Take all that together, stir well, and you might be starting to get a taste of the pie I think I might be making: if the corollary here is some kind of vague Germany-analogue of a mix-up of WWI and WWII, yet told through the lens of someone whose culture puts a hell of a lot through the lens of Japan's own experiences of the first half of the 20th century, then I think Amestris is a stand-in for Germany is a stand-in for Japan. That's how you get the destruction of its own citizens, but without the historical enabling of the god-on-our-side proposed in pulpits as rationalization for actions (admittedly on the side of the Axis and the side of the Allies, it's a thing we do in the West, it seems).
I've read interviews with Arakawa in which she explicitly disavows allegory, but I do think that she knows her history and knows what she's doing when she collapses the distinction between Germany in World War II and Japan in the Asia-Pacific Wars in the representation of Amestris--the Amestran campaigns in Ishval read just as well as Japan invading China (with the fifth laboratory and the philosopher's stone experiments offering a neat analogue for the exploits of Unit 731 in Manchuria and others elsewhere) as it does the Holocaust. And what I like about her doing that (well, one of many things) is that it explodes the myth of Japan as the victim in the war. Amestrans die, but Amestrans are the villains of the piece.
(And the fact that Amestris was founded for a reason, that as a country it has a teleological purpose, is straight out of state Shinto.)
To circle back around to an earlier point, religion and religious institutions used to be a lot more prominent in Japanese society than they are today, and part of this is due to the fact that both Shinto and Buddhism were thoroughly coopted by the state in the imperial period; Shinto explicitly, and Buddhism mostly through the actions of its own prelates in an attempt to curry the government favour they'd lost after the Meiji Restoration--from what I know, the situation with Lutheranism in Nazi Germany is pretty comparable to Buddhism in imperial Japan, actually.
In the end, it's all different harmonies to the same melody, that if one achieves peace through war, ergo a really BIG war should bring about a really BIG peace.
To be fair, this is the myth or the founding idea of postwar Japan, and it's not surprising that it would get animated over and over again. In some ways Arakawa's story is a creation of the zero-growth, post-9/11 world, in which the postwar order has been exposed as bankrupt and untenable--not that someone other than a lefty Hokkaidou type would think to revisit it, though.
no subject
Date: 28 Jul 2010 04:02 am (UTC)I've read interviews with Arakawa in which she explicitly disavows allegory, but I do think that she knows her history and knows what she's doing when she collapses the distinction between Germany in World War II and Japan in the Asia-Pacific Wars in the representation of Amestris--the Amestran campaigns in Ishval read just as well as Japan invading China (with the fifth laboratory and the philosopher's stone experiments offering a neat analogue for the exploits of Unit 731 in Manchuria and others elsewhere) as it does the Holocaust. And what I like about her doing that (well, one of many things) is that it explodes the myth of Japan as the victim in the war. Amestrans die, but Amestrans are the villains of the piece.
(And the fact that Amestris was founded for a reason, that as a country it has a teleological purpose, is straight out of state Shinto.)
To circle back around to an earlier point, religion and religious institutions used to be a lot more prominent in Japanese society than they are today, and part of this is due to the fact that both Shinto and Buddhism were thoroughly coopted by the state in the imperial period; Shinto explicitly, and Buddhism mostly through the actions of its own prelates in an attempt to curry the government favour they'd lost after the Meiji Restoration--from what I know, the situation with Lutheranism in Nazi Germany is pretty comparable to Buddhism in imperial Japan, actually.
To be fair, this is the myth or the founding idea of postwar Japan, and it's not surprising that it would get animated over and over again. In some ways Arakawa's story is a creation of the zero-growth, post-9/11 world, in which the postwar order has been exposed as bankrupt and untenable--not that someone other than a lefty Hokkaidou type would think to revisit it, though.