The landscape of anime is changing.  All across the newest shows, popping up on hills, in empty fields and in the middle of cities, we see them silently spinning in twos and threes:  Wind turbines, supplying clean, modern electricity to Japan.

“Big deal,” you may think.  But my friends, it actually is– Japan’s wind power sector was developed after 2000. Wind turbines as part of a modern setting are a visual feature unique to the last ten years.

Japan has a few good reasons for using more wind turbines lately.  Environmentalism might be the first one we westerners think of.  But honestly, Japan’s reputation for living in harmony with nature, like many Japanese traditions, is more about ideals than practice.  Nearly every river in Japan is dammed with concrete banks, for example, and there’s also that pesky state-sponsored appetite for whale.

No, sadly; despite the Kyoto Protocol and the amazing cultural power of that crazy luddite Hayao Miyazaki, I don’t think this is the answer.

More likely that green energy has such a foothold in Japan because electricity is just so damn expensive. Japan is a huge producer of electricity, but the people of Japan have historically opposed the use of nuclear reactors, and the resources needed to make energy in other ways are scarce in the home country.  Turbines and solar panels are a way to have some small measure of energy independence from, say, the People’s Republic of China, or the United States.  [Note: Paragraph edited for fact-checking.-- 2DT]

In the domestic sphere, this is also an issue of city versus countryside.  Outside of the giant urban sprawls of Tokyo and Osaka, small towns in Japan are having to merge their local governments, or to accept being under the jurisdiction of the nearest major city.  Frankly, for these villages, whatever energy gets generated from a wind turbine (or, in some cases, an experimental mini-reactor) is energy that doesn’t need to be purchased and transported from the distant, uncaring metropole.

So, behind a few animated wind turbines, we find a heady brew of Japan’s contemporary political issues.  There are additional arguments we could make about wind turbines symbolizing the future, and possibly hope.  Gainax already did something like that visually, but with stoplights.  But I think wind turbines in anime are really just a sign of the times.  Expecting anything more would be…

Quixotic.