Abstract
Japanese animation has longstanding links to nationalism. For example, relatively early in its history, Jonathan Clements quotes sources suggesting that animation was used to promote the singing of Japan’s national anthem before film screenings, through a short film called Kokka Kimigayo (The National Anthem: His Majesty’s Reign, 1931) made by Ōfuna Noburo. It is ‘hence liable to have been one of the most widely seen pieces of domestic animation in the 1930s’ (Clements 2013, 47). Animation’s links to nationalism in Japan developed further during the Second World War, which marked a pivotal moment in Japanese animation production. Thomas Lamarre argues that this animation was not simply nationalistic, but that it was also racist and speciesist. Analysing Momotarō: Umi no shinpei (Momotarō’s Divine Army, Seo Mitsuyo 1945) and Tagawa Suihō’s Norakuro manga and anime Lamarre argues that ‘Speciesism is a displacement of race and racism (relations between humans as imagined in racial term) onto relations between humans and animals’ (Lamarre 2008, 76). The semi-covert depictions of differing nations as different animal species within Japan’s World War II animation subtended state discourses about enemies and a planned Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia.
Highlights
By placing Sakae at the head of the family, Summer Wars employs an obvious set of nationalist paradigms, but reworks and complicates their meanings so that they re-present the ie system as a potential challenge to patriarchal nationalism in Japan, all the while celebrating the ie system itself as a fundamentally nationalist concept, and one that – in this film at least – saves the world
Most are focused on banal reproductions of the nation that reinforce national identity in the late 2000s, at a moment of political upheaval in Japan
By returning to the traditional extended family system, with all of its nationalistic baggage, as the solution to the problem of a rampant Artificial Intelligence (AI) threatening to destroy the world, Hosoda suggests a conservative vision of Japanese culture
Summary
ISSUE 1 – Between Texts and Images: Mutual Images of Japan and Europe ISSUE 2 – Japanese Pop Cultures in Europe Today: Economic Challenges, Mediated Notions, Future Opportunities ISSUE 3 – Visuality and Fictionality of Japan and Europe in a Cross-Cultural Framework ISSUE 4 – Japan and Asia: Representations of Selfness and Otherness. Mutual Images is registered under the ISSN 2496-1868. Mutual Images uses English as a lingua franca and strives for multi-, inter- and/or trans-disciplinary perspectives. As an Open Access Journal, Mutual Images provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
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