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LA Times - Japan crisis evokes comparisons to its pop culture disaster narratives, historic events

Published: 28 March 2011

Like Hollywood in the 1970s, with its queasy procession of upside-down ships, crippled airplanes and towering infernos, postwar Japanese popular culture has had a taste for disaster.

The sublimely cheesy, enormously popular "Godzilla" films launched in the 1950s depicted a dinosaur-like monster, spawned by underwater nuclear detonations, crashing through the streets of Tokyo. The popular 1973 novel "Japan Sinks" envisions the island nation being physically split in two by a combined earthquake-tsunami. And in the landmark 1988 animated sci-fi film "Akira," adapted from a manga epic, a nuclear explosion levels Tokyo and precipitates World War III…

Ambivalence toward "scientific progress" also can be seen in the influential movie "Akira" of 1988. Written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, it depicts a postmodern metropolis, Neo-Tokyo, that rises from the ruins of old Tokyo, but it's undermined by gang violence and governmental corruption.

"Akira" expresses not only fears of nuclear catastrophe but also a leeriness toward the idea that "rebuilding" after disasters is simply part of a natural cycle in which cities and societies can be repeatedly blown up and reconstructed through "a kind of capitalist reinvestment," said Thomas LaMarre, a professor of East Asian studies and art history at McGill University in Montreal. In the reconstructed Neo-Tokyo of "Akira," prosperity has returned, but only because other systemic problems have been swept under the rug.

"That's sort of the key to understanding what's going on in Japan," LaMarre said, "this kind of sense that obviously you want to be bailed out, you want to be rebuilt, you want things reconstructed. But at the same time there's a desire for a definite break with the past.... And as we all know, Japan's been having a lot of economic problems for a long time, and there's growing problems with immigration, unemployment, aging. And so there's a strange sense of not knowing whether to want things to go back to the way they were or to really have change through these catastrophes."

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