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
I don't think it's necessarily an allegory, though, not in the literary sense as I understand it, because her story doesn't map quite that closely. It's more an echo, if you will, and nearly any culture I can think of will produce popular fiction/entertainment that echoes the culture's history/experience. That's why it's no surprise that animanga after animanga has large bombs that invariably look like mushroom clouds, and the whole war-versus-pacifism thing comes up in everything from mecha to ninjas: these are issues of major import for the Japanese culture, it seems, and they use pop-culture just like any other socio-cultural group: to work through one's understanding and awareness of the shared history/experience. The US does the same thing when every decade or so, someone coming out with play, radio-show, movie, or television miniseries about the Revolutionary War or one of its main players: it's revisiting that shared history and trying to see it through a lens of what-we-currently-know. Like, frex, the miniseries that played out Jefferson's long-time affair with one of his slaves, a story that would've been unthinkable only a generation previously, because raising the question also raises questions of how American perceive that history and all that derives from it.
So, allegory... not necessarily. A good writer might not even be intentional, just perceptive enough to remix and mashup existing pop-culture storylines and assumptions and turn them around into something new. That's what (IMO) a good artist/storyteller does, after all: shifts our paradigm. Puts some parallax into our myths.
What stands out in this case is that Arakawa's parallax acts as a kind of exception to the rule, showing how rare it is, otherwise, for pop-culture animanga to question those wartime/post-war myths. For that matter, it was only in the wake of watching Senkou no Night Raid that I even started looking around for what other stories had pulled back the covers on that part of history; I'd come to take it for granted that the mythos is so pervasive that no one bothers to refute it. I don't say "no one dares" because I think some might, if it occurred to them that it's something to even question.
Or maybe I should just look to the newest creations from any other lefty Hokkaidou-types I can find? (Wait, I thought Arakawa was from Osaka...)
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Date: 29 Jul 2010 08:34 pm (UTC)I don't think it's necessarily an allegory, though, not in the literary sense as I understand it, because her story doesn't map quite that closely. It's more an echo, if you will, and nearly any culture I can think of will produce popular fiction/entertainment that echoes the culture's history/experience. That's why it's no surprise that animanga after animanga has large bombs that invariably look like mushroom clouds, and the whole war-versus-pacifism thing comes up in everything from mecha to ninjas: these are issues of major import for the Japanese culture, it seems, and they use pop-culture just like any other socio-cultural group: to work through one's understanding and awareness of the shared history/experience. The US does the same thing when every decade or so, someone coming out with play, radio-show, movie, or television miniseries about the Revolutionary War or one of its main players: it's revisiting that shared history and trying to see it through a lens of what-we-currently-know. Like, frex, the miniseries that played out Jefferson's long-time affair with one of his slaves, a story that would've been unthinkable only a generation previously, because raising the question also raises questions of how American perceive that history and all that derives from it.
So, allegory... not necessarily. A good writer might not even be intentional, just perceptive enough to remix and mashup existing pop-culture storylines and assumptions and turn them around into something new. That's what (IMO) a good artist/storyteller does, after all: shifts our paradigm. Puts some parallax into our myths.
What stands out in this case is that Arakawa's parallax acts as a kind of exception to the rule, showing how rare it is, otherwise, for pop-culture animanga to question those wartime/post-war myths. For that matter, it was only in the wake of watching Senkou no Night Raid that I even started looking around for what other stories had pulled back the covers on that part of history; I'd come to take it for granted that the mythos is so pervasive that no one bothers to refute it. I don't say "no one dares" because I think some might, if it occurred to them that it's something to even question.
Or maybe I should just look to the newest creations from any other lefty Hokkaidou-types I can find? (Wait, I thought Arakawa was from Osaka...)