RE:Animation - Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (Part One)

Latin name: Canis lupus hattai

Common name: Hokkaido Wolf

Habitat: Hokkaido, Japan

Status: Extinct

Post-war Japan hates being post-war Japan.  

The Japanese are desperate to move past it. To gain a new identity as something else that belongs in the modern world, but the fact is they can’t get past it.  The trauma is simply too deep.  The warriors of the Pacific War are mostly dead at this point but Japan has always been a country ruled by old men and the current crops of rulers’ oldest memories are those of starvation, smoke, and burning ash floating gently down in a terrible beauty like fireflies while entire cities scream in deepest agony.

They can’t even get away from post-war Japan in their fantasies.  In the Kerberos Panzer Cops manga, Japan sided with the United States in WWII… 

And still lost!

They can’t even imagine a reality where they came out on the winning side.

In that place, Japan underwent a brutal and heavy-handed occupation by Nazi Germany.  By the 1950s Germany had mostly deNazified itself and Japan had been left to its own devices, an oppressive regime remaining in the wake of occupation. Its most powerful servant was a corps of paramilitary secret police in powered armor, carrying MG-42 machine guns and whose identities were concealed behind a gas mask with glowing red eyes. This was Kerberos, named for the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hell.  

Question: Does that wolf keep the unwanted from getting into Hell or from getting out of it?

This extensive saga is rather formidable, (to say nothing of damn difficult) for an English speaker to get into.  It went on for decades and was in every kind of media from manga to radio dramas to TV to movies, and very little of it has been translated to English. Granted it wouldn’t have done a lot of good if it was because culturally speaking, Kerberos is too Japanese to translate into any other language. This epic is just too close to the core of what they are now.

The movies will be hard enough to survey, so I’ll stick with that.  The Kerberos trilogy of films starts (just to be bloody difficult) with the end of the story.  In The Red Spectacles, the Panzer Cops are already gone. The organization has been forcibly disbanded as a relic of more brutal times. The hard-core Kerberos men had led an uprising against that and were stamped out flat. There was only one survivor. Four years after that event, the last Panzer Cop returns to Japan and has a nonstop series of bizarre, surrealist experiences.  Red Spectacles feels like an absurdist fever dream of a film because it is a fever dream. This is 1980s Japanese weird-ass cinema at its finest. At the end of the film, the audience finds out that the protagonist, the last Panzer Cop, was shot upon returning to Japan and the entire movie has been his dying hallucinations. He dies at the end and Kerberos is gone forever.

The next movie was Stray Dog. It turns back the clock to look to the end of Kerberos as an entity.

It chronicles the events where Kerberos ran afoul of the government and was forcibly disbanded.  Those that didn’t were killed in a last stand. 

Except for the guy from the last movie who escaped so he could come back and die.   Stray Dog took itself a little more seriously. There was a lot less impressionism this time around, although it was present. 

These flicks are both live-action with fairly low budgets.  The last of the Kerberos Trilogy is unquestionably the most famous. 

Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is the only one of the Kerberos films that can stand on its own as a story irrespective of the rest of the saga.  You don’t really have to know more than you are shown in the opening montage to get the rest of the story.  In truth, you don’t even need the background any more than than you did for Akira. Jin-roh is primarily a story of trust, betrayal of trust, and the deep grey fog of morality in counterinsurgency work.

The Story takes place in the 1950s. When Kerberos was at the height of its power and could convict on suspicion and summarily execute by its own judgment. 

The film starts with an opening montage of an alternate history.  Japan somehow ended up as an ally to the US and somehow lost to Nazi Germany.  This is pretty much physically impossible so just move past it as quickly as possible. Through a series of black-and-white stills, you get brought up to speed on Kerebos and its function within Japanese society. Also, the country’s growing displeasure with its methods.  The final scene of the montage is emphasized with an animated black and white of a dissident being executed in the street with a shot to the head. All politically subversive organizations have come together under an umbrella organization called the Sect. 

Then the movie flips the script, and you see a riot in progress, the animation is now in color. The police are in a phalanx behind shields and the rioters are throwing Molotovs at them. The authorities are completely defensive, it’s the rioters that are viciously hostile You see one of the cops getting badly burned. 

There are cut scenes with the rioter’s organizers, the Sect, providing logistical support, they are the ones shipping in the Molotovs.  And more as it turns out.  One of the insurgents hands off a satchel to a girl in a red jacket.  “Present for your Granny,” he says and she nods.  The girl is a Red Riding Hood, a courier for the Sect.  

The Red Riding Hood passes off the satchel to one of the rioters who throws it into the police lines.  The explosion kills many of the cops. Mission complete, the Sect start to exfiltrate through the sewers. 

The Riding Hood is given another satchel charge and ordered to a new location.  On her way there she starts hearing a rhythmic splashing almost like the chugging of a steam locomotive.  She clearly recognizes the sound and is utterly terrified by it.  The young girl ducks into the shadows and presses herself against the wall.  

The Panzer Cops in their distinctive (and rather Nordic) Protect Gear go storming past her through the sewer.

Quick cut to another scene of Sect members about to leave the sewer when the armored paramilitary police are suddenly there. The insurgents freeze when Kerberos orders them to surrender.  Then the terrorists open up with Sten guns…

Against men whose sidearm is an MG-42. That machine gun’s distinctive sound of sheet metal tearing rips through the sewer.  It’s suicide by cop and it’s loud, bloody, and gorey. 

The Red Riding Hood is listening of her comrades being slaughtered to a man.  She’s about to start moving on when she hears, “HALT!”

Another member of the Special Unit has her covered. She can’t get away and she knows it.

Knowing it’s over she reaches up to pull the cord on her satchel and the man in armor asks, “Why?”

His comrades order him to shoot and he doesn’t.  The girl sets off the satchel charge she is clutching as one of the other Kerberos cops tackles the man who showed mercy when he should NOT have.

Quick reminder.  This movie was made in freaking damn 1999.  All of these things have been a daily part of our world since 2001 but this movie was in the theaters two years before 9-11. These things were mostly theoretical warfare back then. I speak as a man who didn’t know what it was like to live in the world I do now.

This movie was that prophetic.  

Everything that counterinsurgency units have had to do for the past 25 years.  Every question they had to ask themselves was being asked in this film in the last century.  

The ugliest of all truths when it comes to counterinsurgency is this: You must betray, and before you can betray, you must belong. 

End of Part One.