Anyone who follows international news may have seen Japan put its foot in it, so to speak, when it comes to its approach to remembering World War Two. Be it angering South Korea when government figures call for the retraction of Japan's recognition of “comfort women” as being sex slaves, or Prime Minister Abe angering everyone when he very publicly paid his respects at Yakasumi shrine, it seems that Japan, or at least a sizeable proportion of its population, continues to struggle with how to conceptualise & remember this period in history, or how the echoes of it continue to reverberate in South-East Asian & world politics today.
This might seem an odd way to start a review of Kancolle (not to mention being simplistic to the point of offensive), an adaptation of a popular pay2win game where cute girls dress up as warships from the Imperial Japanese Navy to fight demons. Well, strictly speaking they posses the spirits of said warships, but it amounts to the same thing. Our protagonist, Fubuki, is the new girl at the all girls scho...navel base where they train to fight the mysterious demons from across the seas. As you'd expect, Fubuki is high on determination & resolve but low on talent or skill, the bulk of the series being about her gradual rise from being barely able to float to becoming the most important battle boat in the babefleet. In addition to her, we have a vast ensemble of other girls whose one dimensional character types loosely match with the ships they represent (the pirate lolis are destroyers, the elegant seniors are carriers etc etc). Much like Girlfriend BETA, the cast is so large that really you can't even try to remember who they all are, or why what they're doing is supposed to matter. (note that from this point things will be discussed that may be considered spoilers)
A lot of Kancolle looks & feels cobbled together from other cute girls shows. There are girls who make animal noises because moe. There's a girl with random mascot creature companions because every show has to have mascots. The bigger ship girls love eating mountains of food because otaku love busty girls with big appetites. There's a random cooking episode in the middle of the series because why wouldn't there be (no points for guessing that they cook curry). There's yuri undertones all over the place & Fubuki has a serious “notice me, senpai” girl crush on fleet carrier Akagi because of course she does. Even the more serious sides to Kancolle feel like they're just going through the motions. A mentor character dies in episode three because a mentor character always dies/disappears to mark the end of Act 1, only in this case you'd only really know her to be that type of character if you know the history of the ship, since her on screen time is negligible. Even the ending, which is ultimately a we'll fight to change our fate showdown, feels like it could have been taken from almost any other action based anime out there.
However, draped around all this generic storytelling & characters is something that becomes increasingly uncomfortable viewing as the show moves towards its climax. As already said, all the girls in the babefleet posses the spirit of an actual IJN warship from World War Two. Indeed, while the plot progresses in a pretty standard way, Kancolle does make an effort to ensure that when things happen to specific girls, it mirrors in some way the actual events their warship counterpart were involved in. Why is this problematic? Well once you see Kancolle as in effect a re-enactment of the Pacific War with cute girls, their demonic enemies can only been seen as the US navy (& possibly also the Royal navy, though less explicitly). Indeed, the final battle is an unapologetic re-imagining of the Battle of Midway, complete with a demon carrier that is easily interpreted as a stand in for the USS Yorktown, where the Japanese win. It's made even more questionable by the preceding event having been a surprise attack by the demons on their main navel base, as though it's not enough to imagine winning at Midway but they had to be the victims of Pearl Harbour too.
If this had been a German movie re-imagining the Battle of Stalingrad as a glorious Nazi victory, or an American one re-imagining Gettysburg as a heroic victory for the Confederacy, one might imagine it would piss people off a bit. Yes, you can say it's only fiction, & Kancolle is certainly making sure to look as fantasy as possible. But the moment you combine fiction with real events you are in effect expressing a view on those events, & Kancolle's seems to be that its audience should not only be proud of their wartime military but in fact celebrate the military aggression it was involved in, presenting the whole thing as in fact a defensive war against a demonic foreign power that couldn't be reasoned or negotiated with.
When looked at in it's current day context, Kancolle ties in with both pressure from the Japanese right on the government (including from some of its own members) to revise what they see as a defeatist & emasculating view of Japan's wartime past & the increasingly bellicose calls for re-militarisation of the Japanese armed forces, including the right to expand the Japanese navy, under the mantra of “collective self-defence.” Yes, you can say it's just a niche late night fanservice anime that hardly anyone watches & seeing it as anything more is just over thinking, but I disagree. For one, cultural products are not created in a vacuum, & at the very least Kancolle depicts the views the creators &, one assumes, their target audience hold. There are no neutral observers of history & Kancolle choosing to depict its version of history in the way that it does is no accident. It might hide its ideas behind more obvious fan service, but they're still there & they're clearly not meant to be ignored by the audience, even though you can always choose to do so.
On the subject of fan service, Kancolle is, as you'd probably expect, riddled with it (I'm aware this is a rather awkward tonal shift, from discussing history to boob grabs, but bare with me). When I first heard of Kancolle, I thought it would be more like Girlz und Panzer, in that it would be about actual warships crewed by high school girls. The reality is something much more laughable, as the girls instead transform into weaponised versions of themselves Nobunagun style. I don't know why it was considered good character design, but what this amounts to is girls in high school uniforms, on jet skis, with scale model parts of their ship class stuck to their clothes. It does work to a degree with the carriers, which are depicted as archers whose arrows turn into aircraft upon firing, but for all the others it just looks stupid. Of course, it allows for the girls to strike lots of cliché & titillating body poses while firing, so I guess if your fetish is girls wearing bits of boat, it's got you covered.
It's ultimate form of fan service, however, comes in the shape of the mysterious admiral. In case you were wondering if there are any male characters in Kancolle, there is one. You never see more than his shadow, but he is always there, always with the right plan for victory. All the girls worship him & Fubuki outright loves him, with one out of nowhere dream sequence involving her in a white dress, confessing while looking straight into the camera. Who is this mysterious, genius Lothario, you ask? Well that's simple: he's you*. You, the (presumed male) viewer &/or player who fantasise as is always assumed in cute girl shows that everything the cast do, they do for & because of you. You're awesome, guy watching a cartoon about 13-18 year old girls in revealing clothes, striking sexy poses while playing with phallic military hardware when they're not playing with each other. Shine on you crazy diamond. (at this point the reviewer caught his reflection in the monitor & cried)
*One could also read the faceless admiral as Kancolle's way of getting around depicting Admiral Yamamoto, the actual mastermind behind the Battle of Midway & someone whose actual depiction in a otaku pandering show like Kancolle would have probably caused the producers far more of a headache than it would be worth.
Kancolle, then, is a fairly standard action anime with cute girls that does manage to distinguish itself, but ultimately in all the wrong ways. Viewed purely as a TV show, stripped of all context or implication behind its subject, it's not bad but at the same time it makes it very obvious that it is doing everything it can to pander to it's intended audience to the point of obnoxiousness. In a broader context, it is an uncomfortable example of Japan's continued struggle to come to terms with it's role in World War Two or how that role continues to shape the opinions of Japan held by other countries. Hayao Miyazaki said of making “The Wind Rises” that he felt torn between viewing Japan's military aggression as having been foolish but taking pride in the Zero as a machine & the bravery of the pilots that flew it. Kancolle lacks such a conflicted view, & either by intention or an accidental by-product of poor writing presents a counter-factual version of history where Japan was both victim & victor. It'll take more than a wide eyed girl in a short skirt to make me agree with that.
