Someone that I know and whose judgement I trust had a lot to say on the subject of Anno's nationalism, so I'm quoting the long message that they sent me. Certain people may be very offended by some of the facts laid within, finding them to clash irreconcilably with the reality that they built in their heads; all I can say is that I've been there back in 2004, when I essentially had my world turned upside and was forced to question almost everything that I had ever been taught since early childhood. It's scary, and it's difficult, but the truth isn't always pleasant nor easy to swallow.
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If we're trying to ascertain Anno's positions, it's probably more useful to look at Anno's statements beyond Eva, and other works, particularly Shin Godzilla.
This is a subject I've been interested in quite a while, ever since I noted gwern made this conclusion on
his source anthology:
the influence of earthquakes on people, connections to Aum Shinrikyo, garbled information about suicide attempts, Anno’s conservative nationalist views or philosophy of “poison”
I’ve long said Anno’s nationalism86 and anti-American subtexts have been ignored, but I’m still amazed by some of the subtlety. No wonder I missed everything but the basic ‘imperial Japan in space’ subtext:
While more ‘military hardware otaku’ than any kind of real right-wing nationalism like Shinzō Abe, Anno’s views tend to lean conservative, nationalist, & anti-American.
This leaning colors some of the earliest Gainax works (see the descriptions of their earliest projects in “Otaking” or Notenki Memoirs), appears in conversations discussing America (eg. “Please Listen To Me, Mr. Anno!”) or his fictional depictions of the USA (eg. Shin Godzilla), subtle allusions to Imperial Japan/WWII (Kritik der Animationskraft’s Gunbuster analysis is particularly interesting) & admiration for works such as Okamoto’s Battle of Okinawa, collaborations with the JSDF (like his 1999 training video), etc.
The overall effect is a mix of 1960s student movement/anti-base activism, anti-pacificism, and American military envy.↩︎
Gwern is, of course, one of the most qualified people when it comes to those sources, so I take his conclusions very much in consideration.
In the 80s, otaku works made up for a lack of Japanese national objectives. They had big themes: law, or justice, or a kind of nationalism. Works like Space Battleship Yamato or Gundam can be analyzed as a kind of supplement.
DM: And young people no longer need that?
HA: They don’t need narratives, they don’t need objectives. They need communication. I think they want a kind of entertainment infrastructure, a way to kill time and chat on the internet. Maybe otaku entertainment is now only a kind of platform. From this point of view, otaku works since the 1990s represent a long history of Japanese losing their grand narratives. With a few very minor exceptions, Japanese otaku works today have no themes, no political implications; but this lack of political meaning has political meaning.
Anti-western views:
Omori: However, [Ryu] Mitsuse-san is more governed by something like an Eastern sense of the transience of things, but the world of Evangelion is more along the lines of Western civilization……
Anno: I dislike Western civilization. I don’t place much trust in Western civilization.
Here Anno how only Japanese animation can express the Japanese psyche. Amazingly, he is not interested in live action remakes and even implies he won't cooperate with Western directors - though I suppose you could argue this is because of inability, not outright refusal. Maybe this could mean we'll never see a Western adaptation of Eva after all:
“Only Japanese animation really explores our interior world and emotions. Japan is probably the only country that makes animation for adults as well as children.” It’s the differences in approach to animation between Japan and the West that makes Anno reluctant to collaborate on international projects. Neither is he interested in live-action remakes of his work. “The mental structure is too different between Hollywood and Japan,” he says. “There may be some Japanese film-makers who can collaborate with Western creators, but I’m not one of them.”
Now, this is just stuff I pulled from Gwern's, but I understand that, by themseelves, these quotes aren't sufficient, and can point at different things. However, there are more sources that are far more conclusive:
Anno
seems sympatehtic to the mainstream Japanese nationalism view that blames an allegedly paternalistic relationship between the United States and Japan post-WWW. Worth mentioning is that this is a view shared by nationalists in most countries in the US' sphere of influence, namely Latin America but of course also Japan and South Korea.
Anno understands the Japanese national attraction to characters like Rei as the product of a stunted imaginative landscape born of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. “Japan lost the war to the Americans,” he explains, seeming interested in his own words for the first time during our interview. “Since that time, the education we received is not one that creates adults. Even for us, people in their 40s, and for the generation older than me, in their 50s and 60s, there’s no reasonable model of what an adult should be like.” The theory that Japan’s defeat stripped the country of its independence and led to the creation of a nation of permanent children, weaklings forced to live under the protection of the American Big Daddy, is widely shared by artists and intellectuals in Japan. It is also a staple of popular cartoons, many of which feature a well-meaning government that turns out to be a facade concealing sinister and more powerful forces.
Shin Godzilla I think is a more transparent case study. One might look at the initial government squabbling and think the movie is critical of the Japanese government. In fact, I'd argue the movie has Japan applying its intelligence and skills as a main theme. The government is portrayed in a sympathetic light and even all of its bureaucrats and technocrats are ultimately working hard to respond to the crisis - and the succeed at the end. I suppose this is an aftershock of the Fukushima disaster. You even have a lot of lines outright saying that Japan needs to stand up for itself against, particularly, the US and the UN. The interim PM outright laments American interference, and another protagonist outright says "Post-War Japan is a tributary state". The real-world JSDF is portrayed favorably in the movie, and not just for Anno's recurrent mil-otaku tastes. The movie was made
in direct cooperation with the JSDF itself, and even the officers you see in the movie were the real-world staff. I think Anno is saying Japan can and should take the initiative to do better, not attacking the government as a lot of Western critics interpreted.
In fact, while a parody of the Japanese government and military might be negatively received or ignored by them, the then-Japanese prime minister, right wing nationalist Shinzo Abe,
openly praised the film.
The film has a “soft nationalism” at its core, said Mark Schilling, a film critic for the Japan Times newspaper. “There’s a sense that ‘We Japanese have to do this ourselves; we can’t rely on the Americans to help us,’ ” he said.
Abe has endorsed the film. “I heard that the chairman of the Joint Staff Council and members of the Self-Defense Forces appear in the film and are depicted as being very heroic,” Abe told a military gathering this month. “I think that [Godzilla’s] popularity is rooted in the unwavering support that the public has for the Self-Defense Forces.”
The film can be seen as marking something of a new level in Japan’s postwar recovery, 71 years after its surrender, analysts say. Japanese people can come out of the movie theater and feel proud to be Japanese.
In fact, I think that article illustrates this quite well. Not only Abe (a lot of people forgot he is no longer prime minister), but his successor Suga says the same. Both are part of the nationalist, conservative right-wing
LDP that has governed Japan uninterruptedly for the last 67 years.
Both are part of the Nippon Kaigi nationalistic and imperialistic revival not-so-secret society. Of course, it is also extremely successful
among the Japanese public and critics, contrary to mixed Western reception.
I''d also mention that Shin Godzilla was made possible through significant political pull - remember Anno has a lot of social prestige now as Miyazaki's more or less appointed successor. SG features many Japanese A-listers. I have heard Anno goes into a lot of detail for this in
The Art of Shin Godzilla (essentially a CRC), but that book is sadly untranslated.
There is also
this statement from him about how he wanted this to happen. It could be argued that he may have changed his mind during the interim, but as far as I know there's no conclusive evidence of this.
ANNO: I wrote a lot of things. The main thing was that I was aiming to make Eva into a Gundam, or a classic. One of the ideas was to create a new series under the title of Evangelion as part 2. My ideal was to create "G-Evangelion".
Do you mean a work that turns over the very concept of Eva, like G Gundam did in the past?
ANNO: Yes. Gundam did quite well with "G". It had a breakthrough with "W", but went downhill a bit with "X". Then "S" was the big breakthrough, and it continued. That's the ideal scenario (laughs). Before that, there was "V" though.
So the note was not about the content of your work, but rather about your business concept.
ANNO: That's right. It's not so much about business as it is about the future of the animation industry. I don't like to call anime "content," but when I think about business, this term is less misleading than calling it a product, so I call it "content" here. When you think of animation as content rather than a product, I think that animation content other than kids' content is currently on the point of not progressing well.
In terms of kids' works, there is a full range of content such as "Anpanman," "Doraemon," "Pocket Monsters," and "Crayon Shin-chan." The products are constantly being updated, and I think they're working well. Many of the works have already been running for more than ten years and still seem to be doing well in the future. I think this line will continue. However, when I think about it as my concept of animation, I worry about the fact that there is only "Gundam" at the moment.
That's an issue I've been thinking about myself. I worry that there are so few character goods that span a long period of time.
ANNO: Right. I wondered what would happen to the anime industry if it continued to have only "Gundam". Even in tokusatsu, which is said to be an industry that is losing ground to newcomers, there are "Kamen Rider", "Ultraman", and "Super Sentai" to support it. This has been going on for thirty or forty years. The great thing about "Super Sentai" in particular is that it has been renewed every year without stopping. This is not the case with "Ultraman" and "Kamen Rider," but in the end they have become a steady line that continues to this day.
The tokusatsu industry is supported by these three, but the anime industry I'm involved in has only one support, which is Gundam. "Space Battleship Yamato," which was intended to be a steady line a long time ago, has not been able to be realized due to various reasons.
The only other anime that I can think of that can be made into a steady line is "Macross".
ANNO: Macross is doing well, but it hasn't yet reached the point where it is accepted by the general public. Ghibli anime is also becoming more popular, but I feel like I'm watching Disney anime, so it's hard to say it's a steady line. After all, Gundam is the anime goods that office workers can put on their desks at work. If it's a Gundam mobile suit, even if others see it, they can just think, "He likes Gundam." It's not just for nerds, it's an anime that's approved by the general public. That's the great thing about that work.
There aren't many other anime goods that you can put on your desk at work. That's why I want there to be as many contents other than Gundam that support the animation industry in a different category than Ghibli, or Hayao Miyazaki now. That's one of my main motivations. Eva is an anime goods that you can barely put on your desk at work. So, I want the new "Evangelion" to continue ten or twenty years from now. I hope that young people, not me, will be able to do it one after another on their own.
I see. So the desire to develop "Eva" into something like that was a major motivation for you before "Rebuild of Evangelion", wasn't it?
ANNO: That's right. I hope that Eva can help as one of the contents that support the entire anime industry. If there was anything else, anything would have been fine, but objectively speaking, "Evangelion" has the highest potential. It's a work that you can go ahead with as you like without worrying about the original rights or other troublesome circumstances.
You might remember
many other statements he gave in this light, even expressing lament at competition from Taiwan. What did surprise me is that he has had this project for 20+ years now, an information we only recently found out after 1.0 CRC started getting translated.
I'd say however, there isn't much pointing at Anno having a more progressive or conservative stance on social issues, though. But he very much a nationalist - he is openly advocating for Japanese interests and autonomy. He might not be a politican (yet?!?), but he seems to like using his works as a platform for that. Again, I can see parallels all over the world. Anno created the Rebuilds, initially, as a way to revigorated the Japanese cultural industry - if he didn't care about it specifically, there'd be no reason he would be sponsoring Japanese creators through projects like AnimatorExpo. Of course, there isn't anything indicating outright chauvinism and racism
like Sadamaoto, but I think we need to remember that this, is after all, a 60-year old Japanese businessman, and the reactions he gets from some people, which
are his intended public, probably speaks more for his intentions and stances than what the average Western liberal-leaning fan might think, included but not limited to this forum. One only needs to look at the still widespread notion that "Anno hates Otaku", omnipresent in the West but not so much in the Japanese fandom, for another example.
EDIT: Added a missing quote from/about Abe in the middle.
"Our magic is not omnipotent. A little bit of courage is the true magic."
–Negi Springfield, Negima: Magister Negi Magi
"Where there is distress, therein lies a story. Where there is a story, therein lies a will. And wherever there is a will, therein lies a soul."
–Evangeline A.K. McDowell, Negima: Magister Negi Magi