7.6-7: Secret of Onomichi REVEALED

7.6 

….ok after 5 movies, two of which I watched twice (Outrage Coda, Violent Cop) it’s time for Kitano to get...beat. I think I know his moves now.

Yakuza 6

- it took them 7 games, 2 samurai spin offs, and zombie zpinoff, but they finally, kinda, sorta, a little bit sold you on a guy who could kick Takeshi Kitano’s ass

wait, the battleship is just proof that a kinda crooked Japanese nationalist politician payed off a sketchy ship building/yakuza dude (w government money, for a shitload of years) bc he wanted a secret battleship? I just imagined the slave labor thing? Welp… I’m certainly racist. Those dudes built the battleship with poor Chinese refugees, which is how Chinese gangsters know about it bc helping poor refugees is what Chinese gangsters do? Conceivably, I am not the only racist at work here. 

-and now TK tells just a beautiful Yakuza story, the first and only Yakuza story: TK was a punk ass kid in bombed out Hiroshima, who joined the Yakuza when a Patriarch took him under his wing. He remained a violent punk ass, even within the context of the Yakuza, useful only for hurting people, and sustained only by the approval of his boss. But his boss was only ever looking out for himself, and turned TK into a killer. TK never explains himself in his movies, and the story is an obvious nod to Fukasaku. He does an extremely nice job telling it, especially from the master of just staring at the camera with a facial twitch. 

-also: if the point is that the secret battleship was kept as a potential weapon, rather than to conceal crimes implied by its existence, I gotta make another appeal for the I-400, since Yamato class ships had been sunk twice by the time they hid this one and one giant battleship would have never done much for any form of Japan-- or been difficult for any post WWI military to sink. On the other hand, a submarine that could go undetected to anywhere in the world and deploy sea planes to armed with potentially biological weapons would have been of some strategic importance.

7.7

Seriously, that fuckn battleship...

Japan probably dodged a bullet when they adopted the clause in their constitution that prevents them from having a military. Even with it, they spent $49 billion on defense last year, good for ninth in the world; if they could have a military you have to assume that the amount of money they would spend on GIANT GODDAM ROBOTS would make the money that we spend on imaginary space lasers look like pocket change. 

[these being Regan-era Star Wars space lasers, which existed--at least in the form of massive expenditures of tax-payer dollars-- as opposed to Majarie Taylor-Greene Zionist forest fire starting space lasers which, baring several truly astounding developments, do not even do that.]

Which probably is the rest of the world’s loss, actually, as a global economy supported by unsuccessful Japanese attempts at building mechs would probably work as well or better as anything we have ever had going. Alternatively, had the Japanese successfully mastered mech technology and used their giant goddamn robots to take over the world… well, we all know I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t cautiously intrigued.

Because, again, even in the context of the fuckn Yakuza series the idea that anyone would have ever thought a single giant battleship would have been of any military use to post WWII Japan is bonkers. Battleships had been, demonstrably, eminently sinkable since the first world war-- and they built the fucking thing in Hiroshima, so you might think they would have some idea which way the wind was blowing (ouch...I didn’t really plan on going there but fuck it)

No one else was especially interested in giant battleships. The Germans had been prevented from building them by the treaty of Versiles and tired to compensate by cramming as many guns as they could onto boats that were technically not battleships, but the so called ‘pocket battleships’ were never good for all that much. Of course, the Nazis did have plans for an insanely ambitious surface fleet but that went almost entirely unbuilt-- when it came to fighting the war they did a sharp pivot to a strategy built around U-Boats. 

The Americans and British presumably liked battleships, but building them as big as possible does not seem to have been a major fixation, and in that weapons were fetishized by the allied propaganda that seems to have centered on ‘high technology,’ like airplanes and submarines. 

Thus, in contrast to contemporary military approaches, the Yamato seems to be from a doctrine of navel warfare driven by forces more psychological than strategic that, carried to its logical conclusion, would inevitably yield giant killer robots.