I've had plenty of time to think about it, and I'm still not sure what to make of those famous
first couple minutes of Taisho Yakyuu Musume.
But I really think
this TV Tropes comment is way off: "One example of this is Koume walking past the Tokyo landmarks in the first episode. The Tokyo landmarks that will be flattened by B29s during World War II. While singing "Marching Through Georgia". One troper's friends described this scene as the only scene in anime that they felt could compete in sickness with a Tarantino movie (they haven't seen much anime) and one of the most brilliant and chilling things they had ever seen."
I mean, yes, most of those buildings are going to be bombed into rubble. Even the ones that survive are going to look somewhat different -- Tokyo Station is two stories now, for example. But I think people tend to ascribe to the Pacific War a much greater impact on Japan's psyche than is actually the case. Let's remember that she's walking through
Tokyo. The Matchstick City. The reality is that almost everything in the city had just been rebuilt after the Great Kanto Earthquake, and wasn't really expected to last more than about twenty years anyway. (That's an inference, but it seems reasonable to me.) To assume that people in Japan, when presented with scenes from their own modern history, think only of America's interaction with that history is an insidious kind of cultural imperialism. Yes, it's an almost stereotypically American song, but Japan imported a lot of music -- they also sing the
Ode to Joy without feeling any sort of cognitive dissonance. The Wikipedia notes that the Japanese Army sang it, and so did the British.
Even Hiroshima is today a bustling commercial city, and people manage to go about their lives without sparing a thought for the memorial in the center of the city. It's there, and it's really quite stunning, but we've managed to move on.
I think it may actually be similar to the way Americans feel about "Marching Through Georgia," at least here on the Left Coast. It's a nice folksy song, right? Bear in mind that this is a ditty about Sherman's "March to the Sea," perhaps the first "total war" campaign of the modern age, in which Sherman captured cities, scattered the populace, took what he could, burned the rest, and repeated. It must have been intolerable to a generation of Southerners at least, but we here and now, over a century and a thousand miles away, can listen to it without a care.
Japan's relationship to its history is exactly the same.
words from chris, 2009-12-04 02:31:42, los angeles
