Nerv, the JSSDF, and Anno's nationalism

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Re: Nerv, the JSSDF, and Anno's nationalism

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Postby Asunji_Yuko » Sun May 28, 2023 7:39 am

View Original PostMarqFJA87 wrote:
SPOILER: Show
While browsing the Japanese Wikipedia's NGE glossary article for whatever info it may have on the JSSDF (scroll down to this section and then go to the heading with "戦略自衛隊(J.S.S.D.F.)" in it), I came across a couple of interesting facts.

First, Nerv's descriptor of "Special Agency" (特務機関) exists IRL as the name of an Imperial Japanese Army unit that specialized in intelligence, covert ops, counterinsurgency etc. in occupied areas as well as "operational areas" (presumably referring to areas where military operations are being actively conducted).

Second, the JSSDF... well, read this passage (Google TLed and then refined by me)
Its military power is said to surpass that of the (ex-SDF) UN Armed Forces (because the armies of the major powers are nominally part of the UN Armed Forces), and it is positioned as the strongest army in the world.


The original passage is here, for those who are curious:
その軍事力は国連軍(旧自衛隊)をも凌ぐともされ(主要大国の軍隊が名目上は国連軍の一部であるため)、世界最強の軍隊に位置づけられる。


So apparently, the JSSDF surpasses in military power the collective assortment of UN Armed Forces units that were formerly SDF units; that's not implausible, given that Japan apparently had so little faith in the UN being able to protect it from China's continuing threat of militaristic expansionism (as evidenced by the war it waged with Vietnam) that it decided to throw Article 9 out the window and establish a brand-new military to replace the appropriated SDF.

However, it bugs me that somehow the SSDF is considered to be the strongest remaining national military force in the world despite the assertation that the respective armed forces of the "major powers" (presumably the US, Russia, China and EU) retain most if not all of their pre-UN autonomy. Said persistence of autonomy, incidentally, would explain how China was able to wage war against neighboring Vietnam over the Spratly Islands despite the assertation in the same article that the UN's appropriation of national militaries for itself had been enacted in the wake of the Second Impact via the "Valentine Peacekeeping System" (apparently either an alternate name for or a component of what we know as the "Valentine Treaty").

Now, all this assumes of course that the information from the article does indeed come from actual NGE materials (presumably supplemental books, possibly ones that are still in the Japan-exclusive territory) and not fanon that had been shoehorned there while none of the Japanese editors with actual knowledge of NGE lore were looking (I would greatly appreciate verification of the relevant passages' factuality). That being said, it does check out with already existing facts about Anno's nationalistic attitude towards WW2 and Imperial Japan, illustrated by some of his statements on NGE as well as his earlier work Gunbuster (conveniently listed on the EvaGeeks Wiki); specifically, he expresses resentment towards how the cultural trauma from Japan's defeat at the hands of the Allies (specifically naming the United States) had apparently led to widespread "stunting" of the Japanese people into a "nation of permanent children", and answers a question about Gunbuster's alternate future ("is it dominated by Russia?") by saying "There's a Japanese Empire. In the year 2000, the U.S. and Japan had a war, and Japan occupied Hawaii. Sorry."

I don't know about anyone else, but it seems to me that Anno had been stealthily trying to inject some of his nationalist fantasies into his works, with rather unrealistic outcomes at that (there are ways to plausibly portray Japan rising to become a hyperpower; AFAIK Anno didn't even bother trying to come with an excuse).

PS: I shamefully admit that I had somehow remained ignorant about the expressions of Anno's nationalism in NGE and Gunbuster until very recently; I actually knew about the "nation of permanent children" thing, but didn't realize it was tied to nationalistic sentiment until now.

Tbh this makes me like Anno more now

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Re: Nerv, the JSSDF, and Anno's nationalism

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Postby Axx°N N. » Sun May 28, 2023 3:33 pm

View Original PostC.T.1290 wrote:I was under the impression that Anno hates Americans in particular, same as Miyazaki. Unless, if I’m mistaken.

I highly doubt they would ever put it in these terms. This kind of extremely binary way of putting things feels like it only occurs when someone is assuming something about another person. Or to use a synonym, social media.
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Re: Nerv, the JSSDF, and Anno's nationalism

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Postby Blockio » Sun May 28, 2023 6:25 pm

There is one very core piece that the JSSDF argument fails to address every time I see it getting brought up: The usage of flamethrowers during the raid.

Flamethrowers in the Japanese cultural consciousness are the defining atrocity; their image as such comes out of a nationalistic sentiment of "this is the thing that the US used to kill our brave defenders", but that is not the heart of the matter here - even more so than in western media, any military force in Japanese media that uses flamethrowers is a safe bet for being not the good guys. The cultural trauma runs incredibly deep.
And that's where the entire argument that the JSSDF is supposed to embody Japan's supremacy falls apart at its seams - knowing that context, they are even more pointedly the bad guys than they are at the face of the story, and their status as "the Japanese government unit" does paint a rather particular picture.

There is a valid argument to be made for Gunbuster (even if I frequently see it stretched far beyond reason - there was one poster on tumblr who argued that the love triangle only exists to claim that Japanese men are irresistible to women of other nations, which lmao), but by the time of NGE, I think Anno's attitude towards Japan as a political entity has changed to a much less glorified one
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Re: Nerv, the JSSDF, and Anno's nationalism

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Postby MarqFJA87 » Sun May 28, 2023 10:32 pm

Interesting point, but it is undermined by the fact that the JSSDF force that's raiding Nerv HQ is operating at the command of the Seele-compromised Prime Minister of Japan. For all we know (and it's certainly has been my headcanon, for the lack of any canon info on their exact nature), the raiding force is a black-ops unit of the JSSDF that Seele had their puppets in the Japanese government establish over the past several years specifically as a last-resort measure to throw at Nerv, and both their willingness to indiscriminate kill whoever they're sicced on and use of flamethrowers are things that they've been keeping secret from the rest of the JSSDF and the government.
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Re: Nerv, the JSSDF, and Anno's nationalism

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Postby Blockio » Mon May 29, 2023 1:31 pm

That... doesn't really undermine the point at all. "It's just a small portion that did the warcrimes" is a flimsy reasoning at the best of times, and one that squarely does not apply when it's the only time we see them actually do anything that is not openly ridiculed as being a pointless waste of taxpayer money (which is the next thing - the JSSDF in all pof its other appearances is shown to achieve precisely fuckall, which very much goes against the notion that they are meant to show how powerful and effective the Japanese military is)
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Re: Nerv, the JSSDF, and Anno's nationalism

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Postby MarqFJA87 » Tue May 30, 2023 1:41 am

You do realize that you're shitting all over the JSSDF for repeatedly failing against a threat that is explicitly well beyond anything that is reasonably expected of a "conventional" national military to face, right? They established primarily for dealing with conflicts against human belligerents; throwing them against extraterrestrial kaiju that they were probably quite skeptical of even existing is pitting them against what is known as an "outside-context problem". They were never prepared to deal with such enemies in the first place, so failing so badly in this endeavor isn't unreasonable, especially since a certain foreign conspiracy insists on hoarding the secrets to a certain weapon that could fix that problem handily.
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Re: Nerv, the JSSDF, and Anno's nationalism

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Postby Blockio » Tue May 30, 2023 6:25 am

That equally does not discount any of what I said.
Take Shin Godzilla for example, which does much of the same thing - the JSDF is there, doing its thing, and failing horribly at it. Yes, noone can reasonably expect them to be effective against Godzilla, but it is not precisely subtle in its messaging that large problems are not solved by military might.
As one of my mutuals put it - "Shin Godzilla could only have been made by an ex-nationalist". It shows in great detail how the military is, at best, ineffective and at worst, as evident by the nuclear threat being the big deadline condition, as harmful or more as the thing they are notionally protecting the population from.

I argue that NGE is the start of Anno thinking that, of coming to the realization that actually, military might is kind of useless in the face of things that actually matter, and is much more easily used to commit atrocities on other humans.
I can see why Gendo hired Misato to do the actual commanding. He tried it once and did an appalling job. ~ AWinters
Your point of view is horny, and biased. ~ glitz2hard
What about titty-ten? ~ Reichu
The movies function on their own terms. If people can't accept them on those terms, and keep expecting them to be NGE, then they probably should have realized a while ago that they weren't going to have a good time. ~ Words of wisdom courtesy of Reichu

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Re: Nerv, the JSSDF, and Anno's nationalism

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Postby MsenjaKagami » Tue May 30, 2023 1:02 pm

Yeah also an in-universe technicality that may or may not slightly change the context of what's going on in it doesn't really negate the fact that the JSSDF are presented, first and foremost, as a.) the military arm of the Japanese government and b.) the bad guys that are brutally slaughtering Nerv personnel and trying to kill the main characters, aka the people we've spent the better part of 9+ hours getting to know and whom we were asked to sympathize and identify with.

Hardly what I'd call a glowing endorsement of Japan's military.
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