Japan’s defeat in World War II was a huge emotional blow to the country which is still felt today. Although more than sixty years have passed, the subject of the war is still in many ways “taboo,” and not discussed very often outside of certain specific situations. (Kind of reminds me of growing up in the 1970s and asking what that Vietnam War thing was all about…no one seemed to want to tell me.) One interesting mechanism the Japanese have evolved to allow them to deal with the subject of war has been an unlikely one: animation. While the traditional image of a “soldier” used to be tied to black and white photographs from the historical Pacific War, this has changed somewhat after three decades of popular culture in which the idea of “war” was more likely to be defined in sci-fi terms, such as the One Year War of the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, in which spacenoids living in orbital colonies fight for independence from Earth. While it’s not generally possible for Japanese to wax romantic about the real war, which they lost, you can probably find fans within a certain age range who could tell you about the First Battle of Jaburo between Char Aznable-lead Zeon forces and the Federation in great detail, or a Space Battleship Yamato fan who can get misty-eyed about the Battle of Saturn, when dozens of Andromeda-class battleships were destroyed by the Comet Empire. If you asked Japanese who they considered the most respected “military heroes” of the country were, you might find some who would answer Amuro Rei or Bright Noah or Captain Okita/Captain Avatar, the legendary characters from these war-oriented anime series. It’s not unlike the original Star Trek, which was able to tell stories about race relations and other difficult topics that couldn’t be discussed in the 1960s unless they were disguised as science fiction tales far off into the future.
