Sharks and Revolutionary Girls: The “Imperial Us” in Kaneko Mitsuharu’s “Same” and Ikuhara Kunihiko’s Shōjo kakumei Utena Available to Purchase

Japan’s empire was idealized as an exercise in cooperativism, multi-ethnic harmony, pan-Asianism, and, most crucially, liberation. Liberation by kindly Japanese benefactors and genial cooperation between Japanese and imperial subjects are hallmarks of an imperial ideology that I call the Imperial Us. This essay argues that the Imperial Us is an enduring regime of representation that legitimates Japan’s imperial project (either during or after the fact), yet often goes undetected because it does not explicitly legitimate domination but instead advocates peaceful cooperation or even unity. I examine two works from this framework of the Imperial Us: Kaneko Mitsuharu’s narrative poem “Same” (“Sharks”) and Ikuhara Kunihiko’s anime Shōjo kakumei Utena.