{"id":1557,"date":"2024-11-11T22:15:23","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T03:15:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/?p=1557"},"modified":"2024-11-11T22:15:23","modified_gmt":"2024-11-12T03:15:23","slug":"the-juxtaposition-of-the-fire-nation-and-imperial-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/2024\/11\/11\/the-juxtaposition-of-the-fire-nation-and-imperial-japan\/","title":{"rendered":"The Juxtaposition of the Fire Nation and Imperial Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"

While the world of <\/span>Avatar: The Last Airbender<\/span><\/i> itself is fictional, its influences are very much rooted in real cultures and global histories. Though no nation in <\/span>Avatar<\/span><\/i> is purely based on one culture, from a plot-based function, the Fire Nation with its violent colonialism and warmongering parallels the Japanese Empire (1868-1945), particularly at its height during WWII and the preceding decade.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like Imperial Japan, the Fire Nation sits on a volcanic archipelago and commands the most impressive navy in the world of <\/span>Avatar<\/span><\/i>. It is a nation with a strong, centralized government that is extremely militant and expansionist. But the similarities are most evident when looking at the actual movements of the Fire Nation and its military. With the Air Nomads wiped out and the Water Tribes isolated from both one another and the rest of the world, the Earth Kingdom is the largest obstacle in the Fire Nation\u2019s path to total hegemony. Large, geographically diverse, and multi-ethnic (drawing primarily off of China), the Earth Kingdom is hard to conquer in its entirety. At no point in the show does the Fire Nation manage to control the entire country, but they do occupy smaller islands, regions, and individual kingdoms. Instead, they colonize and occupy border territories in the west and south, with one of the most notable conquests being Omashu city. They have \u201ccolonies\u201d with other minorities (usually Earth Kingdom), the existence of which allows Aang and his friends to hide in the Fire Nation as immigrants from the colonies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Japan\u2019s own occupation of Manchuria, in northeastern China, bears similarity to the operations of the Fire Nation, down to the infiltration of the occupying citizenry into the occupied lands. After the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, Japanese citizens flocked to the region in large numbers\u2014similar things happened with the siege and occupation of Omashu in season 2 of <\/span>Avatar<\/span><\/i>. The new proxy government was set up and Fire Nation citizens displaced Omashu residents in their own home. This pattern of similarity includes more large-scale violence. The genocidal massacre of Aang\u2019s people, the Air Nomads, evokes similar levels of incomprehensible destruction and life lost to China during WWII. In the Nanjing Massacre alone, the Japanese military murdered up to 300,000 people. Low estimates for the amount of Chinese people killed during WWII (both civilian and military) stand at around 15-20 million. Since rewatching <\/span>Avatar: The Last Airbender<\/span><\/i> in 2020, I have always seen the real-life comparisons to Japan\u2019s empirical age and the devastation they enacted throughout Asia but especially in China. But until I took a closer look and thought about the specific intricacies of that colonization, I didn\u2019t realize just how similar certain plot points were to actual historical moments.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Young, Louise. \u201cManchukuo and Japan.\u201d <\/span>Japan\u2019s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism<\/span><\/i>, 1st ed., University of Cali<\/span>fornia Press, 1998, pp. 3\u201320.<\/span><\/p>\n

World War II Casualties by Country 2024<\/span><\/i>. https:\/\/worldpopulationreview.com\/country-rankings\/world-war-two-casualties-by-country.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender itself is fictional, its influences are very much rooted in real cultures and global histories. Though no nation in Avatar is purely based on one culture, from a plot-based function, the Fire Nation with its violent colonialism and warmongering parallels the Japanese Empire (1868-1945), particularly at its … Continue reading The Juxtaposition of the Fire Nation and Imperial Japan<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145914],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2024-blog-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}