Imperial Japan/Examples

Representations of Imperial Japan in media include:

Anime and Manga

• The incompetent, war-crazy Keron Empire in Keroro Gunsou is largely a satire of Imperial Japan. This is Played for Laughs - even their tendency to think military force can solve anything, their 731-style scientist's experimenting on humans and their name for Earth being a wordplay on a WWII-era ethnic slur against the Chinese has made the series.
• Osamu Tezuka's Adolf is set during WWII in the Axis nations, especially Japan. His portrayal of the government and the general public (aside from our heroes, of course) is less than sympathetic. He was also planning to do a Phoenix story set during this period that involved the Imperial army searching for the titular bird in conquered China, but sadly, it was never completed.
• Grave of the Fireflies is another WWII story that takes place in Japan, showing in heartbreaking detail what the civilians had to put up with as the war ground down to its last bloody days.
• Barefoot Gen largely takes place during the last days of the Empire.
• Kurogane Pukapuka Tai is a much less serious work than the above, but it is set on an Imperial Japanese Navy cruiser in 1943. Crewed almost entirely by women. Les Yay comedy ensues.
• Now and Then, Here and There is loaded with references to Imperial Japanese culture. The fact that the king is a completely batshit insane warlord only furthers the effect.
• Millennium Actress begins with the titular heroine being sent to Manchuria to make propaganda films during the second Sino-Japanese war and goes on to depict the general devastation of Japan as the war progresses. Also hints at the role of that the Kempetei military police played in suppressing dissent during the war years.
• Rail of the Star tells the story of the trials and tribulations of a Japanese family desperately trying to escape North Korea after the surrender. Notably glosses over why Japanese civilians would be so desperate to escape Korea after the war.
• Zipang has a modern-day Japanese warship sent back in time to World War Two, where the Values Dissonance between the pacifistic modern-era crew and their Imperial military counterparts is explored.
• While they're more often compared to Nazis, the brutal Principality of Zeon from Mobile Suit Gundam was also heavily influenced by Imperial Japan. It's especially notable the way Zeon's hypocrisy towards the rest of the space colonies parallels Japan's toward the rest of Asia. Both claimed to be fighting for the people's freedom against corrupt, imperialistic foreign powers while at the same time wiping out huge swathes of the population they were nominally trying to protect.
• Gyo by Junji Ito features one of 731's hideous experiments coming back to haunt modern Japan with fantastically disturbing results.
• Fullmetal Alchemist and Pumpkin Scissors are both set in A Nazi by Any Other Name settings, with the protagonists being members of the Evil Army who want to change things. They both also feature secret government labs where mad doctors conduct sick experiments, although they seem to do this mostly to their own soldiers as opposed to captured enemies.
• Rurouni Kenshin is a historical fiction set in the early years of the Meiji Era. It follows Kenshin, a former hitokiri (assassin/killer) of the pro-Emperor Choshu party during the Boshin War, and his life in the new era. He seeks to repent for his crimes of killing and vows never to take another life.
  • Makoto Shishio, one of the major Big Bads of the series can be considered as an embodiment of all that was evil about WWII-era Japan with his cruel Social Darwinist beliefs that those who are strong have the right to kill and oppress the weak in their quest for power and the disire to make Japan a great and powerful nation at the cost of throwing away any kind of morality. In fact, the manga outright states it.
• Apocalypse Zero
  • The protagonist and the Big Bad are decendents of Shiro Hagakure, their equivalent of the infamous Shiro Ishii of unit 731. The reason that his clan dedicated themselves to fighting for justice is to make up for this specific ancestor's horrible deeds.
  • His Powered Armor is powered by the souls of 3,000 sacrificed Chinese POW.
  • His fighting style is also created by unit 731. A flashback in the manga shows Shiro himself demonstrated a technique on a POW to a group of Japanese soldiers, killing him brutally, then told the soldiers to practice on other POW.
  • The freakish monsters he fought are also the result of a unit 731's experiment.
• Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei contains a few references to the period and its effect on modern Japan. One episode has the characters putting on glasses from earlier eras and expressing reactionary views. The owner of the glasses store indicates a pair from the 1930s to 1945 and cautions against putting them on because bad things happen from that viewpoint. Another episode centers on a character who Apologizes a Lot and the protagonist asserts that people in Japan are expected to be deferential and apologetic because of their militarism during the earlier period, and this general idea that modern Japan is a defanged Butt Monkey compared to the past is raised in several episodes.
• Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is a guro manga with surprisingly little ^{[dead link]} Gorn, however it does follow the titular concept and ends with it being a roaring success. Essentially a humiliation comic, a meteorite that makes only females grow to giant size hits Japan. Rather than follow standard obvious logic and merely have giant busty samurai ladies wield giant mile-long-firing bows, they do some...interesting modifications to replace their tanks with ko-gals and other high school riffraff. Much much much much weirder than it sounds. The lack of gorn is due to the fact most tanks are taken out off to the side in the background, it is much more about the training of these tankwomen and showering them with the loving adoration of the Imperial Spirit and other good propagandistic stuffs, then they are followed through training as they must be broken of their filthy western-American liberalism thought processes and basic human modesty to become just and great imperial war machines. The most insane part has to be pages 150-154 where there are actually worked out schematics for how the tankwomen function and a little afterwards when they discuss how to get the tanks shells to fire...more...properly. It should be obvious by now they certainly aren't spitting these shells... As to Imperial Japan content, lets just say if the nudity and humiliation were removed and it aired, Japan would quickly find themselves under attack by the rest of the Pacific nations. For no apparent reason, by the way, Japan's idea works wonderfully and wins them many victories so the allied nations steal bits of the meteorite and copy Japan's tank-girl technology. This is just one very strange manga from beginning to end.
• The first few Sakura Taisen games are set in a Steampunk Imperial Japan, before going to Gay Paree and The Big Applesauce.
• Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service references both Unit 731 and the Rape of Nanking, big taboos in Japanese media, and several of the skeletons in the closet the service exhume (sometimes literally) are connected to Imperial Japan or its fall.
• Yuu Watase's Sakura Gari is set in the Tokyo of The Roaring Twenties. The Fushigi Yuugi prequel Fushigi Yuugi Genbu Kaiden is from a similar time frame, happening around 60 years before the events of the original Fushigi Yuugi'.
• In Highschool of the Dead, the Takagi family are Uyoku Dantai—e.g militant right wing traditionalists, revisionists and ultranationalists. This is admitted outright in the manga but toned down in the anime.
• Night Raid 1931 is set in Manchuria at the beginning of the so-called "Manchurian Incident".
• Some parts of Axis Powers Hetalia take place around the period as well. Uncommonly for Japanese media, Japan himself isn't exactly shown as being flawless in this period: when he stabs China In the Back, it's presented as a Kick the Dog moment and not Played for Laughs, thus marking quite the big Mood Whiplash.
  • It's also a common sight in Hetalia fan fiction and specially Dark Fic, with Japan receiving either Draco in Leather Pants or Ron the Death Eater treatment depending on the fan writer. I.e, Japan/Taiwan J-Fen fanart set in this make him the first via portraying him as Taiwan's Knight in Shining Armor, while the... infamous fanfic All He Ever Wanted has him as the second via portraying him as a total Lawful Evil bastard who manipulates everyone around him and specially England.
• Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is a gekiga manga by Japanese war veteran and mangaka Shigeru Mizuki that harshly criticizes the Japanese war effort and graphically portrays the war as a futile and pointless campaign, depicting the horrific conditions Japanese soldiers endured, the unsympathetic commanding officers, and questioning the original intent of the war.

Other Media

• The Blue Lotus
• The Man Behind The Sun, a Chinese Exploitation Film about the 731 war crimes. The characters are fictional, but the grotesque moments are based on the actual war crimes.
• The Devil's Gluttony, another 731 flick, this time produced by Japanese filmmakers. Being that they were affiliated with Japan's Communist party, the message we're apparently supposed to take away from this is that Japan's current government isn't as far removed from these atrocities as they'd like people to think.
• Tora! Tora! Tora!, acclaimed Japanese-American co-production that shows us Pearl Harbor from two very different perspectives.
• Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard.
• An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro. After the war, an artist is confronted by the consequences of his past as a fervent militarist and painter of propaganda posters.
• The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang (whose grandparents escaped the massacre). Provides much historical information about this event. Unfortunately, she committed suicide a few years after writing it.
• In earlier and less brutal times (1878 and 1905, to be specific), but still in Imperial Japan: The Diamond Chariot.
• Also in earlier and less brutal times, the Puccini Opera Madame Butterfly (set in 1904).
• Letters From Iwo Jima, a rare western (and sympathetic, no less) film about the battle from the Japanese soldiers' perspective.
• The Bridge on the River Kwai about the infamous "Railroad of Death" across Burma and Thailand.
• 2009: Lost Memories, is an Alternate History film that features a Korea that is still dominated by Imperial Japan in the early 21st century.
• The Escapist, a tie-in comic from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay features an Animesque version of the character, supposedly a licensed version from a Japanese publisher. Playing with the original's typical Golden Age anti-axis themes, this version is an ex-kamikaze pilot who miraculously survived & is sent on a mystical quest to free the souls of all the people his father, a 731 Mad Scientist, tortured & killed. The book wryly acknowledges that a real Japanese would never come up with this sort of story, implying the creator was actually Clay working under a pseudonym, trying in his own strange way to convince the Japanese to own up to their unfortunate past. Unsurprisingly, this version was said to be a massive flop.
• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence a 1983 movie written by Nagisha Oshima and Paul Mayersberg and based on Laurens van der Post's experiences during World War II as a prisoner of war as depicted in his works The Seed and the Sower (1963) and The Night of the New Moon (1970).
• Paradise Road about a Japanese prison camp for female European colonists in Sumatra.
• Akira Kurosawa's 1946 film 'No Regrets for our Youth is about the persecution of student radicals, ironically from a man who likely had quite a bit to regret from his own youth in the wartime propaganda film industry.
• Noted Japanese film Auteur Seijun Suzuki's Fighting Elegy uses a schoolboy obsessed with fighting as a metaphor for the early Showa era
• One of the Sociopathic Soldiers of Nazi Zombies is Takeo Masaki, an Ax Crazy Blood Knight obsessed with honor to the point that he tattooed the word inside of his eyelids. Ironically, he's the least crazy of the playable characters.
• Sixth Column by Robert Heinlein is an SF novel written about a year before Pearl Harbor. In it, Imperian Japan has fused with the rest of Asia and conquered North America. Atrocities ensue. This novel was written in response to the imperial excesses of Japan at the time.
  • Also Pan-Asian sentiment, something you see in H.G. Wells's 'the coming war' or whatever it was called. Something Japan has been advocating since the mid-1800s.
• City of Life and Death: Film of the Nanjing Pleasantness, made by a Chinese-Japanese team. Provoked some controversy in Japan and China, where right-wing groups have criticised its portrayal of Japanese soldiers and Japanese war crimes. For being dirty liars & trying to shame the Japanese nation with untruths and trying to portray the Japanese in too human & sympathetic a light, respectively. It comes off fairly neutral, speaking from an Anglospheric POV. Maybe a little muted, even; the film certainly doesn't stray as far into gratuitous war crime territory as it could've, favouring instead a more coherent (and human) narrative.
• Pearl Harbor... what? Imperial Japan is in it. For a couple minutes. From the air. Still counts.
• Commandos 2. A good portion of the game puts your squad against the Japanese military in the pacific.