Last month, we published an article about politics in anime. It covered Marxist anime on the left, all the way across the political spectrum to anime with overtly far-right and fascist iconography and themes. The article briefly touched on a number of popular anime, like Fullmetal Alchemist, My Neighbor Totoro, and Attack on Titan.
Thanks to the article’s success, in this new series, Your Anime is Political, we’ll be introducing the political themes of major anime. Those themes will be contextualized partly to Japan, but mainly as how they stand up in the contemporary discourse.
For the first entry, I’m going to explore Akira and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
(Read the full disclaimer in the original article about differences between Japanese and American political spectrums.)
But why these two, together? Well, both are titanic accomplishments of sci-fi anime. Both would have no problem landing in a top-ten (or maybe fifteen) list of the most influential anime ever. Also, both of them received fresh life outside of Japan in the last decade.
Above all, both are immensely dense, politically and philosophically charged works of art. Neither can be defined as explicitly left or right wing. Instead, they interweave a variety of intriguing political ideologies. Sometimes it may feel like we veer away from politics altogether.
But in my opinion, both of these anime depict and advocate for nothing short of revolution.
Let’s jump into it, starting chronologically. That means starting with Akira.
Akira: A Revolution of Apocalypse
Akira is surprisingly and even disturbingly relevant to the contemporary political climate.
It began as a serialized manga in December 1982, created by Katsuhiro Otomo. Akira is set in 2019 in the dystopian Neo-Tokyo. It takes place on the dawn of the Olympics and in the aftermath of a third world war. Neo-Tokyo is prosperous, but suffers from a corrupt government. It has turned into a police state weaponized to fight an anti-government resistance movement as well as lawless gangs. (More than a few things sound familiar here.)
Its influence can hardly be understated. Experts say that Akira helped kick-start the anime boom in the U.S. and the U.K. The plot’s heavy-handed political themes and the amazing visual spectacle of the film combined to make it a cult classic for generations. It received many re-releases and screenings in the U.S. and elsewhere in the 2010s, alongside the rising popularity of anime and Japanese culture abroad.
It does feel hard to ignore the film’s experimental elements and unusual visual flair. But even strictly analyzing the plot on a surface level, Akira puts forth several critiques of capitalism, technology, military, and bureaucracy—and a call to revolution.
Before digging into what these critiques are, they are perhaps most easily understood in the context of pre- and post-war Japan. The film overtly references these periods of history. Before World War II, a totalitarian regime crushed the opposition with political assassinations and distributed power among military leaders. Some Japanese orphans were left in China after the war. Others were abandoned by the government after the nuclear bombings. These children are clearly represented by the children in Akira, twisted by technological experimentation. Then, post-war, Japan saw a wave of sometimes-violent student protest movements in the 1960s, a wave of “new religions” in the ‘70s, and the turbulence of biker gangs and violent youth throughout the second half of the century.
As a result, Akira features scathing critiques of Japan’s post-war stubborn and power-hungry government, desperate for technology as a means of control and relentless economic growth.
Corrupt government and society demands rebellious actors
The film depicts abundant military failures and incompetent bureaucrats. Akira is a portrait of civil society corroding alongside bureaucratic power-grabbing and an obsession with technology. The government refuses to invest in its youth and instead goes to war with them. Akira doesn’t fall so much on the right or on the left as it is a critique of politics in practice. It criticizes the type of people that seek power and maintain the status quo.
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Given recent events, we cannot ignore the clashing between a revolutionary youth and a weaponized police state in the film. We’ve seen this all over the world—in Myanmar, Chile, Hong Kong, the United States. The film intentionally puts its subjective positioning close to the biker gangs, rebels, and outlaws, despite their moral ambiguity. But the subjectivity elevates the police as the problem. The ruthless quashing of dissent by the police state lies at the heart of all the problems in Akira. It is the refusal of those in power to relinquish it that destroys society.
Furthermore, Akira has a visible critique of development and technology. The movie has a dark visual portrayal of urban sprawl and urban development. Written during the height of the Cold War, Akira makes references to the atomic bombing of Japan. Lines of dialogue in the film directly state that attempts to harvest the energy of Akira inevitably led to the destruction of Tokyo. The relentless pursuit of capital and technology has violently destructive negative consequences.
In Akira, Otomo writes a highly realistic alternate universe in which radical revolution is the only way out. But the conflict between revolutionary and reactionary forces in society ultimately unleashes a new apocalypse.
Given the numerous similarities between the crises that plague the world of Akira and contemporary society, a viewer is left to wonder if revolution is the only answer left at our disposal that will truly cleanse the world of its many sins.
Evangelion: A Revolution of the Human Spirit
Speaking of cleansing the world of its sins, let’s talk about Neon Genesis Evangelion.
This is another essential science-fiction anime that holds nothing short of immense influence in Japan as well as abroad. When Evangelion went on to Netflix in 2019, it had an instant resurgence in the English-speaking world. Now the whole world is tuned in to the most recent installment in the saga, Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 Thrice Upon a Time. Evangelion became even more overtly popular than Akira in Japan upon its release and has seen five total movies released since the end of the original series in 1995.
Where Akira is overtly political, Evangelion is overtly science fiction. The very complicated backstory of the apocalypse in Evangelion revolves around the origin of humans on earth descending from “seeds of life.” The discovery of a second seed on Earth, which contains the monstrous angels that serve as the main protagonist throughout the series, results in an apocalypse. Then the angels begin to attack Japan in order to touch the first seed and wipe out the rest of human life. That’s where the story begins.
Politics don’t come directly into play via this plot. In fact, it’s hard to say politics come directly into the film at all. But stay with me.
Let’s start with the anime’s critiques of technology and religion. The father of the main character Shinji, Gendo, is the primary antagonist of the series. His objective is to force humanity to merge as a single consciousness, unifying incomplete individual consciousnesses. The core villains of the story see technological advancement as the key way that humans can achieve self-actualization.
In the context of the story, at times, merging consciousnesses doesn’t sound half-bad. None of the characters in Evangelion have whole or complete families. Everyone is damaged. Abandoned or neglected by parents or separated from lovers.
On the one hand, these damaged relationships are a clear consequence of humanity ‘reaching too far’ (as seen in Akira). It’s hard to say that Evangelion rejects technology or modernity altogether, but its depiction of modern life is always riddled with critique. The super-advanced Eva robots are flunky, inconsistent, and strong-but-not-strong-enough. A critique of concentrated authority can also be clearly seen in the selfish motives of the SEELE group, which seeks to use Gendo’s singularity for strictly personal gain.
This critique comes through even more clearly with the idyllic, almost Ghibli-esque world of rice-farming depicted as a fulfilling and beautiful way of life in the new Evangelion film. Evangelion depicts how a capital- and technology-driven world tears apart relationships and families. So we have another blatant critique of the use of technology.
On the other hand, the confusing motives behind the leading authorities of SEELE and Gendo, as well the puzzling background mythology, read as a critique of religion and its authority. All of these leaders, all of these adults tell lie after lie, set up wall after wall, all in order to hide what they really want and justify their own decisions. The grand mythology behind Gendo’s motives is in fact a smokescreen to disguise his simple desire to reunite with his wife.
The Hedgehog’s Dilemma
One philosophical theme directly explored in Evangelion is the “Hedgehog’s Dilemma” (the title of episode four, and outlined in greater detail here.)
It’s a cold day, and hedgehogs want to huddle together for warmth. But the closer they huddle together, the more they prick each other.
In Evangelion, this is an analog to human intimacy. Intimacy can hurt us as much as it harms us. This trauma, caused by an advanced technological society and the grand-mythologizing of religions, ideology, and authority as outlined above, is depicted as completely irreversible. The bulk of the show uncovers the characters, primarily Shinji and Asuka, trying and failing to overcome the pain of those pricks. They suffer immensely.
Family cannot redeem them, and individual relationships fall short. But in the end, Shinji commits himself to humanity. He commits himself to fighting angels. He commits himself for the chance of warmth, despite the pain of the pricks.
Connection to revolutionary politics
So what does this mean in terms of politics? Well, Shinji ultimately rejects the revolution of human souls urged by Gendo and by SEELE.
Instead, he insists on a revolution of the human spirit: a commitment to altruism and the needs of humanity over the needs of the individual. It is painfully hard, but ultimately, Shinji chooses the collective. So we can see in Evangelion a very clear and surprisingly straightforward impetus to action, both moral and political.
In contemporary American political terms, we could say that it rejects libertarian impulses to prioritize the individual over the group.
Above all, Evangelion speaks to the possibility of the kind of revolution in Akira—a revolution that might actually repair the ills of society.
While Akira portrays a society in need of a revolution, Evangelion depicts the psychological struggle necessary to achieve such a revolution.
In the end, and to drastically over-simplify, both of these anime demonstrate the need for radical collective action to improve deeply flawed societies. They are revolutionary texts. But perhaps that’s why they have dazzled our collective imagination as few others have.
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