Special Circumstances

"Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade" by Mamoru Oshii

Jin-Roh is a deceptively simple drama: a look at a resistance movement against a repressive government told through the lens of the Red Riding Hood fable. Written by Mamoru Oshii (a well-known director of famous anime, "Patlabor", "Avalon", among others), directed by Hiroyuki Okiura and produced by Production I.G.; as Oshii says, "the only way to do this was in animation".

Showa 30's, the name for the alternate history that covers the period between the end of WWII and the Tokyo olympics, as stated by Oshii, a different Japan than after the olympics. This is the setting used in Jin-Roh and it also appears in "The Red Spectacles" (Jigoku no banken: Akai megane) and "Kerberos", both earlier movies by Oshii (recently released as part of a DVD boxed set with three early Oshii movies). This period also covers the social unrest of the 60s. Jin-Roh was also in some sense an adaptation of Oshii's graphic novel "Hellhounds: Panzer Corps" (Kenrou Densetsu).

Here's a slightly edited excerpt from the essay "History's Unquiet Spirit: Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade" by Carl Gustav Horn

In [his] review of Jin-Roh, ... Mark Mays wrote for the Nashville Scene, "The forces of modernization have always tried to eliminate the bestial nature of man ... Oshii suggests that this only works if our fellow beasts will agree to that proposition. The beasts in the alternate reality of Jin-Roh believe that they can never be eliminated."

... Jin-Roh is a dark pool reflecting those very years -- more than forty years past -- that were, according to the received critical wisdom, a height to which Japanese film has never returned. But what Jin-Roh is conjuring through a chill distorted glass is what was really going on in Japan in those days -- the reality never seen in the samurai films that were winning Academy Awards.

Oshii describes Jin-Roh's alternate history as being set somewhere within the "thirties" of the long reign of the late Showa Emperor, Hirohito -- that is, between 1955 and 1965. Japan was then still a largely working-class society, and even as contemporary America by and large enjoyed the peace and prosperity of the Eisenhower, Japan was rocked by social upheaval.

Left-wing parties often made use of the pressure of strikes and massive demonstrations, among whose ranks marched a young university student someday to be known as the brilliant director of Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki. A picture survives of Miyazaki with a (naturally) hand-drawn protest sign showing a woman smacking riot police with a hammer. In Jin-Roh, as Fuse and Kei read Rotkäppchen to each other, and the camera passes over the streets outside, we see a shot of an elementary-school kid in a baseball cap. He would have been just the age of Mamoru Oshii in 1960 -- and he gazes in fascination as a protest march walks by.

But the Left faced a quick and sometimes ruthless response. That very year Oshii was a boy, perhaps cheering for the Nankai Hawks, a young neo-Nazi assassinated the head of the opposition Japanese Socialist Party, Inejiro Asanuma, on live television. Many would have said that the far right had allies in high places: the highest, even -- Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic party was led in 1960 by a convicted war criminal, Prime Minister Nobosuke Kishi, who, once back in power, had tried to give the national police the right of arbitrary arrest.

David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro have documented how Prime Minister Kishi even proposed to mobilize in secret, with the support of Japanese organized crime, an irregular right-wing army of 30,000 counter-demonstrators to be supported with Japanese Self-Defense Force helicopters and aircraft. With all that in mind, Oshii's script, and Jin-Roh's opening sequence of street riots, bombings, and terrorists cut down by the machine guns of the government's secret death squad, the Capital Police and their Special Unit, seems not too far from real history -- or from an unresolved past.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

Isaac Asimov's Hugo award winning novel "The Gods Themselves" was a collection of three stories, each with distinct characters and set apart in time and space, one even set in another universe. As Pamela Sargent points out in her afterword to this book, if only this book was presented to the sf audience as a single novel, it might have been an instant hit like Asimov's novel, rather than the sleeper it turned out to be.

Considered by many to be Gene Wolfe's best single work, this judgement is made even more impressive by the quality of Wolfe's other novels. Unlike his other novels, this is not sf disguised as fantasy, but rather straight sf with complex questions raised about individual identity and how it relates to the identity of entire civilizations. The understated tenor of the writing means that you have to pay extra attention to the details and Wolfe certainly does not pander at all, making reading this complex set of stories even more enjoyable.

The first novella in the trilogy is The Fifth Head of Cerberus, the story of a coming of age, but of a clone -- being taught his way by a robot nanny of sorts, and his brother David. By the end of the story, we are aware of the complex relationship between the planet and it's dual sister planet and the inhabitants who existed on these planets before the colonists landed. The second novella, "A Story", by John V. Marsch switches perspectives to the apparent civilization of the original aborigine inhabitants of the planets in a style that shifts between myth and history. The final novella, V.R.T., is another switch of perspective to an explorer whose diary is being closely read by a torturer (shades of Wolfe's future characters). The explorer is searching for proof of the previous inhabitants and preserves the story of his search in a travelogue.

All three novellas merge only in the details of the place, and the central theme of identity of a civilization, rather than in the characters. An impressive journey for the patient reader.

%A Gene Wolfe
%T The Fifth Head of Cerberus
%I Ace Books
%P 277
%D 1972
%G ISBN: 1857988175 (pb) publisher: McArthur & Co
%K science-fiction