Leo Kataoka, 24, remembers watching “Grave of the Fireflies,” Studio Ghibli’s anime about the hardships of a boy and his young sister during World War II, in his ninth-grade civics class.
“It’s not like I think about it all the time, but whenever someone talks about watching a film in school, I always think about ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ — it's vividly in my memories till now,” he says.
Many schools in Japan show the 90-minute anime as educational material to tell the emotionally grueling story of the boy, who has no means to prevent his sister from starving to death.
The anime played a part in sparking Kataoka’s interest in the war back then and he went on to watch other war films.
“Even though you learn it from a textbook, it's not really something you can visualize and imagine,” he added. “By having anime, whenever you're reading a textbook or something, you kind of come back to one of those memories that you had of watching the film.”
Eighty years after Japan surrendered in World War II, opportunities to hear first-hand experiences of the war, whether it be from grandparents or oral storytellers during school trips, are becoming scarce, especially for youngsters.
Many of the younger generation may, in fact, never get the chance to listen to first-person accounts. And Japan’s anime — despite its limitations — could be a key medium for them to learn about what it was like to be in a war, allowing the experience to be passed on to the next generation.
How war anime developed
Anime on war began emerging in the 1980s after many books and autobiographies of WWII survivors were published in the 1970s, amid fears the memories of the deadliest conflict in history would end up lost in the sands of time. Some of them were adapted for educational purposes into films, many of which were in the form of anime.
“Many accounts were first and foremost about the hardships people endured at home during the war,” said anime critic Ryota Fujitsu. “In Japan’s postwar peace education, there was a strong emphasis on passing down memories of the suffering caused by the war, and these stories were very much tied to that.”
A prime example is “Barefoot Gen,” featuring a 7-year-old boy’s experience of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which was used as educational material at schools.
It was originally a manga authored by Keiji Nakazawa, a hibakusha, that ran in the weekly Shonen Jump from 1973, which to date has sold more than 10 million copies and been translated into multiple languages. It was then turned into an anime film in two parts during the 1980s.
The peak of WWII anime came in the 1990s, with at least 26 films related to the war released.
However, the number of anime works being made in recent years has been declining, due in part to diminishing public interest in war and concerns that it may not be profitable.
And even the most renowned war anime is losing its audience among the younger generation. Joachim Alt, an assistant professor at Niigata University who specializes in WWII anime, recounted that when he taught a guest lecture at a prominent university in 2023, he was shocked to find that fewer than 10 people had seen “Grave of the Fireflies” in his class of around 300 students.
“If you haven't seen ‘Grave of the Fireflies,’ you probably haven't seen anything else,” he said. “And this kind of makes you worry ... for Japan to maintain its identity as a peace nation, of course you need to have this kind of awareness and this reproduction of war memory.”
Shift from victimhood
Over the decades, the focus of war anime has evolved to attempt to give more depth and perspective of what happened and how it happened — and not just on people’s suffering during the war.
“You can clearly see how over the years there are changes in what the films are stressing,” said Alt.
Alt said war anime has gradually started to attempt to portray more of the background of how Japan actually started its part of the war, rather than how it came to have been drawn into it. This marks a change from older works that only portrayed the Allied forces as being some sort of aliens or phantoms that came down to attack Japan.
The protagonists also shifted from boys to girls and they now tend to be older.
“They have more autonomy, they have more agency and they technically have the power to oppose the war, even though that usually is being a bit undercut by the fact that the stories are still mostly set in 1945, when any kind of opposition really doesn't make any difference because it's already almost over anyway,” added Alt.
For example, “Nagasaki 1945 — The Angelus Bells” from 2005 — based on a true story — follows the tale of a young radiologist who helps his patients following the atomic bombing in Nagasaki.
More widely known is “In This Corner of the World,” a 2016 hit movie that portrays an 18-year-old woman’s life during the war. Critics say it does a better job of telling a story compared with many other works in its depiction of the protagonist as she comes to realize how ordinary people like herself could have unknowingly been contributing to Imperial Japan’s war effort.
A 2018 remake of the popular anime series “GeGeGe no Kitaro,” authored by Shigeru Mizuki, also attempts to capture how a nation at war is simultaneously a victim and an aggressor. In one episode centering on the topic of WWII, the anime’s characters go to what appears to be Southeast Asia and see a memorial for Japanese soldiers. They casually comment on how Japanese troops had come this far to attack and be attacked.
“It’s very important that this perspective — seeing war as something that happens within the cycle of attacking and being attacked — was included,” said Fujitsu.
As more works are made in an attempt to understand the complexities and layers of the war, the potential of getting a more holistic understanding of what happened in WWII grows, he said.
Limitations
As a medium, however, anime has its limitations when it comes to illustrating the complexities of WWII — such as the political background and Japan’s geopolitical situation — in order to make it understandable and approachable for the audience.
“Once a war becomes a war of total mobilization, ordinary citizens are inevitably drawn into it and I think (anime) can convey how serious and difficult a situation like that is,” said Fujitsu. “But if someone pushes back and asks, ‘Well, why is that such a bad thing?’, there’s really no ready answer you can give just from watching that work.”
Anime may be the first point of contact for those who are not well versed on what happened during war. But other materials such as books, academic documents and museums would be able to provide a more in-depth look into the war, he said.
Isao Takahata, the director behind “Grave of the Fireflies,” once said that he does not consider the film to be anti-war. For the anime to be an anti-war film, Takahata said, it has to look into how Japan waged the war and how the country can prevent it from happening again in the future.
“I completely agree,” said Fujitsu. “If what gets passed down is a sentimentalized story with only the emotions emphasized, I don’t think that has the power to actually stop a war.”
Future prospects
Still, anime allows filmmakers to reconstruct historical locations and characters that might be too difficult to portray in live action films.
An example in which such creativity is on full display is in the beginning of “In This Corner of the World,” when the protagonist takes a walk in the Nakajima-honmachi area in Hiroshima — an area currently renamed as Nakajimacho district.
Although the original city no longer existed after its complete destruction due to the atomic bomb, the cityscape was recreated by cross-referencing surviving photos from before the bombing, along with various materials such as residential maps. Even the people in the foreground were rendered almost like portraits, modeled after photographs kept by the bereaved families.
Fujitsu has high expectations for “Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise,” an upcoming war anime set to be released at the end of this year. The film, which follows characters on the front line of the war — but attempts to ease its goriness on the battlefield by illustrating the characters in a more cartoonish style so more emphasis is put on the storyline — could offer a new perspective not yet seen in other WWII animes.
In the end, no single work can achieve everything. The importance is engaging multiple mediums — from books to documentaries to museums — to really understand the war and learn from it. Anime is one of them.
“Its accessibility reaches a wide range of ages, and because many of these (anime) works are actually based on real events, they also serve the role of passing down memories,” Fujitsu said. “But the function they serve is really only a small part of the much larger question of how war should be conveyed.
“Anime can be merely an entryway — but it is a very effective one.”
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