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Answerman - Why Isn't There Political Anime?


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Jose Cruz



Joined: 20 Nov 2012
Posts: 1767
Location: South America
PostPosted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 12:36 am Reply with quote
yuna49 wrote:
leafy sea dragon wrote:
Which reminds me: How well does the general mainstream in Japan understand their political process? Of the spots up for office, do they know where they stand in the hierarchy and what they're in charge of? Do they know what needs a majority, a supermajority, or just a plurality? If something passes X, where does it go, or is it ratified?

It's a parliamentary system. People vote for parties, and measures get passed by the majority in the Diet. I doubt most people know more than that nor need to really. As I said earlier, despite having democratic institutions like elections and a legislature, Japanese politics tends to take place within the elite and among party factions. It took half-a-century before the Japanese threw out the LDP, only to discover that their successors were even less competent so they voted the LDP back in.


Well, that applies to all countries except Switzerland which incorporates direct democratic institutions. The US is not different from Japan: 2 parties run the country and their established elite cadre, now they put someone outside of the political elite to run the country and everybody thinks it is the end of the world.

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On the question of why young people in Japan pay so little attention to politics, I found this article rather informative. Perhaps one reason young Japanese don't pay attention to politicians is that Japanese politicians don't pay much attention to young people. With a rapidly-aging population, the global tendency for older people to vote at higher rates than younger people encourages politicians to pay more attention to issues like pensions and less to education and affordable housing. In addition, the malapportionment of Japanese parliamentary seats gives rural areas disproportionate power in making policy. Since younger Japanese are more likely to live in the cities, they are underrepresented by the workings of the electoral system.


Poor young Japanese people: they have no political power and have to work like dogs to pay the pensions of tens of millions of elderly people. No wonder shows like PMMM are so successful among the Japanese youth, since their situation is exactly this: a fight to not succumb to despair and take the weight of the elderly on their shoulders.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
Location: Another Kingdom
PostPosted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 12:56 am Reply with quote
Jose Cruz wrote:
Poor young Japanese people: they have no political power and have to work like dogs to pay the pensions of tens of millions of elderly people. No wonder shows like PMMM are so successful among the Japanese youth, since their situation is exactly this: a fight to not succumb to despair and take the weight of the elderly on their shoulders.


Another thing to consider is that a lot of anime, if not most anime, is escapism. I think the most visible case of this is the recent trend of "trapped in a video game" anime series, which has a wish fulfillment aspect to it, that being that the audience for these shows are so unhappy with their real lives that they dream about staying in some other reality where they can have power and the rules and hierarchy suit them better.

Of the anime made recently, what percentage of them are about normal people doing normal things? I don't really stumble across that many--when the setting and premise are both mundane, they throw loads of cute girls into it (which is a form of escapism itself, the fantasy of being surrounded by said cute girls).
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yuna49



Joined: 27 Aug 2008
Posts: 3804
PostPosted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 9:53 am Reply with quote
Jose Cruz wrote:
Well, that applies to all countries except Switzerland which incorporates direct democratic institutions. The US is not different from Japan

I disagree. First we have a federal system that incorporates local, state, and national governments. Japan has municipal governments, but otherwise a unitary state. In addition, the "balance of powers" in the US Constitution was designed to hobble decision makers, while parliamentary systems place immense power in the hands of the governing party or coalition.

Political competition in Japan is generally not between parties since every party other than the LDP is pretty weak. That forces political disputes into factional conflict among elite actors particularly within the LDP.
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