I would bet a large part (or all of it) is that anime and cartoons and toys aren't seen as toys, as things just for children, it is normal adult interest. Much anime is very adult and dark. Other anime is war filled.
It's no different than painting pin-up girls on on your B-17. Also, btw, US Cartoons bugs, daffy, woodpecker are not uncommon nose art subjects. google "bugs bunny nose art".
Is it really? How intimate are you with Japanese culture? I am skeptical that Japanese people generally view anime with the same reverence that they view the works of Akira Kurosawa or Natsume Soseki.
My partner's parents and grandparents watch anime, read manga, and her parents definitely game way more than us (PC, iPhone, and handheld PS/Nintendo/...). It's a casual activity like reading a book or watching TV, not just for techies/geeks/nerds/etc. But to address any concerns about value to society, they do hold Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira on a pretty high pedestal. Not the same as Kurosawa, but why should that matter?
Edited to add: both her and my parents are roughly the same age and share many interests in art/media/culture. Mine are from the US and were adults by the time Pong came out; despite the explosion of media in recent years I don't think the type of content they look for is much different than it would be otherwise. South Park might be the only exception.
It is its own medium of entertainment and the content can vary wildly between different intellectual properties depending on the target audience. Pigeon-holing anime as being "for kids only" is like watching a Pixar production and saying that all American movies are "for kids only".
The difference between intended audiences is more easily observed when you look at manga (comic books, often adapted to anime if successful) rather than just the animated cartoons, since the language used in manga directly reflects the target demographic. Plenty of manga are directed at an older audience and will use harder, more complicated kanji (Chinese characters), with or without furigana (helper text in a simpler alphabet) than those directed toward children.
I visited Japan over a decade ago and it seemed like everywhere i turned there was anime and manga and adults reading it.
I stayed a couple of nights in an inn as well and there were several shelves of manga (mostly hentai) on the bookshelf in the waiting room.
Also all of my Japanese friends in America (admittedly they were in their teens) were into manga and anime.
I think its a pretty well known and accepted fact that anime and manga are popular among all age groups in Japan.
They also seem to be fine (at least more fine than midwest America) with softcore porn.
There was a lot of waste-up porn on news stands and I saw a row of Japanese men looking at more explicit porn mags in a bookstore in front of the magazine rack like it was a sunday paper -- totally nonchalant.
"normal adult interest" doesn't have to imply reverence, only general familiarity. I doubt as many Japanese people even know who Akira Kurosawa is, as know Doraemon or Gundam or Attack on Titan or whatever.
Here is a list of the top grossing films in Japan[0] - note that #1, #5, #6 and #10 are anime. Windows in Japan has official anime mascots[1,2] and Mercedes has used anime to sell cars, at least twice[3,4]. Examples abound of anime covering adult (not necessarily pornographic but that too) themes[5], and of being used as a cultural referent to market to adults[6,7].
It's not even that controversial that anime is mainstream in Japan. They put Pikachu on some of their commercial airplanes[8], ffs.
Without having heard the full talk, it sounds to me like he was using Godzilla movies as a reference point for an issue he was interested in, which is the moral and practical implications of interacting with an alien species if one were discovered.
Related (won't teach you anything very profound but you'll chuckle):
An actual commercial for the Japan Maritime Self-Defense force. An actual commercial for the US Navy. Then the same two commercials with the audio switched.
(This highly selectively picked example aside, the main recruitment messages for the JSDF are very similar to that of the armed services in the US: "Preserve the peace. Serve the nation. Learn a useful trade. Enquire within.")
> This stressful, ongoing debate fuels the seeming paradox of an “endearing” military force. In Japan, where indirect communication is highly valued, cute illustrations have long played the role of tension-breakers and mediators in situations of conflict. Thus kawaii mascots, whether miniskirted girls or bunny-rabbit decoy launchers, are both a reflection of pop-cultural trends and a way to defuse the very touchy issues surrounding the military’s undeniable presence.
Contrast this to the way [The Culture][0] dealt with their ambivalence over having to tool up to fight a full-scale war (the Idiran War). They specifically designed their warships to be ugly, and gave them ship class names reflecting the ugliness of their roles (e.g. Gangster, Torturer, Psychopath, and Thug). While depicting your weapons as kawaii is very different from depicting them as heroic/inspiring, I think the Culture's lack of euphemism is the better way to go.
This is a very good point, but I think the Japanese way might actually be better. The problem is that emphasising brutality and ugliness in the style of the Culture may over time lead to a shift in perception normalising agression, or in other words, it could shift the Overton Window towards militarism. For example, if ships were named something like "Peacekeeper" or "Ambassador" rather than "Torturer" or "Thug", it would lead to a perception of peace-keeping as their intended role.
It works in the case of the Culture because of their extraordinary degree of self-awareness and anti-militarism; no member of the Culture could possibly lack cognizance of the significance of the names, wheras we, alas, live in somewhat less enlightened times. In the Culture it serves to emphasise the ugliness of their purpose, wheras if applied in our world could be all to easily misinterpreted as unvarnished militarism.
It is interesting to note the degree of anti-militarism in Japan. Though this may be taken to an extreme in the opposition to taking part in international peacekeeping missions, at the very least it means that Japan is very unlikely to be subject to escalating influence and dominance by the military as may be permitted in other countries due to general public apathy. However, I think this also means that any attempt to emphasise the inherent ugliness the the purpose of the military would be prima facie faced with extreme opposition, no matter the intent.
> For example, if ships were named something like "Peacekeeper" or "Ambassador" rather than "Torturer" or "Thug", it would lead to a perception of peace-keeping as their intended role.
I'm reminded of Star Trek, where the Federation's focus on "peacekeeping and exploration" never stopped it from fitting even the most measly science vessels with phaser banks and maybe some photon torpedo launchers.
Keep in mind that in Star Trek, both phasers and photon torpedoes are versatile tools (the former being useful for all kinds of pinpoint-accuracy energy delivery, the latter being used for sending probes), and in general, Federation's armament is multi-purpose and not really too optimized for combat.
As well, it's got a lot of naval/old west parallels in story and setting. You'd be hard pressed to find a family venturing west in the 1800s that didn't have a few guns on hand, or a sailing ship between Europe and the Americas that didn't have an armory. There are dangers out in the wild spaces between worlds.
The Culture doesn't have quite the same aims as Japan in this scenario. The Culture reluctantly entered into open, large-scale war against the Idirans because they had incompatible morals. The Idirans were religiously-motivated conquerors whose beliefs placed their species above all others, and the Culture is all about personal freedoms. The Culture's goal in the war was to defeat an enemy their ideals could not tolerate and then stop fighting. They were not looking to permanently transition to a more military society, or have those unpleasantly named warships around longer than necessary. The Culture's people knew going into the war that it would be an ugly thing, and the sooner it was done the better.
On the other hand, Japan is not really doing much fighting at all, and their military is even called the "Self-Defense Force." They can't get rid of their military-industrial complex because they already did and what they've got now is what they were left with at the end. It makes sense for Japan to try and make their people comfortable with the idea of coexisting with the SDF, since they will in fact have to coexist with the SDF indefinitely. It's not going anywhere, and it's not really doing anything particularly ugly just sitting there.
"Gate", the anime,[1] was written by a former JSDF member and is being used for recruiting by the JSDF.[2]
It has its cute moments, but in some ways it's painfully serious. The concept is that a Roman-empire level culture with huge armies tries to invade Tokyo and conquer Japan via a magical inter-world gate in Ginza. Here's the short version.[3]
The vibe that I got off of it is that the creators really, really, really wanted to glorify the Japanese military and imperialism. Unfortunately, Japan having not been in a significant combat role for many decades, there was no actual concrete thing to reference.
So, instead, they had to fabricate a civilization so far backwards that the military could show off uncontested (hence Bronze-age tech) but which could still be portrayed as an aggressor (hence the portal and attempted invasion of Tokyo).
And that's not even touching on the weirdness of the normal harem tropes (things like a gothic lolita demigod, etc.) that interrupt an otherwise entertaining if absurdist portrait of military operations.
The funniest thing in the series is how the other countries are portrayed, especially the United States. Then again, I'd much rather watch a show about the US doing an Iraq peacekeeping mission in fantasyland than what Gate has to offer.
I watched that, and enjoyed it for the most part, but I either totally missed, or they just didn't explain, what the purpose was for the initial invasion from the other world into Japan. Do we know what that was all about? Was it purely, "Hey we've got this sweet portal thing, let's go seize whatever's on the other side"?
What I got from watching it (during one of the political discussions in a later episode) was that the initial effort, what is seen in the opening scenes, was a combination of blind land grab and attempting to experiment with a new resource. Naturally, once the invading force had awoken the wrath of the public the SDF fought.
"Or does the Japanese constitution allow for preëmptive strikes outside of domestic borders, in the manner of a traditional military?"
I found this sentence interesting -- I've been under the impression for some time that preemptive war is not necessarily a traditional doctrine, at least in America, and was introduced in the post-9/11 national security backlash era. But I don't know enough about military history to really know.
Preemptive war is a traditionally-accepted justification of war; is a subset of defensive war in which the attack it is responding to is an imminent attack (one in progress) rather than one that has completed.
What was controversial in the Bush Administration was an attempt to expand the concept of preemptive war to include what is also referred to as "preventive war", where the attack is not "imminent" as that concept had been traditionally understood, but a more distant presumed eventuality. This had been traditionally (and generally remains, despite the efforts made by that administration) viewed as a subtype of aggressive war.
("Traditionally", here, means particularly in the post-WWII, under-the-UN-Charter, world in which states are viewed to operate under a regime of international law in which resort to force, except in immediate self-defense -- possibly collective -- or as directly authorized by the Security Council is forbidden. Though this generally follows other theories of war and its legitimate justification that make similar distinctions, such as Catholic Just War doctrine.)
Historically, a lot of military action is preemptive.
Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was a preemptive move in their eyes.
Imagine how Americans would feel if Russia established a huge military base halfway between Russia and America in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Now imagine that nuclear weapons don't exist.
In that scenario, a preemptive strike might start to make sense to a lot of people in America.
That's pretty much how Japan felt about Hawaii before Pearl Harbor.
I'm not justifying Japan's attack. It was a horrible tragedy. But it's totally understandable, if not laudable.
> I found this sentence interesting -- I've been under the impression for some time that preemptive war is not necessarily a traditional doctrine, at least in America
I'm not certain what exactly 'preemptive war' is supposed to be, either than war undertaken in order to preempt a worse possibility (which would seem to be the traditional doctrine for going to war in general).
America's first war, the Quasi-War with France, could be seen as a kind of pre-emptive war in order to prevent further seizures of our ships, which was seen as worse than the war itself.
The First Barbary War was waged in order to prevent the Barbary Pirates (of Tunis, Tripoli & Algiers) from seizing & enslaving our merchant sailors. It should stand to reason that war was considered preferable to continued enslavement of American citizens.
The War of 1812, of course, was waged in response to certain British provocations whose continuation was considered worse than war.
The Second Barbary War was again waged in order to prevent the Barbary Pirates from seizing & enslaving our sailors.
I also thought that line was interesting, because, the way I look at it, Pearl Harbor was a pre-preemptive strike by the Empire of Japan. They figured our entry into WWII was imminent and decided to strike early and decisively to cripple our strength in the Pacific.
Large portion of assaults have been framed as pre-emptive throughout history. Famous example would be sack of Carthago.
Past 100 years is exception as rifles, machine guns, mines and then antitank missiles have made defense lot easier than assault. If it's lot more effective to dig in and wait, the rhetoric loses credibility. I'm oversimplifying of course.
Napoleon waged preemptive wars more than two centuries ago, most notably against Russia: that one didn't end up well for him or for France. But the concept of striking a known enemy before its army is fully prepared is probably as old as war itself.
Seeing how anime culture has permeated the military in Japan makes me wonder if anime/manga/games like Strike Witches[0], Kancolle[1], and Girls und Panzer[2] are strictly for entertainment purposes or if they are in part developed as a recruitment tool?
Are Counter Strike, Battlefield and their ilk in the west "recruitment tools"? Nah. Fiction involving military is still just fiction and implies little about its purpose. All those examples are definitely entertaining though.
While Counter Strike and Battlefield in particular aren't used as recruitment tools, the US military has (albeit overtly) gotten involved in video games in the past[0], so it's not outside the realm of possibility.
Japan is not an independent country, but rather a satellite of the United States.
from the article:
"...ongoing debate over the mission of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Is their role truly one of self-defense, pure and simple? Or does the Japanese constitution allow for preëmptive strikes outside of domestic borders, in the manner of a traditional military?"
This is kind of shocking to read when you think about it:
1) militaries, historically, are for more than self-defense, even pre-emptive self-defense. The article leaves this out, casting the choice as "in-border defense vs out-border defense."
2) In a rare moment of visible doublethink, the article also implies plainly that it is in doubt whether Japan has a military at all: Traditional militaries are the only kind, folks.
How does Japan survive as a sovereign nation without a military? Answer: it doesn't.
It might be the case that Japan's pacifist stance was forced on them by the US ~70 years ago, but they're still officially pacifist because they choose to be. The US has wanted Japan to take a more aggressive military role for years, particularly in dealing with the other Asian countries, but why should they, when they have the world's most powerful and violent superpower sworn to throw themselves into the meat grinder on Japan's behalf?
Why does a country need to have a military (as opposed to whatever the SDF is) to remain sovereign/independent? I don't see it as doublethink; rather, the author doesn't carry that assumption.
It's no different than painting pin-up girls on on your B-17. Also, btw, US Cartoons bugs, daffy, woodpecker are not uncommon nose art subjects. google "bugs bunny nose art".