(This article is a stand-alone version of something originally published in my personal blog.)

The prevalence of atomic bomb-inspired imagery (Akira) and atomic horrors (Godzilla) in Japanese pop culture is pretty well recognized.  However there is a more subtle yet profound apocalyptic theme that runs through modern Japanese pop culture.  It is the idea that human civilization is an arbitrary, unstoppable, and sometimes self-destructive force.  It is a theme developed not just from immediate WWII history, but assembled from classic Japanese dramatic themes and Japan's post-war reconstruction period.


    It's easier to start with a more obvious and exaggerated example, such as the entire body of animated work from Katsuhiro Otomo, whose every animated film and short forwards a thematically similar apocalyptic vision.  Akira opens with the sudden destruction of Tokyo in a scientific experiment gone haywire.  What follows is a portrayal of a gritty Neo-Tokyo gripped in the chaos and violence of rapid post-holocaust reconstruction.  At the end of the film, Tokyo is destroyed again by a second iteration of the experiment.  The head scientist in the film is portrayed as amoral, willing to risk another holocaust for potential scientific achievement.  Throughout the film, the various characters struggle to assert their control upon the forces of civilization, ultimately in vain.
    In his short film, The Order to Stop Construction, a supervisor visits a fully automated, unmanned mega construction project gone haywire.  The malfunctioning construction robots continue to build arbitrarily.  When the supervisor gives the order to halt construction, the robots consider him and obstacle and attempt to eliminate him.
    Cannon Fodder portrays an ambiguously post-apocalyptic fortified city.  Its entire livelihood revolves around the firing of large stationary cannons at an invisible enemy outside the city walls.  When the enemy is eventually revealed to the audience not to exist, the headless war machine continues in the face of irony.
    All his other films and shorts, from Roujin Z to his Robot Carnival segment and even his most recent film, Steamboy, portray the forces of human civilization spiraling out of control.  He is not the lonely auteur when it comes to this subject.  Apocalyptic themes and post-apocalyptic settings in Japanese animation and comics are a relentless cliche.  However, it is not just the apocalypse being portrayed.  It's the idea that we, despite our best individual intentions, are powerless to act against the larger forces of society.


    This ties into the more classic Japanese dramatic themes of ninjou versus giri, "one's desires versus his obligation to society".  This is reflected in telling proverbs such as "the nail that sticks up must be hammered down" and in such films as The Twilight Samurai, which portrays a samurai emotionally crushed by his duty to put himself into deadly combat while raising his two young children.  This is a classic ninjou/giri situation.  Unlike American characters who often fight for freedom and liberty by attempting to change the status quo and/or defend "what's right", Japanese characters like the Twilight Samurai instead put their societal duties ahead of their personal wishes and struggle to find some balance of happiness within their grim predicament.  One of the overarching themes of the classic ninjou/giri conflict is that one cannot go against the forces of society.  Duty, conformity, and "finding one's place" are major values in Japanese society, but what happens when the societal system itself becomes a destructive force?

    Disclaimer: the rest of this article may contain heavy amounts of gaijin speculation.

    One only needs to look as far back as the Empire of Japan that existed up to WWII.  During that time, the forces of military propaganda and mass media created a feedback loop of nationalism, twisting societal aspects like giri into a military machine that blazed through Korea, China, Russia, and other parts of the Asia-Pacific before its inevitable collapse (more reading on the subject).  Even as destruction seemed all but inevitable during the last days before the atomic bomb, Japanese individuals were helpless against the war machine that forced them into kamikaze missions and other futile acts of desperation.  The machine would've continued down to the last man.
    When the war came to a close, major cities such as Tokyo (not just Nagasaki and Hiroshima) were already flattened by an unprecedented bombing campaign.  In yet another binge of "catching up to the west", Japanese cities experienced a period of rapid reconstruction which transformed its ruins into haphazard, endlessly sprawling metropolises.  The corrupt ties between the construction industry and the Japanese government continue to this day, perpetuating meaningless construction projects.  Eventually the period of rapid post-war economic growth came to an inevitable implosion, and the Japanese economy has been in a deep recession ever since.  Workers who pledged themselves to conglomerates (in yet another giri-like relationship which was similarly detrimental to their families) suddenly found themselves cast off, much like Americans who have lost their pensions in the past decade.


    With so many giri-based systems that have collapsed spectacularly in Japanese history, it's no wonder that these dreadful themes are so often found in Japanese fiction.  When faced with a large-scale crisis, characters will often remark on their sudden change of perspective, as if everything in the past was an illusion; as if they've just woken up from a dream; as if everything beforehand was a wasted effort.  Of course this emotion parallels the reactions people have to real earth-shattering events (like 9/11 for an example closer to home).  Characters will often wonder where exactly their civilization is headed.  The first two Patlabor movies for instance meditate on this subject and the themes of being snapped out of a mass illusion in the face of a crisis.  Patlabor (1) in particular features a massive Tokyo land expansion project which eventually ends up threatening the city with total annihilation.  By dealing with the crisis, the characters in the film are forced to reflect upon the waste and emptiness of urban development.  In this way, the film deliberately personifies urban construction as a headless monster.
    In Pom Poko, mythological creatures find themselves unable to cope with Japan's rapidly changing post-war landscape as their forests are cut down.  Rather than deliver a ham-fisted environmentalist message like other films with this basic premise, the creatures ultimately fail in their efforts to stand in the way of human civilization, and instead settle on finding ways to survive in the new urban landscape.  They recall with bitter nostalgia the forest they lost under the unstoppable force of urban development.  However, life for them must go on in the face of drastic change.


     One of the more incredible apocalyptic visions comes from a surreal cyberpunk comic series called BLAME!.  A futuristic city with a fully automated infrastructure was created, but the access code known as the "net terminal gene" was somehow lost.  The city, without instruction, continued to grow with the aid of its construction robots.  Flash forward to an unspecified amount of time into the future (tens of thousands at least), the city, using dark matter as raw building material, has evolved into a megastructure encompassing the extents of the solar system.  So much time has passed and so much data has been lost that "Earth" has been forgotten.  Sparse bands of genetically modified humans (some less human than others) fight for territory within the vast structure, but without the net terminal access code, it is nothing more than a futile exercise.
    BLAME! manifests the subtle horror of a modern Japanese metropolis in this way-- the anxiety of being at the mercy of the headless, arbitrary force of human civilization; something far beyond anybody's power to change.  The protagonist of BLAME! wanders the endless, twisted and lonely expanses of the megastructure.  He occasionally encounters mindless construction robots whacking together more meaningless structures.  He has been searching for a countless number of years in vain for the net terminal gene; however, it is hinted that he is simply fulfilling his duty as an agent from a pre-megastructure Earth.  There is a sense in general that everything in BLAME! was set into motion from a forgotten time.


    The Japanese apocalypse is distinct from those portrayed in American fiction in more ways than plain old atomic horror.  While we may fear the potential horrors of global warming, asteroids, skynet, mutually assured destruction, and genetically engineered monsters and diseases upon our freedoms and status quo, the Japanese apocalyptic vision seems to be based heavily on their recurring history of societal collapse and reconstruction, and the highly ambiguous direction of their present.    In a sense, it is mono no aware applied on the most epic of scales.