Does Japanese Fiction’s take on Post Apocalyptia mostly have Society-Rebuilt relatively fast?

[CarlManvers2019]

Admittedly this is something I notice more for Light Novels and Anime/Manga that maybe adapted from them

But seems to me, that Post-Apocalypse there doesn’t last too long and if there are dangerous threats, people get to hide behind big rebuilt and surprisingly advanced or even modern looking settlements

This seems to be something for the ones that decided “Mad Max, Fallout? Erm, those all look pretty dirty, we’ll just have society mostly rebuilt”

So no scavenging or improvising tech from ruins

 

[Spartan303]

Admittedly this is something I notice more for Light Novels and Anime/Manga that maybe adapted from them

But seems to me, that Post-Apocalypse there doesn’t last too long and if there are dangerous threats, people get to hide behind big rebuilt and surprisingly advanced or even modern looking settlements

This seems to be something for the ones that decided “Mad Max, Fallout? Erm, those all look pretty dirty, we’ll just have society mostly rebuilt”

So no scavenging or improvising tech from ruins

Spacebattleship Yamato. The Earth is restored and people are living in futuristic cities rebuilt. All inside 3 years from the end of the first series to the second one. Kinda nuts.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Spacebattleship Yamato. The Earth is restored and people are living in futuristic cities rebuilt. All inside 3 years from the end of the first series to the second one. Kinda nuts.

Not quite as bonkers, but Evangelion's take on this is interesting. After the Second Impact, a catastrophic explosion in the petaton yield that annihilated Antarctica, the world seems pretty much like our own except with the inclusion of giant robots. And this is supposedly the "realistic and dark" Anime...

 

[MelancholicMechanicus]

The Japanese are so focused and strict about the entire "saving face" and "manners" thing they would force themselves out of the post-apocalypse just to not look bad.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

The Japanese are so focused and strict about the entire "saving face" and "manners" thing they would force themselves out of the post-apocalypse just to not look bad.

Imagine that you spent years learning all manner of skills from finance, management, agriculture, chemistry, CQC, hunting, marksmanship, smithing and engineering in preparation for the Apocalypse

Finally it happens!!!

1-2 years later you discover you’re the only one who looks like you came from a Mad Max set and your neighbors are going off to watch an Idol Concert

 

[Marduk]

Admittedly this is something I notice more for Light Novels and Anime/Manga that maybe adapted from them

But seems to me, that Post-Apocalypse there doesn’t last too long and if there are dangerous threats, people get to hide behind big rebuilt and surprisingly advanced or even modern looking settlements

This seems to be something for the ones that decided “Mad Max, Fallout? Erm, those all look pretty dirty, we’ll just have society mostly rebuilt”

So no scavenging or improvising tech from ruins

Interesting question with an interesting answer i think.
Consider Japan's own handling of natural disaster aftermath:

Why is there no looting in Japan?

A lawless atmosphere often follows natural disasters. How has Japan managed to maintain order in the aftermath of last week's earthquake and tsunami?

theweek.com

With their own culture, validated by experience, suggesting quite different immediate effects of real disasters than those in certain high profile (for the opposite reasons) cases in America (Puerto Rico, Katrina), no wonder they end up thinking that things would be different for them in more fiction grade disasters too.

Katrina: Governor Orders Troops to Shoot and Kill Looters

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco has ordered the National Guard to "shoot and kill" looters in New Orleans. La. governor warns troops will "shoot and kill" Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco warned rioters and looters in New Orleans on Thursday that National Guard troops are under her orders to "s

www.outsidethebeltway.com

Meanwhile Americans also think these things through according to own experiences, which are notably different, in turn leading to extrapolation in a different direction.

In my opinion both sides probably extrapolate their own experiences a bit too far in such scenarios, but in general do have a point.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

Interesting question with an interesting answer i think.
Consider Japan's own handling of natural disaster aftermath:

Why is there no looting in Japan?

A lawless atmosphere often follows natural disasters. How has Japan managed to maintain order in the aftermath of last week's earthquake and tsunami?

theweek.com

With their own culture, validated by experience, suggesting quite different immediate effects of real disasters than those in certain high profile (for the opposite reasons) cases in America (Puerto Rico, Katrina), no wonder they end up thinking that things would be different for them in more fiction grade disasters too.

Katrina: Governor Orders Troops to Shoot and Kill Looters

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco has ordered the National Guard to "shoot and kill" looters in New Orleans. La. governor warns troops will "shoot and kill" Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco warned rioters and looters in New Orleans on Thursday that National Guard troops are under her orders to "s

www.outsidethebeltway.com

Meanwhile Americans also think these things through according to own experiences, which are notably different, in turn leading to extrapolation in a different direction.

In my opinion both sides probably extrapolate their own experiences a bit too far in such scenarios, but in general do have a point.

I guess amongst the only ways to avoid that restored-order is to go off and live in the wastelands where the world-ending-monsters now live and on occasion attack those surprisingly advanced settlements

I played a bit of God Eater and it looks like most of the human population isn’t even hiding in the ruins

Instead they’re living with FENRIS Corp or something

Same thing with Code Vein, yeah, it looks like the setting is to a degree lawless with some gangs of Revenants making other Revenants do their jobs, but the Provisional Government actually has industry and scientists and even a bureacracy and tax system that took and redistributed Blood Beads as a substitute for human blood and took care of the remaining human who did not turn into revenants

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Well that's something I like about post-apocalyptic settings in Japanese anime and games. The civilizations of eld have crumbled... but new ones have arisen, and life goes on. In FFXIV (notably the Shadowbringers expansion) and the Atelier Dusk games, you're building up a new civilization in the wake of a world wide disaster, and eventually society will eventually reach the same heights of the previous civilization. It feel optimistic. Whereas Western apocalyptic fiction tends to be convinced that society will never be restored and that it will be chaos and man vs man forever. They never really rebuild a stable, growing society in The Walking Dead; it's just a pocket of a few dozen survivors that last for a few months than then gets broken up and reformed over and over again.

Maybe it's because Japan was virtually leveled after WW2, and yet was rebuilt very quickly in the years after. So an apocalypse that levels the previous civilization isn't the end of the world to them. "We will get through this and life will go on". Whereas American haven't really been a nation wide apoclaypse, so they tend to think that there is no coming back from the apocalypse?

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Maybe it's because Japan was virtually leveled after WW2, and yet was rebuilt very quickly in the years after. So an apocalypse that levels the previous civilization isn't the end of the world to them. "We will get through this and life will go on". Whereas American haven't really been a nation wide apoclaypse, so they tend to think that there is no coming back from the apocalypse?

You have a fair point. I like Fallout to an extent for example, but I do find it interesting that after one hundred and fifty years, civilisation is still struggling to pick itself up again. Even after the collapse of Rome the various "barbarians" went and built their own stuff that was far more complex and sophisticated than we give them credit for. Iron Age hill forts are nothing to sneeze at either.

Meanwhile in Fallout, when you have entire organisations devoted to gathering and preserving knowledge (Brotherhood of Steel and Followers of the Apocalypse) with radio technology, it's still a bit up in the air about "what happened before" for most in the Wastelands.

 

[Marduk]

You have a fair point. I like Fallout to an extent for example, but I do find it interesting that after one hundred and fifty years, civilisation is still struggling to pick itself up again. Even after the collapse of Rome the various "barbarians" went and built their own stuff that was far more complex and sophisticated than we give them credit for. Iron Age hill forts are nothing to sneeze at either.

Meanwhile in Fallout, when you have entire organisations devoted to gathering and preserving knowledge (Brotherhood of Steel and Followers of the Apocalypse) with radio technology, it's still a bit up in the air about "what happened before" for most in the Wastelands.

The only difference that could explain this is that, contrary to IRL cases, in Fallout everyone lives on what could be technically considered a death world, with radiation here and there, shitty agricultural conditions, and half the wildlife trying to kill you, some even able to give a decent fight to a dude with power armor and a squad support weapon. That really puts a brake on rebuilding and trade.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

The only difference that could explain this is that, contrary to IRL cases, in Fallout everyone lives on what could be technically considered a death world, with radiation here and there, shitty agricultural conditions, and half the wildlife trying to kill you, some even able to give a decent fight to a dude with power armor and a squad support weapon. That really puts a brake on rebuilding and trade.

Also, you’ve gotten populations of crazy drugged up raiders who maybe more interested in being douchebags and raiding people than actually stabilizing and consolidating their power for trade

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Also, you’ve gotten populations of crazy drugged up raiders who maybe more interested in being douchebags and raiding people than actually stabilizing and consolidating their power for trade

Trouble is, someone (ironically) like Caesar would have butchered them long ago. They would have began with raiders, then warlords, then petty kingdoms, then empires. And that is all without remnants of the old world (more well represented by the NCR than the Enclave) surviving and managing to rebuild atop the rubble.

 

[Marduk]

Trouble is, someone (ironically) like Caesar would have butchered them long ago. They would have began with raiders, then warlords, then petty kingdoms, then empires. And that is all without remnants of the old world (more well represented by the NCR than the Enclave) surviving and managing to rebuild atop the rubble.

In older games this issue is apparently hinted at. There is a reason why most raider locations look like temporary settlements at most. When they start to encounter patrols from something like Enclave or NCR, they GTFO and move to an area without such threats and with reasonably poorly defended locals that got complacent from not being preyed upon by intelligent beings recently.

 

[Navarro]

Trouble is, someone (ironically) like Caesar would have butchered them long ago. They would have began with raiders, then warlords, then petty kingdoms, then empires. And that is all without remnants of the old world (more well represented by the NCR than the Enclave) surviving and managing to rebuild atop the rubble.

What? The NCR is more like the Holy Roman Empire - a later state which claims succession from the previous one but has no real claim on that title.

Meanwhile in Fallout, when you have entire organisations devoted to gathering and preserving knowledge (Brotherhood of Steel and Followers of the Apocalypse) with radio technology, it's still a bit up in the air about "what happened before" for most in the Wastelands.

The Fallout setting would make a lot more sense if it was 50-75 years since the nuclear war, not 200.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

What? The NCR is more like the Holy Roman Empire - a later state which claims succession from the previous one but has no real claim on that title.

The NCR is a successor state to an extent, but it holds truer to American values than the fascistic nightmare that is the Enclave. Thus, I deem the New California Republic an heir of the United States of America. A distant one to be sure, but still very much related (indeed, a bit more so than the Holy Roman Empire was to the Roman Empire).

 

[LifeisTiresome]

Admittedly this is something I notice more for Light Novels and Anime/Manga that maybe adapted from them

But seems to me, that Post-Apocalypse there doesn’t last too long and if there are dangerous threats, people get to hide behind big rebuilt and surprisingly advanced or even modern looking settlements

This seems to be something for the ones that decided “Mad Max, Fallout? Erm, those all look pretty dirty, we’ll just have society mostly rebuilt”

So no scavenging or improvising tech from ruins

Maybe because their fiction doesn't see a need to be endlessly depressing and cause nihilism unlike Western media like Last of Us?

 

[Argent]

Maybe because their fiction doesn't see a need to be endlessly depressing and cause nihilism unlike Western media like Last of Us?

Not exactly true. Just look at stuff like Tank Police and older anime from the 80s. Japan had a lot of stuff that you would see in current Amercian fiction. This stuff goes though cycles and even in Amercian fiction you can find some stuff that is not completely made of doom.

But in general with post apocalyptic worlds it has to do with cultural experiences. Japan rebuilt quickly after WWII after being truned into a apocalyptic landscape with only being months away from massive casualties. But the remains of the goverment and local populations generally kept order.

A lot of the Amercian post apocalyptic ficti o.k n is based of our veiw of the cold war. A massive world wide nuclear war which would wipe out everything bit limited communities. Even then you see a wide range of fiction. Just look at the Hunger Games which is a post apocalyptic universe. They have rebuilt to a highly technologically society within only a coupme of generations. Which while slower then some is still pretty fast.

You also tend to see a lot more focus on individual or lone wolf survivor in Amercian fiction. So the focus is a lit different not to mention scale.

The Fallout setting would make a lot more sense if it was 50-75 years since the nuclear war, not 200.

Maybe but the oringal game still had cities of a decent size like the hub and a trade network. So there was a decent amount of rebuilding.

Fallout also takes all the pop science up to 11. This means that nuclear winter, former fram land is now deserts and so on.

One thing I do like about Fallout is 5he wide range of tech and societies we see. You have Vault City to Hub to New Vegas. Which is some I think would happen in real life. Some places would be doing allot better then others. Not to mention I could easily see some groups reverting to simple tribes.

So the time frame to see larger goverments then city states is not bad.

 

[LifeisTiresome]

Imagine that you spent years learning all manner of skills from finance, management, agriculture, chemistry, CQC, hunting, marksmanship, smithing and engineering in preparation for the Apocalypse

Finally it happens!!!

1-2 years later you discover you’re the only one who looks like you came from a Mad Max set and your neighbors are going off to watch an Idol Concert

You can just move the opposite direction and keep going until you are far enough and then do your own survivor thing.

Not exactly true. Just look at stuff like Tank Police and older anime from the 80s. Japan had a lot of stuff that you would see in current Amercian fiction. This stuff goes though cycles and even in Amercian fiction you can find some stuff that is not completely made of doom.

Agreed. I was just speculating to Carl's question.