The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was born out of pragmatic necessity. The necessity to understand the Other in times of immediate crisis. To accomplish this goal, Ruth Benedict was given the task to provide the leaders of her country an ethnographic treaty that would help understand and deal with Japan, then an enemy nation. However, the truly fascinating aspect of this story is how she was able to partly decipher the Japanese cultural codes mainly through the analysis of texts while staying in the United States. This is not unlike what I understand to be the project of this seminar, that it investigating contemporary Japan through one of its major international export, video games.
What comes off the readings this week seems to emphasize two sets of questions during the course of this seminar. The first one has to do with the difficulty of understanding the specificity of video games as a media. Paul Newman makes clear that video games— and games in general for that matter—have been considered unworthy of academic attention for very long and that we are just discovering their potential as a form of art and education tools even though they are becoming an ubiquitous part of modern life. However, video games are now officially out of the closet and we have moved beyond a uniquely negative perspective perspective (Jenkins and Cassell, Mori) and started to acknowledge them in a more favourable light—and even perhaps to a fault (McGonigal).
The second challenge brings us back to the tradition of ethnography and the heritage of Ruth Benedict. The question would be to evaluate to what extend we can consider an object as a window of understanding towards a foreign culture in all of its complexity and divergent points of tension. Can we read Japan through its video games? Can an understanding of Japan help us read its video games? Since Edward Said published his highly influential book Orientalism and that the field of post-colonial studies started to re-evaluate the value of centuries’ worth of writing on the Orient—essentially a process of trying to cope with the Other as he is, not as the West has imagining it to be—, we are better equipped in term of both renewed sensibilities and theoretical tools to attempt a global understanding of a foreign culture. It seems to me that we are moving away from a tradition that isolate, constructs and apply normative cultural codes to a population towards investigations of a more direct human experience. However, Japanese elites have a history of pandering in claims of self-exoticization. Without citing the entire corpus of the Nihonjinron or Theory of the Japanese, one could be very tempted to find easy answer to big questions regarding the Japanese national character (Nakane), its biology (Tsunoda) or even essentialist claims linked to the Japanese landscape (Watsuji). Tessa Morris-Suzuki provides an enlightening overview of the extend of this type of literature. The field of video game study doesn’t seem to try distance itself from this tendency and, already, we are confronted to authors pointing to a specific essence of Japanese games design (Masuyama Hiroshi states that the success of Japanese games are due to a unique sensibility to affordance design) and journalist/gamer discourse that adopt a similar position (1-Up).
Clearly, we want to get a sense of what space video games occupy in Japan, but, considering this week’s readings, this should be done while being aware of the problems that have plagued the study of Japanese culture in the past. The video game industry is now a major player in the global network of cultural product circulation and our perspective on the media can be blurred by many aspects such as corporate interests (the articulation of japaneseness by Square-Enix), longing for national prestige (the Cool Japan campaign) or issues of language (manipulation of meaning through the process of localization). Studying Japanese game culture is an incredibly stimulating endeavour, but one that is also riddled with challenges and walls of all sorts that we will try to overcome in the coming months.
Additional Sources Cited
1-Up. Clash of the Cultures. Accessed online. <http://www.1up.com/features/clash-cultures>.
Jenkins, Henry. and Cassell, Justine. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat : Gender and Computer Games. Edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. MIT Press Cambridge, 1998. Print.
Masuyama, Hiroshi. Terebi gêmu bunkaron : intarakutibu media no yukue (Treatise on Video Games: Towards an Interactive Media). Kôdansha Gendai Shinsho. Tokyo: Kôdansha, 2001. Print.
McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. Print.
Mori, Akio. Gêmu Nô no kyofu (Fear of the Game Brain). Nihon Hôsô Shuppan Kyôkai. Tokyo: Seikatsujin Shinshô, 2002. Print.
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. Re-inventing Japan : time, space, nation. Japan in the modern world. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. Print.
Nakane, Chie. Tate Shakai no Ningen Kankei (Human Relationships in a Vertical Society). Tôkyô: Kôdansha Gendaishinshô, 1967. Print.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1978. Print.
Tsunoda, Tadanobu. Nihonjin no Nô (The Brain of the Japanese). Kakuda Chûshin: Tôkyô. 1978. Print.
Watsuji, Tetsurô. Fûdô Ningengakuteki Kôsatsu (Fûdô: Anthropological Investigations). Tôkyô: Iwanami Shôten. 1935. Print.
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