Not only did the film spark discussions within the anime industry and community proper, it also caused nation-wide movements from actors outside of the anime world, such as Parent-Teachers Associations or the Japanese Communist Party.
It all happened around a single movie that came out in November 1982: Future War 198X. But in the very same period, and at the exact moment when otaku communities as we know them were forming, a controversy shook the anime industry and revealed that political debate and action were very much on the agenda for some creators. The rise of apolitical otaku circles and their own ironical, derivative aesthetic seems to confirm this tendency.
We are all the more inclined to brush off such specificities, as a common narrative of Japanese social history and anime history holds that, starting from the 1980’s, the Japanese population has gotten increasingly distant from politics. Non-Japanese, especially Western, audiences may sometimes be aware of such debates, but rarely of the detail of the arguments or who was involved in them. It has, for those reasons, largely been claimed by sections of the Japanese far-right.
In the case of anime, the Space Battleship Yamato franchise is something of a typical example: while the original show undoubtedly condemns war and violence, the series as a whole makes intense use of ambiguous World War II imagery and militarist rhetoric. The representation of war in Japanese media has always been a complicated issue.
Many thanks to Drake and Renato Rivera Rusca for providing the sources for this article