It would be funny if the punchline to this joke was a bunch of Japanese military officials all looking around in panic and screaming, “Oh no, hesu on tsu us!”
Firstly, for those who have no idea of what the Kantai Collection (or KanColle) is, it’s “a online browser game in which one assumes the role of an admiral, assembles a fleet of kanmusu (“ship girl”, girls based on World War II era Japanese ships and submarines) and battles against fleets of alien enemy warships.”
Or at least that’s what the Japanese want you to think!
Having not just games but Kantai models, singers and dancers, music and anime both of and inspired by it (see character names from Arpeggio of Blue Steel) as well as one of the biggest pushes in the fan-fiction (or doujinshi) community since the Touhou Shinto/Air Force conspiracy of the 2000s, Kantai has a secret agenda. Because, as you will come to know, under the surface of this seemingly innocent cover of cute anime girls and weapon personification is actually hiding the Japanese government’s darker underlying motive.
Manipulating young Otaku males to join the Japanese Navy!
“YVAN EHT NIOJ!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBnNyhx_jzg
Seriously (but not really), the fact that the ‘girls and guns’ element is being so pushed into the Otaku medium in both the mainstream and underground culture it does make you wonder if Call of Duty is the only thing both training and inspiring our children for the robot wars of the future. Shows like Girlz und Panzer, Sound of the Sky, Upotte, Strike Witches and Infinate Stratos are all romanticizing the military life for a young male audience by portraying it as having an abundance young and cute girls, the Kantai Collection then delivers to them a ‘male power fantasy’ of dominance over them in the navy. For you are the Admiral with authority over your fleet of young highsch… *ahem* “ship girls”.
Looking at it objectively and considering the military and socio-geopolitical climate of Japan after the issue of their whaling exploits, it’s no wonder that such a cultural push would try to swoop in to encourage the Japanese youth to joint their ranks. The appealing but false portrayals of the Japanese Navy in these shows is enough to encourage the desperate NEET and Otaku youths to join up to the vicious whaling killing (and soon to be nuclear-armed) fleets. And with their neighbors being North Korea, who are threatening their international waters with their own nuclear ships, there’s no need to wonder why!
North Korea is comin’ to get ya Japan!
It seems Japan is the West’s last line of defense against the Tyranny of Kim Jong-Un (as well as China and Thailand… and India), but the real question is are we willing to let all the whales die and let the youth of Japan be enticed by cute “ship girls” just so the Kantai Collection can trigger World War III to break out in Asia? The short answer is ‘YES’, because as we all know the Japs were in league with the Nazis in WWII so it’s about time they did democracy a solid. If the only way they can do that is through cute anime girl games and fan-made erotica, all the power to them! War propaganda, (which these game and cartoons most definitely are!) can come in many forms.
So don’t fight it fellow Otakus, join the Japanese Navy TODAY!
POSTSCRIPT
I couldn’t write this without laughing. The point of this was to show that people incorporate their own ideology into their art but that this can go both ways as people can also interpret ideologies into art that aren’t really there. This was my attempt to emulate this to the extreme by imitating the warning of a conspiracy nut-job trying to find the hidden motives behind one of the most perverted fandoms around today.
Fantasy and Anime 
For a second there, I thought this article serious. It was a real “WTF” moment until I realized the author was being humorous.
And then you find out I’m working for the Japanese Mwahaha!
Actually, given the presence of a newly aggressive North Korea, China, and Russia, and given the recent passiveness of the US in Asian waters, and given the large helpings of Chinese government stuff pushing hatred and revenge on the Japanese for the bad stuff in WWII… well, I think it’s pretty obvious why the Japanese have been beefing up their defense forces and taking a more positive view of their own military.
In the last decade, there have been an unusually large number of series trying explicitly to deal with Japan’s iffy military past with various amounts of realism. There have been several times I’ve been shocked to hear series explicitly criticize Japan’s failings in WWII and before, in an open way that would never have happened in the Eighties or even the Nineties. A fair number of series seem to be trying to work out a modern military and civilian ethic, so as to be able to fight hard but avoid atrocities and the bad side of honor. A lot of this has been going on for decades in much more veiled terms, but now it feels more serious and forthright.
Japan still isn’t very good at making friends and allies with Taiwan and the Philippines and South Korea, but they are trying harder.
OTOH, Japan has also been getting much more interested in China and Russia’s culture over the last few years, and this is also getting very noticeable.
It’s a classic love-hate relationship on all sides. There are fans of anime and Japanese martial arts all over the world, including in China and Russia, and Japanese real estate is very desirable to Chinese with cash. There are some segments of the Chinese who actually feel gratitude for various things that post-war Japan has done for China, sometimes inadvertently. (For example, an entire banned kind of Chinese alcohol was brought back by the Communist government, because back in the early 1970’s, the Japanese prime minister mentioned a classic Chinese poem referencing it by wishing to drink some, which meant wishing for good relations in poetic terms.) Russia (not too secretly) longs for revenge for the Russo-Japanese War’s buttkicking, but Putin learned judo and became a judo champion in the KGB.
Anyway… there’s a definite difference from old-school military anime, where the moral of the story was usually that atomic bombs are bad, all wars are misunderstandings, and love solves everything. OTOH, the current ship girl stuff is just a bit much! So I hope the Japanese can find their way to a reasonable consensus. If they keep going, they can come to terms with their past and be freed to do good things in the present, without always shuffling things under the rug.
Of course, a lot of the new openness in talking about Japanese WWII war crimes is because most Japanese military and civilian war-criminals are now dead, along with the rest of the WWII generation. It’s a lot easier to openly admit Japanese sins when Grandpa is no longer alive to hear how he approved the use of slave labor at the factory.
Of course, the downside is that the stories of particularly heroic and honorable Japanese resistance to war crimes, or of Japanese diplomats who saved Jews from Hitler’s death camps, have also gone untold until now.
I suspect that, just as the US has always been a little obsessed with trying to deal with every little detail of the Civil War, Japan is going to spend a really long time going over and over what everybody did in WWII.
Reblogged this on Medieval Otaku and commented:
This was a hilarious conspiracy post. Take a look at it!
Afk. Joining Japanese army now.
Very effective propaganda.
“One of the most perverted fandoms around today” made me laugh, probably because of how true it is. I wasn’t sure this was a joke until I hit YVAN EHT NIOJ (which sounds Russian to me, said that way). Since you mentioned the Kancolle/Arpgeggio link in our emails I decided to look it up myself, and though I couldn’t find any naming references (maybe naming characters after ships just leads to coincidental similarities?) they -did- have an Arpeggio-themed Kancolle event a while back. The conspiracy is real. *Dons tin-foil hat and rides into glorious Nippon’s sunset*
I mean the doujinshi market in Tokyo reveals that to me alone, shelf after shelf of Kantai hentai from lolicon to bdsm. I wasn’t sure whether I should say to Hayley “Hide your eyes!” or “Now embrace the Japanese culture!” Lol I wonder how many people got that Simpsons reference.
From the Wiki:
In September 2013, it was announced that there would be a collaborative project between the Arpeggio of Blue Steel anime and the online game Kantai Collection. Illustrators for Kadokawa Games, including Shibafu and Konishi, are responsible for the characters, which feature crossovers with Kantai Collection characters. An Arpeggio of Blue Steel in-game special event for Kantai Collection also took place from 24 December 2013 to 6 January 2014.