*to Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Κυνόσαργες

Thursday 19 December 2013

Japanese will never rebel

Off to piss away my life!  Good luck with the American total blockade, son.  If you survive, your height will be stunted at under 5', and your mother may have to sell her ass to the occupiers so you can eat, but Tenno Heike Banzai!
I have no idea of the merits of this film, but the marketing on TV shows a lot of lantern-jawed pilots and their timid wives.  The PR is selling to a population that is ignoring something, which the J-wife didn't like me sumarizing while the commercial was playing:
You do realize your men followed like sheep your 'leaders' who led you into a war you couldn't win, and your women only got political rights from a woman Japan's choice of allies would have turned to soap, translating for the men who wiped the floor with your armed forces, with one hand tied behind their backs in a theatre the other side of the planet, but not before Japan let a quarter of Okinawans be killed to no purpose.
Perhaps I should be more tactful.  What pissed me off is that the Japanese still follow the same people as they did then, and many of its politicians have close family ties to wartime leaders: Abe/Kishi, for one.  Some students rebelled in the sixties, and the 'Red Army Faction' went batshit, and then... nothing.  This is not the movie the Japanese need, unless it is a lot more intelligent than the trailer promises.  No, they need the scene from 'Letters from Iwo Jima' looking out of the Japanese bunker at the hopeless whirlwind their leaders had reaped for them: a foreign armada (2:15-45).

5 comments:

  1. You are probably missing the whole Okada Junichi is hot thing about this film :)

    I find some Japanese war films/dramas interesting - well as interesting as war stuff gets - because it's a whole side you seldom get to see. I was going to say Western countries are just as bad about going into stupid wars but I guess the difference is that we have (or have had anyway) media that question and challenge that kind of bollocksy thinking.

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  2. I think, to be honest, that after the machine gun slaughters of WW1 the Somme and such, and the anti-war poetry and literature that it spawned, that western nations have a certain healthy cynicism regarding patriotic duty, that serves us well.
    On the other hand, the Japanese don't seem to understand that their export economy of the 70's and 80's, and all the improvements in quality of life that resulted from that economic growth, we're not in spite of having lost the war, but rather because they lost the war. If the Japanese had won, and continued exterminating across Asia and (presumably, had Japan won) the US, who would have been buying walkmans and Toyotas 40 years later?
    The Japanese often suffer from the fallacy that a Japan that had won the war would be just like today's Japan, only in some inexplicable way 'better'.

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    1. The other answer is that Japan succeeded after the war, because it was useful to America to have a capitalist country on the other side of China and the USSR than West Germany and the others, but the post-war American and Japanese leaders (the latter being much the same people as the leaders during the war) found it useful to let the plebs think it was a Japanese success story, with the usual shibboleths of 'ganbaru', 'gaman' and the like, ignoring the facts it's a 'house of cards' built on massive internal debts, real-estate over-valuation and pouring concrete over every island.

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  3. "What are you rebelling against?"

    "What have you got? No, not that. Not that either. What else? No, no, no..."

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