Oshii Mamoru’s <i>Patlabor 2</i>: Terror, Theatricality, and Exceptions That Prove the Rule

75 In foregrounding controversy surrounding the Japanese use of military force, Patlabor 2 (1993, Kidō keisatsu Patoreibaa 2 the Movie) is a work that participated in the widespread early 1990s Japanese questioning of Japan’s postwar settlement with the United States. It specifically raises questions about the qualification of Japanese national sovereignty that flowed from Article 9 and the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty.1 It thus questions Japanese complicity in postwar U.S. “global police” violence (the most immediate context was the Gulf War conducted two years before the film’s release), dramatizing what critics began to suggest was a mistaken conflation of Japanese and U.S. security as institutionalized in the very one-sided U.S.–Japan security relationship. In Patlabor 2, the boundaries of Japanese identity and security strategy appear riven and contested, with a range of conflicting approaches to controlling and resolving these claims depicted. In addition, the film connects analog and digital media to competing perspectives on the status of 1990s Japan as a nation and Tokyo as a globalized city. In sum, Patlabor 2 offers an exploration of the shifting status of media, sovereignty, and warfare in the Pacific in the post–Gulf War era.