Responding to this absence of scholarship, the following thesis uses a design history based analysis of Japanese video game producer Nintendo to illustrate the depth and degree to which games can embody and communicate cultural ideas. This lack of attention means that the impacts of these games, as embodiments of particular cultural ideas on the people who play them outside their country of origin, have not been investigated. Unlike other designed artefacts, video games are not commonly considered in relation to the cultural context of their creation. The hyper-sexualization of women in Kantai Collection contributes to the exoticization of war as distant and unreal, in a context of controversial war memories in Japan vis-à-vis the Asian mainland. Kantai Collection depends on a masculinist construction of history in which the woman’s body is put to ideological use, deeply indebted to prewar kokutai philosophies. This paper examines the manga, anime and game as part of a popular politicization of WWII by Japanese artists, also seen in blockbuster revisionist films from Japan. The Kantai Collection megatext is highly political in terms of theme, representation of women, and enactment of war memories.
In Kantai Collection, warships are anthropomorphized as highly sexualized young women. Encompassing manga, anime, game spin-offs, figurines and a wide array of related merchandise, Kantai Collection attracts a broad consumer audience. Kantai Collection is a media-mix phenomenon that has taken Japan by storm since the online videogame was released by DMM.com in 2013.
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