Aaron Gerowmost effective rendition of this trope of inescapability is when the heroine Miki heads to the
airport to leave the country. After showing her documents at the counter, however, she is simply
ignored and must return home. One is reminded of an episode of the British television program
The Prisoner that one of the characters in Aoyama Shinji’s Helpless (1996) cites: the character
Number 6, a former secret agent confined to a Kafkaesque prison Village, escapes The Village
only to be thrown back in its midst. Perhaps to a number of filmmakers, Japan is like the prison
Village, impossible to escape even with the supposed transcending of boundaries that globalism
promises. While Matsuda suggested more radical, revolutionary, even apocalyptic ways of over-
coming this impasse around 1970, some directors of the 1990s seemed even more pessimistic
about the prospects of escape.
Far from reaffirming the nation’s borders, such pessimism may itself constitute a damning
critique of Japan, which can first take the form of a claim about mainstream Japan’s inability
or refusal to globalize. It could be argued that the dominant sectors in Japan, far from being
an exemplar of postmodern transnationality, stubbornly cling to an insular worldview. Japan is
not alone in currently exhibiting the rise of right-wing nationalism, with a controversial film
depicting the sacrifices of kamikaze fighters—Yamazaki Takashi’s The Eternal Zero (Eien no zero,
2013), itself an adaptation of a novel by the rightist Hyakuta Naoki—becoming one of the
biggest hits of this most recent decade. However, such a trend on the level of popular culture
can be traced back not only to 1990s works like Kobayashi Yoshinori’s manga On War (Sensōron)
or the film Pride (Puraido—Unmei no toki, I tō Shun’ya, 1998) that revised the history of World
War II, but even to earlier special effects films like Atragon (Kaitei gunkan, Honda Ishirō, 1963)
or anime/manga like Space Battleship Yamato (Uchūsenkan Yamato, 1974–1975) that reimagined an
alternative postwar history with Japan at the center. While one must be careful about reducing
complex popular texts to nationalist allegories, there is a need, for instance, to understand why
one of the most popular narratives of the 2010s, the manga/anime/film Attack on Titan (Shingeki
no kyojin), is centered on a community, safe in its walled enclosure, that suffers a breach of that
border by alien giants and responds through militarization.
One need not advocate neoliberal free-trade theories to notice how the promised free flow
of goods and content over borders has not been realized by major media institutions in Japan.
Yoshiharu Tezuka analyzed the Japanese film industry’s efforts to engage in co- productions in
Asia and noted their lack of success, especially as other Asian producers have come to avoid
Japanese involvement, even when making films involving Japanese content. To Tezuka, this
is because “Japan-centred regional cosmopolitanism, which locates ‘Japan’ above ‘Asia’ and
invites other Asian countries to follow Japan’s example—the so-called ‘flying geese model’ of
development—lost credibility” (Tezuka 2011, 169). While Tezuka has found scattered evidence
of cosmopolitanism on the individual level, to him it has largely failed on the institutional level.
This echoes the complaints of distributors and producers in the West, who have described the
insularity of the Japanese major studios and their seeming inability to conduct business with
potential foreign partners (see Schilling 2015). While the Japanese government has lent support
to popular culture industries, particularly the anime and manga productions that have registered
successes abroad, they have done so through a Cool Japan and new media policy that reduces
such content to national branding, and which enforces hierarchies between media (devaluating
film, for instance, as not a new media).
Such narratives of failure, however, tend to assume that nationalism and globalism are on
opposite poles, with the former representing an age that is now past. It could be argued, how-
ever, that the ideology of Japanese nationalism is often flexible enough to allow for globalism.
Kang Sang-jung (2001), for instance, argued a central duality to the Japanese ideology of kokutai
(literally, “national body”), which operates as both a political entity demanding loyalty to the