Battle Royale

First post here.

I've just finished with Koushun Takami's manga series Battle Royale. For the lack of a better word, it was almost unbearably depressing. I've heard it's infamous back in Japan just because of the premise: a high school class is taken away each year and put on an island. Each of the kids is given a weapon, and they're forced to kill each other. The contest ends when only one student is left alive.

I thought it would be just a pulp comic with blood, gore and no real plot when I picked it up. But it was a real tear-jerker. Because each of the 40 kids has at least one chapter narrated by them, before most of them are killed by their own classmates. All of the characters are sympathetic victims, really. (In the end, the survivor Noriko says "Even the worst of them deserved better"). Battle Royale was an emotional fragmentation grenade to me.

There's signs that the story takes place in an alternate history Japan. The totalitarian state is called the "Greater East Asia Republic". The old Imperial Japanese flag with sunbeams is everywhere, from water bottles to school buses. Maybe Japan won WWII in this timeline?

What did you guys think of the alternate history aspect?
 
Recommendation: There is an "Alternate History Books and Media" section of this forum, and it is for this exact type of question. I suggest you post it there. This part of the forum is more concrete points-of-divergence(PODs), as in, "What if Hitler was assassinated in 1938?".
 

The Vulture

Banned
I got the impression that the story involved the United States staying isolationist and Japan not screwing around too much with anyone else's property and being less militaristic (they mention that the country has no conscription). As a result, no Pacific War, and eventually the Emperor was overthrown or marginalized, leading to the system in the book.

They also mention that all of Korea is communist and independent, so at some point the Japanese abandoned that as well.

Welcome to the board, by the way.
 
But to be a little more constructive(I too enjoyed the book throughly and it was emotionally deeper than I thought) I do recall some character referring to another totalitarian state that used to be in Korea, which I understood as referring to North Korea. That said, the state definitely resembled a Japan that emerged from WWII with some of their Empire intact. In order to do this, we have to have Japan avoid war with the Western powers, as otherwise, to be frank, they'll lose.
 
All right, I'll post this in that other part of the forum. I just joined today, and didn't know there was a separate sub-forum for books and movies.

I haven't read the book, only the manga and watched the movie. I didn't get the impression that Japan was less militaristic in that setting - it's described as "a military dictatorship" on the very first page in the prologue, if I remember correctly. The Imperial Japanese flags everywhere gave off a very 1984-like feel.

I'm thinking that the Japanese maybe destroyed the entire US fleet at Pearl Harbor. And the Americans, needing their remaining full strength for the war in Europe, had to negotiate a peace with Japan which allowed them to keep parts of their empire.
 
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I dont think the movie (which is what I've seen) dealt much with the AH setting, since the people and weapons seemed pretty OTL (not-alternate) to me. I think the general premise was simply "Japan is a brutal dictatorship but otherwise it's the way we know it."
 
It's not set in an imperial Japan. The book (or at least the English translation) specifically mentions that it's set in a national socialist Japan.
 
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