- Namtab
- Feb 22, 2010
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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 Laws, 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, an 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 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 radical's 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.
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Jul 5, 2015 20:51
She's really good
