zipang.jpg

Zipang, or Zipangu, or Jipangu, or however you think it should be spelt, is the ancient European name for Japan. It was believed by foreigners to be a land of immense wealth and the name carries a somewhat mythical association.

Zipang

Zipang the anime is about Mirai, an AEGIS class cruiser belonging to the Maritime Self Defense Force (de facto Navy of modern Japan), travelling 60 years into the past by accident while in the middle of a joint military exercise in the Pacific. The ship found itself right in the middle of Japan’s attack on Midway in the Pacific theatre of WW2.

While the setting sounds horribly like a sorry excuse for nationalistic right-wing propaganda (id est, Raimuiro Senikitan), it really isn’t. Instead of joining the Imperial Japanese Navy and pwning the hell out of the Americans like you would expect, Mirai maintains its neutrality while trying its best to preserve the paths of history and find a way back to the future.

Though Mirai has a crew of 240, the story mainly revolves around a few key characters and how they, as the generation that has never witnessed war, deal with the realities of the most brutal war man has ever fought.

Zipang screenshotsZipang screenshots
Zipang screenshotsZipang screenshots

If you are looking for adrenaline-filled WW2 battles, you’ll not find any here. Even Midway, the turning point of the whole Pacific War, is only given a cursory coverage. What you will get instead is a modern but distinctively Japanese perspective of WW2 and Japan’s great imperialist ambition. Indeed, Zipang is a WW2 show that has way more talking than shooting.

Zipang tries to humanize both the Japanese and American sides, though it does it better for the Japanese side (well duh). The show tries to create a more authentic feel by introducing real historical characters, although the way they are portrayed is probably far from reality.

The important decision makers on the Japanese side are divided into two main factions: those who instigated and advocate war and those who oppose war but comply out of loyalty to the nation. Zipang carries a clear anti-war message that depicts the former as irrational, self-serving and not truly doing things for the sake country like they claim to be, while the latter is portrayed as far-sighted and wise.

The unwilling participants of war, such as Admiral Yamamoto, welcome Mirai as a sign of Japan’s recovery. They know that the war has long been lost but yet they cannot disobey orders. They take comfort in that fact that Japan’s defeat will ultimately serve as the starting point of a much more powerful and rich nation than Imperial Japan ever was. They want peace but they, honour-bound as soldiers of the Empire, can do nothing but fight on.

The war hawks believe that they can win the war, despite the odds against Japan. They see Mirai as a threat to the war effort because it embodies the defeat of Imperial Japan. They are more or less portrayed as the antagonists in the show.

I think that as a whole, Zipang does a great job avoiding the traps of conventional WW2 films. It does not seek to glorify war by colouring the world in black and white, neither does it go into the other extreme and be anti-war for the sake of it by showering you with deaths and violence. Instead, Zipang utilizes the personalities of its main characters to present to you the various Japanese perspectives of WW2 and also how the main characters who have been brought up in peacetime respond to the ugly realities of a war.

I think the three scenes that left the deepest impressions are:

Spoiler Alert

  • Yosuke, the XO of Mirai, is forced to kill an American marine in melee combat in order to save his own life.
  • Masayuki, the pacifist Gunnery Officer who didn’t want to enlist in the MSDF, ends up being the one to propose using a Tomahawk missile to destroy USS Wasp.
  • Mitsumasa Yonai, former Navy Minister, tells the captain of Mirai that Japan has to lose the war for its own good.

It’s quite a thoughtful show and I would recommend you to give it a chance. That ends the pseudo-review section of this entry, now for the rantage.

Modern Japan and WW2

Zipang is a perfect example of what is often misunderstood about modern Japan’s perspective of WW2. With all the media’s attention focused on the Prime Minister’s visits to Yasukuni shrine, the censorship of history textbooks and the general portrayal of Japan in Asian WW2 films, many Asians today believe that Japan’s refusal to face its ugly past is a dangerous step towards a new wave of Japanese militarism and nationalism.

The truth is that, most Japanese people are starkly anti-war, probably even more so than USA and China. Japan in WW2 was a brutal and inhuman oppressor in the eyes of most of East Asia, but those atrocities only represent a very tiny portion of WW2 as a whole, at least from the Japanese perspective. A Japanese is more likely to remember WW2 for Hiroshima, the intense fire-bombing of Tokyo or the heavy losses incurred by both sides during the island-by-island attrition warfare in the South Pacific.

The Japanese are anti-war because of their own sufferings in WW2. They too have learnt first-hand the horrors of war and the insanity of those who advocate it. When Americans landed in Okinawa, civilians killed their own families and committed suicide in other to escape torture at the hands of the Americans, because they were fed lies by the military government. Young boys were brainwashed into blood-thirsty soldiers who were told to fight to the death for a war that Japan had clearly no hope of winning since Pearl Harbor. Nearly half of Tokyo was razed in the fire-bombing campaign in the final months of WW2. Japan also became the first and only victim of the atomic bomb.

Indeed, Japan today is one of the most anti-war nation on the planet. There are plenty of right-wing extremists of course, but the nation of Japan as a whole is unlikely to be of any threat to the rest of Asia again. Just look at how long it and how much effort it took for the government to justify SDF’s involvement in Iraq’s reconstruction, and even then most Japanese are still strongly against SDF’s presence in a foreign nation.

Paradoxically, the very thing that makes the Japanese people love peace is also what’s causing the anti-Japanese sentiments in China and South Korea. The Japanese view of WW2 is too neutral and too morally irresponsible.

The ugly roles of that Hitler and fascism played during WW2 have been driven into the German national identify from the ground up. The German people gain their respect for peace by understanding both their own sufferings, such as in Dresden, and the sufferings of those who were victimized by the German war machine, such as the Holocaust. Both sides belong to the same coin and Germans learn about WW2 in its entirety and thus gain a respect for peace.

Japan on the other hand, has grossly overlooked the flip side of the coin. Japan’s own suffering during WW2 is overly-emphasised and the rest of Asia is all but forgotten. Japan’s starch anti-war sentiments come not from a balanced understanding of the horrors of war but from its own sufferings. Imagine if a German history textbook on WW2 talks about the carpet bombing of Dresden in great details but skims over the Holocaust. The reader will no doubt still conclude that war is a terrible thing, but it would be due to an entirely different reason. That is what is happening in Japan now.

The Japanese people are peace-loving and reasonable people just like everyone else, but the moderates in power clearly need to get themselves a stronger voice and a backbone. If they continue to fail to do so, what the rest of Asia perceives of Japan will be represented by the the right-wing extremists who threatened the Japanese publisher of The Rape of Nanking, the colourful military history of Japan as told by the war museum in Yasukuni shrine, and the history textbooks that refer to South-east Asia as nothing more than a resource node in a war game.

In America, you can find publications that slam the Vietnam War and documentary films that talk about the My Lai massacre. In German, children learn about the horrors of Holocaust in school. Where are you now, Japan? Where indeed.

Dear Japan, please stop letting the right-wing nutcases do the talking if you want to be heard by the rest of Asia.

On the other hand, as I have said early, Japan today is clearly not a military threat to anyone, neither does its people have the intention of repeating WW2 again. Chinese and Korean right-wing nutcases need to chill out and tone down the anti-Japanese rhetorics that are only going to help the Japanese nationalists gain more power and influence over their moderate counterparts.

Gah… too sleepy to rant anymore.

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