ABSTRACT
Kantai Collection is a media-mix phenomenon that began as an online videogame, in which Japanese Imperial warships are anthropomorphised as highly sexualised women. This chapter examines the videogame, manga and anime as part of a popular politicisation of World War Two by Japanese artists, also seen in blockbuster revisionist films. Kantai Collection depends on a masculinist construction of history employing women’s bodies for ideological ends, deeply indebted to pre-war kokutai philosophies. The hyper-sexualisation of women in Kantai Collection exoticises war as distant and unreal, in a context of controversial war memories in Japan vis-à-vis the Asian mainland.
