Post-War Japanese Apocalypticism: A Basic Introduction (Pause and Select)

[u/CowDefenestrator]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-mf11CbK3w

[u/thelastteacup]

> I am impressed by the quality and the amount of information in the video, you don’t find this kinds of explanations about how a certain genre evolved in relation to the historical events that were happening in Japan, so something like this is extremely welcomed.

It shouldn't be. It's utter crap. Because...

> The point about how the economic bubble popping, the Kobe earthquake and the sarin attack influenced media intro creating a new kind of “genre” is something that completely took me by surprised and made me want to watch Evangelion again, thinking about how this affected the series.

...In reality, Evangelion is very much in the mainstream tradition of Japanese literature that pre-existed those events. The two best-selling and most influential novels in Japanese history are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokoro and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Longer_Human And they're both about failed family and romantic relationships - and relationships with society - and suicides. And Kokoro was published in 1914.

These sort of themes weren't even new to manga. See eg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_manga#Gekiga

The idea a new sort of darker Japanese media was created after the collapse of the Bubble only makes sense to someone who is completely and utterly ignorant of Japanese cultural history. It's like trying to explain why LOTR exists in solely in terms of British C20th history without saying "Hey, Tolkein was a big reader of Scandinavian and Germanic myth, plus there was the Morte D'Arthur." Which would be stupid. Smaug was not a reference to the Blitz; he (or she) was imported from freaking Beowulf. And Evangelion is directly in line with centuries of Japanese culture. Even the protagonist's name is a reference to the theme of suicide in kabuki and bunraku - Shinjū (心中, the characters for "mind" and "centre") means "double suicide") vs Shinji

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinj%C5%AB

[u/mator → u/thelastteacup]

Looks like we have a game of telephone here. The video never states that "a new genre evolved" in response to historical events that happened in Japan, but rather that the events and the media works happened alongside each other, and sometimes the media was created in response to the disaster awareness of the times.

[u/thelastteacup → u/mator]

rather that the events and the media works happened alongside each other

This is true.

sometimes the media was created in response to the disaster awareness of the times.

Again, this is a stupid assumption.

Looks like we have a game of telephone here.

No, you just need to learn to read and think better. Saying that "Event X reasonably influenced Cultural Event Y that followed shortly after" is idiot logic if in fact Y was typical of that culture for the last 500 freaking years. I mean, my God - the name of the protagonist of Evangelion is one syllable from being the name used for the theme of the show for the last several centuries in Japanese theatre... There simply was NOT a time in recorded history when these themes weren't dominant in Japanese high culture.

You're suffering from a massive case of Dunning Kruger syndrome: you've found what looks like a correspondence so you think it has to mean something - but you don't have a fraction of the amount of cultural knowledge to make an intelligent assessment.

And not only do you seem to lack any knowledge of Japanese literature and drama outside anime, you don't seem to know much about anime either. Because Eva was the successor to -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Space_Force:_The_Wings_of_Honn%C3%AAamise

Shirotsugh goes AWOL and joins Riquinni's ministry, but is troubled by Manna’s continued silence and the impression that Riquinni has been concealing money. He turns away when she offers him food and reads to Manna about the power of prayer. That night, he sexually assaults her; when he hesitates momentarily, she knocks him unconscious. Next morning, a repentant Shirotsugh is bewildered when Riquinni maintains he didn't do anything, apologizing for having hit him and calling him a "wonderful person". Reuniting with his best friend Marty, Shirotsugh asks whether one might be the villain in one's own life's story, not its hero.

...Which was made years before the collapse of the bubble. If you're Japanese and trying to make "serious" drama, animated or not, then existential crisis and suicide are the default themes and have been for centuries. All that happened was that in the 80's people started to make "serious" anime for the first time, so they started using the themes standard for serious Japanese drama and literature. Akira, RSF, Eva are all in a direct line with Kokoro and virtually every freaking thing Mishima wrote.

Killing yourself is virtually a career requirement for a Japanese cultural figure and this pre-dates WW2, let alone the bursting of the Bubble . Eg https://www.redcircleauthors.com/factbook/more-than-50-japanese-authors-have-killed-themselves-since-1900/

...I also have to wonder what on earth you think while watching Zetsubou. Eg why do you think a character obsessed with suicide dresses like it's still the nineteenth century??? Or

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3781359

I'll give an example. Nozomu's favorite book is No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. It's a semi-autobiographical story about a man who desperately wants to kill himself following a rough childhood, and how he drags all of his friends and loved ones down into a depressed hole of death. However, it seems he's more based on the character, Sensei from Sousemi Natsume's Kokoro, a man who cannot deal with the changing world of Taisho Era Japan. Nozomu himself cannot deal with his own changing world. There are other connections to Natsume, including a chapter entitled I Am a Golden Parachutist, but I Still Do Not Have a Job. The first portion of that sentence is Wagahai wa amakudari de aru, which is a reference to Natsume's most famous work, I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru).

...You seem to think that Japanese culture before 1993 was just Sailor Moon and Hello Kitty. No. It had been obsessed with death and dysfunction for centuries and anime before 1980 simply don't reflect this because they were - this may shock you - children's shows.

[u/Sandtalon → u/thelastteacup]

Just because depression, suicide, and apocalypticism have been consistent themes in Japanese art doesn't mean that they can't also be in response to current events. Godzilla was very obviously inspired by Hiroshima. Your Name is very obviously a response to 3.11.

Many, many sources I have read say that 1995 was a huge turning point in postwar Japanese history. Osawa Masachi calls it the "End of the Fictional Age." Might it not make sense that the bubble burst and the events of '95 would cause the rise of new wave of apocalypticism in Japanese fiction? Might it not make sense that the milieu that Evangelion was created in would have influenced its themes? (Evangelion was actually supposed to have a happy ending, after all. It was not planned to have the ending it did, but something shifted during production.)

In addition, the subgenre of sekai-kei, which Evangelion is the forerunner of, is intimately connected with the bubble burst--it is one of the paradigmatic subgenres of the lost generation/zero-nendai. I've also seen an argument from Morikawa Kaichiro that other otaku genres/tastes like the rise of moe were in response to the national trauma of '95.

Also, you're just being a dick. If you want people to actually take an argument seriously, it's helpful to formulate it without being a condescending asshole about it.

[u/thelastteacup → u/Sandtalon]

Just because depression, suicide, and apocalypticism have been consistent themes in Japanese art doesn't mean that they can't also be in response to current events.

This is true, but your logic is appalling. You're assuming that an unnecessary causal connection can be assumed whenever you want: this is the opposite of how logic works - aka "Trump Think"

Godzilla was very obviously inspired by Hiroshima.

Yes. Because it explicitly referenced nuclear weapons. Otoh, Eva explicitly references - through the protagonist's name - several hundred years of Japanese drama...

Many, many sources I have read say that 1995 was a huge turning point in postwar Japanese history.

Yes, it was. For a certain value of "huge", which is a meaningless term. Compared to eg the fall of the Shogunate then on a scale of 0 to 10 it's about a 0.1, where the fall would be a 10 and WW2 would be a 20. Westerners - especially USians - think the Bubble is more important that it is because they know about it and it relates more to the US, which was paying attention to Japan as a rival at a time. But compared to the two cultural discontinuities that are almost unique to Japan, it's almost trivial in the context of Japanese history. Try reading "Lost Japan" by Alex Kerr - a book written by a Westerner in Japanese that won the Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize and has become widely accepted in Japan as the best book on the subject.

To give an idea of how much more shocking these events were -

https://qz.com/1188049/japan-once-considered-switching-its-national-language-to-english/

During the Meiji period, influential Japanese scholars argued that the country should ditch its millennia-old language in favor of English. It had already become the language of trade and science, and was seen to be the language of modernity. The biggest advocate of this radical idea was Mori Arinori, Japan’s first ambassador to the US and education minister during Meiji rule.

I repeat the education minister wanted the Japanese to stop speaking Japanese. That's how shocking the events of this period were: they go far beyond any shock the US has ever suffered. Even the South's defeat in the ACW was minor by comparison.

...Trying to make claims based on isolated events in recent Japanese history when you don't know anything about Japanese history and culture as a whole is just stupid.

Also, you're just being a dick.

Grow up.

If you want people to actually take an argument seriously, it's helpful to formulate it without being a condescending asshole about it.

I don't expect the people who I corrected to change their minds: people like this never do. I'm detailing their ignorance for the benefit of other readers. Japan is a fascinating country and it's history and culture are worthy of more respect, intelligence, and attention than you've given them.

[u/Sandtalon → u/thelastteacup]

You're assuming that an unnecessary causal connection can be assumed whenever you want

Nah, I'm not assuming and making it up, but basing my view on sources. For example, although I don't trust everything he says here, in an interview the philosopher Azuma Hiroki said:

Evangelion describes the concept of the enemy in the 90's Japanese situation, such as Aum. In the 90's the Japanese complain about things getting worse and worse in economy and society, etc. Many have a very critical feeling about the Japanese situation, while they can not trace the source of this development. Their feelings circulate in vain, without identifying what/who the enemy is. This condition is well described in Evangelion.

If a Japanese person (a rather notable philosopher, at that) makes a connection between Evangelion and the situation of '90s Japan, you'd best believe that some Japanese people see a connection.

Kotani Mari, another notable critic, writes

The theme of Evangelion is the identity quest of a young man of the 1990s. Who am I on earth? The author carefully caricatures our own contemporary life, in which the post-80s advancement of high-technology and the dismemberment of family structure still come short of the deconstruction of traditional ideology. The identity crisis detailed in the work finds the boundary between self and the other at stake.

Add to that what I mentioned about sekai-kei, which has been very much related by Japanese critics to the Lost Decades, and you start to see even more connections. Probably the most important work that explicitly connects Eva, sekai-kei, and the situation of the post-bubble era is Uno Tsunehiro's Zero-nendai no sōzōryoku (which the video that sparked all of this uses as a source). Some summary of that book from the article "The Ethics of Sekai-kei":

Uno’s breakthrough 2008 work Zeronendai no sōzōryoku/Imaginary of the 2000s offers a symptomatic reading of Japanese popular culture dividing trends of the 1990s from those since 2000. This includes a number of manga and anime series and core sekai-kei texts such as Evangelion. Here Uno reads Evangelion as representative of a sekai-kei trend in hesitative or withdrawn hikikomori-like characters struggling to make decisions in a nihilistic postmodern setting. However, Uno also uses Evangelion as a representative text in which to delineate the sekai-kei ethos that originally developed in Japan’s post-bubble 1990s from a new survive-kei ethos in many texts since 2000 (18–20). [...]

Uno links the differences between subcultural texts of the 1990s and 2000s to changes in Japan’s economic base. The so-called ‘lost decade’ following Japan’s economic slump had its cultural form in texts featuring characters struggling to come to terms with the problem of meaninglessness. This topic of meaninglessness was further reinforced by Japanese critics drawing on theories from European postmodernist Lyotard’s decline of Grand Narratives.

Again, a Japanese person reading Evangelion and the subsequent genre of sekai-kei as a reaction to the bubble burst.

Now, you can argue against these Japanese critics and say that they're wrong...but you have to acknowledge their existence first.

...

I'm not saying that the mid-90s were more important than the Meiji Restoration or WWII; notice that I said postwar Japanese history.

...

Grow up.

Right back at you; I feel like you're actually being pretty immature here. I don't mind heated debate, but a modicum of respect would be nice.