To the Land of the Covenant

'Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they cannot understand one another's language.' Genesis 11:7

I have asked myself in another web log why the 1980's matters. There should be sociological theories to explain it but all I should like to say is in Japan, the 1980's truly was the golden age not only of scientific and humanity progress but also in music and movies. The animation, or anime, as this form of expression is called, is one of the best developed form of art, if you will. The efforts the Japanese anime artists put into an animated movie is unthinkable unless you have seen one. In 1989-1990, when Japan's asset bubble was almost blown up, a movie called Patlabor the movie, which was an extension of the eponymous TV anime series, was carefully produced. Patlabor is the team of police, equipped with robots, Patlabors, established by the police department to tackle crimes and situations created by robots which are widely used in Tokyo. This first movie version of Patlabor is shocking in images and reality. The delineation of a post-buble Tokyo realistically reflects what Japan is going to face - in a bleak future some people endeavour to protect the things that decent people hold dear. The whole movie defies anything you want from an anime, from the pace to the speech. It is a movie, a dramatic scientific fiction which subtlety covers the dramaticity that could be mistaken as boring and pointless.

The title song, To the Land of the Covenant, is to me the best anime song I have ever come across (the second best is Megazone 23 Part 2 - Please.give.me.the.secret). The title sounds biblical, which in a sense reflects the rationale behind the story of the Patlabor movie that people have become corrupted in the financial bubble and lost their own self - but retained a vacuous ego; so some cleansing work must be done and the remaining good ones are promised a place where God and the good make a covenant. The 'God' is never disclosed in the movie however in the middle, an investigator concludes him to be evil, for he was (he was dead) not truly God as we all know in the conventional sense, but he was the unfathomable one who had some idea that he believed to be right. The song creates a sense of sin which people, the reprobates, have committed and for which they must accept penalty - but the brightness in the rhythm conveys message that the Land of the Covenant is there in store for all of us, but we have to endeavour to fight for it, to fight because of it. The team of Patlabor is among the good; because of whom the world is worth fighting for. How can I forget when confronting a bleak future.

Postscript: The quotation of the Book of Genesis is not from the Catholic edition. I just followed that in the movie.