Germany in Japanese pop culture | Hitler, half-timbered buildings, dragon balls

No matter whether it's a woman with huge googly eyes or a man with an ugly mustache, evil remains evil. Photo: Mag Garden He seems to appear everywhere: in the anime film "Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn" he personally walks out of the gates of hell, in "Lupine III: The First" he was supposedly able to escape to South America, and in the series "Petals of Reincarnation" he returns as a little Japanese girl, albeit with the same murderous intentions. Adolf Hitler is a constant within the Japanese manga and anime landscape. The ultimate villain who doesn't even need to be introduced as such because everyone knows him. But Hitler is not the only German heritage that can be found regularly in Japanese pop culture, especially in manga and anime series: half-timbered houses in "Attack on Titan", Schopenhauer quotes in "Neon Genesis Evangelion", historical buildings from imperial times in "Fullmetal Alchemist", "A Little Snow Fairy Sugar" and the popular Studio Ghibli films. But the romanticization of historical Germany becomes scary when you look at the German-Japanese past. 

The two nations were aligned as Axis powers long before they fraternized. Well before the 20th century, they were already connected through trade and during its economic opening, the so-called Meiji Restoration, the Japanese Empire took the German Empire as a model. When the Civil Code came into force in Germany in 1900, Japan adopted it, Prussian soldiers trained the local military and in the pre-war period the island nation supplied extensive resources from its occupied countries to the Third Reich. The fact that both nations had aggressive great power ambitions and did not get in each other's way thanks to the geographical distance led to them joining forces in 1936. 

You have to look for self-critical films, both real and animated, with a magnifying glass. Instead, crimes are denied, relativized or revised.

This bloody alliance, based on racism and colonialism, receives little attention in the Japanese anime and manga scene. Although you can definitely find titles that are critical of the military and the war (especially “How the Wind Lifts” and “Adolf”), they still remain an exception. Even when works like “The Last Glowworms” and “Barefoot through Hiroshima” directly address the Second World War, they strikingly often stick to their own suffering and the effects of the atomic bombs.

Even in the West, Japanese fascism, its mass murders in southeastern China, and colonialism in Korea and other East Asian countries are not a common topic of conversation. The patterns of the atrocities are known, but their extent and how it influences today's political lines are hardly known. The Nanking massacre, the comfort women and hundreds of thousands of human experiments by Unit 731 are still causing discussions in several Asian countries today, while Japan is opposing a political and cultural reappraisal of its own history. 

Compared to Germany, which has dealt with the Holocaust and its own war guilt in every medium and with varying degrees of success, Japan's coming to terms with the past looks different. You have to look for self-critical films, both real and animated, with a magnifying glass. Instead, crimes are denied, relativized or revised.

Anime and manga are just as much an expression of cultural soft power as James Bond was for Great Britain and, secondarily, the Western values ​​that he defended on screen against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

What is particularly striking is the recurring romanticization of Germany, especially the imperial era, even though the Federal Republic is not even the largest sales market for the industry and lags behind North America, China and India. Nevertheless, half-timbered houses, Wilhelmine architectural styles and German character names have become something commonplace. Animes like “Elfen Lied”, “Frieren” and “Weiß Kreuz” put the German words right in the title. And “Legend of the Galactic Heroes” (titled grammatically incorrectly in the Japanese original as “Heroic Legends of the Cosmos Island”) from the 1980s brings together names like Reinhard von Lohengramm, Rudolf von Goldenbaum and Lord Braunschweig in large space battles.

This constant presence of German identity is accompanied by a romanticization, an exaggeration of the historical imperial era. In anime and manga, the audience only gets to know them through postcard motifs, but not through their authoritarianism and colonial rule. The only distillation that remains is German-sounding names, attractive old buildings and the impression of a “good old time”. The worlds are not directly referred to as Germany or the Empire, but are given telltale names like “Germania” in “Izetta: The Last Witch”. “Monster” is one of the few exceptions, as the manga and its film adaptation take place in the German 1990s, in Düsseldorf and Heidelberg, including the Edeka sign. In stark contrast to the other beautifully colored views of Germany, here you see a cold, unwelcoming Federal Republic and the rise of neo-Nazism. Nazis do appear in series like “Hellsing” and “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure,” but only as antagonists who are hopelessly exaggerated and caricatured beyond recognition. 

Of course, countries often romanticize their respective cultures, not least for economic reasons. But it is significant that the Japanese cultural industry, depicted in this case, has such a strong connection to historical Germany. There has long been a discussion among friends of Japanese pop culture about how one should evaluate this loyalty to the Nibelungen. Is it active historical revisionism, antiquated solidarity or propaganda? In most cases, the finding of cultural osmosis through which Japan absorbed German cultural assets over several epochs and integrated them into its cultural industry is sufficient. While anime and manga show a romantic Germany and at the same time can reject any accusation of glorification with a recurring Hitler specter, the bad aftertaste of historical nostalgia remains.

Despite the deliberately narrow representation of German history, watching and reading anime and manga cannot be consistently criticized. Although both, like the country in which they were created, all too often have an antiquated image of women, this does not delegitimize the art form itself. The same applies to the romanticization of Germanness. Nevertheless, more criticism of historical Germany, including in drawn form, would be desirable. 

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