, convey narration and are impregnated with ideological significance true to the spirit of Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, whereby the way writing and by extension the semiology of graphic art connote a literary mode of production that may reveal the implicit ideological agendas.2 In this sense, manga as a series of slow-motion images not unlike animation are propelled only by our rapid eye movements. As we unconsciously scan images we become subject to modern marketing practices and branding targets. As John A. Lent reminds us in his seminal work on Asian Comics, ‘political and editorial cartoons … are almost always the first stage in the evolutionary process of comic art’.3 This makes our modern consumer cultures enclaves of iconolatry (veneration of images) wherein our modern icondules (those who serves images) compete with iconoclasts for our attention. Graphic art thus becomes a type of secular iconophilia whereby readers

Introduction   3 consume pop culture loaded with a cornucopia of competing political, cultural and social trends. Ever since Joseph Nye suggested that Japan ‘has more potential soft power than any other Asian country’ and pioneered the theory of soft power as a method where the positive reception and appreciation for a nation’s culture may also support that nation’s global political agenda, the Japanese government has pinned its hopes for economic recovery on the unlikely source of Japanese manga comic books.4 Economically as well as politically, manga are a force to be reckoned with – not only do they demonstrate the political role of popular culture in shaping national images and erasing historical memories via a plethora of competing discourses but also, for many young Korean and Chinese, there is a division in the perception of a ‘cool’ grass-­roots-level cultural Japan and a ‘bad’ political Japan.5 As a result, the rising worldwide influence of manga and graphic art has seen an increase in research conducted in the various comic traditions, combining and comparing the American superhero tradition with the European Franco-­Belgian and Japanese manga traditions (to name only a few global trends). As a result, manga, comics and graphic art are nowadays considered a serious field of research through which investigation can unearth socio-­political as well as cultural dimensions important to our understanding of media studies. As early as 1972, John Berger had criticised the traditional Western cultural aesthetic tradition by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images.6 Similarly, Clifford Geertz in 1973 highlighted the ideological underpinning of cultures via ‘a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms’.7 It is those symbols that are so readily transmitted through a semiotics of manga. Berger and Geertz’s assertion of the danger of embedded and concealed ideological elements and how they intermingle with our own prejudices, presumptions and biases is exemplified by James Anthony Mangan’s somewhat shocking examination of the iconicity of superman, which excavates one of our most consecrated global cultural avatars and demonstrates how it may readily be associated with fascist ideologies.8 Such extreme ideological implications in graphic narratives beg the question of what has happened to traditional politics in one of the world’s largest economies. Kumiko Saito has argued, in her analysis of Japanese landscapes in popular cultural representations, that the US occupation and subsequent years of leftist student protest movements in post-­war Japan from 1945 to the 1960s marked the last period of the nation’s visible political activism to date.9 The rapid rise of popular culture in the 1970s, accompanied by the progress in visual media, as well as rapid economic growth, appears to have replaced a resilient political consciousness with a high consumerist Japanese pop culture. The return of nationalism in the 1990s, following a prolonged economic recession and the subsequent acute crisis of confidence triggered by the rise of precarity in Japanese society, meant that the soft-­power potential of Japanese pop culture has also taken on an important role in the socio-­political realm of Japan.10 As a result, more recent developments have reinvented Japan’s manga market as an

4   Roman Rosenbaum a­ lternative platform for political and historical debate, wherein graphic art provides an alternative avenue for people to acquire and disseminate information that shapes the public opinion of the nation’s political history.11

Educational versus political manga Yet, the omnipresence of graphic images in our daily lives is not necessarily a bad trend. As media that intermingle graphic art and narrative discourse, manga and graphic novels expedite and make the learning process more enjoyable, which has led to the creation of a dedicated educational genre in Japan referred to as gakushū manga (学習). Enjoying a long history in Japan, educational manga was developed by Ishinomori Shotaro as a form of modern edutainment media via his seminal work Manga Nihon Keizai Nyūmon (マンガ日本経済入門, An Introduction to

Figure 1.1 Doraemon: seiji no shikumi ga wakaru [understanding the political process]. Source: © Fujiko Pro, Shogakukan.12

Introduction   5 Japanese Economy), which was published from 1986 to 1988. This work became the prototype for the development of the educational genre in the field of graphic discourse. Nowadays, almost any field of study has its accompanying manga genre and it is no understatement to suggest that every freshman at university will reach for the associated manga before they grasp the course textbook. Even the most beloved children’s character like Fujiko Fujio’s Doraemon has been utilised in teaching complicated subjects like ‘politics’ in a fun and entertaining way. Rendering complex subjects in graphic art has been a successful trend that has also made inroads into many other languages. The English language series titled Hamlet: The Manga Edition insists that:  manga are a natural medium for Shakespeare’s work … in fact, potentially more visual than a stage production … [because] unbound by the physical realities of the theater, the graphic novel can depict any situation, no matter how fantastical or violent, that its creators are able to pencil, ink, and shade.13  Yet, the adaptability of the graphic edutainment phenomenon is not limited to transliterations in the field of humanities. Similar graphic trends are also emerging for science subjects via popular series, such as The Manga Guide Series, which explicates theories in physics, chemistry and many others, because ‘conventional textbooks rarely provide adequate images’ and ‘cartoons are not just simple illustrations – they are an expressive and dynamic medium that can represent the flow of time.’14 As this examination of several popular contemporary manga series reveals, many modern manga are hybrids and combine serious socio-­historical elements with pop culture in order to pay lip service to the gakushū manga tradition with its educational agenda. The resulting intermediality between genres, media and discourses becomes increasingly complex and it is up to the reader to decide which manga seeks to convey what kind of message. It is the purpose of this book to guide students and researchers in their journey through the sophisticated landscape of modern graphic narratives and equip them with methodologies to decipher the politics of meaning contained therein.

A brief history of politics in Japanese manga Many early manifestations of political cartoons exist and the practice of disseminating political messages via Japanese graphic art has a proud trajectory that began with the inauguration of political editorial cartoons known as fūshi manga (風刺漫画), or literally, ‘satirical cartoons’. The practice has transformed considerably since the British weekly magazine Punch helped to coin the term ‘cartoon’ in its modern sense as a humorous, socio-­politically relevant illustration. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, during the height of their influence, entertaining socio-­political graphics were eventually transported to Japan via Charles

6   Roman Rosenbaum Wirgman – the correspondent for the Illustrated London News, who launched the first like-­minded monthly magazine in Japan. Titled Japan Punch, the magazine initially was published between 1862 and 1887, while Wirgman resided in Yokohama from 1861 until his death.15 Punch become a transnational phenomenon with the establishment of China Punch in 1867 in colonial Hong Kong, which was the first humour magazine in greater China. Elements of Punch became ingredients for the modern manga medium via Kitazawa Rakuten – a Japanese artist who drew many editorial cartoons and, in 1899, moved to Jiji Shimpo (時事新 報), a daily newspaper founded by the social reformist Yukichi Fukuzawa.16 From January 1902, he contributed to Jiji Manga (時事漫画), which were literally ‘comic pages focusing on current affairs’ that appeared in the Sunday editions. His comics for this page were inspired by American comic strip traditions like Rudolph Dirks and Harold H. Knerr’s Katzenjammer Kids as well as the pioneering work of Frederick Burr Opper, whose political cartoons satirised industrialists and the established aristocracy. Incidentally, Opper’s cartoons contain some of the earliest uses of the phrase ‘fake news’ and were highly politicised.17 Kitazawa is considered by many historians to be the founding father of modern manga, not only because he founded the popular Tokyo Puck in 1905, but also because his satirical work combined politics with humour and sensuality in imaginative ways that inspired many younger manga artists and animators. There is also increasing evidence that his satirical work inspired political participation by highlighting domestic social inequalities. As such, his status as a provocateur is one of the early examples of manga as a political tool.18 Subsequently, in the 1920s and 1930s, a surprising number of Japanese artists toured the United States and reported on, or even studied, American comic strips. Ippei Okamoto, one of the most famous political and social satire cartoonists of his time, visited New York in 1922 and marvelled at the rich socio-­political tradition of Sunday Funnies.19 Conversely, the West was introduced to the socio-­political dimension of Japanese graphic art in 1983 with the publication of Frederik Schodt’s seminal Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. One of the earliest scholarly examinations of Japanese pop-­cultural graphic art. It noted the potential of manga to convey political thought and introduced the plethora of Japanese graphic narratives to the Western comic tradition. Schodt noted astutely that manga were implicitly political.20 Close intellectual scrutiny soon followed, as Sharon Kinsella’s analysis of adult manga at the dawn of a new millennium demonstrated. As adult manga series shifted towards the economic and political discourses and aspirations of individuals in positions of power, so the discursive contents of adult manga began to overlap with current affairs journals and periodicals. Furthermore, Kinsella argues that this daring, idealistic and imaginative approach stole customers from other more traditional media.21 Although earlier hybrid examples of long, socio-­politically discursive manga exist, like the fascinating Four Immigrant Manga by Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama (1931), they are relatively unknown; it was not until the publication and translation into English of Barefoot Gen in 1979 that the influx of Japanese pop-­cultural graphic art into Western discursive practices began.22

Introduction   7 In contemporary Japan, manga and their political facets have repeatedly become the object of serious academic inquiry. Ibaragi Masaharu’s ‘Seiji Manga’ no seiji bunseki (Political analysis of seiji manga), elaborates on the raison d’être of political manga not only as ‘explaining’ information pertaining to political phenomena, but also to add an element of giga (戯画, caricature) to deride the political subject and thus invoke a sense of criticism.23 Yet, at its most basic, manga today still seek to humanise, trivialise and mock the foibles of the human political machine. It is this tradition to mock, denigrate and subvert iconoclastic socio-­political institutions – to bring the highbrow world down to earth – that has become the hallmark of political manga today. In this sense, political cartoons and by extension manga have become the graphic equivalent to the literary carnivalesque mode whereby stereotypical dominant tropes are subverted and liberated through humour and chaos via a rhetoric that frees ‘the natural lout beneath the cassock’ and has thus become a vital means of our democratic process. The prominent film theorist Tadao Satō (佐藤 忠男) highlights this important function of manga as zappaku na geijutsu (雑駁な芸術) or discombobulating arts, which is reminiscent of the traditional reference to manga (漫 画) as whimsical pictures. Yet, Satō suggests that unlike newspaper, photographs and even literary works manga have a tacit licence to portray the vulgar (低俗, teizoku) and often distorting (歪曲, waikyoku) subjective sensibilities of the ordinary townsfolk and city slicker (市井, shisei) that exist beyond the objective facts of the incidents depicted.24 As such, they provide us with a window into the often emotional socio-­political and cultural minutiae of historical paradigms. Comparable to the debate about the highbrow versus lowbrow implication of manga, which is further complicated by shifting social mobilities, so the left/ right political paradigm of manga also finds ample expression. Several notorious right-­wing manga like Kobayashi Yoshinori and Yamano Sharin of the infamous Kenkanryū – often translated as ‘the hate Korea wave’ – have experienced relatively high media exposure while their left-­wing counterparts are less well-­known but have equally strong representation with, for instance, the political counter-­ cultural manga of enfant terrible Akasegawa Genpei (赤瀬川 原平), and the protest cartoons of Oze Akira (尾瀬あきら) to name only two examples.25 Recently, however, this heritage of the licence to offend is increasingly coming under pressure in our globalised consumer culture, where images become impregnations of intersectionality or the interlocking systems of power that echo each other and create a synergy between class, race, gender and identities. This has led to examples of self-­censorship and more subtle cases of politicised manga such as the case of Ichi-F discussed in Chapter 10 of this volume. Once manga and by extension graphic art took hold in the Western imagination, it quickly stoked the flame of curiosity in relation to a highly theorised exotic oriental other. It proliferated exponentially and developed into today’s soft-­power economic and political discourse that marks a shift to win over global partners with cultural and diplomatic affinity. Once the global marketing brand Japan Cool was successfully married with the traditional discourse of the uniqueness of the Japanese language, cuisine and immaculate hospitality in combination with

8   Roman Rosenbaum p­ ost-­war pacifism and a reputation for technological prowess, the repackaging of Japan’s national culture (nowadays well-­known as the neoliberal discourse of Abenomics) has become one of the world’s most infatuating political brands. Scarcely has this marriage of the political with the pop-­cultural consumer culture been more symbolic of globalisation and capitalism than with the unexpected appearance of Prime Minister Shinzō Abe as the pop-­cultural icon Mario at the closing ceremony of the Rio Olympics in 2016. It not only provided the perfect marketing opportunity and exploited the viral capacity of social media to promote the Tokyo 2020 Olympics but, more interestingly, demonstrated the inevitable fusion of pop-­ cultural iconicity with global politics.26

From local to global cartoon controversies: a brief dialectic Manga have come a long way from the funny pages in fin de siècle newspapers to modern consumer cultures, as their focus shifted from primarily comic storytelling and childhood entertainment traditions to encompass modern economic and political discourses. With this maturation, their raison d’être began to overlap with other media. Nowadays, the analysis of the representation of complex socio-­political issues in manga has become a stable alternative analytical tool whereby we are able to probe all kinds of complex social discourses via a medium that is much beloved across most social stratifications. The socially inclusive drawing of disabilities by manga artist Inoue Takehiko (井上雄彦), best known for the wheelchair basketball series Slam Dunk (1990–1996), displays the visual politics of embodied masculinity and has become one of the best-­selling manga series in history.27 Similarly, the discussion of contentious national political issues like Japan’s 3/11 triple catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster in manga – for example, Hagio Moto’s (萩尾望都) assessment of the risks and consequences of nuclear energy in Na no hana (Rape Blossom, 2012) – illustrates how graphic art may become an imaginative conduit for the exploration of socio-­political discourses.28 Hagio is considered one of the founding mothers of modern shōjo manga, revolutionising the genre from the 1970s by introducing radical gender issues as well as political motives into this otherwise apolitical genre. As recent events have painfully taught us, manga and by extension graphic art in general are subjective, prevalent to take on a life of their own and readily offend our social, cultural and religious sensibilities. In a post-­truth world awash with fake news, verisimilitude is but a chimera of our alter egos that increasingly inhabit hyper-­real spaces, where realities are but a figment of our imagination. But wait, let us not get carried away with philosophy just yet, since it is the mundane and often quixotic realities of politics that make up the essence of this book, dedicated to the art of the political as much as the politics of art. Relatively minor socio-­cultural but also intrinsically political controversies reveal graphic art’s power to offend occur almost regularly in the world’s media. The following two recent cases of the Serena Williams and Aoshima Megu cartoons shall illustrate this point.

Introduction   9 Nowadays, seemingly innocuous caricatures like Australian cartoonist Mark White’s depiction of tennis star Serena Williams’ on-­court tantrum can rapidly circumnavigate the globe. Although naively drawn as a hissy fit of a sport celebrity, the iconic cartoon quickly encompassed much larger issues ranging from sexism, the painful historical context of racism and the disenfranchisement of 300 years of slavery culminating in Jim Crow segregation laws across America, and finally as indicative of the white supremacist views of the Australian media.29 So, as Duncan Fine puts it succinctly in the Sydney Morning Herald review of this storm-­in-a-­teacup: ‘if you can see nothing wrong with this cartoon then you are casually dismissing centuries of history and oppression.’30 This is true for Japan as well, where seemingly innocuous depictions of cute girls can easily lead to misrepresentation. The paradigm of kawaii or cuteness is all-­encompassing in Japanese marketing campaigns, for example, when in 2016 the Group of Seven summit was hosted in central Japan at the city of Shima, famous for its ama pearl divers, the character Aoshima Megu (碧志摩メグ) was created as a mascot for the city.31 Following the publicity storm, the feminist group Ashita Shōjotai (明日少女隊, Tomorrow Girls Troop) raised a petition for the withdrawal of the character due to biased misrepresentation of traditional female pearl divers. The petition claimed that the depiction of an underage seventeen-­year-old girl was sexually suggestive, due to exaggerated breasts clothed in a tight-­fitting diving dress that showed her thighs and her online profile suggesting that she is looking for a boyfriend.32 The group indicated that displaying female minors as sexual objects to be used as campaign material in public spaces is inappropriate.33 Following the protest shortly before the city hosted the high profile Group of Seven Summit in 2016, the city officially withdrew the character but continued to endorse it unofficially.34 In Japan, overtly sexual cartoons are widespread and the line between art and pornography is heavily debated, with graphic art often easily becoming mired in the politics of representation of gender and sexuality.35 In the global amphitheatre, manga just like cartoons must come-­of-age and navigate the increasingly treacherous corridors of political correctness that surround our daily lives. Yet, these cartoons are relatively innocent when compared to the global ramifications of several recent malicious cases of iconic misrepresentation discussed in brief below. In comparison to the above-­mentioned two relatively innocuous cases, recent memory bears witness to examples of graphic art that violated social taboos and thus triggered several violent incidents. While designed to mock, satirise, belittle and often deconstruct painful stereotypes, these graphic transgressions provoked public outrage and have been hijacked by radical ideologies for nefarious purposes well beyond their intended meaning. In 2005, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-­Posten published twelve editorial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, in order to debate criticism of Islam and self-­censorship, it pitted itself against the prevalent tradition of aniconism and triggered what became known as the ‘Muhammad cartoons controversy’, which eventually led to protests around the world as well as violent demonstrations and riots in some Muslim countries.37 Following the Jyllands-­

10   Roman Rosenbaum

Figure 1.2 Controversial pearl diver avatar: the Aoshima Megu (碧志摩メグ) moe character. Source: © MARIBON.36

Posten publication of the Muhammad cartoons, the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo republished the cartoons in 2006 and added some of their own which caused further uproar. Over the course of the next few years, Charlie Hebdo continued its publication of Muhammad cartoons, escalating the debate between freedom of speech and socio-­cultural provocation. After a ­firebombing incident in 2011 and further publication of satirical cartoons in

Introduction   11 2012, in early 2015, two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, forced their way into the offices of the French magazine in Paris and killed twelve people while injuring eleven others. This has become known as the Charlie Hebdo shooting, which led to the birth of the phrase Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie) in support of free speech and freedom of expression. While the global ramifications of the Muhammad cartoon controversies ended in bloodshed and demonstrate the fine line between cultural aniconism, political correctness and free speech, we are reminded of the impossibility of remaining impartial by Nietzsche’s dictum that ‘we have art so that we may not perish by the truth’. Far removed from the ambiguity of extreme right-­wing versus far-­left-wing political as well as global religious undertones of the international cartoon controversies, Japan faces its own domestic challenges with representations in graphic art.

Japan’s own cartoon affair: Toshiko Hasumi and the Syrian refugee affair The relatively unknown graphic illustrator Toshiko Hasumi (蓮見都志子) burst into the public limelight with the publication of a denigrating Syrian refugee image that led to her being labelled as an artist promoting hate-­speech and anti-­ foreign rhetoric.38 Hasumi has been identified as the President of the Society of Japanese Nationals in Canada to Protect Japan’s Honour in petitions protesting various events or public acknowledgement of comfort women across Canada, although her connection to Canada is unclear.39 Hasumi refers to herself as a white propaganda manga artist (ホワイトプロパガンダ漫画家) with bipolar disorder on her Twitter page.40 The publication caused local outrage and made international news. Following the release of the refugee image on Facebook, several domestic Japanese organisations have condemned the controversial graphic depictions released in her maiden work Soda Nanmin Shiyo!.41 Hasumi’s first book: Soda Nanmin Shiyo! (I have an idea, let’s become a Refugee!).42 After her political manga-­esque cartoons were published as a collection in December 2015 by Seirindo – the publisher of JAPANISM and other far-­right publications – a media conference was held in Tokyo, criticising the book as marking the ‘commercialization of discrimination’.43 The Tokyo director of Human Rights Watch, Doi Kanae (土井香苗) met with Iwashita Yu (岩下結), the representative of BLAR (Book Lovers Against Racism) and third-­generation Korean resident Shin Su-­gok (辛淑玉) of the volunteer organisation Norikoe netto, to publicly condemn the publication.44 Despite these protests, Hasumi’s controversial graphic manga album quickly rose to number one in Amazon’s sales ranking in the category of Japanese politics. The graphic image displayed a six-­year-old Syrian refugee girl, which was based upon a photograph taken by Jonathan Hyams, a photographer working for the United Kingdom charity Save the Children. Hasumi copied the image, added a wry smile and adorned it with the contentious interpretation. Hasumi eventually removed the manga from her Facebook page citing a request made by Hyams as the reason. He tweeted earlier: ‘Shocked+deeply saddened anyone

12   Roman Rosenbaum

Figure 1.3 Controversial distortion – Toshiko Hasumi’s Syrian refugee manga. The translation reads: ‘I want to go on living a safe and clean life, eat gourmet food, go out to play freely, wear pretty things, and live a luxurious life, without any hardship. At the expense of someone else. I have an idea. I’ll become a refugee.’ Source: © Seirindo, Toshiko Hasumi.

would choose to use an image of an innocent child to express such perverse prejudice.’45 But despite removing the manga and admitting that she was trying to be provocative, Hasumi was unapologetic and insisted that: ‘I don’t want European nations to be victimised and hardworking people should not suffer by those fake immigrants.’46 The fake refugee manga episode illustrates how popular cultural consumption patterns may be exploited by a new type of pop-­ cultural nationalism. Crying foul over ‘fake refugees’ and illegal immigrants are but the latest populist manifestation of nationalism and its ugly cousin: right-­ wing extremism.

Manga as overt political artefact Japanese youths in contemporary society are suffering from a plethora of social malaise, ranging from a decline in the birth rate caused by an increase in social precarities like declining job markets, kakusa shakai or ‘gap-­widening society’ with low social mobility; all of which leads towards an aged greying society with a social welfare system that is creaking under huge ranks of retirees, and to make matters worse, a long-­standing stagnant economy. It comes as no surprise

Introduction   13 that disenchantment or mukanshin with the political system is rampant and the project of lowering the voting age to the international norm of eighteen years will add about 2.4 million eligible voters to the political apparatus. Yet, youth in Japan are not only outnumbered by their elders, they are also outvoted by them. While eligible voters aged 20–34 made up just 19 per cent of the electorate in 2015 compared to the 55 per cent who were 50 years or older, the turnout for twenty-­somethings in the last national election was less than half the 68 per cent for those aged in their sixties.47 This reflects a current serious lack of credible policy options for Japanese adolescents in tandem with a weak political outreach to disenfranchised youths. The recrudescence of historical political activism, still

Figure 1.4 Politicised teenagers on the front cover of the Liberal Democratic Parties manga, Kuni ni todoke. Source: © Liberal Democratic Party of Japan.48

14   Roman Rosenbaum tainted by violent student protests in the 1960s, requires urgent political engagement by Japan’s young underclasses. Due to their visually appealing nature and readers being accustomed to the manga narrative form from a very early age, the medium has been deemed particularly suitable as an agent to seed ‘youth nationalism’, and trigger the urgently required re-­engagement of young voters.49 Manga as the mainstay pop-­cultural medium in Japan was arguably most suitable for the national election held on 10 July 2016, when a revised law expanded the electorate by 2.4 million voters aged 18–19 to be on a par with the international norm. The move was designed to give more political say to a younger generation of voters and increase the pool of eligibility after record low voter turnouts.50 Political tropes in manga are readily incorporated in the well-­established media that are popular with high school and college-­age consumers and may be easily adopted by political parties for their campaigns. Thus, in the lead up to the 2016 election, the Japanese incumbent Liberal Democratic Party adopted a manga by Nakatake Shiryu (中武 士竜) for their election campaign and created the narrative of Kuni ni Todoke (国に届け, Notify the Country) with the subtitle ‘Election for 18 year olds have begun, Japan needs the power of youth’.51 The manga revolves around the female high school student, Yasuda Asuka, who develops an interest in politics after hearing the handsome head of the student council Asakura-­kun talk about the upcoming election. The manga has been promoted as a seisaku panfuretto (政策パンフレット, policy pamphlet) for the Liberal Democratic Party and the title capitalises on the award-­winning popularity of the comic Kimi ni Todoke (君に届け, lit. Reaching You), a Japanese shōjo romance manga by Karuho Shiina (椎名軽穂) published between 2006 and 2017. The resulting pop-­cultural reviews of the political manga were mixed: while some readers regarded the manga as demeaning and sexist towards women, others thought that it was a good initiative to awaken political interest among younger voters.52 Yet, accompanying the adoption of manga in the political realm is a sense of pop-­ cultural nationalism in order to attract voters and swing public opinion. Japanese cultural nationalism is a force which now rivals other political media and is easily consumed by a public that is well attuned to the manga medium.

Conclusion Much has changed since Frederik Schodt introduced the concept of ‘manga’ and the ‘world of Japanese comics’ to the mesmerised Western reader in 1983, and after Sharon Kinsella wrote about the manga medium’s potential to regenerate national culture, via the rapid expansion of early story manga during the 1960s, when manga became associated with political radicalism and counter-­cultural experimentation. Kinsella gently reminded us at the dawn of the twenty-­first century that graphic art had always been a contentious medium prone to the practice of politics as much as that of aesthetics.53 Nowadays manga have developed into a global pop-­cultural phenomenon that taps into the rich tapestry of graphic art common in all cultures on Earth. Even though back then manga

Introduction   15 appeared less political and more innocent, this of course is merely an illusion and belies the fact that all forms of graphic art carry subliminal political messages that seek to engage the reader. But a lot has changed; it is the endeavour of this book on the political implication of Japanese graphic art to demystify, deconstruct, unravel, elucidate and bring to light some of the contemporary political discourses and rhetoric deployed by the manga medium. While the scope of politics in graphic art is extensive, apparently no single work has yet focused on the synergy created between political discourse and the graphism of manga, which produces a formidable oratory wave with a frequency that now traverses the globe via the tidal wave of social media we are all inextricably attuned to.

Chapter overview In Chapter 2, Barbara Greene examines the depiction of Japan’s Dark Valley Period and the resultant Asia–Pacific War via two recent highly successful manga series. She demonstrates that the discussion of the Dark Valley Period and the ensuing socio-­political ramifications also exist within the graphic manga medium and have shifted genres multiple times in the decades following the Japanese surrender. Within contemporary fantasy manga, the multiple coups d’état spearheaded by middle-­ranking officers are reimagined and regurgitated to serve contemporary political ends. However, rather than portraying these attempts as misguided, futile and ultimately destructive, these fictional putsches are shown as heroic. The fictional officers, who conspire against the state, are doing so only as they face malicious conspiracies undertaken by the military and political elite. Furthermore, where their historical forebears fail, these fantasy rebellions succeed – restoring order within the state and ably mounting a defence against foreign incursion. Due to its wide-­scale consumption by youth, manga has the potential to both represent and forward shifts in public perception. Additionally, historical revisionists and anti-­Article 9 proponents have shifted their discourse into manga in order to appeal to and influence a younger audience. This rhetoric, in turn, undermines the historical foundations of the popular taboo against remilitarisation and potentially fosters support for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Abe’s alterations of Self-­Defense Force policy among Japanese youth. Greene suggests that these discussions of the Dark Valley have recently shifted into shōnen/ seinen fantasy manga and that they reflect a level of sympathy with revisionist historians which would normally cause a public backlash if they were not masked by manga genre conventions. In Chapter 3, Michael Lewis examines how Japanese manga artists, especially newspaper cartoonists, the writers of editorial and topical jiji manga, expressed their love of country during the 1930s and 1940s by contributing to the wartime national propaganda effort. Their efforts typically aimed at both whipping up the public’s fighting spirit and depicting the corruption and weakness of the ‘ABCD’ (America, Britain, China and Dutch) political and military enemies. In the decades since 1945, nationalistic and historically revisionist manga explaining

16   Roman Rosenbaum Japanese wartime history assert the benignity of Japanese attempts to liberate their nation and the region’s peoples from the yoke of Western imperialism. Several of these works have become bestsellers. Kobayashi Yoshinori’s thick comic books in his Gōmanism Sengen series are arguably the best and most sophisticated representative of this genre. The series takes up pre-­war events in Taiwan, China and Okinawa and considers, from a rightist position, the implications of the history of Japanese and international society today. The cartooning style is slickly modern, but the revisionist message harkens back to the Asia–Pacific conflict through reasserting notions of daitōa kyōeiken or the now debunked ideal of the Great East Asian Co-­Prosperity Sphere; suggesting that the wartime Japanese nation was more victim than aggressor and always put the altruistic goal of liberating Asia from Western imperial domination before all others. Lewis examines manga messages like Kobayashi’s, which perpetuate pre-­war and post-­war right-­wing discourses advocating that Japanese expansion was an essential part of a larger ‘just war’. Despite the differences between Japanese wartime and post-­war historical contexts and their representation in contemporary pop culture, thanks to a saturating social media, the twin pillars of ever-­present geopolitical existential threats and new media technologies have come to support a new populist appreciation of old ultra-­nationalistic ideas. In Chapter 4, Michiko Takeuchi illuminates how, after Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, the United States referred to the occupation of Japan euphemistically as the ‘workshop of democracy’. Although the occupation ended in 1952, US forces claiming to protect Japan have remained because of the Security Treaty (1951), with Japan providing military bases and fiscal support for over seventy years. The arrival of American troops prompted the phenomenon of streetwalkers, or ‘Pan-­Pan Girls’, who provided sexual services to American GIs. Previous scholarship painted Pan-­Pan Girls as symbols of Japan’s defeat and subjugation, a sexual metaphor also adopted for the reinvigorated post-­war relationship between Japan and the United States. Takeuchi, however, contends that Japanese often saw Pan-­Pan Girls as symbols of resistance to both the Japanese and American governments, as demonstrated by images appearing in popular culture formats such as manga and magazine illustrations. For the Japanese, drawing Pan-­Pan Girls was a political act, because the very existence of Pan-­Pan Girls in the ‘workshop of democracy’ contradicted US claims about democratising Japan and Japan’s claim to being a democratised country. That view of Pan-­Pan Girls can also be seen in post-­war manga, especially amid the anti-­Security Treaty and anti-­Vietnam movements of the 1960s and 1970s and in more recent debates over the revision of Article 9 of the constitution, which would allow for the rebuilding of the Japanese military to better assist US forces. Takeuchi argues that Pan-­Pan Girls in graphic arts represent Japanese voices of contestation aimed at transforming the US–Japan Security Treaty system – a post-­war bilateral form of imperialism in Asia. In Chapter 5, Sean Patrick Webb investigates the limited presence of the ­Japanese Christian tradition as a powerful trope in Japanese popular graphic

Introduction   17 n­ arratives. Despite its limited presence as a lived religion, historically, Christianity has had a significant rhetorical role to play in Japan. In the seventeenth century, the Japanese cast antagonism between the Tokugawa state and foreign Christians in terms of a struggle for the heart of Japan. Christianity continued to serve this symbolic role through sakoku isolationism, the Meiji Restoration, Taishō cosmopolitanism and post-­war economic prosperity. Webb explores the continued use of this trope in contemporary (specifically post-­bubble economy) Japanese popular culture. Recent deployments of Christianity reinforce, at the level of popular consumption, the basic logic of Japanese conservatives. The frequent appearance in manga of Christian characters or imagery functions as a cue to evoke historically conditioned fears about the integrity of Japanese national identity – fears that are increasingly associated with conservative attempts to rehabilitate wayward Japanese youth. The manga narratives of Kamachi Kazuma, Akaishi Michiyo and Furuya Usamaru are examined as a set of case studies for the investigation of the functions of religion within Japanese socio-­ political discourses. In Chapter 6, Rachael Hutchinson investigates the Kantai Collection as a media-­mix phenomenon that has taken Japan by storm since the online videogame was released by DMM.com in 2013. Encompassing anime, manga, game spin-­offs, figurines and the usual gamut of related merchandise, the Kantai Collection attracts a wide consumer audience. The Kantai Collection is highly political in its theme, representation of women and enactment of war memories. Hutchinson closely examines the manga, anime and game as part of a popular politicisation of the Second World War by Japanese artists, also reflected in the recent spate of blockbuster revisionist films, as well as (more disturbingly) the plethora of Nazi imagery and narratives in contemporary anime and manga. In the narrative structure of the Kantai Collection, warships are anthropomorphised as highly sexualised women. Hutchinson argues that the hyper-­sexualisation of women contributes to the exoticisation of war as distant and unreal, in a context of controversial war memories in Japan vis-­à-vis the Asian mainland. In Chapter 7, Jeffrey Hall examines the pop-­cultural representations of Article 9 enshrined in Japan’s 1947 Constitution. Written in the aftermath of Japan’s devastating defeat in the Second World War, it states that the nation may not maintain ‘land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential’. Yet, despite this fairly clear ban on maintaining a military, Japan has maintained a de facto military since the 1950s – the Japan Self-­Defense Forces (JSDF ). For much of Japan’s post-­war history, the JSDF had kept a low profile, avoiding actions that could prompt negative reactions from a public that was extremely weary of militarism and war. However, in recent decades, the JSDF has increased its engagement with the Japanese public. These efforts have included the creation of promotional materials that avoided politically controversial topics and tended to downplay the physically demanding and violent aspects of military life. Meanwhile, the prime ministership of Shinzō Abe brought about major changes for the JSDF, including a 2014 reinterpretation of Article 9 that greatly broadened the circumstances under which the JSDF could utilise military force.

18   Roman Rosenbaum Hall closely examines the popular cultural depictions of the JSDF since 2014 by focusing on two works of privately produced manga series that have been endorsed by the JSDF: Takumi Yanai’s Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There and Aozakura: The Story of National Defense Academy. Both works are analysed in the context of Japan’s recent domestic and international political situation. While not overtly political propaganda, these works tell stories that depict a Japanese conservative/neo-­nationalist ideal of the JSDF. In the case of Gate, the JSDF is a force that aggressively and proactively wages war to protect Japan and save lives, free from the restrictions placed upon it by meddling left-­wing politicians and sceptical journalists. Aozakura, on the other hand, presents an overwhelmingly positive picture of the tough but rewarding process of becoming a military officer. Both works provide a glimpse of the cooperation between the JSDF and private content creators, as well as the ensuing implications on the public image of the military in Japan. In Chapter 8, Roman Rosenbaum investigates the graphic revisionism of Kōno Fumiyo, whose recent highly successful graphic renditions In This Corner of the World (Kono sekai no katasumi ni, 2007–2009) and Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Yunagi no machi, sakura no kuni, 2003–2004) portray a new vision of Hiroshima that eschews the city as merely a site of the atomic bombing of Japan. Both narratives juxtapose rural domesticity with climactic urban destruction and visualise the post-­war generation’s perspective on the Asia–Pacific conflict for contemporary audiences. Well before the 2011 Tohoku triple catastrophe reawakened Japan’s legacy of nuclear disasters, Kōno reintroduced the spectre of Hiroshima in graphic art, at a time when historical revisionism and rearmament was gaining momentum in Japan and historical amnesia had almost eradicated the A-­bomb genre. Rosenbaum investigates the context of Kōno’s visionary discourse on wartime Japan, during a time when the politics of ‘overcoming the post-­war regime’ have become a national imperative. Kōno’s manga narratives question the significance of the reimagined contemporary discourse on Hiroshima by a post-­war generation born into the era of Japan’s accelerated economic growth and consumer culture. In Chapter 9, Ben Whaley examines the racial and national identity politics in Gringo (1987–1989, Big Comic), one of the last, unfinished manga Tezuka Osamu was serialising at the time of his death. In a tape-­recorded interview conducted in 1987 from his Tokyo hospital bed, Tezuka characterised Gringo as a message to a Japanese citizenry he viewed as increasingly insular – unwilling to associate with foreigners abroad or accept them domestically into Japanese households. While Gringo debuted during the height of Japan’s bubble economy, it remains oddly prescient in how it anticipates populist political discourses in both Japan and the United States today. Gringo is read as Tezuka’s own rebuttal against the forces of cultural nationalism, and Whaley’s analysis centres on the destabilisation of Japanese identity as it moves through different national and cultural spaces, typified by the main story arc of transplanting a sumo wrestler turned salaryman, his French-­ Canadian wife and their biracial daughter to South America. Tezuka’s series

Introduction   19 highlights a new, internationalised vision for the Japanese nuclear family that is quickly called into question when the characters sojourn in Tokyo Village (Tōkyō-mura), an anachronistic diaspora community in Brazil that values Japanese ethno-­racial purity. Japanese culture, cuisine and national sport are therefore recast to expose ongoing tensions between contemporary Japanese society and the imperialist and nationalist values that defined the country four decades earlier. It is by parodying these stereotypical images of ‘Japaneseness’ that Tezuka’s Gringo becomes as useful a critique of Japan’s bubble economy as it is of today’s political climate. In Chapter 10, Stephan Köhn investigates how the catastrophe of 3/11 marks a turning point in Japan’s nuclear age. Until 2011, A-­bomb (genbaku) and nuclear plant (genpatsu) have constituted the discursive field of the ‘atom’ in post-­war Japan. While the former was considered part of an overcome past, the latter was regarded as a promise for a bright future. But in marked contrast to genbaku, which has been picked up as a central theme in very different kinds of work ranging from novels, poems, plays to manga, only a few narrative structures have broached the issue of genpatsu before the triple catastrophe took place. However, following 3/11, things changed dramatically; the aftermath of Fukushima has now become a central theme in a large number of quite different works. But while works of literature and poetry serve as a widely used medium of critique and discontent with Japan’s nuclear dream, popular culture in the form of manga or anime seems to be quite hesitant to shed a critical light on Japan’s nuclear policy, as only a comparatively small number of works dealing explicitly with Fukushima have been published. Some of them, like Tetsu Kariya’s popular manga series Oishinbo (The Gourmet), which depicted a journalist as the main character, who blames radiation exposure for the nosebleeds he experiences after a reporting trip to the plant, have had serious media repercussions. In this sense, Tatsuta Kazuto’s manga Ichi efu Fukushima daiichi genshiryoku hatsudenjo rōdōki (translated in English as: Ichi-­F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant) deserves special attention, as this manga (vols 1–3) was serialised in 2013–2015 in one of Japan’s major manga magazines (Shūkan mōningu, Kodansha), and has been promoted as a reportage (rupo) on the work of a nuclear liquidator in Fukushima Daiichi after 3/11. Köhn focuses closely on Tatsuta’s well-­cited manga and its fundamental narrative strategies, and considers the role of popular culture as a medium of critical articulation within the discursive field of Japan’s ‘atomic dream’. In Chapter 11, Christopher Smith examines how present-­day pop culture presents a confusing morass of images, symbols and themes to the scholar of Japanese nationalism. While certain texts, such as Kobayashi Yoshinori’s infamous manga Sensōron, are written as political tracts and have clearly detectable nationalist messages, many other texts seem to employ a dizzying montage of nationalist images not connected to national or nationalist discourses in any clearly recognisable way. Indeed, they often do not seem to make sense in the pop-­cultural texts themselves, much less in their intertextual connection to larger political discourses. Smith questions whether these texts are ‘nationalist’, in the

20   Roman Rosenbaum sense espoused by Yoshino Kosaku’s definition of an ‘aim to regenerate the national community’. If so, do they support specific contemporary political objectives that have been identified as nationalist, such as Article 9 revision? Smith adopts Azuma Hiroki’s database theory of postmodern consumption as well as other postmodern theories to argue that nationalist symbols and themes have become ‘database-­ised’; that is, disaggregated into component parts, which then become elements in the pop-­cultural database of images. Pop-­cultural texts can then pick freely from this database and mix elements in ways that are surprising and incongruous (and all the more interesting for it). The outcome of this intermingling is that apparently nationalist symbols and themes are deployed disconnected from their traditional narratives. As a result, these texts can either rehabilitate or subvert nationalist symbols by juxtaposing them with competing discourses and subversive images. Smith asks whether a moe depiction of a schoolgirl wearing the imperial chrysanthemum crest rehabilitates or subverts that imperial symbol. As is not uncommon in postmodern culture, these pop-­ cultural texts often paradoxically do both simultaneously. In Chapter 12, Rachel DiNitto examines how the Fukushima disaster inaugurated a new era of life amidst radiation exposure that disproved the apocalyptic predictions rampant in Japanese cultural production. DiNitto examines the visionary graphic discourse of Shiriagari Kotobuki’s response to Japan’s nuclear disaster as it evolved across three manga collections from 2006–2015. These futuristic imaginings recall the now hollow promise of a post-­war prosperity generated by nuclear power, as well as the perils of Chernobyl. DiNitto’s examination details Shiriagari’s techniques for making the Fukushima meltdowns and radiation visible and meaningful despite the attempts of the government, nuclear industry and affected areas to shut down critical discourse. Shiriagari’s dissenting manga reveal the tragic consequences when government lies, mismanagement and national amnesia render the nuclear accident and its victims unspeakable and invisible. In Chapter 13, Yuka Hasegawa pays close attention to the philosophical implication of political discourse in manga via a careful examination of three classic Japanese war-­themed manga: Barefoot Gen, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths and Message to Adolf. In these manga, the authors Nakazawa Keiji, Mizuki Shigeru and Tezuka Osamu share a common theme of presenting kokoro, or the Japanese metaphorical seat of thought and emotions, in ways that demonstrate civic epistemologies of self-­knowledge informed by their own experiences of the war. The artists’ stories are narrated through protagonists, who inadvertently become ‘traitors’ to their own country and critique those figures that represent ideological and xenophobic discourses of national identity. These stories also help readers learn about different individuals and groups who held a variety of positionalities in the war, including Japanese civilians, soldiers and ‘hybrids’ or children of foreign nationals and/or cultures who lived in Japan. Hasegawa analyses manga as a visual discourse that illustrates active versus contemplative notions of kokoro. Readers will catch a glimpse of an agonistic public space akin to Walter Benjamin’s flash of vision that could displace the hegemony of Japan’s foundational narrative. That is, the narrative that attributes the

Introduction   21 bombing of two Japanese cities as the foundation for Japan’s post-­war peace and prosperity recited as a way of collectively remembering to forget not only the past atrocities and trauma inherited as a nation, but also the future risks that we continue to face while living through nuclear proliferation.

Notes   1 Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (London: Curzon, 2000), 90.   2 Jonathan Culler found ‘a seemingly inexhaustible trove of exotic and disorienting material to note down, enumerate, and classify’, see Culler, Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 23.   3 John A. Lent, Asian Comics (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2015), 5.   4 Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 85–86. For government investment into the manga industry, see Justin McCurry, ‘Japan Looks to Manga Comics to Rescue Ailing Economy’, The Guardian, 11 April 2009.   5 Mark McLelland, The End of Cool Japan Ethical, Legal, and Cultural Challenges to Japanese Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2017), 22 and 35.   6 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 2008).   7 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Basic Books, 1973), 89.   8 James Anthony Mangan, Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon (London: Routledge, 2014), 29.   9 Kumiko Saito, ‘Regionalism in the Era of Neo-­Nationalism Japanese Landscape in the Background Art of Games and Anime from the Late-­1990s to the Present’, in John A. Lent and Lorna Fitzsimmons (eds), Asian Popular Culture: New, Hybrid, and Alternate Media (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 35. 10 Nyshka Chandran, ‘The World’s Third-­Largest Economy may be Derailed by a Rising Political Crisis’, CNBC, 31 July 2017. 11 Nissim Otmazgin and Rebecca Suter, Rewriting History in Manga: Stories for the Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), v–vii. 12 Cover page of Fujiko Fujio’s Doraemon: seiji no shikumi ga wakaru (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2004). 13 Adam Sexton and Tintin Pantoja, Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Manga Edition (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, 2008), 2. 14 The series is a co-­publication of No Starch Press and Ohmsha, Ltd. See, for example, Hideo Nitta and Keita Takatsu, The Manga Guide to Physics (San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press, 2009), a translation of the Japanese original: Manga de Wakaru Butsuri, 2009, 11. 15 Peter Duus, ‘ “Punch Pictures”: Localising Punch in Meiji Japan’, in Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler (eds), Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair (New York: Springer, 2013), 313. 16 Several other lesser known pioneers of the political comic tradition in Japan such as one of Kitazawa’s lesser known teachers, the Australian-­born Frank A. Nankivell are discussed in Ron Steward ‘An Australian Cartoonist in 19th Century Japan: Frank A. Nankivell and the Beginnings of Modern Japanese Comic Art’, International Journal of Comic Art 8(2) (2006), 77. 17 Public Domain Review, ‘Yellow Journalism: The “Fake News” of the 19th Century’, Library of Congress. 18 Michael Lewis, ‘Kitazawa Rakuten as Popular Culture Provocateur’, in Nissim Otmazgin and Rebecca Suter (eds), Rewriting History in Manga: Stories for the Nation (London: Springer, 2016), 31–32.

22   Roman Rosenbaum 19 Frederik Schodt, Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983), 43. 20 Ibid., 40–42 and 60. 21 Kinsella, Adult Manga, 90. 22 For details, see Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama translated by Frederik Schodt, Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco 1904–1924, (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1999). 23 Ibaragi Masaharu’s Seiji Manga’ no seiji bunseki (Tokyo: Ashi shobō, 1997), 208.  24 Tsurumi Shunsuke; Satō Tadao (佐藤忠男); Manga sengo-­shi I: seiji-­hen (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1970), 334–335. 25 Akira Oze’s Boku no mura no hanashi [The Story of my Village, (1991–1993)] recounts the conflict involving the Japanese government and the agricultural community during the construction of Narita Airport. For details, see William Andrews, ‘Political Comics: Japan Radicalism and New Left Protest Movements Told Through Manga’, Throw Out Our Books, 3 November 2015. 26 Motoko Rich, ‘A Morning Surprise for Japan: Shinzo Abe as Super Mario’, New York Times, 22 August 2016. 27 Andrea Wood, ‘Drawing Disability in Japanese Manga: Visual Politics, Embodied Masculinity, and Wheelchair Basketball in Inoue Takehiko’s REAL’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 37(4) (2013): 638–655. 28 Verena Maser, ‘Nuclear Disasters and the Political Possibilities of Shōjo (Girls’) Manga (Comics): A Case Study of Works by Yamagishi Ryoko and Hagio Moto’, Journal of Popular Culture 48(3) (2015), 558. 29 Alana Lentin, ‘The Serena Williams Cartoon Exposes Australia’s Ignorance on Race’, The Guardian, 11 September 2018. 30 Duncan Fine, ‘Don’t Get Why the Serena Cartoon was Racist?’ Sydney Morning Herald’, 11 September 2018. 31 Dinah Zank, ‘Kawaii vs. Rorikon: The Reinvention of the Term Lolita in Modern Japanese Manga’, in Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn (eds), Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 211–215. 32 Robin Harding, ‘Japan’s G7 Host City Drops Manga Mascot Deemed Sexist’, Financial Times, 5 November 2015. 33 Tomorrow Girls Troop, ‘Signature Campaign to Seek the Official Withdrawal of the moe Character ‘Aoshima Megu’ as Authorised by Shima city in Mie Prefecture’, 2016. 34 Jun Hong, ‘Japan’s G7 City Abandons ‘Sexist’ Manga Character as Official Mascot’, Wall Street Journal, 6 November 2015. 35 For a detailed study on representation and sexuality, see, for example, Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, Bad Girls of Japan (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 2–7. Since 2014, Japan has officially banned the possession of child sexual abuse imagery after years of delay, but disappointed campaigners claim that by not including the multibillion yen market in manga comics, animated films and video games the problem remains unsolved. 36 For the public profile page of the fictitious Aoshima Megu character, see http://ama-­ megu.com/aoshima-­megu/. Accessed 6 January 2019. 37 For details, see the study by Peter Hervik ‘The Danish Muhammad Cartoon Conflict’, Current Themes in IMER Research 13. Current Themes in IMER Research (Sweden: Malmö University, 2012). 38 Yoshino Taichirō, ‘Sōda nanmin shiyō!’ gashu hatsubai ni shuppan kankeishara kōgi, Huffington Post, 21 December 2015. 39 Details about this spurious society titled ‘Nihon no meiyo wo mamoru zai-­kanada hojin no kai’ (日本の名誉を護る在カナダ邦人の会, Society for Resident Japanese in Canada to Protect the Honor of Japan) A Basic Profile of Toshiko Hasumi (蓮見都

Introduction   23 志子) can be found at FEND (Japan–U.S. Feminist Network for Decolonization). Online at: http://fendnow.org/encyclopedia/toshiko-­hasumi/. Accessed 5 October 2018. 40 Hasumi Toshiko, https://twitter.com/hasumi29430098. Accessed 16 October 2018. 41 Justin McCurry, ‘Manga Rows Show Why It’s Still Japan’s Medium of protest’, The Guardian, 15 November 2015. 42 Tomohiro Osaki, ‘Manga Artist Hasumi Stirs Outrage Again With New Book Slammed as Racist’, Japan Times, 22 December 2015. 43 JAPANISM (ジャパニズム) here stands for the far-­right-wing bimonthly magazine published by Seirindo, which was founded by conservative journalist Kohyu Nishimura. 44 Norikoe-­netto (のりこえネット) stands for the international network to overcome racism and hate speech. The homepage can be found online at: https://norikoenet.jp/. For details see, Yoshino Taichirō, ‘Sōda nanmin shiyō!’ gashu hatsubai ni shuppan kankeishara kōgi. 45 Jonathan Hyams, Online at: https://twitter.com/jonathanhyams?lang=en. Accessed 3 January 2019. 46 Mike Wendling, ‘Is this Manga Cartoon of a Six-­Year-Old Syrian Girl Racist?’ BBC, 8 October 2015. 47 Linda Sieg, ‘Lower Voting Age Leaves Many Wondering ‘Where’s Japan’s Bernie?” ’, Reuters, 1 July 2016. 48 At the time of writing this article, four volumes of the manga have been published in 2018. Volume 1 is available online at: www.jimin.jp/18voice/vol. 1/. Accessed 6 January 2019. 49 The term ‘youth nationalism’ has been adopted by Honda Yuki in his review study of the shift of Japanese youth towards the political right and the surge of nationalism in ‘Focusing in on Contemporary Japan’s “Youth” Nationalism’, Social Science Japan Journal 10(2) (2007): 281–286. 50 Kwan Weng Kin, ‘Low Turnout in Japanese Election a Cause for Worry’, The Strait Times, 29 December 2014. 51 Kyodo ‘Japan’s Political Parties Deploying Mascots and Manga to Appeal to Younger Voters’, Japan Times, 9 June 2016. 52 The Huffington Post, ‘ “Kuni ni todoke” jiminto 18 sai senkyo no manga panfu ni “onna no ko wo baka ni shite iru no ka” no koe mo’, 20 May 2016. 53 Frederik Schodt, Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics; and Kinsella, Adult Manga, 4–5.

References Andrews, William. 2015. ‘Political Comics: Japan Radicalism and New Left Protest Movements Told Through Manga’. Throw Out Our Books, 3 November. Online at: https://throwoutyourbooks.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/political-­c omics-japan-­ radicalism-protest-­movements-manga/. Accessed 16 October 2018. Berger, John. 2008. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Chandran, Nyshka. 2017. ‘The World’s Third-­Largest Economy may be Derailed by a Rising Political Crisis’. CNBC, 31 July. Online at: www.cnbc.com/2017/07/31/the-­ worlds-third-­l argest-economy-­m ay-be-­d erailed-by-­a -rising-­p olitical-crisis.html. Accessed 15 October 2018. Culler, Jonathan. 2002. Barthes: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Duus, Peter. 2013. ‘ “Punch Pictures”: Localising Punch in Meiji Japan’. In Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler (eds), Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair. New York: Springer, 307–335.

24   Roman Rosenbaum Fine, Duncan. 2018. ‘Don’t get why the Serena Cartoon was Racist?’ Sydney Morning Herald, 11 September. Online at: www.smh.com.au/sport/tennis/don-­t-get-­why-the-­ serena-cartoon-­was-racist-­20180911-p5031f.html. Accessed 17 September 2018. Fujiko, Fujio. (藤子 不二雄). 2004. Doraemon: seiji no shikumi ga wakaru, [(ドラえも ん: 政治のしくみがわかる – 社会科おもしろ攻略; Doraemon: Understanding the Political Process – Strategy Towards Interesting Social Science]. Tokyo: Shōgakukan. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Basic Books. Harding, Robin. 2015. ‘Japan’s G7 host city drops manga mascot deemed sexist’. Financial Times, 5 November. Online at: www.ft.com/content/785c1c2c-838c-11e5-8095ed1a37d1e096. Accessed 21 September 2018. Hervik, Peter. 2012. ‘The Danish Muhammad Cartoon Conflict’, Current Themes in IMER Research 13. Current Themes in IMER Research. Sweden: Malmö University. Online at: https://muep.mau.se/bitstream/handle/2043/14094/CT%2013%20muep.pdf. Accessed 3 January 2019. Honda, Yuki. 2007. ‘Focusing in on Contemporary Japan’s “Youth” Nationalism’. Social Science Japan Journal 10(2): 281–286. Hong, Jun. 2015. ‘Japan’s G7 City Abandons ‘Sexist’ Manga Character as Official Mascot’. The Wall Street Journal, 6 November, Online at: https://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2015/11/06/japans-­g 7-city-­a bandons-sexist-­m anga-character-­a s-official-­ mascot/. Accessed 16 October 2018. Huffington Post. 2016. ‘ “Kuni ni todoke” jiminto 18 sai senkyo no manga panfu ni “onna no ko wo baka ni shite iru no ka” no koe mo,’ [「国に届け」自民党18歳選挙の漫画 パンフに「女の子をバカにしているのか」の声も, ‘Claims Like “Insulting to Women” have been Labelled Against the Manga Pamphlet Kuni ni todoke of the Liberal Democratic Party for the Lowering of the Election Age to Eighteen’]. The Huffington Post, 20 May. Online at: www.huffingtonpost.jp/2016/05/20/jimin-­18voicekuninitodoke_n_10075554.html. Accessed 5 January 2019. Ibaragi, Masaharu. (茨木正治). 1997. Seiji manga no seiji bunseki. [政治漫画」の政治 分析; The Analysis of Politics in seiji manga]. Tokyo: Ashi shobō. Kinsella, Sharon. 2000. Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. London: Curzon. Kiyama, (Yoshitaka) Henry. 1999. Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco 1904–1924. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Kyodo. 2016. ‘Japan’s Political Parties Deploying Mascots and Manga to Appeal to Younger Voters’. Japan Times, 9 June. Online at: www.japantimes.co.jp/ news/2016/06/09/national/japans-­political-parties-­deploying-mascots-­manga-appeal-­ younger-voters/#.XDAobml9i01. Accessed 5 January 2019. Kwan, Weng Kin. 2014. ‘Low Turnout in Japanese Election a Cause for Worry’. The Strait Times, 29 December. Online at: www.straitstimes.com/opinion/low-­turnout-in-­ japanese-election-­a-cause-­for-worry. Acccessed 5 January 2019. Lent, A. John. 2015. Asian Comics. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Lentin, Alana. 2018. ‘The Serena Williams Cartoon Exposes Australia’s Ignorance on Race’. The Guardian, 11 September. Online at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/11/the-­serena-williams-­cartoon-exposes-­australias-ignorance-­on-race. Accessed 16 September 2018. Lewis, Michael. 2016. ‘Kitazawa Rakuten as Popular Culture Provocateur’. In Nissim Otmazgin and Rebecca Suter (eds), Rewriting History in Manga: Stories for the Nation. London: Springer, 29–55.

Introduction   25 McCurry, Justin. 2009. ‘Japan Looks to Manga Comics to Rescue Ailing Economy’. The Guardian, 11 April. Online at: www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/10/japan-­mangaanime-­recession. Accessed 6 January 2019. McCurry, Justin. 2015 ‘Manga Rows Show Why It’s Still Japan’s Medium of Protest’. The Guardian, 15 November. Online at: www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/15/ manga-­rows-japan-­g7-shima-­syria-protest. Accessed 6 January 2019. McLelland, Mark. 2017. The End of Cool Japan: Ethical, Legal, and Cultural Challenges to Japanese Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Mangan, James Anthony. 2014. Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as a Political Icon, Volume 1, Aryan Fascism. London: Routledge. Maser, Verena. 2015. ‘Nuclear Disasters and the Political Possibilities of Shōjo (Girls’) Manga (Comics): A Case Study of Works by Yamagishi Ryoko and Hagio Moto’. Journal of Popular Culture 48(3): 558–571. Miller, Laura and Bardsley, Jan. 2005. Bad Girls of Japan. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Nitta, Hideo and Takatsu, Keita. 2009. The Manga Guide to Physics. San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press; a translation of the Japanese original: Manga de wakaru butsuri [Understanding Physics Through Manga]. Tokyo: Ohmsha, 2009. Nye, Joseph. 2009. Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics. New York: Public Affairs. Otmazgin, Nissim and Suter, Rebecca. 2016. Rewriting History in Manga: Stories for the Nation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Public Domain Review. n.d. ‘Yellow Journalism: The “Fake News” of the 19th Century’. Library of Congress. Online at: https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/yellow-­ journalism-the-­fake-news-­of-the-­19th-century/. Accessed 6 January 2019. Rich, Motoko. 2016. ‘A Morning Surprise for Japan: Shinzo Abe as Super Mario’. The New York Times 22 August. Online at: www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/world/asia/ shinzo-­abe-super-­mario-tokyo-­rio-olympics.html. Accessed 6 January 2019. Saito, Kumiko. 2013. ‘Regionalism in the Era of Neo-­Nationalism Japanese Landscape in the Background Art of Games and Anime from the Late-­1990s to the Present’. In John A. Lent and Lorna Fitzsimmons (eds), Asian Popular Culture: New, Hybrid, and Alternate Media. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Schodt, Frederik. 1983. Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Sexton, Adam and Pantoja, Tintin. 2008. Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Manga Edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing. Sieg, Linda. 2016. ‘Lower Voting Age Leaves Many Wondering “Where’s Japan’s Bernie?” ’ Reuters, 1 July. Online at: www.reuters.com/article/us-­japan-election-­youth/ lower-­voting-age-­leaves-many-­wondering-wheres-­japans-bernie-­idUSKCN0ZG39T. Accessed 6 January 2019. Steward, Ron. 2006. ‘An Australian Cartoonist in 19th Century Japan: Frank A. Nankivell and the Beginnings of Modern Japanese Comic Art’. International Journal of Comic Art 8(2): 77–91. Tomohiro, Osaki. 2015. ‘Manga Artist Hasumi Stirs Outrage Again with New Book Slammed as Racist’. Japan Times, 22 December. Online at: www.japantimes.co.jp/ news/2015/12/22/national/social-­issues/manga-­artist-hasumi-­stirs-outrage-­new-book-­ slammed-racist/#.W7U4Hvl9i02. Accessed 4 October 2018. Tomorrow Girls Troop (明日少女隊). 2016. ‘Mie-­ken Shima-­shi kōnin moe kyarakuta – “Aoshima Megu” no kōnin tekkai wo motomeru shomei undō’ [三重県志摩市公認萌

26   Roman Rosenbaum えキャラクター「碧志摩メグ」の公認撤回を求める署名運動, ‘Signature Campaign to seek the Official Withdrawal of the moe Character “Aoshima Megu” as Authorised by Shima City in Mie Prefecture’]. Online at: www.change.org/p/志摩市公 認萌えキャラクター-碧志摩メグ-の公認撤回を求める署名活動. Accessed 3 January 2019. Yoshino, Taichirō. (吉野太一郎). 2015. ‘Sōda nanmin shiyō!’ gashu hatsubai ni shuppan kankeishara kōgi, akarasamana sabetsu no sendō’ [『そうだ難民しよう！』画集発 売に出版関係者ら抗議 「あからさまな差別の扇動」; ‘People in the Publishing Industry Protest About the Publication of the Art Book “I have an Idea, Let’s Become a Refugee!” It Clearly Incites Racism’]. Huffington Post, 21 December. Online at: www.huffingtonpost.jp/2015/12/21/soda-­nanmin-shiyou_n_8852642.html. Accessed 16 October 2018. Wendling, Mike, 2015. ‘Is this Manga Cartoon of a Six-­Year-Old Syrian Girl Racist?’ BBC News, 8 October. Online at: www.bbc.com/news/blogs-­trending-34460325. Accessed 16 October 2018. Wood, Andrea. 2013. ‘Drawing Disability in Japanese Manga: Visual Politics, Embodied Masculinity, and Wheelchair Basketball in Inoue Takehiko’s REAL’. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 37(4): 638–655. Zank, Dinah. 2010. ‘Kawaii vs. Rorikon: The Reinvention of the Term Lolita in Modern Japanese Manga’. In Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn (eds), Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 211–222.

2 Re-­envisioning the Dark Valley and the decline of the peace state Barbara Greene

Introduction Japan is one of many developed nations that have experienced an upsurge in nationalist rhetoric in recent decades.1 However, the discussion of this rhetoric in Japan is complicated by the long-­standing debate over the nature and necessity of the Japanese military actions during the 1930s through the end of the Asia– Pacific War in 1945. The perception that Japanese expansion into China and the rise of a fascist state focused on the Shōwa Emperor led to the immense loss of life and the material destruction of the war is one of the fundamental underpinnings of Article 9—the clause in the Japanese post-­war constitution that prohibits the creation and maintenance of offensive military. However, individuals, such as former Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintarō, who has posited that the current view of wartime history is a post-­war distortion, have put the peace constitution under increasing pressure.2 They are joined by political-­action groups like Nippon Kaigi.3 Nippon Kaigi’s actions have included mailing unsolicited manuscripts of the group’s interpretation of the period to historians and journalists.4 Additionally, the adoption of textbooks reflecting this interpretation has increased during the Abe administration despite their otherwise controversial nature.5 Furthermore, these interpretations were advanced in tandem with contemporary policy concerns, such as the March 2016 reinterpretation of Article 9 and the passing of numerous laws that loosened the constraints placed on the Japanese Self-­Defense Force.6 However, the discussion of the fifteen-­year period prior to the end of the Asia–Pacific War in 1945 is not limited to the political realm or public policy, as popular culture has become a fundamental aspect of the discourse on the topic. Manga artists, most notably the controversial Kobayashi Yoshinori, have openly entered the debate with their works. However, overtly political manga is just one facet of the way the debate over the Dark Valley and wartime history has been incorporated in popular culture. Seemingly non-­political works that contain a bias towards a particular interpretation are also part of this discourse. Furthermore, the way that the public perceives its collective past is not a purely of academic concern as it impacts ongoing political and social narratives. The public perception of the past is not constructed solely

28   Barbara Greene in the political or educational realm, as one of the greatest influencers of collective memory is popular media and the way in which is represents history. In post-­war Japan, manga has a long history as a medium in which one can contest and shape popular memory. From the revisionist narratives of Yoshino Sharin and Kobayashi Yoshinori, to the anti-­war memoirs of Mizuki Shigeru, the Asia–Pacific War and the political turmoil of the 1930s have been debated extensively in the pages of manga. These debates do not exist solely within the volumes of war-­focused manga. At least one aspect of the wartime period, that of the upheaval of the Dark Valley Period that eventually lead into the Second Sino-­Japanese War, has leeched into seinen fantasy manga.7 This use of history as a source for unrelated and ostensibly completely fictional narratives that target a youth audience can be regarded as a reaction to recent political policies, particularly the alterations of security and defense policies by the Abe administration. Seinen manga also contain covert commentary on ongoing political issues concerning wartime history that would cause controversy or trigger a backlash against the already embattled author if forwarded in a more direct manner. Below I will examine the use of Dark Valley inspired imagery, particularly depictions of the transformation of radical young officers who engaged in political violence, such as the February 26th Incident, in contemporary fantasy manga. In these works, historically inspired coups are posited as positives for society with the underlying assumption that the need for active defense is vital for national security. This rhetoric undermines one of the historical underpinnings of Article 9, that the misapplication of violence and the consolidation of power in the hands of radical young officers is ultimately destructive. The analysis of Fullmetal Alchemist and the ongoing series, Attack on Titan, are two popular manga series that demonstrate the existence of narratives sympathetic to revisionist history in contemporary fantasy manga.

Media and memory An important aspect of pop culture’s impact on collective memory is its impact on collective identity—the perception that a generally accepted perspective of the past is a vital part of the present community. Certain pop-­cultural media have a greater carrying capacity to influence collective memory with an immediacy and impact that often surpasses other modes of transmission, such as textbooks.8 Moreover, mass popular culture has the ability to create and shape the national and collective memory.9 The consumption and selection of media in contemporary Japan has become for some so interlinked with their own sense of personal identity that fantasy-­inspired pop culture can almost blur the line between fiction and reality for consumers in Japan.10 As such, the study of pop-­cultural consumption may provide an insight into the shifts in perception within the popular imagination of Japan as well as concerning its collective memory and identity. Welzer argues that when contemporary German youth addressed the atrocities or complacency committed by their forebears, the images that influenced these individuals the most were those

Re-envisioning the Dark Valley   29 seen on television or in film rather than what they were exposed to in their homes or school.11 Fushiki has noted a similar effect in action in Japan and argued that the collective memory transmitted through mass media is a lived memory that functions as a means of personal identification with, and understanding of, a collective identity.12 Collective memory becomes recursive and self-­perpetuating, relying on a nesting doll effect of ideas and images that reference previous ideas and images in order to create meaning and memory that is always in flux.13 Manga also longs for a level of realism and emotional verisimilitude.14 For instance, research demonstrates that narratives focused on first-­hand accounts, either real or fictional, are best retained by the audience who can thereby easily project themselves into the story.15 There is no objective “truth” in collective memory; there are stories that, despite being fictional, are considered emotionally “true.”16 For example, Bukh, who has undertaken multiple investigations into the impact of nationalist sentiments in manga on its readers, noted that ultranationalist-­revisionist manga had little impact on the perception of history in a majority of readers.17 The manga, Shima wa Furusato (Islands Are Our Home) produced by Nippon Kaigisho depicts a love story set before and during the Soviet occupation of Etorofutō (択捉島)—one of the Kuril Islands north of Hokkaido also known as Iturup—and explores how the trajectory of the romance between the two Japanese leads was impacted by a seemingly unjust annexation of national territory.18 Believing that an engaging romance manga would not possess a bias toward any particular interpretation of history, readers expressed sorrow at the suffering of the character and claimed that, though they had little prior knowledge of the event, they viewed this manga as an accurate retelling of history.19

Fan discussions on the intersection of pop culture and politics Attack on Titan by Isayama Hajime enjoys a high public profile when compared to Fullmetal Alchemist’s author Arakawa Hiromu. This has been a mixed blessing for Isayama, who once received death threats after revealing on his blog that the character Dot Pixis was based on Russo-­Japanese War era admiral Akiyama Yoshifuru. This controversy was reignited after he confirmed that the character Mikasa was named after the battleship by the same name. There were also allegations that a private Twitter account that questioned accounts of Japanese wartime atrocities in China belonged to Isayama under a pseudonym. These allegations were given further weight as Isayama is known for being deeply interested in pre-­1945 military actions and admires controversial figures such as Admiral Akiyama, whose participation in the colonization of Korea and the Russo-­Japanese War is a source of ire in the Korean fan community.20 Due to its global popularity, Attack on Titan’s chapters have been scanned, translated into multiple languages and posted on multiple websites by fan communities. These groups also closely follow Isayama’s blog, as his commentary on fan speculation provides potential spoilers for upcoming story arcs. Therefore,

30   Barbara Greene Isayama’s comments spread quickly.21 Due to the perception that some of his comments promote revisionist historical interpretations, criticisms and death threats in Japanese, English, and Korean against Isayama have been posted anonymously in a number of different digital forums. A counter-­movement, often promoted by revisionist leaning followers, in support of Isayama was mustered in response.22 It is debatable whether Isayama’s courting of controversy is sincere or just a clever method of ensuring the high interest level from his fans at all times. By remaining ambivalent, he is able to retain a wide audience that might otherwise be repelled by a clearly expressed position on the controversies that surround their series.

The Asia–Pacific War era in manga Asia–Pacific War-­inspired manga swiftly came into existence after the end of the American Occupation, which had placed limits on the narrative content.23 During the 1950s and into the 1960s, a genre called senki-­mono (戦記もの, chronicles of war) became popular with young manga readers. Senki-­mono focused predominately on a seemingly bloodless air war conducted by bright-­eyed and self-­ sacrificing youth. The inevitable injury and death inflicted on these characters was obscured by the destruction of the machines that they flew through the pages of the many series while the misery of the ground war was eclipsed by a romanticizing of war altogether.24 By the 1970s, senki-­mono manga became a point of contention between artists and audiences who viewed the war in diametrically opposed ways.25 The anti-­war movement against the American military intervention in Vietnam and Japan’s logistical support of this endeavor began to play a role in this debate. This prompted many readers to reject rose-­colored war narratives just as Ienaga Saburō’s lengthy lawsuit against the Ministry of Education began to be heavily reported in the media.26 Artists creating sanitized war narratives were finding themselves on one side of a political chasm with an audience made skeptical by the same tropes being evoked by pro-­war or revisionist elites. In response, some authors began to cloak their own personal perspectives within works that re-­enacted the war in outside of the history or historical fiction genres, some strategically selecting science fiction or fantasy. Science fiction and fantasy readily serve as a means of propagating a specific ideology or worldview and serve as a method of interrogating social concerns in an emotionally safe way.27 This revisionist perspective was not alone in causing a shift in genre, as similar works on the anti-­war side found their own audience. The long-­running Gundam series is primary example of anti-­revisionist manga of the period. Matsumoto Leiji, a co-­creator of the series, consciously constructed his series as a means of forwarding his own interpretation of the war and the military’s role within it without interference from increasingly war-­averse editors.28 It is perhaps only natural that when the war became a hindrance to sales, authors would find new ways of adding their own perspective through a narrative sleight of hand. Many of the tropes of early senki-­mono transitioned readily to new genres such as mecha and science fiction manga genres.29 For example, the romance of

Re-envisioning the Dark Valley   31 the doomed soldier, once a canard of senki-­mono, moved seamlessly into mecha.30 Through the early to the mid-­1990s, mecha became the primary manga genre where the Asia–Pacific War remained an active point of discussion. However, this was derailed with the airing of the mecha deconstruction Neon Genesis Evangelion that exposed the psychological horror implicit in the genre and undercut the viability of new mecha franchises. A new outlet for this debate needed to be found and the many iterations of the fantasy genre proved an easy shift. Pseudo-­mecha, such as the Kantai Collection, comedy series such as Axis Powers Hetalia, and horror-­fantasy such as High School of the Dead demonstrate the success of this shift.

February 26th in fantasy manga Radical young officers in fantasy manga, rather of acting as a destabilizing force, provide the only potential outlet for political revitalization and reform. The military coup that ends Fullmetal Alchemist is redolent with overtones of the February 26th Incident, only lacking a snowstorm to fully complete the scene. The officers encircle the state center, including the home of Fuhrer King Bradley’s family, and cut off communication with the outside world. The fictional analogy succeeds where the factual coup failed.31 The alchemists in Fullmetal Alchemist are keenly aware of the necessity of appearing legitimate to the wider public. Unlike the February 26th rebels, they quickly take to the airways explaining their actions using the wife of Fuhrer Bradley as their mouthpiece. In comparison, the coup in Attack on Titan is a success for largely the same reasons—they obtain allies in the limited print media who expound on Historia Riess’s connection to the royal family and the cowardice of high command.32 Good publicity, ultimately, proves the deciding factor in securing the success that the historical counterparts failed to achieve. There may be several reasons for the parallels between these series and Japan’s relatively recent history. Particular tropes, narratives, and storytelling structures move in and out of fashion, and the image of the dashing officer saving the day has never truly been abandoned. Expectations are set both by media consumed and by actual events. The readers of these manga series are not that removed from their junior high and high school textbook lessons concerning the Asia–Pacific War. Media stories about the war in movies, television, and novels are published with great regularity. Fantasy genres, while seemingly grounded in an imaginary universe, work within the same set of expectations as a war drama or a period piece. While many of the elite in Japan during the 1930s considered socialists, anarchists, and communists a threat to the stability of the state, it was radicals within the military and the political right—here defined as those holding explicitly anti-­ Soviet views—who were perhaps the greater, although more palatable, threat. With the example of the Meiji Reformers before them, they had no taboo against undertaking a potential revolution. During one putsch against the state, middle ranking officers flew banners emblazoned with a play on the Meiji Restoration

32   Barbara Greene motto: “Revere the Emperor, Destroy the Traitors.”33 Members of the young officer class also demonstrated a greater propensity toward violence than many of their peers, such as the Young Officers Revolt. Even natural catastrophes within Japan itself exist as examples of the potential for violence that could be perpetrated by members of the military, such as the period immediately after the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Toland noted that despite contrary popular belief, the more frightful political faction came from within the political establishment, as exemplified by the myriad members of the military and political commentators aligned with them, than from the fringe and fractured socialist and communist movements.34 Young officers with extreme political beliefs and their sympathizers had few legitimate political outlets to vent their frustrations. If these groups had the ability to operate in the open and to affect change, much of their violence might have been avoided. The February 26th Revolt of 1936, which saw members of the military surround the Imperial Palace with the goal of reigniting yet another imperial restoration, was one of multiple putsches during the Dark Valley Period led by middle-­ranking military officers.35 While it was eventually suppressed by the central state, the punishments doled out were surprisingly light considering that the accused anarchists prosecuted during the High Treason Incident just twenty years before were all either executed or sentenced to life imprisonment.36 Contemporary media in Japan does not portray these officers with great sympathy. One is unlikely to find a positive portrayal of the kempeitai, the imperial military police, or the “thought-­police,” Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu.37 Nor is one likely to see radical factions or secret societies consisting of middle-­ranking officers planning the Marco Polo Bridge Incident or the February 26th Revolt as the sympathetic protagonists in movies or television. This does not mean that such portrayals do not exist, the late author Mishima Yukio created a short story and film, titled Patriotism, focusing on the sacrifice of one of the young officers tied into the February 26th Incident.

Fantasy Februaries and the narrative allure of conspiracy and coups d’état While the February 26th coup failed in actuality, the perception that the reins of power had been stolen from the nation by the machinations of a greedy, self-­ serving few remained a salient image in popular culture. The motif of middle-­ ranking officers and specially trained forces, who must strive against a cabal of political and social elites, who cower behind the figurehead of a monarch, constantly reappears. Such characters may be designed as a means of enticing young readers who, still confined by the seemingly arbitrary boundaries of authorities within their homes and schools, wish to engage in both escapism and wish fulfillment. The idea of projecting oneself into the role of someone special, such as an officer with the ability to impose their will on others and who obtains new skills and knowledge via a rite of passage or quest, is appealing. Campbell notes the omnipresence of the Hero’s Journey in storytelling and myth, that draws in

Re-envisioning the Dark Valley   33 readers to this type of manga. This journey, however, is also culturally informed and the image of the heroic officer ties in closely with a period, the Dark Valley, in history still fraught with meaning. Contemporary Japanese genre fiction, from the popular mecha anime Neon Genesis Evangelion39 to the fantasy manga Claymore, has combined these threads into the reoccurring motif of the small, monstrous cabal that guides a nation into destruction. While the antecedents of this trope are clear, the draw of conspiracy is less so. This is partially due to the difficulties in defining the nature and outlines of conspiratorial beliefs. Conspiracy theory is generally defined as a belief that a discreet group acts in concert toward a specific goal through the manipulation of a number of concurrent events.40 The phrase “conspiracy theory” itself is a product of mid-­century American paranoia, as scholars and social critics sought a term to express the amorphous fear of social upheaval and manipulation from on high that seemed to erupt with every generation.41 While it should be noted that there are historical events that were the result of conspiracy, the majority of conspiratorial paranoia is directed at situations, events, and personages that are likely uninvolved in any such pact.42 A historical conspiracy, however, often acts as a justification for the belief in something that is likely fictional. When combined with a sense of powerlessness within a community, it can result in a pervasive belief of a conspiracy. This mental state of frustration, belief in personal persecution, and powerlessness is often called ressentiment.43 Ressentiment is believed to have a strong link to the self-­perceived intellectual, a figure Boltanski and others call the “semi-­educated.” This is a person who believes that they have been unjustly prevented from attaining the status and power that they deserve. These individuals are often incapable of grasping the gap between their abilities and their ambitions and are, as a result, vulnerable to radicalism and conspiratorial beliefs that promise a just world in which they reach their desired success.44 While this description parallels that of the narrowly educated and frustrated middle ranks of the Imperial Japanese military during the Asia–Pacific War, it is one that can be readily found in any post-­ industrialized state. Contemporary Japan, with its cohort of underemployed youth derived from an excellent, but highly standardized education system, has also fostered a situation where ressentiment, and its comorbid radicalism or conspiratorial thinking, could readily flourish. It is thereby unsurprising that conspiracy, both from and against the state, has become a popular trope in contemporary fantasy manga. The, often young, readership, perceiving itself as tormented by circumstances outside of its control and burning with unrealized ambition, is perhaps the best audience for stories focused on conspiracy and upheaval of the status quo. The paranoia and paralysis of ressentiment can result in an individual who seeks out conspiracy even in otherwise escapist entertainment. For example, those watching the most recent entry of the Godzilla franchise in Japan may not believe in the existence of gigantic sea monsters, but may view the government response to the Tohoku Earthquake and Fukushima Disaster as negligent and can perceive the metaphorical parallels between recent history and the story on the screen.45 38

34   Barbara Greene Conspiracy theory, in contrast to personal paranoia, is one that creates a community of belief that Bilewicz argued can be internally perceived as psychologically normal.46 Conspiracy theory, ascribed to by those in the throes of ressentiment, may even be beneficial as a means of solidifying collective identity and to direct hostility outwards toward a generally untouchable victim.47 As a means of ensuring that an alienated individual causes little harm to those living around them, conspiracy theories offer a level of security. With the artificial cathexis of a conspiracy theory, those who subscribe to that theory also demonstrate little need for cognitive closure. Rather, conspiracy theorists tend to constantly revisit their narrative and seek to reinterpret them, and while often remaining anchored to specific themes, they are under a constant state of revision.48 Conspiracy as a narrative device offers a number of benefits to both the creator and the consumer. It heightens drama as events and betrayals unfold and adds a layer of unpredictability and suspense to what may otherwise present as tedious story arcs. In fantasy shonen manga, conspiracy is often used as a means of world-­building. Fantasy worlds seem more authentic and deep when multiple factions with their own particular agendas overlap, rather than offering a simplistic division between the protagonists and the antagonists. In the two series presented in this chapter, these conspiracies are dualistic. The main characters typically begin with inchoate and divided conspiratorial actions that merge as the story progresses. These conspiracies, moreover, serve as a reaction to outside force with characters that are not portrayed as duplicitous but rather as secretive out of necessity. Generally, this is presented as the result of a pre-­existing conspiracy formed by invisible forces that possess control of the state while simultaneously hiding behind weak figureheads. The members of this high-­level conspiracy are venal and treacherous. For the sake of clarity, these conspiracies are referred to as “active conspiracies,” while those created against it are “reactive conspiracies.” This dualism allows for the actions of the protagonists to be justified. In most action or action-­fantasy shōnen manga series, the protagonists band together in a clear fight against their opponents in order to achieve a specific goal. One such example is the fantasy-­action manga, Inuyasha,49 in which the characters are the victims of schemes perpetrated by the villain but have no intricate plots of their own. This is typical of most shōnen series. In the seinen series, however, which are designed for an older audience, the behavior and actions of the protagonists become increasingly complex. In Fullmetal Alchemist and Attack on Titan, the vast majority of named characters of any relevance are eventually pulled in to some form of conspiratorial action. Their level of participation in a conspiracy at the start of the series typically indicates their level of villainy. Those who are engaged at the state-­level, actively partake in conspiracy at the beginning of the narrative to commit evil, while those that enter later, are engaged in reactive conspiracy to thwart the first group and tend toward good.  Authors will waste little time getting to this narrative device. In Fullmetal Alchemist, for example, the conspiracy becomes the primary focus early in the

Re-envisioning the Dark Valley   35

(a)

(b)

Figure 2.1a and 2.1b Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist. The State Alchemists Using Ishvalen Prisoners in Experiments. Source: © Hiromu Arakawa and Square Enix.

text. Initially, the series seems to follow the basic structure of the typical shōnenfighting manga, where young men seek to attain ever-­higher degrees of expertise in their specialty, usually involving physical combat of some kind. Action is presumably more easily consumed than long periods of introspection and verbal clashes, which is why few children or adolescents seek out political dramas for Friday night movie fests. After several chapters with the lead characters thumbing their noses at authority and righting wrongs, they are confronted with the mutilation of a small child. The perpetrator of this crime is assassinated by a terrorist seeking revenge against State Alchemists for the ethnic cleansing of his nation. This event leads the two protagonists to seek out both the cause behind the ethnic cleansing of the Ishvalen population, which occurred while they were infants, and a larger state cover-­up concerning the creation of chimeras—the active conspiracy. Even the figurehead of the state, the seemingly benevolent and symbolically named Fuhrer King Bradley, is himself a chimera created through a joint effort

36   Barbara Greene

(a)

(b) Figure 2.2a and 2.2b Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist. General Armstrong Infiltrates and Subdues Human Military Conspirators. Source: © Hiromu Arakawa and Square Enix.

Re-envisioning the Dark Valley   37 of the military and the homunculiin order to have a leader palatable to the population during a period of constant warfare.50 This is a persistent trope, namely, that of the figurehead behind which a larger, and more monstrous, conspiracy acts. These characters serve dual purposes: as a clear focus of fear and tension for the readers; and as a means of comparison when the stronger, actual antagonist appears. Furher King Bradley initially appears to be a genteel and empathetic leader, whose eventual betrayal is shocking to readers who are less genre savvy. They also act as a second layer of obfuscation in the text concerning the outlines of the conspiracy and its goals. By setting up Bradley as the initial villain, the conspiracy seems to be one of human-­derived chimeras attempting to grasp control of the state through chaos and assassination. In reality, the stakes are substantially higher and are existential threats to the entire nation. Only ethically compromised middle-­ranking officers and their supporters, acting in cahoots in a reactive conspiracy are capable of eradicating this threat. In Attack on Titan, it is apparent that the Titans are also simply transformed humans and that the enclosed human population is one of at least two in existence. Authorities rely on religion as a key tool to keep the general population docile and to morally justify their own actions. When the population in Attack on Titan becomes destabilized beyond the point of control by the religious authorities, the ruling families reset the memories of that population. This calls into question the veracity of the characters’ belief that the wall surrounding their communities had not been breached in over a century. The fact that the population has been repeatedly ravaged and reset explains the low-­level technological advancement in a society that has appeared to have mastered genetic engineering as well as the ability to solve the Malthusian Dilemma that a walled population would quickly encounter. Attack on Titan focuses on the manipulation of history and technology via a conspiracy just as Fullmetal Alchemist aims to do. The fictional nation of Amestris in Fullmetal Alchemist is set in a pseudo-­1930s era that is technologically advanced compared to its neighbors only through the intervention of homunculi derived from a much older empire, whose existence the homunculi have erased from the country’s history. This particular paranoia resonates within Japan, whose history with state-­driven religion, forced modernization and industrialization combines with debates over masochistic history and textbook debates to create a readership primed to consume media where these Gordian Knots are swiftly cut by relatable heroes.

Potential policy implications Within popular works, such as 1988’s anime feature film Grave of the Fireflies and the manga series Hadashi no Gen, the war is shown as an act perpetrated on the innocent populace of Japan by faceless elites and bombers that fly almost unseen overhead. A small minority is responsible for the war and its attendant suffering, while the general population is simply victim to the war and its effect, forced into sometimes-­vile acts in order to survive.51 Within contemporary

38   Barbara Greene fantasy manga not only are all nations depicted as guilty of terrible acts but the crimes perpetrated by the lead character’s nation are carried out in response to outside aggression.52 Additionally, the most indefensible acts are spearheaded not by young officers or the gullible public that they defend but rather by a cabal of state elites who work in cahoots with the outside enemy. If all are guilty, then the horror performed by the young officers in contemporary fantasy manga is an unavoidable result of Realpolitik, that is, a reactive socio-­political and pragmatic pursuit of the national interest rather than one based on ideology or ethical considerations. The protagonists in the series are just as guilty as those they overthrow of conspiracy, they can be just as cruel and violent, but these actions are portrayed as a form of necessary self-­sacrifice done for the benefit of the nation. This negates their culpability and allows the reader to view the protagonists as heroes, rather than anti-­heroes. This is seen in the world-­building of each of the series. In both series, the characters discover that their government is the creation of a cabal of high-­ ranking military officers and oligarchs who actively work against the common good and therefore must be removed by high-­minded, middle-­ranking young officers. Furthermore, the states that these officers serve are all under constant attack from foreign powers. In Attack on Titan, the state is pre-­industrial due to the machinations of a technologically superior, outside power seeking to enforce a power differential. In other words, an economic castration of military power and a symbolic Article 9. Additionally, the characters are forced by these conspiracies to commit horrific acts against “enemies of the state” during wartime, including the massacre of unarmed civilians and drafted cannon-­fodder. In Fullmetal Alchemist, for example, the older State Alchemists are all complicit in the ethnocide of the Ishval population but, as true patriots, are able to redeem themselves through later peacetime service. Additionally, each of these worlds is hemmed in by hostile entities. Like the historical ABCD Line that Imperial Japan claimed to have encircled and threatened their nation, these fictional states live under a constantly looming menace of powerful neighbors.53 Amestris is encircled by states desiring new territory and regions that have an eye toward succession. This situation, largely instigated by the machinations of the homunculi, is used to justify the maintenance of the exceedingly expensive military. Amestris has little cross-­border trade, and the economic struggle of the general population is not placed on the shoulders of its leader, Fuhrer Bradley, but on the military and their recalcitrant neighbors. The walled civilization in Attack on Titan is doubly surrounded. The Titans are the first of the known threats and the nominal reasons for the high walls and the ban on outside travel. However, it is the civilization of Marley on the mainland, and to a lesser extent Marley’s main rival on the far side of the planet, who pose the greatest threat to Eldia, the true name of the island nation on which they live. Notably, in all three series, these neighbors encircle the island states and threaten their integrity through the use of greater technology and by cutting off trade and outside resources. As a result, the population of these states lives in poverty and under constant fear—a situation that is exploited by venal forces

Re-envisioning the Dark Valley   39 internally to create authoritarian states that further oppress the population. Only through the action of a faction of radical young officers, in conspiracies created in the hothouse of the armed forces, are these states freed from the shackles of authoritarianism and from foreign threats. While these worlds mirror that of the Dark Valley, contemporary implications and parallels also exist. While the officers engaged in coups against the state feared the encroachment of European and American colonial power into what they perceived to be Japan’s sphere of influence, concerns that tensions between Japan and its current neighbors pose a threat to Japanese security lie behind much of the impetus to revise Article 9. This doubling of potential interpretation of the imagery is the cause behind the digital debates that swirl around Attack on Titan. For example, the existence of machinations at the state level by a small group of highly motivated individuals has echoes not only in the various coups of the Dark Valley, such as the February 26th Incident,54 but also in the intersection between Nippon Kaigi and the Abe administration. Officially, Nippon Kaigi is an organization that merely proposes policy changes to interested politicians.55 Over the last two decades, however, Nippon Kaigi has strategically placed around 300 members in vital parliamentary seats and within the Abe Cabinet.56 Their ultimate aim may be the alteration of Article 9—the constitutional amendment that limits Japan’s ability to remilitarize. Previous attempts by Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have failed due their inability to form the super-­majority needed for direct change,57 however, the loosening of restrictions on the use of force, alterations to official interpretations of relevant laws, and the recently passed legislation concerning disaster response and terrorism have lowered the hurdles that must be overcome.58 These changes were unpopular and largely succeeded due to the strategic use of voting blocs.59 However, this did not preclude the mass protests that followed.60 Whether the Abe Administration would be the reactive or active conspirators in the narratives discussed is debatable, however, it is important to note that rearming society against an external threat were key goals of the protagonists in Attack on Titan. Revisionists in Japan are not a singular bloc but rather are a disparate group that simply share a similar ideological stance on the causes and ultimate justifiability of the Asia–Pacific War. Individuals who consider themselves to be a Netto-­uyoku (right-­wing internet neo-­nationalists) may view the Abe Administration as ineffectual. As such, one could interpret the most recent chapters of Attack on Titan as a criticism of the current administration due to its manipulation of a relatively favorable public political atmosphere to hold both a snap election and to potentially forestall the fallout from the investigation into the Moritomo Gakuen real estate, which implicated the prime minister and his wife in a corruption scandal.61 German literature scholar Ikeda Hiroshi argues that the strategies employed by the Abe Administration mirror those used by Hitler’s National Socialists Party during the Dark Valley.62 Vice-­Prime Minister Asō Tarō suggested the same in July 2013.63 This perception may have led some to believe that the actions of the Abe Administration are the active conspiracy while others, for example, Koike

40   Barbara Greene Yuriko’s Party of Hope, are the real-­world analogues for the reactive conspiracy. However, Fullmetal Alchemist ended prior to these events. Furthermore, with the historical controversies sparked by Attack on Titan, it is likely that the combination of the current political environment fostered by the Abe Administration and the potential symbolism within Attack on Titan’s narrative will shift the discussion concerning Japan’s wartime past well into another genre.

Conclusion The social milieu of Japan’s Dark Valley period and its ideologies are replicated within contemporary fantasy manga to a significant degree. The parallels are both frequent and continuous, likely due to the ubiquity of the debate concerning the Asia–Pacific War in the contemporary media. While the Dark Valley and the Asia–Pacific War period are portrayed directly in a number of mediums, veiled portrayals of and commentary on the period have been incorporated in a several manga genres as a means of covert commentary that avoids the controversy a more direct representation may attract. With the decline in the mecha genre, war­inspired narratives have moved into fantasy manga. Within fantasy manga, civic­minded middle-­ranking officers rescue the duped civilian population from malicious oligarchy via coups d’état that mirror the many failed putsches of 1930s Japan. However, within these series the attempt to overthrow the state succeeds, leading to the officers installing a superior—although no less authoritarian—government that can rationally project military power abroad. The covert refashioning of historical events may be a subtle means of influencing the readership to be more sympathetic to revisionist narratives that undermine the ethical foundations of the Peace Clause contained within the current Japanese constitution. As the current Abe Administration, political organizations such as Nippon Kaigi, and rightists such as Kobayashi Yoshinori attempt to posit that Japan should amend the constitution and complete remilitarization, fantasy manga demonstrates within its pages how such a program could be beneficial to the nation. Furthermore, by creating a fictional world in which historical putsches that failed in reality succeed these narratives may also underline the concept forwarded by revisionists that the current perception of history is “masochistic.” These manga propose that, if only the historical officers had achieved their goals, perhaps the catastrophes of the Asia–Pacific War may have been avoided as they guided the state toward a policy of rational exertion of force. As hostile fan reaction toward Isayama’s Livejournal comments has shown, a direct statement of this belief would likely result in hostility. However, as prior research by Bukh has demonstrated, by incorporating revisionist ideology covertly, authors are shrewdly able to influence reader’s perception. Through fantasy manga, artists create a plausible deniability that grants them a certain level of freedom to laud historical figures, who are otherwise maligned.

Re-envisioning the Dark Valley   41

Notes   1 For details, see, for example, Karoline Postel-­Vinay (2017) “The Global Rightist Turn, Nationalism and Japan,” where she discusses the global ramifications of this rise of ultra-­conservatism in democratic societies.   2 Condry (2007: 6–8).   3 This is a political organization whose official stance is that it merely seeks to advise politicians who seek out their service (Tawara 2017: 5). While its official membership is less than 40,000 persons, this organization has close ties to the Abe administration and has a small, yet significant, presence in the Diet (Mizohata 2016: 3). This group has therefore been successful in proposing and passing pet legislation, such as 2006’s Fundamental Law to Revise Education (Sasagase et al. 2015: 1–3).   4 McNeill (2015: 1–3).   5 Yamaguchi (2017: 3).   6 Martin (2016: 1).   7 The Dark Valley refers to a period of economic depression and political instability during the period between the start of the Great Depression, through the Second Sino-­ Japanese War and the end of World War Two. In Japan, this period was marked with not only economic malaise but also the rise of a semi-­fascist state troubled by multiple coup attempts and a focus on outward colonial expansion. Seinen refers to a genre geared for teenaged to early adult men.   8 Saito (2006: 356).   9 Fushiki (2009: 45–46). 10 Condry (2007: 1–2). 11 Welzer (2002: 9–10). 12 Fushiki (2009: 43–44). 13 Ibid., 46. 14 Ito (2005: 184). 15 Murakawa (2012: 98). 16 Ibid., 100. 17 Otmazgin and Suter (2016: 135–139). 18 Bukh (2016: 139–140). 19 Ibid., 143–147. 20 Ashcraft (2013). 21 Copies of these tweets have been largely expunged from Japanese-­language sources. However, due to the global nature of contemporary fan communities, screenshots and translations of these tweets still exist within the English-­speaking fan community. The tweet that caused the greatest controversy among Korean fans argued that the demonization of soldiers involved in the colonization of Korea was unfair and not analogous to Nazi actions in Eastern Europe. Seldomusings [pseud.] commented on “The Possible Disturbing Dissonance Between Hajime Isayama’s Beliefs and Attack on Titan’s Themes,” Musings That Are Seldom, comment posted, July 23, 2016. 22 Ashcraft (2013). 23 Dower (1999). 24 MacWilliams (2008: 167–168). 25 Ibid., 172. 26 Tsutsui (2009: 1403). 27 Stahl and MacWilliams (2010: 328). 28 Ibid., 328–329. 29 Mecha is a genre in which large machines, often robot exoskeletons, engage in dramatic battles. Frequently, this genre is geared for younger consumers, however, it may also target older, seinen consumers as well. 30 Stahl and MacWilliams (2010: 330).

42   Barbara Greene 31 This is the title the character possesses as the head of the state of Amestris, continuing with the German-­inspired world-­building. 32 Historia is the illegitimate and only surviving child of the true king. 33 Brendon (2000: 452). 34 Toland (2014: 34–40). 35 Shillony (1981: 56–72). 36 Gavin and Middleton (2013: 1–15). 37 Although, notably, in the Tokyo Trials held after the war by Allied States, neither high-­ranking members of the Kempeitai, nor even members of the many secret societies that fomented war fever, were tried as war criminals (Dower 1999: Amazon Kindle Location 8713–8718). 38 Campbell (2008: 12–18). 39 This mecha-­anime initially ran from 1995–1996, however, it has become a major franchise. 40 Boltanski (2014: 203–205). 41 Ibid., 195–196. 42 Ibid., 171. 43 Boltanski (2014: 178). 44 Ibid., 181. 45 Hideaki Anno, director. Shin-­Godzilla (Toho Studios, 2016). 46 Bilewicz (2015: 63–64). 47 Ibid., 65–66. 48 Ibid., 49. 49 Written and illustrated by Rumiko Takahashi, in 1996–2008. 50 This term refers to artificial humans created through alchemy. 51 For more information on this, please refer to James Orr’s 2001 work The Victim as Hero: Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan, 19 and 75. 52 Tsutsui (2009: 1391–1393). This is described by Tsutsui as Projection and Universalism, a phenomenon in which the responsibility for wartime atrocities is justified by either accusing opposing forces, or another community, as guilty of similar acts or, in the latter case, that all communities are guilty of equivalent crimes. This thus mitigates feelings of responsibility and guilt. 53 The ABCD Line refers to the territorial holdings, belonging to the United States (the “A” in ABCD Line), the overseas territories and members of the commonwealth of the British Empire, China, and the Netherlands (the “D” signifying “Dutch”), that surrounded Imperial Japan and limited its expansion. These geopolitical rivals were considered hostile and inimical for the long-­term survival of Japan as a world power. 54 This event was an attempted coup d’état perpetrated by a group of renegade army officers in Tokyo who had the goal of creating a “Showa Restoration,” where the Emperor would become the sole head of state. This event paralyzed central Tokyo for several days and resulted in several executions, including that of political philosopher Kita Ikki. 55 Yoshifumi (2017: 5). 56 Mizohata (2016: 3). 57 Muto (2016: 2–5). 58 Goodman (2017: 1–2). 59 Muto (2016: 5–6). 60 Rikkyo University Institute of Peace and Community Studies (2016: 2–3). 61 Repeta (2017: 1–4). 62 Ikeda (2016: 2–10). 63 Muto (2016: 5–7).

Re-envisioning the Dark Valley   43

References Anno, Hideaki (dir.). 2016. Shin-­Godzilla. Toho Studios. Allen, Kate and John E. Ingulsrud (2005) “Reading Manga: Patterns of Personal Literacies Among Adolescents.” Language and Education 19:4. Arakawa, Hiroshi 荒川弘. 2012. Hagane no renkinjyutsushi [鋼の錬金術師—Fullmetal Alchemist] (vols. 1–25). Tokyo: Square Enix. Ashcraft, Brian. 2013. “A Thousand Death Threats Against a Popular Anime Creator.” Kotaku. July 1. Online at: https://kotaku.com/a-­thousand-death-­threats-against-­a-popular-­ anime-creato-­631792221. Accessed May 22, 2018. Bilewicz, Michael, Wiktor Soral, and Alexandrina Chichocka (Eds.). 2015. The Psychology of Conspiracy: A Festschrift for Miroslaw Kofta. London: Routledge. Boltanski, Luc. 2014. Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity. Brendon, Piers. 2000. The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s. New York: Vintage. Bukh, Alexander. 2016. “Decoding ‘Hate the Korean Wave’ and ‘Introduction to China’: A Case Study of Japanese University Students.” In Nissim Otmazgin and Rebecca Suter (Eds.), Rewriting History in Manga. London: Palgrave. Campbell, Joseph. 2008. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. San Francisco, CA: New World Library. Condry, Ian. 2007. “Youth, Intimacy, and Blood: Media and Nationalism in Contemporary Japan.” The Asia–Pacific Journal. Online at: https://apjjf.org/-Ian-­ Condry/2403/article.html. Accessed October 31, 2019. Dower, John W. 1999. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. London: Penguin. Fisker-­Nielsen, Anne Mette. 2016. “Has Komeito Abandoned its Principles? Public Perception of the Party’s Role in Japan’s Security Legislation Debate.” The Asia–Pacific Journal 14(21), no. 3. Online at: https://apjjf.org/2016/21/Fisker-­Nielsen.html. Accessed October 29, 2019. Fushiki, Ken 伏木賢. 2009. Syuugouteki kioku to media [集合的記憶とメデイ ア—Collective Memory and Media]. Nagoya gakugei daigaku media zoukeigakubu kenkyuu kiyou. Gavin, Masako, and Ben Middleton. 2013. Japan and the High Treason Incident. London: Routledge. Germer, Andreas, et al. (Eds.). 2014. Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan. London: Routledge. Goodman, Carl. 2017. “The Threat to Japanese Democracy: The LDP Plan for Constitutional Revision to Introduce Emergency Powers.” The Asia–Pacific Journal 15(10), no. 5. Online at: https://apjjf.org/2017/10/Goodman.html. Accessed October 31, 2019. Ikeda Hiroshi. 2016. “Hilter’s Dismantling of the Constitution and the Current Path of Japan’s Abe Administration: What Lessons Can We Draw from History?” Caroline Norma (Trans.). The Asia–Pacific Journal 14(16), no. 8. Online at: https://apjjf. org/2016/16/Ikeda.html. Accessed October 31, 2019. Isayama, Hajime 諫山創. 2012. Shingeki no kyojin (進撃の巨人—Attack on Titan). (vols. 1–17). Tokyo: Kodansha. Isayama, Hajime. 2010. “Genzai shinkouchuu no kurorekishi.”: Koushin ga todokotte suimasen! Henjishimasu!. [現在進行中の黒歴史,諫山創別冊少年マガジンで進撃の 巨人を連載してます—The Currently Ongoing Black History, Isayama’s Serialized

44   Barbara Greene Additional shōnen Magazine on “Attack on Titan”] n.p., October 4. Online at: http:// blog.livedoor.jp/isayamahazime/archives/2010-10.html. Accessed June 10, 2018. Ito, Go 伊藤剛. 2005. Tezuka izu deddo Hirakareta manga hyougen e [テヅカ・イズ・ デッド ひらかれたマンガ表現論へ; Tezuka is Dead—Towards the Hidden Study of Manga]. Tokyo: NTT Shuppan. McNeill, David. 2015. “Nippon Kaigi and the Radical Conservative Project to Take Back Japan.” The Asia–Pacific Journal 13(50), no. 4, 2015. Online at: https://apjjf.org/David-­McNeill/4409. Accessed October 29, 2019. MacWilliams, Mark (Ed.). 2008. Japanese Visual Culture. Leiden: Brill. Martin, Craig. 2016. “Jus ad Bellum Implications of Japan’s New National Security Laws.” The Asia–Pacific Journal 14(10), No. 2. Online at: https://apjjf.org/2016/10/ Martin.html. Accessed October 29, 2019. Mizohata, Sachie. 2016. “Nippon Kaigi: Empire, Contradictions, and Japan’s Future.” The Asia–Pacific Journal 14(21), no. 4. Online at: https://apjjf.org/2016/21/Mizohata. html. Accessed October 29, 2019. Morris, Errol (dir.). 2003. The Fog of War. Sony Pictures Classic. Murakawa, Haruhiko 村川治彦. 2012. “Ichininshou kara ayuminaosu ‘Sensou taiken’ Taiken shinrigakuni motozuku rekishi heiwa kyouiku no kouchiku ni mukete-. [一人称 から歩み直す「戦争体験」―体験心理学に基づく歴史・平和教育の構築に向け て―“Stepping back from the first person’s ‘War Experience’—Building Towards History and Peace Education Through Experimental Psychology”]. In Ritsumeikan daigaku ningenkagaku kenkyujo: Kyoudou taijin enjo model kenkyu; Houkokusho, Vol. 3. Muto, Ichiyo. 2016. “Retaking Japan: The Abe Administration’s Campaign to Overturn the Postwar Constitution.” John Junkerman (trans.). The Asia–Pacific Journal 14(3), no. 3, 2016. Online at: https://apjjf.org/2016/13/Muto.html. Accessed October 29, 2019. Otmazgin, Nissim and Suter, Rebecca (Eds.). 2016. Rewriting History in Manga: Stories for the Nation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Orr, James J. 2001. The Victim as Hero. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Postel-­Vinay, Karoline. 2017. “The Global Rightist Turn, Nationalism and Japan.” The Asia–Pacific Journal 15(10), no. 1. Online at: https://apjjf.org/2017/10/Postel-­Vinay. html. Accessed October 31, 2019. Repeta, Lawrence. 2017. “Backstory to Abe’s Snap Election—the Secrets of Moritomo, Kake and the ‘Missing’ Japan SDF Activity Logs.” The Asia–Pacific Journal 15(20), no. 6. Online at: https://apjjf.org/2017/20/Repeta.html. Accessed October 31, 2019. Rikkyo University Institute of Peace and Community Studies. 2016. “Local Response to Prime Minister Abe’s Attack on Article Nine and the Constitution.” Saitō Yuriko (trans.). The Asia–Pacific Journal 14(3), no. 5. Saito, Hiro. 2006. “Reiterated Commemorations: Hiroshima as National Trauma.” Sociological Theory 24(4): 353–376. Sakamoto, Rumi. 2011. “ ’Koreans, Go Home!’ Internet Nationalism in Japan as a Digitally Mediated Subculture.” The Asia–Pacific Journal 9(10), no. 2. Online at: https:// apjjf.org/2011/9/10/Rumi-­SAKAMOTO/3497/article.html. Accessed October 29, 2019. Sasagase, Yuji, Hayashi, Keita and Kei, Sato. 2015. “Japan’s Largest Rightwing Organization: An Introduction to Nippon Kaigi.” Japan Focus: The Asia–Pacific Journal 13(50), No. 5. December. Seldomusings [pseud.]. 2016. commented on “The Possible Disturbing Dissonance Between Hajime Isayama’s Beliefs and Attack on Titan’s Themes.” Musings That Are

Re-envisioning the Dark Valley   45 Seldom, comment posted, July 23. Online at: https://seldomusings.wordpress. com/2013/10/19/migiteorerno/. Accessed May 14, 2018. Shillony, Ben-­Ami. 1981. Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan. London: Clarendon. Shinoda, Masahiro. 2003. Spai Sorge. Tokyo: Toho Kabushikigaisha. Stahl, David and Mark MacWilliams. 2010. Imag(in)ing the War in Japan. Leiden: Brill. Takahashi, Rumiko. 1996–2008. Inuyasha. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Tanaka, Toshiyuki. 1996. Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II. Boulder, CO: Westview. Toland, John. 2014. The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945. New York: Random House. Tsutsui, Kiyoteru. 2009. “The Trajectory of Perpetrators’ Trauma: Mnemonic Politics around the Asia–Pacific War in Japan.” Social Forces 87(3): 1389–1422. Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall. 2002. Opa War Kein Nazi: Nationalsozialismus Und Holocaust Im Familiengedächtnis [Gramps was No Nazi: Nazism and the Holocaust in Familial Memory]. Berlin: Fischer Taschenbuch. Yamaguchi, Tomomi. 2017. “The ‘Japan is Great’ Boom, Historical Revisionism, and the Government.” The Asia–Pacific Journal 15(6), no. 3. Online at: https://apjjf. org/2017/06/Yamaguchi.html. Accessed October 31, 2019. Yoshiaki, Yoshimi. 2015. Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People. New York: Columbia University Press.  Yoshifumi, Tawara. 2017. “What is the Aim of Nippon Kaigi, the Ultra-­Right Organization that Supports Japan’s Abe Administration?” The Asia–Pacific Journal 15(21), no. 1. Online at: https://apjjf.org/2017/21/Tawara.html. Accessed October 31, 2019.

3 Kobayashi Yoshinori’s just war and unjust peace Sensō ron, arrogant-­ism and selective memory Michael Lewis

Introduction Japanese manga artists (manga-­ka), especially newspaper cartoonists, the writers of editorial and topical jiji, or “current affairs” manga, expressed their love of country during the 1930s and 1940s by contributing to the wartime national propaganda effort. Their efforts typically aimed at both whipping up the public’s fighting spirit and vilifying the “ABCD” (America, Britain, China, and Dutch) political and military enemies. In the decades since 1945, creators of revisionist manga have again sought to explain Japanese wartime history asserting the benignity of Japanese attempts to liberate their nation and the region’s peoples from the yoke of Western imperialism. Among these works, Kobayashi Yoshinori’s thick comic books in his Shin gōmanism sengen (New Declaration of Arrogance) series, in particular his Sensō ron (Treatise on War) arguably are the best and most sophisticated representative of this genre.1 The series takes up pre-­war and wartime events in Asia and considers, from a rightist position, the implications of that history on Japanese and international society today. The cartooning style is slickly modern but the revisionist message harkens back to World War Two in presenting Japan as more a victim than an aggressor and a nation that always put the altruistic goal of liberating Asia from Western imperial domination before all others. This chapter examines Kobayashi’s manga messages, especially those that interweave Japanese pre-­war and post-­war history. His historical narrative, often harshly stated, is in many places also plaintively sentimental. In pursuit of purity, justifying an unjust war, and advocating a Japanese restoration, he creates both an imagined community that probably has never existed and envisions an imagined social consensus that probably never will. One might justifiably ask why Kobayashi’s make-­believe consensus matters. The answer is that this manga-­ka is not just a cartoonist but is also an influential commentator whose views, as his interview with Prime Minister Abe Shinzō attests, are taken seriously by the general public and political leaders alike.2 Kobayashi is not only a manga-­ka, but also a political activist, satirist, blogger,

Kobayashi’s just war and unjust peace   47 and a mass media fixture with interests and opinions on a wide swathe of topics on Japanese history, social problems, and trends. In his activist role, he has been praised for demanding accountability in the use of tainted blood products that resulted in children contracting AIDS. Among his treatises in the gōmanism series is a book-­length manga on breaking with Japan’s use of nuclear energy.3 Sensō ron itself has become immensely popular and has enjoyed a long shelf life for this kind of manga. Since its original publication two decades ago, its sales figures have reached into the millions making it one of the many Kobayashi bestsellers. The work’s staying power, alongside spin-­off projects, demonstrates its wide popular acceptance as an accurate narrative of the past. Its value as an historical narrative is matched, if not outweighed, by the manga treatise’s prescriptive value. Kobayashi’s focus is unmistakably historical but his assessment of the past is meant to find an explanation for what is wrong with Japanese society today. From this revelation of the causes and consequences of contemporary corruption, a blueprint for the future emerges. The prescriptive plan is vague and more negative than positive in its emphasis on revising past mistakes, but has proven popular and lasting nonetheless. Kobayashi’s medium is the manga but he has loaded this entertainment with a powerful political message. The weaponizing is smartly seductive. By presenting serious historical issues and a scathing indictment of contemporary Japanese society with the comically silly, Kobayashi is able to be both sincere and forgiven for his jester-­like uttering of what he presents as unpalatable truths. This has enabled him to enjoy a long and successful media career delivering political bombs while enjoying wealth and fame thanks to the resulting controversies.

Purity, righteousness, and beauty in Kobayashi’s—and Japan’s—just war Kobayashi’s Sensō ron mixes his interpretation of historical and contemporary events in several major story lines. Among the most prominent and recurring are the good, pure past of the pre-­1945 years of the “Greater East Asia War” (Kobayashi’s preferred collective term for hostilities beginning in 1931 through 1945 on the Asian mainland, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific). His coverage of this subject is usually followed by a depiction of the poisoned post-­war legacy arising from corrupt Occupation Period. The overall presentation makes for a 381-page long manga—a study far more detailed than comparable accounts presented in widely used high school textbooks and undoubtedly better known because of the publicity it has generated. Kobayashi breaks with the more common story manga that present illustrated but fictional accounts. Where most manga tell made-­up stories, Kobayashi’s work purports to be largely non-­fiction history bolstered with factual secondary materials (especially wartime-­centered memoirs), and autobiography. He accordingly does not rely primarily on images to develop his major themes. Striking illustrations abound, of course, but instead of advancing the story, they are used in diorama fashion to secondarily dramatize his written arguments. In this

48   Michael Lewis respect, his massive manga narrative resembles serial museum pieces. This upsetting of the usual balance of text to image has not put off his readership. On the contrary, his lecture-­style interpretation of historical “facts,” presented as indisputable—even when they are not—and images filtered through Kobayashi’s vivid artistic imagination, have produced a bestseller. His methods may break with other manga styles but are certainly easier and more entertaining than historical exposition lacking illustrative cartoons. They also provide one-­stop shopping in creating an easily digestible holistic explanation of the just war and post-­war society’s fall from grace. The presumed purity of the Japanese-­led war for Asian liberation is presented in Kobayashi’s “war affirmation thesis” (sensō kōtei ron).4 Its core asserts that the Japanese military’s wholesome motives mean that labeling soldiers as war criminals is completely unjustified and meaningless. This is because neither the nation’s military nor its political leaders waged war for criminal ends, but chose warfare as a legal policy of necessary self-­defence required to preserve Japan’s existence. The Japanese military did not start the fight but justifiably responded after economic and materiel boycotts (especially the cut in petroleum imports) deprived Japan of any other choice. Far from a criminal or atavistic act, the decision to fight was a reasonable and justifiable policy that any nation similarly confronted might be expected to take.5 Kobayashi further justifies the Japanese decision for war on the grounds of historically longer and regionally deeper concerns than mere Japanese national interest. The Euro–US colonial occupation had imposed an intolerable order on Asians since at least as early as the mid-­nineteenth century. In this historical respect, the ABCD encirclement was not a sudden development but the almost predictable outgrowth of Euro–US expansionism and colonial conquest. According to Kobayashi, the cinching of the ABCD noose may have been something relatively new for Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. It was less so in the many Asian countries previously forced into colonial submission and already in the colonial stranglehold. Kobayashi explains that a high-­level understanding of this obvious fact can be seen in the pronouncements of prominent Asian leaders—Gandhi, Bose, Sukarno, and others—who welcomed and celebrated Japanese modern military victories against white colonizers from the Russo-­Japanese War through the early victories of World War Two.6 In essence, Kobayashi sees Japan’s struggle to defend itself as part of a larger regional war of liberation. From Japan’s valiant early victories, Asia’s peoples learned that resisting white imperialists is possible. From the “Greater East Asia War” (Kobayashi firmly rejects the US-­centric “Pacific War” appellation), Japanese conflicts with Euro-­American colonialists and their Asian compradors became the essential fuse that lit the fires of liberation wars throughout Asia. Japan’s generous willingness to stand up for Asia, its Asia-­by-and-­for-Asians policies, thereby transformed the regional map and from a collection of colonies to today’s array of independent states.7 Kobayashi argues that Japanese motives and policies in choosing to fight have been grossly misunderstood. This extends to even to his explanation on the

Kobayashi’s just war and unjust peace   49 wartime slogan, Hakkō Ichiū or “The World’s Eight Corners Beneath the Emperor’s Benign Rule.” The motto was originally advocated by Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro in a policy speech in 1940 as a precursor to the Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere. For the local populations in areas occupied by the Japanese military, it became the propaganda slogan that attempted to justify Japanese expansionism and subservience to a new group of colonizers. Kobayashi argues that the slogan actually was not intended to assert the Emperor’s or ­Japanese supremacy but to express the idealistic policy that “beneath the Emperor all peoples are equal.”8 If the impure Western Powers waged racist wars to create colonial holdings, Japan’s wars were just the opposite. These conflicts were anti-­racist and intended to break the political, economic, and cultural control of white imperialists. The pure motives behind the Japanese struggle, according to Kobayashi, can be seen in the policies that were blind to ethnic or religious difference, a point he makes repeatedly in citing incidents of Japanese assistance to Jews fleeing Hitler’s concentration camps.9 As for treachery, betrayal, and inhuman brutality, he places those on the Western side of the historical ledger. They are the malign qualities distinguishing the entirety of the Euro-­American colonization of Asian states. More ­relevant to the Japanese wartime experience, they are equally clear in the ABCD encirclement, and the Soviet Union’s wartime political betrayal and the wanton and criminal acts of its troops. Inhuman brutality is especially evident in the American firebombing of Tokyo and every major Japanese city. Such cruelty reached its zenith in the unnecessary use of atomic weapons that indiscriminately killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.10 In light of the causes and consequences of the Greater East Asia War, Kobayashi’s summary conclusion is that, yes, the people of Japan fought and lost but right was overwhelmingly on their side. Kobayashi’s war affirmation thesis not only justifies the acts of the Japanese people and state in World War Two but also affirms the experience as positive on a personal and individual level. While not stating that “war is peace,” his description of war’s exhilaration as a test of “love and courage,” an opportunity to display laudable “self-­sacrifice,” and an expression of “pride and nobility,” rings similarly Orwellian.11 He supports these generalities with autobiographical accounts such as that of Takamura Takehito, who describes his wartime activities as the high point of his life and a collection of experiences that made for his post-­war success in Japanese business and political worlds.12 The lesson Kobayashi takes from Takamura’s wartime experiences is that “there is nothing as fully thrilling as war.”13 Kobayashi extracts from the soldier’s memoirs of war in the Philippines and other locations the kind of adventures that might attract a teenager. His dramatic cartoons depict aerial dogfights, friendly fighter planes swooping low over coconut groves wagging wings to greet their comrades, bodies blown into the air in dead-­on accurate artillery attacks on enemy strongholds, hand-­to-hand combat, and the successful defense of resident Japanese women threatened by

50   Michael Lewis enemy troops bent on rape. In true adventure story fashion, Takamura survives all of these dangerous scrapes and goes on to prosper. His experiences earn him quick promotions during the war and harden him for the post-­war struggles to come. Kobayashi comments on Takamura’s example and declares that it is too simple to say that “war is evil.”14 But what of those people who, unlike the good soldier Takamura, did not survive and prosper? Kobayashi spends little time commenting on non-­Japanese victims of the war. They are dealt with more abstractly, sweepingly covered in his arguments about the Greater East Asia War as a war of liberation magnanimously waged by Japan. Any bill owed to the rest of people of Asia has been paid long ago. Aside from formal post-­war reparations paid by the Japanese government, the currency for that payment included the victor’s justice meted out at the Tokyo war crimes and the suicides of Japan’s wartime military and political leaders for their unsuccessful policies. This retribution came atop the less well-­ known executions of more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers found guilty of war crimes throughout Asia after cessation of most of the organized fighting.15 As for alleged Japanese wartime atrocities, Kobayashi rejects that any debt, material or moral, is owed because no offense was committed and accusations of the military’s misconduct are false. This includes any Japanese culpability for the Nanjing Massacre or exploitation of “comfort women.” In the first instance, he asserts that stories of massacres and rapes at Nanjing were simply made up by “Shina,” by both its KMT and CCP representatives, and China’s foreign sympathizers.16 During wartime, according to the Sensō ron, corrupt journalists, misguided missionaries, and diplomats and politicians in pursuit of their interests propagated the equivalent of today’s “fake news.” In the peacetime that has ­followed, these erroneous accounts continue to be spewed by journalists, ­Japanese and foreign (especially the American, Iris Chang), and members of peace groups. They are even exaggerated in museums and memorials in Japan and abroad. While incidents involving Japanese are made up and embellished, Kobayashi asserts that genuine atrocities committed by Chinese against their own people, crimes ranging from rape to cannibalism, are ignored. In his eyes, these enemy actions surpassed in levels of treachery and cruelty anything attributed (or, according to his point of view, misattributed) to Japanese soldiers. Kobayashi contends that the problem of erroneously blaming the Japanese military for acts of wartime barbarism is especially evident in the “comfort women” controversy. According to his explanation, Korean girls and women, the people who made up the majority of workers at the “comfort stations,” served with the approval of their families for the express purpose of making money. He emphasizes that they were not “abducted” or otherwise deceived. He further contends that the issue is not really all that important. The details of the “comfort woman” dispute, the question of their exploitation, abuse, and possible restitution for what they suffered, were not cause for controversy at war’s end. It was only after decades of silence that these concerns belatedly surfaced as a criticism of Japan’s wartime behavior. For Kobayashi, this non-­issue has become another political cudgel used by the Korean government and Japan’s foreign

Kobayashi’s just war and unjust peace   51 enemies, as well as masochistic peacenik Japanese sympathizers and timid mainstream politicians (e.g., Kōno Yōhei and Miyazawa Kiichi) to bludgeon Japan.17 Not surprisingly, Kobayashi advocates thoroughly revising Japan’s textbooks to erase the false and masochistic interpretations of both the Nanjing Massacre and the “comfort women.” Revision would help to tell the true story of Japan’s heroic attempt to liberate Asia from the West’s colonial stranglehold and the benefits that accrued to Asia’s peoples, despite the unavoidable inconvenience of war waged in their countries. Kobayashi sees the real victims of the Greater East Asia War to be his fellow Japanese and accordingly takes more care in explaining their sacrifice. While acknowledging the massive loss of Japanese lives and material devastation, he nonetheless finds something affirming in the death and destruction. He agrees with and quotes Tōjō Hideki’s view that, “There are things more precious than life and worth risking death to protect.”18 To defend this abstract assertion, Kobayashi makes the commonsense case that compares soldiers to police, firefighters, and teachers, all public servants who might be expected to die for sake of “endangered children.” But this reasonable explanation is just a diving board into a deeper, philosophical justification based on the hoary imagery of gyokusai, the “shattering of the jewel” of the banzai charge and clichéd death-­before-dishonour explanations of sacrifices by Japanese soldiers and civilians. For him, war is, above all else, a test of love and courage, self-­sacrifice, and pride and nobility. Of course, going to war is also a duty. But in Kobayashi’s manga vision, it is more than this in being an almost aesthetic pleasure reminiscent of Mishima Yukio’s commingled notions of beauty, love, death, and blessed oblivion.19 Kobayashi tells us that war itself can be a cathartic festival of death, one in which the human being’s natural urge toward violence is recognized and valued. It provides a rare chance to live on the existential edge where fear mingles with the hunger for revenge and all is forgivable through the nobility of heroic acts. Such acts, however destructive, reveal what is important, what should be saved, and what should be destroyed.20 Per Kobayashi, war fully manifests the human’s original nature, in all its beauty and ugliness, including the erotic. On this last point, Kobayashi goes so far as to suggest that sex crimes and other violent criminality demonstrates the individual’s desire for war still smoulders even in pacifistic post-­war Japan. These crimes occur because the outlet provided by war has been blocked.21 Even accounting for combat’s adrenaline rush, anyone who has actually experienced war will not likely find Kobayashi’s descriptions of it a match for battlefield reality. The notion of the aesthetic beauty of a heroic wartime death is contradicted by the more usual cases of combatants who do their utmost to survive. The same desire is even stronger for non-­combatants such as Japanese “settlers” helplessly trapped in overseas war zones. Despite tales of heroic self-­ destruction on Saipan, Okinawa, and other battlefields, the willingness of civilians to follow the Emperor’s troops as “shattered crystals” was a rarity. More often such acts were not freely chosen but compelled, forced at gunpoint or accomplished with soldiers’ grenades.22

52   Michael Lewis

The just war’s unjust peace and resulting societal breakdown Kobayashi’s presentation of what was right about Japan’s role in the Greater East Asia War, what was just on both a national and an individual level, is directly connected to his analysis of what has been profoundly wrong with Japanese society since 1945. Defeat in war caused the Japanese people to lose their individual and collective sense of righteousness—a key part of their essential shared identity as minzoku. This distinct ethnos represents something more fundamental than mere citizenship in its blood-­and-soil associations that makes for membership in an especially virtuous nation.23 The national loss of pride and purpose, the fading of the minzoku identity, per Kobayashi, has resulted in the individual’s sense of anomie. The masses’ worship of materialism before all else has worked to partially fill the void of this purposelessness. Abetted by deceptive notions of democracy introduced by self-­interested American occupiers, the values of a rampant consumer culture have usurped patriotism. During the post-­war period, the outcome has been a society-­wide lonely individualism that has worked to sour more basic human relationships. A healthy love of the group and cohesive values about home, place and the nation, shared by so many before 1945, have disappeared. The resulting vacuum has been filled by new religions and cults such as the Aum Shinri Kyō, alongside the ever-­ tantalizing but ultimately unsatisfying pursuit of possessions and experiences.24 These bogus palliatives, spiritual and material, have exploited the deep-­seated and genuine mass desire for substance and authority. Unable in the US-­imposed post-­war system to find what is really needed, Japanese people have turned to anodyne experiences to overcome the unbearable lightness of being Japanese. Kobayashi sees the poisonous fruits of the unjust peace everywhere. Again, the worst does not begin with defeat on the battlefield but in the peacetime system compelled by the American occupiers. Individualism and democracy were the hallmarks of this new order. However, the post-­war individualism that has emerged, in Kobayashi’s view, has not been genuine. Because of its origins in a propaganda campaign that intentionally split the individual from the Japanese minzoku collectivity, success was impossible from the start. To be the kind of individual envisioned by the Occupation Period War Guilt Information Program, the post-­war citizen was compelled to abandon patriotism, reject authority, and hate the motherland. Kobayashi, sounding like a convert now on the right path, admits that even he was once a victim of this kind of mind control.25 Kobayashi explains that the masses descent into this zombie-­like state was not simply the potency of the ideas of American-­style individualism and democracy. More important to the transformation was the lasting political and legal changes that flowed from compulsory Occupation Period reforms. These changes never really fit Japanese society. In Sensō ron, the process is described as beginning with The Supreme Command Allied Powers (SCAP) and the Occupation’s planting of the seeds of the leftist anti-­authoritarianism that dominates Japan today. Kobayashi claims that the sway of the left is still dominant. It continues

Kobayashi’s just war and unjust peace   53 particularly strongly in the media, and in educational and legal institutions, but can also be found in various citizens’ groups that appear benignly humanistic and internationally oriented in their various advocacies. Kobayashi labels these organizations “the lightly sweet leftist citizens groups” (usuamai sayouku shimin guruupu), but deems their humanism as nothing more than a cover to advance alien collectivist causes.26 If the onset of the corruption of the essentially good Japanese ethnos came with the Occupation’s policies and SCAP’s many reformist initiatives, other Western governments quietly abetted the process that allowed leftists to propagate their ideas. The outcome has become a kind of enduring political correctness originally shaped by SCAP and its War Guilt Information Program, bolstered with kindred laws and campaigns, that finally made the “anti-­war peace” mentality the single mode of thought acceptable in educational, legal, and media institutions. From Kobayashi’s vantage point, at the time he began writing Sensō ron in 1998, he could see that a “give me chocolate, give me constitution” mindset had come to dominate Japanese thinking and the manner in which people lived their daily lives.27 This was no accident but the product of a half-­ century of pernicious American influence. While recognizing the strength of the alien system that holds Japanese people in its thrall, he also observes that individualism and democracy have produced these toxic effects because they do not suit fundamental Japanese cultural values. He patronizingly observes that most Japanese individuals are average. To have a meaningful existence, they need the support of the state, an ethnic identity, religion, traditions, and family lineage. They need these things more than freedom. Without these supports, society becomes just a weird collection of egotistical mini-­monsters or, in Kobayashi’s words “ego-­only individuals.”28 In elaborating on a society dominated by “ego-­only individuals,” Kobayashi sees no contradiction in what he posits is the coexistence of dominant leftist ideas and rampant consumerism. He contends that many today think the primary aim in life is to consume. Consuming can be eating various foods (note the number of Japanese food-­centred television programs) but also extends to finding gratification through other experiences. Romantic and sexual love, the pleasures of family life, and all the material gratifications afforded by a modern capitalist economy are all commodities to be consumed. Unhappily, the obsession with consumption does not bring genuine satisfaction. This is because what Japanese people actually crave is not things or experiences, but to live according to the minzoku values presently missing in post-­war society. Their real hunger can never be satiated until a shared sense of “public spirit” (kōkyōshin) is revived.29 Kobayashi laments that this quality is now all but universally absent, missing in the young and the old, men and women, bureaucrats and politicians. The damage resulting from the disappearance of public spiritedness can be seen across a wide arc of social, political, and cultural degradation. It is evident in the lack of enthusiasm for voting, schoolgirls prostituting themselves in a practice euphemistically called enjo kōsai or “compensated dating,” mass belief in radical new eschatological religions, thrill murders, and suicides by individual strangers

54   Michael Lewis linked only by the Internet for the express purpose of dying together.30 In Kobayashi’s words, these calamities have happened because people “… have no one to love, no one to protect, no one to die for.”31 In contrast to contemporary expressions of selfish, perverse, and lonely individualism caused by any sense of public spiritedness, Kobayashi cites the healthy example of the wartime Tokkōtai or “kamikaze.” Kobayashi laments the widespread popular misunderstanding obscuring the significance of these sincere warriors. In accounts of their lives, he attempts to make clear they did not believe that Emperor was a god, did not murder civilians, and were not terrorists. They died neither drugged by painkillers or because of religious intoxication. In sum, they were motivated by wholesome ethics grounded in human warmth and compassion. Kobayashi concludes that they intended only “to protect the country in which their loved ones lived.”32 In contrast to today’s Japanese, they were truly rational, selfless, and “real citizens.”33

Kobayashi’s prescription: gōmanism (aka: arrogant-­ism) In seeking to restore the purity of the true Japanese ethnos, Kobayashi offers little in concrete terms about what is to be done. He is far more voluble about what should be undone. In general, he sums up his program as gōmanism or arrogant-­ism, a neologism meaning an “ism” or ideological stance that can be mistaken for haughty patriotism but in fact is an entirely justified view of Japan’s modern history. Gōmanism explicitly recommends few reforms but its bitter criticisms of the main features of current Japanese society, politics, and diplomacy imply that much must be undone if Japanese people are to live autonomously, honestly, and without delusions. Gōmanism is the only antidote for the mass brainwashing afflicting Japanese people with a false sense of guilt and responsibility.34 Through gōmanism, the atomized individual is able to reset ties to the community and society. Again, Kobayashi is vague on what this means in any positive sense. He is more concrete—and enthusiastic—in his discussion of war’s affirmative qualities. But at the very least he is clear that gōmanism means once again finding the courage to stand up for Japan. This requires regaining the mettle to appreciate the value of the national collectivity and recognize the contributions of pre-­war and wartime generations who fought and died for Japan and Asia in a righteous war of liberation against racist whites.35 Gōmanism is good—but it is more than that. It is a curative mindset able to fix what ails contemporary Japanese society. It is better than freedom, individualism, consumerism, and the entire basket of faux -isms foisted on Japan since the beginning of the American Occupation. It can even provide people with a meaning worth dying for.36 Kobayashi, toward the end of his Sensō ron manga manifesto, announces that Japanese leftists are for the world, but he is for the nation of Japan.37 In recommending the gōmanism ideology, he encourages his readers to adopt the same attitude. If the nation and its special ethnos is to be saved, the false narrative of the “comfort women” must be refuted, leftist-­influenced schoolbooks must be

Kobayashi’s just war and unjust peace   55 rewritten, and Japan must reject American domination and find a way to defend its legitimate place in international society. Along with his major concerns (e.g., textbook revision, “comfort women,” the “Nanjing Incident”), Kobayashi also has a menu of related annoyances which gōmanism may usefully correct. These include people who have no sense of the “public” and believe that their personal individualism trumps all. He observes that one can find them legion throughout today’s Japan. They can be seen applying make-­up in public train cars, openly reading racy tabloids on public conveyances, failing to surrender seats to the aged and handicapped, giving sloppy drunken embraces at parties, entering public baths without washing their privates, and committing other similar anti-­social acts.38 For Kobayashi, these failings, however minor, must be corrected because they demonstrate the failure to place the public good before individual selfishness. He argues that even these small symptoms of social breakdown cannot be overlooked if one is to respect gōmanism’s first principle of placing the nation/ethnos before all else.

Conclusion: Kobayashi’s fugue state and Shinmin no michi (the path of the subject) In psychiatry, the fugue state is a period of memory loss after which one sometimes begins a new life and even upon overall recovery still cannot remember anything from the time forgotten. Kobayashi’s account of wartime and post-­war Japanese history in Sensō ron presents us with a kind of metaphorical fugue state, one created by his selective recollection of the past and its significance. He has opted to forget the realities of the state and society that once existed and that he has experienced only as second-­hand recollections. Of course, everyone, professional historians and private individuals alike, shape their own personal past, selecting memories based on recollections passed on to them as well as their own direct experiences. Usually this creation of public and personal memory is also shaped by a desire to recall. Yet, in Sensō ron, what we encounter is an abundance of wilful forgetting, overlooking uncomfortable historical narratives that do not support the notion that war is thrilling, ennobling, or purifying. Only if wartime memory is wiped clean of contrary evidence can a way be cleared to create the Sensō ron’s heroic fantasies. Only in that fugue state can revisionists claim that defeat in Japan’s just war, by its destruction of a unique Japanese ethnos, corrupted the peaceful, democratic, affluent, if imperfect, society that has emerged since 1945. Many inside and outside Japan have challenged Kobayashi’s and kindred interpretations of Japanese modern history in careful critiques on what his narrative presents and what it forgets.39 One need not engage hand-­to-hand with Kobayashi and the many who agree with him to prove the historical reality of the atrocity at Nanking, the Japanese military’s involvement in wartime sexual slavery, or that Japan is a not a society dominated by Marxist sympathizers. Even the Japanese government has explicitly acknowledged, albeit waveringly, the historical reality of the first two issues. The very interworking on the state

56   Michael Lewis bureaucracy, political parties, and economy belies the third. Undoubtedly, those keen on finding historical conspiracies will discover or fabricate what they need to make their arguments, even when doing so stretches credulity to absurd lengths. They will similarly continue to make relativistic and specious moral arguments based on comparative degrees of malevolency contending, for example, that the slaughter of 30,000 is somehow less atrocious and more exculpatory than a body count of 300,000. What is important is to remember is what Kobayashi would prefer be forgotten. This requires understanding that what he has accomplished in Sensō ron is a re-­issue of Japanese wartime propaganda while disremembering that it was indeed propaganda. Even the manga-­ka who originally created some of the most potent imagery to illustrate The Greater East Asia War’s political slogans emphasized that feeling not historical accuracy was what manga could contribute. The June 1938 founding issue of Karikare (or Caricature) noted: Printed and filmed manga can instantaneously make a million people laugh and feel happy. It can also easily achieve the important mission of mass cultivation through humour, which is often difficult to accomplish. Manga is an indispensable political and economic weapon and powerful propaganda tool.40 Nowhere in this declaration of the Tokyo Manga Institute is there any suggestion that their art or their journalism reflect cogent policy analysis. In fact, the manga-­ka working during the pre-­war and wartime years were a variegated group that created manga out of mixed motives. While some actively embraced the role of the wartime propaganda message, others were drafted into that role, still others resisted the message completely and paid for their resistance through imprisonment and torture.41 In some places, the manga-­ka demonstrated a combination of motivations, shifting sides chameleon-­like before, during, and after the war as a kind of survival mechanism.42 They differ from Kobayashi in never possessing the arrogant-­ism required to believe that propaganda cartooning constituted a serious manifesto for political change. Where we do see the values Kobayashi espoused in Sensō ron is in Shinmin no michi (Path of the Subject), a manifesto issued by the Japanese Ministry of Education by order of Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro in 1941.43 The text is a short and simple work intended to inform Japanese subjects of all they need to know to fulfil their duties to enable the nation to prevail in wartime. It was distributed to the upper grades of middle schools and higher levels, but was also intended as a general guide to help the public understand the causes of the war and how Japanese people should conduct themselves during wartime. It is in Shinmin no michi that we find each of the major themes advanced by Kobayashi to justify gōmanism. The Sensō ron does not mention kokutai, but its recognition of a singular Japanese ethnos bears a strong resemblance to the notion of the unique Imperial polity. In both Sensō ron and Shinmin no michi, Japan’s singular polity runs counter to Western ideas and ideals of individualism,

Kobayashi’s just war and unjust peace   57 liberalism, and materialism. These alien concepts are not just different from the virtues fundamental to Japanese identity, they also positively threaten all that makes Japan good. This goodness was already eroding in the 1930s and 1940s thanks to the lingering after-­effects of the age of Western-­influenced ero, guro, nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense) and its attendant liberation and libertinism.44 Shinmin no michi represents an attempt to reset wartime society along its imagined pristine and wholesome basis. Likewise, in Kobayashi’s Sensō ron, the country must be saved, and the corrosive effects of individualism, materialism, and liberalism stopped. In Sensō ron as in the Shinmin no michi, the only way to redemption is to return to the communal practices and values of an imagined past. Kobayashi’s Sensō ron also echoes Shinmin no michi in justifying Japan’s resistance to the Euro-­American domination of Asia and its more than 450 million people. Both works see the expansion of Western imperial penetration and control as motivated by greed, racism, and an unreflective sense of historical mission. Shinmin no michi describes the European countries from the early modern period forward colonizing weaker countries and expanding hegemonic control. The incursion continued with the conquest of America and the expansion of the colonial dominion over India and China. Shinmin no michi writers note, “This has spread across the entire earth and at last reached the extremity of political, economic, and cultural global rule. They view the world as their possession and act audaciously, as if no others existed …”45 The lesson to Japanese subjects is that given Japan’s unique identity, the perversity of Western values, and the injustice of Euro-­American domination, Japan’s mission to liberate Asia for Asians is entirely just. It is in Shinmin no Michi and in similar simple manifestos distributed after its publication that we find the essential core of Sensō ron arguments. These government-­issued tracts made the same sweeping calls for the purity and patriotism that are a prominent part of Kobayashi’s gōmanism. Such calls for a return to past martial values did not emerge immediately after the end of World War Two. In fact, and somewhat counter-­intuitively, it is only after the advent of the affluent, liberal society that develops decades later that we see a longing for the essential wartime values. In many cases, Kobayashi’s included, the longing is often based on second-­hand nostalgia. Almost three-­ quarters of a century of peace and forgetfulness seem to have whetted an appetite for new dreams about the glories of war. These widely shared dreams have enabled Kobayashi’s revisionism to take hold and make his fantasy of creating a new community based on old values seem somehow attainable. What gōmanism’s supporters may fail to realize is that these supposed pure values may have never existed in modern Japanese society except as immaculately conceived by the Ministry of Education’s wartime propagandists. The state apparatus these martial values supported also showed little tolerance for independent thinking or dissenting views. If resurrected and implemented today, they would hardly be hospitable to the voices of social and political criticism. When faced with the stressful complexities and frustrations of life in the  liberal, democratic, post-­industrial nation Japan has become, it might be

58   Michael Lewis comforting to imagine an orderly, harmonious world organized according to gōmanism. But realizing such a state and society seems impossible for even Kobayashi to imagine. In the end, the overall message of his Sensō ron is largely negative. It rejects the present but in exchange offers only the anachronistic values of a vague militaristic utopianism.

Notes   1 Yoshinori Kobayashi, Shin gōmanizumu sengen SPECIAL: Sensō ron (Tokyo: Gentosha, 2000).   2 Kobayashi’s interview with Abe is included in a collection of nine such interviews with top Japanese political leaders. See Yoshinori Kobayashi, Kibō no kuni Nihon: kyūnin no sejika to shinken shōbu [望の国・日本: 九人の政治家と真剣勝負, Japan—country of hope: playing for keeps with nine politicians] (Tokyo: Asuka Shinsha, 2010), 271–311. See also Matthew Penney, “Abe and History—The Kobayashi Yoshinori Interview,” Japan Focus 8 (2013). Online at: https://apjjf.org/Matthew-­Penney/4760/article.html. Accessed December 19, 2017.   3 Kobayashi Yoshinori, Shin gōmanizumu sengen SPECIAL: Datsu genpatsu ron (Tokyo: Gentosha, 2012).   4 Kobayashi, Shin gōmanizumu sengen SPECIAL: Sensō ron, 37.   5 Ibid., 34.   6 Ibid., 31.   7 Ibid., 32.   8 Ibid., 35.   9 Ibid., 311. 10 I agree with Kobayashi’s assessment of the US use of nuclear weapons against the Japanese. It is a war crime that awaits prosecution. 11 Kobayashi, Shin gōmanizumu sengen SPECIAL: Sensō ron, 37. 12 Ibid., 209. 13 Ibid., 226. 14 Ibid., 271. 15 Ibid., 35. 16 Kobayashi throughout Sensō ron uses the pejorative term “Shina” to refer to pre-­war modern China. Embracing the word adds a little salt to the wound of his sweeping dismissal of any substance to the story of atrocities at Nanjing. He attempts to refute photographic evidence of the atrocity in Chapter 11, 151–171. 17 Kobayashi, Shin gōmanizumu sengen SPECIAL: Sensō ron, 179–182. 18 Ibid., 280. 19 John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), 182. 20 Kobayashi, Shin gōmanizumu sengen SPECIAL: Sensō ron, 317–318. 21 Ibid., 339. 22 Michael Bradley, “ ‘Banzai!’ The Compulsory Mass Suicide of Kerama Islanders in the Battle of Okinawa,” Japan Focus 11(22) (2014). See also Haruko Taya Cook, “The Myth of the Saipan Suicides,” Quarterly Journal of Military History 7(3) (1995): 12–19. 23 Michael Weiner, “The Invention of Identity: Race and Nation in Pre-­War Japan,” in Frank Dikötter (Ed.), The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 98–105. 24 Usually called a “doomsday cult,” Aum Supreme Truth mashed together elements of Buddhism, Hinduism, meditation, and the group’s leader’s apocalyptic vision and

Kobayashi’s just war and unjust peace   59 waged guerrilla war against Japanese society. Asahara Shōkō ordered Aum followers to carry out coordinated sarin gas attacks on Tokyo subway trains in March 1995. The attacks killed thirteen and injured more than 6,000. The toll was in addition to other individual murders and crimes committed before 1995. Asahara and six of the remaining top leaders of the cult were executed in July 2018. Austin Ramzy, “Japan Executes Cult Leader behind 1995 Sarin Gas Subway Attack,” New York Times, July 5, 2018. 25 Kobayashi, Shin gōmanizumu sengen SPECIAL: Sensō ron, 52–53. 26 Ibid., 22–23. 27 Ibid., 50. 28 Ibid., 347–349. 29 Ibid., 343. 30 According to Karolina Broma-­Smenda,  The practice of enjo-­kōsai (compensated dating) arose in the mid-­1990s in Japan. It is a trend where an older, wealthy man sponsors attractive and significantly younger women (often high school girls) for their companionship and sometimes sexual services. Those young girls, by becoming involved in an enjo-­kōsai relationship, are trying to make money to purchase brand clothes and accessories.  See Karolina Broma-­Smenda, “Enjo-­kōsai (Compensated Dating) in Contemporary Japanese Society as Seen through the Lens of the Play Call Me Komachi,” Acta Asiatica Varsoviensia 27 (2014), 19. The origin of the term “compensated dating” and the prevalence of the practice are controversial issues. Some critics contend that the word is the product of predominantly male writers of salacious weekly magazines keen on increasing circulation numbers and that the phenomenon’s prevalence is statistically far less significant than sensational reports suggest. 31 Kobayashi, Shin gōmanizumu sengen SPECIAL: Sensō ron, 355. 32 Ibid., 356. 33 Ibid., 360. 34 Ibid., 194. 35 Ibid., 150. 36 Ibid., 272. 37 Ibid., 343. 38 Ibid., 344. 39 For details, see, for example, Aaron Gerow, “Fantasies of War and Nation in Recent Japanese Cinema,” Japan Focus 4(2) (2006); Rumi Sakamoto, “ ‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’ Nationalism and History in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensoron [sic],” Japan Focus 6(1) (2008); Philip Seaton, “Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism: Testimony in Sensōron, Sensōron as Testimony,” Japan Focus 8(3) (2010); and Mark Driscoll, “Kobayashi Yoshinori Is Dead: Imperial War/Sick Liberal Peace/Neoliberal Class War,” Mechademia 4 (2009): 290–303. 40 Quoted in Rei Okamoto Inouye, “Theorizing Manga: Nationalism and Discourse on the Role of Wartime Manga,” Mechademia 4 (2009), 23–24. 41 Taro Yashima, The New Sun (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), passim. 42 For a case study examining the life of one of the most chameleon-­like of these manga­ka, see Rinjirō Sodei, “The Double Conversion of a Cartoonist: The Case of Katō Etsurō,” in Marlene J. Mayo, J. Thomas Rimer with H. Eleanor Kerkham (Eds.), War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia 1920–1960 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 235–268. 43 Japan, Ministry of Education (Monbushō), Shinmin no michi (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun Sha, 1941). 44 For a thorough analysis of the age of ero, guro, nansensu, see Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006). 45 Japan, Ministry of Education, Shinmin no michi, 1941, 6–7.

60   Michael Lewis

References Bradley, Michael. 2014. “ ‘Banzai’: The Compulsory Mass Suicide of Kerama Islanders in the Battle of Okinawa.” Japan Focus 11(22). Online at: https://apjjf.org/2014/11/22/ Michael-­Bradley/4125/article.html. Accessed January 9, 2018. Broma-­Smenda, Karolina. 2014. “Enjo-­kōsai (Compensated Dating) in Contemporary Japanese Society as Seen through the Lens of the Play Call Me Komachi.” Acta Asiatica Varsoviensia 27: 19–41. Cook, Haruko Taya. 1995. “The Myth of the Saipan Suicides.” Quarterly Journal of Military History 7(3): 12–19. Driscoll, Mark. 2009. “Kobayashi Yoshinori Is Dead: Imperial War/Sick Liberal Peace/ Neoliberal Class War.” Mechademia 4: 290–303. Gerow, Aaron. 2006. “Fantasies of War and Nation in Recent Japanese Cinema.” Japan Focus 4(2). Online at: https://apjjf.org/-Aaron-­Gerow/1707/article.html. Accessed November 3, 2017. Inouye, Rei Okamoto. 2009. “Theorizing Manga: Nationalism and Discourse on the Role of Wartime Manga.” Mechademia 4: 20–37. Japan, Ministry of Education (Monbushō). 1941. Shinmin no michi. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun Sha. Kobayashi, Yoshinori. 2000. Shin gōmanizumu sengen SPECIAL: Sensō ron. Tokyo: Gentosha. Kobayashi, Yoshinori. 2010. Kibō no kuni Nihon: kyūnin no sejika to shinken shōbu. Tokyo: Asuka Shinsha. Kobayashi, Yoshinori. 2012. Shin gōmanizumu sengen SPECIAL: Datsu genpatsu ron. Tokyo: Gentosha. Kure Tomafusa. 1986. Gendai manga no zentaizō. Tokyo: Jōhō Sentaa Shuppan Kyoku. Nathan, John. 1974. Mishima: A Biography. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company. Penney, Matthew. 2013. “Abe and History—The Kobayashi Yoshinori Interview.” Japan Focus 8. History—The Kobayashi Yoshinori Interview.” Japan Focus 8. Online at: https://apjjf.org/-Matthew-­Penney/4760/article.html. Accessed December 19, 2017. Penney, Matthew. 2007. “ ‘War Fantasy’ and Reality—‘War as Entertainment’ and Counter-­narratives in Japanese Popular Culture.” Japanese Studies 27(1): 35–52. Ramzy, Austin. 2018. “Japan Executes Cult Leader behind 1995 Sarin Gas Subway Attack.” New York Times, July 5. Sakamoto, Rumi. 2008. “ ‘Will You Go To War? Or Will You Stop Being Japanese?’ Nationalism and History in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensoron [sic].” Japan Focus 6(1). Online at: https://apjjf.org/-Rumi-­SAKAMOTO/2632/article.html. Accessed November 29, 2017. Seaton, Philip. 2010. “Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism: Testimony in Sensōron, Sensōron as Testimony.” Japan Focus 8(3). Online at: https://apjjf.org/Philip-­Seaton/3397/article.html. Accessed November 29, 2017. Shimizu Isao. 1999. Manga tanjō: Taishō demokurashii kara no shuppatsu. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Bunkan. Silverberg, Miriam. 2006. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sodei, Rinjirō. 2001. “The Double Conversion of a Cartoonist: The Case of Katō Etsurō.” In Marlene J. Mayo, J. Thomas Rimer with H. Eleanor Kerkham (Eds.), War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia 1920–1960. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 235–268.

Kobayashi’s just war and unjust peace   61 Weiner, Michael. 1997. “The Invention of Identity: Race and Nation in Pre-­War Japan.” In Frank Dikötter (Ed.), The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 96–117. Yashima, Taro. 2008. The New Sun. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.

4 Sexual politics in manga Pan-­Pan Girls confronting the US occupation, Vietnam War and Japan’s Article 9 revision Michiko Takeuchi

Introduction I like Pan-­Pan because they wear nice clothes and have beautiful faces. I like them because they wear lipstick. I like them because they are rich. I like them because they have nice houses.1 In 1953, a first-­grade boy in Yokosuka, where the largest US Navy base outside a US territory is located, submitted this essay in response to a nationwide call for essays by children living near US military bases. Pan-­Pan or Pan-­Pan Girls were freelance Japanese prostitutes, who had associated with American GIs since the US occupation of Japan (1945–1952). As the boy’s essay indicates, these women often achieved a better standard of living than other Japanese, many of whom had not yet recovered from the devastation of World War Two and were barely subsisting. The Yokosukan boy’s impression of Pan-­Pan Girls was not unique. According to a 1952 Keio University study of 2,273 students from elementary and middle schools in Yokosuka, nearly one-­third of students explicitly admired Pan-­Pan Girls for their material and financial wealth, fashion, and attitudes.2 Many parents and teachers who despised prostitution, especially with foreigners, were outraged by this result. But the children’s admiration for Pan-­Pan Girls presents a different view than the way scholars painted them as a symbol of defeat. As this article shows, for many Japanese, not just the children surveyed, Pan-­Pan Girls represented much more than subjugation by a foreign occupier. Research on occupation magazines and post-­war manga (comics) has revealed that, in graphic arts, most Pan-­Pan Girls look quite glamorous, though it is rare to find works in which adults write of their admiration.3 A closer examination of the glamorous images of Pan-­Pan Girls in post-­war graphic arts (1945 to the present) shows that Japanese have used those drawings as a vehicle for expressing their views not only on Japan’s defeat, occupation, and the US–Japan Security Treaty of 1951 (renewed in 1960 and 1970), which permits the continued presence of US troops, but also about the ongoing debates over revision of Article 9 of the “Peace Constitution.” While previous scholarship has focused

Sexual politics   63 on the occupation’s sexual politics toward Pan-­Pan Girls, this article sheds light on Japanese people’s sexual politics. By analysing the graphic arts depictions of Pan-­Pan Girls, this article argues that Japanese people have used their own sexual politics to voice their contestation of the post-­war Japan–USA bilateral order. In the historiography of Japan, reading politics in the graphic arts is not a new methodology. John Dower, in his groundbreaking War without Mercy (1986), has examined how both Japanese and American racial politics played into the creation of World War Two propaganda images that justified the wartime killing of millions of civilians in the Pacific theater.4 With regard to sexual politics and the arts, from Timon Screech’s examination of shunga (erotic images) to Miriam Silverberg’s analysis of ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) culture from 1700 to the 1930s, scholarship has demonstrated how expressions of sexuality in art contest social norms of the time.5 These scholarly studies also show the important nexus of art, sexuality, and politics and how this nexus was embedded into Japanese people’s everyday lives in modern times. For scholars of the US occupation, Dower’s reference to Endō Takeo’s (1914–2009) illustration elucidating the sexual politics of Japan gave us a lasting image of Japanese sentiment toward the occupation (Figure 4.1).6 In the image,

Figure 4.1 Endō Takeo, 1956. Source: Courtesy of Endō Takeo Family. From Chiba City Museum of Art.

64   Michiko Takeuchi Endō has drawn a Japanese veteran and American GI encountering each other in US-­occupied Japan after having met in the Guadalcanal campaign of 1942–1943. The Japanese veteran is depicted as smaller, skinny, shabbily dressed, barely able to stand with his prosthetic leg, having a beggar’s donation box hanging from his neck, and accompanied by a stray dog, all of which suggests that he is homeless. In contrast, the “burly GI,” to use Dower’s words, is tall, large, well dressed, and accompanied by a Japanese woman. The image sends a clear message as to who is the victor and who the loser. Dower writes, “The wound to [Japanese] masculine pride of having to kowtow to an army of occupation was compounded by the ubiquitous fraternization of the victors with Japanese women.”7 Subsequent scholarly debates in the past two decades have also echoed that the fraternization between American GIs and Japanese women represented Japan’s post-­war sense of emasculation by and subjugation to the United States.8 However, scholars studying the occupation have not fully paid attention to the Japanese woman in the same illustration. This inattention to the female in the image suggests that previous scholarship, equating occupier men and occupied women’s fraternization with the states’ relationship, centered on a patriarchal, moralistic, middle-­class view of sexuality. Previous scholarship was thus an analysis of men versus men, with women constituting mere commodities of the more powerful men. However, a closer examination of the same illustration could go beyond such views. The Japanese woman is well dressed and walking arm-­in-arm with a GI. Her gaze is fixed on the GI, while the Japanese veteran is almost invisible to her. Her high heels and bold lipstick indicate that she is a Pan-­Pan Girl. She appears attractive and larger than the Japanese veteran. While she does not challenge the authority of the American GI, she obviously has more money and food than the Japanese veteran. Her size alone relative to the Japanese man suggests that Pan-­Pan Girls had more power than Japanese men in the specific socio-­cultural context of the occupation. Furthermore, the woman’s size and her association with a conqueror demonstrate that Pan-­Pan Girls were not being subjected to Japanese men’s patriarchy but were instead subverting it. Thus, re-­examination of one famous image could complicate the picture of Pan-­ Pan Girls established in previous scholarship. Acknowledging Pan-­Pan Girls as important actors in the occupation rather than merely “spoils of war” could therefore lead us to rethink Endō’s illustration. Perhaps it shows how the war not only disabled and impoverished Japanese men but also turned Japanese women into prostitutes. In showing this outcome of the war, Endō’s illustration of sexual politics in occupied Japan suggests that the war was wrong. It is thus anti-­war art, which challenged the authority of the ­Japanese government and its militarism. It also challenged the authority of the American occupation by illustrating the existence of Pan-­Pan Girls—some 70,000–150,000 women (and men) went to work as prostitutes for GIs during the occupation—a clear contradiction to American claims that the occupation was a “workshop of democracy.”9 The drawing of the Pan-­Pan Girls was thus a political act, especially since the American occupation censored any media mentioning this fraternization or offering any criticism of the occupation.

Sexual politics   65 In an attempt to go beyond traditional views on the representation of Pan-­Pan Girls in the graphic arts, this article builds on feminist debates about prostitution as an overarching socio-­economic and cultural phenomenon.10 Such an approach is important because, as the feminist Shannon Bell claims, the prostitute’s body is a site where the questions of morality and sexuality are contested.11 Prostitution is indeed a complex phenomenon because, as the historian Kathryn Norberg has asserted, prostitutes are, on the one hand, obliged to subordinate themselves to men, including to authorities who abuse them. On the other hand, the act of selling one’s body can be seen as a public challenge or subversion of male domination and patriarchy over women’s bodies and sexuality.12 Prostitutes could thus lead the way to a transformation of consciousness, lifestyle, and society as a whole, because engaging in prostitution transcends socially normative actions.13 These scholarly debates on prostitution explain why Japanese identified their political views through graphic arts depictions of Pan-­Pan Girls, because these women contested and even subverted post-­war Japan’s new socially normative actions and order. Indeed, my research shows that Japanese have already used the contested body of Pan-­Pan Girls in graphic arts to subvert not only their own government within the occupied space but the occupiers’ authority as well. Despite their association with occupier men, Pan-­Pan Girls’ contradictory existence—as prostitutes for American GIs in the so-­called workshop of democracy—made it possible for artists to project people’s political contestation onto the depictions of Pan-­Pan Girls. During the occupation, Japanese graphic artists, from well-­known cartoonists to unknowns such as the pre-­war ero guro nansensu illustrators, drew Pan-­Pan Girls for magazines.14 Just as Susan Napier has observed that sexuality was a key narrative for expressing fragmented society in literature during the occupation, drawn images of Pan-­Pan Girls, from the minor kasutori (“erotic”) works to the mainstream Yomiuri and Asahi magazines, represented people’s devastation, the fear of being occupied, their desire to recover, and their sense of injustice because of the actions of the Japanese and US governments.15 In the post-­occupation era, particularly after 1960, many famous manga artists, such as Hasegawa Machiko (1920–1992), Mizuki Shigeru (1922–2015), Nakazawa Keiji (1939–2012), and Tezuka Osamu (1928–1989), drew Pan-­Pan Girls. Many did so to challenge more explicitly US imperialism and Japan’s past imperial aggressions. Reports of atrocities committed by the US military in Vietnam and the Japanese government’s renewal of the Security Treaty in 1960 and 1970, which aided the war in Vietnam, prompted artists’ rearward glance at the occupation period. In the twenty-­first century, with the new debates over the constitutional revision of Article 9 on whether Japan should have a ‘real’ military with the right of belligerency, Japanese manga and graphic artists showed renewed interest in revisiting the history of World War Two and the occupation and in reintroducing Pan-­Pan Girls in graphic arts.

Pan-­Pan Girls contesting the “workshop of democracy” In 1946, what became Japan’s kokumin-­teki anime, or “national animation,” Sazae san (Ms. Sazae [1946–1974]) first appeared in a Fukuoka city evening news-

66   Michiko Takeuchi paper, Yūkan Fukunichi, as a four-­panel cartoon. The cartoon and later the anime version both gained popularity for their description of ordinary people’s everyday lives.16 Its creator, Hasegawa Machiko, later attributed Sazae san’s popularity to people’s love of reading about bonnō (煩悩, kleshas), or the Buddhist concept of everyday desires.17 One Sazae san strip from just after the war features Wakame, Sazae’s pre-­teen sister, imitating Pan-­Pan Girls by wearing vividly colored lipstick, just as other children imitated Pan-­Pan Girls in their everyday make-­believe.18 Similarly, Pan-­Pan Girls in Hasegawa’s manga were always shown as a part of the everyday landscape of occupied Japan. In another Sazae san strip, a Pan-­Pan Girl was an acquaintance of Sazae and in Hasegawa’s autobiographical manga, a Pan-­Pan Girl was part of the crowd hanging out in a black market, walking a few steps behind Hasegawa.19 What set Pan-­Pan Girls apart from other ordinary people in Hasegawa’s everyday manga, however, was their distinctive appearance, as seen in other graphic arts. Pan-­Pan Girls’ distinctive features included bold make-­up, permed hairstyles, high heels, and American-­style clothing. Their postures are also distinct: smoking, sitting with legs open, speaking English (or Pan-­Pan English, or Pan-­ glish), and perhaps being physically larger than other Japanese, men included. Pan-­Pan Girls appear aloof because they are often looking up and glaring. In contrast, most Japanese women in the immediate post-­war period were drawn as being shabbily dressed in the typical wartime work trousers, carrying either food or a child on their back. Just as Hasegawa saw her manga as being about everyday desires, other Japanese graphic artists drew Pan-­Pan Girls specifically to express their political desires in a “democratized” Japan. Many cartoonists and illustrators, like other artists, had served in the war, and their work had been used in propaganda and/or censored by both the Japanese and US governments.20 Still, their Pan-­Pan Girl artwork projected destabilization and upheaval among Japanese, suggesting anti-­Japanese government sentiment. Moreover, Pan-­Pan Girls were often portrayed in the graphic arts as symbols of opposition to the American occupation, despite their association with Americans and American fashion. This political aspect of Pan-­Pan Girls became more prominent, as this section shows, especially after the “reverse course”—the incipient Anpo, or Security Treaty system—began in 1947, when many progressive occupation policies were halted in order to re-­create Japan as a strong US ally in the Cold War. Furthermore, Pan-­Pan Girls were almost always drawn wearing middle-­class American apparel, which represented not only Pan-­Pan Girls’ deviation from the Japanese patriarchal system but also the American Cold War domesticity ideology. Dressing in American-­style clothing was seen as a symbol of democratization, as evidence of Americans liberating Japanese women.21 A more recent study shows that occupation authorities promoted American-­style beauty and fashion—a form of cultural imperialism designed to make Japanese admire America as superior.22 Post-­colonial feminists have long argued that imitating colonizers’ fashion represents colonized people’s surrender to Eurocentric aesthetic ideas—proof that the mythical norms of Eurocentric aesthetics came to invade colonized people’s self-­consciousness.23 It is too reductionistic, however,

Sexual politics   67 to assume that the illustration of Pan-­Pan Girls is a simple representation of Americanization and Japanese submission to American looks. For one thing, under censorship rules prohibiting discussion or images of American GIs, drawing Pan-­Pan Girls in American-­style clothing could suggest that their customers were American GIs, which would contradict the idea of the occupation troops as a democratizing force.24 Moreover, Pan-­Pan Girls were represented in glamorous, fashion-­forward dresses, comparable to those of Blondie in the famous American comic strip, which was introduced in Japan in 1946 to promote American Cold War domesticity culture. Blondie and other American women depicted in contemporaneous graphic arts are housewives—Cold War America’s ideal women. US “liberation” policy pushed Japanese women to conform to that ideal.25 While Blondie was confined to kitchen, Pan-­Pan Girls were almost never shown at home. Prostitution itself is clearly a deviation from the ideals of domesticity. Thus, the imagery of prostitutes looking as glamorous and appealing as Blondie the dutiful housewife makes Pan-­Pan Girls subversive figures in both Japanese and American patriarchal Cold War orders. This imagery may have reflected a Japanese desire to be equal to Americans, but because the Cold War domesticity ideal confined “good” women to their kitchens, artists drew Pan-­Pan Girls as extrapatriarchal to the Cold War structure of both Japan and the United States and as subversive to the hypermasculine nature of the military occupied space. Therefore, by drawing Pan-­Pan Girls in paradoxical ways—looking like ideal American housewives, but outside the home and patriarchal sexual norms—graphic artists pointed out contradictions and injustices in the workshop of democracy and challenged both the American occupation and the Japanese government. One example of this subversive art is a 1948 illustration by Ono Saseo (1905–1954), well known for moga (modern girls) illustrations on the cover of the satirical magazine Tokyo Puck, which criticized the Japanese government’s irresponsibility after the war (Figure 4.2). Ono’s 1948 illustration accompanied a piece of reportage, “A Night at Ueno,” in the magazine Gekkan Yomiuri (Monthly Yomiuri). The piece was by the novelist Ikeda Michiko (1910–2008), known for her Pan-­Pan novels. Located in downtown Tokyo, Ueno was destroyed by US air raids. Its still-­standing train station’s underpass became the hub of homeless persons, and after the war, prostitutes gathered there as well. The illustration depicts numerous homeless persons sitting or lying beneath the underpass. The tone of the illustration is depressing, as most of the figures are looking down, which suggests the people’s devastation and sense of loss. Two women in the lower right corner are Pan-­Pan Girls who seem discontent; they are the only figures with noticeable facial expressions. One of them is looking up, glaring fiercely at the audience of readers. They are sitting, legs spread, on the ground and smoking. Their body size is at least three times larger than that of other homeless Japanese. As in the case of Endō’s illustration, Pan-­Pan Girls are still portrayed as larger than other Japanese in a similar social class, indicating more power. Their postures—smoking, sitting on the ground, legs open—are very masculine. Ono’s Pan-­Pan Girls are nothing like the Meiji-­era (1868–1912)

68   Michiko Takeuchi

Figure 4.2 Ono Saseo, 1948. Illustration from Ikeda Michiko, “Yoru no Ueno: Sakka no shakai tanbō” Gekkan Yomiuri 6, no. 11 (1948): 22–3. Source: Courtesy of Ono Kōsei. From the Gordon W. Prange Collection, University of Maryland Libraries.

Sexual politics   69 invented concept of “traditional” Japanese women, who were “good wives and wise mothers.” That assigned gender role was the foundation of modern Japanese patriarchal empire building.26 Ono’s Pan-­Pan Girls challenge the Japanese empire by subverting the social, economic, political, cultural, and moral relationship between women and men. Pan-­Pan Girls’ masculine postures and fierce expressions in Ono’s illustration represent a resistance to the Japanese imperial government that sent people into war and, after serving their country, into homelessness. Ono’s illustration of homeless Pan-­Pan Girls further contests American cultural superiority over Japan, as well as Soviet communism in the Cold War. Toward the end of World War Two, the United States rejected the notion of a USA–Soviet joint occupation of Japan and projected itself as the protector of Japan against the threat of Soviet communism.27 The politics of domesticity then became key not only to making Americans the sole authority in Japan but to proclaiming their cultural superiority over Soviet communism by making “home” the safest place.28 In fact, American occupiers promoted the image of a happy American housewife in a modern kitchen as proof that American life was better than that of Japanese and Soviets, thanks to American capitalism and democracy. While Americans promoted images of their affluent lives, they censored in the Japanese media anything that was “overplaying starvation,” hoping to prevent a communist revolution in Japan, where an estimated 9 million were homeless.29 In Ono’s illustration, however, no one has a home, even though American occupiers were supposedly bringing the democracy and capitalism that offer a safe home and the good life. And despite censorship, Ono drew the homeless whose homes were actually destroyed by Americans. They were survivors of the American air raid of March 10, 1945, which in one night caused an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths and left homeless a million individuals, who now would likely die of starvation. Although the Japanese government had created the circumstances that led to starvation in the first place, Ono’s images nevertheless contest America’s self-­proclaimed role as “rescuer” of Japan from Soviet communism. And because “home” was an important element of American Cold War cultural politics, Ono’s drawing of homeless prostitutes catering to GIs in “democratized” Japan is a significant challenge to the American claim of superiority over the Japanese and Soviet systems. The most prominent example of Pan-­Pan Girl graphic art being used for Cold War political contestation was an illustration by Matsushita Ichio (1910–1990), which challenges the “reverse course” (Figure 4.3). Matsushita was one of the pioneers of children’s cartoons and a disciple of Kitazawa Rakuten (1876–1955), a pioneer of modern (political) cartoons. In March 1948, Matsushita’s illustration of a Pan-­Pan Girl was featured on the cover of Satadei Nyūsu (Saturday news). The illustration contrasts a Pan-­Pan Girl with the prime minister, Ashida Hitoshi (1887–1959), whose name appears on a sign in the middle of the illustration. One of the most influential Marxist historians, Inoue Kiyoshi has written that the Ashida cabinet (March–October 1948) was called the Pan-­Pan naikaku (Pan-­Pan cabinet) because its members favored the US-­led remilitarization

70   Michiko Takeuchi

Figure 4.3 Matsushita Ichio, cover of Satadei Nyūsu 2, no. 10, no. 12 (1948). Source: Courtesy of Matsushita Keiichirō. From the Gordon W. Prange Collection, University of Maryland Libraries.

Sexual politics   71 p­ olicies in Japan. With the reverse course under way in 1947, the original US occupation policies had clearly shifted to rebuild Japan into an economically and militarily strong ally of the United States, even though Americans had written Article 9 of Japan’s constitution to renounce its right to maintain armed forces. The nickname Pan-­Pan naikaku thus mocked Japanese leaders for being at America’s beck and call. Despite such metaphorical use of the term “Pan-­Pan,” the Pan-­Pan Girl in Matsushita’s illustration does not look as submissive as the Ashida cabinet. Once again, she has a masculine posture of smoking, emphasizing her subversiveness. She is clearly discontent, crossing her arms and glaring at the sky or the name Ashida. By drawing Pan-­Pan Girls in symbolic opposition to the Ashida cabinet, the illustration criticizes the remilitarization policies of the Japanese government, whose previous militarism had led women into prostitution. Matsushita’s depiction of the Pan-­Pan Girl as the reverse course was under way also made it clear that the workshop of democracy was a mere façade, just as the US forces’ democratizing was a sham policy, proclaimed despite continued sexual exploitation of Japanese women. Under the censorship enforced by the American military, which had both the technological capability and cavalier mindset to drop incendiary and atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, drawing Pan-­Pan Girls was one of the few ways for Japanese to publicly criticize the hypocrisy of the occupation’s workshop of democracy. Also subject to such criticism from those graphic arts was the official claim to having been quickly democratized; such claims seemed absurd coming from a government that had so recently led Japanese and other Asians into war. Pan-­Pan Girls in the graphic arts of occupied Japan, with their subversive bodies, pointed out such contradictions and represented Japanese people’s sense of injustice in “democratized” Japan. 30

Pan-­Pan Girls advocating anti-­Anpo and anti-­Vietnam views Nakazawa Keiji, who survived the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and whose autobiographical comic Barefoot Gen (1973–1985) became one of the most widely read comics, remarked: My anger toward nuclear bombs was revived with the Vietnam War and the 1970 [second] renewal of the Anpo (Security Treaty) with the United States. I was also in anguish over the effect of nuclear bombs [radiation] on my daughter.31  As in the United States, by the mid-­1960s, the reports of American military actions victimizing Vietnamese civilians had incited Japanese to voice their anti-­ war views. Those news reports also led several groups, such as anti-­Anpo activists, students, women, and labor unionists, to merge into a massive anti-­Vietnam War movement. Miyazaki Manabu (1945–), a former student activist and writer, recollected that he and others were furious, especially after learning that the experimental use of incendiary bombs (including napalm-­based M69) in the US

72   Michiko Takeuchi air raids in Japan had been part of an effort to develop “napalm B,” which came to symbolize the atrocities in the Vietnam War.32 These wartime and post-­war generations sympathized with Vietnamese people’s experience and recalled their own and their families’ wartime suffering, leading them to proclaim that war cannot be justified as a rescue mission or democratizing effort. Some criticized Nakazawa’s anti-­war cartoons and other anti-­war activists for portraying Japanese as victims and ignoring Japan’s own aggression in Asia. However, the young activists of the 1960s and 1970s did acknowledge that Japan was an agent of imperialism in Asia and called for Japan to renounce further aggression. Feminists in particular pointed accusingly to Japan’s imperial past, reminding others how Japanese imperial troops had raped and murdered thousands of other Asians during the war.33 Therefore, Japanese activists were also furious at the Japanese government for its willingness to cooperate in this atrocious new war by renewing the US– Japan Security Treaty in 1960 and 1970. With the treaty, as in the case of the Korean War, Japan had agreed to become a strategic base and military factory for America’s war efforts in Vietnam. And despite Japan’s economic boom associated with being an American ally in these two wars, activists viewed US corporations as enabling Japan to practice a new form of imperialism in Asia, because the Japanese government was once again taking part in military actions against other Asians.34 When the myth of American exceptionalism—that the United States is unique because of its tradition of democracy and liberty—was collapsing, especially after reports of the My Lai Massacre (1968) aired in the United States, Japanese cartoonists responded by challenging that myth. They illustrated American air raids and atomic bombs that targeted civilians rather than soldiers. By presenting their experiences in World War Two and the American occupation, cartoonists also challenged the American notions of a “just war” and a “good occupation” that would save the Vietnamese from the Soviets. Two of the most renowned cartoonists, Nakazawa and his inspiration, Tezuka Osamu, challenged the myth of American exceptionalism, dashed by US military actions in Vietnam, as well as the Japanese government’s cooperation in the war, in their (semi-)autobiographical cartoons. Their political commentary against the Security Treaty and Vietnam War was manifest in their representation of Pan-­Pan Girls. In a 1969 entry in his “black” manga series, “Kuroi hato no mure ni” (“In a flock of black pigeons”), Nakazawa expressed his firm opposition to the Security Treaty through a Pan-­Pan Girl heroine, Tomoko, an atomic bomb survivor with half of her face burned. The story focuses on her and her brother, Yūji, who were orphaned when their parents were killed by the blast on August 6, 1945. Twenty­four years later, the brother, in order to survive, had become a pimp and Tomoko had become a prostitute for Japanese men.35 However, it is actually a con game, because once the customers pay Yūji, Tomoko, beautiful and glamorous, reveals the burned part of her face and the horrified customers run away. Nakazawa illustrates the horror of atomic bombs and the continued injustice their victims faced through Tomoko’s grotesquely drawn face—just like Nakazawa’s friend’s

Sexual politics   73 and Yūji’s radiation-­affected skull, which melted when he was cremated—just like Nakazawa’s mother’s. As these graphic artworks show, the plot presents an anti-­nuclear bomb message, conveyed when Yūji is shown suffering from radiation effects and having been called a “specimen”—a mere research sample—by the US Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, established in 1946 in Hiroshima and at Japanese national university hospitals. Tomoko also agonized over the 1963 Tokyo District Court’s so-­called “Atomic Bomb Decision,” three years after the first renewal of the Security Treaty, making victims unable to claim reparations from the US government. Nakazawa’s main goal for this anti-­nuclear manga was to stop the second renewal of the Security Treaty. In the comic, Tomoko harshly criticizes the Japanese government for peko peko suru (sucking up) to the US government, which had dropped atomic bombs that killed her family and caused her suffering. At the end of the story, Tomoko once again stands on the street, calling to potential customers. When a Japanese man refuses and calls her “Pan-­suke” (a derogatory term for Pan-­Pan Girls, equivalent to “whore”), Tomoko yells back, “Bakayaro! Inpo!” (Idiot! [equivalent to “Fuck you!”] Impotent!). Similarly, an award-­ winning short novel, American Hijiki (1967), written by a Kobe air raid survivor, Nosaka Akiyuki (1930–2015), criticized the Japanese government’s incompetence in the face of US demands—the Security Treaty—via an illustration of a Japanese man’s penis unable to “stand up” in front of an American man in a sex show. Nakazawa, through the lens of a Pan-­Pan Girl atomic survivor, criticized the impotence or the incapability of the Japanese government to refuse the US Security Treaty system. Known as the “god of manga,” Tezuka Osamu also voiced his discontent with the notion of American exceptionalism by exposing the myth of the United States as a democratizing force in his 1975 autobiographical manga Sukippara no Burūsu (Empty stomach blues). The story revolves around Tezuka’s relentless post-­war hunger. Tezuka draws cartoons in order to distract himself from hunger. A black soldier walks by and asks Tezuka to draw his portrait and a pin-­up of a black woman, and in return he provides Tezuka with food. The black soldier is described as cheerful, the friendliest of the Americans. Then, three white GIs walk by and harass the black soldier. When Tezuka tries to stop a white GI from stealing the drawing he gave to the black soldier, the white GI beats him up (Figure 4.4, left panel). In the narration Tezuka says,  The occupation troops’ violence [against Japanese civilians] was cruel. Here and there, [civilians] got beaten up and murdered, and girls were raped. Still, American GIs had food and money, so in order to survive, some women came at GIs’ beck and call.36  Tezuka illustrated the biggest injustice in the workshop of democracy: American criminals were not prosecuted for crimes; they had extraterritoriality, or immunity, in Japan. Similarly, many children in base towns, as cited earlier, expressed their devastation about parents and siblings being casually murdered

74   Michiko Takeuchi

Figure 4.4 Tezuka Osamu, “Sukippara no burūsu” (1975). Source: Courtesy of © Tezuka Productions. Japanese translation: “Hey, what are you doing with the kid?”

and/or raped by American GIs.37 Although Tezuka was a tall man for his generation (approximately 170 centimeters, or 5 feet, 7 inches), by depicting a white GI three times larger Tezuka illustrated American military men’s absolute rule over Japanese civilians—a censored topic—during the occupation, which contradicted the notion of the occupation as a democratizing effort. In the same story, Tezuka presents Pan-­Pan Girls to show the dynamic of power in the occupation that highlights the hypocrisy of American claims to be the leader of free world (Figure 4.4, right panel). In this image, three white GIs, with looming, oversized bodies, are with two Pan-­Pan Girls. They call a black soldier “Negro” in a demeaning manner. The previously cheerful black soldier becomes frightened and silent. White American GIs assumed extraconstitutional power over not only occupied Japanese but also segregated people of color (and American women). And with that power, GIs sexually exploited lower-­class impoverished Japanese women, using them as prostitutes, not treating them as equal partners. The image of evil-­looking white GIs challenges the popularly constructed image of friendly American occupiers (and submissive Japanese) that supposedly made the occupation successful. This one scene with Pan-­Pan Girls sheds light on many contradictions that existed in the American claim to be the leader of the free world conducting a workshop of democracy in Japan. Tezuka’s illustration was a powerful reminder of the segregated nature of the American military. Tezuka’s rendering of Pan-­Pan Girls, however, is strikingly different from other artists’ work. His images show Japanese men’s patriarchal contestation over prostituted bodies in a challenge to American exceptionalism. Even though

Sexual politics   75 Pan-­Pan Girls were discriminated against and exploited, most post-­war artists depicted Pan-­Pan Girls as strong and/or attractive figures. Tezuka’s Pan-­Pan Girls, however, are clownish and clinging to the GIs. During the occupation, some people even called Pan-­Pan Girls burasagari (which means hanging from GIs), thus ridiculing their dependency on GIs.38 In addition, Tezuka’s rendering of African Americans is demeaning, as it emphasizes the nose and lips, suggesting that they are uncivilized and not equal to white Americans or even occupied Japanese.39 Tezuka’s illustration, along with exposing American racism, sexism, and class exploitation, also demonstrated Japanese racism, sexism, and class segregation in the rendering of Pan-­Pan Girls. Nevertheless, challenging the rhetoric about the “successful” American occupation by exposing the hypocrisy in the workshop of democracy (including continuing Japanese imperialistic attitudes toward other people of color) was significant in contesting the ongoing Vietnam War. Such a challenge could bring attention to America’s rehashed claims of a “just war” and “good occupation” in Vietnam, of “saving” and “protecting” the Vietnamese. Nakazawa’s and Tezuka’s manga were not a simple recollection of their experiences; their sexual politics in graphic arts voiced opposition to the Vietnam War, including the Japanese government’s involvement through the Security Treaty system.

Pan-­Pan Girls sneering at the Article 9 revision In 2006, Abe Shinzō (1954–), who was chief cabinet secretary, published a best-­ selling book, Utsukushii kuni e (Toward a beautiful country). Abe claimed that the right of belligerency is a “natural right” of any nation.40 When Abe became a prime minister in the same year, he called for a “break away from the postwar regime,” through the constitutional revision of Article 9, which renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation. Although the American occupiers wrote Japan’s constitution of 1947, many Japanese who were weary of war had enthusiastically supported Article 9. Activists and intellectuals opposed Abe’s revision proposal, most notably Kyū-jō no kai (Article 9 Association), a group of former anti-­Anpo and anti-­Vietnam activists. Kyū-jō no kai was established in 2004 in reaction to the government dispatching Self-­Defense Forces (SDF ) to Iraq, a conflict zone, to assist US forces there—a violation of Article 9. Those activists also knew that the US government had pushed Japan to increase its military role since the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991.41 Indeed, Prime Minister Abe’s cabinet, by attempting to revise Article 9, hopes to strengthen the Security Treaty system by integrating Japan’s “real” military into American forces stationed in Japan. The intensifying debate over Article 9 in the mid-­2000s is a direct response to Japan’s uncertain future in the post-­Cold War era, as well as a decade-­long economic recession. The end of the Cold War nullified the American argument that the presence of American troops, through the Security Treaty, was protecting Japan from attack by the Soviet Union.42 The early twenty-­first century also witnessed shifting power in northeast Asia and new perceived threats of China’s growing economy and military might, territorial disputes with South Korea, and

76   Michiko Takeuchi missile threats from North Korea. All of these elements led Japanese to rethink revising Article 9 and the issue of whether Japan should be able to exercise the right of belligerency to pre-­empt attacks on Japan. Revising Article 9 would also mean dealing with Japan’s past aggression and unresolved war responsibility. Therefore, both anti- and pro-­revision forces papered over the historical memory of World War Two. Anti-­revision forces claimed that changing Article 9 might rekindle Japan’s aggressive imperialism. Pro-­revision forces responded by affirming Japan’s twentieth-­century military campaign as a just war. The most prominent example of historical revisionism in the early twenty-­first century occurred when Gen. Tamogami Toshio (1948–), of Japan’s Air SDF, wrote an article in 2008 denying that the second Sino-­Japanese War (1937–1945) was a war of aggression.43 Manga artists also joined in the debate over Article 9 and historical memory. The twenty-­first century saw the rise of manga like Fujiwara Satoshi’s Raijingusan (Rising Sun) that emphasized more heroic roles and humane aspects of the Japanese imperial military and the SDF. Yet, anti-­war manga also persist. An important shift was that ladies’ comics or women’s erotic comics became one of the major platforms of contestation over war memory. Starting in 2007, Bunka sha’s monthly series Manga gurimu dōwa (Comic Grimm Fairy Tales) has published Onna no sensō ai-­shi (Women’s Sad Story of the War) special issues. Those issues have featured women’s experiences as central to the war and occupation by highlighting the sexual politics of war, including rape, comfort women, and of course Pan-­Pan Girls.44 Whether anti- or pro-­revision (or undecided), as described here, graphic artists expressed their contested views on the Article 9 revision through the re-­signification of the most intensive period of confusion and fear—World War Two and the American occupation. This section examines such contestations, which once again were summed up in a graphic expression of sexual politics: Pan-­Pan Girls of US-­occupied Japan. The connection between debates over Article 9 and historical memory was reflected in a 2005 special edition of Biggu Komikku Konpakuto (Big Comic Compact), a bimonthly cartoon magazine for men.45 The edition included three reprints of 1970s cartoons of Saitō Takao (1936–), best known as the creator of the popular long-­running comic Gorugo 13 (Golgo 13, 1968–). Golgo 13 is the world’s top-­rated sniper and played a key role in Cold War politics. This edition also featured Sabaibaru (Survival, originally published in 1977), a story about a young man, Akio, surviving on a desert island. The story is a reminiscence of Japanese wartime and post-­war starvation, homelessness, and the sense of separation. Natural disasters such as the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed Akio’s family and home metaphorically symbolize American air raids; the magazine editors were well aware of these historical representations. This 1977 cartoon was re-­signified by an article following it that featured a guide for survival under foreign occupation; it was titled “Survival Now for Ordinary Japanese: Resist or Cater to the Enemy?”46 The article, edited by Sugimori Masatake (1959–), a well-­known manga critic, equated natural disasters with foreign occupation as extenuating circumstances. It also suggested to ordinary Japanese

Sexual politics   77 readers the possibility of Japan being downtrodden by foreign troops, reflecting the unstable northeast Asian political climate of the time. Most significantly, the article connected the 1970s recollections of wartime and post-­war experiences to contemporary debates on Article 9 and how Japan could survive in the post-­Cold War era. An illustration by Oriko (c.2004) accompanying the article cited above is labeled, “Takoku no shihaika de ikinuku ni wa?” (“How do We Survive Under the Foreign Country’s Domination?”), and, like other graphic arts from previous decades, it does not portray occupation as a democratizing mission (Figure 4.5). The drawing implies fear of foreign occupation, with fear symbolized by a

Figure 4.5 Oriko, “Takoku no shihaika de ikinuku niwa?” (c.2004). Source: Courtesy of Shogakukan. Featured in Masatake Sugimori, “Heibon na Nihonjin no tame no sabaibaru NOW,” 2005.

78   Michiko Takeuchi camouflaged airplane between the buildings, like a US plane conducting an air raid. Two large-­sized white men are shown in military uniforms, indicating that they are occupiers. They have a malicious look, suggesting that they are up to no good. A soldier with a pipe resembles the iconic image of Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964). When he first landed in Japan in 1945, MacArthur struck a pose with his pipe—an image engraved into Japanese memory of the occupation, as is revealed in this illustration. A Japanese woman has her arms around the American soldier. The short, tight dress indicates that she is a prostitute. And as in Endō’s illustration (see Figure 4.1), not only are GIs bigger than Japanese men, thus symbolizing GIs’ dominating power, but so is the Japanese woman. She is surviving better than Japanese men by selling her body to the dominating forces. Similar to other graphic arts addressing sexual politics in the occupied space, Oriko’s illustration challenges the popular historical discourse of the workshop of democracy in Japan. What stands out in Oriko’s illustration, compared to graphic arts of previous decades, such as Endō’s and Tezuka’s, is the image of submissive Japanese men in suits asking for chocolates, a representation of Japanese officials still conforming to the Security Treaty system. That the two Japanese men are in suits implies that they are politicians or businessmen. They each wear a sign hung from the neck: “Give Me Chocolate.” That was the first English phrase many starving children of the occupation learned within days of Americans landing.47 Tezuka’s “Sukkipara no burūsu,” cited earlier, also depicts children chasing a GI and asking for chocolate, something Tezuka and other grown-­ups were too embarrassed to do.48 But in Oriko’s illustration, those who are asking for chocolates are adults. And as opposed to Endō’s description of a homeless veteran, those two Japanese men in Oriko’s drawing are well dressed, which indicates their financially well-­off status. While Endō’s veteran hangs a donation box from his neck, implying that he is living on the mercy of others, whether Japanese or American, Oriko’s Japanese men have signs in English, directly appealing to the American conquerors. Despite their well-­off status, those two Japanese men are begging for chocolates and candies. And whereas Endō depicts a Japanese woman who focuses all her attention on an American man, Oriko shows Japanese men who have their eyes focused on the treats and the American handing them out. These two men represent Japanese male authorities, who have placed themselves under the wing of the dominating force, representing the Security Treaty system. Oriko’s illustration shows Japanese politicians’ and businessmen’s willing subordination to the United States for political, economic, diplomatic, and military benefits. By conforming to the American conquerors’ Security Treaty terms, Japanese male authorities have received their chocolates: access to the international capitalist market, “allied” status with Japan’s formerly colonized areas now occupied by the United States, and oil from the Middle East, to name few. Yet, the blank eyes of the Japanese and Americans suggest that they are not entirely trusting of one another, indicating that their alliance is artificial.

Sexual politics   79 Through the image of the Pan-­Pan Girl, drawn shortly after the SDF entered the conflict zone for the first time in its fifty-­year history, Oriko derides the Japanese officials for so easily violating Article 9 in order to receive their treats from the US government. As opposed to Endō’s Pan-­Pan Girl, with her almost clueless look, Oriko’s Pan-­Pan Girl is chuckling. This shows that she knows what she is doing to survive. She is an agent, not “taken away by the conquerors”—a common phrase in the patriarchal discourse of sexuality in the occupied space. Moreover, the Pan-­Pan Girl is the only one who is looking at the entire scene: the post-­war interaction between the Japanese officials and the Americans. By making the Pan-­Pan Girl a spectator, the illustration is ridiculing Japanese officials who have not even challenged the stationing of US troops in Japan, which led to the Pan-­Pan Girls phenomenon. The Pan-­Pan Girl knows the pattern of Japan’s post-­war development. And as a pattern, Japan’s increased SDF overseas activities in the post-­Cold War era were aimed at strengthening the Security Treaty, thus keeping Japan in a subordinate position because of the benefits Japan receives, as Oriko suggests. Although the illustration is humorous, the dark foreground shadows represent fear of Japan’s renewed sense of militarism: the shadows are a man with helmet, symbolizing the military, and a man with a top hat like those worn by Japan’s modern politicians, symbolizing Japan’s imperial politics, diplomacy, and capitalism. The camouflaged airplane could also represent Japan’s militarism: the SDF on the way to Iraq. Perhaps the Pan-­ Pan Girl is sneering at Japanese officials who are so willingly violating Article 9 to accommodate American demands. Fears related to Article 9 revision and the absurdity of Abe’s “break away from the postwar regime” are also reflected in a recent popular shōjo manga or girls comics, Sakamichi no Apollon (Kids on the Slope, 2007–2012) by Kodama Yuki, through Pan-­Pan Girls’ appearance, which harkens back to the occupation. Set in 1966, in the US Navy town of Sasebo, one of the protagonists, Sentarō—a first-­year high schooler fathered by an American GI and abandoned by his Japanese mother when he was a baby—suffers over the meanings of his origins. As Kodama was born and raised in Sasebo, her manga reminds us that for people who live in US base towns, the American military occupation is ongoing. Another protagonist, Kaoru, is from Yokosuka, another US Navy town. It suggests the vast network of Americans stationed in Japan. By specifically setting the narrative in 1966, during the Vietnam War, Kodama also implies how Sasebo and its people were affected by the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In the story, Sentarō turns sixteen, suggesting that he was born in 1950, at the beginning of the Korean War, when the number of US troops stationed in Japan significantly increased. Sasebo was a key strategic base for both wars. In such a setting, Kodama’s description of Pan-­Pan Girls of the 1960s, drawn and published at the time of heightened debates over Article 9, is striking in the sense that they closely resemble the distinctive look of the occupation period, with bold lipstick, high heels, and American fashions. It is not a mere copy of occupation styles; rather, the sameness of Pan-­Pan Girls represents the continuing issues surrounding the Security Treaty, such as extraterritoriality and war responsibility. The

80   Michiko Takeuchi undisclosed mother of Sentarō suggests that she may have been a Pan-­Pan Girl or even a victim of rape, who in many such cases had to bear the trauma silently because of American extraterritoriality. Sentarō, forgotten by the US military and abandoned and bullied by the Japanese, represents the victims of unresolved war responsibility for World War Two atrocities on both sides, precisely because of the Security Treaty. The unchanged representation of Pan-­Pan Girls shows that Abe’s call to “break away from the postwar regime” is disingenuous, as Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party continue to welcome US troops with extraterritoriality— the state-­sanctioned unequal relationship between American servicemen and Japanese civilians in Japan, which has not changed since August 1945.

Conclusion Graphic art depictions of glamorous Pan-­Pan Girls represented more than defeated, impoverished Japanese admiring these women’s wealth and fashion; they also reveal political contestation over the post-­war Japan–USA bilateral relationship that led to the occupation, the Security Treaty system including Japan’s role in the Vietnam War, and the ongoing debates over Article 9. The contested bodies of Pan-­Pan Girls therefore were not merely symbolic of the defeat and American domination of Japan, as previous scholarship has claimed. Through the sexual politics of Pan-­Pan Girls in graphic arts, Japanese aimed at more than subversion of the social norm; they also sought to transform the post-­ war Japan–USA relationship, especially the Security Treaty system. Over the past seventy years, since the beginning of occupation in 1945, graphic and manga artists have continued to express their political views through their renderings of Pan-­Pan Girls. The sexual politics represented in both old and new graphic arts imagery of Pan-­Pan Girls challenges the larger notion of American exceptionalism and democracy, as well as the idea that Japan, by revising Article 9, would be free to use its military in the “democratic” fashion so chillingly exemplified by the United States.

Notes   1 Quoted in Shimizu Ikutarō, Miyahara Seiichi, and Ueda Shōzaburō, Kichi no ko: Kono shinjitsu o dō kangaetara yoika (Tokyo: Kōbunshakan, 1953), 157.   2 Keio Gijuku Daigaku Shakai Jigyō Kenkyūkai, “Gaishō to kodomo tachi: Tokuni kichi Yokosuka-­shi no genjō bunseki,” unpublished work archived at Yokosuka City Library, Yokosuka, Japan (1953), 25–27.   3 Japanese magazines from the US occupation period are archived at the Gordon W. Prange Collection, University of Maryland. For a further exploration of US military prostitution in occupied Japan, see Michiko Takeuchi, “ ‘Pan-­Pan Girls’ Performing and Resisting Neocolonialism(s) in the Pacific Theater: US Military Prostitution in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952,” in Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon (Eds.), Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 78–108.   4 John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).

Sexual politics   81   5 Timon Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999); and Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).   6 John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999), 135.   7 Ibid.   8 For details, see Mire Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008); Sarah Kovner, Occupying Power: Sex Workersand Servicemen in Postwar Japan (Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 2012); and Robert Kramm, Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017).   9 For an examination of the “workshop of democracy,” see Takeuchi, “ ‘Pan-­Pan Girls’ Performing and Resisting Neocolonialism(s) in the Pacific Theater,” 78, 94–95, and 100–103. 10 See, for example, Jo Doezama, “Forced to Choose: Beyond the Voluntary v. Forced Prostitution Dichotomy,” in Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (Eds.), Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition. New York: Routledge, 1998), 41–42. 11 Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 73. 12 Kathryn Norberg, “Prostitutes,” in Natalie Davis and Arlette Farge (Eds.), Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Vol. 3 of A History of Women (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 495. 13 Wendy Chapkis, Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor (New York: Routledge, 1997), 29–30. 14 Those famous artists included Ikuzawa Rō (1906–1984), a prominent Western-­style painter, and Shiratori Eisetsu (1912–2007), a very prestigious Japanese-­style painter. 15 Susan Napier, Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 44. Publishing flourished during the occupation period, despite the paper shortage and censorship. The term kasutori is derived from kasutori shōchū, a poor-­quality intoxicating liquor, which was said to knock down the drinker by the third glass. Similarly, most kasutori magazines (often focused on sexuality) were made with poor-­ quality pulp papers and rarely endured beyond the third issue. John Dower states that kasutori culture was a cult of degeneracy and nihilism and that kasutori magazines captured the mordant humor of that culture; see Dower, Embracing Defeat, 148. 16 Sazae’s family is an upper-­middle-class family of the 1940s, with the father and husband holding university degrees, and Sazae and her mother are housewives. 17 Hasegawa Machiko, Sazae san uchiake banashi (Tokyo: Shimaisha, 1979), 91. 18 Hasegawa Machiko, The Wonderful World of Sazae san, Vol. 3, translated by Jules Young (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1997), 128. See also Dower, Embracing Defeat, 111.  19 Hasegawa Machiko, Hasegawa Machiko zenzhu, Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun, 1997), 86; Hasegawa, Sazae san uchiake banashi, 41. 20 For example, see Rinjirō Sodei, ‘The Double Conversion of a Cartoonist: The Case of Katō Esturō,” in Marline J. Mayo and J. Thomas Rimer with H. Eleanor Kerkham (Eds.), War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia 1920–1960 (Hawaii, HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2001), 235–236. 21 Mark McLelland, “ ‘Kissing Is a Symbol of Democracy!’ Dating, Democracy, and Romance in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19(3) (2010), 519. 22 Malia McAndrew, “Beauty, Soft Power, and the Politics of Womanhood during the US Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952,” Journal of Women’s History 26(4) (2014), 85–86. 

82   Michiko Takeuchi 23 Ella Shohat, ‘Introduction,’ in Ella Shohat (Ed.), Talking Visions in Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1998), 27. 24 Michael Molaskey has also noted the absence of GI customers in “Pan-­Pan novels” due to censorship, see Molaskey, “Kaisetsu,” 258. 25 Tsuchiya Yuka, Shinbei Nihon no kōchiku (Tokyo: Akatsuki Shoten, 2009), 217–219. 26 For discussions on “good wives and wise mothers” (良妻賢母 ryōsai kenbo) and imperialism, see Kathleen Uno, “Womanhood, War, and Empire: Transmutations of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ before 1931,” in Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (Eds.), Gendering Modern Japanese History. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 493–519. 27 Yukiko Koshiro, “Eurasian Eclipse: Japan’s End Game in World War II,” American Historical Review 109(2) (2004), 442. 28 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 93; and Michiko Takeuchi, “Cold War Manifest Domesticity: The ‘Kitchen Debate’ and Single American Occupationnaire Women in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952,” U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal 50 (2016), 13. 29 Takeuchi, “Cold War Manifest Domesticity,” 11–12. 30 Inoue Kiyoshi, Gendai Nihon josei-­shi (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1962), 77. 31 Nakazawa Keiji, “ ‘Ikite’: Manga Hadashi no Gen no sakusha Nakazawa Keiji san 11 genbaku manga,” interview with Hiroshima Peace Media Center, 2012. 32 Miyazaki Manabu and Suzuki Ikuo, “Kaisetsu taidan,” in Manga ga kataru sensō: shōdo no chinkonka, edited by Haruyuki Nakano (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2013), 476. 33 A group of feminists, Onna tachi no Ima o Tou Kai (Society for Questioning Women’s Present), led by the late historian Kanō Mikiyo, had published Jūgo-shi Nōto [Homefront Notes] between 1977 and 1996 to reflect upon Japanese women’s imperialism and their war responsibility. See Onna tachi no Ima o Tou Kai, Chōsen sensō: Gyaku kōsu no onna tachi, sengo-­shi nōto sengo-­hen (Tokyo: Izara shobō, 1986), 13. 34 Tsurumi Shunsuke, Manga no sengo shisō-shi (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 1973), 57. 35 During the occupation, prostitutes were generally called Pan-­Pan. The term later came to refer specifically to prostitutes for GIs. 36 Tezuka, “Sukippara no burūsu,” 165. 37 Children’s heartbreaking accounts are included throughout Shimizu, Miyahara, and Ueda, Kichi no ko. 38 Fujiwara Akira, Yokosuka dobuita monogatari (Tokyo: Gendai shoten, 1991), 67. 39 Tezuka Productions does acknowledge and address such issues. For a discussion of Tezuka’s representation of African Americans, see John G. Russell, “Manga to anime ni egakareta kokujin-­zō,” in Nihonjin no kokujin-­kan: Mondai wa ‘Chibikuro Sanbo’ dake dewa nai (Tokyo: Shinhyōron, 1991), 86–89. 40 Abe Shinzō, Utsukushii kuni e (Tokyo: Bunshun Web Bunko, 2006), 233–237. 41 Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 334. 42 Ibid., 333. 43 Tanogami Toshio, “Nihon wa shinryaku kokka de atta noka” (2008), 1–2. 44 Onna no sensō ai-­shi (女の戦争哀史) special issues are published irregularly. 45 Compact version is currently discontinued. 46 Sugimori Masatake, “Heibon na Nihonjin no tame no sabaibaru NOW: caution final regisutansu ka? teki ni geigō ka?,” Biggu kommiku konpakuto no. 12 (2005), 151–154. 47 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 72. 48 Tezuka, “Sukkipara no burūsu,” 158–159.

Sexual politics   83

References Abe, Shinzō. 2006. Utsukushii kuni e [美しい国へ; Towards a Beautiful Country]. Tokyo: Bungeishunjū. Bell, Shannon. 1994. Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Chapkis, Wendy. 1997. Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor. New York: Routledge. Doezema, Jo. 1998. “Forced to Choose: Beyond the Voluntary v. Forced Prostitution Dichotomy.” In Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (Eds.), Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition. New York: Routledge, 34–50. Dower, John. 1986. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books. Dower, John. 1999. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: Norton. Fujiwara, Akira. 1991. Yokosuka dobuita monogatari [ヨコスカどぶ板物語; A Story of Yokosuka dobuita Street]. Tokyo: Gendai shoten. Gordon, Andrew. 2014. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 3rd edn. New York: Oxford University Press. Hasegawa, Machiko. 1979. Sazae san uchiake banashi [サザエさん打ち明け話; A Confidential Talk About Sazae San]. Tokyo: Shimaisha. Hasegawa, Machiko. 1997. Hasegawa Machiko zenzhu: Sazae san [長谷川町子全集： サザエさん; The Complete Works of Hasegawa Machiko: Sazae San]. Vol. 3. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun. Originally published in 1950 and 1951. Hasegawa, Machiko. 1997. The Wonderful World of Sazae san. Vol. 3. Translated by Jules Young. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Inoue, Kiyoshi. 1962. Gendai Nihon josei-­shi [現代日本女性史; Contemporary Japanese Women’s History]. Tokyo: San’ichi shobō. Keio Gijuku Daigaku Shakai Jigyō Kenkyūkai (1953) “Gaishō to kodomo tachi: Tokuni kichi Yokosuka-­shi no genjō bunseki” [街娼と子どもたち：とくに基地横須賀市の 現状分析; Streetwalkers and Children: An Analysis of the Present Condition, Especially in base town Yokosuka]. Unpublished work archived at Yokosuka City Library, Yokosuka, Japan. Kodama, Yuki. 2007–2012. Sakamichi no Apollon [坂道のアポロン; Kids on the Slope]. 9 vols. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Koikari, Mire. 2008. Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Koshiro, Yukiko. 2004. “Eurasian Eclipse: Japan’s End Game in World War II.” American Historical Review 109(2): 417–444. Kovner, Sarah. 2012. Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kramm, Robert. 2017. Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. McAndrew, Malia. 2014. “Beauty, Soft Power, and the Politics of Womanhood during the US Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952.” Journal of Women’s History 26(4): 83–107. McLelland, Mark. 2010. “ ‘Kissing Is a Symbol of Democracy!’ Dating, Democracy, and Romance in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19(3): 508–535. May, Elaine Tyler. 1988. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books.

84   Michiko Takeuchi Miyazaki, Manabu, and Ikuo Suzuki. 2013. “Kaisetsu taidan” [解説 対談; Commentary and Conversation]. In Haruyuki Nakano (Ed.), Manga ga kataru sensō: shōdo no chinkonka [漫画が語る戦争：焦土の鎮魂歌; Manga tells the War: Requiem for Scorched Earth]. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Molaskey, Michael. 2015. “Kaisetsu” [解説; “Commentary”]. In Michael Molaskey (Ed.), Gaishō: panpan & onrī [街娼：パンパン＆オンリー；Streetwalkers: Pan-­ Pan Girls and Only]. Tokyo: Kōseisha, 254–288. Nakazawa, Keiji. 2012. Interview with Hiroshima Peace Media Center. “ ‘Ikite’: Manga Hadashi no Gen no sakusha Nakazawa Keiji san 11 genbaku manga.” [『生きて』: 漫画「はだしのゲン」の作者 中沢啓治さん＜１１＞ 原爆漫画; “ ‘Survived’: The author of Barefoot Gen, Nakazawa Keiji, 11, Atomic Bomb Cartoon”], Hiroshima Peace Media Center. Online at: www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/?p=22103. Accessed February 28, 2018. Napier, Susan J. 1996. Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Norberg, Kathryn. 1993. “Prostitutes.” In Natalie Davis and Arlette Farge (Eds.), Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Vol. 3 of A History of Women. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 458–475. Nosaka, Akiyuki. 2018 (1967). Amerika Hijiki [American Hijiki]. English translation included in Jay Rubin (Ed.), The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. London: Penguin, 406–444. Onna tachi no Ima o Tou Kai [女たちの現在を問う会]. 1986. Chōsen sensō: Gyaku kōsu no onna tachi, sengo-­shi nōto sengo-­hen [朝鮮戦争・逆コースのなかの女たち 戦後史ノート 戦後編; The Korean War: Women Amidst the Reverse Course, Post-­ War History Notes, Post-­War Issue]. Tokyo: Izara shobō. Russell, John G. 1991. “Manga to anime ni egakareta kokujin-­zō” [マンガとアニメに描 かれた黒人像; “Representations of Blacks in Manga and Anime”]. In Nihonjin no kokujin-­kan: Mondai wa “Chibikuro Sanbo” dake dewa nai [日本人の黒人観: 問題 は「ちびくろサンボ」だけではない; Japanese Views of Blacks: Problems are Not Just “Little Black Sambo”]. Tokyo: Shinhyōron, 86–108. Screech, Timon. 1999. Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Shimizu Ikutarō, Seiichi Miyahara, and Shōzaburō Ueda. 1953. Kichi no ko: Kono shinjitsu o dō kangaetara yoika [基地の子: この事実をどう考えたらよいか; Children of Military Bases: How Shall We Think About this Truth?]. Tokyo: Kōbunshakan. Shohat, Ella. 1998. “Introduction.” In Ella Shohat (Ed.), Talking Visions in Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1–63. Silverberg, Miriam. 2006. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sodei, Rinjirō. 2001. “The Double Conversion of a Cartoonist: The Case of Katō Esturō.” In Marline J. Mayo and J. Thomas Rimer with H. Eleanor Kerkham (Eds.), War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia 1920–1960. Hawaii, HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 235–268. Sugimori, Masatake (Ed.). 2005. “Heibon na Nihonjin no tame no sabaibaru NOW: caution final ‘regisutansu ka? teki ni geigō ka?’ ” [平凡な日本人のためのサバイバ ル “Now: caution. final” ‘レジスタンスか？敵に迎合か？’; “Survival Now for Ordinary Japanese: Resist or Cater to the Enemy?”] Biggu kommiku konpakuto [ビッ グコミック コンパクト; Big Comic Compact] no. 12: 151–154.

Sexual politics   85 Takeuchi, Michiko. 2010. “ ‘Pan-­Pan Girls’ Performing and Resisting Neocolonialism(s) in the Pacific Theater: US Military Prostitution in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952.” In Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon (Eds.), Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 78–108. Takeuchi, Michiko. 2016. “Cold War Manifest Domesticity: The ‘Kitchen Debate’ and Single American Occupationnaire Women in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952.” U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal 50: 3–28. Tanogami, Toshio. 2008. “Nihon wa shinryaku kokka de atta noka” [日本は侵略国家で あったのか; “Was Japan an Aggressor Nation?”] Online at: http://ronbun.apa.co.jp/ images/pdf/2008jyusyou_saiyuusyu.pdf. Accessed February 15, 2018. Tezuka, Osamu. 1995. “Sukippara no burūsu” [すきっ腹のブルース; “An Empty Stomach’s Blues”]. In Tezuka Osamu meisakushū 1: Goddo fāzā no musuko [手塚治虫名 作. 集１: ゴッドファーザーの息子; Masterpieces of Tezuka Osamu 1: A Son of the Godfather]. Tokyo: Shueisha. Originally published in 1975, 151–182. Tsuchiya, Yuka. 2009. Shinbei Nihon no kōchiku: Amerika no tainichi jōhōseisaku to Nihon senryō [親米日本の構築：アメリカの対日情報政策と日本占領; Creating Pro-­American Japan: The United States Re-­Education and Re-­Orientation Policy for Occupied Japan]. Tokyo: Akatsukishoten. Tsurumi, Shunsuke. 1973. Manga no sengo shisō-shi [漫画の戦後思想史; A History of Post-­War Thoughts in Manga]. Tokyo: Bungeishunjū. Uno, Kathleen. 2005. “Womanhood, War, and Empire: Transmutations of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ before 1931.” In Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (Eds.), Gendering Modern Japanese History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 493–519.

5 NEETs versus nuns Visualizing the moral panic of Japanese conservatives Sean Patrick Webb

Introduction As a religious system, Christianity plays as little a role in Japanese popular media as it does in society at large—where Christians make up less than 2 percent of the population.1 As a repository of potent cultural symbols, however, Christianity has thrived as a widely deployed and broadly understood tool for commenting on Japan’s place in the world and the Japanese national sense of self. Christian people, institutions, and emblems abound in this context in anime, manga, and light novels as a way to alert readers and viewers to the often dangerous foreignness of a character or object. Though the subject of these representations, both in contemporary media and throughout history, is depicted as something absolutely Other to the rhetorically constructed authentic Japanese self, in actuality, Christianity has most often been deployed by political elites as a way to delegitimize those forces within society considered to be a threat to prosperity, stability, or cultural authenticity. Christianity has continued this politico-­rhetorical function in Japanese society since the collapse of the asset price bubble in the early 1990s, being reworked and redeployed as a cue to evoke historically conditioned fears about national integrity. Though Japanese conservatives have identified a variety of causes for the downturn in national fortunes since the late-­twentieth century, one common target of these anxieties is Japan’s post-­bubble generation. Political leaders and cultural commentators fear that some loss of self has occurred among a dwindling generation of Japanese youth that have been corrupted by the individualism and lethargy of other societies. While politicians address these fears with policy intended to inspire Japan’s youth, incentivize their reproduction, and punish their lack of ambition, visual media artists solve these problems narratively by pitting an idealized Japanese youth against Christianized versions of their own defects. The deployment of Christianity in this context allows conservative political fears about the decline of society to be expressed in ways that are culturally legible while remaining ostensibly more benign than direct assaults on Japan’s youth. Thus, the basic conservative cultural logic of Japan’s governing party penetrates far beyond overtly neo-­nationalist manga and into the culture more broadly. After considering the continuity between the history of Christianity

NEETs versus nuns   87 as a rhetorical device and its current use in media, three examples from very different genres of popular media demonstrate how the narrative encounter between Japanese youth and Christianity serves to reinforce a neoliberal cultural agenda.

Christianity and the historical politics of alterity The early history of Christianity in Japan is brief, dramatic, and of ultimately debatable historical consequence. Yet, it is precisely these characteristics that have made it a malleable raw material for constructing powerful political discourses throughout Japanese history. Immediately following the expulsion of Christian missionaries in 1635 and the ill-­fated Shimabara Rebellion (a tax revolt led by Christian peasants) in 1637, anti-­Christian laws and discourses emerged as an effective tool for establishing ideological unity and loyalty in the Tokugawa state. The fact that Christianity remained largely absent in Japan—expelled by law or crushed by state violence—made it all the more pliable as a ­“metaphysical foreigner,” a convenient foil against which to construct unity through alterity.2 In domestic policy, this discourse was deployed to ostracize threats to the social order—as a “discursive tool for delineating intellectual and political orthodoxy and heterodoxy” even when the targets were neither Christian nor even particularly religious—while in foreign policy anti-­Christian discourse became a way to stress the common Confucian civilization of China and Japan.3 When the Tokugawa system collapsed, the Meiji government already had reliable symbolic tools at its disposal with which to conceptualize enemies of the new nation-­building project. As Kiri Paramore notes, the state required “not an invention of tradition, but a redeployment of existent (and already engaged) political ideology.”4 One tool was Aizawa Seishisai’s New Theses, written in 1825 but only distributed in 1857 after the re-­introduction of Christianity. In his analysis of the principal threats facing Japan, Aizawa noted of the ascendency of “Western barbarians” that “Christianity is the sole key to their success” because “its main doctrines are simple to grasp and well-­contrived; they can easily deceive stupid commoners with it.”5 Precisely because it was so barbarously simple, Christianity forged together divided societies into single-­minded nations pliable in the hands of capable political leaders. In the words of Ōhara Sakingo, an older contemporary of Aizawa, these “customs allow popular unity and integration to be well established. High and low act as one … All of them—the sagacious and stupid … are united in striving to expand their territory.”6 For both thinkers, Christianity shone a light on vulnerabilities in the Japanese national character. As Trent Maxey notes, Christianity threatened Japan not because of its specific characteristics but because it exposed the fragmentation of the Tokugawa state. “While the ‘barbarians’ used Christianity to convert, unite, and mobilize those they conquered, [Aizawa] believed the Tokugawa realm lacked unity and hence could not be mobilized in defense.”7 Meiji nation-­ building policies acted to remedy precisely these disintegrative forces, which were rhetorically linked but functionally unrelated to Christianity.

88   Sean Patrick Webb Christianity retained its rhetorical significance in the Taishō era as a tool for expressing social and political anxieties. With accommodation to Western cultural modes a fait accompli, the concern became less whether to engage the West than the fallout from this engagement, specifically the emergence of cultural cosmopolitanism and the “underlying uneasiness about cultural authenticity” that this produced.8 In this context, Christianity found popularity as a rhetorical device perhaps most famously in the Kirishitan stories of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. In these stories, Akutagawa frequently reflected on the comic dimensions of Christianity’s alterity “not simply to ridicule them but to use them as hermeneutic tools for a reflection on broader existential and political issues”: the excesses of Taishō xenophiles, communism and socialism as modern thought crimes requiring recantation, and more broadly the various technologies of power in the modern nation-­state.9 Christianity served no more significant purpose, however, than to render ridiculous the persistent Orientalist binary of Japan as sensual, emotional, and aesthetic and the West as logical, dispassionate, and scientific. Undermining these constructions of culture, Taishō democracy carved out a space in an era of cosmopolitanism for an authentic Japanese national self that required neither a return to mythologized traditional values nor a sacrifice of the cultural self in the name of Westernization.10 A devastating war and foreign occupation reshaped Japanese social and political anxieties and with them the deployment of Christianity in popular culture. The post-­war period saw Japan emerge from destitution into stability and prosperity, developments that became intimately intertwined with the emerging discourse of nihonjinron. Stressing the absolute, static uniqueness and homogeneity of Japanese society, nihonjinron texts allowed a degree of self-­critical (if also self-­Orientalizing) reflection and a fair measure of assertive self-­confidence. In both modes, nihonjinron adheres to what Marilyn Ivy calls “the logic of the fetish, the denial of a feared absence through its replacement with a substitute presence.”11 Addressing the fear that Japan had not only lost a measure of self-­ determination in the war but also a measure of its national identity, society at large and the state more narrowly undertook a project of “national-­cultural self-­ fashioning.” Quotidian expressions of Japaneseness—chopsticks, kimono, and sushi—took on broader significance, even as the Japanese language itself began to assume almost mystical qualities. Political conservatives began to refocus their attention on the imperial family, stripped of its divine status but nevertheless central to their nationalist imagination. Here, more than anywhere else, the fetishistic nature of Japan’s self-­reflection is revealed, as the embrace of the archetypal symbol of the Japanese nation only served to “[announce] the absence it means to cover up, thus provoking anxiety.”12 These anxieties spilled out into popular culture through representations of Christianity that stressed the potentially devastating foreignness of the religion, hyperbolic depictions that cast Christians as demons, zombies, and vampires to heighten their potential menace for readers. In the post-­war period, stories about the seventeenth-­century defeat of Christianity allowed the public to act out Japanese power within the safe and segregated context of a highly fictionalized

NEETs versus nuns   89 history. The Other of the post-­war period was not, of course, actual Christians nor even in this case the West as such; instead, it was new economic outsiders— resident Koreans, migrants workers, burakumin, and women—whose empowerment might threaten the political and economic stability of Japan.13 Yet this was consistent with the historical uses of Christianity to conjure up and exorcize anxieties about alterity regardless of their relationship to actual Christianity. When the post-­war system collapsed, the government and cultural commentators took up the task of assigning blame. If the generation of wealth and stability had been a natural outgrowth of the core characteristics of the Japanese national character (as nihonjinron texts asserted), then it stood to reason that the abrupt end of that system meant some defect had emerged in that character. Fearing an inability to project their power on an international stage, Japanese conservatives retreated into both overt and banal forms of nationalism and “busied themselves to (re)discover the virtue of Japan and being Japanese.”14 Cultural commentators pointed to a variety of economic, political, and cultural lapses to explain this lost virtue, but one favorite expression of emerging discontent targeted a new generation of Japanese youth who lacked the vigor, ambition, and social conscience of their predecessors.15 The downturn in the economy and the onset of government-­led, politically calculated moral panic about Japan’s youth occurred almost simultaneously, beginning with the 1990 Youth White Paper that spawned the Hikikomori/Futōkō Child Welfare Pilot Project (hikikomori/futōkō jidō fukushi-­tasaku model jigyō).16 In the post-­bubble era, an ostensibly social-­scientific lexicon emerged to label this corrosive new generation: hikikomori (shut in), NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), freeter (part-­time and temporary contract workers), parasite singles (unmarried adults living with their parents), and herbivore men (men with no interest in dating or marriage).17 In the throes of recession, each of the new social categories represented a departure from the core features of Japanese identity that had been so essential to the success of an economically vibrant and globally enviable Japan during the mid- to late twentieth century. Critics attributed the rise of these groups largely to the divergent (implicitly defective) values of Japanese youth, in spite of the fact that studies show that most “parasite singles” still wanted to get married and most “freeters” lacked permanent employment for economic reasons beyond their control.18 These groups became the subject of constant cultural comment, official government studies, and broad efforts to rehabilitate and employ or, alternatively, to punish these wayward Japanese. Conservative political forces laid at the feet of the dwindling youth of Japan the responsibility for a series of upcoming crises—the year Japan’s population begins to shrink, the year open college spots are equaled by college applicants, the year when there will be one worker contributing to the social welfare system for every retiree dependent on it, and so on. This fear of “one apocalypse trailing off into the next”—what Mark Driscoll calls “apoco-­ ellipsis”—serves an important political function. While the challenges faced by Japan are real, the embrace of apoco-­ellipsis has more to do with the cultural logic of neo-­liberalism, for which “orchestrated ‘moral panics’ [are] activated by

90   Sean Patrick Webb political elites to justify crackdowns on … imagined ‘internal enemies.’ ”19 Increasingly, these internal enemies are a generation of young Japanese whose withering demographic presence serves as a constant omen of Japan’s withering future. Ultranationalist manga, like Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensōron, attack these “internal enemies” directly, “abjecting the fashion-­victimed and self-­absorbed Japanese youth” and “[counterposing] them to the projected valor and self-­ sacrifice” of an earlier generation.20 Yet, the cultural logic of Japanese conservatism penetrates into popular visual media in more subtle ways as well, and here again Christianity emerges as a familiar, legible, and conceptually safe tool through which to cope with pressing national anxieties. Among its plural rhetorical functions in post-­bubble Japan,21 Christianity is commonly deployed as a way to recast the perceived defects in the character and values of Japanese youth as a kind of Other to the authentic Japanese self—embodied and caricatured by the quintessential icon of alterity—so that an authentic Japanese protagonist can destroy, overcome, or reform these forces as necessary. A review of three representative post-­1990 manga demonstrate the ongoing fluidity and utility of Christianity as a tool for political and cultural commentary and, more specifically, the degree to which conservative fears of an unreliable Japanese youth are publicly exorcised through narrative conflict with a traditional antagonist.

Overcoming Christianity in Shōnen media Kamachi Kazuma’s award-­winning and popular Toaru Majutsu no Indekkusu (A Certain Magical Index, hereafter Indekkusu) began as a series of light novels but has become a broad media franchise, including anime, video games, an ongoing manga adaptation (published in Monthly Shōnen Gangan since 2007), and a variety of spin-­off series within the same universe. That universe centers around Academy City, a technologically advanced educational enclave in western Tokyo that is dedicated to the study and training of young ESPers (nōryokusha), people with paranormal abilities. Academy City is, in many ways, a utopian projection of Japan’s cultural ideal for itself. The city is technologically advanced, powered by clean, safe wind turbines; it is politically significant on a global scale; and it is the object of international fascination and envy. Perhaps most importantly, Academy City is young in a way that Japan may never be again; roughly 80 percent of its more than 2 million residents are students. Even some adults (like Tsukuyomi Komoe) appear childlike while others (like Aleister Crowley) actually remain eternally young. The characters within the novels admit to the idealized nature of the setting, so that a Japanese man entering Academy City from without cannot help but remark to his wife that the city looks just like the imaginary future they drew as children. Yet, this fictionally actualized future hangs perilously in the balance. Beset from without and within by a host of enemies, the supernaturally empowered residents of Academy City must battle constantly to maintain their established way of life.

NEETs versus nuns   91 The operative logic of the alternative science-­fiction reality of Indekkusu reflects the basic anxiety of contemporary Japanese conservatism: a binary world in which the dominant forces are incompatible with and antagonistic to Japanese cultural and political norms. The world Academy City inhabits is divided into two broad camps: the Science Side and the Magic Side. In this context, “magic” refers not to witches and wizards but functions instead as a gloss for religion, typically though not exclusively Christianity. In fact, the three main factions of the Magic Side are the Roman Orthodox (rōma seikyō), English Puritan (igirisu seikyō), and Russian Achievement (roshia seikyō) churches corresponding to the Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox branches of Christianity. Representatives of each of these foreign bodies, at various times and with varying degrees of malicious intent, threaten to disrupt or destroy the peace and prosperity of Academy City. Only the active intervention of various Science Side heroes can maintain the careful balance between the Japanese utopia and the forces of chaos in the world. As in the Taishō era, this deployment of Christianity inverts old Orientalist dichotomies. Contrary to the classical depiction in the West, Japan emerges as rational, progressive, and adept while the West is reduced to an irrational, reactionary, and inept foil to highlight the excellence of Japanese actors. While Christians struggle to use basic modern conveniences like cell phones, video chats, and washing machines or puncture their eardrums (literally) rather than hear the contradictions in their own teachings, the Japanese students of Academy City move smoothly through a world of futuristic technology, aware of the imperfections of their system but eager to reform rather than ignore these flaws. It is with evident meaning then that, when the story detours outside of Academy City to eavesdrop on a private conversation in an English cathedral, the narrator wryly comments that though it is morning in Japan, in England (which sets the time for the rest of the world) it is midnight. Between this idealized depiction of a young, potent Japan and a superstitious, violent Christian West, stands an unlikely, unwitting, and hapless protagonist, Kamijō Tōma. Tōma is a picture of Japanese adolescent under-­achievement, manifesting all the markers of a future life of unrealized potential. His romantic ineptitude and obliviousness are outstripped only by his academic mediocrity. In the midst of the action-­adventure peril that dominates the series, readers are frequently reminded that Tōma has failed to finish his summer homework, forgotten everything he learned in the previous school year, been assigned more supplementary lessons than even his most delinquent peers, and disappointed his classmates with his poor performance at and eventual absence from the inter-­ school sports festival. Tōma is, in the classification system of Academy City, a level zero, and significantly his only distinguishing skill as an ESPer is the ability to nullify the extraordinary gifts of others, a power that resides in his right hand. Tōma is pointedly unlike many of his Japanese peers in Academy City, who are distinguished by their diligence and aptitude. He finds, however, a clarifying mirror of his own worst qualities in the appearance of the titular Index—a lazy,

92   Sean Patrick Webb ditsy, and aggressively consumptive nun of the English church. Index falls out of the sky and onto Tōma’s balcony in a twist on the familiar “sudden girlfriend appearance” trope of manga and anime. Rather than promising a titillating new romantic opportunity for the protagonist, however, Index arrives as a plague, promising to burden Tōma (in much the same way that derelict youth threaten to burden Japanese society) by squandering his limited resources, contributing nothing to household maintenance, and needing constant care and attention both in the banal context of everyday life and in moments requiring extraordinary heroism. The emergence of a distinguishably Christian figure, who hyperbolically manifests the worst anxieties of the Japanese about themselves, creates a safe space for self-­reflective criticism. This lovable but disruptive Christian agent allows Tōma to assume his role as a bulwark against the threat of Christianity gradually in a series of successively more menacing encounters with Index’s latent religion. First, Tōma is prodded to prove his magic-­nullifying powers by placing his hand on her habit, a garment she claims is an indestructible magical artifact. When he does, the habit rips apart leaving Index standing completely naked. The next encounter is somewhat darker, as Tōma realizes—through an exercise of scientific reason apparently unavailable to the Christians around him—that Index has been deceived by the church into allowing inhumane rituals to be performed on her annually. This scientific reasoning sets him apart from the targets of conservative cultural criticism, since one of the “axioms in nationalistic, neoliberal discourses in Japan … is that the rampant consumerism and superficiality that absorbs the thought and affect of young urban Japanese makes them by definition incapable of critical thought.”22 Having undermined the false Christian narratives, Tōma finds, touches, and destroys a runic spell in Index’s mouth to free her from the yearly rituals. The elimination of the rune triggers a self-­defense response, provoking the final conflict with Index’s Christian inner nature. In this struggle, the true enemy is less Index’s magic than Tōma’s own sense of inadequacy born of his history of misfortune and under-­achievement. In an epiphanic moment of clarity wherein the confrontation with Christianity transforms the flawed protagonist, Tōma declares that he will not merely pretend to be a hero but will actually become one. In the first of many climactic heroic moments, Tōma’s confrontation with Christianity not only demonstrates the superiority of the Japanese protagonist but transforms that protagonist into the socially sanctioned fullness of himself. As often as he recapitulates this heroic emergence in subsequent volumes, Tōma does so primarily when an overriding sense of social obligation to those around him forces him to set aside his natural tendency to underwhelm. This is aided in the aftermath of his struggle with Index by the total loss of his memory. This amnesia transforms Tōma into a blank slate, one that can respond to and act on not the accumulated experiences of his thus far disappointing life but instead the “memories” retained in his heart. This intrinsic Japaneseness manifests in a sense of obligation to strangers (often forgotten friends) and in chivalrous service to women who, in spite of usually being more intelligent, capable, and

NEETs versus nuns   93 powerful than Tōma, nevertheless constantly find themselves indebted to him, enthralled by his inadvertent charm, and propped up as objects for his sexual gaze. More than anywhere else, however, the amnesiac Tōma manifests a conservative vision of Japanese social organization in his interactions with his forgotten family. When concern over his son’s well-­being in Academy City prompts Tōma’s father to seek the assistance of objects of foreign superstitions, Japan is plunged into another apocalyptic crisis. It is then left to Tōma both to defend his father from the violent assaults of the English church and to convince his father that Academy City had taught him the value of social responsibility. Tōma declares that he would rather live a responsible (if difficult) life of service to the greater good than a happy, selfish life of good fortune. In the end, the conflict is resolved when the anxieties of the older generation about the younger are allayed by the powerful expression of traditional values. Whatever may have been the case before his encounter with Christianity and the loss of his memory, Tōma now stands as the embodiment of resolved generational conflict. However often appearances suggested just the opposite, Japan’s youth still held in them that immutable character that makes the nation great. Tōma is not alone in this. Though he frequently comes to the rescue of a Japan that woefully underestimates the extent and deliberateness of the threats arrayed against it, there are times when even Tōma’s skills are not sufficient to the task before him. In cases like these, a more abstracted version of enduring Japanese cultural strength must stand up to resist the corrosive influences of Christianity. Such is the case when agents of the Roman church invade Academy City with a Christian artifact that, when planted in the earth under a date-­andtime-­specific constellation of stars, allows the Vatican to override the wills of people living in that territory. In this reprise of seventeenth-­century anxieties, Tōma and his allies race around in the midst of the annual citywide sports festival hopelessly trying to find and stop the Roman invaders. In the end, though, it is the sports festival itself and not Tōma that saves the day. When he is unable to defeat the Roman agents, Tōma is left to watch what he believes will be the inevitable conquest of Academy City by Roman Christians. Yet, at the critical moment, the stars on which the artifact depends for its power are obscured by the evening fireworks of the night parade. The manga depicts Tōma small, standing before a cityscape illuminated by fireworks, with his back to the reader—suggesting his own orientation toward the bright light of rational, scientific society and inviting the viewer to so orient as well. In a final triumphant moment and with the fireworks shown bursting over his head, he asks the Christian, “Didn’t you know, this is when the night parade starts?”23 His culturally specific knowledge gives him a confidence that sharply contrasts with the thwarted hubris of imperializing Christianity. Having so many times personally risen to the challenge and rewarded the faith that the teachers and students of Academy City have put in him against all odds, Tōma now finds his own faith in the students of Academy City richly rewarded as well.

94   Sean Patrick Webb

Redeeming Christianity in Josei Manga While Indekkusu revolves around an otherwise ill-­suited youth hero constantly saving Japan from enemies without, Akaishi Michiyo’s historical josei manga Amakusa 1637 (published in Flowers from 2001–2006) takes an alternative tack, focusing on hyper-­adept youth working desperately to save Japan from itself. Amakusa 1637 tells the story of a group of six high school students who are inexplicably transported from Kobe in the year 2000 back in time to Kyūshū in various years in the 1630s. Each time traveler is a member of the student council and a high achiever in his or her own right. Horie Eiji is an engineering genius, who introduces a variety of modern technologies into the past. Kasugano Eri has a near perfect recall of historical facts that proves indispensible in navigating the early Tokugawa political landscape. Akishima Seika’s gift for song and multilingualism must be deployed regularly to defuse tense situations. Finally, Hayumi Natsuki, Miyamoto Masaki, and Yatsuka Naozumi are each kendo adepts whose martial prowess allows them to substitute for many of the most famous military figures of the era. These six students find themselves in the midst of a critical moment for Kyūshū and Japan more broadly, arriving as they do on the eve of the Shimabara Rebellion. As students of the St. Francisco Academy, their position in the violently anti-­Christian past is complicated by their use of and familiarity with Christian iconography, something benignly stylish in modern Japan but hazardous in the seventeenth century. Masaki and Naozumi, struggling with fragmented or missing memories, quickly find themselves playing the part of the persecutors, hunting down Christians on behalf of Tokugawa Iemitsu. Natsuki, however, arrives with her memories intact and immediately springs to the defense of the persecuted in Amakusa and Shimabara. The Christian symbols she wears, her spirited protection of those being oppressed, her striking resemblance to the recently deceased Amakusa Shirō (the young historical leader of the Shimabara Rebellion), and her arrival’s coincidence with a Christian prophecy together combine to thrust an otherwise inconspicuous high school girl into the spotlight of history. The place of an adolescent at the heart of an epoch-­making moment in history itself countervails the prevailing anxieties about Japanese youth, but more important than the powerful Japanese teenagers who drive the narrative are the feeble Christians to whom they are compared. The aforementioned passivity that emerged as the bugbear of post-­bubble conservatives is characteristic neither of the time-­travelling teenagers transported back to Amakusa nor of their anti-­ Christian Japanese counterparts in the past. Instead, it is the Christians of Kyūshū who, as cautionary tales about a loss of authentic self from cultural hybridity, show a marked willingness to allow life to happen to them, to be pushed to a breaking point that will inevitably erupt into an apocalyptic outburst of violence that is devastating in arguably equal measure for themselves and society as a whole. In this respect, Amakusa 1637 presents the Shimabara Rebellion as a Tokugawa-­era analogue to the sarin gas attacks perpetrated by Aum

NEETs versus nuns   95 shinrikyō in 1995. These attacks “caused a widespread public perception of religion in Japan as a dangerous phenomenon, to which the disaffected youth generation were particularly vulnerable because of the perceived loss of the ethical values that had inspired the previous generations.”24 The rhetorical marriage of a loss of Japanese values and violent religious extremism allows the reader to engage the historically remote space of the Shimabara Rebellion with a sense of cultural urgency. Natsuki and her friends find themselves in a society similarly struggling with economic crisis and similarly hampered in their efforts to alter their fortunes by an inability to engage in decisive, positive action. In a sequence played out repeatedly for emphasis, Natsuki is forced to take extraordinary measures in response to Christian unwillingness to act. It begins early when Natsuki is called to the scene of a burning home where Christians are standing around watching flames engulf the house and praying that someone will rescue the child trapped inside. When Natsuki arrives with Eri, the two spring into action, with Eri coordinating the effort to extinguish the fire while Natsuki rushes in to save the child. What strikes the time travelers (and readers) as a simple act of will is rendered miraculous to onlookers who are crippled by an inability to take decisive action. In another incident, Natsuki must convince a family to eat the rice they have piled up in corner; the family had reasoned it was better to starve than to fail to pay their taxes. This scenario is repeated when Natsuki must stop parents from murdering their child to avoid paying the taxes on a new family member and again when a man chooses to run into a burning building to die with his family rather than be questioned by soldiers. The Christians constantly struggle to outdo one another in their passivity, in their willingness to surrender their fates alternatively to Deus-­sama (the ultimate unseen Other) or his wonder-­working messenger, Shirō. When Christians do take action, it is always extreme, violent, and unproductive—most obviously in the case of the open revolt that leads to the senseless death of 30,000 Christians (a fate Natsuki must constantly try to forestall until a successful rebellion can be achieved with minimal bloodshed) but also in more mundane acts of self-­destruction, as when Natsuki must resuscitate a man’s family after he strangled them to death in a fit of desperation. Thus, Christians embody the two dominant modes in which conservatives imagine Japan’s twenty-­first century youth threaten society, inaction and extreme action. Even so, touched by the Christians’ suffering, Natsuki convinces her friends selflessly to postpone their efforts to return to the twenty-­first century and focus on changing history for the better. Saving people who seem unwilling to save themselves, however, requires the heroes to act simultaneously on two fronts: first by redeeming Christianity toward positive (Japanese) ends; and then by actively engaging with society for the betterment of all. This latter task drives the narrative, with Natsuki and her friends demonstrating a positive vision of adolescent competence and potential as they travel around Kyūshū arranging charitable acts to alleviate the plight of the poor, standing up to injustices committed by individuals and government officials, rescuing people from natural disasters, and solidifying the political allegiances necessary to ensure the success of their

96   Sean Patrick Webb future rebellion. These allegiances, significantly, are typically forged through an appeal to those immutable core Japanese characteristics of honor and duty that would be equally comprehensible to and have equal motive force for Tokugawa-­ era daimyō and twenty-­first-century teenagers, at least in their idealized narrative iteration. It is precisely this ability both to engage the public at large and negotiate the political terrain of the seventeenth century that allows Natsuki-­as-Shirō to succeed where the historical Shirō had failed, bringing the rebellion to a meaningful and peaceful conclusion that involves separating Japan into a domain governed by Iemitsu (and the traditional policies associated with the Tokugawa era) and a liberalized southern domain in Kyūshū governed by Iemitsu’s cousin, Matsudaira Tadano. Underneath these outward tactics lies an equally important key to success; while the historical Shirō and his rebels had been true believers, Natsuki and her friends transform Christianity into something else entirely for the purposes of their rebellion, specifically stripping out those elements that give it meaning to foreign adherents—namely, its explicitly religious content—and instead making it entirely instrumental, a tool for inspiring a people who would otherwise be unable to act effectively in their own interest. Rather than a foreign religious system that might suggest dangerous cultural hybridity, Natsuki re-­imagines Christianity as a gloss for those features that make Japanese modernity so successful and appealing: tolerance, prosperity, equity, and (ironically) secularism. This substitution is especially stark when the time travelers try to explain that they have come from “another place,” which the Christians consistently assume refers to “paraiso” (the Christian heaven). When Natsuki delivers rousing speeches about how she can make Japan into a world like the one she came from, the Christians take this to mean that she will transform Earth into a heavenly paradise. These misunderstandings go uncorrected since the students are secure in the knowledge that the new social order they will establish will have no meaningful Christian content at all. Christianity, for them, has been effectively domesticated to be deployed to appropriately Japanese purposes. Though genre conventions require the basic stance toward Christianity as a social threat to be framed in redemptive terms (rather than the adversarial terms of Indekkusu), the basic posture toward deviations from the national Japanese character remain the same. The multiculturalism implicit in Christianity and explicit in the policies of the new government of Kyūshū is tolerable only insofar as non-­Japanese values pose no authentic threat to core Japanese identity. While Amakusa 1637 allows for a critique of the excesses of both xenophilia and xenophobia, represented by Christianity and the sakoku policies of the Tokugawa respectively, it does so in a way that resonates with the basic posture of Japanese conservatives toward the world. When readers (following the reverse time-­ traveling Eri) are thrust back into the present, they find the Japanese colonization of their own past has yielded incredible results, with Japan having emerged as an exaggerated manifestation of its best qualities: prosperous, technologically advanced, liberal, and environmentally responsible. The fantasy of a neoliberal free trade state in Tokugawa-­era Kyūshū extends the boom economy of

NEETs versus nuns   97 twentieth-­century Japan not only forward into the twenty-­first century but also backward deep into Japanese history, showing what the world could be like if the essence of Japanese modernity continued to win out. Even Natsuki—who again, aligning with the genre, had subverted her own gender identity and roles by becoming a male and leading a revolution—conforms in the end to conservative expectations, shedding her identity as Shirō and making the culturally appropriate transition to dutiful wife, presumably continuing her service to the Japanese nation in a way not only more palatable but also more replicable in the present. Amakusa 1637 thus transforms and redeems historical Christianity in a subtle vindication of the conservative vision of a nationally assertive, economically open Japan. All that Japan lacks is a pool of young, authentically Japanese leaders with the aptitude and ambition to actualize this vision.

Outgrowing Christianity in Indie Manga Though lacking the narrative depth and broad popularity of the previous cases, one final example can briefly serve to demonstrate the extent to which Christianity has been repurposed in contemporary Japanese media as a tool to critique Japan’s wayward youth. Christianity appears as a frequent visual theme in the avant-­garde works of Furuya Usamaru, most often in the context of Japanese children and adolescents struggling against childish impulses and making the transition to adulthood. That Christianity can serve this function in yomikiri (one shot) and 4-koma (four panel) manga—without the detailed explanations and explicit historical contexts found in the serialized works reviewed above—demonstrates the degree to which these visual cues are broadly understood by the reading public and can be marshaled for immediate comic effect. Furuya’s debut unconventional 4-koma, Palepoli (published in Garo in 1994), highlights the simultaneous strangeness and triviality of the foreign religion by re-­imagining Japan’s relationship with Christianity as the fascination of young boys with bugs. For example, an ant-­Moses leading his tribe of Israelite ants comes to the edge of a great sea. Raising his staff to heaven, the ant-­Moses calls down a divine light and parts the waters. In the final panel, the reader assumes the position of a snot-­nosed Japanese boy, Takashi, watching the spectacle unfolding in a sidewalk puddle. The ants are barely visible to him and completely unseen by his mother who urges the distracted child to hurry along. In another instance, a single-­panel scene is dominated by the image of Christ crucified, except that rather than being nailed to a cross he is push-­pinned into a shadow box, dutifully labeled “Jesus,” and surrounded by other insect specimen. A nameplate at the bottom suggests that this was the author’s science project in the third grade. A similar allusion is drawn in “The Passion,” which depicts two boys engaged in the familiar pastime of forcing stag beetles to fight. Rather than bringing a beetle, however, one boy has decided to throw Jesus—again dressed for the crucifixion—into the ring. The stag beetle quickly defeats Jesus, prompting its owner to ask the telling question, “This guy’s pretty weak; where’d you find him?”

98   Sean Patrick Webb All of this allows Christianity to stand in for an otherwise undefined set of attitudes and behaviors appropriate only to children, a reflection of a kind of cultural immaturity that can be dangerous if retained into adulthood. In an English publication of selections from Palepoli, Furuya devotes what little space is available in the introduction to expressing anxieties over what he knows of America: “I’ve heard that 80% of America is made up of anthropocentric and passionate Christians who deny the theory of evolution. Could this be a misconception on my part?”25 In this, Christianity is an explanation for a more dangerous kind of anti-­scientific thinking that still grips some foreign societies. Yet, the real anxiety is not about Western culture, Christianity, or America; instead, it is about negotiating the nature of Japanese culture relative to these foreign influences and positioning the former as authentic and legitimate in comparison to the latter. By transposing Christian imagery into the world of insects, Furuya admits the fascinating qualities of foreign culture but sets appropriate boundaries between fascination and reverence. Indulging features of cultural otherness is a juvenile fancy and should be shed in the process of maturing in favor of pursuing a more authentically Japanese path. Even the boys of Palepoli understand this. In “The Creaking Night,” a boy walks home from cram school—an experience, if not specifically Japanese, then at least decidedly non-­Western—and begins to come to terms with the end of his childhood. He realizes that growing up means he will now no longer hear the whispering of insects and, as a kind of afterthought, also no longer see the angels drawn flying overhead. If the young Takashi must constantly be called away from religion by his overbearing mother, older Japanese characters understand that they must make the choice to turn away from Otherness and toward their place in Japanese society on their own. Adult life has no room for playing with bugs or Jesus. Christianity intrudes in another crisis of maturity in Furuya’s Garden collection of yomikiri (published variously in Garo, Comic Cue, and Manga Erotics). In “The Garden of Pleasure – Angelic Fellatio,” Furuya tells the story of the Annunciation with the role of Mary played by a Japanese high school girl.26 Rather than greeting the news with joy, she muses—her inner monologue rolling over classic Christian images of the Madonna with child and Jesus on the cross—that having a child, particularly a special child, would be a burden. Desperate to avoid the responsibility, Mary resolves to lose her virginity before she can be impregnated thus disqualifying her from bearing the son of God. She chooses Judas to be her partner, a grotesque caricature of the herbivore man who boasts of his sexual prowess but does not realize he must take his clothes off for sex, needs directions to find Mary’s genitals, and must be stopped from ejaculating prematurely after the slightest stimulation. Even so, Mary presses on, but at the moment of penetration, three cherubs descend from heaven to thwart her—two physically restrain her while the third performs oral sex on Judas until he ejaculates. The story repeats with eleven more apostles, and each time the sex is abandoned when angels intervene. Finally, with all the boys psychologically broken by the divine experience of sex, a beam of light shoots down from

NEETs versus nuns   99 heaven into Mary’s womb indicating her final defeat. If Mary had been an authentic Japanese girl, the story could not have concluded as it did with resigned acceptance. Ekaterina Hertog observes that in Japan “everyone, including unwed mothers themselves, sees the choice of bearing an illegitimate child to be egoistic and potentially harmful for the child.” In this context, abortion is a broadly considered “a clearly optimal, guilt-­free, and easy solution.”27 Thus, with a repurposed biblical narrative, Furuya offers a caricature of young women who lack maternity and young men who lack virility recast as Christians stuck in a futile struggle to thrive in a Japanese society that has no place for them.

Conclusion Furuya’s narrative in “The Garden of Pleasure” plays out for overtly comic and erotic effect, but the implications are nevertheless profoundly political insofar as they play on and reinforce the cultural logic of Japanese conservatives and their anxiety about the deficiencies of the post-­bubble generation. These anxieties find a narrative salve when young Japanese protagonists overcome their own passivity or the passivity of others in order to achieve explicitly political ends that resonate with the agenda of dominant neoliberals. This also happens in Amakusa 1637 when extraordinary youth overcome the inertia of Japanese Christians to establish an alternative shogunate that is open to the commerce and technology of the broader world but symbolically insulated from cultural contagions by the domestication of Christianity by Japanese modernity. In Indekkusu, these political outcomes are more frequent, as the successive apocalyptic threats become increasingly generalized. The crises build from the personal—threatening just Tōma or his friends—to broader social catastrophes like the attempt to control Academy City with the Croce di Pietro or a later attempt to destroy the city with the religious equivalent of an atomic bomb (in the “Queen of the Adriatic” story).28 Conflicts escalate until a climactic multi-­ volume arc in which Tōma becomes embroiled in a global war pitting the forces of science against those of religion. As Tōma becomes more assertive and his actions become more globally significant, so too do the political actors in control of Academy City. Reflecting a conservative desire for a militarily prepared, internationally empowered nation, Academy City enters the war (on behalf of Japan) in defense of a fragile global order it had established and maintained for generations. In a kind of historical revisionism written onto the future, the world war resolves in favor of Academy City through a combination of the extraordinary heroism of a reliable cast of young protagonists and the decision of Academy City’s leaders to pursue war through humane (technologically advanced) means rather than wanton bloodshed. Whatever the narrative nature of the specific conflicts and outcomes, in every case, what stand between Japan and a thriving future—in neoliberal terms—are the internal enemies of the conservative cultural calculus, the post-­bubble generation. Since the intrinsic characteristics that have made the Japanese nation great throughout history and especially throughout the post-­war era of economic

100   Sean Patrick Webb growth cannot be at fault, this generation must be plagued by some defect of an extrinsic sort, a deviation from the Japanese national character that must be overcome, redeemed, or outgrown for Japan to recapture its economic and political stature in the world. As this need seeps out of policy debates and onto the pages of popular media, the ever-­utile image of Christianity recurs as a means of embodying these extrinsic characteristics and providing characters with an opportunity to triumph over them. In the end, Christianity remains as relevant for negotiating the moral panics of Japanese politics in the twenty-­first century as it was in the seventeenth century.

Notes   1 Roemer discusses the difficulty in pinpointing a precise number of Christians in Japan, but all methods agree that they represent an extreme minority; see Michael Roemer, “Religious Affiliation in Contemporary Japan: Untangling the Enigma,” Review of Religious Research 50(1) (2009): 298–320.   2 The term, used by Kiri Paramore, is adapted from Carol Gluck’s “metaphorical foreigner,” used to describe a much later phenomenon; see Kiri Paramore, Ideology and Christianity in Japan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 65; and Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).   3 Paramore, Ideology and Christianity in Japan, 7.   4 Ibid., 160.   5 Quoted in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-­Foreignism and Western Learning in Early Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 200.   6 Ibid., 68.   7 Trent Maxey, The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 21–22.   8 Rebecca Suter, Holy Ghosts: The Christian Century in Modern Japanese Fiction (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2015), 40.   9 Ibid., 93. 10 For a complete account of representations of Christianity in Taishō literature, see Suter, Holy Ghosts, 39–107. 11 Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10. 12 Ibid., 10–12. 13 Suter, Holy Ghosts, 108–109. 14 Satoko Suzuki, “Nationalism Lite? The Commodification of Non-­Japanese Speech in Japanese Media,” Japanese Language and Literature 49(2) (2015), 522. 15 “Youth” is left deliberately ambiguous in this chapter, reflecting an openness and fluidity in discourses about the wayward generation. The designation has been gradually aging in the post-­bubble era, with the government now officially defining it as those 15–34. This broadening of the category reflects a belief that “there were a substantial number of over-­30-year-­olds who had not yet reached ‘adulthood’ and required support”, see Tuukka Toivonen, “NEETs: The Strategy within the Category,” in Roger Goodman and Yuki Imoto (Eds.), A Sociology of Japanese Youth: from Returnees to NEETs (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 144. As the moral panic of politicians has aged, so too have its targets. 16 Sachiko Horiguchi, “Hikkikomori: How Private Isolation Caught the Public Eye,” in Roger Goodman and Yuki Imoto (Eds.), A Sociology of Japanese Youth: from Returnees to NEETs (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 125.

NEETs versus nuns   101 17 On the origin and discourse on some of these categories, see Wim Lunsing, “ ‘Parasite’ and ‘Non-­Parasite’ Singles: Japanese Journalists and Scholars Taking Positions,” Social Science Japan Journal 6(2) (2003): 261–265; Wim Lunsing, “The Creation of the Social Category of NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training): Do NEET Need This?” Social Science Japan Journal 10(1) (2007): 105–110; Horiguchi, “Hikkikomori”; and Toivonen, “NEETs”. 18 For details, see Lunsing, “ ‘Parasite’ and ‘Non-­Parasite’ Singles”; and Mikiko Eswein and Matthias Pilz, “Zwischen Wollen, aber nicht können und Können, aber nicht wollen: Übergangsprobleme von Jugendlichen in Japan am Beispiel der ‘Freeter’ und ‘NEETs’ ”, International Review of Education 58(4) (2012): 505–531. The conservative retreat into cultural criticism serves to obscure the degree to which the rise of these categories is a direct response to neoliberal policies. Mark Driscoll observes that: “one of the most dramatic effects of [widespread neoliberal restructuring] has been the hollowing out of the labor market for young Japanese and the exacerbation of social disparity”, Mark Driscoll, “Kobayashi Yoshinori is Dead: Imperial War/Sick Liberal Peace/Neoliberal Class War,” Mechademia 4 (2009), 300. In a sense, then, the new target of cultural criticism is similar to the target during the boom years, the economically marginal on whom society reluctantly depends for its prosperity. The difference, of course, is that unlike resident Koreans and migrant workers, Japan’s youth are no longer clearly outsiders requiring new interpretations of and solutions to their alterity. 19 Mark Driscoll, “Debt and Denunciation in Post-­Bubble Japan: On the Two Freeters,” Cultural Critique 65 (2007), 164–166.  20 Driscoll, “Kobayashi Yoshinori is Dead,” 292. 21 The argument presented here is not that the use of Christianity described is the only one, but that it is an unusually common and effective theme that speaks clearly and directly to contemporary political needs. Patrick Drazen has effectively catalogued the variety of twentieth- and twenty-­first-century manifestations of Christianity in anime and manga; see Patrick Drazen, Holy anime! Japan’s View of Christianity (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2017). 22 Driscoll, “Kobayashi Yoshinori is Dead,” 301. 23 Kamachi Kazuma, “Tenmodai 5 [Observatory 5],” Toaru Majutsu no Indekkusu [A Certain Magical Index] [manga] 14(84) (2014), 12. 24 For details, see Suter, Holy Ghosts, 139. Even without religion, the ideas of social disengagement and passivity were publicly linked with violence, something that had been highlighted by a series of violent incidents involving hikikomori in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Such incidents proved critical in shift the public posture toward wayward youth from concern to panic, see Horiguchi, “Hikkikomori”. 25 Chikao Shiratori, Secret Comics Japan: Underground Comics Now (San Francisco, CA: Cadence Books, 2000), 172. 26 Furuya Usamaru, Garden 1 (Tokyo: East Press, 2000): 17–28. 27 Ekaterina Hertog, Tough Choices: Bearing an Illegitimate Child in Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 153. 28 Kamachi Kazuma, Toaru Majutsu no Indekkusu [A Certain Magical Index] [light novel] 11 (2006).

References Akaishi, Michiyo. 2010. AMAKUSA 1637. Tokyo: Shōgakukan. Drazen, Patrick. 2017. Holy anime! Japan’s View of Christianity. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books. Driscoll, Mark. 2007. “Debt and Denunciation in Post-­Bubble Japan: On the Two Freeters.” Cultural Critique 65: 164–187.

102   Sean Patrick Webb Driscoll, Mark. 2009 “Kobayashi Yoshinori is Dead: Imperial War/Sick Liberal Peace/ Neoliberal Class War.” Mechademia 4: 290–303. Eswein, Mikiko and Matthias Pilz. 2012. “Zwischen Wollen, aber nicht können und Können, aber nicht wollen: Übergangsprobleme von Jugendlichen in Japan am Beispiel der ‘Freeter’ und ‘NEETs’ ” [“Caught between Wanting but Not Being Able to, and Being Able, but Not Wanting to: Transitional Problems among Japanese Youths Based on the Examples of ‘Freeters’ and ‘NEETs’ ”]. International Review of Education 58(4): 505–531. Furuya, Usamaru. 2000. Garden. Tokyo: East Press. Furuya, Usamaru. 2003. Palepoli. Tokyo: Ōtashuppan. Gluck, Carol. 1985. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hertog, Ekaterina. 2009. Tough Choices: Bearing an Illegitimate Child in Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Horiguchi, Sachiko. 2012. “Hikikomori: How Private Isolation Caught the Public Eye.” In Roger Goodman and Yuki Imoto (Eds.), A Sociology of Japanese Youth: from Returnees to NEETs. Abingdon: Routledge, 122–138. Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kamachi, Kazuma. 2004–2014. Toaru Majutsu no Indekkusu [A Certain Magical Index]. Tokyo: ASCII Media Works. Lunsing, Wim. 2003. “ ‘Parasite’ and ‘Non-­Parasite’ Singles: Japanese Journalists and Scholars Taking Positions.” Social Science Japan Journal 6 (2): 261–265. Lunsing, Wim. 2007. “The Creation of the Social Category of NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training): Do NEET Need This?” Social Science Japan Journal 10(1): 105–110. Maxey, Trent. 2014. The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paramore, Kiri. 2009. Ideology and Christianity in Japan. Abingdon: Routledge. Roemer, Michael. 2009. “Religious Affiliation in Contemporary Japan: Untangling the Enigma.” Review of Religious Research 50(1): 298–320. Shiratori, Chikao. 2000. Secret Comics Japan: Underground Comics Now. San Francisco, CA: Cadence Books. Suzuki, Satoko. 2015. “Nationalism Lite? The Commodification of Non-­Japanese Speech in Japanese Media.” Japanese Language and Literature 49(2): 509–529. Suter, Rebecca. 2015. Holy Ghosts: The Christian Century in Modern Japanese Fiction. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Toivonen, Tuukka. 2012. “NEETs: The Strategy within the Category.” In Roger Goodman and Yuki Imoto (Eds.), A Sociology of Japanese Youth: from Returnees to NEETs. Abingdon: Routledge, 139–158. Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi. 1986. Anti-­Foreignism and Western Learning in Early Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

6 The body political Women and war in Kantai Collection Rachael Hutchinson

Introduction Kantai Collection is a free-­to-play online card game with 4.8 million registered users, developed by Kadokawa Games and released by DMM Games for the PC in 2013.1 The English-­language version of the title, ‘Combined Fleet Girls Collection’, points to the naval focus of the narrative, the female characters and the card-­collecting nature of the gameplay. A strategy war game set at sea, the objective of Kantai Collection is to gather cards representing destroyers, aircraft carriers and battleships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and send them out into the Pacific to do battle against the mysterious Abyssal fleet. Players take the role of the Admiral, and gameplay is competitive, featuring single-­player action against the computer or randomised opponents rather than collaborative play. Kantai Collection is rather limited in terms of the distribution of the original game, which has not migrated to other ports apart from the PlayStation Vita, and has not been translated into English.2 Despite these limitations, the characters enjoy a remarkably high degree of popularity and visibility in cross-­media adaptations, both in Japan and overseas.3 KanColle, as it is commonly called by fans, is a media phenomenon in contemporary Japan, with many creative works based on its fictional world, encompassing manga, anime, light novels, a table top RPG (role-­playing game) and a feature film, as well as merchandise or ‘goods’ including character figurines, posters and room decor, PC wallpaper, clothing, accessories and even car decals.4 In this, Kantai Collection shares many common elements with other mega-­texts based on original videogames, such as Final Fantasy or Street Fighter, whose manga and comic book adaptations alone would fill many bookshelves. Unlike these more mainstream texts, however, KanColle stands out for its specific focus on the Second World War and women’s bodies in gameplay and character design. While scholars are divided over KanColle’s connections to right-­wing ideology and militarism, I will use the game and its manga and anime adaptations to argue that the militaristic modifications of ‘cute’ (kawaii) visual culture found in KanColle are highly political. I argue that Kantai Collection depends on a masculinist construction of history in which the use of the woman’s body is indeed ideological, and deeply indebted to pre-­war kokutai philosophies.

104   Rachael Hutchinson The consumption of KanColle products by fans can be understood as a vicarious ‘enactment’ of the Second World War in the popular imagination, but this relates not only to fantasy but also to the everyday lived reality of women in contemporary Japan.

Gameplay and ideology in Kantai Collection In terms of gameplay dynamics, Kantai Collection has much in common with other war-­themed strategy games. The command centres of KanColle and its sequel, KanColle-­Kai, have very detailed screens, with buttons like ‘repairs’, ‘supplies’, ‘construction’, and ‘logistics’. Selections appear as cogs in a circular pattern evoking a ship’s wheel, featuring the silhouette of a realistic warship in the centre. The sheer amount of detail in the game is shown in the comprehensive equipment list for the ships, including everything from artillery and shells to sonar, torpedo mounts, high-­angle guns, searchlights, reconnaissance aircraft and so on.5 If a player spends a lot of time on this game, part of the fun is knowing all the different tactical capabilities of the weaponry and equipment, typical for serious war games. On the other hand, there is little strategy involved other than choosing the make-­up of the card deck. Once a sortie begins, the player has no control over the route or the way the battle plays out, as these decisions are made randomly by the computer. The random element is even foregrounded by the spin of a roulette wheel whenever a strategic decision must be made. Narrative in Kantai Collection is sparse, with no opening cinematics to set the scene or intermittent cut-­scenes to show characters interacting with each other. Narrative comes from gameplay, which may be summarised as ‘using battleships of the Japanese Imperial Navy to fight a war at sea’. Each player will create their own specific narrative details through their own strategy, wins and losses, but overall, the idea is to use one’s resources to assemble the strongest fighting force possible, and then deploy that force successfully in battle. The background setting is the Pacific Ocean and the naval base in Japan from which the ships are deployed. The time is set now, in the current era, rather than in the wartime years of the 1940s. Each character card represents an actual historical battleship from the Imperial Japanese Navy, but the ships have been resurrected as ‘ship girls’ (kan-­musume, or kan-­musu for short), understood as contemporary physical manifestations of the ships’ spirits. This whimsical idea distances the gameplay from the harsh realities of the historical Asia–Pacific War, avoiding many of the problems that game designers face when creating a war game from the Japanese perspective.6 Distance is also achieved through humour and parody, consistent through KanColle in its game, manga and anime forms. Valtteri Vuorikoski has analysed the parodic elements in the original Kantai Collection game, pointing to map elements as one method used by the designers to lessen the serious feel of the war. Fighting takes place in zones at sea, with names analogous to real-­world locations known for their role in the Asia–Pacific War. The names are suggestive enough to evoke the real place-­name for

The body political   105 k­ nowledgeable players, but also silly enough to be enjoyed for their surface meanings. For example, Java becomes ‘Jam Island’ and the Solomon Islands ‘Salmon Island’.7 The ship girls in Kantai Collection depend on resources and fuel to function effectively, an idea depicted in the anime with girls eating huge heaped servings of food.8 The use of jam and salmon in the place names reinforces this ‘cute’ correlation of the ship girls with food consumption, and displaces the reality of what happened in Java and the Solomon Islands during the war. Other parodic elements include the emphasis on the roulette wheel noted above, as well as the use of extremely cute chibi characters, discussed below.9 Yamamura Takayoshi has argued that KanColle and similar ‘moe-­military’ media products like Girls und Panzer (2012–2013) or Strike Witches (2007) are not meant to be taken as truly militaristic in nature, merely presenting a consumerist fantasy.10 But Akiko Sugawa-­Shimada draws attention rather to the displacement of historical reality and the nationalist ideology in this kind of fantasy.11 Sugawa-­Shimada argues that media products like Kantai Collection and Arpeggio of Blue Steel: Ars Nova (2013) create a sense of familiarity with the Japanese military, which ‘unconsciously draws young fans closer to militaristic ideology’.12 Familiarity is gained through use of the shōjo image, with unthreatening young girls acting as the warships, and through ‘sentimental human drama among shōjo’ at the naval base.13 These arguments apply more to the anime series than the game, which is very low on narrative drama. In the case of the videogame form, textual elements such as narrative and emotional affect are secondary to gameplay, which conveys ideology through a number of different methods. Ideology in gameplay is often thought of in terms of procedural rhetoric, in which the game’s message is conveyed to the player through its rules, including objectives as well as limitations and affordances for player actions. Examining the goal rules for Kantai Collection, the player must clear each zone of the ocean from Abyssal enemies, eventually winning over the entire territory. Vuorikoski reads this procedural rhetoric in terms of a colonialist expansion over the seas, but does not go so far as to describe the game as a conveyer of militaristic ideology, pointing out that the use of fictional settings, parody, and beautiful ship girls all distance the player from historical realities of war, undermining the militaristic reading of the game.14 Overall, Vuorikoski finds that ‘there is no definite ideological stance in Kantai Collection, though it provides something of a buffet which includes elements that point to the glory days of Japan’s military.’15 In contrast to scholarly assessments, critique of the game’s militaristic outlook has been much more fervent in online discussions. The first release of the game attracted harsh criticism online for its heavy-­handed nationalism, resurrecting militaristic discourse from wartime Japan.16 Perhaps in response to the criticism, DMM Games changed the make-­up of the player’s fleet cards to include Allied ships from 2016.17 That DMM Games felt the need to make these modifications indicates the jingoistic tenor of the first release. There is also the matter of the enemy, which the player is trying to destroy. Even though the player’s fleet uses real battleships from history, the player is not

106   Rachael Hutchinson fighting against American or Allied forces but against giant creatures called ‘Abyssals’ from the bottom of the ocean. There is much discussion online as to what these Abyssals represent, with fans theorising that they stand for the American fleet.18 There is some evidence for this theory, as Japanese ammunition is described in centimetres while the Abyssals use inches, congruent with the metric and imperial measurement systems of Japan and America in the 1940s.19 This reading over-­privileges America as the enemy in the Second World War, but also recognizes the overwhelming power of the US Navy in the Asia–Pacific War. I would suggest that the Abyssals represent an ultimate Western Other, with pale skin, white hair and blue eyes signalling everything that is ‘not Japanese’.20 The incorporation of American ships into the Kantai Collection fleet went some way towards breaking the Japan–America binary that underlies most representations of the Second World War in Japanese popular culture, but some see DMM’s modifications as only a half-­hearted attempt to appease critics. Interestingly, less criticism was directed at the representation of the ships themselves, highly sexualised in visual appearance, voice tone and dialogue.21 Where Shimada-­Sugawa notes the ‘familiarity’ of the unthreatening shōjo figure as a gateway to militaristic ideology, the use of women in Kantai Collection requires deeper analysis.

Militarising the female body The ships of Kantai Collection are anthropomorphised as beautiful young women (bishōjo), surrounded by their armaments and often depicted in schoolgirl outfits, with exposed midriff and thighs. Because each card or character represents a battleship, each one also has distinct battle statistics and abilities suitable for war. Starting gameplay, the player must choose one ship girl as their ‘fleet commander’. Short descriptions of each girl’s personality help players in their selection. The fleet commanders are all very young looking, supporting the idea of development and growth: characters increase in strength and experience as the player levels up in the game. After a ‘modernisation’ or ‘remodel’, some aspects of her visual design will change, which becomes a point of humour in the anime series. By crafting with various resources, or through randomised drops on the map, players can acquire new ship girls, heralded by the GET! Screen. These screens resemble shōjo manga panels, with sparkles and flowers in the background (see also Figure 11.1, p. 209). Sexualised figures are not uncommon in videogames, and this type of schoolgirl image is very common in Japanese anime and manga.22 But the particular focus on the female body in Kantai Collection is distinctive, with the attributes of the Japanese warships directly reflected in the physical characteristics of the women on the cards. Where smaller ships like destroyers and aircraft carriers are represented by younger, girlish figures, a large warship with high tonnage such as a battleship will be represented by a mature, full-­bodied woman. The card depicting the Yamato, pride of the Japanese imperial navy and the biggest battleship ever made, also makes liberal use of cherry blossom imagery, in the decorations in her hair as well as in the background. A common military image used in Japanese culture, floating cherry blossoms evoke fallen soldiers and sacrifice in battle. The

The body political   107 Yamato was sunk on 7 April 1945 after spending most of the war in dock at Truk and Kure naval bases. Never used to its full potential, the Yamato is seen as the ultimate tragic icon of the Asia–Pacific War. Its depiction in Kantai Collection is notable for the massive size of the armaments, taking up most of the screen, and the torpedo-­like breasts jutting forth. In all the cards, the body of the woman is analogous to the body of the ship, with the ship’s power most directly reflected in the size of the breasts. Reflecting further on the representation of the female body in Kantai Collection, we see it positioned as a site of masculine militarist discourse. The use of the female body for war is reminiscent of Meiji-­period rhetoric on the kokutai, the living body of the nation-­state. As part of the kokutai, women best served their country by producing male babies to swell the ranks of the Imperial Army. The focus on the breasts mimicking weapon size in Kantai Collection character design is not coincidental. Breasts indicate fertility and the ability to nourish children. As sexuality and fertility are made synonymous with a ship’s destructive force, breasts are weapons for the Imperial Japanese state. The feminist critic Ueno Chizuko argued that the Asia–Pacific War was in many ways a war of female oppression, fuelled by female factory labour and reproduction back home and female sexual slaves on the battlefield. The modern nation of Japan was created through gendered policies, and is now remembered through male historical narratives.23 The naval war of Kantai Collection, inscribed on the bodies of women, seems like Ueno’s portrayal of masculinist Japanese history come to life.

Roles of women in Kantai Collection Apart from the ship girls, many other women play roles in Kantai Collection. A large part of the game is maintaining and supplying the fighting forces, so players must construct new ships, repair damaged ones, and use various minerals to make more ammunition and weapons for the fleet. This work is carried out by small female sprites, who often appear carrying stuffed animals, or lying on the floor reading books or colouring. This idea of having a smaller version of something serious is known as chibi style, common in Japanese visual culture. Chibi characters in KanColle talk in very high voices, and are used as a fun counterpoint to the game’s detailed instructions. Whenever the player is given a gameplay tutorial, the instructions appear as text on the screen which is then read out aloud by a soothing woman’s voice. This voice sounds like a female teacher, using polite language and a calm tone. After she gives the instructions (for example, about avoiding heavy losses or damage to the fleet), the chibi character will often burst into tears saying: ‘I don’t want to sink in the ocean!’ or something similar, providing comic relief. This use of chibi characters undercuts the serious nature of war, and emphasises the ‘cute’ (kawaii) nature of the shōjo characters. In the anime, chibi characters pilot the reconnaissance planes, producing a light contrast with the serious demeanour of the aircraft carriers Akagi and Kaga who launch them.

108   Rachael Hutchinson A fun aspect of gameplay, which further emphasises the femininity of the ship girls, is decorating the captain’s cabin. Items for decoration include furniture and wall hangings, which can be bought with Furniture Coins, acquired only through in-­game activities such as sorties, quests and expeditions. Furniture styles range from very masculine, with scale models of battleships displayed on traditional wooden bureaus, hardwood floors and brass lamps, to more feminine, with tea sets, fluffy rugs and candy bowls, or a bright pink desk. A Christmas theme is also available, complete with tree and ornaments. Websites with titles like ‘Show off your room!’ allow players to display their creations. In these ways, every aspect of the game involves female characters, either embodying the fleet as ship girls, giving the player instructions as a voice, providing entertainment as a chibi worker, or manifesting in the décor of the cabin. The player, meanwhile, is positioned in the role of Admiral, implying a relationship with the ship girls that is constructed as sexual or romantic in nature. This relationship is strengthened through the player’s responsibility to build, maintain and develop the characters. As Philipp Klueglein recently argued, game mechanics encourage the player to form a long-­term bond with the characters, enhanced by a perma-­death feature that strengthens the player’s feeling of responsibility, and a wedding feature to further tighten the bond.24 The player is not represented in the game as an Admiral character, rather acting as Admiral themselves in their off-­screen management position. This first-­person role is echoed in the anime series, which shows the Admiral rarely, and then only as a shadow. Throughout the anime and manga, various characters profess their love and devotion for the Admiral, vying to cook him the perfect curry or even marry him. Kongou is the most vocal on this point, with the battle cry ‘Burning Love!’ Although the director Tanaka Kensuke leaves the gender of the Admiral open to interpretation, maintaining a broad target audience, it is clear that the relationship is constructed in heteronormative terms.25 During gameplay, battle is also sexualised in various ways. In sorties, damage to ships is indicated visually by torn clothing. Ship girls cry out with high-­ pitched shrieks when injured, or deep grunts when taking a hit, sounding more sexual than aggressive. A losing KanColle mission sounds almost like a pornographic film. Prior to the release of Kantai Collection, most games from DMM. com had an R-­18+ rating. Some YouTube videos of KanColle gameplay come with warnings like this: WARNING If you dislike Japanese, WWII, or moe things, DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO It is just a cute browser game … that’s all. Thank you.26 The words ‘cute/kawaii’ and ‘moe’ (with the original meaning of ‘bud’), indicate an innocent joy in the young body. While the characters are often depicted as innocent in demeanour, their childlike personality is usually wildly at odds

The body political   109 with their over-­inflated breasts and sexual physical poses. This disjunctive contrast is common in Japanese visual culture, and it may be one reason why Kantai Collection has not been released for the Western market. The sexualisation of battle is also shown in the characters’ dialogue, through specific words and tone of voice. Before battle, ship girls say things like ‘Leave it to me!’ or ‘don’t let them get me’ (yarasenai de ne). The verb used here is yaru, ‘to do’, which can mean a wide range of things – act, practice, give – but is also a slang term for having sex. To ‘yaru’ someone could mean to get them, hurt them or have sex with them. When a ship girl cries out to the Admiral, don’t let them yaru me, it is a mixed message which could mean the ship is going to be damaged or sexually attacked during battle. A similar linguistic slippage occurs when new ship girls are introduced. With each GET! Screen of the PS Vita release, the new character says things like ‘let’s be friends’ or ‘please hold me!’. The verb ‘to hold’ is not the holding of cards, but the holding of a body in an embrace, daku. This greeting can certainly be interpreted as a seductive invitation. After the battle, damaged ship girls are taken for repairs, where dialogue includes lines like ‘be gentle with me Admiral’ or ‘now it’s time for an embrace’. As well as establishing a flirty relationship with the player, the use of extensive dialogue establishes the ship girls as distinct individuals, each with their own backstory, blood type, hobbies and interests. The well-­developed personalities have lent themselves well to manga and anime adaptations. These place far greater significance on narrative, revolving around interpersonal relationships between the ship girls, as well as between the ship girls and the Admiral.

Sexual objects and ‘changing fate’: anime and manga adaptations The KanColle worldview places the player/reader/viewer in a heteronormative masculine position, in which the gaze is directed at the ship girls as sexual objects. In the anime series, the docks are envisioned as a spa, providing many scenes of girls soaking in the bath.27 ‘Fan service’ scenes that add nothing to the plot but titillate the viewer include the main character Fubuki running into the full-­figured heavy cruiser Atago in a doorway and bouncing off her breasts, and beach scenes with close-­ups of the girls in skimpy bikinis. Conventions of shōjo manga, featuring cute girls in situations of rivalry, jealousy and friendship, are mixed with the masculine perspective and mild adult content, suggestive rather than explicit. Some female–female love interest is suggested, particularly between Secretary Ship Nagato and her second in command, Mutsu, as well as the torpedo cruiser tag-­team of Ōi and Kitakami, a relationship in which Kitakami proves a cold partner. The idea of ‘moe’ as a feeling of passion for cute girl characters is parodied in Episode 12 of the anime series, in which Kitakami finally expresses affection, and Ōi is overcome with joyous surprise. ‘What is this feeling?’ she asks, clasping her hands to her breast, eyes sparkling. ‘Could it be … moe?’28 The fact that this moment of epiphany takes place in the

110   Rachael Hutchinson midst of a violent battle against the Abyssal fleet adds to the humour. In keeping with conventions of moe media products, voices are high-­pitched and some characters have ‘cute’ speech affectations. The moe aspect of the KanColle anime reinforces the Admiral’s role in gameplay, as the older, wiser commander who must take care of the fleet. The anime used the same artists employed for the videogame, creating a high degree of visual consistency across the media and adding to the viewer’s feeling of ‘knowing’ the characters. The series also offered an idealised visual setting – a bright and beautiful world, with backgrounds of sparkling water and blue skies giving an optimistic feel. In contrast to the visual consistency of the anime and game, the artwork of KanColle manga varies greatly in style and format. Some take the classic newspaper 4-panel format, with each column a discrete gag; others are more chapter-­ based narratives. Fubuki, Gambarimasu! is drawn in a cartoony chibi style, with liberal use of deformation to show extreme emotions. The artist Momoi Ryōta employs much humour in the relationships between the ship girls, with Akagi losing her temper while teaching the younger girls and Kaga trying to catch her and calm her down. This depiction is very different to that of the anime, where both of these air carriers are portrayed in a more serious manner. There is more sexual humour in this manga, with light cruiser Sendai hoping the girls’ shirts will get wet in the rain, and that they can practise night manoeuvres so she can ‘hear their cute cries after my attacks expose their skin’.29 The manga also considers more metaphysical matters. Kaga worries that the ships may sink and lose their memory, identity and existence, but Akagi comforts her: ‘Certainly, such memories exist within us, but we are ourselves, right? So don’t worry, we won’t disappear.’30 Different comics feature different ship girls as the main character, with series devoted to Kongō, Tenryū and Tatsuta, the Akatsuki sisters, Inazuma, Shimakaze, Kumano and Suzuya. In many of the manga adaptations, the masculine viewing position is more extreme, while the static form of the printed page allows for a longer viewing period. The most notable example is Shimakaze Whirlwind Girl (Shimakaze tsumujikaze no shōjo) by Yamazaki Kazuma, a twenty-­chapter manga available in translation online, with a warning of mature content unsuitable for readers under 17. This is not surprising given Shimakaze’s appearance in the game, the ship girl with the least clothing and most obvious underwear, her visible G-­string riding up high on her hips. The first page has Shimakaze complaining ‘he’s late’, with her full body drawn from a ground-­level perspective, buttocks clearly visible under her schoolgirl skirt. Bunny ears, stripy socks and an exposed midriff complete her ensemble. The object of her complaint is Ensign Akai Seiichirō, a male teacher new to the naval base. Shimakaze Whirlwind Girl stands out not only for its frequent ground-­level views of Shimakaze’s underwear and nude bath scenes, but also for its male lead, replacing the Admiral. This allows for more heterosexual interactions in the series, giving a more intimate look at relationships on the naval base. Overall, the manga series are drawn with titillation and amusement in mind, with the focus squarely on the characters and developing aspects of their personalities through narrative.

The body political   111 Military ideology is more noticeable in the game and anime, which are also more serious in tone. What is most noticeable in the manga series is the visual emphasis on the sexual availability of the woman’s body, aimed at the male audience. There are several narrative differences across the media adaptations, some significant. The anime is the most interesting in this respect, ending with the ship girls achieving victory in the Pacific. Even though the enemy is not the US Navy, the mere idea of ‘victory in the Pacific’ makes a very strong impact. Narrative tension increases through the series as the battle becomes more serious and intense. When the great battleship Yamato is introduced in Episode 8, we hope and expect that she can also take part in the battle as it unfolds. In a dramatic entrance, Yamato emerges from the jungle of Truk Island with cherry blossoms in her long, flowing hair. Akagi and Kaga explain that Yamato-­san is ‘the strongest Fleet Girl in history’; rumour has it that she has 46 cm cannons, but she has never been in a real battle. Yamato is later depicted gazing wistfully out to sea under the full moon. Fubuki expresses great sympathy for Yamato, but Nagato explains that because of all her equipment and weaponry, Yamato uses too many resources to be able to launch her without good reason. In an amusing sequence, Fubuki devises a way to launch Yamato with her friends, but we are stunned later in the series to see Yamato actually join the action. This build-­up and focus on the flagship allows us to understand the significance of the battle against the Abyssals in Operation MI (often interpreted as the Battle of Midway) in Episodes 11–12 of the anime series. The significance of Operation MI is also underscored by a sense of mystery and the supernatural, as Akagi admits that sometimes she seems to hear voices in her head, pushing the fleet in certain directions. She asks Nagato if she ever feels trapped by the ‘yoke of fate’ (sadame no kubeki), and Nagato confesses she sometimes feels compelled into certain actions. Next morning, Nagato is back to her usual self, rousing everyone with the command: ‘Seize victory in the dawn horizon!’ The rising sun imagery is effective as the fleet sets out – but something is amiss. After their first attack, the fleet takes damage and Akagi declares ‘kondo koso, daijoobu!’ (This time will be all right!) as she looses her arrows. The translation ‘this time’ is ambiguous – is Akagi referring to the first failed attack, or to something else? When the second attack also fails, Akagi muses ‘This is the one thing I tried to avoid. But … maybe you can’t beat it. Maybe you can’t beat fate.’ This reference to fate (unmei) is the last line of Episode 11. Episode 12 of the anime opens with Fubuki and Yamato arriving on the scene. Yamato says ‘It’s finally time. I feel like I’ve been waiting for this since a long, long time ago.’ The Abyssal enemy, the Airfield Princess, intones in a deep voice: ‘Nando demo … nando demo shizunde ikimasu!’ meaning ‘sink … sink again, no matter how many times!’ Great emphasis is placed on Yamato’s massive cannons turning to fire, upon which the Airfield Princess is consumed in flames as she repeats ‘shizunde’ (sink). But a new enemy carrier appears, and Yamato realises ‘it’s like there’s some kind of power at work, making events of the past happen again.’ The viewer starts to wonder if perhaps this ‘power’ is the strength of history itself. The fleet enters a time loop, which repeats itself,

112   Rachael Hutchinson s­ eemingly inescapable. Nagato appears with the full force of the combined fleet behind her, urging them to struggle ‘against fate’ and against what is kimete-­iru, things already decided and set in stone. The viewer is reminded again of the force of history, the fact that time can never turn back. But Fubuki shouts that ‘Everyone is waiting for us, believing we will win!’ This refers to the anime audience as well as the historical people back home in Japan, waiting for the navy to return victorious from battle. After one final effort, Fubuki and Kongō sink the carrier and all open fire on the Airfield Princess, destroying her utterly. Akagi announces ‘We changed things. We fought against fate, and changed something that was never supposed to change!’ As the credits roll, we see scenes of the fleet returning to base. Fubuki finally meets the Admiral (who appears only as a shadow), and we see the full sun in the sky. The combination of sun imagery, victory at sea, and the overturning of ‘fate’ make it clear that Japan has overcome its history.

KanColle and right-­wing rhetoric Kantai Collection’s alternate history echoes right-­wing Japanese rhetoric on the Second World War and the Asia–Pacific War, which denies the factuality of the Nanking Massacre, and sees the Emperor as the true leader of Japan. The current Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has backed away from apologies made to Asian countries by previous prime ministers, and has resumed visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where Japanese war criminals are revered as national heroes. Hero-­ worship of the Emperor, kamikaze pilots and certain leaders in the Japanese navy are seen in blockbuster revisionist films such as Men of the Yamato (2005), Admiral Yamamoto (2011), The Eternal Zero (2013) and The Emperor in August (2015). Aaron Gerow has examined the ‘ideological contortions’ necessary to sustain a purely nationalistic tone in such films: We should be careful, however, of perceiving a monolithic quality to right-­ wing revisionist nationalism in Japanese popular culture. The visions of a fighting Japan presented in these films, precisely because they are often contradictory, [have] only been effected through certain compromises and ideological contortions that tell us as much about the obstacles nationalism faces in Japan as the gains it has made.31 In a similar way, the ‘ideological contortions’ of Kantai Collection show the difficulties of Japanese nationalism in the current era. The fictional Abyssal fleet and its mysterious origins; the Japanese nature of the KanColle fleet that was then expanded to include the naval forces of other countries; the all-­ woman command and crew; the resurrection of sunken battleships – all are important aspects of the text that need and yet defy explanation. The upshot is much fodder for the online discussion boards and dōjinshi manga adaptations, in which theories abound for each of these components of Kantai Collection. But while the ambivalence towards outright nationalism remains, fans revel in

The body political   113 the victories of the KanColle fleet in the Pacific, yet remain uneasy with strident patriotism. On the other hand, Kantai Collection does not seem to be ambivalent towards war itself, as some of these films are. It seems that DMM Games has no compunction in either the blatantly sexualised depiction of women in its visual construction or the resurrection of the Japanese Imperial Navy in the narrative. Aimed at a smaller, online audience, Kantai Collection needs less apology and prevarication about its ideology and representation than the blockbuster films from large movie studios. However, Laura Miller criticises the assumption that ‘otaku culture’ is able to use women’s bodies in sexualised ways because ‘it’s only anime’ or ‘just for fun’.32 Miller argues that masculine appropriations of kawaii culture deny female agency, as well as the plurality and complexity of shōjo culture.33 The use of female ambassadors for ‘Cool Japan’ by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is strikingly similar to the use of female mascots in recent recruiting advertisements by the JSDF. Seen as the ‘cutification’ of the Japanese military, these mascots wear tight military uniforms and tout weapons in a confident manner, projecting an image of the military as cool, cute and sexy.34 Such advertising blurs the line between the fantasy world of manga/anime and the real world of history, war and international conflict. But the use of the shōjo in this discourse is not merely familiar and unthreatening – by its very status being constructed as ‘unthreatening’ and part of a fantasy world, female power in the real world is absolutely rejected. Yamamura Takayoshi examines anime collaborations between creative studios and the JSDF, showing how they too blur the lines between fantasy and reality. Focusing on the direction of requests to collaborate, Yamamura shows that, in nearly all cases, requests come from the anime studio, needing access to tanks and other military hardware for reasons of realistic replication in the artwork.35 The passive role of the JSDF in such collaborations is used by Yamamura as evidence that military ideology is not purposefully embedded in the text. However, the active involvement of the JSDF in the production is not needed for the artist to draw on military ideology in their creative work. Moreover, anime artists may already be invested in military ideology themselves, before arriving at the anime series in question. While commentators often point to the veteran JSDF status of artist Takumi Yanai, creator of the anime series GATE, other artists are more oriented towards the military in terms of a hobby or personal interest. Kantai Collection is a case in point, as we see with the online activities of the artist known by the singular appellation ‘Shibafu’, one of the main collaborators with character designers Ide Naomi and Matsumoto Mayuko.36 Shibafu’s artwork uploaded to sharing sites such as Pixiv features many examples of moe-­ military figures, some with words of greeting written in German or Russian, so the art can be shared with friends.37 The unfamiliarity of Russian and German to the young Japanese audience, forced to learn English in school, may add to the appeal. The use of German and Russian military figures in this artwork echoes a distinction often made in Japan, between the Asia–Pacific War and the war in

114   Rachael Hutchinson Europe. Where the first is seen as serious and controversial, the European war is often represented as distant and glamorous, a subject for fantasy and play. ‘Shōjo Nazi’ imagery is commonplace on the Internet, while Nazi cosplay has become increasingly popular in Japan, with fans describing the aesthetics of German military uniforms as more ‘cool’ (kakkoo-­ii) than Japanese costumes.38 This is consistent with findings in the UK and USA, where Nazi uniforms are admired among re-­enactment communities for their smooth lines and crisp design. The difference is that Nazi re-­enactors in the USA are seen as somehow strange or aberrant, while in Japan it is the Imperial Japanese cosplayers who are seen as more deviant, placing more emphasis on traditional military values such as the bushido ethos, duty and love for one’s country, love for the Emperor and so forth.39 The cultural critic Ōtsuka Eiji comments:  In Japan, compared to the West, there is a tendency to detach criticism of Nazism and the Holocaust from the cultural items they brought about. Of course these things should be criticized, but I think that we cannot avoid facing the fact that the ‘aesthetics’ of fascism are the root of ‘otaku’ culture.40  Ōtsuka enumerates the origins of ‘otaku’ culture in wartime Japan, including the wartime experience of artists who later created science fiction television and film. Alan Tansman persuasively argues that many art forms of modern Japan, from the 1920s through to the post-­war period, were underpinned by a fascist ideology and aesthetics of violence.41 Kantai Collection and similar media products may be seen as a continuation of these mid-­century fascist aesthetics. Ōtsuka concludes that the ‘contemporary shift to the right’ in Japanese popular culture can be taken as evidence of growing nationalism, and an ongoing search for identity and belonging. Recent developments in manga, anime and light novels see a rich vein of alternate history where Japan is imagined as having won the Second World War. Kantai Collection provides a fantasy of Japan with a victorious navy, a world in which the sinking of the Yamato merely resulted in a reincarnation years later – much like the raising of the ship in Space Battleship Yamato.42 Such media products provide not only escapism, but also a hopeful, optimistic vision of the nation, particularly appealing in times of uncertainty and economic recession. Kantai Collection and Space Battleship Yamato share a hopeful view of Japan as the saviour of humanity, fighting monstrous enemies such as the Gamilans and Abyssals for the sake of the entire Earth. These texts speak to a deep sense of yearning and loss, a wish that Japan had not lost the war, a desire for Japan to rise again to international importance and prestige. Today, we are seeing a right-­wing resurgence in many countries around the world, not just in Japan. We do not have to look far to find a rising conservatism affecting policy on immigration, for example, or the belief in the merits of a strong military, or limitations on women’s reproductive rights. Kantai Collection is interesting not so much for its militarism, but for the ‘moe’ aspect of that militarism. Kantai Collection distributes and reinforces a masculine discourse of

The body political   115 war and society in which women are objects to be used, viewed, possessed and consumed. Kantai Collection shows the prevalence of sexualised imagery in the resurgence of conservative politics, with a ready audience in Japan and around the world.

Conclusions Kantai Collection media may be described as a set of artistic works which draw on Second World War realities for inspiration and fantasy, while simultaneously distancing the modern audience from the realities of the Second World War. This distancing effect is achieved through the presentation of an alternate vision of Japanese military history, and through the sexualisation of the female body. Although the ‘alternate history’ aspect of KanColle has been noted and criticised in both scholarly and fan discussion, the use of the female body has been minimised. Game Studies theorist Ian Bogost has argued that videogames are merely representations and cannot produce political change.43 But I would argue that representation in itself is a site for change and an awakening of the political imagination. In Kantai Collection, the militaristic imagery and narrative may be understood as a romantic yearning for the past glory days of the Japanese Imperial Navy. Yet, the character designs resurrect not only the imperial warships themselves, but also the masculinist rhetoric of the ‘rich country, strong army’ from the Meiji period, when women’s bodies served the state (and the fleet was victorious over Russia). The evidence suggests that Kantai Collection is a highly political game that demands some kind of response from players, whether this takes the form of a rise in nationalist fervour, a sexual arousal or a sense of historical shock. The manga and anime adaptations conform to existing conventions of visual representation and narrative in these media forms, widening the appeal to a gender-­diverse target audience. But these media also serve the ideological underpinnings of the original Kantai Collection, bolstering right-­wing conservatism in contemporary Japan. The women of Kantai Collection, although patronisingly called ‘ship girls’ and dressed in school uniforms as sexual objects for the male gaze, also embody female strength and purpose. Further research is required to see how female players engage with these characters in terms of player–character identification, and whether the ‘ship girls’ could be seen as role models in their physical power and determination to succeed. Although it may be surmised that the overly sexualised forms of the characters would undermine any sense of strength they might possess, female consumers might overlook the sexualised visuals to focus on the characters’ personalities and other attributes.44 Current female cosplayers of Kantai Collection characters find personal expression and fulfilment in taking on the identities of Yamato, Nagato, Akizuki and the other kan-­musume.45 In this case, the enactment of the Second World War fantasy may be less about Japanese military glory and more about exciting female role models, much as Lara Croft from Tomb Raider has provided inspiration for female gamers in the West. The character Nagato would provide much inspiration here, with her important role as Secretary Ship and leader of the Naval Base, her clipped commands

116   Rachael Hutchinson issued in a deep voice, and her serious, responsible demeanour. In closing, I would suggest that this kind of player–character identification is also in itself political, as Japanese women find strength in compromised characters, indicative of the ambivalent position that women hold in contemporary Japanese society.

Notes   1 User data is constantly updated on the game’s official website, http://games.dmm. com/detail/kancolle/. This number is the estimate as of January 2019.   2 YouTube videos and online fan materials abound, providing English translations of commands and instructions, plus strategy tips and commentary. The PS Vita release of the sequel in February 2016 sold out in the first week.   3 Kantai Collection’s popularity in Asia produced the Chinese adaptations Azur Lane and Battleship Shōjo R, smartphone apps marketed in Japan and widely seen as ‘rip-­ offs’ of the original.   4 Official merchandising is sold on Amazon.com, but fan-­produced goods are also popular. As with much dōjinshi art, many items play on the characters’ sexualities, including artistic and narrative erotica.   5 See the KanColle Wiki, online at: http://kancolle.wikia.com/wiki/Equipment. Accessed 11 January 2019.   6 Following the game design tactics of Kōei’s Naval Ops series (Kurogane no hōkō), Kantai Collection uses a fictional universe to avoid any tension involved in recreating historical battles from the Second World War. For more on distancing strategies in Japanese war-­themed games, see Rachael Hutchinson, Japanese Culture Through Videogames (London: Routledge, 2019), 181–206.   7 For a sample list of KanColle place-­names and real-­world equivalents, see Valtteri Vuorikoski, ‘Discourses of War and History in the Japanese Game Kantai Collection and its Fan Community’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Helsinki, 2017, 48.   8 Many scenes in the anime and manga take place in the Mamiya café, with aircraft carrier Akagi famed for her food consumption. In Episode 8 of the anime, Akagi is outdone by the Yamato, who eats even greater amounts.   9 Vuorikoski notes the roulette wheel as parody, ‘Discourses of War and History in the Japanese Game Kantai Collection and its Fan Community’, unpublished, 51. 10 Yamamura Takayoshi, ‘Cooperation Between Anime Producers and the Japan Self-­ Defense Force: Creating Fantasy and/or Propaganda?’ Journal of War and Culture Studies, 22 December 2017, 11. 11 Akiko Sugawa-­Shimada, ‘Playing with Militarism in/with Arpeggio and Kantai Collection: Effects of shōjo Images in War-­Related Contents Tourism in Japan’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 3 March 2018, 3 and 11. 12 Ibid., 11. 13 Ibid., 12. 14 Vuorikoski, ‘Discourses of War and History in the Japanese Game Kantai Collection and its Fan Community’, 50, 54 and 72. 15 Ibid., 73. 16 See, for example, Aquagaze ‘The Unfortunate Implications of Kantai Collection’, Glorioblog, 1 May 2014. 17 One Russian ship, the Verniy, was introduced in 2013, joined by three Kriegsmarine ships (including the Bismarck) in 2014 and two Italian ships in 2015. US ships like the Iowa and Saratoga were added from 2016. An expansion in Winter 2018 added the USS Intrepid and HMS Jervis from the Allied fleet. For discussion of the expanded fleet, see Sshinka, ‘Any Thoughts on American/British/Soviet Ships?’ KanColle Wikia, Forum topic. 7 November 2015.

The body political   117 18 For example, see the KanColle Wiki Q&A pages on Abyssals. Vuorikoski also takes the Abyssals as standing for the American fleet, see Vuorikoski, ‘Discourses of War and History in the Japanese Game Kantai Collection and its Fan Community’, 74. 19 Through the game and its adaptations, there is much emphasis on the size of munitions used in battle, with centimetre measurements accompanying the firing of torpedoes and featured in descriptions of the ship girls themselves, such as Nagato ‘with her giant 41-cm cannons’ (Anime Episode 6). The phallic imagery and emphasis on inches may be seen in terms of the sexual power of the player, firing the artillery in the role of Admiral. 20 Similar depictions of Western characters as Other occur in the SoulCalibur fighting game series, with blue-­eyed, blond character designs shading into palettes of green and purple as the Other becomes more distanced from reality (and the normalcy of the Japanese characters); see Rachael Hutchinson, ‘Virtual Colonialism: Japan’s Others in SoulCalibur’, in Alexis Pulos and S. Austin Lee (eds), Transnational Contexts of Culture, Gender, Class, and Colonialism in Play: Video Games in East Asia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 159–162. 21 Aquagaze provides one of the most vocal critics of the sexualised representation, see Aquagaze, ‘The Unfortunate Implications of Kantai Collection’. 22 Sharon Kinsella, ‘What’s Behind the Fetishism of Japanese School Uniforms?’ Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 6(2) (2002), 219 and 225–226. 23 See Ueno Chizuko, Nationalism and Gender (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2004), 16–21. On the role of ryōsai kenbō (‘good wife, wise mother’) ideology in nation-­ building, see Kathleen Uno, ‘Womanhood, War, and Empire: Transmutations of “Good Wife, Wise Mother” before 1931’, in Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (eds), Gendering Modern Japanese History. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 24 Philipp Klueglein, ‘The Design and Reception of Characters in Japanese Free-­to-play Games’. Nottingham, UK: Replaying Japan Conference, 22 August 2018. 25 Tanaka refers to players as ‘admirals’ and expresses his thanks to ‘all the admirals’, without specifying gender; see Tanaka Kensuke ‘Kensuke Tanaka Interview: Famitsu Weekly May 27th, 2018’, 2018. 26 This video, ‘Kancolle: Kantai Collection. Brief Gameplay’, posted by todkapuz on 4 November 2013, currently has 227,279 views. Online at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=EGSlFE6YvQM. Accessed 20 February 2019. 27 The anime series Kantai Collection aired in 2015, directed by Kusakawa Keizō. 28 The anime quotes are from English-­language subtitles to the DVD box set of DMM Games, KanColle: Kantai Collection, Toyyo: Kadokawa, 2017. 29 Momoi Ryōta, Fubuki, Gambarimasu! 2013, Chapter 3, 5. Translators are not listed online, appearing only as ‘Kadokawa Development’. 30 Ibid., Chapter 4, 5. 31 Aaron Gerow, ‘Fantasies of War and Nation in Recent Japanese Cinema’, The Asia-­ Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 4(2) (2006). 32 Laura Miller, ‘Cute Masquerade and the Pimping of Japan’, International Journal of Japanese Sociology 20 (2011), 19. 33 Ibid., 23–26. 34 Jonathan Gad, ‘The Japanese Military is Getting Offensively Cute’, Vice News, 13 April 2015. 35 Yamamura, ‘Cooperation Between Anime Producers and the Japan Self-­Defense Force’, 7–10. 36 As with SoulCalibur, the character design team is led by women, counteracting the assumption that hyper-­sexualised characters are mainly designed by men. 37 For examples, see online at: www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=312614. Accessed 11 January 2019.

118   Rachael Hutchinson 38 Aleksandra Jaworowicz-­Zimny, ‘Nazi Cosplayers in Japan’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 3 March 2018, 10. 39 Jenny Thompson, War Games: Inside the World of Twentieth-­Century War Reenactors (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 53–58 and 112–114; and Jaworowicz-­Zimny, ‘Nazi Cosplayers in Japan’, 12–13.  40 Ōtsuka Eiji, ‘Otaku Culture as “Conversion Literature” ’, in Patrick Galbraith, Thiam Huat Kam and Björn-Ole Kamm (eds), Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan: Historical Perspectives and New Horizons (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), xxii. 41 Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009). 42 On militarism and national narratives in Space Battleship Yamato, Matsumoto Leiji’s animated series from the 1970s, see William Ashbaugh, ‘Contesting Traumatic War Narratives: Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam’, in David Stahl and Mark Williams (eds), Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 43 Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 332. 44 This is the case in regards to female players of fighting games, well known for sexualised character designs. See Todd Harper, The Culture of Digital Fighting Games: Performance and Practice (London: Routledge, 2017). On the other hand, some players (male and female) find the hypersexualision in SoulCalibur, Tekken and Virtua Fighter distracting, causing breaks in immersion and player–character identification, see Rachael Hutchinson, ‘Race and Gender Stereotypes in Japanese Fighting Games: Effects on Identification and Immersion’, NMEDIAC: Journal of New Media and Culture 10(1) (Summer, 2015). 45 Sugawa-­Shimada sees female KanColle cosplayers in terms of performances enacted for men, but this generalises cosplay performance and intent; see Sugawa-­Shimada, ‘Playing with Militarism in/with Arpeggio and Kantai Collection’. Similarly, gamers enact performance identities based on their own narratives and meaning-­making, see Anne-­Marie Schleiner, ‘Does Lara Croft Wear Fake Polygons? Gender and Gender-­ Role Subversion in Computer Adventure Games’. Leonardo 34(3) (2001): 221–226; and Rachael Hutchinson, ‘Performing the Self: Subverting the Binary in Combat Games’, Games and Culture 2(4) (Fall) (2007): 283–299.

References Aquagaze. 2014. ‘The Unfortunate Implications of Kantai Collection’. Glorioblog. 1 May. Online at: https://theglorioblog.com/2014/05/01/the-­unfortunate-implications-­ofkantai-­collection/. Accessed 28 August 2018. Ashbaugh, William. 2010. ‘Contesting Traumatic War Narratives: Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam’. In David Stahl and Mark Williams (eds), Imag(in) ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film. Leiden: Brill, 327–353. Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DMM Games. 2013. Kantai Korekushon [Kantai Collection]. Windows. Tokyo: Kadokawa. DMM Games. 2016. KanKore-­Kai [KanColle the Sequel]. PlayStation Vita. Tokyo: Kadokawa. Gad, Jonathan. 2015. ‘The Japanese Military is Getting Offensively Cute’. Vice News, 13 April. Online at: https://news.vice.com/article/the-­japanese-military-­is-getting-­offensivelycute. Accessed 28 August 2018.

The body political   119 Gerow, Aaron. 2006. ‘Fantasies of War and Nation in Recent Japanese Cinema’. The Asia-­Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 4(2). Online at: https://apjjf.org/-Aaron-­ Gerow/1707/article.html. Accessed 11 January 2019. Harper, Todd. 2017. The Culture of Digital Fighting Games: Performance and Practice, London: Routledge. Hutchinson, Rachael. 2007. ‘Performing the Self: Subverting the Binary in Combat Games’. Games and Culture 2(4) (Fall): 283–299. Hutchinson, Rachael. 2015. ‘Race and Gender Stereotypes in Japanese Fighting Games: effects on identification and immersion’. NMEDIAC: Journal of New Media and Culture, 10(1) (Summer). Online at: http://ibiblio.org/nmediac/summer2015/GenderStereotypes.htm. Accessed 11 January 2019. Hutchinson, Rachael. 2016. ‘Virtual Colonialism: Japan’s Others in SoulCalibur’. In Alexis Pulos and S. Austin Lee (eds), Transnational Contexts of Culture, Gender, Class, and Colonialism in Play: Video Games in East Asia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 155–178. Hutchinson, Rachael. 2019. Japanese Culture Through Videogames. London: Routledge. Jaworowicz-­Zimny, Aleksandra. 2018. ‘Nazi Cosplay in Japan’. Journal of War and Culture Studies, 3 March. Online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17526272.2018.1427015. Accessed 11 January 2019. Jewell, Jerry (Dir.). 2017. KanColle Kantai Collection: The Complete Series. Anime DVD box set. Funimation. Kinsella, Sharon. 2002. ‘What’s Behind the Fetishism of Japanese School Uniforms?’ Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 6(2): 215–237. Klueglein, Philipp. 2018. ‘The Design and Reception of Characters in Japanese Free-­toPlay Games’. Nottingham, UK: Replaying Japan Conference. 22 August. Abstract Online at: http://replaying.jp/wp-­content/uploads/2018/08/replaying2018conferencebook-2.pdf. Accessed 20 February 2019. Kusakawa Keizō (Dir.) 2015. Kantai Collection. Anime TV series. 12 episodes. January 8–March 26. Tokyo: Diomedea Studios. Miller, Laura. 2011. ‘Cute Masquerade and the Pimping of Japan’. International Journal of Japanese Sociology 20: 18–29. Momoi Ryōta. 2018 (2013). Fubuki, Gambarimasu! [Fubuki Does Her Best!], Kadokawa. Online at: http://mangakakalot.com/manga/kantai_collection_kankore_4koma_comic_ fubuki_ganbarimasu. Accessed 20 August 2018. Ōtsuka Eiji. 2015. ‘Otaku Culture as “Conversion Literature” ’. In Patrick Galbraith, Thiam Huat Kam and Björn-Ole Kamm (eds), Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan: Historical Perspectives and New Horizons. London: Bloomsbury, xiii–xxix. Schleiner, Anne-­Marie. 2001. ‘Does Lara Croft Wear Fake Polygons? Gender and Gender-­Role Subversion in Computer Adventure Games’. Leonardo 34(3): 221–226. Sshinka. 2015. ‘Any Thoughts on American/British/Soviet Ships?’ KanColle Wikia, Forum topic, 7 November. Online at: http://kancolle.wikia.com/wiki/Thread:207167. Accessed 28 August 2018. Sugawa-­Shimada, Akiko. 2018. ‘Playing with Militarism in/with Arpeggio and Kantai Collection: Effects of shōjo Images in War-­related Contents Tourism in Japan’. In Journal of War and Culture Studies, 3 March. Online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17526 272.2018.1427014. Accessed 11 January 2019. Tanaka Kensuke. 2018. ‘Kensuke Tanaka Interview: Famitsu Weekly May 27th, 2018’. Online at: http://en.kancollewiki.net/wiki/Kensuke_Tanaka_Interview:_Famitsu_Weekly_ May_27th,_2018. Accessed 11 January 2019.

120   Rachael Hutchinson Tansman, Alan. 2009. The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thompson, Jenny. 2004. War Games: Inside the World of Twentieth-­Century War Reenactors. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books. Ueno, Chizuko. 2004. Nationalism and Gender, trans. Beverley Yamamoto. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Uno, Kathleen. 2005. ‘Womanhood, War, and Empire: Transmutations of “Good Wife, Wise Mother” Before 1931’. In Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (eds), Gendering Modern Japanese History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 493–519. Vuorikoski, Valtteri. 2017. ‘Discourses of War and History in the Japanese Game Kantai Collection and its Fan Community’. Unpublished MA thesis. University of Helsinki. Online at: https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/229753/Vuorikoski_Valtteri_ Pro gradu_2017.pdf. Accessed 11 January 2019. Yamamura, Takayoshi. 2017. ‘Cooperation Between Anime Producers and the Japan Self-­Defense Force: Creating Fantasy and/or Propaganda?’ Journal of War and Culture Studies. 22 December. Online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17526272.2017.1396077. Accessed 11 January 2019.

7 Towards an unrestrained military Manga narratives of the self-­defence forces Jeffrey J. Hall

Introduction Japan’s 1947 Constitution, written in the aftermath of Japan’s devastating defeat in the Second World War, states that the nation may not maintain ‘land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential’. Yet, despite this ban, Japan has maintained a de facto military since the 1950s – the Japan Self-­Defense Forces (JSDF ). For much of Japan’s post-­war history, the JSDF kept a low profile, avoiding actions that could prompt negative reactions from a public that was extremely weary of militarism and war. In recent years, the JSDF has increased its engagement with the Japanese public. This engagement has crossed over into the realm of popular culture, including anime and manga. While the JSDF has dabbled in using such mediums for public relations materials, a far more significant development has been its cooperation with private content producers. The private sector is producing an ever-­growing number of manga and anime series that deal with military topics, ranging from playful fantasy to realism, and the JSDF has provided assistance in their creation. This phenomenon has occurred alongside major political developments in Japan. Since the 1990s, conservative politicians have gradually expanded the role of the JSDF through the removal of legal restrictions that previously limited it to a narrow defensive role. The most significant developments occurred in 2014, when the Japanese government approved a reinterpretation of the Constitution that greatly broadened the circumstances under which the JSDF could utilise military force. Conservative politicians were also pushing for a formal revision of the Constitution, which would include changes to Article 9. While elite discourses and high cultural works influence the way countries view the existence of entities such as the military, popular culture has its place as well. It is relevant to understand how such issues have been portrayed in popular culture, for it is ‘a crucial domain in which social and political life are represented’ and through which societies construct their understanding of the world around themselves.1 This chapter examines popular cultural representations of the JSDF produced during a politically significant period in its development. Specifically, it focuses on two manga series published during the prime

122   Jeffrey J. Hall ministership of Abe Shinzō: Aozakura bōei daigakkō monogatari (Aozakura: The Story of the National Defense Academy) and Jieitai kano chi nite, kaku tatakaeri (Gate: Thus the Japanese Self-­Defense Force Fought There). Although they contain some unrealistic elements, both manga attempt to portray the contemporary Self-­Defense Forces as they exist in the real world. These works can serve as a window into how private sector content producers are representing the JSDF in this important period in the history of Japan’s post-­war security policy. In addition, these two privately produced manga series have received cooperation or endorsement from the JSDF, meaning that they serve as examples of how the organisation wants to be perceived. As we will go on to see, these works offer very different views of Japan’s armed forces. The first, Aozakura, avoids potentially divisive political issues, so much so that one could mistake it for something directly produced by the JSDF ’s public affairs office. The other, Gate, controversially depicts scenarios in which the JSDF are heroic warriors, Japan’s political left is demonised, and soldiers are celebrated for disobeying democratically elected politicians. This contrast raises questions about the degree to which the armed forces should be allowed to cooperate with and promote politically contentious works of popular culture.

Historical background To understand the constitutional and societal conditions under which the JSDF currently exists, it is necessary to look back to the period immediately following Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. Upon its surrender to the Allied Powers, Japan was placed under an American-­led military occupation that viewed the re-­emergence of a militarily powerful Japan as a potential security threat and took measures to prevent it. The Imperial Japanese Military was completely disbanded and a war-­renouncing Constitution was imposed on Japan: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.2 However, despite a clear ban on maintaining a military, Cold War geopolitics led to pressure on Japan to re-­arm, both from the United States and from conservative Japanese politicians. In place of a formal military, the Japan Self-­Defense Forces (JSDF ) was established in 1954. Although not officially called a ‘military’ or legally defined as one, it was organised and equipped in a manner similar to the military forces of other nations. To explain this seemingly unconstitutional development, the Japanese government produced a new interpretation of Article 9 stating that it was legal to maintain armed forces with only ‘the minimum necessary’ for self-­defence in the case of an attack on Japan.3 This

Towards an unrestrained military   123 interpretation prohibited overseas deployments of the JSDF and collective defensive arrangements with other nations. Preservation of these restrictions allowed Japan to avoid having its military dragged into overseas military conflicts directly, such as the Vietnam War, although indirect logistical support was always expected as a subservient nation to the USA. The 1947 Constitution was welcomed by Japan’s war weary public, many of whom remembered that the powerful Imperial Japanese Military had not only carried out acts of aggression and atrocities abroad, but also had repressed freedoms on the home front. In contrast to the pre-­war view of a strong military being essential to national survival, the balance of public opinion in Japan ‘valued protection from overprotection by their military’.4 From the day of Japan’s defeat, some Japanese conservatives aimed for a full rearmament, but they faced stiff political opposition. Believers in the value of the Constitution strongly resisted any attempts at any revision, whether related to Article 9 or not. This resistance has been attributed to:  a deep-­rooted fear not only among the Left but also among broad segments of the political center that democracy was a delicate, alien flower planted in inhospitable soil, and that constitutional revision could cause the fragile blossom of freedom to wither.5  The fierce political debates of the 1950s led political elites to accept a ‘procedural norm of concurrent majority rule, which respects the veto power of intensely held minority views’.6 Accordingly, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), an alliance of conservatives that held power for most of the post-­war period, shelved the idea of constitutional revision for decades. The 1990s brought with it geopolitical shifts that forced Japan to re-­evaluate its political role in the world and the role of the JSDF. The end of the Cold War caused the end of a stable bipolar system in which Japan was relatively confident of American security guarantees. New regional and global threats emerged, from the rise of China and North Korea’s transformation into a nuclear-­armed rogue state, to the American-­led War on Terror. This increased insecurity placed pressure on Japan to loosen legal restrictions on its use of military force. A gradual evolution in Japanese defence policy led to a limited increase in the role of the JSDF. Beginning with the 1991 dispatch of minesweepers to the Persian Gulf and the 1992 deployment to aid the UN peacekeeping mission in Cambodia – very small numbers of JSDF personnel were dispatched overseas. Their missions were strictly non-­combat in nature, focusing instead on reconstruction, humanitarian assistance and the delivery of supplies. In order to make this legally possible, Japanese legislators passed special laws authorising each overseas mission. The largest and most dangerous overseas mission was the 2004–2006 deployment of about 600 JSDF personnel to southern Iraq. The Japanese soldiers were placed in a relatively quiet area of the country, forbidden to use their arms in any situation other than self-­defence, and placed under the protection of Dutch and Australian soldiers. During the two-­year mission, they did

124   Jeffrey J. Hall not become involved in combat. In the decade after the Iraq mission, there have been smaller-­scale missions involving significantly lower levels of danger, such as the deployment of naval vessels to participate in anti-­piracy convoy duty off the coast of Somalia. The evolution of the JSDF reached a new stage under the leadership of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, a conservative member of the LDP who sought to make Japan a ‘normal’ country with a formal military instead of a legally ambiguous self-­ defence force.7 In 2014, Abe and his allies enacted a controversial re-­interpretation of Article 9. It legally established shūdanteki jieiken (集団的自衛権) or the right of Collective Self-­Defense as the new status quo and it eliminated previous rules that restricted JSDF troops on overseas deployments to strict self-­defence, allowing for the possibility of the JSDF to come to the defence of friendly forces who are under attack. This re-­interpretation, together with increases in the military budget and a controversial State Secrets Law, caused large-­scale domestic protest marches. Opponents saw these legal changes as a departure from previous procedural norms respecting minority viewpoints, and feared that it could lead to Japan’s participation in overseas wars.8 While it represents a historic shift in the legal restrictions on the JSDF, Liff has noted that ‘without formal constitutional revision … more ambitious efforts to fundamentally transform Article 9’s interpretation or the scope of scenarios in which Japan can use force overseas are unlikely without major domestic political realignments.’9 Abe, seeking to achieve the aspirations denied to previous generations of LDP politicians, has called for formal constitutional revision to take place by 2020.10 Domestic support for revision, however, remains elusive. Public opinion polls conducted in 2017 and 2018 indicated that roughly half of the Japanese public supported revision, but many did not see a need for immediate action.11 Barring a major change, it would appear that revision by 2020 would be very difficult. At the time of writing this article, the JSDF had never received an order to engage in combat overseas and no JSDF personnel had died in combat. The commitment of JSDF personnel to fight and die in defence of their country had not been tested, nor had the Japanese nation’s political tolerance of combat casualties.

The self-­defence forces and popular culture For much of Japan’s post-­war history, the JSDF seemed aware of its legally precarious situation as a military organisation in a country suspicious of militarism. It pursued a policy of ‘strategic self-­preservation’ by staying out of the public eye and avoiding potential controversies. One JSDF officer summed up the situation by quoting an old Japanese proverb: ‘the pheasant would not be shot but for its cries’ (kiji mo akazuba utaremai).12 That is not to say that the JSDF was a completely passive organisation. Midford has demonstrated that the JSDF was active in building public support for its existence.13 Notable acts included aerial acrobatics shows conducted by

Towards an unrestrained military   125 the Air Self-­Defense Forces’ Blue Impulse squadron, the use of over 7,500 JSDF personnel to manage the 1964 Olympic Games, the participation of JSDF personnel in the national Olympic team, overseas humanitarian missions and the JSDF ’s numerous domestic disaster relief operations. Largely because of such disaster relief operations, polls have shown ever-­increasing support for the existence of the JSDF. It was not until the 1990s that the JSDF finally opened public affairs offices and began cooperation with producers of popular culture. Until that point, filmmakers and creators of works featuring the Self-­Defense Forces rarely received any form of official assistance. Noteworthy examples of pre-­1990s popular culture were Toho Studio’s Godzilla film series and its related kaiju (monster) films, which often involved stories in which the JSDF would be deployed to fight against giant monsters. Lacking official JSDF cooperation, Toho largely relied on low-­budget and unrealistic miniatures, causing fans to label the military force in the films the ‘Tōhō Self-­Defense Forces’ (Tōhō Jieitai) rather than the Japan Self-­Defense Forces.14 Post-­1990s works of popular culture received significant levels of cooperation from the JSDF, ranging from permission to film JSDF troops and vehicles, to technical consultations on how to accurately depict military technology. Yamamura15 has noted some important features of this cooperation. One is that the JSDF is a passive actor, so the most usual pattern is that a creator of a movie, animation or other work contacts a local JSDF office and requests assistance. For films, such requests require review and approval from the entire chain of command, up to the Minister of Defense. Other works, such as television anime, are left up to the discretion of regional JSDF officials. Another important feature is that market forces, not government propaganda efforts, are driving this cooperation. There is a market for stories that involve the use of military weaponry and/or the JSDF, and the creators of such works seek assistance and expertise from the JSDF because they believe consumers appreciate accuracy. In addition to cooperation with the private sector, the JSDF has undertaken efforts to create its own promotional manga and anime. In the 1990s, they produced several short manga volumes, available free in print form and online, presenting stories in which these the official mascots of the JSDF, Prince Pickles and Princess Parsley, realise the importance of having a defence force that can protect one’s country and come to appreciate the various duties carried out by the JSDF. More recently, the Ministry of Defense has turned the information found in its White Papers into a comic book. Frühstück has noted that the creation of such comics represent efforts by the JSDF to disseminate a self-­image ‘suitable for mass consumption and specifically for consumption by children and youth’.16 While being a significant step by the JSDF, it is questionable whether many Japanese consumers would actually seek out and read a comic book produced and distributed by a government agency. Privately produced content, on the other hand, needs to reach a wide audience if its creators want to survive in the marketplace. Two notable studies have been conducted on the consumption of military-­themed popular culture and the

126   Jeffrey J. Hall JSDF ’s relationship with those works. A recent study by Sugawa-­Shimada analysed the two anime series – Kantai Collection and Arpeggio of Blue Steel: Ars Nova (Aoki Hagane no Arupejio).17 Both series could be categorised as fantasy stories that take the Second World War technologies out of their original historical context and combine them with cute female characters. The popularity of such series has led to a boom in war-­related tourism, with anime fans flocking to military bases that appear in the shows, particularly the JSDF base in Yokosuka. The JSDF has sought to use the popularity of these anime in its PR activities, using voice actors and actresses of Arpeggio of Blue Steel in promotional DVDs and having the Maritime Self-­Defense Forces’ band perform Kantai Collection background music at public events. Sugawa-­Shimada has persuasively argued that these works serve to ‘displace the meanings and contexts of war-­related tourism sites, of JSDF and Japanese militarism’.18 She also contends that while these anime stories take place in a fantasy world and have little relation to real world politics, they could serve as an indirect way of introducing young Japanese to nationalistic ideology. Yamamoto also analysed the JSDF ’s involvement in tourism related to the anime series Girls und Panzer and High School Fleet. Like the works studied by Sugawa-­Shimada, these are works of fantasy involving out-­of-context Second World War-­era military technology and stories involving cute young girls. Parts of Girls und Panzer are set in a Japanese town that exists in reality – Ōarai in Ibaraki Prefecture – sparking a tourism boom. While there was some controversy involving the displaying of JSDF tanks and personnel at local festivals in the town, Yamamoto notes that the presence of the JSDF was actually requested by local officials seeking to attract military anime fans. Contrary to those who see the popularity of such anime as indicating a resurgence of nationalism or militarism in Japan, Yamamoto sees this phenomenon as ‘focusing on fantasy and entertainment, not ideology’ and that none of the works discussed are ‘fundamentally pro-­war’.19 In light of recent political developments and the JSDF ’s gradual evolution towards a ‘normal’ military, there is a necessity to study works of popular culture that are less focused on fantasy and more focused on reality. Focusing on contemporary political issues involving the JSDF and the use of military force, works like Aozakura and Gate allow for an exploration of contemporary representations of the Self-­Defense Forces’ place in Japanese society, the motivations of its personnel, and the politics of employing military violence under Japan’s pacifist Constitution.

Aozakura: the story of the National Defense Academy Aozakura is a manga series focusing on student life at the National Defense Academy of Japan (NDA). Founded in 1952, NDA is a four-­year university, whose graduates become officers in the three branches of the JSDF. The lives of cadets at NDA are very different from that of most Japanese university students – cadets must wear military-­style uniforms, must live in barracks-­style

Towards an unrestrained military   127 dormitories, must engage in physically demanding military training, must observe strict military-­style discipline and are not allowed to leave campus without special permission. Aozakura began publication in 2016, at around the same time that NDA appeared in the news in relation to a major political controversy. Media attention focused on the fact that 47 of its 419 graduating cadets, or 11 per cent of the total, refused to become officers in the Self-­Defense Forces. It was one of the highest numbers of refusals in the history of NDA, and it was the first class to graduate since the enactment of Prime Minister Abe’s controversial re-­ interpretation of the Constitution. Although NDA representatives and some students stated that their reasons for not pursuing a military career were unrelated to politics, speculation nonetheless focused on the possibility that students were unhappy about Abe’s reforms. According to an article printed in the Mainichi Shimbun, one student believed that senior officers were ‘trying harder than last year to stop refusals, maybe because they don’t want criticism that the number of graduates refusing to become officers increased because of the security laws’.20 Other media reports after the 2015 law noted that JSDF recruiters were expressing worry about their ability to find young people willing to take on an increasingly dangerous job.21 There are no tuition fees for NDA but graduates are expected to serve at least six years in the JSDF. However, students are given the option of refusing military service upon graduation. Those that refuse have to pay a fine of 2,500,000 yen, which is not particularly high when one considers that cadets receive a salary of 110,000 yen per month for all four years at the academy, in addition to free room and board. Both the six-­year service requirement and the option of refusal are lenient compared to the requirements at military academies in other nations. For example, cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point are required to formally sign papers joining the US Army after their second year of study, and upon graduation are required to serve five years of active duty and three years of reserve duty. West Point graduates cannot simply quit and pay a penalty – like other members of the US Army, they can face arrest and imprisonment if they try to quit without permission. Japan’s lax requirements are a product of societal views of militarism and the ambiguous constitutional status of the JSDF. Since it is not legally considered a military, its members are civilian employees of the government and cannot be forced to serve. The government compelling young men to serve in the armed forces, even if they are NDA graduates who have received costly educations at taxpayers’ expense, can evoke memories of the forceful policies of the pre-­1945 Japanese state. Nikaidō Hikaru, the author and illustrator of Aozakura, has stated that he created the series because he wanted to tell an interesting coming-­of-age story and was interested in the lives of young people who want to protect and serve their country. Nikaidō’s interest in the JSDF goes back to his childhood, when his father served in the Self-­Defense Forces. Although his father later became a salaryman, Nikaidō would often go to base events with his parents. Years later, after successfully publishing several non-­military manga series, he decided to

128   Jeffrey J. Hall create Aozakura. The work is a reflection of his admiration for the young cadets, as well as a desire to depict a setting that is unique and interesting. Having never attended NDA or served in the JSDF, Nikaidō relied extensively on the help of NDA alumni for the research on school life at the academy.22 This chapter analyses volumes 1–7 of Aozakura, which were published in September 2016–March 2018. These books are compilations of short chapters that were originally serialised in Weekly Shōnen Sunday, a weekly manga magazine published by Shogakukan, one of Japan’s major publishing houses. Weekly Shōnen Sunday had a circulation of about 310,000 in 2016–2017, and a target demographic of young men in their teens or early twenties.23 Like other manga magazines that are categorised as youth publications, the actual age of readers may vary widely, and often includes older readers. However, it is noteworthy that the target demographic for this publication also happens to be around the ideal age for recruits to the JSDF or applicants to NDA. Aozakura’s story centres on the experiences of Kondō Isami, a first-­year cadet at NDA. Kondō’s tale begins as an academically gifted high school student is unable apply for a university education because his family is facing economic hardship. Through a chance encounter with his childhood friend Katsuragi, Kondō learns about NDA’s existence. Katsuragi, who is several years older than Kondō, is a soldier in the Ground Self-­Defense Forces. He is depicted as a muscular, handsome and friendly individual, admired by the people around him. People in the community recognised Katsuragi on television news reports about the JSDF ’s disaster relief operations in Tohoku, and Kondō is surprised that during his time studying, Katsuragi has been out in the field helping save lives. Although Kondo is unsure of what he wants to do in the future, when he finds out that NDA can provide a university education for free, he jumps at the opportunity and applies for admission.24 The preceding paragraph sounds like it could be describing a manga written and published by the Japanese government, as it depicts the academy and military service in an overwhelmingly positive light. Even among the civilian characters in Kondō’s hometown, there are no people who have any negative opinions on the military or Kondō’s decision to enter NDA. This is quite different from depictions of public attitudes towards the military in other works of popular culture. For example, Kawaguchi Kaiji’s Zipang, a 2000–2009 manga series about the Maritime Self-­Defense Force, contains images of anti-­JSDF protesters on its first pages, as well as scenes that flashback to characters’ experiences facing insults from random civilians because they were wearing NDA uniforms off-­campus. There are no such scenes in Aozakura. While it may be true that recent public opinion polls show high levels of support for the existence of the JSDF, opposition has not disappeared. Anti-­military pamphleteers and protesters remain a visible sight in Japan, including in Yokosuka, the base city in which NDA’s campus is located. The Japan of Nikaidō’s Aozakura is one that appears to conveniently lack anti-­military sentiments. On the other hand, it can be said that Aozakura does realistically portray some negative aspects of military life. Nikaidō’s work does not have the ‘sunny

Towards an unrestrained military   129 relaxed atmosphere’ of official JSDF recruitment posters, which tend to hide the realities of physically and mentally strenuous duty.25 From the moment Kondō formally enters the Academy, he and other first-­year cadets are subjected to cruel hazing from upperclassmen. Minor infractions of the rules, from a failure to properly address an upperclassman to not wearing one’s hat at the proper angle, result in dozens of push-­ups, being forced to ‘sit’ on non-­existent chairs, being called to upperclassmen’s rooms to be shouted at, or having to handwrite stacks of apology letters. The error of one platoon member results in an entire platoon receiving punishments, creating scenes in which one individual becomes the subject of hatred from his peers. There is even a scene in which Kondō returns to his dormitory room and finds that upperclassmen have thrown his bed out the window and into a tree. Upon asking an upperclassman why he has been receiving such harsh hazing, Kondō is told that the cruel hazing is carried out to make the cadets experience ‘unfairness’ (rifujin). Unfairness, according to the upperclassman, is something that future JSDF officers need to get used to, as they will one day need to keep their cool and make important decisions in the midst of unfair or chaotic situations, such as natural disasters or foreign invasions.26 Kondō and his roommates accept this explanation and strive harder to overcome the unfairness they must face every day at the academy. Thus, one of NDA’s most unattractive features is depicted as necessary and important to the development of good military leaders. Another form of hardship shown in Aozakura is the unfavourable conditions under which students are expected to study. On his application form to NDA, Kondō writes that his motivation for entering the academy is to put his love of studying to work in a way that will help other people.27 He soon discovers, however, that physical training, mandatory extracurricular activities and various forms of punishment leave students with little time for studying. Exhaustion from other activities is so extreme that many students are shown falling asleep in the middle of classes. Although initially disappointed by this, Kondō uses weekends to study in the library and organises study groups to help his fellow cadets pass their exams. Like the unfairness of hazing, it is another opportunity in the story for Kondō to overcome difficulties and move forward towards becoming a JSDF officer. The cadets of Aozakura have varied motivations for seeking a military career but none of them are politically problematic. They are not joining the JSDF out of a desire to participate in war, a love of weaponry or fear of any specific foreign threats. One of the cadets, Harada, states that his motivation to enter NDA is to challenge himself, and that he hopes to one day participate in a UN peacekeeping mission and teach baseball to local children. Accompanying this are illustrations of JSDF personnel distributing aid to villagers and helping with reconstruction, rather than images that bring to mind the potential hardships or dangers of such deployments.28 At the time of Aozakura’s publication, the JSDF had not experienced a foreign deployment involving actual combat but it is not inconceivable that such deployments, even those in which the JSDF serve as UN peacekeepers, could involve the use of deadly force. In fact, as Aozakura was

130   Jeffrey J. Hall being published, the JSDF was facing the potential of combat during its peacekeeping deployment in South Sudan. Although the South Sudan mission was supposed to end if combat broke out in the country, Japanese government officials had intentionally hidden details about fighting near JSDF personnel and allowed the mission to continue, a scandal that led to the resignation of the Defense Minister.29 In this respect, Aozakura depicts UN peacekeeping in its most ideal form, both physically and politically safe. Throughout the manga, characters seem aware that their future career will involve protecting their nation, but no character talks in specific terms about what countries could be a threat to Japan. This pattern extends to the discussion of a real event – North Korea’s name is not mentioned when characters talk about the 1999 encounter between a Maritime Self-­Defense Forces warship and a North Korean spy ship. Allies are also not discussed – the USA–Japan alliance and even the existence of a large American military base in the same city as NDA are left out. Perhaps discussions of complicated political issues would be a distraction from a coming-­of-age story about youths building friendships and overcoming the challenges of Japan’s strict university system. Whatever Nikaidō’s reason is for leaving politics out of the story, the end result is a manga that does not touch on any controversies surrounding the JSDF. Several of the printed book volumes of Aozakura include bonus interviews with NDA alumni, all of whom speak fondly of their experiences at NDA. One of them is retired Rear-­Admiral Ochia Taosa, who commanded the JSDF ’s first-­ ever overseas mission, the deployment of minesweepers to the Persian Gulf in 1991. Ochia looks back to the hardships he endured and the personal relationships he built at NDA as crucial in preparing him to be a responsible leader. Among his fondest memories is a 70-kilometre overnight march from the NDA campus to the Yasukuni Shrine, in which all students carried heavy packs and went without sleep.30 Despite the Yasukuni Shrine’s politically controversial position as a site associated with the Imperial Japanese Military, student marches to Yasukuni Shrine are an annual event at NDA. Another interview subject is Admiral Kawano Katsutoshi Chief of Staff, Joint Staff, the highest-­ranking officer in the JSDF. Admiral Kawano gave readers tips on leadership and noted that his first year at NDA was an almost non-­stop series of punishments, during which he could only find peace in the toilet.31 The harsh discipline at NDA, which continues under his leadership, is something he can fondly look back on as helping him in his career. The JSDF and Ministry of Defense do not use Aozakura in any official advertising campaigns but cooperation with and promotion of the manga series is evident. As mentioned above, Nikaidō Hikaru received assistance from NDA graduates during his background research, and some of the alumni were active duty JSDF officers. Nikaidō’s printed interviews with former and currently serving military officers are also signs of official support for this manga. In addition to support from JSDF personnel, the visibility of Aozakura at and around the campus of the National Defense Academy was another indication of support. Upon my first visit to the academy in late 2016, a poster advertising the

Towards an unrestrained military   131 manga could be observed within the train station closest to the campus. Throughout the 2017 school year, during which I worked as an instructor at NDA, I found the latest volumes of Aozakura were prominently displayed within shops on campus. Support could also be seen from the cadets. One student organization, the automobile club, decorated one of their cars with images of Aozakura characters (Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Aozakura characters decorate the front of a car belonging to NDA’s automobile club. This was part of a display of student club activities at the 2017 NDA school festival, a two-day event in which the normally closed campus is open to the general public. Source: Photo by author.

132   Jeffrey J. Hall The JSDF ’s positive attitude towards Aozakura should not come as a surprise. The manga series manages to depict even the most unpleasant aspects of military cadet life as important life lessons that help teenagers become physically and mentally strong adults. In part through the complete avoidance of political issues, it manages to represent NDA and the JSDF as overwhelmingly positive institutions. At a time when the JSDF is expected to face increasing danger and difficulty in recruitment, the release of Aozakura has no doubt been a welcome development to the Ministry of Defense.

Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Forces Fought There The second manga series I will discuss in this chapter is Yanai Takumi’s Gate, a manga series that began in 2011 had reached twelve volumes as of late 2017. It is the manga adaptation of a light novel series of the same title, written by the same author in 2006–2015.32 Gate tells the story of the JSDF being dispatched through a portal to a new world, and although much of the story involves fantasy such as magic and dragons, it is partly grounded in the real world and its politics. Yanai, a former JSDF soldier, first published his novels online, and was only later offered book and manga publishing deals by Alphapolis, a small publishing company. The target demographic of this series is adult males, and the manga’s contents are remarkably more violent and sexual than works such as Aozakura, which are aimed at younger audiences. Due to the fact that it is not published in a magazine and Alphapolis focuses on digital distribution, Gate’s circulation figures are not publically available. However, advertisements in the manga editions note that the light novel series sold over 2 million copies. Additionally, the series proved popular enough to be turned into an anime series by A-­1 Pictures, airing late at night on the Tokyo MX network in 2015–2016. Gate’s story revolves around the events following a foreign invasion of Japan. The invaders are not from a neighbouring country but rather from a different world. The invasion takes place in the heart of Tokyo, where a magical gate suddenly opens and acts as an entry point for a foreign army. The invaders proceed to slaughter civilians in the streets of Tokyo until the JSDF arrive. The invaders come from a world with medieval-­era technology, so their swords and arrows are no match for the machine-­guns and rockets of the Japanese armed forces. The JSDF drive the invaders back into the gate, apparently without suffering a single military casualty. Gate takes place in a Japan that politically resembles the conditions found in 2006, when Yanai first began writing his novels. The country is ruled by a party similar to the LDP but they have not enacted legislation similar to Abe’s 2015 revisions. Therefore, legally, in order to allow for a JSDF combat mission into the gate, the government decides to pass a law defining the land on the other side of the gate as a ‘Special Region’ of Japan. Under this legal loophole, it is technically a domestic defence mission, not an attack on foreign territory.

Towards an unrestrained military   133 The JSDF expeditionary force is immediately attacked upon reaching the other side of the gate, which is within the territory of a nation known as the Empire. The Empire, which had orchestrated an invasion of Japan without realising the gap in technology between the two worlds, repeatedly sends armies against the JSDF, and the results are predictable. Japanese soldiers armed with rifles, tanks and artillery kill over 100,000 imperial soldiers without suffering a single casualty. The fighting is all done in self-­defence, as the imperial soldiers are charging towards the JSDF with an intent to kill, but given the gap in technology, the Japanese can defeat their enemies at a safe distance. Japan’s military advance into the Special Region is not depicted as an invasion. Instead, it is a response to an unprovoked attack by a hostile and barbaric foreign country. Japan stands at the moral high ground as a democratic nation that values the lives of all its citizens, as well as the lives of foreign civilians. The Empire is an autocratic country that accords no special value to the lives of commoners and foreigners, and its armies murder, rape and enslave enemy civilians. Instead of seeking to invade and annex the Empire, Japan seeks a peace and commerce. When negotiating an early truce with the Empire, Japan confuses imperial representatives by not demanding the expected rights of a victor, such as the killing or enslavement of enemies, and they are puzzled by the Japanese insistence on ‘humane’ (jindōteki) treatment of prisoners.33 The Special Region is a place in which Japan enjoys diplomatic and military freedom on a level unheard of on Earth. Everywhere the JSDF go in the Special Region, they stand out as heroes, and their interactions are not encumbered by the historical baggage of Japan’s pre-­1945 actions. They introduce new ideas about human rights, protect civilians from bandits and dragons, and commit no atrocities. Through their tremendous military might, they are able to act as a force for good in the new world. The discovery of a new world that can only be accessed through Tokyo opens up new possibilities for Japan. Some JSDF officers see the new world as a place that offers Japan exclusive access to nearly limitless natural resources, something that could be worth the risk of having the other nations on Earth to turn against Japan. Accordingly, they proactively seek treaties that will give Japan access to underground resources, and see no need to explain the value of oil reserves to their medieval counterparts.34 As the subtle insinuation in the manga suggests, some within the JSDF see possibilities for Japan to become a superpower, yet its political leadership appears to be not up the task. Whereas Yanai depicts JSDF personnel as brave, morally upstanding and decisive, his depiction of Japanese politicians is nearly the opposite. The Japan of Gate has a ruling conservative party with indecisive leaders who fear defeat in an upcoming election. This political indecisiveness leads to an excessive unwillingness to take risks, something that has a negative impact on the JSDF ’s mission in the Special Region. Characters often mention shortages of needed equipment due to Tokyo’s apparent unwillingness to increase its defence budget. Parts for vehicles are limited, and the JSDF has to rely on hand-­me-down equipment donated by the United States.35 The Japanese

134   Jeffrey J. Hall government also replaces the JSDF expeditionary force’s rifles with older models because it would prefer that expendable equipment be used. If Japan’s defence budget is too low to properly equip its soldiers for a war against medieval armies, what does that say about its real-­world defence budget, which is designed to address modern military threats? The message to readers is fairly clear – Japan needs political leadership that is willing to increase its defence budget. Some of the greatest enemies to Japan in Gate are Japan’s own opposition politicians and the Japanese media. Two particular incidents stand out in their portrayal of these segments of Japanese society. In the first, an opposition lawmaker attacks the government and the JSDF for what she claims is a ‘failure’ to protect civilians from a dragon. The lawmaker is illustrated as gleefully anticipating the political points she will receive for demonising the JSDF. Instead, she is publically embarrassed when it is revealed that civilian survivors praised the Japanese for rescuing them, and that the military budget increase that she opposed could have equipped the JSDF with the capability to save more lives.36 The second example involves a Japanese journalist who has been allowed into the Special Region to interview soldiers and local civilians. The journalist makes no attempt to conceal his scorn for the military, believing everything he sees to be a sham set up by the JSDF and that instead that all Japanese soldiers are lazy and good-­for-nothing. A witness to the journalist’s ranting thanks him for revealing how mass media operates.37 In addition to this depiction of the media, there are moments throughout the manga, which show headlines of Japanese newspapers or television programmes reporting about the events in the Special Region, usually in a manner that twists the facts to depict the JSDF in a negative light. These episodes combine to paint a picture of a Japan in which the JSDF is the constant victim of biased and unfair journalism. Gate also touches on the actions of three major world powers: the United States, China and Russia. All of these countries covet the resources that can be found on the other side of the gate but each takes a different stance. The United States offers its Japanese ally limited logistical support but secretly hopes for a Japanese failure that would give it a chance to send troops into the gate. China, on the other hand, is depicted as an expansionistic power that covets the resources of the new world. Russia also wants access to the gate but its Putin-­ like president appears to wait at the sidelines and hope for a future opportunity. There are calls on Japan to grant other countries access to the gate but it refuses. Although there is no open conflict between Japan and these countries, there are deadly exchanges between spies. When representatives from the new world are brought to Tokyo, American, Chinese and Russian spies attempt to kill their escorts and kidnap them. JDSF soldiers manage to successful defend the visitors from early attacks but America uses ill-­gotten information on political corruption to blackmail Japan’s prime minister into ordering security to stand down. Despite the underhanded efforts of its ally, the JSDF protagonists manage to protect the visitors from abduction.38 This serves as yet another example of how Japan’s democratically elected politicians are almost as much a danger to their nation as hostile foreign countries.

Towards an unrestrained military   135 Yanai’s story offers a solution to the problem of corrupt and indecisive civilian leadership: disobedience. Throughout Gate, the plot is advanced and lives are saved due to independent actions that fly in the face of standing orders from Japan’s cautious government. The main protagonist, Second Lieutenant Itami Yōji, becomes a hero through ignoring orders rather than obeying them. Some of Itami’s main achievements – including sheltering war orphans and refugees, forming a collective defensive arrangement with a city to fight bandits, and breaking a truce to rescue an abducted Japanese civilian – are carried out through his own initiative, without taking the time to ask permission from superiors. Although some of Itami’s actions anger superior officers, the positive results prevent them from seriously punishing him. At another point in the story, a low-­ ranking Japanese official disobeys orders, offers protection to civilians and sparks a military conflict. Japan’s prime minister fears that any escalation in the conflict could hurt his approval ratings and lead to electoral defeat but the Foreign Ministry official’s act of disobedience, together with pressure from hawkish cabinet members, forces him to authorise military action.39 These examples of disobedience all result in the saving of numerous civilian lives at no cost in life for the JSDF. However good the outcome, such actions are controversial when viewed in the context of Japanese history. Distain for civilian

Figure 7.2 Gate merchandise at a Tokyo shop in 2016. These included items decorated with JSDF camouflage patterns, dog tags containing the names of characters, and key chains shaped like Japanese military rifles. Source: Photo by author.

136   Jeffrey J. Hall governments and a willingness of the military to act without government authorisation were key factors that led Japan into the disaster of the Second World War. While a JSDF officer disobeying orders to rescue a Japanese abductee is undeniably different from Imperial Japanese Army officers independently orchestrating an invasion of Manchuria, it can be seen as an erosion of an important norm that allows democratic nations to function without the fear of military intervention into politics. Despite its controversial depictions of Japanese politics, Gate has enjoyed official endorsement from the JSDF. During the production of its anime adaptation, the JSDF provided technical consultations on the accurate portrayal of military technology. Most important of all, Gate has been featured on official JSDF recruitment posters. In 2015, the Japan Self-­Defense Force Tokyo Provincial Cooperation Office used images from the anime version of Gate in its recruitment posters. The poster features Itami and other Gate characters with the slogan ‘Let’s become able to protect others’ (dareka wo mamoreru jibun ni narō).40 As of January 2019, the posters and an interview with Takumi Yanai were still featured prominently on the JSDF Tokyo Provincial Cooperation office’s homepage.41

Conclusion Both Aozakura and Gate represent significant examples of the Japan Self-­ Defense Forces’ collaboration with creators of popular culture. The two manga series appeal to different target demographics: Aozakura to young men in their teens and twenties; and Gate to older adult males. Through their work with the creators of these manga series, JSDF officials have taken advantage of opportunities to reach out to two important demographics of the public that are eligible both to serve in the military and to vote. Aozakura and Gate offer unquestionably positive representations of the JSDF and the importance of national defence. Although both series were released and received official support during the years of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s controversial legal reforms to the status of the JSDF, the representations of politics in these manga series are very different. Aozakura is almost apolitical, lacking in discussion of political debates about the military in Japanese society and instead focusing on the struggles and personal relationships of young cadets. Gate, on the other hand, is highly political, expressing a worldview that could be considered farther to the right and more hawkish than the Abe administration. This raises questions about what level of ideological consistency and oversight exists within the public affairs offices of the JSDF and Ministry of Defense, and whether or not the armed forces should be permitted to openly endorse politically controversial works of popular culture. These questions have yet to receive major attention in Japanese society but as JSDF cooperation with the popular culture industry continues, they are likely to receive more public notice.

Towards an unrestrained military   137

Notes   1 Iver B. Neumann and Daniel H. Nexon, ‘Introduction’, in Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann (eds), Harry Potter and International Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 6.   2 The Constitution of Japan (Takenaka 1947), Article 9.   3 Kenneth B. Pyle, Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), 236.   4 Richard J. Samuels, Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 49.   5 Thomas U. Berger, Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 32.   6 Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms & National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 3.   7 Kenichi Ōmae, ‘Shūdanteki jieiken – Abe ryū futsu no kuni to ha dona kuni ka’ [‘The Right of Collective Self-­Defense – Abe-­style Normal Country – What Does it Mean?’], President, 20 June 2014.   8 Kiyoshi Takenaka, ‘Huge Protest in Tokyo Rails Against PM Abe’s Security Bills’, 30 August 2015.   9 Adam P. Liff, ‘Policy by Other Means: Collective Self-­Defense and the Politics of Japan’s Postwar Constitutional Reinterpretations’, Asia Policy 24 (2017): 139–172. 10 Yuka Hayashi, ‘For Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Unfinished Family Business’, Wall Street Journal, 11 December 2014. 11 William Choong, ‘Revising Japan’s Article 9: Yes, but not now’, IISS, 16 March 2018. 12 Sabine Frühstück, Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 118. 13 Paul Midford, ‘The GSDF ’s Quest for Public Acceptance and the “Allergy” Myth’, in Paul Midford and D. Eldridge Robert (eds), The Japanese Ground Self-­Defense Force: Search for Legitimacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).  14 Jeffrey J. Hall, ‘Japan’s Anti-­Kaiju Fighting Force: Normalizing Japan’s Self-­Defense Forces through Postwar Monster Films’, in Camille D.G. Mustachio and Jason Barr (eds), Giant Creatures in Our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017). 15 Yamamura Takayoshi, ‘Cooperation Between Anime Producers and the Japan Self-­ Defense Force: Creating Fantasy and/or Propaganda?’ Journal of War and Culture Studies. 22 December 2018. 16 Sabine Frühstück, ‘To Protect Japan’s Peace We Need Guns and Rockets: The Military Uses of Popular Culture in Current-­day Japan’, The Asia-­Pacific Journal 7(34) (2009). 17 Akiko Sugawa-­Shimada, ‘Playing with Militarism in/with Arpeggio and Kantai Collection: Effects of shōjo Images in War-­Related Contents Tourism in Japan’. Journal of War & Culture Studies 1–14 (2018). 18 Ibid., 11. 19 Yamamura, ‘Cooperation Between Anime Producers and the Japan Self-­Defense Force’, 11–12. 20 Mainichi, ‘More Defense Academy Graduates Refusing to Become SDF Officers’, 22 March 2016. 21 Tom Le, ‘Japan’s Security Bills: Overpromising and Under-­Delivering’, The Diplomat, 4 October 2015. 22 Hikaru Nikaidō, Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 2 [Aozakura The Story of the National Defense Academy 2] (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2016b), 187–189. 23 Japan Magazine Publishers Association (2017). 24 Hikaru Nikaidō, Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 1 [Aozakura The Story of the National Defense Academy 1] (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2016a).

138   Jeffrey J. Hall 25 Frühstück, Uneasy Warriors, 128. 26 Nikaidō, Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 2, 21–25. 27 Nikaidō, Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 1, 146. 28 Nikaidō, Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 2, 147–150. 29 Jonathan Soble, ‘Japan’s Defense Minister Resigns, in Blow to Shinzo Abe’, New York Times, 27 July 2017. 30 Hikaru Nikaidō, Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 7 [Aozakura The Story of the National Defense Academy 7] (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2018), 185–187. 31 Hikaru Nikaidō, Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 3 [Aozakura The Story of the National Defense Academy 3] (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2017a), 187–189. 32 The manga adaptation is illustrated by Sao Satoru. 33 Takumi Yanai, Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 2 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 2] (Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics, 2013a). 34 Takumi Yanai, Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 6 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 6] (Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics, 2015a). 35 Takumi Yanai, Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 3 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 3] (Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics, 2013b). 36 Ibid. 37 Takumi Yanai, Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 12 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 12] (Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics, 2017b). 38 Yanai, Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 3. 39 Yanai, Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 12. 40 Scott Wilson, ‘New Anime Gate Entertains, Tries to Recruit You to the Japan Self-­ Defense Forces at the Same Time’, Sora News, 24 July 2015. 41 The homepage can be found at: www.mod.go.jp/pco/tokyo/index.html.

References Berger, Thomas U. 1998. Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Choong, William. 2018. ‘Revising Japan’s Article 9: Yes, but not now’. IISS, 16 March. www.iiss.org/en/expert%20commentary/blogsections/2018-4efc/march-­d0a2/revising-­ japans-article-­9-87d2. Accessed 20 March 2018. Frühstück, Sabine. 2009. ‘To Protect Japan’s Peace We Need Guns and Rockets: The Military Uses of Popular Culture in Current-­day Japan’. The Asia-­Pacific Journal 7(34). Online at: https://apjjf.org/-Sabine-­Fruhstuck/3209/article.html. Accessed 16 January 2019. Frühstück, Sabine. 2007. Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hall, Jeffrey J. 2017. ‘Japan’s Anti-­Kaiju Fighting Force: Normalizing Japan’s Self-­ Defense Forces through Postwar Monster Films’. In Camille D.G. Mustachio and Jason Barr (eds), Giant Creatures in Our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 138–160. Hayashi, Yuka. 2014. ‘For Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Unfinished Family Business’. Wall Street Journal, 11 December. www.wsj.com/articles/for-­japans-shinzo-­abe-unfinished-­ family-business-­1418354470. Accessed 15 January 2018. Japan Magazine Publishers Association. 2017. Insatsu Busuu Kouhyou [Print Circulation Announcement]. www.j-­magazine.or.jp/user/printed/index/39. Accessed 24 February 2018. Katzenstein, Peter J. 1996. Cultural Norms & National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Towards an unrestrained military   139 Le, Tom. 2015. ‘Japan’s Security Bills: Overpromising and Under-­Delivering’. The Diplomat, 4 October. https://thediplomat.com/2015/10/japans-­security-bills-­overpromising-and-­underdelivering/. Accessed 30 December 2017. Liff, Adam P. 2017. ‘Policy by Other Means: Collective Self-­Defense and the Politics of Japan’s Postwar Constitutional Reinterpretations’. Asia Policy 24: 139–172. Mainichi. 2016. ‘More Defense Academy Graduates Refusing to Become SDF Officers’. 22 March. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160322/p2a/00m/0na/012000c. Accessed 30 December 2017. Midford, Paul. 2017. ‘The GSDF ’s Quest for Public Acceptance and the “Allergy” Myth’. In Paul Midford and D. Eldridge Robert (eds), The Japanese Ground Self-­Defense Force: Search for Legitimacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 347–360. Neumann, Iver B. and Daniel H. Nexon. 2006. ‘Introduction’. In Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann (eds), Harry Potter and International Relations. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 6–8. Nikaidō, Hikaru. 2016a. Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 1 [Aozakura The Story of the National Defense Academy 1]. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Nikaidō, Hikaru. 2016b. Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 2 [Aozakura The Story of the National Defense Academy 2]. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Nikaidō, Hikaru. 2017a. Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 3 [Aozakura The Story of the National Defense Academy 3]. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Nikaidō, Hikaru. 2017b. Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 4 [Aozakura The Story of the National Defense Academy 4]. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Nikaidō, Hikaru. 2017c. Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 5 [Aozakura The Story of the National Defense Academy 5]. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Nikaidō, Hikaru. 2017d. Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 6 [Aozakura The Story of the National Defense Academy 6]. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Nikaidō, Hikaru. 2018. Aozakura Bōeidaigakkō Monogatari 7 [Aozakura The Story of the National Defense Academy 7]. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Ōmae, Kenichi. 2014. ‘Shūdanteki jieiken – Abe ryū futsu no kuni to ha dona kuni ka’ [‘The Right of Collective Self-­Defense – Abe-­style Normal Country – What Does it Mean?’]. President, 20 June. https://president.jp/articles/-/12753. Accessed 18 January 2019. Pyle, Kenneth B. 2007. Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose. New York: PublicAffairs. Samuels, Richard J. 2007. Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Soble, Jonathan. 2017. ‘Japan’s Defense Minister Resigns, in Blow to Shinzo Abe’. New York Times, 27 July. www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/world/asia/japan-­south-sudan-­ shinzo-abe.html. Accessed 30 December 2017. Sugawa-­Shimada, Akiko. 2018. ‘Playing with Militarism in/with Arpeggio and Kantai Collection: Effects of shōjo Images in War-­Related Contents Tourism in Japan’. Journal of War & Culture Studies 1–14. doi:10.1080/17526272.2018.1427014. Takenaka, Kiyoshi. 1947. ‘The Constitution of Japan’. Article. 9. Takenaka, Kiyoshi. 2015. ‘Huge Protest in Tokyo Rails Against PM Abe’s Security Bills’. Reuters, 30 August. www.reuters.com/article/us-­japan-politics-­protest/huge-­ protest-in-­tokyo-rails-­against-pm-­abes-security-­bills-idUSKCN0QZ0C320150830. Accessed 30 December 2017. Wilson, Scott. 2015. ‘New Anime Gate Entertains, Tries to Recruit you to the Japan Self-­ Defense Forces at the Same Time’. Sora News. 24 July. https://soranews24.

140   Jeffrey J. Hall com/2015/07/24/new-­anime-gate-­entertains-tries-­to-recruit-­you-to-­the-japan-­selfdefense-­forces-at-­the-same-­time/. Accessed: 15 March 2018. Yamamura, Takayoshi. 2018. ‘Cooperation Between Anime Producers and the Japan Self-­Defense Force: Creating Fantasy and/or Propaganda?’ Journal of War & Culture Studies 1–16. doi:10.1080/17526272.2017.1396077. Yanai, Takumi. 2012. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 1 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 1]. Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics. Yanai, Takumi. 2013a. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 2 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 2]. Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics. Yanai, Takumi. 2013b. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 3 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 3]. Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics. Yanai, Takumi. 2014a. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 4 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 4]. Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics. Yanai, Takumi. 2014b. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 5 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 5]. Tokyo: Alphapolis. Yanai, Takumi. 2015a. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 6 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 6]. Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics. Yanai, Takumi. 2015b. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 7 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 7]. Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics. Yanai, Takumi. 2015c. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 8 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 8]. Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics. Yanai, Takumi. 2016a. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 9 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 9]. Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics.  Yanai, Takumi. 2016b. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 10 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 10]. Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics. Yanai, Takumi. 2017a. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 11 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 11]. Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics. Yanai, Takumi. 2017b. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri 12 [Gate: Thus the Japan Self-­Defense Force Fought There 12]. Tokyo: Alphapolis Comics.

8 The political representation of Hiroshima in the graphic art of Kōno Fumiyo Roman Rosenbaum1

Introduction When asked about the meaning of Hiroshima, manga artist Kōno Fumiyo explained that it is a heavy burden for those born there in the post-­war period. ‘It is a topic we’d like to avoid, but it looms so large that we must not forget either. Even though we don’t know much we must not get involved carelessly.’2 In this sense, the portrayal of supposedly sacred sites in graphic art has caused much controversy and has even led to bloodshed in recent memory. The Jyllands-­ Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy in 2005 and the Charlie Hebdo incident in 2015 are only two examples where representations of aniconism have led to violence and graphic art lost its innocence when it comes to the engagement of cultural taboos. In today’s global fraternity, visits by Japanese prime ministers to the Yasukuni Shrine trigger international condemnation from Asian communities, who still suffer post-­traumatic stress from the Asia–Pacific conflict some three-­quarters of a century later. How then does a place, space or site become a loci sacri, whose representation has to be carefully considered in today’s post-­truth paradigm, where ‘truthiness’ replaces fact and fake news is rampant?3 Coomans et al. suggest that sacred places are not static entities but reveal an underlying historical dynamic that is the result of cultural developments.4 Often these sacrosanct spaces are imagined as places where time is suspended, giving them an eternal character that enables the beholder to experience a transcendence of place and time. We could add that for us – the beholders of the sacred – the notion of rebirth, regrowth and new life emerging phoenix-­like from the ashes is even more vital because it allows us to glimpse something beyond our own mortality. That is why sites commemorating cataclysmic global events like the Holocaust and Hiroshima/Nagasaki are paramount to our imagination – because their tragic proportions are scalable; the larger the catastrophe, the more remarkable transcendence becomes and the more majestic the miracle of life. Thus, while sacred sites are often architectural, like historical ruins, cathedrals and archaeological locations, they may also include places that worship the  natural world. Yet, on the flip side of the nature/culture divide lies the more  troublesome representation of what Hansen-­Glucklich has termed the

142   Roman Rosenbaum ‘­ disfiguration and refiguring of the sacred’ via the aesthetics of displaying human catastrophes in museums.5 Sepulchral sites of the Holocaust and Hiroshima face a difficult task as they strive to commemorate and document the horror of the human condition. Ultimately, sacred spaces function as sites of pilgrimage that can lead in turn to rites of passage for visitors, viewers and future generations. Globally, consecrated sites like Hiroshima become places of worship, remembrance, memorialisation, political activism and much more; they become topophilic emblems and represent topologies of our own psyche while we search for transcendence, eternity and immortality. The term ‘topophilia’ was coined by the Chinese–American geographer Yi-­Fu Tuan to describe the feeling-­link between people and places that represents the development of a human geography.6 Ironically, it is the ambiguity of the sacred as a site of transcendence, where we experience both eternity and its opposite, the abject horror of the human condition that attracts us to it.

Towards a historiography of A-­bomb Manga Much was written about Hiroshima and Nagasaki before Japan’s introspection about the nation’s collusion in the Asia–Pacific War became stigmatised as masochistic: that rendition of history was frowned upon as, in a neoliberal political climate, a new direction was sought for Japan to overcome the post-­ war era.7 Do we still need to talk about Hiroshima/Nagasaki? The answer is deceptively simple, as Kipling reminds us in his 1897 poem Recessional: ‘lest we forget’. We have to ‘be careful not to forget’, because it is through the sacred that we are reminded of our own fragility and temporality in this world.8 Paradoxically, Hiroshima now looms larger than ever, with the first visit, in 2016, of a US president to Hiroshima seventy-­one years after the nuclear attack in 1945 coinciding with a call for a ‘moral revolution’ to nuclear arms.9 At the same time, North Korea and Iran are engaging in a nuclear arms race and ‘weapons of mass destruction’ are being deployed in the Syrian conflict. This indeed seems the perfect time to redefine the sacrality of Hiroshima. Before Hiroshima-­commemoration fatigue set in, it had been widely represented in popular culture and the arts, from literature, films and works of art to many other modern media – with an honourable mention here of Godzilla as the ultimate offspring of the atomic grotesque in popular culture.10 Yet, before addressing the recent recrudescence of the Hiroshima trope in popular culture and examining the inscape created by a new generation of artists, we must at least briefly reconsider the genealogy of manga (graphic novels) that deal with the sacred site of Hiroshima. Arguably the depiction in graphic narratives of the atomic bombing began as early as 1951 with the serialisation of Shaka Bontarō’s 謝花凡太郎 slapstick comedy Pikadon Niisan ピカドン兄さん (Brother Pikadon).11 It was followed by more serious works, such as Tanigawa Kazuhiko’s 谷川 一彦

Political representations of Hiroshima   143 ‘Hoshi wa miteiru’ 星はみている (Looking at the Stars, 1957),12 which tells of a young woman who has lost both parents to the atomic bombing. But it was not until 1972, when Nakazawa Keiji 中沢 啓治 burst onto the scene with his dramatic manga Ore ha mita おれは見た (I Saw It, 1972), that the atomic bombing took centre stage in graphic narratives.13 Nakazawa drew his autobiographical account of witnessing the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, as a seven-year-old. He followed this in 1973 by what became the most well-­ known A-­bomb manga in the world: Hadashi no Gen はだしのゲン (Barefoot Gen). Told from the perspective of an angry young male, this grotesque depiction of the atomic bombing is politically conscious, unromantic and savagely anti-­establishment. Several years passed before an indirect reference to the public consciousness of the atomic bomb was made with the great explosion at the start of Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s 大友克洋 Akira, which ran from 1982–1990 in Young Magazine and became a global success. In Ōtomo’s tale of post-­ apocalyptic politics, ‘a new type of bomb’ explodes in downtown Tokyo and the psyche of its inhabitants. Ōtomo’s international success was followed by a long repressive silence and a sense of A-­bomb fatigue surrounding the depiction of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) and other war imagery as Japan strove for post-­war reconciliation in an endeavour to transcend the post-­war period.

Figure 8.1 ‘Good-bye Hiroshima’. The artist bids farewell to Hiroshima well before the fatal atomic bomb blast eventuates. It becomes the artist’s task to recreate Hiroshima from scratch via her drawings for a new generation of readers. Source: © Kōno Fumiyo and Futabasha.14

144   Roman Rosenbaum It was not until 2003, when Kōno Fumiyo began to serialise her Yūnagi no machi, sakura no kuni 夕凪の街 桜の国 (Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms),15 that the Hiroshima taboo was lifted, and several artists ­followed in her footsteps. In 2008, Matsuo Shiori 松尾しより drew her story about the atomic bombing, Kimi ga kureta taiyo 君がくれた太陽 (The Sun You Gave Me),16 which she created from contemporaneous books and picture postcards she had bought and listening to the experiences of A-­bomb survivors. Others like, Nishioka Yuka 西岡由香, whose debut manga Natsu no zansho nagasaki no 8 gatsu 9 nichi 夏の残像 ナガサキの八月九日 (9 August the Summer Afterimage of Nagasaki) also came out in 2008 and who drew a non-­fiction manga about three hibakusha who survived the atomic bombing, have written extensively about the neglected atomic bombing of Nagasaki.17 Even well-­established artists like Ozawa Yuki おざわゆき took up the challenge to re-­examine the A-­bomb genre. Ozawa inadvertently created the ‘grandma manga’ with her counter-­narrative Sanju Mariko 傘寿まり子 (Eighty-­Year-Old Mariko),18 which juxtaposes the stereotypical world of the shōjo 少女 (young woman) manga with the realism of the kōreisha 高齡者 (elderly) in contemporary society in her story of an aged widow who finds she is no longer wanted in the home she shares with her son and his wife along with their son and his family. She later drew about the national scar that is Hiroshima in her Atogata no machi あと かたの街 (City of Traces, 2015), where she paints an unflinching depiction of the war and focuses on the devastation caused by air raids and incendiary bombs.19 Thus, manga about Hiroshima and Japan’s nuclear legacy are by no means new. On the contrary, they are part of a long history of cultural representation whereby each new work has created an aura of the sacred around one of Japan’s most controversial sites with tales offering a new vision of Hiroshima for a new generation of readers that has never experienced war. Remembering Hiroshima, the city obliterated by the world’s first nuclear attack, is not only a complicated and intensely politicised process. Today, the sacred space of Hiroshima is geographical as well as psychological and geopolitical, steeped in what Lisa Yoneyama has referred to as the ‘dialectics of memory’.20 Nowadays, Hiroshima is so much more than a single discourse. It is part of a tapestry of unconventional texts and cultural dimensions that constitute the cultural enclave we refer to as Hiroshima. The site simultaneously invokes memories of history textbook controversies, discourses on the city’s tourism and urban renewal projects, campaigns to preserve atomic ruins, survivors’ testimonial practices, ethnic Korean narratives on Japanese colonialism and – importantly – the feminised discourse of the peace process. Hiroshima remains a battleground: in neoliberal Japan, the controversy is about whose memories are more correct. Each historical period imagines a new Hiroshima that reflects the geopolitical global climate of the time. In this sense, Hiroshima is a precedent event, a model of what may come, and whose socio-­ politics of remembering contains contradictory senses of time, space and our own positionality. This vast number of factors involved in our understanding is

Political representations of Hiroshima   145 what legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw has termed intersectionality, that is, the interlocking systems of power that echo each other and create a synergy between class, race, gender and identities.21

Shattering the taboo of silence By the turn of the millennium, the A-­bomb genre had apparently run its course. Researchers like Karl Ian Cheng Chua have observed that, aided by an increasingly conservative Ministry of Education and the revisionist textbooks currently in use, historical memory and the importance of representing the event has been waning in recent years.22 The overwhelming reason for this is that the process of remembering and forgetting Hiroshima and Nagasaki is fraught with the danger of misrepresenting Japan’s sanctified memory as well as upsetting the survivors. Michele Mason, for instance, has analysed Kōno’s work as part of a new generation of manga artists who have come to terms with Hiroshima by revealing the inter-­generational complexity of the ethics of representation by non-­hibakusha writers. She sees Kōno’s work as overcoming the simple retelling of stereotypical atomic bomb narratives, focusing instead on their crucial relevance to global citizens living in the twenty-­first century.23 The pioneer of the movement in 2003 by a new generation of artists to reintroduce Hiroshima into public consciousness was the illustrator and manga artist Kōno Fumiyo, born in Hiroshima in 1968 at the height of Japan’s student protest movements against the renewal of the security treaties with the United States and the anti-­Vietnam protests.24 The global revolutions of the late 1960s had largely subsided by the time Kōno came of age and her generation grew up in a decade of increasing prosperity, a generation of youths that the economic anthropologist and philosopher Kurimoto Shin’ichirō 栗本慎一郎 has labelled the shinjinrui sedai 新 人類世代 (new humanity generation).25 Kōno’s breakthrough came with the interconnected survivor stories of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, which focus on the repercussions of the atomic bombings in the post-­war period. Her manga was awarded the Ninth Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2005 for its ‘refreshing depiction that quietly draws out the tragedy of the atomic bombing amidst the daily lives of the postwar period’.26 While her generation is often described as self-­indulgent and decadent, Kōno’s work challenges this stereotype and she has taken up one of Japan’s most sacred taboo subject. Her renewed focus on Hiroshima came after what one of her reviewers, Senjo Nakai, refers to as the ‘hegemony of silence’ in popular culture and mainstream media surrounding the vexatious topic.27 Against this trend of national amnesia, the impetus for engaging with Hiroshima came for Kōno when her editor asked her: ‘Why don’t you write a story about Hiroshima?’28 Even though her husband and her friends advised against it because it was too ‘serious’, it was this reluctance to deal with the taboo surrounding Hiroshima that compelled Kōno to write her own vision of the event from the perspective of a generation that had no direct experience of the calamity. Her manga, a long-­overdue reconsideration of Hiroshima, came as a refreshing surprise. Kōno suggests that she takes seriously

146   Roman Rosenbaum the diligent jijitsu no tsumikasane 事実の積み重ね (layering of facts) and placing of fictitious characters, which requires ‘not allowing mistakes. Since there are still people alive who can verify the narratives of the senjichū mono 戦時中もの (interwar period), I have taken great pains to create works that do not tell lies’.29 Whereas most manga about war in Japan can be roughly divided into two categories – hansen (anti-­war) and sensō (war) – Kōno’s graphic novels about Hiroshima do not fit neatly into either of these categories and have been referred to as sensō seikatsu mono 戦争生活もの (stories of the home front and life amidst war).30 When asked about the challenging psychological aspect of the theme, Kōno explained that her methodology was to ‘draw a large variety of individuals to reach a diverse audience and I also had the intention of drawing myself as one of them in order to create a multiplicity of voices that reflect the complexity of war’.31

Figure 8.2 ‘Right Hand … I wonder where you are and what you are doing’. Trompe l’oeil effects after the narrator loses her right (drawing) hand. Source: © Kōno Fumiyo and Futabasha.32

Political representations of Hiroshima   147

Manipulating viewpoints in In This Corner of the World Since Kōno has neither first- nor second-­generation hibakusha in her family, she based her first work on the atomic bombings entirely on the memorial literature of second-­generation hibakusha. In one of the key episodes in the manga, Harumi, the six- or seven-­year-old daughter of Shūsaku’s sister Keiko, is killed by a time bomb in Kure while walking with her aunt, the protagonist, Suzu, who loses her right hand in the explosion. From this point onwards, the narrator and author merge and Kōno begins to draw episodes with her inferior left hand to illustrate physical impairment, using trompe l’oeil techniques (see Figure 8.1). Suddenly, the drawings no longer have ligne claire (clear lines), and distortions and anamorphosis are foregrounded that skew our perception of reality. The physical as well as the psychological effects of the war, the bombing and its aftermath are accentuated via stylistic anomalies unique to Kōno’s innovative manga literacy. After completing Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, her first work on the post-­war ramifications of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, she began to think about how the ravages of war affected places other than Hiroshima and how that was different from the damage caused by the atomic bomb. Kōno choose the adjacent city of Kure, which she was familiar with because her mother had been born there, as the stage for her second narrative. Her follow-­up graphic work on Hiroshima, Kono sekai no katasumi ni この世界の片隅に (In This Corner of the World), focuses on the period of December 1943–January 1946. It ran in the magazine Weekly Manga Action in 2007–2009 and upon completion comprised three lengthy volumes.33 This second graphic omnibus is concerned with the repercussions of Hiroshima but from the peripheral geography of the adjacent city of Kure. From this geographic periphery, Kōno also shifts the perspective from the political to the shomin (ordinary townsfolk) in relation to the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. In fact, it has been suggested that while her focus on the interwar period exercises ‘ideological restraint’, Kōno deliberately distances herself from hyperbolised ideologies and subverts iconic images such as the famous mushroom cloud by omitting them and presenting this stereotypical collective memory from unfamiliar optical angles.34 One of the strategies Kōno adopts to highlight the mercurial position of the individual in the complex global amphitheatre of the Asia–Pacific War is different vantage points to tease out different interpretations of Hiroshima. Her unstable ever-­changing narrative angles of perception under a fluctuating horizon constantly shift readers from being the observer to the observed. We notice the challenge to our observational powers when, at one stage, we are transfixed as the object under the microscope as the observed (victim) only to find that several pages later we become the observer (perpetrator) when we view landscapes from a vantage point above in a bird’s-eye view.

148   Roman Rosenbaum

Figure 8.3 An example of the narrator’s chūkanzu 虫瞰図 (worm’s-eye view). Source: © Kōno Fumiyo and Futabasha.35

Political representations of Hiroshima   149 Kōno’s seamless shifts from panoramic scenes to chōkanzu 鳥瞰図 or fukanzu 俯瞰図 (aerial bird’s-eye view) depict various interpretations of the dropping of the atomic bomb.36 Changes in vantage points and perspective are also apparent on a geographical level, as when Kōno oscillates the focus of the narration between the relative safety and marginality of Kure vis-­à-vis the magnitude of Hiroshima, which

Figure 8.4 An example of the narrator’s chōkanzu 鳥瞰図 or fukanzu 俯瞰図 (aerial bird’s-eye view). Source: © Kōno Fumiyo and Futabasha.37

150   Roman Rosenbaum inevitably begins to overshadow and trivialise all other events of the war. In this way, she swings the story from the bird’s-eye view to the microscopic and back again in a pulsating staccato that drives the narration forward to and beyond its inevitable crescendo.

Feminisation of belonging: escaping the nostalgia of furusato Kōno also uses the topology of Kure, on the periphery of Hiroshima and Japan’s socio-­political centre, to decentre and destabilise the control that official histories have had on the narrative. Kure becomes the ibasho 居場所 (narrative centre) –where one may feel at home – of the narrator Suzu, who was born in Hiroshima but moved to the metaphorical corner of the world, Kure, a city notorious as Japan’s single largest naval base and arsenal.38 The peripheral mise en scène of the narrative is paired with the marginalised protagonist Suzu who, as an eighteen-­year-old, moves to Kure because of an arranged marriage to Shūsaku, a judicial officer at the Military Court. Peripheral Kure becomes Suzu’s ibasho, where she lives with her new family in war-­torn Japan. A quiet and innocent character adept in reading the subtleties of human nature, she is an unlikely shōjo manga heroine. Suzu becomes the female protagonist of what Yumiko Iida has termed the feminisation of Japan’s war discourse in post-­war Japan.39 This psychological trend arose from the need for Japanese society to subordinate itself to the male domination of its American occupier. Discourses like the well-­ publicised genbaku otome, Hiroshima Maiden, who left for the United States to receive medical treatment, came to symbolise in popular culture the stoicism and overwhelmingly female-­centric aspect of the atomic bombing. In the absence of masculinity, this led to the engendering of an innocent and powerless female notion of victimisation (and, needless to say, the selective forgetting and displacement of the perpetrator consciousness and male aggression) as the outcome of the Asia–Pacific War in post-­war narratives. Moreover, in her long graphic novels, Kōno creates cute nostalgic characters that invite a fetishised surrogacy known as moe, which draws readers into a relationship whereby they follow the escapades of their favourite characters. This relationship between reader, fan and avatar displays pop-­culture’s most sophisticated marketing and branding methodology that serves as a surrogate to traditional family values.40 Kōno, in a sense, represents the latest generation of artists who engage the graphic tradition of war stories retrospectively.41 Unlike the graphic rendition of melodramatic aspects of the war depicted in, for instance, Nakazawa’s Hadashi no Gen, Kōno eschews the depiction of violence and rejects the notion that we should measure the scale of a tragedy by the number of deaths.42 In this sense, manga dealing with war in general and specifically the atomic bombing in Japan have developed their own trajectory via the shōjo (feminine) manga genre, which is in a dialectical relationship with their dominant archetypal male counterparts like Mizuki Shigeru, Tezuka Osamu and Nakazawa Keiji. We may go so far as to refer to them as feminist rewritings, according to Fujimoto Yukari 藤本由香里, who has shown that shōjo manga

Political representations of Hiroshima   151 reflect the transformation of the sexuality and psychological development of the feminine in Japan from the 1970s to the 1990s. In her examination, Fujimoto suggests that ‘to me, who was not exactly pampered and spoiled by my parents, the question of whether there was a place for me to belong in this world was a very serious one’.43 Her notion of ibasho is a fairly recent concept in Japan and refers to the psychological realm of our most comfortable space, which is sacred to us all. Ibasho is different from the traditional concepts of belonging such as kyojū 居住 (one’s residence), jūsho 住所 (one’s address) and even the much mythologised notion of furusato 故郷 (hometown), all of which no longer fit one’s place of socio-­cultural belonging in contemporary Japan. Ibasho is the place where one feels one belongs and can be happy in even, as Kōno suggests, under the most dire circumstances. For Kōno, reconsiderations of the precarity experienced during the Asia– Pacific War enable meaningful and metaphorical comparisons with the notion of precarious living in contemporary Japan. For instance, the psychological dimension of ikigai (one’s will to live) is closely intertwined with the geographic locality of ibasho (one’s place of belonging). Both ontological states are increasingly jeopardised by our modern consumer lifestyles. Ranging from the macroscopic – Fukushima’s environmental degradation – to the mental landscapes eroded by our stressful living conditions, these subliminal expressions of contemporary angst have been contextualised in the motives of shōjo manga of the twenty-­first century. Fujimoto Yukari suggests that the central impulse of the shōjo manga genre is to formulate an answer to two basic human questions: Where do I belong? Can I find somebody that will accept me the way I am?44 Following this trajectory, Kōno’s story about ordinary people living through fire bombings, starvation, the atomic bombing and nuclear fall-­out not only addresses Hiroshima and Kure but, more importantly, provides an essential guide on how to live through challenging times for contemporary readers who, some eight decades later, face essentially the same fundamental challenges to mind and body. Thus, Kōno’s motivation for reimagining the legacy and trauma of Hiroshima for a new generation of readers via the shōjo manga genre may have been to engender hope and to provide evidence that recovery from even the most devastating circumstances is indeed possible and may change society for the better. Overcoming transgenerational trauma is here the primary objective: to dispel the existing taboo and openly talk about the sacred aspects of an event that shook the world. It is this motivation that led her away from gratuitously depicting the violence of the event to a consideration of the zanzō 残像 (afterimage) and the contemporary legacy of the atomic bombing. Each post-­war generation has their own way of depicting atomic bombs in graphic art and the changes in these depictions tell us much about the changing perception of the event in the Japanese collective consciousness over time. In his review of the history of A-­bomb manga, Masashi Ichiki argues that most atomic bomb graphics are drawn in the shōjo manga style, which takes young girls as its primary readership, and have thus been criticised for their fantasy-­oriented and unrealistic depictions creating

152   Roman Rosenbaum a gendered memory of the A-­bomb experience that has become a type of refuge for the imagination of female stereotypes in male-­oriented Japanese society.45 Kōno’s manga story takes place when it is almost certain that Japan will be defeated in the Asia–Pacific War but, instead of tragedy, the ordinary pleasures in life are described in minute detail via the daily routine of life amidst war. The author’s narrative strategy is revealed ‘when you steadily fasten your gaze and observe even the trivial and common; our daily lives are full of quirks’.46 It is the repetitive nature of observing mundane daily routines, whose ritualisation becomes a meditative means to forget about life’s hardships. Kōno emphasises the importance of the quotidian: There is hardly any individuality in a life where you get up, eat breakfast and tidy up, then you have a bath, eat again and go to sleep. Yet, this makes up the bulk of our lives. Even if there are feelings of wanting to do and achieving something, or striving towards a goal, they are mere piggybacking on the quotidian aspects of our lives.47 While death is backgrounded, it is still ever-­present, but it is described subtly and indirectly with all of the protagonist’s family members affected by the atomic-­bomb explosion in Hiroshima. Suzu’s father, Jūrō, who leaves for downtown Hiroshima to search for Suzu’s mother, becomes a niji hibakusha (secondary hibakusha) and dies of radiation sickness. Suzu’s mother, Kiseno, leaves for a festival preparation in Hiroshima city on that fateful 6 August and her whereabouts remain unknown – she is presumed to have perished. Even Suzu’s younger sister Sumi, who frequently leaves for Hiroshima with her father to search for their missing mother, becomes seriously ill due to the radiation in Hiroshima. The last family member, Suzu’s elder brother Yōichi, is a soldier sent to an island in the southern Pacific Ocean near New Guinea, where he is reported to have been killed in action. Instead of his body, a single pebble is returned to the family. Suzu’s family history is emblematic of Hiroshima and Japan at large and reveals the depth of the epistemic crisis – the lack of trust in our social knowledge, the reliability of the news, fact and truths we are able to obtain from reliable sources – that tore the country apart then but also manifests metaphorically a powerful hidden gesture towards the contemporary status quo. Manga here function as a cathartic tool to work through one of the most traumatic and irreconcilable aspects of Japan’s history by refocusing the discourse of Hiroshima on the ordinary lives of individuals while excavating the gracefulness of their lives.48 As in several other manga, Kōno works through gaps in the historical imaginary of post-­Hiroshima culture that have resulted from the ambiguous status of the event in Japan’s cultural consciousness.49 In This Corner of the World highlights those gaps. It is the grotesque malformation of this consciousness that has dominated the headlines and overshadowed the miracle of recovery and rebirth.

Political representations of Hiroshima   153

In This Corner of the World as a site of parodic trauma Despite its commercial success, reviewers have criticised In This Corner of the World for emphasising victimhood and not touching on larger issues such as responsibility for war, accountability and apologies for the war.50 For instance, in an interview conducted by manga researcher Yoshimura Kazuma 吉村和真, Kōno was asked why she has not drawn anything about war responsibility. Kōno replied: When I researched the material of the interwar period, there were depictions of exercises with bamboo spears stabbing at targets that had Truman and Churchill painted upon them, or their faces were painted on paper that was purposely trodden upon. I have avoided the condemnation of specific persona. I thought that it is important that we must tell the contemporary generation that ordinary townsfolk had easily been involved in the war without either a sense of responsibility or the consciousness of having committed a crime. If I had painted war responsibility issues, it would have been with the assumption that ‘people of that era have done such things and are bad’. And we on the contrary are different, and I thought that would have been self-­indulgent and an easy escape route.51 In this way, Kōno is strict in trying to disable any position from which we, as readers, can distance ourselves to safely criticise the perpetrator aspect and the responsibility of the characters for the war. Following her avoidance of war responsibility and the victimiser versus perpetrator dichotomy, Kōno was asked why she did not draw about the Japanese people’s discrimination and victimisation of Koreans and Chinese: I thought that I must not create an escape route where people would be able to say I was the only one who was not bad, I tried to get along with them, but everybody else was bullying those who were imprisoned and forced to work. In the end this would just be a free get-­out-of-­jail card and would end up mollycoddling and enabling an escape hatch for us contemporaries.52 Kōno refuses to abide by existing stereotypes surrounding the Hiroshima discourse by drawing what Reiko Tachibana has referred to as counter-­memorial narratives that eschew the official objective or comprehensive views of history, and draw instead upon personal memories to offer subjective, selective and individual accounts that are in dialogue with the broadly available versions of official history.53 In This Corner of the World urges us to re-­examine the significance of personal memory that stands in opposition to the official version of history and, through visual representation, interrupt the ‘culture of invisibility’.54 As readers, we must look beyond the supposedly repetitive superficiality of daily life depicted in Kōno’s manga to discover subtle hidden parodies. When Suzu’s young niece Harumi is preparing for her first day at school amidst the

154   Roman Rosenbaum escalating aerial attacks on Kure, the family is preparing to pick up her textbooks. Kōno’s side note explains that: … in those days, there was only one series of school textbooks officially recognized by the government. The individual books were re-­used year after year, so almost all children used hand-­me-downs from other children. The books were considered sacred, so of course doodling in them was strictly forbidden. It wasn’t unheard of for teachers to scold a student for doodling when it was really the doing of the book’s previous owner.55 In the following pages, Harumi confides that she is scared to go to school but Suzu explains that as long as she does not doodle in her textbooks everything will be fine (see Figure 8.4). When Suzu and Keiko go to pick up the textbooks

Figure 8.5 The sacred school textbook showing the children’s doodles. Source: © Kōno Fumiyo and Futabasha.56

Political representations of Hiroshima   155 for Harumi, they discover that the store has been burned down in the latest air raid. Unable to find textbooks anywhere in Kure city, everybody is relieved when Harumi’s elder brother Hisao sends his old textbooks as a gift for Harumi’s school admission celebration. Yet, to the family’s horror, they discover a handwritten parody of the 1938 propaganda song Aikoku kōshinkyoku 愛国行進曲 (Patriotic March) in the textbook: Lo! What do we see ahead? It’s teacher’s Bald head! Should a fly land upon it it would slip and slide then slip and slip! Slide and slip and slide again.57 Kōno’s side note diligently explains that ‘the parody reached its greatest popularity around 1943–1944, though in the proper lyrics the word “teacher” is replaced with “Tōjō” ’, a reference to the infamous general of the Imperial Japanese Army Hideko Tōjō, the tragicomic implications being that the entire family would probably be court-­martialled if the doodle was discovered.

Conclusion In today’s datsu-­shinjitsu 脱真実 (post-­truth) climate of uncertainty, amidst the destabilising effect of fake news and paradoxical ‘false truths’, individual vigilance is more important than ever. Narrative counter-­monuments like Kōno’s graphic novels re-­evaluate contested memorial spaces and challenge the very premise of Hiroshima as a stable sacred monument.58 The above examination of graphic narratives depicting the atomic bombing in Japan reveals that several contemporary artists have drawn the story of the sacred space of Hiroshima indirectly from adjacent cities and thus evoke the catastrophe of Hiroshima via what Pierre Nora has referred to as lieu de mémoire (sites of memory) rather than an actual physical location.59 In so doing, Hiroshima becomes the ontological focal point of a global locality, where the memories and emotional trauma of not only its inhabitants but also of the larger community, the nation and ultimately the whole world are involved in its symbolic ritualisation. This is also evident in the graphic symbolism of Hiroshima exhibited via the stele of the A-­bomb memorial dome that evokes the collective memory of this sacred space. Hiroshima thus functions as the focal point that connects the memories and emotions of a global confraternity united by the trauma of Hiroshima as an international tragedy – a tragedy that is multinational, trans-­generational and multidimensional in the sense that its repercussions are still felt as relevant today. Kōno’s visual reworking of the Hiroshima narrative contemplates how we should preserve and narrate traumatic memories for the next generation. Graphic narratives combine the image with the written word to provide spaces for

156   Roman Rosenbaum t­suitaiken 追体験 (the phenomenon by which we ‘relive’, ‘re-­experience’ or ‘reimagine’ the sacred aspects of our lives). Rather than trying to interpret or rationalise Hiroshima, In This Corner of the World memorialises and commemorates the indecipherability of the events via a celebration of the human element. Out of its ashes, Kōno meticulously reconstructs the missing inheritance for those post-­war generations, who have struggled to come to terms with the taboos surrounding that traumatic event. Ultimately, it was the unassimilated nature of a stable historical interpretation that led to the fixation with the radical period as a sacred moment that is simultaneously elusive and ever-­present in post-­Hiroshima culture. In the contemporary revisionist paradigm of Japanese society, where rearmament and the amendment of the Article 9 Peace Clause of the Japanese Constitution have taken socio-­political centre stage, Kōno reintroduced the dialectic of Hiroshima to balance precarity with memories of Hiroshima for the next generation of writers, who had no recourse to the fast-­fading trauma of the atomic bomb. Echoing the historiography of Edward Hallett Carr (2001), who insisted that we must study the historian before the facts, Kōno’s graphic art opens a new chapter in the representation of Hiroshima to undermine the single and stable absolute truths of histories via the vagabond manga medium that has the power to speak to our youngest generations in a narrative and visual language of their own. Kōno is able to lift the taboo of representation and shunt aside a stigmatised geopolitical history of place. In This Corner of the World inaugurates a new ontology of Hiroshima, as a site of rebirth and growth but one that will always be imbued with an aura of the sacred. This has only become possible by a new kind of artist removed in time from the cataclysmic events that mired the city in unpleasant connotations. Hiroshima as world heritage is not only a fixture in the public imagination, it is also a site of memory whose representations continue to reflect the sentiments of the collective memory of the nation – albeit in a negative way. With In This Corner of the World, Kōno attempts to reclaim the stigmatised territory of Hiroshima as a transcultural space that now exists well beyond the chimaera of Japan’s grotesque imagination. In so doing, she repurposes the nuclear catastrophe and challenges its contested memory for the benefit of the next generation of readers and consumers. Through her careful drawings, the sacred aspects of Hiroshima as a site of transnational and transcultural heritage is foregrounded by intimate and detailed depictions of the pleasurable minutia of the quotidian. Disaster is commonplace, to be fair, but it no longer assumes centre stage, rather it is relegated to the periphery of existence as a player who, in the Shakespearean sense, merely ‘struts his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more’. Life, rather than death, takes centre stage and affirms all aspects of our humanity.

Notes   1 This paper was presented at the Australian National University Religion Conference 2018 Sacred Sites/Sacred Stories: Global Perspectives, Saturday 7 April 2018. All

Political representations of Hiroshima   157 translations are mine unless otherwise stated. Kōno Fumiyo’s (こうの史代) name is also commonly romanised as Fumiyo Kouno.   2 For her first graphic work on Hiroshima, Kōno Fumiyo was awarded the Ninth Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, for ‘quietly illustrating with refreshing expressions the drama of the atomic bombing in the daily lives of the postwar period’. See Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, 2005.   3 The word ‘truthiness’ was coined by the American comedian Stephen Colbert in 2005 to refer to the quality of something appearing to be true based on one’s own intuition rather than on factual evidence.   4 Thomas Coomans et al., Loci Sacri: Understanding Sacred Places (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), 8–9.   5 Jennifer Hansen-­Glucklich, Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 153.   6 For details, see Yi-­Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 4.   7 Jeff Kingston, ‘History Problems Cast a Shadow over Abe’s Japan’, Japan Times, 18 April 2015.   8 The implications of forgetting the atomic bombings are too subtle to be discussed in full here but, for details, refer to Howard Zinn’s The Bomb (New York: City Lights Books, 2010), which was written for the sixty-­fifth anniversary of the bombings in an attempt to bring the Hiroshima text back into print. For the Japanese implications, see Colin Joyce’s interview with Nakazawa Keiji, ‘Japanese are Forgetting the Lessons of Hiroshima, Says the Man Who was Barefoot Gen’, The Telegraph, 4 August 2005.   9 Gardiner Harris, ‘At Hiroshima Memorial, Obama Says Nuclear Arms Require “Moral Revolution” ’, New York Times, 27 May 2016. 10 See, for example, William M. Tsutsui and Michiko Ito, In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 16 and 28. 11 Shaka Bontarō, Pikadon Niisan (Tokyo: Nakamura shoten, 1951). For details of his influence, see, for example, Helen McCarthy, ‘Unknown in English 6: Bontaro Shaka’, Helen McCarthy: A Face Made for Radio, 27 August 2011. 12 Tanigawa Kazuhiko, ‘Hoshi wa miteiru’, in Nakayoshi, January–December, 1957. 13 Keiji Nakazawa and Alan Gleason, ‘Keiji Nakazawa Interview’, The Comics Journal (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, Inc. October 2003). 14 Kōno Fumiyo, Kono sekai no katasumi ni (Tokyo: Futabasha, 2006), Vol. 1, 104. 15 Kōno Fumiyo, Yūnagi no machi, sakura no kuni (Tokyo: Futabasha, 2008). 16 Matsuo Shiori, Kimi ga kureta taiyo (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2008). 17 Nishioka Yuka, Hibaku Maria no inori manga de yomu 3nin no hibaku shōgen (Nagasaki: Nagasaki bunkensha, 2015). 18 Ozawa Yuki, Sanju Mariko (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2016). 19 Uran Sasaki, ‘Grandmas are Manga’s Rising Stars’, Nikkei Asian Review, 5 March 2018. 20 Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (London: University of California Press, 1999), 30. 21 Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, 1, Article 8 (1989): 139–167. 22 Karl Ian Cheng Chua, ‘Representing the War in Manga’, in Mark Baildon (ed.), Controversial History Education in Asian Contexts (London: Routledge, 2016), 126–127. 23 Michele Mason, ‘Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century: A New Generation of Historical Manga’, Asia–Pacific Journal 7, 47–45 (16 November 2009). 24 While this was a very significant year in post-­war Japanese socio-­political history, with the USA and Japan attempting to extend for a further ten years the bilateral

158   Roman Rosenbaum security agreement that Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru had negotiated, the Japanese populace erupted in large-­scale violent protests to protect the new young democracy. 25 Paul A. Herbig and Pat Borstorff, ‘Japan’s Shinjinrui: the New Breed’, International Journal of Social Economics 22(12) (1995). 26 See Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, 2005. 27 Senjo Nakai, ‘Breaking the Silence of the Atomic Bomb Survivors in the Japanese Graphic Novel Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms and the Film Adaptation’, in Matthew Edwards (ed.), The Atomic Bomb in Japanese Cinema: Critical Essays (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 185. 28 Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, 2005. 29 Kōno Fumiyo, ‘Kōno Fumiyo sensei “kono sekai no katazumi ni” intabyu-­’, こうの 史代先生『この世界の片隅に』インタビュー, 12 June 2015. 30 Kōno Fumiyo, ‘Kōno Fumiyo sensei “Kono sekai no katasumi ni” intabyu-­’, こうの 史代先生『この世界の片隅に』インタビュー, 2 May 2015. 31 Kōno, ‘Kōno Fumiyo sensei’, 2 May 2015. 32 Kōno, Kono sekai no katasumi ni, Vol. 3, 105. 33 Several interpretations have been given for the title phrase Kono sekai no katasumi ni, but which katasumi (corner) of this world is Kōno referring to? The phrase kono sekai (of the world) also implies a more personal interpretation, via the author’s surname Kōno, to suggest ‘in this corner of Kōno’s world’. 34 Takeuchi Miho, ‘Kouno Fumiyo’s Hiroshima Manga: A Style-­Centered Attempt at Re-­Reading’, Kritika Kultura 26 (2016): 246–248. 35 Kōno, Kono sekai no katasumi ni, Vol. 2, 120. 36 Ibid., Vol. 3, 15. 37 Kōno, Kono sekai no katasumi ni, Vol. 3, 16. 38 At the height of the conflict, most of the city’s industry and workforce were employed in the service of the naval installations, munitions factories and associated support functions. In the final devastating phase of the war, Kure suffered sustained aerial bombardment that culminated in the Kure gunkō kūshū 呉軍港空襲 (aerial bombings of Kure) throughout June and July 1945. Kure’s story finds many historical parallels with the bombings of Dresden throughout February 1945. 39 Yumiko Iida, ‘Beyond the “Feminization of Masculinity”: Transforming Patriarchy with the “Feminine” in Contemporary Japanese Youth Culture’, Inter-­Asia Cultural Studies 6(1) (2005): 56–58. 40 Moe refers to cute youthful characters that create sensations of longing and compassion in readers. For details, see Patrick Galbraith, The Moe Manifesto: An Insider’s Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2014), 7. 41 In Germany, the tradition of the Väterliteratur is an important milestone in the development of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (reckoning with the past). Here the sons of National Socialist fathers began to question the legacy of their fathers, accomplishing a male introspection, which arguably was accomplished by daughters in Japan. Whereas the Väterliteratur marked a tendency towards a ‘new subjectivity’ with a focus on the personal themes of the authors’ private lives and often an attempt to resolve and come to terms with the controversial father figure in their lives, the shōjo manga epoch marks the ascendency of the daughter literature, which attempts to come to terms with the failure of Japan’s patriarchal social structure. 42 Kōno Fumiyo, ‘Afterword’, In this Corner of the World, translated by Adrienne Beck (Los Angeles, CA: Seven Seas Entertainment, 2017), 157. 43 Fujimoto Yukari, Watashi no ibasho wa doko ni aru no? Shōjo manga ga utusu kokoro no katachi (Tokyo: Gakuyo shobo, 1998), 22. 44 Ibid., 143. 45 Masashi Ichiki, ‘Embracing the Victimhood: A History of A-­Bomb Manga in Japan’, International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies (IJAPS) 7(3) (Special Issue, September 2011): 46–47.

Political representations of Hiroshima   159 46 Kōno Fumiyo, Blog: Heibonclub, 2009, http://webheibon.jp/heibonclub/, Accessed 21 May 2018. 47 Kōno Fumiyo, ‘Kosei ga arisō mo nai kurashi ni yadoru kakegae no nasa’, interview, 2017, www.mammo.tv/interview/archives/no277.html. Accessed 21 May 2018. 48 See, for example, Jill Petersen Adams, ‘Irreconcilable Mourning: Inheritance, Redemption, and the Critique of History’, PhD dissertation, Syracuse University, 2013, 268. 49 See, for example, Marc Yamada, ‘Trauma and Historical Referentiality in Post-­Aum Manga’, Japanese Studies 34(2) (2014): 166–167. 50 Nakata Kentarō, ‘Sekai ga konsen suru katari’, in Special Edition: Kōno Fumiyo (Tokyo: Yuriika, 2016), 133. 51 Cited in Tanaka Kentarō, ‘Sekai ga konsen suru katari’ [‘Narrations that Confuse the World], in Yuriika – Tokushū: Kōno Fumiyo (Eureka: Special Edition: Kōno Fumiyo, 2016), No. 11, 133. 52 Ibid. 53 Reiko Tachibana, Narrative as Counter-­Memory: A Half-­Century of Postwar Writing in Germany and Japan (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 8–9. 54 Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016), 5. 55 Kōno (trans. Beck), In This Corner of the World, Vol. 2, 124. 56 Kōno, Kono sekai no katasumi ni, Vol. 2, 130. 57 The original lyrics to the popular verse are: ‘Lo, above the Eastern sea, clearly dawns the sky; Glorious and bright the sun rideth up on high. Spirit pure of heaven and earth fills the hearts of all’. See Kōno (trans. Beck), In This Corner of the World, Vol. 2, 130. 58 James E. Young, ‘Memory and Counter-­Memory: The End of the Monument in Germany’, Harvard Design Magazine 9 (Fall 1999), 3. 59 Pierre Nora and D. Lawrence Kritzman (eds), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

References Adams, Jill Petersen. 2013. ‘Irreconcilable Mourning: Inheritance, Redemption, and the Critique of History’. PhD dissertation, Syracuse University. Carr, Edward Hallett. 2001. What is History? London: Palgrave. Chua, Karl Ian Cheng. 2016. ‘Representing the War in Manga’. In Mark Baildon (ed.), Controversial History Education in Asian Contexts. London: Routledge. Chute, Hillary L. 2016. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Coomans, Thomas et al. 2012. Loci Sacri: Understanding Sacred Places, KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture, and Society 9. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, 1, Article 8: 139–167, http://chica gounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol. 1989/iss1/8. Accessed 6 June 2018. Fujimoto Yukari. 1998. Watashi no ibasho wa doko ni aru no? Shōjo manga ga utusu kokoro no katachi 私の居場所はどこにあるの？少女マンガが映す心のかたち [Where is My Place of Belonging? The State of Mind Reflected in Girl Comics]. Tokyo: Gakuyo shobo. Galbraith, Patrick W. 2014. The Moe Manifesto: An Insider’s Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming. Tokyo: Tuttle.

160   Roman Rosenbaum Hansen-­Glucklich, Jennifer. 2014. Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums And The Challenges of Representation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Harris, Gardiner. 2016. ‘At Hiroshima Memorial, Obama Says Nuclear Arms Require “Moral Revolution” ’. New York Times, 27 May, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/world/ asia/obama-­hiroshima-japan.html. Accessed 19 April 2018. Herbig, Paul A. and Borstorff, Pat. 1995. ‘Japan’s Shinjinrui: the New Breed’. International Journal of Social Economics 22(12): 49–65, https://doi. org/10.1108/03068299510104750. Accessed 25 May 2018. Iida, Yumiko. 2005. ‘Beyond the “Feminization of Masculinity”: Transforming Patriarchy with the “Feminine” in Contemporary Japanese Youth Culture’. Inter-­Asia Cultural Studies 6(1): 56–74. Ikeda, Kyle. 2014. Okinawan War Memory: Transgenerational Trauma and the War Fiction of Medoruma Shun. London: Routledge. Joyce, Colin. 2005. ‘Japanese Are Forgetting the Lessons of Hiroshima, Says the Man Who Was Barefoot Gen’. The Telegraph, 4 August, www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/1495510/Japanese-­are-forgetting-­the-lessons-­of-Hiroshima-­says-the-­man-who-­ was-Barefoot-­Gen.html. Accessed 17 April 2018. Kingston, Jeff. 2015. ‘History Problems Cast a Shadow over Abe’s Japan’. Japan Times, 18 April, www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/04/18/commentary/history-­problemscast-­shadow-abes-­japan/#.WwOUb4oRVxA. Accessed 22 May 2018. Kōno, Fumiyo 2017 (2006). Kono sekai no katasumi ni この世界の片隅に. Vols 1–3. Tokyo: Futabasha. Translated by Adrienne Beck as In This Corner of the World. Los Angeles, CA: Seven Seas Entertainment. Kōno, Fumiyo. 2008. Yūnagi no machi, sakura no kuni 夕凪の街 桜の国 [Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms]. Tokyo: Futabasha. Kōno, Fumiyo. 2009. Blog: Heibonclub, http://webheibon.jp/heibonclub/. Accessed 21 May 2018. Kōno, Fumiyo. 2015. ‘Kōno Fumiyo sensei “Kono sekai no katasumi ni” intabyu-­’ こう の史代先生『この世界の片隅に』インタビュー [‘Interview, Kōno Fumiyo sensei’s Kono sekai no katasumi ni’], 2 May, http://konomanga.jp/interview/32698-2, accessed on 17 April 2018. Kōno, Fumiyo. 2015. ‘Kōno Fumiyo sensei “Kono sekai no katasumi ni” intabyu-­’ こう の史代先生『この世界の片隅に』インタビュー [‘Interview, Kōno Fumiyo sensei’s Kono sekai no katasumi ni’], 12 June, http://konomanga.jp/interview/29799-2/2. Accessed 7 January 2018. Kōno, Fumiyo. 2017. ‘Kosei ga arisō mo nai kurashi ni yadoru kakegae no nasa’ 個性が ありそうもない暮らしに宿るかけがえのなさ [‘The Irreplaceable Slumbering in the Day-­to-Day Life Devoid of Individuality’]. Interview, www.mammo.tv/interview/ archives/no277.html. Accessed 21 May 2018. Masashi, Ichiki. 2011. ‘Embracing the Victimhood: A History of A-­Bomb Manga in Japan’. International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies (IJAPS) 7(3) (Special Issue, September). Mason, Michele. 2009. ‘Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century: A New Generation of Historical Manga’. Asia–Pacific Journal 7(47–45), http://apjjf.org/Michele-­Mason/3260/article.html. Accessed 22 February 2018. Matsuo, Shiori 松尾しより. 2008. Kimi ga kureta taiyo 君がくれた太陽 [The Sun You Gave Me]. Tokyo: Kodansha. McCarthy, Helen. 2011. ‘Unknown in English 6: Bontaro Shaka’. Helen McCarthy: A Face Made for Radio, 27 August, https://helenmccarthy.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/ unknown-­in-english-­6-bontaro-­shaka/. Accessed 23 May 23, 2018.

Political representations of Hiroshima   161 Miho, Takeuchi. 2016. ‘Kouno Fumiyo’s Hiroshima Manga: A Style-­Centered Attempt at Re-­Reading’. Kritika Kultura 26: 243–257. Nakai, Senjo. 2015. ‘Breaking the Silence of the Atomic Bomb Survivors in the Japanese Graphic Novel Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms and the Film Adaptation’. In Matthew Edwards (ed.), The Atomic Bomb in Japanese Cinema: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Nakata, Kentarō. 2016. ‘Sekai ga konsen suru katari’ 世界が混線する語り [‘The World Talking at Cross-­Purposes’]. In Special Edition: Kōno Fumiyo 特集=こうの史代. Tokyo: Yuriika. Nakazawa, Keiji and Gleason, Alan. 2003. ‘Keiji Nakazawa Interview’. The Comics Journal. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, Inc. October. www.tcj.com/keiji-­ nakazawa-interview. Accessed 11 June 2018. Nishioka, Yuka 西岡由香. 2015. Hibaku Maria no inori manga de yomu 3nin no hibaku shōgen 被爆マリアの祈り 漫画で読む3人の被爆証言 [The Prayer of Atom Bombed Madonna: Reading the Testimony of Three Survivors in Manga]. Nagasaki: Nagasaki bunkensha. Nora, Pierre and Kritzman, D. Lawrence (eds) 1996. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press. Ozawa, Yuki おざわゆき. 2016–2018. Sanju Mariko 傘寿まり子 [Eighty-­Year-Old Mariko]. Tokyo: Kodansha. Sasaki, Uran. 2018. ‘Grandmas are Manga’s Rising Stars’.’Nikkei Asian Review, 5 March, https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-­Arts/Japan-­Trends/Grandmas-­are-manga-­s-rising-­stars, accessed on 12 May 2018. Shaka, Bontarō 謝花凡太郎. 1951. Pikadon Niisan ピカドン兄さん [Brother Pikadon]. Tokyo: Nakamura shoten. Tachibana, Reiko. 1998. Narrative as Counter-­Memory: A Half-­Century of Postwar Writing in Germany and Japan. New York: State University of New York Press. Tanaka, Kentarō. 2016. ‘Sekai ga konsen suru katari’ [‘Narrations that Confuse the World’], in Yuriika – Tokushū: Kōno Fumiyo (Eureka: Special Edition: Kōno Fumiyo) No.11, 147–162. Tanigawa, Kazuhiko 谷川 一彦. 1957. ‘Hoshi wa miteiru’ 星はみている [‘Looking at the Stars’]. Originally in Nakayoshiなかよし [Good Friend]. Tokyo: Kodansha, Jan-­ December. Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, 2005. Asahi shimbun, www.asahi.com/shimbun/award/ tezuka/05b.html. Accessed 27 May 2018. Tsutsui, William M. and Michiko, Ito. 2006. In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tuan, Yi-­Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press. Washburn, Dennis C. 2007. Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity. New York: Columbia University Press. Yamada, Marc. 2014. ‘Trauma and Historical Referentiality in Post-­Aum Manga’. Japanese Studies 34(2): 153–168. Yoneyama, Lisa. 1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. London: University of California Press. Young, James E. 1999. ‘Memory and Counter-­Memory: The End of the Monument in Germany’. Harvard Design Magazine 9 (Fall), http://partizaning.org/wp-­content/ uploads/2014/01/Memory-­and-Counter-­Memory.pdf. Accessed 22 May 2018. Zinn, Howard. 2010. The Bomb. New York: City Lights Books.

9 What Tezuka would tell Trump Critiquing Japanese cultural nationalism in Gringo Ben Whaley

Introduction The setting was a Japanese country club and the twin white hats featured the message “DONALD & SHINZO, MAKE ALLIANCE EVEN GREATER” embroidered in gold lettering. The hats were a ceremonial gift from Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō to US President Donald Trump to commemorate his three-­day visit to Japan in November 2017, his first official tour of Asia since taking office. That the current US President and Japanese Prime Minister share a particularly close friendship, both politically and personally, was made all but apparent when Abe’s exasperated reaction to an uninterrupted 19-second handshake with the then newly elected President went viral earlier that year.1 So, when, later during the same trip, Trump unceremoniously upended his entire wooden box of fish food into a serene koi pond at Akasaka Palace, no one seemed to bat an eyelid—It was yet another humorous scene linking the leaders of these two nations.2 Yet, laughter belies a certain sense of political unease in Japan. A survey conducted one-­month prior to Trump’s Asia tour revealed that 44 percent of Japanese respondents felt the relationship to be “bad for Japan.”3 This sense of unease was further echoed in the video interviews of Japanese citizens conducted by noted YouTuber “That Japanese Man Yuta.” Leading up to the election in August 2016, many of Yuta’s anonymous respondents felt that Donald Trump’s remarks were too inconsiderate toward other countries, his personality too extreme, strong-­ willed, and aggressive to gain much traction. One young Japanese woman suggested that Trump would have never made it as far in Japan: “Maybe Americans tend to like that type of guy … [but] Japanese people are conservative, so it would be difficult for them to accept such an aggressive person.” She continues, “I feel like he is too authoritarian. If I had to compare, he would be someone like Hitler.”4 In a second video, recorded after the US election results in November, a different young Japanese woman remarked on President Trump’s hardliner stance toward foreigners: “He is talking about eliminating foreigners so if that’s true I’m worried if travelling [to the USA] would be more difficult.”5 It is understandable that the uncertainty of a Trump presidency might prompt young Tokyoites to highlight the clear differences between Japanese and American

What Tezuka would tell Trump   163 politics, of which there are many. However, in stating that a Trump-­like figure could never be accepted in Japan, the interviewee emphasizes overt differences in personal temperament over clear parallels between Trump’s populist, America-­first politics and Abe’s own nationalistic and historical revisionist agenda at home. When considering manga (Japanese print comics), which have, since their inception, commented on issues of the political and the social, the case of Abe, Trump, and the ongoing rhetoric of cultural nationalism evokes a sense of déjà-vu.6 Thirty-­years prior, Japan’s most influential and prolific manga artist, Dr. Tezuka Osamu (1928–1989), was serializing his most distilled and direct commentary on Japanese identity and ethno-­racial discourse from the confines of his Tokyo hospital bed.7 Tezuka was battling stomach cancer and, while the illness would claim his life at the young age of sixty, it could not deter his tireless work ethic. Gringo (Guringo), which first appeared in the seinen (adult male) manga magazine Big Comic in August 1987–January 1989, and remains unfinished to this day, deals overtly with the socio-­cultural and political stakes of Japan becoming a global economic superpower. The series tells the story of Himoto Hitoshi, the paragon of a successful bubble-­era Japanese “salaryman” (company worker), who travels with his French-­Canadian wife and biracial daughter to South America when he is appointed president of the local branch of the Edo Shoji trading company in the fictional city of Canivaria in the Republic of Lido.8 As the story twists and turns, Himoto is demoted and transferred to a politically unstable region run by rebel forces; forced to flee with his family and sojourn with an indigenous tribe deep in the mountains; and this is all before the manga concludes in a curious Japanese immigrant colony. With each narrative permutation, Tezuka explores how the concept “Japaneseness” resists easy classification as it moves through different geographical and cultural spaces, and furthermore, how debates about what it means to be Japanese are central for understanding the politics of East Asian identity more broadly. Tezuka envisioned Gringo as a message to a Japanese citizenry whom he viewed as becoming increasingly insular and unwilling to associate with foreigners abroad or accept them domestically into Japanese households. During the height of Japan’s bubble economy (1986–1991), where stock market and real-­ estate prices rose precipitously, Tezuka sought to draw attention to practices of exclusionism and xenophobia that he saw as becoming more commonplace in Japan. Referring to what he metaphorically called inescapable “colonies” (koronī), Tezuka warned that even as Japanese citizens moved around the world, they tended to carry with them an assumed sense of superiority and practice a culture of homogeneity. Tezuka discusses his initial plans for Gringo in a 1986 interview, which was originally published in Tezuka Fan Magazine, volume 66 and is reproduced as an afterword to Gringo: In my works up until now, I have been drawing different aspects of Japanese people from the point of view of this era or that era—there’s this type of Japanese person or that type of Japanese person. However, this time, I want to question what exactly is the Japanese race [nihonjin to iu minzoku]?

164   Ben Whaley Or, what is this thing we call Japanese identity [nihonjin to iu aidentiti]? … For example, if a Japanese person were suddenly thrown into a place without electronics, cars, or TVs, how would that person exhibit their Japaneseness [nihonjin rashisa]? That is what I want to question.9 While it is, of course, impossible to know how Tezuka might have reacted to and addressed the spectacle of Abe and Trump in manga form, this chapter argues that Gringo can be read as Tezuka’s own rebuttal to notions of Japanese cultural uniqueness. My investigation into Tezuka’s racial politics centers on the manga’s new, internationalized vision for the Japanese nuclear family that is quickly called into question when the characters stumble upon an anachronistic diaspora community in Brazil that values Japanese ethno-­racial purity. I present an analysis of how Japanese culture, cuisine, and national sport are recast to expose ongoing tensions between contemporary Japanese society and the imperialist and nationalist values that defined the country four decades earlier. It is my argument that Tezuka shows readers a blueprint for the rise of nationalistic thought, one that begins with an assault on the free press, strengthens with the establishment and enforcement of so-­called “national values,” and concludes with the expulsion those who do not fit the dominant view of national culture. I conclude the chapter by suggesting that in openly parodying these stereotypical images of “Japaneseness,” Gringo asks readers not to gaze backwards toward an imagined historical moment capable of validating Japanese identity, but rather to look ahead to the myriad ways Japanese language, culture, and family might create new and meaningful connections for a globalized future. In this way, Tezuka’s final manga becomes as useful a critique of Japan’s bubble economy as it could be of today’s USA–Japan political climate.

A new Japanese family circa 1987 In a serialized column in the magazine Children’s Culture (Kodomo no bunka, 1988–1989), Tezuka maligns the lassitude of those Japanese who, at the height of the bubble economy, outwardly profess a passion for internationalization yet show no real interest in pursuing international travel. To Tezuka, it is as if these people are worrying that a bear might attack them should they venture across the ocean to a new continent.10 Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that in Gringo Tezuka chooses to counter the hypocrisy of this attitude by constructing a satirical view of Japanese identity involving an internationalized vision of the Japanese nuclear family. Our patriarch is a sumo-­salaryman and the manga’s art style employs a deliberate use of racialized caricature. Tezuka regarded satire (fūshi) as one of the essential characteristics of comic art and readers are clearly meant to notice and appreciate the incongruous juxtaposition of character and social backdrop.11 Romit Dasgupta defines the Japanese salaryman as, “The figure of the urban, middle-­class, white-­collar [worker] loyally toiling away for the organisation in return for an implicit guarantee of life-­time employment stability.”12 The

What Tezuka would tell Trump   165 s­ alaryman came to represent both the “corporate ‘ideal’ and masculine ‘ideal’ ” during the post-­war bubble economy,13 and the image still popularly circulates in manga, anime, video games, and advertisements to this day. Himoto is not only a wildly successful businessman, in the vein of Donald Trump, it is revealed that he was also an amateur sumo champion (yokozuna) fighting under the name Mamenishiki in his home town of Sugio-­cho, Ibaraki Prefecture. He moved to Tokyo with the hopes of joining the senior sumo ranks but was disqualified due to his short stature and forced to clean the stables instead of compete on the national stage. “Dosukoi” is defined in Japanese as a “nonsense refrain.” It is a vocalization unique to sumo wrestling meant to summon a wrestler’s inner strength as he grabs his opponent’s belt and attempts to throw him to the ground or force him from the ring. In the manga, Himoto’s sexual escapades adopt this language of sumo wrestling. In order to increase his virility, Himoto assumes a naked wrestling pose and rushes toward his partner while screaming “dosukoi!”14 In short, this phrase specific to the world of contemporary sumo wrestling, but ultimately devoid of any literal significance, becomes one tool Tezuka uses to satirize his country’s national sport. In his provocative book, Empire of Signs, French philosopher Roland Barthes writes of sumo, “The match lasts only an instant: the time it takes to let the other mass fall. No crisis, no drama, no exhaustion, in a word, no sport: the sign of a certain hefting, not the erethism of conflict.”15 Barthes’ failure to observe in sumo anything other than a unique and elaborate form of Japanese pageantry is visually represented on the pages of Gringo. After being angered by a South American dinner party guest’s misconception that judo is the Japanese national sport, Himoto undergoes a quick costume change and re-­emerges wearing nothing but a mawashi belt. He strikes a wrestling pose and states, “So, this is sumo. Behold the form of sumo, the national sport!!” Unimpressed, his dinner guests shriek and avert their eyes at the sight of Himoto’s near-­naked body (Figure 9.1).16 It is interesting that Himoto is not compared to a samurai, one of the most enduring images of the Japanese fighting spirit in contemporary visual culture. A sumo wrestler still fights, but there is so much more girth, and so much less status. Ultimately, the image of Japan’s giant, naked, fat men cannot help but appear comical. Sumo scholar R. Kenji Tierney notes that the term “naked ambassadors” (hadaka taishi) was the unofficial title for wrestlers during exhibition trips abroad sponsored by the Japan Sumo Association.17 Tezuka is likely aware of this view of sumo wrestling and, in the two-­page spread discussed above, he successfully parodies Japan’s national sport, fissuring its presumed link to imperial Japanese culture.18 Tezuka surrounds his sumo-­salaryman with a diverse supporting cast: Himoto’s wife Hélène (Eren) is French-­Canadian from the fictional town of Grizzly Bear, Quebec, and their six-­year-old biracial daughter Renée (Rune), holds Japanese citizenship but attended an American school for foreigners. Other supporting characters include Japanese nationals residing in South America, such as

166   Ben Whaley

Figure 9.1 Himoto greets his dinner guests in a traditional sumo mawashi. Japanese Text: Himoto proclaims, ‘Now, this is sumo. Behold the form of the sumo match!!’ To which his guests reply, ‘Not a chance.’ ‘Oh, wrestling.’ ‘How unsightly!’ Source: © Tezuka Productions.

What Tezuka would tell Trump   167 former guerilla fighter turned Edo Shoji office clerk Onigasoto Kazu and a call girl named Togakushi Miho, who is in love with rebel leader Jose Garcia. Noted manga critic Natsume Fusanosuke argues that in Tezuka’s three unfinished works, the author swaps long-­held ideas like utopianism for an emphasis on an ecological “pan-­life worldview” (hanseimeiteki na sekaikan) that is inclusive of a wide variety of characters, nationalities, and opinions. It is through this pan-­life worldview that Natsume argues works like Gringo comment on the composition of a changing world.19 Indeed, by the late 1980s, the ethno-­racial make-­up of Japan was gradually changing, yet Tezuka was still dissatisfied with the nation’s slow progress toward inclusion. Hélène and Renée’s presence in the manga can be read as an optimistic formation of the Japanese nuclear family, a family that freely integrates foreigners into the fold and also travels outside the borders of the island nation. In Gringo’s cosmology, Japanese identity does not belong to members of a particular nationality or bloodline. This is a fact readers are reminded of throughout the series as Hélène’s stilted Japanese speech, rendered in katakana, signifies both her Otherness and the mutability of Japanese identity. In order to visually draw attention to the construction of Japaneseness, Tezuka’s representation of Himoto uses a strategically essentialist portrayal of the Japanese reminiscent of Allied wartime propaganda and the infamous depictions of Japanese characters played by white actors in Hollywood cinema.20 Himoto’s caricature purposefully distills an entire country into a single, representative symbol, and in so doing foregrounds how easily cartoons and comics circulate and reinforce racialized images. As if to mock these commonly held images of the Japanese, and the business suit-­clad salaryman in particular, Himoto is always depicted as a short, plump, Japanese man with thick-­rimmed glasses. Moreover, the character’s name is written using the kanji characters 日本人. These are the same characters used to write the word nihonjin or “Japanese person.” Tezuka uses a superscript gloss to slyly indicate that readers should pronounce them as character name “Himoto Hitoshi,” further positioning the protagonist as a stand in for the nation. In his analysis of sumo characters in modern manga series, Masao Yamaguchi argues that young readers might relate to sumo wrestler anti-­heroes in manga because they achieve a sort of rebel status by refusing to adhere to the strict rules and etiquette that reflect the modern Japanese working world.21 Himoto, by contrast, is a character both visually and narratively aligned with a stereotypical racialized visuality and a corporatist business background. His very presence prompts a reconsideration of how long-­revered tenets of Japanese identity can be dismantled and reassembled for satirical purposes. It is this contemporary, cosmopolitan vision of a Japanese family that Gringo purposefully sets in opposition to entrenched ideas about Japan’s imperial legacy.

Fake news The third act of Gringo takes place in the anachronistic Tokyo Village (Tōkyōmura). At this point in the story, Himoto and his family have just escaped from

168   Ben Whaley an AIDS-­infected indigenous tribe in the mountains and eventually stumble upon a decidedly out of place stone torii gate, most commonly used to mark the entrances to Shinto shrines in Japan, near the Brazilian–Colombian border (Figure 9.2).22 The family is quickly arrested by the standing military of Tokyo Village, which is revealed to be a colony home to undocumented Japanese expatriates living in complete ignorance of the fact that Japan lost World War Two. Latin American historian Jeffrey Lesser validates this seemingly dubious aspect of Tezuka’s narrative, namely, that an immigrant colony could exist in complete ignorance of Japan’s losing the war: The idea of Japan’s defeat had little resonance among immigrants and Brazilian-­born rural dwellers because the Japanese education system (in both Japan and Brazil) taught national invincibility. This combined with a ban on Japanese-­language newspapers in Brazil and the poor circulation of Brazilian newspapers in rural areas. Newsreels of the surrender ceremonies were never seen by Japanese farmers who had no access to cinemas, and those in rural areas often received their news about the war from hidden short-­wave radios, clandestine newspapers, or neighbors’ oral reports.23

Figure 9.2 Himoto and his family stumble upon the torii gate and shrine that mark the entrance to Tokyo Village. Japanese Text: “You’re a …”/Box says “Offering.” Source: © Tezuka Productions.

What Tezuka would tell Trump   169 Given Tezuka’s penchant for researching and using real-­world news and cultural events as inspiration for his manga, one surmises that Tezuka based the inhabitants of Tokyo Village on a secret Japanese society in Brazil known as Shindō Renmei (League of the Subjects’ Way).24 Society membership, which exceeded 50,000 by the end of 1945, was primarily composed of retired Japanese army officers whose central goals were to “maintain a permanent Japanized space in Brazil through the preservation of language, culture, and religion among Nikkei [people of Japanese descent], and to reestablish Japanese schools.”25 According to Lesser, none of the members believed that Japan lost the war.26 In fact, by mid-­1946, the league went as far as to alter photographic evidence as well as craft fake press reports claiming that Japanese troops had invaded the USA and were marching from San Francisco toward New York.27 Tezuka, who came of age during Japan’s march toward war, recalls how easily children, himself included, became swept up in the war effort,28 and how PTAs soon spearheaded book burnings at local schools.29 Commenting on the underlying morals of the war manga he produced forty-­years after Japan’s unconditional surrender, Tezuka states, “Above all else, I wanted to emphasize how totalitarianism oppresses thoughts and expression, and how state violence is overlooked as righteous.”30 Rereading the conclusion of Gringo thirty years later thus reveals Tezuka’s stern warning against the rise of ethno-­racial and cultural nationalism. A process that he suggests begins with an assault on the free press, intensifies when certain universal cultural values are constructed and championed, and concludes with the expulsion of anyone who does not adhere to this imposed definition of a national citizen. Tezuka includes a reference to Japanese wartime propaganda when supporting character, and Japanese tabloid reporter, Kondō is recruited by the editor of the Tokyo Village newspaper and tasked with producing “fake news” articles that celebrate Japan’s successes in the final days of the war (Figure 9.3).31 Headlines read, “Enemy Troops Annihilated” and “Imperial Army Troops Launch Counterattacks Everywhere.”32 Kondō knows these stories to be fallacious, yet he has no choice but to comply with the politics of persuasion. Jowett and O’Donnell assert that what distinguishes propaganda from other forms of persuasion is a deliberate intent to manipulate and a systematic plan to achieve a purpose that is advantageous to the propagandist.33 When deception succeeds in a vacuum, those inculcated with misinformation designed to mislead often lose the ability to think critically or weigh the merits of arguments with counter-­evidence. This becomes truer the longer one is exposed to propagandist materials. In the case of village Lieutenant Yamazato Shinichirō, the son of the village leader, he has spent his entire life in the village and has no choice but to blindly accept the veracity of these “alternative facts.” Manipulation can coerce people into acting against their will but it can also pose harm to the perpetrators themselves. As Yamazato becomes increasingly suspicious of his father’s subterfuge, this causes him to violently assault his father, leaving the village leader in a coma. In a story beat not far off from current political debates over the science of climate change in the United States, Tokyo Village is experiencing a rice

170   Ben Whaley

Figure 9.3 Kondō stares in disbelief at the fake news articles in the village’s newspaper. Japanese Text: “Wh … What … is this? Where is this information from?” Source: © Tezuka Productions.

s­ hortage due to drought. Yamazato rationalizes it as result of El Niño weather patterns (for he has listened to forbidden radio broadcasts on his crystal radio receiver), but his father refuses to acknowledge modern meteorology and instead declares that the village will hold a grand sumo tournament in order to pray for rain. It is decided that Himoto will compete for his family’s right to stay in the village. There is evidence that a form of sumo wrestling existed as a religious ritual during the Yayoi and Kofun periods (approx. 300 bc–ad 538). This “agrarian sumo” is said to have arisen from a tale in the Kojiki, wherein the ancient gods Takemi-­Kazuchi and Takemi-­Nakata battled for control of the Japanese islands.34 Here again, Tezuka deftly shows how the legitimization of propaganda requires that it be consciously linked to an imagined and elevated national past.

Constructing Japaneseness Next, Tezuka turns his attention to the ways in which countries artificially construct a common set of core values and use these to reinforce collectivist notions of national identity. He accomplishes this narratively through placing Himoto, Hélène, and young Renée in prison upon arrival in Tokyo Village on suspicion of being either Chinese or indigenous. Considering the historical context of rioting and the massacre of resident Koreans following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, as well as the persecution of some Japanese who were thought to be Korean because of regional accents, this mistaken identity takes on subtle political undertones.

What Tezuka would tell Trump   171 Socio-­cultural anthropologist Millie Creighton (1997) discusses class and ethno-­racial hierarchies among foreigners in Japan and argues for a differential treatment between what she terms soto (outside) and uchi (inside) “Others.” In the Japanese context, Creighton suggests that “outside” foreigners from Western countries are often treated differently, and perhaps more positively, than those minority groups from “inside” Japan, such as the indigenous Ainu or resident Koreans, not to mention immigrants from other Asian countries.35 In Gringo, Himoto is clearly meant to function as a stand-­in for the Japanese nation as a whole. While purposefully racialized, this generic depiction of a Japanese salaryman is useful for thinking through the social and political privileges given to hegemonic Japanese identity. Thus, as Himoto’s identity and credentials are repeatedly called into question by the village military officials, a sense of Japanese superiority, often taken for granted within the homeland, is undermined through the farcical tests the villagers use to authenticate the family’s Japaneseness. This scrutiny approximates the way many visible and invisible minorities in Japan could experience discrimination in their everyday lives. While locked in his prison cell, the village authorities feed Himoto miso soup, spinach salad with sesame dressing (goma yogoshi), and pickled daikon radish (takuan) to gauge his reaction. Just as nattō (fermented soy beans) is often used these days as a litmus test for acclimation to Japanese cuisine, “true Japanese” (honmono no nihonjin) identity in Gringo becomes intimated in one’s ability to stomach the national dishes (Figure 9.4).36 Although Himoto passes the test, happily gulping down food, the villagers remain unconvinced. This distrust is mutual. It is only after Himoto tastes the food and is able to identify the region of Japan where the miso is produced that he too is convinced that the chef and villagers are themselves Japanese. Anthropologist Jennifer Robertson (1988) suggests that the sense of national unity evoked from traditional Japanese art forms and culture can be understood as a manifestation of furusato-­zukuri or “the construction of a hometown.” She regards this as a “political process by which culture, as a collectively constructed and shared system of symbols, customs and beliefs, is socially reproduced.”37 Robertson’s analysis is useful in that it seeks to expose the potential artificiality and constructed nature of cultural symbols, and furthermore enjoins us to consider how nostalgia for bygone eras often bends toward conservative political ideologies and is frequently used in the service of nationalism.38 The obvious irony is that Hélène and Renée are Japanese by nationality and often display more outward knowledge of Japanese cultural traditions than the ethnically Japanese characters in the manga. For example, Hélène holds an instructor title with the Urasenke Tea School and cooks flawless Japanese food such as nabe (stew) and yōkan (sweet red bean jelly). For Renée, who has spent most of her young life living outside of Japan, Tokyo Village gives her an opportunity to connect with her Japanese roots, such as when Himoto lights the irori (traditional sunken Japanese cooking hearth) for dinner and explains its historical significance. There are clearly benefits and common values to be cultivated through national culture. Yet, so too can these elements of culture be used to

172   Ben Whaley

Figure 9.4 The ability to stomach traditional food becomes a litmus test for Japanese identity. Japanese Text: “Hey! Miso soup and spinach salad with sesame dressing? With daikon radish in the soup …” Source: © Tezuka Productions.

separate and authenticate identity. It is only by deracinating the dominant Japanese ethno-­racial identity and placing it in this anachronistic context that Tezuka shows how the new immigrants and (in)visible minorities of Japan have embraced the country and culture oftentimes more fully than “natural-­born” citizens.

Will the real Japanese please stand up? In the final section of Gringo, Tezuka shows the dangerous effects of cultural nationalism. When totalitarianism takes root unchecked and entrenches an “us versus them” mentality, this mentality can be used to forcibly expel anyone different. In these cases, even performing “authentic” ethnic or cultural traits ceases to validate one as a member of the in-­group. Earlier in the manga, Himoto remarks to call girl Miho that he is fed up with many of the Japanese people he meets during his foreign travels: “They are always trying to adapt to their new country but it comes off as unnatural and forced.”39 Tezuka scholar Natsu Onoda Power (2009) argues that Gringo is yet another representation of how Tezuka’s adult manga often “exoticized” what seems familiar, and familiarized what may

What Tezuka would tell Trump   173 otherwise be “exotic” for a Japanese reader.40 Yet, I would contend that Tezuka goes beyond simply providing an exotic, South American veneer for his story. It is clear from his interviews and lectures that Tezuka conceived of Gringo, in part, as a social intervention. After eventually being released from their holding cells, Hélène and Renée are forced to reside in a cottage at the edge of Tokyo Village. This is because both women appear outwardly “white” and do not conform to the stereotypical image of Japanese ethnicity. Reasoning that the presence of even one white person would undermine a village of Japanese, Yamazato orders Hélène, “If you want to be in this village, become a Japanese woman. Dye that blonde hair black!”41 Otherwise, he threatens that both mother and daughter will be banished from the village. Tezuka reuses a scene of racial discrimination from his earlier World War Two epic Message to Adolf (1983–1985) in Gringo: When Hélène disobeys Yamazato’s orders and visits the local elementary school, the administrators refuse to enroll Renée as a student and the school children throw rocks at the child while mocking her appearance.42 The scene ends with Himoto embracing an injured Renée while screaming, both to the diegetic characters and to the readers, “Are we not Japanese? Well then … who the hell are the Japanese?!” (Figure 9.5).43 This tragic juxtaposition of a Japanese man questioning what it means to be Japanese succinctly encapsulates the central speculative question of Gringo and illustrates how Tezuka destabilizes commonly held notions about contemporary Japanese identity and singles out Himoto and his family as Others, even within a social group comprising their own countrymen. Through the narrative device of the ahistorical Tokyo Village, a rupture emerges between the contemporary, internationalized Japanese identity represented by Himoto and his Canadian wife and biracial daughter, and the imperialist and nationalist values that defined Japan a mere four decades earlier. However, Tezuka is careful not to cast the fictional Tokyo Village as a foil for the real city of Tokyo’s imagined ethno-­racial harmony. To be sure, the nostalgia embedded in Tokyo Village is for a pristine and imagined Japanese national-­cultural identity. It is free from the Westernization, urbanization, and commodification that defined the country’s 1980s bubble economy. It offers no vision for new formations of Japanese families, no inclusion for foreigners, no acceptance of transnational cultural exchange. This historical myopia propels much of Tezuka’s social commentary about the fallacies of Japan’s imperialist project and wartime atrocities in East Asia. However, much to Himoto and the reader’s surprise, Hélène recounts that she was equally lonely and isolated when she first arrived in Tokyo to live with her husband. When Himoto seeks to defend the treatment of foreigners in Japan, Hélène responds, “I was lonely every day in Japan. I was saved because you were there … but the country of Japan in and of itself is a country you cannot understand. It is close to this village.”44 While Hélène does not elaborate any further, reflected in her comment are the myriad ways in which (in)visible minorities in Japan continue to face hardships. With Gringo, Tezuka seemingly cannot bring himself to gaze optimistically toward a real-­life future of racial harmony that will arise as a result of

174   Ben Whaley

Figure 9.5 Himoto questions what it means to be “Japanese.” Japanese Text: “Are we not Japanese? Well then … who the hell are the Japanese?!” Source: © Tezuka Productions.

What Tezuka would tell Trump   175 Japan’s bubble economy. There are too many problems still at hand. Indeed, racial politics and debates over Japaneseness and immigration continue to influence political discourse in Japan to this day.

Conclusion: make Japan great again The slogan “Make Japan Great Again” (Nihon o futatabi idai ni shiyō!) appears nowhere in Tezuka’s manga, and yet it could very well serve as a satirical subtitle to Gringo. Himoto’s story ended abruptly due to Tezuka’s death on February 9, 1989. The final scene of the manga is Himoto waking up in Tokyo Village on the morning of the grand sumo tournament, ready to compete for his family’s honor. When manga artist Tanaka Keiichi began serializing a sequel to Gringo, titled “Gringo 2002,” he made the choice to pick up the story twenty years later and focus on an elderly Himoto coming to grips with the bursting of Japan’s bubble economy. “Gringo 2002,” which had the official support of Tezuka Productions, was serialized in volume one of Trauma Manga Magazine (Eichi shuppan) in 2002. It was originally intended as a full series but only lasted for a single, one-­off issue. In a potentially controversial narrative decision, Tanaka chooses to kill Hélène and Renée off page, sometime between the events of the original and second series. Himoto is left to run Edo Shoji Co. Ltd. by himself, a bitter and distant shadow of the man from the original manga. During the sequel, Himoto falls asleep at a Tokyo café and dreams of speaking with a young adult version of his daughter at the opening of Osaka’s Expo 70 world’s fair (Ōsaka Banpaku). When Renée asks how things have changed in Japan in thirty years, Himoto praises the excellence of Japanese auto and personal electronics makers. He further boasts about how the country’s unrivaled GDP growth has allowed Japanese companies to procure international works of art and even acquire Hollywood movie studios.45 At first glance, Himoto’s speech to Renée, in which he champions the economic and cultural might of twenty-­first-century Japan, seems to echo the rhetoric of President Trump’s joint press conference during his aforementioned trip to Japan. There, Trump faced cameras and proclaimed,  The Japanese people are thriving, your cities are vibrant and you’ve built one of the world’s most powerful economies. I don’t know if it’s as good as ours, I think not … And we’re going to try to keep it that way but you’ll be second.46  Of course, Japan is currently the world’s third most powerful economy behind its East Asian neighbor China. While the president went on to praise Japan’s respect for its rich culture, heritage, and traditions, the overwhelming sense from his speech was that Japan and the United States share many of the same national and economic priorities, albeit with the USA clearly functioning as the stronger half of the partnership.

176   Ben Whaley Yet, Trump’s comment also evidences ignorance of the fact that economic and cultural hegemony can also damage a country’s standing in the world, particularly in the eyes of poorer nations that feel this unbalance of power. This was a point that Tezuka was quick to include in the original Gringo. The series pointedly critiqued the entrenched 1980s image of the Japanese as a technologically advanced, economically superior country poised to take over the world. For example, upon first arriving in Canivaria, anti-­government demonstrators attack Himoto’s limousine. He does not understand the behavior, rationalizing that the protestors have no reason to hate the Japanese because Japan donates billions of dollars in aid annually and produces electronics that are used regularly throughout the country.47 It is only later that clerk Onigasoto explains to Himoto that companies such as Sony and Toyota have relatively little brand recognition in a poor, third world country such as the Republic of Lido.48 The misconception that foreign aid, or foreign defense, should buy respect from recipient nations is repeated several more times in Gringo, and in each case Himoto cannot wrap his head around why the other nations of the world might resent the Japanese. This is particularly ironic given that many of Himoto’s business ventures throughout the manga involve raping the natural South American land for raw materials, be they rare minerals or compounds for new pharmaceutical drugs that can be exported back to Japan. Tanaka rekindles some of Tezuka’s morality in “Gringo 2002.” Shortly after relating to Renée the triumphs of modern Japan, Himoto turns his attention to the darker side of consumer capitalism. He openly mocks a Japanese citizenry who became possessed by the pursuit of riches, causing their hearts and minds to become ruined in the lead up to the bursting of the bubble.49 It is odd then that “Gringo 2002” should end not with a forward-­looking gesture toward the pan-­ life worldview for which Tezuka advocated in his original series. Rather, the ending to “Gringo 2002” primes readers to reconsider Shōwa-era (1926–1989) nostalgia, albeit with a nod toward coexistence and co-­prosperity. After Himoto awakens from his dream in the café, he becomes singularly driven to hold a new world’s fair, modeled after Osaka’s Expo 70. This time it will take place in the fictional Southeast Asian country of Bedonesia. As Himoto unveils a scale model for his company’s board members, one cannot help but recall Japan’s imperial project of the establishment of a “Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere” (Figure 9.6).50 The ultimate panel of “Gringo 2002” shows several Bedonesian children pointing excitedly at the pavilions of the world’s fair. “Hey dad, did this guy really make all that?’ one of the boys asks of Himoto. The final caption reads, ‘If you believe, a bright and just future can certainly be made!!.”51 The sentiment is warm, yet for all the art style and visual cues Tanaka adapted from Tezuka, the sequel to Gringo seems to miss Tezuka’s core message. It reproduces Shōwa-era nostalgia for Expo 70 and once again portrays Japan as the singularly advanced modern nation, capable of exercising its economic and cultural might to aid a poorer Asian neighbor. At the end of “Gringo 2002” then, we have the nation of Japan, focalized through Himoto, taking on the role of Donald Trump. That is,

Source: © Tanaka Keiichi.

Figure 9.6 An elderly Himoto unveils his plans to hold a world’s fair in “Gringo 2002.” Japanese Text: “That’s right! It’s a world’s fair!!” To which the board members reply, “Oh!”

What Tezuka would tell Trump   177

178   Ben Whaley allowing other Asian nations to be second while she clings to bygone dominance. This narrative does not move Japan ahead into a more open and accepting social, cultural, and political future. It is only by using manga’s inherent ability to critique, satirize, and illustrate this future, as Tezuka did in 1989 with the original Gringo, that Japan continues to be great.

Notes   1 Brenna Williams, “Donald Trump Shook the Japanese Prime Minister’s Hand for 19 Seconds,” CNN Politics, February 13, 2017.   2 Matt Alt, “Donald and Shinzo’s Excellent Adventure,” The New Yorker, November 7, 2017.   3 Eric Johnston, “Abe and Trump to Rekindle Friendship, But Not all See Rapport as Positive for Japan, Survey Says,” The Japan Times, November 3, 2017.   4 That Japanese Man Yuta, “What Japanese Think of Donald Trump (Interview),” August 28, 2016.   5 That Japanese Man Yuta, “Japanese React to President Trump (Interview),” November 9, 2016.   6 For example, Kitazawa Rakuten (1876–1955), often credited as Japan’s first commercial manga artist, produced political cartoons of then Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi (“The Occupants of the Political Sea”) as early as 1906. For more information, see Brigitte Koyama-­Richard, One Thousand Years of Manga (Paris: Flammarion, 2007).   7 I have argued elsewhere about Tezuka’s penchant for including hybridized characters, who blend race, gender, and sexuality; see Ben Whaley, “Doomed Hybrids: Three Cases of Fatal Mixing in the War Comics of Tezuka Osamu,” International Journal of Comic Art 16(1) (2014): 244–257. Most of Tezuka’s longer works centering on racial politics are presented either as genre-­specific allegories, as in the case of Kirihito sanka (1970–1971, Ode to Kirihito), or against the backdrop of World War Two, as with Adorufu ni tsugu (1983–1985, Message to Adolf ). Gringo is a departure from this trend in that it comments directly on specific nations, ethnic groups, and global conflicts against the then contemporary landscape of Japan’s bubble economy.   8 At the time of writing this chapter, Gringo has no English translation and all translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Foreign place names and character names appear in katakana throughout Gringo. I have opted to Romanize and translate these names to aid comprehension. In rare cases, Tezuka draws English text directly into his original manga panels, such as with the place name “Esecarta” in Gringo. In these instances, I have reproduced the English as Tezuka originally intended.   9 Osamu Tezuka, Gringo 3, Vol. 306 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993c), 200. 10 Osamu Tezuka, Tezuka Osamu manga no ōgi, Vol. 391 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997), 124.  11 Osamu Tezuka, Manga no kakikata: Nigaoe kara chōhen made (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 1996), 243. 12 Romit Dasgupta, “Globalisation and the Bodily Performance of ‘Cool’ and ‘Un-­Cool’ Masculinities in Corporate Japan,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 23 (2010), para. 5. 13 Romit Dasgupta, “Performing Masculinities? The ‘Salaryman’ at Work and Play,” Japanese Studies 20(2) (2000), 192.  14 Osamu Tezuka, Gringo 1, Vol. 304 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu (Tokyo: Kōdansha,1993a), 74–78. 15 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 40.

What Tezuka would tell Trump   179 16 Osamu Tezuka, Gringo 2, Vol. 305 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993b), 97. 17 R. Kenji Tierney, “Outside the Sumo Ring? Foreigners and a Rethinking of the National Sport,” in Nelson H.H. Graburn, John Ertl, and R. Kenji Tierney (Eds.), Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 210. 18 While a history of sumo wrestling is beyond the scope of this chapter, Light and Kinnaird note that most of the rituals and pageantry commonly associated with contemporary sumo tournaments was strategically added in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was done to situate the sport within the Shinto tradition at a time when the indigenous Japanese religion was gaining national prominence; see Richard Light and Louise Kinnaird, “Appeasing the Gods: Shinto, Sumo and ‘True’ Japanese Spirit,” in Tara Magdalinski and Timothy J.L. Chandler (Eds.), With God on their Side: Sport in the Service of Religion (London: Routledge, 2000), 141. It was not until Emperor Meiji attended a sumo tournament in 1884 that public opinion on the sport began to shift. Before this validation, sumo was largely regarded as uncivilized a mere decade earlier due to its apparent clash with Japan’s rapid modernization. The construction of a national sumo stadium in Ryōgoku, Tokyo in 1909, the same year sumo became designated as the “national sport,” further emphasized the sport as an important practice inextricably linked to a sense of national and cultural heritage, Light and Kinnaird, “Appeasing the Gods,” 151–152. 19 Fusanosuke Natsume, Tezuka Osamu no bōken: Sengo manga no kamigami (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1995), 282. 20 Kazuma Yoshimura, Satoshi Tanaka, and Tomoyuki Omote, Sabetsu to mukiau mangatachi (Kyoto: Rinsen shoten, 2007), 82. 21 Masao Yamaguchi, “Sumo in the Popular Culture of Contemporary Japan,” in D.P. Martinez (Ed.), The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 25. 22 Tezuka, Gringo 3, 27. 23 Jeffrey Lesser, “Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei: A Short History of Identity Building and Homemaking,” in Jeffrey Lesser (Ed.), Searching For Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 11. 24 Himoto’s trials and tribulations at the hands of South American guerillas are said to have been inspired by the actual life story of Japanese businessman Wakaōji Nobuyuki. Wakaōji was the then acting president of the Manila branch of Mitsui Corporation when he was abducted by members of the Philippine’s communist New People’s Army in 1986. He was held for four months before being released unharmed. Coincidentally, Wakaōji died on February 9, 1989, the very same day as Tezuka Osamu (tezukaosamu.net). 25 Lesser “Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei,” 11. 26 In a humorous parallel, Tezuka recalls that he himself did not initially believe Japan had lost the war. Unable to properly hear the Emperor’s declaration of unconditional surrender over the radio, it was not until Tezuka was aboard a train later in the day on August 15, 1945, that he overheard other passengers discussing Japan’s defeat and realized, much to his delight, that the war was finally over; see Osamu Tezuka, Boku no manga jinsei [My Manga Life] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1997a), 62. 27 Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 140. 28 Osamu Tezuka, Tezuka Osamu manga no ōgi [The Secrets of Tezuka Osamu’s Manga]. Vol. 391 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997c), 121–122. 29 Ibid., 154–155. 30 Osamu Tezuka, Tezuka Osamu koenshū [Tezuka Osamu Lecture Collection]. Vol. 400 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997b), 133. 31 Tezuka, Gringo 3, 73.

180   Ben Whaley 32 Ibid., 72 and 81. 33 Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 6th edn (Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2015), 20. 34 Light and Kinnaird, “Appeasing the Gods,” 144–145. 35 Millie Creighton, “Soto Others and uchi Others: Imaging Racial Diversity, Imagining Homogeneous Japan,” in Michael Weiner (Ed.), Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity (London: Routledge, 1997), 212 and 214. 36 Tezuka, Gringo 3, 42. 37 Jennifer Robertson, “Furusato Japan: The Culture and Politics of Nostalgia,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 1(4) (1988), 494. 38 Ibid., 508. 39 Tezuka, Gringo 2, 44. 40 Natsu Onoda Power, God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-­World War II Manga (Jackson, MS: The University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 151. 41 Tezuka, Gringo 3, 89. 42 Ibid., 98–99. 43 Ibid., 103. 44 Tezuka, Gringo 2, 215–216. 45 Keiichi Tanaka, “Gringo 2002,” Trauma Manga Magazine 1, August 1 (2002), 341. 46 Nyshka Chandran, “Trump Says Japan’s Economy is ‘Not as Good as Ours’ and Should Stay That Way.” CNBC, November 6, 2017.  47 Tezuka, Gringo 1, 35. 48 Ibid., 134–135. 49 Tanaka, “Gringo 2002,” 342. 50 Ibid., 350–351. 51 Ibid., 353.

References Alt, Matt. 2017. “Donald and Shinzo’s Excellent Adventure.” The New Yorker, November 7. Online at: www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-­desk/donald-­and-shinzos-­excellentadventure. Accessed January 12, 2019. Barthes, Roland. 1982. Empire of Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Chandran, Nyshka. 2017. “Trump Says Japan’s Economy is ‘Not as Good as Ours’ and Should Stay That Way.” CNBC, November 6. Online at: www.cnbc.com/2017/11/06/ trump-­says-japans-­economy-is-­not-as-­good-as-­ours-and-­should-stay-­that-way.html. Accessed August 5, 2020. Creighton, Millie. 1997. “Soto Others and uchi Others: Imaging Racial Diversity, Imagining Homogeneous Japan.” In Michael Weiner (Ed.), Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity. London: Routledge, 211–238. Dasgupta, Romit. 2000. “Performing Masculinities? The ‘Salaryman’ at Work and Play.” Japanese Studies 20(2): 189–200. Dasgupta, Romit. 2010. “Globalisation and the Bodily Performance of ‘Cool’ and ‘Un-­ Cool’ Masculinities in Corporate Japan.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 23. Online at: http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue23/dasgupta.htm. Accessed January 12, 2019. Johnston, Eric. 2017. “Abe and Trump to Rekindle Friendship, But Not all See Rapport as Positive for Japan, Survey Says.” The Japan Times, November 3. Online at: www. japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/11/03/national/politics-­diplomacy/abe-­trump-rekindle-­ friendship-not-­see-rapport-­positive-japn-­survey-says. Accessed January 12, 2018.

What Tezuka would tell Trump   181 Jowett, Garth S. and O’Donnell, Victoria. 2015. Propaganda and Persuasion, 6th edn. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications. Koyama-­Richard, Brigitte. 2007. One Thousand Years of Manga. Paris: Flammarion. Lesser, Jeffrey. 1999. Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lesser, Jeffrey. 2003. “Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei: A Short History of Identity Building and Homemaking.” In Jeffrey Lesser (Ed.), Searching For Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 5–19. Light, Richard and Kinnaird, Louise. 2002. “Appeasing the Gods: Shinto, Sumo and ‘True’ Japanese Spirit.” In Tara Magdalinski and Timothy J.L. Chandler (Eds.), With God on their Side: Sport in the Service of Religion. London: Routledge, 139–159. Natsume, Fusanosuke. 1995. Tezuka Osamu no bōken: Sengo manga no kamigami [Tezuka Osamu’s Adventure: Gods of Postwar Manga]. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Power, Natsu Onoda. 2009. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-­ World War II Manga. Jackson, MS: The University of Mississippi Press. Robertson, Jennifer. 1988. “Furusato Japan: The Culture and Politics of Nostalgia.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 1(4): 494–518. Online at: www. jstor.org/stable/20006871. Accessed 12 January 2019. Tanaka, Keiichi. 2002. “Gringo 2002.” Trauma Manga Magazine 1, August 1: 322–357. Tezuka, Osamu. 1977. Kirihito sanka [Ode to Kirihito]. Vols. 31–34 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1993a. Gringo 1. Vol. 304 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1993b. Gringo 2. Vol. 305 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1993c. Gringo 3. Vol. 306 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1996a. Adorufu ni tsugu [Message to Adolf]. Vols. 372–376 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1996b. Manga no kakikata: Nigaoe kara chōhen made [How to Draw Manga: From Portraits to Full Length Stories]. Tokyo: Kōbunsha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1997a. Boku no manga jinsei [My Manga Life]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Tezuka, Osamu. 1997b. Tezuka Osamu koenshū [Tezuka Osamu Lecture Collection]. Vol. 400 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Tezuka, Osamu. 1997c. Tezuka Osamu manga no ōgi [The Secrets of Tezuka Osamu’s Manga]. Vol. 391 of The Complete Manga Works of Tezuka Osamu. Tokyo: Kōdansha. That Japanese Man Yuta, (dir.) 2016a. “What Japanese Think of Donald Trump (Interview).” YouTube video, 9:02. August 28. Online at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehk PE6rRlaw&list=WL&index=2. Accessed January 12, 2019. That Japanese Man Yuta, (dir.) 2016b. “Japanese React to President Trump (Interview).” YouTube video, 7:50. November 9. Online at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R0yu Fmql-c&index=3&list=WL. Accessed January 12, 2019. Tierney, R. Kenji. 2008. “Outside the Sumo Ring? Foreigners and a Rethinking of the National Sport.” In Nelson H.H. Graburn, John Ertl, and R. Kenji Tierney (Eds.), Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within. New York: Berghahn Books, 208–217. Whaley, Ben. 2014. “Doomed Hybrids: Three Cases of Fatal Mixing in the War Comics of Tezuka Osamu.” International Journal of Comic Art 16(1): 244–257.

182   Ben Whaley Williams, Brenna. 2017. “Donald Trump Shook the Japanese Prime Minister’s Hand for 19 Seconds.” CNN Politics, February 13. Online at: https://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/10/ politics/trump-­abe-awkward-­diplomacy/index.html. Accessed January 12, 2019. Yamaguchi, Masao. 1998. “Sumo in the Popular Culture of Contemporary Japan.” In D.P. Martinez (Ed.), The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19–29. Yoshimura, Kazuma, Satoshi Tanaka, and Tomoyuki Omote. 2007. Sabetsu to mukiau mangatachi [The Manga that Confront Discrimination]. Kyoto: Rinsen shoten.

10 Questioning the politics of popular culture Tatsuta Kazuto’s manga 1F and the national discourse on 3/11 Stephan Köhn

Introduction The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 not only brought about the end of the Pacific War, it also marked the dawn of a new era for Japan – an era that would become entirely dominated by the Janus-­ faced power of the atom, characterised by the negative side of nuclear energy in form of the atomic bomb (genbaku, 原爆) and the positive side of nuclear energy in form of nuclear power plants (genpatsu, 原発), which were promoted nation-­ wide. These two sides of nuclear energy began to constitute the discursive field of the ‘atom’ in post-­war Japan, with the former considered part of an overcome past, and the latter regarded as a promise of a new, bright and shiny future (akarui seikatsu, 明るい生活) for the emerging middle class. In other words, the physical splitting of the atom was reproduced in the discursive splitting of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ energy. For many decades, this discursive split factually shaped both post-­war history and society. But after 3/11, even this alluring bright future of Japan’s clean and good energy finally revealed the hidden dark side of the almighty nuclear myth and clearly showed the inadequacy of this hitherto predominant discursive splitting into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ energy. Very soon, it became clear that the ‘good’ energy, too, is a very hazardous one, bearing the same risks as the condemned ‘bad’ energy, namely, ‘radiation exposure’ (hibaku, 被曝).1 Immediately after 3/11, the catastrophe and the aftermath of Fukushima became a central theme in a large number of quite different kinds of literary works (novels, poetry, essays etc.), published, for example, in newspapers, magazines and anthologies. In the field of popular culture, however, only a comparatively small number of works dealing explicitly with 3/11 have been published as yet.2 Manga and anime somehow seem to be quite hesitant to shed a critical light on Japan’s nuclear policy, although ‘nuclear energy’ in its very different manifestations became a central leitmotif in many manga and anime right after the end of war. But have manga and anime really become so ‘apolitical’ and ‘uncritical’ as is often claimed? In this regard, Tatsuta Kazuto’s 竜田一人 manga Ichi efu Fukushima daiichi genshiryoku hatsudensho rōdōki, いちえふ 福島第一原子力発電所労働記

184   Stephan Köhn (translated in English as: Ichi-­F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant)3 deserves special attention, as this manga was serialised in one of Japan’s major manga magazines in 2013–2015 and has been promoted as a report on the work of a nuclear liquidator in Fukushima Daiichi after 3/11. In the pages that follow, I will focus on Tatsuta’s widely cited manga, depicting fundamental narrative strategies, contextualizing production and reception, and reflecting the role of popular culture as a medium of critical articulation within the discursive field of Japan’s ‘atomic dream’.

The ‘reality’ of Fukushima Winning the 34th Manga Open Award (Manga Open taishō 大賞),4 a newcomer award bestowed by the publishing house Kōdansha from 1995–2014,5 for the purpose of recruiting new, promising authors for both their weekly magazine Morning and their monthly magazine Morning Two, was undoubtedly one of the most decisive factors for Ichi efu being serialised in one of Japan’s major manga magazines for young adults (seinenshi, 青年誌), the weekly magazine Morning, since the author was totally unknown in the manga scene at that time. As the manga business is a highly risky and volatile one – like many other manga magazines – the magazine Morning experienced a marked decline in circulation from 800,000 copies in 1982, the year the magazine was founded, to a little less than 300,000 copies in 2013, the year Ichi efu was first published.6 Newcomer awards such as the Manga Open Award serve first and foremost to minimise the risk for the publisher and, at the same time, to effectively promote a newly started manga serial. A brief look at the statements of the committee members at that time is quite insightful for our purpose, as it shows that Ichi efu was anything but a unanimously approved manga from the very beginning – at least for the committee members. A crucial point in all discussions obviously was the fact that Ichi efu seemed to be an authentic undercover report from inside an absolutely forbidden no-­go area, and therefore worth being published. As chief editor Shimada Eijirō 島田英二郎, praising the ‘you-­are-there-­feeling’ (rinjōkan, 臨場感) of this work, states: ‘Well, many people have already produced written texts about the nuclear power plant, but this is the first author writing about it as a manga. I think this is an unusual [and happy] encounter for our magazine Morning.’7 But especially in the second and last stage of selection, some of the committee members (all belonging to the editorial board of Morning) questioned the informative value of Ichi efu as a so-­called ‘report manga’ (rupo manga, ルポマンガ). Mimura Yasuyuki 三村泰之, for example, criticises it:  Speaking honestly, for me it does not really look like a skillfully written report manga. There are too many things in it that have already been reported, nothing surprising [for the reader]. I am sure there must have been much more [to write about], actually.8 

Questioning the politics of popular culture   185 And Tabuchi Kōji 田渕浩司, another editor in charge, adds:  I agree with Mimura. I think that there must have been much better ways for [writing] a report manga, it should have been possible to write it more enthralling. Whether fiction or non-­fiction, I cannot make an appraisal for this work as a manga […].9  But in the final analysis, Ichi efu was chosen for the 34th award and the serialisation in the magazine Morning due to its ‘content’ (kontentsu, コンテンツ) and ‘you-­are-there-­feeling’, or as Shimada Eijirō puts it:  The people who say that this is no new information are people who usually read written texts (newspapers or weeklies). But there are people who do not want to bother themselves to read these written texts; wouldn’t it be enough if they read our magazine? Admittedly, there is nothing new in it, but it has this ‘you-­are-there-­feeling’.10 After receiving the Manga Open Award in October 2013, this prize-­winning manga, originally titled ‘1F – A Guidebook to the Nuclear Power Plant Fukushima One’ (Ichi efu – Fukushima daiichi genshiryoku hatsudensho annaiki, い ちえふ～福島第一原子力発電所案内記～), was published in next to no time in Volume 44 of weekly Morning (October 2013), with the unusual length of 37 pages and the first four cover pages in full colour.11 This marked the beginning of a rather irregular serialisation of this manga, starting with Volume 48 (2013), over a period of two years, until the last of a total of twenty-­three episodes was published in Volume 45 of Morning in October 2015. One should always keep in mind that one crucial selling point of this manga is the mysterious aura of the author himself. Only known under his assumed name Tatsuta Kazuto 竜田一人 and always hidden behind a wrestler’s mask when shown in magazines or on television, the author of Ichi efu dramatically emphasises the verisimilitude, and, above all, dangerousness of his report through his mysterious appearance – why otherwise should he go through the trouble of keeping himself anonymous all the time? His first-­hand working experience at Fukushima, a point also widely stressed by most of the members of the above-­mentioned selection committee, seems to guarantee the immediacy and authenticity of the information he reveals to his readership from inside an almost uncharted, dangerous world. For that very reason, two quite noteworthy and somehow enigmatic advertising slogans are printed on the front page of this manga: ‘This is the “reality of Fukushima” he has seen with his own eyes’ (kore ga sakusha ga sono me de mita ‘Fukushima no genjitsu’, これが作者がその目 で見た「福島の現実」) and ‘This is not a work uncovering the “truth about Fukushima” ’ (kore wa ‘Fukushima no shinjitsu’ wo abaku sakuhin dewa nai, こ れは「フクシマの真実」を暴く作品ではない). The slogans are noteworthy in three aspects. First, the author, or at least the editors of Kōdansha, make a clear distinction between Fukushima 福島, as a

186   Stephan Köhn neutral toponym for a place with a nuclear power plant, and Fukushima フクシ マ, as a synecdoche for the triple catastrophe.12 Second, they draw a clear line between their non-­fictional ‘report manga’ Ichi efu and the successful, fictional gourmet manga Oishinbo 美味しんぼ (The Foodie, 1983–2014)13 by Kariya Tetsu 雁屋晢 (story) and Hanasaki Akira 花咲アキラ (illustration), which had launched a special ‘Fukushima issue’, titled ‘The Truth about Fukushima’ (Fukushima no shinjitsu 福島の真実) in January 2013, which had been serialised in the rival weekly Big Comics Spirits (Biggu komikku supirittsu, ビッグコ ミックスピリッツ, Shōgakukan) until May 2014. And third, by emphasising the word ‘reality’, the author and editors respectively imply that, in contrast to other reports about Fukushima, Ichi efu is ‘real’ in the sense of ‘unbiased’. Or to put it differently: that it is neither a ‘fake report’ nor an ‘ideological demagogy’. But what kind of ‘reality’ is actually depicted in Ichi efu?

A worker’s view from inside Fukushima The manga Ichi efu is about an anonymous nuclear liquidator with the assumed name Tatsuta Kazuto, who works in the nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi after 3/11. Or, perhaps more precisely, it is the story of an anonymous manga artist with the assumed name Tatsuta Kazuto, who tells us about his working experience as a nuclear liquidator in Fukushima Daiichi after 3/11. At a first glance, this manga seems to be a prime example of a typical homodiegetic narrative, as often used in historical or educational manga – an omniscient narrator, the manga artist Tatsuta, who also appears as one of the dramatis personae in this manga, the liquidator Tatsuta in Fukushima Daiichi. This omniscient narrator not only provides the reader with all kinds of necessary background information, represented by a flood of squared narrative boxes dominating panel and page layout, he also intersperses more or less funny comments on scenes or situations from an extradiegetic narrative level. These are written in the gutter and provide the reader with both information and entertainment. At a second glance, it becomes quite obvious that the omniscient narrator of this manga, the artist Tatsuta, even appears personally within the intradiegetic world of the dramatis personae, as manga artist Tatsuta. Thus, the homodiegetic narrative becomes increasingly ambiguous and, as a consequence, somehow unreliable due to a permanent crossover of narrative perspectives and self-­references. Ultimately, it remains unclear for the critical reader whether Tatsuta, the narrator of this story, is in fact a manga artist who writes about his part-­time working experiences in Fukushima Daiichi, or whether he is originally a contracted liquidator (or someone else?), who only pretends to be a manga artist giving a report of his part-­time working experience. This is a point I will come back to in more detail below, when discussing the reception of this work. Chronologically speaking, the story begins in October 2011, when Tatsuta consults the job centre Hallo Work (Harō wāku, ハローワーク) in Tokyo to find work in the disaster area.14 By chance, he finds a job announcement for Fukushima Daiichi and immediately makes the decision to apply for it.15 But eventually, he

Questioning the politics of popular culture   187 has to wait until May 2012 to get the long-­awaited call from his new employer. He is asked to come to Kōriyama in the Prefecture of Fukushima to get his pre-­ employment medical examination and one-­day training in radiation protection before starting his first, out of a total of three, jobs as service staff in a rest area for liquidators on the grounds of Fukushima Daiichi. In Fukushima, Tatsuta experiences a working world that is quite different from anything he – and probably most of his readers – has experienced so far. The companies recruiting workers for Fukushima are part of a complex and highly hierarchical system of contractors and subcontractors. TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company, Tōkyō denryoku, 東京電力), the operator of Fukushima Daiichi and other power plants in the Kantō area, is at the top of this hierarchy, contracting liquidators and other related jobs out to a subcontractor who, in turn, contracts these jobs out to a sub-­subcontractor and so on. Tatsuta discovers that there are actually up to six different levels of hierarchically organised subcontractors who recruit workers for TEPCO, and that he, like most of his fellow workers in Fukushima Daiichi, primarily works for companies at the bottom end of this rigid hierarchy.16 The world of these subcontractors is a more or less unscrupulous world in which workers, being recruited from all over the country, are more often than not hired with false promises regarding their salary, packed together in an overcrowded dormitory or left in uncertainty whether they will get a successive employment or not. Tatsuta depicts a system that is highly corrupt and obscure, with subcontractors withholding a large part of the agreed salary for contracted work as commission, sub-­subcontractors bypassing the hierarchy to maximise their profit, or workers recruiting other fellow workers on behalf of one of the rival subcontractors – for a small commission of their own. In constant demand for workers, many people recruit secretly – and profit from the system in Fukushima. It is this very system, Tatsuta explains, which keeps the wheels in Fukushima turning, not the job centres in Tokyo or elsewhere.17 In marked contrast to all the profit-­oriented and anything but trustworthy subcontractors, who do not really care about the well-­being of their workers, it is TEPCO, of all organisations, who really seem to care for the subcontracted workers in their power plant, sending section chief Mita Fukushima Daiichi for mental and physical support. Mita is not a typical bureaucrat or one of the TEPCO pen-­pushers, who most readers will doubtlessly have seen during countless interviews on television after 3/11, wearing overalls and carrying piles of paper with them. Instead, Mita is a man who enthusiastically joins hands with the other liquidators, fearlessly fighting in the front line and running the same risk of contamination as all the others. He epitomises the scrupulous and trustworthy superior, who stands in for his subordinates anytime, anywhere and, it goes without saying, would have loved to stay with his team in Fukushima, as he confesses at the end of his short assignment: ‘I really wish I could [stay with you], but the headquarter in Tōkyō …’18 The message for the reader is obvious – even though the hierarchical system of subcontractors may be extremely corrupt, at least the original employers at TEPCO honestly care for all their contracted workers.

188   Stephan Köhn Tatsuta’s first job assignment leads him to one of the rest areas (kyūkeisho, 休 憩所) for liquidators working on the grounds of Fukushima Daiichi, run by several cooperating companies. Here, he and his colleagues are responsible for maintaining the unit. This means, for example, taking care of all kinds of supplies (radiation-­protective clothing, refreshments for the workers, gasoline for the generators etc.), controlling and documenting the daily radiation doses of the liquidators after their working shift, disposing of heaps of contaminated working clothes or simply cleaning a portable container unit from any kind of radioactive particles. The reader does not only take part in Tatsuta’s daily working routines. By reading Ichi efu, he gets, above all, the feeling of being granted a look behind the usually well-­guarded secret scenes of the infamous Fukushima Daiichi. Numerous, minutely detailed maps and plans that were interspersed in every single episode of this work reveal a world that was largely unknown, or at least unfamiliar, to most of the readers. The amount of detail, spiced up with many, sometimes very personal comments by the author, suggests that only an insider could know this, supporting the impression that one is reading a serious report on Fukushima which is both extremely investigative and, needless to say, impressively authentic. While reading this manga, the reader is, in some way, an accomplice of Tatsuta (especially as Tatsuta’s true motivation for working in Fukushima Daiichi remains unclear throughout the entire manga), sharing his experiences and his impressions – that is what Shimada Eijirō may have had in mind when emphasising the ‘you-­are-there-­feeling’ of this work. Apart from the admittedly unusual work environment, working in Fukushima Daiichi in some ways is, and this appears to be a central theme in this work, a place just like anywhere else. The work in Fukushima, as far as Tatsuta depicts it for his readers, is primarily characterised by comradeship, teamwork and commitment in an almost exclusively male-­dominated society. It is a world that very much resembles the typical framework of manga aimed at young male readers (shōnen, 少年), where friendship (yūjō, 友情), effort (doryoku, 努力) and victory (shōri, 勝利) have become the ultimate leitmotifs, whether intended by the author or not.19 As Tatsuta explains in an intradiegetic interview with a reporter, who serves as a kind of alter ego for the doubting reader of his manga:  Of course, before coming to Fukushima Daiichi, even I felt a little bit uneasy. I thought that I would return home as soon as I see something that could be risky. But seeing [all these] normal men laughing and working together in a normal way, all my anxiety disappeared.20  For Tatsuta, working in Fukushima Daiichi is actually nothing to be really afraid or scared of. As radiation exposure and contamination can seemingly be kept at bay quite easily with a full face mask and radiation-­protective clothing, he looks forward to his next challenge, a job assignment inside a building for waste disposal for Fukushima Daiichi’s third reactor.

Questioning the politics of popular culture   189 In October–December 2012, Tatsuta finally manages to work in a reactor building, a place he was very anxious to work in due to the ‘special spirit’ he witnessed among other workers who had been working there.21 The team Tatsuta belongs to is responsible for both the inspection of already existing piping and the installation of additional piping within the cooling water system for the fuel rod pool, in case the old one malfunctions. In quite some detail, the author provides background information on the cooling system, depicting the painstaking inspection and installation, and repeatedly emphasises the astonishingly high degree of technical skill among his colleagues.22 However, the fact that Tatsuta and his colleagues are working in an area with relatively high radiation levels seems to be nothing to write home about. Radiation doses are measured, documented and joked about – but nothing of real concern, as Tatsuta explains to a former colleague from the rest area: ‘Well, I guess I have become numb to numbers in some way. But even if radiation exposure adds up to 20 [millisieverts] that doesn’t mean that something will actually happen to you.’23 For Tatsuta, radiation is controllable, calculable and therefore only harmful to a certain extent. When his radiation exposure finally reaches the statutory maximum of 20 millisieverts (per annum), he returns home to Tokyo again, eagerly awaiting his next job in Fukushima, when his received radiation dosage has sufficiently decreased in the following months. His third and, for the time being, last job assignment, lasting from July to November 2014, brings Tatsuta, who apparently has used the time in Tokyo to write down new episodes of Ichi efu, to Fukushima Daiichi’s first reactor. Here, he and his colleagues are in charge of a remote-­controlled robot unit which is used to conduct a complete scan of the interior of the destroyed reactor building for the planned decommissioning. This time, Tatsuta fights the ‘invisible enemy’ of Fukushima Daiichi side by side with machines. The scenario depicted by the author somehow resembles a science fiction manga set in the very near future, with heavy gates leading to a gaping emptiness inside, robots moving up and down long and dark corridors, and human beings hiding behind movable lead walls to save life and limb. Due to extremely high radiation levels inside the reactor, the hurdles for this third and last mission are quite high. And again, it is comradeship, passion and blind confidence in each other which, how could it be any different, are the key to success for Tatsuta and his team – mission completed. The implicit message of this slightly futuristic depiction is quite obvious – the liquidation in Fukushima is technically innovative, up-­to-date, and, needless to say, very effective. Everything is under control. At least for Tatsuta, the liquidation in and of Fukushima Daiichi is a success story. As thousands and thousands of contracted workers like Tatsuta devote themselves to the swift and thorough liquidation of the reactors, significant progress in Fukushima actually is visible everywhere. Tatsuta’s appeal to the readers at the end of his work is that one only has to be aware of this progress.24

190   Stephan Köhn

Behind the mask, behind the curtain The manga Ichi efu reveals Tatsuta Kazuto’s perception of the ‘reality’ of Fukushima Daiichi to its readers. Tatsuta captivates his readers with great amounts of detailed material and information (plans, maps, comments etc.) from inside Fukushima Daiichi. In addition, the manga Ichi efu makes many deictic references to real images and pictures from Fukushima Prefecture, which most of the readers will have seen repeatedly on television or in the newspaper after 3/11. It refers to extra-­textual realities such as the ruins of the Ōkawa Junior High School in Ishimaki-­shi,25 the quite famous banner ‘Tomioka will not give up’ (Tomioka wa maken, 富岡は負けん) in Tomioka-­chō,26 or the formerly promising slogan ‘Nuclear Power: Energy for a Bright and Shiny Future’ (Genshiryoku akarui mirai no enerugî, 原子力明るい未来のエネルギー) in Futaba-­chō,27 to cite only a few. Tatsuta evokes commonly shared memories or impressions of the disaster and, by doing so, reinforces his claim that he gives a true and authentic report on the ‘reality’ of Fukushima as an eyewitness, as someone who has really been there. The author of Ichi efu nourishes his readers’ expectation that they are reading a highly delicate undercover report from the inside of Fukushima Daiichi. He achieves this not only through his mysterious, masked appearance in public settings and his assumed name Tatsuta, which is supposedly borrowed from a local train station in the Prefecture of Fukushima,28 but also through reiterated comments that the names of all dramatis personae within the manga had to be changed to protect the author, his fellow workers and informants, pixelated parts within a panel to hide the intradiegetic identity of persons depicted, or interspersed comments by the author that he will refrain from showing further details for security reasons;29 these all play quite a crucial part in boosting the impression that the author must have very good reasons for keeping everything anonymous in this manga. But what could actually be at stake for the author, and who could seriously be out to get him? As a matter of fact, Tatsuta depicts a ‘reality’ in Fukushima that follows a very clear agenda: radiation is, above all, a problem inside Fukushima Daiichi, and not outside of it. And even inside, as seen before, radiation can be perfectly kept at bay by using masks and radiation-­protective clothing provided by the subcontractors. Oddly enough, this assertion is actually quite in line with Japan’s national myth of safe and controllable nuclear energy (anzen shinwa, 安全神話), which has been perpetuated throughout recent decades.30 This is despite the fact that, as early as 1979, Horie Kunio 堀江邦夫 published an undercover report titled ‘Nuclear Power Plant Gypsies’ (Genpatsu jipushī, 原発ジプシー), which revealed that nuclear accidents do happen more often than not and that (contracted) workers working in the reactor buildings are quite frequently exposed to radiation, notwithstanding the fact that they are wearing supposedly radiation-­ protective clothing.31 But that is not all. Tatsuta even discredits any public concerns about the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima as a kind of ‘demagoguery’

Questioning the politics of popular culture   191 (dema, デマ), saying that they are false and groundless rumours spread by activists, interest groups or mass media.32 As contamination, at least for the author of Ichi efu, is only a problem inside, but not outside Fukushima Daiichi, public fears that cases of thyroid cancer in people (especially children) living near the power plant will significantly increase within the next years are ruled out as absolutely unfounded. Tatsuta can therefore wholeheartedly assure his somehow concerned colleague that: Fukushima is not Chernobyl, no abnormalities have been detected.33 The fact that the author of Ichi efu passionately takes up the cudgels for local products of that very region deserves special attention. For example, Tatsuta refers to the case of dairy products, such as the ‘Rakuō café au lait’ (Rakuō kafeore, 酪王 カフェオレ), and local fish, such as the ‘green eye’ (mehikari, メヒカリ), to demonstrate to his readers that news about a possible contamination of local milk or fish are nothing more than fake news.34 Interestingly, Tatsuta uses the expression ‘reputational damage’ (fūhyō higai, 風評被害) for this kind of news, an expression that was widely used in both mass media and on the Internet after the manga Oishinbo had sparked a heated debate in May 2014. This debate revolved around the potential health risks for people living in Fukushima Prefecture through contamination with radioactive particles. It was started by Oishinbo showing one of its main characters, Yamaoka Shirō 山岡士郎, getting nose bleeds during his stay in Fukushima. This so-­called ‘nose bleeding problem’ (hanaji mondai, 鼻血 問題), which I will discuss in some more detail in the next section, undermined the official agenda of the Japanese government that 3/11 was first and foremost a natural disaster (tensai, 天災), not a man-­made disaster (jinsai, 人災), meaning that there were no responsibilities on the part of the Japanese government and TEPCO. In times where politicians had to enthusiastically bite into cucumbers or fried fish from Fukushima in front of a camera to put consumer’s worries and fears at rest, reports – even in a fictional medium such as manga – on contaminated soil or air were doubtlessly a thorn in their sides.35 The manga Ichi efu, as we have seen so far, is not only in line with the national anzen shinwa, but also, by all appearances, with the national narrative of ‘restoration’ (fukkō, 復興), according to which buying and eating products from Fukushima is part of everybody’s civic duty towards the people of Fukushima, and towards the state of Japan.36 This euphemistic fukkō is the key to overcome a ‘temporal’ crisis in North-­Eastern Japan, and the necessary precondition for staging the 32th Olympic Games in Tokyo. Tatsuta’s obvious approval of the official genpatsu-­agenda and his blatant disapproval of any kind of criticism towards this agenda is somehow puzzling and his absolute denial of any ‘system’ behind Fukushima Daiichi (and other power plants) is also rather surprising – especially since several authors have already written in great detail about the hidden power of Japan’s so-­called ‘nuclear power village’ (genshiryoku mura, 原子力ムラ), a complex network of politicians, energy groups, power plant producers, scientists, local communes etc.37 As the ‘reality’ depicted in Ichi efu is apparently anything but an unbiased ‘reality’, one question inevitably arises: who is really behind that wrestler’s mask and who is actually behind the curtain of that all?

192   Stephan Köhn

The red line of depiction As already mentioned, the gourmet manga Oishinbo started a special ‘Fukushima issue’ in January 2013, which was serialised until May 2014 in Big Comics Spirits and afterwards published as a two-­volume book. In the manga Oishinbo, Yamaoka Shirō and Kurita Yūko, both reporters for the Tōzai News and in charge of the newly launched column ‘the ultimate menu’ (kyūkyoku no menyū, 究極のメニュー), encounter not only new recipes, unknown ingredients and secret methods of preparation but also many like-­minded people with whom they exchange ideas or even enter into competition on their ongoing search for the ‘ultimate menu’ – this is especially the case with Yamaoka’s father, the famous-­infamous gourmet Kaibara Yūzan.38 From 1999 onwards, the concept of Oishinbo was expanded by focusing on the refined local cuisine in each prefecture with a new special issue series called ‘Gourmet trip to all prefectures of Japan’ (Nihon zenken ajimeguri, 日本全県味巡り). Until 2011, a total of nine special issues had been successfully published, with another one already planned.39 However, 3/11 changed things completely and the authors quickly began to serialise a special issue on the Prefecture of Fukushima. These special issues didn’t stay within the narrative framework of the ajimeguri-­series, but focused on local food producers’ struggle for survival after 3/11, with the first issue named ‘Disaster Area. People Who Do Not Give Up’ (Hisaichi-­hen. Megenai hitobito, 被災地編 めげない人々).40 In this issue, Yamaoka and his news crew head for Fukushima to get a personal impression of the devastation and the effects on local food producers they try to meet and talk to. But in marked contrast to their second Fukushima issue, ‘The Truth About Fukushima’, the depiction centres first and foremost upon the aftermath of the earthquake, and especially of the tsunami, on local communities rather than on possible health risks caused by radioactive contamination after the meltdown in Fukushima Daiichi. As radiation is apparently a problem but not really a fundamental threat, the manga ends optimistically, with Yamaoka’s pious hope while eating products from Fukushima together with his crew: ‘Those people who did not give up will surely recover the delicious taste [of local products] from the earth of North-­Eastern Japan. […] Good luck to all those courageous people from the disaster area.’41 But this optimism, nourished by the government by means of countless press releases after the catastrophe and willingly shared by large parts of society bound together in a feeling of solidarity with the victims (kizuna, 絆), did not last very long. At least, this was the case with the authors of Oishinbo. In their second Fukushima issue, titled ‘The Truth About Fukushima’, the authors adopt a quite different stance. As Yamaoka explains to his readers right from the beginning: ‘The last time we travelled through the disaster area, we were overwhelmed by the tremendous devastation caused by the tsunami. But the greatest problem now is, of course, the radioactivity [in this area].’42 The ‘truth’ about Fukushima in Oishinbo now is that radiation is not only a problem inside Fukushima Daiichi, but outside, too, and that this problem is apparently

Questioning the politics of popular culture   193 anything but a ‘temporal’ one, as the government has been trying to make society believe. In this sense, the second reportage in Oishinbo has become a counter-­narrative to Tatsuta’s point of view in Ichi efu and, by all appearances, to the official agenda of the Japanese government. By depicting the main character Yamaoka Shirō with a nose bleed and explaining that this symptom is usually caused by exposure to radiation,43 the authors of Oishinbo sparked off a probably unprecedented debate which took place in virtually all mass media in Japan. Even the prime minister at that time, Abe Shinzō, and several politicians expressed their ‘regret’ (ikan, 遺憾) concerning this ‘inappropriate depiction’ (futekisetsu-­na hyōgen, 不適切な表現) and sharply criticised both the authors and the publishers for causing ‘reputational damage’ to the people of Fukushima without having any scientific evidence for their assertion.44 So, what happened? The reason for the heated debate was, simply spoken, that Oishinbo broke a taboo by questioning Japan’s anzen shinwa, the myth of a controllable and safe nuclear energy. Although known as the ‘nose bleeding problem’, it was not so much the depiction of a character suffering from nose bleed – other dramatis personae in Oishinbo complain about the same symptoms, too – that was the bone of contention, but rather the fact that this symptom was explained by using the delicate expression ‘exposure to radiation’ (hibaku), an expression hitherto used almost exclusively in the context of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By pointing out that ‘the reason why so many people in Fukushima are getting nose bleeding and suffer from weariness is because they have been exposed to radiation’,45 the depiction of a nose bleeding character, normally used in manga as a device for expressing sexual arousal, becomes re-­contextualised, as bleeding from nose, mouth or gums were typical symptoms among atomic bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.46 Oishinbo’s ‘truth about Fukushima’ is that there is radiation outside Fukushima Daiichi, and that this radiation doubtlessly has a negative effect on people’s health. As early as 2013, the atomic bomb survivor and writer Hayashi Kyōko 林京子 saw an evidently structural analogy between the aftermath of Fukushima caused by genpatsu and the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused by genbaku for the local population as follows:  The nuclear power plant that was initially highly praised for its peaceful use was now struck by a meltdown and an explosion. […] A new danger, even more terrible than the tsunami, spread out very quickly: the danger of radioactivity. […] The resulting ‘internal exposure to radiation’ is a problem we hibakusha have been confronted with for more than six decades, men and atom, life and radioactivity.47  For Hayashi Kyōko, genpatsu and genbaku are, at the end of the day, just two sides of the same coin. The manga Oishinbo obviously crossed a red line of depiction by revealing another version of ‘Fukushima’, one which apparently caused discomfort to a government that had been propagating quite a different narrative of ‘Fukushima’.

194   Stephan Köhn The same goes for large parts of society, which had willingly believed in this official narrative of a successful restoration of the disaster area of ‘Fukushima’. By discussing radiation and radioactivity in the context of ‘Fukushima’, Oishinbo suddenly became a ‘political’ issue for both government and society. It therefore comes as no surprise that the more general debate over ‘regulation for manga’ (manga kisei, マンガ規制) versus ‘freedom of expression’ (hyōgen no jiyū, 表現の自由), which had been sparked off in 2010, in the context of the allegedly harmful influence of boys’ love manga on juvenile readers, started all over again.48 The repressive policy of the Abe government towards mass media (television, newspapers, etc.) was anything but a secret.49 But the fact that a prime minister personally railed against authors and publishers of a single fictional work in public and that an entire cabinet discussed the matter several times in their official meetings was unheard of and alarming, even for experts. Eventually, the publishers had to bow down to public opinion and political pressure and Shōgakukan stopped the serialisation of Oishinbo in May 2014, after thirty-­one years of successful publishing. This was an act of ‘self-­imposed regulation’ (jishu kisei, 自主規制), a strategy pursued by most of the big manga publishing houses in Japan to avoid getting into conflict with the government or the public. But that was not all. For the occasion of the ensuing publication as a two-­volume book, many of the dialogues had to be changed to appease Oishinbo’s powerful critics.50 Although Yamaoka’s ‘nose bleeding’ and the expression ‘radiation exposure’ were kept unchanged, anything that traced these symptoms directly back to any kind of radiation outside of Fukushima Daiichi was completely changed, or at least the sting was taken out of them by saying: ‘Well, at least this could be one possible explanation for the nose bleeding.’51 For the medium manga, being political seems to be a double-­edged sword. As the case of Oishinbo’s nose bleeding problem impressively demonstrated, the question is probably not if the manga medium has the potential to be political, but rather if this agency of manga may be able to bring about significant socio-­ political change in Japanese society at all.52

Politics of manga in the wake of 3/11 In marked contrast to Oishinbo, Tatsuta Kazuto’s manga Ichi efu apparently did not cross any red line of depiction by revealing his ‘reality of Fukushima’, otherwise this manga probably would have shared the same fate as its ‘rival’ Oishinbo. It goes without saying that the manga Ichi efu is political but in quite a different sense, as it does not criticise the Japanese government or TEPCO as Oishinbo does.53 Ichi efu is political because it unreservedly affirms the official point of view of 3/11 and the aftermath. In the intradiegetic world of Ichi efu, there are no responsibilities for 3/11 to be questioned, no fatalities among the contracted workers caused by inappropriate equipment or hazardous working conditions, such as described Suzuki Tomohiko’s undercover report ‘Yakuza and Nuclear Power Plants’ (Yakuza to genpatsu, ヤクザと原発),54 and no serious risks of radiation exposure for the

Questioning the politics of popular culture   195 people living outside Fukushima Daiichi. In this sense, Ichi efu is a ‘political’ manga, as it is perfectly in line with the national agenda of 3/11 and the national myth of a safe and controllable nuclear energy. And, Ichi efu is, of course, a ‘critical’ manga, as it criticises the critics of nuclear power plants, nuclear power villages and national nuclear policy, or to put it differently, Ichi efu is critical of any voice that is opposed to the national nuclear narrative. So, Ichi efu is, admittedly, both ‘political’ and ‘critical’, but in a rather confusing and surprising way for many readers. Needless to say, the reception of Ichi efu became highly controversial. On the one hand, quite a few readers felt captivated by the above-­mentioned ‘you-­arethere-­feeling’ and the ‘immediacy’ and ‘authenticity’ of Tatsuta’s supposedly personal experiences. As the journalist Karyn Nishimura Poupée, just like many others in Internet blogs or reviews, emphasises in the introduction to the English translation:  He never claims to be delivering the one and only truth; he merely drew what he lived through, like a soldier who comes home from war and puts his small part of the sweeping battle down on paper. He may not grasp the whole picture, but that does not lessen the value of his experience.55 On the other hand, a substantial number of readers became very suspicious of Tatsuta’s depiction of his supposedly personal working experiences in Fukushima Daiichi and thus sharply criticised Ichi efu as an extremely government-­friendly and highly biased report that was, in actual fact, written as a ‘report purveyed by TEPCO’ (Tōden goyōtashi no ruporutāju, 東電御用達のルポルタージュ).56 For many of them, the man behind that wrestler’s mask was undoubtedly someone from TEPCO, from inside the system, and the manga Ichi efu therefore was nothing more than a piece of genpatsu-­propaganda sponsored by TEPCO, which was supposedly controlling everything from behind the scenes. Tatsuta’s Ichi efu harping on about demagogies and fake news spread by activists, interest groups or mass media, now aroused suspicion of being a piece of fake news itself, solely written to manipulate public opinion towards nuclear energy and energy policy. The field of literature may demonstrate best how difficult it apparently is to give a ‘political’ and/or ‘critical’ account of ‘3/11’ nowadays. After 3/11, quite a few novels, essays, poems and so on were published, which broached the issue of 3/11 as a catastrophe in one or another way. In next to no time, these writings became subsumed by literary critics and scholars, among others under the newly coined generic term ‘post-­disaster literature’ (shinsaigo bungaku, 震災後文 学),57 whereby the ‘post-­disaster’ in this term evokes associations rather with the natural aspect of the disaster (tensai) than the man-­made (jinsai). The majority of authors that were considered to be representative for this new genre of ‘post-­ disaster literature’ – for example, Ōe Kenzaburō 大江健三郎, Kawakami Hiromi 川上弘美, Takahashi Gen’ichirō 高橋源一郎 and Itō Seikō いとうせいこう, to name only a few – had been highly acclaimed writers in the renowned field of ‘pure literature’ (junbungaku, 純文学) even before 3/11. Hence, critical voices

196   Stephan Köhn questioning the adequacy of their chosen stylistic devices for representing the un-­representable of 3/11, problematising the apparent lack of any historical contextualisation, or accusing the authors of being ‘apolitical’ or ‘uncritical’ as they did not raise the question of responsibility for the nuclear catastrophe – once the core of criticism in the fierce ‘debates on atomic bomb literature’ (genbaku bungaku ronsō, 原爆文学論争) – could hardly be found in any of the relevant literary treatises published up until now.58 The mere fact that a well-­established author picked up 3/11 as a central theme in his or her work somehow seemed sufficient enough for canonising and praising this work as an important piece of ‘post-­disaster literature’. This is probably illustrated best by the overwhelming reception of Kawakami Hiromi’s short novel ‘Kamisama 神様 2011’, which is included in virtually every treatise on ‘post-­disaster literature’. Writing literature about 3/11 is first and foremost writing about Japan’s nuclear dream, about the allegedly good energy that finally showed the other dark side of the atomic coin. But despite Japan’s experiences with the atomic bomb, this nightmarish nuclear dream seems to be merely considered a historical singularity in both the writings about 3/11 and the writings about these writings. As a result, the majority of Japanese treatises on ‘post-­disaster literature’ avoid, whether deliberately or not, contextualising 3/11 within post-­war Japan’s discursive field of the ‘atom’, as the examples of ‘Nuclear Power Plant Literature and Atomic Bomb Literature’ (Genpatsu to genbaku no bungaku, 原発と原爆の文 学, 2016) by Kobayashi Takayoshi 小林孝吉 or ‘Voices from the Dead, Words from the Living’ (Shisha no koe, seija no kotoba, 死者の声、生者の言葉, 2014) by Komori Yōichi 小森陽一 show. The voices from the past mainly serve to encourage the reader to emotionally overcome the national trauma of 3/11; they are useful for national affirmation, consolation and conciliation, but not for making the reader question post-­war Japan as a system that is dominated and configured by the ‘atom’. In this sense, ‘post-­disaster literature’, in the final analysis, is neither more ‘political’ nor more ‘critical’ than manga or other representatives of popular culture, as is widely believed. On the contrary, this ‘post-­disaster literature’ somehow seems to adhere to the same logic of ‘self-­ imposed regulation’ which most media products in Japan, especially manga, have been exercising for quite a long time. The discursive field of the ‘atom’ determines virtually all depictions on 3/11 and the aftermath, regardless of media or format. The manga Ichi efu is, of course, no exception. On the contrary, Ichi efu even functions as a crucially constitutive part within this field by reiterating the national narrative of a clean and safe form of energy. Ichi efu keeps the atom discursively split into good and bad nuclear energy even after 3/11, the former described in great detail, the latter generously omitted and thus transformed into a discursive blank space within this work. Manga such as Ichi efu or Oishinbo are ‘political’ and ‘critical’ in two aspects: by adopting an intradiegetic stance towards 3/11 and by igniting an extradiegetic debate about that stance. As discussed before, Oishinbo was sharply criticised by the establishment for disseminating a counter-­narrative to

Questioning the politics of popular culture   197 the national agenda of 3/11, while Ichi efu was vehemently criticised by the anti-­ establishment for promulgating the national narrative of 3/11. In the final analysis, both debates, each in a different way, raised awareness towards 3/11 as a natural and a man-­made disaster, and even drew attention to the subtle mechanisms of political pressure and influence on mass media. In a sense, Tatsuta Kazuto’s manga Ichi efu can be considered as both symptomatic and emblematic of the Japanese government after 3/11, in particular the Abe administration. In times when media and news are increasingly manipulated, official documents falsified on a regular basis and insecure nuclear power plants are restarted rather than decommissioned, the demarcation line between ‘truth’ and ‘post-­truth’, ‘reality’ and ‘fake’ for 3/11 has become totally blurred. Tatsuta Kazuto’s manga Ichi efu tells both the truth and post-­truth, the reality and the fake, with regard to Fukushima Daiichi and the world outside the power plant. In the end, it is up to the reader to ‘read’ a manga like Ichi efu properly in the discursive context of genpatsu and genbaku. So perhaps we should no longer question the politics of manga but rather question the political awareness and media literacy of manga readers nowadays.

Notes   1 As early as 13 March, the Asahi shinbun titled: ‘90 Persons Exposed to Radiation in the Periphery of Fukushima Daiichi?’ on their cover page.   2 Hagio Moto’s 萩尾望都 short novel Rape Blossoms (Nanohana, なのはな), which picks the problem of radioactively contaminated soil in Fukushima as a central theme, is probably one of the first manga published directly after 3/11 (August issue of the magazine Flowers).   3 Tatsuta Kazuto, Ichi efu: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, translated by Stephen Paul (New York: Kodansha, 2017).   4 The selection committee of the Manga Open Award was made up of two or three manga artists and several members of the editorial board of the magazine Morning. From 2010 to 2014, manga artists Higashimura Akiko 東村アキコ and Moritaka Yūji 森高夕次 belonged to this committee.   5 In 2015, the award was renamed ‘The Gate’.   6 For the figures, see J-­Magazine, ‘Zasshi kakushu dêta’, 2013.   7 The comments of the 34th Manga Open Award selection committee are still available on the Internet; see Morning, ‘Dai 34 kai MANGA OPEN, saishū senkō no gijiroku wo kōkai shimasu!’, 2013; and Morning, ‘Dai 34 kai MANGA OPEN, 2ji senkō no gijiroku wo kōkai shimasu!’, 2013.   8 Ibid.   9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 The original version of Ichi efu is still available on the Internet. Online at: www.moae. jp/comic/1f/1?_ga=2.38214883.1918282536.1522774060-1229252693.1522774060. Accessed 17 January 2019. 12 This harmless-­looking change of notation implies important connotations that were, in actual fact, widely used in the context of the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Almost immediately after the bombings, both cities were referred to exclusively in katakana notation, as a short glimpse in Japanese newspapers of that time reveals. With this new notation, the historical cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were irreversibly transformed into places that had been detached from time and space

198   Stephan Köhn in Japanese collective memory, transformed into places for national commemoration and mourning. This change of notation also symbolised a specific historical and national awareness in Japan. While the kanji notation referred to the historical preand interwar cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the katakana notation referred to the reconstructed new post-­war cities. 13 The manga Oishinbo, a neologism made up of oishii (delicious) and kuishinbō (gourmand), was published in English by Viz Media under the title Oishinbo: A la carte in 2009–2010. Despite the fact that the Japanese original comprises 111 volumes, published by Shōgakukan, Viz Media stopped the publication of their translation after Volume 7. 14 Ichi efu does not seem to follow any plausible narrative (chronological) structure. The story starts with Tatsuta’s second job assignment in 2012, then jumps back in time to the beginning of the story in 2011, then jumps forward in time again etc. 15 Although Tatsuta was originally looking for a job where he could help clearing debris from the disaster, he finally decided to go for a job in the power plant Fukushima Daiichi because the employer guaranteed dormitories for the workers; see Ichi efu, Vol. 1, 80. 16 Ichi efu, Vol. 1, 97. 17 Ichi efu, Vol. 2, 32–34. 18 Ichi efu, Vol. 3, 144. 19 As a manga serialised in one of Japan’s major manga magazines for young adults, Ichi efu has to adhere to certain genre or magazine conventions regarding motifs, structure or style, to name only a few. As Tatsuta obviously plays with genres, ways of depiction such as the use of deformed chibi-­characters (Vol. 3, 14) or a second face of the characters (Vol. 2, 121), and maybe even his readers, information and depictions in Ichi efu should not carelessly be taken at face value, as is the case with many Internet reviews of the manga. 20 Ichi efu, Vol. 1, 176. 21 For example, see Ichi efu, Vol. 2, 41. 22 Ichi efu, Vol. 2, 53–65. 23 Ichi efu, Vol. 2, 160–161. 24 Ichi efu, Vol. 3, 170. 25 Ichi efu, Vol. 3, 157. Similar photographs are available on the Internet, see Ikegami Masaki, ‘Higashi Nihon daishinsai kara 5nen: tokubetsu intabyû, in Hazrd Lab, 8 March 2016.  26 See Ichi efu, Vol. 1, 39. Almost identical photographs (and perspectives) are available on the Internet, see Kahoku Shimpo Publishing Co, ‘Genbaku jiko Tomioka wa maken! Ōdan-maku de êru’, 2016. 27 See Ichi efu, Vol. 2, 141. Almost identical photographs (and perspectives) are available on the Internet, see Sakate Yōji, ‘Genshiryoku akarui mirai no enerugî’, 23 August 2015. 28 See Ichi efu, Vol. 3, 172. 29 For example, see Ichi efu, Vol. 2, 98. 30 See, for example, Akihiro Yamamoto, Kaku enerugī gensetsu no sengoshi 1945–1960 [Post-­War History of Statements About Nuclear Energy 1945–1960] (Tōkyō: Jinbun shoin, 2012), 187–221; and Ryū Honma, Genpatsu puropaganda [Nuclear Power Plant Propaganda] (Iwanami shinsho) (Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten, 2016), 141–196. 31 Horie, a freelance writer and journalist, worked in the nuclear power plants of Mihama and Tsuruga (both in the Prefecture of Fukui) as well as Fukushima in 1978–1979. Horie’s genpatsu jipushī are workers hired by subcontractors to do risky work in a power plant, such as cleaning, inspection and other related jobs inside the reactor buildings. When their contract expires, they usually have to look for work in another power plant, wandering through the country like ‘gypsies’. Only half a year after 3/11, parts of Horie’s former report were republished, this time with Illustrations

Questioning the politics of popular culture   199 by manga artist Mizuki Shigeru 水木しげる, under the title ‘The Dark Side of the Fukushima Power Plant’ (Fukushima genpatsu no yami, 福島原発の闇), in it, was a chapter tellingly with the heading: ‘Protective Clothing that is Protective in Name Only’. 32 A point Tatsuta frequently posts tweets about on his Twitter account; see Tatsuta Kazuto, Online at: https://twitter.com/tatsutakazuto. Accessed 17 January 2019. 33 See Ichi efu, Vol. 3, 92. 34 Ichi efu, Vol. 2, 87–88 and 169–170. 35 See, for example, former prime minister Kan Naoto’s famous ‘cucumber-­appeal’ on television, which is still available on the Internet: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3HA6yPjfUZQ. Accessed 24 April 2018. See also Tetsu Kariya, Oishinbo ‘hanaji mondai’ ni kotaeru [Replying to the ‘nose bleeding problem’ in Oishinbo]. ([Tōkyō]: Yūgensha, 2015), 66–72. 36 Even today, Fukushima Prefecture still appeals for the unwavering support of society with the slogan: ‘I want to support by buying and eating products from Fukushima’ on its homepage; see www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/portal/list276-867.html. Accessed 15 April 2018. 37 The ‘nuclear power village’ is brilliantly described in Hiroshi Kainuma, ‘Fukushima’ ron [Debate on ‘Fukushima’] (Tōkyō: Seidosha, 2011). 38 For a detailed description and analysis of Oishinbo, see Stephan Köhn, ‘Gourmetcomics in Japan – Betrachtungen zum Begründer und Trendsetter Oishinbo (Der kleine Feinschmecker)’ [‘Gourmet Manga in Japan. Reflections on the Founder and Trendsetter Oishinbo’]. Japanstudien 12 (2000): 183–209. 39 Special issues of the ajimeguri-­series had been published on the prefectures of Ōita (1999), Miyazaki (2000), Ōsaka (2000), Yamanashi (2001), Toyama (2003), Kōchi (2003), Nagasaki (2007), Aomori (2007), Wakayama (2009) and Shimane (2012). 40 Oishinbo is a highly self-­referential manga. Many of the local food producers visited and interviewed in this issue had already been introduced in earlier episodes, focusing not on a region but on special ingredients, ways of preparation etc. By comparing these two depictions, the reader can get an idea of the full extent of the devastation. 41 Oishinbo, Vol. 108, 213–214. 42 Oishinbo, Vol. 110, 9. 43 This episode was published in Big Comic Spirits’ double issue 22/23, released on 28 April 2014. 44 A considerable number of videos with statements of Japanese politicians concerning the ‘nose bleeding problem’ are still available on the Internet. The probably most ‘impressive’ one is Prime Minister Abe’s comment during his visit to the Prefecture of Fukushima to do everything to ‘eradicate’ (fusshoku, 払拭) such rumours. See, for example, the short press release by Sankei News, ‘Abe shushō konkyo nai fūhyō ni kuni toshite zenryoku de taiō’, 2014. 45 Oishinbo, Vol. 111, 246. 46 For the symptoms, see the explanation in Hiroshima-­shi, Nagasaki-­shi Genbaku saigaishi (eds), Genbaku saigai [Atomic Bomb Disaster] (Iwanami gendai bunko gakujutsu) (Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten, 2005), 91–99; and for the literary depiction, see Yōko Ōta, ‘Shikabane no machi’ [‘City of Corpses’], in Nihon no genbaku bungaku, Vol. 2 (Tōkyō: Horupu shuppan, 1983), 21. 47 Kyōko Hayashi, Tanima/Futatabi Rui e [Valley/Rui, to You Again] (Kōdansha bungei bunko) (Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 2016), 227. 48 For a detailed description of the debate and the historical background, see Yoshiyuki Nagaoka, Manga wa naze kisei sareru no ka [Why Do Manga Become Regulated?] (Heibonsha shinsho) (Tōkyō: Heibonsha, 2010). 49 See Ryōsuke Nishida, Media to Jimintō [Media and the Liberal Democratic Party] (Kadokawa shinsho). (Tōkyō: Kadokawa shoten, 2015), 206–225. 50 For details, see Kariya, Oishinbo ‘hanaji mondai’ ni kotaeru, 248–266.

200   Stephan Köhn 51 See, for example, Yamaoka’s comment on the explanation of the medical effects of radiation exposure in Oishinbo, Big Comic Spirits, Vol. 22/33, 260; and Oishinbo, Vol. 111, 248. 52 Kei Sugimura’s depiction of the ‘nose bleeding problem’ is somewhat symptomatic of the general expectation towards manga as a political medium. Sugimura criticises Oishinbo for disseminating ‘false’ rumours which cause ‘damage to the reputation’ of the people in Fukushima, but does not even mention the fact that the prime minister himself publicly rails against the authors and publishers; see Kei Sugimura, Gurume manga gojūnen shi [50 Years of Gourmet Manga] (Seikaisha shinsho) (Tōkyō: Seikaisha, 2017), 202–208. 53 See, for example, Sugimura, Gurume manga gojūnen shi, Vol. 111, 187 and 248. 54 See Tomohiko Suzuki, Yakuza to genpatsu: Fukushima daiichi sennyūki [Yakuza and Nuclear Power Plant: Undercover Report from Fukushima Daiichi] (Tōkyō: Bungei shunjū, 2011), 138–190. 55 Karyn Nishimura Poupée, ‘The Simple Testimony of a Fighting Man: An Introduction to Ichi-­F ’, in Tatsuta Kazuto, Ichi efu: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, translated by Stephen Paul (New York: Kodansha, 2017), 4. 56 See, for example, the anonymous blog at: https://blog.goo.ne.jp/syokunin-­2008/e/ c85ee2663b0b746143e4e0908d5daa69. Access 17 January 2019. 57 Like most generic terms in Japanese literature, shinsaigo bungaku is a rather vague term lacking a precise definition. In general, all kinds of works picking up 3/11 and the aftermath as a central theme are subsumed under this label; see, for example, Genkaiken (eds), Higashi Nihon daishinsaigo bungaku ron [Debate on Post-­Great East Japan Disaster Literature] (Tōkyō: Nan’undō, 2017). Saeko Kimura recently presented a rather confusing definition by asserting that every literary piece of work published after 3/11 should be considered shinsaigo bungaku, regardless of its content; see Saeko Kimura, Sono go no shinsaigo bungaku ron [Debate on Post-­ Disaster Literature Afterwards] (Tōkyō: Seidosha, 2018). 58 See, for example, Saeko Kimura, Shinsaigo bungaku ron [Debate on Post-­Disaster Literature] (Tōkyō: Seidosha, 2013), which is rather a retelling than a critical debate of literary works written after 3/11.

References Genkaiken (eds). 2017. Higashi Nihon daishinsaigo bungaku ron [Debate on Post-­Great East Japan Disaster Literature]. Tōkyō: Nan’undō. Hagio, Moto. 2012. Nanohana [Rape Blossoms] (Flower Comics Special). Tōkyō: Shōgakukan. Hayashi, Kyōko. 2016. Tanima/Futatabi Rui e [Valley/Rui, to You Again] (Kōdansha bungei bunko). Tōkyō: Kōdansha. Hiroshima-­shi, Nagasaki-­shi Genbaku saigaishi (eds). 2005. Genbaku saigai [Atomic Bomb Disaster] (Iwanami gendai bunko gakujutsu). Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten. Honma, Ryū. 2016. Genpatsu puropaganda [Nuclear Power Plant Propaganda] (Iwanami shinsho). Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten. Horie, Kunio. 1979. Genpatsu jipushī [Nuclear Power Plant Gypsies]. Tōkyō: Gendai shokan. Horie, Kunio and Mizuki, Shigeru. 2011. Fukushima genpatsu no yami [The Dark Side of the Fukushima Power Plant]. Tōkyō: Asahi shinbun shuppan. Ikegami Masaki, 2016. ‘Higashi Nihon daishinsai kara 5nen: tokubetsu intabyû-­kikaku’ (東日本大震災から5年 特別インタビュー企画, Special Interview Planning: 5 Years Since the Tōhoku Calamity) in Hazard Lab, 8 March. Online at: www.hazardlab.jp/ know/topics/detail/1/2/12811.html. Accessed 17 January 2019.

Questioning the politics of popular culture   201 J-­Magazine, 2013. ‘Zasshi kakushu dito, dêta’. Online at: www.j-­magazine.or.jp/user/ printed/index/20/15. Accessed 17 January 2019. Kahoku Shimpo Publishing Co. 2016. ‘Genpatsu jiko Tomioka wa maken! Ōdan-maku de êru’ (＜原発事故＞富岡は負けん！横断幕でエール, Banner Shouts: Tomioka Does Not Given Up!). Online at: http://sp.kahoku.co.jp/graph/2016/05/05/01_2016050 5_63015/004.html. Accessed 17 January 2019. Kainuma, Hiroshi. 2011. ‘Fukushima’ ron [Debate on ‘Fukushima’]. Tōkyō: Seidosha. Kariya, Tetsu. 2015. Oishinbo ‘hanaji mondai’ ni kotaeru [Replying to the ‘Nose Bleeding Problem’ in Oishinbo]. [Tōkyō]: Yūgensha. Kariya, Tetsu and Hanasaki, Akira. 1983–2014. Oishinbo [The Foodie] (Big Comics), 111 vols. Tōkyō: Shōgakukan. Kimura, Saeko. 2013. Shinsaigo bungaku ron [Debate on Post-­Disaster Literature]. Tōkyō: Seidosha. Kimura, Saeko. 2018. Sono go no shinsaigo bungaku ron [Debate On Post-­Disaster Literature Afterwards]. Tōkyō: Seidosha. Kobayashi, Takayoshi. 2016. Genpatsu to genbaku no bungaku [Nuclear Power Plant Literature and Atomic Bomb Literature] (Shakai bungaku sōsho). Tōkyō: Seishidô. Köhn, Stephan. 2000. ‘Gourmetcomics in Japan – Betrachtungen zum Begründer und Trendsetter Oishinbo (Der kleine Feinschmecker)’ [‘Gourmet Manga in Japan. Reflections on the Founder and Trendsetter Oishinbo’]. Japanstudien 12: 183–209. Komori, Yōichi. 2014. Shisha no koe, seija no kotoba [Voices from the Dead, Words from the Living]. Tōkyō: Shin Nihon shuppan sha. Morning. 2013. ‘Dai 34 kai MANGA OPEN, saishū senkō no gijiroku wo kōkai shimasu!’ (第34回MANGA OPEN、最終選考の議事録を公開します！; The 34 Manga Open Release of the Final Selection Committee Minutes) Online at: http://morning.moae.jp/ news/468 and http://morning.moae.jp/news/170. Accessed 17 January 2019. Morning. 2013. ‘Dai 34 kai MANGA OPEN, 2ji senkō no gijiroku wo kōkai shimasu!’ (第34回MANGA OPEN、2 次選考の議事録を公開します！; The 34 Manga Open Second Release of the Final Selection Committee Minutes) Online at: http://morning. moae.jp/news/468 and http://morning.moae.jp/news/170. Accessed 17 January 2019. Nagaoka, Yoshiyuki. 2010. Manga wa naze kisei sareru no ka [Why Do Manga Become Regulated?] (Heibonsha shinsho). Tōkyō: Heibonsha. Nishida, Ryōsuke. 2015. Media to Jimintō [Media and the Liberal Democratic Party] (Kadokawa shinsho). Tōkyō: Kadokawa shoten. Nishimura Poupée, Karyn. 2017. ‘The Simple Testimony of a Fighting Man: An Introduction to Ichi-­F ’. In Tatsuta Kazuto, Ichi efu: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, trans. Stephen Paul. New York: Kodansha. Ōta, Yōko. 1983. ‘Shikabane no machi’ [‘City of Corpses’]. In Nihon no genbaku bungaku, Vol. 2. Tōkyō: Horupu shuppan, 12–117. Sakate Yōji. 2015. ‘Genshiryoku akarui mirai no enerugî­’ (原子力 明るい未来のエネル ギー; Nuclear Power: Energy for a Bright Future), 23 August. Online at: https://blog. goo.ne.jp/sakate2008/e/b055c0280f023771a909ff6594cbd1fd. Accessed 17 January 2019. Sankei News. 2014. ‘Abe shushō konkyo nai fūhyō ni kuni toshite zenryoku de taiō’, (安倍首相「根拠ない風評に国として全力で対応」; Prime Minister Abe’‚ Respond with Utmost Effort as a Country Against Baseless Rumours). Online at: www. sankei.com/affairs/news/140517/afr1405170009-n1.html. Accessed 17 January 2019. Sugimura, Kei. 2017. Gurume manga gojūnen shi [50 Years of Gourmet Manga] (Seikaisha shinsho). Tōkyō: Seikaisha.

202   Stephan Köhn Suzuki, Tomohiko. 2011. Yakuza to genpatsu. Fukushima daiichi sennyūki [Yakuza and Nuclear Power Plant: Undercover Report from Fukushima Daiichi]. Tōkyō: Bungei shunjū. Tatsuta, Kazuto. 2014–2015. Ichi efu: Fukushima daiichi genshiryoku hatsudensho rōdōki [Ichi efu: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power plant] (Mōningu KC), Vols 1–3. Tōkyō: Kōdansha. Tatsuta, Kazuto. 2017. Ichi efu: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, translated by Stephen Paul. New York: Kodansha. Yamamoto, Akihiro. 2012. Kaku enerugī gensetsu no sengoshi 1945–1960 [Post-­War History of Statements About Nuclear Energy 1945–1960]. Tōkyō: Jinbun shoin.

11 Database nationalism The disaggregation of nation, nationalism and symbol in pop culture Christopher Smith

Introduction Is nationalism on the rise in Japan? Certainly, the recent election of conservative politicians and governments who sometimes push nationalist agendas has convinced many observers—both within Japan and without—that it is. Long sought­after nationalist policy goals seem closer to being realized than at any other time in Japan’s post-­war history. As of this writing, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has implemented a reinterpretation of the constitution’s pacifist Article 9, and momentum is gathering for a formal revision of that article. However, these political changes are also strongly connected to external factors, such as North Korea’s persistent test-­launches of ballistic missiles in Japan’s direction. A much more important question is whether Japanese culture reflects a rise in nationalist sympathy and sentiment that would support nationalist ideologies and politics in the long term. An investigation of Japanese pop culture might reveal the presence of nationalist or anti-­nationalist sentiment in the popular sphere and provide a sense of the strength of nationalist sympathy in the cultural Zeitgeist. However, Japanese pop culture is far from straightforward in this respect. Certainly, pop culture employs a dizzying array of nationalist symbols (or symbols that have come to have nationalist connotations), but these symbols seem to be only rarely deployed in connection with a recognizably nationalist narrative. Can this confused hotchpotch of nationalist images in pop culture rehabilitate a national identity, or support specific nationalist policies? Following Azuma Hiroki’s database theory of postmodern consumption, this chapter argues that nationalist symbols and themes have become “database-­ ized,” that is, disaggregated into component parts, which then become elements in the pop-­cultural database of images. Pop-­culture texts can then pick freely from this database and mix elements in ways that are surprising and incongruous—and all the more interesting for it. The result is that apparently nationalist symbols and themes are deployed disconnected from their traditional narratives. Consequently, these texts can rehabilitate nationalist symbols by juxtaposing them with new discourses, or they can subvert those symbols by doing the same. As is not uncommon in postmodern culture, these pop-­cultural texts often paradoxically do both simultaneously.

204   Christopher Smith

Japanese nationalism(s) Ernest Gellner has written that “Nationalism is a political principle which maintains that similarity of culture is the basic social bond,” and that therefore shared culture is the most important condition for membership in the political group— that is, the nation.1 He writes, furthermore, that “nationalism is a phenomenon of Gesellschaft using the idiom of Gemeinschaft: a mobile anonymous society simulating a closed cosy community.”2 This national simulation of a gemeinschaft with a shared language and values creates some of the noted benefits of nationalism and nationhood, such as the ability to communicate anonymously in a context-­free fashion (essential for industrialized societies) and the encouragement of altruism and self-­sacrifice.3 By encouraging citizens to think of themselves as members of an intimate community rather than an anonymous society, the nation inculcates bonds of trust and kinship that cement society together and promote selflessness. Threats to this ideation of the nation as community, therefore, are often felt to threaten the fabric of society itself. The movement of identity away from the nation, whether to supra-­national identities (i.e., the rise of internationalist and cosmopolitan identities) or sub-­national identities (i.e., the noted postmodern fragmentation of identity into smaller and smaller sub-­national units, or even to the level of the atomic individual), is one such threat. And, of course, the national simulation of gemeinschaft becomes caught up in specific ideologies: in pre-­war Japan those included reverence of the emperor as father to the nation (kokka 国家, literally “national family”) and the positing of the imperial soldier or sailor as a masculine ideal. Maruyama Masao has called this the ideology of “ultra-­nationalism” that the state promulgated to overcome a deficiency in grass-­ roots “national consciousness” that could have supported liberal democracy.4 However, while these ideologies may have been disseminated top–down by state power, they nevertheless became widely accepted and deeply important to individual and social identity. In the post-­war era, these ideologies were denounced and lost their currency, which some nationalists saw as another threat to the social fabric that glued the national community together. Nationalism as a movement, then, in the contemporary sense, seeks to remediate those threats and recuperate a shared national identity based on a language and culture that members of the national polity all have in common. For the purposes of examining nationalism in pop culture, I will use Kosaku Yoshino’s quite reasonable definition of cultural nationalism: Cultural nationalism aims to regenerate the national community by creating, preserving or strengthening a people’s cultural identity when it is felt to be lacking, inadequate, or threatened. The cultural nationalist regards the nation as the product of its unique history and culture and as a collective solidarity endowed with unique attributes. In short, cultural nationalism is concerned with the distinctiveness of the cultural community as the essence of a nation.5

Database nationalism   205 Nationalist cultural texts, for the purposes of present study, are those texts that aim to regenerate the national community, restore Japanese cultural identity, or justify the distinctiveness of the national essence. Kevin Doak, however, warns us that the source of national identity is not straightforward, and is signified using a variety of distinct words that have been conflated as “nationalism” in translation. He writes that:  anyone who speaks or writes on nationalism in Japanese must come to some understanding as to what [the] different ways of articulating nationalism in Japanese signify, and then sometimes make a choice between these alternative ways of articulating “nation” or “nationalism.”6  While nationalisms might all seek to “regenerate the national community” in Yoshino’s words, they define the nation very differently. Minzokushugi (民族主義), for example, might be translated as “ethnic nationalism” and constructs the nation as the minzoku: the volk or the Japanese ethnic group. Meanwhile kokuminshugi (国民主義) does not have a good distinctive English translation but defines the nation as composed of kokumin, legal citizens. Kokkashugi (国家主義) takes as its target the “state,” the organ that both governs and is composed of a certain territory and set of people. All of these have been translated into English as “nationalism,” despite the very different entities at which their nationalist sentiment is directed.7 Of course, it can be hard to tease out the target of nationalist sentiment in cultural texts, especially fictions where, for example, all characters are both Japanese minzoku and kokumin. However, we can state with some confidence that nationalist texts, given the definition above, should at a minimum seek to regenerate some national community or identity, whether that is Japanese ethnic identity, the community of Japanese citizens, the state community of Japan, or something else. Cultural texts classically understood to be “nationalist” neatly fit into this definition of nationalism, but many recent pop-­cultural texts which employ nationalist symbols do not. In the realm of literature, the most conspicuous nationalist texts are those written by Mishima Yukio. Mishima famously committed ritual suicide in 1970, after taking over the office of a Japanese Self-­Defense Force (SDF ) commander and haranguing SDF officers gathered at the scene on the need to turn the SDF into a true “military” in order to restore the pre-­war and wartime Japanese state, and the Japanese identity that state guaranteed. In his final manifesto, he declared that “The foundational principle of a Japanese military can only be protecting Japanese history, culture, and tradition centered on the emperor.”8 Mishima sought to revitalize the pre-­war/wartime “emperor system” (tennōsei, 天皇制), in which the divine emperor, from a line unbroken since antiquity, served as the source of meaning, identity, and legitimation for every individual and every aspect of the nation, society, and culture. The post-­war nationalism Mishima became a symbol of is most famously articulated in his 1966 novella Yūkoku (Patriotism), about the ritual suicide of an Imperial Japanese Army officer and his wife during the attempted coup of February 26, 1936 (the so-­called 2–2–6

206   Christopher Smith Incident). In explaining the moral character of the couple—which allowed them to commit suicide so bravely—Yūkoku invokes, valorizes, and inscribes wartime Japan’s grand narratives. The text explicitly describes the couple’s devotion to the emperor:  On the god shelf below the stairway, alongside the tablet from the Great Ise Shrine, were set photographs of their Imperial Majesties, and regularly every morning, before leaving for duty, the lieutenant would stand with his wife at this hallowed place and together they would bow their heads low.9  There is no mistake that this valorized, beautified couple is devoted to the divine emperor. More interesting, however, is the description of the couple’s worldview. For example, Reiko, the officer’s wife, “gazed up into the distance at the great sunlike principle which her husband embodied. She was ready, and happy, to be hurtled along to her destruction in that gleaming sun chariot.”10 The sun imagery used here is, of course, an oblique reference to the emperor, whose putative descent directly from the sun goddess Amaterasu supplied the legitimacy for his rule, and subsequently for the entire civilian and military governing structure. The “sunlike principle” Reiko’s husband embodies, therefore, is exactly the tennōsei grand narrative. His service in the Imperial Japanese Army, at the emperor’s command, affords him a firm place in a world ordered by the emperor and imperial divinity, as does Reiko’s status as his wife. Yūkoku is also known for its graphic descriptions of sex, but it carefully places even such lurid scenes within the framework of the tennōsei: The lieutenant was confident there had been no impurity in the joy they had experienced when resolving upon death. They had both sensed at that moment—though not, of course, in any clear and conscious way—that those permissible pleasures which they had shared in private were once more beneath the protection of Righteousness and Divine Power, and of a complete and unassailable morality … they had felt themselves safe once more behind steel walls which none could destroy, encased in impenetrable armor of Beauty and Truth. Thus, so far from seeing any inconsistency or conflict between the urges of the flesh and the sincerity of his patriotism, the lieutenant was even able to regard the two as parts of the same thing.11 Having resolved to die, a moral act required of them by their tennōsei-ordered worldview, their places in the moral world organized around the emperor are secure, and their pleasures are once more permitted by the emperor’s divine power. The lieutenant’s observation that patriotism and lust are two parts of the same thing is key: the tennōsei orders and legitimates all aspects of life: public and private; marriage and death; and production, destruction, and reproduction. Yūkoku, written in 1966, therefore expresses longing for the totalizing Japanese identity provided by the Japanese state—and ultimately the emperor—during the pre-­war and wartime years, especially that of the gunjin 軍人, or military man. It

Database nationalism   207 is clearly an attempt to restore the wartime Japanese identity, community, and state. There is little doubt that it fits Yoshino’s definition of cultural nationalism above. More recently, Kobayashi Yoshinori’s infamous Sensōron (On War), has been called emblematic of a new type of nationalism, sometimes called neo-­ nationalism.12 Japanese neo-­nationalism controversially attempts to revise the historical record of World War Two, denying several war crimes or morally decrepit acts committed by the Japanese military. Chief among these are the Nanking Massacre of 1937–1938 and the servitude of “comfort women” forced to serve the Imperial Japanese Army in brothels during the war. Sensōron contributes to both of these discourses. Kobayashi is famously iconoclastic and vituperative; his signature work is the long-­running Gōmanizumu (arrogance-­ism) manga serialization (of which Sensōron was a special edition), where he turns “arrogance”—by which he means a refusal to bow to conventional social pieties—into a virtue, and where he has tackled all sorts of social issues and institutions, from discrimination against burakumin to pharmaceutical companies to Aum Shinrikyō, and even the Imperial Household Agency. It is hard to imagine an iconoclast like Kobayashi longing for a sanctified emperor or consecrated tennōsei, or admiring the seriousness of the imperial soldier in the manner of Mishima. Indeed, in the process of denying both the Nanking Massacre13 and the forced abduction of comfort women,14 Sensōron barely mentions the emperor or signals any yearning for a Japanese identity guaranteed by the emperor. Nonetheless, it does attest a desire to regenerate the national community. Throughout the text, Kobayashi sets up a dualism between the ko (個), the individual, and the kō (公), the public, society, or the state. He argues that “American brainwashing”15 led Japanese to believe that the ko was suppressed during the war. As a consequence, post-­war Japanese have turned their backs on the kō and embraced individualism, but he calls this individualism mere egotism. It is this overabundance of attention to the ko and dearth of deference to the kō that is responsible for nearly all the ills of contemporary Japanese society—everything from corrupt politicians, ill manners, and lack of political engagement, to the rise of cults, teenage prostitution, the rise in the divorce rate, and mass stabbings, among other things.16 Kobayashi desires a rehabilitation of the Japanese kō that he believes ordered and bound together Japanese society during the pre-­war and wartime years. Since that kō has been discredited by the terrible war crimes it led Japanese to commit, those crimes must be erased from (or at least ameliorated in) the historical record. In a few places, Kobayashi gives concrete examples of the kō. Kamikaze pilots, for example, “had something to protect, even at the cost of their own lives … their country, their homes, their families, and their emperor.”17 Today, however, “people who advocate the restoration of ‘family,’ the restoration of ‘community,’ the restoration of ‘the nation’ are dismissed as hopelessly romantic old men.”18 It is clear, therefore, that the kō is precisely the collection of grand narratives that were active and healthy during the wartime years—nation,

208   Christopher Smith emperor, family, and social solidarity: in a word, national community. Kobayashi argues that individuals (ko) separated from the kō are not people at all, but only animals,19 echoing Kojève’s animalized Man at the end of History who has ceased to struggle against history and strive for change, but merely enjoys existence.20 For Kobayashi, this animalization must be reversed through the restoration of the national community provided by the wartime and pre-­war state, even if he does not seem to hold any particular reverence for the emperor that was the lynchpin of that national community. In fact, Kobayashi identifies his desire for, specifically, a narrative (monogatari, 物語): “people should be able to live and die according to a narrative, and through it feel their lives have been fulfilled.”21 He compares the way contemporary Japan holds the SDF at arm’s length and dispatches it with tepid enthusiasm, despite the fact that its members are risking their lives, to the way that Imperial military personnel were treated as heroes: “Wasn’t it better in the past?” he writes, “For those people of long ago, the nation had a narrative prepared for those who risked death for their country.”22 In order to fulfill his express desire for narrative, Kobayashi attempts to remove those historical blemishes that have discredited Japan’s old grand narratives in order to revive them. Therefore, while Kobayashi’s neo-­nationalism is very different in style from Mishima’s “old-­school” nationalism, in terms of substance, they both clearly aim to regenerate a national community. Both, therefore, fit into the conventional “nationalist” framework described above by Yoshino’s definition of cultural nationalism. The same cannot be said, however, for many works of recent Japanese pop culture. These works deploy symbols or themes associated with Japanese nationalism, such as the Imperial Japanese military, imperial symbols, the Self-­Defense Force, gunjin, World War Two, etc., and since these works seem to use these nationalist symbols sympathetically or positively, it is tempting to call these works nationalist. However, in most cases it is difficult to see how these symbols connect to a narrative of regeneration of a national community. What are we to make, for example, of the immensely popular online game Kantai korekushon (Fleet Collection), in which players gather and wage battles with the ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy? The full panoply of wartime symbols is employed: the silhouettes of famous ships, the imperial chrysanthemum seal, etc. However, the ships are personified as sexualized schoolgirls, and those wartime symbols are a part of their apparel: the silhouettes of Japan’s long-­lost legendary naval ships become hairpieces or accessories, the chrysanthemum seal is worn as a neckpiece, etc. (Figure 11.1). Does this confused mishmash of ships and sexuality, wartime pride and post-­war pop, aim for a regeneration of national community or identity?

Database nationalism To answer this question, I turn to Azuma Hiroki’s database theory of postmodernism. Azuma takes Jean-­François Lyotard’s famous assertion that in postmodernity the grand narratives of modernity have collapsed, but observes that

Database nationalism   209

Figure 11.1 Yamato from Kantai korekushon. Source: © Kadokawa Games‎ and DMM.

these narratives organized culture during modernity, forming an “inner layer” within cultural texts. Now that the totalizing narratives of modernity have collapsed, Azuma proposes they have been replaced by a “grand nonnarrative.”23 That is, he theorizes a structure which exists underneath individual texts and organizes culture, but which can never have the narrative function of a modern meta-­narrative or grand narrative. It can never be, as Axel Honneth writes of grand narratives, “a philosophy of history which construes the history of the species as a process of emancipation.”24 In other words, it can never be a narrative of future national greatness, class emancipation, etc., which legitimates the exercise of power in the present. This non-­narrative structure is a “database” of “moe elements” (moe yōso, 萌 え要素). The word moe has come to be associated (especially in the West) with

210   Christopher Smith the sexualization of young girl characters in manga and anime. However, Azuma here is using an earlier meaning, namely, a “strong, passionate emotional response.” Therefore, I will translate moe yōso as “affective elements,” things which evoke strong emotional responses. As implied by the use of “affect” (although Azuma never uses the term), these elements are cultural symbols or images which transmit intensities devoid of linguistic signification, much in the manner of music.25 As Brian Massumi famously writes, in our postmodern age, “belief [in master narratives] has waned for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it.”26 Azuma’s theory suggests that this surfeit of affect has become the organizing structure behind popular culture; that this database of moe (affective) elements has replaced modernity’s grand narratives in the inner layer of culture (although, again, it cannot signify, and therefore cannot become another narrative). The database is filled and modified as readers (or consumers) indicate which elements are most potently affective. These might be visual elements such as “cat ears” or “blue hair,” character traits such as “quiet, mysterious girl,” or narrative elements such as “destined lovers.” Individual texts then freely pick from this database and combine these affective elements (e.g., a story about a quiet, mysterious girl with cat ears and blue hair who has a destined lover) in order to maximize the affective intensity of the text and the emotional engagement of readers. As texts are produced, consumers identify new affective elements, which are then added to the database. These elements are incorporated into new works that appear on the Internet or in amateur comics, and eventually major publishers and studios pick up on the new elements and incorporate them into commercial works, and the cycle begins again. Most crucially, there is no modern grand narrative controlling the meaning of individual texts. The expression (or signification) of the text is revealed by each reader’s affective response to the composite database elements at each moment of “reading up.”27 Azuma’s theory generally agrees with other theories of the structure of postmodern culture. Lyotard, for example, proposes that in the absence of grand narratives culture becomes organized into “many different language games—a heterogeneity of elements,” which “only give rise to institutions in patches, local determinism,” and “each of us lives at the intersection of many of these.”28 Rather than organized around a central top–down narrative, postmodern culture is fractured into many different playful “language games,” which individuals both produce and consume, and we all participate in several of these multi-­nodal games. Similarly, Fredric Jameson notes that postmodern culture revels in “comic-­book juxtaposition,” where: … conditions of possibility lie very precisely in our sense that each of the elements involved, and thus incongruously combined, belong to radically distinct and different registers … our preconscious minds refuse to make or acknowledge the link, as those these [sic] cards came from different files … [but] it is very precisely their interesting dissonance and the garish magic realism of their unexpected juxtaposition which is the bonus of pleasure to be consumed.29

Database nationalism   211 Azuma’s innovation is the imposition of a structure on the propagation of simulacra in culture. Rather than a random and chaotic proliferation of language games and simulacra using symbols haphazardly, the database imposes a semblance of order on cultural production, since there has to be some consensus that the various database elements are actually emotionally evocative and can be validly recombined into new narratives. Azuma’s examples of database elements are mainly character design features. However, the example of Kantai korekushon mentioned above provides a hint that the database may include other kinds of elements as well. I propose that the nation itself, its narratives and symbols, have been denatured, secularized, and transformed into affective elements in the database. Or, to state it more clearly, the nation has been made into merely another database element, equal in weight to other elements such as cat ears or blue hair. Symbols of the nation have been stripped of signification and retained only for affect: they are transmitters of intensities rather than meaning. This is readily apparent in Kantai korekushon, a fine example of database construction of a narrative, as the ship girls obviously combine many different database elements. The character Yamato, for example, is built from several common affective elements, such as “school uniform,” “short skirt,” and “asymmetrical socks,” and some less common elements such as “long ponytail tied high on the head,” which, having been attested previously in such characters as Kanzaki Kaori in Toaru majutsu no indekkusu (A Certain Magical Index, 2007), encode her as (and evoke an affective response to) a “graceful, courageous woman.” In addition to these, however, Yamato is also built from database elements that were formerly important national symbols: the imperial chrysanthemum seal, the radar mast of the eponymous pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during World War Two, the battleship Yamato (the largest ever built, bearing the name of the ancient province where the imperial court originated, a powerful symbol of the nation), and the guns of the Yamato (the largest naval guns ever, another source of national pride), all worn as accessories. Here it is apparent that various elements—each with its own intertextual allusions—have been thrown together in a mishmash that is entirely incongruous (at least on the level of signification), and all the more delightful for that incongruity. “Yamato’s radar mast” and “chrysanthemum seal” are incompatible with “short skirt,” of course, but that is exactly the sort of playful absurdity postmodern pastiche revels in. The important point is that these are all merely affective elements from Azuma’s cultural database, which this individual text has thrown together haphazardly (or seemingly so) to appropriate the affect they can transmit. Elements such as “Yamato’s radar mast” and “chrysanthemum seal” might evoke intensities tied to feelings of “national pride,” or at least “enthusiasm for military technology.” These symbols are deployed right next to other database elements like “short skirt,” which might evoke sexual attraction, and “long ponytail tied high on the head,” which might evoke “admiration for (and attraction to) graceful, courageous women.” All of these elements have equal weight; the symbols that used to be important fixtures in the national grand

212   Christopher Smith n­ arrative have been stripped out from that narrative, entered into the cultural database, and then retrieved from the database by this text as independent affective symbols, no more or less important than “short skirt.” Notably, the fact that “radar mast” evokes a feeling of “national pride” might have originated from a connection to a grand narrative of national greatness, but now that emotion is intertextually locked with that symbol and it is being deployed only for the affect it transmits, severed from the narrative that engendered that intensity. There is no narrative that can link the national pride surrounding the real IJN Yamato, as an engineering and military feat specifically connected to building a 65,000-ton battleship, to the radar mast Kantai korekushon’s Yamato wears as a hairpiece. I argue that this is the manner in which many recent works of pop culture deploy national symbols and themes. To return to the original question; can this playful use of database-­ized national symbols for their affective properties regenerate the national community or strengthen national identity, the basic definition of “cultural nationalism” proposed by Yoshino above? To examine this question, we must here acknowledge that although these texts use national symbols as mere database elements for their affective rather than their signifying properties, those symbols do still signify. Texts are still manipulating these symbols—severed from their national narratives though they might be—juxtaposing them with other symbols in surprising ways, and therefore manipulating their signification. Can this manipulation of signification contribute to regenerating the national community, or at least promote nationalist political goals? It seems wholly incompatible with the sort of restoration of the grand narratives of wartime Japan that Mishima advocated; the restoration of the emperor system and the masculine ideal of the gunjin. On the contrary, in Kantai korekushon and other works examined below, masculine military symbols have become feminized and sexualized. Furthermore, the playful hotchpotch of symbols these narratives use is too obviously absurd to regenerate a solemn national narrative that provides life meaning, or a serious commitment to the public sphere, the kō, as Kobayashi desires. And since these texts explicitly deracinate national symbols from the narrative of national history, it seems unlikely they can rehabilitate that specific narrative, as Abe Shinzō’s attempts to revise education about World War Two and the Tokyo War Crimes Trial seek to do.30 This database use of national symbols, then, cannot itself be called “nationalist” in the conventional sense denoting certain political goals. However, it is clear that such texts, with their manipulation of national symbols, might have a profound effect on symbols themselves. By deploying national symbols in ingenious (and irreverent) new combinations, these texts transgress their sanctity, true, but in the process they also create new associations with them. It is, therefore, quite possible that database pop texts might rehabilitate national symbols by overwriting their connection to Japan’s dark history of fascism and imperialism; there is now a whole generation whose primary exposure to the Imperial Japanese Navy’s fighting ships will be their representation as cute or sexualized schoolgirls. While these texts themselves cannot reconstruct a national community

Database nationalism   213 or narrative, it is possible that some other agent (such as an enterprising politician or educational reformer) might then use these symbols, defused of their associations with dangerous militarism, to restore pride in the pre-­war nation and reconstruct a national community or national identity. However, it is equally likely that the opposite is true, that these database texts playfully denature former national symbols, associating them so firmly with other absurd contexts that they become thoroughly deracinated and cannot be used for the solemn projects of national identity again. If “Yamato” becomes mainly associated with sexualized schoolgirls in overly snug uniforms with ridiculous hairpieces, the use of “Yamato” to rehabilitate Japanese history or a sanctified national community by some other agent would be laughable. Crucially, pop-­culture texts might be doing both things simultaneously. Of course, this is entirely characteristic of postmodern literature, which, as Linda Hutcheon writes, “ultimately manages to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge.”31 This textual retrieval and deployment of national symbols from the database, their deployment as mere affective database elements, and the juxtaposition of these symbols with other database elements that may change their intertextual connections I call “database nationalism.” Unlike cultural nationalism, database nationalism does not seek to regenerate the national community or strengthen national identity, but in its irreverent play with national symbols has the potential to manipulate those symbols in a variety of ways, which may either (or simultaneously) deconstruct or rehabilitate them. I will examine two more representative pop-­culture texts that conspicuously use Japanese national symbols and themes in terms of this database nationalism.

The Otaku self-­defense forces: database nationalism in Gēto The novel, manga, and anime Gēto jietai kanochi nite, kaku tatakaeri (Gate: This is How the Self-­Defense Forces Fought in a Distant Land) is a superb hotchpotch of nationalist and subcultural images. Originally an Internet novel by Yanai Takumi (a former member of the Ground Self-­Defense Force), it was made into a manga and a popular anime directed by Kyōgoku Takahiko. The basic premise of the work is that an interdimensional gate opens suddenly one day in Ginza. A premodern army, reminiscent of ancient Rome except for its dragon-­mounted flying cavalry, pours through the gate, attacks the unsuspecting shoppers there, and invades downtown Tokyo. After a period of initial confusion, the Self-­Defense Forces arrive and easily eliminate the invaders with their modern weapons. Subsequently, the SDF itself goes through the gate to the world on the other side, establishes a base there, and defends the gate against attack while surveying the local political situation. The anime is unwaveringly positive in its portrayal of the Ground Self-­ Defense Force (GSDF ), and generally portrays military action as positive and exciting. For that reason, it might well be considered a nationalist work. In fact, the GSDF itself was so convinced it would impart positive impressions of

214   Christopher Smith Japan’s armed forces it created a recruiting poster with characters from the anime (Figure 11.2). However, it quickly becomes clear that this work deploys the SDF as just another affective element taken from the cultural database, and does so alongside many other recognizable subcultural database elements. Any connection to narratives of the nation, national community, or national identity is dubious at best. The narrative follows protagonist Itami Yōji, a first lieutenant in the GSDF, who happens to be in Ginza when the gate opens, receives a commendation for helping to evacuate civilians, then participates in the expedition to the other world. However, Itami is far distant from the pre-­war/wartime gunjin, or the Japanese masculinity that nationalists hope survives in the SDF. Mishima, for example, in his final exhortation to SDF officers before his suicide, called on the SDF to revive the “soul of the bushi” (warrior, samurai) he believed still remained in the organization.32 Itami, in contrast, is a self-­declared otaku (nerd), who happens to be in Ginza when the gate opens only because he is on his way to buy amateur comics (dōjinshi, 同人誌). Far from a sincere SDF officer devoted to service to the nation of Japan, or to the restoration of Kobayashi’s kō, he declares he “works to live for [his] hobbies.”33 Those hobbies are, of course, the obsessive interest in manga, anime, and pornographic amateur comics characteristic of otaku that society deems unhealthy and a symptom of undersocialization. The database elements “otaku” and “SDF officer” have been extracted from the database and juxtaposed for effect, all the more interesting because they are so unexpected. Furthermore, as Itami reconnoiters the world beyond the gate, it becomes clear that it is a delightfully absurd mishmash of database elements. It is populated by cat people, rabbit people, elves, sorcerers, and female knights; all subcultural affective elements extracted in this text and juxtaposed with the SDF, which—it is apparent—has become just another such element. Itami eventually befriends several individuals from the other world who are also immediately recognizable as database character types: the taciturn girl with short, blue hair, for example.34 Itami and his otaku subordinate even diegetically name the database elements the characters they encounter are molded around, such as “blond elf ”35 and “gothic-­lolita girl,”36 a playful metatextual acknowledgement of the database work the text is performing. Here we see the same pastiche of subcultural and national symbols apparent in Kantai korekushon. The SDF, its personnel, olive-­drab tanks, machine-­guns, attack helicopters, and jets—the object of so much invidious debate about the appropriateness and the role of a military and military violence in post-­war Japan—are separated from that narrative, reduced to affective database elements, and deployed in the text with equal weight to other affective elements such as the overtly sexualized blond elf and gothic-­lolita girl. The text is hardly political, with the exception of a single scene featuring the spectacle of a demigod taking a Diet member to task for her antagonism toward the SDF.37 Rather, the SDF is an element that evokes intensities such as “enthusiasm for military hardware,” “awe of military destructive force,” and occasionally “admiration of loyalty to comrades-­in-arms.” The text evokes these feelings right alongside passion for

Database nationalism   215

Figure 11.2 GSDF Recruiting Poster featuring characters from Gēto. Source: © AlphaPolis Co.

216   Christopher Smith fantasy elements such as magic, premodern civilization, and demigods, and sexual passion for voluptuous elves and sexually aggressive lolita girls. These things are all incongruous, of course, but it is precisely the juxtaposition of cards from radically different “registers,” in Jameson’s terms, that supplies the pleasure and fun of this postmodern text. The text transforms the SDF into just one more object of consumption, just another database element in a buffet the consumer can choose from for the pleasure of consumption, of no greater import than blond elves or gothic-­lolita demigods. Gēto, therefore, is a fine example of “database nationalism.” Unlike a classical nationalist text, it is hard to see how this text could restore a national community or strengthen Japanese identity since the SDF is severed from national narratives and reduced to subcultural kitsch. Nevertheless, the text certainly juxtaposes national symbols for their affective properties, and so inevitably manipulates their signification in multivalent ways. On the one hand, the juxtaposition of the SDF with ridiculous subcultural images profanes the SDF. It is torn down from its place as the lynchpin of Japan’s security, as an institution with a proud history of national service, or as the repository of military masculinity the right wing imagines it to be. Instead, it is associated—absurdly, fictionally, on an overtly textual level, but nevertheless associated—with sexualized images and symbols of unhealthy subculture. On the other hand, precisely because the text turns the SDF into just another database element, it divorces it from its history and politics, including the less savory connections to Japan’s military history. Instead, it associates it with images that are fun and exciting: magic, elves, etc. Therefore, in a paradox typical of postmodern culture, Gēto may rehabilitate the SDF even as it denatures and relativizes it. Consequently, it is possible to read Gēto as a text that advances political goals that have generally been considered nationalist, such as Article 9 revision or an expanded role for the SDF in international peacekeeping missions. If the SDF comes to be associated not with the shadow of wartime militarism and fascism, but rather with attractive women, whimsical fantasy, and harmless subcultural tropes, there may be far less fear that revising Article 9 could lead to a dangerous slide into militarism. However, this rehabilitation (such as it is) happens precisely because the SDF is juxtaposed and manipulated as a database element, just another entry in the “grand non-­narrative.” Gēto, therefore, cannot restore the grand narratives of Japan, no matter how sympathetic its portrayal of the SDF. As a work of database nationalism, it does not participate in the cultural nationalist project to restore a national community or strengthen national identity.

Magical girls at war: database national symbols in Sutoraiku witchīzu This jumbling of the national and subcultural is certainly not limited to symbols that are historically contemporaneous with each other. The various incarnations of Takamura Hirokazu’s “media mix” narrative Sutoraiku witchīzu (Strike

Database nationalism   217 witches) deploy a mishmash of database elements from modern subculture and World War Two. It is set in the mid-­1940s, in an alternate history where mysterious aliens attack Europe in 1939. The aliens can only be defeated by magical girls (witches), who sprout animal ears and tails when using their powers, and who inexplicably never wear pants or skirts. Most significantly, those same magical girls fight the aliens by wearing “striker units” on their legs which closely resemble various World War Two fighter aircraft, giving the visual impression that they have stuck their legs into small airplanes lengthwise, from nose to tail with the propellers moved down to the tail, around their ankles (Figure 11.3). This setting is patently ridiculous, but nonetheless—or perhaps precisely because of it—the series has enjoyed strong popularity, with three television anime series, a movie, and various other media adaptations produced. In this

Figure 11.3 The witches with their “striker units.” Source: © Kadokawa.

218   Christopher Smith text, the difficult problems of history are completely elided. Certainly, the war with America never happened, but history before 1939 is simply not mentioned. It is not clear if Japan still embarked on its colonial adventure on the Asian mainland or committed the various atrocities in China that historically happened before 1939. Significantly, in the text, the name for the nation of Japan has been changed to Fusō (扶桑), an old Chinese term that referred to the Japanese islands. Therefore, the text completely avoids indicating whether or not the nation is the expansionist Dai Nippon Teikoku (大日本帝国), or Great Japanese Empire, of our own history. Nonetheless, Fusō is unmistakably the Japan of the 1940s, even if its frontiers or politics are unclear: Fusō includes Sasebo, Hiroshima, and other Japanese locations, Fusō cooking is Japanese cooking, and the Fusō navy includes Japan’s historical fighting ships. In this parallel world unburdened by the difficult questions of history, Sutoraiku witchīzu juxtaposes subcultural and national images in ways that are reflexively absurd, but whose absurdity only increases the pleasure of consumption. The “striker units” are diegetically named after the World War Two aircraft they resemble, such as reisen (零戦, Zero) and shidenkai (紫電改, Violet Lightning).38 These are powerful symbols of national pride and military power, but it is clear that they are merely affective elements in this text, stripped out from their native narratives and deployed for the intensities they transmit to readers, alongside other affective elements like “magical girls” and “animal girls.” World War Two Japanese naval uniforms are worn by pantless witches, creating a ludicrous pastiche of the masculine national symbol “IJN naval uniform” and “panties.” Historical naval ships such as the Akagi39 and the Yamato40 make an appearance, but the aircraft carrier Akagi, at least, is used to launch magical girls as well as historical aircraft. Since the witches are capable of hovering and VTOL (Vertical Take-­Off and Landing) in every other context, it seems their use of the carrier flight deck in the manner of a contemporary fighter craft is rather clearly intended to associate the Akagi with magical animal girls and include it in Sutoraiku witchīzu’s hallucinogenic bricolage of symbols. Much like Gēto, Sutoraiku witchīzu presents an ambivalent reorganization of symbols on the signifying level, as opposed to the affective level. Symbols of national pride frequently featured in nationalist discourses, such as the Zero fighter, which was the most capable and technologically advanced aircraft at the beginning of the Pacific War and the pride of Japanese engineering, as well as the Imperial Japanese Navy’s ships and uniforms, are radically denied any sanctified status. The Zero fighter becomes an absurd piece of female, feminine clothing, sexualized because its nose goes up to the witches’ pantless mid-­thigh. The uniform of the gunjin, so fetishized by Mishima and other early nationalists, now becomes fetishized in a different way as it is worn without trousers, panties showing plainly, by magical girls who also sprout animal tails from underneath the uniform jacket. The proud aircraft carriers of the IJN fleet primarily launch cute or buxom magical girls. The text sexualizes, subculture-­izes, and otaku-­izes these nationalist symbols, and with that new intertextual association their earnest

Database nationalism   219 use—as symbols of national pride that could unite and regenerate the national community—seems farfetched. On the other hand, at the same time these symbols are disassociated from their troubling history and associated instead with harmless or attractive subcultural images. They are effectively defused; the Zero fighter sheds its associations with, for example, the attack on Pearl Harbor that began Japan’s disastrous war with America, or the thousands of kamikaze pilots who flew the aircraft in hopeless suicide missions. Instead, this text associates it with attractive females, magic, and animal ears. Although, of course, Sutoraiku witchīzu is set in a fictional timeline and does not try to revise the history of World War Two, its clever juxtaposition of World War Two symbols with subcultural symbols alters their intertextual, discursive associations. It is not hard to imagine that viewers of this text, although they might be fully aware of the narrative history of the war, may begin to feel that World War Two was not such a monstrous calamity—since its symbols are now associated with the feminine and rendered harmless for pleasurable subcultural consumption—and that consequently Article 9 revision (to name just one prominent contemporary issue) is not such a big deal after all. In either case, database nationalist texts carnivalize the national symbols they play with, removing their solemnity as nationalist symbols, but also their solemnity as past tragedy and dire warning about the future. Although, again, these texts cannot regenerate the national community and are therefore not nationalist in the classical sense, they may open up symbols to new meanings, some of them amendable to nationalist agendas.

Conclusion As this chapter has demonstrated, recent pop-­culture texts that feature symbols and themes usually considered to be nationalist, such as the SDF, World War Two, the Japanese military, military hardware, and many others, are not easily susceptible to analysis as “nationalist” texts in the traditional sense. They do not support a “regenerat[ion of] the national community by creating, preserving or strengthening a people’s cultural identity,” the working definition of nationalism given above. Nor do they seek to restore the grand narratives of Japan, as both old-­school nationalists and neo-­nationalists desire in their different ways. These texts are instead examples of database nationalism. This sort of nationalism (if it can be called such) is based on the recognition that important national(ist) symbols, themes, and narratives have become mere elements in Azuma’s postmodern database of affective cultural elements. They have been disconnected from their original grand narratives of national greatness and pride, reduced to mere affect that can be pleasurably consumed, of no greater import than any other affective element in the database. Database nationalist texts extract these national symbols from the database as denatured, self-­contained affective elements and combine them with other such subcultural elements in ingenious, unlikely combinations that increase consumption pleasure. This, needless to say, is a radical appropriation and delegitimation of foundational national symbols

220   Christopher Smith and narratives, distinctly anti-­nationalist in the traditional sense. However, since these symbols do still signify, this affective play translates to semiotic play, and on that level the mechanics of this play with symbols is more ambiguous. Since they associate powerful national symbols with subcultural elements, they carnivalize those symbols, but in that process they can also de-­solemnize them as a dire warning about the violence and abuses of power those symbols (or the narratives they were attached to) legitimated. As I have shown here, characteristic of postmodern literature, these database nationalist texts may do both simultaneously.

Notes   1 Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), 3–4.   2 Ibid., 74.   3 Frank Buckley and Francesco Parisi, “Political and Cultural Nationalism,” in Charles K. Rowley and Friedrich Schneider (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Public Choice, Vol. 2 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), 410.   4 Masao Maruyama, “Nationalism in Japan: Its Theoretical Background and Prospects,” in Ivan Morris (Ed.), Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, translated by David Titus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 143–146.   5 Kosaku Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan : A Sociological Enquiry (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1. There is a distinction here between cultural nationalism and political nationalism. Political nationalists, in Yoshino’s words, “seek to achieve a representative state for their community and to secure citizenship rights for its members, thereby giving their collective experience a political reality”; Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan, 1. This variety of nationalism is not germane to the present discussion as the Japanese state is already formed.   6 Kevin Michael Doak, A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People, Handbook of Oriental Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 2.   7 Ibid., 2–4.   8 Yukio Mishima, “Mishima Yukio no ‘geki’ zenbun,” Asahi Shinbun, November 26, 1970.   9 Yukio Mishima, Patriotism, translated by Geoffrey W. Sargent (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1995), 7–8. 10 Ibid., 11. 11 Ibid., 21–22. 12 Rikki Kersten, “Neo-­Nationalism and the ‘Liberal School of History,’ ” Japan Forum 11(2) (January 1, 1999), 191–193. 13 Yoshinori Kobayashi, Sensōron: shin Gōmanizumu sengen special (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1998), 44–45. 14 Ibid., 179–182. 15 Ibid., 55. 16 Ibid., 54–55 and 8. 17 Ibid., 87. 18 Ibid., 103. 19 Ibid., 105. 20 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 158–159. 21 Kobayashi, Sensōron, 292. 22 Ibid., 295–296. 23 Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, translated by Jonathan E. Abel (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 34.

Database nationalism   221 24 Axel Honneth, “An Aversion against the Universal: A Commentary on Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition,” Theory, Culture & Society 2(3) (November 1, 1985), 151. 25 For a discussion of affect, see Jeremy Gilbert, “Signifying Nothing: ‘Culture,’ ‘Discourse’ and the Sociality of Affect,” Culture Machine 6 (2004). 26 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995), 88. 27 Azuma, Otaku, 32. 28 Jean-­François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxiv. 29 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 370–371. 30 Sven Saaler, “Nationalism and History in Contemporary Japan,” Japan Focus 14(20–27) (October 15, 2016), 4–5. 31 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 1–2. 32 Mishima, “Geki.” 33 Takahiko Kyōgoku, Gēto jietai kanochi nite, kaku tatakaeri (A1 Pictures, 2015), ep. 1. 34 Attested at least as far back as 1995’s Shin seiki evangerion, and in many texts since then. 35 Attested at least as far back as 1991’s Rodosutō senki. 36 Kyōgoku, ep. 3. 37 Kyōgoku, ep. 8. 38 Hirokazu Takamura, Sutoraiku witchīzu 2 (AIC, 2010), ep. 1. 39 Hirokazu Takamura, Sutoraiku witchīzu (GONZO, 2008), ep. 1. 40 Takamura, Sutoraiku witchīzu 2, ep. 1.

References Azuma, Hiroki 2009. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Translated by Jonathan E. Abel. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Buckley, Frank and Parisi, Francesco. 2004. “Political and Cultural Nationalism.” In Charles K. Rowley and Friedrich Schneider (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Public Choice, Vol. 2. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 409–411. Doak, Kevin Michael. 2007. A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People. Handbook of Oriental Studies. Leiden: Brill. Gellner, Ernest. 1997. Nationalism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Gilbert, Jeremy. 2004. “Signifying Nothing: ‘Culture,’ ‘Discourse’ and the Sociality of Affect.” Culture Machine 6. Honneth, Axel. 1985. “An Aversion Against the Universal: A Commentary on Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition.” Theory, Culture & Society 2(3) (November 1): 147–156. Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kersten, Rikki. 1999. “Neo-­Nationalism and the ‘Liberal School of History.’ ” Japan Forum 11(2) (January 1): 191–203. Kobayashi, Yoshinori 小林 よしのり. 1998. Shin Gōmanizumu sengen special sensōron 新・ゴーマニズム宣言SPECIAL 戦争論 [New Declaration of Arrogance-­ism Special: On War]. Tokyo: Shōgakkan. Kojève, Alexandre. 1980. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kyōgoku, Takahiko 京極尚彦. 2015. Gēto jietai kanochi nite, kaku tatakaeri ゲート 自 衛隊 彼の地にて、斯く戦えり [Gate: This Is How the Self-­Defense Forces Fought in a Distant Land]. A1 Pictures.

222   Christopher Smith Lyotard, Jean-­François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Maruyama, Masao. 1969. “Nationalism in Japan: Its Theoretical Background and Prospects.” In Ivan Morris (Ed.), Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics. Translated by David Titus. New York: Oxford University Press, 135–156. Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31: 83–109. Mishima, Yukio. 1970. “Mishima Yukio no ‘geki’ zenbun.” Asahi Shinbun. November 26. Mishima, Yukio. 1995. Patriotism. Translated by Geoffrey W. Sargent. New York: New Directions Publishing. Saaler, Sven. 2016. “Nationalism and History in Contemporary Japan.” Japan Focus 14(20–27) (October 15): 1–17. Takamura, Hirokazu 高村和宏. 2008. Sutoraiku witchīzu, ストライクウィッチーズ [Strike Witches]. GONZO. Takamura, Hirokazu 2010. Sutoraiku witchīzu, 2ストライクウィッチーズ 2 [Strike Witches 2]. AIC. Yoshino, Kosaku. 1992. Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry. New York: Routledge.

12 Envisioning nuclear futures Shiriagari Kotobuki’s 3/11 manga from hope to despair Rachel DiNitto

Japanese artists responded to the 2011 triple disaster known as 3/11 with films, short stories, novels, poetry, manga, performance art, paintings, and photographs—a body of work that has only grown in the years following the calamity.1 One of the earliest artistic responses came from manga artist Shiriagari Kotobuki. He wrote his Ano hi kara no manga: 2011.3.11 (Manga Since That Day: 2011.3.11, 2011) amidst an atmosphere of tremendous confusion and anxiety. Shiriagari’s work straddles the divide between the competing discourses of safety and danger, countering the mainstream media’s parroting of government assessments of safety, and the public mood of “self-­restraint” (jishuku) that discouraged citizens from voicing anti-­nuclear sentiment.2 Shiriagari spoke out about the dangers of radiation, and his manga not only evaded criticism, but earned him the Medal of Honor for Culture (Purple Ribbon) from the Emperor in 2014 and an NHK special.3 The reception for Shiriagari’s work contrasts sharply with that of Kariya Tetsu, author of the manga Oishinbo, who suffered public and professional censure for an episode titled Fukushima no shinjitsu (The Truth about Fukushima, May 2014) that linked the protagonist’s nosebleed to radiation exposure from a visit to the damaged nuclear power plant.4 Other manga also drew attention to the controversy surrounding radiation exposure in the disaster area and at the plant, but not all were written from a strictly political or anti-­nuclear stance. For instance, manga artist Yamamoto Osamu felt the need to include images of radiation monitoring stations and data on radiation levels, which highlight the dilemmas faced by residents of the affected areas in his drawings: Kyō mo ii tenki: Genpatsu jiko hen (Good Weather Today Too: Volume on the Nuclear Power Plant Accident, 2012) and issues of his Sobamon series. Tatsuta Kazuto recorded his experience working as a temporary worker at the damaged plant in Ichiefu: Fukushima Daiichi genshiryoku hatsudensho rōdōki (Ichi-­F: A Record of Working at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, 2013–2015). Tatsuta overwhelms readers with details about safety procedures at the plant, but as Ryan Holmberg argues, he downplays dangers and the industry’s poor labor record to create a manga that is “the kindest response the nuclear industry can hope for” in the post-­accident climate.5 Shiriagari’s manga do not have the documentary feel of Kariya, Yamamoto, or Tatsuta. He does not tie his manga to specific sites in the disaster area or to

224   Rachel DiNitto the plant, nor does he fill them with the specialized vocabulary of the nuclear disaster. But the lack of geographical specificity—a placelessness—allows him to bring the historical weight of other disasters and tragedies (from World War Two to Chernobyl) to bear on 3/11, emphasizing the severity of the Fukushima accident and the ongoing nature of Japan’s radiation problems. This chapter examines the story manga in Shiriagari’s two collections specifically tied to the 3/11 disaster, Ano hi kara no manga: 2011.3.11 (hereafter Manga Since) and Ano hi kara no yūutsu (Despair Since That Day, 2015) (hereafter Despair Since), as well as in his Gerogero pūsuka: kodomo miraishi (Gerogero pūsuka: Death of the Children’s Future, 2006–2007), a work written in response to the Chernobyl accident and reprinted with a new afterword in 2012.6 By tracing his work across the three collections mentioned above, the reader can see a shift from open representation of the nuclear accident in 2011 to a despair over the difficulty of representing radiation and its dangers in manga form in 2015. In this chapter, I detail Shiriagari’s techniques for making the meltdowns and associated problems of radiation visible and meaningful in a context where the government, nuclear industry, and many in the affected towns are attempting to shut down such critical discourse, and a national amnesia is being hastened by the government’s successful attempts to redirect attention away from the disaster toward the upcoming 2020 Olympics. In drawing attention to not just the Fukushima accident, but also to its nuclear victims, the hibakusha, Shiriagari brings visibility to the invisible and speakability to the unspeakable.

Images of the nuclear in Manga Since That Day On March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by a 9.0 earthquake that triggered tsunami waves of staggering heights (one of the highest recorded was 43 meters or 141 feet). The inundation of the tsunami waters compromised the reactor cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), leading to three meltdowns and the most severe nuclear accident since Chernobyl happened twenty-­five years earlier. The disaster was one of the worst in Japan’s post-­war history with close to 16,000 dead and over 330,000 displaced. Although radiation levels have fallen and decontamination work continues, radiation is still leaking from the damaged nuclear power plant, there is no long-­term solution for the irradiated waste, and some residents may never be able to return home. The nuclear accident features in the story manga of Manga Since That Day that were penned in April–June 2011, and their relevance comes to the fore when aligned with the unfolding news about the disaster and the public response. In the earliest of these story manga, “Umibe no mura” (“Village by the Sea,” April 12), the iconic yet crippled Fukushima Daiichi NPP shows up in a double-­page spread as fully defunct (see Figure 12.1a and b).7 The ocean barriers and towers of the plant are overgrown with greenery, and the main function of the plant has been usurped by the field of wind turbines

Envisioning nuclear futures   225

Figure 12.1a and 12.b “Umibe no mura,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga. Shohan. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entā Burein, 2011).

covering the surrounding landscape. The story is set fifty years in the future, and this image signals a hopeful end to the menace of nuclear power and the success of Japan’s green revolution. Images of the nuclear continue in the second and third installments in this series “Kibō” (“Hope,” May 12) and “Furueru machi” (“Shaking Town,” June 12), as well as in “Kawakudari futago no oyaji” (“The Twin Old Geezers Go Downriver,” May 21).8 “Hope,” a manga that imagines radioactive elements as cartoonish humans trying to get out into the world, ends with a photorealistic rendering of the damaged Fukushima NPP.9 The lack of words and the extreme style switch in this final image emphasize the abandoned feelings of the title, confirming the reality of the radioactive emissions from the plant. In “The Twin Old Geezers Go Downriver,” the damaged plant appears as a box-­shaped female, who the old men encounter downstream. She laments her position as a jilted lover, as she leaks toxins into the river spreading her contamination.10 Her jilted status reflects the shift in public opinion regarding nuclear power in Japan. Post-­disaster polls showed a huge reversal in support for nuclear power from 60 percent in favor in 2009 to 74 percent desiring denuclearization in June 2011.11 These images of a damaged and decommissioned NPP and the accompanying anti-­nuclear sentiment appeared alongside the real world announcement on April

226   Rachel DiNitto 12, 2011 that the meltdowns were not a Level 6 but a Level 7, meaning the accident was equal to Chernobyl; admissions by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the company that owns the plant, that their president instructed officials to avoid using the word “meltdown” for two months after the disaster, despite their knowledge otherwise, purposely misrepresenting the situation as a less serious state of “core damage”; and calls by the then Prime Minister Kan Naoto to end nuclear power in Japan on July 13, 2011.12 Shiriagari further references the ongoing crisis in his manga “Shaking Town,” the story of a young, pregnant disaster widow that captures the anxiety and confusion of Tokyo residents and of evacuees in the disaster zone. The manga indexes the disaster through images of the television news discussing the earthquake in Tohoku, the explosion at the plant, and a scene of the protagonist surrounded by tweets such as: “TEPCO is lying,” “It’s another Chernobyl,” “It’s melting down!!,” “Flee now,” and “Radiation will reach Tokyo” (Figure 12.2).13

Figure 12.2 “Furueru machi,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga. Shohan. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entā Burein, 2011). Source: © Kadokawa/Shiriagari.

Envisioning nuclear futures   227 This image represents not only the widow’s confusion, but also the confusion that descended on the Japanese public in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. It also represents the distrust for the government and its attempts to assuage public fears through now iconic pronouncements like that made by Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary, Edano Yukio, who reassured the public that there were “no immediate health risks” (tadachi ni eikyō wa nai) from the radiation spewing from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi NPP.14 This phrase is represented in a partially obscured tweet that is purposely confusing: “It’s OK. Health effects are …” (Daijōbu. Mada kenkō ni wa eikyō ga …).15 Many writers reprised Edano’s now infamous phrase to reveal its true warning: even if danger is not immanent, victims will suffer health effects in the future. The widow in “Shaking Town” decides to flee to Tohoku because in her mind it is the one place in Japan that is least likely to have earthquakes in the future. This decision is curious, since rather than running from the radiation, she is likely headed straight for it and the very danger she feared would affect her unborn child. But, many evacuees did flee to areas of higher radiation because of the lack of accurate information about radiation dispersal when the Japanese government decided to delay the release of the SPEEDI (System for Prediction of Environmental Dose Information) data that would have predicted the movement of this toxic cloud.16 The protagonist in “Shaking Town” can be seen as representative of those who unknowingly evacuated and fled to areas of higher radiation, or those who fled to areas they thought were safe. In 2016, the magnitude 6.2 earthquake on Japan’s southern island of Kyūshū threatened the Sendai Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), 75 miles to the northwest, forcing those who had fled the Fukushima accident to question their decision to move there. This was the only NPP in Japan that remained in operation after the mass shutdowns f­ ollowing the Fukushima accident. In the early days after the disaster, Shiriagari was part of a small group of artists who responded with anti-­nuclear criticism that ranged from openly confrontational to subtle. The guerrilla artist group known as Chim↑Pom created a video performance titled “Real Times” in which they entered the no-­go zone at the Fukushima Daiichi NPP to stand atop a lookout on the grounds of the plant.17 With the damaged NPP in the background, they painted a white flag to look like the Japanese flag and then transformed that into the radiation symbol. Fiction writers Kawakami Hiromi and Furukawa Hideo published literary works within a few months of the disaster that addressed the nuclear threat, at a time that many authors were writing about the earthquake and tsunami.18 Musicians uploaded anti-­nuclear songs to the Internet, like “It was Always a Lie,” albeit anonymously so as to avoid censorship.19 Early voices like Shiriagari’s challenged mainstream media perceptions that sought to downplay the damage, contain the confusion and collective response of public horror, and silence anti-­ nuclear sentiment. These artists worked against media representations that functioned “like euphemisms to obstruct seeing, saying, and understanding.”20 Within a year, however, Shiriagari was lamenting the difficulty of making radiation visible and, four years later, he titled his follow-­up volume Despair Since That Day, indicating a shift away from the hopeful mood for political

228   Rachel DiNitto change that had characterized the early post-­disaster months. Below I examine Shiriagari’s techniques for making the meltdowns and associated problems of radiation visible. As mentioned above, Kariya’s issue of Oishinbo became the object of public controversy, sparking criticism from the local disaster communities and the government, as well as censorship from the publisher.21 The music industry restricted artists by censoring lyrics, and nuclear power companies used advertising dollars to silence anti-­nuclear artists by blacklisting them and pressuring media companies to exclude them.22 Fiction writer Henmi Yō compared the climate of censorship to wartime Japan, blaming individual citizens as well as the government and nuclear industry for this “twenty-­first century Japanese-­style fascism.”23 It is amidst this climate that I consider how the problem of representation is tied to issues of censorship and forgetting, making the nuclear accident and its victims unspeakable and invisible.

Making radiation visible Writing over a year after the disaster, Shiriagari expressed his frustration in a manga titled “Hōshanō kashika keikaku” (“Proposal to Make Radiation Visible,” July 2012) from the Despair Since collection. The tongue-­in-cheek bureaucratic title belies a serious problem. In the manga, Shiriagari’s alter ego manga artist laments his inability to depict radiation despite the symbolic expressions of the genre (manpu) that can effectively capture the invisible, such as conventions used to represent sound waves and atmospheric disturbances.24 Yet, there are no standard conventions in manga to represent radiation. “Proposal to Make Radiation Visible” shows him drawing a scene in which his characters talk about radiation, but the manga artist is unable to give it visual form in the background.25 He attempts to find a solution through crowdsourcing but gives up, realizing that he cannot reduce radiation to any one symbol. The consequence of multiple representational means is that his manpu for radiation risk being misunderstood or missed altogether by readers. But if he does not attempt to represent the radiation, the problem remains invisible. Looking across his 3/11 related volumes, we can see Shiriagari experimenting with these different symbols or manga techniques to draw the reader’s attention to the radiation. In “Shaking Town,” strange lightening-­like marks fill the Tokyo sky behind the iconic Shibuya crossing, marks that align with the protagonist’s worries about radiation (Figure 12.3).26 He also experiments with these symbols in his follow-­up manga about the same widow now settled in Tohoku: the “Purorōgu” (“Prologue,” 2015) and “Epirōgu” (“Epilogue,” 2015) for Despair Since. In these works, the widow questions her decision to flee to and stay in Tohoku. Radiation exposure is not addressed directly in the speech bubbles; however, the “Prologue” includes flashback scenes showing the disaster clean-­up, and these scene have grid-­like black dots covering the images (Figure 12.4).27 The dots only appear on these clean-­up frames, and since the characters in them are wearing masks, the dots can be seen as a visual representation of radiation, a type of manpu.28

Envisioning nuclear futures   229

Figure 12.3 “Furueru machi,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga. Shohan. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entā Burein, 2011). Source: © Kadokawa/Shiriagari.

230   Rachel DiNitto

Figure 12.4 “Purorōgu,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no yūutsu. Bīmu komikkusu (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2015). Source: © Kadokawa/Shiriagari.

At the end of the “Epilogue,” the disaster widow worries there will be no further efforts at redeveloping the disaster area in her lifetime, making it difficult for her to find work and stay in Tohoku. She hopes for positive change in her son’s lifetime, but the manga ends with her speculating about the length of her son’s life.29 This ambiguous comment could be read as anxiety that his life will be cut short, and in the context of the disaster area, the obvious cause for that would be radiation-­induced illness. This final comment is in a speech bubble overlaying a realistic image of nature—the ocean and mountains—but the shining sun is emitting strange rays with white dots. These dots resemble the hail-­like rain in the opening panels, but since in this panel the sun is shining and there is no onomatopoeia to indicate rain, the reader is left to question the meaning of these dots. Could they be another manpu for radiation? By referencing the problem of radiation in the disaster towns, Shiriagari questions the livability of these areas, in a move that reverberates with the controversy over Oishinbo. In the final panels of “Proposal to Make Radiation Visible,” the manga artist decides he must devise different means for bringing radiation into the visible

Envisioning nuclear futures   231 spectrum. In one frame, he draws angular lines and dots emanating from a gutter to represent high levels of radiation, and by doing so, actually makes the radiation visible in the image, even though in reality it remains invisible. Below I examine other methods Shiriagari employs to represent radiation and its dangers: including references to other disasters and historical tragedies, as well as to symbolic images within the visible realm. Shiriagari’s strategies are a response to the climate that discourages such expression. 30

Recourse to history: from Hiroshima to Chernobyl Shiriagari’s “Yūenchi no kessen” (“Showdown at the Amusement Park,” 2006) from the Gerogero pūsuka collection is full of references to World War Two, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power plants.31 In the manga, the mention of a weapon (heiki) that will be reluctantly activated (kadō) recalls the atomic bombs (kakuheiki) and the activating or reactivating (saikadō) of nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are also referenced in “Village by the Sea.” The residents live with minimal and intermittent power in a shanty town that is reminiscent of the atomic bomb victim ghettos in Kōno Fumiyo’s Hiroshima manga, and the black dots in the “Prologue” recall the black rain that fell after the bombs (Figure 12.5).32

Figure 12.5 “Umibe no mura,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga. Shohan. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entā Burein, 2011). Source: © Kadokawa/Shiriagari.

232   Rachel DiNitto These images link the communities in Shiriagari and Kōno’s work as nuclear victims (hibakusha). This linking of victims of atomic bombs and nuclear power is controversial in Japan. Ryan Holmberg explains that the term “irradiated laborers” (hibaku rōdōsha) used for nuclear power plant workers is “politically loaded” because the word hibaku is homophonous with that used for victims of the atomic bombs.33 The Japanese government and nuclear industry have long tried to maintain the line separating the peaceful from non-­peaceful uses of the nuclear. However, as Roger Pulvers argues, in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident, nuclear power was linked with the radiation released by the atomic bombs to reveal the government betrayal hiding behind Japan’s no nuclear stance.34 In between the publication of Manga Since and Despair Since, Shiriagari republished Gerogero pūsuka, a work originally created as a response to the Chernobyl accident. This manga provides an important subtext for reading the other two collections, as Shiriagari draws a clear connection between the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. When Gerogero pūsuka was reprinted in 2012, Shiriagari added an afterword that references the 3/11 Fukushima nuclear disaster and encourages a re-­reading of Gerogero pūsuka in light of the more recent catastrophe. Not only do the storylines connect across the two works, but the earlier disaster also informs and reinforces the severity of the later one. By bringing the weight of Chernobyl to bear on Fukushima, Shiriagari reinforces a recognition of the victims of these nuclear accidents as hibakusha, something that is, as explained below, still controversial in Japan with regards to victims of the Fukushima accident. Although there are no overt indicators linking the manga in Gerogero pūsuka to Chernobyl, the memory of that accident looms over the manga through indirect yet recognizable iconic references such as the famous Ferris wheel in Pripyat’s amusement park (Figures 12.6 and 12.7). The Ferris wheel in Gerogero pūsuka, as seen in “Kyūjitsu” (“Holiday,” 2006) and “Showdown at the Amusement Park,” could easily be the famous wheel at the Tokyo Dome or in Odaiba.35 However, the fact that neither the wheel nor any of the rides are operational recalls the amusement park in Pripyat, which was abandoned shortly before the May Day celebrations in 1986 due to the Chernobyl explosion a few kilometers away. The Pripyat wheel is now iconic of the Chernobyl disaster: it has become part of the landscape of dark or disaster tourism, featuring in video games and movies.36 The modern town of Pripyat that housed workers from the Chernobyl plant is recalled in Shiriagari’s massive housing complexes that are empty of human life, as seen in his manga about a child all alone in a large housing complex titled, “Sanjō!! Mitottaman” (“Visit!! Child Caregiver,” 2006).37 These iconic images from the Chernobyl disaster work as visual shorthand for the dangers of radiation. By associating the images in Gerogero pūsuka with Pripyat, there is no need for Shiriagari to add in a separate visual representation (manpu) for radiation. Chernobyl casts a long shadow over the other two collections and asserts Fukushima’s status as another Chernobyl, directly countering Japanese government

Envisioning nuclear futures   233

Figure 12.6 “Kyūjitsu,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Gerogero pūsuka: kodomo miraishi. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entaburein, 2012). Source: © Kadokawa/Shiriagari.

Figure 12.7 The Ferris Wheel in Pripyat. Tiia Monto. Source: CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bysa/3.0), from Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Pripyat__ferris_wheel.jpg.

234   Rachel DiNitto assurances that the situation was under control. Shiriagari addresses not only the immediate impact of the disaster, but also the slow violence of long-­term radiation exposure. In “Village by the Sea,” the somatic damage is represented by grandchildren who have grown wings, and is rationalized as a natural form of human evolution via a comparison with dinosaurs who grew wings in order to survive.38 But, in Gerogero pūsuka, the world has already changed to the point that only the old and the young survive. Or, even worse, the world is only occupied by the old and children are a true oddity. Shiriagari depicts the violence of radiation-­induced human mutation as both a form of human evolution and the possible end of humanity itself. This dire prediction for humanity’s future is explained on the opening page of the title manga “Gerogero pūsuka” (2006), which can easily be read as a futuristic story about the Fukushima accident (Figure 12.8). Against a scene of decrepit skyscrapers, the text reads: “20XX. Human desire and idleness caused this accident. The radiation contaminating the globe is survived only by the old with their slow metabolisms and children who live until age fourteen.”39 Despite this grim warning, the bodies of the youth in all three manga collections are healthy and suffer no visible damage from radiation. Although the manga states that children die at age fourteen, it does not explain how or why. Shiriagari chooses not to depict the bodily harm that leads to the children’s deaths. In other words, he chooses not to make the somatic damage visible.40 Similarly, in Manga Since, there is no discussion about the damage to the area or its residents from the NPP, although the father in “Village by the Sea” warns his son to stay away from the plant. Are Shiriagari’s characters so used to the fact that children do not live past age fourteen that there is no need to discuss it? Is Shiriagari showing how those deaths that result from radiation are in essence invisible, meaning those who die are society’s disposable? The lack of damaged bodies also points to Rob Nixon’s assertions about the difficulty of representing the slow violence of radiation and its “long dyings.”41 I do not in any way mean to dismiss Nixon’s assertions or the disposability of radiation victims. These are important issues that require attention in both creative works and scholarship on the Fukushima accident. Yet, I propose another way to read the healthy bodies of the children in Shiriagari’s manga by using the example of the naked boys roaming the streets in “Chisana matsuri” (“The Little Festival,” May 12, 2012) from Despair Since (Figure 12.9). The cartoonishly drawn boys engage in juvenile jokes as they attempt to create a festival (matsuri) but are unable to find anything indispensable enough to parade about. There are no mothers anymore, and they reluctantly rule out poop and snot. The boys find their answer when they encounter a checkpoint, men in protective gear, and no entry signs, and decide to make a portable shrine out of the barriers in order to parade the men around.42 Amidst the middle-­school scatological humor, the real danger is hidden in plain sight. The boys are naked and their entry into a no-­go area exposes their bodies to radiation.43 Their very nakedness is visible in a way that damaged, irradiated bodies are not in Japan. The manga emphasizes this with a warning in the final panel: “Don’t take life for granted.”44

Envisioning nuclear futures   235

Figure 12.8 “Gerogero pūsuka,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Gerogero pūsuka: kodomo miraishi. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entaburein, 2012). Source: Kadokawa/Shiriagari.

236   Rachel DiNitto

Figure 12.9 “Chisana matsuri,” in Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no yūutsu. Bīmu komikkusu (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2015). Source: © Kadokawa/Shiriagari.

Envisioning nuclear futures   237

The invisible and the unspeakable While writing an article about debris and cultural trauma a year after the 2011 disaster, I speculated about the lack of dead bodies in the 3/11 visual and literary archive.45 This absence is surprising given the graphic images of bodies that featured in previous disasters from the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923, to World War Two, to the atomic bombs. Fiction writer Ikezawa Natsuki commented on the media’s intentional avoidance of images of dead bodies in their coverage of the 3/11 disaster: “I learned of the circumstances of these many deaths through the media, but the Japanese media would not show these remains as dead bodies … The camera casually averted its gaze. But the corpses were there.”46 Mary Knighton discusses the mood of restraint (jishuku) “with regard to 3.11 out of respect for Tohoku’s dead and its displaced populations.”47 Knighton sees the effects of this in Shiriagari’s wordless manga “Sora to mizu” (“Sky and Water,” July 12, 2011) in which children, born atop lotus pedals growing out of the disaster debris, have a temporary reunion with the dead souls of their loved ones, who also emerge from the mud and water-­covered debris. The dead bodies are shown in this manga, but as ghost-­like figures with no verbal commentary, leaving interpretation fully up to the reader.48 In the debris article mentioned above, I speculated that the resistance to showing corpses was a post-­9/11 style censorship meant to minimize human “collateral” damage.49 This mood of restraint that descended on Japan post-­3/11 can be aptly described as a case of “trauma instrumentalized as an alibi for censorship,” a phrase used to describe post-­9/11 America.50 The self-­restraint, or as Knighton translates it “self-­ censorship,” kept the Japanese public from discussing the disaster dead and debating the nuclear disaster, a silence that aided in the government’s efforts to downplay the danger.51 However, it is not just the corpses that are invisible, but also the living victims of radiation exposure, the hibakusha, who are also invisible in Japanese society. Unlike the victims of the atomic bombs, the somatic damage to the hibakusha of Fukushima has not manifested itself as the horrific bodily injuries seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At least for the present, the damage only appears on disembodied thyroid scans and body counters. But for many hibakusha, the invisibility is also self-­imposed, a strategy to avoid discrimination at work, school, and in society. Soon after the nuclear meltdowns, critic Yamauchi Akemi discussed the stigma attached to the label hibakusha and the difficulty of applying this label to the new generation of victims.52 The media and Japanese public tend to avoid the term hibakusha when speaking of Fukushima’s victims, commonly using hisaisha, a more neutral term that simply implies a disaster victim. In many ways, the term hibakusha resides in the “domain of the unsayable,” just as the victims of Fukushima remain unseeable.53 This does not mean that representations of them are fully absent in post-­Fukushima Japan, but that the designation of the Fukushima victims as “nuclear victims” is an act that moves outside sanctioned speech. As Judith Butler argues, censorship makes “certain

238   Rachel DiNitto kinds of citizens possible and others impossible,” circumscribing “the social parameters of speakable discourse.”54 From the perspective of a government and nuclear industry eager to repatriate residents back into formerly contaminated zones, the label hibakusha undermines the purpose and efficacy of the decontamination work. From the perspective of those citizens who remained in affected areas or returned to zones officially designated as “decontaminated” but which may still be irradiated, the term hibakusha threatens the existence of their communities. The destabilizing nature of the term hibakusha stands in sharp contrast to terms like “decontamination” (josen) and “damaging rumors” (fūhyō higai), which offer reassurances of safety while silencing fears and doubt.55 What is speakable and, by extension, for a manga artist like Shiriagari, what is seeable in post-­Fukushima Japan? In Shiriagari’s case the not seeing of dead or damaged bodies in the Japanese media allows for the very visibility of the naked body in his manga, and when it is placed in the toxic landscape, it acts as shorthand for the damaged, irradiated body.56 Although he does not openly label them as such, the characters in Shiriagari’s manga are all hibakusha—the old men who meet the damaged NPP leaking her toxins into the river, the intergenerational family living near the decommissioned NPP, the children in the Chernobyl stories living in a contaminated world, the disaster widow in Tohoku and her son wondering about their longevity. The designation of these characters as hibakusha and of their environments as toxic, runs counter to decontamination campaigns and to a reaffirmation of the hometown (furusato) that are key to successful repatriation. If the radiological danger from the Fukushima NPP was well recognized and accepted, why would the government delete the word “sarcophagus” (sekkan)—a reference to the concrete entombment at Chernobyl—from a report on decommissioning the Fukushima NPP in 2016? Local governments raised objections and the Fukushima governor expressed his outrage that this solution meant acknowledging a condemnation of the site and no possibility of return for former residents.57 There is no clear solution for dealing with the melted fuel, yet residents and local governments play semantic games in order to hold out hope rather than face this grim reality. That reality is apparent in the afterword to Gerogero pūsuka, where Shiriagari says: “We may not be able to pass on a prosperous, rose-­colored world to the children. … The era when we could carefully raise those few children in an ideal environment is over.”58 Shiriagari is not looking to place blame for the NPP accidents (either Chernobyl or Fukushima). Rather he insists that we must keep reproducing and sowing the seeds of life. “We must plant these seeds regardless of how barren or contaminated the earth and they will bud.”59 As seen in the controversy over Oishinbo, such recognition of the contaminated status of the disaster areas is an unwelcome sentiment for many living in those zones. The controversy continues to swirl around the irradiated status of these disaster landscapes, and as reader, we have to wonder what kind of children could be born of such a contaminated landscape.

Envisioning nuclear futures   239

The invisibility of forgetting The despair in Shiriagari’s second 3/11 collection points not only to censorship but also to a national forgetting of the disaster that creates its own form of invisibility. The Japanese government is interested in making the damage of Fukushima as invisible as possible in order to rally support for the upcoming 2020 Olympics. The Tokyo Olympics expect to host some events (baseball, football, rowing, and canoeing) in Tohoku, but none in areas that experienced evacuations.60 The committee claims they want to showcase a rebuilt Tohoku, but in order to do that, the continued menace of radiation must be removed from view.61 A certain level of compassion fatigue is normal for any disaster, and it would be unreasonable to expect that the 3/11 disaster would retain its impact several years later. Shiriagari addresses this desire to move on in Despair Since.62 But, Shiriagari’s “Village by the Sea” shows the dangers of this forgetting; the NPP becomes hidden from view, and this invisibility also serves to hide its toxic threat through an act of public forgetting. The children in this story are unaware of the existence or history of the nuclear power plant. When the winged son goes off to play, the father warns him not to go near the plant, the genpatsu. When the older son asks what the genpatsu is, the father explains that fifty years ago there was disaster and  many things were lost. We resolved to take a different path forward. We put an end to the prosperous lifestyle that was filled with the anxiety of not knowing when we would face such losses again, and chose the path of endless happiness.63  The reader can assume that “endless happiness” means the abandoning of the NPP and all it stood for. But the manga ends with the “good” news that the town will be able to start up a new power plant (bio or hydrogen), and residents speak with nostalgic cheer about the possibility for cars, refrigerators, and the prosperous world of the past.64 Shiriagari’s use of the word “prosperous” (yutaka) intentionally echoes the now empty slogans that promised the affluence of nuclear power. “Village by the Sea” is driven by a dynamic of forgetting. The children do not know what the NPP is or the damage it still poses, so in essence, the threat of radiation remains invisible. Even though the father’s generation knows of it, they are willing to forget in exchange for “prosperity.” The cost for failing to retain and transmit information about the dangers of radiation is palpable in an essay Hayashi Kyōko wrote after 3/11.65 Hayashi was distressed that the knowledge of radiation gained from the atomic bombs had already faded from the national consciousness, and she and others like critic Kuroko Kazuo fear the memory of Fukushima will fade as well. The sense of danger may be fading, but the slow violence of radiation is not and will not for years to come. Shiriagari’s manga do not blame the government, nuclear or electric power industries, or residents of the affected zones. Neither do they employ the documentary

240   Rachel DiNitto strategies or specialized vocabulary of many other post-­disaster manga. They are nuanced, at times purposely silly, and not always clear in their anti-­nuclear stance. But a careful reading of his manga and symbols reveals “the limited, obstructed vision that characterizes a historical moment ruled by trauma and censorship.”66 Shiriagari brings a much-­needed visibility to the ongoing problems of the Fukushima accident and the dire fate of its victims.

Notes   1 The term 3/11 refers to the March 11, 2011 triple disaster in Japan: earthquake, tsunami, and three meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.   2 Noriko Manabe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 112–113.   3 Mary Knighton, “The Sloppy Realities of 3.11 in Shiriagari Kotobuki’s Manga,” The Asia–Pacific Journal 11(26) 1 (June 30, 2013).   4 Lorie Brau, “Oishinbo’s Fukushima Elegy: Grasping for the Truth About Radioactivity in Food Manga,” in Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-­Weickgenannt (Eds.), Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster (London: Routledge, 2017), 177–198   5 Ryan Holmberg, “Nuclear Gypsies,” Art in America, December 2015, 114–119. See the NHK special for more on these manga and interviews with the artists, including Kotobuki Shiriagari: “Ima Fukushima o Egaku Koto: Mangaka-­Tachi No Mosaku,” Kurōzu-up Gendai. NHK, June 2, 2014.   6 See Knighton’s article on Shiriagari for more on his four-­panel strips (4-koma): Knighton, “The Sloppy Realities of 3.11 in Shiriagari Kotobuki’s Manga.”   7 Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga: 2011.3.11. Shohan. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entā Burein, 2011), 28–29.   8 The word for “hope” (kibō) is crossed out in Shiriagari’s original.   9 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga, 72. 10 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga, 78–83. See Knighton for these images from “Hope,” and “The Twin Old Geezers Go Downriver”: Knighton, “The Sloppy Realities of 3.11 in Shiriagari Kotobuki’s Manga.” 11 Richard A. Hindmarsh, “3/11: Megatechnology, Siting, Place and Participation,” in Richard A. Hindmarsh (Ed.), Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi: Social, Political and Environmental Issues (London: Routledge, 2014), 56. 12 Associated Press, “TEPCO: Delay in Declaring ‘Meltdown’ Was a Cover-­Up,” The Asahi Shimbun, June 21, 2016; and Chico Harlan, “Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan Calls for Phase-­Out of Nuclear Power,” The Washington Post, July 13, 2011. 13 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga, 99. 14 Edano used this phrase on March 16 after explosions at reactors 1, 2, and 3, and a fire at number 4. He repeated this phrase on seven occasions. See Manabe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, 49. Also see Manabe for a list of officials who said the conditions were safe post-­meltdown: Manabe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, 125. 15 The Japanese word to indicate no negative health effects (nai) is obscured in this quote, purposely adding to the sense of confusion surrounding radiological danger. 16 The Japanese government delayed the release of this data to the public until March 23, although they gave it to the US military on March 14. Sarah Phillips, “Fukushima Is Not Chernobyl? Don’t Be so Sure,” Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, Anthropology (blog), March 11, 2013. 17 The performance is from April 11, 2011 and can be viewed online at: http://chimpom. jp/project/real-­times.html. Accessed April 24, 2018.

Envisioning nuclear futures   241 18 Hiromi Kawakami, “God Bless You, 2011,” in Elmer Luke and David Karashima (Eds.), March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown. Translated by Ted Goosen and Motoyuki Shibata (New York: Vintage, 2012), 37–48. Hiromi Kawakami’s “Kamisama 2011” was published in the June 2011 issue of the journal Gunzō, and Furukawa’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (Umatachi yo, sore de mo hikari wa muku de, 2011) first appeared in the July 2011 issue of the journal Shinchō. For more on these two works, see Rachel DiNitto, Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2019). 19 Manabe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, 117. 20 Marianne Hirsch, “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage,” PMLA 119(5) (October 2004), 1214. 21 Brau, “Oishinbo’s Fukushima Elegy.” 22 Manabe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, 74; and Mathieu Gaulène, “Does the Advertising Giant Dentsu Pull the Strings of the Japanese Media?” Translated by Sachie Mizohata. The Asia–Pacific Journal 14(11) 5 (June 1, 2016). 23 Yō Henmi, Gareki no naka kara kotoba o: watashi no “shisha” e (Tokyo: NHK Shuppan, 2012), 85–86. 24 Manpu are signs, symbols, and characters used as conventions in manga to represent a variety of actions, emotions, and conditions. 25 Kotobuki Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no yūutsu (Bīmu komikkusu. Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2015), 83. 26 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga, 97. 27 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no yūutsu, 1. 28 See Katsumata Susumu’s “Devil Fish (Octopus)” (1989) for a different visual representation of radioactive particles: Holmberg, “Nuclear Gypsies,” 117 and 119. 29 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no yūutsu, 178. 30 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no yūutsu, 90. 31 Kotobuki Shiriagari, Gerogero pūsuka: kodomo miraishi. Beam comix (Tokyo: Entaburein, 2012), 91–126. 32 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga, 14, 16 and 19; and Fumiyo Kōno, Naoko Amemiya, and Andy Nakatani, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, 1st edn (San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp, 2009), 71. 33 Holmberg, “Nuclear Gypsies,” 114. 34 Roger Pulvers, “Murakami, the No-­Nuclear Principles, Nuclear Power and the Bomb,” The Asia–Pacific Journal 9(29) 6 (July 18, 2011). 35 Shiriagari, Gerogero pūsuka, 104 and 181. 36 For more on the Pripyat Ferris wheel and its place in popular culture, see Sarah Phillips and Sarah Ostaszewski, “Illustrated Guide to the Post-­Catastrophe Future,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 30(1) (spring 2012): 127–140; and Kim Hjelmgaard, “Pillaged and Peeling, Radiation-­Ravaged Pripyat Welcomes “Extreme” Tourists,’ USA TODAY, April 17, 2016. 37 Shiriagari, Gerogero pūsuka, 127–150. 38 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga, 22. 39 Shiriagari, Gerogero pūsuka, 29. 40 Other artists have included images or descriptions of the somatic damage from atomic bombs and radiation. See, for example, images of humans affected by the atomic bombs in manga, in Keiji Nakazawa, Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima/Keiji Nakazawa, translated by Project Gen (San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2004); the declining health of children in fictional novels, in Yōko Tawada, Kentōshi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2014); and filmic depictions of children undergoing thyroid cancer screenings in Ian Thomas Ash, A2-B-­C, Ian Thomas Ash, 2013.

242   Rachel DiNitto 41 Rob Nixon, “Slow Violence,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 26, 2011; and Ron Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 42 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no yūutsu, 17–19. 43 In Kawakami Hiromi’s “God Bless You, 2011,” the narrator goes outside for the first time since the disaster wearing normal clothes that expose her skin. All other people she encounters outside are in protective gear; see Kawakami, “God Bless You, 2011,” 37. 44 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no yūutsu, 20. 45 Rachel DiNitto, “Narrating the Cultural Trauma of 3.11: The Debris of Post-­ Fukushima Literature and Film,” Japan Forum 26(3): 340–360. 46 Natsuki Ikezawa, Haru o urandari wa shinai: shinsai o megutte kangaeta koto (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha, 2011), 6–7. 47 Knighton, “The Sloppy Realities of 3.11 in Shiriagari Kotobuki’s Manga.” 48 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga, 140–144. 49 DiNitto, “Narrating the Cultural Trauma of 3.11,” 19. 50 Hirsch, “Editor’s Column,” 1211. 51 Knighton, “The Sloppy Realities of 3.11 in Shiriagari Kotobuki’s Manga.” 52 Norio Akasaka, Eiji Oguma, and Akemi Yamauchi, “Tōhoku” Saisei (Tokyo: Īsuto Puresu, 2011), 34. 53 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 133. 54 Ibid., 131–133. 55 David H. Slater, Rika Morioka, and Haruka Danzuka, “MICRO-­POLITICS OF RADIATION: Young Mothers Looking for a Voice in Post-­3.11 Fukushima,” Critical Asian Studies 46(3) (July 3, 2014): 485–508. 56 See Hirsch on the “not seeing” in Art Spiegelman’s post 9/11 manga In the Shadow of No Towers: Hirsch, “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage,” 1213. 57 The Asahi Shimbun, “VOX POPULI: There’s No End to Fukushima Crisis While Melted Fuel Remains,” July 23, 2016. 58 Shiriagari, Gerogero pūsuka. This afterword is on an unpaginated page at the end of the volume. 59 Ibid. 60 Seth Berkman, “Would You Play Ball at Fukushima?” The New York Times, December 29, 2017. 61 Justin McCurry, “Fukushima to Host Tokyo Olympics Events to Help Recovery from Nuclear Disaster,” The Guardian, March 17, 2017. 62 See, for example, the manga “Fukushima shōsuke kudarana matsuri,” in which a guitarist wants to have a meaningless festival in Fukushima in order to allow people to forget “that day”; see Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no yūutsu, 69–72. For more on the actual festival with this title, see: www.i-­m.mx/kudarana/info/. 63 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga, 26. 64 Shiriagari, Ano hi kara no manga, 33. 65 Hayashi, “Futatabi Rui e.” 66 Hirsch, “Editor’s Column,” 1213.

References Akasaka, Norio, Oguma, Eiji, and Yamauchi, Akemi 2011. “Tōhoku” Saisei. Tokyo: Īsuto Puresu. The Asahi Shimbun. 2016. “VOX POPULI: There’s No End to Fukushima Crisis While Melted Fuel Remains.” July 23. www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201607230013.html. Ash, Ian Thomas. 2013. A2-B-­C. Ian Thomas Ash.

Envisioning nuclear futures   243 Associated Press. 2016. “TEPCO: Delay in Declaring ‘Meltdown’ Was a Cover-­Up.” The Asahi Shimbun, June 21. www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201606210075.html. Berkman, Seth. 2017. “Would You Play Ball at Fukushima?” The New York Times, December 29, Sports section. www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/sports/fukushima-­nucleardisaster-­tokyo-olympics.html. Brau, Lorie. 2017. “Oishinbo’s Fukushima Elegy: Grasping for the Truth About Radioactivity in Food Manga.” In Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-­Weickgenannt (Eds.), Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster . London: Routledge, 177–198. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. DiNitto, Rachel. 2014. “Narrating the Cultural Trauma of 3.11: The Debris of Post-­ Fukushima Literature and Film.” Japan Forum 26(3): 340–360. DiNitto, Rachel. 2019. Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Gaulène, Mathieu. 2016. “Does the Advertising Giant Dentsu Pull the Strings of the Japanese Media?” Translated by Sachie Mizohata. The Asia–Pacific Journal 14(11) 5 (June 1). http://apjjf.org/2016/11/Gaulene.html. Harlan, Chico. 2011. “Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan Calls for Phase-­Out of Nuclear Power.” Washington Post, July 13, section: World. www.washingtonpost.com/world/ japans-­prime-minister-­calls-for-­phase-out-­of-nuclear-­power/2011/07/13/gIQAXxUJCI_story.html. Hayashi, Kyōko. 2013. “Futatabi Rui e.” Gunzō 4: 7–25. Henmi, Yō. 2012. Gareki no naka kara kotoba o: watashi no “shisha” e. Tokyo: NHK Shuppan. Hindmarsh, R.A. 2014. “3/11: Megatechnology, Siting, Place and Participation.” In Richard A. Hindmarsh (Ed.), Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi: Social, Political and Environmental Issues. London: Routledge, 57–77. Hirsch, Marianne. 2004. “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage.” PMLA 119(5) (October): 1209–1215. Hjelmgaard, Kim. 2016. “Pillaged and Peeling, Radiation-­Ravaged Pripyat Welcomes ‘Extreme’ Tourists.” USA TODAY, April 17. Accessed December 5, 2019. www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/pripyat-­chernobyl-30th-anniversary/82897578/. Holmberg, Ryan. 2015. “Nuclear Gypsies.” Art in America, December, 114–119. Ikezawa, Natsuki. 2011. Haru o urandari wa shinai: shinsai o megutte kangaeta koto. Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha. Japan Broadcasting Corporation. 2014. “Ima Fukushima o Egaku Koto: Mangaka-Tachi No Mosaku.” Kurōzu-up Gendai. NHK, June 2. www.dailymotion.com/videox1y3wts_. Kawakami, Hiromi. 2012. “God Bless You, 2011.” In Elmer Luke and David Karashima (Eds.), March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown. Translated by Ted Goosen and Motoyuki Shibata. New York: Vintage, 37–48. Knighton, Mary. 2013. “The Sloppy Realities of 3.11 in Shiriagari Kotobuki’s Manga.” The Asia–Pacific Journal 11(26) 1 (June 30). http://apjjf.org/2014/11/26/Mary-­ Knighton/4140/article.html. Kōno, Fumiyo, Naoko Amemiya, and Andy Nakatani. 2009. Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. 1st edn. San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp. Manabe, Noriko. 2015. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima. New York: Oxford University Press. McCurry, Justin. 2017. “Fukushima to Host Tokyo Olympics Events to Help Recovery from Nuclear Disaster.” The Guardian, March 17, sec. World news. www.theguardian.

244   Rachel DiNitto com/world/2017/mar/17/fukushima-­to-host-­tokyo-olympics-­events-to-­help-recovery-­ from-nuclear-­disaster. Nakazawa, Keiji. 2004. Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima/Keiji Nakazawa ; Translated by Project Gen. San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp of San Francisco. Nixon, Rob. 2011. “Slow Violence.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 26. www. chronicle.com/article/Slow-­Violence/127968. Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phillips, Sarah. 2013. “Fukushima Is Not Chernobyl? Don’t Be so Sure.” Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, Anthropology (blog), March 11. http://somatosphere.net/2013/03/ fukushima-­is-not-­chernobyl-dont-­be-so-­sure.html. Phillips, Sarah and Ostaszewski, Sarah. 2012. “An Illustrated Guide to the Post-­ Catastrophe Future.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 30(1) (spring): 127–140. Pulvers, Roger. 2011. “Murakami, the No-­Nuclear Principles, Nuclear Power and the Bomb.” The Asia–Pacific Journal 9(29) 6 (July 18). www.japanfocus.org/-Roger-­ Pulvers/3570. Shiriagari, Kotobuki. 2011. Ano hi kara no manga: 2011.3.11. Shohan. Beam comix. Tokyo: Entā Burein. Shiriagari, Kotobuki. 2012. Gerogero pūsuka: kodomo miraishi. Beam comix. Tokyo: Entaburein. Shiriagari, Kotobuki. 2015. Ano hi kara no yūutsu. Bīmu komikkusu. Tokyo: Kadokawa. Slater, David H., Morioka, Rika, and Danzuka, Haruka. 2014. “MICRO-­POLITICS OF RADIATION: Young Mothers Looking for a Voice in Post-­3.11 Fukushima.” Critical Asian Studies 46(3) (July 3): 485–508. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2014.935138. Tawada, Yōko. 2014. Kentōshi. Tokyo: Kōdansha.

13 Kokoro (心) Civic epistemology of self-­knowledge in Japanese war-­themed manga Yuka Hasegawa

Manga or Japanese graphic art was one of the inexpensive modes of artistic production and popular entertainment available for a public struggling to survive in a war-­torn Japan. For example, akabon or ‘red book’ manga was a popular medium that post-­war manga artists used to launch their careers. Akabon manga is a type of manga printed on poor quality paper, often published by small, independent publishers that saw an earning potential in the relatively unregulated market that emerged immediately after the war.1 Manga provided the artists with a venue to make ends meet while providing an inexpensive medium of entertainment for both children and adults. Nakazawa Keiji (1939–2012), Mizuki Shigeru (1922–2015) and Tezuka Osamu (1928–1989) are manga artists, who lived through the Second World War and flourished as Japan’s leading manga artists throughout the post-­war decades. This chapter introduces the artists’ manga discourse on the Asia–Pacific conflict as representations of their war memories illustrated through the notion of kokoro, a Japanese term that may be translated as the ‘heart’, ‘mind’ or ‘soul’. Traditionally, kokoro has been treated as an inner psychological and emotional quality in Japanese literature and social science research. However, we may better understand the term kokoro as a civic epistemology, that is, a ‘culturally specific, historically and politically grounded, public knowledge-­ways’ of the artists’ self-­knowledge.2 The manga examined in this chapter are Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (2005), Mizuki’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (2011) and Tezuka’s Message to Adolf (2012).3 In these three self-­conscious chef d’oeuvre, the protagonists’ kokoro are depicted as part of their humanity, which enables them to deal with the profound changes and challenges brought upon by the war. The manga artists represent their epistemologies of self-­knowledge through their storytelling as well as graphic art, and portray how the protagonists actively reveal, reflect upon and engage with their sense of kokoro. Hannah Arendt’s notions of the vita activa and vita contemplativa are effective tools to explain how the manga artists codify the concept of kokoro as a form of symbolic action. In her books The Human Condition (1998 [1958]) and The Life of the Mind (1977 [1971]), Arendt claims that humans develop their common sense by acting in the presence of one another. The manga illustrations of kokoro help to reveal the artists’ life at war as an expressive and agentive force that shapes the protagonists’ commonsense world.

246   Yuka Hasegawa Moreover, the visual surface of these manga lends itself to what Arendt calls a ‘space of appearance’ or ‘the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicit’.4 Arendt’s description of the space of appearance makes it clear that she conceived it as ephemeral moments of human encounter. For example, she writes that the space of appearance ‘does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being’ and ‘disappears … with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves.’5 In the manga format, these moments are captured in the form of graphic art. The manga artists may present the space of appearance from multiple points of view using a multi-­angle layout. The historian Tessa Morris-­Suzuki elaborates on this point: What matters is not just which places and events we see, but also the angle that we see them from. The techniques of comic-­book graphics developed by postwar artists like Tezuka Osamu, Chiba Tetsuya and others paid particular attention to angle of vision. By presenting a scene from a particular angle, the skillful comic-­book writer can position the reader so that she or he sees events from a certain perspective: from the viewpoint, say, of a child or a fighter pilot, or (as in the case of Nakazawa Keiji’s depictions of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima) from several points of view simultaneously. In this way the comic, even more than the museum, the novel or perhaps even the mainstream movie, has the capacity to define the collective ‘we’ of the viewing audience.6 This multi-­angle layout helps reveal the space of appearance in which manga artists are not only authors who represents multiple points of view in a visual discourse, but also engage with those viewpoints through their own agency as the protagonist. In other words, the manga artist is in a dialogue with the characters in his manga via a Bakhtinian sense of discourse such that: ‘to a certain extent he even polemicizes with this language, argues with it, agrees with it (although with conditions), interrogates it, eavesdrops on it, but also ridicules it, parodically exaggerates it.’7 By engaging the dialogue from which the protagonists’ characters develop through the story, the manga artists reveal the underlying social and political constitution of the common public space at the time.

Precedents of Kokoro in literature and social science research In literature, the writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1926) contextualised kokoro over a century ago, when Japan was undergoing a historical transformation that brought an end to feudal society and triggered the emergence of a modern nation via a Westernised model of a representative government. The trajectory of his life displaced him from his birthplace in Greece via Ireland, France and England to the United States, where he worked as a journalist, and finally led him to Japan as a newspaper correspondent in 1890. This is where he eventually became naturalised as a Japanese citizen by adopting the name Koizumi Yakumo. Hearn

Kokoro   247 cultivated an acute sensibility and insight into the inner lives of the Japanese people that he discussed in his book Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1972 [1896]). In this book, Hearn wrote that kokoro, which he translates as the ‘ “Soul,” … means an almost infinite combination of both good and bad tendencies, – a combination doomed to disintegration not only by the very fact of its being a compound, but also by the eternal law of spiritual progress.’8 Hearn describes the qualities of kokoro using the theory of evolutionary biology that was in vogue at the time. He cites, for example, Thomas Henry Huxley, who was a proponent of evolutionary biology and the author of Evolution and Ethics (1893) to scientifically support the idea of the soul’s transmigration through disintegration to renew itself in new and different forms. Hearn’s book Kokoro was published four years before the Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki visited London and almost twenty years before Soseki wrote his novel Kokoro (1914). In Soseki’s literary rendition, the emotional and psychological dynamics of kokoro are vividly described, primarily through the interactions between the male narrator and a person whom he calls sensei or ‘teacher’. The narrator, who is younger and less experienced than the sensei, is curious about sensei’s thoughts, such as, why sensei believes that love is a crime, or that everybody is good on average but they suddenly become evil.9 The narrator prods sensei to explain his thoughts, but sensei is hesitant to answer because they carry his anger and guilt from the past that he is unable to let go of. Towards the end of the book, the narrator learns that sensei has been mourning the death of a friend after reading sensei’s memoir that was sent to him before sensei commits suicide. The narrator also learns from this memoir that sensei was troubled by a contradiction in his own sense of kokoro. While he felt cheated by his relatives out of his parents’ inheritance, he also cheated his friend from pursuing a girl whom they were mutually attracted to by asking for the girl’s hand. A century after Hearn’s observations and Natsume’s description of kokoro, anthropologists have studied the concept of kokoro as a distinctly Japanese inner life delineating the ‘heart, sentiment, spirit, will, or mind’ (Takie Lebra), or ‘the heart, seat of feeling and thought’ (Dorinne Kondo).10 The anthropologist Takie Lebra suggests that there are three dimensions to the self in Japanese culture, which include: the interactional or ‘outer’ self, the ‘inner’ self, and the boundless or ‘transcendental’ self. Based on this schema of the self, kokoro is ‘the center of inner self-­grounding the outer self that dynamically shifts in relation to the social context and even the transcendental self by recognizing that kokoro is subject to universal laws’.11 Lebra writes: ‘It is the inner self that provides a fixed core of self-­identity and subjectivity, and forms a potential basis of autonomy from the ever-­insatiable demands from the social world’.12 One of the reasons anthropologists saw kokoro as a distinctly Japanese state of interiority is due to the challenge that it posed to the Cartesian epistemology of self-­knowledge that informs Western medicine, which understood the mind as a separate entity from the physical body. Medical anthropologist John Traphagan states that ‘rather than representing a distinct mind, in the Cartesian sense of the

248   Yuka Hasegawa concept, kokoro represents a broad category of psychosomatic unity’.13 In his research on the Japanese cultural category boke, a social-­physical-emotional condition that includes early symptoms of dementia prior to the development of Alzheimer’s Disease or other medical conditions, Traphagan states that ‘the emotion, thinking, and memory-­related indications of boke are connected to the idea of kokoro, a rather diffuse concept that is difficult to translate directly into English’.14 He explains that Japanese speakers have a greater sensitivity towards boke symptoms because the concept of kokoro relates the psychological and somatic aspects of a person, which are evident in the plethora of Japanese expressions such as ‘mune ga ippai’ (‘chest is full’) to express heightened sense of emotions such as joy or sorrow and ‘hara wo tateru’ (‘gut is stirred’) to express anger. According to the anthropologist Dorinne Kondo, the psychosomatic unity of kokoro is what makes the so-­called ‘Japanese self ’ contradistinctive to what she calls the ‘Whole Subject’, a fixed personal identity synonymous to the idea of the Western individual whose selfhood is generally understood as ‘a bounded essence containing inner, true feeling’.15 The Western self is an entity separated from the world, represented by the disciplinary boundary between ‘psychology’ and ‘sociology’. Nevertheless, Kondo debunks the idea of the Whole Subject by arguing that, even within the anthropological literature of ‘the self ’, there is a distinction that is often made between ‘a “person” – that is, human beings as bearers of social roles, on the one hand, and “self ” – a kind of inner, reflective psychological essence, on the other’.16

Illustrating distortion through the traitor discourse Contrary to these previous studies that either describe or highlight the significance of kokoro and ultimately created the basis for the emergence of nihonjinron or the discourse of Japanese uniqueness, we may position kokoro as an epistemology of self-­knowledge.17 Doing so will allow us to decouple kokoro from the following two conditions that structured Japan’s post-­war period: first, from the historical context that situates Japan under the nuclear umbrella of the United States after losing the war; and second, from the discourse of national security in which kokoro is reified as the ‘peace clause’ or Article 9 of the post-­ war constitution. This task finds its urgency from the official proposal made by the Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō in 2017 to amend the Constitution of Japan. He did so by drawing on the national security discourse, arguing that Japan should assume a ‘normal’ international military role by expanding the role of the Self-­Defense Force to include collective self-­defense overseas so that Japan may ‘finally bring to a close the “postwar period” and constraints on Japan’s sovereignty and national dignity’.18 While the national security discourse puts forth the state’s claim to political legitimacy in what some political scientists call a G-­Zero world that suggests a vacuum in global governance with the decline of American hegemony in Asia, it effectively dismisses the notion of kokoro that historically motivated civic groups and individual actors including

Kokoro   249 the manga artists to produce literary and artistic works that aim to end the ‘post-­ war period’ based on their own visions of sovereignty and dignity.19 The current Constitution of Japan was devised by the Japanese government in 1947 under the supervision of General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), who headed the Allied Forces which occupied Japan from 1945 until 1952.20 There were several conditions to Japan’s surrender at the war’s end, which included the Declaration of Humanity that brought the Emperor of Japan to renounce his status as a living god. The constitution was meant to introduce a democratic civil society in place of the Emperor’s divine lineage that supported Japan’s symbolic order. However, SCAP decided to retain the imperial institution after discussing its fate with members of Japan’s Supreme Council for the Direction of the War. This helped to establish what historian Igarashi Yoshikuni calls the ‘foundational narrative’ of post-­ war Japan, which suggests that Japan’s freedom and democracy was brought upon by ‘the bomb and the conclusion of the conflict through the figure of the emperor’.21 In other words, Igarashi points out that Japan’s foundational narrative is forged through the complicity of two ‘benevolent’ acts: first, Shōwa Emperor Hirohito’s Declaration of Humanity that demonstrated his ‘benevolent’ kokoro to the people through his acceptance of surrender; and second, United States President Harry Truman’s rationale for dropping the two atomic bombs as a ‘benevolent weapon that ultimately saved millions of lives’.22 This foundational narrative is encoded in Article 9 or the ‘peace clause’ of the Constitution that declares the Renunciation of War: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.23 The Article 9 was initially incorporated into the constitution as ‘one of the three nonnegotiable demands imposed on the Japanese by General Douglas MacArthur’.24 It enjoyed the support of Japanese politicians throughout the post-­ war years because it was seen as beneficial from a national security standpoint. Pragmatists found it effective to rely on the United States military to safeguard Japan’s geopolitical territory, while the pacifists wanted to recover its international reputation by redefining post-­war Japan as a ‘peace nation’.25 However, the post-­war constitution hailed as a ‘document of freedom and democracy’ and heroically delivered by SCAP as ‘a path to conversion’ in an effort to ‘save Japan’ did less to install a democratic civil society than it did to legitimise the US–Japan Security Treaty.26 Instead of paving the way for ‘freedom and democracy’, the post-­war constitution helped ‘avoid direct participation in politics by the people’ as a constitution bestowed from above.27 It also maintained the pre-­war bureaucracy to carry out policy administration

250   Yuka Hasegawa through the law ‘for the sake of citizenry’ rather than by the law based on a ‘participation of citizenry’.28 As a result, the post-­war constitution that encoded the ‘benevolent’ kokoro of Emperor Hirohito and President Truman helped maintain the pre-­war bureaucrats to oversee and administer national industrial policies in alignment with the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty. Johnson claims that many Japanese bureaucrats during the post-­war period were thus able to hold ‘the highest levels of government control over the economy ever encountered in modern Japan before or since’ by manipulating the discrepancy between the constitutional and the actual locus of sovereignty.29 The literary critic Kato Norihiro (2005) refers to this state of affairs as nejire or ‘distortion’.30 In the three manga Barefoot Gen, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths and Message to Adolf, the artists problematise this distortion in the post-­war Japanese political system that supports the constitutional sovereignty of the Japanese citizens by paradoxically enhancing the power of pre-­war bureaucracy. One of the striking ways in which these manga foreground this distortion is by introducing a protagonist who unintentionally become traitors to the Japanese nation. For example, Barefoot Gen tells a story about the life of the boy Nakaoka Gen and his family who lived in Hiroshima city, Japan, when the Allied Forces dropped the atomic bomb on 6 August 1945. In this story, Gen’s father is one of the very few people who publicly oppose Japan’s involvement in the war, which instigates constant violence and oppression from the authorities and neighbours, who call the Nakaoka family ‘traitors’ (hikokumin). In Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, the Japanese soldiers of the Baien infantry unit serving in the campaign of Baien, Papua New Guinea, end up becoming ‘traitors’ for having survived the battle in which they were ordered to die in a suicide attack. The soldiers unintentionally became traitors partly as a result of helping to carry their injured lieutenant colonel away from the battlefront and partly from their desire to eat a full belly before they re-­entered the war on their suicide mission. Similarly, the main protagonist Tōge Sōhei in Message to Adolf is a former journalist whom Tezuka depicts as the writer of a story about the three men whose names are all Adolf. Like Gen and the soldiers of the Baien campaign, Tōge also becomes a ‘traitor’, watched and tortured by the Japanese police as well as spies for possessing a confidential document that is of an international significance. Ironically, however, his possession of the document also enables Tōge to remain alive as a fugitive until the end of the war, when he decides to write about the three Adolfs that shaped the history in which his life had become entangled.

Kokoro as a civic epistemology of self-­knowledge In all three stories, the manga artists show the protagonists overcoming life-­ threatening conditions of the war including their social and political exclusion as ‘traitors’ to the nation by revealing, reflecting and problematising kokoro as a kind of civic epistemology or ‘the institutionalized practices by which members of a given society test and deploy knowledge claims used as a basis for making collective choices’.31 Unlike the national security discourse that appropriates the

Kokoro   251 Japanese constitution as an instrument of governance, these manga critique the distortion in the Japanese political system by showing the protagonists engaging in a dialogue with the communal sense of kokoro that guides their process of subjectivisation. According to the social theorist Jacques Rancière (1992), subjectivisation is a coming into being as members of a socio-­political category such as a citizen or a human being, but also as the subjects of radical democratic politics.32 Through the protagonist’s subjectivisation, the manga artists consider how the common people might see themselves as agents shaping their political history through their everyday lives. The approaches and techniques that Nakazawa, Mizuki and Tezuka use to illustrate and articulate kokoro as part of the protagonists’ subjectivisation vary. However, they resonate with Hannah Arendt’s philosophical notions of the vita activa and vita contemplativa as well as Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of history to illustrate kokoro as epistemologies of the self. For example, Nakazawa powerfully illustrates his characters’ kokoro in vita activa or the activities of work, labour and action by depicting Gen helping his mother through hunger, sickness and their shared agony of losing family members after having barely survived the atomic bomb themselves. In doing so, he constructs a visual narrative about ‘the most intense feeling we know of, intense to the point of blotting out all other experiences, namely, the experience of great bodily pain’ which, according to Arendt, ‘is at the same time the most private and least communicable of all’.33 Mizuki’s work also represents the kokoro but in the mode of vita contemplativa or inner reflections and thoughts. Arendt maintains that in vita contemplativa, the mind is not severed from one’s body and sense perceptions. Instead, there is a close connection between thoughts and emotions, a defining feature of the kokoro, by asserting that ‘inner’ psychic experiences cannot exist without the mediation of thought that interprets those experiences.34 Mizuki’s illustrations of kokoro reveal the soldiers’ vita contemplativa by foregrounding their thoughts against the background of their mundane lives that are about to perish. For Tezuka, the kokoro is not a feeling or a thought to be revealed as much as it is a paradox that unfolds the political drama in which the protagonist Tōge becomes involved. Tezuka, like Nakazawa and Mizuki, codifies the kokoro-­in-action by assuming the task of the manga artist, but he also represents the movement of kokoro as a historian who mimes ‘the interpretive gestures by which those who make history attempt to understand themselves and their world’.35

Barefoot Gen: the vita activa of kokoro Arendt makes the distinction between work and labour by stating that:  unlike working, whose end has come when the object is finished, ready to be added to the common world of things, laboring always moves in the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism and the end of its ‘toil and trouble’ comes only with the death of this organism.36 

252   Yuka Hasegawa Barefoot Gen is first and foremost a visual discourse that shows, through Gen, the will to labour in order to sustain the biological lives of his family and friends that the nuclear bomb and its subsequent radiation ruthlessly consumes. Examples of this are everywhere in the story, but perhaps one of the most striking example is the scene where the atomic bomb detonates. Although everybody is close to dying, victims are still walking to find some water to cool off their bodies, looking for food to sustain their hunger or searching for their lost family members to be reconnected with them again. Yet, Barefoot Gen also shows its readers how the vita activa moves the victims of the atomic bomb out of the continuous state of labouring through action. Nakazawa emphasises how the act of witnessing and testifying helps these people who have been affected by the bomb to disclose something about their objective reality while shaping their subjectivity as a hibakusha, a term that literally means ‘bomb-­affected-people’ and refers specifically to the survivors of the atomic bomb. For example, the artist Seiji, who is introduced in the third volume of Barefoot Gen, has become disfigured from the bombing. He suffers from constant itchiness and pain from the maggots that crawl underneath his burnt skin and the flies that hatched from the maggots annoyingly buzz around him at all times. Gen meets Seiji when Seiji’s well-­to-do family employs Gen to take care of him. Abandoned by his family, Seiji feels as if he has died a social and symbolic death that is confirmed every time he sees his disfigured self reflected in the horrifying look of his parents’ and siblings’ eyes. Seiji’s inner death is also mirrored in the terrifying landscape of dead bodies scattered out in the streets where Seiji musters his courage not to avert his eyes and to paint the landscape instead (see Figure 13.1). Many hibakusha writers have documented similar experiences where they wrestled to articulate their subjectivity not only because they had to overcome their trauma that violated their entire sense of being but also because there were no other experiences like it that they could compare it to.37 Unlike hibakusha literature, the manga’s multi-­angle layout allows Nakazawa to show the paradoxical perspectives that contributed to producing a hibakusha subjectivity. For example, Nakazwa shows in Figure 13.1 how Seiji’s determination to ‘draw the suffering face of every one of these people’ emerged alongside the development of his own self-­awareness that ‘I-­I’ll be one of them myself, soon enough …’ These pages display how the artist’s kokoro in a state of awe, fear, anguish and anger resorts to graphic art as a means to document extreme political demonstration. We might describe the artist’s vita activa as an activity that opens a space from which the hibakusha writers and artists like Nakazawa are able to engage in political action. Seiji’s disjointed behaviour expresses the ambiguity of kokoro that goes back and forth between his eagerness to see on the one hand and the frustration with his inability to draw on the other hand. Such images delineate the limits from which the hibakusha perceive their own death as they also keep their death at bay. Through articulating the vita activa of kokoro as a coherent visual narrative, Barefoot Gen produces a hibakusha subjectivity that

Kokoro   253

Figure 13.1a and 13.1b Keiji Nakazawa, Barefoot Gen, Vol. 3 ‘Life After the Bomb’. Translated by Project Gen (San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2005), 114 (left panel), 115 (right panel). Source: © Nakazawa Misayo.

lends the manga its epistemic autonomy, which reflects Nakazawa’s knowledge of himself as a hibakusha.

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths: the vita contemplativa of kokoro Unlike Barefoot Gen, where the notion of kokoro is largely expressed through the physical action of labour and work, kokoro in Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is illustrated as an object of reflection as the soldiers’ thoughts and memories. For example, the soldiers in the Baien campaign are often depicted away from the actions in the battlefield, engaging in mundane tasks such as searching for food, building shelter and dodging their enemies, while their superiors scold them for not attending to their tasks well enough. Arendt states in The Life of the Mind that ‘Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is, is meant to be perceived by somebody’.38 This statement is instructive for understanding why Mizuki chose to focus on the

254   Yuka Hasegawa s­ oldiers’ mundane tasks and conversations in a manga that is also Mizuki’s semi-­autobiographical story. In other words, Mizuki used the manga medium to reveal the vita contemplativa of the soldiers’ kokoro and create an audience for the soldiers who had internalised the distortions of war as a paradox of life that can only be resolved through suicide. This semi-­autobiographical story can therefore be read as an atonement for those who died on the battlefield, but in ways that were not always noble in their causes. For example, in the manga, Mizuki describes a scene where a private second-­class soldier Nakamoto dies, in a banal and unheroic manner, by chocking on the fish he had hoped to eat. By depicting these scenes with a delicate balance of humour and tragedy, Mizuki focuses his story not on the war as such but on the soldiers who constructed and shared their reality in a space one step removed from the heroic battles at the frontlines of the war. This balance allows Mizuki to foreground the precarious world of appearance in the here-­and-now that ironically receives its semantic richness under the threat of dying a meaningless and inconsequential death. Mizuki makes this explicit through the scene where the second lieutenants Kitazaki and Yamagishi accede to commit suicide for having survived their superiors’ order to die in a suicide attack. The two men say farewell to their units and sit contemplating about their lives on the beach before they make their final exit. Kitazaki asks Yamagishi: ‘What the hell was that suicide charge for? What are we killing ourselves for?’ To these questions, Yamazaki tells Kitazaki to shut up and says: ‘No matter how much we kick and scream, there’s nothing we can do about it now. This is our destiny, no doubt about it’ (see Figure 13.2). Mizuki writes that this semi-­autobiographical story was driven by his rage that he describes as being animated by the ghosts of fallen soldiers: ‘Whenever I write a story about the war, I can’t help the blind rage that surges up in me. My guess is, this anger is inspired by the ghosts of all those fallen soldiers’.39 Mizuki’s rage compelled him to reveal the soldiers’ vita contemplativa in which he also participated. Thus, for Mizuki, losing his friends in the battlefield opened a space to write a semi-­autobiographical story that portrays the soldiers reflecting and exchanging their kokoro as part of his memory. Mizuki makes this point clear in the Question and Answer section, where he states that the task of turning perishable fragments of memory into documented history was what compelled him to produce his work: ‘I’ve drawn a variety of war manga, but with Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, what prompted me was the feeling that I wanted to leave a record of this significant event.’40 These statements demonstrate that it is not Mizuki’s personal quest for truth and/or his professional faithfulness to history that lend his work its epistemic autonomy, but his act of writing that turned his loss into a commemorative story about those soldiers who anonymously died in the war. This is clearly represented in the last frame of Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths where Murayama, a private second-­class infantryman from the Baien campaign, dies as he utters his last words: ‘Aaa … Guess everyone died feeling like this. With no one watching. No one to tell … just ­slipping away, forgotten’ (see Figure 13.3).

Kokoro   255

Figure 13.2a and 13.2b Shigeru Mizuki, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. Translated by Frederik L. Schodt (Montreal: Dawn and Quarterly, 2015 [2011]), 321 (left panel), 322 (right panel). Source: © MizukiPro.

Message to Adolf: problematising kokoro While Tezuka experienced the war, he takes a third person approach in Message to Adolf by introducing the protagonist Tōge as the storyteller. The manga begins by showing Tōge in the later stages of his life, standing at a graveyard with the caption: ‘This is the story of three men named Adolf. They each followed a different course in their lives …’ This opening introduces the readers to Tōge and the story of his life, which the manga traces through its dynamic twists and turns. As a fugitive who comes to possess information that is of an international importance, Tōge cannot remain in the same place for too long. He starts out working as a reporter, but soon becomes a day laborer in the poorest quarters of Kobe city as the focal point of the story. During this time, Tōge is approached by an American spy who offers 150,000 Japanese yen (approximately US$4.5 million in today’s value) in exchange for the secret documents he possesses. Later, he marries and becomes the co-­owner of a German restaurant in a distinguished part of Kobe city. After losing his wife in the war, however, Tōge travels the world to write the story Message to Adolf by contacting Adolf Kamil and Adolf Kaufmann who were involved in the sequence of events spurred by the confidential information that was in Tōge’s possession.

256   Yuka Hasegawa

Figure 13.3a and 13.3b Shigeru Mizuki, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. Translated by Frederik L. Schodt (Montreal: Dawn and Quarterly, 2015 [2011]), 358 (left panel), 359 (right panel). Source: © MizukiPro.

Adolf Kamil was born in Japan to parents who are both Ashkenazi Jews from Germany and run a bakery in Kobe city. Adolf Kaufmann was also born in Japan by a Japanese mother and a German father who is the German ambassador to Japan. Adolf Kamil and Adolf Kaufmann are best friends as children, but their backgrounds could not be any different. Adolf Kamil has blond hair and blue eyes, but he considers himself to be Japanese as much as a Jew who is assimilated to the country where he lives. Adolf Kaufmann is raised as a German even though he is half Japanese and becomes more ideologically captivated by fascism after he enters the Adolf Hitler School in Germany where he is trained to become a future Nazi party leader. From then on, the lives of Nazi-­German Adolf Kaufmann and the Jewish-­Japanese Adolf Kamil intertwine as they drift apart. Adolf Kaufmann falls in love with a Chinese Jewish girl Eliza Gerd Hymer in Germany from where he secretly helps her to escape by arranging for her to board a ship to Japan. Adolf Kaufmann asks for the help of Adolf Kamil to look after her once she arrives but finds out when he returns to Japan that Eliza and Adolf Kamil are engaged. This triggers the rage of Adolf Kaufmann, who rapes Eliza and destroys his friendship with Adolf Kamil.

Kokoro   257 Tezuka’s story Message to Adolf problematises the kokoro through the figures of Adolf Kamil and Adolf Kaufmann, whose lives interweave against the demonic figure of the real Adolf Hitler. Through the three Adolfs, Tezuka shows how the dichotomies we often use to interpret our experiences of the world, such as good and evil, self and other, love and hate, do not have a clearly demarcated boundary within ourselves and that this boundary can be reversed in a single person depending on the contingent forces of socio-­historical circumstances and political events. Adolf Kaufmann is portrayed as the villain in the major part of the story, but the readers also learn that he has been a victim of Nazi fascism by killing thousands of Jews that torment him even as he moves up the ladder to become a lieutenant. In one scene where Adolf Kaufmann boards a submarine that takes him to Japan, we see how Kaufmann sees the ghosts of all the Jewish people he has killed including Adolf Kamil’s father. Later, when Kaufmann learns that Adolf Hitler has died and that the Nazi party surrendered to the Allied Forces, he bursts into a hysterical laughter and cries: ‘Just what have I been playing all this time? Adolf Kaufmann the clown!! In the act of his lifetime as a sorry, gullible bafoon! Hee hee …’ This scene is also drawn using a technique that the manga critic Takeuchi Osamu calls dōitsu-ka gihō or ‘identification technique’ that allows the reader to identify with the protagonist’s point of view.41 This technique allows the

Figure 13.4a and 13.4b Osamu Tezuka, Message to Adolf, Vol. 2. Translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian (New York: Vertical, 2012). Kindle edition. Source: © Tezuka Productions.

258   Yuka Hasegawa readers to identify with Tōge’s gaze that lays upon Adolf Kaufmann’s expressive self-­consciousness, which reveals a complex mixture of defeat, self-­ mockery, anguish, irony and shame. The readers watch as Tōge sees Kaufmann’s self-­pity on display as he laughs, extending his arms theatrically, then crying with his head against the pole. The readers are able to witness how Tōge sees Kaufmann’s past unravel before him and forces him to reflect on his misdeeds: ‘Just what have I been playing all this time?’ These frames are laid out in a multi-­angled format to enable the readers see Kaufmann through the eyes of Tōge and the Japanese military police that Kaufmann brought to search for the classified document. They help the readers assume Tōge’s point of view to witness Kaufmann’s kokoro that moves between the self-­mocking present on the one hand and the tormenting memories of his past actions on the other hand. Towards the end of Message to Adolf, the readers are also introduced to Adolf Kamil’s not-­so-innocent side when he moves to Israel in the Jewish movement to seize Palestinian land where they establish their independent state in 1947. Adolf Kamil has become an Israeli soldier killing countless numbers of Arabs while Adolf Kaufmann has been recruited to fight among the Palestinians and he also marries an Arab woman with whom he has a child. Via an ironical twist in the narrative, Adolf Kamil kills Adolf Kaufmann’s wife and child, who are among the other Arabs attacked in a village. In response, Adolf Kaufmann distributes a flyer titled ‘message to Adolf ’ that calls Adolf Kamil to a duel after he learns about the death of his wife and child. This message, which is also the title of Tōge’s story and Tezuka’s manga, allows Tezuka to relate the dialectic movement of kokoro expressed through the interactions between Kaufmann and Kamil with Tōge’s memory, which in turn elevates Tezuka’s manga into a discourse of international history. Thus, the manga Message to Adolf becomes Tezuka’s message on the problem of evil that Adolf Hitler represents but also more broadly the global abominations of racism, ultranationalism and cultural imperialism. As shown through Adolf Kaufmann’s reflective monologue below, the message does not oppose or accept evil nor does it even address the subject of evil explicitly. However, it turns the address inwards by framing the problem as a question of justice:  Just what the hell has my life been about? Aiding ‘justice’ in this or that country … I ended up losing everything. Parents, friendship … even my own self … I must be a fool. But it must be because fools are so plentiful that countries can brandish that ‘justice’.42

Conclusion Through their respective stories, the manga artists Nakazawa, Mizuki and Tezuka show the politicised subjectivities of their protagonists in ways that also critique the distortion in the post-­war Japanese political system. For example, in Barefoot Gen, Nakazawa illustrates the vita activa of the kokoro of ordinary

Kokoro   259

Figure 13.5a and 13.5b Osamu Tezuka, Message to Adolf, Vol. 2. Translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian (New York: Vertical, 2012). Kindle edition. Source: © Tezuka Productions.

townsfolk to show how the people survived after the atomic bomb was dropped upon the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nakazawa’s critique is voiced strongly through the artist Seiji who, as Nakazawa’s double, struggles to draw the hibakusha, who are ‘turned into monsters and tossed away like old rags’.43 In Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, the vita contemplativa of the soldiers’ kokoro is revealed through Mizuki’s illustrations of the soldier’s mundane activities and conversations on the battlefield. In this way, Mizuki critiques the war and particularly the Imperial army’s command that drove its own soldiers to die in a senseless suicide attack, while commemorating the lives of those fallen soldiers. Finally, in Message to Adolf, the notion of kokoro is problematised through the figures of Adolf Kamil and Adolf Kaufmann whose friendship is affected by Nazi ideology and the anti-­Semitic sentiments that it endorsed. By showing the dialectic engagements of the figures Kaufmann and Kamil, Tezuka questions whether multivalent subject positions can ever achieve ‘justice’ in not only interpersonal relationships but also collectively in international relations. In this respect, the manga Barefoot Gen, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths and Message to Adolf do more than simply tell a story about the war. Their multi-­lingual translations notwithstanding, they help codify and constitute a political subjectivity in our world of appearance that enables their readers from

260   Yuka Hasegawa different national, cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds to think, speak and share their sentiments about the war in the present. This capacity of the manga in general to reveal its characters’ inner worlds through graphic art is powerful for they help the readers to perceive how thoughts and sentiments are translated into action to construct a commonsense reality. However, these three manga are particularly significant as semi-­autobiographical stories that represent the manga artists’ epistemologies of self-­knowledge. In other words, these artists are not simply telling a story about the war but they are also revealing the conversations the artists have had with themselves, disguised as the protagonist as much as with those whom the artists have shared their lives. The multi-­angled layout of the manga helps the readers to visualise how these conversations produce a space of appearance in which each figure’s positionality becomes determined in relation to one another. As a result, these semi-­autobiographical stories show how the artistic medium of manga helped the artists to arrive at their self-­ knowledge as a hibakusha, a veteran or a historian just as their artistic and storytelling skills assisted in establishing their careers as manga artists. Finally, the above-­mentioned manga indicate that Nakazawa, Mizuki and Tezuka envision a ‘post-­war period’ that diverges from the one posited by Prime Minister Abe, who contrives to expand the role of Japan’s Self-­Defense Force by amending the post-­war constitution. Manga that describe protagonists as being unfairly treated as a ‘traitor’ yet are still able to overcome various obstacles in their lives, reimagine a post-­war where national sovereignty and dignity is achieved not by a constitutional amendment but through the agency and political participation of its subjects. In other words, their manga envisions a post-­ war period in which citizens actively contribute to making their own civil society rather than passively becoming beneficiaries of the ‘benevolent’ protection from those who are in positions of power. Moreover, they promote vita activa, vita contemplativa, and problematise the Japanese notion of kokoro to construct a commonsense reality in which critical subjectivities, memories and histories are formed to explore the homogeneous, devoid space of the post-­war period. The post-­war period that Nakazawa, Mizuki and Tezuka envision is therefore wary of the distortion that maintains the power of Japanese bureaucrats at the expense of disempowering their own citizens, whom they are supposed to serve. Nevertheless, as Tezuka, Nakazawa and Mizuki insightfully deliberate on the epistemic autonomy of kokoro, their visions of the post-­war period do not suggest who the real heroes are or should be. Their manga rather remind us that such labels are ascribed relationally and contextually, as they are continuously negotiated by the parties involved through their subjectivity that changes dynamically, are (re)imagined dialogically, but always appear in the presence of one another.

Notes   1 Takeuchi Osamu, Sengo Manga 50 nen shi [Fifty-­Year History of Post-­War Manga] (Tokyo: Tsukuma Shobō, 1995), 19.   2 Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 249.

Kokoro   261   3 The original titles are as follows: Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen; はだしのゲン) serialised in 1973–1974 in the weekly manga Shūkan Shōnen Jump, Volumes 25–39; Mizuki Shigeru, Seinto Jyōji Misaki – Sōin Gyokusai Seyo – (Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths; セントジョージ岬 – 総員玉砕せよ–) was first published on 1 August 1973, by Shūkan Gendai Extra Edition Gekiga Gendai; and Tezuka Osamu Adorufu ni Tsugu (Message to Adolf; アドルフに告ぐ) was serialised on 6 January 1983–30 May 1985 by Shūkan Bunshu.   4 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]), 198–199.   5 Ibid., 199.   6 Tessa Morris-­Suzuki, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History (London: Verso, 2005), 183–184.   7 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds and trans.) (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 46.   8 Lafcadio Hearn, Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1972 [1896]), 235.   9 Natsume Soseki, Kokoro (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2017 [1914]), 79. 10 See Takie Lebra, ‘Self in Japanese Culture’, in Nancy Rosenberger (ed.), Japanese Sense of Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 112; and Dorinne K. Kondo, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 105. 11 Lebra, ‘Self in Japanese Culture’, 112. 12 Ibid. 13 John W. Traphagan, Taming Oblivion: Aging Bodies and the Fear of Senility in Japan (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 140. 14 Ibid., 139. 15 Kondo, Crafting Selves, 34. 16 Ibid. 17 Nihonjinron is a post-­war discourse about the supposedly ‘uniqueness’ of Japanese people that couples culturally shaped sense and sensibilities to the psychological and behavioural qualities considered to be ‘innate’ among the Japanese race. For examples of nihonjinron literature, see Nakane Chie, Japanese Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970); and Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1981[1971]). 18 Christopher Hughes, ‘Why Japan Could Revise its Constitution and What It Would Mean for Japanese Security Policy’, Orbis 50(4) (2006), 726. 19 See, for example, Ian Bremmer, Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-­Zero World (New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2012). 20 Whether the Article 9 was imposed by the SCAP and the Allied Forces or proposed by the then Japanese Prime Minister Shidehara Kijūrō (1872–1951) is debated in the popular media. For example, the manga artist Kobayashi Yoshinori (2016) known for his neo-­nationalist manga Gōmanisumu Sengen – Sensō ron [Neo Gōmanism Manifesto Special – On War] (1998) argued that the jury is still out as to whether the Article 9 was an idea coined by Shidehara, as reported by the TV Asahi news programme Hōdō Sutēshon on 25 February 2016. 21 Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 20. 22 Ibid., 22. 23 Cited from the website ‘Constitution of Japan’, maintained by the Prime Minister and His Cabinet. Online at: http://japan.kantei.go.jp/constitution_and_government_of_ japan/constitution_e.html. Accessed 7 October 2017. 24 Patrick J. Boyd and Richard J Samuels, Nine Lives? Politics of Constitutional Reform in Japan (Washington, DC: East-­West Center, 2005), 2.

262   Yuka Hasegawa 25 Ibid., 3. 26 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 34. 27 Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy 1925–1975 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982), 43. 28 Ibid., 38. 29 Ibid., 41. 30 Kato discusses his concept of the nejire throughout his book Haisen go ron [On Post-­ War Defeat], mostly through literary references such as ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, where he interprets the post-­war through its ‘split personality’; Norihiro Kato, Haisen go ron (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2005), 51–55. Although Kato does not mention Paul Ricoeur, his notion of nejire is similar to Ricoeur’s analysis of Marx’s concept of ideology as a distortion or ‘the contrast between things as they appear in ideas and as they really are, between representation and praxis’, Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), xiii–xiv. I translate nejire as ‘distortion’ here to make this connection explicit. 31 See Jasanoff, Designs on Nature, 255. My approach to epistemology is, however, different from Jasanoff ’s socially determined approach to epistemology, where she compares the politics of biotechnology in Britain, Germany, the United States and the European Union. The approach to epistemology taken here is closer to Mannheim’s ‘two directions in epistemology’, which shows the situationally determined character of kokoro but also to discuss how each work of art neutralises the multiple perspectives to rise above them by positing a new synthesis, Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1954), 269–271. 32 Jacques Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization’, in October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 58–64. 33 Arendt, The Human Condition, 50. 34 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, CA: A Harvest Book, Harcourt, 1977 [1971]), 31. 35 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 229. 36 Arendt, The Human Condition, 98. 37 See, for example, John Whittier-­Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). 38 Arendt, The Life of the Mind , 19. 39 Mizuki Shigeru, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, translated by Jocelyne Allen (Montreal, CA: Drawn & Quarterly, 2015 [2011]), 369. 40 Ibid., 370. 41 Ichirō Takeuchi, Tezuka Osamu = Sutōrī Manga no Kigen [Tezuka Osamu = The Beginning of Storytelling Manga] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2006), 97. 42 Tezuka Osamu, Message to Adolf, translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian (New York: Vertical Inc., 2012), 587. 43 Keiji Nakazawa, Barefoot Gen, translated by Project Gen (San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2005), 115.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1998 (1958). The Human Condition, 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1977 (1971). The Life of the Mind. San Diego, CA: A Harvest Book, Harcourt. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds and trans.), The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Kokoro   263 Boyd, Patrick J. and Samuels, Richard J. 2005. Nine Lives? The Politics of Constitutional Reform in Japan. Washington, DC: East-­West Center Washington. Online at: www. eastwestcenter.org/fileadmin/stored/pdfs/PS019.pdf. Accessed 1 March 2018. Bremmer, Ian. 2012. Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-­Zero World. New York: Portfolio Penguin. Chie, Nakane. 1970. Japanese Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Doi, Takeo. 1981 (1971). The Anatomy of Dependence. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Hearn, Lafcadio. 1972 (1896). Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co. Hughes, Christopher. 2006. ‘Why Japan Could Revise its Constitution and What It Would Mean for Japanese Security Policy’. Orbis 50(4): 725–744. Huxley, Henry. 1893. Evolution and Ethics. London: Macmillan and Co. Igarashi, Yoshikuni. 2000. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture 1945–1970. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jasanoff, Sheila. 2005. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Johnson, Chalmers. 1982. MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy 1925–1975. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kato, Norihiro. 2005. Haisen go ron [On Post-­War Defeat]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Kobayashi, Yoshinori. 1998. Gōmanisumu Sengen – Sensō ron [Neo Gōmanism Manifesto Special – On War]. Tokyo: Gentōsha. Kobayashi, Yoshinori. 2016. ‘Kenpō 9jyō wa Shidehara an de kakutei wa shitenai’ [‘The Jury is Still Out for Shidehara as the Inventor of Article 9’]. Kobayashi Yoshinori Blog, 26 February. Online at: https://yoshinori-­kobayashi.com/9634/. Accessed 14 June 2018. Kondo, Dorinne K. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lebra, Takie. 1992. ‘Self in Japanese Culture’. In Nancy Rosenberger (ed.), Japanese Sense of Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 105–120. Mannheim, Karl. 1954. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Mizuki, Shigeru. 2015 (2011). Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. Translated by Jocelyne Allen. Montreal, CA: Drawn & Quarterly. Morris-­Suzuki, Tessa. 2005. The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History. London: Verso. Nakazawa, Keji. 2005. Barefoot Gen: Life After the Bomb. Translated by Project Gen. San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp of San Francisco. Natsume Kinnosuke. 2017. Kokoro: Sōseki Zenshū Vol. 9. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.  Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet. 1947. The Constitution of Japan. Online at: http://japan.kantei.go.jp/constitution_and_government_of_japan/constitution_e.html. Accessed 1 March 2018. Rancière, Jacques. 1992. ‘Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization’. In October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 58–64. Ricoeur, Paul. 1983. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Soseki, Natsume. 2017 (1914). Kokoro. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Takeuchi, Ichirō. 2006. Tezuka Osamu = Sutōrī Manga no Kigen [Tezuka Osamu = The Beginning of Storytelling Manga]. Tokyo: Kōdansha.

264   Yuka Hasegawa Takeuchi, Osamu. 1995. Sengo Manga 50 nen shi [Fifty-­Year History of Post-­War Manga]. Tokyo: Tsukuma Shobō. Tezuka, Osamu. 2012. Message to Adolf. Translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian. New York: Vertical Inc. Traphagan, John W. 2000. Taming Oblivion: Aging Bodies and the Fear of Senility in Japan. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Whittier-­Treat, John. 1995. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

14 In conclusion Abenomics, Trumpism and manga Roman Rosenbaum

Given the ubiquity of the manga media, nowadays it is difficult to ignore the persuasive power of grass-­roots graphic discourses as a political force. As we have seen in the above examination of several canonical as well as popular contemporary manga, their influence – whether subtle as in Kazuto Tatsuta’s graphic memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, or brutally straightforward as in the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) politicised manga pamphlets, not to mention the indomitable propaganda of Kobayashi Yoshinori – is felt across all socio-­cultural divides. Manga nowadays also cover a plethora of issues ranging from feminism, nuclear catastrophes, the reimagining of history and religious terrorism to foster a global sense of intoxicating pop-­cultural agency. Similar to the contentious subversive influence of social media engulfed with populist discourse, the global consumer’s petulant penchant for consumption of apparently innocuous graphic art may ultimately become our hamartia. It is the raison d’être of this book to deconstruct the latent political potential of manga and argue that they are no less equal to other highly persuasive media in a world awash with rivalling soft power ideologies. The former prime minister of Japan, Tarō Asō, was well known for his love of manga and argued that embracing Japan’s ostentatiously transnational pop culture could be an important step to cultivating ties with other countries. He anticipated that manga would act as a bridge to the world and his predictions have been fairly accurate.1 He also was instrumental in the establishment of Japan’s International Manga Award with winners announced yearly from across the globe, which further enhanced the visibility of manga internationally. More recently, in 2015, President Obama thanked Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō during a White House meeting suggesting that, ‘today is also a chance for Americans, especially our young people, to say thank you for all the things we love from Japan. Like karate and karaoke. Manga and anime. And, of course, emojis.’2 The power of pop culture on the international stage has not been lost on future leaders and Abe’s incumbent government has been advancing a carefully calibrated image of a beautiful, vibrant Japan, simultaneously traditional and modern which strives to perpetuate the myth of Japan’s interstitial uniqueness in between the Western and Asian cultural hemispheres despite its precarious social reality at home. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this was Abe’s

266   Roman Rosenbaum bovarism as he appeared as Super Mario at the closing ceremony of the 2016 Rio Olympics announcing Tokyo’s turn in 2020.3 It might have looked trivial but, in reality, it was the apex of a calculated, long-­term media campaign that will project Japanese pop-­cultural influence in Asia far into the future. The choice of Mario is no coincidence as he is one of the most recognisable global, soft power, graphic avatars fighting for justice in the world for Japan as one of the best-­selling video game franchises of all time. Likewise, manga are one of the most successful cultural products that Japan has produced and disseminated the world over. Its success is testimony to a long tradition of graphic art emerging from the early tradition of Western-­inspired political cartoons, intermingled with Japan’s domestic storytelling traditions like kamishibai and akabon. Likewise, the gradual rise of manga from the merely pop-­cultural consumption realm into the pantheon of politics has undergone a long history of socio-­political development. It reflects the historical trajectory of the socio-­ political state of Japan, from the media’s early emergence as a shomin geijutsu (庶民芸術, folk art) that enabled the graphic expression of dissonant and dissident voices to be heard against the hegemony of mainstream discourses. The graphic novel social criticism of artists Shirato Sanpei, Chiba Tetsuya and Tatsumi Toshihiro steered manga out of its immature phase of ‘whimsical pictures’ into the adult world of gekiga or serious graphic novels, where it engaged with the undertones of capitalism, consumerism and neoliberal markets.4 Following the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s and in the following two decades of lost generations (ushinawareta nijūnen), a neoliberal mindset took hold in Japanese political rhetoric. During the ensuing rise of the gap-­widening social structures (kakusa shakai), the sense of precarity dramatically increased and began to undermine the employment and living conditions of the ordinary citizenry. The deterioration of Japan’s independent media began to influence our reliance on ‘truths’ supported by empirical research and, instead, society relied on alternative sources of information. Increasingly populism, fake news and neoliberal agendas generated a Zeitgeist of precarity. Despite the fact that ‘the art of the lie’ rose to prominence during Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016, ‘fake news’ and its umbilical Japanese brother datsu-­shinjitsu seiji (post-­truth politics) are by no means new phenomena, quite on the contrary, they are as American as Hollywood and Broadway, and as Japanese as Kabuki and manga.5 Nations the world over have exploited conspiracy theories to dispel national trauma ranging from Roswell, to the Moon-­landing and 9/11. Japan has an equal long traumatic history of cover-­ ups ranging from the atrocities in Manchuria, to comfort women in the Asia– Pacific conflict and the nuclear disaster cover-­up referred to as 3/11.6 Historical similarities to the ineffable post-­truth paradigm are more common than we think and come in various manifestations whose recalcitrant after-­effects drag on well into the contemporary world. Holocaust deniers, the recrudescence of fascism and the escalation of nationalism in East Asia are only a few historical parallels that feel familiar and provide evidence for the efficacy and adaptability of ‘fake news’ throughout history.

In conclusion   267 While ‘fake news’ and ‘post-­truths’ have been around a long time, albeit with different names, several studies have illustrated how cartoons and manga have been deployed to spread anti-­Japanese racism as liberally as white supremacy. John Dower has analysed the pictorials of both sides in the Asia–Pacific War and found a striking similarity in the adoption of manga for racial propaganda: As the Japanese extended their overseas imperium, even prior to Pearl Harbor, cartoonists depicted the country as an octopus grasping Asia in its tentacles. In Know Your Enemy – Japan, Frank Capra’s team enlisted animators from the Walt Disney studio to present this as a central image, with the tentacles of octopus-­Japan reaching out to plunge daggers into the hearts of neighboring lands, and groping toward the United States itself. The bucktoothed Japanese became a standard cartoon figure.7 Similarly, Shimizu Isao’s fascinating insight into the discourse of wartime manga titled Taiheiyo senso-­ki no manga (Manga of the Pacific War Period), demonstrates how, on the other side of the Pacific, the same stereotyping practices existed in Japan.8 Shimizu suggests that the reason why these manga were never made public in the post-­war period and nor were they mentioned in post-­ war publications of manga histories was because they were tainted by the stigma of having contributed to this miserable war.9 These types of wartime propaganda manga were known as yokusan (翼賛) manga, meaning literally to aid or assist the wartime effort but also with the special ‘connotation of conducting politics to assist the emperor’ (天皇を補佐して政治を行なうこと), a practice which raised unpleasant memories in the liberal climate of the post-­war period. Their other name was beiei gekimetsu manga (米英撃滅漫画) or literally ‘manga for the annihilation of Anglo-­America’. Shimizu remarks that as much as these manga are highly emotional they reveal the importance of the media as a compelling discourse since they reflect the attitudes of the shomin (庶民) or ‘ordinary citizen’ at the time and would not have been published unless they expressed the popular consensus opinions of the taishū (大衆) general public.10 For this very reason, they are a highly important resource for the investigation of the society that gave birth to these graphic images. Thus, manga, like contemporary contentious social media in the age of populism, have long been an integral vehicle in the perpetuation of pseudo-­truths, propaganda and conspiracy theories. By focusing on the innate fears of ordinary people, comics and manga likewise became vehicles for promulgating Japanese racial stereotypes as well as intensified the anxiety over fear of a Japanese invasion and colonisation of Asia. Likewise, in Japan, manga were instrumental in promoting the Japanese myth of the daitōa kyōeiken (East Asian co-­prosperity sphere) and exaggerating the threat of Western expansionism. Several studies have shown how comics, cartoons, manga and graphic art in general have played a pivotal role during major wars fought the world over. Warren Bernard’s Cartoons for Victory examines not only how cartoons ‘helped to lighten America’s mood and reflect what war time society was experiencing’,

268   Roman Rosenbaum but also ‘directly engage people into war-­related activities such as loan drives, rationing scrap drives and victory gardens’, and thus illustrates how the powerful effect of the comic industry in the United States was used at the home front to support the war effort.11 Bernard illustrates the importance of manga during the Second World War as follows: Newspapers carried political cartoons, single-­panel gag cartoons, and popular comic strips. By 1944, newspapers had a combined circulation of 45 million copies per day – about the same as in 2012, in a United States with a population more than double that of World War II’s America. With no television or internet, and radio news programs that ran only 15 minutes, the news of the war was brought into American homes mainly via the daily newspaper.12 Just as political cartoons, the funnies and comics took on the critical carnivalesque tasks of mocking and satirising during the absence of other media and thus came to play an important role in the dissemination of news in interwar societies, so the twin echo chambers of our contemporary society: popular culture and social media are intricately intertwined in a fast-­paced tango that creates our socio-­ political reality within a rapacious consumer lifestyle. In our Trumpian Zeitgeist, we find ourselves hemmed in between these two pillars of our consumer culture. Nowadays, Nietzsche’s dictum that ‘we possess art lest we perish from truth’ rings true more than ever before and all of a sudden, with the loss of reliability in ‘truths’, artworks and aesthetic experiences become equally vital to human well-­being.13 Suddenly, we can no longer rely on Keats’ ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all, ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ The truths of representational art like manga are manipulated by a cacophony of discourses competing for our attention. This realisation has also been acknowledged in Asian philosophy and the notion of whether ‘art is a political tool’ (geijutsu wa seiji no dōgu ka) has been an ambiguity at the heart of Japanese society throughout the malign post-­war period and well into the contemporary.14 All of the chapters in this collection demonstrate the surprising beguiling effect of manga on our political and cultural consciousness, which deeply affect how we think about the world. The mesmerising quality of manga is hypnotic and can make sense out of the most disparate discourses. Nowadays, history is readily rewritten, right-­wing nationalism and patriotic zeal are immanently normalised and facts we knew about the world are rendered in a new light that may lead us to question how we perceive reality. Fiction and manga are definitely stranger than facts and in our post-­truth bubble, we hardly realise the daily manipulations that surround us everywhere. It is no surprise that ever since the ascendency of Trump, terms like shinjitsugo no seiji (真実後の政治, post-­truth politics) and posuto jijitsu no seiji (ポスト事実の政治, post-­factual politics) have become popular keywords in the daily Japanese news. In this context of ever-­new corrosive counter-­political discourses, the role of modern manga vis-­à-vis social media should not be underestimated. Once again,

In conclusion   269 we can find early post-­war examples to illustrate the power of manga discourse to sway our political thought. For instance, as early as 1946, one of the first female manga artists, Machiko Hasegawa, created Sazae-­san an early post-­war heroine, who stood for millions of Japanese disadvantaged ordinary citizens rendered homeless and orphaned by the war. Sazae-­san become an avatar for dealing with the complexities of daily life in a highly affiliative family style that stood in stark contrast to the officially interwar doctrine of feminine subservience espoused by the ryōsai kenbo (良妻賢母, good wife, wise mother) dialectic. Digital manifestations of graphic art, whether caricatures, cartoons or manga, are an essential part of online platforms and thus their presence and impact is ubiquitous in today’s modern media. After ‘fake news’ became the word of the year in 2017, French language guardians sought to ban the expression all together.15 Attempting to defy a tide of populism after the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s victory in the US election, the French president Emmanuel Macron beat the far-­right Marine Le Penn to win the 2017 election, but announced that he wanted new legislation for social media platforms during election periods ‘in order to protect democracy’.16 Likewise, in Japan, Prime Minister Abe had been tormented by the mass media before and felt bullied by a scandal-­tainted Cabinet during his first term as prime minister in 2007. Returning for a second term, Abe was again haunted by the media about allegations of cronyism centring on the heavily discounted sale of public land to the operator of an ultra-­nationalist kindergarten in Osaka with links to his wife, Akie Abe.17 Following these incidence, Abe retaliated by attempting to abolish the existing Broadcast Act that protects unbiased reporting in Japan, while Conservative groups argued that deregulation was essential to stamp out fake news.18 Similar trends occurred around the world and while social media and the traditional press have been in the limelight for quite some time now, manga and graphic art have avoided close scrutiny in regards to fake news and the dissemination of political charged discourses targeting young audiences.19 Yet, just like Trump, Abe felt victimised by existing media and followed with suggestions of dismantling the right of conventional broadcasters to pave the way for internet-­based services. The implication here is that Abe sought to scrap Article 4 of the law, which urges broadcasters to keep their programmes politically neutral.20 Considered the Japanese equivalent of the now-­defunct Fairness Doctrine in the United States, this legislation required political balance in broadcasting and has now been supplanted by social media platforms. Similarly unconventional, manga like social media have been adopted increasingly to spread political messages, but have managed to stay under the radar in terms of their influence, arguably with the notorious acceptation of Kobayashi Yoshinori. Like many world leaders who have been attacked by the democratic media, Abe’s basic sentiment is ‘I don’t need traditional broadcasters anymore. All I need is the internet.’21 By the time he returned to power a second time, Abe had morphed into an active Facebook user, repeatedly complaining about the way television shows portrayed him and, as he did so, attracting sympathy from

270   Roman Rosenbaum s­ upporters online who then joined him in vilifying the media. Abe’s undermining approach basically complains about the media on social network services (SNS), and incentivises his supporters to ‘gang up on them and heap criticism together. … The same goes for Trump’.22 Domestic political pressure on Japan’s democratic media are given credence by Japan’s falling rank in the World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF ). Japan’s position has dropped steadily from eleventh place in 2010 to seventy-­second place in 2016 and 2017.23 In its latest report, RSF notes the ‘decline in media freedom in Japan since Shinzo Abe became prime minister again in December 2012’.24 Due to growing self-­censorship within the leading media groups and a system of kisha clubs (reporters’ clubs) that discriminate against freelancers and foreign reporters, journalists have difficulty serving the public interest and fulfilling their role as democracy’s watchdogs. RSF mentions several cases of harassment by nationalist groups and dismissals of investigative reporters who cover certain anti-­ government subjects.25 In addition, Abe’s proposal of the controversial Specially Designated Secrets (SDS) law was approved by the Security Council and came into force in 2014.26 It allows the government to designate defence and other sensitive information as ‘special secrets’ that are protected from public disclosure. RSF has also repeatedly raised issues concerning Fukushima, citing a ‘climate of censorship and self-­censorship’ and the lack of access to the accident site by freelance and foreign journalists. Much of this criticism mentions the left­leaning Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s five major daily newspapers. In 2014, the paper retracted parts of its past reporting on the ‘comfort women’ issue and also withdrew a major story about the Fukushima accident, leading to the resignation of the president of the company and a large drop in circulation and trust.27 In comparison to this aggressive politicised campaign against traditional broadcast media, social media and manga are largely unregulated and, akin to Trump’s usage of Twitter, the current Japanese administration has been voraciously pursuing the development of media tools designed to appeal to a younger generation and spread a positive image about itself.28 Add to this the ready availability of social platforms that utilise manga to target their audience across all social stratum and not just the intellectual elite and the result is a world wherein messages are disseminated via seductive visual graphics without critical democratic checks and balances. The resulting maelstrom of lopsided discourses devoid of alternative viewpoints can easily influence the socio-­political consciousness of the disenfranchised precariat classes, where populist discourses resonate without counter-­arguments. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Prime Minister Shinzō Abe authorised the creation of a new manga that addresses the complicated issue of constitutional revision in a way that is engaging and easy for younger readers to understand. When Abe tried to revise the constitution he developed yet another manga pamphlet to spread a kawaii political message. This political manga manifesto by Japan’s LDP tells the story of the positive impact of constitutional revision on Japan’s nuclear family and adopts the gentle

In conclusion   271

Figure 14.1 Liberal Democratic Constitutional Reform Promotion Headquarters: ‘Honobono Ikka no Kenpo Kaisei tte Nani’. Source: © Liberal Democratic Party of Japan.29

272   Roman Rosenbaum soft power of graphic art to ‘illustrate’ how Japan’s constitution was written in English by the United States in only eight days without the proper knowledge of Japanese history and culture and for the purpose of ‘rendering Japan powerless and unable to become a threat in the world again’.30 It is a surprisingly biased nationalistic reading of the need to revise Japan’s constitution, which has not been amended in over seventy years. It provides a persuasive argument because in comparison, the manga claims that the United States have amended their constitution six times, Korea nine times and Germany, with a history resembling that of Japan, a remarkable sixty times.31 The oldest member of the family, Honobono Senzō (92 years old), concludes with a soliloquy to the youngest member of the family, Honobono Shōto (two years old), that ‘continuing with a constitution provided by GHQ to defeated Japan, means that Japan will remain a defeated country forever’.32 While the need for constitutional reform is argued cogently and portrayed in a benevolent light, there is no mention of Japan’s history of aggression and expansion in the Asia–Pacific. Although developed as a manga ‘pamphlet’, this graphic political discourse finds its antecedent and metaphorical opposite in the long story-­manga of Tezuka Osamu, Japan’s manga no kamisama or ‘god of comics’. His creation of the post-­ war superhero Astro Boy quickly became an avatar for a new post-­war world of peace and the renunciation of war. Astro Boy was Tezuka’s metaphor for depicting democracy in action and the renunciation of war via Article 9 of the Japanese constitution.33 Manga in Japan are more than mere entertainment and have depicted the dominant political consciousness of the community for a long time. From Tezuka to Abe, manga lend themselves to the representation of both sides of the ideological spectrum and combine intersectional elements such as class and gender adroitly across ideological divides. That expressiveness is part of why caricatures and cartoons are also experiencing a heyday via the irrational behaviour of world leadership. The trinity of comic art: satire, irony and sarcasm are experiencing a renaissance in the world of politics, ranging from graphic collections like Doonesbury in the Time of Trump, to the vicious lampooning of Theresa May in the world press.34 Japan is somewhat more subtle and whereas commentators agree that there is little direct political humour in Japan, there are exceptions.35 When comedy duo Woman Rush Hour did the unthinkable and talked about politics on prime-­time television in December, they lamented that there are too many taboo words in Japan.36 As this collection of critical articles on the political potential of manga has demonstrated, all graphic media are a mixed blessing. They enjoy a long proud tradition that may be easily hijacked by all kinds of competing political discourses. It is a case of caveat emptor, and the reader’s responsibilities are greater and more complicated than ever. Following closely behind the ‘death of the author’ comes the inevitability of the ‘death of the reader’, who is no longer capable of discerning truths from fiction since both are entangled beyond recognition. Never have we needed our critical faculties more for reading between proverbial ad hominem lines, investigating sources and looking behind the thin veneer of chatoyant populist edifices.

In conclusion   273 In this sense, modern text like manga are echo chambers – designed to resonate with particular narrow worldviews. If we subscribe to them literally and figuratively, we may find ourselves suddenly caught in a lopsided information bubble without alternative points of view, devoid of competing discourses, which may lead us further down the rabbit hole of political radicalism. Texts are ‘hailing’ us more forcefully than ever and to escape will take all of our critical faculties and ultimately a willingness to challenge easy answers, remain compassionate and listen to the opposite point of view and always find a middle ground. To aid us in our quest to go beyond political platitudes, we have history and culture to guide us in order to cultivate a contemporary variation of the American humourist (1867–1936) Finley Peter Dunne’s famous aphorism, written in the age of ‘muckraking journalism’, that satire is supposed to ‘comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable’, while it also ‘buries the dead and roasts them afterwards’.37 Today’s intermedial texts have become highly charged and loaded with symbolism that target our innermost fears, longings and wishful thinking; to look beyond this pregnant iconicity is no easy task, but as the manga discussed in this collection attest, political representation can take many subtle forms.

Notes   1 BBC News, ‘Manga Shares Gain on Leader Hopes’, 12 September 2007.   2 Jose A. DelReal, ‘President Obama Thanks Japanese Leader for Karaoke, Emoji’, The Washington Post, 28 April 2015.   3 Taku Tamaki, ‘Japan has Turned its Culture into a Powerful Political Tool’, The Conversation, 26 April 2017.   4 Shirato’s Kamui-­den (The Legend of Kamui) plays out during the brutality of feudal Japan, and tells the story of a lower-­class ninja, who has been disowned by his clan. The series is a metaphor for Japan’s anti-­security treaty demonstrations in the 1960s and combines historical adventure with social commentary and themes of disenfranchisement that reflect Shirato’s Marxist convictions. Similarly, Chiba Tetsuya’s cult manga Ashita no Joe (1968) is set in the late 1960s, when Japanese society was transforming amidst considerable economic and social upheaval. Joe reflected the tragic working-­class hero and the struggle of the lower class. Enfant terrible Tatsumi Yoshihiro drew the grotesque underbelly of society with a humanistic graphic touch.   5 The Economist, ‘The Art of the Lie’, 10 September 2016, 11.   6 Refers to the triple catastrophe of the Great East Japan Earthquake on 7 March 2011, followed by a tsunami and the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.   7 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 84.   8 Shimizu Isao, Taiheiyō sensō-ki no manga [Manga of the Pacific War Period], (Tokyo: Bijutsu dojinshi, 1971).   9 Ibid., 1. 10 Ibid. 11 Warren Bernard, Cartoons for Victory (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2015), 16. 12 Ibid. 13 Walter Kaufmann, The Will to Power: Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), section 822.

274   Roman Rosenbaum 14 See the discussion by Mishima Yukio, Ishikawa Jun, Kawabata Yasunari and Abe Kobo and in ‘Wareware ha naze seimei wo dashita ka’, Chuō Kōron, May 2019, 210. 15 Alison Flood, ‘Fake News is “Very Real” Word of the Year for 2017’, The Guardian, 2 November 2017. 16 Angelique Chrisafis, ‘Emmanuel Macron Promises Ban on Fake News During Elections’, The Guardian, 3 January 2018. 17 Justin McCurry, ‘Japan’s Shinzo Abe Tipped to Resign in June as Cronyism Scandals Take Toll’, The Guardian, 16 April 2018. 18 Daisuke Nakai, ‘The Japanese Media in Flux: Watchdog or Fake News?’ Suntory Foundation Research Project, Reexamining Japan in Global Context Forum, 2 April 2018, 3. 19 For example, while Japan banned the possession of child sexual abuse imagery in 2014 after years of delay, disappointed campaigners took umbrage to the exception of the multibillion-­yen market in manga comics, animated films and video games, which artists called an attack on freedom of expression. See, Justin McCurry, ‘Japan Urged to Ban Manga Child Abuse Images’, The Guardian, 27 October 2015. 20 Tomohiro Osaki, ‘In Trump-­Esque Fashion, Abe on Offensive Against Japan’s Established Media’, Japan Times, 3 May 2018. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Hiroko Nakata, ‘Japan Stays 72nd on Press Freedom List But Falls to Last in G-­7’, Japan Times, 27 April 2017. 24 Reporters without Borders, ‘Tradition and Business Interests’, 2019. 25 Reporters without Borders, ‘RSF Concerned About Declining Media Freedom in Japan’, 11 April 2016. 26 Known as Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets (SDS) (特定秘密 の保護に関する法律, Tokutei Himitsu no Hogo ni kansuru Hōritsu), Act No. 108 of 2013. See Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets. Online at: www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/law/detail/?id=2543&vm=04&re=02. Accessed 19 January 2019. 27 Nakai, ‘The Japanese Media in Flux’, 2–4. 28 Ibid. 29 Liberal Democratic Constitutional Reform Promotion Headquarters, ‘The Honobono (Warm) Family Asks: What are Constitutional Revisions?’ (Tokyo: Jimintō, 2015). 30 Liberal Democratic Constitutional Reform Promotion Headquarters, ‘Honobono Ikka no Kenpo Kaisei tte Nani’ (Tokyo: Jimintō, 2015), 16. 31 Ibid., 47. 32 Ibid., 62. 33 For a detailed discussion, see Roman Rosenbaum, ‘Reading Showa History Through Manga: Astro Boy as the Avatar of Postwar Japanese Culture’, in Roman Rosenbaum (ed.), Manga and the Representation of Japanese History (New York: Routledge, 2013), 44–46. 34 See Gary B. Trudeau, #Sad!: Doonesbury in the Time of Trump (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2018). For political comics on Theresa May, see Rachael Revesz, ‘Theresa May Ridiculed by Cartoonists Across the Globe After General Election Disaster’, The Independent, 12 June 2017. 35 Eric Johnston, ‘Japan’s Political Satire Offers Comic Wordplay – But Rarely Any Offense’, Japan Times, 2 February 2015. 36 Tomohiro Osaki, ‘ “Country of Cowards”: Comedy Duo’s Political Satire Stands Out in Gun-­Shy Japan’, Japan Times, 31 January 2018. 37 ‘Muckraking’ was the forerunner of today’s ‘investigative journalism’ in the Progressive Era in the United States. See, for example, Finley Peter Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley (New York: Harper, 1902), 240.

In conclusion   275

References BBC News. 2007. ‘Manga Shares Gain on Leader Hopes’. BBC News, 12 September. Online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6991720.stm. Accessed 27 January 2019. Bernard, Warren. 2015. Cartoons for Victory. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books. Chrisafis, Angelique. 2018. ‘Emmanuel Macron Promises Ban on Fake News During Elections’. The Guardian, 3 January. Online at: www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ jan/03/emmanuel-­macron-ban-­fake-news-­french-president. Accessed 20 January 2019. DelReal, A. Jose. 2015. ‘President Obama Thanks Japanese Leader for Karaoke, Emoji’. The Washington Post, 28 April. Online at: www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-­ politics/wp/2015/04/28/president-­obama-thanks-­japanese-leader-­for-karaoke-­emojis/. Accessed 27 January 2019. Dower, John. 1987. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books. Dunne Finley, Peter. 1902. Observations by Mr. Dooley, New York: Harper. The Economist (2016) ‘Art of the Lie’. The Economist, 10 September. Flood, Alison. 2017. ‘Fake News is “Very Real” Word of the Year for 2017’. The Guardian, 2 November. Online at: www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/02/fake-­ news-is-­very-real-­word-of-­the-year-­for-2017. Accessed 27 January 2019. Hiroko Nakata. 2017. ‘Japan Stays 72nd on Press Freedom List But Falls to last in G-­7,’ in Japan Times, 27 April. Online at: www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/04/27/national/ japan-­stays-72nd-world-­press-freedom-­list-last-­g-7/#.XD_djml9i00. Accessed 16 January 2019. Johnston, Eric. 2015. ‘Japan’s Political Satire Offers Comic Wordplay – But Rarely Any Offense’. Japan Times, 2 February. Online at: www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/02/02/ reference/japans-­p olitical-satire-­o ffers-comic-­w ordplay-but-­rarely-any-­offense/#. XD7Jr2l9i00. Accessed 27 January 2019. Kaufmann, Walter. 1968. The Will to Power: Friedrich Nietzsche. New York: Vintage Books. Online at: https://archive.org/stream/FriedrichNietzscheTheWillToPower/ Friedrich%20Nietzsche%20-%20The%20Will%20to%20Power_djvu.txt. Accessed 27 January 2019. Liberal Democratic Constitutional Reform Promotion Headquarters. 2015. (自由民主党 憲法改正推進本部), ‘Honobono Ikka no Kenpo Kaisei tte Nani’, [ほのぼのの一家の 憲法改正ってなあに？; The Honobono (Warm) Family Asks: What are Constitutional Revisions?]. Tokyo: Jimintō. Online at: http://constitution.jimin.jp/pamphlet/. Accessed 19 January 2019. McCurry, Justin. 2015. ‘Japan Urged to Ban Manga Child Abuse Images’. The Guardian, 27 October. Online at: www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/27/japan-­urged-to-­banmanga-­child-abuse-­images. Accessed 16 January 2019. McCurry, Justin. 2018. ‘Japan’s Shinzo Abe Tipped to Resign in June as Cronyism Scandals Take Toll’. The Guardian, 16 April. Online at: www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ apr/16/japan-­shinzo-abe-­tipped-to-­resign-june-­cronyism-scandal. Accessed 27 January 2019. Mishima, Yukio, Ishikawa, Jun, Kawabata, Yasunari and Abe, Kobo. 2019 (1967). ‘Wareware ha naze seimei wo dashita ka: geijutus ha seiji no dōgu ka’, [われわれはな ぜ声明を出したか: 芸術は政治の道具か; Why We Have Made a Proclamation: Is Art a Political Tool?]. In Chuō Kōron May. Reprinted in Yukio Mishima to sengo [三島由紀夫と戦後; Yukio Mishima and the Post-­War]. Chuō Kōron, 210–221.

276   Roman Rosenbaum Nakai, Daisuke. 2018. ‘The Japanese Media in Flux: Watchdog or Fake News?’. Suntory Foundation Research Project, Reexamining Japan in Global Context Forum, 2 April. Online at: www.suntory.com/sfnd/jgc/forum/013/pdf/013.pdf. Accessed 16 January 2019. Osaki, Tomohiro. 2018. ‘ “Country of Cowards”: Comedy Duo’s Political Satire Stands Out in Gun-­Shy Japan’. Japan Times, 31 January. Online at: www.japantimes.co.jp/ news/2018/01/31/national/social-­issues/country-­cowards-comedy-­duos-political-­satirestands-­gun-shy-­japan/#.XE01Cml9hxB. Accessed 27 January 2019. Osaki, Tomohiro. 2018. ‘In Trump-­Esque Fashion, Abe on Offensive Against Japan’s Established Media’. Japan Times, 3 May. Online at: www.japantimes.co.jp/ news/2018/05/03/national/trump-­e sque-fashion-­abe-offensive-­japans-established-­ media/#.XDqFrml9i00. Accessed 16 January 2019. Reporters without Borders. 2016. ‘RSF Concerned About Declining Media Freedom in Japan’. 11 April. Online at: https://rsf.org/en/news/rsf-­concerned-about-­decliningmedia-­freedom-japan. Accessed 16 January 2019. Reporters without Borders. 2019. ‘Tradition and Business Interests’. Online at: https://rsf. org/en/japan. Accessed 17 January 2019. Revesz, Rachael. 2017. ‘Theresa May Ridiculed by Cartoonists Across The Globe After General Election Disaster’. The Independent, 12 June. Online at: www.independent. co.uk/news/uk/home-­n ews/theresa-­m ay-cartoonists-­e lection-martin-­r owson-jos-­ collignon-masaaki-­sato-ian-­knox-a7785991.html. Accessed 17 January 2018. Rosenbaum, Roman. 2013. ‘Reading Showa History Through Manga: Astro Boy as the Avatar of Postwar Japanese Culture’. In Roman Rosenbaum (ed.), Manga and the Representation of Japanese History. New York: Routledge. Shimizu, Isao. 1971. Taiheiyō sensō-ki no manga [Manga of the Pacific War Period]. Tokyo: Bijutsu dojinshi. Tamaki, Taku. 2017. ‘Japan has Turned its Culture into a Powerful Political Tool’. The Conversation, 26 April. Online at: http://theconversation.com/japan-­has-turned-­itsculture-­into-a-­powerful-political-­tool-72821. Accessed 27 January 2019. Trudeau, Gary B. 2018. #SAD! – Doonesbury in the Time of Trump. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel.

Index

2–2–6 Incident 205 3/11 xv, 8, 19, 183–184, 186–187, 190–192, 194–197, 223–224, 228, 232, 237, 239, 266; 3/11 disaster 244, 237, 239; post-3/11 1, 237 4-panel manga 97; 4-panel cartoon 66 9/11 266; post-9/11 237 ABCD (America, Britain, China, and Dutch) enemies 15, 38, 46, 48–49 Abe Shinzō 8, 17, 46, 75, 112, 122, 124, 136, 162, 178, 193, 203, 212, 248, 265, 270 Abenomics 1, 8, 265 adaptation 90, 103, 109–112, 115, 132, 136, 217 AIDS 47, 168 Aizawa Seishisai 87 akabon 245, 266 Akaishi Michiyo 17, 94 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke 88 alterity 87–90 alternate history 112, 114–115, 227 Amaterasu 206 American GI 16, 62, 64–65, 67, 73–74, 79 anime 17, 19, 33, 37, 65–66, 86, 90, 92, 103–115, 183, 210, 265; JSDF 121, 125–126; Gate 132, 136, 213–214, 217; Tezuka 165 Anpo 66; anti-Anpo 71, 75 anti-nuclear manga 73 Anzen shinwa (nation myth of safety and controllable nuclear energy) 190–191, 193 Aozakura: The Story of the National Defense Academy 18, 122, 126–132, 136 Arendt, Hannah 245–246, 251 Arpeggio of Blue Steel: Ars Nova 105, 126

Arrogant-ism 46, 54, 56 Article 9, 16–17, 27–28, 38–39, 65–71, 121–124, 156, 203, 272; Anti-Article 9, 15; Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan (public opinion polls) 248–249; Article 9 revision 20, 62, 75–77, 79–80, 216, 219; Article 9 Society 75 Asia–Pacific War 15, 27–28, 30–31, 33, 39–40, 104, 106–107, 112–113, 142, 147, 150–152, 267 asset price bubble 86 Astro Boy 272 atomic bombs 71–73, 151, 183, 231–232, 237, 239, 249 Attack on Titan 28–29, 31, 34, 37–40 Aum Shinrikyō 207 Azuma Hiroki 20, 203, 208–211, 219 Barack Obama 265 Barefoot Gen 1, 6, 20, 71, 143, 245, 250–253, 258–259 Battle of Midway 111 battleships 103–105, 108, 112 Black soldier 73–74 Blondie 67 Blue Impulse 125 Bose 48 Brazil 19, 164, 168–169 bubble economy 18–19, 163–165, 173, 175, 266; post-bubble economy 17 burakumin 89, 207 carnivalesque 7, 268 CCP (Communist Party of China) 50 censorship xiv, 67, 69, 71, 227–228, 237, 239–240; self-censorship 7, 9, 270 Charlie Hebdo 10–11, 141 Chernobyl 20, 191, 224, 226, 231–232, 238

278   Index chibi style 107, 110 Chim↑Pom (Real Times) 227 Christianity 17, 86–100 civic epistemology 245, 248, 250–251, 260 Collective Self-Defense 124, 248 comfort stations 50 comfort women 11, 50–51, 54–55, 76, 207, 266, 270 compensated dating (enjo kōsai) 53 concentration camps 49 Confucian 87 conservatism 90–91, 114–115 conspiracy 32–35, 37–40, 266–267 Constitution of Japan 248–249 contamination 187–188, 191–192, 224–225 Cool Japan 113 cosplay 114–115 coups d’état 15, 28, 31–32, 39–40, 205 cultural identity 173, 204–205, 219 cultural imperialism 66, 258 cultural nationalism 12, 14, 18, 162–163, 169, 172, 204, 207–208, 212–213 Dark Valley 15, 27–28, 32–33, 39–40 database 20, 203, 209–214; database element 210–211, 216–217; database nationalism 208, 216, 219–220 decontamination 224, 238 distortion 27, 147, 248, 250–251, 254, 258, 260 DMM Games 103, 105, 113 Doak, Kevin 205 dōjinshi (amateur comics) 112, 214 domesticity 18, 66–67, 69 Doraemon 4–5 Driscoll, Mark 89 ego-only individuals 53 Emperor 32, 49, 51, 54, 112, 114, 204–208, 212, 223, 249, 267; Emperor Hirohito 250; Shōwa Emperor 27 Endō Takeo 63–64, 67, 78–79 ero, guro, nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense) 57 fake news 1, 6, 8, 50, 141, 155, 167, 169–170, 191, 195, 266–267, 269 fan service 109 fascism 114, 212, 216, 228, 256–257, 266 February 26 Incident 28, 31–32, 39, 205 female agency 113 female body 106–107, 115 feminism 265

Final Fantasy 103 foundational narrative 249 freeter 89 Fubuki, Gambarimasu! 110–112 fugue state 55 fukkō (restoration) 191 Fukushima 8, 19, 20, 33, 151, 183, 186–195, 197, 223, 225, 231, 237–240, 270; Fukushima accident 224, 227, 232, 234; Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant 183–185, 265 Fullmetal Alchemist 28–29, 31, 34–38, 40 Furukawa Hideo 227 Furuya Usamaru 17, 97–99 gakushū 4–5 gameplay dynamics 104 Gandhi 48 GATE 18, 113, 122, 126, 132–136, 213–214 Gellner, Ernest 204 Gekiga (dramatic pictures) 266 Gemeinschaft 204 genbaku 19, 183, 193, 196–197; genbaku otome (Hiroshima Maiden) 150 genpatsu 19, 183, 190–191, 193–197, 223, 239 Gerow, Aaron 112 Gesellschaft 204 Gēto jietai kanochi nite, kaku tatakaeri (Gate) (anime) 213 Girls Und Panzer 105, 126 Gōmanism (Gōmanizumu) 47, 54–58 Gōmanism Sengen 16, 46 grand narrative 206–210, 212, 216, 219 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai Tōa Kyōeiken) 49, 176 Greater East Asia War 47–52, 56 Gringo 18–19, 162–165, 167, 169, 171–173, 175–178 Gunjin (military man) 206, 208, 212, 214, 218 Gyokusai (shattering of the jewel) banzai charge 51 Hakkō Ichiū (The World’s Eight Corners Beneath the Emperor’s Benign Rule) 49 Hayashi Kyōko 193, 239 Hearn, Lafcadio 246 Henmi Yō 228 Hibaku (radiation exposure) 183, 193, 232 hibakusha (nuclear victim) 143–145, 147, 193, 224, 232, 237–238, 252–253, 259–260; niji-hibakusha 152

Index   279 Hikikomori 89 Himoto Hitoshi 163, 165–168, 170–177 Hiroshima xv, 18, 71, 73, 141–147, 149–153, 155–156, 183, 218, 246, 250; and Chernobyl 231; Hiroshima Maiden 150; and Nagasaki 142, 145, 183, 193, 231, 237, 259; post-Hiroshima 156 history 1, 4–5, 16, 28–31, 33, 37, 55, 65, 79, 89, 92, 94–95, 113, 135, 142, 151–153, 156, 208–209, 218–219, 231, 239, 250–251, 254, 258, 265–266, 268, 272–273; alternate vs. real 112, 114–115, 217; of Christianity 86–87; and fate 87, 95, 109, 111–112; history textbook controversies 144; masculinist 103, 107, 115; masochistic history 37, 40, 51, 142; modern history 54, 55; national history 212–213; post-war history 17, 121–122, 124, 183, 203–205, 224; wartime history 27, 46–47 Honneth, Axel 209 humour 6–7, 56, 104, 106, 110, 254; political humour 272 Hutcheon, Linda 213 Ibasho 150–151 Ichiefu (Fukushima Daiichi genshiryoku hatsudensho rōdōki) 223 identification technique 257–258 identity xv, 17–18, 20, 52–53, 57, 88–89, 96–97, 110, 114, 163–164, 167, 170–173, 190, 203–208, 212–214, 216, 219, 247–248; collective identity 28–29, 34; minzoku identity 52–53, 205 Igarashi Yoshikuni 249 Ikezawa Natsuki 237 Imperial chrysanthemum seal/crest 20, 208, 211 Imperial Japan 38, 107, 114, 122–123, 130, 136, 155, 165, 205–208 Imperial Japanese Navy 103–104, 211–212, 218 Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) 211, 218; IJN Yamato 212 Indekkusu (A Certain Magical Index) 90–91, 94, 96, 99, 211 indie manga 97 intermediality 5 intertextual 19, 211–213, 218–219 invisibility 237, 239–240; culture of invisibility 153 Isayama Hajime 29–30, 40 Jameson, Fredric 210, 216

Japan, Ministry of Education (Monbushō) 30, 56–57, 145 Japan–America binary 106 Japanese Self Defense Forces (JSDF) 27, 122, 205; and 1964 Olympics 125; defense budget 124–125, 133–134; Iraq Reconstruction and Support Group 75, 79, 123–124; Persian Gulf minesweeping 123, 130; South Sudan deployment 130 Japaneseness 19, 88, 92, 163–164, 167, 170–171, 175 jiji manga 6, 15 josei manga 94 just war 16, 46–48, 52, 55, 72, 75–76 Jyllands-Posten 9–10, 141 Kadokawa Games 103 kakusa shakai or ‘gap-widening society’ 12, 266 Kamachi Kazuma 17 kamikaze 54, 112, 207, 219 kamikaze pilots 112, 207, 219 KanColle 103, 105, 107–110, 112–113, 115; KanColle-kai 104 Kantai korekushon (Fleet Collection) 208, 209, 211, 214 Karikare (Caricature) 56 Kariya Tetsu 186, 223 Kasutori 65 Kato Norihiro 250 kawaii 9, 103, 107, 108, 113, 270; kawaii culture 113 Kawakami Hiromi 195, 196, 227 Kimi ni Todoke 14 Kisha clubs 270 Kitazawa Rakuten xi, 6, 69 KMT 50 Kobayashi Yoshinori 27, 28 Kojève, Alexandre 208 kokka (national family) 204 Kokkashugi (statism) 205 kokoro 20, 245–255, 257–260 kokuminshugi (citizen nationalism) 205 kokutai philosophy 56, 103, 107 Kondo, Dorinne 247–248 Kōno Fumiyo xv, 18, 141, 144, 145 Kōno Yōhei 51 Konoe Fumimaro 49, 56 Kure 107 Kyōgoku Takahiko 213 Lara Croft 115 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) 15, 39, 123

280   Index Lost generation 266 Lyotard, Jean-François 208, 210 Machiko Hasegawa 269 magic 91, 92, 132, 210, 216 magical girls 216–218 manga x–xii, xiv–xvi, 1–21, 27–40, 43, 48, 51, 54, 56, 62, 65–66, 72–73, 75–76, 79–80, 86, 90, 92–94, 97, 103, 104, 106, 108–115, 121, 125–128, 130–134, 136, 141–147, 150–153, 156, 163–165, 167, 169, 171–172, 175–176, 183–185, 188–189, 190–197, 207, 210, 213–214, 223–226, 228, 230–232, 234, 237–240, 245–246, 249–255, 257–260, 265–270, 272–273; manga-ka 46, 56 manpu 228, 230, 232 Mario 8, 266 Maruyama Masao 204 Massumi, Brian 210 Matsushita Ichio 69, 70 Meiji period 107 Message to Adolf 1, 20, 173, 178, 245, 250, 255, 257–259 metaphysical foreigner 87 militaristic ideology 105–106 minzoku 52–53, 163 Minzokushugi (ethnic nationalism) 205 Mishima Yukio 32, 51, 205 Miyazawa Kiichi 51 Mizuki Shigeru 20, 28, 65, 150, 245, 251, 253–256, 258–260 moe 10, 17, 20, 108–110, 113–114, 150, 158, 209–210; moe elements (moe yōso) 209; moe-military 105, 113 moga mobo 67 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa 246 Muhammad cartoons 9–11, 141 mukanshin 13 multi-angle layout 246, 252 My Lai Massacre 72 Nakazawa Keiji 20, 65, 71, 143, 150, 245–246 Nanking Massacre 112, 207 narrative 1–6, 14, 17–20, 27–32, 34, 39–40, 46, 48, 54–55, 65, 79, 86, 87, 90, 92, 94–97, 99, 103–105, 107, 109–113, 115, 121, 142–147, 150, 152–153, 155, 156, 163, 167–168, 170, 173, 175, 178, 184, 186, 191–198, 203, 206–214, 216, 219–220, 249, 251–252, 258, 261 national community 20, 204–205, 207–208, 212–214, 216, 219

National Defense Academy of Japan 18, 122, 126, 130; hazing and discipline 129; promotional posters 103, 129, 136; refusing military service upon graduation 127 national essence 205 national identity xv, 17–18, 20, 88, 170, 203–205, 212–214, 216–217 national pride 211, 212, 218–219 nationalism 3, 89, 105, 112, 114, 171, 205, 209–210, 212–213, 215–217, 219, 258, 266, 268; cultural nationalism 12, 18, 163, 169, 172, 207; Japanese nationalism 19, 204; and resurgence 126; youth nationalism 14 Natsume Soseki 247 Nazi 17, 11, 256–257, 259; Nazi cosplay 114 NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) 89 nejire 250 neo-liberalism 89 neo-nationalism 21, 207, 208 newspaper cartoonists 15, 46 Nihonjinron 88–89, 248, 261 Nikaido Hikaru 127, 130 Nippon Kaigi 27, 29, 39, 40 North Korea xvi, 76, 123, 130, 142, 203 nuclear energy xv, 8, 47, 183, 190, 195–196 Occupation Period 47, 52, 65, 79 Ōhara Sakingo 87 Oishinbo 19, 186, 191–194, 223, 228, 230, 238 online discussion 105, 112, 280 Ono Saseo 67–68 Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths 20, 245, 250, 253–254, 255–256, 259 Orientalist 88, 91 otaku 133, 114, 213–214, 218 Ōtomo Katsuhiro 143 Ōtsuka Eiji 114 Ozawa Yuki 144 Pacific War 48, 183, 218, 267 Pan-Pan Girls 16, 62–67, 69, 71–76, 79–80 paradise 96 parody 19, 104–105, 155, 164 pastiche 211, 214, 218 peace groups 50 Pearl Harbor 219, 267 pop-culture xi, 150, 203, 213, 219 post-bubble generation 86, 99

Index   281 post-disaster literature 195–196 postmodern 20, 203–204, 208, 210–211, 213, 216, 219, 220; postmodernism 208 post-truth 1, 8, 141, 155, 197, 266–268 postwar pacifism 8 precarity 1, 3, 151, 156, 266 Pripyat Ferris wheel 233 prostitution 62, 65, 67, 71, 207 public spirit (kōkyōshin) 53–54 racism 9, 11, 57, 75, 258, 267; racist wars 49 radiation 19–20, 71, 73, 152, 183, 187–190, 192–194, 223–224, 226–228, 230–232, 234, 237, 239, 252 Rancière, Jacques 251 rating 135; R-18+rating 109 revisionist films 17, 112 right-wing 7, 11–12, 16, 39, 112, 114–115, 268; ideology 103 rising sun 76, 111 Russia 91, 113, 115, 134 Russo-Japanese War 29, 48 Saipan 51 Saitō Takao 76 Sazae san 65–66, 269 SCAP (Supreme Command Allied Powers) 52–53, 66, 249 Schodt, Frederik 6, 14 seiji manga 7 Self Defense Force (SDF) 15, 17–18, 27, 75, 121–122, 125–128, 130, 132, 136, 205, 208, 213, 248, 260 self-restraint (jishuku) 223, 237 Sensō ron (Treatise on War) 46–47, 50, 52–58 sexual politics 62–64, 75–78, 80 sexualization 210 Shimabara Rebellion 87, 94–95 Shimakaze Whirlwind Girl 110 Shimizu Isao 267 Shin gōmanism sengen (New Declaration of Arrogance) 46 Shina 50 Shinmin no Michi (The Path of the Subject) 55–57 Shinzō Abe 8, 17, 46, 75, 112, 122, 124, 136, 162, 193, 203, 212, 248, 265, 270 ship girls 104–111, 115, 211 Shiriagari Kotobuki 20, 223–240 shōjo 105–107, 110, 114, 144, 150–151; shōjo culture 113; shōjo manga 8, 14, 79, 109

shomin (ordinary citizens) 147, 267; shomin geijutsu (folk art) 266 shunga 63 Silverberg, Miriam 63 simulacra 211 soft power 2–3, 7, 265–266, 272 Soviet Union 49, 75 Space Battleship Yamato 114 space of appearance 246, 260 Street Fighter 103 Sukarno 48 Sumo 18, 164–167, 170, 175 superhero xiv, 1–3, 272 Sutoraiku witchīzu (Strike Witches— anime) 216, 218–219 Taishō 17, 88, 91 Taiwan 16 Takamura Takehito 49–50 Takamura, Hirokazu 216 Takie Lebra 247 Tarō Asō 39, 265 Tatsuta Kazuto xv, 19, 183–191, 193–195, 197, 223, 265 Tennōsei (emperor system) 205–207 TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) 187, 191, 194–195, 226 textbook revision 55 Tezuka Osamu 1, 18, 20, 65, 72–74, 145, 150, 163, 245–246, 272 time travel 94–96 Tōjō Hideki 51, 155 Tokkōtai 54 Tokugawa 17, 87, 94, 96 Tokyo Puck 6, 67 Tomb Raider 115 Toshiko Hasumi 11–12 traitor 20, 32, 248, 250, 260 translation 6, 110–111, 195, 205, 259 Traphagan, John 247–248 Trump, Donald xvi, 162–165, 175–176, 265–266, 268–270, 272 Ueno Chizuko 107 ultranationalism xv, 204, 258 United States 2, 6, 16, 18, 64, 67, 69, 71–73, 78, 80, 122, 127, 133–135, 150, 169, 175, 246, 248–249, 267–269, 272 US–Japan Security Treaty 16, 62, 72, 249 US Navy 62, 79, 106, 111 US occupation 3, 62–63, 71 Utsukushi kuni 75

282   Index Vietnam War 62, 71–72, 75, 79–80, 123 visibility 103, 130, 224, 238, 265 visual consistency 110 vita activa 245, 251–252, 258, 260 vita contemplativa 245, 251, 253–254, 259–260 war affirmation thesis (sensō kōtei ron) 48–49 war games 104 War Guilt Information Program 52–53 Western imperial domination 16, 46 Western Other 106 Wirgman, Charles 6 workshop of democracy 16, 64–65, 67, 71, 73–75, 78 World War II 46, 48–49, 57, 62–63, 65,

69, 72, 76, 80, 168, 173, 207–208, 211–212, 217–219, 224, 231, 237, 268 Yamamoto Osamu 223 Yamano Sharin xv, 7 Yamato 106–107, 111, 114–115, 211–213, 218 Yanai Takumi 18, 113, 132–133, 135–136, 213 Yasukuni Shrine 112, 130, 141 Yoshino, Kosaku 20, 204–205, 207–208, 212 Yukichi Fukuzawa 6 Yūkoku (Patriotism—novel) 205–206 Zero (aircraft) 218–219 Zipang 128