Oshii Mamoru’s Patlabor 2: Terror, Theatricality, and Exceptions That Prove the Rule

In foregrounding controversy surrounding the Japanese use of military force, Patlabor 2 (1993, Kidō keisatsu Patoreibaa 2 the Movie) is a work that participated in the widespread early 1990s Japanese questioning of Japan’s postwar settlement with the United States. It specifically raises questions about the qualification of Japanese national sovereignty that flowed from Article 9 and the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty.¹ It thus questions Japanese complicity in postwar U.S. “global police” violence (the most immediate context was the Gulf War conducted two years before the film’s release), dramatizing what critics began to suggest was a mistaken conflation of Japanese and U.S. security as institutionalized in the very one-sided U.S.–Japan security relationship. In Patlabor 2, the boundaries of Japanese identity and security strategy appear riven and contested, with a range of conflicting approaches to controlling and resolving these claims depicted. In addition, the film connects analog and digital media to competing perspectives on the status of 1990s Japan as a nation and Tokyo as a globalized city. In sum, Patlabor 2 offers an exploration of the shifting status of media, sovereignty, and warfare in the Pacific in the post–Gulf War era.

Patlabor 2 stages a series of attacks—it is initially unclear if the attacks are the military acts of governments or terrorist acts—that are depicted as too singular to be framed within the established rules and procedures of the Japanese security bureaucracy, the security police, and the Self-Defense Forces. The film depicts opportunism and moral abjection in the civilian leadership of Japanese security. It argues that Japanese security has reached a state of emergency that its legally responsible leadership fails to recognize as such. It dramatizes the efforts of competing factions of the Japanese security state to determine the exception to the rule of Japanese law. In this respect, to use Carl Schmitt’s terms, the film shows how factions within Japan struggle to determine the location of sovereignty with respect to Japanese security.²

The media and technologies of perception that Patlabor 2 relentlessly foregrounds are implicated in the theatricality of such attempts to both challenge and unify the space of Japanese national and personal identity, strategic theaters of conflict, and national law and order. The first domestic attack depicted is on the Yokohama Bay Bridge (Figure 1). Visually, as Ueno and Fisch have noted, the attack scene is reminiscent of video footage from “smart” munitions deployed by the United States during the Gulf War.³ As if to confirm the associations with the Gulf War, the accompanying news report uses language that nearly elides the term for the bridge attack with that for the Gulf War (Wangansen/Wangan sensō). Thus the film indirectly but provocatively invites the viewer to associate what is at one point feared to have been a U.S. fighter jet’s unprovoked peacetime attack on a Japanese bridge with U.S. conduct of the first Gulf War.

During the Gulf War, many critics decried the dearth of images and the manipulation of images from the war zone, which contributed to a sense that the war reporting conflated spectacle and war, and in a manner that implicated viewers in its mendacity and manipulation. It was widely seen as a spectacle in which obvious strategic interests were routinely disavowed and misrepresented: namely, it was reported that the United States fought for Kuwaiti freedom, not for control over and access to Kuwaiti oil; that the war was for democracy, not to restore the Kuwaiti aristocracy to power or further the subjugation of Islam within the capitalist world order; that Saddam was Hitler reincarnated, not a former client of the U.S. intelligence state whose interests began to diverge from those of the United States. Some commentators stressed that the media staging of the war barred communication between those on opposite sides of the TV screen on which the war was depicted.⁴ In general, the spectacle of war was construed as a degradation of war, in which war had become a “war-like event” made to fit into the media programming and advertising requirements of a consumerist society. Information seemed to generate the event, where one might have expected or hoped the event would guide the information.⁵

Figure 1.

This video from a Hellfire missile closing in on the Yokohama Bay Bridge closely resembles video from the “smart bombs” that memorably defined the Pentagon’s carefully orchestrated presentation of the first Gulf War.

Many called for an interrogation into the status of the war as an event, describing it as a simulation, a fraud, and a farce.⁶ For some critics, the real warmongers were those who were willing to pretend that the Gulf War was a traditional or conventional war rather than acknowledging it to be a new variety of promotional campaign on behalf of weapons sales, U.S. international authority, and militarized globalization. For others still, it reflected a new coimplication of media, the military, and the state, which had restructured the very concept of a theater of war, making it subject to real-time media coverage that reduced the significance of territorial spatiality.⁷ The Gulf War was also identified with a deference of military will to an international legal order divorced from justice on the part of the U.S.- and UN-aligned forces, given that they effectively permitted and oversaw Saddam Hussein’s slaughter of Kurdish and Shiite Iraqi resistance subsequent to the end of formal hostilities between Iraq and UN forces in the name of respecting the principle of national sovereignty.

Patlabor 2 opens with scenes three years prior to the present of the film. After mechanical failure debilitates a Japanese mecha, several other Japanese mecha from the same unit stationed in Southeast Asia with UN markings come under fire from tanks and rocket-propelled grenades presumably controlled by local forces. The Japanese pilots request permission from UN officials to return fire, but permission is twice denied. The pilots are instructed to wait until armed Canadian assistance arrives. The unit leader, Tsuge Yukihito, ultimately defies these orders, killing the most immediately threatening enemy target, a tank. But he is too late to save his men. As a direct result of dysfunctional rules of engagement that prohibit Japanese peacekeepers from exercising their right of self-defense, all members of the Japanese unit appear to lose their lives, with the exception of Tsuge.⁸

Contemporary action in the film begins with the destruction of the Yokohama Bay Bridge by air-to-surface missile from an F-16 fighter.⁹ News reports announce that the fighter appears to have been a plane from the Japan Self-Defense Force, but the JSDF directly denies this. The two protagonists, Gotō and Nagumo (captains of the second section of the security police whose units are responsible for the mecha referred to in the title as “patlabors”), meet with a JSDF intelligence officer, Arakawa. Arakawa informs them that the plane in question was stolen from a U.S. base in Japan, and the prime suspect is Tsuge Yukihito and the group associated with him. Arakawa delivers an extended disquisition on the hypocrisy of Japan’s current pretense to be at peace and to represent an alternative to the rule of force in international affairs. His point is that this makes accepted understandings of Article 9 and the U.S.–Japan security alliance illegitimate, even anti-Japanese. Shortly afterward Tokyo comes under threat of attack from three Japanese F-16s (detected on JSDF headquarters radar), but the attack proves to be a phantom attack produced by hackers who compromised the JSDF network.¹⁰

As Gotō and Nagumo begin their search for Tsuge, their work is interrupted by an order from their superiors to mobilize the police around a JSDF base at Nerima. Gotō and Nagumo deploy their personnel, but in a manner that their bosses interpret as defiant. While civilian leadership initially creates difficulties by falsely impugning the JSDF, it proceeds to compound the error by blaming the police for the standoff created by its own actions. It then declares martial law, mobilizing select units of the SDF throughout the Tokyo area.¹¹

Under interrogation by their civilian superiors, Nagumo and Gotō express their contempt for the behavior of civilian government officials who have sacrificed the reputation of the Japanese military and police, and whose desire for personal political gain has obfuscated responsibility and thus endangered the people. Both officers are then relieved of duty and taken into custody. At the same time, the Tsuge group has mounted an attack on Tokyo with three helicopter gunships. Several bridges are destroyed, and JSDF command and control connections are taken out. Gotō and Nagumo physically attack the officers who detain them, escaping in a patrol car while Tsuge’s attack copters strafe the police building.

While suspended from duty, Gotō and Nagumo organize a paramilitary, extralegal response to Tsuge, using the manpower and resources of their security police section to capture Tsuge by force. They eventually succeed in placing him under arrest. In the meantime, Tokyo is held hostage by three airships circling over the city and carrying poison gas. In defiance of direct orders, Gotō and Nagumo ultimately prevail over Tsuge by force of arms in a paramilitary action, which all concerned know to be illegal and unapproved. The JSDF intelligence officer, Arakawa, is arrested while the vigilante action is in progress, but the arresting officers never question the legality of Gotō and Nagumo’s ongoing activities. The film ends with Tsuge in detention and no hint of legal sanctions or consequences for the actions of Captains Gotō and Nagumo.¹²

Theatricality and Patlabor 2

Sam Weber writes that, insofar as a medium may not be construed as self-contained or self-regulating, an element of theatricality accompanies the spread of the contemporary electronic media. The electronic media are relational and situational; they constitutively depend on extraneous elements such as spectators or audiences. The media involve not only a delocalization of physical settings but also a change in the structure and function of such settings in their relation to the physical; including physical bodies. Consequently, there can be no delocalization of media or of modes of perception without a corresponding relocalization.¹³

Weber suggests that the military sense of the term “theater” speaks to a salient trait of media: it is a medium in which conflicting forces strive to secure the perimeter of a place in dispute. Theater implies the imposition of a border rather than a representational-aesthetic genre. That means theatricality is a problematic process of placing, framing, and situating rather than a process of representation.¹⁴

The opening sequence of Patlabor 2 presents a highly mediated experience of combat, which is depicted largely via digital control screens in conjunction with overwrought, near hysterical radio communication between the participants. This is followed by a sequence of what appears to be a less mediated and more spontaneous depiction of testing a “labor,” that is, a labor mecha. But we later discover that it is simulated operation of a labor for the purpose of pilot training. Early in the film, then, we confront the paradox whereby simulated civilian experience appears less mediated and more “real” than the highly mediated real-life experience of contemporary warfare. For viewers of the film, the boundary between simulated experience and real experience (albeit highly mediated) of characters becomes extremely difficult to distinguish.

The film also systematically stages the delocalization and relocalization of visual experience that occurs with analog broadcast television: the screen before the viewer depicts television monitors carrying news broadcasts.¹⁵ The film shows the news broadcast announcing military mobilization and a state of emergency by following it across TV monitors of various sizes over a range of private and public settings, from homes to offices to shop windows to enormous outdoor displays in public squares. At other points, the viewer is presented with videotape produced for a karaoke video being replayed and digitally manipulated as evidence for the purpose of surveillance. The tape directly contradicts visual evidence on a public news broadcast.

In other words, there is visual evidence that suggests the official broadcast presentation of national reality is at best dubious or unknowable, at worst simply false.¹⁶ Patlabor 2 thus shows corporate TV news broadcasts as a powerful site for the manipulation of public opinion by forces as yet unknown. Broadcasts effectively function as weaponry within a public sphere that is somehow broken and no longer rational or coherent. The visual evidence casts doubt on the veracity of both the Japanese state and news authorities, hinting that they routinely lie.

On the more typically cybernetic side of things, the film vividly depicts smaller military theaters entailing individual weapon-targeting systems, and larger-scale theaters of national and regional military conflict. Much of the screen time is taken up with emulation of weapons and reconnaissance monitoring systems little distinct from the computer graphics technology used to produce segments of the film itself. The film sutures viewers into the virtual reality of a broad range of perceptual machinery: labor sensors operating in the jungles of Southeast Asia and on the streets of Tokyo; the calibration of sensors and cybernetic feedback systems; the camera’s-eye view of a camera-guided air-to-surface missile as it closes in on its target in Yokohama Bay; night-vision goggles; binoculars; jet fighter and attack helicopter targeting systems; an unmanned airship cockpit; computerized architectural blueprints utilized in the course of tactical planning; and, the most spectacular, a JSDF radar system on which the viewer observes a phantom attack on Tokyo led by three JSDF fighter jets, organized by hackers.

Patlabor 2’s persistent focus on the mediation of experience has understandably led critics such as Ueno Toshiya to read it in terms of a Baudrillardean hermeneutic that foregrounds a purported blurring of the boundary between the simulated and the real, between image and fact. Ueno submits that in Patlabor 2 the simulated and the real are mutually implicated. He seemingly follows Baudrillard in suggesting that the simulated and the real remain so inextricably intertwined that it is no longer meaningful to attempt to distinguish the two. He reads Patlabor 2 as making the implicitly Baudrillardean point that all contemporary experience is mediated to such an extent that, while we need to reflect on how this is changing our life/world, there is no meaningful “outside” to the media and simulation to which we might turn in order to draw the distinction. He describes Tsuge and Gotō’s projects as efforts to alter the balance between the two, concluding that both characters are quixotically trying to influence forces far beyond their control by attempting to discriminate orders of reality that cannot be effectively distinguished from the vantage point of contemporary human experience.¹⁷

In an effort to outflank the Baudrillardean problematic, Christopher Bolton turns to the phenomenological approach to film analysis developed by Vivian Sobchack.¹⁸ He follows Sobchack in positing two regimes of visuality, a traditional experience of film viewing that inscribes a conventional sense of embodied, human corporeality, and a disruptive digital experience of digital media that inscribes a flattened, disembodied loss of human corporeality. While he finds both modes operative in Patlabor 2, he shows a preference for the filmic regime he evokes in criticism of an allegedly disembodied regime of digital media.¹⁹

For all my appreciation of Bolton’s analysis of Patlabor 2, and as a sign of that appreciation, I would like to insist on some of the key differences with my analysis. Methodologically, when Sobchack incorporates Guy Debord and Fredric Jameson’s notion of a pervasive and inescapable mediation of spatial experience into her phenomenological reading of cinematic embodiment, she imports with it their take on digital experience, which follows from Baudrillard’s reduction of the real to simulacral virtuality.²⁰ In their analysis, however, the category of digital media runs counter to the phenomenological frame of reference, which Sobchak evokes to characterize her analysis. As a result, the experience of the digital falls outside Sobchak’s analysis, and she ends up capitulating to Baudrillard, insisting that, in the case of digital media, any notion of a bodily schema is effectively evacuated.²¹

Because Bolton adopts Sobchak’s take, his reading of Patlabor 2 remains within the interpretive horizon of Baudrillard’s simulacrum. His manner of thinking the digital is ultimately very similar to that of Ueno Toshiya, with which he takes issue.

In contrast with Sobchak, Weber’s approach has the advantage of insisting that both analog and digital media involve a delocalization and relocalization of the corporal position of the viewer. Weber persuasively argues that the status of theatrical spectatorship is more effectively approached through an analysis of framing and the imposition of contested boundaries, rather than through an analysis of aesthetic representation in the manner of Sobchak and Bolton.²² If we refuse to grapple with the role of media and spectacle in contemporary terrorism/warfare, we fail to recognize the challenge that Patlabor 2 extends to us in presenting an event that blurs the line between a military and a terrorist event. I would argue that the film makes a strong case that it is no longer possible to distinguish the spectacle of contemporary interstate warfare from the mediated spectacle that constitutes the regime of contemporary terrorism and, analogously, that it is no longer possible to distinguish war from peace. An analysis of war and media centered on representation will inevitably ignore the problematic that organizes the film as a whole, the blurring line between terror and warfare and thus between war and peace.

Patlabor 2 comprises two basic visual modes, the emulation of conventional camera movement and the emulation of weapons and reconnaissance systems. The film is a visual tour de force that insistently foregrounds the challenge that emulation presents for human perception. Patlabor 2 features animated emulation of conventional camera movement such as tracking, crane, and helicopter shots. The extraordinarily sophisticated emulation of lighting effects includes dazzling, dynamic reflections of light on polished animated surfaces and the impression of multisource “natural” lighting in urban settings. The natural lighting effects include the blinding flash of a train passing at night and the stroboscopic effect of highway lights from within a darkened, moving car. The effect of this vast array of visual modes on the viewer ranges from a sense of hyperreality in the attention to the detail and dynamism of virtual reflections to the sheer physical challenge of processing nearly blinding flashes of light and stroboscopic set pieces in the midst of ongoing action and dialogue. The film is literally stunning in that it consistently strains or overloads the optical capacity of the viewer.

Visual technology figures prominently in the efforts of various characters to distinguish truth and falsehood. Characters frequently call on visuals to challenge what they perceive to be falsehoods concerning the status of contemporary Japan. For instance, the JSDF intelligence officer Arakawa uses videotape in his attempt to persuade security police officers Gotō and Nagumo that the official news media account of the bridge attack is misleading and distorted. The implication is that the public media is a site for manipulating perception rather than solving problems or sharing information. News reports of SDF responsibility for the Bay Bridge attack explicitly set the stage for the later decision of civilian security bureaucrats to unfairly scapegoat the air branch of the SDF. But these reports may well be false. Subsequently, the broadcast media provide cover when the bureaucracy chooses to shift blame to the security police. This is part of the public declaration of emergency by which the SDF is mobilized in the name of militarizing a purportedly ineffective police operation.

The public sphere of the broadcast media is implicitly depicted as a site of public manipulation. We see how news broadcasts act on behalf of forces that are never overtly acknowledged. Arakawa, Gotō, and Nagumo consistently reiterate that politics and civilian control is the problem with rather than the solution to Japan’s paralysis regarding security issues. They imply that, contrary to the received wisdom in postwar Japan that holds civilian control over security to be intrinsically democratic, civilian control is seen to open the public sphere to bureaucratic manipulation. Civilian control does not brake the abuse of state powers.²³ Patlabor 2 implies that broadcast news and the public sphere are an emergency broadcast system in waiting. This system purports to do other things while in fact serving its only effective purpose, that of emergency mobilization of the population in accordance with bureaucratic intentions. Bureaucratic intentions are directly realized through the declaration of emergency by way of the broadcast media and the deployment of SDF forces in the streets of Tokyo.

The JSDF air defense system serves as yet another stage upon which Tsuge and Arakawa’s demands for Japanese strategic sovereignty clearly founder. The virtual air attack on Tokyo by three phantom JSDF F-16s purportedly stationed in Misawa allows Tsuge to reveal that the JSDF security network is compromised by its alliance with the United States, and thus Japanese security and sovereignty are undermined. Ties to the United States are consistently shown to sabotage or fatally expose Japanese strategic control over its territorial borders and airspace. In both the dramatic and military sense, Tsuge directs a series of virtual and physical attacks on Tokyo. His attacks constitute an attack on media spectacle per se intended to produce an effect on its audience, the Japanese people, by removing them from their status as spectators, as an audience. To the degree that we may discern any logic at the heart of Tsuge’s project, his goal appears to be an attack on spectacle, rather than achievement of a conventional strategic objective such as capture of government ministries or state power.²⁴

The Competing Positions in Patlabor 2

Patlabor 2 presents an unusual combination of plot-driven action with lengthy discussions of abjection, national sovereignty, and social authority. Director Oshii Mamoru and writer Itō Kazunori have characters hold forth to a degree rarely seen outside nonfiction documentary or academic lecture. How do the competing rhetorical positions articulated within Patlabor 2 variously seek to contest, unify, delimit, or control competing projections of national and metropolitan space?

On one hand, the film does not have its characters denounce the attacks on legal grounds, which would entail a simple reiteration of the prewar responses to attempts at military coup that typified the 1930s, such as the 2-2-6 Incident (a coup attempt in Tokyo undertaken on February 26, 1936) that was linked to the Japanese takeover of Manchuria. The character Ōta, for instance, unambiguously embodies a spiritual devotion to martial values often associated with wartime militarism. The film develops a contrast between Ōta and other characters, to assure that we do not mistake Ōta’s perspective (or theirs) for that of the film. Ōta appears as a danger to Japanese security, due in part to his indifference to economic concerns, but above all due to his irrational and willful lack of interest in the military technology that is otherwise fetishized throughout the film. Gotō explicitly asks his boss to speak to Ōta about his misguided and irrational understanding of both police work and training.

On the other hand, the police recruit Ōta for the unit that attacks Tsuge’s heavily fortified position on Lot 18 when Gotō and Nagumo’s police unit prepares for its final and illegal paramilitary action at the end of the film—even after Ota has been arrested and detained by military officials for attempting to organize a military rebellion against offending civilian officials. The implication is that the security police have replaced the military as the site of lawless and potentially authoritarian action in contemporary Japan.

At the same time, the film presents a series of uniformed military and police figures—Tsuge, Nagumo, Gotō—as martyrs and victims of spineless, abject, out-of-control civilian bureaucrats and politicians. In sum, rather than contest special police operations on legal grounds, the film takes seriously the stance associated with rebellious military figures of 1930s Japan. One of the premises of the film is that claims on the part of the civilian leadership to defend the public from the nonexistent threat of a 1930s-style military rebellion are malicious and self-serving. Ultimately, however, the film sends a very mixed message on this score. Events in the film are apparently supposed to give the lie to the suggestion that civilian seizure of authoritarian power serves any cause beyond delaying and obstructing public understanding of the incompetence of the civilian leadership as well as its danger to the public itself. Yet civilian control and postwar democracy per se are relentlessly depicted as absolute shams that effectively invite authoritarian action through a failure of will and principled concern for the Japanese common good, views that actually were important to 1930s-era military terrorism at home and adventurism abroad.

New-Fashioned Military Autonomy

The evocation of Angkor-Thom in the initial action scenes clearly situates the events in Cambodia (Figure 2). Japan’s first UN peacekeeping mission in the early nineties was to Cambodia, and on that mission, two Japanese lives were lost.²⁵ The opening sequence, culminating in the decimation of Tsuge’s unit, thus alludes to the loss of Japanese lives in this early 1990s UNTAC mission to Cambodia, in which the rules of engagement were widely held responsible for their demise. The same legislation concerning rules of engagement was still in effect at the time of Patlabor 2’s release. This explains why Tsuge presumably feels the loss of Japanese life in Cambodia reveals the danger to which civilian rule exposes Japanese security.

Figure 2.

This statuary evokes Angkor-Thom in Cambodia. It is a sculpture of the Buddhist bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (in Japanese, Kannon), who was identified with compassion and attending to the cries of the suffering. He refused to leave this world until all sentient beings had been freed from the illusion of samsara.

Tsuge’s airships hovering over Tokyo carry the phrase ultima ratio in enormous black letters. Ultima ratio means “the last argument,” which is associated with the phrase ultima ratio regum (“the last argument of kings”) that the French King Louis XIV famously engraved upon his cannon. The implication is that Tsuge thinks that laws mean no more and no less than the force available at any given moment to enforce those laws.²⁶ Tsuge thus implies that, without the threat of force, adherence to the rule of law is a dangerous and false pretense, which situation he intends to correct. For Tsuge, the 1990s legal status quo under which Japanese security personnel lacked the right of self-defense at home or abroad is a dangerous illusion that must be forcibly shaken in order to cease risking Japanese security personnel and the safety of Japanese citizens for the sake of legal fictions. This motto thus implicitly serves as an indirect criticism of UN and Japanese doctrines of international law that purport to apply it without acknowledging the strategic requirements that would be realistically required to make Japan’s UN-associated, wishful half-measures a reality.

Arakawa identifies Tsuge as a member of the “national defense tribe” (kokubōzoku, also bōeizoku), with which Arakawa himself is identified later in the film. This term refers to an actual group of individuals who constitute an important political link between state and society on defense matters. Such individuals have exhibited an ongoing interest in Japanese defense policy and a general support for increased defense spending. They include bureaucrats who have served in the Japan Defense Agency, former civilian or uniformed officials in the Japan Defense Agency, and Diet members whose electoral districts include military bases.²⁷ Evidently, Tsuge’s actions constitute an attempt to communicate an essential truth to other Japanese: that the contemporary Japanese state mistakenly continues to act as if domestic security and international security remain clearly distinguishable. Tsuge argues, in effect, that the institutional demarcation between law and force is a false and unreal boundary, and that reality has bypassed these statutes and policies. Given that the legislation governing the status of Japanese forces under UN command follows legally from Article 9, Tsuge’s position ultimately requires the abolition of Article 9 or its legal reinterpretation, which would amount to the same thing. Tsuge’s actions strive to show that these issues intersect at both ends, and that the official Japanese position will necessarily lead to failure in both international and domestic security contexts.

Quasi-religious associations accompany Tsuge’s actions. The opening scene, for instance, lingers on Buddhist imagery, the statue of a bodhisattva, Avalokitesvara, who attained enlightenment yet refused departure from this world until all sentient beings had also been freed from the delusion of samsara.²⁸ This bodhisattva was particularly concerned with the cries of the suffering. Thus the film establishes an analogy between the Buddhist concern with freeing oneself from this world of illusion and Tsuge’s quest to free Japan from modern, technologically driven forms of illusion, as if to allow Japan at last to hear foreign cries of suffering.

Presumably, Tsuge’s terrorist act is calculated to make visible the loss of Japanese life in Cambodia for civilian Japanese on Japanese soil, and thus to allow his men’s actions to take on a significance greater than that of this particular conflict or moment. Tsuge’s response holds out the hope of a future Japan in which the frailty and finitude of his mission’s abjection and failure will be sublimated and overcome by greater Japanese force of will. He seeks to awaken contemporary Japan from its delusion so that in the future perhaps Japan may survive and ultimately triumph over the death by which it currently continues to be threatened. Tsuge’s personal refusal to die for his cause may also be read in Buddhist terms as the ethic of a bodhisattva who refuses to move on to the next life until he has done his part to save others in this one.

In addition, Tsuge’s letter to Nagumo expresses in Biblical terms a concern with restoring unity to Japanese relations.²⁹ It is important to note, however, that this passage’s discussion of familial/national dissension also implicitly evokes a falling away from the ideals of a founding document of the Japanese family-state in the Meiji era, the Imperial Rescript on Education. Similarly, Arakawa states that men will act where gods do not and that, with contemporary technology, any man can be a god. Tsuge also uses Biblical text as computer code. In sum, Tsuge’s disruption of modern communications technologies and weapons systems takes on distinctly religious connotations, related to the Japanese imperial cult, to Buddhism, and to Christianity.

Significantly, the passage from the Bible functions both as computer code and as a commentary on lost Japanese national unity. Tsuge’s actions thus recall Baudrillard’s ideas about symbolic protest in Symbolic Exchange and Death. Tsuge’s actions operate as a symbolic protest against the contemporary and secular codes of Japanese modernity, in which the translation of the Bible into computer code functions as an anagram, with Tsuge’s terrorist acts working to bring the contemporary system crashing down around its own contradictions. But I lack the space to fully explore such a possibility in this essay.³⁰

Lastly, Tsuge designates as illusory (maboroshi) those conceptions that resist the sense of immersion and empathic mutual existence he would purport to restore to Japanese modes of life in Japanese space. His actions imply that the notion of a meaningful boundary between post–Second World War Japanese peace and the globalized violence undertaken by its U.S. ally during the same period, and from which Japan profited, is illusory and false; they imply that the international legal order sustaining such a boundary is illegitimate.³¹ In this respect, Tsuge’s critique deeply resonates with Carl Schmitt’s mid-twentieth-century challenge to the legitimacy of Anglo-American centered “peace” whose maintenance demanded colonial and imperial violence. Significantly, when we finally hear Tsuge’s own words, he expresses his concern for the future of Tokyo, rather than a concern for the nation of Japan. While his Biblical quote implies a concern with national unity, his own words almost immediately link him with metropolitan media networks rather the nationalist project.

Arakawa has the longest extended monolog in the film. Along with the sequences of military mobilization in Tokyo, Arakawa’s speech on peace, war, and the use of force is accompanied by the most emotionally haunting soundtrack music in the film.³² Arakawa observes that the responsibility of the SDF and the security police is to maintain peace, but he challenges conventional understandings of peace as superficial and hypocritical. He asserts that conventional understandings assume an illusory integrity of Japanese space that disavows Japanese implication in international, strategic, and economic relations. For Arakawa, claims to defend Japanese peace are simple-minded, false, and self-serving because they entail a disavowal of Japanese complicity in global police violence.

Arakawa argues that Japan is today implicated in postwar U.S. militarism, much as it was in prewar militarism. Globalization implicates Japan in the violence used to sustain the global order from which Japan profits. For Arakawa, Japanese protestations of pacifism entail faith in a fiction of Japanese control and unity. He argues that Japanese must come to understand peace as something more complex than “not war.” He argues that, given the brutality that defines the international status quo, the defense of “peace” constitutes a particularly dangerous illusion.

Arakawa broadens the discussion of peace and war to questions about international order and legitimacy. There does not exist, in his opinion, an international order that does not ultimately ground itself in force. He insists that any peace grounded in observation of the law requires enforcement. To counter how the Japanese state has made a fetish of peace, Arakawa offers a larger view that reveals Japan’s implication in regimes of force; Japan relies on such regimes but continues to disavow them through its professed adherence to Article 9 and its refusal to fully participate in UN peacekeeping missions.

Arakawa builds on the widespread sense that the Gulf War was a war that featured a failure of communication across the televisual media to portray the Japanese television viewer’s relation to military conflict and international relations as a mode that includes foreign affairs within broadcast television news coverage, but by way of exclusion, that is, through a logic of relation as nonrelation:

While we steadfastly reap the benefits of these conflicts, we banish war to a realm beyond the [TV] screen, forgetting that—no, pretending to forget—that we are on the rear lines of that struggle. If we continue to deny our responsibility, in the end we’ll receive a great punishment.³³

Arakawa thus lays out a critique of Japanese media and war suited to the global televisual theater of war. His insistence that foreign war is included within media by way of exclusion recalls Giorgio Agamben’s reading of the state of exception in domestic and international law (Figure 3). Agamben argues that a state of exception emerged in the domestic and international law of developed nations since the First World War, which constitutively incorporates individuals and groups within the law and sovereignty by way of their exclusion. This “exclusive inclusion” builds on the logic of relation as nonrelation, which is manifest in the logic of the ban.³⁴

Arakawa’s speech requires us to account for the state of exception to international law as instituted by U.S.–Japan security policy in the immediate postwar years.³⁵ Because of Japan’s formal lack of military forces, the 1951 Japan–U.S. Security Treaty was a completely unilateral affair. The treaty did not proceed from the United Nations, which meant that the terms for the deployment of U.S. forces were subject only to the unilateral discretion of the United States; it did not require consultation with the government of Japan and thus did not even rise to the status of a mutual security treaty.³⁶ It entailed, in effect, the institutionalization of a state of exception in international law, wherein unilateral U.S. security interest took the place of UN auspices. The 1960 revision of the treaty made reference to the UN and allowed for a very loose, formal process of U.S.–Japanese consultation, but the treaty remains one-sided and toothless.³⁷ To make matters worse, it is primarily the United States that has exerted extreme and unrelenting pressure on Japan to field a military force, tirelessly demanding that Japan violate the very peace constitution imposed on it under U.S. military occupation. Both Oshii and Agamben show an awareness of this problem, which opens the possibility for a substantial critique of unilateral U.S. power. Ultimately, however, both Oshii and Agamben also share a narrowness of focus that prevents them from directly connecting their criticisms of media and sovereignty to a broader critique of the biopolitical aspects of capitalist exploitation, either in Japan specifically or in East Asia generally.³⁸ Even as the very idea of the relation as nonrelation Oshii deploys opens out onto a broader, less nation-centered problematic, the film’s main characters nevertheless remain centrally concerned to reinstitute effective Japanese national boundaries and sovereignty.

Figure 3.

The visual logic of this shot parallels Arakawa’s claim of foreign affairs being included in Japanese media by way of exclusion, the relation of nonrelation. The billboard depicts a foreign land stereotyped and commodified for the purpose of promoting long-distance telephone service, yet any connection of the territory in question to contemporary power politics is entirely elided.

To some extent, Arakawa’s criticisms of the U.S.–Japan security alliance reflect a general Japanese questioning of the U.S.–Japan relationship in the early 1990s. With the end of the Cold War, a Japanese public opinion poll conducted in July 1991 reported that more Japanese saw the United States as the primary threat to Japanese security for the first time since 1945.³⁹ Similarly, Arakawa stresses that the U.S.–Japanese security relationship undermines Japanese sovereignty and the integrity of the Japanese security apparatus. For Arakawa, Japanese security is compromised by U.S.–Japan politics: agreements made with the United States sabotage Japanese strategic agency and autonomy. Arakawa’s emphasis reflects the consensus view of security professionals in Japan during the 1990s. SDF policy is set by civilian ministries such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which places high priority on meeting the demands of the U.S.–Japan relationship, sacrificing the desires of SDF commanders for the sake of maintaining that relationship.⁴⁰

Arakawa repeatedly submits that integration of the Japanese security apparatus within U.S. networks debases Japanese sovereignty and fundamentally compromises any effort to defend Japan from any given enemy, even if that enemy is not necessarily an agent of the U.S. per se. He argues that Japanese policy dangerously conflates U.S. and Japanese interests, even in contexts in which they demonstrably do not correspond. For Arakawa, Japan’s only option is either to rely on the military force of the U.S., whose security interests already diverge from those of Japan, or to take responsibility for the use of military force on its own terms. The effective premise of nearly every word of Arakawa’s speech is that genuine concern for Japanese security requires the abandonment of Article 9 and a restoration of Japanese military sovereignty, which would require a serious Japanese challenge to the U.S.-imposed state of exception in the international law of the Pacific.

Police Power in the Japanese Police State

Arakawa intimates that he chose to confide in Gotō because the Kanagawa police have a reputation for indulging in extralegal domestic security activity. He consequently sees them as useful allies in a common effort to expose how the exception operates in the application of Japanese security law. Gotō dismisses Arakawa’s analysis as a misunderstanding, but their exchange alludes to an actual incident.

In November 1986, Kanagawa security police wiretapped the executive leader of the Japanese Communist Party, illegally, in defiance of Japanese law. Despite two separate recommendations for prosecution, the Tokyo Prosecutors’ Office decided not to prosecute due to sympathy for the guilty policemen and fear of bureaucratic retribution.⁴¹ The incident highlights how, in stark contrast to contemporary Japanese military forces, the Japanese security police are almost entirely shielded from political supervision of any kind.⁴² Indeed, former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, a former police inspector, was part of a new trend in Japanese politics in which former police officials reached high political position and began to comprise a very powerful faction within the government, connecting the cabinet to the bureaucracy.⁴³ This trend became pronounced from the 1980s.

Gotō describes the civilian security leadership’s response to Tsuge as a theatrical farce played by characters who are miscast, who would not normally choose to play their assigned parts. Gotō claims that the civilian leadership has effectively militarized state functions under the aegis of defending the state from the (phantom) threat of military subversion. Gotō’s points echo the polemics of General Kurisu, who was the head of the Joint Staff Council during the 1970s. Kurisu insisted that Japanese law, as regards the civilian chain of command and response to surprise attacks, was inadequate, requiring carefully tailored legislation that allows uniformed military officers to respond in real time. Without such legal reform, Kurisu insisted, a real-world security emergency or surprise attack would surely require extralegal military response. Kurisu was made a scapegoat and forced to resign, for his remarks were seen as evocative of 1930s-era military rejection of civilian control. Yet the policy remedies that Kurisu advocated essentially called for restructuring the Japanese Defense Agency chain of command along the lines of the U.S. Department of Defense.⁴⁴

In response to Arakawa’s long speech on the increasingly blurred distinction between peace and war at the center of the film, Gotō recites a long excerpt from James Dunnigan’s How to Make War: the farther a decision maker is from the theater of battle, the greater the degree to which decisions on strategic questions become detached from reality; such a tendency is even further exacerbated when a nation is on the losing side of an ongoing war.⁴⁵ Dunnigan, a war game designer and historian, has served as a military consultant to the CIA and the U.S. War College. Elsewhere in the book, Dunnigan presents historical research concluding that military rebellions have more frequently been instigated by civilian rather than military authorities. The Gotō–Dunnigan connection demonstrates the degree to which the screenwriter Itō and the director Oshii impart to Gotō a transnational and avowedly apolitical perspective that is characteristic of the contemporary military professional.

While Gotō comes to agree with Arakawa that war is already underway and that the peace the civilian authorities imagine they are defending is now illusory, he also criticizes Tsuge’s event—his “little war”—as even more false or illusory than the falsehood of the postwar peace that Tsuge and Arakawa lament. Gotō states that destruction is the goal of Tsuge’s actions, not a byproduct. Gotō’s remark resonates with Naomi Klein’s recent argument that postwar neoliberalism is ultimately a political project grounded in destruction.⁴⁶ By suggesting that American seizure of power would mean Japan has to start all over, Arakawa frames the U.S. occupation of Japan as one more byway on the path of destruction charted by postwar capitalism centered in the United States.

Gotō and Nagumo’s contempt for the fecklessness in civilian response to emergency is yet another point at which the film alludes to public Japanese debates. Fear of military takeover along the line of the various coup attempts of the 1930s had made emergency legislation so politically charged in the postwar that the Diet did not even consider emergency legislation: “One observer pointed out in 1975 that Japan’s military defense lacked a mobilization plan, a military court system, emergency legislation, and a civil defense system.”⁴⁷ As of the early 1990s, it still lacked all of those things. News reports featured in the film relate this information in passing.

Gotō consistently regards Tsuge as a target for coercive paramilitary action where necessary, and for arrest where possible. In violating the social order, Tsuge becomes a criminal who must be stopped before he endangers more people. For Gotō, targeting, arresting, and preempting Tsuge’s further action resolves the challenge that he poses to Japanese social space for the time being. In other words, Gotō aims to reintegrate Tsuge into the Japanese social order.

Gotō’s speech on the two kinds of government figures who violate the law could have come out of a silent-era jidaigeki: “There are those who are forces for justice (seigi) and those who are forces for evil.” Yet the speech also resonates with Walter Benjamin’s discussion of law and force in “Critique of Violence.” Gotō advocates what Benjamin describes as law-preserving violence, the suspension of the law and the use of force for the sake of restoring the rule of law.⁴⁸ Gotō purports to violate the law for the sake of restoring normality and the rule of law, the rule of the state, and the public interest. In effect, Gotō arbitrarily delimits the apparently unmanageable network that Arakawa and Tsuge have spun between law, force, and legitimacy. Gotō makes it thinkable in simple terms, in the terms of criminal justice and the restoration of law and order.

In effect, however, Gotō’s actions constitute an exception even to the state of exception—they violate the very terms of the state of exception laid out by his superiors in the security hierarchy of the Japanese state. Gotō and Nagumo’s actions can be seen as a coup within a coup. They present a decision that effectively decides the exception in the context of the nonstate threat with which the film presents us. Their decision determines that the sovereignty of the Japanese state vis-à-vis security resides with Gotō and Nagumo’s unit, the SV2. The implication is that civilian bureaucrats are not capable of defending Japan; therefore security professionals must step into the breach even when their civilian superiors have expressly prohibited such action. While Gotō and Nagumo thus shut down many of the larger questions raised by Tsuge’s action, they are ultimately in agreement with Arakawa that Japanese civilian leadership is incompetent and untrustworthy. One of the primary targets of the film is the Japanese bureaucrat. Where postwar Japanese popular opinion has sometimes deprecated Japanese politicians and idealized bureaucrats as unselfish civil servants, Patlabor 2 aims to smear bureaucrats and politicians interchangeably as “civilians” who are unworthy of authority in situations where Japanese security comes under serious threat.

Nagumo, like Gotō, directly challenges civilian Japanese security leadership as opportunistic, incompetent, and dangerous. She also takes issue with Tsuge, advocating that the citizens of Tokyo possess existential value as concrete living creatures. She implies that his insistence that Tokyoites live in an illusion seems to discount or abstract the value of their lives as such. She implies that Tsuge reduces the citizens of Tokyo to pawns in a contest over the parameters and unity of contemporary Japanese space. Tsuge’s actions suggest that he believes an increased militarization of Japanese security is necessary at home and abroad and can only be undertaken by Japanese security professionals, not civilians who will surely botch the job and endanger everyone else in the process. In Nagumo’s opinion, however, Tsuge’s approach cheapens or even erases the value of human lives as such.

The Menagerie

The recurrent depiction of nonhuman agents such as fish, dogs, and birds may serve to reinforce Nagumo’s explicit challenge to Tsuge’s terror plot: war is of flesh and blood as well as of images and symbols. Birds, for instance, interfere with security police targeting of Tsuge’s remote-controlled airship. Security forces aligned with the state thus express an explicit disregard for the fate of nonhuman life.

The overwhelming visual domination of thousands of seagulls over Lot 18 both on the ground and in the air in the final sequence of the film—over land reclaimed by humans from the ocean—vividly raises the issue of the unintended consequences of human action on nonhuman life as well as human life, on life as such (Figure 4). On the one hand, the seagulls’ status as a form of life on Lot 18, seemingly disconnected from direct human control, stands as a trace of life that at least momentarily falls outside the relentless economic imperative to organize all forms of matter and life for the purpose of the reproduction of capital. On the other hand, the process of land “reclamation” that produced Lot 18 from what was previously part of Tokyo Bay is a form of technological destruction of natural habitat pervasive in modern Japan, frequently catastrophic for both human and nonhuman life from an ecological perspective. It is tempting to draw a connection between the assault on nature that creates Lot 18, where Tsuge takes his stand, and the smashup between nature and technology staged in the first Patlabor film, where the Ark project turns ocean into land and raises towers (monuments to modern construction technology) that create unintended effects—under tidal wave conditions, resonance created by wind interacting with the buildings is designed to trigger a rampage of Patlabor mecha with the HOS operating system. In both cases, technological human assault on the environment leads to a sort of revenge. In Patlabor 1, Hoba’s cyber-terrorism utilizes a natural environmental trigger that requires destruction of the Ark built on Tokyo Bay. In Patlabor 2, Tsuge’s actions also appear to be somewhat inspired by a concern for nature. He seemingly calls for a less technologized and more empathic relation to the environment and other creatures both human and nonhuman, and he directs his plot from the newly installed landfill that is Lot 18. The very name of the location communicates the transformation of an ocean habitat into a unit of land that produces economic property at the expense of the environment and that is now ripe for manipulation and exploitation.⁴⁹

Figure 4.

Seagulls visually dominate the scene at Lot 18 where Tsuge made his headquarters and where he is captured by Nagumo’s band of vigilantes.

For all its consistent association with the character of Tsuge, animal life thus seems to represent a surviving form of organization and perception not yet drawn into the fierce demands of social reproduction largely enforced by the forms of technology and altered perception more predominantly featured in the film. Baudrillard offers a seagull soaked in oil as an emblem of the television viewer’s implication in the media manipulation of the Gulf War.⁵⁰ Oshii seems to offer the seagull, the fish, and the dog as animals that have avoided abjection by what Tsuge at least appears to consider the pathological mediation of contemporary Japanese experience (Figure 5). Oshii’s work thus raises the issue of speciesism, the role of the animal in sustaining or challenging humanism, and the possibility of challenges to this mode of thought from the subject position of nonhuman animals.⁵¹ The film thus in part seems to actively champion a mode of mutual empathy and cobelonging it depicts as characterizing the behavior of nonhuman animals as an ideal to be aspired to by human animals, and that would have positive consequences for all life forms, including other humans. Rather than arguing that animals are much more human than previously realized as more liberal animal-rights activists would have it, the film on the contrary uses the behavior of animals as a criterion by which to judge human behavior and find humans seriously wanting.⁵²

Figure 5.

Along with various birds and fish, this basset hound is one of several dogs Oshii depicts in the film as possessed of a gaze and a power of vision that is seemingly uncontaminated by the mendacity of the mass media that corrupts human perception.

Patlabor 2 in 2008

Patlabor 2 screens Arakawa and Gotō acknowledging, with Tsuge, a blurred boundary between war and peace. The film depicts a world that reinforces Arakawa’s thesis that the Japanese media relate to foreign affairs by way of a strategy of inclusion by exclusion. The former is foundational for claims of a state of emergency that has become the norm. The latter mirrors the logic of Giorgo Agamben’s reading of the state of exception as informed by a logic of relation as nonrelation.

On one hand, the film conveys an important and useful warning to Japanese regarding their own implication in the catastrophic international destruction of postwar U.S. imperial practice. Nevertheless, the film’s insistence on the collapsed boundary between war and peace and the rise of a permanent state of exception is also quite congenial to the contemporary neoconservative Japanese national defense tribe’s own variant of the “war on terror” grounded on just this premise. In effect, Patlabor 2 ultimately appears to advocate militarizing Japanese foreign and domestic policy and saving it from what the film depicts as ultimately the greatest threat of all—civilian rule that refuses to recognize an ongoing and potentially permanent state of emergency.

Given the general identification of so much of Patlabor 2 with the perspective of the Japanese military professional, much of the argument seems to be driven by a variety of technological determinism. The technology of the weapons Japan deployed in the 1990s seamlessly pulled the JSDF from a posture of defending Japanese territory to a posture of projecting power as far as Korea and the Taiwan Straits for the purpose of a greatly enlarged notion of self-defense.⁵³ In this sense, it is the technology fetishized by most of the film that sustains a theater of security operations that reaches far beyond the geographical boundaries of Japan and thus presents a theater of Japanese security interests that causes Article 9 and the Japanese constitution to appear obsolete in the manner suggested by Tsuge, Arakawa, and, to a lesser degree, Gotō.

With the advent of the Koizumi administration, the Heisei militarization foreshadowed in Patlabor 2 intersected with Japanese reception of the Bush Doctrine. In the event, Japanese neoconservatives have gleefully retrofitted outstanding demands of the Japanese national defense tribe as the only natural and appropriate response to a global war on terror. Japanese neoconservatives have used the spectacle of a missile threat from North Korea and media-fueled hysteria over decades-old kidnappings of Japanese by North Korean intelligence as a screen memory to generate Japanese self-righteousness, erase all memory of Japanese colonial oppression of millions on the continent, and to clear the Japanese public conscience regarding remilitarization.

Just since the turn of this century, Japan has joined the international coalition to cooperate with international police and intelligence efforts to track terrorist groups. It has proclaimed a right to preemptively attack North Korea. An Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law was passed that led to deployment of Japanese air and maritime SDF troops in the Indian Ocean in support of U.S. operations outside a United Nations peacekeeping force structure. The Koizumi cabinet announced its intention to deploy U.S.-built missile defense systems.⁵⁴

In other words, Japan’s “defense” posture has been militarized in the meantime, but by way of further deepening U.S.–Japan cooperation rather than by moving away from it as Patlabor 2 strongly advocates. From the perspective of Arakawa, this would mean that Japanese security has been further endangered and abjected. During televised debate over deployment of Japanese troops to Iraq on the Fujisankei network, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) representative wholeheartedly supported Bush administration objectives of Japanese deployment while the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) opposed deployment as a violation of Article 9 and Japanese legislation requiring the troops to be stationed in a pacified area. Only the nationalist manga writer Kobayashi Yoshinori consistently advocated the longer-term project of articulating Japanese security objectives distinct from those of the United States. He was repeatedly derided by the moderator for being hopelessly naïve as regards the reality of U.S. power.⁵⁵ The Japanese public sphere thus currently presents a competition between a neoconservative Japanese nationalism that identifies Japanese and U.S. security interests for the purpose of advancing Japanese militarism, a legalistic pacifism that fails to address neoconservative claims of an unrecognizably transformed security environment, and competing varieties of Japanese nationalism that insist on distinguishing between the U.S. and Japanese interests such as advocated by Ishihara and Kobayashi. To date, Japanese leaders have managed to institute and expand militarizing policies despite consistent and widespread popular opposition to them among the Japanese voting public.

In sum, Patlabor 2 stages an intersection of the theatricality of cybernetics with the theater of military operations as a contest for control over national and metropolitan space. It concludes that the overarching and decisive outcome of this development is an abolition of the boundary between war and peace, that Japan now lives under a permanent state of emergency. It further suggests that, in the wake of the first Gulf War, it is now virtually impossible to distinguish between interstate warfare and nonstate terrorism as modes of terrorist spectacle. While the film distances itself from the revival of 1930s wartime militarism in some respects, it depicts an alternative threat of authoritarianism in the security police, and an abject irresponsibility and failure of civilian democratic leadership. It follows hegemonic professional military understandings of the technology it so consistently features in effectively demanding increasingly militarized Japanese foreign relations, though it also challenges certain premises of Japanese neoconservatism and speciesist humanism.