Japan is a weird place. It is weird because the elements running the place are quietly battling those in charge of its counter culture, which makes its counter-media which are widely distributed. When you compare the Japan visited 150 years ago by Isabella Bird with the one from WW2 to the one that's there today, and get additional viewpoints you are left pondering what a very strange place it is. The counter-culture of Japan are the great grandchildren of the monsters that slaughtered their way across asia and the pacific, butching Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and especially Chinese. All these people bear scars on their grandparents, and they have long memories for revenge. And I can respect that. However, the ones they'd be avenging against are mostly dead by now or are withered away in old folks homes across Japan. Soon all the people who were alive during WW2 will be gone. So is it right to want revenge on the great grandkids of the survivors of a war fought by your great grandparents?
The Japanese are still using the image of the nuclear bomb going off in most of their anime. Not all, but most which have any kind of frantic shonen jump (boys) battles always get a mushroom cloud. The metaphor is thin at the best of times. And its pretty tired. These days there's more radiation in Japan from Fukushima leaking into the ground water and drifting in the pacific current. This is a bad time to eat fish caught there. Denying the accident following the quake and tsunami was so utterly pointless and destructive, especially when the world saw the videos of the thing blowing up. Duh! So there's still elements of mania in Japan.
Not all Japanese mania is bad, however. When Haruhi Suzumiya burst onto the scene a decade ago, its hipster driven God-Is-A-High-School-Girl message gained a flash mob that danced the opening number on the streets of Shinjuku, in Akihabara (Ah kee hah bah rah). As one of the anime I own, it is a classic like Martian Successor Nadesico and Cowboy Bebop.
There's important anime in there too, which reveal cultural clues to Japan's feelings, considering that their housing bubble burst in 1989 immediately following the translated statement: "You're nuts if you don't get in on this. You can't lose!" Its been 25 years and their economy is STILL in the toilet. This is best depicted in anime via the classic Niea_7: Poor Girl Blues which is about an 18 year old woman struggling to make ends meet, renting the room from the new owners of what used to be her family business, attending college prep classes so she can get a degree, but the bathhouse which serves a poor community is run by an MBA fresh out of college and it is failing. As the heroine is heading for college and more or less the same circumstances, this is the view of her future. The entire anime is an endless loop of layered despairs. Her best option is dating and marrying the smitten rice farmer's son she used to read stories to when she babysat him. He brings her 40 pound bags of rice which are literally keeping her alive. Now that's investing in your future, guys. Keeping your future spouse alive.
Another fine example of hipsterdom is FLCL aka Fooly Cooly. This is a gonzo anime from about 15 years ago and was reprised in the extremely violent threads and blood gore-fest of Kill La Kill. FLCL was far less gory, and remains on the top of the list for "coming of age" anime. It covers a great deal of territory with drastically broken people, often using each other for their own reasons, and how very absurd that is. This is probably a lot closer to the Real Japan, and how people feel about the place. The music is classic Japanese Punk. Since Japan's music tends to be 15-20 years behind the rest of the world, and usually lacks spontaneity you find the music of other nations, most often Japanese anime have songs by the voice actresses, which you can call competent but not inspired. FLCL is an exception to this rule. The soundtrack by the Pillows, a Japanese punk band is every bit as listenable as Zepplin or Green Day.
And The Pillows applied to a the best coming of age anime? One full of Japanese hipsters hurting each other to hurt themselves? That's layers of depth and makes so much more sense of their situation.
Of course the anime with the greatest and most honest nihilism is "Welcome To The NHK", and its pretty grim. Rather than play the despair of the broken Japanese economy, this shows just how few options people have, and the spiral that leads to the inevitable, in the nation with the highest suicide rate on earth and whose money is controlled by sadistic grandmothers who inherited control from husbands they literally worked to DEATH. Now they grin like cannibals and deny funding of new businesses, even if those would energize the economy and save the future because those evil grandmothers would rather their nation DIE WITH THEM than have a future out of their own greedy control. How f'd up is that? There is such a thing as declaring someone incompetent, Japan. Get on with it. You might even save yourselves.
When I was at Foothill college studying medicine, which is totally EASY btw, I had quite a few divorced 28 year old Japanese woman classmates. They were distant, cold, very focused on their careers and education, and had been rejected by their own people and left Japan as "Christmas Cake", which is any unmarried woman over age 24. Any one of them were pretty and marriageable and probably will once they get income of their own in their new careers. Japan hates people succeeding. Keep them down, I guess. It's a big Asian ghetto. Small wonder the goofiness of Samurai Champloo, its soundtrack composed of black American hip hop tunes twisted into a very unique sound by Japanese teenagers. It was seriously weird. Thank Nabeshin.
Nabeshin is the director of most of these anime mentioned, and sometimes appears as a character in them, usually very gonzo. He is the essential rejection of Japanese conservatism which clearly isn't working and is effectively murdering (often literally) Japanese youth. Nabeshin calls out for a new way. It really is odd that Japanese progressivism is really just putting the crazy old ladies in the rest home and investing in small business with the now-freed up money instead of buying govt bonds when the govt is only selling them to pay the interest on the bonds they've already sold. Japan is completely screwed, financially. Don't own Yen. Seriously don't. They have the largest debt on earth. Its $1 Quadrillion converted to dollars. That's one thousand trillion. Or a million billion. Or a thousand million million. Can you imagine that kind of number? How do the youth intend to pay that off, when 99% of that debt is owed to grandmothers who already hate their children so much they setup the banking system to deny business loans so there's never going to be competition to their power? Seriously Japan, put your grandma in a home. She's insane. Its called Senile.
Why do I care? Because what's happened there is happening here in the USA. The Federal Reserve is printing money, selling bonds to itself, which the taxpayer is required to pay back, to support a currency we're required by law to use and they can actually shoot us if we refused to accept it. The law doesn't say what we can charge in the exchange rate, but considering there's an actual Dictator violating the constitution telling us what we can do? That could change in an instant. So are we 10 years behind Japan? Are the despairs of Japan our future? It kinda looks that way. That's why I pay attention. Also, the art is good in their anime. Their TV is better than ours.
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