A little while ago I read an article that said that China was trying to ban all Japanese animation. This proved unpopular and not particularly sustainable. Of course, young Chinese kids watch anime legally or not, online, and the effort to police that is substantial. However, the initiative still does exist and to some degree persists to encourage the local animation market to favor Chinese animation rather than Japanese. Eventually, this might translate to International gains which could add some interesting revenue and public interest for China.
This got me a little bit curious because lately, I’ve noticed a lot of anime made in Japan using Chinese manhwa or webtoons as source material. It got me wondering whether those shows are illegal to watch in China. That would be very weird right. I looked it up and couldn’t find a clear answer. As far as I can tell shows like All Saints Street and a Herbivorous Dragon… are not in fact banned in China at this time, but other anime are.
There are quite a few popular titles banned in China. The list includes shows you might expect due to violent or ecchy content that would be considered unsuitable for the population. Shows like High School of the Dead or Death Note because of depictions of violence towards others and especially minors. Even Black Butler made the list for containing “unsavory” material. I guess I can kind of see where they’re coming from, but why single out that shows specifically? If Black Butler is a step too far then a lot of other anime aren’t going to make the cut. I was particularly surprised to see that Sword Art Online was considered too violent and featured way too many weapons to be suitable for the Chinese public. But the title that really caught my eye was Psycho-Pass.
Now obviously if Sword Art Online has too many weapons and Black Butler is too unsavory then I can see why a show like Psycho-Pass would be considered unsuitable for the general public. However, that’s not what caught my attention. Aside from the usual explanation that the show was violent and featured guns therefore shouldn’t be allowed on the air in China, there was the quiet part out loud: Psycho-Pass is particularly dangerous to China because it encourages rebellion against the state…
You can understand why right? On the surface, this is exactly what Psycho-Pass does. In fact maybe not even just on the surface. It is a show that encourages people to question authority and to examine morality according to their own values rather than the ones of the state. Ultimately the main character, one that is presented as the ultimate good of the series, does choose to enforce the existing systems. That would seem to go against the argument of ensiding rebellion. However, it is a decision she comes at after much soul searching and after defining the system for herself. So if you just examined the show itself you could argue that maybe the Chinese government is misunderstanding the core messaging or interpreting it in the most negative way but ultimately it seems like a rational decision.
However the more I thought about it the less sense it started to make sense. After all, if China truly believes that a show like Psycho-Pass could create dangerous civil unrest, why didn’t it have that effect in Japan? Why would Japanese animation studios purposefully create distribute and then air a show that could be detrimental to their own society? The show takes place in Japan, that is literally the government the story questions. It’s the answer to this question that reveals something more interesting to me. Unless China is trying to say that their own society is so fragile that it could accidentally be completely corrupted by a random animation, the more logical explanation is that Psycho-Pass was created specifically to bring down societies like the one in China and not Japan. That the message was purposeful and aimed. And you know what, maybe they aren’t completely paranoid.
I have been meaning to talk about Cool Japan for a while. It’s a little complicated, well complicated is not the right word, there’s just a lot of history to it and that’s why I’ve never gone into it on this blog. Not sure it’s gonna interest anyone other than me. So I’m going to include a gross oversimplification of what Cool Japan is. Essentially a few decades ago Japanese officials noticed that their, let’s call it social and artistic capital, was becoming in high demand around the world. To put it in highly scientific terms, people taught Japan was cool.
And so the Cool Japan initiative was born. This was meant as an effort to put Japanese culture on the international stage and to make whatever parts of that culture seemed more monetizable, front and center. Small odd or funny news stories were purposefully translated into several languages and then leaked to international media and on targeted websites when normally they would have been overlooked altogether. These stories were carefully chosen to make Japan appear futuristic and quirky or interesting. A place like nowhere else on earth. Only in Japan! Even if these stories gave a completely unrealistic view of life in Japan.
Similarly, large grants were given to entertainment companies and the arts to produce national products that could be easily exported. And you guessed it, anime is a HUGE part of Cool Japan. The industry benefitted** (arguable) from the policies and was pressured to create shows that would in essence sell Japan to the rest of the world.
I am grossly oversimplifying things here. In my opinion, Cool Japan is a very interesting bit of political and media history and I encourage anyone that has an interest in these things to go read up on it for yourselves. In very short, the idea was to drive up international sales of national Japanese products, encourage tourism, and position Japan as a country of interest and influence on the international scale.
But that’s the rosy optimistic view of it. It’s not easy to find any explicit mention of using media for international pro-Japan propaganda but it would be silly for us to completely dismiss the idea.
First, it’s easy to see that a good portion of media from anywhere in the world has nationalistic messages. Similarly, you will likely see media from most places (that aren’t completely censored) have media that criticize national policies. That’s normal. But usually, that media is created with a domestic audience in mind.
Anime is not always created that way. In fact, anime is often created in a sort of dual audience demographic. Shows are meant to appeal domestically but ultimately the lucrative international market is the main goal. As such, any messages that are either supportive or critical of national policies are also crafted with this audience in mind. Things are going to get out of the family so to speak. It also means that any media with messages that are either biased against other cultures (not to say downright bigoted) are also added with the expressed knowledge that members of that culture will see them. As such a little bit of delicacy is required.
Subtle political messaging in anime has always been present. If you decide to look for it you will find it pretty much everywhere although it was a bit more obvious and unified in older shows (like 80s to early 2000s). It’s not always so obvious as overt as the nationalism of Attack on Titan. Sometimes shows just tend to push specific cultural viewpoints or moral stands or even something as simple as foods. There’s a reason why we see so many traditional Japanese dishes in anime. Why we are so much more likely to see someone snack on dango or Takoyaki than a candy bar or chips.
Most of us might not think of this as propaganda. We associate the practice with nefarious goals. At the end of the day, propaganda is simply information used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. All media is full of it. But at one point anime was specifically used for it and it’s hard to tell to what extent it still is.
