It’s been a few months since I last posted anything here, I know. The thing is, real-life tends to get in the way, so my work on Asterion and my analysis of the Holy Hayase Family both had to take the back seat. Rest assured I’m slowly getting back on track, though. That said, I have to admit that I got stuck on the upcoming chapter of Asterion, which got me “quite cross”. Having said that, today’s article will focus on episode 11 “First Contact” of the original Macross TV series and, more specifically, on the scene where Hikaru Ichijyo, Misa Hayase, and Hayao Kakizaki, having been captured by the Zentradi, are interrogated by them.

What prompted me to write this post was a line delivered by Exsedol Folmo, Vrlitwhai (alternate spelling: Britai; this is also how his name is pronounced) Kridanik’s archivist and advisor during the interrogation scene: “[t]he universe overflows with conflict, and it is in battle that one finds life!” This was his response to being told by Ichijyo and Kakizaki about the concept of civilians – to a Zentradi like him, the notion of a life not dedicated to war and, more specifically, war for war’s sake, was unthinkable – deculture. But where did series creator Shōji Kawamori take the concept of an alien race existing solely for war from? Was it history? Or was it prior art?

To answer this question, we must first ask what the Zentradi are in Macross: a genetically engineered race of humanoid giants, created by an alien space-faring race called Protoculture as proxy warriors for its interstellar polity, the Stellar Republic (mentioned by name much later, in Macross 7). The Zentradi are produced asexually and clinically, on an industrial scale, in cloning facilities, as later works establish. Although the series makes no direct reference to their production, it can be reliably inferred that they are created as full adults: in their society, the concepts of male-female coexistence and companionship, romance, sex, and parenthood are non-existent, unfathomable, and incomprehensible; likewise, there are no babies, children, or adolescents.

Drawing from History: Sparta

Exsedol’s reply to Ichijyo and Kakizaki reveals the valorization of war in Zentradi society. To a casual watcher, a comparison between Zentradi society and ancient Sparta is quite attractive, as the similarities are striking. Sparta’s extreme militarism and jingoism are well-documented, of course. But there are other parallels as well: although sexual segregation in Sparta was not as severe as in Zentradi fleets, it existed; boys were separated from the mothers at the age of seven and were sent to live and train in all-male barracks. Regarding culture, Classical Sparta was never known for trailblazing artists. After all, it feared such indulgences would “soften” its men; the Zentradi, on the other hand, were denied culture by their creators, for the exact same reason: their legends had it that exposure to culture deprived them of their resolve to fight.

Drawing from History: Imperial Japan

However, Kawamori and the rest of the Macross creative team had another historical example to draw inspiration from – one that was closer to home and far more recent than Lacedaemon. It was the infamous Kokubō no hongi to sono kyōka no teishō (国防の本義と其強化の提唱), commonly translated as “The Essence of National Defense and Proposals for Strengthening It” and usually referred to as the Army Pamphlet (Rikugun panfuretto). It was a highly influential military manifesto published by the Imperial Japanese Army Ministry on October 1, 1934, which marked a watershed moment in Japan’s slide toward all-out militarism, fascism, and a total-war state during the Shōwa era.

Being published by the Imperial Japanese Army Ministry and drafted under the guidance of key military strategists and reform bureaucrats within the War Ministry (most notably associated with the rising Tōseiha – Control Faction), the Army Pamphlet couldn’t be dismissed as the ramblings of some extreme hardliners among the military.

Instead, it stated the ideology of the subsequent military hijacking of civilian life, which had already been facilitated by the suppression and prohibition of liberal and left-wing ideas (e.g., with the Peace Preservation Law of 1925). A few years later, these exact principles culminated in the State General Mobilization Law of 1938, which placed all human and material resources under imperial state control during the Second Sino-Japanese War, setting in motion a process that, by 1945, had practically erased the line between civilian and combatant, making Japanese society shockingly similar to that of the Zentradi.

What makes the Army Pamphlet especially relevant to the portrayal of the Zentradi “philosophy” in Macross is its opening line “「たたかひは創造の父、文化の母である」”: “War is the father of creation and the mother of culture.” Essentially, this is the Zentradi worldview – war is not a means to an end, but what generates life and culture: as Exsedol put it, “it is in battle that one finds life.” This is not an idea native to Japan, though. It was also expressed by Heraclitus (“war is the father of all”), appears in German militarist writing (e.g., Friedrich von Bernhardi’s Deutschland und der nächste Krieg, published in 1911, which called war a biological necessity). The Army Pamphlet itself anticipates General Erich Ludendorff’s Der totale Krieg (1935).

Additionally, around the time Macross (1981-1982) was being developed, any Japanese person over 45 years of age had been raised and schooled inside this ideology, including the militarized Kokumin Gakkō (国民学校) and Seinen Gakkō (青年学校) curriculum from 1941. Series director Noboru Ishiguro was born in 1938 and was a child during WW2. The core of the creative team, Kawamori and Mikimoto (born in 1960 and 1959, respectively), grew up in the pacifist setting of Article 9. However, their parents had lived under the militarist, totalitarian regime whose ideology was articulated by the Army Pamphlet. So, this extreme militarism and jingoism was well within Japanese living memory, and it’s plausible for the creators of Macross to have drawn inspiration from its ideology to design the antagonists.

Drawing from Prior Art: Berserker

There’s another possible starting point for the Zentradi, though: Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series of novels. The Berserkers, named after the berserker warriors of Norse legend, were self-replicating intelligent machines whose mission was to destroy all organic life they encountered. The Berserkers are doomsday weapons left over from an interstellar war between two alien races; they were created by one of the two races, the Builders, to wipe out their rival, the Red Race. However, the Builders somehow failed to ensure that their creation would not attack them – so, very shortly after the Red Race was eradicated, the Berserkers destroyed their own creators and set out to destroy all life in the galaxy, wherever they found it. Under the “Berserker hypothesis” name, Saberhagen’s concept has been cited as a possible explanation for the Fermi paradox, which poses the question of why we have not witnessed alien life in a universe so vast.

It makes sense to suspect a connection between the Zentradi and Saberhagen’s Berserkers. Like the Berserkers, the Zentradi are also created to conduct proxy warfare. Although the Zentradi are an animal species and not a range of machines, they’re a doomsday weapon: when a Zentradi armada encircles a planet, it’s all over – not just for the sentient and sapient species of the planet, but for the biosphere itself, as Boddole Zer aptly and arrogantly demonstrates.

A trait shared by the Zentradi and the Berserkers is their rogue status: created by a precursor race as proxy warriors with the power to erase entire civilizations in a matter of seconds, they somehow end up disregarding whatever safeguards had been put in place and destroy their creators. The Berserkers destroy the Red Race and, shortly thereafter, the Builders themselves. Similarly, the “do not interfere with Protoculture” directive that was issued so that the Zentradi would not attack their creators becomes ineffective in their fight against the Supervision Army, an enemy that, according to later works, assimilated billions of Protoculture. Ironically enough, this enemy – the Protodeviln, as Macross 7 names them – was of Protoculture’s own making; another genetically engineered proxy warrior race, even more powerful and dangerous than the Zentradi.

So, what inspired the portrayal of the Zentradi?

Honestly, I can’t be sure. I’m not aware of any statement from either Kawamori or anyone else from the creative team addressing this point. Then again, I’m not aware of them having ever been presented with this question – anime and manga press focused on Kawamori’s status as a Gundam fan and the original concept for a Gundam parody. Still, although there’s no official “word of God”, we can go with what’s available to us: it’s plausible that Kawamori was aware of the roots of Imperial Japanese militarism – the similarity of Exsedol’s line with the opening line of the Army Pamphlet is too palpable to dismiss. As for the Berserker-Zentradi connection, if Kawamori was a well-read sci-fi fan, it would have been possible for him to be familiar with Saberhagen’s Berserker series (which was first introduced to Japan in 1969) and to have used parts of its premise as a basis for the design of the Zentradi.