I'll take an unjust peace over a just war any day.
patlabor: the movie (mamoru oshii, 1989) + patlabor 2 (mamoru oshii, 1993)
A proposal: Machines are great. We love machines. Software is creepy. We hate software.1 At this point in time, though, the distinction between machine and software has mostly disappeared into the vague world of “tech.” Even if you don’t work a desk job because you’re a farmer and you refuse to allow a “smart” device in your home, if you rely on John Deere products, well, they’re computerized. Software rules your life and the domains in which it does not intrude at all, or can be prevented from doing so, keep on shrinking. For instance: do you want to buy a car with no—or at least minimal—computer? Good luck.2
The introduction of software, of more computer-driven machines, does two things. First, it increases the user’s range of abilities. (For instance, you no longer have to turn around when putting your car in reverse, because there is a camera.) You are no longer limited to what you can see with your eyes; you can use cameras. You can perform more delicate maneuvers. A typewriter represents a mechanical advance over writing by hand: it makes writing physically easier. Using a word processor, though, I can move chunks of text around at will, as opposed to the various and more laborious efforts I’d have to use with a typewriter. My whole writing process is different.
In exchange for making it easier, or even possible, to do more things, software reduces the user’s autonomy. It does so in a few ways: people no longer understand how their machines work, those machines can now be remotely controlled, and software’s representation of reality can be manipulated in ways your actual eyes cannot. For instance, software can be tricked into telling you an enemy plane is there when it’s not there, as happens in Patlabor 2. As Goto says, looking at a digitally enhanced video that’s supposedly accurate (as opposed to a manipulated video that was not)—all this really proves is that video is unreliable.
Of course it’s not a given that “nobody” can understand how software works. Some people do.3 But people are pretty happy not to understand, the same way most people didn’t maintain their own cars: they just want stuff to work. Nevertheless, the difference between being able to pop open the hood of a machine and mess around and the difference between interacting with that machine exclusively through a complex, proprietary operating system written in its own special language isn’t just a difference in degree. Your relationship to the technology actually has shifted simply because you can no longer understand it in a direct, top-to-bottom way.
That difference is part of what the two Patlabor movies are about. In both of these movies, the relatively “low tech” status of SV2’s Labors—to the point where in Patlabor 2 they are antiques—is why they are ultimately useful. Still, in the first movie, you can see that the mechanics are being left behind, and in Patlabor 2, the chief mechanic has retired and moved on to trying to solve new problems, like clipping a cat’s claws. The Patlabor movies are not manifestoes “against software.” They are depictions of what is lost through software’s ascendancy and what has to be preserved in the face of that loss. Software is here to stay, yes. So are we.
In Patlabor: The Movie, all of the Labors are being upgraded to a new OS (“HOS). It’s great. A new, much more advanced line of Labors that run HOS natively are under production. Unrelatedly, people are losing control of their Labors. This has never happened before, but it surely doesn’t have anything to do with HOS. After all, if HOS were so unproven, surely Shinohara Heavy Industries wouldn’t insist on installing it on everything just to capture market share. However, there isn’t an easy way to find out if the problem is HOS, which of course it isn’t, because Eiichi Hoba, the creator of HOS, killed himself and almost completely erased his existence from databases world wide and nobody else has really been able to understand how the program works. That’s probably fine.… (It’s not fine.)
In Patlabor 2, a clever and disillusioned former UN Peacekeeper, Yukihito Tsuge, manipulates Japan into the brink of civil war, staging a coup d’etat before jamming all radio frequencies. His allies within the Japanese government think that this is all a demonstration to make the country aware of its military deficiencies, but it seems that what he really wants to do is bring the war that Japan exports abroad, through its manufacturing of weapons, home. He wishes to shatter an illusory peace. Goto and friends are brought into to stop him by a shady GSDF officer, Shigeki Arakawa. (That Arakawa is one of Tsuge’s erstwhile allies is obvious long before it is “revealed.”)
But—as both Goto and Shinobu say at different points—if this peace is an illusion, Tsuge’s war is not inherently “real.” It is staged and manufactured, too. Tsuge views Tokyo as a mirage, but if it is a mirage, it is one in which millions of people live. The glib realism of Tsuge and Arakawa says that only violence is real, that any return to reality has to be a return to violence. While he’s happy to play up the idea that Japan’s peace is bought with a bloody price, Arakawa doesn’t object to Japan manufacturing weapons. He objects to a form of life in which the fundamental truth is not war. Accusations of hypocrisy and complicity are rhetorical tools, not moral appeals.
A fundamental division in both Patlabor movies is the one between the people who know how stuff works and the people who don’t. This is a variation on the OVA’s emphasis on responsibility, which is also a major part of these two movies. Both heroes and villains understand something about how stuff works, but the villains operate by exploiting the culpable ignorance of middlemen. As in the OVA, the most contemptible class of people are those who have a lot of power in a way that makes them think they know “how stuff works” when, in reality, they don’t.4 They think that they can simply make something the case by demanding it be so. When Shinobu demands to know who will take responsibility for needlessly inflaming public fear in Patlabor 2, she is told that this is now a political matter, which is another way of saying: nobody.5 Shinohara Heavy Industries, in mass-installing HOS as a way of aggressively capturing market share, reveals it doesn’t understand how anything works. Shige, who does understand how things work, delays and lies to avoid installing HOS on SV2’s Labors. But there’s also a suggestion that SHI will get away with this risk simply because if “software” is bad that is just a problem of software, for which no particular person can be held responsible other than the disgruntled (and conveniently dead) man who designed it.
People who uninterested in knowing how their technology works are easily used by it, and people who are uninterested in the work necessary to maintain peace fantasize about purifying war. The war will burn everything down, either so that it can be built back better (Patlabor 2) or perhaps just left to nature (Patlabor: The Movie). In both movies, abandoned homes and infrastructure play crucial roles. The only clue that Hoba leaves behind him are his old addresses, which take detectives on a tour through Tokyo’s abandoned and rotting buildings, culminating in his childhood home. Hoba’s desire to flatten Tokyo is revenge for its combination of wasteful luxury and neglect; the tool through which he plans to accomplish this revenge is an expensive and probably pointless floating city that is a part of “Project Babylon,” called the Ark. The irony here is intentional; Hoba himself uses the nickname “Jehovah” and his ultimate plan is to create “Babel,” not “Babylon,” hiding one story of human collapse within the shell of a story of human opulence.6
Are we just kicking the can down the road? That’s the question Arakawa and Tsuge both seem to be asking. Did we waste the opportunity the destruction of everything presented? Should we induce catastrophe, given that catastrophe is coming sooner or later? Nothing Arakawa says in his speech about just war and unjust peace is really wrong, after all.
The response both Goto and Shinobu to Arakawa and Tsuge have is unsatisfying but honest: yeah, we are kicking the can down the road. Who isn’t? That total destruction led back to this scenario should be enough to learn that destruction itself isn’t a solution. The solution to Tokyo’s neglect of whatever is not shiny and new isn’t burning everything down. If you can’t value the lives of the real people living in Tokyo right now then you won’t value whoever survives. All anybody can do is avert catastrophe the ways you can, improve what’s possible, and accept responsibility for what you get wrong. One day disaster will strike, sure. Until then, get to kicking.
Due to events beyond my control (dog barking at me) I watched most of Patlabor 2 in five minute increments. It is not meant to be watched this way but it held up pretty well.
I have to say—I loved both of these movies but I absolutely flipped my shit for Patlabor 2. It’s odd how much the progression here is the same as Urusei Yatsura’s actually: episodic initial work, first movie that is like an extended episode, second movie that is a completely new thing.
Two Animation Obsessive links for you this time around:
The scene with the blimp reflected in the glass in Patlabor 2 was so creepy that I got full body shivers.
image from fancaps More creepy things: Arakawa in Patlabor 2, partly because everybody else has had their character designs made more realistic but his is quite cartoony—he looks sort of like a human fish. Unsettling. I kept waiting for something horrible to happen with him physically but instead he was just a bad person.
Thanks to Jake who recommended these videos on Oshii! I have not caught up on the earlier videos, but here’s the one on Patlabor, which talks about some of the political context behind Patlabor 2:
If you enjoy this video, subscribe to this guy’s Patreon, he is definitely working harder than me.When trying to check facts for Patlabor 2 without skipping around the movies I ended up at this transcript that auto-censored every single use of the word “war.” (For other reasons, it was not very useful.)
In the martial law sequence in Patlabor 2 I again got Satoshi Kon vibes, but this time I got them for a reason. That’s right… there’s a third, surprise Animation Obsessive link:
In both of the Patlabor movies the bad guy quotes the Bible ominously. Do good guys ever quote the Bible, I find myself wondering. Like, does anybody ever write a Bible verse on a wall without being evil. All I’m coming up with here is the movie Frailty. Great movie.
Patlabor 2 has a lot in common with the two part episode in the OVA, to the point where the OVA feels like a rough draft of this movie. One thing I admired in these movies is that Oshii is really not afraid to reuse ideas or images if he thinks he can do them better this time.
Patlabor 2 marks the beginning of the Mamoru Oshii basset hound cameos. I initially had this in here as a question (“is this the beginning”) and then realized I could just look it up.
Where was Kanuka Clancy in Patlabor 2. Where was my American. At least we got this in Patlabor: The Movie.…
Watching the Patlabor TV show for more Kanuka is, I’ll admit, tempting:
Next month we’ll have Kiki’s Delivery Service (March 14) and Only Yesterday (March 28). Normal BDM Industries activies will resume soon.…
This is what Dune is about.
You will be competing with this guy:
Some of you are even reading this!
When it’s necessary to dismantle the Ark, Goto persuades the Metropolitan Police leadership to look the other way by arguing that anything that happens in a typhoon is an act of God. Nobody has to be held responsible. Of course—Goto also knows that if things don’t go his way, he will absolutely be held responsible.
The exchange she has with the… Metropolitan Police leadership again? honestly I was not completely clear on who these guys were… is so predictable that rather than watch them argue directly, we watch Goto mouthing along.
Software is a gift to those with a God complex, which anybody calling himself “Jehovah” certainly has. The malicious aspect of HOS is activated through sound frequencies people can’t hear but machines can register, generated by wind running through the high-rise vanity projects that dominate Patlabor’s Tokyo. It is simple and obvious, an ingenious combination of high tech and no tech, and Hoba’s gamble that no one will care enough about both things to put it together is a smart one.