In 2011, to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the Japan Self Defence Force’s 4th Anti-Tank Helicopter Unit rolled out a Cobra attack helicopter with a kawaii (cute) anime character painted on the side. The character, affectionately named Aoi-chan by soldiers, is emblematic of moe aesthetics in anime – cutesy, childlike femininity, complete with big eyes, pale skin, and colourful hair. Aoi-chan is dressed in a JSDF uniform and surrounded by flames, but grins next to stylised text; violence and destruction are juxtaposed with a non-threatening cuteness. After the helicopter’s unveiling, a woman dressed as Aoi-chan could be seen posing for photographs alongside JSDF mascots – soldiers with bulging, helmeted foam heads. The helicopter was retired in 2013, but not before Aoi-chan gained equally cute friends adorning other helicopters.[1] The aircraft have since become something of a meme online, and the so-called ‘Weebchopper’ has been added to the popular military game War Thunder.
These helicopters were part of a recent trend in which the JSDF has sought to present itself as cute and harmless. Cutesy mascots attend military events; anthropomorphic animals give online lectures on how the JSDF keeps Japan safe; the Maritime Self Defence Forces was especially ahead of the curve and released commercials decades ago in which its sailors dance and sing about peace. The JSDF has even published manga in which Japan and the US are depicted as a pair of cute, schoolgirl friends, or another schoolgirl teaches readers GI slang.[2] Scholars have offered several reasons for this. Some attribute the JSDF’s increasingly kawaii self-representation to the effects of the 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami. Many Japanese, previously sceptical of militarism, experienced a revived trust in the JSDF having seen soldiers rescuing their friends and loved ones. The JSDF has since capitalised on the idea that it is a peaceful organisation, dedicated to rescue rather than war, and what better way to show that than to embrace cutesy aesthetics?[3] Others point to a wider, national trend of ‘loliconisation’, in which Japanese popular culture has become dominated by young Lolita girls. The term Lolita, originating in the book by Vladimir Nabokov, implies a paedophilic desire for underage girls, and indeed, the abovementioned JSDF propaganda often has childlike girls in compromising positions or with underwear on show.[4]
Military history has also fallen victim to the loliconisation trend. On a visit to Kōdaiji Temple museum, Susan Westhafer Furukawa was surprised to find that, since her last visit, the samurai unifier Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his wife Onene had been rendered kawaii. The museum gift shop is replete with Chibi (a cutesy aesthetic involving an oversized head and stubby limbs) depictions of the couple, often in heart frames suggesting that they are a model for true love and tranquillity.[5] Of course, Hideyoshi and Onene’s real relationship was far from perfect, and Hideyoshi could arguably be described as a brutal dictator. Through kawaii depictions, bushido, the invented samurai code beloved of nationalists which we’ve encountered time and again, is ‘beautified’, or loliconised, and therefore made palatable.[6]
Conspicuous in some anime is the presence of particularly WW2-era military paraphernalia, rendered cute or attractive. Some examples consciously use famous military technology to advance progressive ideals – in Space Battleship Yamato (1974-5), for instance, the legendary Yamato warship, sunk during WW2, is turned into a spaceship, but the setting actually becomes a backdrop for pacifist ideals.[7] Other shows are less thoughtful in their deployment of military imagery. In Arpeggio of Blue Steel: Ars Nova (2013) and Kantai Collection (2015), warships are personified as young girls. Arpeggio’s main character, Iona, is a humanoid Imperial Japanese Navy I-401 submarine, and the various other characters, good and bad, in the show are also young girls who literally embody WW2 Japanese vessels. Iona especially is characterised as innocent, subservient and – through her school uniform-style sailor outfit – childlike, and instantly takes orders from a male character. WW2 memory is displaced by cuteness, and viewers can forget difficult historical narratives and marvel at the military spectacle displayed on screen; at conventions, Arpeggio cosplayers sometimes hang out with Japanese military-buffs dressed in uniforms. The Maritime Self Defence Force has also teamed up with the showrunners for promotional events, and the voice actors have performed as a musical group at naval reviews.[8]
In Arpeggio, the human figures of the warships are detached from their actual machinic forms, whereas in Kantai Collection, cutesy moe girls are part battleship, with metal appendages. Some are humanoid versions of actual WW2 battleships such as the aircraft carrier Akagi, which sank during the Battle of Midway in 1942. Akiko Sugawa-Shimada argues that fans only form a tenuous connection to WW2 through the show, focusing instead on the human drama of the characters, but I disagree. For one thing, male fans experience sexual attraction to moe characters, and online, pseudo-nationalists often joke about finding military paraphernalia ‘sexy’ or ‘hot.’ Attraction to the moe characters is, in this sense, an outlet for a highly problematic desire pointed at WW2 machinery – an otherwise tongue-in-cheek attraction can be rendered real, including through the purchase of suggestive figurines. Secondly, the anime is consciously designed to make fans feel sympathy for, in the creator’s words, the ‘hardships’ of the real-life ships. In one episode, the girl/battleship Kisaragi is sunk, an emotional event for fans. The real Kisaragi was destroyed during the Pearl Harbour attack, so fans come to feel sympathy for a ‘death’ which occurred during perhaps the most recognisable (to westerners) expression of Japan’s wartime aggression. Depicting battleships as schoolgirls certainly does distance the audience from historical trauma, but at the same time it can encourage Japanese viewers to see their country’s wartime exploits in a positive or empathetic light.[9]
Even more concerning, in my opinion, is Girls und Panzer (2013), or Garupan, which started as an anime show but has evolved into what can only be described as a pop-culture mega-success, with movies, original video animations, and in 2017, a 6-part theatrical show. The protagonist, Miho, attends a school in the real-life town of Ōarai and takes part in the school’s sensha-dō club. Sensha-dō is a martial art (as suggested by the dō suffix – think judō) in which schoolgirls battle each other in WW2 tanks. Each of the school’s tank teams are named after an animal, including a hippo and a duck, just as classes might be in a school for young girls, and the characters are, of course, depicted as kawaii. Significantly, Miho’s Anglerfish team do not operate a Japanese tank but a Nazi German Panzer IV. Where other teams, who are often depicted as gimmicky or as comic relief (a team piloting an Australian tank appoints a koala as their commander), overdecorate the exteriors of their tanks with flags and bright paint, the Anglerfish team leaves theirs unadorned, encouraging fans to appreciate the impressive form of the Panzer IV.[10]
To some degree, Garupan leads fans to appreciate the JSDF. All the characters, regardless of the tanks they pilot, are Japanese, and fans often view the international tanks on display as stand-ins for familiar JSDF machines. Indeed, the real town of Ōarai has been the site for collaboration between Garupan and the JSDF, with modern, Japanese tanks displayed for visitors alongside cutouts of the characters. Ōarai was heavily damaged during the 2011 Triple Disaster, so fans may have already formed a mental link between the town and the nonviolent rescue operations of the JSDF before encountering Garupan.[11] However, for some fans, their admiration for military technology goes beyond Japan. The fan-generated Garupan Wikipedia is replete with detailed articles about the girls’ tanks, especially the German Panzers driven by many of the main protagonists. Internationally, Garupan has attracted many Anglophone fans specifically because of their existing fascination with Nazi German aesthetics, and the show is emblematic of a particularly fascist strain of thought in western anime fandom. From personal experience, many western fans of Garupan and other militaristic anime not only adore Nazi German aesthetics but also revere Japan for its imagined nature as a culturally homogenous ethno-state, free from immigration, queerness, and other stains on the ideal fascist national culture.[12]
For many fans, the cuteness of the tank pilots in Garupan disconnects the show from an actual fascist politics, but for others, the traditional femininity of the characters merges perfectly well with military technology, embodying a fascist worldview which delineates masculine strength and feminine passivity. The show’s fronting of German military technology is significant; Japanese military-buffs have long admired the ‘technological superpower’ of WW2 Germany. This goes beyond aesthetics – for many Japanese, German military prowess is rooted in a noble, warrior culture which supposedly continues to exist in present-day Germany and which feeble Japan should emulate. Despite a few outstanding anti-war manga which deal with Nazi Germany, including by the famous Tezuka Osamu, a trend has emerged since the 1980s in which Nazi German technology, aesthetics and, yes, ideology, are depicted in a positive light in manga and anime – sometimes thoughtlessly, other times deliberately. Stories depict Panzer tanks in stunning detail affixed with fantastical weapons, describe Nazi generals including Rommel as knights, or show SS officers nobly sacrificing themselves for innocents. While it is true, as scholars emphasise, that many fans can critically engage with such media and enjoy it without coming to fascistic conclusions, it is also true that admiration for Nazi Germany can become overtly political in some fan circles. Fans of militaristic manga may, for example, downplay Nazi war crimes as a tactic to imply that Japanese war crimes are overblown and that, therefore, Imperial Japan has been wrongly blamed.[13]
Which brings me to Attack on Titan, a manga and anime series which has become, to put it lightly, one of the most successful media franchises to ever come out of Japan. AOT and its creator Isayama Hajime have, like many action series, flirted with militaristic Japanese history. The admirable Commander Pixis is based on an admiral from the Russo-Japanese War who participated in the colonisation of Korea, upsetting Korean fans, and a protagonist, Mikasa Ackerman, is named after a warship. A live-action adaptation was partly filmed on Hashima Island off Nagasaki, where Korean forced-labour took place during WW2. Isayama has, moreover, been accused of denying Japanese war crimes through an anonymous Twitter account.[14] That being said, Isayama has also used AOT as a platform for progressive messages.
AOT (spoilers ahead) begins as a simple fantasy story about humans fighting giant monsters called Titans, but over time it emerges that Titans come from a race of humans called Eldians. Eldians have been discriminated throughout history as a result of their ability to turn into Titans, and are the subject of atrocities including sterilisation and ghettoization. Allusions to German fascism are abundant throughout the series. Characters often have Germanic names, eat German foods, and the walled setting of Shiganshina looks so similar to the town of Nördlingen that fans from all over the world have begun to visit the town as contents tourists. Even the soundtrack includes booming German vocals.[15] The imperial nation of Marley, originally an antagonistic force, outfits its soldiers with Nazi-style weapons and helmets, and places Eldians in ghettos, complete with armbands emblazoned with stars. Reference to the Holocaust is clear, and many fans interpret AOT as fundamentally a story which condemns prejudice, racism, and antisemitism.
However, the story complicates matters; Eren Yaeger, the protagonist, eventually turns to mass genocide to punish the world for its treatment of Eldians. His followers, the Yaegerists, mark their captees with armbands just like Marley. Again, some fans view this as a complex treatment of the danger of using violence to fight against prejudice, or of power corrupting good people. But the fact remains that Eren is the protagonist of the series. Viewers are encouraged in significant ways to relate to his plight, and his strength and vitality is favourably depicted in similar style to fascist aesthetics. For instance, a scene in the anime where Eren goes topless, showing off defined muscles, became so famous amongst fans that skits were performed in emulation and a viral statuette was released which even further sexualises him.[16] The Titans, which pacifistic fans see as the embodiment of unthinking totalitarianism, are devoid of sexual organs, yet Eren, who fans have consistently found sexually attractive, comes to eroticise mass murder similarly to fascist ideology. A casual peruse of fan sites reveal that some viewers find his Titan form equally appealing.
AOT’s appeal is global, and the recent seasons of the anime have led to heated fan debate in Anglophone spaces over whether Eren is ‘right’ to commit genocide. Fans who defend his decision are often written off as lacking media literacy – the series is ‘obviously’ anti-war/anti-totalitarian, others say, and anyone who disagrees is simply blindly following a character who they were originally rooting for but who has since turned to evil. Yet looking at these discussions, fans in fact deeply consider various political, ethical and logical arguments before coming to overtly fascist conclusions, sometimes even citing philosophical texts. For many AOT fans, Eren is in fact a bringer of peace and prosperity. Echoing Nazi rhetoric about Jews, they argue that it is only a matter of time before Eldian society is destroyed by outsiders, and therefore Eren and his supporters must commit genocide in the name of self-preservation. Notably, such a conspiracy theory is true in the show, as the Eldians really did once rule the world; fans with antisemitic theories in the backs of their minds may feel that AOT confirms those theories through a fantasy setting.[17] Conspicuously, these fans are often the most vocal in their idealisation of the militaristic aesthetics of the Survey Corps, including by saluting and shouting the slogan ‘Shinzou wo sasageyo’ (‘Devote your hearts’). As mentioned above, fans sometimes consciously admire German military technology as a stand-in for the Japanese military or otherwise insert real-life politics into fantasy settings in the process of interpretation; in this case, I argue that many AOT fans dress in fantasy military uniform and make fantasy military salutes as a stand-in for the much more problematic uniforms and salutes of the Third Reich.[18] This process may be very involved for some, but for many fans, it is simply a matter of how ‘cool’ Eren looks vis-à-vis the other characters.
Garupan and AOT are two important anime to end on, because both are incredibly popular in the English-speaking anime fandom. In the US and Europe, appreciation of Nazi aesthetics are very often an entry-point into more serious far-right engagement, and for many, anime such as these are a crucial part of that entry. Little research has been done on this, but as someone who has long been on the outskirts of anime fandom, I can personally attest to the extent that Anglophone anime fans espouse fascist rhetoric, especially regarding gender. Japanese ‘culture’ (or a certain interpretation of it through media) is said to be ‘traditional’, moral, righteous, homogenous. Japanese women, including the girls from Garupan and Mikasa from AOT, arouse fans’ sexual excitement and are said to be perfect ‘waifus’, modest Japanese women who embody a fascistic image of proper, subservient femininity. 4chan especially, an online community which originated in Japan, is both a site for committed anime fandom and outright fascism, which overlap commonly.[19]
Anime is, therefore, a transnational medium through which fascism is regularly revived in contemporary fandom. In Japan, military-buffs come to admire WW2 technology through, variously, its depiction as powerful weaponry or as cutesy girls, and in the process express sympathy for wartime Japan and its aims. Fascist ideology may be, at least seemingly, an object of criticism in shows like Attack on Titan, but the coolness factor of German military aesthetics encourages fans both in Japan and the west to align themselves with fascistic characters.
On the left, we often talk of an ’alt-right pipeline’ – a process through which ‘apolitical’ individuals, usually young men, slowly get enticed further into alt-right and fascist online circles. It is remarkable to me that so little research has been done on the role which anime and manga play in this process; speaking from experience, shows such as Girls und Panzer are all too often an entry-point to fascist circles. I personally have known young men who have started out with an ‘innocent’ admiration for German Panzer tanks and weapons technology, explored through militaristic anime, but have ended up being pushed into actual fascist political circles by engaging with fan communities online. Contemporary anime can have dangerous effects and is too often a force responsible for the revival of fascism in the present-day, even when the intended message of such media is pacifistic or progressive.
[1] Robert Johnson, ‘Japan Takes Its Anime Very Seriously — Check Out Its New Cobra Paint Job’, Business Insider (20/10/2012) https://www.businessinsider.com/just-in-case-you-thought-japan-did-not-take-its-anime-seriously-its-new-cobra-paint-job-2012-10?r=US&IR=T [accessed 25/07/2023]; Jonathon Gad, ‘The Japanese Military Is Getting Offensively Cute’, Vice News (13/04/2015) https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa4ee7/the-japanese-military-is-getting-offensively-cute [accessed 25/07/2023].
[2] Sabine Frühstück, Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (California, 2017), 194-207.
[3] Takayoshi Yamamura, ‘Cooperation Between Anime Producers and the Japan Self-Defense Force: Creating Fantasy and/or Propaganda?’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 12/1 (2019), 8-23.
[4] Naitō Chizuko and Nathan Shockley (trans.), ‘Reorganizations of Gender and Nationalism: Gender Bashing and Loliconized Japanese Society’, Mechadamia: Second Arc 5 (2010), 325-333.
[5] Susan Westhafer Furukawa, The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi: Historical Fiction and Popular Culture in Japan (Harvard, 2022), 166-176.
[6] Chaochu Xiang, ‘The Characteristics and Harm of Militarism Thoughts in Japanese Animation’, International Journal of Learning and Teaching 5/2 (2019), 145-149; Oleg Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushidō in Modern Japan (Oxford, 2014), 217-241.
[7] Shunichi Takekawa, ‘Fusing Nationalisms in Postwar Japan: The Battleship Yamato and Popular Culture’, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 12/3 (2013).
[8] Akiko Sugawa-Shimada, ‘Playing with Militarism in/with Arpeggio and Kantai Collection: Effects of shōjo Images in War-related Contents Tourism in Japan’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 12/1 (2019), 53-66.
[9] Sugawa-Shimada, ‘Playing with Militarism in/with Arpeggio and Kantai Collection’, 57-58.
[10] ‘Anglerfish Team’, Girls und Panzer Wiki https://gup.fandom.com/wiki/Anglerfish_Team[accessed 26/07/2023]. Academics might discourage using Wikipedia as a source, but fan-generated wikis are both replete with useful and specific information and give an excellent idea of how fans view the show in question.
[11] Akiko Sugawa-Shimada, ‘Girls With Arms and Girls As Arms in Anime:The Use of Girls for ‘Soft’ Militarism’, in Jennifer Coates et. al. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2019), 391-398.
[12] Ashley A. Matthias, ‘#TradCulture: Reproducing whiteness and neo-fascism through gendered discourse online’, in Shona Hunter and Christi van der Westhuizen (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness (Routledge, 2021), 91-102.
[13] Matthew Penney, ‘Rising Sun, Iron Cross – Military Germany in Japanese Popular Culture’, Japanstudien 16/1 (2006), 165-187.
[14] Barbara Greene, ‘Re-envisioning the Dark Valley and the decline of the peace state’, in Roman Rosenbaum (ed.), The Representation of Japanese Politics in Manga: The Visual Literacy of Statecraft (Routledge, 2021), 27-45.
[15] Timo Thelen, ‘Transnational comic franchise tourism and fan capital: Japanese Attack on Titan fans travelling to Germany’, Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 17/2 (2020), 303-325; Ryo Koarai and Takayoshi Yamamura, ‘Fantasy wars and their real-life inspirations: Tourism and international conflicts caused by Attack on Titan’, in Takayoshi Yamamura and Philip Seaton (eds.), War as Entertainment and Contents Tourism in Japan (Routledge, 2022).
[16] Evan Valentine, ‘Attack On Titan Unveils New Figure of Eren and His Ripped Abs’, Comicbook (25/08/2021) https://comicbook.com/anime/news/attack-on-titan-new-eren-jaeger-shirtless-figure/ [accessed 27/07/2023].
[17] Gita Jackson, ‘Everyone Loves Attack on Titan. So Why Does Everyone Hate Attack on Titan?’, Vice (22/04/2021) https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kvpj4/everyone-loves-attack-on-titan-so-why-does-everyone-hate-attack-on-titan [accessed 27/07/2023].
[18] Tim Brinkhof, ‘Revisiting the Fascist Subtext of Attack on Titan: Some Notes on a Modern Reactionary Anime’, Film and History 51/2 (2021), 21-29.
[19] Aurélie Petit, ‘“Do female anime fans exist?” The impact of women-exclusionary discourses on rec.arts.anime’, Internet Histories 6/4 (2022), 352-368; Mike Wendling, Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House (Pluto, 2018); Tina Askanius and Nadine Keller, ‘Murder fantasies in memes: fascist aesthetics of death threats and the banalization of white supremacist violence’, Information, Communications and Society 24/16 (2021), 2522-2539.
The Afterlives of Japanese Fascism 
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