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kaigouI watched episode 14 and part of 15 last night and managed to hold on with my notepad and pen, studiously taking notes to remind myself of what stood out, until I realized I was just too tired. Will see if I'm up to watching the remainder of 15 this evening, but in the meantime, one thing did tweak the braincells this morning at the gym, and I did a bit of research over lunch.
Okay, two years ago I was at Katsucon, attending a Gundam panel where one of the panelists explained the AC timeline for GW was, in part, because Sunrise wanted to explore avenues but outside Yoshiyuki Tomino's control (the original creator). Doing a bit of research on the series, there are several things that popped out. One, he's called "the character killer", frequently doing away with broad sections of his cast in every series. Two, he suffers from bad depression at times, and some of the Gundam series have been quite dark as a result. I guess I couldn't blame Sunrise if they found his instability in that sense to be especially difficult when making a series. But third, he was born in 1941.
I'll explain. This means he was four when the bombs hit Nagasaki and Hiroshima; it means he was a small child during the firebombing of Tokyo and the more than sixty towns and cities destroyed across Japan during the US attacks. No surprise there; the repeated theme of something being dropped on Earth--to catastrophic levels--shows up, it seems, in nearly every Gundam series.
Then I went looking up the plotline of the original Gundam series, Mobile Suit Gundam, and found out a few things I'd not known. For starters, in that series, the Earth is the good guys. The colonies--led by Zeon (although often transliterated by fans into Zion--are the attackers, the ones striking out at the peace-loving Earth-folk. As you well know, in Gundam Wing, it's the opposite.
Now, GW--like many of the other Gundam series, I'm told--has elements of WWII tropes and metaphors. Apparently GW is far more so than the previous ones, but still, it's a place to start. With the Romafeller lines, and Treize's comments playing in my head, I went in search of essays and articles to explain Japan's attitudes and behaviors prior to Pearl Harbor. In episode 14/15, if you don't recall, Romafeller's position is that not all disputes can be solved by dialogue; sometimes one must have military force to make changes. These changes are pushed, in GW, by the elite class, who have secretly been working behind the scenes to increase military power. And, Romafeller's spokesman adds (as does Treize), the only way to have true peace is basically to force people to be peaceful. If you control them, tell them what to do, they'll be happy at having rules to follow, and they'll be peaceful--because if they don't, you'll kick their ass.
Well, guess what.
Around the time of WWI, Japan's industry and exports had been growing. The problem was that it had limited, inadequate internal resources. To continue production and exports (which had become a big part of its economy), it had to keep those resources flowing into the country. Its biggest supplier was the United States, which exported resources all over the place. But in contrast to Britain's US imports, for instance, Japan's percentage of exports to internal resources was much, much, higher. (In other words: if Britain imported 30% of its goods for production, with the rest being internal, Japan's percentage of imports was double, if not more.) Japan had begun casting about for additional sources of imports, so it wouldn't have to rely solely on the US.
This is glossing over some things, but it's important to get at least the gist, so bear with the details. Russian held a segment of China, in the north-eastern section (translated as Manchuria); this was an important land section since it was Russia's only eastern port to the sea. After the Russo-Japanese War, this section of land was turned over to the Japanese, who leased it instead. Japan set up the Kwantung governor, and the Kwantung army to defend this territory. In 1931, the South Manchurian Railroad (which runs along the border of Kwantung) was destroyed, in an event known as the Manchurian Incident. One of the military Kwantung leaders later confessed to planning & assisting the sabotage; the Japanese government holds to this day that it was Chinese insurgents, while the Chinese govenment holds that it was Japanese treachery.
Either way, Japan used the destruction of the railroad as the rationalization for moving into Manchuria. At the same time, back in Japan, the civilian government and military forces were dividing, with the civilian government slowly losing power while the military acted of its own accord and informed the civilian government. (It's more complex than that, but that's the gist.) A striking detail is that the forces moving within the military, seeking to de-throne the civilian government, were mostly made up of Samurai secret societies, mostly ultranationalist pro-military types who wanted to return to a time of Japan's cultural (with the benefit of militaristic) dominance. Samurai, of course, being the elite, in a cultural sense; they definitely would rank as aristocrats, given that until the Meiji era they were the only ones granted family names, for instance.
By 1932, Japan had set up the puppet state of Manchukuo; in retaliation to the League of Nations' protest, it withdrew from the U.N. Around this time, it also signed a pact with Germany (and later Italy joined in), forming the Axis; the pact was intended to hem the Soviet Union in. Japan agreed because its position with Kwantung--being the shortest reach between the Soviet Union and a good Pacific port-location--was in danger on the Soviet Union's border if it didn't have back-up on defending its colonies.
In Manchuria (Manchukuo), Japan set up Puyi, the last Chinese emporer of the Ching dynasty. Between Japan's money and the area's rich resources, Japan was set. When the US set embargoes on exports to Japan, and revoked trade agreements, Japan already had a replacement. Roosevelt's attempts to provoke Japan into striking, thus giving him an excuse to get involved in the world theater, didn't work. Instead Japan began stretching its gaze farther, upon all of China, and down into Indochina and the colonies and territories held there by countries like Britain and Portugal.
Japan was on a massive expansion path. From Manchuria, it staged attacks on China, although the battle of Shanghai proved that they wouldn't take over China in three months. The Chinese army--consisting of the Communists and Nationalists banding together--was badly ill-equipped and not trained worth much, but it was determined, and fought viciously to defend China. When Shanghai fell, the Chinese knew Nanking (Nanjing) wouldn't be far behind. It's called the Rape of Nanking. I read some of the testimonies of that incident, and believe me, the word atrocity does not begin to describe it. I won't go into it, but it's chilling, and moreso that while there were observers (Australians, some journalists), the Asian world itself squashed all mention of it (for various reasons) until 1970. Read about it yourself, but not right before you go to bed. Some things should never be forgotten.
Wikipedia has this to say about the two branches of the Japanese military, in the years before Pearl Harbor:
Japan, prior to Pearl Harbor, was an expanionist, ultranationalist ultramilitaristic country. At the drop of a hat it would take on more, expanding its resource base across China, Indochina, and down to within a stone's throw of Australia's beaches. Tactically, it excelled, taking vicious and horrendous retribution on its new colonies, the likes of which are only matched by Nazi Germany, and I don't say that lightly, after what I've been reading today. There were those small pockets, inside Japan, who protested what was going on, but for the most part, people didn't know, and the government/military wasn't about to tell them. The country had a mission, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was a bloc of Asian countries independent from Western control. In reality, it was a series of fronts for Japanese colonization.
I look at the words used by Romafeller, and it's right there: the idea that one carries a greater knowledge, a certainty of rightness, granted by some state of being the Elite among one's fellow humanity. Japan had a mission of being the guiding light, the one who would bring Asia into a new era, if everyone else would just fall in line and be like Japan. And I think of the fact that in Endless Waltz, Barton--when speaking to the troops--quotes Emporer Hirohito's surrender speech ("suffered the insufferable") but twists it around into a declaration of war.
The generational gap is amazing, and telling, I think, in a way I'd never registered before. In Tomino's Gundam series, the colonists are the bad guys, striking out at the peace-loving Earth, which fights in vain to defend itself from the Zeon aggressors. In the days and years after Japan's surrender, it's formed an image of itself as the victim. Even Japanese articles and books--if quietly--point out that Japan has never 'fessed up to its pre-war atrocities, or even its wartime atrocities, unlike Germany. Japan's post-war treatment was relatively light (can you see Sadaam being asked to stick around, alive, to ease the transistion?). Japan has taught itself that it was the victim of brutal attacks by the US, but in light of what I read today, I'm not sure I can do much more than feel queasy. After reading what Japan did in China and Indochina...I'm not saying the Tokyo Firebombing was deserved by civilians. But I'm certain the 80,000 women raped in Nanjing, over six weeks, didn't deserve what Japan did to them, either. How do you fight a people so lost in their own ultranationalism that they refuse to see anything but themselves as human?
And back to Gundam. In the alternate version of Gundam--the A.C. created when Sunrise broke away from Tomino temporarily--the colonists are the good guys. They want independence, and they're sick of the military force. They distrust the Earth's military, but they've been squashed and stepped on and have little power except for one final, last blow. And Earth is not the peace-loving world of Tomino's version, but a power-hungry world, stricken by conflicts between the UESA (the civilian government), Romafeller (the Samurai underground militaristic movements), OZ (the Army), and the Alliance (the Navy). Meanwhile, the citizens of earth go on about their business, completely unaware of how terrible things are in the colonies.
I've missed it, all this time, but I wonder how obvious the metaphors were to the Japanese viewers.
Yet I recall in the Gundam panel that the two panelists joked about the asteroids, the colonies, and space-barges being dropped on earth. In one of the series, apparently, a colony lands on its edge, and is planted like a massive metal donut in the middle of some quasi-European city. Pretty ridiculous. But in GW, this catastrophe is averted. The other thing the two panelists noted was that the hero of every Gundam series is always a Japanese boy. That makes sense; he's the stand-in for the Japanese boys watching the series.
Then I think about the twist in Gundam Wing, and the way it works out. The Earth is power-hungry, blood-thirsty; it tries to subdue the colonies in just about any way it can. Zechs, originally from Earth, turns against the Earth and joins the colonies; he represents the Japanese citizens who struggled to get their government to withdraw from its bloody pursuit of colonial lands. When he tries to drop Libra onto the earth, our intrepid Heero gets in the way, and the layers are just awesome. It's a Japanese boy defending Earth/meta-Japan from a catastrophe that could render it lifeless for generations. But this Japanese boy is a colonist. It's not just that he's protecting the source of the colonists' terrors, but that--as a Japanese person--he recognizes that somewhere the war must end. And in doing so, he demonstrates that there is good in the Japanese heart, that when the chips are down, they will choose what's right--or so the creators may have been trying to say. To give Heero the defense of the Earth, after all it's done to him, is a hopeful ending, I think.
Hrrm. Brain hurts. Any comments?
Okay, two years ago I was at Katsucon, attending a Gundam panel where one of the panelists explained the AC timeline for GW was, in part, because Sunrise wanted to explore avenues but outside Yoshiyuki Tomino's control (the original creator). Doing a bit of research on the series, there are several things that popped out. One, he's called "the character killer", frequently doing away with broad sections of his cast in every series. Two, he suffers from bad depression at times, and some of the Gundam series have been quite dark as a result. I guess I couldn't blame Sunrise if they found his instability in that sense to be especially difficult when making a series. But third, he was born in 1941.
I'll explain. This means he was four when the bombs hit Nagasaki and Hiroshima; it means he was a small child during the firebombing of Tokyo and the more than sixty towns and cities destroyed across Japan during the US attacks. No surprise there; the repeated theme of something being dropped on Earth--to catastrophic levels--shows up, it seems, in nearly every Gundam series.
Then I went looking up the plotline of the original Gundam series, Mobile Suit Gundam, and found out a few things I'd not known. For starters, in that series, the Earth is the good guys. The colonies--led by Zeon (although often transliterated by fans into Zion--are the attackers, the ones striking out at the peace-loving Earth-folk. As you well know, in Gundam Wing, it's the opposite.
Now, GW--like many of the other Gundam series, I'm told--has elements of WWII tropes and metaphors. Apparently GW is far more so than the previous ones, but still, it's a place to start. With the Romafeller lines, and Treize's comments playing in my head, I went in search of essays and articles to explain Japan's attitudes and behaviors prior to Pearl Harbor. In episode 14/15, if you don't recall, Romafeller's position is that not all disputes can be solved by dialogue; sometimes one must have military force to make changes. These changes are pushed, in GW, by the elite class, who have secretly been working behind the scenes to increase military power. And, Romafeller's spokesman adds (as does Treize), the only way to have true peace is basically to force people to be peaceful. If you control them, tell them what to do, they'll be happy at having rules to follow, and they'll be peaceful--because if they don't, you'll kick their ass.
Well, guess what.
Around the time of WWI, Japan's industry and exports had been growing. The problem was that it had limited, inadequate internal resources. To continue production and exports (which had become a big part of its economy), it had to keep those resources flowing into the country. Its biggest supplier was the United States, which exported resources all over the place. But in contrast to Britain's US imports, for instance, Japan's percentage of exports to internal resources was much, much, higher. (In other words: if Britain imported 30% of its goods for production, with the rest being internal, Japan's percentage of imports was double, if not more.) Japan had begun casting about for additional sources of imports, so it wouldn't have to rely solely on the US.
This is glossing over some things, but it's important to get at least the gist, so bear with the details. Russian held a segment of China, in the north-eastern section (translated as Manchuria); this was an important land section since it was Russia's only eastern port to the sea. After the Russo-Japanese War, this section of land was turned over to the Japanese, who leased it instead. Japan set up the Kwantung governor, and the Kwantung army to defend this territory. In 1931, the South Manchurian Railroad (which runs along the border of Kwantung) was destroyed, in an event known as the Manchurian Incident. One of the military Kwantung leaders later confessed to planning & assisting the sabotage; the Japanese government holds to this day that it was Chinese insurgents, while the Chinese govenment holds that it was Japanese treachery.
Either way, Japan used the destruction of the railroad as the rationalization for moving into Manchuria. At the same time, back in Japan, the civilian government and military forces were dividing, with the civilian government slowly losing power while the military acted of its own accord and informed the civilian government. (It's more complex than that, but that's the gist.) A striking detail is that the forces moving within the military, seeking to de-throne the civilian government, were mostly made up of Samurai secret societies, mostly ultranationalist pro-military types who wanted to return to a time of Japan's cultural (with the benefit of militaristic) dominance. Samurai, of course, being the elite, in a cultural sense; they definitely would rank as aristocrats, given that until the Meiji era they were the only ones granted family names, for instance.
By 1932, Japan had set up the puppet state of Manchukuo; in retaliation to the League of Nations' protest, it withdrew from the U.N. Around this time, it also signed a pact with Germany (and later Italy joined in), forming the Axis; the pact was intended to hem the Soviet Union in. Japan agreed because its position with Kwantung--being the shortest reach between the Soviet Union and a good Pacific port-location--was in danger on the Soviet Union's border if it didn't have back-up on defending its colonies.
In Manchuria (Manchukuo), Japan set up Puyi, the last Chinese emporer of the Ching dynasty. Between Japan's money and the area's rich resources, Japan was set. When the US set embargoes on exports to Japan, and revoked trade agreements, Japan already had a replacement. Roosevelt's attempts to provoke Japan into striking, thus giving him an excuse to get involved in the world theater, didn't work. Instead Japan began stretching its gaze farther, upon all of China, and down into Indochina and the colonies and territories held there by countries like Britain and Portugal.
Japan was on a massive expansion path. From Manchuria, it staged attacks on China, although the battle of Shanghai proved that they wouldn't take over China in three months. The Chinese army--consisting of the Communists and Nationalists banding together--was badly ill-equipped and not trained worth much, but it was determined, and fought viciously to defend China. When Shanghai fell, the Chinese knew Nanking (Nanjing) wouldn't be far behind. It's called the Rape of Nanking. I read some of the testimonies of that incident, and believe me, the word atrocity does not begin to describe it. I won't go into it, but it's chilling, and moreso that while there were observers (Australians, some journalists), the Asian world itself squashed all mention of it (for various reasons) until 1970. Read about it yourself, but not right before you go to bed. Some things should never be forgotten.
Wikipedia has this to say about the two branches of the Japanese military, in the years before Pearl Harbor:
The Japanese Navy was in general terms more traditionalist, in defending ancient values and the sacrality of the Emperor; the Japanese Army was more forward-looking, in the sense of valuing primarily strong leadership, as is evidenced by the use of the coup and direct action. The Navy typically preferred political methods. The Army, ultimately, was the vehicle for the anticapitalists, hypernationalists, anticommunists, antiparliamentarians, Extreme Right-Socialists and Nationalist-Militarists ideals.Sounds to me like OZ and the Alliance. It's mixed, definitely, but one doesn't map out a story based on history; to retell well, one takes history as the premise and lets the story run from there.
The military were considered politically "clean" in terms of political corruption, and assumed responsibility for 'restoring' the security of of the nation, too. The armed forces took up criticism of the traditional democratic parties and regular government for many reasons (low funds for the armed forces, compromised national security, weakness of the leaders).
Japan, prior to Pearl Harbor, was an expanionist, ultranationalist ultramilitaristic country. At the drop of a hat it would take on more, expanding its resource base across China, Indochina, and down to within a stone's throw of Australia's beaches. Tactically, it excelled, taking vicious and horrendous retribution on its new colonies, the likes of which are only matched by Nazi Germany, and I don't say that lightly, after what I've been reading today. There were those small pockets, inside Japan, who protested what was going on, but for the most part, people didn't know, and the government/military wasn't about to tell them. The country had a mission, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was a bloc of Asian countries independent from Western control. In reality, it was a series of fronts for Japanese colonization.
I look at the words used by Romafeller, and it's right there: the idea that one carries a greater knowledge, a certainty of rightness, granted by some state of being the Elite among one's fellow humanity. Japan had a mission of being the guiding light, the one who would bring Asia into a new era, if everyone else would just fall in line and be like Japan. And I think of the fact that in Endless Waltz, Barton--when speaking to the troops--quotes Emporer Hirohito's surrender speech ("suffered the insufferable") but twists it around into a declaration of war.
The generational gap is amazing, and telling, I think, in a way I'd never registered before. In Tomino's Gundam series, the colonists are the bad guys, striking out at the peace-loving Earth, which fights in vain to defend itself from the Zeon aggressors. In the days and years after Japan's surrender, it's formed an image of itself as the victim. Even Japanese articles and books--if quietly--point out that Japan has never 'fessed up to its pre-war atrocities, or even its wartime atrocities, unlike Germany. Japan's post-war treatment was relatively light (can you see Sadaam being asked to stick around, alive, to ease the transistion?). Japan has taught itself that it was the victim of brutal attacks by the US, but in light of what I read today, I'm not sure I can do much more than feel queasy. After reading what Japan did in China and Indochina...I'm not saying the Tokyo Firebombing was deserved by civilians. But I'm certain the 80,000 women raped in Nanjing, over six weeks, didn't deserve what Japan did to them, either. How do you fight a people so lost in their own ultranationalism that they refuse to see anything but themselves as human?
And back to Gundam. In the alternate version of Gundam--the A.C. created when Sunrise broke away from Tomino temporarily--the colonists are the good guys. They want independence, and they're sick of the military force. They distrust the Earth's military, but they've been squashed and stepped on and have little power except for one final, last blow. And Earth is not the peace-loving world of Tomino's version, but a power-hungry world, stricken by conflicts between the UESA (the civilian government), Romafeller (the Samurai underground militaristic movements), OZ (the Army), and the Alliance (the Navy). Meanwhile, the citizens of earth go on about their business, completely unaware of how terrible things are in the colonies.
I've missed it, all this time, but I wonder how obvious the metaphors were to the Japanese viewers.
Yet I recall in the Gundam panel that the two panelists joked about the asteroids, the colonies, and space-barges being dropped on earth. In one of the series, apparently, a colony lands on its edge, and is planted like a massive metal donut in the middle of some quasi-European city. Pretty ridiculous. But in GW, this catastrophe is averted. The other thing the two panelists noted was that the hero of every Gundam series is always a Japanese boy. That makes sense; he's the stand-in for the Japanese boys watching the series.
Then I think about the twist in Gundam Wing, and the way it works out. The Earth is power-hungry, blood-thirsty; it tries to subdue the colonies in just about any way it can. Zechs, originally from Earth, turns against the Earth and joins the colonies; he represents the Japanese citizens who struggled to get their government to withdraw from its bloody pursuit of colonial lands. When he tries to drop Libra onto the earth, our intrepid Heero gets in the way, and the layers are just awesome. It's a Japanese boy defending Earth/meta-Japan from a catastrophe that could render it lifeless for generations. But this Japanese boy is a colonist. It's not just that he's protecting the source of the colonists' terrors, but that--as a Japanese person--he recognizes that somewhere the war must end. And in doing so, he demonstrates that there is good in the Japanese heart, that when the chips are down, they will choose what's right--or so the creators may have been trying to say. To give Heero the defense of the Earth, after all it's done to him, is a hopeful ending, I think.
Hrrm. Brain hurts. Any comments?
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Re: Slightly related...
Date: 21 Apr 2005 02:43 pm (UTC)