When do we get to the part where the background basis of things like 'Kawaii Culture' has its roots in pacifying the populace of the Western world given that people were still (rightfully) demanding people like Prince Asaka get hanged for war crimes and the U.S. was trying to improve Japan's foreign relations?
That it was active attempts both within and without Japan to try to distance itself from its culture of high publicized brutality of its activities in China and Korea that it flaunted during the war years as if 'honourable' and 'glorious'?
I would have thought a Canadian conservative such as yourself would hate that ...? What about those honourable Canadian souls that served in the two Canadian infantry battalions in Hong Kong...?
How do you feel that their sacrifices were made and then downplayed by a concerted effort of the Japanese not to have to pay proper war reparations in the face of U.S. desires to prosecute a larger offensive against the powers that actively assisted in the fight against Imperial Japan--your nation's enemy at the time?
How does it make you feel going to a convention, an edifice of spitting on the graves of Canadian soldiers--the courageous flesh and spirit behind your nation's bayonets and their very memories of heroism and battle-eagerness to meet the enemy on any front--solely to soften the image of the very people that swore to bring them ruin?
What does it feel like being a known benefactor of an industry that props itself up on a history of willing consumption of social engineering experiments and appeasement of the atrocities committed against your country and her allies? A complicit agent in the willing consumption of a foreign entity's persistent propaganda aimed at eroding the solemnity of remembering your own people's fallen for the sake of naked consumption and self-gratification?
How do you feel that the majority of adults in Japan, and the majority of youth, don't actually watch anime ...and that it represents an artifice of their society that academics do everything todistance themselves from and actively write out against it mindless consumption?
Even going sofar as to outline how it is impacting negatively on their people and diluting their sense of social cohesion and forming healthier community connections and that it ultimately warps the psyche of excessive consumers and fetishizes and infantilizes not only their history which to be truly respectable must incur both the weight of its sins as well as its triumphs, and rather just producing pure artificial consumption fuel for foreigners to largely consume?
In all seriousness now, when I was living in Japan I was surprised by the number of people I met that just flat out hated how their country was at all associated with it. They thought that it was not only a ham-fisted way of refusing to come to terms with a still living past, and was actively abused by government branches to infantilize and effectively coddle their people in the post-War aftermath rather than fully internalizing the weight of being a defeated country that at one time publicized the atrocities of soldiers killing civilians like you would cricket scores in their own newspapers.
Hell, when I was living there it was still being abused by the government. Moe-ifying their fucking military trying to appeal to children to enlist when they were older... and apparently the JSDF was working hand-in-hand with anime studios.
Which was a surprise to me just how blatant it was. I mean, sure ...I get that the Japanese don't like to talk about the Pacific War .... but going so far as to 'cutesify' everything related around it and their military, and that this was a government endorsed program by members of its military is a bit beyond the fucking pale.
So ... you know ... in the wake of all of this nonsense, why exactly does a Canadian conservative, of all people, like this artificiality of consumer culture and government propaganda? Or perhaps a more pressing question ... you do recognize it's propaganda, right?
That's not to say all anime is. I quite like Spice and Wolf, but the primary reason Japanese animation and comics scene got so large was a co-ordinated postwar propaganda effort. Specifically what we now call 'Kawaii Culture' and its antecedents out of, to begin with.
Strikes me as odd a Canadian conservative would somehow pretend that's a good thing ... Hell, you should have seen how they transformed the story of Momotarou to basically reverse engineer the demons in it to be Westerners who were occupying lands, and the gallant Japanese forces coming to 'liberate them'.
Oh yeah ...that is a thing. And it's still a thing... just with some radical rebranding in Kawaii Culture.
Once again Canadian conservative + 'Kawaii Culture' ... not seeing the connection here.
Hell, even some anime deals with this very poisonous relationship of just how kind of sinisterly the JSDF manipulates government politics and social awareness around their own position on the world stage.
Patlabor 2, for instance ... and its whole examination of the difference between a just war and a false peace, and how a concerted effort of social engineering behind the scenes has constructed somewhat of a 'mirage' of a country that never actually faced its own defeat in full, now faces a terrorist who forces its realization upon them.
It's a really, really good political thriller. But even that movie doesn't exactly drive home; "Yeah, this is actually about the postwar political dynamics of the country and how Japan right now wants to be able to mobilize to fight foreign engagements once more." But it still looks at the cultural dynamics of it, and what it actually means to be 'captured' by an overwhelming force with extensions of power that bleed into the very darkest shadows of a nation...
But I get a feeling that you're not really into anime like that from a look at your purchases.
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Beyond that moment of dark seriousness...
Fortunately I know a show largely made, and their characters largely voiced, by Canadians that you should support and give full backing to as a good Canadian should and put aside your dalliances with foreign (and insidious) subversiveness.
