I think 2DT's post about Taishou in anime is far too brief for the topic. My favourite reference is old SDB's post that predates Chizumatic itself. His take-off point was the Sakura Taizen movie, which as we all know stacked rather poorly against the rest of the franchize. Steven later recanted and valued OVA and TV series higher. Appropriately, his attention shifted away from the Taishou setting and none of his later posts had the clarity that the garbage movie brought out.
I don't find that particular setting (alternate 1925 Japan with mecha) at all interesting or convincing; it's entirely too nostalgic and unrealistic for me. In fact, I'm a bit offended by it, and a lot repelled. It was the last interval before the end of the old order where the underlying ugliness was sufficiently submerged so it could be ignored for purposes of nostalgia. [Historic excourse follows — Author]
The way that era is portrayed in Steel Angel Kurumi and in Sakura Wars: The Movie, is so divorced from reality as to approach hallucination. [..] My big problem is that the culture they portray is far too sanitized. Japan in 1925 was nothing like as wonderful a place to live as they are trying to pretend. They're showing it as a golden age, when it was actually a prelude to a nightmare.
There was a brief period in Nazi Germany where things had improved a lot (especially compared to the chaos of the final days of the Weimar Republic) but hadn't quite gotten as ugly as they finally did around 1943. It would be a period of a couple of years around the time of the Berlin Olympics, and it could also be seen in about the way these series' see 1925 Japan. No one does that for 1936 Germany, because they understand how monstrous it really was. The underlying hideousness hadn't really started to express itself, but everyone knows it was there. But Japan remains to this day in almost complete denial about the equivalent underlying ugliness of the old order, especially in the 75 years between the Meiji Restoration and the end of WWII. To this day, a majority of Japanese do not see Japan's involvement in WWII as coming from Japanese imperialism; they see it as a necessary response to American aggression. They see the attack on Pearl Harbor as resulting from an American-organized economic boycott of Japan, but don't in turn understand that the boycott was a response to Japanese aggression against China. And they don't seem to acknowledge the consequences of the imperialism which caused Japan to acquire control over Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria and which eventually led them to attempt to conquer and rule that entire part of the world.
[..]
They don't talk about Japan's "government by assassination". They don't show how the Army had effectively taken control of the nation in all but name by then, abusing a rule in the constitution which gave the Army effective power of veto over the civilian government through its ability to bring down any ruling coalition any time it wanted. And if any politician, whether MP or minister, was too vocal in advocating policies the Army didn't like, he was likely to be visited by a group of mid-level Army officers, in something essentially identical to what in another time and place was called a "death squad", with identical results.
By the 1920's the civilian government in Japan could only rule as long as it did what the Army wanted, and individual civilian leaders could only stay alive by toeing the Army's line. By the late 1930's Japan had abandoned the pretense of civilian rule entirely, and the prime minister was an Army officer. But even as early as 1910, Japan was for all intents and purposes a military dictatorship.
Indeed.
One related thing that bothers me is how the national-socialist regime basically became the scapegoat for losing the war, while international-socialist regime that was our ally is still admired by many. Leader of confuscian-socialist regime is "favourite political philosopher" of a close adviser to our president. Looks like it's unimportant how many people you murder, it's only important if you win. Given such hypocrisity, it's small wonder that Japanese may be ok with the Nazis, not to mention their own evil past.
UPDATE: Steven says "I'm more forgiving about that kind of stuff now."
UPDATE: J.P. Meyer comments:
My favorite work from the Sakura Taisen franchise is the 2nd game. This is because it's the only time in the entire series where they actually address all that historical ugliness that's bubbling just below the surface that SDB was referring to. Instead of the villains being like evil spirits or demons or whatever like in most of the other games/anime/etc., the villains are the ultra-nationalists in the military. So instead of how the other games would have missions like "Oh noes, the amusement park that symbolizes modernity, which in turn also symbolizes liberal democracy and social progressivism is being attacked by monsters!", it's like "We need to rescue this general/government minister/socially-prominent person before the fascists assassinate them!" or "We need to foil this coup or else no more Taisho Democracy!"
It's also my completely unfounded hypothesis that the reason that the series eventually moved from Japan to France and America is because the timeline had finally gotten too uncomfortably close to when all of the Japanese historical badness was getting too out of control.
That said, I'm still completely unsure how really to think about the politics of that series since there was still a ton of bad stuff going on even before the _really_ bad stuff later on. Like "Yay democracy, we have universal manhood suffrage and labor unions and student activism!" along with laws severely criminalizing dissent and political assassinations. The "_really_ bad stuff" (read: WW2-era Showa stuff) gets portrayed as bad by the series, but the "less bad" stuff isn't even comprehended. I wonder if it's even aware that that stuff was going on (read: the kind of societal problems that built the groundwork for a society that could accept all those later atrocities that Saburo Ienaga talks about in The Pacific War).
The last part may be reaching a bit too deep, like asking if Russia in 1910 was "pregnant with Bolshevism". But sure, if you don't teach them, they aren't aware.