I feel i should apologise for unwittingly derailing this comment thread 
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Complete with right wing nationalist fuckery.
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The only people they killed were two of their own leaders? Pikers. 70s Japanese Communists had higher death counts just with their internal purges.
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They even made a movie about it
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But the Tatenokai had swords and dandy uniforms!
More seriously they managed to inspire repeated terror attacks through the 90’s. And if I’m remembering right there was some connection to Aum Shinrikyo. Though I don’t remember exactly what.
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Crazed 70s Japanese New Left splinter groups like the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front and the Japanese Red Army didn’t just inspire terrorism, they killed plenty of people directly (though IIRC the JRA’s lethal actions (e.g. the Lod Airport massacre) were all done outside Japan). Hence the dark joke that the Communists were more effective than the Tatenokai even on the metric of killing their own.
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Good news, everyone, Akira and Simpsons have a mashup community.
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Because they’re not kwaii, full of cute girls wearing short skirts? Would I be right in thinking you don’t like Ghost In The Shell or Grey either?
You can add Patlabor 2 also predicting the war on terror and how the American world order will fail to adapt to changing events. In many ways, China is the ‘terrorist’ from the film being an unknown quantity that the traditional military and state actors can’t adapt to or refuse to handle in a new way. Rather we just hunker back down to the old ways even if it hurts us more.
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IIRC part of the plot of Akira alludes to the corruption surrounding the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.
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They were also supposed to host in 1940, both the summer Olympics in Tokyo and winter in Sapporo. Japan has had bad luck with Olympic hosting.
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Exactly. Cyberpunk was in the air and these are pretty basic cyberpunk tropes. For obvious reasons; because it was already clear to those that could extrapolate from current trends where society was going.
It might not be raining onto neon streets as much as we thought but we are absolutely living in the future cyberpunk predicted.
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Very much so.
- The unchecked rise of corporate power over government
- The availability of technology to facilitate a golden cage of heavily surveilled escapism
- Massive inequality
- Massive scale of tailored propaganda to control public sentinent
- really cool motorcycles and robots
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There is another very good anime with an Olympic backdrop:
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Ninja Scroll or Wicked City, FTW.
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Never been crazy about Akira as a whole, but this is a remarkable sequence.
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I hope the predictions of this anime don’t come true.
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How about you NOT make that assumption. People get to like what they like, and there really is no reason to condescend to people who don’t like the same anime you do.
And actually, lots of “girly” animes are just as good as those with mechas or those set in a post-apocalyptic future. I’d highly recommend Princess Tutu, Madoka Magicka, or Sailor Moon to anyone, as well as the entire out put of Miyazaki, who often had girls as protagonists. Just because they are about girls doesn’t make them fucking inferior… JFC, you’d think people would move past that once they get out of grade school…
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I saw it when I was probably too young to watch it. The extremity of violence happening to women was hard for me to take and for a while I really thought anime was just another vector for misogyny (though I didn’t have those words then). But then I ended up getting really into more age appropriate stuff. Oddly enough some of the stuff I liked was kind of toxic in retrospect. Ah… So it is.
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Yeah, anime has lots of problematic shows or movies, sadly, even stuff that is well done. But that also provides a vector for discussing what is problematic!
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