- Endorph
- Jul 22, 2009
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This somehow turned into me wanting to force the whole, unaltered thing down the thread's collective throats... for reasons I'm still not completely sure about.
See, I'm slightly reluctant to give the show mega-props for this, because as I recall - and correct me if I'm wrong here - framing it as an excess of undirected youthful exuberance is a mildly popular form of World War II apologism in Japan. The 'atmosphere' in Crowds Insight is the mob, the tyranny of the majority running rampant without checks or balances where morality is replaced by fashion. It can be steered, but never controlled, and was created by accident as a side-effect of increasing personal freedom. The psychosis of Imperial Japan, on the other hand, while anarchic on the surface, was carefully controlled and directed by an (admittedly fractious) alliance of the military, the royal family, and the politicians they had in their pockets, and there's the rub. The royal family is a literally sacred institution in Japan, and the Meiji constitution made the army its direct enforcement arm, bypassing the country's democratic institutions. Framing the rise of Japanese statism as a consequence of well-intentioned idealists and a public herd mentality allows you to sidestep a great deal of criticism of the kokutai, the core state and the ideals it embodied.
Since the show has openly invited us to do so, let's do a breakdown of the Showa era versus Insight to highlight the similarities, the differences, and what this means thematically. I'll start right out by making it clear that I understand that this is a one-cour show that can't possibly cover all the complexities of a highly complex couple of decades. However, it's also a highly political show with a clear message, and the bits it leaves out and emphasises are therefore key to the shape the message ends up taking.
To start with, the era of CROWDS (as in, the big blue eyeball-things, not the show as a whole) can probably be best mapped to the 'Taisho Democracy', a cautious expansion of democratic power during Japan's post-World-War-One golden age, buoyed by its new status as one of the 'Big Five' great powers alongside Britain, France, Italy, and America. Friendly, permissive relations between the kokutai (military and royal family) and seitai (civilian government) let Japanese citizens experience more freedom and control over their destinies, but the core state's patience only went so far. Buoyed by the rise of communism, the Japanese labour and democracy movements campaigned more and more aggressively and with less and less patience for the crumbs they were being thrown.Tensions reached a head with the assassination of Prime Minister Takashi Hara in 1921. Hara was an interesting guy. He was a Japanese Christian and the first commoner prime minister, painting a target on his back from two directions at once, and was emblematic of the cautious liberalisation of the era. He tried to reform the appointed bureaucracy and expand the power of the elected government, reducing the impact of class and religion on civil servants' chances of promotion, and sought a more friendly, conciliatory stance with Japan's overseas colonies. That pissed the right-wing off. He also opposed universal suffrage and many of the more radical democratic proposals of the day. That pissed the left-wing off. In the end, it was the right that got to him first - he was stabbed by an ultranationalist railway worker who feared the consequences of him and his party's gradual liberalising drive. His death sent the political establishment into a panic about the political currents they'd unleashed, and they became more and more hostile to the left and the pro-democracy movement. The radicalising effect of increased economic hardship as the postwar economy cooled, the attempted assassination of Crown Prince Hirohito (yes, that one) by a student communist in 1923, and the rise of the zaibatsu, the Japanese megacorporations, and their dim view on workers' rights didn't help much, either. Eventually, the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 was passed, marking the functional end of the Taisho Democracy and the beginning of the totalitarian Showa Era (despite the fact that Emperor Taisho would live for one more year before being replaced by Showa/Hirohito). Criticising or proposing alterations to the kokutai was banned, effectively outlawing most political radicalism (since it was such a slippery concept, meaning both the core state and, more nebulously, 'Japanese values') but especially the communists, who were inherently opposed to having a divinely-appointed core state in the first place. The 'thought police' (yep, that's where Orwell got the name), the Tokko, was massively expanded, going from a relatively small, specialist terrorist-hunting force to a constant, nightmarishly oppressive presence in Japanese life.
So let's check how this maps onto Insight. It's easy to draw parallels between Hara and Rui, the talented outsider trying to grant power to the people without a return to the anarchy of CROWDS Season One, and Rizumu stabbing him fits with Hara's assassination nicely (right down to the motive, and the way an act of terror perversely shifted the public consensus towards the terrorist's viewpoint). That would make Gelsadra's election and the banning of CROWDS (to get rid of the red menace... heh) the show's version of the Peace Preservation Law, with the decline of the Taisho Democracy being, of course, considerably accelerated. The Tokko are represented by a combo of Gelsadra's thought-balloons, the early 'happiness patrols', and, of course, the Kuus. What's interesting here is the spin the show puts on this. The CROWDS era is treated as pretty great, and its decline is not caused by inherent flaws of the system but by a false-flag movement stirring poo poo because they're afraid of its potential to go wrong. Rui is benevolent and farsighted, and while he's slightly naive, the problem isn't so much with what he's doing as the fact that there's another player in town with a power he couldn't possibly know about. Basically, his regulated democratic expansion has sprung a leak. In real life, meanwhile, Rizumu's analogue might have had similar motives and a similar impact, but was up against a rather different background. The TD was not a huge success, overseeing economic strife and maintaining a degree of repression that led to a genuine and sometimes dangerous protest movement. To analogise, it'd be like if a combination of a wobbly economy and discriminatory CROWDS access had caused a group using blue CROWDS to try to assassinate Suguyama, leading Rizumu to form VAPE and start some good ol' accelerationism in response. Instead, there's trouble in paradise exclusively because of our favourite primate expert. This does, however, illustrate a particular weakness of the CROWDS era - politics has been robbed of much of its stakes and consequence, causing the public to reject CROWDS as 'unfashionable'. This brings us on to the show's take on the Peace Preservation Law. Again, the fundamentals are there - a removal of freedoms caused by questionably-justified public anxiety over their consequences - but the themes are very different. Gelsadra's campaign is a popular groundswell, founded by an everygirl and celebrated by the media as a hot new thing. The conservative old guard (represented by Jou) is instrumental to getting Sadra in, but has zero control over what they've unleashed. His rise destroys the government, replacing them with an ultra-direct democracy headed by a literal vessel of the public will. In reality, of course, things were a bit more managed. The PPL wasn't brought in by democratic request, but was the Japanese core state clamping down on its democratic peripherals which it felt had enjoyed too much freedom. The Diet wasn't replaced with anarchy (well, technically, it wasn't replaced at all, it just lost a great deal of its influence, but that's a quibble), but was supplanted by another established institution, the military.
We should probably chat a little more about the Imperial Japanese Army here. It was enormously culturally influential, thanks to its aforementioned direct connection with the royal family, its string of spectacular military victories against its neighbours, and its universal conscription, which inculcated every adult Japanese man in military values. After the PPA, it gradually took over from the civilian government, triggering the chaos Insight's Gelsadra era is based on. While the military shared a broad political consensus (Japanese spirit strong, all hail the Emperor, crush the inferior races), there were major disagreements on how to put it into practice. Some particularly rabid folks wanted to launch a coup, slaughter the Diet, and create a military dictatorship headed by the Emperor in its place, while the more conservative mainstream wanted to merely shape the civilian government to their purposes in order to accomplish the same goals. Disagreements between the two factions usually involved one or more people getting stabbed. It's easy to get the impression here of a country being led around by its tail in a very similar way to the Gelsadra era. Gekokujo ('principled disobedience') was one of the many legacies of the IJA's romanticisation of the medieval Sengoku Era, giving soldiers the moral authority to rebel against their superiors, often violently. It led to a string of assassinations and coup-attempts that led to the coining of the phrase 'government by assassination', plus a whole string of low-level DIY purges of undesirables. Not only that, but universal conscription enhanced the impression of the mayhem having a popular mandate (one man, one sword), and the higher-ranking conservatives kept borrowing from the radicals' ideological playbook despite how often they cracked down on them. The reality, though, was rather more complex. Unlike in Insight, the country's institutions still existed, and they were powerful. The ideas of radicals like the Kodoha faction (which Hideki Tojo's Toseiha faction was founded in opposition to - 'Toseiha', or 'Control Faction', was actually a Kodoha insult to start with) didn't emerge in a vacuum - they were actively encouraged by the policies and ideology of the Japanese government in much the same way as a long history of dogwhistles by the party leadership has pushed the US Republicans into total frothing insanity, and their own leaders were often merely openly psychotic members of a tacitly psychotic establishment (I'll say again, Hideki Tojo was a relative moderate). Secret, cultish organisations were rife in the Japanese government, with the most notorious being the tiny but incredibly influential Black Dragon Society, and the Japanese people were subjected to a stream of propaganda far more organised and far less opportunistic and capricious than the Millione Show, Insight's mass-media stand-in. More to the point, Japan's institutions directly constrained and directed the chaos - the Tokko still existed, and while gekokujo in service of the kokutai (for example, beating a shopkeeper to death for badmouthing the Emperor) would get you a light prison sentence, gekokujo in service of communism would end with your eyeballs being fished out of Tokyo Bay and the coroner declaring it a suicide. Insight touches on this somewhat by noting that drastic action in service of an unfashionable ideology won't get you anywhere (see also, Paiman's attack on Gelsadra), but ignores the deliberate, malicious intent behind that in the era it's modelling itself on.
Showa Japan wasn't just a victim of 'atmosphere', mob hysteria and apathy taking over a country in the absence of a functional government. There were some very smart, very evil people behind it all, many of them in the highest (and most sacred) echelons of the government, and despite (and sometimes because of) the surface-level violence and mayhem, they managed to steer the country in the way they wanted it to be steered. In CROWDS, though, the violence is headless. Millione doesn't have an agenda beyond 'get more ratings', and only serves to reflect and magnify the public will. Rizumu is more in control and has more of a purpose, but he's an outsider hitching on to an existing movement, not a symbol of institutional evil. The parallels are compelling, but I think they're a bit of a mistake that glosses over some of the least palatable aspects of Japan's history. CROWDS is chiefly about good people doing bad things by accident (particularly Insight, where the only purely malicious character is now somebody's shouty breasts), and that makes it a poor fit for analogising the rise of the Empire.
Sorry for the giant wall o' text, hope it's interesting, and feel free to correct me on anything I've got wrong.
I'm still working through my thoughts on this episode and the direction this has all been taking, but one thing that's continuing to niggle at me is how the problems here seem to only be solvable due to the lack of lasting consequences. Now, that may seem a daft thing to say in the light of this episode and the havoc the 'atmosphere' has wreaked, but think about it for a second. We've just had two governments get dissolved without lasting economic consequences. The whole plan hinged on the 'atmosphere' calming down and moving on after Gelsadra's 'defeat' as if nothing had happened. The Kuus just vanished, leaving their unharmed victims behind. The country can move on and survive because it could have been bad, but didn't end up being a big deal.
The problem is, that doesn't map onto the real world easily. The Gelsadra era was basically a super-horizontal society in which hierarchies and expertise were discarded in favour of fashion and popularity. The show was pretty clear about this - the country was collapsing into quietly terrified apathy, and if things went wrong, there was no safety net because you were harshing the buzz and the Kuus were going to eat you. Logically, that should have completely hosed over the economy. We have experts for a reason - learning a field takes time and effort, and nobody can become an expert in everything. Dissolving the government and turning every decision over to opinion polls (and 'let Gel handle it' was an opinion poll in itself, since he was a vessel for the country's will) would massively decrease the amount of specialist expertise that went into them and subject them to fickle, disastrous short-termism.
Soon, you'd see vital services falling apart, and that's a doubly giant loving problem in the world of Insight because of the developing cult of positivity. Again, if you're unhappy with the situation, the mob (literally) devours you. Your sister dying of blood poisoning because hospital cleaners aren't a sexy, fashionable investment is a pretty good reason to be unhappy, and as more people are disappeared and criticism of a massively unstable, failing system is suppressed, the Kuus are just going to get hungrier. It'd be a socioeconomic feedback loop, and that's before you consider how the tyranny of the majority would interact with class prejudice, sexism, and other bigotries. I mean, do remember that they tend to be hit hardest when the economy goes south/society ties itself in a knot as default, so therefore a disproportionate number of people who'd be going against society's grain by being publicly unhappy with the status quo would be people that society doesn't especially like anyway.
The show does address the problem of expertise dying out in the Gelsadra Era - the most obvious example is Rui's plight. The show's Steve Jobs figure basically ends up regressing to intact in a pile of semi-sentient hug-pillows, but this is treated as a problem for the future. GALAX trundles on perfectly well without Rui, and the tragedy here is that he'll no longer improve the world from the status quo, not that it'll actively get worse without him. I mean, yes, you could argue that that's because the CEO isn't all that important to the day-to-day running of a company, but that's not how Gatchaman Crowds frames things. It may spend much of its narrative casting a very sceptical eye on Great Man Theory, but it still uses individuals to represent sections of society. Suguyama is the Japanese political class. Millione is the media. Jou is the civil service. Rui, then, is the embodiment of the tech sector. Plus, the Gelsadra malaise is a public one, so you can't expect the industry workforce to be better at handling it than their boss.
This issue with lack of consequence follows on to this episode. Japan has lost its government for a second time. At least the first time around, you could argue that Gelsadra's superhuman abilities were keeping the government propped up despite everyone else in it being tired (see also, that scene of him sorting paperwork super-fast). Now, Japan doesn't even have that, and we're expected to believe that the country calmed down afterwards.
The whole thing just doesn't quite seem honest to the real world - the show seems to exist in a nice middle-class liberal bubble where the status quo is fairly OK, people are accepting of even quite extreme differences (like being a literal space alien), and politics is perceived as inconsequential because it doesn't have an immediate consequence on your life, which is where both the problems and the solutions it presents comes from. Maybe it's just me speaking as a guy with multiple disabilities, but much of this seems a bit neat and abstract. I quite understand that all of the above is highly complex and difficult to fit into a thirteen-episode show in its entirety, but as I said in my great big post on Crowds Insight and Imperial Japan, this is a highly political show with a clear message, and messages are shaped as much by what you leave out as what you put in.
I know GC was getting praised earlier for making its points without Psycho-Pass's gore and general edginess, but I think this is one area where P-P did better - it was always willing to examine how its ideas affected multiple sections of society in different ways. Yes, it's a longer series, but I don't think that's the whole story - even the movie covered how a very broad social spectrum in two different countries dealt with Sybil (and even briefly touched on the notorious minefield that is religion in speculative fiction).
Like I said, I'm still mulling this over, but those are my half-formed thoughts so far.
I think the show's going for rather more than just 'political participation is good, do it', even if that's presented as something nice and welcome. Do remember that the first season ended happily with Japan being converted into a more horizontal, more directly democratic society that used gamification to spur on a crowd of enthusiastic volunteers where expertise was welcome but not mandatory. This show's been looking at the dark side of that idea.
The collapse of formal governmental structures has removed the checks and balances against mob rule (remember how Suguyama accepting his own powerlessness was a good thing last time around?), the game-like phone polls have trivialised important decisions, and the death of expertise has turned the country into dumb, instinctual 'apes' going for the easy, fashionable solution. The public aren't exactly praised for their role in this, but it's treated as a natural consequence of the system. Society is built in part around specialisation. People don't have time or energy to be good at and knowledgeable about everything, so micromanaging the country is something the general public just can't handle in addition to their day jobs. Look at the rise of 'let Sadra handle it', and how thinking about the polls and their consequences was framed as an annoying distraction. It's why we and Japan have democracies based on elected representatives in the first place - the idea is that you elect politics specialists to figure out policy based on broad objectives given to them by the public (via choosing between candidates and manifestos).
That's all well and good, but it's thus a what-if of a what-if, even further divorced from the experience of the real world. It certainly doesn't accurately model Japanese political apathy, for a start. Japan's problem is a turbocharged version of a malaise affecting democracies across the world - a sense of powerlessness and the feeling that your vote doesn't matter. It's not that everyone's happy with the status quo, or that nobody's suffering, it's just that they feel they can't change that.
In countries like, say, the UK, this comes from a combination of a regular string of corruption scandals (if politicians are all crooks, why should it matter who you vote for?), empty soundbite politics (in the 2015 election, Labour listed 'having strong values' as one of its core values), and the gradual homogenisation of a small group of unassailably large parties around a single political consensus, making it hard to tell who's worth your time to vote for (because the big parties are all pushing variants on the same message and the small parties are deemed 'unelectable' thanks to the huge barriers to entry of the electoral system). In Japan, meanwhile, the Diet has been a one-party show since the 1950s. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party has an extremely broad, vague platform, a titanic resource advantage over its rivals (what's the point for, say, a zaibatsu to lend its colossal economic power to a party that's never been elected before, especially if the other zaibatsu will stick with the LDP?), and the willingness to completely ignore the democratic process if necessary - when they finally lost power in the Nineties, they responded by forming a coalition with the ruling party and eating it. Oh, and they're just as corrupt as our politicians, too - maybe more so, thanks to how badly democratic accountability and meaningful political alternatives have been eroded. In Insight, people switch off because they have too much power - they can't handle the responsibility of directly running the country in addition to their day jobs, which leaves fickle, mindless mob rule (Gelsadra and the Kuus) in charge. In Japan, meanwhile, they switch off because they feel they have too little, leaving powerful vested interests in charge.
I'm not sure that the failure of Insight to model intentional human malice, socioeconomic forces and the damage they cause, and the power of large, established institutions only harms the analogies it draws with the rise of Imperial Japan. I'm starting to wonder if it also harms its ability to analogise modern Japan, or wealthy democracies in general.
That was part of my point, yes. Someone else was arguing that the show was simply a criticism of voter apathy in modern Japan, but GC's Japan has already moved quite a distance away from that and there's completely different dynamics going on. It's why I'd argue that as it develops further and further away from our world, it becomes less and less relevant as direct social commentary. I mean, obviously, the whole thing's allegory anyway, so you wouldn't expect a one-to-one match with modern problems (the Illuminati haven't let us know about the aliens yet, for a start  ), but the fundamental issues GC is dealing with (like a citizenry paralysed by too much democratic power) are decreasingly similar to ours, and it's presenting an oddly... insulated view of how they'd affect us. Don't get me wrong, there's still some real-world relevance here. Information overload is a real problem in the information age (it's why 'burying bad news' exists as a concept), and some of the stuff the show's done with the media is super-topical (compare Rizumu discrediting the Kuus with how the European media narrative about Middle Eastern/North African refugees was almost instantly changed by one photogenically dead kid). I just don't think some of the analogies that the show and posters in this thread have drawn work that well, and I wish that a story about such broad, weighty topics and their impact on an entire country would dig a little deeper and outside a relatively narrow range of experience.
That's a pretty interesting thought, and it certainly seems to match a little better than the parallels with Imperial Japan that the show explicitly draws, but I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with the time period and events to say if Insight ever specifically pointed to the Khmer Rouge as an analogy (though I guess that would fit with all our antagonists being heavy on the red, I guess). I would say, though, that that makes the absence of the economic component all the more jarring - the collapse in quality of life was a fairly huge part of Cambodia's woes. I don't think the timeframe is really an issue, either - the timeline of Insight is deliberately vague and compressed, allowing it to jump straight to the worst-case scenario without worrying if enough time has passed to make it happen. If it wanted to show society collapsing to an agrarian state, it'd do it - instead, everyone seems to become increasingly coddled and insulated by technology.
This somehow turned into me wanting to force the whole, unaltered thing down the thread's collective throats... for reasons I'm still not completely sure about.
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Jul 5, 2015 04:35
