Hello everyone! It's been a while! Sorry for the absence, but I've been dealing with my final exams of high school and now I'm enrolled in university! I will try to continue to post articles here whenever I can. Thank you for all the people that will stick by!
This
article is a though one. Reader discretion is advised.
TRIGGER
WARNINGS: This article contains mentions of Nazism, Fascism, rape, war-crimes,
gore, abuse, negationism and, of course, spoilers for season 3 and 4 of Attack
on Titan.
It’s
2019. The final season of Attack on Titan has been announced and the anime
series is reaching an all-time high amount of attention. The big plot-twist
that ended season 3 part 2 revealed that the world of AoT is far bigger and
more complex than anyone could ever imagine. To refresh your memory, I’m going
to talk about episode 56: “The Basement”.
The
Battle for Shiganshina is just over. Pieck Finger, in her Titan form, just
escaped the walls, bringing with her a severely wounded Reiner Braun and a
bitter Zeke Jaeger. Armin, who sacrificed himself to accomplish the mission of
blocking the Walls and letting Eren slay the Colossal Titan, is himself turned
into a titan to eat Bertholdt Hoover – and inherit the same titan that
"killed" him.
After
approximately three hours from Bert’s death, the Scouts finally decide to check
the thing they’ve hardly fought for: the truth in Grisha’s basement.
Eren,
Mikasa, Hanji and Levi enter in the basement of Eren’s old house, and find
something unexpected: three books written by Grisha Jaeger.
The
written sentence behind the picture found in one of the books recites this:
“This is no illustration. Instead, this uses light reflected off a subject and
burns the image on special paper. I come from a place outside the walls where
humanity lives in elegance. Humanity has not perished.”
Then,
Grisha continues to explain that across the sea, there’s an entire world that
wants only to destroy their race: the Eldians.
Eldians
outside the Walls are treated as society’s rejects: they live in ghettos and
they’re forced to wear armbands to be distinguished from other people. They
cannot mix with non-Eldians, they cannot receive good education, get a
good-paying job or be rich in general.
As
soon as these episodes came out, people have started to draw parallels between
Eldian conditions in Marley and the atrocities that Jews had to go through
during WW2, under Axis occupied territories.
In
this article, I want to comment an article written by Tom Speelman for
Polygon.com, titled:
“The fascist subtext of Attack on Titan
can’t go overlooked”
Ironically
I called my article “The fascist subtext of Attack on Titan that got
overlooked”, not to mock Speelman’s words, but to highlight the main problem
with the points they deal with in their article.
Let’s
start with the first point:
The series, […] is now in its
final arc, […] The closer you get to its endgame, the easier it is to see what
the message of the series really is. And the message of Attack on
Titan appears to have Anti-Semitic
and pro-fascist leanings.
This
statement is both wrong and right. Attack on Titan’s message does have a
right-wing leaning, but it’s not of anti-semitic nature, I'd say it's more "Anti-chinese" than ever.
The
author goes on to describe the similarities between Eldians and Jews during the
1940s and then talked about the controversy behind the inspiration for Dot
Pyxis.
Pure Titans are mindless, not even
needing to eat to live. Many of them have grotesque or exaggerated
features, from short arms to giant heads to ... large noses. And then there’s the Eldians living in
ghettos, wearing star-embroidered armbands.
In a 2010 blog
post, Isayama […] admitted that a supporting character, wily general Dot
Pixis, was based on real-life Japanese general Akiyama Yoshifuru, who served in
the Japanese Imperial Army from 1916-1923.
when Isayama revealed Yoshifuru as
an inspiration, and got into a Twitter flame war where he appeared to
deny the notorious Nanjing Massacre, he was swarmed by death threats
from Koreans.
“I believe that categorizing the Japanese soldiers who were in Korea
before Korea was a country(??) as ‘Nazis’ is quite crude. Also, I do not
believe that the people whose populations were increased twofold by Japan’s
unification(??) of the country can be compared to people who experienced the
Holocaust. This type of miscategorization is the source of misunderstanding and
discrimination.”
@migiteorerno dismisses how Japan’s imperialist war atrocities are often considered the East Asia equivalent to the Holocaust, instead giving credit for Korean’s modernization to Japan’s colonization. (Source:"The Possible Disturbing Dissonance Between Hajime Isayama’s Beliefs and Attack on Titan’s Themes”, by Seldomusings, published on www.seldomusings.wordpress.com)
The two articles seem to
talk about only one of the views Hajime Isayama personally has about Japanese
Imperialism of the 20th century.
But I believe there’s
another subtext that has been missed by most people, that is by far the most
modern yet worrying of the problems that negationist views on Japanese war
crimes have been imprinted in Attack on Titan – And that is: “The Sins of the
Father”.
The fourth season of Attack
on Titan deals with a serious moral question:
“Is it acceptable to punish
one for the sins their ancestors have committed?”
Obviously, Isayama’s views
on this moral topic are all over the final season, but I want to stop at one
episode in particular: Episode 70, “Liars ”.
In this episode, Gabi and
Falco manage to escape from the prison they’ve been kept in (previously the
kids have reached the Scouts’ Zeppelin and Gabi killed Sasha) and end up
running in a forest, where they take off their armbands and are rescued by Kaya
(a girl from Dauper who was saved by Sasha back in Season 2).
It is revealed that the girl
now lives on a farm, with Sasha’s parents and other orphan kids, who’ve lost
their parents because of titans.
As Gabi continues to be
diffident and racist towards the Braus Family, her fake identity and Falco’s
are blown up.
After revealing that “Ben”
and “Mia” (Gabi and Falco’s pseudonyms) are from Marley, the two girls start
discussing about history and blame.
Kaya brings the cadets to
the ruins of her old village, in the house where she had to helplessly watch as
her mother was being devoured by Connie’s father turned into a Pure Titan.
As Gabi proceeds to blame
her and all of Paradis’s Eldians for the atrocities their race has committed on
countless peoples up until 100 years prior, Kaya tries to explain that neither
her, nor her mother or any other person who died by the hands of Titans had
anything to do with the horrible ethnic cleansing their common ancestors have
done on the Marleyans.
Before going on with my
point, I want to talk about history:
Between 1937 and 1945, Japan
had fought a “Parallel War” to WW2; that is the Second Sino-Japanese War.
To cut it shortly, the
Japanese army had fabricated an incident on the Manchurian border with the
Republican Chinese Government (led by Chinese general and Statesman Chang
Kai-Shek) – the so-called Marco Polo Bridge Incident.
The Chinese army has fought
hard against the Japanese, despite the latter being more technologically
advanced than them.
The fact that their enemies
were putting up a fight against their invaders made the Japanese furious.
This anger brought more
atrocities than the ones that were already being perpetrated on the civilian
population.
One of the most infamous
episodes of Japanese war crimes is the Massacre of Nanking.
Now, I don’t want to get
into great details of what happened there, since it’s been heart-wrenching and
outright gut-punching to read and see what the Japanese army has done to
China’s capital’s population.
If you feel brave enough to
read mentions of extreme gore, rape, forced incest, impaling, boiling, bayonet
exercises, alive burials and much worse, you can search it up
.
Now, the worst part about all of this ordeal
is not only the fact that the main director of this holocaust has been left
completely unpunished (it was Prince Asaka, who had an immunity pact with
Allied authorities to ease the American occupation of Japan, that protected the
imperial Japanese family, and lived until 1981, dying from natural causes) but
the fact that, still to this day, many people in Japan see these events
(Japanese imperialist wars, the brutal colonization of Korea and the countless
war crimes committed against all people in the Pacific) in a different way than
they actually were. And, of course, no official apology was ever issued towards
China or Korea. Not even today.
The main excuse used to
justify the lack of an apology is the following reasoning: “Modern day Japan is
far different from the one it was 70 years ago. Many of the people living
nowadays in Japan have never taken part in such deplorable actions – therefore
the modern Japanese government doesn’t deserve to be hated, nor it needs to
apologize for things it has never done.”
Sounds familiar? It’s
because it’s the same reasoning Kaya uses against Gabi in Episode 70.
“The Eldians of today are
far different from the Eldians of 100 years ago, although they were responsible
for atrocious things, modern Eldians don’t deserve all the hate, prejudice and
suffering imposed by the Marleyans, as they cannot be punished for the ‘Sins of
their Ancestors’.”
These are Kaya’s words from Chapter 109 “Liar”:
What do you think about
this?
**DISCLAIMER** With this
article I don’t intend to criticize any of the journalists mentioned here. This
article also doesn’t have the intent to defame Hajime Isayama or any of his
works.
Unfortunately, Isayama’s
opinion isn’t a rare one in Japan.
Every year, millions of
Japanese students are taught to not pay much attention about Japanese war
crimes, by not having impartial history books in their history classes.
Japanese school books hardly talk about the Nanking Massacre, and when they
talk about it, it’s formulated in a way that paints Japan as the true victim of
the war, and not the other way around.
Please, inform yourselves on
the atrocities that have happened in the past, so that we will not repeat or
defend them in the future.
P.S. Down here are some of the sources I used to inform myself on this controversy and to inform myself about the Nanking Massacre. Feel free to have a read and a look!
Thank you for reading,
-Alesmat.
Sources:
Tom Speelman’s article
(2019):
https://www.polygon.com/2019/6/18/18683609/attack-on-titan-fascist-nationalist-isayama-hajime-manga-anime
Seldomusings’s article
(2013):
https://seldomusings.wordpress.com/2013/10/19/migiteorerno/
Reddit thread on Isayama’s
beliefs (2013):
https://www.reddit.com/r/ShingekiNoKyojin/comments/1sxoim/controversy_surrounding_isayamas_beliefs/
Nanking Massacre info:
Wikipedia Article (last
edit: September 2022):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
“Playing the Victim |
Historical Revisionism and Japan” by YT Knowing Better (2018):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnAC-Y9p_sY&ab_channel=KnowingBetter
Two survivors tell their
story in Nanking (2010):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2wFsu_O490&ab_channel=pitas1029384756
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWxMLCYekuU&ab_channel=pitas1029384756
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