Why I don't like In This Corner of the World

Contrary to popular belief I don’t craft opinions to deliberately butt up against friction points, creating just the right amount of abrasiveness to get attention. Of course, me making that statement is me using typical reverse-REVERSE psychology so maybe in fact yes, that is exactly what I do. Draw your own conclusions.

Galaxy brain arguments aside, one thing I feel like I have to clear the air about is my take on media set in World War 2. More specifically, how can I make outrageous claims about bombastic, trivializing pop works like Kantai Collection or Girls und Panzer being far more innocent than certain films that have been deemed as being “significant”? Obviously I’m just being contrarian again. Obviously I just have a terminal case of internet irony-poisoning. Obviously I’m a closet rightist worming my way into circles of progressive anime fans to sow confusion where consensus should be clear. Right?

The core of my position is thus: Suffering can be politicized. That doesn’t mean that the suffering of people who lived in Axis nations was faked or somehow invalid. In my shitty alt-light military history dork phase I was a firm believer in the idea that the goal in memorializing WW2 should be reconciliation, and a central part of that is accepting that everyone on all sides suffered and that their suffering should be viewed as equal in importance and validity. I still more or less believe that, but with some significant asterisks smacked on top.

The issue isn’t whether or not civilians in Germany, Italy, and Japan were subjected to cruel levels of abuse as citizens of Allied and neutral countries were. The politicization of suffering is in where the depiction focuses and how it’s choreographed for the audience. E.g. it’s not that 4,000 American deaths in Iraq isn’t sad, it’s that the 460,000 Iraqi deaths that aren’t mentioned are exponentially worse -- especially considering America was the aggressor and the occupier.

We Live in a Society. We also live in a postcolonial, postmodern world. Anime pundits seem to not recognize this, still conceptualizing nationalist propaganda as chest-thumping celebrations of raw martial prowess and cartoon-ification of historical violence. And while that shit does still exist (in some cultures more than others), in most public spheres of a postmodern society that doesn’t quite fly anymore. Instead, propaganda has been made tasteful by refocusing on suffering and sacrifice. Hell, it was even happening back in the rapacious-as-fuck Victorian era. The ever-innovative British Empire took defeats like the Siege of Khartoum and Isandlwada and ran with them, creating propaganda paintings that riled people up not through displays of triumph, but the heroic sacrifice of the soon-to-be-dead Brits surrounded on all sides by hordes of faceless dark forces who exist only to destroy them.

The Siege of Khartoum, George William Joy, 1893; Battle of Isandlwana, Charles Edwin Fripp, 1879

So you’re saying that every time a work by Japanese, for Japanese, depicts the depredations of WW2 for the Japanese people it has to have a footnote pointing out that Japan’s neighbors were also suffering at the same time?? Well, uh, sort of yes.* That’s sort of the whole point of the postwar reconstruction of the Axis nations.

I’ll tell you a little story about my own familial involvement in WW2. (since I feel like the next rebuttal is that I’m just slinging Whataboutism on subjects I have no visceral stake in from my ivory tower) By the time of the war the patriarch of my family was an American citizen living in the Philippines. He provided aid to American and Filipino guerrillas after the Japanese invasion of the islands. Predictably, he was targeted by the Japanese occupation forces for this. The IJN shelled our ancestral house and he fled with his family into the mountains. (Fun trivia: According to the IJN order of battle there’s a very strong chance that one of my favorite Kancolles, Nachi, was one of the ships doing the shelling) Conditions there were, unsurprisingly, harsh. My grandmother’s first child, who would’ve been my eldest aunt, died a few weeks after being born due to exposure and malnutrition. She was buried up there and the grave is still standing. There were dozens of times the entire family narrowly missed being captured, thanks only to the help of the hill tribes they stayed with.

Nachi Kai-Ni, Kantai Collection. Not Imperial Japan propaganda

And this is the story of a relatively fortunate war experience. People who were less well-to-do and holed up in cities or towns will have stories that are much more dire, if they survived.

So that’s where I’m coming from when I talk about these things. And again, I’m not saying what was done to the civilians of Axis nations was any less terrible than what their armies did to the countries they invaded. But they were the invaders, and, to me, that matters. I’d be less bothered by an anime depiction of grief and anger over the devastation of Japan had part of that anger, even in just a throwaway scene, been directed towards the military and imperial state that pushed the country into that abyss, and/or a realization by the characters that the suffering they endure is a product of the suffering their country exported to millions of other innocent people just across the ocean. To not do that is to narrow the camera lens down to the handful of noble British lads being cut down and cropping up the thousands of massacred natives around them. And to do that is a great way of subconsciously guiding people towards that very Orwell take on imperial war -- imperialism is bad because it’s bad for the imperialist.

Anyways, that’s just my take. I don’t think the movie shouldn’t have been made. It’s very well written and directed. I don’t think you’re a bad person if you like it. But if you can’t abide the existence of a take like mine being out there I suggest you take my evergreen advice of Block Early, Block Often, because I’m not budging. And that’s not reverse-reverse psychology.

*This is rhetorical. I’m not actually saying that every movie, book and TV show should be legally required to shoehorn this in. People can make whatever kind of media they want and I can describe them however I want as per my interpretation of them